Back to our traveller.
We have rumours of plague. She had rumours of something far worse. A presence, an entity, waiting between the stars. Older than the history of any culture known to her kind. A kind of mechanism, waiting to detect the emergence of bright and busy civilisations such as hers. Or ours, for that matter.
Something with a mind and a purpose.
And she found it.
“I’VE NO REASON to think you haven’t already killed Lenka,” I said, a kind of desperate calm overcoming me, when I realised how narrow my options really were.
“Oh, she is perfectly well,” the voice answered. “Her suit is frozen, and I have pushed channels of myself into her head, to better learn her usefulness. But she is otherwise intact. She has travelled well, this Lenka. I can learn a great deal from her.”
I waited a beat.
“Are you strong?”
“That is an odd question.”
“Not really.” I reached beneath my chest pack, fumbling with my equipment belt until I found the hard casing of a demolition charge. I unclipped the grenade-sized device, presenting it before me like an offering. “Hot dust. Have you dug deep enough into Lenka to know what that means?”
“No, but Teterev knew.”
“That’s good. And what did Teterev know?”
“That you have a matter-antimatter device.”
“That’s right.”
“And the yield would be…?”
“A couple of kilotonnes. Very small, really. Barely enough to chip an asteroid in two. Of course, I have no idea of the damage it would do to you.”
I used two hands to twist the charge open along its midline, exposing its triggering system. The trigger was a gleaming red disk. I settled my thumb over the disk, thinking of the tiny, pollen-sized speck of antimatter held in a flawless vacuum at the heart of the demolition charge.
“Suicide, Nidra? Surely there’s a time-delay option.”
“There is, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get to my ship in time. Besides, I don’t know what you’d do with me gone. If you can paralyse Lenka’s suit, you can probably work your way into the charge and disarm it.”
“You would kill Lenka at the same time.”
“Not if you let her go. And if you don’t let her go, this has to be a kinder way out than being sucked into you.” I allowed my thumb to rub back and forth over the trigger, only a twitch away from activating it. There was an unsettling temptation to just do it. The light would be quick and painless, negating the past and future in a single cleansing flash.
In that moment I wanted it.
WHAT WOULD YOU have done, Captain?
Her mistake?
That’s easy. The thing she found, in the wreck of another ship, seemed dead to her. Dead and exhausted. Just a cluster of black cubes, lodged in the ship’s structure like the remnant of an infection. But it had not spread; it had not destroyed the wreck or achieved total transformation into a larger mass. She thought it was dead. She had no reason to think otherwise.
Can we blame her for that?
Not me.
Not you.
But the machinery was only dormant. When her ship was underway, while she slept, the black cubes began to show signs of life. They swelled, testing the limits of her containment measures. Her ship woke her up, asking what it should do. Her ship was almost a living thing in its own right. It was worried for her, worried for itself.
She had no answer.
She tried to strengthen the fields and layer the alien machinery in more armour. None of that worked. The forms broke through, began to eat her ship—making more cubes. She put more energy into her containment. What else could she do?”
Throw them overboard, you wonder?
Well, yes. She considered something like that. But that would only be passing the problem on to some other traveller. The responsibility was hers alone. She felt quite strongly about that.
Still, the machinery was definitely damaged. She was sure of that. Otherwise the transformation would have been fast and unstoppable. Instead, she had achieved a sort of stalemate.
What next?
Suicide, perhaps—dive into a star. But the data offered no guarantees that this would be enough to destroy the machinery. It might make it stronger!
Not a chance she could take.
So instead she found this world. A ship in space is an easy thing to see, even across light years. A world offers better camouflage—it has mass and heat. She thought she could screen herself—drawing no attention from passers-by.
She was wrong.
The cubes were resilient, resourceful. Constantly testing her capabilities. They demanded more power, more mass. She converted more and more of her ship into the architecture of their prison. She died! But by then her living ship had grown to know her so well that her personality lived on inside it, haunting it as a kind of ghost.
Centuries blasted by.
Her ship protected and enlarged itself. It ate into the surrounding geology, bolstering the containment and consolidating its defenses. For the most part it had no need of her, this residue of what she had been. Once in a while it raised her from the shadows, when her judgement was required. She was never lonely. She’d burned through her capacity for loneliness, discarding it like an outmoded evolutionary stage.
But she had visitors, all the same.
Like us?
No, not quite. Not to begin with. To begin with they were just like her.
“THEY CAME,” THE voice said. “My sensors tracked them with great vigilance and stealth. I watched them, wary of their intentions. I risked collapsing my containment fields, until they were out of range. I did not want to be found. I did not want my mistake to become theirs. It was always a bad time.” It paused. “But I did not miss their company. They were not like me. Their languages and customs had turned unfamiliar. I was never sorry when they turned for space and left me undisturbed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like. It hardly matters, anyway. They stopped coming. A silence fell, and endured. It was broken only by the tick of pulsars and the crack and whistle of quasars half way to the universe’s edge. There were no more of my kind. I had no knowledge of what had become of them.”
“But you could guess.”
“It did not mean that I could give up, and allow what I had found to escape. So I slept—or ceased to be, until my ship had need of me again—and the stars lurched to new and nameless constellations. Twenty million orbits of my old world, two hundred thousand lifetimes. And then a new visitor—a new species.”
I guessed that we were still in the distant past.
“Did you know this culture?”
“I had no data on anything like them, dead or alive. Frankly, it disturbed me. It had too many limbs, a strange way of moving, and I wondered what it looked like outside of its armour. I wanted it to go away. I quietened myself, damped my energies. But still it came. It dug into me, seeking an explanation for whatever its sensors had picked up. I thought of simply killing it—it had come alone, after all. But there was another possibility open to me. I could take it, open its mind, learn from it. Fold its memories and personality into my own. Use its knowledge to better protect myself the next time.” A kind of shame or regretfulness entered the voice. “So that is what I did. I caught the alien, made sure it was incapable of escape, and pushed feelers through the integument of its suit and into its nervous system. Its anatomy was profoundly unfamiliar to me. But at one end of its segmented, exoskeletal body was a thing like a head and inside the brittle cage of that head was a dense mass of connected cells that had something of the topological complexity of what had once been my own brain. It was hierarchically layered, with clear modular specialisation for sensory processing, motor control, abstract reasoning and memory management. It was also trying very hard to communicate with its fellows—wherever they were—and that made it easy for me to trace the circuits and pathways of expression. Before long, I was able to address the alien through the direct manipulation of internal mental states. And I explained what was to become of it. Together we would be stronger, better equipped both to deal with the thing at the heart of me, and also to make my concealment more effective. I was sorry about what had needed to be done, but I made it understand that I had no choice at all.”