Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (46 page)

Quavoce looked magnanimously around the room, looking for support. To-Henton did not let his friend stand alone, and added, sternly, “Good points all, I am sure. The good news is that in the extremely unlikely event that such a thing is true, we have time to let the image resolve and react accordingly.”

All very fair of them, thought the group as a whole, feeling self-satisfied.

The chair took control of the meeting once more, and started to wade through this week’s series of internal conflicts, lawsuits, and information claims that had been alleged and filed between the various members of various races as their long journey wound its way through its last decade.

Big news, thought DefaLuta, as the Yallan waffled on. Her appetite for these meetings had waned, she had to admit, since they had completed their translation through the Alpha Centauri cluster. Of course, that had also been her last turn as Council chair, and at the very least these tedious, unimaginative surroundings would be different if she was in charge.

These last years of approach had proved the hardest, for her, and if it weren’t for her role on the Council she would no doubt have undergone voluntary mental hibernation like so many had as the journey dragged on.

But there were other things afoot, as well. Movement. DefaLuta had always known it would come, but now even the Arbite reports were starting to show patterning. Allegiances, long suspected, were starting to creep out into the open, and DefaLuta was as concerned about some of the ties that were starting to show themselves as she was about her own efforts at subterfuge coming to light.

The Kyryl were nobody’s subordinate, and so had stayed away from any overtures from the Lamat Empire, however circumspect and vague they might have been. But though the Kyryl had more cause than most to feel like they should not have to ally themselves with a megalomaniac like Sar Lamati, someone clearly utterly incapable of sharing power, DefaLuta was not immune to the allure of safety in greater numbers.

She had found friends in surprising places over the last few years. The most interesting lead had come when her back channels had fed her a simple line, one of warning. Warning of the ever more obvious union of Lamat and Eltoloman, but more importantly, the potential that the Mantilatchi might succumb after all, a turn of events that would unite a force too great to be opposed, even if all others stood together against them.

But the most interesting part, thought DefaLuta, glancing across the table at the innocuous-looking Shtat Palpatum, had been the source of the warning. One of Shtat’s underlings, though DefaLuta’s informants had been unable to uncover which.

It had led to a roundabout conversation between her and the Nomadi Alliance leadership. A conversation that had led to a more covert inquiry, and then an extremely covert proposition. DefaLuta stared at the Nomadi now. After a moment she caught his eye and he returned her gaze. He looked befuddled. He always did.

He was not a fool, this was just not his arena. He was out of his depth. He could not play this game because he did not understand the point of it, the definition of victory. But DefaLuta did. And she knew that this man was not the real leader of the Nomadi. The question, then, was who was?

She had her ideas, and her sources continued to feed her more and more information as a truer picture of the inner workings of the loosely formed but still strong traders’ alliance emerged. But, like the images forming of Earth, or New Mobilius, as they would soon anoint it, there were fractures in the picture, blurs, errors. It was all very curious. Things were not as they seemed in the Nomadi Alliance.

Maybe it was not as strong as everyone had always suspected, thought DefaLuta, drawing her eyes away from the perplexed-looking Nomadi Council member to peruse the room as a whole again. And what other surprises lay in wait as the final years ticked by?

They would find out, she supposed.

Interval H: Before

…3…

“But why?” said Gussy.

“Because there is no plan for it, yet,” replied the chairman of Third Yalla, or rather Mum, as Gussy knew her.

“But I am twelve now, I have rights,” said Gussy, with every pretense of seriousness.

The chairman stifled a laugh that threatened to send this all-too frequent topic of discussion into a more heated debate. She could, she knew, have her AM handle this, but when it came to parenting, she was the same as she was in business; she believed in traditional, face-to-face methods.

Not that she had ever actually seen her daughter, Gussy, or even touched her. The girl had been born after a malfunction in one of the million cryo-units housed in the transport ships had suffocated its occupant. The unit had been repaired, but the man inside had been beyond saving. Too long had passed before the error was discovered, indeed it was only the slow fermentation of his dead body that had alerted the system to the fault.

It had to all be hushed up, but when you had this many units, and this much time, even the most robust systems must eventually fail, and eventually those failures will trickle down through the multiple redundant fail-safes that backed up all such structures and you would have a critical breakdown. It was a simple probability of scale, even the most improbable of events morph toward certainties with enough repetition.

The upside, for the chairman, had been that a spot in the previously full fleet had opened up, and as it had been a Yallan who had died, it was the Yallan chairman that had been allowed to fill the spot.

She had filled it with a stored progeny design from her first union, transposed into her personal AM’s databanks before they left. Young Gussy had been slated to be among the first generations born on New Mobilius. Now she would be one of only forty-three born in transit there.

And now Gussy wanted, like all blossoming youths, to be allowed into adulthood. Only she was not an adult. She was both much older and much younger than the twelve years she had perceived. As she clamored for the right to access the full net of the fleet, and wander the public sims to interact with the other members of the Yallan and other contingents, her body was still, the chairman knew, unnaturally stunted.

There was nothing wrong with it, it was only that while the mind was allowed to grow and mature and move within the cryo-unit’s supplemented and enriched systems, the body was, by design, put on hold. Gussy, then, was a maturing young woman in the distorted body of an infant.

That alone would not prevent her from entering the virtual world that was home to the fleet’s million-odd inhabitants. But her candor, innocence, and youthful curiosity would. For Gussy’s birth was, by necessity, a secret. No one on the Council wished the failures in any system to be made public, especially the cryo-units, no matter how rare said failures were.

And so the chairman of Third Yalla, Mum, looked at her daughter and said, once again, “We have, my little lightning bolt, been over this before, and you know your mother is nothing if not constant on such things.”

Gussy groaned. She wanted to meet new people. Not the amalgams that the AMs created, however engaging, and certainly not the various senior toadies of the Third Yallan Wholly Owned Subsidiary Corporation, who, being privy to her existence, were allowed to extend their profound sycophantism and general licking of her mother’s nether regions to her own young self.

She had enjoyed it, the attention, once upon a time. But it had soured in her as she came to see them for the lackluster fools they were. She wanted to meet real people. She wanted to meet the other members of this great colony force, and most of all, she wanted to meet a member of the pilot elite.

But that, she knew as she glared at her immovable mother, was not going to happen, not in this lifetime. She sighed and turned away, stepping out of the space into one of her many simulated play areas. A network of tree-houses nestled above a broad fen, joined by rickety rope bridges she could nimbly hop across, and thrilling ropes to allow her to swing between her many little oases in the dense jungle scene.

The life here was like the moist air, noisy and thick around her, and she reveled in it. This is what she imagined being in one of the networking hubs must be like. So many strange sounds and sensations. She closed her eyes and listened to the animals and birds fleeting around her in their brief but magnificent existences, and she dreamed of adventures to come.

She could not know that the dose of reality to break the monotony was around the corner.

…2…

Gurdy opened his eyes to the light. It was powerful and all around him, like he was sat inside a star. But there was pattern in the light, and he tried to urge his brain to adjust. He must take it in, must find the clues.

There.

No … wait …

Suddenly, blackness again.

Shit, he thought. He had missed it. He breathed deep, or rather he sent a signal through his brain’s life-support systems to prepare themselves, a mental sigh, then the tendrils of his perceptive cortices, enhanced and trained as they were into the pattern of the Skalm’s systems, settled and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

He would not know when it would come. Or even
if
it would come. That was the nature of glance practice. Microsecond flashes in which he must be ready to respond.

The simulations were the hardest and purest level of flight practice, and as such they were not designed to be beaten. They were designed to teach the pilot elite two things: that they must learn to clear their minds of all distractions, and that, no matter how good they were, the glance was faster and harder than they were, and they must always strive to be better.

As Gurdy settled himself, though, a thought brushed across his mind for an instant before he banished it. A thought of his coming furlough.

There had always been two schools of thought when it came to pilot isolation, but time had shown that, however tempting it was to lock potential brains away and subsume them in the Skalm’s world, such routes led, inevitably, to disassociation, and with that, came indifference. Indifference to whatever mission was being assigned, indifference to the ideals of the nation that had bred that pilot and built that Skalm, and indifference, in the end, to their own very survival.

A meaningless life was a life more easily forgone, and while they needed pilots who were willing to sacrifice themselves if necessary, they also needed pilots who were committed, and driven, with a will to fight. There was a crucial difference between a willingness to die and a desire to.

So Gurdy was due a furlough. Three days, nine hours, and twenty-three minutes from now. And for one complete cycle. But he had no time now for such thoughts as he focused. Focused on the glance that could happen any moment.

Then, without warning, the flash came.

…1…

The life of Witchypoo was a good one. It met people, it reminded them it was real. This was met with skepticism and often scorn, and then, after they verified the fact with their AMs, the fun began.

Witchypoo was a pet. A mascot. A robust, four-legged animal, with a thick, lush coat, big eyes, a soft, twitchy little nose, and dangling tongue that liked to loll out of its oft-agape mouth.

After hundreds of years of careful breeding, and then more direct manipulation of Witchypoo’s genes, young Witchypoo was riddled with adorable flaws. Witchypoo was inherently fascinated by anything squeaky; a whistle, a bird, a toy, Witchypoo could not resist it. Witchypoo also loved to horse around, tumbling and throwing itself into mock battle with anyone that tried to pry away whatever trinket Witchypoo had taken a fancy to.

And, of course, Witchypoo was incorrigibly ticklish, and that, almost inevitably, was the first thing anyone did when they realized they were in the presence of one of the fleet’s true-pets. Unlike the many simulated pets in the ether, both sentient and less so, the only difference between Witchypoo and her cousins and ancestors back home on Mobilius was that Witchypoo’s body was in hibernation in a cryo-unit, like the Mobiliei colonists themselves, a choice that many had called extravagant, but which few could disagree with when faced with Witchypoo’s big, docile, and patently lovable eyes.

And so Witchypoo waited expectantly while the group of revelers it had stumbled upon confirmed that this bundle of fluff and huggability was, indeed, a true-pet, and then, when one of them looked surprised and then shouted something and leapt forward, Witchypoo howled with elation and bounded away, so they could chase Witchypoo, chase and catch Witchypoo, catch and tickle and hug Witchypoo, as everyone must.

Yes, the life of Witchypoo was a good one.

But now, as this particular group chased the downy beast, something seemed to shudder. They tried to compute what they were seeing, but before they could even ping their AMs to find out what was happening, everything went black.

Everything.

In an instant, a million souls were suddenly cut off from their mindscapes. For many, they would never return.

Interval I: During

The swarm of missile-mines reappeared into the universe as one, synchronized by design, in their very cores, all their history focused on this tenth of a second, on getting up to their current fantastic speed so they could get here, en masse, and give themselves over to their own utter annihilation.

Over the two years since leaving earth, the swarm had reconfigured itself into a cylindrical formation, a mile wide, and two thousand miles long. Spread out along and within this formation they had continued to accelerate with abandon.

Attrition had taken its toll, the slow erosion of the cosmos plucking sometimes one, sometimes more from their midst in fleeting pocks of flame and dust. But they had surged onward, regardless, firing themselves out into the void and hurtling toward the coming Armada.

They did not care for their destruction. They were designed for mayhem, for death, theirs, and anyone who fell across their path. And now, in an instant picked by choices made over decades, by the decisions of two races to go to war with one another, one for a world, the other for their survival, this moment, this fraction of a second, became the very definition of momentous, as vital as a moment could become, as it was suddenly heated by deadly intent into a slice of supernova destruction through the fleet’s heart.

The swarm did not come at the fleet, it appeared within it and about it, a cloud translating into reality all around the massive Armada. The broadness of this stroke was a requisite, a forced thing imposed by the incredibly ephemeral moment of this encounter. Accuracy in such minuscule timeframes was nearly impossible, certainly impossible to guarantee, and so the net had need to be cast wide to have a real chance of striking home.

For many of the component parts of the swarm, the moment of reemergence was already too late even at its beginning, as they appeared already behind the fleet, and were instantly vanishing in its wake, to surge onward and outward for years, maybe centuries, maybe forever. All the work to build and launch them suddenly made pointless as the universe moved on without them.

For tens of thousands of others, those that appeared a fraction of a light second in front of the Armada, their rebirth came straight into the embrace of the fleet’s mighty plume. And so their mass was also lost almost immediately, not to space but to flame, as they were consumed in the buttressing stellar conflagration that had protected the fleet from so many other obstacles during its long deceleration.

But for those that sat between those two extremes, for the center of the swarm’s epic gamble, their journey would not be for ought. They would get the kamikaze end they so single-mindedly sought, and they would plow death and destruction into the heart of humanity’s enemies in the process.

In the framework of a Skalm, at the junction of one of its akas with the main fusion body, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with the very substance of the machine at the molecular level. The forces at play as the missile-mine instantly transferred its opposite but equal momentum into the Skalm’s superstructure were almost beyond measure, and the Skalm, with all its strength and capability, was without answer. In the ensuing nanosecond, the once mighty warship spasmed into nuclear ruin.

As its engines exploded outward, releasing its power in a last throw, it ripped backward from its place at the fleet’s vanguard, crushing all it encountered for the next millisecond, until it had liquefied itself and vaporized its whole being into a streak of gore scratched back through the Armada it had once been proud to protect.

In the core of a Nomadi carrier ship, fifteen meters out from one of the military-grade Accelosphere generators that had once carried this small sector of the fleet safely through the hearts of suns, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with the very substance of the walls that housed the esoteric subspace actuator. From within the core it was like the wall, once solid, once an armored shell around this beating heart of the fleet, suddenly opened up in a ragged, ugly grin, widening as it went.

But the departing missile-mine was not through. Even though it was obliterated in the instant of arrival, the kinesis of its advent continued to ripple outward through the carrier ship’s core, turning infinitesimally complex systems to molten ruin, and in doing so, rattling the core’s thick cage. The pinpoint center of the core, normally sustained at the point between universes, ever ready, warbled at the thought of freedom, as if sensing its prison’s coming riot. As the central framework sang from the missile-mine’s blow, the pinpoint moved, finding the fissure in its confinement as it must, seeking it with inevitability, the truth of its physics manifested in sudden abandon.

Freed, it instantly ballooned outward, destabilizing as it went. Like so many captive animals, its freedom was also its doom, and so it vanished almost as soon as it broke loose, not with a roar, but with a pop, sucking a ten-meter-wide section of the center of the ship with it into the beyond, and lobotomizing the essential fleet craft in the process.

Farther back in the Armada’s bulk, in one of many cavities in one of many transport ships, a missile warped into existence, fusing as it did so with a bank of cryo-units. The inhabitants of those units did not know their end. Like every cartoon villain promises, they did not feel a thing as they were merged with the passing comet. Their essence, woven now into the fabric of the missile-mine, struck onward, though.

- - -

Witchypoo, with all its furry softness laid against its skin in the stillness of cryogenic sleep, was five meters away from one such event horizon. The animal met its end by being sucked into the passing tornado, pulled backward and inward into the eye of the storm along with its entire cubby and a thousand other Mobiliei that had maybe once sought solace in the simple animal’s company. They were compressed by the thundering pressure of the passing, as an epicenter formed in the mine’s wake, following it out, screaming at it for the murder it had caused for the microsecond before the munition was lost to molecular disintegration along with all of its victims.

Elsewhere, Gurdy could not find the pattern in the flash. He could not see it. The flash was too quick, even for the best of pilots. These were not glancing speeds, these were interstellar speeds, and no mind, real or artificial, could conceive a single thought in the entire length of this battle. In the moment Gurdy’s brain, eviscerated like all pilots and stored in a cylinder lodged to one side of a Skalm’s core, was lost in a similar blaze of subliming glory with a hundred seventy-five of his one thousand peers.

Even though the chairman of Third Yalla had only just been standing next to Gussy, her feisty young daughter, when she was wiped from existence, the girl’s mother did not even feel a gust of wind as the mine that killed her child passed by. For the chairman, the scene simply went black, as did all sims in the fleet, either because the generating system had been damaged or destroyed, or because the first thing every single Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Mind, and Prime Mind did as the attack etched itself into terrible history was shunt all available processing power to the Arbite, who had begun taking control of the fleet as soon as it sensed it was under attack.

Before a single person was even consulted, the Arbite had precious seconds to balance the remaining decelerating engines, stopping the fleet from tearing itself to pieces, and analyze the shreds of information coming in real-time into its mind. The Arbite was no born thing. It had no AM surrogate, and had never even spoken to a live person. It had grown up in martial confinement, bred and fed by pellets of data from committee after committee of political oversight, military strategy, and legal stricture. It was singularly focused even for an AM, monotone, without an understanding of or need for humor.

It saw only fact, and sought only truth. The truth it found now had implications, both immediate and far-reaching. That they had been attacked became more and more certain with time, though the Arbite did not communicate that likely conclusion, and its ensuing ramifications, for a full eight seconds after the attack, once it had finished bringing the fleet under control.

But as the information swelled in its mind, the truth was plain to see. The aftershock, not of the mines themselves, but of their subspace footprints, proved beyond question that these had been synthetic, and not cosmic in origin, as did the synchronization of their arrival into the fleet’s midst. As the Arbite allowed pieces of its investigation to trickle outward to the Council and each contingent’s Prime Mind, it also started to filter out numbers. Numbers of the dead. Numbers of the unaccounted for. Numbers of ships lost or damaged, though very few members of the fleet’s complement had escaped entirely unscathed.

And its immediate plan, empowered into limited action as it was by universal mandate, also kicked in. They would translate out, temporarily, to protect against further attack.

It would be costly on their systems, but they must assess and regroup. And so, a full twenty seconds after the attack that had taken seven years to plan and execute was over, the Arbite sent out orders to the Prime Minds, felt the Armada’s systems as they shakily climbed to their feet after the holocaust, and once all were ready and synchronized, took the battered Armada back into subspace for the first time since the Alpha Centauri translation five years before, there to nurse its wounds.