Nemesis (25 page)

‘It certainly suggests this is sect activity,’ said Sam. ‘I just didn’t expect to see evidence so soon.’

‘I disagree,’ said Venetia. ‘Look at the styling on that head. See those hair curls? The iconography here is consistent with the Truth Reborn group, the one we suspected of founding the initial colony. Which makes me wonder – why would an invading group decorate the star system with their victims’ religious material? Or are you suggesting that Truth Reborn faked the invasion to protect their own colony?’

‘Okay,’ said Sam, ‘so maybe that thing’s out there because the invaders trashed a temple and tossed it into an elliptical orbit. I grant you we’ll have to look at more artefacts before we reach any conclusions.’

Mark had read about Truth Reborn. It was one of the weirder groups Earth had turned out, but was well funded by its parent sect and hugely successful. Each Flag colony they founded had its own Sanchez clone grown from reconstituted genetic material from the great man himself. Unsurprisingly, the clones lacked independent neural function and only spoke to make religious proclamations on behalf of the sect.

The creepy thing about them was that they weren’t life-sized. The sect manufactured them like little Buddha dolls which sat on shrines. Each one was about the size of a three-year-old, but ancient-looking and fierce. Mark could easily imagine such a thing scaring the pants off a congregation of the Following. What a giant replica of one was doing way out here was anybody’s guess.

‘Scanning for another target,’ he told them.

He zoomed in on a new artefact. A rounded triangular structure the size of a tower-block loomed out of the night. It had a shiny, wet-looking mottled surface and flickered occasionally with spastic electricity.

‘What the hell is
that
?’ said Zoe. ‘Is that a statue of
faecal matter
?’

‘No,’ said Citra. ‘I can answer that one. It’s a liver.’

‘Actually,’ said Mark, ‘I think it’s a drone reshaped into a human liver.’ He passed them a spectroscopic analysis, disbelieving what it told him even as he did so. ‘Note that this thing has remnants of warp inducers, and appears to still have antimatter containment running.’

Zoe shook her head. ‘I don’t get it. Why disguise a drone as a liver? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.’

He shared her confusion. Whatever was going on here, it didn’t feel right.

‘Targeting again,’ he said. ‘Scanning for consistent themes and patterns this time.’

The
Gulliver
’s cameras swept the system. One by one, a bewildering array of objects appeared, most of them made out of repurposed munitions twisted and squeezed to resemble everything from body parts to domestic robots.

Mark found what at first appeared to be a survival bubble filled with human corpses. On closer examination, the bodies proved to be four times life-size and fashioned out of frozen hydraulic solution from a Fecund nestship. Their perfectly duplicated faces bore expressions of terror and agony. A model of a domestic cleaner robot he found turned out to be made from compressed human meat, partially carbonised. Grotesque hybrid figures, half-human, half-machine, hung lost between the worlds, like disused mannequins from the staging of a nightmare.

It was as if, Mark thought, someone had taken a medieval artist’s depiction of hell and rendered it in space on an unimaginable scale.

‘It feels like we’re being mocked,’ Mark told Ash over their private channel. ‘Someone’s fucking with us. I don’t like it.’

Ash didn’t reply.

Mark turned his attention back to the swarm. ‘There’s still no evidence we’ve been spotted,’ he told the team. ‘There’s a lot of drone traffic in here, and none of it has changed course since we arrived. All that clutter around the colony world? That’s drones. I’m seeing some warp flicker, yet we’re not even getting sensor bounce off the hull. It’s as if they’re not interested in us.’

As they closed on the swarm and the planet it enveloped, a team of Mark’s sensor SAPs came back with some digitally resolved images of activity from the surface. Mark posted them on to the team in the lounge.

They showed odd nodes of activity surrounded by what looked like grounded drones. They appeared to be industrial centres of some sort, except they weren’t obviously making anything. The contents of the human colony buildings had been dragged out onto the sand and arranged in aimless spirals or long, meandering lines.

‘I need a deep sweep on that atmosphere,’ said Citra. ‘Look for unusual biomarkers.’

Mark refocused the sensors and posted their data feed to her view.

‘I’m not seeing any,’ he said. ‘Just your ordinary Mars-Plus— No, wait. What the hell is
that
? Is that biological or industrial?’

He sent Citra the molecular profile of some high-atmosphere residue hovering above the equator. The
Gulliver
’s analytical SAPs couldn’t make head or tail of it.

‘They’re long chain molecules of some sort,’ he said. ‘That’s about as much as I can tell you.’

‘They’re not matching anything in my database,’ said Citra, her eyes feverish with interest. ‘Which is an excellent start. But this could just be noise. We need to get closer. Much closer.’

‘Wait,’ said Zoe. ‘First can you show us more data on the drone cloud, please? What I’m seeing here is confusing. These things can’t possibly be functional.’

Mark called up a suite of engineering SAPs and blackboarded them together to examine the dense cloud of flickering vehicles. Many of them had been so deformed that they could no longer warp effectively.

‘But that data must be wrong!’ said Zoe. ‘These don’t match the scans made by the
Reynard
. And that unusual warp signature is gone!’

Just then, a group of three drones set upon one of their observation targets, scorching it with g-ray pulses. With the lone drone disabled, the others sliced it into pieces with scything blasts from scavenging lasers and scooped up the remains. In seconds it was gone.

‘What the fuck was that?’ said Mark. ‘Are these things
feeding
off each other?’

He surveyed the drone swarm with renewed alarm and ran a second round of analyses, looking for predation patterns. Before they intercepted the swarm, it’d be useful to know just how violent it was likely to get.

The SAP came back with a confused mishmash of readings. The drone traffic was neither exclusively random, predatory nor organised, but a confused mix of all three. He saw reports of drones modifying themselves or each other, and occasionally, for no apparent reason, self-destructing.

‘I guess now we know what the weapons fire is about,’ muttered Ash.

‘Okay,’ Mark said to the science team. ‘I admit I’m changing my opinion. This place isn’t human. I can’t think of a single group in human space weird enough to invent all this.’

‘It doesn’t look alien either, though,’ said Venetia. ‘Everything we’re seeing here has a human origin. It looks like a psychotic, almost parodic rehashing of the Earther colony that was here when the Photurians arrived.’

‘So long as you discount the atmospheric data,’ said Citra. ‘Which we shouldn’t.’

‘The rehashing may be important,’ said Yunus. ‘Maybe they’re reaching out to us. They anticipated our arrival and this is their way of saying hello.’

Mark could hear the excitement in Yunus’s voice. Whatever was actually going on in the system, he was loving it. For Yunus, encountering the unknown was apparently enough.

‘As your ship’s exopsychologist,’ said Venetia sternly, ‘I have to absolutely disagree. That’s anthropocentric confirmation bias. You’re seeing what you want to see. Where are the open comms channels? Where are the attempts at symbolic language? Let me ask you this: what kind of person takes something apart and then puts the pieces back together in random combinations?’

‘You mean scientists?’ said Zoe.

‘That’s right,’ said Venetia. ‘If anything, we’re being analysed here, not spoken to. Think about it: we’ve got models and samples at different levels of representation and attempts to mix them. We’ve got randomised reassembly, both in message and physicalised format. One way to look at this mess is as a kind of actualised dream or filtering process. I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing a single intelligence here that’s using the entire star system as a cognition blackboard.’

‘But what for?’ said Zoe. ‘If we’re looking at something that can form a system-wide intelligence, why in all the worlds would it bother to attack us? And why would it even be struggling to understand us at all? It didn’t take the Transcended an hour. They did it all in a single software incursion.’

‘I have no idea,’ said Venetia.

Zoe shook her head as if appalled by the lack of order to it all. ‘Why this system? Why now?’ she said.

‘Of course they’re trying to understand us,’ said Yunus. ‘That’s a given. We invaded their territory. They’ve never seen anything like us before. They’re figuring us out.’

‘Bullshit!’ said Venetia.

Yunus sighed at her. ‘You said yourself you had no idea why they attacked. That’s an answer for you.’

‘There’s a difference between
an
answer and the
right
answer,’ said Venetia.

‘And we lack the information to assess in any case!’ said Yunus, throwing up his hands. ‘The only thing that matters is that we choose the safe interpretation – the one that’s least likely to create a disaster for the human race. We proceed with the utmost respect because anything else is madness. It’s time to invoke the diplomatic protocol and hail them.’

‘That’s the
safe
option?’ said Venetia. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, this entire system is full of several million cannibalistic warp-munitions.’

‘Won’t you please shut up and let my husband do his job?’ said Citra. ‘I mean, what else is supposed to happen here? Is your plan for the diplomacy ship
not
to engage in diplomacy?’

‘Shouldn’t we carry out a little more research before making ourselves known?’ said Mark.

‘What do you imagine the watchers at the edge of the system have been doing for the last month, Ruiz?’ Yunus snapped. ‘We have their data already. Are a few more minutes of prevaricating honestly going to make a difference?’

‘Mark,’ said Sam, ‘why don’t you ready a comms channel for Professor Chesterford? And keep the engines warm.
Really
warm.’

As the
Gulliver
slid into the shifting haze of the drone swarm, Mark grimaced to himself and prepped the comms-buffer. Yunus inserted a simple audio message, mimicking the style the Photurians had used in their initial assault.

‘We are humanity. We come in peace. We wish to talk.’

With grim reluctance, Mark forwarded it to the transmitter array and pumped it towards Tiwanaku Four. The Photurian response was almost immediate. It came back on the same channel, audio only, delivered by the voice of a human child. The accent was Earther, Tigerbelt – New Bangkok, perhaps.

‘We will talk,’ it said serenely. ‘Bring all your people to the surface of the planet.’

Yunus laughed in delight.

Sam blinked in surprise. ‘I’m not reassured,’ he said.

6.3: WILL

Will watched the camera feeds as they bore down on the drone swarm surrounding the occupied colony. Whatever was going on here, it wasn’t a scam, or at least not the kind he’d expected. The sects simply didn’t have the resources or imagination to create something this wasteful and random. On the other hand, every alien site and memory he’d seen when he encountered the Transcended had one thing in common – purpose – and this place didn’t appear to have that, either.

From the carefully targeted puzzles to the borrowed experiences in unfamiliar bodies, everything the Transcended had shown him was designed to broaden his perspective. In contrast, the senseless display of symbols and artefacts here just left him feeling lost.

‘Who’d do this?’ he asked himself. ‘What’s it all for?’

Nelson watched from beside him on the
Ariel Two
’s bridge.

‘I’m starting to rule out human origin,’ he said, scanning the swarm for the fifth time. ‘Could this be another kind of a Transcended test?’

‘I can’t think of a justification,’ said Will. ‘This place isn’t a puzzle. It’s just nuts.’

He listened in as the
Gulliver
sent out their message to the swarm and brought his weapons systems as close to full readiness as he could without them being visible to a direct scan. The simple, straightforward reply it received surprised him just as much as the surreal junk that had preceded it.

We will talk. Bring all your people to the surface of the planet.

He waited for the
Gulliver
’s team to compose a reply and regretted afresh that he’d let Yunus Chesterford take the diplomatic lead. The mission plan called for Will to play a passive role until he had justification to act otherwise, which meant sitting and listening. He wasn’t sure he could stand it.

‘You want to meet us in person?’ came Yunus’s voice from the
Gulliver
.

‘Yes,’ said the swarm.

Will zeroed in on the origin of the response. It appeared to be coming from a loose mass of orbital machinery built around one of the Flags’ suntap stations.

‘Why isn’t he using a fucking video channel?’ Will muttered to Nelson. ‘Politeness, or something else? I want to know where that voice is coming from.’

‘We need reassurances,’ said Yunus. ‘Can you tell us why you attacked this colony?’

‘You attacked the body,’ said the swarm. ‘We are punishment.’

Another pause while the diplomatic team deliberated.

‘We did not attack you,’ Yunus assured the swarm.

‘Clearly you did, as we are here.’

‘When and how did that happen?’

‘We do not know how to make this answer yet,’ said the swarm. ‘Bring your people to us.’

‘Wow,
that
sounds inviting,’ Will muttered.

He set his sensors to make another deep scan of the alien machines, scrambling for clues as to what was going on. At least the other drones weren’t moving to surround them. They appeared indifferent to the ships sliding through their midst.