Nemesis (71 page)

Ann’s cheeks tingled. She didn’t want to be the person who had to do this. She hated it so much that she wanted to die. If the universe had decided to mete out the cruellest possible punishment for her involvement with the League, this had to be it. She signalled a slow, cautious retreat. And, with a regret that burned in her throat, she started back towards the carrier.

As soon as they were in range, Mark opened a channel.

‘What’s going on?’ he said. His eyes burned. ‘We can’t afford to let this happen! The Photurians are just going to predate on the human race. They’ll take out our colonies one by one. They’ll keep evolving.’

‘I agree,’ said Zoe from behind him. ‘This is inviting disaster.’

‘Then we’d better get our shit together, hadn’t we?’ said Ann.

‘Overcaptain Ludik,’ said Tak. His face was grey. ‘Do I need to remind you that New Panama is strategically situated at the Penfield Lobe? If we let the Photurians take it, we risk having the entire New Frontier cut off from us. That’s over a
dozen
worlds, and all of Fecund space. We can’t afford that.’

‘I’m well aware of the risks,’ said Ann, ‘but Will and I are making an executive decision. There will be no fight here today. I expect everyone to obey orders and resume formation within the carrier envelope. You may register your dissent. Your opinions will be presented in my report to Admiral Baron.’

What she wanted to say was,
They’ve taken my home
. And all of her friends. And everything she’d built for herself. The world she loved was already dead. She wanted to burn the Photurians more than she’d ever wanted anything, save perhaps rescuing the human race from immediate oblivion.

An icy pause followed. One by one, her ships complied. Ann moved the
Ariel Two
in last. And with a regret that screamed inside her, she gave the order for them to depart.

21.5: ANN

As soon as they hit the home system, Ann went to see Ira. He’d received their message from the edge of the out-system and pushed the
Knid
to meet them at maximum thrust just to spare a few minutes of their time. She arrived at his study on the habitat ring with self-disgust chewing a hole in her, as it had for every second of the trip home.

Ira stood by the wall-screen looking out at a synthetic view of the stars. In reality, his room lay buried deep inside lead shielding in a modular habitat component that could operate as an armed shuttle in its own right if the
Knid
broke up.

Ira had seen her briefing package already. He said nothing, so she spoke.

‘I tried to make the best decision under the circumstances, sir,’ she said, holding her chin high. ‘The options weren’t good, and I’m aware that many of the captains disagreed with me.’

‘I don’t want to hear your defensiveness, Ludik,’ Ira snapped. ‘I’d have done exactly the same thing that you did, so quit feeling sorry for yourself. You didn’t have an option. We all fucked up. The whole human race has fucked up.’

He gestured at the artificial window, stabbing the sky. ‘We were offered a chance and we pissed the thirty years of peace they gave us up against the wall. And why? Because we were in love with our own stupid ideas of how everything was
supposed
to be. Of what we were
due
. Whether it was money, or religion, or high-handed notions of what was right or good.’ His voice dripped scorn. ‘We didn’t spend enough time thinking about the obvious threats that were staring us in the face. We couldn’t think past our own tiny fucking perspective and the economics of the
now
. We bickered like
children
over the scraps of someone else’s dead. We weaponised migration, for crying out loud. And now we don’t have a choice any more.’

He fell silent again and hung his head.

‘Sir?’ said Ann quietly. ‘No choice in what?’

‘The Earth’s too fragile,’ said Ira. ‘So are the colonies. We can’t have worlds so full of people that we can’t afford to lose them, or which are too thinly populated to defend. Humanity needs to be strategically spread, on planets with enough industry and firepower to look after themselves. Up till now, we’ve done the shittiest possible job of getting people off Earth. The Photurian carrier removes any excuse for that. So we’re going to pick up people by the million. Every single world will have to be on high alert until we solve this.
If
we solve it. If it’s not too late already. At the start of all this, I asked Will to bring me a miracle that would change politics. He achieved that, all right. It’s just a shame we might go extinct because of it.
Everyone
is in the Fleet now. Every single human being is at war. Unless they want to give up their identities and go and join the fucking Photurians.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should just spare ourselves the worry and admit defeat.’

‘I assume you’re not being serious,’ said Ann.

‘You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Ira. He turned to look at her for the first time since she arrived. His eyes were red. He scowled. ‘I have a memory dump for you.’

Ann still hated sucking down other peoples’ thoughts, but she accepted it anyway.

[
Let me help,
] said her shadow.

Experiences from their prisoner observation SAPs came streaming in. She watched the Photurians standing patiently in their cells, smiling like priests. They looked healthier, happier and stronger than ordinary people, at peace and reconciled to their situation. Their faith in their superiority never wavered. When given the opportunity, the Photurians chatted engagingly with their captors, offering charming insights on how much their lives had been improved by absorption. The process was painless and instant now, they said. They could administer it themselves, like a baptism. And the beneficial effects lasted for ever.

According to SAP-based Turing assessors, their probability of achieving full sentience kept rising. By some measures, the prisoners were smarter now than they’d been before the swarm took them. Ann might have found them convincing but for the perfect, serene, uniform gloss the Photurians presented. They were too ideal as an advertisement, and not quite human enough.

She shivered. She knew there’d be many who’d look at that cartoonish strength and envy it. Inevitably, word of their survival would leak out making the situation even more complicated. The Photurians would get their converts, all right.

‘It’s all a facade,’ she said.

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Ira. ‘But we still don’t really understand what’s underneath it, and eventually it’s not going to matter. People won’t care. The angry, the disillusioned and the just plain desperate – they’ll see what they want to see. The Photurians will use our needs and vulnerabilities against us.’

‘Sir,’ said Ann. ‘We have to look to our strengths, surely. So far as we know, the Photurians haven’t attacked since New Panama.’

‘Because they don’t want to set fire to their own lunch,’ Ira growled.

‘Perhaps. But even that gives us something to work with. Hope isn’t lost.’

Ira sighed. ‘I’ll have to make a public address. This is the biggest, scariest pile of shit that anyone has ever been asked to clean up, and I want you there with me. You’re Will now. His shit job is your shit job. Do you get that?’

‘Of course, sir,’ she said. ‘I knew that from the moment he brought me back to life.’

‘Good, because you and I are about to become the public face of the largest and least popular relocation programme in the history of the human race. And it’s going to be grim. Even with all their overbuilding, our colonies are tiny. I have no fucking idea where we’ll find homes for so many people.’

[
Actually,
] said Ann’s shadow, [
I may be able to help with that.
]

22:
STALEMATE

22.1: SAM

Sam didn’t complain or resist as they led him down the corridor. He knew he was on his way to see Ira Baron and that it would be the last conversation he’d ever have. He didn’t let it touch him.

They’d mined all the knowledge they wanted out of him with neural taps weeks ago. Not that he’d held anything back when they asked. There would have been no point. He’d felt curiously numb since they brought him out of the
Gulliver
’s med-bay. So much that he’d worked for had fallen away since Carter. He’d made so many compromises already that what was left of his life didn’t matter to him much.

Only one thing held his attention these days, and that was following the news-feed they allowed him about the Nems and their activities. He watched it avidly, like a boy transfixed by a spider, without feeling satisfaction, fear or dismay. If he had one regret about death, it would be going out not knowing how the story finished – not knowing what the Nems were up to.

They led him to an interrogation room. Ira sat there on a plain plastic chair, bent forward and brooding. He drummed his fingers on the table and didn’t look up. They pushed Sam into the seat opposite him, not bothering with restraints. They had far more effective tools for ensuring compliance these days.

‘Hi,’ said Sam.

Ira fixed him with a furious stare. ‘Tell me why you did it.’

Sam blinked slowly. ‘Because you were fucking it all up,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’ve told your people already.’

‘I know,’ said Ira. ‘I want to hear it from your own lips.’

‘I was trying to make a difference,’ said Sam. ‘All that shit in your speeches about
balance
, about trying to include all parties in the future – did you ever really buy that crap? Somebody had to do something. We were headed for war.’

‘And this is your solution. This fabulous fucking new world?’

‘No. This is a disaster. I used what I had to try to fix society and I backed the wrong horse. But at least I had a go, rather than sitting there on my ass playing everyone off against each other.’

Ira sighed. ‘How did I ever promote a half-witted clown like you to such a position of power? Do you honestly believe I didn’t consider options like the one you’re still so in love with? Of course I did. I discarded them because they were pitiful. An interstellar community with a dead Earth would have been a pathetic, emasculated thing.’

‘Except that’s what we’ve got now, isn’t it?’ said Sam. ‘So in a way, I won, didn’t I? You’re going to have to take Earth apart. Scatter the population.’

Ira glared at him and for a moment Sam thought that maybe he’d successfully slid a knife in. Then Ira laughed and broke the illusion.

‘You call that winning, you dumb fuck? The population of every single colony world is going to be drowned in Earther immigrants inside six months. There won’t be a single place left in space for your kind of society. It’ll be Earth everywhere.’

‘And are you proud of that?’ said Sam. ‘It’ll be the end of Galatea, too.’

‘I don’t give a shit what happens to Galatea so long as I keep the human race going. You appear to have forgotten, Sam, that Galatea’s only ever really been about one thing: survival.’

Sam rubbed his head. They’d shaved it for the neural probes. The stubble felt rough under his fingertips.

‘Look. I know I’m not getting off this station alive,’ he said, ‘so I’ll make my parting words very clear. We both know why you’re in this situation.’

‘Oh, really?’ Ira drawled. ‘Do tell.’

‘Because we failed as a species. Your administration failed. Transcendism failed.’

Sam saw Ira’s face harden and knew that this time he’d got him.

‘We failed for a very simple reason: idealism. You can’t
hope
the human race into maturity or good behaviour. People have been trying that for hundreds – no, thousands of years. Human beings don’t work that way. People respond to incentives, which means that everyone was going to carry on doing exactly what they wanted while you preached at them. If I hadn’t screwed up, it would have been somebody else. We had a choice: either the Transcended turned out the lights or we burned ourselves up without them. One way or the other. You saw it happening just as well as I did.

‘So when you leave me here, take just one idea with you. People like to imagine that civilisation is what happens when you give everyone the freedom to act on their own terms. That’s bullshit. Feudalism is what happens when you do that. Civilisation is a response to crisis. If you don’t give people a reason to have high standards, some of them will behave like shits. And those who do that will fuck it up for everyone else. Whatever you build next, remember that. Let the scumbags do what they like and you can kiss your species goodbye. It’s that simple.’

Ira smiled. ‘Do you know what I see? I see a sad little sociopath peddling his ideology because he imagines it might live on even though he’s not going to.’

Sam frowned.

‘I didn’t see you properly before because I wasn’t paying close enough attention,’ said Ira. ‘Now I am. Here’s how you work. You sit there like a fucking spider, waiting and watching for people to reveal a vulnerability. If you don’t see one, you guess and pick at them until one shows up. And then, once you’ve found a weakness, you work at it, pressing on that person’s system of self-validation until you’ve squeezed an idea under their skin. You make it so that they have to accept your bullshit in order to keep feeling good about themselves. Then you set them off like little clockwork robots and feel proud of yourself for it. And that, pathetically, is how
you
validate
your
actions.

‘You see, Sam, you think you’re clever because you were modded for strategy and negotiation. But I see people like you all the fucking time and they’re all dumb as rocks, just like you. All sociopaths are. You can’t see the futility of your own schemes because you lack even the first whit of personal insight into your own condition. But your kind don’t win any more, because there are people like me who have mods for looking straight through people like you.

‘Which is good news, really. People like you are always sad and angry inside. That’s because they lack the empathy that would actually allow them to be happy. So instead, your kind just go on collecting money or power or influence, or whatever meaningless crap it is that they’re using as a proxy for joy. And the whole time they keep wondering why they still feel sad and angry and alone. And you do feel lonely, don’t you, Sam? I know you do.’

Ira peered into his prisoner’s eyes, tilting his head this way and that. Sam held his gaze, forcing Ira to blink first. So Ira blinked at him with cartoonish enthusiasm and grinned.

‘Made you blink last,’ he said. He leaned back. ‘There’s an irony in your vision, Sam,’ he said, ‘because one of the badly behaved little shits whose uncivilised behaviour you despise so much is you.’

‘You think I don’t see that?’ Sam said tersely.

‘Oh, I’m sure you do, but you imagine a warped kind of justice in it. Everyone else is misbehaving so you might as well, too, but for a
good cause
. You see your entire self-serving edifice as a kind of sacrifice. The world might not understand your greatness but they’ll benefit from it even if you’re not there.’

Ira let out a cough of grim laughter. ‘That attitude would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic. You’re like that guy on Drexler who put poison in the water supply to get rid of all the Truists and ended up poisoning his own kids. At least that clown had the capacity for regret. I don’t see that in you. So here’s how it will go. I’ll be ignoring your advice. Not because it doesn’t make sense, but because it comes from you. You’ve lied enough that you don’t deserve to have influence. You’ll go down in history as an example of why people should think twice about over-modding their kids, Sam. I’ll make sure of that. Push them too hard and you might end up with a fuck-up joke like Sam Shah.

‘You see, there’s not much I can do to hurt you, Sam, because there’s about as much humanity in you as there is in one of those machines you woke. So I’m not going to bother. You’re just going to die. I came here to look you in the eye for my own satisfaction, to see you for what you are and to be able to dismiss your relevance fairly. I wanted to let you know, before we finished you, that someone saw all the way through your bullshit and out the other side, and didn’t find anything interesting or wise in there.’

Ira got up to leave. ‘Congratulations on being a second-rate failure, Sam Shah. Enjoy your firing squad.’

Sam found himself breathing heavily. His knuckles were white, which surprised him, because he still didn’t particularly feel anything. He squeezed his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids there was only darkness.

22.2: ANN

Ann walked up to the podium beside Ira and stood there to his right while he readied himself to speak. The camerabot hovered patiently in front of them, its ready-light winking.

[
I’m sorry,
] said Ann’s shadow silently.

[
For what?
]

[
For this. This is what happens. Become a super-person and you immediately get sucked into government.
]

[
I don’t mind,
] said Ann. [
There’s work to do.
]

[
Neither did I at first,
] said her shadow. [
Just wait.
]

Ira looked up into the lens. ‘People of the human worlds, I am here today to announce a public emergency. Humanity is faced with a terrible threat. The entities calling themselves Photurians have made their objectives clear. They intend to co-opt and subvert the human race to remake us in their own image. We cannot allow this to happen. For that reason, the civilian governments of all IPSO worlds are hereby suspended. The human race has been put on a war footing and will remain so until we are certain that the threat has been neutralised.’

In fact, moving to a war footing had proved far easier than it would have been before the Nems. Earth’s Leading class had paid the heaviest price during what they were now calling
The Harvesting
. Those family members who’d been spared were only too willing to throw their support behind the Fleet, just as Sam would have expected. They’d been very vocal in the senate in calling for a retaliatory strike. Nobody talked about independent colonies any more, not even as a joke.

‘We are doing this because every human world is at risk,’ said Ira. ‘Earth is vulnerable because it is too populous and too important. In its current state, we simply cannot risk it being taken. Similarly, our colonies are in danger because they are too sparsely populated and under-resourced. Using new technology we have taken from the Photurians, we will be addressing this imbalance. All the colonies will be bolstered and defended. And every person who has signed up for a ticket to leave Earth will be doing so shortly.’

Ira didn’t go into the details, of course. Many of them wouldn’t be popular. Whole cities full of people were slated to be ferried to the colonies using the human race’s only carrier – a dangerous piece of alien technology they barely understood. Once they got there, many of them would end up living in Snakepit-style accommodation before too long.

Will’s parting contribution to the human race, apparently, had been a blueprint for a simplified form of self-stabilising tunnel habitat like the ones on the planet that had swallowed him. He’d woven it into Ann’s DNA along with everything else. Their version wouldn’t be as smart or robust as the Photurian version, but it would grow a hell of a lot faster, which was what they needed right now. What conventional industrial resources they had would be required by the war effort. A programme to convert smart-blood from the
Ariel Two
into the raw material they’d need was already underway.

Ira’s voice took on a hard edge. ‘Our exodus will be made rapidly,’ he said, ‘and in a non-denominational fashion. This will be unpopular with many. Colony populations will soar. Earth will be all but emptied. And while we will respect the needs of families to stay together, religious or cultural affiliations will
not
be respected. Roles will be assigned based on military need
alone
. This transition will be difficult for many. But it is essential.

‘The alternative is for us to give ourselves over to an alien menace and say goodbye to our humanity. I ask each and every one of you for your cooperation in this joint act. Mankind will need to act together as never before. There is no room for a Frontier Protection Party in this new reality, or a Truist Revival. Our differences must and will be put aside. In return, I will make sure that everyone is clothed and fed. Your quality of life will be as good as the IPSO can make it. I wish you all the very best of luck. I will be with you every step of the way.’

The camera light died. There was no piped applause from the video feed and no cheering. This was not that kind of address.

Ira turned to Ann. ‘You know what you have to do.’

She nodded. Her duty lay back at Snakepit, presuming she could reach it. Her mission was clear: rescue Will or torch the planet if she couldn’t. Citra Chesterford had volunteered to go with her as a bioweapons consultant. After downloading Mark’s memories, Ann had been surprised at first that Citra wanted to get back out there. According to Ira, she’d been the first to offer.

Ann thought she understood how Citra was feeling. All of them who’d fallen under Sam’s spell shared a similar kind of shame. There was a stain on them that would never wash away. It had plagued Ann every night until she begged her shadow to push her into unconsciousness. But beside that pain, a new feeling had grown over the last few days – a green shoot of purpose. She might have been a part of the problem, but now she could be an even bigger piece of the solution. Redemption lay in her freedom to act.

For Venetia Sharp, by contrast, that redemption apparently lay at home. She’d agreed to head up Ira’s social engineering team for the new fortified colonies they were building. What the two of them were planning, neither of them would say.