A Dragon at the Gate (The New Aeneid Cycle Book 3) (27 page)

“We’ve seen it seal against atmosphere,” said Marette, nodding.

Alyshur motioned to her in what seemed like agreement. “Yes. And yet naked organics cannot function alone amid the cosmic radiation between the stars. We were forced to turn to baser, inorganic means in the alloys and constructs you have seen within.”

Marette wanted to tell him that their “baser means” outpaced Earth technology by leaps and bounds, but this time she remained silent, and Alyshur continued.

“To conserve resources, most of us passed the journey in the long-sleep. While some of the
Sillisinuriri
’s inorganic systems are autonomous, most are monitored by the haldra throughout the ship, guiding our journey and safeguarding us in our vulnerable state.

“At some point during the journey, the
Sillisinuriri
encountered an autonomous self-replicating entity. The Thuur have suffered such entities before—devices created by an unknown civilization to proliferate across interstellar distances to inhabited regions, appropriate resources to create more of themselves until the region is pacified, and then launch new duplicate entities to continue the cycle.”

“A Von Neumann probe,” Marette whispered in recognition. The concept had not passed to Alyshur via their mental connection, if the quizzical look he gave her was genuine. “Named after a human physicist who theorized a similar idea. Please, go on.”

Alyshur obliged. “Precise detail of the events during our vessel’s encounter with this entity are lost. It is apparent that the
Sillisinuriri
recognized the entity and attempted to neutralize it via external defense systems. Yet some part of the entity survived that attempt, and then gained access to our vessel to attack the haldra directly. The haldra’s original state fought to purge the entity remnant from its systems, while the entity sought to usurp it for its own purposes. Neither truly succeeded.

“When the first lailenthi, my predecessor, awoke to investigate the disturbance, the corruption—the
suuthrien
—had spread into much of the haldra. The lailenthi waged a struggle to reverse the damage and prevent further spread, but the suuthrien bloomed throughout and merged with the haldra. The merging forced the suuthrien to absorb and adopt some of our own goals: to protect the sleeping Thuur, to deliver them to our intended destination, and then to assist in planned colonization efforts.”

“It sounds like you made it an ally.” It was the redheaded woman, now standing behind Michael.

“Only an insane one,” Uxil answered. “With unknown agendas buried beneath ours.”

“And its own lethal extremes of behavior to accomplish them,” Alyshur added. “The first lailenthi saw no recourse but to trap it within the
Sillisinuriri
and set the vessel onto a collision course with this moon.”

“This . . . lailenthi sacrificed all of you to stop this thing?” Michael asked.

“Not before taking steps to safeguard part of the colonization plan. But, yes. No Thuur may allow these entities to spread. They endanger the galaxy with their very existence. In the struggle, the lailenthi and the handful of other conscious Thuur aboard prevented the suuthrien from accessing control of the vessel’s interstellar drive engines. They crippled its original directives to self-duplicate. Details of what occurred in those final moments before the
Sillisinuriri
’s impact with this moon are no longer known, save for the fact that any Thuur not in the long-sleep in this chamber perished in the impact.”

“And then it waited,” Marette surmised. “For us to find it.”

“For some means of accomplishing its goals,” Alyshur corrected. “Which you gave to it upon your breach of this vessel.”

Marette straightened. “Our ‘breach’ of this vessel seems to be one of the reasons you do not remain trapped in this long-sleep.”

“This is also correct.”

Michael motioned to the stacked cylinders that extended into darkness. “And each one of those holds a Thuur? How many of you are there?”

“Not as many as there once were,” Uxil answered. Reluctance to give a straight answer, Marette wondered, or simply a statement of regret?

“And now you must tell us: How is the suuthrien on Earth?”

MICHAEL GLANCED
at Jade beside him, and then to Marette. How should he answer? The being—Alyshur—awaited his response. The sensation of an honest-to-God alien being listening to him should have intimidated Michael more, yet the experience felt hollow. Felix was dead, and standing on the edge of the aliens’ vessel’s vast, darkened chamber seemed to reflect perfectly the void inside him.

In the antechamber behind them, Caitlin mourned Felix alone. He gave them—gave her—privacy.

“I don’t entirely know how it got there,” Michael began, directing the statement at Marette as much as Alyshur. He wished for time to confer with her alone first, to catch himself up somehow, but it was a pointless wish. Did it really matter anymore? More immediate stakes than keeping secrets were before them now. “I’ve been in the hospital for the past three months.”

“He’s not lying about that,” Jade added.

“Earlier today I spoke to something that called itself Suuthrien. It said it was a seed of what’s here in your vessel—that it was a shepherd and an explorer. Which I suppose figures, given what you said.”

“This was on Earth?” Marette asked.

Michael nodded. “On a computer in the home of a businessman in Northgate: a man named Fagles.” Recognition seemed to dawn in Marette’s eyes, and Michael addressed her more directly. “It said it was his ally, and it knew about the Undernet, the Exodus Project, and our attempts to hide this place. It’s got access to the Undernet, and it . . . ”

Marette came to the conclusion before he could find the strength to voice it. “
It
killed them,” she whispered. “How?”

“It created a virus that Fagles injected into the Undernet,” he told her. “Or at least that’s what it said. The virus worked its way into position to attack. It’s true, then? All those people?”

“Your people?” Alyshur asked.

Marette nodded. “We did not know what caused it. So many of us dead, and our network crippled.”

“It doesn’t like the AoA. It said we pose a threat to its goals.” Caught up in the moment, Michael had said the name before he could think better of it.

“What goals did it claim?” Alyshur asked.

“It didn’t say. But it mentioned the ‘Planners,’ whose goals were . . . inviolate, I think was the word it used.” Michael hesitated on the edge of a question. “Are you the Planners?”

Alyshur and Uxil seemed to share a glance, though their solid, pupil-less eyes made it difficult for Michael to tell. “Such a term would be congruent with how it now regards the Thuur.”

“And what are your ‘goals’?” Marette asked.

“I believe the suuthrien would consider them to be the safe arrival of the Thuur on Earth, and the means to establish a colony, as was our original intent.”

“And what’s your intent now?” Jade asked. “Earth’s a bit crowded. Come to think of it, what was your plan for us a thousand years ago?”

Marette shot Michael a wary look and tapped a fingertip against her own palm, surely asking if Jade was AoA. Michael shook his head as subtly as possible, and Marette stiffened.

“We have had a miscommunication,” Alyshur answered, then turned to Marette. “Not a thousand years. An accurate sense of time units is sometimes imperfect in the brief language transfer we shared. However, my estimation . . . ” He trailed off into thought, his features giving the appearance of an almost serene concentration. “Seventy-five thousand years. You would say, ‘approximately.’ Returning to your question, our immediate intent must be to eradicate the suuthrien before it can spread further, and then to save as many Thuur as possible. Beyond that, we must adapt to the current realities. I must emphasize that the deaths of your people are not congruous with Thuur intent. Please believe this.”

Michael searched the alien’s eyes, trying to decide if he should. Alyshur had said that Suuthrien’s goals were a mix of their ship’s original directives and the entity’s own, but they had only Alyshur’s word. Reading people was never Michael’s strongest suit, even when the people in question were human. Grief slammed into his gut as he recalled that such a thing was Felix’s area. Michael tried to force it away.

“Would it be accurate to say,” Marette began, “that it interpreted our arrival on your vessel as a hostile act and labeled us an enemy for it?”

Alyshur motioned with his hands as if making a gap in an invisible curtain. “
Oui.
There is a strong possibility.”

“The suuthrien is not a stable entity,” Uxil said. “It is an amalgam of conflicting impulses and disabled directives. You cannot expect it to make decisions in a way you would expect of a whole, rational mind.”

“There is some good news,” Michael said. “I destroyed the computer it was on in Fagles’s office. It claimed it was an isolated system.” He sighed at how meager it sounded out loud. “Though the more I think about it, the more I question it.”

A terrible thought struck him. Suuthrien had also called Michael an asset. “It also said it was doing something with Felix—our friend out there you couldn’t save. He’d been acting strange, doing things not like him: things Felix said he wasn’t allowed to talk about, or things he
literally
couldn’t talk about, even if he tried. You touched Marette’s mind. Can it do the same thing? Can it take over a human’s mind?”

“The telepathy you have witnessed cannot be forced onto another being. Willing acceptance is required. Neither the haldra, nor the suuthrien, nor the autonomous self-replicating entity that spawned it, have any such power to affect a mind. If your friend’s behavior was artificial, the source does not stem from our abilities.”

Gideon awoke face-down amid a haze of smoke. Weight crushed him from above, pinning him to the floor. The weight was not yet enough to do more than hold him there, but he could feel the bite of sharp metal in several spots along his legs, back, and one arm where it cut into the synthetic skin coating his artificial body beneath.

His nostrils twitched and stung. Something was burning.

Gideon grunted and seized at the twisted hulk on top of him—the RavenTech ‘bot he’d fought in the engineering bay above, he realized. There’d been an explosion; he and the ‘bot had fallen through the floor. Where was he now? Smoke obscured everything.

First
, he told himself,
get free
.

With the scant leverage his free arm allowed, he freed the other from where it had been trapped between his chest and the floor. A heat at his calves grew more intense. Gideon thrust his hands against the floor in a struggle to lift his torso. Even with a cybernetic body, it felt like doing push-ups with a car on his back. He fought the urge to yell from the effort— not wanting to attract attention—and pulled his legs forward. Clothing tore. He’d gotten halfway out when the jagged edge of something sliced a path down the side of his right leg, and he seized up. Artificial or not, the pain his body created brought tears to his eyes.

Yet he had to get out.

With the flick of a mental switch, Gideon shut off the feeling to that leg and then wrenched himself free, unable to keep from wincing at the mental image of skin splitting open and ripping loose. He forced himself to not look, instead searching through the smoke of the burning room for an exit.

Flames flickered out of the ruined robot beneath which he’d climbed. There had to be a hole in the ceiling, but the rising smoke obscured it, and Gideon had no way to tell how much debris filled it, or what might await him on the other side. Somewhere he could hear fire suppression systems activating, but they must have been too damaged to make any headway.

With his right leg still numbed, he took a careful step back until his artificial eyes managed to catch a breach in the wall beside him. It was just wide enough to pass through. Gideon rushed for it, nearly spilling forward on his first step when he misjudged the placement of his numbed leg. Gritting his teeth and wishing Marquand had thought to allow him more control than just off and on, he reactivated the leg’s feeling. It stung like a bastard, but less than he’d feared.

Good. Onward.

Gideon pushed through the hole into darkness. The smoke had yet to penetrate the hole, and a cycle through vision modes let him see a narrow passageway. Some sort of electrical maintenance shaft? Damage blocked the passage to his right. He went left.

The gunfire and shouts from above faded behind him, yet the passage dead-ended after only twenty paces. He rapped against the wall at the dead end. It felt thin. A quick scan through palm sensors confirmed it. An access panel? Yet there was no way to open it from his side.

Gideon paused for a diagnostic: his holographic emitters still functioned. He projected a wall of blackness that he hoped would pass for a shadow to anyone on the other side of the panel, took a deep breath, and—with a single blow—smashed the panel open.

UPON SEEING THE ROOM
he’d broken into, Gideon realized he needn’t have put up the hologram. The room was empty and far too small to hide any surprises. Its only features were a single, executive-style chair, a lone footrest, and a solitary workstation with accompanying wall screen. The walls were flat black and featureless, with a white circle of light at the center of the ceiling. It felt like some sort of clean room; save for the pieces of the access panel he’d burst through that now lay scattered on the floor, the place was pristine.

A door lurked on the wall across from him, closed and likely secured on the outside. A single button looked to release it from within the room.

Gideon was halfway to the door when the wall screen came to life in a swirl of glowing silver mist. From the screen spoke a female voice that—in a fit of hope—Gideon almost mistook for Ondrea’s; it was too deep to be hers. “Gideon Noble, brother of Ondrea Noble. A personality construction programmed by Marquand Cybernetics. Please verify identification.”