Echoes of Earth (23 page)

He pulled the switch. The thread that was her mind flickered but didn’t cease.

“You’re making a mistake, Peter.”

Her voice tugged at him, stung his conscience. Now that a simple shutdown had failed, there was only one option left open to him.

Hidden deeper in the tangle of commands and displays that made up Engram Control was one marked Erase, for use only in the direst of circumstances. Hopefully, the programmers had left them this fail safe, because if they hadn’t, he didn’t know what else he could do.

When he found it, his vision rippled as though it was a reflection on a pond into which a heavy stone had been thrown.

“Please, Peter,” she said softly. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t you see, Cleo?” he said, hesitating. “I have no choice.
They
have given me no choice! If the mission is to have any chance, I have to do this.”

But before he could make the command, something wrapped around his throat, choking him. The two worlds he occupied suddenly overlapped. He was torn between the virtual illusion and the reality of the outside of the
Tipler.
Still holding the access point, he managed to swing himself around enough to see his attacker: it was the droid he had left behind in the hole ship. It was stubby but strong, and it had a good grip on the
Tipler.
Its limbs writhed like those of an angry spider as it unfolded a cutting tool and brought it down with a flash toward his neck.

He flinched, but all he felt was the impact of the blow: no stabbing pain, no sharpness. Fighting his surprise, he grappled with the limb around his throat, managing with some difficulty to get his fingers around it; then he pulled as hard as he could.

The knife slashed at his fingers, and again failed to bite. The Immortality Suit repelled the blade, no matter how hard the droid struck. But there was nothing it could do about momentum, and the droid—with Samson’s mind behind it—swiftly changed its tactic. Its limbs spread- eagled around his head to push as hard as they could against the
Tipler
, hoping to tear him away from it.

Alander hung on, knowing that if he let go, he might never make it back, while the fingers of his free hand tore at the limb around his throat. He thrashed his head to put the droid off balance. Stars formed behind his eyes as he pitted every muscle in his android body against the machine trying to kill him.

Then abruptly the pressure was gone and the droid was falling away, quickly becoming little more than a sparkling mote drifting toward Adrasteia.

He waited until his heart beat normally again before turning back to the
Tipler
and allowing the virtual world to wash over him again.

“Peter, please listen—” she started, but this time he didn’t hesitate; he hit the switch.

It wasn’t as he’d imagined it. It took no more than a second to wipe everything that had been Cleo Samson from the
Tipler’
s main banks: the primary pattern laid down by her original, along with all the memories she had added to it over the last century of the mission. He felt her absence the moment she was gone. The ship was silent and empty around him; ConSense was a vacuum containing nothing but his thoughts and his regret. He couldn’t cry in conSense; he didn’t have a body in the sense that Hatzis and the others did. But the last thing he remembered for a long, long while was grief.

1.2.7

“Peter, can you hear me?”

For the second time that day, he rose from oblivion into confusion. This time, though, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing. He felt like he was caught in a dream—a nightmare in which sight was swapped with sound, where taste became touch, and the world had turned inside out. He was lost—

“
Is
it you, Peter? It took us longer than we thought to find you, but I think it’s you.”

The familiar voice paused for a moment. He didn’t know where it was coming from, but it sounded like Caryl Hatzis.

“If it is you and you can hear me, don’t bother trying to respond. Just do exactly as I say.”

Even if he’d wanted to respond, he had no idea how to go about it.

“You have to break the connection, Peter,” she went on. “You know how to do that. It’s easy. You have a ripcord like we all do. All you have to do is
use
it. Once you’re out, we can talk properly.”

He frowned into the void. A ripcord? At first he didn’t know what she was talking about. Ripcords were used as a last resort to crash a conflicting environment, such as the ctrl-alt-del command his father had used on his old PC. But what had that to do with him? He wasn’t even able to enter subversive environments anymore. If he did, all he had to do was...

The memory surfaced with surprising ease from somewhere in the dark and long untouched recesses of his mind. The command had always been there, of course; he simply hadn’t needed it for a long, long time. In fact, he hadn’t used his ripcord since his breakdown upon arriving in Upsilon Aquarius, almost ten years earlier. Nevertheless, it was there now, clear in his mind, as it always would be should he ever need it.

Hatzis was repeating her instructions to him, but this time he was ignoring her, focusing instead on his ripcord command.

“Tabula rasa.”

He spoke the words loud and clear into the void, knowing that the
Tipler’
s AIs would recognize it.

Suddenly he was hanging in shadow between the hole ship cockpit and the
Tipler,
one hand still clutching the manual access port. He groaned slightly and eased his grip. His throat hurt from where the droid had attacked him earlier. How much earlier, he couldn’t tell. How long had he actually been out?

The voice of the
Tipler
interrupted his thoughts: “Do you wish to end this session?”

“Huh?” he croaked. “Oh, yes. Yes, I do.
Arachne,
can you bring the cockpit around here?”

He didn’t know if the ship’s AI could hear him, but he figured it was worth a try. Relief flooded through him as the AI’s voice replied:

“I am receiving transmissions from—”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But they can wait. Just get the cockpit over to me, all right?”

He relaxed somewhat as the open mouth of the cockpit swung into view, then kicked himself toward it as soon as it was stationary. Inside, he collapsed with a grunt. Too weak to stand, he crawled the rest of the way into the cockpit, heaving himself onto the couch.

“Will you be requiring medical assistance?” the AI asked.

“No, I’m all right. The suit’s looking after me just fine. Just put those calls from the
Tipler
on speaker.”

“Peter?” came the voice of Jayme Sivio. “Can you hear me, Peter? Please respond if you are receiving this transmission.”

“Give me an open channel.” A moment later, Sivio’s face appeared in the screen before him.

“Peter?”

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Jayme. How long was I out?”

“A couple of hours.” There was no hiding the relief on Sivio’s face. “We came up to speed not knowing a thing about what had happened, but when we worked it out, we found you embedded in the systems. You weren’t responding, and we couldn’t hail the hole ship. We were worried that...” He stopped, smiled. “Well, we were just worried, that’s all. Caryl wouldn’t give up on you.”

“Cleo...” He was unable to finish the sentence.

Sivio’s smile faded. “We know,” he said. “You don’t need to tell us about that right now, though.”

Alander leaned back into the seat, rubbing his forehead. His skin was dry, almost brittle. Or was that the Immortality Suit? He couldn’t tell. The last thing he remembered was erasing Samson from the
Tipler
’s banks. Beyond that, he drew a complete blank. He must have had the presence of mind, though, to bring the others back up before blanking out completely. Had he not, the
Tipler
might have remained empty but for his mind-locked engram for eternity.

Maybe the idea of oblivion had been preferable a couple of hours ago. Had that been what he’d wanted? He certainly hadn’t tried to extricate himself from his predicament. Adrift in conSense, instead of pulling the ripcord as Hatzis had finally instructed him to do, he had simply let himself sink deeper and deeper, losing himself to the emptiness. After what he’d done to Samson, that might have seemed an easy solution to his guilt. But it wasn’t a foolproof one. If he’d
really
wanted to die, the erase command would have been the only certain way. He must have known that Hatzis would not simply leave him to oblivion indefinitely, despite what must have been a temptation to do just that.

It seemed she cared what happened to him, after all. And so did he. For
himself,
though, not for anyone else.

“
Arachne,
take me back to the Dock,” he said. “And Jayme, give me a moment. I need to rest.”

“Understood, Peter.”

A new face appeared on the screen before the line died, though.

“Good work, Peter,” said Hatzis. Her tone was cautious but respectful. “And thanks.”

He shrugged but couldn’t be bothered saying anything in response. He didn’t have the energy or inclination to score any points off her, so he just let his head fall back onto the couch, rubbing absently at his aching throat.

I’m sorry, Cleo,
he thought suddenly.

“Is there anything you need?”

“No.” Then, after a moment’s consideration, he said, “Actually, there is something you could do. I want you to call that meeting. Talk to the crew; give them the choice. I want a decision within twenty-four hours.”

“A decision?”

“You know what I’m talking about.” He took a deep breath and held it for a moment. When he let it go, it came out in a rush. “I want to go to Earth, and I want to go soon, before something else like this happens.”

“Peter, I—”

“Can you at least put it to them?” He kept his voice firm and even.

She was silent for a while, but in the end she didn’t argue. “All right, Peter,” she said. “I’ll do it—for
me,
if not for any real reason. The sooner we get back home, the sooner I can start tearing strips off those fuckers who sent us here.”

The virulence in her voice surprised him, but it did make sense. It must have been galling to have had her command ripped away so casually. He would have felt the same way, he was sure.

“Thanks, Caryl. I appreciate it.”

She nodded. Then the line went dead, and he was alone.

* * *

The decision surprised them all. Samson’s attempted sabotage,
seemed to have galvanized feelings more than anything else in recent days. Those who had originally argued for more time were now arguing that time was of the essence—that, as Peter had implied, the longer they waited, the greater the chances were that some other incident could occur and threaten everything.

And then there were the gifts themselves.

“When the Spinners first came here,” said Peter, “we were apprehensive. We didn’t know what they wanted with us. Some might argue that we still don’t, and therefore we should still be wary of them... and to a point, I’d have to agree. We
don’t
know if the Spinners have a hidden agenda, but it does seem unlikely when you consider what has been given to us. So I think we should be careful not to let our fears and suspicions continue to cloud our judgments. Regardless of what their intentions are, it seems that we can at least rest easy in terms of the actual technology.”

“Why?” asked Jene Avery, one of the few who remained skeptical.

“Well, because I’m alive, for starters,” he said. “And because we’re here now, talking as we are.”

He looked around at the faces of the people he had trained with. They had come to him, this time, patching into his version of reality—the Hub—rather than insisting that he join theirs. The thirty people stared back at him with expressions he knew well. Even though he hadn’t been a proper part of the crew, he still knew them. They had entrained together. Christ, along with the other engrams on missions elsewhere, they were probably the closest thing to family he had.

“For one thing, the Gifts could have refused to help,” he said. “They could have denied me the use of the hole ship, or the on-board AI could have refused such a close maneuver.” When he thought of the jump from the gas giant to the
Tipler
—a distance of over a billion kilometers with a margin for error of barely meters—he shuddered. “The Immortality Suit itself could have killed me at any time. But it didn’t. The gifts came through when we needed them most.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said Sivio. “They were just the tools. It was you who used them effectively.”

The praise both warmed and irritated him at the same time; he couldn’t tell if Sivio meant it or if he was just saying it to make up for his earlier doubts.

“My point is,” he continued, “that they’re
reliable
tools. We can believe what the Gifts say in that respect. It looks like they’re not going to lie to us in a way that will cause us immediate harm.”

“Maybe that’s just what they want us to think,” persisted Avery.

“Maybe,” Alander concurred. “And maybe we could argue like this forever. But at some point we
have
to make a decision. Do you really want to wait another two hundred years for a reply from Earth? A reply that might never even come?”

Avery backed down at that. No one wanted to wait that long. No matter what had happened on Earth, no matter why communications had ceased so abruptly, the people back home deserved to know what the survey team in Upsilon Aquarius had found. There was no question about that. The only disagreements occurred over the timing, and Hatzis, as she had intimated to Alander in the hole ship, was keen for a swift resolution.

It came a short time later when the vote was finally taken again. This time the majority was satisfied that the risks had been minimized, if not completely nullified, and Alander was given the go-ahead to leave at his earliest convenience. There were still a few dissenting voices, but generally it was agreed that, as soon as enough information had been compiled on the gifts by their respective specialists and compressed into mobile Solid-State Data Storage, Alander would take the hole ship to Earth and hand the matter over to whatever authority remained there. If any semblance of UNESSPRO still existed, the Spinners and all their gifts would become their responsibility. However, if he found only savagery—or worse, nothing at all—then he was to return to Adrasteia with the data still on the SSDS units. From there, they would decide what course of action to take next.