Heirs of Earth (9 page)

In Lucia’s mind, the absence of that photo constituted hard evidence of foul play. Thor agreed with her findings, and so did Alander. The only problem was that the interference had taken place decades before the Spinners and the Starfish had arrived in the area. As there had been no further disturbances that Lucia had noted while continuing on her journey beyond pi-1 Urea Major, the question was open as to what exactly was in the system, and why it was there at all.

Frank Axford reasoned that it was a Spinner base designed to coordinate the local gift-dropping exercise, or some sort of advance party. All attempts to look in the system resulted in rapid destruction and a thorough cleanup, so it was hard to tell for sure. The time lag between arrival in pi-1 Ursa Major and the deposition of the gifts was symptomatic of a galactic time-scale, he said. Forty years was nothing to beings who might cross the gulf between galaxies as if it were nothing more than a stroll across a road.

The other alternative, of course, was that Lucia was wrong—or worse, crazy—which meant the whole plan was founded upon nothing whatsoever. And in that case, Alander had nothing to be thankful to Thor for except possibly an early grave.

“We have no choice but to accept Lucia’s findings,” he said. “Time is ticking, and we’re no closer to finding another way out of this.”

Sol nodded as she turned back to the schematics. “Is there anything I should know here? And I ask only out of curiosity, you understand. Strictly as an observer.”

He came back to the table but didn’t sit down. “Some of the probes were attacked by forces the gifts could help us resist. It’s pretty exotic stuff, and I’m not sure I follow half of it, but there are nanofacturers working on some sort of shield effect that will protect us from the worst of it. If we keep quiet and don’t disturb anything, we’ll probably have a chance.”

She nodded as her eyes scanned the sheaves of electronic paper before her. Diagrams and explanations scrolled up and down at her touch. There was no way to tell just how much she absorbed from the casual glance, but he knew better than to underestimate her.

“This is hairy stuff,” she said. “Playing around with fundamental constants is not something you do lightly or easily. I’m not sure I like the idea of being on either end of this sort of technology, especially when we only have the Gifts’ word that it’ll work.”

“If it doesn’t, I guess we won’t have long to curse the fact,” said Alander. “I can’t imagine the Starfish taking prisoners.”

“Except in a specimen jar.” She sagged back into her seat, sighing. Despite advanced biomods and incredible hormonal control, she was still a victim of stress.

He came around behind her and rubbed at the muscles in her neck.

“I don’t want to die, Peter.”

“So take a leaf out of Axford’s book. Copy yourself; leave a backup somewhere. Bury it deep enough, and it might just slip through the Starfish net.”

A strange expression crossed her face. “Why should it when nothing else we’ve left behind has managed to survive the wake?” she asked. “If only the Gifts would fight with us. But they won’t even defend themselves!”

He didn’t say anything; this was ground they’d covered many times before.

“I know I shouldn’t hang my hopes on someone stepping in to save us at the last minute,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I just can’t believe that humanity could—” She shrugged, helplessly searching for the right word. Then, finally. “Could just
die
!”

“Maybe we’re already dead,” he said dryly. “Maybe we just haven’t realized it yet.”

She slipped out from under his hands and turned in her seat to face him, her expression torn between amusement and amazement.

“Of all the people I could be spending my last days with,” she said, shaking her head, “why did it have to be with such a miserable bastard like you?”

“I’ve actually been asking myself the same thing.” There was no humor in his response, just grim awareness that their situation really didn’t make any sense. “Maybe it’s just because our scars match.”

She snorted a short laugh. “Misery loves company. Is that it?”

He turned away from her, from her facetiousness, and moved back to look at the schematics again. “How long do you think we have?” he asked after a moment’s reflection.

“Until the mission, or until the end?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Well, unless Thor changes the timetable, then we leave in twenty-five hours. And unless the plan works, the Starfish will be here in three days.”

Her tone carried uncertainty and fear, but he had no reassurances to offer her. He had little enough for himself. All he could think of was Axford’s words:
Better to run to your death than run from it.

In the grim silence of
Klotho’s
cockpit, he found himself almost ready to believe it.

1.2.5

There were ten orbital towers in all, each linked by a
super-strong and superconducting circuit. At first, Lucia was apprehensive about exploring them, feeling small and insignificant against the alien marvels. But the more she ventured into them, the less her trepidations bothered her.

Movement was initially slow—relatively speaking—as she followed the complex circuitry from spindle to spindle. But once she’d touched upon each of the gifts, it became easier for her to go back to them, and before long she was jumping between the spindles with instinctive ease. She just had to think of the spindle that she wanted to go to, and she immediately knew the route to take. The entire process took barely nanoseconds.

Each of the enigmatic installations had very distinct purposes: Spindle One was the Science Hall, where the Spinners provided arcane theorems in order to educate their primitive charges; Spindle Two allowed for companion experiments and materials in order to elucidate those theorems. The Library in Spindle Eight contained a vast knowledge base that would take millennia to examine thoroughly, given the chance; while the Gallery in Spindle Nine demonstrated that artistic expression was as diverse across the galaxy as it had been on Earth. There was a Surgery in Spindle Four that provided tools for medical analysis and treatments that appeared to be designed specifically for humans, although it displayed a flair for Yuhl physiognomy as well. Spindle Ten housed the Dark Room, the very depths of which she still avoided, despite her growing confidence; there was a hole ship Dry Dock in Spindle Six, and the Gifts themselves—the AIs who oversaw the entire complex—occupied Spindle Seven. Spindle Five was the Hub of the instantaneous matter transmission system, a room consisting of ten doors that offered access to each of the gifts.

Why ten?
she found herself wondering.
Only nine doors would be required to access the other spindles, surely?

Investigating this anomaly, she discovered that one of the doors looped back upon itself, back to the Hub. She remembered Rob Singh’s talk of glitches in the gifts, and wondered if this was one such—evidence that the authors of these astonishing gifts were capable of error.

The Gifts themselves wouldn’t talk to her as she explored, despite her attempts to ask them questions. But neither did they obstruct her, and the lesser machines in the spindles were willing to take her instructions. It was a weird feeling, seeing these alien artifacts from the inside. It felt as though she could extend herself into any of the gifts, becoming a part of them, mentally flexing here and there to examine and explore any aspect of the items contained within them. As her pov moved between the cracks in those spaces, she found that the gifts weren’t as clear-cut as they appeared from an outside perspective. The Surgery, for instance, revealed to her that it could construct another I-suit to replace the demonstration model that had been appropriated by Cleo Samson, Rasmussen’s mission supervisor. Furthermore, the dimensions of the I-suit could be customized to almost any setting. That raised possibilities Lucia found particularly exciting.

The more she explored the gifts, the more proficient she became at using them, effortlessly jumping between each of the spindles to further her understanding of the knowledge she found. Having examined a piece of art, for example, she could jump to the Library and find information on the species responsible for that piece of art, then cross-reference that information with star charts from the Map Room that would pinpoint the system or systems occupied by them. From there it would be just a quick trip to the Dry Dock where, had there been a hole ship available, she could have traveled to that system and witnessed the species firsthand.

That none of these species visited by the Spinners existed anymore, thanks to the Starfish, weighed heavily upon her after a while. It was depressing to think that so many lives, so many diverse cultures, had been wiped out forever. The longer she explored, the more depressed she became, until soon she felt totally exhausted and found herself needing to rest.

In no time at all, Lucia had returned to the confines of the Dark Room. With her mind expanded to the degree it was, it seemed as though an entire year had passed, when in truth it had only been a couple of hours—but she felt like an entirely different person than she had been at the start. She’d learned things, seen things, experienced things that had given her a new perspective on life. And yet she had still only touched the surface of everything within the gifts.

They were the most incredible things she’d ever seen, and she had managed to touch them. She alone had seen the awesome and beautiful mask the Gifts hid behind from
their
side. And it was a sight more wondrous than anything she could have imagined. The marvels of the Map Room rotated in her mind as she floated in the darkness, trying to absorb the information she had just accessed.

The gifts orbiting Sagarsee were the same as those deposited on all the other Earth-like worlds in Surveyed Space. It was a simple arrangement repeated on dozens of worlds. Only where physical conditions forbade it did the pattern vary. Around Hammon, where a dense cloud of orbiting rubble left over from a disintegrated moon posed a threat to geosyncronous orbits, the gifts adopted a rosette arrangement well out of danger. Sol had noted a different arrangement again in the system of Vega. There, the gifts had been built inside the core fragments of a disintegrated gas giant, where Frank Axford had built himself a sanctuary. And although these had been effectively hidden from view, the Starfish had still managed to root them out and destroy them.

That the gifts
could
be destroyed set Lucia’s mind spinning. They contained such a wealth of technology and knowledge; their very nature spoke of advancements far beyond anything Earth had ever achieved. Neither human engrams nor
Yuhl/Goel
had managed to damage one nor even get close to seeing how one worked. Yet the Starfish effortlessly reduced them to slag heaps, to clouds of energetic dust.

Humanity, she was beginning to understand, stood between the benevolence of one superpower and the destructive wrath of another. They were refugees in an incomprehensibly vast war, doing all they could just to survive.

Perhaps, then, the gifts were aid drops. She wondered if they existed to help new civilizations weather the oncoming destruction that was the Starfish migration. Maybe the Starfish weren’t following the Spinners at all; maybe the Spinners were simply running ahead, doing what they could to minimize the damage to those who fell in the Starfish’s path.

The thought was a disquieting one, putting as it did Thor’s intended mission to contact the Spinners into serious doubt, so Lucia turned away from it. After all, it wasn’t her problem. She had watched the other engrams scurry about at their highest clock speeds, frantically choosing systems, preparing for every possible contingency, expending far too much energy, she thought, in staving off the inevitable. For a brief time she considered volunteering for the mission, but that foolish notion soon passed. She’d spent what felt like an eternity locked in an electronic coffin alone; now that she was out, she wasn’t about to consign herself to another more permanent tomb. She had better things to live for.

“You’re back?”

Lucia had been so preoccupied that she hadn’t noticed Rob’s tumbling robot at the entrance to the Dark Room.

“Yes. I went exploring without you. I’m sorry.”

“The gifts?”

“I visited them all, but there was too much to take in, in one scan. I spent most of my time in the Library, checking out some of the alien cultures recorded there.”

His chuckle resounded in the darkness. “I wish we’d had you sooner, Lucia. It would have made our job a whole lot easier. It’s a shame the hole ship isn’t here, though. Now
that’s
an awesome piece of technology we’d love to figure out.”

“Why do you suppose there’s only one of each thing per set of gifts?”

“That’s one of the many mysteries we’ve yet to work out,” he answered, his robotic limbs twitching. “There are so many things here that we just don’t understand: complex machines that, for all we know, might well start a production line that could supply us with as many of each item as we need. Who knows?”

It was certainly possible, thought Lucia, especially given what she had learned about the I-suits, but it was all too alien for her to be absolutely certain of anything. She might have had the ability to explore the gifts far more effectively than anyone else, but it would still take time—time that she knew she didn’t have. No one did.

She did, however, sense hidden structures behind the gifts that hinted at unseen potentials. There was enough information in the Library alone, for example, to keep a hundred researchers occupied for a century. But behind that there was an underlying purpose or function that Lucia couldn’t quite fathom—and the same applied to all the other gifts, too: the Lab, the Surgery, the Science Hall, the Map Room—they all had things hidden beneath the surface.

Of all the gifts she’d investigated so far, she had no doubt that the hole ships were the linchpin of humanity’s survival effort. Without them, there would be no ftl communication and no physical exchange between the colonies. Nor would there be any chance of escape, either.