The Tabit Genesis (25 page)

‘Why does that matter so much to you?’ Sig rebuked. ‘I stopped counting years ago.’

Angus smirked.

‘I just want to win a wager,’ he said, moving away from the hatch. ‘Don’t take the high road with this crew, mate. Everyone ’ere hates ’imself for one reason or other.’

Big Eye interrupted their conversation, which it wouldn’t unless it found something.

The two men looked at each other as if they’d seen a ghost.

A plot of heat signatures was superimposed on the local starmap within their helmet UIs. The odds of that track being anything other than a disabled ship were minimal. The time to intercept, risking a very high-profile burn from this location, was twelve hours.

If it was a Lightspear, it was right where Vladric said it would be.

‘That’s why we kill for ’im,’ Angus muttered. ‘The bastard’s never wrong.’

Drifting aimlessly through space, Myrha Obyeran considered the cycle of simplicity in her meaningless life:

Sleep. Loathing. More sleep. Time wasting away. Repeat.

Instead of battling for the highest honour of House Obyeran, she was the equivalent of an actress in some staged drama, worshipped only because she shared the name of a king, handed a crown by a father who didn’t trust her to earn it on merit alone.

One week after her escort ships vanished, the Lightspear came alive on its own, all systems functioning normally.

At which point, she forcibly shut the whole ship back down.

It drifted. And drifted. And she meditated on her actions, reasoning that her motivation was not spite or anger, but a rational necessity. If her father did not truly believe in the ideals he had founded an entire culture upon, then she would make him. Ultimately, her defiance would make House Obyeran stronger. By thwarting his succession plan, he would be forced to reconsider what he wanted their House to stand for – after he moved past his anger, just as she had to.

Myrha passed the time by making challenges for herself, attempting repairs to the damage she had inflicted on the Lightspear, wondering if Maez had already returned. That would be glorious. But more likely, his suffering was just as prolonged. Her father had certainly taken measures to ensure that his Lightspear could never return before her own.

Sadly, there was more dignity in her brother’s lost cause than what she was doing now.

Every glance outside shattered her calm and restored the anger that would never subside. A glittering line of dust broke the shroud of blackness in the distance. The Orionis sun was the brightest star in the Milky Way, and the pale bluish hue of the Triton Worlds stood out like sapphires on a coat of velvet. There was no question she was in the Hades Terminus. Had this been a real test, finding her way back to Hyllus would have been possible; difficult without astrometric data, but with a functioning engine and power plant, it could be done. With a Lightspear, you always had a chance.

That was the whole point of The Voyage Home.

Myrha pushed herself away from the bridge and into the long corridor running the length of the ship, smiling her hands along the smooth, cold bulkheads. Their whole culture, the Obyeran way, was illuminated by the Lightspear. Yet she had attacked this beautiful creation and shut her down out of spite for her father.

Ashamed, she resolved to bring the ship back to life.

Moving towards the reactor compartment, Myrha considered giving her a proper name. It was her father who had imposed the Lightspear collective on the fleet. Her ship should be different from the rest.

As she passed the short hallway leading to the dorsal personnel hatch, the unmistakable sound of docking clamps latching onto the hull startled her.

Myrha had cursed her father often in the past weeks, but none as loudly as this. King Obyeran had come to whisk his daughter home like some delinquent child. And with her Lightspear shut down, of course she hadn’t seen him coming.

Like a child
.

In a rage, she bashed the emergency release hatch to greet him.

For several milliseconds, Sig froze, and so did his crew.

No one was expecting the hatch to open, least of all Drake and Theron, who had just armed the charges that would blast it apart. Those explosives were now floating between them and an enormous pale woman in a survival suit.

Experts that they were, the Glasnard brothers had designed a pyrotechnic masterpiece to get the hatch open quickly. They had used two sets of explosives: one consisted of six shaped charges that would punch through the door’s outer shell and shatter the locking mechanism behind it.

The second set was placed like tape along the perimeter of the hatch, close to the frame. This charge delivered the functional equivalent of a blowtorch, converting its mass into a controlled plasma stream that would melt anything in direct contact. A loaded demolition ‘spring punch’ was next to Drake; immediately following the detonation, the miniature battering ram would deliver several thousand pounds of force to bash the weakened door in.

None of this was relevant now, as Sig’s view of the scene abruptly vanished in a blinding white flash.

Myrha’s honed combat instincts instantly grasped that the breach explosives had been knocked loose when the hatch opened, and the warrior in her took action to save her life.

Her right arm grabbed the railing beside the hatch and yanked hard.

A terrible blast popped her eardrums. There was a simultaneous explosion of pain in her left ribcage, as she was sent tumbling through the Lightspear’s main corridor.

But Myrha smiled, even as she crashed into the bulkhead.

This was the challenge The Voyage Home was meant to be.

When the lens flare in the camera dissipated, Sig saw dark stains where Drake had been crouched. Debris and body parts were still caroming throughout the airlock.

Half of Theron was spinning over the spring punch.

Angus, Larry, and Jaz were stunned, trying to shake off the concussive effects of being inside a metal tube during an explosion.

‘Angus, can you hear me?’ Sig shouted.

But he couldn’t. None of them could.

And the Obyeran woman must have known it, because she flew out of the Lightspear hatch like a railgun slug.

Myrha didn’t know who they were, only that they were not Obyerans. She ignored the extent of her injuries, knowing that her body was already repairing them with unnatural rigour.

The first encounter was with a rump of a man who was still disoriented from the blast. Planting her mag greaves in front of him, she stopped her momentum by slamming the butt end of her skythe in the centre of his mask, punching a deep crater into his face.

As she shoved the haemorrhaging, convulsing husk aside, a searing pain lashed through her as raw voltage boiled her blood. Another lesser creature had fired a stun weapon into her, screaming insults, eyes wide with terror. But she refused to be stopped. With sheer willpower, she ripped the wire lead out from her stomach and lunged for the man who had fired it, skythe in hand. With a flick of her wrist, she separated the man’s head from his shoulders.

As globules of his blood merged with her suit, she spotted the last man between her and the attacker’s ship, the older one who commanded this pathetic group, as he tried to flee.

She would not let that happen.

Sig’s mind was racing to find options.

Lethal force was the only response that made sense, but it was the only one they couldn’t use.

Jaz had landed a direct hit with the stun gun and had been
decapitated
for the trouble. She couldn’t be human. No one moved that fast, that fluidly, all while sporting what appeared to be a mortal wound. Yet she had just killed two men within a span of five seconds, and was on her way to kill Angus.

Then she would come for him.

Angus had just crossed the breaching module connecting the
Black
’s airlock to the Lightspear’s. In just a few moments, he would be inside the ship. The Obyeran woman was a leap or two behind.

It suddenly dawned on Sig that the module was still pressurised.

Taking her brother’s arm off was nothing in comparison to killing men in hand-to-hand combat.

Her prey was just ahead, banging furiously on the airlock hatch. Slaying him would bring no satisfaction. But she would be that much closer to finding the captain, whom she would thank for giving her a worthy trial before taking his life.

‘Open the door, Sig!’ the man screamed.

Myrha made a note of that name, wondering if that was the captain.

‘Motherfucker!’ the man shouted. ‘Open it!’

Engaging her mag greaves, she charged towards him – upside down from his perspective – skythe at the ready. He began screaming; her heart filled with a primal bloodlust.

The skythe was arcing downward when the hatch suddenly opened, followed by the awful sound of screaming, ripping, snapping metal.

Myrha was slammed sideways and then hurled backwards with terrific force.

She knew it was a structural breach, and a catastrophic loss of pressure was under way. All the air in the attacker’s ship was rushing out into space, taking her and anything not bolted down with it.

With as much strength as she could muster, she stabbed the skythe into the nearest bulkhead. But the blade snapped on impact. By pure luck, her other hand managed to catch an edge and clamped on for dear life.

Her prey slammed off the bulkhead in front of her and hurtled past. Unable to look behind, Myrha came to the awful realisation that the only airflow was coming from the attacking ship.

It took all her strength not to give up. Her survival suit was torn. Myrha took one last breath and held it.

When the rush subsided, she turned and saw a star field instead of her Lightspear.

Sig assessed the outcome of his gamble.

If a fire’s advance could no longer be contained by isolating compartments, starving the entire vessel of oxygen was a last resort. So Sig had remotely opened the hatch of every compartment on the ship except the bridge, and the airlock keeping Angus out.

Then he instructed the
Black
’s
life support system to generate as much overpressure as possible.

The two ships were joined at the belly by a breaching module, and the weakest point of the union was where it latched onto the target’s airlock. To prevent the Obyeran twin from escaping back to the Lightspear, halt her advance on the
Black
, and have any chance of capturing her alive, the module would have to be forcibly detached from the Lightspear side.

Sig accomplished that by generating torque with the
Black
’s thrusters.

To create as much yaw as possible, he aimed the forward and aft thrusters in opposite directions and fired them simultaneously. The result was a shearing action that ripped the breaching module off the Lightspear. A split second later, he had opened the final airlock hatch that Angus was trapped behind.

But that excess yaw smashed the two ships into each other, doing extensive damage that Sig had yet to process as the
Black
tumbled out of control.

Sig had gambled that the module would stay attached to the
Black
, and that the Obyeran twin was strong enough to hold on. He won both bets. With the Lightspear already a kilometre away, she had no choice but to board the
Black
on his terms.

Angus’s vital signs, broadcast from his survival suit, were very weak. Sig judged that any attempt to save his life would be futile.

Myrha had never known such dread.

She caught a glimpse several times, each one smaller with every rotation. There was no greater humiliation than to be separated from her Lightspear.

Now she knew how her brother felt to have lost his arm in combat.

There was no choice but to find this ‘Sig’ and take his ship.

That would be difficult. In her desperation, she considered scaling the outer hull to find a different way in. But she had lost her skythe. And she couldn’t hold her breath for much longer.

Myrha conceded defeat.

Her lungs burning, she pulled her way inside, to a strange compartment too small for comfort.

The hatch closed behind her. The Voyage Home had truly begun.

The collision had cost the
Aria Black
one of her main thrusters.

That was the biggest consequence of Sig’s gamble. There was also no way to recover the Big Eye, adding to the forensic debris cloud that would leave little doubt as to who was responsible for this.

The autopilot instructions were set for a coordinate in the middle of nowhere. No known bases, installations, nothing. It was a random location at the fringe of the Hades Terminus, over a billion kilometres from here. With only one thruster, it would take much longer to reach it. And Sig still didn’t know what supplies had tumbled out into space along with Angus.

A fleet of Lightspears would be looking for his prisoner very soon.

Sig composed his message, which would eventually find its way to Vladric, wherever he was:

One VIP secured

No contact with second

Five crew KIA

Heavy damage sustained

Proceeding to checkpoint

ETA double allotted time.

At the end of the message was an image of his hostage. The heiress to an empire was in the hold of his ship.

Vladric’s ship.

Sig watched the vital signs of Angus McCreary flatline.

‘The bastard’s never wrong,’
Sig muttered, as the
Aria Black
limped into the void.

11 April 2809

Dear Amaryllis,

You were twenty-three years old when we met.

Instead of wearing a mottled grey UNSEC Traveller uniform like the other
Genesis
passengers, you wore a white dress that made you stand out like a diamond.

Boarding hour was two days away, and the streets of Bangor were filled with Travellers revelling with loved ones, savouring their final moments on Earth. For as long as man has taken to the sea, the voyagers of antiquity have marked the eve of great journeys with celebrations just like the one that night.

For a young, warm-blooded UNSEC infantryman, these were fertile breeding grounds, and I joined the festivities hoping to meet a Traveller who sought no regrets. When we met by the Gazer Pavilion at Broadway Park, I thought I had found exactly what I was looking for. But something else happened instead.

We formed the deepest bond I have ever known.

There will never be another like it. To this day, every detail of every moment we shared haunts me. Your warm eyes, your contagious laughter, the sound of your breathing, the peace of your sleep, the way that white dress fell from your shoulders, and the way you put it back on when it was time to say goodbye.

The memories sustain me. Or not. I don’t know any more. My colleagues have warned that this correspondence has become harmful. The mission could be compromised, and they blame you.

So be it. I
need
this, because it is uniquely
human
. But I wonder how our bond would hold if you could see me now.

I am presently three metres long, if you measure from the tip of my antennae to the end of my thorax. I have three pairs of legs, and my ‘feet’ contain secretial glands that allow me to adhere to any surface from any aspect, which is impressive considering I weigh 130 kilos. My eyes, of which there are six, only see in infrared, but give me 360 degrees of coverage, which makes it difficult for anything to sneak up on me. I don’t breathe oxygen; my circulatory and respiration are governed by a system that utilises captured sunlight and molecular hydrogen produced by hydrogenosomes in the synthetic hemolymph that flows through me. Incidentally, this process generates a highly acidic waste product that accumulates in storage glands that I can propel from ducts in concentrated streams to defend myself.

Last night, my arthropod-like colleagues and I scaled a vertical wall four kilometres high to eat the eggs of a lychtymorph queen – all 200 million of them. The acidic secretions in my glands helped digest them, and then my bio-engineered body used them as fuel to sustain my descent in total darkness, and subsequent two-hundred-kilometre march to the exfiltration site.

These eggs were gestating the larvae of lychtymorph alphas, impressionable little creatures that, if properly trained and augmented, can be hammered into a number of service roles, from industrious servants to battlefield hunter-killers. I should add that their size is proportionate to how much they are fed; a mature alpha can grow to over two metres in height and rip a three-centimetre-thick steel plate in half with its jaws. This particular batch of formerly independent, intelligent life forms was due to be sold to the Raothri, who planned to distribute them throughout their nanotechnology manufacturing pipeline. The larvae are very adept at weaving tungsten nanotube fibres, one of the more devious technologies the red race has in its arsenal.

Ceitus always knows best how to hurt the master species. She is also quite clever at genetic manipulation, designing just the right creature for just the right task – something the Raothri have been doing for thousands of years. They are gods, in the classical sense that they create life to serve a specific purpose. The indigenous world of the lychtomorph is a half-scorched, half-frozen world with no atmosphere and a narrow temperate band where a number of species exist. It is tectonically hyperactive thanks to the immense tidal forces of the gas giant it orbits and a molten metal inner core. The resulting fault lines that rip across the planet make the Valles Marineris on Mars look like a shallow ditch.

We were built to navigate this treacherous landscape while also remaining invisible to Raothri technology and lychtomorph alpha sentries. Ceitus makes us into whatever we need to accomplish the mission. Last week I was a carnivorous reptile. Next month I will be a gilled mammal. Only Ceitus knows what we will become next.

But I still remember what I was before all this started. Our time together makes that life worth remembering. Between missions, Ceitus lets us resume our native forms in a virtual simulator. This is the only place we can interact with each other ‘in person’, since our native environments are lethal to each other. It’s here, in this simulator, where we remind ourselves of why we fight. We talk about our homeworlds, and the ‘people’ we miss, and all the times we think we died during these missions.

My memory of your white dress is a sequence of stored quantum bits that can be translated into their biological mnemonic equivalent in any creature that Ceitus designs. But she also exercises great discretion in choosing the memories that stay with us from one incarnation to the next. When things go badly, we never remember how we die. We also never remember how we are transformed from one creature to the next. We just become something different; as comfortable in our new skin, membrane, or exoskeleton as if we were born that way.

There is never a mission post-mortem. Nor do we ever analyse success, because the Raothri are never fooled by the same approach twice.

Whether or not the setback to Raothri nanotech manufacturing capabilities made any lasting impact on ‘the big picture’, we cannot say. The scope of what Ceitus hopes to achieve with her rebellion is beyond my comprehension. And yes – Ceitus is female, or the equivalent of one, as I recently learned.

Given the fact she can kill us, or erase our memories or put us in a simulator where nothing is actually real, well … we’re alive because she says we are. We have no choice but to believe in her, and in what she’s doing with us. During one of my worst moments trying to acclimatise here, I demanded to know what it was like to play god, and if all Raothri considered themselves as such. Her answer was surprisingly humble for a superior creature. She said, ‘Intelligence is not the same as wisdom. Even a child can own an ant farm.’

Your beautiful white dress still inspires me because humans need hope. It has always given them something to live for, and it’s a rare thing in the universe that something as intangible as ‘hope’ is such a powerful motivator. My alien colleagues draw their inspiration from different sources. Most don’t assign sentimental value to their actions. Theirs is an innate call to duty, the way the denizens of insect hives respond to an assault on their queen. They are truly selfless in that sense, and readily sacrifice themselves for a greater cause without hesitation.

I’ve not made contact with another human being in almost two centuries. Those that joined me at Station Alsos are in other units like this one, operating on distant worlds, doing the same work as us. We operators have predictions on the amount of time each of our respective species has left before they are totally extinct. For humans, that number is five years. If not for the Gift, it would have been over already. And even then, who knows what other events have been set in motion that cannot be averted? A rogue planet, flung out of another system aeons ago, changed the fate of that beautiful world you called Eileithyia, and gave Orionis the Hades Terminus instead.

Judging from what just happened there, five years may be too generous an estimate.

Even so, I
hope
– there’s that word again – that you still remember me the way I was.

Love always,

- A