“The one what?” Jessika quizzed.
“We’ve all experienced it,” Yuri said. “That’s why we were chosen to interpret this. Though I have to admit, Soćko came as a big surprise to me. Didn’t see that coming.”
“Experience?” Alik clicked his fingers. “Ah, right: we’ve all had experiences which didn’t quite add up, somehow.”
“Yes,” Yuri said, “and those personal cases of ours are the tip of the iceberg. We’ve been analyzing similar incidents for a while now, especially those with critical defense issues.”
Kandara gave me a shrewd look. “I thought I was here for my professional expertise.”
“That was a bonus,” I told her. “You and Callum both encountered Cancer, who had been contracted on a sabotage mission that could have crippled the primary astromanufacturing capability at Delta Pavonis.”
“What’s the connection between that and this situation?”
“Defense,” Yuri said flatly. “If Sol and the settled systems are attacked, Bremble would be essential to build—well, battleships, orbital fortress stations, everything we need to protect ourselves from an invasion.”
“New York’s shields,” Alik said quietly. “She was going for those.”
“And she was there on Bronkal, eliminating any evidence of Baptiste snatching low-visibility people—for no reason we could ever find,” Yuri said. “Which is an even stronger association to what’s going down here, now that we know Soćko was shipped directly from there to the ship.”
“Nobody on Akitha could figure out the motivation for what Cancer was doing,” Kandara said thoughtfully. “We all thought some kind of political fanatic was employing her to sabotage their industrial systems, but this…aliens scouting around the human race…I hate to say it, but this makes a kind of sense.”
“Who the fuck are they,” Alik snarled, “and how long have they been watching us?”
“Ask the Olyix,” Loi said. “They’re clearly complicit. Maybe it’s them.”
I let out a wearisome breath. “Not this again,” I said in exasperation.
Callum gave me a sharp stare. “They lied to Yuri about Horatio Seymore. They knew he’d been snatched,” he said. “They were involved. What more do you need?”
Which was an interesting outburst. Someone—some group—had to be pushing both Ainsley and the grade-one Utopials into believing the Olyix were chasing a hidden agenda, fueling the insecurities and paranoia of the old and powerful who inevitably see change as danger. And the only people with a reason to do that are the other aliens, trying to deflect attention from themselves. Aliens with influential agents in both Utopial and Universal ruling political classes.
“There was something odd about that,” I agreed. “Maybe they employ corporate intelligence gathering companies to keep a closer look on things than we realized. I don’t know. But face it, Ainsley Zangari’s exposed granddaughter calling him in a panic is going to be noticed by someone. It may be Hai-3 was being a little too helpful and cooperative just to keep Zangari sweet. He is the richest, most powerful individual alive, and it would pay politically to keep him sympathetic. And I’m certain this ship we’ve found can’t be theirs. The Salvation of Life is a slower-than-light arkship; the Olyix don’t have wormholes. Loi, you said the power level a wormhole needs is beyond anything we produce in the Sol system.”
“Yeah,” he agreed almost grudgingly. “That’s right.”
“So it’s not them,” I said.
“You seem very certain,” Kandara said.
I gave Yuri a quick glance. He nodded permission. It didn’t go unnoticed. “It goes like this,” I said. “Ainsley has been suspicious about the Olyix since before Horatio was snatched. He never quite believed their claim to be peaceful religious fanatics.”
“Now that has truly got to be the universe’s biggest oxymoron,” Alik mocked
“Whatever they are, they’re not actively hostile to humans,” I said.
“You can’t claim that,” Eldlund said. “There’s a lot of evidence piling up against them.”
“Circumstantial,” I replied. “Or maybe it’s disinformation. Look, after Horatio, Ainsley decided to find out what was really going on. So we’ve been mounting a discreet surveillance on the Salvation of Life ever since.”
“And?” Kandara prompted.
“They aren’t being entirely honest with us; they are keeping secrets about themselves. But there’s no conspiracy.”
“You can’t know that. Not for certain.”
“I do.”
“How?”
“Because five years back I took point on a covert mission that broke into the Salvation of Life.”
FERITON KAYNE’S SPY MISSION
THE SALVATION OF LIFE, AD 2199
I’d been living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for more than a year to physically inflate my cover story. Data-based legends are easy to install in solnet; these days you can basically be anyone you want to be, providing you have the money and expertise. Connexion Security had both in abundance. Even a G8Turing’s search would only turn up the cover history I’d been given. But if the Vatican or the Grand Ayatollah actually sent someone to Lancaster, they’d be able to verify what a great citizen I was and how my attendance at local Quaker meetings was top rate. Not that anyone in the office expected any cardinals or imams to physically turn up and run a deep check. But given where I was heading, office policy was to make that cover story as real as possible. So if some dark-ops agent did come checking in person, they’d swiftly get wearied talking to neighbors and colleagues and friends who would all tell them what a great (if moderately dull) guy I was, complete with the personal anecdotes I’d generated by actually living there.
Ainsley Zangari was very clear about getting the mission absolutely right. Funding for his Olyix Monitoring Office was already over three quarters of a billion wattdollars a year. A portion of that money was spent on G8Turings that scoured solnet for evidence of operatives like Cancer corroding and corrupting corporations and institutions, with emphasis on the defense sector. Deals like that were absurdly easy to set up anonymously through solnet. So whenever we did come across an op that had defense connotations, it was virtually impossible to backtrack.
Outside of that, the Olyix Monitoring Office had two main divisions with dedicated tasks. The first ran an operation devoted to watching the Olyix embassies, which we did mainly by planting our own operatives inside among the human staff. To be honest, I don’t think there was a single Olyix embassy employee who wasn’t reporting back to some intelligence agency or other. Our knowledge of their official trade deals and financial status was absolute.
The second, and most involved, division was the one I wound up working for. We were trying to find out if the Olyix had opened any private portal doors between their arkship and Earth—something that would allow them to collaborate with their Kcell development partners without having to go through the official channels established by the Sol Senate—which would explain how they knew about Horatio’s snatch. That was a tough one. It’s not like the Olyix themselves could move around Earth unnoticed. They would have to use human agents to mount hostile operations.
But it didn’t matter how many renditions we threatened and alt-legal interrogations we performed. There was no verifiable line of sight back to the Olyix. I never got that: people who would betray their own species. But I’d been in law enforcement and corporate security long enough to know that every bastard in that field simply took the money and skipped the questions. They wouldn’t know and wouldn’t want to know whom they were working for.
Our other problem was why the Olyix would bother. Their sole purpose for stopping in the Sol system was to buy energy to generate antimatter so they could continue their pilgrimage flight. The original theory was that they wanted to increase revenue for the Kcells by introducing new treatments and didn’t car
e about their human partners performing illegal experiments to develop those treatments. But then we started to notice the buildup of hostile incidents in Sol’s defense sector, like the attempt on the New York shield files. Nobody could figure out what was happening. Then after we heard what Cancer was doing at Delta Pavonis, Ainsley’s paranoia skyrocketed up to whole new levels. The attack against Bremble made absolute sense if it was in preparation for an invasion.
My division was refocused on technology, physically locating quantum spatial entanglements between Salvation of Life and Earth. If we could find a portal that led back to Earth, or a habitat, we’d finally have solid proof the Olyix were hostile. But while it is possible to detect a portal’s quantum signature, the equipment is short-range, large, and expensive. More than half of the Olyix Monitoring Office budget was spent on refining the sensor technology. First they had to perfect it. Then they had to make it small—really small. Finally, and with wonderful irony, they had to make it undetectable.
After that, smuggling it on board the Salvation of Life was almost easy. Which is where I came in.
The 2199 joint ecumenical delegation, of which I was a proud member, assembled in Vatican City. There were four such delegations every year. Somewhat inevitably, the Olyix were keen to welcome emissaries from human religions to the Salvation of Life. Equally understandably, our priests and rabbis and imams were eager to explore alien religion. Sorry, but the utterly devout Olyix were literally a heaven-sent opportunity in that respect.
There were seventeen of us smiling for the solnet news feeds in St. Peter’s Square, with the basilica as our formidable backdrop. Most faiths were represented, so nobody was questioning a Quaker’s inclusion. The robes some representatives wore were impressive; I thought they looked brand-new and obviously professionally tailored.
The most painful part of the mission was that long year in Lancaster learning about my new religion, which seemed to be about the most nonhierarchical, nonjudgmental faith anyone had ever formed. It took a great deal of self-discipline to focus on the tenets and (loose) structure, but I got there in the end. Anyone curious about Quaker history and practices would swiftly be bored into retreating as I recited it all to them.
Interestingly, it was Nahuel, the Buddhist monk, who was keenest to talk to me. He told me all about his acceptance and learning in the temple, in return listening politely to my cover story of how I came to my gentle faith. We chatted amicably as we walked through the Vatican’s hub, into Rome’s metro network. From the city’s international hub it was just a few quick paces to the main Olyix transfer portal in Buenos Aires.
I stepped straight through into a rotational gravity effect. The toroid was small, and spinning faster than I was used to, as my inner ears were quick to let me know. I saw Nahuel pause, instinctively holding his arms out in a novice surfer’s pose to regain his balance.
“Have you ever been in a space habitat before?” I asked.
He shook his head, which is always a mistake in fast-spin gravity; his lips puckered up as the combinations of deviant motion assailed his ear canals.
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “This is as bad as it’ll get. The Salvation rotates very slowly; you won’t feel the spin at all.”
“Thank you,” he said with an insincerity that his fellow monks would doubtless frown upon.
“Until then…” I proffered an anti-nausea tab.
“No. I wish my mind to remain clear.”
“Of course.”
Officially the station we were in was the Arkship Transfer Buffer Facility—a human-built space station that held position ten kilometers out from the forward end of the Salvation of Life. Everyone just called it the Lobby.
It was there because the Olyix had been very clear they didn’t want a portal inside the arkship, especially not from Earth. They were concerned about a terrestrial plague devastating their biosphere. Fair enough; even we hadn’t classified and analyzed all Earth’s microbes and germs and viruses, let alone what they’d do if exposed to Olyix biology.
Negotiations via radio had started almost as soon as the Salvation of Life began decelerating into the Sol system back in 2144. First on the agenda after the Sol Senate’s First Contact Committee started exchanging messages was: You’re not bringing that thing anywhere near Earth. Simple reason: the forty-five-kilometer-long, multi-billion-ton arkship was powered by antimatter. The Olyix had enough of the stuff on board to accelerate it up to twenty percent of the speed of light. Which meant, should they prove hostile, the incoming aliens carried enough destructive energy to wipe out Earth and every asteroid habitat in the solar system, with plenty left over to wreck Mars and Venus for good measure (not that we’d ever bothered trying to terraform them). So the first agreement was that Salvation was to park in Earth’s Lagrange-3 point, directly opposite Earth on the other side of the sun. Even that left some officials and old generals nervous.
Once Salvation reached that orbit, physical contact began. The Lobby was assembled in a couple of months—a kilometer-diameter toroid, rotating at the center of a hexagonal space dock, that serviced dozens of short-range cargo and passenger craft. All the little vehicles did all day every day was fly between the Lobby and Salvation’s zero-gee axis dock.
The ecumenical delegation was led into the decontamination suite—a fine name for what was basically a disinfectant shower. It lasted a compulsory eight minutes, ensuring every follicle and flesh fold on a human body was thoroughly saturated. I think prisoner hose-downs were more dignified. But it did give the contact staff time to irradiate our clothes and shoes and luggage.
We all reconvened in a small waiting room, trying not to show how disconcerting the cleansing experience had been. I wasn’t sure my hair would ever recover from the chemical assault; it smelled like a bathroom air freshener.
“Do the Olyix undergo an equivalent process to travel to Earth?” Nahuel inquired. He was sitting in a plain plastic chair, holding his sandals up to give them a disapproving look. I’m pretty sure his robes were bleached a shade paler, too.
“I’ve no idea,” I told him—not true, but I had to play the part of my new legend, and a Quaker accountant from Lancaster wouldn’t know a whole lot about biological transference protection clauses in treaties the Sol Senate had negotiated. In fact, the Olyix do undergo a mild decontamination on their way to Earth, but then they never leave their embassies, which have a filtered atmosphere. However, when they come back, they’re subjected to the same sanitization as humans before they can return to the Salvation of Life.
Our delegation took the elevator up to the toroid’s axis, and free-fall. When we were halfway up, I offered Nahuel a tab again. This time he took it without a word.
A couple of stewards helped us along the zero-gee corridors in the center. The crossover chamber was a wide cylinder, with four hatchways on the toroid end and another four hatches at the dock end. Halfway between them was the seal, allowing the two halves of the cylinder to rotate without losing any air. Plenty of people were crossing between them, casually air-diving in and out of the hatches. It all seemed so crude to me, but then I’d grown up in a world that had come to live Connexion’s slogan: Everywhere is one step away.
We pushed, wiggled, and knocked elbows along the corridor to airlock 17B, where our passenger ferry was docked. The cabin was a small cylinder, with thin padding on the walls, and twenty-four simple metal seats in a couple of rows, with a lone seat at the front for our “pilot,” who did nothing but monitor the G7Turing that actually flew us. Apparently that dates back to the days when autopilots were taking over more and more aircraft functions, but people still wanted a human in the control loop. Personally I’d trust the G7 over a human pilot any day.
I hauled myself along the cabin and claimed a seat beside one of the small windows. The dock grid stretched away out to the stars, its structure cluttered with tanks and cables that were covered i
n silver-white thermal blankets. Like everything in space, it was either sharply lit by sunlight or sheltering in the utter darkness of shadows. The contrast between sections was immediate and striking.
We left the dock with a soft motion and loud knocking sounds that reverberated down the cabin as the vessel’s tiny rockets fired in short fast bursts. I saw the dock fall away behind us. The flight was due to take twelve minutes. At three minutes, the reaction control rockets began to fire again, rotating the craft.
The Salvation of Life slid into my line of sight. I’d seen enough images and diagrams of it, but even so, looking out at the real thing was a hell of a moment. I stared at it the same way jet pilots used to gaze at airships, with a twinge of envy and false nostalgia for a still-birthed alternate history where those giant, serene craft were kings of the world. To travel among the stars in an artificial planetoid would have been an awesome existence.
The Olyix had started with an asteroid drifting in some distant orbit around their home star. Humans, with their molecular bonding technology, would have simply mined the ores and minerals and used the refined mass to construct a habitat-sized arkship. But the Olyix used a cruder method, cutting away the rock’s rumpled, crater-scarred outer layers until they were left with a smooth cylinder forty-five kilometers long and twelve in diameter. Further mining excavated the three main biochambers and a huge honeycomb of compartments that formed the engineering and propulsion section at the rear.
After so many millennia traveling between stars, the arkship’s exterior was in remarkably good condition, shimmering like polished coal under the sun’s unremitting glare. That unblemished sheen was all thanks to the impact defense screen, of course. When traveling across the interstellar gulf, the Salvation of Life generated a massive plasma cloud ahead of it to ablate and absorb any particles it ran into at twenty percent light speed. The arkship’s forward section was studded with generators, fashioned like golden barnacles, to create the magnetic field that held the tenuous ionized gas in place.