Here Be Dragons (19 page)

Gideon’s
bridge was a hollow sphere, nearly ten meters across. Thick round beams emerged from six of its poles, each of which corresponded to one of
Gideon’s
six vertices. They ran the length of the bridge and converged at the center to form a large globe, its interior space bounded by two interlocked rings. Elena thought it looked like a gyroscope, or an avram. The globe contained a single chair, and an outsider sat within it.

Suspended next to the chair was a woman in a blue Agency issue spacesuit. She faced the outsider, her back turned to Elena and her crew. Her helmet had been removed and placed to her left, and her long, red hair wafted about her shoulders. A pair of silver stars had been fixed to her uniform sleeves. At her right was a large life-support unit, about the size of a quarter barrel. It filled the room with blasts of hot, oxygenated air.

The woman heard them enter, and rose slowly and turned to face them, hands held before her and clearly visible. She smiled, and Elena felt the world open up beneath her feet and swallow her whole.

“Please come in. And do hurry and close the door, or I shall catch a chill.”

Elena, Rivkah, and Ikenna floated to the nearest bar one by one and held to it. Elena felt the blood rush from her head and the bile rise in her throat, and she held tightly to the metal, as if she would fall. The center of this particular strut had been engraved with Roman, Hebrew, and Cyrillic characters. They formed the word
Naphtali.

“You may if you wish remove your helmets. It would be more pleasant to speak face to face,” she said. Her English was fluent but German flavored, reminiscent of Jacob Erasmus’s Afrikaner accent. She gestured to the heater. “I have activated the solar collectors, and they are drawing emergency power from the plasma torus. This conditioner will maintain circulation in the air until the life support is back online, and you may keep your rebreathers active as well.”

The
Gabriel
party followed the beam until they were nearly to the center of the room. Without discussing it, Ikenna and Rivkah separated and floated to the beams to Elena’s left and right, and left her alone in the middle. Blacks spots swam the bridge before her.

“I have to say, to see friendly faces so far from home would be a delight,” the woman said.

Elena’s crew glanced at her, and when she did not move or speak, unlocked their helmets and removed them. The woman smiled and nodded to each of them in turn, Rivkah first, respecting the rank. She turned to Elena, whose breaths inside her helmet were quick and shallow. With each heartbeat a black ring tightened around her vision a little bit more. The woman remained at the center of her tunnel of vision, waiting for her.

Elena took off her helmet, and the cool air struck her at once and blew the black veil from her eyes. The woman smiled again, and Elena spoke.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s good to see you too, Elena,” Captain Anne Muller said. She moved closer, and Elena put out a hand.

“Stop. You are fine right where you are.” She lowered her arm and shook her head. “No, you’re not fine. You’re dead.”

“I can explain that.”

“
Archangel
was lost with all hands. The Agency confirmed it.”

“On the contrary Elena, every single member of my crew is alive and waiting for me on
Metatron.
”

“Stop lying to me.”

“I’m not lying, Elena,” Anne said. “Not anymore.”

“And stop calling me that.”

“Very well, Captain.”

Elena shut her eyes, and breathed. She turned on Ikenna.

“How much of this do you know?”

“Captain?”

“You served with her on
Archangel.”

“For a few months,” Ikenna said. “They asked me to commit to the mission indefinitely, and I declined. I was transferred off that day.” He glanced at Anne. “I was the only one. I know as much as you do, Captain.”

Elena turned back to Anne.

“You’re going to explain all this. And if I think you’re lying—if I think for a second that you are a threat to my people or my mission—then I’ll call my XO, and he’ll blow your ship to hell, with every single member of your crew on it. And I’ll leave you here to think about it.”

“You would kill your own?” Anne asked.

“It won’t be the first time.”

Anne nodded.

“Ask your questions, Captain.”

“Where the hell did that thing come from?”

“And where is
Archangel?
” Ikenna asked.

“Two questions with the same answer,” Anne said.

“
Archangel
was destroyed,” Elena said.

“No, Captain. She was reborn.”

“Captain Muller,” Ikenna said. His voice, though steady, sounded a flawed note that Elena had never heard from him. Ikenna was just as lost as she. “I found the debris myself.”

“No, Mr. Okoye,” Anne said. “You found debris.”

“Where has she been all this time?”

“The trojan asteroids,” Anne said. “The closest unclaimed territory in the solar system. It took us over a year to reach them. We could not risk a rocket burn, you see.”

“That’s incredible,” Ikenna said.

“It’s insane,” Elena said. “It’s fucking loco. Why do all this? Why are you here?”

“
Gabriel
and
Metatron
share the same mission, Captain.”

“Es verdad? We came to protect humanity from the outsiders.” Elena held her hand out to the dead man at his post. “Who the hell are you saving it from?”

“Its worst enemy. Itself.”

“We were hunting monsters,” Elena said. “If I had known they were men, I would have stayed home.”

“Thank you, Captain. You’ve summed up the situation quite nicely.” Anne said. “Dr. Golus, could you assist?”

Rivkah looked to Elena, who nodded to her. The doctor crept along the beam to the sphere, where Anne slid aside so that Rivkah could see the man in the chair.

“He is Rabin Weizmann,” Rivkah said. “His uniform identifies him as a seren.”

“A captain,” Anne said, and Rivkah nodded.

“How many of…of them…are there?” she asked.

“We don’t know, really,” Anne said. “We know less than you probably think we do. Seven digits, at the very best.”

“Millions?”

“That’s a very rough estimate,” Anne said. “We don’t know their original population size, or their rate of natural increase. Birth rate and death rate and so on.”

“Life must be hard out here,” Rivkah said softly.

“But easier than on Earth, in at least one way,” Anne said. “Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun, and its magnetic field is ten times as strong. The Storm would have passed right over them. I don’t know if they saw it coming, but there would have been no better place to hide from it.”

“How did they get here?” Ikenna asked.

“I believe Dr. Golus can probably guess,” Anne said. “Can’t you?”

“Moishe Avramovich.”

Rivkah had yet to take her eyes off Rabin, and she spoke quietly, to the air, as if she were alone with the body.

“Yes,” Anne said. “He had the resources, and the motivation. The historical record is fragmentary, but we know that the Avram Corporation was conducting unmanned exploration of Jupiter as early as 2040. Exactly when that exploration became manned is a matter of conjecture,” Anne said.

“Tel Aviv,” Elena said.

“We believe so. It would have been slow going at first. A few handpicked settlers, the pioneers, the true believers.”

“Aliyah,” Rivkah said. Elena had no idea who this could be.

“But after Tel Aviv,” Anne said, speaking slowly, her eyes on the doctor, “we imagine that recruitment picked up steadily.”

“Even so,” Ikenna said, “there must have been records, leaks. The Avram Corporation was a trillion dollar empire, hundreds of thousands of employees. How could they keep it a secret?”

“Those were the early days of colonization,” Anne said. “Avramovich had opened up the frontier, and it was a rush to get in on the ground floor. Thousands of people were going into space every year, it would have been easy to lose count. Whatever electronic record existed was wiped by the Storm, or the wars. And after that, anyone who knew of the migration at the time had more pressing issues to deal with.”

“After all, it was only some missing Jews,” Rivkah said. “With so many gone, what difference would a few more make?” She was trembling so badly that Elena could barely understood her. “How can you know all this? Have you spoken to them?”

“No, Doctor,” Anne said. “I’m sorry. We’re not even here, as far as they know.”

Rivkah turned her back then, and refused to look at anyone.

“You only answered one of her questions, Captain,” Elena said. “How did you learn of this?”

“Personally or…” Anne searched for the appropriate word. “Institutionally?”

“Either. Both.”

“As I said, we know less than you suppose. We keep no records, and what is known is handed down, quietly, from one trusted officer to the next. What we do know is that, at some point, one of our reconnaissance drones broke through. You’ve noticed that their defenses are not nearly so strong as expected?”

“When was this?” Elena asked.

“I am not sure. Truly. But the oldest of us—I would not be surprised if he had been the first—has been with the Space Agency since the beginning.”

“Sir William Campbell-Azzam.”

“His father commanded the
Solstice,
as I’m sure you remember. So this matter is quite personal to him.”

“Who else knows about this?” Ikenna asked. “The Prime Minister? Either of them?”

“Helena Dixon is a good woman. And Jacob Erasmus, I am led to believe, is a good man,” Anne said. “But some decisions are too important to entrust to politicians.”

“What about the Director?” Elena asked.

Anne smiled again, eyes narrowed.

“That man knows nothing. Sir William is our leader.”

“Was he the one who convinced you to mutiny?”

Anne did not flinch.

“I had served under him on
Havana
, his last command. Six years later he recommended me to head the Archangel
Project. And he was waiting for me at Ceres when
Archangel
docked there on her first cruise. He told me what I’m about to tell you, Captain.”

Anne turned her back to them then, and knelt by Rabin. She leaned over his body and gently kissed him on both cheeks. It should have been macabre, but seemed reverent instead. She might have kissed a Bible the same way. Then she reached out to the control panel and pressed a single switch.

The lights went dark immediately. Elena could feel every muscle in her body coil and wait to strike, but no attack came. Nor was it completely impossible to see. A soft white glow suffused the bridge, rather like the dim light on
Gabriel’s
bridge. It felt like coming home.

The walls of the sphere had lit up all around them. The outsiders had daubed them with dots of phosphorescent paint that shone in the darkness. The four—five—of them were surrounded on all sides by stars, each bound to its neighbors by thin strips of light. These were the constellations, and the walls were the heavens. The outsiders had built their bridge to be a celestial sphere.

“I don’t think these people have ever known what they’ve done for us.” Anne’s disembodied voice rose from the void at the center of the bridge. “They hid from us, and struck at us, and united us. They gave us an enemy that we fear more than we hate each other. But the outsiders are not our enemies. They are our saviors.”

Elena revolved in place to take it all in. Eight of those ghostly orbs were much larger than the others, beamed onto the walls by spotlights that could rotate in place. Each of them stood alone, connected to no other by a gossamer thread. Seven were white—six planets, and one enormous globe that could only be the sun—but the eighth was a bright arterial red. To the outsiders, Earth was the color of blood.

“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in 1945,” Anne said. “It was only one hundred and three years before the bomb was used in anger once more. How much longer would we have lasted this time? How much longer until we would have been at each other’s throats once more? The knowledge is always there. It lacks only the will to use it.”

Elena could feel, beneath her glove, the touch of warm plutonium in the palm of her hand.

“You call them your saviors,” Rivkah said. “Is this how you repay them? With slaughter?”

“Doctor, if their blood could buy humanity’s salvation, I would spill every drop. Just as I would order any of my crew to their deaths if the mission demanded it. I would expect the same of any officer. But no, we have no wish to harm them. We seek only to hide them—to stalemate the situation for as long as possible, until humanity is united, and the threat is past.”

She turned back to Rabin and knelt beside him, and held his hand within her own.

“There will be war in heaven until there is peace on Earth.”

“You have no right to make that choice for them,” Rivkah said.

“We haven’t,” Anne said. “We had no idea who they were until a few years ago, but they have always known about us. They could come back in any time, if they wanted. They choose to remain outside. And can you blame them?”

Rivkah wiped her eyes, and a teardrop fell from her hand and floated away.

“No.”

“Neither can I,” Anne said.

She reached down to the control panel, and turned the lights back on. Elena blinked and saw the constellations tattooed on the inside of her eyelids.

“Do you understand now? Why this must be kept a secret?”

“And how do you plan to do that, without killing the outsiders?” Elena asked. “Don’t tell me that this was the plan all along.”

“This is the backup. Ideally, the
Archangels
would have been commanded by our people. But I understand that the new Prime Minister had a different idea,” Anne said. She glanced at the stars on Elena’s shoulders. “In that case,
Metatron
was to shadow you, and destroy any evidence of the outsiders’ true nature before you could find it.”

“Destroy the evidence? You mean destroy
them.
”