Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (51 page)

Hours blurred into days with as few breaks for rest as he could stand. Through the fog of exhaustion, his personal problems faded into insignificance, allowing him a fragile clarity of thought focused on the refit systems under his care. Only during his infrequent rest breaks did he spend time tracing Gehrke’s steps through the mainframe.

The first thing he did was study the communications and d-mat systems—trying not to think about Pearce’s remains as he did so. Yes, the transmit dishes had drifted from their proper target; no, they couldn’t be realigned without the proper algorithms. The transmission beam was a maser signal with an infinitesimally small rate of dispersal; even so, by the time the beam reached Earth it would have expanded in width from a pencil-thin beam to a cone large enough to cover the entire Lunar disc. Even then the dispersal rate was too low to give him much chance of striking the target. If he spread the beam wider, at the expense of signal-strength, then his chances of hitting the receivers improved. But with a wide enough dispersal to give him good odds of hitting Sol System and only the probe’s tiny reactor behind it, the signal reaching Earth would be undetectable above the Universe’s background radiation.

Twenty-two light years amounted to over two hundred
trillion
kilometres. It was too far, too great a distance to gamble his life across. No mere human could relocate Earth with the required precision once the transmit dishes had been shifted from their proper orientation.

Five days passed before he abandoned that line of pursuit. It hadn’t told him anything he didn’t already know. And what
did
it matter, anyway? The survival of the refitters made little difference to the probe’s mission. Unless the other Saul probes had suffered similar catastrophes, the target star would one day soon be surveyed by humans, and that was the main thing.

Perhaps, he wondered, it would be better to follow Gehrke’s last words of advice and try the self-destruct program. If the systems analyst had been lying, and the program functioned as normal, it offered a swift alternative to a lingering death—not only for him, but for the refitters still on their way. And if it didn’t, then he might learn something more about Lockley’s intentions.

But he wasn’t quite ready to take that final step; not until he had exhausted every possible avenue of thought. If the Earth was too distant, then a closer target had to be found ... And if he solved this one small mystery, then and only then would he assume that Lockley knew what he was doing and had changed the self-destruct program for the better.

On the twenty-second day, Hallows cued his priority planner for the next task and was told: “All Tasks Complete”. He stared blankly at the three words for a long while before truly comprehending what they meant. Then he crawled behind a blanket of matte-grey polymer and slept for eighteen hours.

When he awoke, his mind was clear and fixed on the sole remaining task. He had two days left in which to leave the probe; or, failing that, to die. The only oxygen reserve on the probe was that contained within his suit, and he lacked the resources to reprogram the nanomachines to provide another.

Abandoning his earlier explorations, he turned to the commandeered LSM. When operating normally, the high-energy laser fired a short burst of coherent light in a tightly-focused beam once every hundredth of a microsecond. Its programming had been altered, however, to allow it to pulse less frequently— ten times per microsecond—and at roughly double the output. While it would ordinarily have been aimed at a planet or an asteroid, or some other item of space debris to be analyzed, it now pointed into deep space almost directly behind the probe. And Lockley—if it had indeed been him—had made sure that it would stay put.

But why? Hallows grappled with this question for several hours. The transmit and d-mat systems could be re-routed to the LSM, but its output was far too weak to reach Earth with any useful power-level. At the LSM’s low frequency, it would take years for a full human to be transmitted. Why would Lockley go to so much trouble to sabotage the transmit dishes only to replace them later with a poor second best?

After studying the LSM’s target for what felt like an eternity, he was forced to admit that his first impression had been correct. It wasn’t pointing at anything, as far as he could tell. There was nothing within range of the LSM, not even the aliens.

Nothing visible anyway ...

As he lay back in the relative shelter offered by one of the interior bulkheads, his eye was caught again by the graffiti etched into the metal.

“The key is here,” someone had written. Lockley himself? If so, why so cryptic? “Use it if you want to.”

Hallows stiffened unconsciously in his suit. There
was
something behind the probe. Something that had been designed to detect emissions from the laser spectrometers aboard
Saul-1.
Something which, while not able to actually decode the d-transmissions broadcast by the LSM, was perfectly placed to act as a relay ...

Saul-2
had been launched one year behind its sister-craft. That put it roughly one and a quarter light years away. And 1.25 light years was only
twelve
trillion kilometres.

The distance was still too big, too daunting, but when expressed as a ratio against the only alternative, it suddenly seemed a whole lot better, solving the mystery not only of Hallows’ dream but of the numbers ending the brief note:

3:50.

To make
Saul-2
even more attractive, at this stage in its journey it maintained a fixed distance from
Saul-1
and was oriented in a direction that had been preordained by Control decades ago. All he had to do was calculate the position of
Saul-z
using the navigation systems, point the LSM, and ...

Leap.

Gehrke’s choice of phrase couldn’t have been more apt. There was no way to know if
Saul-z
was in its proper position. Likewise, he could only hope that its forward detectors were fully functioning and able to detect the laser pulses from its sibling. If it too had lost contact with Earth, then the telemetry data containing those pulses would be as lost as a d-mat transmission from
Saul-1.
Or if it
did
arrive and Program Control failed to realize that the pulses encoded a d-mat transmission, or ignored them as a glitch in the data ...

There was only one way to find out.

Crawling from the innards of the probe, he tugged his way forward to the manual over-rides and called up the self-destruct program.

~ * ~

“Surprise,” said Lockley. “If you were expecting a quick, clean death, whoever you are, then you’re going to be disappointed.”

The image appeared, via his implants, in Hallows’ left eye— presumably recorded by one of the probe’s visible light scanners. Lockley’s face looked shrunken behind his visor, his eye-sockets hollow and lips white. Two of his upper teeth had fallen out. Tufts of hair stuck in places to the visor itself, resembling hairline fractures in the transparent plastic. All in all, Hallows thought, Lockley appeared to have aged a hundred years since they had last met—which, relative to him, had been only a few weeks ago.

“You’ll have to excuse me if I ramble a little,” Hallows’ predecessor continued. “I’m dying, you see. The rad counters went berserk a week ago, and the aliens haven’t been back since. I guess that means the nanos did their job, although they’ve almost killed me in the process too ...” Lockley stopped, shook his head to clear it. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Forgive me, please. There’s so much I have to say, and I keep forgetting what should come first.

“If you haven’t worked it out by now, I’ve rigged LSM 14 to transmit the d-mat signal normally broadcast through the transmit dish. As soon as I finish this message, I’ll enter the d-mat cage and begin the process. I guess you might have noticed that the d-mat buffer is off-limits too, along with the targeting program of the LSM.” Hallows automatically shook his head; Gehrke hadn’t picked that up. “Well, that’s why. There’s only just enough buffer memory in the d-mat to hold me until the LSM has finished transmitting to
Saul-2,
and I don’t want you taking Steve Pearce’s way out and robbing someone else of the chance to escape.

“My best guess says it’ll take about eighteen and a half months to down-load me—and the same applies to you, of course. That means that if there are two of you left, only one can live. You can rig the other LSMs if you like, or try something else, but there’s no way to transmit one full human back to Earth in less than four weeks, which is the most time you have.

“I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

Lockley paused to swallow. One hand rubbed at the neck of his suit as though he desperately wanted to scratch himself.

“As for the rest... I don’t really know where to start. They were here, on the probe, when I arrived. The aliens, I mean. Five of them, and big sons of bitches too; like machines with dozens of limbs growing out of a central structure that looked like a cross between a tractor and a ... I don’t know what. Folded up they were about two metres round; at full-stretch they could reach ten metres. How they communicated among themselves, I don’t know. When we tried to talk to them, they just ignored us. We weren’t even worth killing for all the times we got in their way. They just let us roam freely, watching everything they did. I don’t think that means they were stupid, though. We were simply beyond their experience, as alien to them as they were to us.

“They must have been studying the probe for about a year before we arrived, if the telemetry data is right. Their ship was right on top of us—and it was huge. Bigger than a small moon. But they still hadn’t cracked the mainframe. That bothers me, even now. How they could build a ship like theirs without technology advanced enough to make ours look like child’s-play is beyond me. But somehow they did. It wasn’t until shortly after we stepped out of the airlock that they guessed what the d-mat cage was for.

“We took them by surprise; that I do know. We mightn’t have been interesting enough on our own, but our arrival caused quite a stir. Another three joined them poking around the d-mat bay. Eventually they worked out how to activate it. And it was only then I decided we had to do something.

“The aliens started sending things—weird little bundles of machines in nets, wrapped tight to keep them from drifting—back to Program Control. Whatever they were, they made my skin crawl. The aliens had their hands on a direct route to Earth, and anything they sent along it would arrive unchallenged. Maybe the bundles contained bombs, self-replicating AIs, or God only knows what. I couldn’t take the risk that by standing aside and letting them do it I’d be putting my friends back home in danger.

“So that’s why I killed the d-mat.”

Lockley stopped, and sighed. “Maybe it was a mistake. Prosilis thought it was. When he found out what I’d done, he went crazy. Cried for about four hours straight. Then he went down to the drive shaft, where he could see Sol, and opened his suit.

“That left me and Steve. He wasn’t too happy about it either, but could see my point. We decided that the best thing to do was to attempt to communicate with the aliens again and work our way onward from there. If they turned out to be friendly, then maybe they could help us. If they didn’t, then we’d done the right thing. I for one would die gladly knowing that I’d saved everyone back home.

“It was a good plan, but the aliens didn’t want any of it. They ignored us as they had before. When they realized that something had interrupted the d-mat program, they unloaded more equipment from the big ship and wrapped it around the probe. It looked like a finely-spun mohair rug connected to a larger version of themselves. When it touched the probe, it began to spread, sending little fibres into everything. Searching.

“It took me a while to guess what they were doing. Almost too long, in fact. They were trying to find the mainframe core. Luckily it’s deep inside the probe, and it took time before they even got close—long enough to counter-attack. There was no way I was going to sit back and let them take over
Saul-1.

“The nanos were inactive when we arrived, awaiting our instructions. With the aliens aboard and everything, none of us had got around to starting them up. But that’s all it took. Once they began to work, it didn’t take long.”

Lockley paused again, allowing Hallows’ imagination to fill in the gaps. The nanomachines, hungry for raw material, would have attacked the alien metal instantly—digging in, extracting what they needed, reproducing, and then moving on. Once a handful had crossed the gap between the probe and the alien ship, they would have eaten forever, until the entire vessel was consumed.

Except that something had obviously overloaded—maybe the engines or the power generator—thereby killing the nanos in a single wave of hard radiation.

Too late for the aliens, though. And not just the ones on their crippled ship, it seemed, as Lockley continued:

“I watched one of them decay. As the nanos dug in, exposing layer after layer, its internal structure appeared. Not that I could understand much. Beneath the skin they were almost uniformly white, with tangles of fibres that might have been muscles or nerves; a cross-hatched tubular skeletal structure, not the solid supporting bones we have; no obvious brain, just as they had no obvious leader ... They looked like they were made of bleached, fibrous wood, like some sort of organic robot.

“Anyway, whatever they were, they’re gone now. After they died, Pearce and I managed to complete the schedule and set the nanos to repair where the aliens had damaged
Saul-1.
We also rigged the LSM to transmit the d-mat data back to
Saul-1.
If Control picks up the signal via the other probe’s forward sensors—which they should do—then they can decode it at their leisure. Assuming, of course, that there’s any Control left by then. God only knows what the things the aliens sent through will have done.