The Dying Light (10 page)

Second, the system was suspiciously silent, apart from one unintelligible signal emanating from near the major port around Jagabis and another whose source was in hiding.

Third, the sun had been transformed into a cosmic hypershield generator by a weapon used only once before, over a thousand years ago. The last government known to have had access to the sole remaining Asha’s Gauntlet prototype was the Kesh.

Fourth, Maii’s mind-riding abilities had been negated by a mysterious “smothering” effect.

Fifth, the system had been cordoned off on the outside by three Armada vessels acting under direct orders from General Ramage, commander in chief of the COE Armada.

And that was all. Roche was fairly confident that the Sol Wunderkind was trapped in the system, but beyond that she didn’t want to speculate too far. It was tempting to write off the epsense-dampening phenomenon as another of his extraordinary talents, but that seemed unlikely. Apart from the occasional suggestion from Maii that Cane possessed a strong but latent epsense ability, there was no indication that he possessed any such talents. Nevertheless, Roche was wary of closing off any avenues of exploration too early. Not while the matters of the Gauntlet and the Armada flotilla were still to be explained, anyway. She had learned from experience that especially where conspiracies were concerned, the major factor preventing the truth’s being discovered was the observer’s unwillingness to explore connections between facts that on the surface seemed unconnectable.

She leaned back into the pillow, pushing her knuckles into her aching, tired eyes. There was, in short, enough to make her cautious, but not enough to provide her a definite focus for her fears.

And that, in a sense, only made it worse.

You will not stop me,
the second transmission had said. Could she have stopped
Cane,
had he chosen to attack rather than to aid her? Was he even on her side?
I am not yours to command,
the message had said. The words made Roche wonder whether he had ever truly been...

* * *

She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until the alarm on her door buzzed.

In the dream she heard the hiss of a predator. She jerked forward on her bunk and called out in the dark, clutching at the fringe of the dream even as she was wrenched from it. She had been back on Ascensio, trying to lure a viridant out of its burrow by offering it a dead rodent. The lizardlike animal had been suspicious, but she managed to encourage it by repeating the offer several times. She had no intention of giving it the bait, though; her only intention had been to gain its trust—and then to strangle it. Only too late had she seen the glint in its eye and known that
she
was the one being lured. Her hand had lashed out, and the viridant had snapped its jaws around it, pulling her into its burrow...

The door buzzed again. She shook herself from a daze and spoke into the intercom:

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” Cane answered. “The data from the probes are due soon. I would like to discuss something with you before then, if it’s not inconvenient.”

“Wait a moment.” She ran her hands over her stubbled scalp and wiped her face. Her skin was greasy and coarse at the same time—a grim reminder that she was overdue for a shower. After a moment she said: “Lights; door open.”

The room brightened at her command. Cane stepped into the cabin.

“I’m assuming it’s not an emergency,” she said, “or else Uri would’ve called first.”

“Little has changed,” said Cane. “We have received another transmission from the same source as the first, but that’s about it. Kajic posted details of it to your buffer, marking it as a low priority. If you were asleep, you wouldn’t have seen it.”

She checked her implants out of habit; sure enough, the message was there. She also learned that she had been asleep for seven hours. It felt more like four.

She stayed on the bed and offered Cane the chair. “So, what can I do for you?”

“Everyone is resting,” he said. When he sat he folded his hands in his lap, making him look uncharacteristically unsure of himself. “I thought I’d take advantage of the situation to talk to you alone.”

“About?” she prompted.

“The transmission from Jagabis.”

“What about it?”

“I can translate it.”

She studied him suspiciously. “The Box said it wasn’t in any language that it recognized.”

“I know.”

“But
you
recognize it?”

“I didn’t at first,” he said. “Only after reading through the raw text for some hours did it begin to make sense. And even then, not all of it.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I am not
certain
what it means, but I do understand it. I know how odd that sounds, but the situation is as confusing to me as it is to you. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you first rather than the others.”

“You’ve kept this from Maii?”

“She knows I’m hiding something, but she won’t learn what it is unless I let her.”

Roche nodded. “So what does the transmission say?”

“It is a call to arms,” he said. “It is also a plea for help. And a request to negotiate. And an order to retreat. And an offer of assistance. And—”

She cut him off: “I don’t understand. How can it be all these things at once?”

“The message is composed of fragments. Some make sense, but a lot don’t. The bits that don’t are just meaningless, but there is still a resonance in the words—as though they have been engraved in my mind, that I might never forget them.”

She suddenly grasped the implication. “Are you suggesting that this is some sort of language used by the Sol Apotheosis Movement? That you’ve been
programmed
to understand it?”

“Nothing else can explain why I know what some of the fragments mean, and respond to them”—he put a hand on his stomach—”
here,
almost before I have time to realize.”

“Are they dangerous? Could they make you do things you don’t want to do?”

Cane shook his head. “Whoever is broadcasting the orders doesn’t know what they are doing. The fragments that make the most sense are the most emphatic, of course, but they are often the most inconsistent, too. The fragment repeated most often, for instance, is a request to trade information that is not relevant in exchange for supplies that no one in this century would need.”

“Why would anyone broadcast something like that?” Roche wondered. “And where did they find the code? It wasn’t in any of the records I accessed.”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Cane said. “Perhaps the source
is
a beacon, after all.”

“One the Sol Apotheosis Movement left behind, perhaps?”

He shrugged. “It may have successfully summoned my sibling here, then malfunctioned.”

“That wouldn’t explain why he bothered to reply.”

“Unless the beacon is an AI,” Cane suggested. “Or we have it the wrong way around. Perhaps the Sol transmission is from my sibling, and the reply from someone else entirely.”

Roche thought this over. The first transmission had come from Jagabis, their current destination. “If so, that means we’re heading into trouble.”

“I know.” Cane’s dark features remained expressionless. “It appears that being able to translate the transmission, even in part, has only made the situation worse.”

“It’s not your fault, Cane,” Roche said. “This whole system is a mess.” She rubbed sleep from her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Besides, you can’t help what you are,” she went on, sensing that he wanted something more from her than just acting as a confessor. “Your lack of motive worries me sometimes, but you’ve convinced me that you don’t mean
me
any harm—for what that’s worth. Just because you’re a weapon, and you’ve been designed to do certain things that might harm a great number of people, that doesn’t mean you will. There’s a big difference between design and intent, after all; I try to keep that in mind.”

Cane nodded slowly. “Thank you, Morgan. I was worried that the reminder of what I am might cause you to rethink our association.”

She smiled vaguely. “I’m glad you told me. At the very least, we can get the Box onto it and see whether it can’t translate the rest.”

“You would like me to tell the Box?”

“I can’t see why not. Having some understanding of a high-level Sol language will probably come in handy one day.” She went on: “When you have the time, go over the text of the transmission, pull out the bits that you can translate and see what the Box can come up with. It may be no more of a linguist than you or I, but it must be able to run basic statistical checks. Something’s bound to come up.”

Cane stood, his muscles flexing smoothly with the movement. “We’ll begin immediately.”

“I’ll be down to review your results soon.” She stood, too, and followed him to the door. “But don’t let it get in the way of mapping the system. That’s our first priority at the moment.”

The door slid closed behind Cane, leaving Roche with yet another mystery to ponder. She wondered how many more this system would throw at her before finally surrendering some definite answers. And how much longer she could juggle the conflicting trust and suspicion she felt for Adoni Cane.

When she made it to the bridge almost an hour later, the first wave of information had begun to arrive. The probe aimed at the sun had announced that it had data to send within moments of Cane’s return. Since then, the Box, Cane, and Kajic had been fully occupied, paring back the packets of data to the ones most relevant or likely to contain answers to Roche’s many questions. As a result, the mystery of the possible Sol transmissions had been placed on hold.

“Okay,” she said, settling into her seat. Maii took a place next to her, apart from a hand on her shoulder keeping carefully unobtrusive. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Pictures in visual spectra, mostly,” said Kajic. “And, according to the Box, the mechanism underlying the Gauntlet.”

“Show me.”

The main screen blossomed to reveal a bloated red giant, magnified to fill one third of the view. Cooler patches had been dimmed by compensators to appear charcoal black, giving the star’s surface a cracked appearance. Massive disturbances, clearly visible despite the blur of distance, flowed sluggishly from each pole to the equator, skewed east by the star’s rotation.

Roche winced at the sight. “You’d never guess that until a month ago,
that
used to be a green dwarf.”

“Precisely,” said the Box. “The change in its composition goes much deeper than I thought.”

“How deep, exactly?”

“To the core. Look closely, Morgan.”

‘The view zoomed forward, closer to the star. Gases bubbled like magma from an unimaginable interior, casting a baleful red light through the bridge. A green ring stood out on the screen, highlighting a darker point. As the ring swung past, Roche realized that the point at its center was an object orbiting the star, deep within its chromosphere. She had no reference points against which to estimate the object’s size, but the way it disturbed the gases around it, leaving a deep, roiling scar in its wake, suggested enormous size or mass, or both.

“That can’t be a ship,” she said.

“It isn’t,” said the Box. “It is one of sixteen quark breeders in high-speed orbit, firing pellets of strange matter into the heart of the star.”

“You can tell that just by looking at it?”

“Not entirely, Morgan. If you watch carefully, you can see the pellets strike the photosphere.”

Roche looked more closely at the image. Sure enough, every few seconds or so, a bright spark of blue light flared at the base of the wake.

“Why strange matter?” asked Haid.

“Strange matter is super-dense,” Roche said before the Box could reply, “and it can be moved more easily and more precisely than neutronium. With it, you can alter the workings of a star’s core. Once you control the core, you can play with its electromagnetic and gravity fields.”

“This, clearly, is how the Riem-Perez Horizon is generated,” added the Box.

“Overkill,” said Haid.

“The Gauntlet is a grotesque example of just that,” the AI agreed. “If its designers had stopped to consider what they were doing even for a moment, they would have realized that what they hoped for simply wasn’t possible.”

Haid shrugged. “You have to admire them for trying, anyway.”

The quark breeder continued to plow its way through Hintubet’s wounded chromosphere, as implacable as the physics that foretold the star’s death.

“What would happen if we destroyed them?” Cane asked.

“Disaster,” said the Box. “The nuclear processes inside the sun would spiral out of control until the reactions sustaining the Riem-Perez Horizon ceased. The boundary would become increasingly chaotic until, within a very short period of time, it collapsed entirely.”

“Any idea who planted the breeders?” said Roche.

“Detail is sparse at this resolution,” said the Box. “I cannot tell if the breeders display any markings. However, only one nation in this region manufactures breeders of the sort required for such a macro-project as this, and that is the Eckandar Trade Axis.”

“Do you think they might be involved?”

“No. The devices have been available for many centuries; the array is probably that belonging to the original Gauntlet prototype, not one manufactured recently.”

“That’s good to know. I hate to think why anyone would build them today.” Roche mused to herself for a moment. “If this is the prototype, and it’s being used to entrap the Sol Wunderkind, then it must have been kept somewhere nearby. Allowing time for the weapon to be dusted off and programmed, then put into place and activated, that doesn’t leave much for transport.”

“Do we know when it was activated?” asked Haid.

“Not before the twenty-sixth of last month,” said the Box. “That was when the Armada Marines investigating the system were ambushed. Presumably the system was open at that point.”

“Is there any way to pin it down further?”

“I have been observing the rate of decay of the boundary. If we assume that it originally extended to cover Palasian System’s cometary halo, then that gives us an activation date somewhere between the thirty-seventh and fortieth.”