Orphans of Earth (6 page)

Vince Mohler was the civilian mission supervisor of Mission 707, in charge of operations once the survey vessel had arrived in-system. He had also been in charge of the
Paul Davies,
one of the first successful missions Alander and Hatzis had found following the destruction of Adrasteia. They had encountered him in various roles in a number of other systems as well. It was hard to imagine him being dead, let alone feel any sense of loss, when he was still noticeably active in so many places.

That was the problem, Alander thought. There might be hundreds of missions left, each with thirty crewmembers, but all those people were really just the same sixty people copied over and over again. He was beginning to feel suffocated, one of the very few singular people left. With the death of his sole remaining stable copy in the Head of Hydras, he was alone again.
Would anyone miss me if I died, too?

“No sign of any gifts,” he said, shaking the thought. Once he would have lingered over the data coming in from the planets in the system, but he was becoming desensitized to the thrill of exploration. He had seen dozens of similar systems in the previous weeks, and many of them had been dead, like this one. AC +48 1595-89 was a time waster. It would be catalogued with the others; its suitability for future colonists would be noted, so Hatzis and her supporters would have somewhere to live when the settlement faction got their way; the failure of the mission would be a footnote added somewhere at the bottom of the file. Then he could move on.

“Do you think we should bring
Pearl
in closer?” Hatzis interrupted her broadcast to look at the screen.

“I don’t see the point,” replied Alander. “There’s no one here.”

“What about the Starfish?” she asked. “Any evidence of visitation?”

Alander shook his head slowly as he examined the data. “No debris, no hot spots, no suspicious gas clouds, no death marker.”

“Damn it,” she said, then cycled through the message one more time before resigning herself to the fact that there was no one around to hear the message anyway.

He could understand her frustration. The exploratory mission to the Spinner front had generated ambivalent data at best.
Pearl’s
first two ports of call, near neighbors Groombridge 1830 and 61 Ursa Major, had contained successful missions untouched by either Spinners or Starfish. Alander and Hatzis had ejected messenger buoys in each system, microsatellites designed to bring the UNESSPRO missions up to date without requiring
Pearl
to stick around too long. From there,
Pearl
took them to numerous other systems along the projected front. Many of them had either failed from senescence or simply failed to arrive altogether, including those sent to Tau Ceti, BD+14 2889, Altair, Mufrid, and a high-profile mission sent to Castor and Pollux. Half of the double mission to Procyon and Luyten’s Star had succeeded, and it had been contacted by the Spinners. Gamma Serpens and BD+14 2621 were likewise Spinner drops, thankfully caught in time before they brought the Starfish down upon themselves. Apart from those few active colonies, though, there was just an automated monitoring station around Barnard’s Star to report. Alander doubted any of it would help pin down the Spinners’ progress with much greater accuracy than they already knew.

He performed a quick mental calculation.

“We have an hour to the next transmission,” he said. “I suggest we wait to hear it, send our own update along with the usual warning, then get the hell out of here.”

“In that case, we might as well spend the time collecting as much data as we can.” She shrugged. “Has to be better than sitting around twiddling our thumbs, right?”

Alander didn’t argue; it was her call. They had spent their time in the hole ship so far trying their best to maintain both distance and politeness. He didn’t know what her original had told her back on Sothis, but she hadn’t brought up the issue of colonization even once, and he had no intentions of rocking the boat now. Not until he’d come up with an alternative, anyway.

He found himself missing his copy from Athena more than he had expected to. They had met on only a couple of occasions, but that had been enough to cement their relationship. The same but different, they had both struggled with Overseer processing problems and were trying to keep their thoughts together as best they could. Their plans to discuss Sol’s intention in more detail had been put to a dramatic end by the Starfish, and Alander sometimes wondered if his other self had experienced any blinding revelations at the last moment, if suddenly everything had become clear.

Hatzis instructed
Pearl
to take them to a medium polar orbit around the fourth planet and, moments later, the hole ship had relocated smoothly to this location. They performed a cursory sweep for transmissions of any kind from their new position but quickly gave it up for a lost cause. Instead, they concentrated on gathering data about the planet, adding it to the many other examples they had of worlds that might one day be capable of supporting human life.

The globe was unevenly split between land and sea, with only a few small oceans in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere was richly vegetated, relying on deep reserves of groundwater to preserve the water cycle. They christened it Ea, a Babylonian deity whose realm had been the sweetwater ocean under the Earth. It seemed appropriate, Alander felt, as did claiming it in the name of Sol, rather than either of the UNESSPRO missions. Alander didn’t know when there would next be an active government residing in the human home system, but he wasn’t prepared to give up on the idea just yet.

The familiar ringing of the ftl communicator brought an end to their brief survey of the planet. The broadcast was scheduled to coincide with midday on Sothis, although it might be broadcast from anywhere, and more often than not, it contained little of interest to their mission. But they listened to it when they could, anyway, to see if anything had changed.

Caryl Hatzis, the voice of hope for many, began the transmission with her usual spiel: “This is an open broadcast from McKenzie Base, Sirius, to all UNESSPRO missions within range of this transmitter. Do not reply until you have read the entire contents of this message. We are the sole survivors of the human race, and we are united by the goal of rebuilding. Our primary task at the moment is to locate those colonies that have survived and been contacted by the alien race known as the Spinners. All life is precious. All resources are valuable. To ensure that nothing else is lost, we
must
cooperate in this venture—even if it is to be our last.”

There followed the standard introductions to new colonies that might have received the gifts but not been contacted by other survivors, warning them not to use their communicators except from their hole ships in positions well away from their home systems. After that, there was the plea to both Spinner and Starfish, requesting the opening of diplomatic channels as a matter of some urgency. Until either of the aliens talked to the humans whose paths they were so dramatically crossing, there was little the survivors could do to prevent the ongoing catastrophes. The long-term goal for all species was peaceful coexistence within human-surveyed space.

Attached to the message were data files containing the current state of the human survivor network. Alander glanced at it and saw that their last update had been included, along with data gathered from the fringes of surveyed space, where other missions were exploring. A handful of new Spinner drops were also highlighted. Starfish attacks were noted, too, as was their change of tactics, although not in any great detail. A careful perusal of the latest attacks suggested that three more systems had fallen to surprise invasions, one of them the mission found in Beta Hydras, the
Carl Sagan,
yet there was no talk about evacuation. Alander wondered if Hatzis was trying to play down the new development in order to further her own plans or whether she genuinely wanted to avoid an overreaction.

Also embedded in the data was something intended specifically for them: “We have a message from Groombridge saying that the Spinners arrived two days after you left. The colony on Perendi did everything your messenger buoy told them to do, and everything went smoothly. Yesterday, though, they were buzzed by one of the anomalies and managed to capture an image. See for yourself, but I think it looks like one of our friends from Varuna.”

The transmission carried a picture of a modified hole ship, its black cockpit encrusted with strange growths similar to barnacles or coral. It was shown silhouetted against the bright gold hull of one of the spindles, blurred as though in fast motion.

The message went on, “As usual, the anomaly departed when hailed, but not before giving the colonists a bit of a fright. They’ll keep an eye on the colony in 61 UMA to see if the Spinners or the anomalies go there next. Who knows? We might be able to get the jump on them, this time.”

“And do what?” said Alander dubiously.

Hatzis didn’t reply; she was listening to the continuing message: “Peter, in your last report, you expressed a degree of uncertainty for the benefits of continuing your mission. But I’m asking you to seriously reconsider coming back too soon. We need scouts along the front—now more than ever, in fact. You are our closest agents to 61 Ursa Major and a possible Spinner/anomaly occupation. Please stay in the area for a while longer. If we do get any news, we may need to act quickly.”

And that was that. There was nothing more he could do, unless he planned to hog-tie Thor and take command of
Pearl.
He waited restlessly as she broadcast a brief reply to accompany the little information they had discovered on the system. When she had finished, he sat down beside her on the couch.

“So,” he said, “where to next?”

“You choose,” she said. Her mood was subdued and morose. “Somewhere nearby, though. I don’t want to be too long out of contact.”

Yes,
he thought,
mustn’t disobey orders.

“I need a change,” she said. “All these systems are starting to look the same to me.”

He consulted the star chart in the hole ship’s memory and compared it against the UNESSPRO mission register. One name stood out. He changed the view to external cameras, then panned around until he had found the direction he was looking for.

“There,” he said, pointing to the brightest star in the sky. “That’s where I want to go.”

“Vega?” she said, frowning. “But there won’t be much to see. Any proplyd would have been dispersed long ago—”

“I know that,” he said. “And UNESSPRO knew that, too, but they sent a mission just the same. The truth seekers won out on this one, I guess.”

She was about to say something, but he cut her off. “Anyway, that’s my decision, Caryl.”

She shrugged. “Data is data, I guess.”

“Exactly,” he said. Then, not wanting to give her the chance to change her mind, he addressed the ship’s AI: “
Pearl,
take us to Vega, twice standard orbital insertion.” He didn’t know the habitable zones of a blue AOV variable, and he wasn’t about to take any chances. They were still unsure just how much punishment the hole ships could take. “Advise ETA.”

“Two point nine hours,” the AI reported. “External.”

“Okay,
Pearl
,” he said. “Do it.”

The screen went blank as the hole ship got under way. He turned to Hatzis next to him, wondering what she intended to do during the three-hour trip, and caught her staring vacantly toward the empty screen, her gaze lost somewhere between her and it.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She came to life, then, meeting his eyes. “What?” she asked distractedly. “Oh, I was just reviewing data.”

“Are you sure?” Even though he had known several incarnations of Caryl Hatzis, Alander found it hard sometimes to read the woman as an android. The muscles of the face were a profoundly complex and subtle barometer of personality; and the slightest change could have a profound effect. Half the time he didn’t recognize her at all, let alone know what she was thinking. Or when she was lying.

She stood. “I’ll be in my cabin.”

“Reviewing the data?” he asked.

“That’s right,” she said and walked from the cockpit.

* * *

Alander came to get her before they relocated.
He had
spent the jump lying on the cockpit couch listening to a selection of music from various alien races, courtesy of the Gifts’ Library, piped directly to his ears from the hole ship’s AI. He wasn’t so much enjoying the unusual sounds as fascinated by how much they differed from what his own species regarded as music.

She opened her eyes when she noticed him watching her from the archway to her tiny cabin.

“You look relaxed,” she said.

“Just conserving my energy,” he said. It sounded better than
bored out of my mind.

She laughed lightly. “For what?”

He shrugged. “Who knows what we might find in Vega?”

“It’s an astronomical curiosity at best,” she said. “We’ll be lucky if anything remains of the cloud it coalesced from.”

He rolled his eyes and went back to the cockpit, calling over his shoulder: “We’ll be there in five minutes!”

He was performing stretching exercises when she appeared. Sitting on the couch while he utilized the empty space behind her, she crossed her legs and waited.

“The
Matthew Thornton
, wasn’t it?” he asked, fishing for conversation.

She nodded. “Registered as UNESSPRO six six six, believe it or not.”

“Really?” He hadn’t noticed that. “How would you feel getting
that
mission?”

“Out of 1,000 missions, one of them had to have that number; 23 Bootis got unlucky thirteen. It doesn’t mean anything.”

He touched his toes. “Maybe the devil himself will be there to greet us.”

Hatzis didn’t comment. She just kept her attention fixed on the screen.

“Relocating,” said
Pearl.

Vega blossomed on the screen, a powerful blue white star with a highly variable output that peaked every three hours or so. Alander couldn’t tell if it was on an up- or downswing of its cycle, but was nonetheless impressed with its brightness. Hatzis had been right, of course: with that sort of energy blasting through the solar atmosphere, it was unlikely the cloud of gas it had condensed from would have been stable enough to form planets of any kind.