“Wrapper is programmed off of something that may or may not have been alive in the first place. Proto-xenocytes, growing in tholin fields. Warped, alien. Horrific.” He sniffed. “This kelp was pure, patterned from the base pairs up. And multicellular, might I add. Before Mars destroyed it.”

  Tharsis sighed. “You mean when the Polarists forced us to come in and put hundreds of thousands of dying children to death? Nuking a living moon to stop it from continuing?”

  “What happened on Europa was regrettable. The Arcna would not have—”

  “Regrettable? That entire colony’s genome was warped past the point of survivability in a quest to become seals or whatever the fuck?” Tharsis shot back. “Regrettable isn’t the word I would use.”

  “They were the children of the ocean, a new species, built to survive and thrive,” Ang said, sad. “The Arcna could have perfected them, made them live, true and proper, if your people hadn’t gone in.” He sighed. “And she wouldn’t have to speak to us now from the Kuiper.”

  “And maybe if she’d died in that purge, the Heliosphere—”

  “Seriously, people, shut up. I’m trying to focus here!” tDaer growled.

  Ang, stung, stared mournfully out the side of the craft.

  On the strange flow of movement, taking them through the kelp halls, they went into something that could have been a town. Structures blurred into each other, hard surfaces and electricity and carrier signals and heat blending to smears of color that had nothing to do with visible light, more bizarre than beautiful. Like listening to a shortwave show played too slow and too fast at the same time, Tharsis thought, as it slid through her. Like one of those moving picture plays the Ibbies produced, being shown with the projector bulb half burnt out.

  “It’s not like she’s wrong,” Ang said, after long minutes.

  “The Arcna?” Tharsis sighed. “What is she not wrong about?”

  “What is she not right about? Your people see so much, but you don’t comprehend.”

  “Stop lumping Tharsis in with the rest of the fucking Martians. She’s not some judgmental, racist, mudcunt,” tDaer said, hand still enveloped in that extruded control-pillar of hull. The Iapetan’s dark eyes were on her. “I mean, seriously, right?”

  Tharsis did not at all like the implications contained in her friend’s words. But before she could reply properly, she noticed something.

  People.

  Surrounding them. Falling through the water. Some slow, some fast, the matter of their bodies passing through the space in slowly curling contrails of purest white light. The worldlines of blood and teeth and hair and eyes, their descent imprinted into the penumbra. Bodies falling. Energy fleeing. Soundless.

  A set of eyes turned on her, light streaming from vacant sockets. One set. Another. All.

  And every story she’d ever heard about the passing of the dead rushed through her.

  “You brought me to a massacre site!” she groaned. “Where are we?”

  “Ceres.” tDaer looked up at her, steady. Unafraid. “You do see it, then?”

  Rubbing a hand over her face, Tharsis fell back. “Fuck,” she muttered, and tendrils of penumbra-pressed death energy flowed through the hull, smoke in strong winds. Ceres. Dear Christ. “Fuck you, tDaer.”

  “Let me know if you see anything interesting,” the grad student replied.

  They floated through the stream of the dying up into the sound of the ten-kilometer–thick ice sheets, groaning around them in impossible frequencies. None of the dead made any attempt to touch her, but Tharsis could feel them. Their questions, anger, confusion. She fought to keep her tears down, stop that foreign emotion flooding her.

  So many of them. Too many of them. Killed by their own Landlord. For no reason. Nobody knew why. Nobody had ever known why.

  Eventually, the death glow faded, the divedrive ghosting inside a small room. Not kelp, this, but reinforced titanium and carbon fiber. Through now smeared vision, Tharsis discerned the darkness of a world that had never seen sunlight, and never would. Not until the sun swelled into a red giant and devoured it.

  The walls, equipment, the very atmo left little more than a shadowed whisper along the worldlines of the trillions of atoms it had once been built from. Ornate carvings littered the walls and great pillars rose to three meters above the floor, smeared in the same inconstant whisper.

  It felt sacred, but unlike any church she’d ever been in—not the towering heights of Saint Peter’s in District of Lunae, not the small mountain caves of her own parish, the flutter of silk prayer flags bright against driving snows. This, even through the disassociation of the oob, felt self-satisfied. Arrogant. Tiny and cruel. Privy to secrets that were best left unspoken, secrets with the power to devour those who sought them out.

  They weren’t just observing this place. They were inside it.

  “This is it,” Angakkuq said reverently, kicking carefully off into it, towards the central panel of the room. “This is where the ones who came before us came to talk to the heavens. This is the space she carved to store what was precious, to hide it from us. But we found it, and we took it from her.” His face hardened. “This is what the Rallarhu sought to destroy.”

  “Stop the sermonizing and find the fucking things,” tDaer ground out. Hen looked to be in a bad way. “Craft’s starting to fight me.”

  “Right,” the Jovian traveler said, eyes luminous in the weak light of the phased-out flow they were stuck in. He went to work prying open a panel.

  Tharsis, unease mounting, tried to focus on the details. The little things. Tubing beneath the candlelight, twists of circuitry, the markings on hardwired radiation feeds...

  “This is a Lighthouse,” she realized.

  “The control center that was lost in the First Propagation,” tDaer confirmed. “The only control center. It does still exist. I thought so.”

  The Heliosphere’s silic-based radio network had been built in pieces, cobbled together by a dozen different corporate entities of the Silicone Age, to facilitate mining and colonization efforts. But they hadn’t been pulled into one cohesive thing until the final years of the Euphemism, when the Lighthouses were constructed. Radio relay stations were already scattered throughout the inner system, but the Lighthouses extended that reach from 4Vesta out to the frozen reaches of the Kuiper Belt.

  The Arcna had claimed one of those Lighthouses, built her Noqumiut, broadcasted her Propagations across the entire Heliosphere. Or so it was believed. It had to be a Lighthouse. Nothing else had the transmission range, nor the subsentient encryption that could withstand even Arran quants. No other network even existed.

  But nobody had ever been to the Arcna’s world since the ill-fated expedition of the First Propagation. Especially after the destruction of Ceres, it was unlikely anyone would ever go back.

  Even without her isolation enshrined, sacred, in international law, the planetoids on which the Kuiper Lighthouses had been built were almost impossible to reach, even for the best fusion drives available under the Accords. A trip could last a decade or more, depending on launch point, and long-term stasis technology had been destroyed during the Scient’s purges. Any existing divedrive navigation material had long been lost or destroyed. Compounding the issue, nobody even knew which location she was at, or if she moved between many.

  Noqumiut was an impossible place to reach.

  Didn’t mean the ASDF wasn’t still wary. Didn’t mean others didn’t still try. Task Force Gabriel was in charge of guarding against any incursion from the place. Mostly, they dealt with pirates and unaffiliated can stations and assorted voider craft; Toks, mostly looking for their heaven. Jovian patrol craft could be found out there too, Tharsis had heard, but security in the Heliosphere had always been the province of Mars.

  “Why are we here?” Tharsis demanded, wanting nothing more than to fucking leave.

  tDaer ignored her. “Ang, fucking hell,” hen snapped, “I’m losing my grip on it.”

  “Calm down,” he hollered back, still ripping into panels and cabinets, frantic now. “It’s got to be here.”

  Faint, far away, it seemed.

  “Fucking voidburn, Ang, we’re only going to get one shot at this. When the wetware figures out where we are, it’s not going to let us come back!”

  “I know that...” Tharsis heard, but the words trailed into static as the world deformed.

  Turned to nothing but ice sheets above, the starfield blazing in the sky, a doorway of twisted organic metal around her that led seemingly to nothing. There was a craft parked above. Arran. Blasting out some kind of unintelligible warning.

  There was a figure striding towards her. Towards the doorway. Naked, barefoot, dark against the blue of the ancient ice.

  Hand raised.

  A great whine rose from the ice beneath her, the burning scent of the void tearing into Tharsis, screaming, her very soul streaming out like wind across the tundra. Death lights shone in the dark waters around her, and all sense fled.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Tharsis noticed a few things immediately upon coming back to her senses.

  Her body was a mass of pain, joints swollen and popping.

  The Arran-made ENEX was fully deployed around her.

  She wasn’t in the voidcraft.

  That last one rattled her to the core, and she shot up, almost floating off whatever surface it was she was lying on. Microgravity. She caught a fingerhold at the last second, barely catching herself. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus, struggling against the bubble of the integrated goggles. Adrenaline was spiking into her blood, itching its way to her fingertips.

  Biting hard on the silicone teeth guard of her rebreather, she concentrated on her lungs, on her heart. A trick she remembered from the Centrifuge and its horrible three weeks of outwell survival training. Her forty-nine hours spent alone on a sun-blasted spit of spongy ʼroid.

  Tharsis let the slight edge of oxygen deprivation take down the panic, slow the heart, calm the body. Let her mind flow around the problem. Water around rocks in the stream. Wind around the peaks, she told herself.

  It almost worked. She hated this.

  The earpiece of her deployed helmet buzzed.

  Ang. With no small amount of relief, Tharsis tapped her radio on.

 

  But as her brain got past how the fuck did this happen? something new occurred to her.

  she demanded into the radio, tearing her eyes away from the planet in the sky above and scrambling for her wrist read-out. How long had she been out? How long did she have before the fucking xenocyte wrapper in her ENEX began eating her?

 

 

  tDaer said,

  Tharsis snapped, still careful not to let herself lift off the surface. The planetoid’s gravity was weak; she had no idea how far up she would drift if she let go of her tenuous connection to the ancient ice.

 

  About to reply that it was not, at all, an overreaction, Tharsis looked behind herself and the words dropped from her tongue. The ruins of an antenna forest, the cracked fragment of the heat shield, tops of ancient antennas, poking through the ice, out to the steep slope of the horizon. But not three hundred meters from her, on the other side of a large mass, protruding up through the ancient ice, there was a figure. Just outside of the protrusion of what looked like rock. Featureless, without definition. Walking around the far side of the broken ice.

  It couldn’t be a ghost. Teams of priests had spent months on Ceres after the disaster, helping settle the dead. Even what she’d seen in the ocean had been far back in the flow of the temporal gradient, an echo, not intelligent.

  Ignoring it was the best course of action.

  Instead, Tharsis turned the gravity in her boots up, and followed.

  To her surprise, the protruding mass wasn’t solid. It was cracked apart, a hatched-out egg, exposed to the elements. As Tharsis maneuvered herself around, her arm caught on a worn edge of rock-hard, dead kelp bark. Moving fast enough to hurt, the wrapper layers in the exposure suit used her own momentum to displace it, disassociating the incoming substance through the negative space in her own flesh, sliding two pieces of solid matter through each other.

  An involuntary shiver jittered up her arm as nerves temporarily stopped talking to each other, synaptic clefts interrupted. Tharsis gritted her teeth as she pulled herself free. Using the Cronuan xenomyocetic wrapper to eliminate micrometeor damage or stray cosmic radiation on the craft was one thing. With the heavy internal shielding, disassociations weren’t felt by those inside. The way the ENEX translated the sensation, however, was downright disconcerting.

  she asked over the headset, shaking her arm out.

  There was a pause, and then,

  Fucking brilliant, she thought, and stepped inside the battered interior of what had been, only moments ago, such a carefully constructed little space.

 

  and she stopped.

  There, in the weak refracted light, in the eclipse of the node’s shattered shell, was a man.

  A soldier. In the same uniform as the one she’d seen in the antenna field on 4Vesta. Dark, torn, skin bruised, hair gone, some kind of pattern roughed over with red ink on his bare scalp. Huddled up over his knees, or maybe his legs were missing from the knees down.

  The umbran-thing didn’t look at her. Its mouth moved, its eyes stared, but she couldn’t hear the words. Not intelligent, unaware. Residual energy then, but impressed into what? The dwarf planet was dead, abandoned, no EM fields strong enough to hold onto something like this.

  What the hell was going on?

  She rotated on a knee on the rotten floor to see Angakkuq, wrapped in his own suit, raise a hand in greeting. He stepped into the shadows with her, flashlight out, the beam piercing through the haze.

  Tharsis asked, distracted. The soldier apparition was gone.

 

 

  He touched the protrusion of the panel reverently.

  she said, and an inexplicable flash of memory assailed her. Christmas, the whole family gathered around the hearth, storm winds whipping around outside. Something transcendent at the heart of it. When was the last time she’d been home for that? The Academy granted leave for that. Why hadn’t she gone home?

  Angakkuq replied, the bubble of his ENEX’s goggles mirrored against stray cosmic radiation, giving nothing of his intentions away.

  tDaer’s voice crackled over the line.

 

  Silence for a moment, the line on mute. Tharsis got the distinct impression, though she didn’t know why, that tDaer was spitting obscenities on the other end.

  Tharsis replied, and looked over at the voider.

  The Jovian traveler started a bit in his own exogear.

  she said, but lingered for a moment on the edge of the broken room. Hoping, for some strange reason, that she might see the soldier again. Damn, she thought, and left, following Angakkuq’s easy bounds back with her own plodding steps, to where the divedrive was waiting for them. A few meters above the ice, it was nothing to turn off the gravity compensators and jump lightly up.

  An opening yawned in the hull. A tight-chambered air lock, molded in place of the divedrive’s usual entrance.

  As they settled in, Tharsis noticed movement beyond the circle of white hull. A great multitude of small, dark figures, misshapen and awkward, eyeless, soundless, watching.

  That little boy from before. Standing in the center. Eyes locked on her.

  She didn’t say anything about it to Angakkuq. Just closed her eyes until the door slotted into place, and the pressure rose enough for her to pop the hood.

  tDaer, mercifully, didn’t ask.

  Instead, the Iapetan just watched with a vague interest as Tharsis tore off her ENEX as quickly as possible, the second they were through. Still naked, to save time, she punched the suit’s storage locker open up out of the hull. A curved door section rose up and she carefully deposited the suit back in its protective suspension fluid. Once deployed, the outer layers would degrade in atmo. The goo stopped the reactions that led to damaging radiation release, effectively resetting the biological components to full dormancy.

  “You, uh, you good?” tDaer finally asked.

  The lieutenant punched open the adjacent space, where she’d stashed her civilian clothes, and shrugged them on. She didn’t like the way the grad student was looking at her. Nobody ever looked at her that way. For some reason, it pissed her off, almost as much as being hurled onto the surface of Ceres.

  “This craft burped me out like waste through a cell wall. Am I supposed to be okay with that?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40