Jian sat curled up in the corner of his shower and let the nearly-scalding water batter against his skin until his nerves went numb and the knots in his muscles loosened.
Everything hurt. Tomorrow, it would be worse. Spending several hours tightly strapped into a crash couch in an uncontrolled four gee spin will do that to a body, no matter how fit. Jian watched as the last of his weekly water allocation spiraled down the drain between his feet. It was Tuesday. He didn’t care. What were they going to do, shut off his water?
“You can bill me,” he muttered to no one.
His plant chimed, alerting him to someone waiting at the door.
<Go away,> he sent.
<Jian, it’s your father.>
<Oh. Well in that case, you can go away and go fuck yourself.>
The connection dropped, and Jian heard the door to his apartment swing open. Damned command overrides. The bathroom door slid open. Jian didn’t ever care enough to object.
“Jesus, son. You look like a raisin. How long have you been in there?”
“There’s still hot water, so not long enough.”
Chao reached over to the shower’s control panel and shut down the flow, then threw open the glass door as the fog rolled across the floor. He threw a towel at Jian.
“Honestly, Jian. If your mother could see you like this, it would break her heart.”
“Yeah, well she can’t, now can she?”
Chao ignored the barb. “Dry yourself off and get dressed. I’ll be waiting for you in the living room.”
“Why?”
“Because your captain just ordered you to. Now move, kiddo.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Yeah, well I cheated my way into the position. Five minutes, then I’m dragging you out of here, dressed or not.”
His father left the bathroom and shut the door behind him, leaving Jian alone, wet, and naked on the floor. He sat there for a long minute until the steam disappeared up into the exhaust fan and the air chilled his damp skin. He briefly considered turning the water back on, but although he didn’t mind telling his father to stuff it, he wasn’t so far gone that he felt like committing insubordination against his commanding officer.
Damn them both for being the same person.
Jian stood on sore, wobbly legs and steadied himself against the sink basin. The bare metal felt cool against his thigh. Jian toweled himself dry, then wrapped his body in an embarrassingly luxurious bath robe. It was old, threadbare in several places, but made of genuine wool grown by a centuries-dead sheep. It had been passed down through many generations of his family. Just one of the myriad little perks of being a Feng that had passed beneath his notice as a child. But as an adult, he saw them all too clearly.
He’d grown to resent them, but it was a very soft robe.
Jian crossed the hallway into his bedroom and opened his closet. What to wear? Well, he’d been ordered to dress by his captain, so his crew uniform made the most sense. Yeah, keep it formal, keep his father at arm’s length. He didn’t have any choice about dealing with his CO, but he could send the message loud and clear that “captain” was the only capacity Jian was willing to work with his father in at the moment.
He selected a freshly-cleaned and pressed uniform, and donned it with the sort of careful eye that he hadn’t used since graduating Flight School. Jian ran a lint brush over his sleeves and shoulders, fixed his hair, then took one last look. Satisfied that everything was ready for inspection, he walked out into the living room to find his father resting on his chaise lounge.
“All right, captain, what am I dressed for?”
Chao stood up and walked briskly for the door. “Follow me.”
Jian rolled his eyes, but did as he was told. His father called an elevator. They waited in silence until the car arrived. The doors closed and Chao selected the ground floor.
“I have… news,” Chao said once they were alone in the car. “About Benexx.”
Jian’s eyebrows inched up in anticipation, but his father’s face wasn’t encouraging.
“Yes? Tell me.”
Chao swallowed and squared his shoulders. “Well, it turns out that paranoid lunatic father of zers had implanted a subdermal locator chip in zer when Benexx was a kid and didn’t bother to tell anybody. So as soon as he got out of the hospital, Bryan and Theresa tracked zer chip down to some flop house in the native quarter.”
“Except Benexx wasn’t there,” Jian said, anticipating his father’s next sentence.
Chao shook his head. “No. Someone had removed the chip and implanted it into one of the other Atlantian bombing victims. We haven’t identified the victim yet. The Bensons found zer abandoned in an upstairs room, presumably left there to die. They got zer to the hospital just in time, but ze hasn’t regained consciousness yet. Regardless, it’s obvious now that Benexx isn’t just missing, but has definitely been kidnapped, and by well-organized people who know what they’re doing.”
“If Benson didn’t tell anyone about the chip, how did they know to look for it in the first place?”
“Good question. Maybe they’re just as paranoid as he is.”
“Is that what this is about? Benexx’s kidnappers? They have to be linked to technician Madeja somehow.”
“We’re working that angle up here. We dug through Madeja’s web traffic, search history, correspondence, social connections, all of it and found nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, until we searched her apartment, and…”
“And what? She was storing files offline?”
“About as far offline as you can get. Paper. She had a bunch of rough-cut paper newsletters from some frothing-at-the-mouth separatist lunatic calling themselves the Voiceless.”
“A member of the crew? Seriously?”
“No, we don’t think so. The paper is Atlantian from Pukal. Whoever’s writing this trash, they’re probably based dirtside and shipped the leaflets up the beanstalk. We never caught wind of them before because nobody ever thought to screen for paper. I mean, paper!? Who even thinks like that?”
“Can I read them?”
“Later. Right now, we’re going to a debriefing about the other unmitigated disaster you stumbled into.”
“The facility?”
Chao nodded. “The facility.”
They reached the ground floor of Jian’s apartment building. It was a quick walk to the nearest spoke lift. In its heyday, it was prime real estate. But now with the Ark supporting one-tenth of the population it had been designed for, there wasn’t much competition for living space anymore, even with Shangri-La module’s towers reduced to permanent shrines to the victims of Kimura and da Silva’s attack.
They entered the lift and headed for the hub a kilometer above their heads. With each passing meter, the apparent gravity acting on Jian’s aching joints and muscles lessened, until the lift glided to a stop. Jian had been so distracted by the view that he’d forgotten to put his feet in the hold-down loops and floated up in the zero gee. His father grabbed his ankle and pulled him back down, arresting his momentum before Jian hit his head on the ceiling.
“I need you present, son. Don’t offer any more than you have to. Stick to the facts alone.”
“I passed the damned BILD scan. Isn’t my trial over?”
“Your innocence may have been proven, but your judgment is still an open question. So if you care about your flight status, stick to the facts. Honestly, Jian, your mother and I raised you to be more level-headed than this.”
“Will you stop bringing up mom every five minutes?” Jian shrieked. “I’m having a shitty enough couple of days as it is.”
Despite his smaller size and advancing years, Chao’s face and arms turned to steel. Before he even knew what was happening, his father had Jian’s back pinned up against the inside of the lift car, his elbow pressed against his throat. So, his father had taken the hint from his uniform. This wasn’t a parent disciplining a child. It was a captain doling out a little bulkhead counseling.
“I’ve let your tongue flap because I know just how hard this has been on you.” Chao pressed his forearm in just a fraction harder. “That ends now. Disrespect me in the privacy of your quarters all you want. But we’re in public now, even if we’re behind closed doors. Whether you’re smart enough to recognize it or not, I am trying to protect you and your future, Jian. And don’t you dare presume to lecture me on ‘shitty days.’ I was already a man when I watched Shangri-La die. Panicked when I didn’t know if you were trapped inside among the damned. Watched your mother, my wife, die. And no matter what you think about it, I loved her, even if in a complicated and unconventional way. I watched it all carrying the guilt that it was my fault, at least in part. Guilt I still carry. Everyday. I don’t need reminders from an insolent child, even if he is technically a man.” Chao took a deep breath before continuing. “I’m going to release you now. And while we are among the rest of the crew, you are going to show the respect befitting of a commander addressing his captain, yes?”
Jian nodded several times in rapid succession.
“Good.” Chao let his forearm drop. “I’m sorry about all this, Jian, really I am, especially the scan. I know how… degrading they can be.”
“Yeah?” Jian rubbed his throat. “And how do you know that?”
“Because I’ve been scanned. By Captain Mahama herself, bless her memory. I hated her for it for months afterward. But in time, I came to recognize that circumstances, and my own actions, had made it not only necessary, but unavoidable.”
“And you think that because you forgave your captain, that I’ll come around and forgive you?”
“Hope springs eternal.” His father keyed the doors to open, then held out a palm. “After you.”
Back to the command module they went. Back through Shangri-La again. Neither of them spoke. Neither wanted to. Soon, they settled into chairs in one of the command module’s conference rooms. Not the one Jian had been scanned in, thankfully, although the only way he could tell was from the room number on the door. Otherwise, they were identical.
Jian glanced around the table as he strapped himself down to keep from floating out of the chair during the meeting. There were already half a dozen people seated in the room in addition to himself and his father, mostly command staff, and a couple of reps from the various science departments, most notably Dr Kania who headed up the Astrophysics unit.
Usually, the crew didn’t bother with the chairs and instead just floated in small alcoves built into the walls while they conducted their business. The only time the chairs were pulled out was as a courtesy to “visiting” dignitaries from Shambhala, who found talking to floating holograms disorienting, even to the point of inducing motion sickness in some with weaker constitutions.
On cue, ghostly forms began appearing in the chairs one after another as the holo-projectors mounted in the ceiling warmed up. In moments, they solidified and four new people “sat” at the table. Of them, Jian only recognized two people: Agrawal, the city’s current administrator, and Devorah Feynman, the long-serving curator of Shambhala’s museum. The woman had to be pushing ninety by now, but gave no impression of slowing down. Why she’d been invited was a bit of a mystery to Jian, however. She was technically still a crew member, but held no official position and hadn’t since her retirement.
The resolution of the holograms hadn’t been affected much by the accident. While the ribbon had been shut down to lift car traffic and high-voltage power transfer to the surface for fear of further damage, comparatively low-voltage data transmission had been deemed safe by the engineers.
Chao, acting as the chair and host of the meeting, brought it to order with a bang of a gavel, the end of which was tied to the table to keep it from floating away. Some traditions never died.
“Thanks for coming, everyone. We all know what this meeting is about, so let’s just cut right to it, shall we?” A wave of agreeing nods ran around the table. “Good. So, the ‘facility’ as it’s been taken to be called. The question before us is what to do about it. But before we can answer that, first we need to have some idea of what it is in the first place. To that end, I’ve invited Dr Kania, head of the Ark’s Astrophysics Department, and Commander Feng, the only person to have actually explored the facility in person.”
“Only surviving person,” Jian corrected his father reflexively.
Chao shot him a look, but quickly relented and bowed his head. “Of course you’re right. Technician Rakunas’s bravery and sacrifice should not go without mention. Or those of the rest of the Atlantis’s crew. But, we must continue. Dr Kania has prepared a short briefing of what we’ve learned with certainty over the last few days.” Chao ceded the floor.
“Thank you, Captain Feng,” Kania started. “I should start out by saying this briefing will be very brief indeed, as we know almost nothing about the facility with certainty. However, here’s what we can tell you.”
At the center of the table, an image of Varr’s surface surrounding the facility site materialized and started to slowly rotate. “What you’re seeing here is a rendered image of the cave-in entrance and grounds near where the facility was discovered, extrapolated from pictures and video feed recovered among the shuttle’s data and transmissions. We’ve already determined the age of the scene is somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a few million years. We’re confident, based on the differential in the number of impact craters in the immediate scene and the surrounding area that the facility was built inside an excavated hole, and then reburied.”
“Why such a large span in the estimate?” Devorah asked.
“There’s a lot of variability in meteorite impact rates. We’ve managed to date enough craters down on the surface of Gaia and on Varr to know the outer solar system goes through periodic instabilities, probably as a result of some sort of orbital resonance with Tao Ceti F we’re still trying to understand. This causes higher than average meteor activity for a couple thousand years at a time. We’re not sure exactly how many of these storms have taken place since the facility’s construction or how intense they were, hence the wide range of possible dates. But we are very confident that a quarter million years is the least amount of time it could have been there.”
“Fair enough,” Devorah said.
“I’ve heard it suggested that an older civilization of Atlantians may have constructed it,” Chao said. “Is that likely?”
“I wouldn’t bet a bucket of reheated tofu on it,” Devorah said. “The sort of civilization that’s progressed far enough to develop a heavy lift to orbit capacity and large-scale, space-based construction would leave a footprint on the world that would last for many tens of millions of years. Roads, dams, erosive effects of agricultural clearing, mining sites, the kind of advanced industrial capacity that can build a multi-stage rocket would have to be massive. Yet outside of their road network and villages, we’ve seen no archeological evidence anywhere on the surface of Gaia that any prior Atlantian society had advanced even as far as the current one has.”
“My department’s findings concur with Director Feynman,” Kania said.
<Director?> Jian thought to his father. <Of what department?>
<Devorah is the informal head of Atlantian Cultural Studies. Now pay attention and stay sharp.>
“Anyway,” Devorah resumed. “Combine that with the fact any civilization that could build an underground complex on their own moon would also have the capability to deflect or destroy any incoming asteroids and avoid being knocked back to the stone age in the first place.”
“That may be,” Chao said, “but it wouldn’t necessarily protect them from disease, famine, or war. There are a lot of ways to collapse a civilization. We should know, having tried most of them ourselves at one point or another.”
“That is certainly true,” Devorah conceded. “But again, there would be some evidence of the previous civilization. Not only that, but we’ve found no mention of any prior advancement beyond their current level of technology in either the Atlantian oral or written traditions. But they’ve got a buttload of stories about Cuut getting pissed and shoving a big rock up their asses every few thousand years. Awfully tough to break out of the stone age when the reset button keeps getting hit every couple of eons.”
“Why don’t we just ask them?” Jian said. The room turned and cast disapproving looks at the disruption. He ignored them. “In fact, why aren’t any Atlantians sitting in on this meeting? It’s their moon we’re talking about, one of their Gods. Shouldn’t they be hearing this?”
Devorah’s hologram smiled. “You know what? That’s a really interesting question. One I’d like an answer to myself.”
An uncomfortable silence blanketed the room as the nominal leaders of humanity glanced at each other, scrambling for an answer. It was Administrator Agrawal that found her voice first.
“We will be only too happy to brief our Atlantian citizens and allies on what we have discovered, once we have ascertained exactly what it is, and our investigation has arrived at appropriate… recommendations for how best to handle the situation.”
“You mean once you’ve already decided on a course of action,” Devorah snapped back. “That’s what this is all about, right?”
“We wouldn’t presume to act unilaterally without the consent of our allies on their territory.”
“There are a lot of ways to extract ‘consent’,” Jian said.
“Any decision will be arrived at in a completely transparent manner in accordance with all applicable agreements and treaties,” Chao said impatiently. “And I would remind the commander that Dr Kania has the floor.”
<Shut. Up.> The message came through Jian’s plant on a private channel from his father, just to drive home the point. “Anyway,” Chao said aloud, “Dr Kania, please continue.”
The good doctor nodded her thanks, then hit a couple of buttons on her tablet. The hologram above the table shifted and dove through the collapsed roof and into the pit before settling on the facility entrance. To the left, footage captured by Rakunas’s suit camera looped the fragment of video showing the door sucking Jian inside.
“This is where we go from solid science into pretty heavy speculation. Most of the tech Commander Feng’s team encountered during their brief expedition inside the facility appears to be nano-based, far and away more advanced than anything we’ve developed up to this point. But that’s not to say we can’t learn from it. Their version of an airlock, for example, is brilliantly simple and eliminates any air loss during transfers. Our own nanotech is up to the task already, it’s just a matter of implementing it. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing none of us thought of the application before now. We should have a test rig ready to evaluate for the Alcubierre prototype within a couple of weeks. But, moving on…”
The hologram changed again to the feed from Jian’s own camera once they’d entered the facility. Swarms of Polly’s brethren poured out of the walls and went about their work, ignoring him and Rakunas entirely. Even still, several of those present visibly recoiled from the hologram as if the robotic alien bugs were in the room with them. No matter how much time passed or how advanced humanity got, there would always be something about critters with more than four legs that screamed nope! at an instinctual level.
“What you’re seeing here are non-biological, autonomous, drones. They appear to be made of roughly the same nanomaterial as the airlock, just repurposed and imbued with some level of virtual intelligence to manage their tasks.”
“‘Imbued’ is a strange word for a scientist of your stature to use, Dr Kania,” Administrator Agrawal’s hologram said. “With its mystical connotations and all.”
Kania shrugged. “It’s a reflection of our ignorance at this point. We don’t have the first idea how any of this is being accomplished. All we’ve learned so far from the sample is the individual nano particles seem to be held together and manipulated through a combination of electromagnetism and exploiting van der Waals’ forces. But insofar as how they establish and maintain their neural computing networks, or even where the hell their power is being drawn from, we don’t have the first idea.”
“Hold on, time out,” Agrawal said. “Sample? You have one of these things on board the Ark?”
Kania paused and awkwardly glanced to her captain. Chao gave her a slight nod, giving her permission to proceed.
“Yes,” Kania said. “Commander Feng, ah… captured one of them and brought it back to the shuttle. Our recovery team transferred it to one of our labs yesterday afternoon. We’ve only just begun our initial survey, but expect to learn an immense amount about the material, given enough time. And resources, of course.”
Jian smirked at the subtle sales pitch. Kania was pushing sixty. She’d come up through the ranks of scientists working to smooth out all the wrinkles to colonization before the Ark had made orbital insertion around their new home. She was used to having to fight for man hours, materials, lab time, even electricity for her projects. Nothing went to waste on the old Ark, and everyone had to fight for priority among the scarcity. A lot of the old guard still acted that way. Consequently, they also tended to get what they wanted.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” one of the other representatives from the surface said, one that Jian didn’t recognize.
“We’ve taken all necessary precautions.” Kania flipped the footage hovering above the table over to a feed from inside one of the Ark’s clean room labs. “As you can see, the sample is being held under armed guard behind fifteen centimeters of ballistic-rated glass. The joints between the panes have been ultrasonically welded to create a seamless, uninterrupted chamber. It is, for all intents and purposes, impenetrable.”
Polly strained against its confines. In one moment, it flowed like water into all the edges and corners of the glass, probing for weaknesses. In the next, it reformed in the exact center and sent tiny spikes out into the middle of the glass panes trying to crack it. In the next, it morphed into a hammer and tried to smash it with brute force. Then, it inspected its progress, or lack thereof. Then, the process repeated. Jian cringed as he watched the little creature struggle.
“Further,” Kania continued, “the base of the enclosure is equipped with a high-capacity discharge microwave unit. Within three milliseconds of detecting a containment breach, everything inside it will be flash heated to eight thousand Kelvin, more than hot enough to not just melt, but break the covalent bonds of any known compound and reduce it to a cloud of charged plasma. Our safety protocols are more than adequate.”
“I don’t mean to be crass,” continued the rep, “but how the hell do you know what ‘adequate safety protocols’ are when you don’t even know how the thing moves, thinks, or where its battery is? How can you even begin to guess its capabilities?”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Jian interrupted. “I’m the only person to see them in action. They’re maintenance and repair drones. He’s…” Jian’s tongue caught on the word “harmless” as a flash of Polly running a spike through Madeja’s eye danced across his brain. “…helpful,” he settled on instead.
“Actually, commander,” Kania interjected before the rep could retort, “I think this would be a good point for you to take over and explain what you saw in the map room in greater detail.” The image flickered from the lab over to the cavernous spherical space he’d nearly lost himself in.
“I’m not sure what you want me to tell,” Jian said. “I’m not a trained scientist.”
“Perhaps not, but you are a trained pilot. Your observational skills and attention to detail are probably equal to anyone on my staff.”
“That’s kind of you to say, director, even if I don’t know how true it is.”
“Just walk us through the scene. Give us your impressions of what you saw, touched, and so on. I’m transferring control of the video feedback to your plant.”
An incoming authorization alert flashed in the left side of his field of vision. Jian toggled the icon, and a small virtual control board appeared in its place. He reached out and grabbed the table with his hands as if to steady himself. “OK, here goes. We entered the room thinking it might be a natural cavern that had just been incorporated into the facility, but the perfect spherical shape made it clear it had been excavated intentionally. We soon figured out for what purpose.” He resumed the playback to the point he sat down in the awkward chair. Watching himself go back through the same motion from two days earlier was a little disorienting. “The chair pretty obviously hadn’t been designed with your average human in mind, but it quickly adjusted to fit my body type.”
“Who, or what, did it seem designed for?” Administrator Agrawal asked.
“That, I couldn’t say,” Jian answered. “It was just damned uncomfortable until it finished morphing, even through my vac suit.”
“Would an Atlantian fit in it?” Chao asked.
“Maybe? It was a little oversized for me, but it didn’t look or feel like any of the Atlantian chairs I’ve seen or sat in before. But, like I said, it quickly accommodated me, and once it did…” Jian let the footage spool out a little more until the room-sized hologram of Gaia erupted from the walls like a fireworks show, complete with “oohs” and “aaahs” from the assembled audience. “…we got quite a show. If you’re having trouble orienting yourself inside this map, realize that it’s being viewed from the perspective of someone sitting at the planet’s core looking out. That’s why everything is mirror-image.” Jian waited a beat until he saw a dawning of recognition on enough of their faces before proceeding. “Once I was settled in, then the really weird shi… stuff started to happen.”
The image zoomed in on Shambhala, then flipped to an overhead view, just as it had done before. The same inwardly-spiraling symbols appeared, like foreign characters being sucked down a drain.
“What are those supposed to be?” Agrawal asked.
“I assume they’re language characters like letters or pictograms, Administrator.”
“Obviously, but whose characters?”
“We’ve taken a look at them already,” Devorah injected. “They don’t share any commonalities with any written Atlantian system we’ve studied. And it should go without saying that it’s not based on any known human language system.”
“Well who does that leave?” Agrawal said.
“Hell if I know. Please continue, commander.”
“Thank you. If you’ll notice, it didn’t take long before the program, or whatever is in control over there, realized I was having trouble interpreting the displays and reverted to a, a learning module, or a sort of instruction manual, as far as I can tell.”
The spirals disappeared, replaced by individual symbols hovering over important buildings and landmarks in and around Shambhala, testing him. Teasing Jian to decipher their meaning.
“I believe the facility was trying to make itself understood,” Jian said. “If I were to use any word to describe it, I’d call it accommodating. Forming itself to our needs and doing everything it could to be user friendly.”
“Why the hell would it want to do that?” Agrawal asked. “Why would it want to help aliens exploit it to their own ends?”
“It may not know we’re aliens,” Kania said quietly.
“Would you care to expand on that, doctor?” Chao said.
“Certainly. This facility has been here for a minimum of a quarter million years and is still functioning. It was obviously built with the long haul in mind. A quarter of a million years ago, there were at least three distinct hominid species wandering around the Earth, none of which came even close to sharing a language or sharing a culture. All of us sitting in this room, excuse me, in this room or on the surface, are an average of twenty centimeters taller than our Earthbound ancestors were during the Renaissance. If I were to open the museum’s copy of War and Peace in the original Russian, who among us could read Cyrillic without a translation program? Those examples are over the span of just a few centuries. Now imagine the changes we’ll go through as a technologically advanced race capable of manipulating our own DNA over the course of the next few hundred millennia? Would we recognize ourselves? Would we be able to talk to ourselves? Preparing for deep time means throwing out all of your assumptions about what it means to be human, or whoever they were, in this case.”
“Philosophical and existential musings aside, that doesn’t really answer the central question,” Agrawal said. “Which is, what is the facility’s purpose? Who built it? Why was it built? And what is it still doing here?” She held out three fingers. “We know of only three sentient species. Ourselves, the Atlantians, and whoever threw Nibiru at Earth. We know humans didn’t build it. Dr Kania is assuring us that the Atlantians didn’t build it. That only leaves one possibility.” She held out her index finger. “And if it was built by the enemy, then we must assume that their intentions for it were hostile.”
“We hardly need to assume it was the same civilization,” Kania said. “Consider this. We now have two confirmed examples of Earthlike planets, Earth and Gaia. And on both, a sentient species has developed independently of one another. Moreover, before the end of Earth, we’d found fossilized Martian stromatolites, simple life in the oceans of both Enceladus and Europa, and methane-based, self-replicating molecules hiding inside protocellular membranes on Titan which couldn’t possibly have arisen from any sort of panspermia from Earth or Martian contamination. They weren’t exactly life yet, but probably would have been with another billion years to cook. Here in the Tau Ceti system, we know primitive plant life covers much of the tropical latitudes of Tau Ceti F.”
“What about Proxima B?” Chao asked. “It’s earthlike.”
“Yes, but its atmosphere is too thin to keep liquid water from boiling off. It was probably thicker in the past, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find fossilized early life around its equatorial terminus, but we’ve been a little too busy to go poking around there for the last couple centuries.”
“Your point, doctor?” Agrawal said.
“My point is we’ve found life on multiple planets and moons in the only two solar systems we’ve explored first hand. And intelligent life on both of the worlds with liquid water, thick atmospheres, and abundant solar energy powering their ecosystems. That’s a statistically significant finding. Extrapolate it out to the rest of the galaxy and that means millions if not billions of civilizations exist, right now. There is no reason to assume this facility had to be built by one of the three we have direct evidence of.”
“I hate to quibble, but there’s a very good reason to assume it was built by the race that destroyed our homeworld. Because if we don’t, and they find out we’re here, we lose Gaia too.”
“We’ve been closely monitoring the facility for transmissions. No radio or laser emissions. It’s dark.”
“It’s dark to methods of communication we recognize or understand,” Agrawal said. “We’re talking about a race that manipulates black holes. Who knows what other technology they possess? Did I not read something recently about the crew experimenting with quantum entanglement communications for the Alcubierre project?”
“We’re in the early stages,” Kania said. “And although it’s not my department, I can tell you that the entanglement is very, very sensitive. We’ve managed to keep paired particles entangled for a matter of minutes before the connection breaks. It’s incredibly tenuous, and subject to the smallest of outside influences. A stray cosmic ray, or even a neutrino can render the connection moot. Keeping an entanglement intact over the course of days or months is daunting enough. But hundreds of millennia?” Kania shook her head. “I can’t imagine any level of technology being able to automate the process on those kinds of timescales.”
“But then why the hell did they put it there?” Agrawal turned to face Jian. “It has a map of the whole planet laid out in there. What do you suppose that’s all about?”
“I’d rather not speculate,” Jian said, feeling the pressure.
“Indulge us, commander.”
Jian shrugged. “Well, they seemed to have detailed and current maps about the Atlantian villages, and especially Shambhala. I’d guess they have some sort of sensor network, either in heavily-stealthed orbital platforms we haven’t detected, or more likely buried dirtside somewhere out of sight. It’s pretty clear it’s an observation post of some kind.”
“That proves it, then. Someone is spying on us,” Agrawal said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘spying,’ exactly. Studying, maybe. We observed the Atlantians for years before making contact, after all. And our intentions weren’t hostile. Besides, why would they leave the door unlocked? If they’ve been watching us so closely, they know we came from the surface. Why let us in at all? And why try to teach me to use all the buttons and levers?”
“Now it’s my turn to speculate?” Agrawal said. “Because it’s a honeypot trap, tempting us with a few trinkets of technology, but in the end it’s just a way to study us even more closely. Assess our cognitive abilities based on how fast we learn. Determine how much of a threat we are. Hell, for all we know, there are facilities like this sprinkled around inhabited planets throughout the galaxy, waiting for eons until some pond scum finally pulls itself up by its bootstraps and develops a space program. Then whoever left it here knows a new light is shining in the cosmos and it’s time to throw a black hole in their general direction. Problem solved.”
Agrawal stood up from her chair. “It’s my speculation that this facility is the Nibiru race’s version of the Early Warning network we’re constructing on Varr as we speak. A means of identifying potential threats so they can take action. And we’ve just let them know they need to come back to finish the job. Our first priority should be destroying the facility as soon as possible before it communicates any more intel on us.”
Devorah perked up “And how do you propose we do that, nuke it? The Atlantians will never agree to it. It took the better part of eighteen months to convince them to let us gently mine the surface for Helium-3.”
“Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”
“Didn’t you just say, ‘We would not presume to take unilateral action’?” Jian said with a sharpened tongue.
“I think what we’ve heard here changes the equation a bit, don’t you?”
“Are you sure your judgment isn’t being clouded by the fact your city was just hit by a terrorist attack, Administrator?”
“Are you sure yours isn’t from losing your shuttle, commander?”
The muscles in Jian’s neck stiffened at the barb, but he saw the trap his father had warned him about. “Touche.”
“We’re getting off topic.” Chao’s voice was stern. “We’re not here to discuss a course of action, not until we’ve collected all the facts of the matter. Now, Dr Kania, how likely do you think Administrator Agrawal’s scenario is”
Kania shifted uncomfortably against the seat restraints at her shoulders. “It is… possible. The discovery of the Atlantians certainly put a stake through the heart of the old Fermi Paradox, but it left another giant question in its wake. If intelligent life in the cosmos is so common, which we can now say with some degree of confidence that it must be, then why hadn’t we heard from anyone or seen any evidence of it?
“Before Gaia, there was a theory called the ‘Great Filter,’ which posited that somewhere along the development of life, a huge barrier to advancement stopped the vast majority of species from advancing to the point of interstellar travel or communications. Some thought this filter was evolutionary, that life itself was very difficult to get going. Or that the transition from simple, single-cellular life to complex multicellular forms was the stumbling block, or moving from complex life to true intelligence. With two examples of species that have passed these barriers less than thirteen light years apart, we know none of them could be this hypothetical filter, and that it must lay ahead of us in our development.”
She looked around. The room’s occupants sat in rapt attention.
“Which is where we get to the scary bit. Some suggested that the filter wasn’t any natural process or limitation. Some thought that most technologically advanced civilizations reached a point where they could no longer control or contain the power of their tech and invariably destroyed themselves as we nearly did half a dozen times in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But others proposed a super-predator civilization that hunted down and destroyed emerging civilizations as soon as it became aware of their existence. The timing of the attack on Earth would… lend credibility to this hypothesis.”
“How so?” Chao asked.
“Well, think about it. The Industrial Revolution really ramped up in the early eighteen hundreds. That was probably the first time a distant observer could have figured out we had reached a new level of development, based on the sudden and drastic changes to our atmosphere. A hundred years later and we’re sending out our first artificial radio signals. A few decades after that and we’re detonating nuclear bombs. Then we’re landing on the moon, developing super computers, mapping the human genome, all in rapid succession. Our pace of technological progression became exponential. We only had a brief slowdown in the middle of the twenty-first century while we dealt with converting our global infrastructure away from fossil fuels. It’s conceivable this super-predator predicted we were only a few centuries, perhaps even a few decades away from becoming a significant threat, and took action as soon as we turned the corner. It may be a pattern it’s seen repeated dozen, hundreds, or thousands of times.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Chao said, “But it brings up two questions, at least for me. One, Nibiru came in fast for a celestial object, but not nearly so fast as one would expect an advanced race to be able to travel. It was barely doing one and a half percent light speed. The Ark easily outran it. If this was a galaxy-spanning super-predator, why not react to the threat more quickly?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps it was a limitation on the black hole technology itself. It was a very massive object, after all, nearly two thirds of a solar mass. Getting anything of that size up to even a single percent of lightspeed is a massive expenditure of energy that would require a Kardashev Type II civilization at the least.”
“But doesn’t that also mean they must have been right in our back yard, astronomically speaking?” Jian said. “Even assuming they fired Nibiru off right at the first sign of industrialization as you suggested, that’s four centuries from launch to impact. At one and a half percent lightspeed, that puts the point of origin within six lightyears of Earth. How the hell could we not have seen them? There’s almost nothing inside of six lightyears of Earth, certainly not any planets with Type II civilizations just lying about.”
“Again, I can only guess, but maybe they have automated defense nodes sprinkled throughout space, lying in the dark between stars where they’re unlikely to be detected, just waiting for a new fire to break out, as it were. Maybe we were just incredibly unlucky and happened to be close to one.”
“So Earth was murdered by some long-forgotten alien sprinkler system?” Devorah said. “I don’t know if I should be terrified or insulted.”
“I think it’s possible to be both,” Chao said. “But that brings me to my next question. If one of these facilities was watching Earth, why did we never discover it? We had entire cities on Luna by the end, to say nothing of our massive mining efforts.”
“That I can answer,” Kania said. “Even at the height of human activity on Luna, we never directly explored more than a few percent of its total surface area. Varr’s surface area is geometrically smaller than Luna’s, and yet we still only stumbled across the facility by pure dumb luck. And that assumes any facility in the Sol system was placed on Earth’s moon in the first place. Depending on how long it was intended to stay there, the asteroid belt would be an even better position for it, not only to avoid detection, but to be closer to all of the other potential starting points for new civilizations as the sun warmed with age and pushed the habitable zone deeper into the system. Mars would probably have had another shot at supporting life in a few hundred million years. At least one Jovian moon already had life, as did Titan after a fashion.”
“You really think the facility was intended to operate on billion-year timescales?”
“It’s a self-repairing station made out of nanotech. I have no idea how to even begin to calculate its expected service cycle. And it’s pretty obvious whoever this is thinks in much grander terms than we do.”
“Point.” Chao rubbed a temple and sighed. “What would you gauge the odds of this hypothesis being true?”
“I don’t even know where to start that calculation, captain.”
“Who cares?” Agrawal said. “If there’s even a one percent risk of tipping off the Nibiru race, we have to treat it as an… absolute…” Agrawal turned to face Devorah, who was busy laughing in her chair. “Something amusing, director?”
“Oh, no. Nothing funny at all, Dick.”
“What did you just call me?” Agrawal demanded.
Chao slapped a hand on the table. “Decorum, please.” The Ark’s captain shook his head in frustration. “We’re not just supposed to be adults here, but leaders. Is it too much to ask that we pretend to act like it? Just for a few minutes?” The room answered with cowed silence. “Better. Now then, Director Kania, if we pulled one of our remaining propulsive nukes from the inventory, would it have enough yield to do the job?”
Jian bristled at the question. <You can’t seriously be considering this,> he shot off through their private link.
<I have to consider all of our options. That’s what these discussions are for. Now let me hear her answer.>
Kania referenced her pad for a moment, pulling up specs on the beach-ball-sized nuclear devices that had propelled the Ark to Tau Ceti by the tens of thousands. Like nearly everything aboard, the Ark’s engineers had included a little fudge factor of a few percent. Better to cart along a few hundred extra nukes than flip to the ship only to discover they were a few hundred short of what was needed to enter orbit and watch their salvation float out of reach.
“This is just some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations, you understand.” Kania clipped her pad back to the table to keep it from floating off. “The individual devices are pretty low-yield when compared to the sorts of strategic nuclear weapons we’re used to seeing in old war movies. And we haven’t fully mapped the facility to know how extensive the tunnel system is.” She paused. “However, their uranium chambers were shaped in such a way to direct the majority of their force in a thirty-seven degree cone pointed directly at the pusher plate, which drastically increases their propulsive force, and conversely, their destructive potential in that direction. Couple that with the fact the facility sits in an entirely contained space that will further concentrate the energy, not to mention the EMP effects… No, I can’t imagine anything of use surviving that.”
Jian reeled. They were going to blow up the whole thing, he knew it in his bones. But he knew his father, and knew that he was already resigned to the path Kania already seemed to be coming around to, and Agrawal was pushing hard for. He’d have to disrupt it another way.
“I volunteer to command the mission to deliver the device,” he blurted out. “Should there be one.”
“Are you kidding?” Agrawal said. “You’ve been fighting the idea from the beginning. Now you want to lead it?”
Jian cleared his throat. “I’ve lost friends, Administrator. Good ones. I’d like to be the one to finish what we started down there out of respect to their memory, even if I don’t entirely agree with it. Duty comes first.” Jian liked the sound of it. Almost believed it himself.
“Commander Feng’s flight status will be decided later,” his father said. “For now, I’d like everyone to ruminate on what we’ve discussed here before we reconvene to decide on our course.”
“And when will that be?” Agrawal said tersely.
“As soon as we can prepare a briefing for our allies, Administrator,” Chao said. “I understand that time is critical here, but I’m not willing to throw out fifteen years of cooperation and goodwill just to–”
“Um, captain?” Kania interrupted quietly.
“What?”
“We have a more immediate problem.”
Chao’s fists clenched before he forced them open again. “Yes? What is that?”
Kania swiped the display above the table back to the lab where Polly was held. Or, more accurately, where Polly had been held.
The entire room stared slack-jawed at the empty cage. No one spoke. No one dared to breathe.
Except for Chao Feng.
“Oh for fuck’s sake!”