Читать книгу Noumenon Infinity - Marina Lostetter J. - Страница 17

… Convoy Seven has been assigned a new mission, designated Noumenon Infinitum. Its express purpose is to travel to the variable star LQ Pyxidis and complete construction of the alien megastructure, thought to be a Dyson Sphere and known as “the Web.” Once complete, Convoy Seven is to charge the batteries on the ship designated Zetta, then return to Earth …

Confidential addendum to official statement, Convoy Seven crew only:

In addition to the official mission parameters appointed by Earth, Noumenon Infinitum is to investigate the craft known as “the Nest.” Any information garnered from the investigation pertaining to alien involvement with the Web is to be applied …

… The final clause of the official mission statement can be struck. Convoy Seven need not return to Earth …

It started with a map, like all good treasure hunts do. One alien in origin, and not immediately recognizable for what it was. But it had led them here.

Caznal the Fourth gazed out of the shuttle porthole and into the inky night beyond. It wasn’t the total lightlessness of an SD bubble; it was a dark monolith of matter. A planemo—a systemless planetoid—wandering and alone. Starless, moonless. Naught but a black disk against the stars, and it blotted them out one by one as the shuttle shifted.

But Caz didn’t see a flat emptiness. She saw a blank slate. The planemo held nothing but potential.

Light lensed around the edges in a visible halo as they descended, creating a bowed outline of the galaxies and such beyond.

Out the opposite side of the craft, over her apprentice’s shoulder, she could barely make out the twelve ships of the convoy, their illuminated windows only distinguishable from far-off stars because of their orientation and regularity.

No one could have anticipated, all those years ago on Launch Day, that the convoy would have found itself here.

When Noumenon, the original mission, had arrived at LQ Pyx, they’d discovered an alien craft floating near the Web’s most massive component. The craft was damaged, and empty, but clearly belonged to an alien species who had taken up the construction project. The convoy had taken the ship—dubbed the Nest because of the many pipes that circled around it and dangled from its bottom in an arrangement that resembled woven twigs—believing it held answers to the Web.

Now that ship hovered in the belly of Slicer, where the engineers poked and prodded it like a sick patient with a rare disease.

And it had led them here.

As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.

She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.

That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.

The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?

But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.

Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.

If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.

“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice echoing slightly inside Caz’s helmet. “Spotlights should be illuminating the eastern edge soon. Take note.”

Caz squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.

But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.

They were hoping to find something important to the Nataré here (Nataré was what they’d named the Nest’s creators, from the Latin, for how they were believed to be able to “float” or “swim” through the air on their biologically manipulated gravitons). Anything would do really. If all they stumbled upon was a set of tentacle prints and a patch of “we were here” graffiti, she’d take it.

Because that would silence the doubt.

When the convoy had successfully developed the technology to access the Nest’s computer, they’d soon come to the conclusion that the ship was more like a shuttle. Which made sense, given its size. Unless, of course, the aliens were considerably smaller than humans; just one of the many things Caznal was hoping to learn. She was still surprised they didn’t even know something that basic about them.

The ship’s computer contained no visuals of the aliens, nor any general historical data. All they found were three-dimensional representations of hundreds of spheres stuffed full with additional spheres of different sizes.

At first, the engineers had thought they’d stumbled upon the Nataré writing system, that each parent sphere could denote a page or even an entire document, and the spheres inside were words. But running them through a rudimentary algorithm revealed a lack of repetition, a fundamental requirement for ordering anything—sounds, symbols, movements—into meaningful communication.

It took them years to mentally convert the Nest’s data into information more suited to a human thinking process. The breakthrough had come when they found spheres with only a couple of—and in some cases, only one—interior spheres. When these were matched to full-to-the-brim spheres, they found an overlap. The mostly empty spheres appeared to highlight points in the full spheres.

X-marks the spot.

On human maps, the distance between objects was the focal point; the primary information the map was intended to convey. Objects were usually portrayed as a similar size—a single point at large scales. Not so with the alien maps. The Nataré highlighted gravitational influence over all other possible associations. According to the convoy’s best theories, their evolution had clearly influenced the way they saw and interacted with the world.

After recognizing the spheres as maps, their research became a quick spiral of realization and discovery. The spheres represented different sizes of gravitational influence created by various cosmological objects, and though they were shown with no distance between them, they were ordered in accordance with their spatial relation.

All the humans had to do then was take their current gravitational models and overlay them with the Nataré maps.

When they found one nearly empty sphere that highlighted LQ Pyxidis and a handful of other points, they knew they’d struck gold. It was the smoking gun they’d been looking for, evidence linking the Nest and the Web to new locations: places where more Nataré history, or the Nataré themselves, might be found.

Places like this planemo.

Only …

The ground rushed up at them—though their rate of descent slowed for landing, Caz still felt a jolt in her bones when they touched down.

“Ready, sir?” Ivan asked, giving her the thumbs-up.

“Ready,” she breathed, standing. When the pilot gave the green light, she hoisted the duffel bag of tools that lay at her feet onto her shoulder, as did her colleagues.

“Four hours for setup,” the pilot reminded them. “Half an hour for return. Stay in visual range of your assigned teammates at all times. And Captain Nwosu would like to remind you that if it wiggles, don’t touch it. If everyone’s got that, I’m opening the doors.”

A series of thumbs-ups and affirmations over comms led to the locks and their airtight seals disengaging, shifting aside to reveal the open plane and perpetual night of the crater floor.

Since Caznal was the head of the Nataré division, everyone waited for her cue. She would have the honor of stepping on this alien world first.

Hopefully, though, I won’t be the first sentient to explore this surface.

The planemo was roughly the size and density of Mars, with a surface of mostly ice, so Caz knew to expect a lower gravitational pull. It was still strange to feel the burden of her bag lighten and the tension of her muscles ease as she disembarked. The artificial gravity on the convoy ships—even the shuttles—was a constant one-g, and though they’d learned from Earth to make gravity cyclers smaller, allowing for more acute graviton manipulation, they had yet to finesse the tech into spacesuits.

Though she could move easily in the lower gravity, she felt unsteady. Like she was walking on a wobbly gelatin surface instead of solid rock. But the cleats on her soles held true to the frozen landscape, and her confidence increased with each stride.

The darkness, she found, was both a frustration and a godsend. Though the lights on her suit barely illuminated the craggy surface three feet in front of her, the small sphere of light felt safe.

She’d heard stories about planet sickness—the agoraphobia-related illness many of the crew members had experienced when the convoy had revisited Earth—and she had absolutely no desire to experience it firsthand.

“Say something,” Ivan prompted when she’d shambled a few yards away from the shuttle.

Turning back, she realized no one was following her. But eight helmets—the glare from their mounted headlamps obscuring their faces—peered out from the craft’s opening.

“Do we have to say something profound every time we step on new rocks?” she asked.

“Really?” Aziz, whose background was in bioengineering, called. “Really?”

“Oh, come on,” Caz said. “That’s gonna look way better in the history books than ‘one small step.’ Schoolkids love sarcasm.”

“We all hate you right now,” Aziz said, pushing past the others to jump through the hatch. The rest of them clambered out in sequence, looking a bit like a set of robots in their uniformity. Very similar, in fact, to the autons stored in the shuttle’s hold, which Caz would call to her aid once the locations for their gear were set.

They wouldn’t have cared what I said. She smiled as she watched the team quickly fan out in sets of three, carrying their equipment with ease.

Even though the labor was light, Caz could still hear her breath reverberating through her helmet, which added to the being-in-a-bubble sensation.

They’d picked Crater Sixty-four as a landing site because it was so unlike most of the planemo’s other craters, which were clearly created by impact. Their radar-mapping flybys hadn’t revealed any overt signs of civilization, past or present. No sprawling cities, no orbiting satellites, no bizarre megastructures. Not even a Cydonian Face to set pareidolia working, or a prominent mimetolith worth speculating about. Just a uniform frozenness, covered over with the dust of impact after impact.

But here, under the gray-green debris and the superficial indentations left by meteorites, the crater’s rim looked worked, scarred and terraced like in a quarry, disturbed by hand-equivalents with sentient intent.

But perhaps it was natural. Perhaps they would find no sign the Nataré had ever been here, no discernible Webrelated reason for it to be on their map. No one in their division dared voice such a possibility, though surely everyone was thinking it. If they couldn’t tie this planemo to the Nest, then their detour from the Web would be for naught; a waste of time.

It was an outcome Caznal had feared ever since they’d emerged from SD travel, still light-years away, to do a gravitational survey in order to make sure they were on the right track. Everything had lined up relatively well—putting all the gravitational influences almost exactly where the Nataré data put them, accounting for the millennia that had passed since the Nest had been abandoned inside the Web—everything except their destination. Their treasure map’s X, the Cave of Wonders, did not have the gravitational influence the map insisted it should.

There should have been, at a minimum, a star system. But all they’d found was this small wandering rock.

How could that be? Had a collision or some other calamity displaced the mass the Nataré had noted? Did it mark something unnatural? A fleet of alien ships? The fleet the Nest had once belonged to, that had long ago vacated the parsec?

And if the map had meant to point to something other than the planemo, then that meant their time here would amount to little more than a geological side-trek, and the surface beneath her feet was of no more importance than any other. Nothing but a cold rock. Inconsequential. A cosmic red herring, steering them away from their true purpose.

What did that make her career, her department? Misguided? Overblown?

She remembered stories about Earth scientists losing all their funding and credibility in the search for Atlantis. There were even crackpots who’d said the Atlanteans were still alive, just hiding.

That wasn’t what she’d been doing all these years, was it? Searching for Atlanteans?

“Here looks like a good spot for the first post,” Aziz said, waving Ivan over.

They were triangulating spotlights this go-around, and setting up the perimeters of their dig site. They’d become exoarchaeologists soon—using ground-penetrating radar to check for buried evidence, shoveling aside layers of dirt and stone and ice not touched by so much as a breeze in this perpetually frozen nightland.

It wasn’t a job they were meant for, not in the same way other clones were destined for their positions after the DNA reevaluations on Earth, before Infinitum’s inception. Theirs was a small, hodgepodge group. Originally, study of the Nest and its contents had fallen solely to the engineers, but, in time, it became clear the convoy required a new department, one focused on the creatures, full of people who could decode the fundamentals of Nataré culture, biology, and data.

Clones had been siphoned from bioengineering positions, which included medical staff and food processing staff. Communications had given up a line or three, as had computing, education, and SD drive maintenance. And, of course, Caznal’s line had been taken from engineering.

Now, the copper-colored jumpsuits of the Nataré scholars were one of the rarest uniforms among the crew, second only to the server caretakers’ sand color on Hvmnd. They wore it as a point of pride. Caznal saw it as a symbol of evolution: the evolution of purpose, of understanding, of their focus and dedication.

When each of the three teams was set, Caz activated her puppeteer implants, calling to the autons.

Three of the robots emerged from the shuttle’s storage hatch, unfolding from their compact travel positions, with legs slung over their own dislocated shoulders. The autons were an Earth invention, humanoid in form, dexterous in movement, with tensile strength and lifting power far beyond any machine in existence when the convoy was first launched.

Caz couldn’t see them at this range, but she could see through their “eyes,” and they could sense the weak infrared signatures emanating from the humans. She directed one to aid each set of three.

They relied entirely on her instruction, with no will or executable programs of their own. Each auton’s sleek black helmet of a head contained an active neural network, which her implants communicated with. Theirs was a hybrid of human and elephant brain tissue, without its own sentience, but with the speed and nuance only biological computing was capable of.

Scratch that. I.C.C. could match brain banks for reasoning, intelligence, and empathy any day of the week. It was the only truly artificial intelligence currently known to humanity.

But I.C.C. was confined to its body—the convoy. It was of no help down here. Especially with no hands of its own.

She used the autons to work in mirrored tandem, each coring a hole for, and setting up, the spotlight poles. While she directed their labor, others packed up the core samples for testing on Holwarda, and drew a detailed guide-grid for the area.

Few people in the convoy currently knew how to manipulate the autons—especially with her level of skill. The robots weren’t needed on a daily basis, so most of the artificial forms were held in reserve on Bottomless II, with appropriate neural networks being cloned only a handful at a time. Eventually the time of the autons would come, when the convoy was ready to set to work on their Dyson Sphere, but for now, most remained on lockdown.

“Ready to start mapping the grid area,” Ivan announced when Caz was nearly done with the hard labor.

“Everything calibrated?” she asked.

“All’s a go, sir.”

“Then have at ’er.”

The last thing Caz would have to hook up was the generator. She retrieved it with the puppets, as Ivan and Aziz made a slow, straight path across the ice. The Nataré team had picked a two-by-two acre area as their starting point. On the next away mission they’d bring down more of their colleagues, who’d expand the perimeter while they got to work on the first dig site—provided the GPR found anything worth digging up.

“Okay everybody,” she called when her work was done. “Floodlights coming on in three, two, one.”

As the lights snapped on, revealing the glittering fractures in the debris-covered ice, her teammates took turns crying out theatrically at the loss of their night vision.

“Yeah, yeah, all right,” she laughed. “My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” She started to send the autons back—their job complete—when one caught a faint glint in the distance. It was a reflection too dim for human eyes to catch, brassy in color—very unlike the glimmer dancing off the ice.

Without a word, she sent the single auton to investigate. It bounded over the surface, sliding a little as it met the downward slope of a small crater, shards of stone tumbling around its mechanical feet. Then it was up the other side, and Caz focused one of its external lights on the curious spot.

It was definitely metallic, jutting up from the slight rim at an outward angle. It extended maybe a foot above the surface, perhaps the result of the impact itself—ore melting under the heat of friction, splashing upward and then cooling quickly as it encountered the frigidness of space. There were similar nodules around its base, all angled, these no more than a few centimeters in height.

But as the auton came upon them, she realized the cylindrical, if nonuniform, shape was familiar.

Could it—?

She hadn’t let herself hope—still didn’t want to. Fighting the thrill of anticipation, she ignored the weakness in her knees and tried to still her heart as it fluttered wildly.

It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing, she told herself as she jogged in the auton’s direction, only to settle into a walk. It took a lot of willpower to force herself to move slowly, deliberately attempting to look unbothered. No use drawing the others’ attention. Not unless it turned out to be something worth the diversion.

But Ivan noticed her shifting attention, saw her initial run off into the night.

“Sir?” he asked, pausing his trudge behind the GPR skiff as she moved past him.

She didn’t answer.

“Caz?” Aziz prompted. “Caznal, what—?”

The breathy echo in her helmet grew louder as she directed the auton to dig. She had to see, had to know right now.

The robot thrust its fingertips into the ice, smashing the frozen surface. It scraped away pummeled debris from the object’s sides, slowly revealing more of the same.

Leaving the newly illuminated dig site felt like stepping off a cliff. Now, instead of comforting, her small halo of light felt claustrophobic, restraining. As though it kept her hemmed in from the planemo’s secrets on purpose.

She tripped over herself on her way to the auton’s side—it was difficult trying to mentally maneuver the puppet’s limbs contradictory to her own—and the shouts of her name over the comms system became more frantic.

“I’m fine!” she said, though it appeased no one. Both their concern and curiosity had been piqued, if the continued comms chatter was anything to go on.

By the time she reached the robot, it had loosened the ground around the primary object, plus the five nodes nearest. She fell to her knees, joining it, scraping aside what she could with her clumsy, gloved hands.

Something in the back of her mind perked, and she realized it was dangerous to test her suit this way. What if she dug down to something sharp and punctured her glove? She could lose pressure, or worse—just because the planet was cold, that didn’t mean it was barren. There could be dormant microbes beneath the surface, just waiting to encounter a carbon-based life-form.

Though the thought gave her momentary pause, she kept digging. She knew it was irrational, that she should approach this like the tempered scientist she was, and yet the excitement was overwhelming.

And now, close up, she was sure: this oddly formed metal was the spitting image of the Nest’s outer piping, Nataré technology used in their graviton supercycler. Only this seemed to be inverted. Where the Nest’s cycler dangled beneath the ship, this thrust upward, like the prongs of winter branches.

“Over here!” she cried at last, the dam of self-restraint no longer bowing under her exhilaration, but breaking. “I found something! Bring the GPR!”

I found them, she said to herself. I found the Atlanteans.

Ground-Penetrating Radar revealed at least three other supercycler tree structures near the surface, plus a few odd shapes of peculiar density that could be—based on their uniformity—buildings.

They still had to adhere to their four-and-a-half-hour ground schedule, but when they got back to the shuttle, there was much whooping and hollering, and a promise from the pilot to treat them all to an allowance of her special home brew from modified barley.

Ivan forgot himself for a moment and nearly whisked off his helmet after take-off. Only Aziz catching his hands and whacking him on the top of the thing saved him from an arduous level of extra decontamination when they docked with Hippocrates.

Even the scrubbers and the doctors gave them all hearty congratulations. And while Caz was still excited, she was far more subdued. Introspective.

Because the initial thrill of discovery had worn off, her adrenaline had ebbed. The careful thought she should have applied prior to running off into the night now occupied her every moment.

When the team was finally given the go-ahead to strip out of their pressure suits, Caznal’s gaze fell on her apprentice, and she knew what was wrong. The dark curls of his hair framed his tan face and swooped over his ears just so, emphasizing the strong arched slope of his nose. From this angle—with his helmet propped triumphantly under one arm, smile bright and proud—he was the spitting image of a classical statue of a Turkish youth she’d seen in the archives once, but it was his resemblance to someone else that urged her to head to Hvmnd as soon as the doctors declared them all contaminate-free.

The pilot running unscheduled flights from Hippocrates to Hvmnd looked surprised to have a passenger, which wasn’t unusual in Caznal’s experience. Not many people made regular visits to the server ship like she did.

The nine original convoy ships were very different in design from the three added upon Convoy Seven’s second launch, reflecting centuries upon centuries of Earth-centric design evolution. Where the original ships were, in many ways, reminiscent of a cross between zeppelins and beetles, both in their color and nature—being mostly bulbous (save Solidarity and Bottomless II, which were like floating towers) and silvery, and very utilitarian in their individual design differences—the newer ships were earthy. They were dark, and their exteriors had flows and layering that looked imperfect, more natural than designed. If the first nine were biomechanical (heavy on the mechanical), the additional three were geomechanical: they seemed to have morphology, weathering, like they were composed of stones and mud brought together by sheer gravitational adherences.

Of course, fundamentally, they were still ships. But she’d bet her leisure rations any aliens making visual contact with Slicer, Hvmnd, and Zetta would do a double take when they realized they weren’t looking at aesthetically pleasing asteroids.

Disembarking, she was met by one of the caretakers, Ina, who she knew best of all the server ship workers, save the captain. Though best didn’t mean well. It was difficult to truly know anyone who’d been raised on Hvmnd well.

That was because Hvmnd occupied a strange nexus between the convoy’s morality, culture, and the need for Earth’s computing technology. Earth-proper no longer used artificial computers—a fact which nearly led to I.C.C.’s demise—and had learned to use organic power (human brains, animal brains, partial neural networks that could only loosely be called brains) to a much greater advantage. So when the convoy had relaunched, decked out with all the advancements the planet had to offer, the package had included a computing upgrade: clone lines whose sole purpose was to act as human servers.

That didn’t sit well with the board. It might be common for people to sell years of their life away on Earth, but the convoy found it appalling.

They’d intended to shut down that portion of Hvmnd once they were well away from Earth’s watchful eye. After all, with I.C.C. and its inorganic servers fully functional, there was no real need to revamp the original system.

But that was before the conversion of Zetta into a graviton supercycler. Zetta had been built to store the zetta-joules of energy the convoy was expected to retrieve once they completed the Dyson Sphere around LQ Pyx. But the crew had needed it for a different purpose: to turn on the Nest. And this new purpose carried a hefty need for processing power. Power the convoy’s antiquated computing system could not provide.

Hvmnd was required after all.

And yet, cloning lines simply to harvest their brain power would not do.

The server clones had to be given a chance at wakefulness, which meant they would sometimes be off-line. The convoy would either need to accept this disruption, or find a new way to fill the computing void. None of the regular crew members wished to give up portions of their lives to such a service, so where could they get perfectly good brains no one was using anymore?

There was a reason some people called Hvmnd “the grave ship.”

“Permission to visit?” Caznal asked.

The caretaker bowed slightly, revealing the row of implanted connections on the top and sides of her shaved head. “Of course.” She gestured for Caz to follow her out of the bay.

“How are your children?” Caz asked as they entered the main bay.

“Sleeping,” Ina said simply, stopping at a row of iron black steps and indicating Caz should continue without her.

Her boots rattled the connected, corrugated catwalk as she ascended to the level above, and the fine blond hairs on the back of her neck rose with the shock of cold. It was unpleasantly chilly outside of the shuttle bay—for those that were awake, that is. Most of Hvmnd was a single bay, like Slicer, only instead of alien devices, Hvmnd stored people. Catwalks, like the one Caznal was on, snaked this way and that through the many layers of hanging chairs, which held people from all divisions, plugged in and strung up.

It wasn’t just the cold, though. Each ship carried its own smell. Eden always smelled so green and fresh, even in its subarctic tundra biodome, and Hippocrates smelled like rubbing alcohol. Mira smelled like home, and depending on what part of Shambhala you were visiting, it could smell like a sweaty gym or a bowl of buttery popcorn.

Hvmnd smelled like something ancient. The way family heirlooms smelled. Like history and age.

“Why am I not surprised to see you here?” said a familiar voice over Caz’s shoulder.

Captain Onuora always did know how to make an entrance. Caz whirled to see great mechanical arms, like silver spider’s legs, dangling from tracts in Hvmnd’s ceiling. They clasped the captain’s wheelchair, and she controlled them deftly from a keypad on her armrest. With a few extra flicks of her wrist, Onuora bade them set the chair down next to Caz, then they folded up and away, ready for her whenever she called on them again.

Caz saluted, and Onuora answered it with a stern expression, before going into Mothering Mode, as she was inclined to do. “News travels fast—shouldn’t you be celebrating? I know you found something down there.”

Caz strode down the walkway, and the captain stayed at her side, the old-world Jamaican flag on the back of her wheelchair fluttering out behind her like a cape.

Onuora was not part of the original Noumenon crew, just as Caz wasn’t part of it. Their lines were fresh, having only been aboard a few generations. But few people of the forty-second century could trace their family history like Onuora. She took pride in her connection to Earth, whereas many of the original crew didn’t seem to care for genealogy past their original’s birth.

Earth was an abstraction in many ways, which had little bearing on their reality. But it also still mattered, if only as something that could provide grounding—perhaps literally—to the convoy’s reality.

“I will,” Caz said, “I mean, I am celebrating, and … he should know.”

The captain gave her a pitying look, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Her achondroplasia had led to severe arthritis in her hips, as it had with the majority of those in her line. And while the seat was customized just for her—the wheels were controlled by a chip implanted in her brain, just like a prosthetic hand that could grasp or foot that could flex—and was the perfect size for her smaller frame and foreshortened limbs, it wasn’t where she spent the majority of her working hours. In fact, as often as Caz had been to Hvmnd, she rarely saw the captain in her chair. “I’ll give you your privacy, then. Come to the bridge before you leave?”

Hvmnd’s bridge was the only constant zero-g environment in the convoy, at Captain Onuora’s insistence. She preferred the freedom of movement that came with weightlessness. It eased the pressure on her aching joints, let her fly from post to post. Caznal, on the other hand, always felt like a baby animal trying to stand for the first time whenever she visited—all wobbly legs and unintended directions. She wasn’t meant to fly. But that didn’t mean she’d begrudge her friend the visit. “Thank you, Captain. I will. And I can come back tomorrow to work on your chair, if you’re available.” On their off time, they liked to experiment with smaller graviton cyclers, to see if they could invent one precise enough to make Hvmnd’s metal arms obsolete.

“Sounds like a plan,” said the captain with a smile. She swiped at a few keys, and the arms descended once more, lifting her away, back to her bridge crew.

Caz continued her walk. She knew her path well, taking walkway fourteen-A, turning at row five before sauntering down to seat eight. A technician in a sandy-colored jumpsuit checked connections on one chair over, where a Korean woman with a long pale gray braid slept—Roh Jin-Yoon the Sixteenth. Her features flexed with the occasional mental stimulus, either into a half grimace or pseudo smile.

Caznal nodded to the technician next to sleeping Jin-Yoon, who nodded back—the plugs on his dark scalp glimmering in the low light. He pulled an idle connection from where it dangled next to Jin-Yoon’s wrist and plugged it into one of his ports. Caznal immediately averted her eyes, quickly crouching down next to the unconscious man she’d come to visit.

“How are you doing?” Caz asked elderly Ivan the Fourteenth, her mentor, taking his wrinkled hand in hers. He couldn’t answer, of course, but it gave Caznal comfort to speak to him. “We went to the surface. You won’t believe what we found.” Her thumb made tiny circles over the back of his agespotted hand. “I just wanted to let you know, professor. I’ll finally get to apply what you taught me. I wish …” She glanced over her shoulder at the technician.

He had his eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth moving around silent words. His position mirrored Caznal’s in many ways; he too had Jin-Yoon’s hand comfortingly in his.

The techie came from the server lines. Deemed by Earth to have the highest capacity for processing, the people who’d been chosen as new computers for the convoy were now also the caretakers. They had their own lives—lives which Earth never thought they needed to lead—with agency over how they went about them. And still, many of them spent a good chunk of time (67.86 percent of typical waking hours on average, I.C.C. would tell you) plugged in.

That was what Ina had meant when she said her children were sleeping.

Sure she wasn’t being overheard—embarrassed about speaking out loud to someone in the dream state, who, by rights, she shouldn’t even be visiting, since he was legally dead and gone—Caz continued, “I wish you could be awake to see it.”

“Caznal?”

She jolted upright, letting go of Dr. Baraka’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” the Inter Convoy Computer apologized, its voice emanating from a speaker mounted on the underside of the catwalk above. “It wasn’t my intention to startle you.”

“It’s fine, I.C.C. What is it?”

“Your husband is looking for you. I’ve patched him into the control room—Captain Onuora has allowed you to take the call there, for privacy.”

“Thank you.” With a gentle primping of Baraka’s collar, and a quick brush of fingertips through his tussled hair, she let him be.

A set of children rushed by as she climbed flight after flight, through the maze, to the control booth. They all sported age-appropriate connections, and still had their hair—all of it intricately weaved to show off the implants. One little girl pointed at her without a word, and the others nodded emphatically. She wondered, for a moment, if they were speaking mind-to-mind. Under convoy law, they weren’t supposed to, not unless plugged into Hvmnd’s system. The board had a long-ingrained mistrust of secret communications, born of conspiracy and mutiny.

She thought for a moment about chiding them. Not because she begrudged them their heritage, but because it shined a light on her own faux pas. One does not visit the dead, and one does not speak mind-to-mind.

But then the children laughed, as though she not being a caretaker was in itself a joke, and she moved on.

At the top of the ship, a single wide door led into the control room. Inside, behind the long line of forward-tilting windows, was an equally long line of control panels, flanked itself by an equally long metal table. The room was empty, as it often was—the caretakers preferred a more hands-on approach to monitoring their charges. Only occasionally was a sentry posted up top.

“Diego?” Caz asked, noticing the blinking light on one panel, indicating a comm line was open.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Ivan’s here, Vega and MinSeo, too. But no you. We can’t cut the cake until you get back.”

“I just had a quick errand to run.”

His pause said much. “If you’d waited a few hours I would’ve gone with you.”

“I know. I wanted a little time to myself.”

“Self-flagellation isn’t ‘time to yourself.’”

Glaring, she crossed her arms and turned away from the consol. “I’m not punishing … I’m sharing it with him the only way I can.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “This is your day, and you should be able to celebrate it however you want.”

“Just give me a little more time. Half an hour, tops, and I’m home.”

“Deal. I love you.”

She turned back around, posture softening. “Love you, too.”

When the call ended, she slumped against the table, tracing the scratches in the surface. This table was nothing like the grand one on Mira, the long single slab of green granite that graced the situation room. That one was specially carved for the original mission, an artisan piece with only eleven brothers and sisters.

“For what it’s worth,” I.C.C. said. “I wish the same. For Doctor Baraka, I mean.”

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“When do I not?”

“Fair point,” she conceded.

She meant to clam up, then. To go back to the professor’s side. But the conflicting feelings—the excitement, the doubt, the sadness and rage—all came gushing forth. Here, in this quiet space, with only the Inter Convoy Computer to hear her, she let loose. “But it’s not fair. They couldn’t give him six months. Six months. Just so he could see where his life’s work was leading. And they wouldn’t let me …”

“I processed your request to wake him,” it said sympathetically. “I know.”

“I mean, I get it. I know why it’s law. Those put under should never be woken again. Retirement is retirement, and whether the retiree travels to Hippocrates or Hvmnd, they both have to be treated the same: gone.” She clutched the edge of the long table, her knuckles whitening as her fingers curled into talons against the smooth surface.

“I understand that as well, though I don’t necessarily agree.”

She was surprised. “No?”

“Human morality has always been hazy to me. It shifts with the circumstances. Typically, checks and balances are applied, positives and negatives weighed against one another. But not all positives and negatives carry equal measures, as it should be. I do not wish to indicate I believe the board’s thinking incorrect. It is simply different from my own.

“Originally, human servers were believed to be fundamentally immoral, while scheduling end-of-life procedures was not. But when the need for human processing became apparent, the board concluded the two things equal. Now, retirement still equates to passing, but it also signals a transition into a new kind of service. And, just like death, the transition is believed only to be moral if it is final. No teasing retirees with glimpses of their old lives—such an outing is thought to be cruel and unnecessary.”

“And, typically, I would agree,” Caz said. Her face felt hot, her eyes puffy. She didn’t want to cry today. Not when it was supposed to be her day of discovery, of triumph. “But in special cases, like with Doctor Baraka, it’s crueler to keep him under.”

“If he were retired in the traditional manner he would not be present for such an event. He would be deceased,” I.C.C. said. “Which is, of course, the board’s logic: a retiree’s time aboard the convoy has ended, one way or another. That is why he cannot be awakened, that is why we cannot convey information about the outside world to him, even in a dream. And yet, this logic is faulty. Obviously so.

“To deprive one of a deeply personal experience for consistency’s sake does not feel like a moral move to me. But I also understand what kind of gray area such exceptions would create. Should everyone be reawakened for the birthing of a grandchild? For new progress made in their field of expertise? For loved ones’ marriages?”

“I don’t know.” Her vision started to blur slightly, her eyes watering. “I just know that Doctor Baraka should be here.” She inhaled a shaky breath. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Stop crying.

“You see,” I.C.C. said with a curious tone. “Hazy. Malleable. A plastic morality.”

“It’s the only kind worth having,” she said, not sure she believed it.

I.C.C. did not hedge on the point. “I agree. One cannot function in absolutes—empathy sees to that. But so does narcissism. They are two sides of the same human capacity.”

“You think utter selfishness and utter caring spring from the same plasticity?”

“I believe so, yes. But it’s important to note I said narcissism, which is a different kind of selfishness, born out of self-love, quite different than the selfishness exhibited by animals who have not yet become self-aware.”

Caz rubbed at her face. She felt her equilibrium returning, the sudden swell subsiding. “Why are we philosophizing about morality right now? I need to get home.”

“Edging the discussion toward the intellectual and away from the personal has consistently helped clones in your line maintain their composure. I would have tried a different tactic with other crew members. Is it helping?”

A little laugh escaped her. “You are a wonder, I.C.C. Yes. Thank you.”

They worked for nine months excavating Crater Sixty-four and scouring the rest of the planemo’s surface. The entire convoy’s manpower was thrown behind the project, accomplishing in less than a year what it might have taken the Nataré team decades to accomplish alone. They scouted several other spots across the globe—places with anomalous geology—but nowhere else did they find evidence of alien inhabitation.

And the more they dug, the more one thing became clear: to call what they’d found a city or even a settlement was a stretch. The structures they found intact were minimal. And there was nary any evidence of biological activity. No garbage, most notably. If there was one thing Earth archaeologists had come to rely on as never-wavering evidence of civilization, it was the concept of “the dump.” Biological things consumed, and consumption inevitably produced waste. But there were no filled-in pits, no openly strewn excrement. Perhaps they’d incinerated everything, but if so the teams had yet to identify ashes.

Luckily, because of the frigidness of the dark world, there was no decay. Whatever microbes the Nataré might have brought with them from their home world couldn’t survive in such cold. The only destruction on the surface came from ice and outer space.

Which meant when they tested the bricks that formed a few structures’ inner walls, they were in for a surprise.

“It’s just local dirt bound with platelets and fibrin,” Caznal’s husband, Diego Santibar the Twelfth, said. He’d invited her into the chem lab to show her what he’d discovered. “Similar to what makes blood coagulate. But it’s been stripped of any genetic code. No way to tell if the basis came from Nataré biology, an alien cow, or a buttercup. Regardless, here, instead of forming a scab, it’s making bricks. Look at this.”

He slid his arms into the gloves of the nearest glove box. Inside lay a black-and-green slab. Gently, he took a corner and spritzed it with an eyedropper. It dissolved immediately, leaving loose grit behind.

“What’s in that?” she asked, bending down beside him. She adjusted the goggles on her face, hating the way they cut into the bridge of her nose.

“Water,” he said. “From our taps, nothing special. All of the inner walls in your structures were dissolvable in water.”

“Brilliant. No need to take building materials with you if you can mold dust with ease, and scrap it just as fast. I’m starting to think we’ve found a staging ground. I mean, the lack of apparent infrastructure, the size, the transient nature of these materials—it points to more of a worker’s camp than a permanent outpost.”

“But what were they working on?”

“Something that’s gone now. That would explain our missing mass. Our missing gravitons.”

“What about those supercycler towers? How many are there now?”

“Twenty.”

“Could those account for the gravitational difference? If they were drawing in that many gravitons, perhaps there was seepage? Maybe they created a false well that altered the maps?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted. “And we haven’t found any clues as to what they needed that many gravitons for. If all of their buildings used the same hydrogen wiring as the Nest, that would account for a few of the towers. But not twenty.”

She rubbed her eyes. The chem lab was bright, the lights harsh and true white. “I need to get back to analyzing the new items we found. Some malformed block metal.”

“Still nothing like the Babbage Engine on the Nest? No computers, no archives?”

“Nothing. They cleaned up real good when they left. It’s spotless, almost like a crime scene. They rolled up all but the sidewalks.”

“Isn’t that strange?”

She shrugged. “If someone handed an alien a fork, a zither, and a hookah, how accurate do you think their assumptions would be? I feel like that’s the level we’re working on. We have nothing, we know nothing. Our only real hope of understanding them is in those maps. If we don’t find the keys here, we just have to prep for the next stop.”

There were seven more X’s in all on their alien map. The farthest away was a gravitational mega cluster—was it the Nataré home system?

That’s what many were speculating, although it wasn’t the only theory. There were so many possibilities now that they knew evidence was out there, that the maps were real!

He looked concerned then, like she’d just said something that undermined his entire world view. “Caz, you’re assuming …”

She cocked her head, wary of his tone. “What?”

“You’re assuming there is a next stop. The board committed to coming here, but if there’s nothing related to the Web, no instructions, no hint at its engineering, origins, or purpose, then … You know it all has to come back to LQ Pyx to be seen as worthy of convoy attention.”

He can’t be serious.

She pushed her goggles onto her forehead. He was about to protest, but she barreled forward. “That was before all this,” she said excitedly. “That was when we weren’t sure there would be anything to find. But look at this.” She stabbed the glove box, leaving a fingerprint on the otherwise pristine surface. “So simple, so basic, yet brilliant in its design and range of application. When we find a real settlement, a place they truly lived and died, think of what we could uncover. There’s no way the board is going to turn down the opportunity to chase after an entire civilization’s worth of learning in favor of a single construction project.”

His expression didn’t change. Something unsettling snaked its way through her stomach, but she held fast to the evidence before her.

It would take them centuries to hit all of the X’s, and they would have to travel light-years upon light-years in the opposite direction of the Web.

But why should that matter? What was one alien artifact to an entire alien history?

This was bigger, better, surely the board—hell, every last crew member—could see that.

Dr. Baraka saw it, long before anyone else.

With a sigh, Diego removed his hands from the glovebox. “You know the official mission statement doesn’t mention the Nest, or the Nataré.”

Because those points were kept secret from Earth, to ensure they wouldn’t interfere. “So?”

“So, you might find that means something to some people. That they don’t see the omission as subterfuge so much as emphasis—on what’s really important.”

“You know what’s important?” she asked firmly.

“What?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

She kissed the top of his head. “You, me, and our girls.”

“Nice subject change.” He laughed. “Smooth.”