She shivered at the thought of it.
A day after they had first entered, her servitors found some human bodies that were nearly intact, except that their heads had been swallowed by black helmets of surrounding cubes. The alien machinery appeared inert. The servitors removed parts of the helmets and found that prongs of machine-growth reached into the corpses’ skulls, through the eye sockets or the ears or the nasal cavity. Further study showed that the prongs had bifurcated many times, until they reached microscopic scale. They extended deep into the brains of the dead, establishing connections with their native Conjoiner implants.
But the machines, and their hosts, were now very much dead.
Skade tried to work out what had happened; the ship’s records were thoroughly scrambled. It was obvious that Galiana had encountered something hostile, but why hadn’t the cubes simply destroyed her ship in one go? The infiltration had been slow and painstaking, and it only made sense if the cubes wanted to keep the ship intact for as long as possible.
There had been another ship: two had gone on — what had happened to that one?
[Ideas, Skade?]
Yes. But nothing I like.
[You think the cubes wanted to learn as much as possible, don’t you?]
I can’t think of any other reason. They put taps into their minds, reading their neural machinery. They were intelligence-gathering.
[Yes. We agree. The cubes must have learned a great deal about us. We have to consider them a threat, even if we don’t yet know where Galiana was when they found her. But there is a glimmer of hope, wouldn’t you say?]
Skade failed to see what that glimmer could possibly be. Humanity had been searching for an unambiguous alien intelligence for centuries. All they had found so far had been tantalising leads — the Pattern Jugglers, the Shrouders, the archaeological remains of another eight or nine dead cultures. They had never encountered another extant machine-using intelligence, nothing to measure themselves against.
Until now.
And what this machine-using intelligence did, so it seemed, was stalk, infiltrate and slaughter, and then invade skulls.
It was not, Skade conceded, the most fruitful of first encounters.
Hope? Are you serious?
[Yes, Skade, because we don’t know that the cubes were ever able to transmit that knowledge back to whatever it was that sent them. Galiana’s ship made it back home, after all. She must have steered it here, and she would not have done that if she thought there was any danger of leading the enemy back to us. Clavain would be proud, I think. She was still thinking of us; still thinking of the Mother Nest.]
But she ran the risk…
The voice of the Night Council cut her off sharply. [The ship is a warning, Skade. That is what Galiana intended and that is how we must read it.]
A warning?
[That we must be ready. They are still out there, and one way or another we will meet them again.]
You almost sound as if you were expecting them to arrive.
But the Night Council said nothing.
It was another week before they found Galiana, for the ship was vast and there had been many changes to its interior that prohibited a rapid search. Skade had gone inside it herself, along with other sweep teams. They wore heavy ceramic armour over their pressure suits, oiled carapacial plaques that made movement awkward unless one exercised great care and forethought. After several minutes of fumbling and locking herself into postures that could only be got out of by laborious back-tracking, Skade wrote a hasty body-image/motion patch and assigned it to run on a clump of idle neural circuits. Things became easier then, though she had the unpleasant feeling that a shadowy counterpart of herself was driving her. Skade made a mental note to revise the script later, so that the movement routines would feel totally voluntary no matter how illusory that might be.
By then the servitors had done about all they were able. They had secured large volumes of the ship, spraying diamond-fibred epoxy over the ruins of the alien machines, and they had DNA-sampled most of the corpses in the explored zones. Every individual sample of genetic material had been identified against the crew manifests in the Mother Nest, preserved since the departure of the exploratory fleet, but there were many names on the list that had yet to be matched to DNA samples.
There were bound to be names Skade would never match. When the first ship had returned home, the one carrying Clavain, the Mother Nest had learned that there had been a decision in deep space, dozens of light-years out, to split the expedition. One party wanted to come back home, having heard rumours of war against the Demarchists. They also felt that it was time to deliver the data they had already accrued — far too much to be transmitted home.
The separation had not been acrimonious. There had been regret, and sadness, but no real sense of disunity. After the usual period of debate typical of any Conjoiner decision-making process, the split came to be viewed as the most logical course of action. It allowed the expedition to continue, while safeguarding the return of what had already been learned. But while Skade knew exactly who had chosen to stay out there in deep space, she had no way of knowing what had happened subsequently. She could only guess at the exchanges that had taken place between the remaining two ships. The fact that this was Galiana’s ship did not mean that she had to be on it, so Skade readied herself for the inevitable disappointment should that prove to be the case.
More than that, it would be a disappointment for the entire Mother Nest. Galiana was their figurehead, after all. She was the woman who had created the Conjoiners in the first place, four hundred years ago and eleven light-years away, in a huddle of labs beneath the surface of Mars. She had been away for nearly two centuries; long enough to assume the mythic stature that she had always resisted during her time amongst them. And she had returned — if she was indeed aboard this ship — on Skade’s watch. It hardly mattered that she was very likely dead, along with all the others. For Skade, it would be enough to bring home her remains.
But she found more than remains.
Galiana’s resting place, if it could be called that, was a long way from the central core of the ship. She had secured herself behind armoured barricades, well away from the others. Careful forensic study showed that the data links between Galiana’s resting place and the remainder of the ship had been deliberately severed from within. She had obviously tried to isolate herself, cutting her mind off from the other Conjoiners on the ship.
Self-sacrifice or self-preservation? Skade wondered.
Galiana was in reefersleep, cooled down to a point where all metabolic processes were arrested. But the black machines had still reached her. They had smashed through the armour of the reefersleep casket, cramming themselves into the space between Galiana and the casket’s interior surface. When the casket was dismantled, the machines formed a mummylike shell of pure black around Galiana. There was no doubt that it was she: scans peering through the cocoon picked out bone structure, which matched Galiana’s perfectly. The body within appeared to have suffered no damage or decay during the flight, and the sensors were even able to pick up weak signals from Galiana’s implant web. Although the signals were too faint to allow mind-to-mind linkage, it was clear that something inside the cocoon was still capable of thought, and was still reaching out.
Attention shifted to the cocoon itself. Chemical analysis of the cubes drew a blank: they appeared not to be ‘made’ of anything, or to possess any kind of atomic granularity. The faces of the cubes were simply blank walls of sheer force, transparent to certain forms of radiation. They were very cold — still active in a way that none of the other machines had been so far. But the individual cubes did not resist being prised away from the larger mass, and once they were separated they shrunk rapidly, dwindling down to microscopic size. Skade’s team attempted to focus scanners on the cubes themselves, trying to glimpse anything buried beneath the facets, but they were never quick enough. Where the cubes had been they found only a few microgram
s of smouldering ashes. Presumably there were mechanisms at the heart of the cubes that were programmed to self-destruct under certain circumstances.
Once Skade’s team had removed most of the surrounding plaque, they took Galiana to a dedicated room nestling in one wall of the spacecraft bay. They worked in extreme cold, determined not to inflict more damage than had already been done. Then, with immense care and patience, they began to peel away the final layer of alien machinery.
Now that they had less obstructive matter to peer through, they began to get a clearer impression of what had happened to Galiana. The black machines had indeed forced their way into her head, but the accommodation appeared more benign than had been the case with any of her crew. Her own implants had been partly dismantled to make way for the invading machines, but there was no sign that any major brain structures had been harmed. Skade had the impression that the cubes had been learning how to invade skulls until then, but that with Galiana they had finally found out how to do it without hurting the host.
And now Skade felt an optimistic rush. The black structures were concentrated and inert. With the right medichines it would be possible — trivial, even — to dismantle them, ripping them out cube by cube.
We can do it. We can bring her back, as she was.
[Be careful, Skade. We’re not home and dry just yet.]
The Night Council, as it transpired, was right to be cautious. Skade’s team began removing the final layer of cubes, beginning at Galiana’s feet; they were pleased when they found that the underlying tissue was largely undamaged, and continued to work upwards until they reached her neck. They were confident that she could be warmed back to body temperature, even if it would be a more difficult exercise than a normal reefersleep revival. But when they began to expose her face, they learned that their work was far from over.
The cubes moved, slithering without warning. Sliding and tumbling over each other, contracting in nauseating waves, the final part of the cocoon oozed into Galiana like a living oil slick. The black tide sucked itself into her mouth, her nose, her ears and her eye-sockets, flowing around her eyeballs.
She looked the way Skade had hoped she would: a radiant homecoming queen. Even her long black hair was intact, frozen and fragile now, but exactly as it had been when she had left them. But the black machinery had reestablished itself inside her head, augmenting the formations that were already present. Scans showed that there was still little displacement of her own brain tissue, but more of her implant loom had been dismantled to make way for the invader. The black parasite had a crablike aspect, extending clawed filaments into different parts of her brain.
Slowly, over many days, they brought Galiana back to just below normal body temperature. All the while Skade’s team monitored the invader, but it never changed, not even as Galiana’s remaining implants began to warm and re-interface with her thawing brain tissue.
Perhaps, Skade dared to wonder, they might still win?
She was, it turned out, almost right.
She heard a voice. It was a human voice, feminine, lacking the timbre — or the strange Godlike absence of timbre — that ordinarily meant that the voice was originating inside her skull. This was a voice that had been shaped in a human larynx and propagated through metres of air before being decoded by a human auditory system, accumulating all manner of subtle imperfections along the way. It was the sort of voice that she had not heard in a very long time.
The voice said, ‘Hello, Galiana.’
Where am I?
There was no answer. After a few moments the voice added kindly, ‘You’ll have to speak as well, if you can. It’s not necessary to do more than attempt to make the sound shapes; the trawl will do the rest, picking up the intention to send electrical signals to your larynx. But simply thinking your response won’t work, I’m afraid — there are no direct links between your mind and mine.’
The words seemed to take an eternity to arrive. Spoken language was horridly slow and linear after centuries of neural linkage, even if the syntax and grammar were familiar.
She made the intention to speak, and heard her own amplified voice ring out. ‘Why?’
‘We’ll come to that.’
‘Where am I? Who are you?’
‘You’re safe and sound. You’re home; back in the Mother Nest. We recovered your ship and revived you. My name’s Skade.’
Galiana had been aware only of dim shapes looming around her, but now the room brightened. She was lying on her back, canted at an angle to the horizontal. She was inside a casket very much like a reefersleep casket but with no lid, so that she was exposed to the air. She saw things in her peripheral vision, but she could not move any part of her body, not even her eyes. A blurred figure came into focus before her, leaning over the open maw of the casket.
‘Skade? I don’t remember you.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ the stranger replied. ‘I didn’t become one of the Conjoined until after your departure.’
There were questions — thousands of questions — that needed to be asked. But she could not ask all of them at once, most especially not via this clumsy old way of communicating. So she had to begin somewhere. ‘How long have I been away?’
‘One hundred and ninety years, almost to the month. You left in…’
‘2415,’ Galiana said promptly.
‘… Yes. And the present date is 2605.’
There was much that Galiana did not properly remember, and much that she did not think she wanted to remember. But the essentials were clear enough. She had led a trio of ships away from the Mother Nest, into deep space. The intention was to probe beyond the well-mapped frontier of human space, exploring previously unvisited worlds, looking for complex alien life. When rumours of war reached the three vessels, one ship had turned back home. But the other two had carried on, looping through many more solar systems.
As much as she wanted to, she could not quite recall what had happened to the other ship that had continued the search. She felt only a shocking sense of loss, a screaming vacuum inside her head that should have been filled with voices.
‘My crew?’
‘We’ll come to that,’ Skade said again.
‘And Clavain and Felka? Did they make it back, after all? We said goodbye to them in deep space; they were supposed to return to the Mother Nest.’
There was a terrible, terrible pause before Skade answered. ‘They made it back.’
Galiana would have sighed if sighing were possible. The feeling of relief was startling; she had not realised how tense she had been until she learned that her loved ones were safe.
In the calm, blissful moments that followed, Galiana looked more closely at Skade. In certain respects she looked exactly like a Conjoiner from Galiana’s era. She wore a plain outfit of pyjamalike black trousers and loosely cinched black jacket, fashioned from something like silk and devoid of either ornamentation or any indication of allegiance. She was ascetically thin and pale, to the point where she looked on the ravenous edge of starvation. Her facial tone was waxy and smooth — not unattractive, but lacking the lines and creases of habitual expression. And she had no hair on either her scalp or her face, lending her the look of an unfinished doll. So far, at least, she was indistinguishable from thousands of other Conjoiners: without mind-to-mind linkage, and devoid of the usual cloud of projected phantasms that lent them individuality, they could be difficult to tell apart.
But Galiana had never seen a Conjoiner who looked anything like Skade. Skade had a crest — a stiff, narrow structure that began to emerge from her brow an inch above her nose, before curving back along the midline of her scalp. The narrow upper surface of the crest was hard and bony, but the sides were rilled with beautifully fine vertical striations. They shimmered with diffraction patterns: electric blues and sparkling oranges, a cascade of rainbow shades that shifted with the tiniest movement of Skade’s head. There was more to it than that, however: Galiana saw fluidlike waves of different colours pump along the
crest even when there was no change in its angle.
She asked, ‘Were you always like that, Skade?’
Skade touched her crest gently. ‘No. This is a Conjoiner augmentation, Galiana. Things have changed since you left us. The best of us think faster than you imagined possible.’
‘The best of you?’
I didn’t mean to put it quite that way. It’s just that some of us have hit the limitations of the basic human bodyplan. The implants in our heads enable us to think ten or fifteen times faster than normal, all the time, but at the cost of increased thermal dissipation requirements. My blood is pumped through my crest, and then into the network of rills, where it throws off heat. The rills are optimised for maximum surface area, and they ripple to circulate air currents. The effect is visually pleasing, I’m told, but that’s entirely accidental. We learned the trick from the dinosaurs, actually. They weren’t as stupid as you’d think.‘ Skade stroked her crest again. ’It shouldn’t alarm you, Galiana. Not everything has changed.‘
‘We heard there’d been a war,’ Galiana said. ‘We were fifteen light-years out when we picked up the reports. First there was the plague, of course… and then the war. The reports didn’t make any sense. They said we were going to war against the Demarchists, our old allies.’
‘The reports were true,’ Skade said, with a trace of regret.
‘In God’s name, why?’
‘It was the plague. It demolished Demarchist society, throwing open a massive power vacuum around Yellowstone. At their request, we moved in to establish an interim government, running Chasm City and its satellite communities. Better us than another faction, was the reasoning. Can you imagine the mess that the Ultras or the Skyjacks would have made? Well, it worked for a few years, but then the Demarchists started regaining some of their old power. They didn’t like the way we’d usurped control of the system, and they weren’t prepared to negotiate a peaceful return to Demarchist control. So we went to war. They started it; everyone agrees about that.’