It makes me feel better to have her.
We’re through the perimeter and just topping the first rise beyond when Nasha says, “So I know it’s a little late to be asking, but what, exactly, is the plan?”
I glance back at her. “Go down into the labyrinth. Find one of the big creepers. Ask it for the bomb back.”
We walk in silence for a half dozen steps.
“Okay. That’s an outline, I guess. Don’t suppose you’ve got any more detail?”
“Nope.”
“Have you always been like this?”
I stop walking and turn to look at her. “Like what?”
“Like this,” she says, and waves her arm at me. “Just drifting through life like a jellyfish, hoping everything’s gonna work out.”
I shrug. “Yeah, kinda.”
“And it always just does, huh?”
“Well,” I say. “Not always. Drifting through life is what got me onto this expedition, remember? So far it’s gotten me irradiated twice, killed by lung worms, gut worms, and brain worms once each, and, as a capper, slowly vivisected.” I grin behind my rebreather. “On the other hand, though, it also got me you—so I guess I’m calling it a win.”
We keep walking. The dome is out of sight behind us when she says, “You really can talk to them, right? That part wasn’t bullshit?”
“I could. I’m honestly not sure if I still can. I tried to ping them last night. They didn’t answer me.”
“Huh. And if it turns out you can’t?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Sign language? Hand puppets? How are you with interpretive dance?”
She shoves me, hard enough to make me stumble under the weight of my pack. “You’re gonna get me killed today, aren’t you?”
I sigh. “I hope not, Nasha. I really, really hope not.” I don’t add that there’s a reason I told her to stay home. I don’t think she was serious about breaking my legs, but I’m not inclined to put her to the test.
After an hour or so of walking, we reach the head of the gully that leads down to the bomb’s old hiding spot. I have to stop here to get my bearings. We’re on a steep, rocky slope dotted with clumps of greenery here and there. It’s not a trail I’m looking for, exactly, but there should be a route that’s a bit more walkable …
Yeah, there it is. It looks very different without two meters of snowpack smoothing it over, but there’s definitely what almost looks like an old logging road winding its way through the scrub above us. All we have to do is follow that for another half kilometer or so, and we should find a hole cut into the hillside.
“We’re almost there,” I say. “Last chance to turn around.”
“Oh no,” she says. “Don’t start up with that shit again.”
Okay, then.
The entrance is closer than I remember, so much so that I almost miss it. It’s Nasha who spots it, twenty meters upslope from us as we’re trudging by. It’s smaller than I remember too—only a meter or so across at the widest point.
“That’s it?” Nasha says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think so, anyway.”
She crouches down to peer inside. “You sure this is a good idea?”
“I don’t know how many other ways there are for me to tell you that it’s not.”
She pulls a light from a pouch at her belt, clips it over her right shoulder, and turns it on.
“I should go first,” I say.
She shakes her head. “You’re the diplomat, remember? The muscle goes first.” She draws one of her burners and points the targeting laser down into the hole.
I take a half step back and shrug. “Fine. It’s not like they’re gonna fill up on one of us and let the other one go. After you.”
She turns to me and winks, then gives me a mock salute with her burner and goes.
008
THE HISTORY OF humanity’s interactions with alien intelligences is depressingly thin. The Union occupies forty-eight worlds at this point, spread over a volume of space roughly sixty lights across. Almost all of those planets were at least marginally habitable before we showed up. You’d think at least a few of them would have had technologically advanced locals there waiting for us, right?
Not really.
There are intelligent natives on Long Shot, but so far as I know we’ve never really interacted with them in any meaningful way. They’re basically arboreal squids, and their range is strictly limited to a single impenetrable jungle in the mountains at the heart of the planet’s only continent. We made landfall on the coast, and as humans tend to do, we’ve pretty much stayed near the ocean ever since. There have been a few efforts to make contact, but the natives haven’t shown much interest in the project, so it’s never really gone anywhere.
There were intelligent natives on Roanoke. We never interacted with them because by the time we figured out they were there, they’d killed us all dead.
As far as confirmed advanced intelligences in Union space, that’s pretty much it. There’s one other probable, but we don’t talk about that one much, mostly because we like to be able to get to sleep at night. Twelve lights spinward of Eden there’s a main-sequence yellow star with a mass almost exactly that of Earth’s sun. Orbiting that star, dead center in its Goldilocks zone, is a rocky little planet that observations from Eden showed to have an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere with a healthy dose of water vapor. It’s probably the best target we’ve identified in the thousand years of the Diaspora, and the good folks of Eden made it the goal of the first colony expedition they attempted, just over a hundred years after their own landfall.
Twelve lights is a long jump, but not a crazy-long one. By all reports, the trip went as well as it could have. Unlike us, for example, they didn’t hit any rocks at relativistic speed, didn’t need to send any of their people out onto the skin of the ship to get fatally irradiated, didn’t have to sacrifice anybody at all to any of the various gods of deep space, in fact. They made turnaround right on time, were well into the deceleration phase of the journey, were most of the way through their new home’s Oort cloud when they just …
Vanished.
We don’t know exactly what happened to them. They were transmitting continuously, though, so we know they weren’t aware that anything was amiss right up until the moment that they died. We’re pretty confident that they didn’t suffer any sort of catastrophic violence, because if they had, their remaining fuel stores would almost certainly have gone up, and that kind of blast would have been observable even from twelve lights away.
We do know that four hundred years later, Eden’s daughter world Acadia mounted their own expedition to the same target.
Their ship disappeared in exactly the same way, at exactly the same point in their journey.
Colonization attempts fail. Colony ships, though, don’t just vanish—not by themselves, anyway. It’s hard not to conclude that somebody’s at home in that system, and they don’t want visitors.
If you accept that, it’s also hard not to conclude that whoever they are, they have capabilities that are as far beyond ours as ours are beyond those of your average anthill.
There was some loose talk after the second loss about sending them a Bullet. They were sitting there, right in the middle of Union space, and they clearly had the capacity to do us harm. Fortunately, though, cooler heads prevailed. I’d like to say we left them in peace because we realized that we were the interlopers, that they had no reason to think that our incoming ships were in any way benign, and that they had every right to defend their home system. I’d like to say it was a moral decision.
It wasn’t, though. We left them alone because we had no idea how they’d done what they’d done to those ships, and they scared the shit out of us.