Her web now is made of the other crew, each one of them tense as a drawn wire as they close with the coordinates negotiated with the locals. Her web is the ship and its personality-filled operating system and, beyond and into the void of space, the unknown aliens themselves: machines, Humans, something entirely other?
Those who have a mind to are trying to make more of the library of alien signals, especially that baffling preponderance of visual imagery. For her part, the ship’s version of Avrana Kern has sent spies ahead to the meeting point. These are not the same multi-purpose drones she used with the tardigrades, but tiny things, shot out from the Lightfoot at enormous speed and containing nothing but the ability to detect and report. Everyone hopes this will not seem like hostile action to the locals, but if the locals are already hostile then the entire arrangement could be a trap. Yes, this is why the Voyager budded off the Lightfoot, in case of such a betrayal, but that doesn’t mean the crew of the Lightfoot can’t do their best to avoid becoming such a sacrifice.
Portia doesn’t feel fear yet, and when she does she will feed off it, buoyed by all those ancestral memories in which fearful things were overcome by courage and resourcefulness (and luck, but she tends to downplay its importance). She is well aware that some of her crewmates are less sanguine about the prospect. Viola agrees with the theory that the locals are machines, and believes that without organic entities to give them perspective, machines can never be good neighbours, as what can they want, if not to make new machines? Viola is most concerned about a fleet of self-replicating machine probes descending on Kern’s World in the future, led there by what the locals here discover after dissecting the Lightfoot and its contents, crew included. Portia is frustrated with her caution – shy away from every twitch and vibration and you’ll never catch anything at all. On the other hand, the lack of enthusiasm from the two males on board seems altogether more natural, and she actually has more time for their naysaying. Fabian and the Human Meshner have been winkled from their private research and are combing the alien signals for any sign of threat. They are both intelligent in their way, and being cautious and shrinking from danger is an archetypal male trait. Portia is well aware that to think in such terms – as most of her ancestresses have done without ever examining the thoughts – is unhelpful and atavistic of her, but it does mean she will accept a warning from a male far more readily than from another female, from whom any attempt to rein her in feels like a challenge.
Attend, comes the instruction from Bianca, whose own personality sits somewhere midway between Viola and Portia, neither too hot nor too cold on the intrepid scale. We have sight of them.
The threads are twanging, in Portia’s mind. She calls up the images greedily. Kern has done her best with the limited imaging properties of her tiny spies but Portia doesn’t expect too much.
Her expectations are shattered, to her joy. In that moment everyone is staring and nobody is speaking. Not a spider foot or palp moves, not a Human mouth flaps.
There are seven vessels converging on the rendezvous point. Five of them are spheres, radiant with an inner light that silhouettes a complex internal architecture like shadows on the face of the moon. One, the smallest, is a long teardrop that even now is tumbling – seemingly out of control but, as Kern’s commentary explains, actually in the process of commencing deceleration. The last is a fat torus shape, spinning, edge-on towards its direction of travel like a runaway tyre. All of them are festooned with nodules and nodes that suggest only the teardrop ship has a ‘facing’ and the rest are entirely ambivalent about front, back, port or starboard. Kern’s information – her longer-than-long-range scans with which she has kept an eye on these objects – suggests they have been decelerating for a remarkably long time and to very little effect, reducing their speed ridiculously slowly rather than (as the Lightfoot will) waiting to get close to the meeting point before making that irrevocable decision. Some of the crew are suggesting that this shows a confidence in their hosts, perhaps even a trust. Portia has a feeling the practice has a mechanical imperative behind it.
The smallest ship, the teardrop, is half the average volume of the Voyager (given that volume is variable depending on what Kern is doing with it). The largest of the spheres is not much short of the frozen ruin they discovered on the way in. Huge, and they apparently manoeuvre as though they’re even larger, given that gradual deceleration. Portia is intrigued.
Behind those oncoming vessels, the asteroid belt is strung out across a vast region of space, far denser than any such feature in Portia’s home system or long lost Earth, which still means that it is mostly empty space where the odds of any two objects connecting with each other is vanishingly small. Kern’s best guess is that a huge icy body met its doom here, either a fugitive flung from another solar system entirely or a world that formed further out in this one, and was then dragged in towards the sun until it met the grinding teeth of the gas giant’s gravity and was torn apart. It left a great field of nothing, then: scattered rock and ice smeared thinly in a ring around the sun, but extreme magnification shows that later years have added some jewels to this plain setting. There are artificial worlds there. Kern’s best guess at enhancing the images suggests a scatter of pale bodies, like the spherical ships but bigger. The asteroid belt has been colonized. Elsewhere, less radiant, there are installations that must be acting as spittoons for the distant tardigrades’ mining expectorations, catching the missiles and processing them or sending them on.
Could we do this? Portia echoes the past question from Zaine and, to herself, admits that they could not. And yet we have come to them, not they to us. Always better to be the explorer than the explored.
There is a buzz of communication now amongst the crew. As the Lightfoot and the aliens close, the signal density increases, both the background hum of them, from the belt installations and especially from the next planet in the system – their homeworld? – and direct queries sent by the oncoming ships, which seem more and more insistent about something. Kern is communicating on the technical channel still, but the character of those enquiries is changing. The visual element, which means nothing to anyone, is edging out the mathematical data until there is barely anything comprehensible in the barrage of demands. The only numerical information left over seems to be nothing more than sender ID.
At about this time, Meshner completes a structural study of the alien vessels, identifying a variety of installations on their exteriors that might be weapons systems of different types. Of course the aliens are far closer now, so that the Lightfoot can assist him with its own direct analysis. They are closing on the meeting place and it is evident that the visitors are not speaking to the locals in the manner they have come to expect. Portia notes that the characteristics of the visual chatter are shifting. The colours are becoming starker, with fewer blues, greens and yellows and more blacks, whites and reds. The shapes are sharper, spiky with harsh textures. To Human and Portiid eyes there is an implicit sense of threat.
Kern is still transmitting her own signals, including a variety of Old Empire codes and conventions, but there is no sign the aliens understand or even register them.
This is their primary means of communication, Helena states. Whatever they are, we need to send something back to them, something visual but simple. We have no idea what any of this means, but we’re now picking up a common emotional subtext. Or it might even be text. If we are all getting the same impression from this, and if they are of any kind of Earth stock, I think we can take this as an accurate reading. They’re getting angry.