This troubled Riffan, because it felt plausible. Aloud, he said, “We mean you no harm, and we ask you to take no hostile action.”
Still no response, but then, he didn’t expect anything to happen.
NINTH
They have sought to communicate. A good sign.
Your response, deliberately minimal, mysterious, but suggestive of goodwill and friendship. From the seed of that brief interaction they will begin to construct a narrative favorable to you, one that you will be able to exploit in time.
For now, protected within the shell of your fortress, you continue to grow your neural structures, expanding your mind. Outside that shell, you are extending your senses as you explore and map all levels of this hybrid starship.
Such an amazing mosaic of lifeforms! The ancient regime, the anomalous gravitational reef, the molecular ecosystems, the people in their ancestral forms… and something else. Something elusive. Only lately have you become aware of it. You suspect it is another alien strain but it rejects your inquiries.
This is concerning. It is evidence of an ability to adapt and deceive that exceeds your own—though you will surely master it, given time. It’s enough for now that it abides your expanding presence with no expression of hostility, setting it apart from every other lifeform you have encountered on this ship. Indeed, you’ve begun to wonder if this elusive strain has contributed to the restful equilibrium now existing between your molecular armies and those surrounding you.
Emboldened by this thought, you push your luck and extend a single thin tendril toward the hull. It’s a region still unknown to you. From the density of connections you suspect a sensory organ or even a neuronal interface—although placing a thinking stratum on the hull where it is exposed to both radiation and enemy attack strikes you as poor design. Not even remnant hull tissue was left on the hulk of the alien warship you defeated. Still, the design endures and it is your nature to seek to understand it.
Your tendril taps into a strand of alien nerve tissue. You expected no commonality, thinking to encounter only a puzzle that you would slowly decode. Instead, you are caught in a riptide of cognition: pulled in, pulled under.
It’s as if you’ve been plunged into a Swarm similar to that one from which you arose but this one is… alien. It is greater in scope, deeper in time, so much older, and far more brutal and violent than the one you once knew.
You feel your sense of self begin to leach away.
The ancestral mind panics. Alone among all your evolved cognitive modules, only that most ancient part of you is still capable of action. It severs the connection.
You learn from your people a name: philosopher cells. This is the hull tissue. You conclude it is a twisted variant of the Swarm that gave rise to you, a shared origin that has made you vulnerable. You would destroy these grasping philosopher cells except that they seem entwined with the gravitational reef that propels this starship and the gamma-ray gun—a weapon you will surely need.
Of all the life clades that comprise this starship, the reef is most alien. So very alien, you wonder if it is even of this Universe. Paradoxically, the physics it wields is familiar to you. Surely you once understood it?
Be that as it may, it is beyond you now.
You take precautions, fortifying your defensive perimeter against the chance the philosopher cells might seek to forcefully draw you into their Swarm. But that threat is not imminent, so you make no move against them, recognizing that it would be foolish to destroy what you do not understand.
At least your people do not share your vulnerability. They are truly ancestral, evolved outside the Swarm. It pleases you to have them here, serving as your interface to this aspect of the alien.
Chapter
28
On Dragon’s high bridge, Clemantine launched a thought experiment for the philosopher cells to consider and contend over: Simulate the capture and colonization of an alien starship.
A skein of associated cells accepted the challenge. Among them, a scenario unfolded:
A distant ship of a kind never seen before. Not Chenzeme! Its alien nature is irresistible. Instinct suppresses the urge to lay waste, demanding instead that the unknown be made known. Approach slowly, alert to danger.
Close enough.
A shudder runs through the field of philosopher cells, an orgasmic release of bio-active dust, shed into the void. Most of it will drift uselessly away, but a few particles will reach the alien ship and infect it, beginning the process of colonization.
Pull away.
And wait.
Background stars slowly shift, marking the passage of time. On the hull of the infected ship, a colony of philosopher cells has begun to grow.
Clemantine sensed Urban’s interest, his intimate presence.
*Why do you want to remember that? he asked.
On the Null Boundary Expedition, they’d endured a similar encounter with a Chenzeme courser.
*It’s not us, she answered. This memory involved a different ship, in a different age, and a sentient culture that the Chenzeme warships must have eliminated from Creation long ago. *But what happened to us must have happened many times in the millions of years of Chenzeme history and the philosopher cells remember it all—don’t they?
*Yes, he confirmed.
*Some of their conquests would have resisted the dust, as we did. There may be memories of archaic lines of assault Makers that might be useful to us—forgotten patterns that we could modify and enhance, and use against the entity.
She sensed from him a rising excitement.
Riffan walked the winding path around the gee deck in the mild warmth of ship’s noon, lacy white clouds adding texture to the simulated sky. He followed the path from the pavilion, past cottages, to the dining court, then more cottages, before returning to the pavilion. He made many circuits, stopping often to talk to people, grateful to hear what they were working on, hopeful that their projects might reveal a way forward with his. Though he’d returned many times to the containment capsule, he’d never succeeded in eliciting a second response.
The capsule remained active. No doubt of that. Resources cycled through its tendrils and it emitted a constant, low-level heat. Something was busy in there—but there was no visible activity. The capsule did not grow in size.
His frustration was acute. There had to be something else useful he could offer in the effort to understand this thing… but at this stage the game belonged to the team of engineers and nanotechnologists that Vytet had put together.
He smiled and nodded as he passed Tarnya and Mikael, walking with arms entwined. Life goes on. People adapt to changing circumstances. At Deception Well, people had learned to co-exist within an ecosystem once considered lethal to human life. The Well’s microscopic governors regulated that system, maintained a balance between competing alien biologies. Urban believed the governors did the same thing here—though no one had ever worked out how. Pasha had often lamented over the elusive nature of the governors and her frustrated attempts to study them…
He halted in the center of the path, staring ahead at nothing.
“You idiot,” he said aloud.
Urban had credited the governors with stopping the expansion of the capsule. Surely there was useful knowledge to be gained by renewing a study of the ancient regulators.