Bicansa appeared in the air.
She stood in the car’s cabin, unsuited, as relaxed as Dano. Pala felt there was some sympathy in her Virtual eyes. But she knew now without doubt that this wasn’t Bicansa’s true aspect.
‘You came after me,’ Bicansa said.
‘I wanted to know,’ Pala said. Propped up in her suit, her voice was a husk, muffled by the fluid in her throat. ‘Why did you come to the equator – why meet us? You could have hidden here.’
‘Yes,’ Dano said grimly. ‘The Navy’s careless scouting missed you.’
‘We had to know what kind of threat you are to us. I had to see you face to face, take a chance that I would expose’ – she waved a hand – ‘this.’
‘You know we can’t ignore you,’ Dano said. ‘This great sphere is a Xeelee artefact. We have to learn what it’s for.’
‘That’s simple,’ Pala said. She had worked it out, she believed, during her long cocooning. ‘We were thinking too hard, Dano. The sphere is a weapon.’
‘Ah,’ Dano said grimly. ‘Of course. And I always believed your thinking wasn’t bleak enough for this job, Pala. I was wrong.’
Bicansa looked bewildered. ‘What are you talking about? Since the First landed, we have thought of this sphere as a place that gives life, not death.’
Dano said, ‘You wouldn’t think it was so wonderful if you inhabited a planet of this star as the sphere slowly coalesced – if your ocean froze out, your air began to snow … Pala is right. The sphere is a machine that kills a star – or rather, its planets, while preserving the star itself for future use. I doubt if there’s anything special about this system, this star.’ He glanced at the sky, metal Eyes gleaming. ‘It is probably just a trial run of a new technology, a weapon for a war of the future. One thing we know about the Xeelee is that they think long term.’
Bicansa said, ‘What a monstrous thought. My whole culture has developed on the hull of a weapon! But even so, it is my culture. And you’re going to destroy it, aren’t you? Or will you put us in a museum, as you promised Sool?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Pala whispered.
They both turned to look at her. Dano murmured threateningly, ‘What are you thinking, Missionary?’
She closed her eyes. Did she really want to take this step? It could be the end of her career if it went wrong, if Dano failed to back her. But she had sensed the gentleness of Sool’s equatorial culture, and had now experienced for herself the vast spatial scale of the sphere – and here, still more strange, was this remote polar colony. This was an immense place, she thought, immense both in space and time – and yet humans had learned to survive here. It was almost as if humans and Xeelee were learning to live together. It would surely be wrong to allow this unique world to be destroyed, for the sake of short-term gains.
And she thought she had a way to keep that from happening.
‘If this is a weapon, it may one day be used against us. And if so we have to find a way to neutralise it.’ The suit whirred as she turned to Bicansa, ‘Your people can stay here. You can live your lives the way you want. I’ll find ways to make the Commission accept that. But there’s a payback.’
Bicansa nodded grimly. ‘I understand. You want us to find the Xeelee flower.’
‘Yes,’ whispered Pala. ‘Find the off-switch.’
Dano faced her, furious. ‘You don’t have the authority to make a decision like that. Granted this is an unusual situation. But these are still human colonists, and you are still a Missionary. Such a deal would be unprecedented.’
‘But,’ Pala whispered, ‘Bicansa’s people are no longer human. Are you, Bicansa?’
Bicansa averted her eyes. ‘The First were powerful. Just as they made this star-world fit for us, so they made us fit for it.’
Dano, astonished, glared at them both. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, I see. A loophole! If the colonists aren’t fully human under the law you can pass the case to the Assimilation, who won’t want to deal with it either … You’re an ingenious one, Pala! Well, well. All right, I’ll support your proposal at the Commission. No guarantees, though.’
‘Thank you,’ Bicansa said to Pala. She held out her Virtual hand, and it passed through Pala’s suit, breaking into pixels.
Dano had been right, Pala thought, infuriatingly right, as usual. He had seen something in her, an attraction to this woman from another world she hadn’t even recognised in herself. But Bicansa didn’t even exist in the form Pala had perceived, not if she endured this gravity. Was she, Pala, really so lonely? Well, if so, when she got out of here she would do something about her personal life.
And she would have to think again about her career choice. Dano had always warned her about an excess of empathy. It seemed she wasn’t cut out for the duties of a Missionary – and next time she might not be able to find a legal loophole to spare the victims of the Commission’s heavy charity.
With a last regretful glance, Bicansa’s Virtual sublimated into dusty light.
Dano said briskly, ‘Enough’s enough. I’ll call down the flitter to get you out of here before you choke to death.’ He turned away, and his pixels flickered as he worked.
Pala looked out through the car’s window at the colony, the sprawling, high-gravity plants, the dusty, flattened lens of shining air. She wondered how many more colonies had spread over the varying gravity latitudes of the star shell, how many more adaptations from the standard human form had been tried – how many people actually lived on this immense artificial world. There was so much here to explore.
The door of Bicansa’s car opened. A creature climbed out cautiously. In a bright orange pressure suit, its body was low-slung, supported by four limbs as thick as tree trunks. Even through the suit Pala could make out immense bones at hips and shoulders, and massive joints along the spine. It lifted its head and looked into the car. Through a thick visor Pala could make out a face – thick-jawed, flattened, but a human face nonetheless. The creature nodded once. Then it turned and, moving heavily, carefully, made its way towards the colony, and its lake of light.
Pala was right that the Xeelee star-cloak was a weapon. One day this strange apparition would return, to haunt human history.
What a pity Bicansa’s people never did find an off-switch.
This was an age when every resource in the Galaxy had to be harnessed to feed the Expansion. So the Missionaries and Assimilators drove on.
But, at the very edge of the human front, they were never very safe vocations.
BREEDING GROUND
AD 10,537
The starbreaker pod exploded in her face.
Mari was hurled backwards, landing with a jarring impact against the weapons emplacement’s rear bulkhead. Something gushed over her eyes – something sticky – blood? With sudden terror she scraped at her face.
The emplacement’s calm order had been destroyed in an instant. Alarms howled, insistent. There was screaming all around her, people flailing. The transparent forward bulkhead had buckled inwards, and the row of starbreaker pods behind it, including her own, had been crushed and broken open. Charred shadows still clung to some of the stations, and there was a stink of smoke, of burned meat. She had been lucky to have been thrown back, she realised dully.
But beyond the forward bulkhead the battle was continuing. She saw black extragalactic space laced by cherry-red starbreaker beams, a calm enfilade caging in the bogey, the Snowflake, the misty alien artefact at the centre of this assault. The rest of the flotilla hovered like clouds around the action: Spline ships, fleshy scarred spheres, sisters of the living ship in which she rode, each wielding a huge shield of perfectly reflective Ghost hide.