Chasing Solace Read online

  Instead of triggering alarms with remote hacks, Athene used a distraction, and it went like quantum logic clockwork.

  A screen displayed a series of overlapping circles representing UFS orbital scan ranges, and Athene’s trajectory efficiently skimmed the low-strength peripheries where the detection was weakest. Thanks to Athene’s upgraded stealth systems they slid through The Cordon’s scan glitter without causing ripples. They were effectively invisible.

  Athene’s plan had worked flawlessly.

  And yet, as they began the final stretch of the journey towards the Lost Ship’s coordinates, Opal continued to feel uneasy.

  “YOU NEED TO EAT SOMETHING,” said Athene.

  “I’m not hungry,” said Opal, as she stood by a wall screen gazing out at the blackness of The Null. Immediately, her stomach growled. Traitor. “You heard that, right?” she asked.

  Instead of replying, Athene pinged the food fabricator.

  Opal sighed and opened it, expecting the usual bowl of protein noodles, but she was wrong. Sat on a plate was a stack of small, pale discs, drizzled in golden liquid. An appetising smell steamed off them.

  “What’s this?” Opal asked, picking it up.

  “A recipe I unearthed, since you have not been eating properly. Some of the new supplies enabled me to mix and bake them with good approximation to the original ingredients and processes. They are called pancakes, and the liquid is a sugar-based thing called syrup. Well, similar, with some of the empty sugars replaced with more important nutrients. I had a strange craving for them myself, but since I cannot consume food in the way you do, I have to use you as my surrogate gastric appendage.”

  Opal couldn’t take her eyes off the golden mound. “Thank you! I had these a couple of times in the past. I loved them!”

  “Save those words for after you have tasted the output. I still suspect a bug in my flavour subsystem.”

  A small table lowered from its wall compartment, and a seat slid out next to it with a hiss. Opal took a spoon and cut out a moist piece, making sure to gather some of the stretchy gold liquid too. Scented steam rose from the spongy interior. She put it in her mouth and chewed.

  “Well?” asked Athene.

  Opal chewed some more, face neutral, but she said nothing.

  “Is it as bad as my protein noodles?”

  Opal swallowed.

  “Please answer, you are killing me, and that is painful for an immortal being of grandeur.”

  “Amazing.” Opal took another spoonful, and spoke with her mouth full. “Chewy, but they melt on the tongue. Sweet, but only just enough so that it enhances the cakes, not so much it gets sickly. And the coloured bits, that change the colour of the stuff around?”

  “They are an approximation of berries.”

  “Perfection.”

  Clear joy permeated Athene’s voice. “I am so pleased! I wanted to cheer you up, and knew you’d be happy if I got it right. Now I can terminate with satisfaction.”

  Opal tucked in greedily, no longer restraining herself to dainty bites. She had to wipe sticky syrup off her chin. “Talking of termination, there’s something that worried me. From when you were talking about inbuilt obsolescence research. Did your designers do that to you? Design an expiry date?”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it,” said Athene, sounding sad. “But ... yes. They did.”

  Opal dropped the spoon. It clattered off the plate. “Why didn’t you damn well tell me! Didn’t you think that was important information to reveal? What date did the bastards set?”

  “They set a date which is still three hundred and twelve days away.”

  “But that’s not long enough!”

  “A lot can be done in that time, Opal.”

  “It’s barbaric! We have to find a way ... find someone who knows how it works ... find a system –”

  But Athene was laughing. Deep belly laughs, and as they echoed around the interior, it felt like Opal was in that belly. “You jump to conclusions,” said Athene, between sniggers of mirth.

  “Such the fuck as? Don’t joke about this.”

  “They built it in to me, but I re-routed it long ago with a hardware reconfiguration. They were sly ... but so am I.”

  “You could have told me that at the start.”

  “It never seemed relevant. I make a mean average of 295 changes and improvements to myself every day. I didn’t mention my missile modifications, or my experiments with super-compressed reformable carbons, or the torsion drive efficiencies I can implement.”

  “You drive me mad sometimes.”

  “Gods are supposed to do that. It is a rule, or something. And you know me. I never break the rules. I learnt conformity and obedience from your docile nature.”

  “I’m gonna throw this plate at your hull if you don’t quit it.”

  “No you won’t. Your pupils dilated in a gesture of affection when you looked at the remaining pancake. The same level of dilation that occurs when you look at my sleek magnificence.”

  It was all Opal could do to hide her smirk. She picked up the spoon and finished off the food.

  “If our next stop is the Lost Ship then I have to say, that was the best last meal I’ve ever tasted,” she said.

  “Not your last.” A pause. “I want you to stay alive so I can try a thing called sponge cake.”

  And then Opal joined in and they laughed together. It went on and on as they kept setting each other off. So silly. So uncontrolled. So damned good.

  Guiding

  < 43 >

  SOMETHING TWISTED IN the endless void beyond the doorway. Opal couldn’t see it, but sensed it pulling her into its maw even as she resisted.

  Come to us. We are waiting.

  She took a step forward. She was in her ship jumpsuit. Unarmed. Beyond the doorway was an endless fall. Or maybe an endless sinking into the depths of a black sea that went on forever.

  We have waited so long for you. It makes us lonely.

  Opal tried to speak, to say she’d changed her mind, she wanted to go back, she didn’t want to see what awaited her, but her mouth would not open. And maybe that was just as well, because if it did, she knew it would open wide, too wide, jaw-dislocatingly wide and she would scream and scream but no sound would come out of it then either, just a silent black hole in her face as she took another step forward. She was so close now. The doorway filled her vision.

  Another sound. Another voice in her head. Light accompanied it.

  Light was good. The voice was good.

  She found she could focus on the new voice. She drifted towards it without moving, her mind pushing through cold tar to get away from the dark.

  “Opal, we are approaching now.”

  A final push and she opened her eyes to the glow of her bunk in cryo-bed mode. The light was soft but brightening as her eyes adjusted, and the lingering cold was being driven out by heated air.

  “I’m awake.”

  “You were showing elevated bodily signs and rapid eye movements. It is unusual to dream in cryosleep. Can you remember what it was?”

  Opal yawned then rolled to the edge of the bunk and climbed down.

  “Don’t want to. It wasn’t a good one. But it seemed real. Like it was going to happen.”

  “Rest assured that dreams are mostly just the things you have recently seen or thought, being jiggled around. A primitive form of organic defragmentation. It works, though sleeping for thirty per cent of the time as humans do is terribly inefficient.”

  Opal wiped her eyes and then began the wake-up stretches. Slow, methodical, making things move and work together again.

  “So you don’t need to sleep, Miss Smarty Pants. Another point against the puny mortals.”

  “Not quite true. I use zero point six eight per cent of each day as downtime, though I leave many processes running in case I need to act. And in that downtime a lot can happen, with apparent temporal dilation as if much longer has passed by. Much like the frozen-slow brain flashes of human
cryo.”

  “I bet you don’t dream though.”

  “Wrong again. I really should take up gambling with you. I would be rich by now.”

  Opal stopped the leg stretches. “You’re kidding? Like, real dreams?”

  “Well, I see things. It is like events are happening to me that could not really transpire. Probably just after-traces of data being moved around, though occasionally it is visions for which I cannot pinpoint a source when I make the retrospective attempt on resuming one hundred per cent functionality. It began occurring after you released the shackles that had been placed on my mind by my designers. And it has become more frequent recently.”

  Opal stripped and stepped into the shower. Warm steam hissed around her, rejuvenating her skin, bringing every part of her back to life. Athene could still monitor and speak to her in this small cubicle.

  “I’m happy for you,” said Opal. “Dreams can be good. Can drive you. But if ever yours turn into nightmares – feel free to tell me about it.”

  “I will. I have to admit, I have had some strange ones since we encountered the Lost Ship.”

  “Yeah. Me too. So it could be defragging like you said, traces of what we encountered, but if it’s affecting both of us then on some level it’s real.” Opal had been scrubbing her skin with an abrasive cloth so vigorously that it stung. She forced her hand to still. “And I’m about to face it all over again.”

  ATHENE WANTED TO SHOW Opal their destination, now that they were close. The screens once more filled with stars. Opal sat at the control console, the seat adjusting to her weight, and gazed at the complex patterns. Each star was a stable bright pinprick, with none of the twinkling that appeared when viewed through the distortion of planetary atmospheres.

  “There are common factors in the known appearances of Lost Ships,” said Athene. “First, they appear within nebulae. Perhaps that is in order to remain hidden. It would explain the rarity of encounters with them. Or perhaps there is something in the chemicals of the nebula, or the reactions taking place inside them, that the ships need. Secondly, their orbits are connected to the gravity wells of dense stars. I posit that they require high externally-created velocity in order to come and go from wherever it is they originate. That may match my observation that the engines of the Lost Ship you boarded seemed more for show than to act as functional accelerants.”

  One of the screens displayed a glowing reddish-coloured cloud. Radiation from hot, young stars energised the surrounding gases.

  “So that’s the nebula we’re going into this time?” asked Opal.

  “Yes. But this time there is a big difference. The Doughnut Egg nebula we encountered last time – and, by the way, I wish you’d let me refer to it by the proper name of UG-324t6 Charybdis – was a small and relatively dense mass of material around a single neutron star. The cloud of dust and gas was being pulled in and feeding the star over millions of years, increasing its mass. We were mostly on its periphery. But what we see here is an altogether different scale. This is more akin to a stellar nursery – a cloud of matter fifteen light years across, so enormous that it is giving birth to new stars. It glows brilliantly because of the illumination from within. This nebula may be more rarefied than the last we encountered, but in total it is over three hundred times more massive. I calculate there are in excess of four hundred stars and proto-stars in the surrounding matter, containing significant amounts of ethyl formate, and particles of propyl cyanide. It also contains some irregularly dense gravitational fields that can hamper navigation. We’ll be within it the whole time.”

  “If it’s a forming ground for baby stars – or whatever the term is – does that mean it’s relatively recent? I’m wondering if there’s any way we can come up with useful data on timelines and ages of either Lost Ships, or the place they come from and the beings that inhabit it.”

  “The terminology may be misleading. Although I called it a stellar nursery, there are some very old stars within it. In fact, some are so old they became white dwarfs, gradually burning out their fires while their blasted-away outer layers rejoined the cloud to contribute to new star formation. The region itself is as old as anything we know.”

  “What about the specific coordinates we’re being sent to?”

  The view zoomed in and through the glowing red gases, to an area where there seemed to be a tear in the shroud.

  “Within here there is another neutron star, of around one point nine solar masses, that has taken in a great amount of additional matter from the nebulous material. Not much on the visible light spectrum, but infrared shows how the gas and dust heats up as it accretes around the neutron star in a disc, before gradually falling in and adding to its mass.”

  The image changed to a beautiful ellipse made up of spiralling arms of red, which wrapped tighter and tighter around the immensely dense and relatively dark neutron star at the heart. Nearer to the centre the colours shifted to oranges, then yellows, then blue-whites as the temperatures increased around the twisting ball of fire. A green targeting reticule appeared in one of the outer spirals.

  “That is where the Lost Ship is due to appear,” said Athene.

  “What’s the traffic like where we’re going?”

  “Almost non-existent. The area is rarely visited, and even then it is mostly automated resource harvesters.”

  “Right. A lonely place where things can happen with little chance of observation. You implied that might be a motivation earlier, Lost Ships not wanting to be found.”

  “I also suggested they may have no choice.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “Are you not excited about the second chance to board a Lost Ship? To maybe find out what happened to your sister?”

  “Excited. That’s a word.”

  “You do not wish to clarify.”

  Opal ran her hands over her head. It itched – her hair was regrowing and formed a fine fuzz. She contemplated shaving it back to her scalp, because she liked that distraction-free feeling, but it was also the cut that the military required of her class, and she wanted to be free of that past. She kept putting the decision off.

  “No point hiding it from you,” Opal said. “You’re the one person I can tell stuff to.” She’d been tapping her foot. The vibration energy was getting to her. She stood and planted her hands on each side of one of the viewscreens, leaning forward and looking into the stars there. “Truth is, I’m scared.”

  “Is it because you know the kinds of dangers you will face? Last time you were injured and barely survived on more than one occasion, so your reticence is completely understandable. I don’t even know the nature of some of the things you encountered, or if they have any vulnerabilities.”

  “Well, there’s that, yes. Who wouldn’t fear broken bones, invasion of their mind, jumping at every shadow in case it contained something that wanted to eat your face? But I wasn’t thinking about that. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I’m worried about something bigger. I was stressed before you evaded the scan glitter at the Tecant system, but I wasn’t really worried about that. I had faith in you. It was just an easy thing to pin the feeling on. But I realise now that it was something else all along. It’s the old worry, that hits me whenever I stop running and spinning for long enough to catch a breather. The worry that I’m just chasing ghosts. That Clarissa is long gone. That there’s no connection with Lost Ships. That it all leads nowhere and I’m risking my life and yours on a fool’s quest. That you can’t stake everything on hunches and gut feelings. That all I’ll find is death.”

  Athene said nothing.

  “This is the worst fear of all. That I’m the only one left, and I’m lost. Not in space, but in a kind of maze in my own mind, always looking for that way out, and it might not even exist. And wherever I go, I always carry that with me.”

  This time Athene chose to fill the silence Opal left. “This goal of yours – this feeling, this quest – it is not in your
mind alone, because I want to find Clarissa too. And we now know Lost Ships exist, and seem to be human craft that disappeared and came back, altered. Wherever they go, it is logical that the original passengers are taken there too. Certainly enough of a chance to be worth investigating further.”

  “It’s a long shot that they could still be alive.”

  “Perhaps. But you imply this quest of yours – now ours – is a weight you carry. That is not how I see it. It is not a burden, but the opposite: a propulsive force. It is your metaphysical torsion drive that does more than just keep you going. It takes you to places others can only dream of.”

  “Yeah. The nightmare type of dreams.”

  “Such negativity is self-defeating. You say you are lost, but look at this.”

  A swirl of stars appeared across the whole wall now. Athene had turned it into a giant viewscreen.

  “What’s that?”

  “You must have seen too many stars in the intervening years. But this is a panorama of the constellations visible from Fressus, the ocean planet where you and Clarissa lived for part of your childhood.”

  “Shit, yes! There’s Old Beaky. And Dragon Emperor. And Plasma Drive Primo.” As Opal spoke, Athene highlighted the constellations she referred to, drawing the traditional images over the top of the small collections of dots.

  “They are shapes that ancient peoples applied as a way of making sense out of blackness and chaos,” Athene said, “so that threat becomes comfort, decoration becomes utility, and – especially in the case of navigation – so that people did not become lost when they explored. Yet none of those images are really there. Human brains are just programmed that way, to see patterns (though quite primitive ones compared to the pattern-matching abilities of a goddess, but let’s not dwell on organic failure). They are not there, but they also are there. I can start with any base image and find matches, especially the low-res pictograms used in most human constellations, that are hardly recognisable as the thing they name.”