Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘I see the irony,’ said Koshravi. ‘However, that is not the worst of it, as you know.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The alien artifact, of course,’ explained Koshravi. ‘You see, this planet once had its own intelligent species. Ten million years ago, they were wiped out by their own singularity—one that must have been of military origin, just as ours was. They were destroyed by their own war machines, which your meddling with the artifact has reawakened.’

Carlyle shook her head, grinning at the woman’s naivety. ‘That artifact was built by posthumans, not aliens. It’s probably the remains of your own ship !’

‘No,’ said Koshravi, firmly. ‘The fossil evidence is quite clear. The crushed remains of machines similar to the ones you awakened have been found in what we call the Artificial Strata—the traces of their industrial age, just before the mass extinction. Needless to say, we have avoided going anywhere near that artifact since we discovered it.’

‘I’ll bet.’ Carlyle paused, trying to warp her mind into the right frame to explain the facts of life. ‘Look, nobody believes in aliens any more. There’s single-celled life all over the place, but nothing else. Look at it this way—what are the chances that your ship would happen to hit upon the one other place in the Galaxy where intelligent life has arisen independently?’

‘We’ve thought about that, obviously,’ said Koshravi. ‘Our best guess is that it sought out and chose the planet for reasons of its own.’ She shrugged. ‘However improbable it may be, the fact is that it happened. The fossils are there.’

‘That’s wonderful ,’ said Carlyle, sincerely. ‘This place will be swarming wi scientists and tourists once we get things up and running.’

Koshravi sat back in her seat and gazed away towards the front of the plane. ‘It is not for me to decide,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But when the Joint Chiefs—that’s our government, more or less—listen to your poor thrall, it’s very unlikely that they’ll let the Carlyles “get things up and running.’ ”

‘I hope they’ll gie me the chance to put a word in,’ Carlyle said. ‘After all, he’s biased.’

Koshravi’s head turned sharply. For a moment, Carlyle saw in her face the same look that Armand had delivered with a kick.

‘What he may say is not the point!’ Koshravi snapped. ‘That he exists in that condition is enough!’

Carlyle opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. She was, she now realised, among potential enemies, of whose motivations and capacities she knew dangerously little. The less she said, the better. As it was, she just clenched her teeth, shrugged one shoulder, and stared out of the window beside her in silence, until the blue, grey, and white of ocean broke to the ragged green and brown and black of a coastline, and the aircraft tipped forward for the descent.

C

yrus Lamont hung in a web of elastic ropes that made every move, and maintaining any position, an ever-changing effort. The Yettram coils in his suit maintained his bone mass, but that did nothing for his muscle tone in freefall. Hence the webbing, which also served as a multidirectional acceleration couch. Good for evasive manoeuvres. The tumbling of irregularly shaped asteroids was chaotic, unpredictable even in principle, and approaching them was always hazardous.

Right now Lamont’s ship, the Hungry Dragon , was approaching a rock of about two kilometres in its major diameter. Initial spectroscopy of the minute sample Lamont had laser-vapourised from its surface, as well as its orbital dynamics, indicated that its composition was about 5% iron, and even visually at twenty klicks its clinkery surface betrayed the gleam.

Not bad, not bad at all. Eurydice’s system, dominated by its single-mooned gas giant Polyphemus, and otherwise composed of two rocky terrestrials and a sparse asteroid belt, was metal-poor. Whether this was attributable to its original formation, or to subsequent mining by the long-gone indigenes, remained controversial. What wasn’t controversial was that this made asteroid prospecting worthwhile, at least for people with more patience and ambition than current credit. The tonnage in this rock would be enough, Lamont calculated, to tilt the material balances to a point where he could retire if he wanted, or, more realistically, prospect farther for the metals, the demand for which their very delivery would increase.

Lamont was a tall man, somewhat etiolated by his six years in space, and, for reasons not too deep in his hundred and forty-three previous years of life on Eurydice, in no hurry to resume human company. The complicated and spectacular implosion of a family business a century in the making and a month in the unravelling had left him in a condition where the most demanding emotional, intellectual, and sexual relationship he had felt up to handling was with that business’s sole remaining asset in his possession, the ship.

‘What the fuck was that ?’ said the Hungry Dragon .

Lamont jumped in his restraints. ‘What?’

A screen on the display in front of him lit up with a line, broad and intricate.

‘A very powerful signal,’ explained the ship. ‘Like a nuclear EMP, but content-rich. It originated on the day side of Eurydice.’

Lamont knew exactly what that meant. The contingency, remote though it had always seemed until now, had been comprehensively analysed and war-gamed. He found himself shaking. The news was still too big to be real.

‘An encounter with war machines, or a local outbreak.’

‘That would seem to exhaust the likely possibilities,’ agreed the ship. ‘I shall await a general alert.’ The AI paused for a moment. ‘Should we abort our approach?’

‘Why?’

‘There could be war machines in that rock,’ the ship pointed out. ‘The signal could be directed to them.’

Lamont hung, pondering, as the asteroid slowly grew in the scope. Five klicks, now.

‘If we were to take that attitude,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘we’d have to keep our hands off every seam of metal in the system. So far, we’ve mined lots of rocks and haven’t encountered any alien apparatus. No reason why that should change everywhere just because somebody’s wakened up something on Eurydice.’

‘That agrees with my stochastics,’ said the ship.

It was, however, with more than usual attention and apprehension that Lamont brought the ship to a halt about five hundred metres from the rock. He kept the lasers powered up and on a dead man’s switch. He sent a swarm of hand-sized probes to scuttle around the rock. One by one they reported back, confirming the remote analyses: there was nothing metallic in the asteroid but pure meteoric iron, unchanged since the system had condensed out of its protoplanetary disc.

Relaxing somewhat, Lamont released another swarm, of miners and manufacturers this time. Self-organising to a degree, they were nevertheless kept on a tight-beamed leash by the ship’s AI. Their task was to set up the big solar mirrors and small power stations, and to build the machinery of extraction and refining as far as possible from the material of the rock itself, from a small seed stock of replicators and assemblers. Lamont disengaged himself from the webbing and drifted over to the shower pod. Cleaned by recyled piss, dried by recycled air, he kicked himself through the hydroponics corridor, harvesting fresh vegetables on the way, and threw a meal together in the kitchen unit. As he ate he caught up with news, text, and pictures and audio, on the deep-space channels, everything half a light-hour out of date. He noted and acknowledged the Joint Chiefs’ general alert, wondering idly if he and his ship could or would be conscripted, if the struggle really came. He watched the Armand company’s recording of the emergent machines in the ancient relic with a sort of fascinated horror. He replayed it several times, just to get the images stabilised in his head, just so they didn’t run off on their own and give him nightmares.