Damocles (2 page)

Her voice trembled as she gave the command. “Launch Phase Three drones for maximum contact.” She knew the
Damocles
nav system was already interfacing with the drones to determine the optimal launch targets for the next round of drones, her drones. The drones were miniscule, inserted into larger capsules that would burn off upon entering the atmosphere. They would drop down in densely populated areas. Smaller than mosquitoes, they would drift on breezes, drawn by magnetism. They would attach themselves to electronic systems or anything resembling communication devices or manufacturing facilities. They were tiny little spies that would record every sound, every digital pulse, looking for patterns that would be fed into the ProLingLang system Meg had designed. And then Meg Dupris would do what she did best, what she had always tried to do—she would unlock the door to the languages around her.

She pushed back from her console as the screen signaled the launch.

“It’s a mind fuck, isn’t it?”

Meg spun and saw Katie Prader, the engineering officer, leaning in the doorway, her blonde hair pulled back in a greasy, crooked braid. They grinned at each other.

“Have you seen it?” Meg asked.

“Un-fucking-believable.” Prader’s lips were chapped, and she still had a sticky pad stuck to her elbow. “I was second up, not long after Cho. When those first phase readings came back, I was
afraid to hope. When the second phase started pouring in data about transportation systems? I don’t even…I can’t…” Meg was on her feet, hugging the shorter woman.

“They were right.” Meg pulled away and held Prader at arm’s length. “The message. They were right. Humans, down there. All this way from home.”

Prader wiped a tear from her cheek. “This calls for coffee.”

They could hear laughter coming from the dining room. Cho made a show of disengaging BESS from the kitchenette to great applause from the crowd gathered around him.

“Thank you, BESS,” Cho intoned as the yellow screen went black. “You’ve been a wonderful caregiver and life-support system, but as a cook, you suck. We’ve traveled millions of miles through who knows how many space dangers mindlessly absorbing liquid reengineered protein. It’s time for us to do that one thing we’ve waited to do—chew. So with no further ado, I give you chewy reengineered protein.”

Bowls were slung, spoons tapped together, and as one the crew of the
Damocles
dug into their first self-fed meal since leaving Hyperion.

Loul watched his desk mate’s eyes as they focused on the images passing before them. He knew that if he waited, if he stayed very still for another couple of seconds, she would lose herself in her work and forget to keep checking on him. He saw her blinks slow down, steady out, and heard the even whistle of her breathing. He was now free to slouch down in his chair and relax. He didn’t really mind her that much. He didn’t even bother to
remember her name. The seat across from him at Workstation 14 had become something of a no-man’s-land since Jep had been promoted. People came and people went, with the obvious exception of Loul himself.

He risked a glance down the line of workstations to the window at the end of the room. Between him and the glass, seven other workstations hummed with whatever job they were assigned. At least he’d gotten over his paranoia that other people were being given more interesting work than he got. He could tell just from the way her elbow was twitching that the woman three stations down was playing a game of Flange online. He wasn’t the only slacker.

If he leaned back in his chair, he could just make out the edge of the second of the Zobos twins shining through the shaded glass. There were only two or three times a year both suns came into view, paralleling each other on the western horizon. They made the sky turn a sticky shade of yellow and generally put Loul in a grumpy mood, mostly because he would rather be out at the Observatory watching their path than stuck at this workstation charting storm patterns over the Ketter Sea. The way the shadows lengthened in the north, however, gave him an idea for a strategy he’d been mulling over for the game tonight.

Loul let his chair fall forward again. His desk mate—he’d taken to calling her Temporary 7 in his mind—looked up with a scowl that he ignored. She thought she was going to get somewhere in this department. She thought if she worked hard and met her deadlines and researched just a little bit beyond what was asked of her she would rise in the ranks and get a bigger desk and a better desk mate, along with more status and a bigger paycheck. And she was probably right. Jep had done it, and so had the other six people who had taken his seat since. Work hard, think hard, and keep your eye on the future. That was the way to the top.
“Don’t be afraid to think beyond what you already know,” his bosses were fond of saying. Good advice unless what you happened to think of was aliens.

It was so stupid, such an asinine thought that he still ground his teeth when he thought of it. Eight years ago he had graduated with a degree in telemetry with a guaranteed spot in the Cartar Satellite Telemetry Administration. He had shown up for his first day of orientation with a notepad and a head bursting with ideas. When the commanders had told him to think beyond what he already knew, he knew just where his mind was headed. When he’d received clearance to work at the extra-atmosphere satellite observatory, he’d nearly crowed with enthusiasm. When he had taken his first real look at Space (he always capitalized the word in his mind), the vast, velvety blackness of real Space, he had just known that his work was going to change history forever.

It had certainly changed his. He had spent eleven months of his own time putting together the report. Eleven months he could have been dating or bowling or trying to get some girl to lift her shirts for him. Instead he’d spent them wracking his brain, laboring over minute details, charting probabilities, and researching contingency plans to the point where he had almost convinced himself that the event had actually occurred. And after eleven months of uninterrupted and unpaid labor, he’d marched into the office of his superiors, put the report before them, and sealed his doom.

Six and a half years later, here he sat at Workstation 14, charting storm patterns over the Ketter Sea, plotting his strategy in a stupid game of Circle that he and his friends were still playing even though they all knew they were too old for it. Without an official word, his report had been filed away and an invisible mark had been placed on his career file. Well, not completely invisible. He’d had to report to Employment Resources to answer
his superiors’ concerns that he was “unrealistic, paranoid, and beset with juvenile fantasies not congruent with the objectives of the administration.” In other words, he’d had to stand before a panel of generals and administrators and tell them that, despite the assertions of his report, he did not in fact believe alien life did exist, nor did he believe these nonexistent aliens would ever make contact with Didet or its inhabitants.

Loul’s best friend, Hark, had shown his support by exploding with outrage when he’d learned of the inquisition and recanting. Of course, it was easy for Hark to take the high road. He had a cushy job at his mother’s furniture plant overseeing the installation of heavy-duty casters for office chairs. His career path didn’t have a lot of room for improvement, but at least the only people outranking him were his own family. It wasn’t so much a glass ceiling as a blood ceiling, and short of outright embezzlement, he wasn’t in danger of losing his job. Loul wasn’t either. He just had no hopes of ever rising any higher in the ranks than his current midlevel weather-monitoring position.

Hark had gone so far as to suggest that Loul upload the entire report to the Internet, targeting those fringe groups who believed that alien life could and probably did exist, some even going so far as to claim to have made contact with non-Didet life-forms. After the humiliation at the hands of his superiors, he’d been tempted to. His administrators and the generals above them hadn’t even tried to suppress their contempt at his report, some even laughing right in his face at his recommendations. Word had spread quickly throughout the department that Loul Pell was “one of those people,” those nut jobs who claimed to have implants under their skin, who claimed to have had years taken off their lives, who knew for a fact that aliens had probed their bodies and attempted to mate with them. If that was the group
he was going to be lumped into, why shouldn’t he share the hard work he’d put into his report?

Because the administration had seized it. Every word of it. Even though he’d done his research and his calculations and his probability studies on his own computer during his own time, the administration had claimed he’d violated their resources and, as such, his intellectual property was now the property of the Cartar Satellite Telemetry Administration. He’d been chastised for irresponsible use of resources, for attempting to incite public fear, for denigrating the intellectual propriety of his position, and, underneath it all, he could feel the unspoken threat of labeling him a terrorist. They were afraid he would make them all look like fools.

So now he charted weather patterns and ignored his desk mate and waited for his workday to end so he could head out the social center and meet up with Hark and the gang and pretend to be wizards and star kings and minions of the Shadow as they worked their way through another round of Circle. And when the game hit a lull or they got a little too deep in their hot beers, Loul would let his mind and sometimes his words wander back to the ridiculous theories that had trapped him in this cycle of mediocrity. Because despite his recanting and his humiliations and his flatline pay scale, or maybe because of them, Loul Pell still believed there had to be life beyond the yellow skies of Didet.

Meg ignored the bleating of the alarm firing off again from the engine room. In the six weeks since coming up from deep sleep, it seemed the primary malfunction on the ship was the ship’s alarm
system. Something was always going wrong, and while there was no such thing as a minor emergency in space this far from any type of help, she wouldn’t have minded a volume control on the announcement level. After all, she had a lot of listening to do.

She checked again to make sure the door to her cabin was sealed, shutting out as much noise as possible. Of course it was shut. She’d shut it herself. Plus the headphones she wore blocked out all but the most piercing sounds. Meg knew the real reason she kept peeking over her shoulder was to reassure herself that nobody was going to come into the capsule, pull the plug, and inform her that this entire experience was a simulation.

Voices. Meg clamped the headphones down more tightly over her ears, unnecessary for their function, necessary to keep her mind from blowing out the sides of her head. The drones picked up thousands of voices—articulated human vocal sounds—and as the language program separated the threads of sounds into manageable categories, she skimmed through the groupings to hear the sounds for herself.

She knew the look she had in her eyes. She’d seen it in almost every set of eyes on board when she would force herself away from her console to grab a bite to eat or to drywash the oily grime of recycled air off her skin. She’d passed Cho in the toilets and neither one of them could make a complete sentence. They’d finally just given up and grinned at each other. She’d had to step over Jefferson on the way to the kitchenette. After he’d taken in his drones’ data on minerals and inorganic resources in the planet’s crust, he’d laughed so hard he’d had to lie down to catch his breath. Prader had plenty to say, most of it of the four-letter variety, as she threatened every mechanical system on the ship that didn’t come into line with her demands. But when she wasn’t swearing and kicking panels into place, she would look up with a big toothy grin for anyone nearby.

Only Samantha Aaronson, the pilot, didn’t join in the rejoicing. She didn’t grin, she didn’t high-five. She climbed and clambered over every inch of the wiring within the ship, consulting with Prader and Cho and Captain Wagner about the health of the propulsion crystal, but otherwise keeping her eyes on the myriad screens she oversaw. And in the middle of those screens, she occasionally let her eyes drift to a photograph of a handsome man in a military uniform. Sometimes she even let her fingers drift there, and when they did, everyone on the crew knew to look elsewhere.

The ship’s log revealed that the first four planets on the path of given coordinates had been a bust. One had been devoured by a supernova; two were simply labeled “hostile”; and the fourth had been deemed “inaccessible” due to “solar conditions.” Captain Wagner had worked with Aaronson to read the star charts the nav system had created. He signed off on them and launched another relay beacon that would, in theory, transmit the information from the
Damocles
back to one of the gathering satellites they’d scattered through deep space. It was like shooting a spit wad over the ocean, and they all knew it. The crew of the
Damocles
was on an information-gathering mission like no other, farther than any of their kind had ever dreamed of traveling, following coordinates nobody could guarantee led anywhere.

News of an ancient race seeding the species hadn’t set well with the species as a whole. Meg and her language program had come under fire for falsifying information or, as the senator from the Galen colony had suggested, “making it all up.” World religions and scientific communities reeled at the concept of something extraterrestrial influencing the course of life on the home planet. Creationists and evolutionists teamed up to fight the mind-shattering revelation that the one concept they all agreed on—the
uniqueness of humanity—might be in danger. The message had changed the definition of humanity. But to Meg’s thinking, the reaction to that fact did more to damage humanity than any message ever could.

The
Damocles
’s mission might never have happened if not for a horrific organized attack throughout the terraforming ring. Furious at what they saw as hubris, fringe groups of Christian and Muslim fundamentalists banded together for a brutal four-day assault. Firebombs, pipe bombs, and plasma bombs tore through universities and grade schools, laboratories, space stations, and medical labs all in the name of a God who supposedly abhorred science. They claimed they were “bringing down Babel,” but the news media gave them the label that stuck: Evang-jihad.