Chapter 29

Bad News from the Stars

When Madeleine Meacher arrived back in the Solar System — just moments after passing through the pain of her last Saddle Point transition — she was stunned to find Nemoto materializing in the middle of her small hab module.

“Nemoto. You. What…? How…?”

Nemoto was small, hunched over, her face a mask of sourness. This was a virtual, of course, and a low-quality one; Nemoto floated in the air, not quite lined up with the floor.

Nemoto glanced about, as if surprised to be here. “Meacher. So it’s you. What date is it?”

Madeleine had to look it up: A.D. 3793.

Nemoto laughed hollowly. “How absurd.”

There was no perceptible time delay. That meant the originating transmitter must be close. But, of course, there had been no way Nemoto could have known which Saddle Point gateway Madeleine would arrive from. “Nemoto, what are you?”

Nemoto grunted impatiently. “I am a limited-sentience projection. My function is to wait for the star travelers to return. I dusted the Saddle Point radius, all around the system. Dusted it with monitors, probes, transmitters. Technology has moved on, Meacher. Look it up. It scarcely matters… Listen to what I have to say.”

“Nemoto—”

“Listen, damn you. The Gaijin have been fighting the Crackers. Out on the rim of the system.”

“I know that—”

“The war has lasted five centuries, perhaps more. The Oort cloud is deep, Meacher, a deep trench. But now the war is lost.”

The simple, stunning brutality of the statement shocked Madeleine. “Are you sure?”

Nemoto barked laughter. “The Gaijin are withdrawing from the Solar System. They don’t bother to hide this from us. Just as most people don’t bother to look up, into the sky, and see what is going on… Oh, many of the Gaijin remain: scouts, observers, transit craft like this one. But the bulk of the Gaijin fleet — mostly constructed from stolen Solar System resources, our asteroids — has begun to withdraw to the Saddle Points. The outer system war is over.”

“And the Crackers…”

“Are on the way into the inner system. They are already through the heliopause, the perimeter of the solar wind.” The virtual flickered, became blocky, all but transparent. “The endgame approaches.”

“Nemoto, what must I do?”

“Go to Mercury. Find me.” She looked down at herself, as if remembering. “That is, find Nemoto.”

“And what of you? Nemoto, what is a limited-sentience projection?”

Nemoto raised a hand that was crumbling into bits of light. She seemed puzzled, as if she was finding out for herself as she spoke. “I am autonomous, heuristic, sentient. I was born sixty seconds ago, to give you this message. But my function is fulfilled. I’m dying.” She looked at Madeleine, as if shocked by the realization, and reached out.

Madeleine extended a hand, but her fingers passed through a cloud of light.

With a thin wail, the Nemoto virtual broke up.

Sailing in from the rim of the Solar System, Madeleine used Gaijin technology to study the strange new age into which she had been projected.

There was little Gaijin traffic, just as virtual Nemoto had said.

But she found signatures of unknown ships — solar-sail craft, they appeared to be, great fleets of them, a gigantic shell that surrounded the system. They were still out among the remote orbits of the comets for now, but they were converging, like a fist closing on the fat warmth of the inner system.

Cracker fleets, come to disrupt the Sun.

Earth seemed dead. The Moon was a fading blue, silent. There were knots of human activity in the asteroids, on Mars — and on Triton. And she found signs of refugee fleets, humans fleeing inward to the core of the system, to Mercury. But no ships arrived at or left remote Triton.

When she understood that, she knew where she must go first.

The Gaijin flower-ship sailed around Triton, its fusion light illuminating smooth plains of ice. It was a world covered by a chill ocean, like Earth’s Arctic, with not a scrap of solid land; but the thin ice crust was easily broken by the slow pulsing tides of this small moon, exposing great black leads of water that bubbled and steamed vigorously, trying to evaporate and fill up all of empty space.

There were six human settlements.

The settlements looked like clusters of bubbles on a pond, she thought. They were sprawling, irregular patches of modular construction — not rigid, clearly designed to float over the tides. Five settlements seemed abandoned — no lights, no power output, no sign of an internal temperature significantly above the background. Even the sixth looked largely shut down, with only a handful of lights at the center of the bubble-cluster, the outskirts abandoned to the cold.

She radioed down requests for permission and instructions for landing. Only automated beacons responded. The answers came through in a human voice, but in a language she didn’t recognize. The translation suite embedded in her equipment couldn’t handle it either. She had the Gaijin put her down on what appeared to be a landing site, close to a system of air locks.

Suited up, she stepped out of the conical Gaijin lander.

Frost covered every surface. But it was gritty, hard as sand. Remember, Madeleine, water ice is rock on Triton.

She walked carefully to the edge of the platform and looked out beyond the bounds of the bubble city. A point-source Sun cast wan, colorless light over smooth ice fields. Neptune, a faint, misty-blue ball, was rising over the horizon, making the light on the ice deep, subtle, complex, the shadows softly glowing. Pointlessly beautiful, she thought. She turned away.

She found a door large enough for a suited human. She couldn’t understand the elaborate script instructions beside the control panel. But there was one clear device: a big red button. Press me. She hit it with her fist.

Radio noise screeched. The door slid back, releasing a puff of air that crystallized immediately. She hurried into a small, brightly lit air lock. The door slammed shut, and the air lock immediately repressurized.

She twisted off her helmet. Air sighed out of her suit, and her ears popped. The air was biting cold. It smelled stale.

She palmed a panel that opened the inner door, and found herself looking into a long, unadorned corridor that twisted out of sight.

Wandering through the corridors, carrying her helmet, she was eventually met by a woman. She was evidently a cop: spindly, fragile-looking after fifteen hundred years of adaptation to low gravity, but she carried a mean-looking device that could only be a handgun.

The cop walked Madeleine, luggage pack and all, into the center of town. The cop’s skin was jet black. Madeleine’s translator software couldn’t interpret her language.

Madeleine caught glimpses of abandoned corridors and some kind of complex, gigantic machinery at the heart of everything. In one area she passed over a clear floor, water rippling underneath, black and deep. She saw something swimming there, sleek and fast and white, quickly disappearing into the deeper darkness.

The cop delivered her to a cramped suite of offices. Madeleine sat in an anteroom, waiting for attention. Maybe this was the office of the mayor, she thought, or the town council. There was no sign of the colony’s Aboriginal origins, save for a piece of art on the wall: about a meter square, pointillist dots in shades of cobalt red. A Dreamtime representation, maybe.

Madeleine was starting to get the picture. Triton was a small town, at the fringe of interstellar space. They weren’t used to visitors, and weren’t much interested either.

Eventually a harassed-looking official — another woman, her frizzy hair tied back sharply from her forehead — came into the room. She studied Madeleine with dismay.