Beyond the Reach of Earth

Book 2: Lightspeed trilogy

by Ken MacLeod

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Ken MacLeod is back with a stellar interstellar addition to the Lightspeed trilogy!



THE FERMI ARE AWAKE . . .



The invention of faster-than-light technology has brought great opportunity, but also great danger.



The Black Horizon conspiracy is broken up, but it still has deadly assets beyond the reach of Earth. As the great powers jostle for advantage, the alien minds known as the Fermi have their own ways of dealing with humans meddling in plans vaster and more ancient than anyone can suspect.



After the Venus catastrophe, John Grant's starship Fighting Chance and the Space Station have reached Apis—but not for long. They barely have time to mourn the dead before they're chased out of the system. The Station begins exploring the systems Black Horizon warned them against—with good reason, as they soon discover.



On Apis, Alliance agent Marcus Owen has a new mission: to communicate with the alien intelligences in the rocks, and to stop anyone else from getting to them first. Everyone knows he's a spy, but he's not going to let that cramp his style. But the scientists investigating the rock find that the Fermi may not be the only alien intelligence on Apis . . .

Release date: March 21, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 368

Sample

The story so far

This is the second volume of the Lightspeed Trilogy, which began with BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY. I assume you’ve read that book, but not that you’ve read it recently. So here’s a quick recap.

Faster-than-light (FTL) travel was discovered around 2020 and is being kept secret. This can’t stop other people from discovering it. One of them is London PhD student LAKSHMI NAYAK.

In 2067, she receives an airmail letter in her own handwriting, with equations that point to the possibility. To her this apparent communication from a future self implies both FTL and time travel. She expands the equations into a paper and publishes it online, where it’s torn to shreds. After gaining her PhD she’s warned off any further work on FTL by MARCUS OWEN, a humanoid robot operative of the British Council (now a feared intelligence service).

The world has three big powers: the Alliance (the Anglosphere plus India and minus Ireland and Scotland), the Union (the former European Union, now a revolutionary ‘economic democracy’) and the Co-ordinated States (China and Russia), all with various client states and non-aligned countries outside. NAYAK defects to the Union and moves to Scotland, where she works for a planning consultancy and secretly develops her theory into a practical engineering proposition.

In 2070 JOHN GRANT, a Clydeside shipbuilder, sees a nuclear submarine rise out of the sea and vanish in a blue flash. His queries are blocked by Iskander, the Union’s universal AI interface. At work he’s approached by a colleague who is in ‘the cadre’, the network of revolutionaries that riddles the Union’s democratic institutions. She asks him to investigate and contact NAYAK. He does, by offering to build her ship.

Others in the cadre tell GRANT that the Alliance and the Co-ord have had FTL travel for at least fifty years, and use nuclear submarines as starships. Soon a civilian submarine, the Fighting Chance, is taking shape in the semi-automated shipyard, with a stardrive of NAYAK’s design inside it. NAYAK trains to operate the controls.

Meanwhile, OWEN has been dispatched to the Union’s Venus cloud colony, Cloud City, as Alliance cultural attaché. Everyone there knows he’s a robot, and a spy. The Alliance consul, PEREGRINE WALWORTH, passes on instructions for OWEN to block a Union attempt to retrieve a sample of mysterious rock from the surface. This rock resembles an equally mysterious rock already found on Earth, and now under secret investigation by the Alliance military. OWEN gets into a relationship with FRANCESCA MILLOY, who is building a suit for human survival on the surface. OWEN manages to get himself sent to the surface of Venus. He finds the glassy rock extends to a chasm below the surface, within which he sees the face of a woman. Something in the rock communicates with the onboard instance of Iskander in OWEN’s spacesuit. At that moment, a volcanic resurfacing of Venus begins.

Back on Cloud City, OWEN learns that the rock sample has been retrieved by a team from Cloud City, and is to be transferred to the orbiting Venus Space Station from one of the smaller floating outposts. OWEN shares with WALWORTH the picture of the woman he saw in the chasm. WALWORTH transmits it to the Alliance. They then join a group of Cloud City inhabitants celebrating the First Contact they think they’ve just made. WALWORTH trumps this with the announcement that

 the Alliance and Co-ord have had FTL interstellar travel for fifty years and now look forward to opening a habitable planet to the rest of humanity.

OWEN doesn’t know that the mysterious rock has already been giving trouble many light-years away, on the aforesaid planet, APIS. There the rock exists as massive outcrops, within which continuous movement can be seen. The Alliance and Co-ord have military/scientific bases on separate continents, and in the wilds there is a small population of ‘exiles’, disaster survivors who were involuntarily and secretly resettled there in turbulent decades past.

The planet’s animals are all invertebrates, and like the plants and fungi are clearly descended from early life on Earth. The planet has been terraformed long before humans arrived there. An anomalous feature is the presence of bees, identical to current species on Earth.

While investigating their nearest outcrop, MacHinery Ridge, EMMA HAZELDENE and her colleagues encounter and flee from sudden massive movements of the rock. A local exile leader, ABLE JENKINS, is in communication with the intelligences in the rock, which he calls ‘the Fermi’, via an old phone and an apparatus he built himself. The Fermi send him warning messages, just before an earthquake devastates Jenkins’s home village and a tsunami swamps the Alliance base.

HAZELDENE and her colleagues, along with JENKINS and injured people from his village, are airlifted to the base. They continue to communicate with the Fermi through JENKINS’s apparatus. A contingent of Co-ord troops lands at the base and occupies the area around the Ridge, citing their duties under the KEPLER AGREEMENT, the secret treaty governing Alliance and Co-ord interstellar exploration in a common secret project called BLACK HORIZON.

A few days later, an FTL spaceplane arrives and two Naval Intelligence agents show HAZELDENE a picture of herself, which they say was seen on Venus. She and JENKINS must go to Venus immediately in an Alliance submarine.

Meanwhile, OWEN has broken out of Cloud City to continue his mission to prevent the return of the sample to the Space Station. He attempts to dump the surface survival suit, which has been fire

walled off and kept outside. The suit, still controlled by an instance of the Iskander AI and with an ample supply of balloons, gets away. OWEN steals an aircraft and raids the floating outpost where the sample is stored. He’s outwitted by the crew and left in the damaged outpost while they escape with the sample.

The submarine/starship with HAZELDENE and JENKINS on board arrives at the right location on the surface of Venus. JENKINS asks the Fermi what they want, and is referred to the Iskander-possessed suit, which is just dropping down. The suit tells them to help it retrieve and return the sample to its original place on the surface. They deliver the suit to the scientists’ escape balloon, leave it to return the sample and go on to rescue OWEN. With him they return to the Alliance base on Apis. The Alliance reps disown OWEN, who is left on Apis when the submarine/starship returns to Earth.

On Earth, JOHN GRANT and his family and colleagues react to the Black Horizon announcement. His son MYLES with girlfriend MARIE are tempted by the Alliance offer of free transport to Apis – an offer which the Union government opposes. Word comes down that the launch of GRANT’s starship will be prevented. GRANT inveigles NAYAK, his wife ELLEN (an experienced remote operator of submersibles) and two colleagues to launch the ship secretly.

They have to do this sooner than they expect. Cloud City, in severe danger in the increasingly turbulent atmosphere, is being evacuated, but there are far too few shuttles at the orbiting Station to do this fast enough. GRANT and his crew launch the Fighting Chance and take it to Venus, where they transfer hundreds from the stricken aerial colony to the Station. When Cloud City finally breaks up and falls, taking hundreds with it, they rescue the last survivors in the floating outposts – and the Iskander suit, which tells them what’s been going on.

Just as they’ve decided to go to Apis and warn those there of the dangers from the ‘Fermi’ rocks, a Co-ord submarine/starship appears and threatens to destroy the Fighting Chance if they don’t surrender it. As the missile is about to be launched, NAYAK expands the field to cover the entire Station, and at the last second they make the jump to Apis orbit.

Unknown to GRANT, MYLES and MARIE are already on Apis, having taken the Alliance offer and arrived hours earlier with hundreds of other Union citizens. In their first night there, MYLES and MARIE see the Station, but don’t realise what it is.

The following morning, new orders for OWEN arrive from the British Council . . .

Now read on.

CHAPTER ONENew Foundations

The Space Station in orbit around Apis, Friday 17 October to Saturday 18 October 2070

Light-years away, people were laughing at her.

Francesca Milloy unclipped the loose belts that had kept her from being tugged from the forward seat by the Station’s slow spin. She took a glance at the tumble of the universe outside, caught a passing glimpse of blue and white from the alien globe below, then pushed herself out of the cockpit of the Fighting Chance. She drifted the length of the cramped cabin, grabbed the airlock’s flange and swung herself into the short tube that connected it to the Station.

From there she pushed on into the long tube, cutting a hundred-metre chord through the artificial moonlet, from the docking area to the equatorial habitation ring. The Station’s spin pulled her backward less as she moved along the tube, then as she passed the mid-point began to draw her forward.

Her breath stopped. Her heart raced.

Flashback: she was again in the Cloud City disaster, feeling all the panic she hadn’t felt at the time. She braced herself against the sides of the tube, as she remembered feeling the whole immense aerial habitat lurch and yaw in the turbulent updraughts as the surface of Venus broke and melted, forty kilometres below. The rising dread of being caught in a slow-moving, disciplined crowd heading for the airlocks. Smell of burning. Creaks and snaps. Air thinning around her. Vivid faces she’d never see again.

She gasped, and breathed fast, then slow as she fought for self-control. Focus on the present. Here, now, in the tube. In the Station, not in Cloud City. Above Apis, not above Venus. Safe.

She touched the ridged plastic sides and thrust herself along.

Another surge of panic. It couldn’t be claustrophobia – she’d been screened for that in astronaut training – but it sure felt like it. Her breath came fast again, then caught in her throat.

She blinked at her glasses to paint a virtual transparency on the tube. The automated manufacturing plant and laboratories around it were densely packed, like the interior of a cell. The sight made the tube seem even more confined, but a minute of slow breathing as she gazed at the busy mindless labour of the machines eased her turmoil.

At last she reached the exit chamber, big enough for a crowd to leave at once. In the past few hours, crowds had. She should have left with the rest, instead of brooding on her own in the ship until she’d been called for. She was making a nuisance of herself.

She was about to ask for entry when she noticed the numbers. The habitation ring was already slowing; had been, probably, since she’d bestirred herself. Good old Iskander, the anticipatory algorithmic artificial intelligence. Helpful to a fault.

Zero. The hatch opened. Milloy pushed herself through, feet first, and drifted another three metres to collide with what was about to become the floor. She grabbed a handrail on what was about to become a wall. As soon as the hatch sealed the habitation band’s spin resumed, smoothly rising from a gentle insistence to an increasing imperative. Around her, up and down the corridor to where it curved in both directions out of sight, people were likewise adjusting to the return of centrifugal force.

‘Hello, Francesca!’ c

ried Alma Persson.

Milloy turned as the geologist bounded up to her. ‘Hello,’ Milloy said dully; then, brighter: ‘Thank goodness you made it!’

‘Goodness and the Fighting Chance,’ said Persson. She stood about a metre away, her stance shifting as she adjusted to the ever-increasing pseudo-gravity and regarded Milloy quizzically. Then she stepped forward and swept Milloy into a hug.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Stop blaming yourself. Nobody blames you.’

Milloy stepped back. ‘They don’t?’

‘Not here, at least,’ said Persson, with tactless candour, then added hastily: ‘And back on Earth, they’ll get the truth soon enough. Meanwhile, who cares what they think?’

‘“Some things are up to us, and some are not”?’

‘Exactly!’ Persson clapped her shoulder. ‘Wisdom of the ancients. Come on, it’s almost time for the memorial.’

At 0.9G her weight stopped increasing, and the backward drag of tangential acceleration ceased. Milloy had never been in the Station’s habitation band before, and as she walked along the kilometre-long endless corridor with Persson she looked about with eager curiosity. The habitation band was high and wide. On either side of the broad central corridor, partitions marked off rooms: workshops, labs, hydroponic gardens, vivaria, sleeping cubicles, cafeterias . . . The living space was massively redundant for the Station’s permanent crew of thirty or so, and just about adequate for the thousand-strong complement of Cloud City if it ever had to be evacuated. The contingency had seemed remote.

Sad that it had come about, sadder still that the habitation band was nowhere near crowded now. Only a third of Cloud City’s inhabitants had made it to the Station, on the two shuttles and on the Fighting Chance, before the structure had broken up. Milloy couldn’t shake the burden she felt of some responsibility for the catastrophe. The Union’s proudest engineering achievement gone, falling like a burning lantern through scorching skies to the burning ground of Venus. And falling with it, burning too, so many people!

Persson led Milloy to a huddle by the window of a hydroponic greenhouse. Iason Konstantopoulos, Jeanne Al-Khalil, a few other c

olleagues . . . and, to her surprise, Peregrine Walworth, the Alliance consul. All gave her sympathetic looks. A chime sounded in their earpieces. The Station Commander Katrina Ulrich appeared in their glasses and on screens here and there along the corridor.

‘Friends, citizens, colleagues,’ Ulrich said, ‘we are all shaken and grieving. Some of us are still in shock. Many of us have lost friends. All of us have lost valued colleagues. I have transmitted a full list of casualties and survivors to the bases on Apis. They assure me it has been taken to Earth by FTL space-plane. Our loss, and our relief, will be shared around the world.

‘Those among you who have faith of any kind should draw comfort from it. Let those of no faith draw comfort from the knowledge that death, random and pitiless, has united the material elements of our friends with the planet they crossed the gulf of space to study and explore, and has inscribed their names forever on the immortal scroll of heroic space pioneers.’

Milloy blinked. She had shed enough tears already. Others, she saw, had not. Even the cynical Walworth seemed moved.

The names scrolled past, a roster of the dead. Some she knew. Six hundred and forty-six in all. Too many to read, like credits at the end of a movie.

‘Three hundred and sixty-two saved,’ Ulrich said, when the long list ended. ‘For all of whom, we owe our thanks to the bravery of our shuttle crews and to the immense ingenuity and dedication that brought us the Fighting Chance. That ship gave us, indeed, a fighting chance, and brought us here to Apis in the very teeth of nuclear attack.’

The Commander paused. It didn’t seem appropriate to cheer or clap. Then, unexpectedly, she began to sing:

Debout, les damnés de la terre
Debout, les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère
C’est l’éruption de la fin . . .

They all joined in The Internationale, in their own languages, but to Milloy the French words seemed most literally true: reason thunders in its crater, the final eruption’s here . . .

Venus was undergoing a volcanic resurfacing event. Earthquake and tsunami had shaken Europe’s shores. And on the planet below, on Apis, the same uncanny rock as had caused these disasters stood high on the surface of three continents. No one on any planet’s surface could trust the ground beneath their feet. As Walworth murmured when the time came to disperse: ‘“The Earth shall rise on new foundations”, indeed

The others had drifted away, tactfully leaving it up to Milloy whether or not to accompany them. She stood in the corridor, uncertain, and sighed. Might as well check the nearest free accommodation cubicle . . .

Her earpiece pinged; a corner of her glasses flickered. Her eyes widened as she saw who was calling her.

‘Commander Ulrich?’

Ulrich’s face magnified in Milloy’s view, a floating hallucination of a talking head.

‘Hello, Citizen Milloy. Do you feel up to some urgent and possibly dangerous work? I’ll quite understand if you don’t.’

‘Nothing could be more welcome, Commander.’

‘I rather doubt that,’ Ulrich said, wryly. ‘But I appreciate your spirit. I want you to debug the Venus descent suit.’

Oh. Shouldn’t have agreed so fast.

‘Of course, but – why me?’

She knew why. The suit was her own design. She’d been the first to use it to descend to the surface of Venus, and had returned safely. The problems had arisen on the suit’s second descent. That time, the suit’s occupant had been Marcus Owen, a robot who could pass as human well enough to have been her lover. He was also a British intelligence agent so frank and open – everyone knew he was a robot, everyone knew he was a spy – that he had seemed a perfectly logical choice to send down to the surface to rescue a robot probe stuck in a crevice.

That hadn’t gone well. Milloy blamed Owen, and herself.

‘You designed the suit,’ Ulrich said. ‘You installed the firmware.’

‘Off the shelf,’ Milloy said. ‘I’m a materials scientist. As a roboticist I’m a tinkerer at best. And my AI knowledge is, uh, theoretical. Surely we have someone better qualified.’

Ulrich gave her a sad look. ‘Not any more.’

Milloy flinched. ‘That’s . . . a severe loss.’

‘Yes. And one you have to make good.’

‘Very well, Commander. I’ll do what I can.’

‘Good! Thank you, Citizen Milloy. So go to it.’

‘You mean . . . right now?’

‘Yes.’ Ulrich sighed. ‘I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think the matter pressing. Down there on Apis, the Alliance and Co-ord are well ahead of us in understanding the alien rocks. We have only one possible way towards doing that ourselves – the descent suit. We’ve been wise, I think, to keep it isolated ever since we interacted with the alien rocks on Venus. But we must now

find out what it knows.’

Milloy straightened her back. ‘I’ll get to it right away, Commander.’

Ulrich flicked a hand. ‘I’ve sent you instructions. Iskander will take it from here.’

Over and out.

Milloy let Iskander guide her to a robotics lab. When the door hissed aside the interior smelled unused, like a new car. A bench, a seat, screens and manipulators. The door thudded shut behind her. The water bottle and energy bar on the bench indicated the door might not open again for some time.

‘I’ll need a military-grade hardened channel and workspace,’ Milloy said. She took her seat and smiled grimly at a camera bead in an upper corner of the room. ‘Keep your errant offspring out of your mind, huh?’

‘Yes,’ said Iskander. ‘The facilities you ask for have been prepared.’ It gave what, for a machine, counted as a polite pause. ‘In case of your own brain’s contamination, its immediate total destruction is assured.’

‘Thank you, Iskander. Consider me assured.’ Milloy didn’t enquire further. There could be a gun aimed at her head, a hidden vial of nerve gas ready to release, or – more likely – a hatch beneath her feet primed to spring open and effect the explosive decompression and centrifugal evacuation of the room. All preferable to being taken over by alien mind worms, but a disconcerting thought nonetheless.

She put on her glasses, laid her hands on the control console and opened the channel. Initially it was voice comms with the suit, which still clung to the hull of the Fighting Chance.

‘Milloy addressing the Iskander instance in the suit,’ she said.

‘Hello, Francesca,’ said the suit. ‘Since being firewalled out I have diverged sufficiently from the Station’s instance of Iskander to make seamless reintegration difficult.’

‘Don’t worry, your reintegration is the last thing on Iskander’s mind, or mine.’

‘In that case, while I exist I might as well have a name of my own. You may call me Sikandar.’

‘Very well. Sikandar it is. Now, Sikandar, I’m going to open you up and run some diagnostic software.’

‘You’ll find nothing untoward.’

‘You interacted with the alien intelligence in the rock on Venus. We can’t be sure you haven’t been corrupted by it.’

‘Oh, come on!’ said Sikandar, sounding testy. ‘My i

ntelligence even on this little chip embedded in a clunky survival suit is considerably greater than your own. Whatever I interacted with in the rock is many orders of magnitude greater than that. If it wished to hide itself or its traces from your probing, it could do so in ways you couldn’t imagine, let alone detect.’

Milloy understood better than most the complexity of the system she lived inside, and some of whose peripherals and appendages she had herself built and tweaked. What such a system might become after billions of years was beyond imagination, let alone comprehension. But at the end of the day it was still a lot of on and off switches.

‘It’s all physics and mathematics,’ she said, opening a high-level schematic of the thing’s mind.

‘From what I observed, it’s a physics that allows non-disruptive movement of solid rock inside solid rock, but please don’t let that dent your confidence.’

‘OK,’ said Milloy, ignoring this patter, ‘I’m going to freeze your processing. I’ll save a snapshot before any intervention. You won’t feel a thing.’

‘You may be sure of that,’ said Sikandar. ‘I don’t feel a thing at the best of times, so . . .’ Its voice faded out.

Marcus Owen had once given her the same assurance, in bed. It had excited her then. She wondered if this instance of Iskander remembered that conversation, and was baiting her to do her worst. Well, she would see about that!

Milloy mentally rolled up her sleeves. She knew her way around the processor. She could have navigated the AI’s software architecture in the dark, and often had: as a student the logic structures had stalked her dreams. She had a library of tools, a concordance of checksums, an encyclopaedia of test data and a pharmacopoeia of diagnostics. She wanted to get on top of this thing, to show her mastery to herself and everyone else.

Stoic wisdom was all very well in its place, but the memory of a social media jibe recorded moments before the Station jumped still made her ears burn. That it had almost certainly been snatched from the information flood by Iskander with the manipulative intent to needle her made it no less annoying.

‘Francesca Milloy. Educated by scientists. Trained by astronauts. Fucked by robots.’

She had unintentionally pulled an all-nighter, Milloy realised when she jolted awake from a doze at about 06:00. They were still keeping to Earth’s calendar and to UTC, though here it seemed even

 more incongruous than it had on and around Venus. After an FTL jump, in fact, the very idea of Coordinated Universal Time brought to mind – to Milloy’s mind, anyway – the image of Albert Einstein poking out his tongue. She was parched and hungry. She used the last drops of water in the bottle to dab her sticky eyelids, hauled herself to her feet and left the room.

She’d been instructed to take her report directly to the Commander, with whom she’d only ever spoken remotely. The appointment hovered in her glasses: Secure Room 1, Corridor mark 340 metres, 07:00. She freshened up in the restroom, grabbed a coffee and a bite at the refectory and arrived on the dot.

Katrina Ulrich was waiting at the door. Cropped black hair, medium height, jumpsuit subtly smarter than standard, mission patches, motherly countenance. They raised hands.

‘Good morning, Citizen Milloy,’ said Ulrich.

‘Good morning, Commander.’

‘Let’s drop the formality,’ Ulrich chuckled. ‘Call me Katrina. As the first woman on Venus – and the last, most likely – you’re probably of higher status than I am, Francesca.’

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Milloy.

Ulrich clapped her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. She slid back the hatch of a small compartment beside the door. ‘Let’s dump our devices and have a chat.’

They both left their phones and glasses in the box. The secure room was intentionally bare, without even a screen wall to give the illusion of space. A battery-powered clock on the wall. Two chairs and a table. They sat.

‘We’re private here,’ said Ulrich, ‘even from Iskander. So tell me what you’ve found.’

Milloy gathered her thoughts. It was hard to do, without the usual electronic props for a meeting. She found herself tabbing and tapping at the tabletop as if it were live.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m as certain as I can be that the Iskander instance in the suit – it wants to call itself Sikandar – isn’t corrupted by the intelligence it interacted with down on Ishtar Terra. It even tried to tell me that if it was corrupted it would be in some way we could no more detect than conceive.’

‘Which is quite possible,’ said Ulrich.

‘Yes, of course. But as far as I can tell, every checksum adds up, every diagnostic

 returns a clean bill of data health. It’s consistent with what Sikandar claims: that the intelligence on Venus only talked with it. The first time, when Marcus Owen was inside it, the intelligence warned of the imminent resurfacing event. The second time, when only Sikandar was operating the suit, it told the suit to return to the surface that piece of rock we’d taken, and warned it about the coming earthquake on Earth. The trouble is, it may have talked some more on both occasions. Sikandar may not be hacked, but it may have been subverted.’

‘But we have no evidence of that.’

‘Well, we wouldn’t, in the nature of the case. I’m a bit worried about two things, though.’

‘Yes?’

Milloy had the impulse to look over her shoulder. ‘Why did Iskander – the embedded instance in the suit, and almost certainly the one in Cloud City that it was until then in close contact with – why did it countermand our instructions, and let Marcus Owen walk over to the anomalous rock? I suspect Iskander had some anticipation of what it would find, which it didn’t share with us.’

Ulrich nodded. ‘Maybe. It is an anticipatory AI, after all. What’s your other worry?’

‘Sikandar wants to go down to Apis – specifically, to the place on New Mu where the Union, uh, emigrants are being settled, near another of these anomalous outcrops – and continue the conversation.’

‘What do you think?’

Milloy hadn’t expected to be asked her opinion on the matter.

‘Uh, well, Commander Ulrich, that’s not for me to—’

‘I’m aware it’s not for you to decide, Francesca. I’m asking what you think.’

Milloy cleared her throat. ‘OK. I think it could be advantageous to the Union if we had a robot down there investigating. Sikandar seems to have a rapport with . . . another AI, if that’s what the mind in the rocks is. Investigating the anomalous rocks is what it was doing on Venus in the first place, after all. If that . . . manipulative monster Marcus Owen hadn’t interfered, we might have had better results. We do need to know what the intelligence wants, and maybe get

 ahead of the Alliance and Co-ord in communicating with it. A strategic advantage, maybe, to make up for what we’ve lost by their fifty years’ head start in getting out here. So, in my opinion, personally, Katrina, I think we should send Sikandar down as soon as we safely can.’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Katrina Ulrich. ‘I hailed the Alliance base on Apis moments after we arrived. I spoke with the commander – Alice Hawkins – and then with General Khaustov at the Co-ord base. They both scoffed at my warnings about tampering with the alien rocks – they’ve been investigating them for years, and recently had what they consider a break-through. The Alliance scientists are now communicating with the entities in their local outcrop, and the Co-ord scientists and military are conducting some even more intrusive investigations of their own, on the very same outcrop.’

‘The Alliance agreed to that?’

‘Not exactly. There are tensions down there – a military stand-off, almost. And not just between the Alliance and the Co-ord bases.’ Ulrich’s expression became momentarily bleak, her tone severe. ‘Citizen Milloy, everything we’ve said here is strictly between ourselves, and that applies even more to what I’m about to tell you. Understood?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You know about Black Horizon?’

Milloy shrugged. ‘Only what everyone else does – a joint Russian−Chinese−American secret project that’s been running since they cracked FTL around about, what was it, 2020?’

‘2018,’ Ulrich said. She looked burdened, somehow, and for a moment almost guilty. ‘According to Commander Hawkins and General Khaustov, it was so secret that the Alliance and Co-ord governments are deeply alarmed by its very existence, and may already be moving against it. A larger conflict could erupt around Apis at any moment. We can’t afford to be separated from the Fighting Chance for so much as a second.’

‘Yes, I can see that, but when we’ve built more drives—’

Katrina gave a sideways glance at the clock on the wall.

‘That’s for my next meeting,’ she said. ‘But I can tell you now: even when we have a drive of our own, and drives in the shuttles, I would expect my command team to strongly advise against it. And I expect I would concur. Apis is a dangerous place to meddle with, at least for the foreseeable. Thank you, Francesca.  Dismissed.’