Ex Machina Read online

  “Starbase reports all moorings clear, and wishes us fair sailing.”

  “Acknowledge starbase, with our thanks, Ms. Uhura. Mr. Sulu, thrusters ahead.”

  “Thrusters ahead, aye.”

  “Departure angle on viewer.”

  “Departure angle, aye.” Starbase 22 appeared on-screen, a modular structure of branching cylinders, backlit by the system’s small orange star and growing progressively smaller. The other docked ships blinked their running lights in tribute to the Enterprise.

  “Viewer ahead.”

  “Viewer ahead, aye.” Now Kirk took in the forward view, dominated by the swath of the Milky Way crossing the viewer from end to end, sprinkled liberally with the bright blue stars of the Sco-Cen Cluster, and highlighted with the faint wisps of the Azure Nebula off to the right. There was no visible sign of the two powerful, warlike empires whose territory filled much of this field of view, or of the borders which they fought so fiercely to defend or expand. Kirk remembered reading the words of twentieth-century astronauts who believed that war and strife would vanish if people could see the Earth from space and realize how illusory their borders were. In interstellar space the borders were even more invisible, but of course it hadn’t proved to be so easy. War could be overcome, Kirk knew, but not by looking at the scenery. You had to change your internal landscape to pull it off, and that was much harder to see clearly.

  Why, he wondered, had the Yonadan settlers turned to violence? Was it truly in the name of that discredited computer god of theirs? Or was that just an excuse for something else? After ten thousand years with a machine regulating their very thoughts, keeping them placid and controlled on pain of death, were their long-repressed aggressions simply asserting their freedom?

  Either way, you won’t find the answers hanging around here, he reminded himself. “Impulse power, Mr. Sulu. Ahead warp point five.”

  “Aye, sir.” The ship surged with power, and in almost no time Sulu was reporting, “On course, sir. Holding at warp point five.”

  Kirk nodded, impressed at the Enterprise’s swift acceleration. The new impulse engine design used a low-level warp field to reduce the ship’s inertial mass, letting it maneuver at sublight like a ship a fraction of its size. But Kirk found it awkward to hear impulse speeds referred to as fractional warp factors, which didn’t literally correspond to the speed in any case. That was a bit of terminology that he didn’t expect would last long in practical use.

  He tapped the intercom. “Kirk to engineering. Scotty, assuming you’ve got the engines put back together, how far out from the sun do we need to be to engage warp drive?”

  “You can do it anytime, sir,” Scott replied. “Now that they’re properly calibrated, there’s no risk of field disruption from local gravity sources. Ye won’t be seein’ any wormholes outside o’ the apples in the botanical garden.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Scott, for that… appetizing image. Mr. Sulu—ahead warp factor seven.”

  “Aye, sir.” Sulu pushed forward on the manual throttle lever—a bit showy of him to rely on it instead of the computer controls, Kirk thought, but given Sulu’s reflexes, he knew they were in for a smooth ride. “Warp point six… warp point seven…”

  “Never mind, Mr. Sulu.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The subsonic rumble of the ship intensified, lifted, like a racehorse’s body tensing at the gate. Below, Kirk knew, matter and antimatter surged, annihilated into energetic plasma that poured across the massive warp coils, creating the precise patterns of mass and energy required to knead three dimensions of space and six of subspace into unnatural, improbable, and very useful shapes. Gravity-lensed starlight erupted in a prismatic burst once the warp field was fully formed, then appeared to streak backward impossibly fast as the field cycled and played with the light. Soon the field stabilized and locked into place with another prismatic burst.

  “Warp seven, Captain.”

  “Very good, Mr. Sulu.” And it was. For all its distortions of physics, all the loopholes it had to take advantage of to bend the laws of the universe to their limits, there was just something that felt so right about being on a ship in warp. It was something he’d been without for far too long, and he couldn’t imagine ever giving it up again. “Steady as she goes.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The tide is chaos to the ear, / A wild and ever-changing song.

  And yet each time that it goes out, / We know it will come in again,

  As regular as beating hearts, / And nourish us another day.

  The changes are but raucous lies. / The sameness is the stuff of life.

  —Traditional Megarite liturgy

  THE HARDEST THING about being on the Enterprise was how dry it always was.

  It wasn’t just the lack of humidity, Specialist 2/C Spring Rain on Still Water reflected as she hurried to Mr. Spock’s science briefing, her wide flat feet slapping loudly against the deck. Certainly that wasn’t pleasant, requiring her to wear a skintight, hooded “drysuit” most of the time, and periodically coat her face and hands with a moisturizing compound to keep her thick, knobbly brown skin from drying and cracking. True, the emollient’s effects lasted longer than a good wallow in the mud, but it didn’t feel nearly as good. That was what Spring Rain missed the most about Megara—simply having large quantities of moisture around, a place to immerse herself, whether in mud or water. Just having the sound and smell of a river or sea nearby. Would it hurt them so much, she wondered, to put at least a little trickling stream along an edge of the corridor? Maybe have fish tanks periodically placed along the walls? Maybe then she wouldn’t feel so thirsty all the time.

  But Spring Rain wasn’t about to complain. She would never give any sign that she couldn’t pull this off, never give the slightest bit of ground to the naysayers back home who’d insisted that Megarites didn’t belong in space, and that such chores as exploration were unworthy of a female.

  Yes, it had its share of discomforts. Yes, it took an effort for her even to survive here, away from the algae and krill of her home waters. Without a large enough body of water to swim through and strain with her baleen vents, she had to subsist on nutrient injections, at least until Dr. Chapel could devise a better mechanism. She couldn’t even singspeak properly here, with no other Megarite voices to harmonize with—only the staccato, unmelodic sounds produced by species with mouths, and by the voder that stomped over her song with its discordant translations. Uhura had done her best, and was as close to a true singer as any non-Megarite on this ship, but it still wasn’t the same, and every conversation felt incomplete, unresolved at a spiritual depth.

  But none of that mattered. She wouldn’t let it matter. Not if the alternative meant keeping her people stuck on one world, no matter how wet and beautiful. Not if it meant keeping them restricted within their confines of thought and aspiration, cut off from the wondrous diversity of ideas and knowledge which embodied the Federation. It had been two sixty-fours of years since the first Denobulan traders had brought the knowledge of other worlds, yet still Megara had not joined the Federation, had never established a presence in space beyond the occasional diplomatic envoy, and had never been represented in the Federation Starfleet—until a young female named Spring Rain on Still Water, enchanted since childhood by the tales brought by alien traders, had looked at the adult life her clan had laid out for her and thought, Is this all I am to be? Is there nothing more?

  Of course, part of succeeding at her goal was showing up at Mr. Spock’s briefings on time. And her large, thick-limbed frame wasn’t built for running; she was more graceful in the water. Plus, her quarters were at the rear of Deck 6, too far away from the science complex that occupied the forward quadrant of Deck 7.

  Finally she reached the complex and made her way to the large briefing room located at its center, linking the various departments’ labs together and facilitating the kind of cross-disciplinary communication which Mr. Spock believed was essential for scientific progress. Her entra
nce interrupted Spock in the middle of a sentence, and her efforts to make her way to the Planetary Sciences table without stepping on any of the others’ small and fragile feet (unsuccessfully, as it proved) further disrupted things. She endured Spock’s reprimand stoically, knowing it was her own fault for taking so long with her layers—emollient, drysuit, uniform. She had to get better at that.

  But it was time to listen, for Spock was resuming his briefing. “As I was saying… our earliest knowledge of the Fabrini came from a sublight interstellar probe discovered by the Intrepid nine years ago, during a survey of the Scorpius-Centaurus OB Association. As many of you know, this cluster has been the source of numerous supernovae over the past twenty million years, due to its abundance of hot, short-lived stars. Analysis of the probe’s course and the radiation damage to its hull suggested that it had originated in the vicinity of a Sco-Cen supernova which occurred approximately ten thousand two hundred years ago.” A graphic showing the location appeared on the screen behind Spock. “This was confirmed by the translation of the probe’s contents. Its creators, the Fabrini, had known their star was dying and had sent out probes containing cultural databanks, in the hope that their achievements would not be forgotten. In the years following, several other Fabrini probes were discovered by Starfleet crews.”

  “They couldn’t have helped knowing their star was dying,” spoke up one of the sensor analysts, though like Spring Rain he depended on the translator to render his high-pitched, piping speech into Standard. “It would’ve already been a red giant when they evolved.” Hrrii’ush Uuvu’it was a Betelgeusian, tall and blue-skinned, with ears not unlike Spock’s and a triangular brown muzzle containing an upper, beaklike speaking mouth and a lower, vicious-looking eating mouth. He knew whereof he spoke; his people had long since abandoned their homeworld in the Betelgeuse sector to live on ships and space habitats, once they’d learned that Betelgeuse itself was on the verge of supernova.

  “More like when they settled,” interposed Jade Dinh from the Anthropology and Archaeology table. “A phenotype that humanlike couldn’t have evolved there naturally. They must be part of the Sargonian Diaspora, so they would’ve settled Fabrina less than a million years ago.”

  “We don’t know it was Sargon’s people,” said Uuvu’it. “It’s only hearsay.”

  “The archaeology bears it out.”

  “Only that some race settled across space, built livable worlds around young giant stars like Rigel and Altair, then lost their technology and had to start over again. But why pick one on the brink of death, with only a million years or less to go instead of hundreds of millions?”

  “I thought the Sargonians seeded the Vulcanoid races,” interposed Bolek, the Tellarite biologist.

  “In any case,” Spock spoke up, getting them back on focus, “we have no knowledge of the Fabrini’s origins, only their end. They remained only an archaeological curiosity until stardate 5476, when the Enterprise encountered this body on the outskirts of the Daran star system.” The view-screen showed a large, vaguely octahedral asteroid. Uuvu’it leaned across to make a wager with Dinh about the origins of the Fabrini, but Spock glared them into silence before laying out the basics of the encounter with the asteroid-ship Yonada. It was a prosaic account, giving Spring Rain no sense of the feel of the incident, the timbre of each participant, the harmony and counterpoint of their worldviews. It wasn’t just the Vulcan’s matter-of-fact manner, though; these words, these isolated bits of sound most species used, simply didn’t have the necessary fluidity to convey such meanings. How did they ever understand one another?

  “The previously discovered Fabrini probes made no mention of the Yonada project,” Spock went on, “although their language banks do contain the word yonada, meaning ‘hope.’ Apparently, construction of the probes was halted once the decision was made to dedicate their resources to Yonada’s construction—which surely would have required all the available resources of their civilization.

  “Yonada’s shell is three hundred twenty-six kilometers in diameter at its widest axis, with an internal core three hundred and seven kilometers in diameter. The surface of the core is terraformed to resemble a planet’s surface, with the shell interior projecting a simulated sky. The shell’s supports are camouflaged as high mountains.

  “The probes revealed that the Fabrini had lived underground for generations as their swelling star rendered the surface uninhabitable. Thus, it does seem odd that they would go to the trouble of simulating a surface and sky. Apparently the Fabrini did not wish the people of Yonada to know they were not on a planet—perhaps to prevent psychological trauma to the hundreds of generations that would grow up knowing that their destination would not be reached in their lifetime. And perhaps they also wished to give the Yonadi a respite from their underground conditions, a respite unavailable to those on Fabrina. The Yonadan surface does have livable conditions, though it is barren; and many Yonadi we spoke to stated that they occasionally spent time there for recreational or ceremonial activities. Perhaps this was encouraged to reinforce the illusion of a planetary existence.” How cruel, Spring Rain thought, to remind them of their imprisonment by letting them glimpse an illusion of freedom. It was much like the liberties her family had tried to offer her to dissuade her from leaving home—slight variations in convention that would only have made her feel her confinement more acutely. But at least the Yonadi hadn’t known there was an alternative.

  “The gravity,” Spock was now saying, “is considerably greater than would be expected in a body of this type. But there is no evidence that the Fabrini ever developed artificial gravity technology, as can be surmised from the crude fission thrusters employed for Yonada’s propulsion. The source of the gravity appears to be an inner core of collapsed matter with a density of some four hundred grams per cubic centimeter. We believe the Fabrini must have collapsed an asteroid using shaped antimatter explosions, then bombarded it with carbon-coated projectiles in order to coat it in a layer of diamond, the only substance available to their science with sufficient tensile strength to prevent its reexpansion.” Many people fidgeted and muttered at that, and Spring Rain could understand why. It was a dangerous way to achieve artificial gravity. The Fabrini must have truly been desperate, to undertake the construction of this massive starship with such limited technology. Couldn’t they have waited another century or two? But no—Spring Rain thought about how long her own people had waited, and understood the dangers of thinking that way… especially if your star was about to blow up on you. Even without hearing the tone color of their experience in Spock’s words, she could deduce how it would sound.

  “Significantly,” Spock went on, “the gravity at Yonada’s inner surface is point eight-six g’s, virtually identical to that of Daran IV, their intended destination. Clearly they had advance knowledge of this world’s specific conditions, and designed Yonada to prepare their people for inhabiting it.”

  Spring Rain had a thought, and sang it. Her translator rendered it thus:

  “Bright messengers go sailing forth

  Like branches on the ebbing tide,

  And sing of distant shores, so that

  The sailors know what garb to wear?”

  Spock raised a brow, and moved his mouth slightly. If Spring Rain had learned mouth expressions correctly, it may have been a smile, but that didn’t fit what she’d heard about Vulcans. Some of the others seemed surprised by it as well. “If I understand you correctly, you suggest that the Fabrini obtained advance knowledge of Daran IV from their probes.” Spring Rain nodded, or came as close to it as her thick neck allowed. Spock seemed apologetic as he went on. “This is not possible, since the probes’ propulsive capabilities were even less advanced than those of Yonada, and even with their vastly lighter payload would have taken longer to cover the thirty-two light-year distance to the Daran system.”

  “Then on those distant shores are folk

  Who send forth their own songs, which swim

  Unto the
sailors’ ears and sing

  Of how the land does lie.”

  “Correct,” Spock said with a mouth-gesture similar to the previous one. “Evidently the Fabrini gained their knowledge of the Daran system through radio communication with the Shesshran of Daran V.” He switched the viewer to a display of Daran V’s indigenous species, a gorgeous, winged race with iridescent skin and spindle-shaped heads. “The Shesshran are currently at an interplanetary stage, but archaeological studies have confirmed that they had a similarly advanced civilization some ten millennia ago. This earlier civilization evidently made contact with the Fabrini and invited them to settle the uninhabited fourth planet in the system. The Shesshran themselves—or whatever they may have called themselves at the time—had no use for it, since they are adapted to a pressure of 3.4 atmospheres and a gravity of 1.65 g’s.

  “However, when the radiation front from the Fabrina supernova hit, it apparently ravaged the Shesshran’s electronic infrastructure and caused severe ecological damage, either beyond what the Shesshran had expected or beyond what they had been capable of protecting against. Ironically, the very civilization that offered the Fabrini refuge from the death of their sun was wiped out by its aftereffects. The Shesshran were reduced to a primitive, subsistence-level existence, and have only now recovered to their presupernova level.” Oh, if only he could sing it! What a grand and moving tragedy it must have been. How unjust it seemed to feel so little of it in the tale, to have to empathize from such a great remove.

  “However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. To return to the subject of Yonada…” The Vulcan carried on, putting up graphics of the asteroid-ship as he spoke—cross sections, surface maps, geological analyses.