Second Contact Read online

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Second Contact

  Digitesque, Vol. 3

  Guerric Haché

  For Mimi

  & for my mother, father, and sister

  Foreword

  I’m still not sure how I feel about the stars.

  Growing up, we would look to the sky and see them there, dwarfed by the ring and the moon, driven into hiding every day by the sun. There was something out there, but nobody quite knew what it was, and it certainly never seemed important. After all, nobody could reach the stars to find out.

  It turned out that wasn’t true. It also turned out the stars weren’t so different from what we already knew, aside from their being on the other side of the sky. Why should they be, after all? We’re all made of the same stuff.

  Isavel told me once that she met Ada twice - first as a stranger, second as a friend. She never let on exactly when that second moment happened, but when it did, they met on new terms and saw the same person in a different way. Or perhaps the way they had seen each other all along, but with more honestly, and less fear.

  Sometimes I wonder whether we met the stars a second time in much the same way. Not at first - reacquaintance is often rough. But when we did accept that the black and the signal fires were waiting for us, and we took the plunge, it wasn’t frightening or confusing the way first times usually are. We were ready, and open. Maybe, deep down, we never quite forgot our first time among stars.

  Certainly, the stars themselves had never forgotten us.

  Chapter 1

  Gods.

  Isavel looked at the stars, the moon, the glittering ring. She should feel they were watching her, guiding her, doing something .

  She felt nothing.

  Acting on the orders of an ancient golem whose entire existence seemed to be a string of lies, Isavel had almost come unconscionably, incomprehensibly close to destroying the afterlife itself. Venshi’s plan had failed, but she had been scheming for centuries. None of the humans around her had seen the creature for what she really was. None of these gods-fearing people had even seemed to wonder.

  After Isavel died, after she was reborn, after she burst out bloody and screaming from that open-air burial, one of the first things she had seen was that ring. Steel and starlight said to encircle the entire world and house all the gods of Earth. She had been certain her death and life were their doing.

  Then she had eaten a dragon’s heart and felt its fire in her chest. She had done that, not the gods. She had found her way, had had the thought, had torn through the flesh with her teeth. She had done all of that. Where were the gods?

  If they were not there empowering her in her darkest moments, there was no reason to believe they had ever been with her.

  There was no reason to believe they cared.

  She was the Saint Herald of the Gods. She might as well be nothing.

  Now high priestess Mother Jera was whispering words of war in her ears. The old woman’s voice sharpened knives every time she claimed the gods’ will - and that was the truth, wasn’t it? The war wasn’t the will of the gods. It was her will, and the will of the jittery, slighted people who looked up to her.

  Which left Isavel with nothing. No explanation for why she hadn’t died with the rest of her kin. No higher purpose. No role to play in something greater. Just her and the world.

  Gravel crackled under soft shoes as someone approached behind her. She could tell from everything - the smell, the sounds of breathing, the pressure on the gravel, the rustling of the clothes - that it was Hail. Self-appointed bodyguard, repentant killer, some sort of friend. Isavel had precious few of those, either.

  “Hail. Are you ready for this?”

  Silence, the maddening silence of a woman who should long ago have grown used to Isavel’s preternatural senses. She even heard her nod through the rustling of her hair. “Yes. I swore I would help you.”

  She stood up. It was difficult; her heart was still tethered to this place, an ill-advised hope born to a strange city, under the eyes of gods she had once thought ruled the world. But after weeks of waiting, watching, listening, and praying, she had come to the only possible conclusion.

  Gods were irrelevant. Perhaps they were even powerless, aside from their voice and the weight that carried. All she had was herself, and the wide open world beyond the walls of Glass Peaks.

  As she stood, a shape crossed the temple roof, soft paws barely disturbing the gravel as its bushy ringed tail beat against the shrubs and grasses growing wherever enough dirt had built up. The red panda that followed her around the temple stood up against her leg and chirped, as though begging her to stay. She scratched the back of its skull and shook her head. “No.”

  Hail was looking out into the city, starlight dancing against the dark glass of the towers. Their way forward was unclear. Isavel didn’t know what she was leaving. People in the city still raged for the blood of the ghosts and the outers, though in Isavel’s mind the threat had quieted. She had seen the face of what they feared, and in Ada Liu she saw nothing alien to the contours of her mind.

  That would change if the people of the city provoked Ada, but if that was their will, so be it. Let them be fools. The gods would do nothing, and Isavel would do nothing. Her responsibility was to herself, first and foremost. To find a place in herself where she might plant a seed of peace, nurture it with a ray of hope. She was done losing; it was time to build.

  She picked up the red panda and turned him around, pointing his snout away from her and letting him go again. She stepped towards Hail, her feet quietly slipping across the gravel, the tension and fear of being watched still alive and chilling in her spine. She didn’t want to be questioned.

  Hail saw her eagerness and reached for her shoulder. “Have you decided where you want to go?”

  She had not. Confronted with the thousand paths forking out through the forest ahead of her, she found it easier to invent something on the spot. Maybe it would stick. “South. Sajuana. I want to see if I can find my mother’s family.”

  Hail nodded, old shadows crossing her face. She was herself from near Fogpoint, which lay along the coast in the same direction, and she had left little but bad memories in that place. It was perhaps a cruel thing to ask her to return, but she pressed her lips and nodded. “It will be a long march.”

  Everything was. “Good thing I won’t be alone.”

  It was not difficult to slip out of the temple at night, when everyone was asleep. They passed rooms filled with priests and pilgrims, and the coders as well, many of whom had stayed in Glass Peaks with their ailing Elder Tan. He claimed he wanted to be present if the ghosts returned, to help, but privately it was known that he had entered his dying days and could not travel. Isavel tried to imagine the day her own age caught up to her, her health suddenly failing, her body crumpling in on itself. It was always fast, unexpected, with few warnings but a few years’ whitening of the hair.

  Try as she might, she could not imagine she would live long enough for old age to take her to Elysium.

  They threw on cloaks as they left, pulling the hoods close around their faces. Isavel’s ears perked up whene
ver sounds seemed to change around them, waiting for any sign they had been spotted, but nobody expected their Saint Herald to disappear into the night. It was much harder to see the unexpected.

  They exited the city’s western gate and began to climb through the barely-maintained ruins that let to a great bridge spanning the inlet south of the city. Generations of plant life had taken root, grown old, died, and decomposed on these ruins, a thick brown layer of earth seeping into the ancient architecture and almost entirely masking the memory of what had once been its true nature.

  They stood on the edge of the bridge and looked south. She took a deep breath, trying not to let on that she knew Hail was watching her. The hunter was concerned about her mental health, and had tried to get her to see a medic. She had tried to inquire about why it seemed Isavel had grown colder towards the gods. Isavel had told her the truth, but she wasn’t sure the answers had stuck.

  She stepped onto the bridge. Hail followed. As they passed a watcher, its silvery metal shell glinting in the blue light of its own heart, she tried to imagine what the world to the south was like. Her mother had told her story after story, regaling her childhood self with tales of the winding adventure that had brought her so far north of her homeland. Isavel couldn’t see such a future for herself either, any more than she could see herself growing old and frail. It seems too unreal.

  As she walked across the bridge, she looked south-west, to the hilly wood jutting towards the sea, to the rolling forested hills behind it. There was an island, out there. An island with a city. A city with a woman.

  None of the futures of those she knew seemed real to her. But she could so easily imagine herself stepping into that city, and finding Ada in the middle of a city square, waiting for her.

  Ada stood in the middle of the city square. It was dark, starlit, almost entirely empty. A few humans - ghosts, really - floated through the city, but they barely seem real. They didn’t belong. They should be with the outers, and the rest of the ghosts, in the ziggurat behind her. Everybody was there, as the final preparations were made for the transmission.

  Tonight, for the first time in a thousand years, Earth would speak to the stars. Ada looked up at them, twinkling pale and innocent, unsuspecting. She wanted to see them one last time before they disappointed the lonely, trapped outers living in this city. One last time she could look up at them without a hint of bitterness.

  Nobody had come for them in a thousand years. Nobody had sent a message. Nobody had given a sign. There was no reason to think there was anybody out there who could.

  “Ada?”

  She turned to see Zhilik, his white fur a pale grey in the light of the night. She smiled, and sighed. “Why are you out here?”

  “Why are you? You made this possible. You belong in that command room more than many. ”

  “To hear the deafening silence.” She breathed in through her nose. “I’m sure that’ll be great.”

  “You belong in there so you can do what the rest of them are doing. Hope.”

  She widened her eyes at him. “You’ve told me, several times, you didn’t think there’d be a response.”

  “Perhaps I am not hoping for a response.” He stepped closer to her, his alien eyes with their slitted pupils gazing on those same stars. If he wasn’t hoping for a response, then what?

  Knowing Zhilik, she imagined he was hoping for no response at all. “You know, if nothing happens, you’ll belong here. You won’t be able to tell yourselves this isn’t home anymore.”

  His triangular ears perked up. He agreed. He would never say as much, though. The outers saw themselves as strangers in a strange land, unwelcome and unwanted. To suggest otherwise, it seemed, was to threaten what little identity they had managed to maintain over the centuries.

  “Would you like that, Ada? For us to stop looking to the stars.”

  She looked at him. “Keep looking at the damned things. Just don’t look for an escape. I don’t want you to leave.”

  “Why not?”

  She sighed, looking around at Campus. Its buildings were alive, used and maintained. Its streets were solid. Its technology… was in use, at least, even if it wasn’t new. And the outers who lived here did not stifle her. They ignored her, mostly, and alone in this crowded place she found herself more at peace and freer to study than she had ever been among humans. “I don’t think I can keep telling myself this isn’t my home.”

  Zhilik breathed out loudly, his nostrils flaring, and he rested a furry, four-fingered hand on her shoulder. “Come to the command room. The message has been recorded, but Kseresh requested I bring you in to watch before they beam it out. We will see what happens.”

  She looked up at the stars and dared them to answer.

  The air in the ziggurat was thick with tension, and with smell. For the most part outers didn’t smell much at all, but for whatever reason when they were tense with anticipation they started to smell musky, and just stepping into the building Ada could feel generations’ worth of dreams and promises oozing from their pores. She didn’t bother trying to cover her nose - she had done so once, only to be loudly accused of being rude - but she held the gaze of every human ghost she passed as she did, and in their eyes she saw the mutual understanding of the musk’s power.

  Still, her eyes did not water, and she made it into the command room without signalling any discomfort, as best she could tell. In truth, it was a somewhat comforting smell to her at this point, after so many weeks. An honest smell, earnest and straightforward. It spoke to the giddy terror they were feeling in that command room, huddled up against the walls, all their eyes on Elder Kseresh as his old four-fingered hands hovered near a large computer screen.

  His eyes met hers as she entered the room behind Zhilik, and his ears twitched. “Ada Liu.”

  She nodded. “I’m finally here, yes.”

  Some hissing laughter rippled through the room. She saw a human shape startle, and looked over to find Tanos and Sam leaning against a wall in the back, a slight gap separating them from the outers but no discernable gap between the two of them. They met her eyes, and she saw Tanos mutter something, to which Sam nodded.

  Their gaze made her more uneasy than the gaze of the hundred-odd outers packed into this room, so she turned away, her eyes dancing through that sea of multicolored fur as the elder spoke. “Ada Liu, before we do this, we must thank you for everything you have done. We would not be here without your help, your fighting spirit, or, frankly, your human fingertips.”

  Zhilik patted her on the shoulder. “Somebody had to get through all those biometric computer systems.”

  She chuckled. “Well, I wouldn’t be here if not for you furry freaks either.”

  Much of it was down to their centuries of tireless recordkeeping and work, some of it was down to her own impetuous insistence on trying to fix the planet, a little of it was down to her bastard gods. Everybody knew that.

  Only a few knew that she wouldn’t be standing here if Isavel Valdéz hadn’t taken her into her arms, carried her to safety from a collapsing ruin being consumed in the sky. Those few were looking her straight in the eyes.

  She cleared her throat. “Go on, get it over with. Push the damned button.”

  Anxious murmurs rippled across the room, no doubt transmitted by recorders to dozens of devices elsewhere in the ziggurat, where the entire community was watching. Elder Kseresh turned around and flicked the button.

  Everybody drew in a sharp breath.

  She wasn’t sure why they were holding their breaths, but she was doing it too, until somebody in the room let out some air. Kseresh’s ears perked up. “Breath, all of you. We never expected an immediate answer. It may take minutes. Hours.”

  He did not go on to say days, months, years. He didn’t evoke the infinite darkness of space or the infinite silence it might hold. Hope could only stretch so far.

  Ada leaned back against the wall, looking at Zhilik. “What now?”

  He bobbed his neck. “I do n
ot know. We test our patience.”

  She shook her head, not wanting to, but she was in no mood for sleep. Nobody was. How could they be?

  Zhilik pulled a set of small cubes out of his pocket and flashed them at her. The abstract, bold carvings on each side were alien to Earth itself, but Ada had seen them a few times before, whenever Zhilik had tried to teach her this old game from Mir, their ancestors’ homeworld. She smiled and shook her head.

  “Let me rope some other poor humans into this first.” She turned to Tanos and Sam, and beckoned them over with her fingers. They glanced at each other, and she could see their lips moving in whispers even as they crossed the room. When they reached her, though, they peered up nervously at Zhilik instead.

  “What’s up?”

  Ada shook her head. “Nothing. This is going to be a boring long wait, so let’s play a game.”

  Tano’s eyes widened with delight, and he listened to the rules eagerly. Sam seemed much more skeptical, keeping her arms closed as she watched Zhilik explain with hands and words and examples. Ada cracked her knuckles, confident enough that she could at least get second place, if not win, against two new players.

  The blow to her ego when Sam won the first round wasn’t as bad as she had expected. She laughed, and leaned back. “Lucky.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “Play again and let’s find out.”

  She wasn’t just lucky.

  When an unexpected sound suddenly disturbed the command room, though, it wasn’t what they had been hoping for. No surprised or astounded message from the stars, no alien voices, no lost ancestors. It was an electric thrum, a crack, the distant sound of glass shattering and singing its way through the wind down onto the pavement.

  Ada jumped to her feet, grabbed the doorframe, and started hauling her way through the packed ziggurat. The city was under attack.

  Chapter 2

  They had thought it was a thunderstorm. Only in the morning, when Isavel spotted the columns of grey smoke marring the northern sky like an ugly bruise, did she realize there had been no rain or wind. Only lightning.