Second Contact Read online

  “So Ada… tried to kill them?”

  Zoa sighed, shaking her head. “Look, the whole thing was a fucking mess. Nobody ever figured out exactly what happened, and there was no clear proof Ada did anything, technically. But if there’s one thing the senior coders weren’t too proud to admit, it’s that Ada is sneaky and smart. In some ways. So they kicked her out.”

  Isavel squeezed her right hand, and looked out to the side. The hauler was skimming out across the water now, towards the vast island in the distance. This was not painting an optimistic picture. “What about this Jinna?”

  “After Ada left, she… well her parents are spending a lot of time with her. Trying to reeducate her. Get her back on their side.” Zoa shook her head, and looked behind them, to the ruined bridge. “Like I said, she did a lot of damage.”

  Isavel leaned back, looking up into the crisp summer sky, dulled and deadened in places by the dust and smoke from the bridge. So Ada was dangerous and reckless. She could believe it. But she had looked Ada in the eyes and knew there was more to her than that. She had seen something raw there, something wounded and struggling. Something clumsy and uncertain - her dancing feet, certainly, among other things. The memory brought a smile to Isavel’s face.

  “Saint Herald?”

  Isavel looked back down at Hail, who had spoke and was watching her. She looked concerned, and Isavel quickly suppressed that smile. “Zoa, Ada knows you and your brother, doesn’t she?”

  Zoa nodded. “She hates us as much as she hates anyone.”

  “Is there a reason for that?”

  “No.” Zoa’s response was remarkably quick, and she looked away from Isavel’s gaze. “She just hates everyone.”

  She nodded. “When I get to the island, wait outside. Once we’re done, we need to go back and tell the leaders not to start a war.”

  Zoa looked back up at her. “After this? Herald, she tried to shut down Glass Peaks’ access to water. A lot of those boats fish, or trade up and down the coast. It won’t kill the city since they have a northern harbour too, but she was actively trying to hurt us. What are they supposed to do?”

  It was a fair question, but as Isavel watched the jagged concrete fading into the distance, she shook her head. “Remember that she aimed at that bridge very precisely.”

  Zoa blanked. “So what?”

  Isavel looked at her. “Instead of at the city itself.”

  Zoa scrunched up the side of her face, but Hail reached over to her and laid a hand on her knee. “I’d trust the Saint Herald. The gods chose her for a reason.”

  Isavel wondered if that was true at all. Had they chosen her knowing anything about her, or had they just spouted the words because she happened to be standing in front of their shrine at the right time? Did she, herself, matter in all those?

  Of course not. She mattered to individual people, but not to the gods. Nothing seemed to matter to them.

  She turned away, crossing her arms atop the metal cockpit at the front of the hauler, and looked into the oncoming wind, flaring her nostrils and feeling the salty ocean spray fill her sinuses. Whatever the gods minded, she knew she could do something about this. She could help people, in her own way, without the pressure of being a Saint Herald. All she needed to do was have a conversation. A borrowed gun was as good an excuse as any.

  Chapter 3

  Not everybody had been in the ziggurat. Ada had hoped they had, once she had understood what was going on, but she had been wrong.

  Sixteen dead.

  Outers didn’t carry weapons with them - they never had, for fear of incurring the wrath of Earth’s gods, and they had yet to start even after liberated from that threat. What weapons they kept, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, were locked in storage. Nobody had fired back. The outers had died silently under silent stars, and the enemy had fled into the woods.

  She did not want to watch their cremation. She wanted to act. So here she was.

  “This is insanity.” She had never heard Elder Kseresh raise his voice like this. “Ada, you cannot undo centuries of carefully maintained peace with the neighbouring humans. They only tolerate us because they see us as harmless recluses.”

  “Tolerate you?” She jabbed her finger towards the northern edge of the city, where they had come from. “They’ve been prowling the woods looking for things to kill, they stroll up here and fire heavy weapons into the city , and you think they tolerate you?”

  “The island villages do. These are outsiders -”

  “They’re from fucking Glass Peaks, Kseresh. It’s a hop across the water.”

  Zhilik raised a hand. “Ada, please. We are at least as upset as you are, if not more.”

  Kseresh’s ears were completely flat against his skull as he turned on Zhilik. “You make too many excuses for her, Zhilik. Our people died. She has no right to anger -”

  “ I live here! ” She was trying not to shout and failing hard. “I eat with you people, I fought for you people, you can’t tell me to ignore it like it’s none of my business!”

  “Yes, you eat here, and you also bring a legion of reviled human ghosts to live with us.” Kseresh stopped pretending he was going to keep reading the book open in front of him, slamming it shut. “And now we must suffer the consequences of your maddeningly short-sighted decisions. And at such a critical time -”

  “It’s been hours , Kseresh, and there’s nothing .” She couldn’t believe he was still waiting. Did he think any of his kin out across the stars would blink and shrug, wondering whether they should bother answering a message from long-lost Earth? “You need to face the facts - Earth is your home, and there are people who want to hurt you. I can stop them.”

  “I cannot allow -”

  “I don’t need your gods-damned permission! ” She stepped towards the old wooden desk, leaning on it and staring into those angry alien eyes. “Kseresh, I’ve fought for you before and I’ll do it again.”

  “Ada, please.” Zhilik stepped forward as well. “We appreciate all that you have done, but it could endanger us further to provoke them.”

  “Provoke?” She wheeled on him. “I’m going to flatten that whole fucking city. You think the Chengdu can’t do it? I’ve been playing with that ship’s weapons, Zhilik, and let me tell you -”

  Kseresh growled at her, the suddenly loud and animalistic sound breaking through her words. “Zhilik, she is your pet. Deal with her. I am too busy for this.”

  “I’m not a pet! ” She raised her hands, curling her fingers in anger, grasping for something, anything.

  She had nothing. She puffed and turned around, making straight for the door. She didn’t need his permission. She didn’t need anyone’s permission. She stormed out of the ziggurat, past corridors lined with scared and tired outers, still waiting for a signal from the stars that wasn’t coming.

  “Ada! Ada!”

  She ignored Zhilik as she rushed down the stairs and out into the city square. He had soon stopped following her, and as she turned towards the southern gate she felt glad he had. She didn’t want to have to explain to him why she had to do this. She didn’t want to have to find the words. She wasn’t sure she could.

  Blindsided. Humans were always blindsiding her. They were unpredictable, stupidly violent. Stupid violence seemed the only effective response. If she let them get away with this, what next? How would they push their luck? What other ancient weapons would they abuse in their quest for vengeance?

  She was not so different from them, of course. It was infuriatingly hard to deny. She was just as ready to fire back as any of them, and that thought enraged her all the more. She wanted to be better - but how could she be, when people kept doing this?

  She found herself turned around in the city, lost in her thoughts, and she ground her teeth when she arrived at the west gate instead of the southern one. Shit. She turned and focused, hugging the outer walls of the city as she went this time, trying to keep her head straight.

  The Chengdu had weapon
s. Powerful weapons. It was not a very chatty ship, and what little she got from it was in a language she had never heard and didn’t understand in the slightest, but she had figured out a lot of the mental machinery without its help. It was all quite intuitive stuff, much like Cherry’s systems had been.

  She still missed that starfighter, of course. There was something soothing about talking to somebody she knew wasn’t judging her, or trying to manipulate her. Somebody impartial.

  She didn’t bother getting someone to lower the gate - there were no guards right now, all of the outers hiding in fear, and the ghosts who had volunteered to watch the walls couldn’t use the machines. She slowed time with the code Cherry had etched onto her back, and from her fingertips stretched out the long, snaking tendrils of dark code that could let her do just about anything.

  She clawed a levitation sigil into the ground, a feat of no more than a few seconds in real time. Once she slipped time back to its normal pace she jumped up into its column, feeling light as space swelled and pushed her upwards. She scrabbled onto the walkway on the wall and gently lowered herself down the other side, dropping with a thud as she crouched to absorb the impact.

  In the brief moments as she fell, she imagined falling into Isavel’s arms instead, as Isavel had once offered in that golem-infested ruin.

  She shook her head after she landed. She shouldn’t think about that right now. She needed to focus. She needed to do things quickly, to respond appropriately, to make sure no more innocent outers were killed.

  She marched from the city walls towards the small wooden pier, flanked on one side three little boats the outers used to fish, all awkwardly dwarfed by the Chengdu ’s massive, ancient shape dominating the other side of the pier. She smiled. This would be easy, simple, straightforward -

  There were shapes on the pier. Three shapes.

  She froze, her eyes not quite as sharp in the darkness as she would have liked. Only one of them looked like an outer; her mind did the math, and as she walked slowly towards them and they came into view, she wasn’t surprised to see Zhilik, Tanos, and Sam.

  It was Sam who stepped forward first, reaching her pale hands out to rest them on Ada’s shoulders. “Ada, Zhilik told us - listen. You don’t have to do this.”

  “I don’t have to do anything.” Ada tried to push past her. “Including listen to you.”

  Sam slapped her across the face. Stunned, she froze in place, staring at the ghost. Sam spoke in a low, impatient tone. “Tell me what you think will happen after this.”

  “What do you mean? I’ll bombard the city and they’ll be too devastated to mount a counterassault.”

  “They’ll have literally nothing left to hold them back. You’ll have taken everything from them .”

  Ada pushed passed them all, and through the connection her suit had made with the ancient warship, she willed its great maw open. The door at its front flopped down against the beach like a giant tongue. Of course - she didn’t even need to be on the pier. She wasn’t thinking. She turned around and made for the inside of the ship, and heard three pairs of feet following her.

  “Ada - hold on a second -”

  She turned around and saw them stepping into the ship’s hold after her. Fine. They were coming along for the ride, then. She willed the door closed, and it groaned as it rose again, the vast room inside feeling brighter and brighter as they were sealed away from the night. “I’m doing this. Come watch, if you really want.”

  Zhilik’s eyes were wide; he was seeing the inside of the ship for the first time, if she wasn’t mistaken. She had kept a close leash on it since she had brought the ghosts over. Sadly, Sam was not so easily distracted. “Ada, I’ve been around for a really long time. Let me tell you -”

  She willed the Chengdu to move, and it did. It was barely an effort to imagine on a map the place she wanted to go, and the ship moved of its own accord, figuring out the best way to get there as fast as possible, shuddering and groaning as it hauled itself back into the depths of the water. It was not Cherry, but it was an incredible piece of machinery in its own right, not least because it had survived a millennium in some far-off ocean entirely intact.

  She closed the door to the hold behind her, cutting her off from her friends. She would let them into the rest of the ship in a moment, just… not quite yet. She was in a frenzy. Ideally, she should have spent some time in a cherry grove, watching the sky between the falling petals. Failing that, it might be a good idea to meditate, to try and control her breathing and regain her focus, go through some coding forms in her mind. But she wasn’t in the mood, and settled for the third option - furiously pacing up and down the ship’s hallway.

  She had seen the faces of the dead, as they were carried out. Smelled the coppery tang of their alien blood. Here, on the cusp of waking up from their mad interstellar dream, sixteen had died before finding out what their centuries of waiting would amount to. They were so close, and yet now so far away. She had gone to space, faced down her gods, and come back to Earth for them. For other reasons too, to be sure, but they were always there for her. A home unlike the Institute had ever managed to be. It pained her to see them wounded, and it pained her even more to know that it was people like herself who had done it.

  She had to make this right.

  They were banging on the door from the main cargo hold. She sighed, tried to ignore it. A few more minutes. If she could burn a bit more frustration pacing through the halls, she probably should. She felt around in her mind for the ship’s weapons, great cannons that unfurled from the ship’s back and could reach farther than she expected more accurately than she had dreamed. It would be child’s play to put an end to the damned city from a safe distance, and they would never know who had done it.

  Of course, they should be able to guess. She hoped so - they needed to know who to avoid messing with. They needed to know what mistakes they had made to incur this.

  The banging grew louder. She opened the door, and the other three stumbled into the hallway after her. She turned away from them and made for the control room, in the middle of the ship. Turning into that room, she flicked the mental switch that projected a map into the center of the room and stared at it intently as the others walked in. She spoke to them without looking.

  “Don’t whine. Watch.”

  The ship was already cruising through the water. Sam sat in one of the seats here and crossed her arms; there were several seats, actually, a baffling number of them given Ada had so far had no issues controlling the entire thing herself. The ancients had perhaps not been minimalists. Tanos sat in another, curiously poking at the screen, and she clicked her tongue at him. “Don’t touch.”

  “Ada.” Zhilik was standing near her, one hand resting against the bulkhead. “Could you be persuaded to wait?”

  “What a weird question.” She stared at him. “Why would I say yes?”

  He didn’t cross his arms the way a human might if they were fed up; outers, instead, rolled their shoulders repeatedly. He got his message across anyway, before venturing to speak again. “Tell me about the ship.”

  She blanked. “The… this ship? The Chengdu ?”

  His ears pivoted a bit. “Yes. What do you know about it?”

  She wasn’t sure what he was up to. Was he testing her? “It’s got really big guns.”

  “What else? What about this map?” He pointed at the image floating in the centre of the command room, a dizzying constellation of thousands upon thousands of points of light arranged in just the right way.

  She sighed. “What about it?”

  “This looks like some kind of threat assessment map. Very bland. What other map options are there?”

  She looked sideways at him. Then Sam spoke up. “Can it show living things? Like animals, maybe? Or have you not figured that out yet?”

  What were they doing? She thought about it, trying to feel around for the mental machinery that might let her do such a thing. If it got them to stop asking her about whe
ther she was sure she wanted to blow that city away, fine. “ Chengdu? Can you show me other maps?”

  “ Wǒ tīng bù dǒng. ”

  She shook her head. She would never understand what it was saying. “Gods, I should have told Cherry I wanted a ship I could talk to.” She stared around the command room, then reached into the map, stirring her fingers around where Campus was. It was entirely empty on the current map, the floating points of light simply tracing the shape of the land. “Here! What’s here?”

  She waited. No answer.

  “No? Can I change the map? Can I change what it shows?”

  The ship’s response was complex and incomprehensible, and she glanced around the room; the other three shrugged, but they were smiling affably, like this was somehow encouraging. As she looked away from them she saw their faces shift again, serious and concerned now as they exchanged fleeting glances.

  Did they think she couldn’t do this? Ada shook her head and closed her eyes, trying to feel around the mental musculature that connected her to the warship. There was a lot of it she had never bothered with, beyond moving and firing the cannons, but she did know how to make the map appear and disappear. Was there anything that felt… connected?

  She tugged at one line of thought, and the map flickered, losing the blue-green coloration on the terrain, instead showing everything in a landscape of various shades of grey. Land was almost indistinguishable from the ocean floor.

  “No, no, that’s not it.”

  Tanos piped up. “It looks like the shape of the… the world without the water.”

  Zhilik tried to educate them all. “A topographical map.”

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t interesting. She tugged further, as though she were reigning in a tight rope, and the map’s colours shifted again. The terrain looked normal, but this time something entirely different was being displayed, something that made the Chengdu itself and a few places in Campus light up, as well as the base of the Pillar of Heaven to the south.

  “Uh, kind of? What is this, a technology map?”