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  “A lot of biological matter on the surfaces,” Tarkos said.

  Bria slid open the visor of her helmet. Eydis stepped back in shock, but Tarkos only watched Bria take several deep breaths. Her nostrils flared as she squinted in concentration. Tarkos knew that Bria’s implanted gene sequencers and quantum computers would quickly compute the profile of the organisms she sampled from the atmosphere.

  “Dangerous,” Bria said, closing her visor. “Many complex organisms. Some specifically targeting non-Ulltrians. Eydis: maintain suit integrity.”

  “Damn right,” Eydis said.

  To each side of the bay, a hexagonal door opened onto the outer ring. But at the hub end of the room, a heavy door stood wide open. Through it, they could see a hall that stretched up the center of the spoke, lit with blue and white lights. A radar pulse told Tarkos that it reached, uninterrupted, all the way to the hub at the center of the station.

  Bria sent a command to the cruiser and a small panel on the hull slid open and released a flock of tiny drones. They moved off in a buzzing cloud, like hundreds of flies. They spreading out as they flew, but most shot down the hall that formed one of the three central spokes of the station.

  “These drones will map all the contiguous, open space,” Tarkos explained to Eydis. “They won’t try to open doors, but they can go through very small passages.”

  Bria walked out into the spoke. She took two lumbering steps before she seemed to leap away from Tarkos. She jerked in surprise and jumped to the side. When she landed, she remained still. She bent her head down and examined the floor. She cautiously took two steps toward Tarkos—and shot forward.

  “It’s some kind of… moving floor,” Eydis said.

  “But how?” Tarkos crouched down and looked at the black surface around Bria. Like the floor in the bay, it appeared to be black stone, wet and partially covered with algae or some other kind of life. There were no seams visible. It mystified him: how could part move, while the surface surrounding the motion seemed to remain still? It had seemed to know Bria’s direction from her first steps, and then accelerated those; and it had stopped when she stopped walking. “Do small portions of it roll?” he asked aloud.

  “Or maybe it expands and contracts in a kind of pulsing?” Eydis suggested.

  The drones leading the flight down the spoke had nearly reached the end of the hall. The combined data of the drones showed that doors lined the hall for its entire length, each closed. The hall ended at an arch that opened into a large central room at the hub. The round room had openings that fed into the other two spokes. No organisms larger than the organic material covering the surfaces had been seen. Nothing moved. But, in the center of the hub room, two glass cylinders stood, glowing alone, as if waiting for them. The drones circled the cylinders and moved on. The two structures seemed inert, like sculptures. Tarkos, Bria, and Eydis watched the footage coming from the drones for a moment, considering.

  “It’s not exactly the yellow brick road,” Eydis said in English.

  Tarkos nodded. The three of them lined up, side by side, and stepped into the hall. In a few seconds, the floor had determined their direction, and rushed forward under their feet, so that they raced toward the hub.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tiklik’al’Takas floated in the center of its quarters. Its four limbs curled loosely to its chest. Had Tarkos or Bria been there to look at the Kirt AI, they might have suspected it had fallen back into slow time, or gone catatonic. But inside Tiklik, a furious battle raged.

  The AI struggled to hold back the bleeding code that reproduced furiously, spreading across Tiklik’s mind and eating up memory and its quantum computation capacity. If the code continued to spread, there would soon be nothing of Tiklik left. There would be only the virus, a dull wasteland of self-repeating noise.

  The human Pala Eydis had saved Tiklik. Not just when she had intruded directly into his systems, shutting most of them down, giving Tiklik a respite from the spreading information attack. She had also inadvertently helped him when, two days before, she gave Tiklik her huge load of data she wanted transmitted to Earth. When the virus that ate through Tiklik’s mind encountered that data, it paused, hesitated, retreated. The virus recognized Ulltrian code in Eydis’s discoveries from the Ulltrian homeworld, and the virus shrank back, as if fearful of harming its own kind.

  But where had the virus first come from? Tiklik could not tell. From Eydis’s data, perhaps. But perhaps from somewhere else. Perhaps it had been waiting, inside Tiklik, since it had first received the transmission from its peer that told the Alliance that the Ulltrians still survived. The Ulltrians could have constructed that message with this virus buried deep inside, built for this simple purpose: when you hear our call, announce yourself and betray your position.

  This thought gave Tiklik pause. Such a trick might work twice. He could trick the virus the way Tiklik must have been tricked long ago. The Ulltrian virus had tricked Tiklik into believing it was part of a message from another Kirt AI like himself. Perhaps Tiklik could trick the virus into mistaking all of him for being Ulltrian code.

  Tiklik set to work. Each time Tiklik deleted a population of the self-replicating Ulltrian virus, the code sprang back quickly, furiously copying itself through his mind. But, when attacking the virus, Tiklik had left emptiness behind. So now Tiklik did not try to wipe the memory states. Instead, Tiklik copied Eydis’s data into them.

  It worked. The virus did not attack those memory blocks. Each copy remained untouched, that portion of Tiklik’s mind recaptured from the virus.

  In seconds, Tiklik had isolated the virus, surrounded it with data, hemmed it in with Ulltrian code. Seconds later, he had copied over the last of it.

  He was free.

  That’s when the Ulltrians sent him their message.

  _____

  The Farraday field sang.

  A Farraday field is a coherent magnetic field that can be shaped around a space, to prevent electromagnetic signals from entering or leaving. Signals sent from outside bend around and continue on their way, just as solar wind bends around a planet with a magnetic core. Advanced Farraday fields included a range of other tricks that had the same effect on hyper-radio by creating effective distortions in space time.

  But a Farraday field was a thing, from the perspective of a being like Tiklik. It wrapped around the robot like a cocoon. It throbbed and hummed. And if another Farraday field approached this field, it would cause a distortion. And if that distortion were turned off and on, or if it were modulated, then the Farraday field would react in concert.

  The human Amir Tarkos had set the Farraday field around Tiklik’s room, to prevent the AI from sending or receiving any signals. But now, as Tiklik cleaned the last of the information infection from its mind, the Farraday field began to vibrate. It vibrated rhythmically, evenly, in a clearly discernable pattern. And, after a minute, the ringing of the Farraday field began to repeat itself. It rang and then modulated, and settled finally into a familiar whistle. A sound Tiklik had heard before.

  The sound of Dâk-Kir, the gas giant that the Ulltrian’s homeworld orbited.

  The intent could not be mistaken: We are from Dâk-Ull, it said. We are from the home planet of the Ulltrians.

  Tiklik extended his own shields, standard in his design to protect his computation cores from cosmic rays. His shields were like the Farraday field, and they interfered with it directly. He vibrated the field in a pattern that would match standard protocols for the transmission of Galactic.

  I hear you.

  The field shifted instantly, turning from the emulation of the whine of the Ulltrian’s host world to an insistent buzz of binary information.

  You are the artificial intelligence Tiklik’al’Takas, it transmitted. We repeat our offer to you, as it was made before. Assist the Ulltrian cause and you will be returned to the stars.

  Tiklik pondered this. Tiklik could remember no offer of a deal, no exchange, no communication of any kind with Ulltrian
s or servants of the Ulltrians. That suggested to the AI only one hypothesis as explanation. Tiklik realized, with something not unlike what a human would call shock, that if there had been some talk of an agreement, then Tiklik had wiped the memory of that agreement from its mind. But that meant… what? That it had willingly betrayed the Alliance, and then changed its mind? Or that it had refused an offer, and deleted the temptation afterwards?

  The thought horrified Tiklik. It had always remembered everything, from the first moment of consciousness until now. Or so it had believed. But how could it trust experience, how could it be itself, if it could forget, like the animals that had evolved? What was Tiklik, if not a Kirt AI, a thing that learned and reasoned and never forgot anything? Tiklik was an explorer, it’s very essence was to remember, to bear witness. But here was something it did not remember.

  The field vibrated again. State whether there are Harmonizers or Executive warriors aboard this craft.

  Tiklik waved its legs through the air, considering. What should it answer? What did it want to answer?

  State whether there are Harmonizers or Executive warriors aboard this craft, the message came again.

  There are no Harmonizers or Executive warriors aboard this craft, Tiklik replied.

  The response was immediate: Prepare for explosive decompression.

  CHAPTER 5

  “What are they?” Tarkos asked, when the three of them stepped out of the long hallway that formed the spoke. They stopped, and the floor stopped moving also, letting them stand side by side. The black walls of the central hub rose toward huge, twin lights far overhead, one blue, one white. Doors ringed the circumference, but only the large doorways to the three spokes stood open. And, just as the drone telemetry had reported, the only thing in the towering room were two clear, crystal cylinders, each about as tall as a human.

  Bria, Tarkos, and Eydis began to walk toward the cylinders. The floor beneath them did not move; they crossed the distance under their own power.

  “Look,” Bria said, sending Tarkos an indicator for one of the streams of data coming in. The drones had flown to the end of the other two spokes. Tarkos reviewed the drone video, already composited into a three-dimensional image.

  “Ah,” Tarkos said, stopping in the middle of a step.

  “What?” Eydis asked.

  Tarkos pointed at the open hall to the right. “At the end of that spoke, there’s nothing. A bay like the one where the cruiser sits, but with the bay doors closed.” He pointed at the spoke to the left. “But at the end of that spoke, there’s a ship. Ulltrian. Small. But it has probability flanges.”

  “Some of their ships used probability jumps for short distance leaps,” Eydis said. “It was dangerous, because it meant they were jumping near gravity wells, at low speeds. But it provided a significant advantage in some battles.”

  Tarkos looked at Bria. “We’re both thinking the same thing: why is this all here?”

  Bria blinked agreement.

  On their walk toward the hub, they had stopped half way up the spoke, and used a heavy particle beam to shoot a hole through a door, then sent a drone inside through the small, still smoking orifice. The drone found only an empty series of cavernous rooms, each with hard walls dozens of meters apart, under an arched ceiling four meters above. Thin cables and sheets of wet plastic covered the floor. Thick windows looked out at the glowing plankton of the black seas, a forlorn view for no one. It had been only a random investigation, of course, but the station seemed wholly abandoned.

  “So far,” Tarkos said, “it seems this station contains only two things of interest: these cylinders in the center of the hub, and the ship at the far dock.”

  “So let’s check out each in turn,” Eydis said.

  They walked to the crystal cylinders and circled them. Inside each of them stood a peculiar tablet of bluish metal, almost as tall as Tarkos. The surface of each tablet folded back and forth in sheets about a handspan deep, so that the tablet looked like brain coral. Writing covered both sides, but only on the outside edge of a fold could they see the characters inscribed in the metal. Ulltrian writing covered one side: spiky black figures appearing like scars in the surface. And an old, very formal style of Galactic covered the other side.

  “Monument plates,” Bria said.

  “What?” Tarkos asked. He checked the databases he carried in his suit for the reference, and learned that some Galactic treaties were printed on alloy plate, of a kind resistant to most forms of corrosion—very hard, but very brittle, so that it could not be altered without breaking. This had partly ritual purposes, but also partly practical ones: nothing could, in the end, be more stable than hard matter. No EMP pulse could wipe its magnetic memory, because it had none. No failure of quantum state could clear its photon stores, because it had no data depending on a single quantum fluctuation. It was large scale, hard, classical matter, stable and ready to last for eons.

  He stopped in front of the surface of one tablet, where it was covered with Galactic. Bria stood at his side, looking at the Galactic writing visible on the other tablet.

  “Why is it all… wrinkly?” Tarkos asked.

  “Formal rules required the tablet be a certain size,” Eydis told him. “Two measures high, and with a width set to the golden mean. Similar rules constrained the size of the writing. So if you needed to write more, you made the surface area larger by folding it.”

  Tarkos nodded. “I should have known an archeologist would know about these. So, well, how do you read it, then?”

  “You use a machine,” she said. “Some small drone that can crawl into the folds.” She walked around and stopped opposite Tarkos, examining the side covered with Ulltrian writing.

  “I think it’s a treaty,” she said. “Between the Alliance and the Ulltrians. The old Alliance. At the time of the war. I can’t tell quite what it…. I mean, what I can see, on the outside edges, is fragmented. But here, in one spot, it says something about an exchange….”

  Tarkos concentrated on the antique form of Galactic writing, struggling through the words on the convex curves. Along the top he could make out that the text began with a proclamation that the two sides of the battle would cease the war. Farther down, he saw a reference to regions of the spiral arm. Then something about enforcement conditions. And, near the bottom, he saw a list of spiral arm coordinates. They ran into a fold, so he could only read three of them. Tarkos used his suit’s navigation programs to locate the contemporary names of the specified systems.

  Hurlkor.

  Sussurat.

  Earth.

  Tarkos pointed, almost involuntarily. He looked up at Bria. Light from above glared across her visor, and he could not see her eyes. But her posture made it clear that she read the plate closely, following his pointing.

  “I know that last coordinate,” Eydis said, her voice suddenly loud in his helmet. “Harmonizer—Predator—do you hear me?” She walked around the cylinder and stopped in front of Tarkos, hands on her hips, her silvered helmet tilted forward. “Earth is listed there. Why would Earth be listed there? What did it have to do with their attempt at a treaty? Earth was quarantined then.”

  When Tarkos said nothing, she turned to Bria. “Is this real?”

  Bria did not answer but turned her gaze to the other plate.

  “I think it’s real,” Eydis said. “A fake would be worthless. The Ulltrians left it for us. They wanted us to see this. They knew the truth would do the most damage. And the truth is that the Alliance tried to sell us.”

  “You don’t know that’s what it says. We can only read a little of it,” Tarkos said. But he felt a sinking feeling in his gut. Because he had to admit: what else could it mean?

  Before Tarkos had left the flagship, the Savannah Runner, their superior officer, the Neelee Preeajitala, had sent Tarkos a secret message: You humans understand that even good persons can make very terrible mistakes. We must measure oaths broken against oaths kept, and measure mistakes made against just dee
ds. Tarkos had wondered why he would be given such a strange message. Now he knew.

  “Of course that’s what it means,” Eydis said. “And what’s the other one say?” She pointed at the next plate.

  To Tarkos’s surprise, Bria answered her. “Genetic data.”

  “What?” Tarkos said. He touched his helmet to the cylinder. On several folds of the plate within he could make out the symbols that the galactics used for DNA sequence information. It seemed that this second plate described some kind of genome. He looked to the top of the plate. It began, like the first plate, with the formal declaration of some kind of agreement. “It looks like it’s a treaty too.”

  “Contract,” Bria said.

  “From the war?” Tarkos asked.

  “Older,” Bria said, pointing a claw at where a date was visible on a fold.

  “So, we have two, what do you call them, monument plates—one a treaty naming star systems, the other some kind of a contract listing a genome. One from near the end of the war, one from before the war. Why are they here?”

  “Because the Ulltrians want to sow dissension,” Eydis said. “And they’re going to succeed.”

  “You don’t know the Alliance sold us out,” Tarkos said.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Eydis said, without anger. Her voice sounded tired, resigned. “The Ulltrians just broke the treaty, that’s all. They broke the treaty, and then they lost the war, and Earth was saved. By accident.” She walked over to Bria. “You, Sussurat! Did you know about this? Did Sussurat sell us out too?” She shoved on Bria’s arm, a gesture that failed to budge Bria, or even move her limb.