Space - Stephen Baxter

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generations removed from those who began the migration.

      Then these are the Gaijin, he thought. They don’t know who made them. They’ve forgotten. Or maybe nobody made them. After all, you believe you evolved, Malenfant; why not them?

      He wrote out, WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE HERE?

      REPLICATION. CONSTRUCTION. SEARCH.

      So they did come here from somewhere else … and that last word, finally, gave him hope he was dealing with something more than a fixed machine here, more than simple mechanical goals.

      SEARCH, he wrote. SEARCH FOR WHAT?

      The answer chilled him. SEARCH OBJECT: OPTION TO AVOID COMING STERILIZATION EVENT. EXISTENCE OF OPTION QUERY.

      My God, he thought. We always thought the aliens would come and teach us. Wrong. These guys are coming to us for answers.

      Answers to whatever it is they are fleeing. The ‘sterilization event’.

      For long minutes he gazed at Cassiopeia’s crumpled, complex hide. Then he wrote carefully, WE MUST TALK. BUT I NEED FOOD.

      OPTION: RETURN BEFORE EXPIRATION. We can take you home before you die.

      WHAT ELSE?

      OPTION: MANUFACTURE FOOD. ITERATIVE PROCESS, SUCCESS ANTICIPATED.

      Reassuring, he thought dryly.

      COROLLARY: CONTINUE.

      He wrote, CONTINUE? YOU MEAN I CAN GO ON?

      OPTION: ORIGIN NODE. OPTION: OTHER NODES. We can take you home. Or we can take you further. Other places. Even further than this.

      Even deeper in time, too. My God.

      He thought about it for sixty seconds.

      I WANT TO GO ON, he said. MAKE ME FOOD.

      Then he added, PLEASE.

      

      Maura Della died eight years after Malenfant’s disappearance into the Gaijin portal, a few months before a signal at lightspeed could have completed the journey to Alpha Centauri and back.

      But when those months had passed – when the new signals arrived, bearing news from Alpha Centauri – the great asteroid belt flower-ships at last opened up their electromagnetic wings, and a thousand of them began to sail in towards the crowded heart of the solar system, and Earth.

       II

       TRAVELLERS

      AD 2061–2186

      He told himself: All this – the neutron star sail, the toiling community – is a triumph of life over blind cosmic cruelty. We ain’t taking it any more.

      But when he thought of Cassiopeia, anger flooded him. Why?

      It had been just minutes since she had embraced him on that grassy simulated plain … hadn’t it?

      How do you know, Malenfant? How do you know you haven’t been frozen in some deep data store for ten thousand years?

      And … how do you know this isn’t the first time you surfaced like this?

      How could he know? If his identity assembled, disintegrated again, what trace would it leave on his memory? What was his memory? What if he was simply restarted each time, wiped clean like a reinitialized computer? How would he know?

      But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I laboured to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unravelled. That the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors. And that the Gaijin were not even the first – just as Nemoto had intuited from the start. And nothing we learned about those earlier visitors, and what had become of them, gave us comfort.

      Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learned to fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Lived and died.

       Chapter 8

       AMBASSADORS

      Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.

      Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sänger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sänger.

      Then the spaceplane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazelle-like. The Sänger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.

      She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.

      She glanced down: the land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling grey of urban development. Fighters – probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli – were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.

      She lit up the scramjets, and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.

      The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand metres, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this sub-orbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15, before falling back to Earth.

      She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.

      It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.

      For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sänger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.

      The Sänger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt – Boelkow – Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones. But Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.

      While she was still shaking, the Sänger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.

      That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.

      Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.

      Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.

      She acknowledged the message, and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.

      She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near-silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.

      And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.

      

      When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along US 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be

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