The Fall of Sirius Read online

  Outer space is barely twenty meters below us here, Malye reminded herself. For all the vastness of the Atrium, it was hollow as an eggshell. All of Tyumen was hollow, full of bubbles and voids and further hollowed by the engineers and architects who had made it a place for humans. It didn't bother her, exactly, but she preferred her worlds a little more solid.

  The antispinward wall appeared huge ahead of them, and closing with alarming, deadly swiftness, the tunnel mouth invisible from this angle; it looked as if they would simply crash into the wall and die instantly. But then suddenly they were through it, the wall and the Atrium gone, all scenery vanished, replaced by smooth tunnel walls that whizzed blankly by with unguessable and rapidly mounting velocity.

  “Have you no sense of play whatever, Malyene Andreivne?” Kromov wanted to know.

  “Yes,” she said to him in serious tones, “I have.”

  Kromov mused, stroking his chin and squinting at her. “Strange how we never see it. One has to wonder how your children came to be.”

  Elye laughed hard at that, quickly joined by Kromov himself. A few passengers turned to look.

  Malye felt her ears and face warming. These Investigators, so jovial... Two of her very finest; could they really be so blind? You know not whom you taunt, she thought at them with a kind of weary desperation. Indeed, despite long acquaintance they knew almost nothing of her. That Andrei Brakanov was her father? The fact had been well concealed. Elye and Kromov meant well enough; really they just wanted to be friendly, to draw her out, to tease her from her hard shell. Names of Ialah, should she give them what they so obviously wanted? Show them her sharp, vivid sense of play, so very like her father's?

  No, never. The thought rolled through her in blue, pointed waves. The train's ceiling lights played like soft music, vaguely heard.

  Synesthesia. Sensory crossover, stress-induced but hereditary, somehow, at its source. Smell the colors, little Malye, hear the shapes! One of many marks of the beast, so very like her father.

  “You forget yourselves, Majors,” she said icily. Which of course only made them laugh all the harder, the peaks of their voices striking her between the eyes like pellets of hard plastic.

  ~~~

  Later, when they'd arrived at their destination and the proper introductions had been made, Malye sat down at her new desk. Acquainting herself with the look and feel of it, allowing it to become hers, though the glass-walled office itself would of course be shared by Kromov and Elye.

  Setting up in a new location was always inconvenient, for all that they did it five or ten times in a year. Becoming familiar with the equipment, with the layout of the building, with the local data systems architecture.... But such was necessary, if Malye's people were to do their jobs.

  Names of Ialah, there had been seventeen murders in Sirius System in the last standard year, up two from the year before, and only half the perpetrators had yet been caught. Eight cases still open, and there was the holdover from last year, the beating death for which no motive or suspect had ever been identified. Minimal DNA traces at the scene, and no lineup to match them against... It had been the very worst sort of crime—a random one, insoluble unless it were repeated. Possibly many times.

  The very thought sickened her, filled her with outrage. It was fortunately the only such incident on her record, but a blot nonetheless. And a reminder, most unwelcome, of days gone by.

  “We won't be long here in Tyumen,” Elye said to her, with a solid, reassuring tone that suggested some awareness of Malye's mood. “To survive, Gostev must eventually earn some money. Or steal it. Either way, he freshens his trail for us.”

  “We'll get that bastard, no question.” Kromov took an inventory flatscreen from one of the local greenbars, thumbed its approval square, handed it back. Nodding his thanks, the greenbar left the office and strode out onto the station floor to complete the errands from which he'd been interrupted.

  Malye watched him for a few seconds through the glass wall. Tempered silicon glass, she'd been told, transparent as vacuum but not so tough as the metallic glasses with which she was more familiar. But tough enough, the greenbars had assured her—no amount of carelessness was likely to shatter it.

  Alas, someone had scrawled an image of Skato, the shitting boy, in black ink upon the glass. A simple enough graffito, just four lines and four half circles, and yet the image was unmistakable: a little boy, grinning and nude, squatting to relieve himself on Malye's new desk. This was vexing, but not really all that remarkable—over a hundred years old now, Skato was one of the most popular unifying elements of Sirian culture, his picture adorning the trains and shops and corridors and offices of all but the most conservative of worlds. Malye had never seen much humor in this, but she saw little harm in it, either. She would probably leave the graffito alone, as a gesture of goodwill toward her current hosts.

  As such things went, Malye supposed these accommodations were at least adequate. The furnishings had seen better days, probably as long ago as Malye's childhood, but they seemed sturdy and comfortable just the same. Mostly titanium-iron, she thought, hard and light and smoothly contoured, the desks and chairs looking like plated cushions and mushrooms. Lighting was indirect and very bright, and bluer than most people liked it, though it suited her well enough. Less like the light of Sol, which she had never seen, than that of Bee, the smaller of Sirius system's two stars, around which the Thousand Lesser Worlds orbited. A homey, familiar light, not unpleasant in the least.

  The police station itself was a large one, an actual building huddled among several other large buildings inside this particular hollow and very large cavern. Like a bunch of privacy booths standing together, it seemed to Malye, rather than the tunneled-out spaces you'd find on most other worlds. And the staff here had proved focused and professional and had so far showed no overt signs of corruption or incompetence. Nor of the resentment that so often plagued Central Investigators when they were obliged to take over a case from the greenbars—because of the six-week deadline, usually, though in this case it was because the suspect had fled his home jurisdiction, seeking shelter and anonymity in the vastness of Tyumen. As if that could save him, somehow. But the suspect had committed no crimes here, had engaged in no public activity of any sort, and perhaps that helped the greenbars see things in proper perspective. Here were outsiders in pursuit of one of their own, and apparently welcome to him.

  “I should call my family before the shift is over,” Malye said. “Kromov, would you hand me that holie, please?”

  He did so, letting a smile peek out under his mustache. “Be careful. They may think you have a heart beating in there somewhere.”

  “Oh, I have,” she assured him. She felt it beating fiercely within her even now, like a violent prisoner she could barely restrain. So like her father's heart.

  Taking the flatscreen from Kromov, she traced and thumbed an ID sequence, and requested a slot in the transmission queue, priority personal.

  “Grigory,” she said into the blank screen, “it's me. I wanted to remind you that Elle and Vad have a teacher conference tomorrow. Please send along my regrets. I hope you all are well.”

  Damn all this travel, anyway. Elle's last teacher had been a real bastard, singling her out for all sorts of petty mistreatment, sending her home in tears, day after day. Grig and Malye had filed the appropriate complaints, and later she'd gone to have a word with the man in person. Now they were looking for a replacement, but Elle was terrified of teachers in general. And her needs were so different from Vadim's...

  Malye cut the link, returned the flatscreen to its prior configuration, and handed it back to Kromov.

  “Touching,” he said.

  Malye smiled and turned away, busying herself with the straightening up of her desk. She could glare Kromov to silence if she wished, or strike back at him with calculated viciousness. With a little time and a little effort she could reduce him to tears, probing for his weaknesses and then jabbing them over and over, but w
hat good would come of that? The monster's first rule: it costs nothing to be civil.

  The flatscreen beeped, announcing an incoming message. Malye looked up.

  “Your beloved's reply,” Kromov said, glancing at the screen and handing it to her.

  “Huh.” Pinega was nearly half a light-minute away. To reply so quickly, Grigory must have been poised and ready to transmit, as if he'd been waiting eagerly for her to call. Could he be ready at last to divulge his news?

  When the proper validations were complete, the holie screen acquired depth and color in her hands, like a window into another place. Her bedroom, in this case, with Grigory sitting on the edge of the bed, politely holding his flatscreen out to let it record a good view of him. His youthful handsomeness had begun to fade recently, not due to any physical deterioration, Malye thought, but more likely the cumulative stress of dealing day in and day out with her. Not the finest of marriages, theirs. But just now he was grinning broadly, looking more animated than she'd seen him in a good long while.

  “Malye! It's good you called; I wasn't sure how to get ahold of you. I have news, finally! Do you remember that massive gamma ray burster my people recorded thirteen months ago? They couldn't explain its intensity or its duration, or anything else about it. Parallax measurements hinted that perhaps the origin was close, perhaps within as little as ten light years, which of course would mean that it wasn't a gamma ray burster at all. Well, we've all been thinking hard about it, and now it seems we have an answer.

  “The phenomenon was caused by a deliberate emission of coherent gamma rays, possibly propulsive in nature. We have a repeat occurrence, now, much smaller and closer than the last, and in precisely the same region of sky—the waist of Orion. For practical purposes, the proper motion of the phenomenon is zero.”

  He paused, looking excited. In keeping with his job, Grigory often came home with stories like this one, obscure astronomical events that had happened long ago and far away, their light only now reaching Sirian telescopes. She had always envied him the easy passion for his work, but had rarely shared his enthusiasm. But... this particular case seemed different. At least, he seemed to think so. Was this his great secret? The point of it eluded her.

  “Malye,” Grigory said with all possible earnestness, “they are spacecraft. Hundreds of them, heading directly toward Sirius at approximately ninety percent of the speed of light. They haven't come from human space, not from anywhere near human space. The closest star along their velocity vector is Alnilam, over twelve hundred light years away.”

  He paused again, looking giddily unable to contain himself.

  “They cannot possibly be human!” he cried out finally. “We are being visited by a nonhuman intelligence! This changes everything, Malye. Please call me when you can.”

  His image vanished, a blank screen replacing once more the view of the bedroom she and Grigory shared.

  She sighed loudly. Alien spacecraft. Ah. A veritable dream come true for the Ministry of Celestial Observations, and all its satellite organizations. She called up the transmission queue again, traced the RECORD MESSAGE symbols. The flatscreen beeped its readiness.

  “Grigory,” she said into it, “I have no time for jokes. I will speak with you in a few days.”

  She terminated the recording, shipped it, and sighed again. Looking up, she found both Elye and Kromov gaping at her as if she'd done some horrible thing.

  “I think he was serious,” Elye said. “Your husband, he doesn't kid around much.”

  “You have crushed the sense of humor right out of him,” Kromov agreed, wide eyed and chewing at his moustache. “Fearing your icy disdain, he would not joke about something like this. That is, I believe he wouldn't. Names of Ialah, if this is true... I suppose everything will change. Literally everything.”

  “Crap,” Malye said. “It means nothing. They've made some sort of mistake, is all. They're always looking for aliens, looking for origins, looking for the footprints of Ialah out there among the stars. My husband's colleagues are... very excitable. Now, about Gostev's—”

  “Yes, but what if they're not mistaken?” Kromov demanded of her. “What then?”

  Malye cooled him off with her gaze. “We have a job to do here, Major; a murderer is running free in this relatively innocent world. If Grigory's people are not mistaken, well, however amazing that may be, it will not bring Kiril Gostev to justice. Only we can do that.”

  “Have you no heart at all?” he marveled. He was looking at her almost as though she were a stranger, now. How close to the truth he was.

  “Yes, I have,” she said to him, “and it bleeds at the thought of Utako's family wringing their hands in despair and frustration, their loss unavenged. Majors, we must catch this man before he causes any additional harm. We must let nothing distract us from this goal. This much should be obvious.”

  The two had nothing to say to that, and they wouldn't meet her eyes. Perhaps, she thought, there was something a little odd in her reaction. But damn it, what would they have her do? Let Gostev run around as he pleased?

  A greenbar came skidding into the room, his face bright and alive with excitement. “Colonel! Majors! Names of Ialah, have you heard the news?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  213::15

  PINEGA, GATE SYSTEM:

  CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON

  Malye had seen dogs before, not in person but on holies and such. Vicious or friendly, trained or naive, she had an idea they were fairly stupid, fairly emotional creatures. So why did this one, this smooth, hairless animal that had oozed through the white membrane-wall and into the remains of the cryostasis ward, eye her with such a calm, appraising air? Its head bobbed, its glance flicking here and there, taking the measure of her. Neither vicious nor friendly, nor the least bit stupid. It approached, not wagging its tail, and stopped at a cautious two meters' distance. Sniffed the air.

  “Nice doggie,” Malye tried, holding out a clenched fist for it to smell. Stiff and ancient, the fabric of her scavenged uniform cracked at the elbow.

  “She doesn't speak your language,” Plate said.

  Malye blinked. She had not supposed the animal could speak any language at all. Presently it opened its mouth and... fluted at her. Its voice sounded like some peculiar, breathy instrument, not quite like anything she'd ever heard before. And yet the tones were modulated, the dog's lips and throat working purposefully around them to produce... speech?

  Her skin went cold. “Is it speaking Waister?”

  “Of course,” Plate said beside her.

  She rounded on him. “What do you mean, 'of course?' All this innuendo, these veiled comments. What exactly are you people up to?”

  Plate looked surprised, his copper eyes widening more than a human being's would. “It's nothing sinister, Madam. We're good with languages—Teigo, Standard, English, Latin, a few others... but it's their language we speak among ourselves. We live in imitation of the Waisters, the better to understand them. Four sexes, two brains.... They and humanity differ greatly; we attempt to occupy the center.”

  And that was not sinister? Malye shuddered, but she kept her eyes locked on Plate's, searching for the telltale traces of falsehood. “They slaughtered us without comment, never once responding to our signals. Cold, evil, uncommunicative. How do you know their language?”

  “From corpses,” Plate replied. “And from prisoners. A long time ago, during the infarct in Sol system, a single ship was captured outside the orbit of Saturn.”

  “I don't believe you,” Malye said. Those ships had been seven kilometers long, seemingly limitless in their power and their weaponry. Even one of them, she was certain, would have been enough to bring the Sirius colony down.

  The green-haired man simply shrugged. “It's true. Wolf system had an ansible station up and transmitting at the time of its destruction, so Sol and Lalande had nearly a decade's warning before the Waisters finally arrived. Radio signals from Sirius were not received until years later.
Pity there was no ansible here.”

  “It was never finished. Too expensive,” Malye said. Feeling dizzy, the sound of Plate's voice spinning through her like a string of tiny whirlwinds, she placed a hand against one of the coffins to steady herself. “Names, how did the war end? How could we possibly have won?”

  “It wasn't won or lost, it was... completed. It's difficult to explain. Waisters have... a strong emotional response to new stimuli, things that haven't been, well, tested. But Sol system finally rolled over and surrendered, and that was the end of the war. That was all the Waisters wanted to hear.”

  “Until now,” Malye said, her monster's heart beating with slow fear.

  “Yes, until now. We don't have any idea what they want this time, why they're coming back. By our understanding of Waister psychology, it simply can't be explained.”

  A thought struck Malye in high, piercing notes. Her eyes narrowed, locked on the too-angular face of this green-haired man of the future. “You say you imitate their lifestyle, yes? Their language, their thoughts. How do you feel about strangers, my friend?”

  Plate locked gazes with her for a moment, and then looked away, his expression unreadable. “I am only a Worker,” he said.

  “That's one of your four sexes,” Malye probed, not quite guessing, but feeling her way by intuition.

  Plate didn't deny it.

  “What are the others?” she asked. “Dogs?”

  “Yes. And Queens, one for each family unit. Two Workers, two Drones, and a Dog. We call it a 'six.'“

  Specialized, like insects? Was that how the Waisters lived? In her usual manner, she filtered Plate's words, mixed them with her own observations and speculations to formulate testable hypotheses. The dog was smart—it could speak, but of course it had no hands. The dog could not by itself do any useful work. It was not a Worker, but Plate and Crow, who were, had been sent here to wake Malye up from her long sleep. By their Queen...