Age of Deception
"I am looking at the most hated woman in all of history. Dr. Pitka Remera of Etterus, the woman who started the war of all wars."
When people speak of Trasp in the ages to come, if I am wrong, they will speak of the magnificent engineering marvels littered in the wake of every system the ingenious peoples of Trasp have visited. If I am correct, though, they will speak of the fallout from this week’s insanity, the return of war to human cultures, and the tragedy that seems will inevitably ensue. I pray that I am wrong, but the dead tell no lies.
Here follows the personal account of Dr. Pitka Remera of Etterus in the week of the Founders, third year, second decade, second century, sixth millennium of the post-Columnar Epoch, as I was called to Veronia to assist the acting coroner in the investigation of three mysterious deaths. My official report to the governments of Trasp and Etterus has been transmitted, containing only provable facts. This is my personal commentary for historical perspective.
Three engineers assigned to the 804 Sternwheel peg mysteriously died within a week of one another. When I arrived in the system, I had no idea what a Sternwheel peg was. All I knew was that Veronia was a young Trasp outpost in unclaimed territory on the outskirts of the lettered systems of the western Battery between Etterus and Trasp. And I also knew that the Trasp would be building some magnificent structure there, as they always did. Maícon, my AI assistant, explained the pegs once he had connected to the Trasp network upon our arrival in Veronia’s orbit. The pegs were thousand-story modular deep-space habitats being built on the planet’s surface to plug into a hundred-kilometer space-wheel in the orbit of Veronia’s small moon. There were thousands of pegs in various states of completion when we descended, each being constructed atop the most colossal reusable nuclear rockets one could envision. Once completed, the magnificent engines would drive each peg to the orbiting Sternwheel where the peg would be inserted and secured to the outer rim of the wheel.
We were guided to the 804 peg by the acting coroner’s AI. Maícon prepared me for Veronia’s environment, physical and cultural. A shallow gravity well, a thin, toxic atmosphere necessitating a nano-shield, a recirculator, and personal heat. The outpost, loosely populated by human engineers numbering in the hundreds, was mostly operated by more structural and environmental joiners than even the Athosians could muster if they decided to gather all their macro-bots in a single place—billions of operational units according to Maícon.
As our ship neared Veronia’s surface, I could see pegs protruding into the sky all the way to the horizon, as though we were landing on a gigantic spiked orb. We touched down at dusk and were instructed to wait for an escort to the build site where the acting coroner would meet us. Maícon continued to educate me on the specifics of the outpost, its history, its cultural and political influences, informing me of the minor disagreement about Trasp’s mining claims by two of the lettered systems of the western Battery, but these details seemed trivial as Maícon was explaining them to me. There was always some dispute over borders, always settled by mutual concessions, borderless a realm as space is.
Our first indication that this venture would be radically different was the delay. We settled on the landing pad and were instructed to wait until Deb Collison, the acting coroner, could escort us to her workspace. I say acting, because she was merely the outpost’s medic. Without a complement of thousands of living humans, it wasn’t unusual for a far-flung, mostly-automated outpost like this to be without a living medical doctor, but it certainly seemed odd that an actual coroner from Trasp hadn’t arrived to take control of the investigation.
“Any idea how long it will be?” I asked Maícon, who by that time was connected to Veronia’s data stream.
“There’s been another incident,” Maícon told me.
“Can we help?” I asked.
“We’re being instructed to stand clear.”
We sat on the landing pad for hours. Maícon briefed me on the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the first three engineers and relayed the status of the fourth, who’d arrested in her bunk. They’d caught it immediately, and presently, Deb Collison and their AI surgeon were tending to the fallen worker.
In the darkness, without warning, one of the nearby pegs began to glow at its base.
“Is that taking off?” I asked Maícon.
“Apparently so,” he told me. “Pre-flight burn.”
“Are we safe here?”
Maícon paused for a moment, pulling the details from their network.
“Quite safe,” he said. “That peg is nearly twenty kilometers away. The view is deceiving. These pegs are large structures.”
Suddenly the horizon grew bright, as a dull white-orange glow came pouring from the base of the massive tower in the distance. Soon, it erupted into a gigantic red cloud that hyperperfused the horizon, creeping across the landscape like the cloudburst of a glowing, rapidly approaching storm. Still, the peg in the distance remained fixed on the surface, unwavering as the wash from the fusion rocket spread out like a volcanic cloud.
“Large structures,” Maícon repeated. “You will feel it in a few seconds.”
Even so, I was unprepared for the intensity of the shockwave.
“Remain seated, Pitka,” Maícon said.
I had no words for the awesome sight. The distant peg lifted off the surface, shooting a blinding light into the sky, leaving a steady stream of nuclear fire in its wake. Even with a thin atmosphere, the sky roared and the world beneath us shook.
“Magnificent,” I said, almost involuntarily as I watched.
The sight was so spectacular that I’d nearly forgotten about the events that had brought us to Veronia in the first place. Four dead now, the news came over the feed to Maícon.
Another several hours later, with the nearby peg long vanished into the blackness of the night sky, Deb Collison called, apologizing for keeping us waiting so long on the landing pad.
“I’m on my way to meet you,” she said.
“To the contrary, Deb. I’m ordering you into quarantine. Whatever protocols your group has in place for isolation should be activated for any person working in the 804 peg.”
“Quarantine? We have no such protocols. On what grounds?”
“Viral contagion.”
“What? You’re joking. I’m in the 804, along with the section architect. You think there’s a virus in here?”
“It’s a possibility, an unlikely one,” I told her. “But with four dead in the same location, some environmental factor is probable. It’s more likely a chemical exposure. Until we know the common element for certain, I’d like you to stay put.”
“I’m in the room with the deceased,” Deb Collison stated. “Can the virus pass to me from the body?”
“Did you treat or otherwise handle the others?”
“Of course.”
“Then it’s likely you’re clear. Standby.”
I had Maícon request location data for the four decedents for a week prior to their deaths, looking for overlaps in all four pathways.
“They cluster in the engineer’s quarters, where several other workers slept as well,” Maícon said.
“That’s to be expected.”
“There’s one other overlap, clustered in the service access area #73-B on the four hundred seventeenth level.”
“Deb,” I said. “I’m sending you a location. I’d like for you to cordon off the area. Send joiners up to stand guard. No human approaches a five-deck area above or below that room.”
“Understood,” she said.
“I’m also sending instructions from my AI to your surgeon to take tissue samples immediately. Then I would like the body cryogenically frozen within the hour.”
“Frozen?” Deb said.
“That’s an unconventional request,” Maícon stated.
“I’ll send instructions,” I told Deb.
Maícon looked at me inquisitively.
“Call it a hunch,” I said.
“Intuition sounds better, Pitka. Let’s call it that.”
“Call it whatever you want. Just teach her how to freeze a body.”
“A virus?” Maícon said. “Could it be?”
“Deb,” I said. “We would like to make our way inside to assist you.”
“Stand by,” Deb Collison said. “You haven’t been cleared. We’ll need to wait for a section chief to come and clear you before you can be escorted in.”
“I’m coming in regardless of the risk,” I told her.
“It’s not you, Dr. Remera,” Deb said. “Your bot can’t come in embodied. We need to send down a suitable shell if you’re going to bring him in. Site policy.”
Maícon and I discussed the strange policy. He gathered that the Trasp were worried about his ability to pull sensitive data about the project and, more generally, engineering trade secrets through direct interface with equipment on site.
“What information can you pull from their network on the shell she’s proposing?”
“It would be an android body, much like my own.”
“With limited capacity to communicate with their network?”
“To the contrary, it’d actually be an upgrade from what I gather. The limitation is preemptive not operational. They’ll be able to monitor every interaction I have while on site, so if I try to access and copy data I’m not authorized to, they’ll see it in real time and freeze the shell.”
“Would you say that’s paranoia or good policy?”
“A little of both?”
I carried, on my person, several decorative pieces of jewelry that were inert, pieces that had become fashionable in the inner battery. I also wore a gold bracelet that held enough capacity for Maícon to jump to in a pinch. He was an early clone of the original Linden Maícon who came down to me from my great grandfather on my mother’s side, beyond that, he was my friend. We took precautions. I tapped my bracelet, as though to ask if he could leap to the bracelet from the Trasp shell if need be. He nodded.
“Very well then. Let’s proceed,” I told Deb Collison.
It was roughly another hour before the section architect’s supervisor arrived from the nearby hub with the outpost’s security officer. The chief architect, Arlo Fanning, was a tall, imposing figure. The security officer, Mercedes Davor, was the opposite, a trim, petite young woman wearing an exo and weapons package over her form-fitting field suit. Maícon’s Trasp shell entered with them, moving vacantly, as an empty android does.
They cleared the airlock into the back end of the ship, stepping into the annex. They didn’t retract their shields for introductions nor make much of an introduction in the formal way Etterans do.
“Your shields, Mercedes?” I asked Ms. Davor.
“Call me Mercy,” she said. “You need a shield outside anyway, and we figured, given the circumstances, it’s best to be safe.”
“What circumstances would necessitate you wearing a shield in my ship?”
“Deb said something about a virus,” Mr. Fanning, the architect, said.
“It’s unlikely,” I said. “And even if there is a virus in there, it’s certainly not in here.”
“Even so,” Mercy said, “We possess the means to protect ourselves. It’d be foolish to do no less when there’s no cost to it.”
“Suit yourselves,” I said.
I strapped my recirculator and temperature regulator to my belt and extended my shield. Maícon sat his body down and strapped it into the annex’s jump seat. Then he took up the Trasp shell.
“Very good?” the architect asked.
An odd choice of words, I thought, under the circumstances, but said, “We are ready.”
Mercy briefed us on security protocols on the way to the 804 peg. The tower was more stunning the closer we got to it. We didn’t build modern megastructures like this on Etterus. As we neared the base of the thousand-story tower, the stars disappeared behind the dull blue outline of the peg, illuminated by the subtle base-lights. All I could think at that moment was that this peg was merely one of the hundreds and hundreds that would make up the great space wheel.
We rode the lift up thirty-five floors to Deb Collison’s location, which was the peg’s future medical clinic and wellness center. My impression was that the entire structure was cavernous, with tremendous, vast open spaces in almost every direction. The clinic, constructed to accommodate thousands was vacant, or perhaps yet-to-be-occupied was a better description. Mercy took us to the morgue, where Deb had the fourth decedent sealed in a cryogenic container. Deb Collison didn’t introduce herself either.
“Dr. Remera, I’m glad you’re here, but can you please be honest about what is going on. Is there a danger from a virus?”
“The truth is that I don’t know what is going on, and won’t know, until we investigate. At this point I believe an environmental factor is more likely the cause—a chemical leak or something of the like, but because the deceased didn’t die in the common location itself and two of the other deaths occurred elsewhere, one of the possibilities was, and is, a contagion of some sort. But please, worrying about it can do none of us any good. It’s a small possibility.
“In the meantime,” I said, turning to the architect, “Mr. Fanning, I would like you to conduct an engineering review of that area—service access #73-B, floor 417. Air quality, radiation, electrical fields, anything you think could affect a human body.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Mr. Fanning said, dismissing himself.
For some reason, I found it odd that Mercy remained at my side, instead of accompanying the architect up to the area where the threat was. A probing look must have betrayed my surprise.
“I’ll be on you for the duration of your stay, doctor,” Mercy said to me.
Then I realized that I, the outsider, was the threat the Trasp were more concerned with, at least in the long term. That being the case, I wondered why they would call an Etteran in the first place, so I asked. Mercy looked surprised by my directness.
“We don’t have anyone like you, Dr. Remera,” she said. “At least not according to my superiors, I’d never even heard of your profession—forensic something?”
“Pathology, yes, but I practice medicine. The way I study forensic pathology is more as a historian than anything. Events like yours are vanishingly few.”
“There’s your answer,” Mercy said. “You’re the closest thing in the Battery to a practitioner. At least you’ve studied the subject.”
I directed Maícon to confer with the Trasp AI surgeon in the process of preparing the tissue samples. I asked Deb Collison to take me through the autopsy reports of the first three decedents. She seemed wary and nervous.
“I’m wearing my shield indoors now, like you and the others,” Deb said, “but I didn’t before you got here.”
“It is quite a phenomenon,” I said.
“What is?”
“Nothing. Excuse the comment.”
Deb insisted.
“Viruses are clumsy, cumbersome creatures. Yet even here, likely hundreds of light years from any living virus and thousands of years from the last time a human was infected with one, and the very word still strikes terror in the heart of, well, someone I’m presuming is a very rational person?”
“It’s just—the stories. And my colleagues are dead, Dr. Remera—four of them. I’d say it’s rational to be afraid.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I meant to pass no judgement, Deb. Perhaps I can put your mind at rest on the viral front. I have nano-scale medical countermeasures that would make light work of the nastiest pathogens ever written.”
“That’s reassuring.”
Still, it was strange to see how quickly the mention of a pathogen had robbed Ms. Collison of her wits, like the echoes of history were still written into the human genome somehow. I wondered how much technology and modern knowledge we would have to remove before superstitions, ghosts, and warfare returned.
Deb and I began with a review of the three autopsies. Basic microscopy of their blood ruled out a viral pathogen. Mercy informed the architect that a virus had been eliminated as a possibility. Deb and Mercy asked whether they could lower their nano-shields. I hadn’t, but I told them it would be fine. Neither chose to in my presence.
With a virus eliminated, I knew there had to be something else in that room or in the workers’ blood or both. Damage to the cell walls in the neural tissue was extensive, but even more troubling was the state of the sub-cellular landscape of the decedents. Sub-cellular structures were decimated, yet not in the way radiation might cause them to warp and dissolve. It looked as though some sort of nanoscale berserkers had been set loose everywhere. The microscopic universe, normally an orderly and beautiful landscape, in each of these three victims, had become a wasteland, organelles punctured, strewn out of place, torn asunder. Viruses didn’t do that. Nothing I’d ever seen or read about did that. I didn’t tell Deb Collison my findings, for fear she would overreact, but I was concerned by the phenomenon. What was in that room, I certainly couldn’t fathom.
We met back with Maícon and the surgeon they called “Handy.”
“Andy, actually,” he told me, holding up his hands to explain the joke. “I’m one of the Andrews.”
“I bet that’s cute on any other day,” I said. “Today, I’d like to know what the hell’s going on.”
“We have the tissue samples you asked for, Dr. Remera,” Maícon said, modeling the respect he wished for me from the others.
They seemed to take the cue.
“Well, doctor,” Andy said. “As in the other three decedents, scans revealed no obvious signs of trauma, no major bleeds, and no definitive etiology of the sudden arrests.
“Can you scan at the sub-cellular level in this facility?”
“Unfortunately not,” Andy said. “This is a general medical clinic. Each peg is self-contained and there ar—”
“A no would have sufficed,” I told the AI. He was almost as much a social creature as a surgeon, Handy Andy.
“Andy, you’ve been helpful, but for now call up to the architect and have him work through a list of any other people who have been in that room. If there are any, and they’re still alive, I want to see them.
“And, Maícon.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Prep the blood samples,” I said, next turning to Deb. “Ms. Collison, you’ve been very helpful. I’m going to have Andy take a blood sample from you, and then you’re dismissed.”
She looked terrified when I said it, as though I knew something and wasn’t telling her, something ominous. I wasn’t holding anything back; I just didn’t have any further use for her.
“Rest assured,” I told her. “You’re in no danger.”
“How could you know that?”
“Experience,” I said. “Call it intuition.”
She didn’t look so reassured but went off with Andy to get her blood drawn.
Maícon and I got to work in a side room with the samples he and Andy had taken. Laser microscopy revealed little in the organ samples at first. Then, in the brain tissue, we detected an odd feedback that the imagers in the device didn’t quite know how to process.
“See what you can do with the data,” I told Maícon.
“This is bizarre,” he said after pulling the raw data. “I don’t know what to make of it either. It’s not interference. There are structures there—molecular structures, small, compact, ordered.”
“Can you render an image?” I asked.
Maícon shook his new, blocky Trasp head. “They might be damaged, like the cells themselves. It’s almost like piecing together the wreckage of a vehicle after a crash. It’s difficult to see the original shape.”
Maícon kept working. I decided to try and get a look at the decedent we’d frozen. The scans, again, didn’t reveal any trauma or other obvious signs that pointed to a cause of death. We both worked for hours, I reviewing scans at the microscopic level to see if we’d missed something in their bodies, Maícon trying to interpret these anomalies in the light-refraction data.
At some point, Mercy, whom I had forgotten was even in the room with us, stepped up behind my shoulder and startled me so severely, I involuntarily gasped so loudly she jumped back herself. My heart nearly stopped.
“I’m sorry, Doctor Remera,” she said.
I sat for a moment, my hands pressed against my chest looking up at her.
“I’m just anxious to know if you’re discovering anything that tells us what’s going on.”
“Still a mystery, I’m afraid,” I said. “Is there any way you can check in with Mr. Fanning? Perhaps he’s having better luck up there.”
“I can ping him,” Mercy said. “I can’t leave you two alone, though. Hang on.”
I went back to my work while she conferred with the architect, wondering what it was about these Trasp that made them so distrustful of me. There had been some tension over the years: just as siblings quarrel, so do sibling societies, but I’d never seen any true animosity between our two peoples. Now, they wouldn’t leave my side for fear of some unknown security issue—after calling for my aid in the first place? I couldn’t make sense of it.
She returned to her seat behind me and held a long conversation with Mr. Fanning, the architect. After a few minutes, she reported, “He’s coming down.”
I was engaged in my work minutes later when Arlo Fanning came into the lab. I still had no idea what we were dealing with.
“There’s nothing worth mentioning to report, doctor,” Fanning stated. “That section is entirely normal.”
“What isn’t worth mentioning?”
“I’m sorry?” Fanning said.
“You said there’s nothing worth mentioning. That implies there is something but you’ve decided it’s insignificant. I’d like to review that decision.”
“A low efficiency rating in the oxygen recycler, but it’s well within normal limits; damage to a doorframe caused by one of the bots during the commotion when the first worker collapsed; and a minor transceiver malfunction secondary to a power surge—all ordinary construction problems.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fanning. That will be all.”
I worked for another two hours before telling Mercy I was done for the evening. We still didn’t have any answers. Deb Collison had been pinging Mercy asking for an update on her blood work, but Maícon and I hadn’t even looked at it yet.
Mercy invited me to stay in one of the peg’s lower residences, but I declined. I wanted Maícon, my Maícon, back with me in the shuttle where we could talk openly about the situation. Deb pinged Mercy again on the ride down in the lift.
“Deb is scared,” Mercy said. “All of us are, a little. Nothing like this has ever happened here before, or anywhere really.”
“We don’t even know if there’s any further threat,” I told her.
“We don’t know that there’s not,” Mercy said.
“Maícon will continue working. I need sleep, though. Tell Deb we’ll let her know as soon as we uncover any new information.”
“If it’s okay with the doctor, I will look at her blood first thing,” Maícon said, “if it would put Ms. Collison’s mind at ease.”
“It would,” Mercy said.
When we arrived at our ship, Maícon slipped out of his clunky Trasp shell, which Mercy brought back into her shuttle to recharge. Maícon then set to work at the back bench across from the cot where I lay down for the night. There was nothing of note to discuss between us at that point, certainly no indication the future of humanity was about to change. I simply went to sleep.
Maícon woke me at the end of my first sleep cycle, lulling me back to consciousness with music.
“I’ve found something in Deb Collison’s blood, Pitka.” he said as I sat up. “It’s remarkable, diabolical, and I’m not sure what it means yet.”
What he’d found was a structure, a technological structure of unknown origin. It wasn’t in every cell but enough of them that we knew it wasn’t an anomaly. As we examined the structures, we surmised that they were self-assembling nanites that seemed to operate like a cell-within the cell, even interacting with the ordinary organelles in the cells they occupied. They were large, and quantum photonic data revealed they were composed of several hemologically-available metals—metals that matched the composition of the pieces we’d detected in the decedents’ blood. They didn’t look like any breed of medical nanite I’d ever examined, nor would the Purist Trasps adulterate their blood with any such adjuncts knowingly.
“What do you make of that?” I asked Maícon.
“I suspect we’ve found our killer,” he said. “Only it hasn’t been activated in Deb yet.”
“What do you mean, activated?”
“I’m not sure yet. But there must be something in the environment in that service access capable of setting off these objects, something unique to the area.”
I pinged the architect. Arlo Fanning wasn’t pleased I called him so late in the night. It was a few hours before sunrise on Veronia by then.
“I was supposed to get a list of people who’d gone into the service access, Mr. Fanning. Do you have that information for me?”
“Now?”
“Yes, Mr. Fanning if you have it. If not, the second you have it.”
“I’ll have to ping Mercy. Hang on,” he grumbled.
His voice disappeared for a minute before coming back.
“I’m sending the list through now with the times and dates they were in there. Anything else, doctor?”
“Yes. I’d like the details on your transceiver malfunction. Do you know when that malfunction was registered?”
“What do you mean registered?”
“I need to know when that transceiver started malfunctioning, Mr. Fanning.”
“It was just installed last week. You don’t think that could be connected to the—? It’s a harmless frequency. I was in there today.”
“It’s probably nothing, Mr. Fanning. I’m just following every possible thread.”
“I’ll send the engineering log to your AI, Doctor.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fanning. Good night.”
“Good morning, now,” he said before clicking off.
“The frequency?” Maícon said.
“Possibly. Fanning was in his shield yesterday when he went up there. Order Handy Andy to get us a blood sample from him and everyone else on site.”
The second Maícon got hold of the frequency data from the transceiver, my intuition was proven correct. The nanites in Deb Collison’s blood must have resonated with that frequency, because after we exposed them for a minute, the slide we’d been examining for hours looked nearly identical to the slides of the deceased. Maícon described the process to the cells as having a magnetic boulder inside the cell’s membrane, resonating violently, ricocheting off every tissue in the cell’s interior. The walls, the organelles, even the boulder itself, all of them turned out mangled in the end.
“Instant cell death upon exposure,” Maícon said, “and depending on the length of exposure and the number and importance of the cells affected, some of our victims passed instantly on a dead drop, others lingered and died in their bunks.”
“Plausible,” I said.
“Likely.”
“I don’t know. A transceiver malfunction could be an accident.”
“The nanites, though,” Maícon said. “Those are deliberate, vicious creatures. Perhaps the malfunction exposed a larger phenomenon accidentally.”
I called Mercy myself this time, informing her I needed to speak directly with the head of the outpost but didn’t tell her why just yet.
“I’m not certain you should be briefing anyone before we understand what it is we’re looking at,” Maícon said.
“And when do you suppose that will be?” I asked him. “These things clearly pose a serious threat to the people on this outpost.”
“How this is handled may determine whether the threat exposed here proliferates beyond Veronia.”
“What are you suggesting, Maícon?”
“These are non-natural occurrences, Pitka, which means the nanites either got into the workers accidentally or deliberately.”
“Who could do such a thing?”
“I’m suggesting we better have that answer before we tell the quadrant, perpetrators included, that we’ve uncovered their weapon of war.”
The word war hit me like a shock to the chest. I registered suddenly that I understood how poor Deb Collison had been affected by the thought of a virus. I took a deep breath.
“I’ll go take a measure of the mission chief,” I said. “Treat it like a normal briefing.”
“They’re going to want to know what you know soon, Pitka,” Maícon said.
Mercy arrived at the ship soon after to take me to meet the outpost’s director. Maícon and I were still uncertain how we would handle the situation. We needed to know how widespread the nanites were, and we needed to organize a way to do so without inciting a panic among the workers. I left Maícon behind so he could pull every related file available on warfare using insidious and clandestine weapons such as these.
Mercy was nearly silent in the shuttle as we flew to the 1 peg, where site command was housed. She sensed something serious was afoot—the questions I’d been asking, the meeting with the mission chief, my demeanor.
“I’d like you to test my blood,” she said at one point. “I slept in the 804 last night. With the virus ruled out, I dropped my shield—thought it would be safe on the tenth floor, so far away from the quarantine.”
“I’ll take a look,” I said. “You’re probably just fine.”
I said it, but I could tell by her reaction that she could see the doubt in my eyes. I tried to remind myself that we didn’t know anything definitive yet.
When we got to peg 1, I briefed the mission chief, Scarla Liseria-Lee, on everything except the discovery of the nanites. She seemed a capable woman, roughly my age with partially graying hair. She laughed under her breath at my shield and looked at me suspiciously. She asked about each detail of my findings, and whenever I hedged our report by stating that we still needed more data, she asked me why we were meeting if I didn’t have anything substantive to tell her.
“Because four people are dead,” I told her finally. “Is that not reason enough to be thorough?”
Their deaths seemed to have gone unregistered as significant in her operational mindset.
“I heard a rumor about a virus,” Liseria-Lee said.
“Rumors, no more,” I told her. “We’ve ruled that out.”
“I’d like to see you again when you have something more substantive,” she told me. “Unless there’s more to this you’re not telling me?”
I wasn’t sure whether she was making an accusation with that question, but it struck me there was a modicum of distrust, perhaps merely the expected burden of an outsider on a Trasp outpost, perhaps something more. I told her she knew everything I knew, and we parted on uneasy terms.
I asked Mercy to return me to my ship so I could gather some advanced equipment and confer with Maícon before heading to the 804 peg to continue our work. When Mercy dropped me back at the ship, I attempted to initiate a conversation with Maícon to update him on the meeting with the mission chief. He held a finger over his lips and shushed me, handing me an earbar, which I inserted.
“You are almost definitely being surveilled by that security officer, Pitka. We will have little time to confer privately. We must use the day to determine the extent of the nanites’ spread. But first, you must learn what we’re up against.”
Maícon had spent the entire time I was away studying files he’d obtained from the Artemis line, specifically Artemis Prime herself, who was the keeper of several sequestered tranches of forbidden historical knowledge. Maícon warned me it would be dark, that the savagery of the old world had been hidden from me. I had thought I understood the reality of humans before our species separated. In that fifteen minutes Maícon was educating me, I learned a new word, genocide, and a host of others nearly as haunting.
He laid out the three plausible scenarios for what was happening. By then, given the sophistication of the nanites, accidental exposure had been eliminated. These nanites were bioweapons. How they were intended to function and how widespread they were still needed to be determined.
The first scenario was that Etterus was responsible. On its surface, despite my protest that we could never do such a thing, it seemed highly plausible. The territorial disputes had grown more contentious as Trasp expanded, and fair resolutions of these disputes had grown more difficult in the preceding years. But that new word, genocide, was a step that seemed beyond our taking.
The second scenario was an outside actor, a coalition of systems in the Battery who might benefit from the weakening of our two powers through conflict. Certainly, the lettered systems would be decimated and drawn into the conflict, given their location, but Dreeson’s and Carrol’s, the outer systems, and many smaller independent systems would find their standing raised by the diminishment of Etterus and Trasp. But these were competitors and sometimes collaborators, not enemies.
Maícon accounted the final scenario most likely, another addition to my vocabulary, called a false-flag. This is the scenario where Trasp was staging an act of war against themselves to generate the sentiment among their people that war against Etterus was necessary.
“In the age of deception,” Maícon told me, “crooked governments would stage false-flags to start wars they deemed profitable or politically expedient when their supposedly free citizens would otherwise object. It is amazing how credulous ordinary citizens were in that era.”
I stopped him so I could write a response on the touchboard. “Yet my instinct just now when you told me Etterus might be responsible was disbelief. And still I feel it. I want to believe anything but that.”
“Being human is a team sport,” Maícon responded in my earpiece. “You love your team, Pitka.”
“In the face of this, old friend, I am relying on you to keep me on the right team,” I wrote.
“What team is that?”
“Team humanity,” I scrawled across the board.
I asked Mercy to send in the Trasp shell so Maícon could return with me to the lab inside the 804 peg. When we got there, we found blood samples waiting for us, every worker who’d been inside the 804 in the previous month. All the blood was infected, including Mercy’s. Maícon and I were attempting to devise a way to test the nanites against a range of frequencies when we got word that the architect, Arlo Fanning had just been found dead in his bunk after failing to report for work that morning. It hadn’t occurred to us the day before that anyone outside the 804 peg could have been exposed to the nanites, and Arlo had worn his shield all day.
Maícon pulled me aside, out of Mercy’s earshot. “Maybe everyone. All of Veronia.”
“Self-disseminating? Otherwise, how would it spread?”
Mercy approached. “You two know something you’re not saying.”
“We don’t know exactly what we know yet,” I told her.
“Doctor, five people are dead. Two of them are my friends. You know why this is happening.”
“We know how, not why. And Mercy, I need you to please trust that the preservation of as many lives as possible is our only concern right now.”
“I’m taking you back to Scarla, and this time you’re going to give a full report, to her and to me.”
Mercy stepped toward me, as though to take me by the arm. Maícon stepped toward her in his Trasp shell, and the moment he did, the body froze in its place.
“Wait,” I said. “Mercy, we need to figure out what’s going on here before speaking to your mission chief. I’m not sure she can be trusted.”
“Scarla? You think I’d trust you over Scarla, doctor? I’ve known her for four years.”
Two Trasp bots came into the room and stood behind Mercy. She pulled my arm toward the door.
“Do you know what a false-flag is, Mercy?”
“A what?”
“Scarla may be involved.”
She pulled me toward the door, and as she did the bots came around and took up a position behind me.
Mercy looked me in the eyes.
“I’m not sure if we can trust her, Mercy,” I said. “But I know I can trust you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s in your blood too.”
Mercy froze. “Because what’s in my blood? Tell me everything, doctor.”
I did my best to convince Mercy of what we knew. I showed her the slides of the nanites, the blood of the deceased workers, the before-and-after slides of cell death from exposure to the frequency.
“This is in my blood?” she said.
When I nodded, she asked, “Is it in yours?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been careful about wearing my shield since I came to Veronia.”
“Why do you suspect Scarla?”
“Because I suspect everyone. I need you to free Maícon, please. He can explain—about the bioweapons, about the age of deception and war.”
Mercy was in disbelief.
“We do need to determine if your mission chief can be trusted,” I told Mercy. “She may be the only one who can prevent a calamity from unfolding here on Veronia. Please. Unlock Maícon.”
Mercy assented and unlocked the Trasp shell, freeing Maícon. He began to brief her on the art of deception in warfare and laid out the three likely scenarios as he’d laid them out to me.
“How will you know if Scarla can be trusted?” Mercy asked when Maícon had finished.
“We’ll test her blood,” I said. “If she’s among the perpetrators, her blood will be clean.”
“Then let’s go test her blood,” Mercy said.
I’m still not certain why I did it, but in the moment we were leaving, I instructed Maícon with a gesture to slide into my bracelet. I had a feeling. A feeling of what, I did not know, foreboding, insecurity maybe. Perhaps it was seeing Mercy render him powerless like that. Whatever it was, Maícon recognized the cue and instantly programmed the Trasp shell to run on a sequence of recorded algorithms, and he jumped into my bracelet, which buzzed to confirm his presence. Then Mercy and the two Trasp bots escorted me down to her ship so we could fly out to the 1 peg to test the mission chief’s blood.
For the first few minutes, in Mercy’s shuttle, the ride was excruciatingly silent as both of us grappled with the crippling burden of this knowledge. There was a surreal, funerary, stagnant energy between us, I an Etteran and she a Trasp, neither knowing what to say to the other now. I asked her about her home world. It seemed to break the tension. She told me she had never been there, that she was raised in the Atlas cylinder group and had enrolled in the security force when she was eighteen. I guessed she was nearly thirty. She asked me about Etterus, and I told her about Irrea’s Falls, the lake, the mountains. I told her I hoped she could visit one day.
Mercy surprised me with her forcefulness when we arrived at the mission chief’s office, barging past Scarla’s closed door and dismissing the chief engineers’ meeting. She then ordered Ms. Liseria-Lee to submit to a blood draw, all before giving her the least indication why we were there.
“You’d better have a damn good justification for this, Mercedes, if you’d like to have a career tomorrow,” Scarla said, reluctantly sitting and presenting her arm to me.
I only needed a finger prick. It took but a moment for me to set up the equipment and prep the sample. Scarla Liseria-Lee was infected too.
“I need you to be honest with me,” I said once I’d told her. “Is there any way this could be an accident? The release of an experimental tech, some genetic therapy?”
“We’re Trasp,” she said. “We don’t do such things.”
The room was silent for a moment. Scarla seemed to be processing the gravity of the situation.
“We need to test everyone,” she said.
“Agreed,” I said. “But we need to do it without causing a panic or alerting the perpetrators to our discovery.”
“I also think we need to get this Etteran out of my sight and get our own people in here, Mercy.”
“This Etteran discovered the nanites, Scarla,” Mercy said. “And we don’t know that they had anything to do with it yet.”
“Who then?”
“Respectfully,” I said. “We were brothers once, our peoples. And the three of us, I think we all want the same thing. If this situation goes any further, it may get so out of control we’re at all-out war. I don’t want that.”
“That could be exactly what Etterus wants, though,” Scarla said.
“We don’t know who’s responsible,” Mercy said. “We have only our intuition.”
“And what does your intuition tell you, Dr. Remera?” Scarla asked.
I was tempted to rattle off a list of things I had been thinking, that, yes, it could be Etterus; I had no love for our government; that it could be Trasp, an outpost like Veronia would be a small sacrifice to make to turn the population against their old allies; that it could even be a group of terrorists dead-set on provoking the deadliest war in human history. But I didn’t say any of that.
“My intuition is in the process of learning that the first truth of warfare is that nothing is certain. That is to the strategic advantage of the first actor. It also tells me that this information we possess—this is very dangerous information to know.”
“We were brothers once,” Scarla said. “How can we stop this?”
I told her that I wasn’t certain we could, but I proposed we get back to the 804 immediately. Maícon could access records from his Linden ancestors on nanites similar to those that had been released on Veronia. I thought then that we had the upper hand. I believed the malfunction in the transceiver had been a lucky accident that had given us time to stop whatever nefarious wheels had been set in motion. In my mind, it was now a race we had to win.
Scarla Liseria-Lee had a very strategic mind. In the shuttle back to the 804, she began listing possible scenarios, possible actors, possible motives. Then she turned her attention to me.
“You still think you’re getting out of this, don’t you, doctor? You still don’t understand.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“If this is your people, doctor, then they either don’t know that you’re here or don’t care and are content to sacrifice you. And that’s the best-case scenario for you—witless, sacrificial lamb.”
“How do you mean?”
“If this is Trasp, then I am looking at the most hated woman in all of history. What’s your name again?”
“Pitka Remera.”
“Dr. Pitka Remera of Etterus, the woman who started the war of all wars.”
In the moment, I didn’t understand what she’d meant. I hadn’t done anything but respond to their call for help. And, I thought, these people had started dying before I’d even arrived. It couldn’t possibly be me. No one would believe such a thing. The silence in the shuttle hung amongst us as we glided toward the 804 peg, and I began to put pieces together, the lessons from Maícon about the age of deception and the way they’d waged war.
“They’re going to kill me, aren’t they?” I said, looking over at Scarla Liseria-Lee.
“They’re going to kill all of us, doctor,” Mercy said. “Unless we expose this insanity before it unfolds.”
Scarla sat silently, looking at her friend. She didn’t say anything but her face said enough. She had the look of a person stepping calmly toward her own execution, a face that had accepted her fate.
All the original data we needed was in the 804, the blood samples, the work logs, the malfunctioning transceiver itself. We had just set down at the landing pad outside the construction staging area’s perimeter. It was a long walk in and out, one I’d made now several times. Our pace this time, though, was urgent. We hardly had enough time to get clear of the shuttle when we saw an enormously bright light and an explosion from the fuselage of one of the fusion rockets at the peg’s base.
“Get down,” Mercy shouted, jumping in front of me and Scarla and pinning us to the ground.
Even through our shields, there was an incredible, deafening blast as a shockwave hit us. Next was blackness.
When I came to, I had no idea how much time had passed. My entire body was buried in debris and detritus so thick I’m certain I’d have suffocated without my shield, which remained fully intact. Ash was still falling from the sky in diffuse but steady regularity, like the final hour of a snowstorm. When I stood, shook off the ash, and looked around, the 804 peg was gone. In its place was a flaming, smoking pile of rubble hundreds of meters high. This mangled mountain’s plume filled the sky in a dull gray and spit embers high into the atmosphere.
I searched the decimated landscape.
“Mercy!” I shouted.
I couldn’t see her.
“Scarla!”
The construction staging area was unrecognizable, but the joiners, operating on some basic algorithm had already begun the process of clearing debris and setting the area in order. They registered my shouting, looked over at me, and continued poring through the rubble and ankle-deep dust.
I looked over my shoulder toward Mercy’s shuttle. It was littered with chunks of metal and debris and covered over in grey dust. There was no indication either woman had gone that way. I turned back toward the flaming mountain that the 804 had become. A little further into the staging area, I could see the outline of a trench. I began to walk that way, though I’m not sure why. I was dazed and had no better idea.
After about fifty labored steps, my field of vision cleared the rim of the trench, and I could see an odd shaped lump about the size of a human body, submerged in the dust. I staggered into the trench and began to excavate my compatriots, Mercy first, face-down, lying on top of the body of Scarla Liseria-Lee. They were dead. Both shields were intact and neither had a scratch on their skin, yet they were dead, vacant-eyed and breathless. I understood immediately what had happened to those poor women—the frequency. I mourned them, yes, fellow humans, but I remembered what Scarla had said of my fate. There lay the final two Trasp witnesses.
From some place inside of me I had no idea I possessed, I released the most guttural howl—of grief, of anger, of helpless desperation. I could not process whether I had any better option than to lie down and die with them. I wept so fiercely I could scarcely breathe.
I became aware of some commotion not far off. My eyes and ears, hyper-vigilant, my senses clicked to life, burying the grief so far down it became insignificant. Turning out of instinct, my head down, I ran down that trench, fleeing whatever that noise was as fast as my feet could carry me.
I felt a sudden tug on my wrist, a vibration, pulling me toward a specific point in the trench. My bracelet buzzed ferociously when I reached that point. I lifted my head above the rim of the trench and met eyes with a Trasp joiner bot. I realized then what Maícon was up to.
Nearly at that same moment, the Trasp joiner bot turned to me and said in its robotic voice, “Pitka, get down until I tell you to run. They’re looking for your body. When I give you the word, head for the shuttle.”
As I ducked my head back into the trench, I could see the hard outline of a line of Trasp military strikers making their way along the trench in the area I’d just fled.
Maícon shouted at me again, “Get down, Pitka!”
He rushed toward those strikers, and as I took cover, I heard the footsteps of a collection of joiners following him, commandeered by my protector. I had no idea how many of them were networked nearby. There was a crush of noise, the sound of battle, so close. The explosions of energy and deafening noise shook dirt and grey dust into the trench each time a charge was lit. Pieces of the joiners ricocheted across the ground above. Bright lights flashed through the dull gray air. More joiners came running toward the battle. One of them slowed for a moment to say, “Now, Pitka, run!”
“Run!”
There was no thought. No struggle. I registered nothing. No heartbeat, no breathing. My feet never touched the ground. Just terror. My eyes streaked across the horizon and fixated on the shuttle. I had no sense of time, and I didn’t have a sense of breathlessness or fatigue until I was ascending the shuttle’s opening ramp.
Inside, Maícon’s voice spoke through the shuttle’s control system. “Hold on tight, Pitka!” he said.
I focused on regaining my breath while the shuttle shook, rattling its way into the air against all odds. From the mangled sight of it before, I had no idea how it was possible for that battered shuttle to fly.
Just breathe Pitka, I kept reminding myself for the minutes that shuttle rattled through the sky. Breathe. You’re still alive.
Without warning, the shuttle smashed into the landing pad, throwing me across the passenger compartment. I kept breathing but was so disoriented, I couldn’t right myself. Before I knew what was happening, Maícon, my Maícon burst in through the rear door and took me up in his arms. I remember him carrying me toward our ship. Then he strapped my traumatized body into the cot in the ship’s rear. At that point, I passed out.
This is my personal testimony. I regret that my official report cannot definitively identify a culprit, party, or government responsible for the treachery at Veronia. Nor will my account do anything to extinguish the spark of war that has already been kindled. The warmongers, whoever they are, have gotten their cause for war as they always did in ages past, through treachery of some wretched form.
Maícon is with me still. We shall not transmit again and aim to disappear forever. To my family, my eternal love. Do not believe the things they will say of us. You know. Be strong.
Uncertainty is the most potent weapon in war. An ordinary person has no means to know what is real and what is deception. There will be no certain step forward. You won’t understand the hidden forces acting upon your basest instincts, pulling you along.
I am Pitka of Etterus. I cannot go home, for I do not know whether my people will embrace me or kill me. For the same reason, I dare not go anywhere Trasp. I have only a ship and a galaxy before me. I have said what I’ve said. There is no way to teach one how to live in an age of deception, and even now, myself, I do not know.