Judas Unchained

“To continue as your chief advisor on MorningLightMountain should it be successful in destroying the Commonwealth.”

“Ah,” Nigel said. “I see. A berth on one of my lifeboats.” He saw Mellanie start to color, the girl’s shoulders lifted in anger.

“Hardly an extravagance for you,” Dudley said.

“No. Does this request extend to your new twin?”

Dudley shrugged. “If you wish.”

Nigel was tempted to wait long enough to hear what Mellanie was going to shout at her erstwhile lover, because she was clearly about to—unfortunately they didn’t need contention right now. “It will be done.”

“Thank you,” Dudley said. “Very well: while it was at the structure we named the Watchtower, the Second Chance transmitted a signal to the Dyson Alpha homeworld.”

“We know that,” Wilson told him. “Oscar found a record of the dish deployment in our log files. But the Starflyer got to them before we could tell anyone.”

“But do you know what it transmitted?” Dudley asked, keen to maintain his advantage.

“No.”

“It was a warning that the Second Chance was alien, and should be destroyed. The message was in the Primes’ communications pattern.”

“I don’t understand,” Wilson said.

“The Primes did leave Dyson Alpha before the barrier was erected,” Dudley said. “Their fusion drives were allowing them to colonize every other planet and large asteroid in their system. They could see that one day all their star system’s resources would be exhausted. Several of the immotile clusters sent ships out to their neighboring star, Dyson Beta, to establish colonies there. They are a very insular and arrogant species, the Primes; they assumed Dyson Beta would have material resources and nothing more. They were wrong. The immotile on board the first starship found another alien species. It followed its nature, and fought the new species into submission. After that, it absorbed their industrial and scientific base.

“That’s where the real problem started. The Primes on Dyson Alpha, the original Primes, have continuity built into their souls; it’s an integral part of their racial identity. They can remember their ancestors beginning to think, their own rise to consciousness. Those ancient thoughts lock them into what they are. A lone immotile three and a half years distant from its original immotile group cluster was a little more flexible in attitude. The native Dyson Beta species were developing genetics, the whole concept of which is verboten to the Primes. But the starship immotile started to use genetic science to modify itself physically, and God knows there are a lot of minor limitations and deficiencies in all creatures. The motiles were improved drastically, which led to a subsequent improvement in immotiles. For a start they regained their ability to move.”

Dudley gave his audience a mirthless smile. “The Dyson Alpha Primes were horrified. They called the Dyson Beta hybrids alienPrime, and regarded them as heretical abominations. A war started, then ended very abruptly when the barriers appeared around both stars. The next time MorningLightMountain saw the universe was when the barrier came down, and it received a signal from an immotile whose communications pattern identified it as MorningLightMountain17,735. That was a subsidiary group cluster MorningLightMountain had put on one of the early starships. That’s what the Starflyer is.”

“The Starflyer is MorningLightMountain?” Mellanie asked.

“An alienPrime version of MorningLightMountain, yes. It was on a starship that must have been in space between Dyson Alpha and Beta when the barriers were established. When it couldn’t attack its target, or go home, it must have flown off into interstellar space, and finally crashed on Far Away.”

“I’m afraid not,” Wilson said. “I checked with the Institute director, James Timothy Halgarth, personally. The Marie Celeste couldn’t have come from Dyson Beta; it hadn’t been in space long enough to travel that far.”

“If you’re basing that assumption on information from the Institute, then it must be regarded as invalid,” Paula said. “The Director would have lied to you to cover up the Starflyer’s true nature.”

“We’ve been sucked into the worst kind of war,” Nelson muttered.

“In what way?” Campbell asked.

“This is a civil war. They’re always the most violent and hard fought. And we’re caught in the middle of it.”

“No, we’re fighting for the Starflyer,” Nigel said. “We’re its storm troopers, whether we like it or not. If what Dudley has told us about the original Primes is true, then the Starflyer knows they will never allow the alienPrimes to survive. It’s using us to fight them, and conveniently ourselves, into destruction. We’re the new class of motile, to be manipulated and sent out to die while it remains intact behind the battle lines.”