We don’t know what they called themselves,” Colonel Ilich said, lying back on the grass, his hands pillowing his bald head. “We don’t know that they called themselves anything, really. They may have done without language at all.”
Teresa had known Colonel Ilich her whole life. He was a fact of the universe, like stars or water. He was a calm, thoughtful presence in a life full to spilling with calm, thoughtful people. What made him different was that he was entirely focused on her. That, and that he wasn’t afraid of her.
He shifted, stretched. “Some people call them ‘the protomolecule,’ even though that was really just a tool they made. It’d be like calling humans ‘wrenches.’ ‘Protomolecule engineers’ is closer, but it’s kind of a mouthful. ‘Initial organism’ or ‘the alien society’ or ‘the architects.’ They all get used to mean more or less the same thing.”
“What do you call them?” Teresa asked.
He chuckled. “I call them ‘the Romans.’ The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind.”
It was an interesting thought. Teresa turned it over in her mind for a few seconds like she was getting the taste of it. She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful. Her mind wandered down that rabbit hole for a few breaths, seeing what was there, what was interesting in it, and decided to ask Timothy what he thought. He always had views that surprised her. It was why she liked him. He wasn’t afraid of her any more than Colonel Ilich was, but Ilich’s respect tasted like respect for her father, and that made it… not lesser exactly. Just different. Timothy was hers.
She felt the quiet stretching on too long. Ilich would be expecting her to say something, and Timothy wasn’t something she talked about. She found something else.
“So they built all of this?”
“Not all of it, no. The gates, the construction platforms, the repair drones. The artifacts, yes. But the living systems existed on the other worlds first. Stable replicators aren’t as rare as we used to imagine. A little water, a little carbon, a consistent stream of energy from sunlight or a thermal vent? Add a few million years, and more often than not something will happen.”
“Or if it doesn’t, then the Romans don’t have anything to work from.”
“One thousand three hundred and seventy three times that we know of,” Ilich said. “That’s a lot.” The colony worlds—Sol system included—were only on the gate network because there had been life for the Romans to hijack. A few hundred systems in a galaxy of billions. Ilich was old enough that anything more than one was miraculous to him. Teresa hadn’t grown up in a lonely universe the way the colonel had. She’d grown up in a lonely universe the way she had, and the two didn’t compare.
She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun. The light and heat felt good on her skin. The brightness pressed through her eyelids, turning everything red. Nuclear fusion filtered through blood.
She smiled.
Teresa Angelica Maria Blanquita Li y Duarte knew that she wasn’t a normal child the way she knew that light reflected off a level surface became polarized. A not-particularly-useful academic fact. She was the only daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, which all by itself meant her childhood had been strange.
She’d lived her whole life in—or occasionally and clandestinely just outside—the State Building on Laconia. Since she’d been a toddler, other children had been brought in to be her friends and classmates. Usually from the most favored families of the empire, but sometimes because her father wanted her to know a variety of kinds of people. He wanted her to have as close as she could get to a normal life. To be as close as she could be to a normal fourteen-year-old. And it worked as well as it worked, but since she only had her own life to judge from, she couldn’t really say how successful it had been.
She felt more like she had friendly acquaintances than actual friends. Muriel Cowper and Shan Ellison particularly treated her best, or at least most like they treated other students in her peer group.
And then there was Connor Weigel, who had been in her classes almost as long as she’d had them. He had a special place in her heart that she found herself curiously unwilling to examine.
If she was lonely—and she assumed she was—she didn’t have anything to compare it against. If everything in the world was red, no one would know it. Being everywhere was just as good a way to be invisible as not being anywhere. It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.
She wondered if life and death were like that too. Or life and not-life, anyway.
“What killed them?”
she asked, opening her eyes. Everything looked blue. “Your Romans, I mean.”
“Well, that’s the next step, isn’t it?” Colonel Ilich said. “Figuring that out and then building a strategy around what to do about it. We know, whatever it is, it’s still out there. We’ve seen it react to things that we do.”
“The thing on the Tempest,” Teresa said. She’d seen the briefing on it. The first time Admiral Trejo used the Magnetar-class ship’s main weapon in normal space, something had happened that knocked out people’s consciousness all through Sol system for a few minutes and left a visual distortion on the ship itself, locked to its frame of reference. It was why James Holden had come to the palace, which was really the aspect of it that had the biggest impact on her.
“Exactly,” Ilich said. He rolled onto his belly and propped himself up on his elbows to look at her. Eye contact was how he signaled that something he said was important. “It’s the most serious threat to our security. Either the Romans died because they ran up against some natural force that they weren’t prepared for, or because an enemy killed them. That’s what we’re finding out first.”
“How?” she asked.
“We don’t know how they killed the Romans. We’re still just at the edge of understanding what they were compared to us.”
“No. I mean how are we finding out if it was an enemy or a natural force?”
Colonel Ilich nodded to say it was a good question. He pulled out his handheld, tapped on it a few times, and brought up a grid.
TERESA COOPERATES TERESA DEFECTS
JASON COOPERATES T3, J3 T4, J0