tantly recognized her renewed energy and reflected it. “You must have had a good trip.”
“I did.”
“Me too. I loaded the D arc. You won’t believe it.” He brought up a series of images on the screen. “They’re flying reptiles with a photosynthetic dermal layer. They actually become invisible at night when they hunt.”
“Impressive.”
They talked about the exhibit on the homeworld, how the tours would have to be guarded, and how it might reignite excitement for the project, and even inspire a new group of scientists to venture out with them.
Finally, Janus said, “Ready for world 1723?”
Isis nodded, and they again entered their glass tubes, the fog floated up, and time slipped away.
CHAPTER 43
The sound of the alarm was Isis’ first indication that something was wrong. The tube opened, and the fog cleared. As usual, she was out of her tube before Janus. She hobbled across the cold metallic floor to the control panel and worked the green cloud of light that emerged, trying to determine what had gone wrong.
“Did the hyperspace tunnel collapse?” Janus asked. He rubbed his eyes and staggered out to join Isis.
“No. We’ve reached world 1723.”
A message over the speaker echoed in the small space. “This world is under a military quarantine. Evacuate immediately.”
Isis and Janus raced to the ship’s bridge. The viewscreen showed the planet below, which looked nothing like it had in the probe’s survey thousands of years ago. Where a lush green, brown, and white world had been, a wasteland lay. Black craters dotted the surface. The oceans were too green, the clouds too yellow, the land only red, brown and light tan.
The ship’s voice boomed in the bridge. “Evacuation course configured. Execute?”
“Negative,” Isis said. “Sigma, silence notifications from military buoys and maintain geosynchronous orbit.”
“This is reckless,” Janus said.
“This world was attacked.”
“That’s not certain.”
“We have to investigate this.”
“It could have been a natural occurrence,” Janus said. “A series of comets or an asteroid field.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You don’t—”
“It wasn’t.” Isis zoomed the viewscreen to one of the impact craters. “A series of roads lead to each crater. There were cities there. This was an attack. Maybe they carved up an asteroid field and used the pieces for the kinetic bombardment.” The viewscreen changed again. A ruined city in a desert landscape took shape, its skyscrapers crumbling. “They let the environmental fallout take care of anyone outside the major cities. There could be answers there.” Isis’ voice was final.
Janus lowered his head. “Take the Beta Lander. It will give you better maneuverability without the arcs.”
Isis set the Beta Lander down just outside the city, reasoning that there could be leftover explosives or any number of dangers inside the ruin. If the lander were destroyed, she would have nowhere to resurrect, and her life would permanently come to an end. Setting down outside was the only safe bet.
She donned her EVA suit and exited the lander, making a direct path for the ruins of the city.
Along the way, she turned the mystery of 1723 over in her mind. The initial survey had shown two hominid subspecies, both closely related. Their evolutionary progress was in line with the other hominids within the Atlantean swath of space, and they had been deemed unremarkable.
But something had happened here. Progress, evolution had ignited. They had made a great leap forward, and an advanced civilization had risen, only to be bombarded, bombed away in an apocalypse. The thought saddened her. This world could have been what the new Atlantean homeworld had longed for: a peer world. Its discovery could re-ignite interest in space exploration. But clearly someone already knew about the world or had discovered it after the collapse: they had placed an Atlantean military beacon in orbit.
There were only two possibilities. The first was that the initial survey results had been incorrect, that the world was already destroyed when it was initially probed. The alternative was that world 1723’s civilization had risen and fallen in the interval, and some Atlantean organization had found it and opted to hide the truth.
Isis had been hiking for almost two hours when Janus’s voice came over her comm, urgent and nervous. “Incoming ship.” He paused. “It’s a sentinel sphere.”
Isis waited. She stared at the sky, as if expecting the sentinel to break the cloud cover.
“It just scanned our ship,” Janus said. “It’s moving on. Isis, I think you should get out of there.”
“Copy.” Isis started for the lander.
“The sphere is releasing something. The object is entering the atmosphere. It’s a kinetic bombardment—”
The comm signal turned to static, and then cut off. Isis saw the burning object break the clouds above her, a burning hot poker streaking through the sky. Isis began to run but stopped. It was no use. She stood there, waiting, wondering why the sentinel would fire on either this world or her.
The heat grew, and she dropped to the ground and curled into a ball. The pain beat down on her, and sweat poured out of her skin for a few seconds, and then evaporated in the baking heat of the suit. The end came quickly after that, and in the next instant, she opened her eyes, staring out of the round resurrection tube in the Beta Lander.
Kate opened her eyes. She too was in the Beta Lander, on the same world, thousands of years after the memory. She also stared out of a round glass tube, this one a vat of yellow light in the research bay.
She lay on the floor, her head in Milo’s lap. The vat where she had floated, watching, experiencing the memories of Isis lay open, a pool of blood in the floor. Her blood. Isis’ death on the world outside thousands of years ago had felt real, and it had done damage, Kate knew it instinctively. She could barely move.
Paul and Mary stood over her, and the fear on their faces confirmed her assessment.
CHAPTER 44
When Kate opened her eyes again, she was on her back on a flat metallic table. She recognized it. It was the same type of surgical table she had awoken upon in the Alpha Lander, just after the surgery there.
Paul looked down at her, worry on his face. “That was close, Kate. Beta says your life expectancy is now less than one day.”
Kate sat up. “I saw what happened here.” She realized Mary and Milo were also in the room. She spoke to the three of them, recounting what she had seen on the Atlantean homeworld, how their society had fractured.
“Why did the sentinel attack Isis on this world?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know,” Kate replied. “I think the next memory will reveal that.” She read the apprehensiveness on their faces. “I have to. We’ve been over this.” She decided to change the subject. “Any progress on the code?”
“If you want to call it that.” Paul walked to the wall panel and pulled up an image that looked like a single frame of TV static but in color. Kate was amazed at how well Paul worked the panel. She wondered how long she had been in the vat. Either way, she elevated her opinion of his intelligence.
“This image is a translation of the four base codes to CMYK. We tried RGB—red, green, blue—with a null terminator, but it was even worse. We’ve also ruled out a video and several other scenarios.”
“The running joke,” Mary said, “is that it might be like one of those pictures where you stare at it long enough and it transforms into some image.”
“But we’ve been staring at it awhile, and it hasn’t changed.” Paul said, completing her thought. “Our working theory is that it’s a genome sequence. My guess is a retrovirus.”
“I bet you’re right,” Kate said. “It could be some sort of therapy that changes brain wiring, even allows for communication over distance. Or it could work like a quantum beacon in subspace.”
“Creating a quantum entanglement,” Mary said.
“Yes,” Kate agreed. “We inject the virus, and a return signal comes in for whoever sent it.”
“Do you know what it is?” Paul asked.
“No. But…” Kate thought about the retrovirus Isis had administered to the Exiles and about the sentinels and the Serpentine war with the Atlanteans. “I think I’m close. It could be in the next memory.”
Before anyone could object, Kate ushered them out of the adaptive research lab, down the corridor and into a medical lab. She explained the genome synthesis systems and again was impressed at how quickly Paul learned.
When the sequence was loaded, Beta began counting down the construction phase. In a little less than three hours, they would