Interesting, said Peter Delen Dem Tae, whose blue-band training included profound immersion in psychology and anthropology.
Saigyô, play the distress signal, please, said Dem Lia.
There came a series of static hisses, pops, and whistles with what might have been two words electronically filtered out. The accent was early Hegemony Web English.
What does it say? said Dem Lia. I cant quite make it out.
Help us, said Saigyô. The AIs voice was tinted with an Asian accent and usually sounded slightly amused, but his tone was flat and serious now.
The nine around the table looked at one another again in silence. Their goal had been to leave human and posthuman Aenean space far behind them, allowing their people, the Amoiete Spectrum Helix culture, to pursue their own goals, to find their own destiny free of Aenean intervention. But Ousters were just another branch of human stock, attempting to determine their own evolutionary path by adapting to space, their Templar allies traveling with them, using their genetic secrets to grow orbital forest rings and even spherical startrees completely surrounding their suns.
How many Ousters do you estimate live on the orbital forest ring? asked Den Soa, who with her white training would probably be their diplomat if and when they made contact.
Seven hundred million on the thirty-degree arc we can resolve on this
side of the sun, said the AI. If they have migrated to all or most of the ring, obviously we can estimate a population of several billion.
Any sign of Akerataeli or the zeplens? asked Patek Georg. All of the great forest rings and startree spheres had been collaborative efforts with these two alien races, which had joined forces with the Ousters and Templars during the Fall of the Hegemony.
None, said Saigyô But you might notice this remote view of the ring itself in the center window. We are still sixty-three AUs out from the ring this is amplified ten thousand times.
They all turned to look at the front window where the forest ring seemed only thousands of kilometers away, its green leaves and yellow and brown branches and braided main trunk curving away out of sight, the G8 star blazing beyond.
It looks wrong, said Dem Lia.
This is the anomaly that added to the urgency of the distress signal and decided us to bring you out of deep sleep, said Saigyô, his voice sounding slightly bemused again. This orbital forest ring is not of Ouster or Templar bioconstruction.
Doctor Samel Ria Kem Ali whistled softly. An alien-built forest ring. But with human-descended Ousters living on it.
And there is something else we have found since entering the system, said Saigyô. Suddenly the left window was filled with a view of a machinea spacecraftso huge and ungainly that it almost defied description. An image of the Helix was superimposed at the bottom of the screen to give scale. The Helix was a kilometer long. The base of this other spacecraft was at least a thousand times as long. The monster was huge and broad, bulbous and ugly, carbon black and insectoidal, bearing the worst features of both organic evolution and industrial manufacture. Centered in the front of it was what appeared to be a steel-toothed maw, a rough opening lined with a seemingly endless series of mandibles and shredding blades and razor-sharp rotors.
It looks like Gods razor, said Patek Georg Dem Mio, the cool irony undercut slightly by a just-perceptible quaver in his voice.
Gods razor my ass, said Jon Mikail Dem Alem softly. As an ebony, life support was one of his specialties, and he had grown up tending the huge farms on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Thats a threshing machine from hell.
Where is it? Dem Lia started to ask, but already Saigyô had thrown the plot on the holo showing their deceleration trajectory in toward the forest ring. The obscene machine-ship was coming in from above the ecliptic, was some twenty-eight AUs ahead of them, was decelerating rapidly but not nearly as aggressively as the Helix, and was headed directly for the Ouster forest ring. The trajectory plot was clearat its current rate of deceleration, the machine would directly intercept the ring in nine standard days.
This may be the cause of their distress signal, the other green, Res Sandre, said dryly.
If it were coming at me or my world, Id scream so loudly that youd hear me two hundred and twenty-eight light-years away without a radio, said the young white-band, Den Soa.
If we started picking up this weak signal some two hundred twenty-eight light-years ago, said Patek Georg, it means that either that thing has been decelerating in-system very slowly, or
Its been here before, said Dem Lia. She ordered the AI to opaque the windows and to dismiss itself from their company. Shall we assign roles, duties, priorities, and make initial decisions? she said softly.
The other eight around the table nodded soberly.
To a stranger, to someone outside the Spectrum Helix culture, the next five minutes would have been very hard to follow. Total consensus was reached within the first two minutes, but only a small part of the discussion was through talk. The combination of hand gestures, body language, shorthand phrases, and silent nods that had evolved through four centuries of a culture determined to make decisions through consensus worked well here. These peoples parents and grandparents knew the necessity of command structure and disciplinehalf a million of their people had died in the short but nasty war with the Pax remnant on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, and then another hundred thousand when the fleeing Pax vandals came looting through their system some thirty years later. But they were determined to elect command through consensus and thereafter make as many decisions as possible through the same means.