Ambassador

Ambassador

Peter Watts

First Contact was supposed to solve everything.

That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever diseases we'd failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever political squabbles we hadn't outgrown, they would resolve. They were going to fix it all.

They were not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.

I didn't dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static. Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn't make would kill me.

Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the computer would have shown me the system's planetary retinue in an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary measurements.

Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was after me had never given me the chance. Several times I'd made a start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I'd placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.

I'd stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would put me no further ahead at t{plus}1. I'd be lost again as soon as I jumped.

And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don't know how; theoretically it's impossible to track anything through a singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might have been easier to deal with if I'd known why.

What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why, I tried to say hello.

What kind of intelligence could take offence at that?

Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn't even rate a proper name. This is what I'd come upon; there were no ports, no running lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.

Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.

What else do you do with an alien broadcast?

The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible unison, and gone dark.

And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.

So I'd jumped, blind. There really hadn't been a choice, then or the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had given my tormentor a name: Kali.

Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even within puppets such as myself—I'd have to run again in a few hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a potential one, is marginally better.

Of course I'd have to jump long before I got there. It didn't matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all circumstances. Zombie's autopilot may have been disabled, but mine engaged smoothly.

It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to change; the onboard had to be running again before it did.

I knew there wasn't a hope in hell.