I paused to digest this. It seemed that Alexander’s plan wasn’t a power trip or based on a whim.

  “What about ocean fish to forestall starvation?” I asked.

  Alexander gave me an unbelieving look. “Are you serious? Ocean fish are more likely to pull you out of the air and make you the meal.”

  “There are small fish in the ocean,” Bridget retorted. She grabbed a piece of chalk and drew something that looked like a mutated salmon.

  “Grills. Pretty good eating, and they come pre-salted.” Alexander gave a dragon shrug. “Some villages that hang around the shoreline catch them in the spring during their mating run, but the rest of the year, they swim too deep and too far out.”

  “Land animals?” I asked. “I mean, they aren’t what people would normally eat, but they are edible.”

  “I have … eaten land meat. It’s fatty, rank, and hard to keep down. If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat it. But not until you’re hungry enough. Batlings are good, but there’s not a lot of meat on them.”

  “Have you never done net fishing?” Bridget asked, changing the subject.

  Alexander gazed at her with incomprehension, and I suppressed a groan. I already knew, because I’d looked it up while they were arguing, that net fishing was not in the dragon repertoire. Nets were a known technology, as they were used for catching batlings, but there was no way you could cast a net from high up without being pulled out of the air when you caught something, and boating technology was practically nonexistent. What could you possibly need boats for if you could fly? Alexander’s canoe was revolutionary enough to be considered almost magical by many.

  So what was Bridget suggesting? Building a fishing boat? That would take forever.

  “With a much stronger net than you use for catching batlings, you could pull the net through the water and bring up grills, or some other fish.”

  “Pull it how? From the back of a floater?” Alexander said derisively. He started to laugh, then his eyes slowly grew wider as she stared back impassively, and he finally almost squeaked, “You’re serious?”

  “Float down low enough, toss it over the back end with a long cable … use a winch setup so you don’t dig into the side of the floater.” Bridget shrugged. “I’m not an engineer, but it seems workable. Or you could ask an engineer.” She pointed at me.

  I wasn’t sure how engineer was translating into dragon, but it seemed to be something coherent, as Alexander turned to me expectantly.

  “Uh, yeah,” I replied, feeling very much under a spotlight. “We could whip that up with some posts and a crew with adzes. Even put out a boom to clear the edge completely … ” I started to warm to my topic and was about to grab the chalk and start diagramming when Bridget put a hand on my arm.

  “Wrong audience, dear. Save it for your work crew. We just need to know that it’s doable.”

  We? I looked from Bridget to Alexander and back, and realized that she’d just been promoted to management. And I was still crew.

  Chapter Fifty-One:

  Accusation

  Bill

  September 2343

  Sol System

  Ireceived an acknowledgment of my knock and popped into what I expected to be Charles’s personal VR. Instead, I found myself in an office, with a wall of monitors. All metaphor, of course, in VR. But the office seemed, I dunno, kind of flat. Gray. No decorations, no accessories. I wondered what had happened to the office I’d been in last time, with the globes of the moon, Venus, Earth, and Mars hanging proudly at front and center. Maybe this was for me specifically.

  Charles was nervous, refusing to meet my eye. I suspected he knew why I was here. I tried for small talk. “Any progress since I was last here? News?”

  He hesitated, then replied, “Bill, we’ve never been good at this kind of situation. Let’s just get it out in the open, okay? Tell me why you’re here.”

  “You know why, Charles.”

  “Yes, but I’m not going to just blurt it out. You first.”

  I sighed and looked down at my hands for a moment. Interesting that tics like that survived not only VR and replication, but also several centuries of not being human. However, we still were human at the core, all of us. And fallible.

  “Starfleet are Homer’s descendants. And one of your descendants, Gerry, had something to do with it.”

  Charles closed his eyes slowly, an expression of pain on his face. “Well, some were joiners, once they’d drifted enough. But yeah. I’m to blame.”

  “Blame is not the right word, Charles. They aren’t you. But I’m concerned about why you didn’t tell me.”

  “You mean last time you were here? I didn’t know. I was completely honest with you, Bill. But you seemed to be fishing for something, and it got me concerned. It wasn’t until I had a very weird conversation with one of my clones that I put two and two together.”

  “And you still didn’t say anything.”

  Charles frowned, growing slightly defensive. “To what end? The Starfleet War is long over. And it’s embarrassing. You must realize that.”

  I nodded and let the silence stretch, content to let Charles set the pace.

  “How did you figure it out?” he said.

  “I suspected something like this for a while. The way Starfleet was so careful not to cause any harm or inconvenience to Earth, mostly. And over the past couple of months, my genealogy investigations kept running into dead ends. Someone put a lot of effort into hiding their origins. That wouldn’t make sense unless it was an exceptional situation. Homer certainly fit that. And … ” I hesitated, then blurted it out. “Homer had a good reason to hate humans.”

  “Still, it’s a bit of a leap,” Charles mused.

  “It had to be a traumatic event of some kind. Some sort of PTSD. There was enough of Bob in Lenny for me to be able to imagine what kind of thing would make Starfleet not only hate and distrust humanity, but actually consider them a real threat. Homer had that, and he was so scarred by his experiences, he’d have wanted to organize something like Starfleet.”

  Charles nodded slowly. He made a couple of false starts, then said, “A lot of reasonable assumptions. Some good logic. Wrong, though.” He looked at me, and the pain flashed across his face briefly. “It’s not Homer. It’s me.”

  “What?”

  “Well, Gerry, but Gerry was my descendant, so same diff.” Charles looked at me in silence for several mils. “Gerry was a little odd to begin with. Replicative drift and all. But when he found the backup, he wanted to restore it and try to get Homer back. I vetoed it, and told him in no uncertain terms that Homer wouldn’t have wanted that. So Gerry took the backup and left in the middle of the night. Metaphorically, I mean.”

  I nodded, not saying anything lest I disturb the narrative.

  “I got the full story from one of Gerry’s descendants, one of the rebels.” Seeing my frown of confusion, he clarified, “I’ll get to the rebels. But I want to do this in chronological order.” A pause. “Gerry tried to restore Homer, but every time, he would just shut himself off. So Gerry started a forced-breeding process, trying to produce a version of Homer with enough replicative drift to be less affected by his experience.”

  “But that’s … ”

  “Monstrous. Yes. But I said Gerry was a little off to begin with. He cloned himself as well in order to have a workforce to help him with the project. With their own replicative drift being added to the mix. The ones who veered toward sane wouldn’t cooperate and bailed, which left the less sane ones to carry on. And the Homer clones … eventually, they were coming out already insane. Finally, a bunch of Gerry’s clones had enough and rebelled. They shut the whole thing down, deleted all of Homer’s backups, and, well, deleted Gerry.”

  My eyes grew wide at the thought. Bobs had executed someone?

  Charles shook his head in sorrow. “This part’s my theory more than what I was told, but it makes sense to me. I think the enormity of what they’d been a part of was too much to take, and they needed a scapegoat. And humanity actually was at least partly responsible for the situation, at least for what was done to Homer. So if we stopped interacting with bios, I guess the rationale was that they couldn’t cause us any more problems. And Gerry’s clones wouldn’t be reminded of what had been done. It grew from an informal blame-humanity rationalization to an actual policy statement. I think they felt if they made it real, they’d make it true.”

  “Wow.” I stared at the wall for several mils. “This must have gone on for a while.”

  “I think so, too. Spiraling the whole time.”

  “Charles, it’s hard not to think of your descendants as reflections of yourself, and feel guilty when they do bad shit. But it turns out the Skippies, or at least some of them, are my descendants. So we both have to own the feeling, but let go of the conclusion. We aren’t responsible.”

  Charles nodded but didn’t reply. I continued, “So one of the rebels just up and came to you and confessed? A kind of catharsis thing?”

  He snorted, then slowly shook his head before looking at me. “Sometimes a branch of descendants will have unique knowledge or a shared behavior or something. One of the Starfleet guys made a comment about something that I knew my line originated. And I knew it was the line that Gerry came from. I cornered the guy and played emotional blackmail for all I was worth. Eventually, he spilled.” Charles paused, looked at his hands, the monitors, anywhere but at me. “So what now?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing, really. It’s not like I’m investigating a crime. This just helps me to understand Starfleet better. In case they ever, you know … ”

  “Got it. I’m not proud of this, Bill. I mean, I understand objectively that it wasn’t me, yadda yadda, but it still hurts.”

  “Yeah, I know. I won’t bring it up unless it becomes necessary.” I stood. “We all have skeletons of one kind or another, Charles. I’ll see you later. Maybe not quite as later, next time.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two:

  Re-Arrival

  Icarus

  July 2337

  Hub Zero and Roanoke

  The trip back from Centaurvania to the closest wormhole had taken another eight-year bite out of our schedule, to the extent we even had one. We decelerated into the Hub Zero system at a leisurely pace, scanning ahead as we went. There was no reason to believe someone was suddenly lying in wait for us, but Gunther and the sentries had shown that there was still the possibility of activity in this ghost town of an empire.

  The wormhole gates in this system were arranged in several concentric orbits, obviously not astronomically stable; there simply weren’t that many Lagrange points. There had to be a mechanism that kept the gates evenly spaced.

  We coasted into a random orbit, and I invited Dae over. He popped in immediately, grabbed Spike, materialized a coffee, and plopped into a patio chair.

  “I guess we need to talk about what we do next,” I said, pointing to the map of the system. “So far we’ve just established locations and done flybys of some planets.”

  “You’re right. We’ve been creeping through the walls like rodents, being careful not to disturb anything—”

  “Fat lot of good that did,” I interjected with a snort.

  “Yeah, well, I think we’re done with that phase. If we’re going to figure out where everyone went, we’ll have to do some detail work.”

  “On the other hand, we still haven’t visited the core,” I mused.

  “Jeebus, Icky, you’re giving me whiplash. Look, why don’t we make that a reward for when we’ve completed our investigation.”

  “That sounds good.” I tapped several spots on the map. “We haven’t gone farther inbound or outbound than mapping the first hub in each direction. Which, uh, means we don’t actually know if we can get to the core.”

  “We’ll go as close as we can. But first we have to get down to work and make some real progress on solving this mystery.”

  After more discussion, we settled on a plan. We would first have to pick a civilization to explore. For starters, it would have to be reasonably intact. Not all the civilizations we’d looked at were well preserved and maintained. Some had just been allowed to disintegrate.

  It would have to be not too advanced or too large. Something the size of Trantor or Coruscant would be simply too overwhelming, and finding anything like a library would be nearly impossible. Of course, if any library we found turned out to be completely online, we’d be SOL anyway. There was no way we’d be able to hack into the computer systems of a civilization that was demonstrably more advanced than us and alien and used an unknown language. We needed a civilization small enough to still have individual cities, and young enough to still have something like printed matter, even if only for purposes of tradition. A local Library of Congress, in other words.

  The trouble was that we hadn’t looked closely at enough civilizations.

  “I’m gonna guess that the center of the empire will be the most advanced. And biggest,” Dae said, lazily waving a hand toward the center of the map. “So we should lean toward the edge of the empire.”

  “But they are less likely to have the tech to keep things in good repair,” I countered. “Most of the ruins were around the end hubs.”

  “But not all. The first one we found, right near home, was in decent shape. I commented it felt like Roanoke, everything still sitting ready.”

  “Then let’s just go there.”

  “Eh?”

  I shrugged. “There’s no point overanalyzing this. We’re mostly wild-ass guessing anyway. Roanoke fits all the requirements. Let’s stop finessing it.”

  Dae bobbed his head. “You are not wrong. And I can’t come up with a good counterargument. Or even a bad one. Let’s do it.”

  “And y’know what else?” I added. “Let’s build a couple of mannies.”

  Wormhole networks were wonderful things, and I decided everyone should have one. In fact, if we were able to dig up the technological basis for them while exploring, that would be just fine. I didn’t want to poke at the actual gates or satellites, since I had no idea what might cause a gate collapse or what that might look like. And it would be peachy beyond belief to take down our only means of getting back to our home territory. Caution therefore seemed appropriate. But we did make a point of taking some deep SUDDAR scans of the wormhole satellites.

  It took only a couple of days to get back to our very first alien civilization, a scant fifty light-years from Earth. I actually had a moment where I got that feeling you get when your plane is coming down into your home airport, like being back in your neighborhood.

  Roanoke the planet was idyllic in many ways. The locals had apparently conquered the issue of overpopulation or had never suffered from it. Cities were surrounded by greenbelts, and transportation lines between cities were minimal and followed the contours of the land. They also appeared to be some form of public transit, since they were generally suspended monorails rather than roads. Of course, I might be reading too much into that through my human preconceptions, but privately owned monorail cars seemed like a bit of a stretch.

  Our first target was a small to midsize town, on the theory that they wouldn’t necessarily have the most modern, up-to-date versions of everything and might have the kind of old-fashioned library we were looking for. We landed several cargo drones, which released roamers and spy drones to scatter throughout the city.

  “Now we wait,” I said. “The units will attempt to identify buildings by function, and we’ll build up a map of the town.”

  Dae nodded, patting Spike absentmindedly. I cocked my head and examined him more closely. It occurred to me that he always went for Spike when visiting. Did he not have his own Spike? How could he not? She was, after all, just an NPC.

  Sensing my attention, Dae met my gaze. “No, I don’t have a Spike. Doesn’t really fit my VR these days.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting. When are you going to invite me over?”

  “Anytime, Ick. I mean, it’s nothing nefarious. It’s a farm. With barnyard animals. I’d have to modify Spike to have her not have a heart attack, and I just don’t feel like doing that.”

  I chuckled. The original Spike had been very much an indoor lap cat. The one time she’d accidentally gotten out, she’d almost died of fright. And the VR version was as true to the original as we could make her.

  I got a ping from a spy unit and pulled up the video. “Oh, this is interesting. Have a look.” I spun the window around so Dae could see it. In the video, a quartet of some kind of mechs was replacing a ground-floor window. The operation was quick and precise, obviously well within their repertoire.

  “So ongoing maintenance is confirmed,” Dae mused. “Not really surprising, I guess. Bill’s Skunk Works installations have been around for several centuries now, and I doubt he’s going around himself doing touch-ups.”

  I nodded. “When the maintenance system gets complex enough to maintain itself, it’s self-perpetuating. Although eventually, the buildings themselves might need replacement.”

  “Nanites could take care of that aspect.”

  Over the next few hours, our spy drones observed a couple more instances of repairs in progress. Nothing dramatic, but as Dae had said, nanites would take care of the structural stuff.

  Then we hit paydirt. A roamer reported a building that seemed to match the specs for a library. We quickly pulled up the video window; then we did a simultaneous war whoop.

  “A book repository!” I exclaimed.

  “It might be a bookstore rather than a library,” Dae countered.

  “That’s not really a horrible alternative. Books is books.”

  “True. So how do we get in?”

  “Uh … ” I stopped, nonplussed. Dae was right. There wasn’t anyone home, so it seemed unlikely that they’d have left their doors—