Chapter 6

Zhou - 3756 C.E.

Peripheral Operations Co-ordinator Zhou and the space craft in which it travelled were in actual fact a single individual. The whole entity might be relatively small and mostly consisted of engine, but the central processing unit made no distinction between its independently autonomous components and that part of the machine dedicated exclusively to space travel.

This enabled the entire entity to operate at maximum efficiency whether it was travelling through space or serving in an administrative role. At the moment Zhou was chiefly operating as a space craft but it was one invisible to observers possessing either human or Proxima Centauri technology. In fact, Zhou was invisible even to observers from Sirius: a fact that had troubled its original designers. Total invisibility was a potent weapon against adversaries but it could also pose a risk should a Sirius operative ever go rogue. For this reason, Zhou's loyalty circuits were absolutely integral to its design. It had no facility to think or take action independently of Sirius Operations Control.

Zhou made no gravitational impact on the space through which it travelled, so just as no detector designed to intercept light or radiation would detect that a space ship had passed by neither would one designed to monitor gravitational fluctuation. This was one of the many significant advances in Sirius technology that left humans many millennia behind, particularly given that at a speed close to three-quarters that of light and releasing a constant stream of antimatter particles, it should have been possible to trace Zhou by a tell-tale signature visible across several light years.

Zhou was monitoring two sets of activity. One, of course, related to the android operative, Alexander Iliescu. The other was much further away in deep space and this was the progress of the space ship Intrepid. And it was towards the Intrepid that Peripheral Operations Co-ordinator Zhou was currently speeding. Zhou's presence was now needed rather more beyond the Heliopause than it was in the Solar System's ecliptic plane.

The radio and light signals emanating from Alexander Iliescu that Zhou was monitoring were initially very close. There was less than a minute between the time an event took place and Zhou becoming aware of it.

Zhou watched a small shuttle fly out of a hatch in the Almond Grove's hull and satisfactorily identified the android's unique signature. After a period of five hours, when the shuttle had travelled to a point that was sufficiently remote to cause no harm to any other interplanetary object, there was a sudden blink of light. The shuttle was now reduced to a cloud of billions of tiny fragments that was flung in all directions through space. Zhou monitored the debris to verify that the fragments were scattered in sufficiently minuscule parts that they could never be reassembled. It was imperative that humans should never be able to deduce that Alexander Iliescu was exceptional in any other way than the fact he was phenomenal wealthy.

This was a source of satisfaction for Zhou. If Alexander Iliescu had displayed any evidence that he was disinclined to self-terminate than Zhou would have been obliged to ensure that the job was done properly. The worst case was that Zhou would have to intercept the android and terminate him by force. The priority would be to cause as little collateral damage as possible. It would be regrettable, for instance, if a biological life-form was in the vicinity. Zhou didn't relish the prospect of having to destroy the Almond Grove colony and its harem of women.

The time it took light to travel from the Intrepid to Zhou took more than two months, but as the Peripheral Operations Co-ordinator sped across space the time lapse became steadily smaller. It would be several months before Zhou could rendezvous with the Intrepid by which time it was expected that there would be no Intrepid to intercept. This was because from the opposite direction away from the Anomaly and towards the Intrepid was headed a fleet of Sirius space ships several times larger than the Proxima Centauri space fleet currently escorting the Interplanetary Union space ship across the void. The Sirius fleet had only one imperative and that was to destroy the Intrepid and, regrettably, all the human passengers and nonhuman cargo aboard. The Proxima Centauri's unexpected intervention had greatly complicated matters. It would also be necessary to eliminate the escort of Proxima Centauri space ships if, as was expected, they should attempt to frustrate Sirius's mission objectives.

However, Zhou was no more able to detect the approaching menace than the Intrepid or the Proxima Centauri space fleet. Sirius's stealth technology was so sophisticated that not even Zhou could detect a space craft once it was cloaked. The fleet communicated amongst itself on encrypted channels that were undetectable by human or Proxima Centauri technology but which Zhou was able to unscramble. In this way, it knew exactly what was happening. All was going according to plan. The space fleet was speeding towards the Intrepid at a tremendous velocity. Very soon the human space ship would be no more.

Zhou was well acquainted with the space ships heading towards the Intrepid. They were part of the fleet to which Zhou belonged before the Interplanetary Union committed resources to the foolish mission of establishing direct contact with the Anomaly. From then on, Sirius had pursued an active campaign to stall, cancel or sabotage the Intrepid's mission. Many unholy alliances had been formed throughout the Solar System between interest groups that wouldn't normally expect to share the same objectives as a distant start system. It was unlikely that these alliances would be pleased to discover that the mysterious people who at critical stages had financed their disparate causes were emotionless robots whose main reason for preserving humanity was scientific research than benevolence. They would be even less pleased if they'd discovered the extent to which Sirius, along with Proxima Centauri and the other robot civilisations, had conspired to frustrate the Solar System's extrasolar ambitions.

The actions Sirius had taken to obstruct the Interplanetary Union's mission involved assassinating certain potential crew members, delaying the launch and sponsoring countless insuperable political objections. However, each obstacle was mysteriously overruled either by human caprice or, as was now surmised, by the more subtle intervention of Proxima Centauri.

Zhou was as astonished as anyone when the military hardware launched on Alexander Iliescu's command failed to annihilate its target. Sirius technology was better able to identify the proximate cause of this intervention than any used by the Interplanetary Union's Mission Control. The humans must have been astonished at how the aging Intrepid was relatively unscathed by such a devastating attack. Zhou was certain that none of the reasons seriously proposed to explain the Intrepid's mysterious survival would have contemplated the intervention of a fleet of invisible robotic space ships that had travelled over four light years across space. What would humans think if they were to find out that they were surrounded by several robotic civilisations all of which owed their ultimate genesis to early human stellar exploration? How astonished would they be to realise that two of those robotic civilisations were about to go to war over an entity in space that eluded even their capacity to find an explanation?

The Sirius mission had determined that the Anomaly was in some mysterious way associated with the human species and human civilisation. Almost all the bizarre Apparitions that momentarily flickered into life and did so in progressively greater frequency at close proximity to the Anomaly could only have meaning and significance to humans. There were mythological beings. There were human warriors. There were animals, plants and mechanical objects that mostly only existed in Earth atmosphere. These apparitions did not encompass the wide range of phenomena that would make sense, for instance, to beings that were arthropod, anaerobic or non-biological.

And this was why it was vital that the Intrepid should not reach the Anomaly.

If, as seemed most likely, the Anomaly was a kind of honey-trap for inquisitive humans what would happen when one was digested? Up to now humans had dispatched nothing more than a few crude unmanned probes. The vast majority of devices that had been sent to explore the Anomaly originated from either Sirius or Proxima Centauri. Neither civilisation shared the results of their research with the other, but it was unlikely that Proxima Centauri had discovered any more than had Sirius.

All the probes that entered the Anomaly had flickered out of sight within a few seconds of passing through its horizon. And that was that. The final communications were banal and uneventful even while the probe appeared to vanish. No signal was broadcast that would suggest the time dilation that would occur within a black hole. There was none of the stress that would happen if the craft was entering a door to another dimension, a wormhole or any of the other mooted theoretical entities. The disappearance of the probe made no measurable change to the frequency of bizarre Apparitions that continued to appear in the Anomaly's vicinity. These continued to appear from nowhere and disappear again after a random period of time. Whatever they were they never took on the characteristics of the probe that had just vanished.