Metaman

By Graham Storrs

Becoming a metaman was more of an escape from Ross McGowan's downward-spiralling life than a job he really wanted but years of isolation, degradation and drudgery in the service of the Post-Human Collective would give him plenty of time to regret the choice. The company of Tracey Lane, his magnificent captain and mentor, might have helped him through it, if the discovery of an ancient Martian technology hadn't thrown him into deadly peril and set Earth and the post-humans on the path of war.

Trapped millions of kilometres from home and pressed into service as a human guinea-pig for the post-humans as they pursue their desperate ambitions to escape Earth before the war escalates beyond control, Ross, ever haunted by the trauma of his past, steers a fine line between survival and revolt. As events around the post-humans evolve at breakneck speed, Ross and the other humans in the same predicament are branded collaborators by the governments of Earth, making escape from the Post-Human Collective a death sentence.

And crucial to everything, is the answer to Fermi's old question, "Where are all the aliens?"

Metaman is the exciting new novel from best-selling science fiction writer, Graham Storrs, author of the Timesplash novels, the Placid Point novels and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Graham Storrs
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780645363234

Graham Storrs

Graham Storrs is a science fiction writer who lives miles from anywhere in rural Australia with his wife and a Tonkinese cat. He has published many short stories in magazines and anthologies as well as three children's science books and a large number of academic and technical pieces in the fields of psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.He has published a number of sci-fi novels, in four series; Timesplash (three books), the Rik Sylver sci-fi thriller series (three books), the Canta Libre space opera trilogy. and the Deep Fracture trilogy. He has also published an augmented reality thriller, "Heaven is a Place on Earth", a sci-fi comedy novel, "Cargo Cult", a dark comedy time travel novel, "Time and Tyde", and an urban sci-fi thriller, "Mindrider."

Book preview

METAMAN

by

Graham Storrs

This Edition, Copyright © 2022, Graham Storrs

ISBN: 9870655363234

Published by Canta Libre

Cover design by Graham Storrs

Cover Art by DALL.E mini (www.craiyon.com)

Layout and interior design by Graham Storrs

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorised, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Dedication

Metaman has been eight years in the making. There are many ideas in the book that I struggled to clarify and refine as I picked it up, wrestled with it and set it aside over and over during that time. As usual, my wife, Christine, bore the brunt of all that mental anguish and listened with her usual patience and good humour as I beset her with endless ramblings on the subjects of transhumanism, cosmology and, above all, the Fermi Paradox. I feel a dedication is extremely poor recompense for all that but it’s the best I can do. Christine, this one is for you.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my daughter, Dr Kate Storrs, herself an accomplished artist, for pointing me towards the DALL.E mini program (www.craiyon.com). This clever little AI generates artwork based on a set of keywords given to it by the user. It took a while to learn how to steer it to create just what I wanted (the AI was having as much trouble training me as I was training it, I suppose) but I got there in the end. It was a lot quicker than learning to be an artist and also quicker than giving a real artist a creative brief and then iterating towards a finished cover. I’ll let you be the judge of the end result but I would just like to acknowledge the role this software played and to thank Kate for suggesting it. I also used various other software tools (notably bigjpg.com and GIMP) to get the finished image.

Chapter 1

Space is not all that scary when you're used to it. After a couple of years, you begin to wonder what all the fuss is about. Anyone who flies in an airliner is taking the same kind of risk and they're just as dead if the engines fail, or a window cracks open. I said as much to Tracey the other day and she laughed and reminded me what a wimp I'd been when I first took on the job. Then she started mocking me for looking pouty and said, Come and have a cuddle my big brave hero. She was only twenty-five – ten years younger than me – but she treated me like a kid sometimes. Then again, she was stronger, faster and way smarter than me. What's more, she was the captain of the ship and I was just the grunt, the metaman, lowest of the low. So I reckon it wasn't hard for her to justify a feeling of superiority.

I was sorely tempted to take her up on that offer of a cuddle, though. It sounds a bit pathetic, maybe, but I'd had a major crush on Tracey since the moment I first saw her. Even more pathetic was the feeling I had that she liked me too. I kept telling myself I was building mountains out of molehills, that a high and mighty post-human could never stoop to feeling that way about an aboriginal like me. That's what they called us, you know, aboriginals, the savages who inhabited the Earth when the post-humans arrived. For a white, sixth-generation Aussie like me, it's kind of ironic. A karmic wheel kind of thing.

Anyway, if Tracey Lane joked around and teased me sometimes, it was more like a person playing with their puppy than anything significant. All the same, a man can dream.

Stand by for manoeuvring thrusters in five minutes. All staff to the bridge, please.

It was Tracey's voice, speaking in my head. That's another thing you get used to, working with the posties. They don't like to be limited by verbal interaction, so vanilla humans who work for them need to undergo some basic augmentation as part of the conditions of employment. They stick nano-junk in your head so you can communicate with them and, in my case, they did a few gene mods so I could live and work in micro-gee without losing muscle mass and bone density. They'd be happier not having any primitives working for them at all but they still need us for a few things.

Captain wants me, I told Toolbag and headed for the door.

The little bot shrugged and said, Sure, boss, and started to follow me. When I say shrugged, I mean it sort of heaved its body up and down. Toolbag doesn't have shoulders as such. It's about the size and shape of a big suitcase – lots of appendages that can fold out from it, but nothing you could really call a shoulder.

You stay here, I told it, and lock down that team working on recycling plant B. The team was a bunch more bots. A self-organising maintenance crew that could – and did – manage without supervision, but I liked to keep my eye on them. You never knew when things might go tits up and the recyclers were important.

Sure, boss. It settled back into its favourite spot and I headed through the ship's innards towards the command deck, scooting along in micro-gee like a pro.

If you ever saw one of those deep sea drilling platforms they used to have back when there was oil under the oceans, you'd have some idea what the Post-Human Collective Space Vessel Halloween Jack looked like, a roughly box-shaped collection of warehouses, habitats, machinery, engines, fuel tanks, hangars, docks, sensors, grapples, lasers, and solar panels, all attached to a complex, rigid scaffold and interconnected by a maze of tubes and corridors. Jack was built in space and it showed. If you were looking for up or down, you’d need to look elsewhere.

I popped up through a hole in the floor, or down through one in the ceiling, to find everyone else had arrived before me. A dozen post-humans in all. Wolff scowled at me and obviously said something to the others because a few of them looked at me and smirked.

On open comm, please, Otto, Tracey said, her voice clear in my head even though her lips hadn't moved. Ross is part of the staff here and he's part of this meeting.

Of course, Wolff said so I could hear him. I thought his tone was insubordinate, but Tracey let it pass. Let's begin.

A 3D image materialised in the centre of the room, a long-range view of an asteroid, just another grey space rock, lumpy and distorted, like a ten-kilometre-long sculpture of a potato with one end lopped off.

This is target object AB3452. It was routinely assayed in this morning's batch and flagged for further study by the ship's AI. A set of charts came up showing the chemical composition of the big rock. So far, I could follow what was going on. Quite often, keeping up was a problem. Halloween Jack was a survey ship, one of a bunch the posties had out here in the Asteroid Belt. The Post-Human Collective needed materials – organics, metals, gases – and they got them mostly from mining asteroids. So Jack and the other survey ships ran through the Belt zapping rocks with high-powered lasers and analysing the plasma. Once in a while, they'd strike it rich and call in the mining ships to chew up the rock and send the pickings off to factories on other asteroids, or back to Mars orbit. I assumed Tracey was going to announce we'd hit paydirt and were going closer to do a detailed analysis.

I heard sounds of surprise, shock even, from the people around me and I took a closer look at the charts. Most of it was what you'd expect but a few of the spectra looked a bit weird. Before I had a chance to work it out, Tracey was talking again.

As you can all see, this is a most extraordinary piece of rock. People were nodding.

Instrument failure? Peijing asked.

No, Tracey said. A warning came up on the display indicating an imminent course change. I tightened my grip on the rail I was holding and hooked my feet under another. I felt a light nudge as the EM engines kicked in and then the gentle tug on my body, as if the Universe had just that minute decided that down was somewhere to my left and back a bit.

Once we've established the vector, we'll be under acceleration for the next twelve hours, Tracey said. We're going to want a close look at this.

You sent scouts, Peijing said. It wasn't a question. It was the obvious thing to do, therefore the captain would have done it. It's the way they thought. What did they find?

The scouts were high-gee sensor platforms – smart missiles, really, with fancy payloads – that could race off into the vast distances that surrounded us and put eyes on an object of interest, even drop equipment packages if that was called for.

The display changed. The asteroid was still at the centre but now it was much bigger. The caption said it was a model built up from multiple lidar sources moving relative to the asteroid to take up a tetrahedral formation around it. In the display it looked like a beautifully-clear telescopic view as it rotated to reveal its back end. The telemetry was new, barely ten minutes old.

The gigantic boulder was pitted and scarred by countless impacts with other space rocks large and small. Its dusty surface had that smoothed-off ancient look all Asteroid Belt objects had after four and a half billion years of rolling about in that cosmic rock tumbler. I watched, mesmerised as the image of the behemoth slowly turned.

And that is why you're all here, Tracey said with a dramatic flourish. There were gasps of amazement. Murmured conversations broke out around the room. As usual, it took me a moment longer than the others to realise what I was seeing. As the truncated end of the asteroid swung into view, I could see it was hollow, like the exposed end of an almighty geode as wide as a small city. The hollow was deep. It seemed to run the full depth of the rock. But it was only when I saw the hollow end-on that I saw what the others had seen. The asteroid had been broken apart. Somewhere out there was another fragment – perhaps just as big. The break was uneven and ragged so it was only when I could look straight into the hole that I saw it was round. No, not just round: perfectly round, and it maintained precisely the same diameter all along its length.

The only possible explanation was that the asteroid had been deliberately hollowed out by some force – or some thing – that had cut a perfect, cylindrical hole straight down the middle of it.

I was so stunned that it was a while before I became aware again of the conversation going on around me.

We need samples, Peijing was saying. From the broken edge, from inside... From everywhere.

Can I leave you to organise a geological survey? Tracey asked.

Peijing nodded. She stared at the image for a moment, then left the room abruptly, presumably to get started on it.

And you, Otto, a preliminary search for any archaeology? Whatever can be done from the air. I'm happy to fly into that thing, but we won't be landing a team. Reyansh, will you prepare a report for the Collective? Include Otto’s survey plans and Peijing’s when they're ready. I'll append a section myself. Send it tight-beam and make sure no-one else can read it.

Of course. Reyansh also left.

Make sure no-one else could read it? Everyone knew that Earth spied on the post-humans and vice versa. Ever since the posties moved to Mars, Earth had been completely paranoid about them. Now Tracey intended to keep this find a secret, at least for the moment. Probably the most significant discovery ever made. My stomach knotted. What might they find inside that asteroid? Alien technology? Super weapons? A library? The mere fact that I knew of the rock's existence put me in a frightening position. I was the only human alive who knew this secret. Why had Tracey made a point of inviting me here to witness it?

Any questions? Tracey asked.

None that anyone here can answer, Wolff said.

ETA in twelve hours, Tracey said and the room cleared. I looked at Tracey as the others filed past me and left. She caught my eye and signalled me to stay.

What do you think? I asked when we were alone, switching to personal comms.

We both regarded the asteroid. You tell me. You're the engineer.

I smiled. I had three degrees in engineering, one in power systems from RMIT in Melbourne, one in robotics from Caltech, and a Masters degree in space structures from MIT. After that, I'd been building up a pretty impressive resumé until about five years ago. As far as the posties were concerned, that barely qualified me to be their janitor. Only Tracey out of all of them would ever dream of calling me an engineer.

It could be a habitat, I said. There have been designs for hollowed out asteroids for a century or so. If it is a hab, it's old. Extremely old. From the cratering on the rim, it can't have broken up less than a billion years ago. Whoever built it is long gone. But you'd already concluded that and that's why you want an archaeological survey.

She wasn't really listening. Those walls are never less than nine hundred metres thick, she said. Whoever lived there thought that safety was more important than being able to see the Sun.

I saw what she meant. A layer of protection that thick was way over the top for a defence against radiation. It would have shrugged off a bombardment with nukes.

Maybe they were originally cave dwellers and liked the feeling of being deep under the ground.

Her sigh was almost imperceptible. That wouldn't explain the diameter of the bore.

No, of course it wouldn't. The cylindrical space they'd cut inside that boulder was four kilometres across. If you stood on the inside wall, and the rock was rotating fast enough to give you a reasonable pseudo-gravity, it would not seem too much different from standing on the surface of a planet. It was a surface dweller's habitat, not a cave dweller's. It wasn't hard to see, once she'd pointed it out, and I'd have got there in the end, but to Tracey's augmented mind, anything I could reason out in a week was just blindingly obvious, childishly simple. I felt as if I'd let her down.

Why did you want me to see this? I asked. Why did you want everyone to know I've seen this?

I don't want you excluded, she said.

Excluded?

From whatever happens next? I think she saw my confusion because she explained. It's the kind of thing that can start chains of events that could leave you sidelined.

I still didn't really understand, but what I really wanted to know was this, Does knowing about this put my life in danger?

She looked uncomfortable. There are plausible scenarios in which you would not be allowed to return to Earth, or even communicate with other humans, but I don't see why you should fear death at our hands.

Was she telling me the truth, or treating me like a kid again, telling me what I wanted to hear, to keep me calm and make me feel secure? The trouble was, even after working for the Post-Human Collective for two years, I had very little idea how their minds worked. It was easy to get complacent and deal with them as if they were ordinary humans. Then they'd say or do something that wasn't right at all, something that sent a chill up your spine, and you were reminded that they weren't like regular people. They really were a different species.

Just what is the Collective's view on the ethics of killing? I asked, trying to make it sound light.

Of humans? she asked. And there it was: that chill again.

* * * *

The early years of the twenty-second century saw me in West Africa, five years out of grad school, thirty years old, and feeling like the world was mine. I was smart, strong, and fresh as tree-grown apples. As consulting engineer on the world's tallest solar updraft tower, my work was cool and prestigious, and already taking me places I had never dreamed of.

I didn't need to be at the building site in person, of course. I could have done the whole job in VR and telepresence from my apartment in LA. Most people would have. Only I wanted to be there, to experience the place directly, meet the locals, smell the food, put my own hands on the fabric of this amazing structure we were assembling. I've always been like that. Even as a kid, I would collect junk components from recycling bins and connect them up with solderpaste and optic fibres to build weird and wonderful machines. I could have put them together far more quickly and conveniently using a simulation package and a fabber. But in VR, you just don't get the same intimacy with devices as you do in RL. And you don't get that sense of having done it all yourself with the simulation AI constantly peering over your shoulder, reminding you of tolerances and suggesting more optimal components.

Not that I'd dream of working on anything as complex as the solar updraft tower without all the software support I could command. I just like to think that being so hands-on all my life, and using my own brain instead of relying on AIs, has given me a deeper understanding of what I do.

It was a wrench leaving Jacinta but, once I'd done it, not such a big deal as I thought it would be. We'd met at MIT. She was years older than me and Director of Research in the Small Machines Lab. She was beautiful, brilliant, confident, and had just left her second husband when we hooked up. I was completely wrapped up in my work and didn't have much of a social life. We met over coffee in a big group at a smart materials conference. It was like suddenly my eyes opened and there we were, sitting alone together with her saying, Why don't you come back to my place? I'll cook us dinner and you can show me your designs.

Looking back, I suppose she was always a bit distant. I suppose I was too. She could be mean, cruel even, if things weren't going her way at work. She had an ambition that you could bulldoze a site with and I often felt I was incidental to the main game, that she sometimes endured my company rather than enjoyed it. She made no bones about my being an accessory to her public image, like the foreign muscle car she drove, and her designer dresses. You're such a big, strong, male animal, she told me once. Like a panther. When I take you to a party, I like to see the other women stealing glances at you. It was very flattering, but also disturbing.

When I told her I was spending the next year in West Africa, she acted indifferent. She said she always knew I'd get restless one day. She wouldn't talk about it. Then she got mean, said I was still a boy and it would do me good to see the world and grow up a bit. She said she supposed I thought I could do better. I knew it would happen, she said. Now I've hit forty you want to trade me in for two twenties. Men are all the same. It got nasty. So nasty that, instead of us just being apart for a while like I planned, it turned into a full-blown break-up. I'd never seen her so vicious, or so vulnerable. It scared me that I could be so stupid and insensitive as not to see it coming.

Africa was amazing, beautiful, shambolic, dangerous. Even for a bloke from Sydney's West, I found the heat hard to take. And the flies. But the hardest thing to handle was the poverty. We lived in a compound on the building site. The site itself was fenced and patrolled by armed robots. Within that, the compound was fenced too, and patrolled by security cops – white mercenaries with crewcuts and big guns. The compound was pretty basic, like a mid-range motel, but we had a pool and a well-stocked bar, high-speed Internet and, for those who wanted it, women and boys from the local villages would arrive by truck each evening.

I had to agitate with the site foreman for two weeks before he agreed to me getting out and driving around the area. Even then, he made two crewcuts go with me. I filled my pockets with US dollars – paper money was the preferred legal tender in those parts – and we took a Range Rover. I couldn't get anyone else to come, so I sat in the back alone, while one crewcut drove and the other rode shotgun. I asked the driver why the car couldn't drive itself and, in a South African accent, he told me the local gangs would just hijack the nav and drive you straight into an ambush.

We visited a couple of villages and then a small town. The minute I got out of the car at the first stop, I knew it had been a bad idea. Women sat in the doorways of wooden hovels, lethargically watching small children playing in the dirt as babies suckled. Men hung out in groups, watching us suspiciously and muttering to one another. One of the children had an arm missing, a short stump being all that was left. Nobody looked healthy. Many had sores around their mouths. Everyone was skeletally thin. A few of the older, braver children came up to us, begging for money. One boy of about thirteen with only one eye, rushed into a hut and brought out an earthenware jug. He kept thrusting it at me and I finally twigged that he wanted me to buy it.

What does he want for it? I asked the driver, appalled.

Fucked if I know. You think I speak their gibber? Give him a bit of change. He'd sell his mother for a dollar.

I reached into my pocket, grabbed a handful of notes, and gave them to the boy in exchange for his pot. There must have been fifty dollars. The boy whooped and danced, waving his new riches in the air. I saw my driver shake his head in disgust. A group of men got off their perches and began to move towards us, calling out to another group.

All right, that's enough, the driver said and herded me back to the car.

Keep your money out of sight next time, he told me as we drove away through a gathering crowd. That way we won't start a bloody massacre, eh?

The next village was as bad as the first. I stood by the car, feeling embarrassed to be intruding on their private misery. If I'd been visiting a hospital to watch people die, I couldn't have felt more of a sick voyeur.

Why is everyone just sitting around? I asked. Don't they have crops to tend, or something?

The driver looked at me as if I were joking. Look around. There's nothing but rocks and scorpions in those fields. The drought killed everything long ago. The people would be dead too if the relief trucks didn't come through now and then and drop off a few bags of rice. He looked around slowly at the blasted landscape and said, I don't know why they bother.

By the time we reached the town, I was regretting the whole excursion. We drove through acres of shanties before we reached suburbs with real houses and, finally, the centre, with brick buildings and shops and people who wore clothes that weren't rags. I was immediately mobbed by kids trying to sell me junk, clamouring with their hands outstretched. I emptied my pockets, gave them my eyeset, my jacket, my shoes, even the belt from my trousers. Then I got back into the car and said, OK. Let's go. The driver was grinning as he nudged the car forward, out of the crowd.

That night I sat in the bar and drank beer. The foreman came and joined me for a while and I said, Why doesn't the government do something?

The whisky he was drinking made his Irish accent more pronounced than usual. You mean the bunch of corrupt shites and gangsters that run the place?

How can they spend billions on this bloody tower when their children are dying of malnutrition? What kind of sense does that make?

It wouldn't make much sense at all if any of them gave a flying fuck.

I can't believe Hongwei took this project on.

What? You think our beloved megacorp cares where the money comes from? Trust me, kiddo, everybody knows what a joke this project is, the World Bank, the UN, the Hongwei board, the Development Minister, and every crooked bastard taking his back-handers and feathering his nest all the way down to the catering company that supplies that beer you're drinking – which is brewed by the Development Minister's cousin, by the way.

Yet you're still working for them.

And so are you, kiddo. Show me a corporation anywhere with clean hands and I'll go work for them, instead. Until then, I suggest you don't ask what goes into the sausages. Just enjoy the taste.

Chapter 2

I locked down most of my maintenance bots before the big Mach Effect engines growled into life and everything settled to the floor under a one-tenth-gee acceleration. I didn't know what the delta-vee was between us and the rock we were chasing, but if it was low and we kept this up for six hours – with another six to decelerate – we'd be covering a lot of space, maybe a million kilometres. I took the opportunity to pull a mattress out from where I kept it and laid it out on the floor. Having an up and a down for a while was a luxury and so was sleeping on a mattress instead of hanging like a bat in a micro-gee hammock. I intended to make the most of it.

Toolbag woke me when the engines cut off and we manoeuvred for the deceleration phase. I checked the time. I'd slept for five hours – about an hour more than I normally sleep at a stretch – and decided I wouldn't get any more. Regretfully, I stowed the mattress and grabbed a snack. When the ME engines kicked in again, I made my way back to the bridge. Under deceleration, it took me twice as long to negotiate the labyrinth of connecting tubes. I picked up a coffee from the refectory on the way and a bulb of OJ.

For me? Tracey said when she saw me emerge into the room.

I tossed her the OJ. You neglect yourself when things get busy. We were alone on the bridge. The big graphic of the asteroid still hung in the air. After hours of continual scanning by the scouts, it was now exquisitely detailed. I moved over to it, drawn by the momentous implications of its existence. Tracey joined me.

See that? she said and my point of view zoomed though the open end and into the cylindrical interior. I was looking down from the major axis of the bore, at the ground two kilometres below. The surface was grey and dusty, lightly pock-marked with small meteor craters.

What am I supposed to be seeing?

Here. She made no gesture, did not move, but a graphical overlay appeared, a network of straight lines and smooth curves. When she took away the overlay, I could still see some of the pattern, ghostly lines picked out in shades of grey, hints of texture.

For a moment, my thoughts were chaotic as the astonishment churned through me. Roads? I asked. Roads, still visible after a billion years. Roads built by an ancient, alien civilisation. Is that even possible?

Clearly. The asteroid has protected the interior surface – especially at the far end of the hole – enough that something still remains.

If they used roads...

They were not so different from ourselves? No, I suppose not, but that is what we'd expect, isn't it?

Is it? I hadn't thought about it much but it made sense that any animal that evolved on the surface of a planet would have the same engineering constraints as every other animal I knew, the same energy costs for moving from place to place. And, if you were going to travel the same route frequently, it was a sensible investment – or an inevitable consequence of your repeated passage – to make the path smooth and level. To build a road.

The really interesting thing about these roads, Tracey said. Is that they are laid out in simple geometrical patterns. It tells us something about their minds. She smiled at me, excited. We're going to learn a lot, I think.

Maybe they're not roads. Maybe it's some kind of art.

Hmm, she said and smiled. Maybe. She clearly didn't believe it. She was humouring me. It was humiliating to be patronised by her, but I still preferred it to the contempt I received from the others.

What did you tell the Collective? I asked.

That we had found evidence of an ancient, intelligent civilisation and would investigate further.

You didn't feel the need for a more cautious response?

There's no question about it, she said. No other hypothesis fits the data. They're putting together an expedition. In a few months this place will be crawling with scientists.

Will you share the discovery with Earth? By which I meant humanity at large, of course, not the companies, institutions and embassies run by the posties back home.

That depends what it is. A new voice entered the conversation. Otto Wolff had come onto the bridge and, by default, was able to hear and speak with whoever was there. Every word of our conversations was, of course, channelled through our neural implants rather than by voice. It allowed such protocols to be enforced as well as the management of various layers of privacy, closed communications, and side conversations. I hadn't spoken a word out loud for two years except to my robots.

Of course, Tracey said and the matter seemed closed. Except, as usual, Wolff had riled me just by being there and I didn't like the implication that they could keep this from the rest of us.

Pardon? I said, letting my belligerence show.

Wolff rolled his eyes. To Tracey, he said, On any other ship, the metaman would be confined to the engineering decks. Do you have to give this abbo free reign?

I squared up to him. For a human I'm pretty well built. A hundred and ninety-five centimetres tall with the lean, strong build of an Aussie rules football player. Although that made me a bit below average for a postie male, I could still look Wolff in the eye.

Don't give me that Master Race crap, Otto. It's fear of humanity that motivates ninety per cent of what you blokes do. Maybe a hundred per cent. The only reason you want to keep that rock under wraps is the minute chance that there'll be some kind of new technology or weapon buried under the dust that might help keep you safe from the slavering hordes of Morlocks down on Earth, clamouring for your blood.

He smirked. Morlocks. Funny. Are we the Eloi, then? You know that word is ancient Aramaic for ‘my God’?

Tracey intervened. Otto, please stop provoking Ross. And you... She turned to face me. You should remember that any physical violence or threat of violence against any member of my crew, however provoking he is, would mean instant dismissal. And, in the present circumstances, that would leave you in an unfortunate situation.

Violence? I wasn't threatening physical violence. What kind of bloke did she think