by Paul Dixon
Print length 544 pages
Publication date September 27, 2023
Carpathians is a very sure-footed novel with several intriguing character stories that blend into a beautifully-constructed first contact scenario. Humanity has reached the stars, and while life abounds, there is no sapient life. Disturbingly, what they have found are a dozen or so “holocaust worlds”; planets that were ruined by civilization through climate change or nuclear war. Then they find the iceball world of Ragnorock. There, they discover a mysterious gigantic alien artifact in the caldera of an extinct volcano. It is a perfectly reflective orb about 100 meters in diameter.
Suddenly the race is on between viciously competing corporations for control of the object, because knowledge is power.
The Magellenix Corporation discovers the artifact first. The Chief Information Officer on board their ship, Piotre Raskovich, is an imprinted employee: like a baby duck, he is hopelessly attached to the mother corporation and cannot possibly betray the company. It is he who discovers the artifact, and the realization of what it portends strips him of his imprinting control, something considered unthinkable. A free agent for the first time since childhood, he realizes the wealth and power the sale of the knowledge would secure him and promptly defects.
He has a contractor affiliate, Feyis, ferry him down secretly to the orb, where he leaves instruments and other items to help keep it hidden from Magellenix. He then pushes Feyis into a crevasse, leaving him for dead. He returns to his ship, the dutiful bound employee, and returns to the Antarctic archipelago where all three major corporations are based. He approaches rival Transgalactic with an interesting offer.
Transgalactic assembles a team to investigate. They take a third lieutenant, Ian McAllister, who became acting captain of a war prize, and made him captain of a damaged but still space-worthy ship, the Carpathia.
The specialists the company add include an Interlocutor (a human resources officer, hundreds of years old, with the task of counseling, mentoring, and when needed, culling). A unsuccessful xenobiologist who is more interested in life forms than in finding profitable drugs and is thus expendable is cheerfully donated by her parent department. And by happenstance, an escapee from a third corporation, a refugee from a failed colony world who had been experimented upon by a third corporation who unwittingly gave her the resources to escape and the ability to watch a rainstorm and memorize the location and direction of every rain drop. She could basically refute the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Along, of course, with Piotre, whom nobody trusts but whose knowledge makes him essential. And a corporate-trained security officer.
This odd group is set out to establish first contact. They are both well-suited – and utterly expendable.
Will they discover why all intelligent life eventually self-destructs, and will they need the artifact to tell them why that is?
Dixon uses great pacing and beautifully-crafted plotting to get us to an answer.
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