She switched onto the command net, linking with the bridge.
“Captain, Ganymede orders to start a burn out of this system, in case the Sommen come to investigate.”
“Where to, Captain Kyarr?”
“Your choice. Just get us away from here. I’ll start my scans for the next transit.”
“What about the Jerusalem? Shall I radio them?”
“No. I’ll contact their navigator and will let them know to follow. If our luck holds, I’ll have a new course to a Sommen wormhole within a few hours.”
San switched off. She closed her eyes and reached out to Wilson, sending him the orders. After finishing she added, Did you know it’s Christmas on Earth and Ganymede?
No.
Neither did I; I’d never even seen a Christmas tree until just now. And, Wilson?
Yeah?
Our abbess is dying.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Adrift in Sommen space,” said Win. “And I can find no Proelians to kill.”
Zhelnikov chuckled. “We will be fortunate if, when we transit, the Proelian theurgists are gone; in our shape, a fast scout could take us out just from the vibration of docking. And the sleep was short, Win—two months; there were minor injuries to your neural structure and we couldn’t address them with you awake.”
“Do you ever ponder on time, old man?”
“In what way?”
“It has no meaning. We travel and sleep, and years pass without touching us. What will your Earth look like when you get back, Zhelnikov? Have you thought that maybe the war will start without you if we stay out here long enough? For all we know, it already has.”
“Then we are the last of our kind. The last humans in the universe, in the last place the Sommen would look for us: on our way to their home world.”
“I,” Win said, “am not human.”
“Come.” Zhelnikov secured his helmet in place, and opened the hatch from his quarters. “We are nearing the transit and with just fifteen to crew the Higgins, we will be needed in the combat bridge. It’s blind luck the Proelian missiles missed our one good engine and reactor section; the chief was able to save three quarters of our water.”
“Why not just return home? This is hopeless.”
“We repaired the weapon. And the mission is to salvage any tech we can find within the Sommen abandoned zone. By now, my little surprise for your sister has wormed its way onto her ship and with luck, she will be dead soon.”
“You are too pleased given our lack of accomplishment, Zhelnikov.”
Win picked his way through the ship’s corridors, their spaces now filled with cables and piping, the jerry-rigged fixes of a craft on its last legs with just enough functioning infrastructure to keep a single engine running. He dodged the sparks. The sense of a destiny soaked in combat had left Win, who now wondered how long it would take for someone to catch up with them and finish the job his sister started—either the Proelians or Sommen. He laughed at the irony: With so few crew and functioning systems, the Higgins ran truly silent, the possibility of detection due to leakage no longer a concern. They crammed their way into the combat bridge.
“Don’t bother strapping in,” someone said. “We can’t evasive maneuver in this thing anymore; it’ll fall to pieces.”
“How long to the transit?” Win asked.
“We’re moving through now. We’ll be out in a few seconds but if you recall, this one is a bit longer than the others. The navigation solutions indicate we’ll be coming out in five seconds.”
“Zhelnikov,” the captain started. His face contorted with pain and a nearby medbot sprang to life, injecting him with something to take the edge off his broken shoulder and arm. “Has your boy been able to look ahead and see what’s waiting for us?”
“No, Captain. There wasn’t time.”
“We should turn back,” Win reiterated. “Go home. The Higgins is barely operational; what can you possibly expect to accomplish in this heap?”
Zhelnikov slammed his fist against the wall. “Enough, Win. What about the Proelian religious texts? There was a time when you had a sense of mission. This isn’t about us, the Higgins, or you; this is about whose vision will carry us to victory over the Sommen war. The Proelians cannot be allowed to maintain control or we will lose.”
“And yet,” said Win, “it is a Proelian who almost destroyed us. They who have developed undetectable ships and a viable means for interstellar communication and navigation that does not go against Sommen thought—not to mention the treaty.” Win paused. He hadn’t been able to place his finger on it in Zhelnikov’s quarters, after being awoken from hibernation, but now that the drugs wore off, they or his injuries had left him with an overwhelming sense that something was missing. “I am tired, Zhelnikov. I still see the plans, the pattern laid out in my sight, even now, a web of what has been ordained and what is still left to chance. Some of the blanks have been filled in so that I see more clearly. You created an amputee; there is a part of me that should be here, and I feel it like a phantom limb, but you never bothered to create it in the first place.”
“Create what?”
“Faith. I will kill; it is what I know, what I do. But you and this mission were never going to succeed. I don’t need the religious texts now; they are useless. The information they contained is now in sight, in my dreams and in the present. The Sommen and human races linked, racing toward the end of the universe and the discovery we’ve all been searching for.”
“What discovery?”
“That of creation and its mystery—and of our final ending, a universal disposition in the truest sense.”
The captain tried to sit up from his acceleration couch, but movement made him wince and he clutched what remained of his right arm. His face had turned bright red in rage. “Get this thing and its defeatist crap off my bridge, Zhelnikov.”
“Sirs!” One of the crew tapped at the controls so images began piping into everyone’s helmets. “We’ve completed the transit.”
“What the hell is that?” the captain asked.
“It’s a battle,” Win whispered. “And those are Sommen ships, firing.”
He pushed his way out the combat bridge’s hatch, making his way toward what remained of the ashram. A jury-rigged bulkhead had been welded across the corridor. It cut off the main ship from the ashram area and allowed what remained of the Higgins to maintain an internal atmosphere. Now that they’d entered a battle, Win’s suit showed the corridor pressure dropping; depressurization eliminated fire danger, in case the Higgins was hit again, and Win’s servos whined at the same time he worked on a manual hatch in the center of the bulkhead. He managed to squeeze through its narrow opening. The view of space beyond shocked Win, who almost drifted off the Higgins a second time; where the ashram had stood, now he clung to the hull’s exterior, jagged pieces of metal and broken shielding on all sides. Win clipped himself to the hatch and turned, staring into emptiness.
Darkness, he thought. The ally of nothing except the void and surprise. But soon, as the Higgins rotated, the darkness gave way to a view of the same dim red giant they’d run from earlier and a new battle that now raged around its system so that his jaw fell open at the sight: a scene of Sommen ships fighting against . . . Against what? What the hell are those?
Yellow and red Sommen plasma beams played across the midsection of a spherical craft, burning deep gouges into the ship’s outer shell moments before a volley of missiles followed; they buried themselves in the sphere without detonating. Win watched, transfixed. His repaired helmet sensors dropped filters, blocking the intense bloom that erupted from inside the alien ship when multiple Sommen nuclear warheads detonated, sending debris in all directions. How could any debris survive that? he wondered. Win zoomed closer to focus on a speck of it when he realized that not only had the blast shot debris everywhere, but that some of it changed course, diverting toward the Sommen ship that had fired the missiles.
“Zhelnikov,” Win said, ris
king the radio.
“What?”
“The Sommen are fighting the same creatures who we encountered in the wormhole structure at Childress. These spherical ships contain those mechanical, lobster-looking things. I just saw one of its ships destroyed and it acted like a puffball fungus, sending hundreds of them into space; the things have some kind of propulsion that takes advantage of magnetic or gravitations fields; they’re attacking the Sommen vessel.”
The green Sommen ship fired without stopping, sweeping plasma beams in the path of the oncoming attackers, whose articulated bodies had to be the size of a small destroyer for Win to see them at this distance. Any that the plasma beams touched disappeared. Those that remained homed in; they burrowed through the green material as if it consisted of gelatin, one by one disappearing within the ship like tunneling flies searching for a spot to lay maggot eggs. A moment later, the ship exploded in a sphere of glowing red particles; secondary blasts reduced sections that survived the initial blast into small fields of wreckage.
“I strongly suggest risking a burn,” said Win. He scouted, not risking the use of his sight, instead scanning with passive sensors to find a route that would put distance between them and the transit, but which would also skirt the battle and gravity wells. Sommen vessels and their adversaries swarmed everywhere. Ticking by one degree at a time, Win surveyed until he sensed a narrow corridor empty of combatants, and which expanded in size as the Sommen maneuvered away from it for advantage. Win passed the coordinates. “Take this route now. Risk a high-g burn for a few seconds in that direction. We can repair anything that breaks after we’re clear of the danger.”
“We’re preparing. Five minutes. Get back here to strap in.”
Win was about to move back through the hatch when he adjusted his sensors. Far beyond the nearest cloud of battling starships, another fleet of spherical craft approached and he gave up counting when he saw the futility. How many are out there? Ten thousand, a hundred thousand? The new fleet stretched as far as Win could see, in a continuous barrier of spheres, the gaps between them packed with smaller craft of the same shape. A flight of Sommen missiles rocketed toward them. At this distance the missile engines were just visible, a cloud of pinhead twinkles that disappeared against the light-toned hulls. They detonated adjacent to the strange craft, gutting several of them in a series of fusion explosions that lit the Higgins with white light. He shut the hatch and turned. Win shot thrusters to propel him as fast as he dared, making it into the combat bridge and an acceleration couch just in time to strap in.
“Five-second burn now,” someone announced. But the burn didn’t last that long. A second later the engine cut off, and the control panels lit with warning lights.
“Multiple jumper failures. Main reactor hall.”
“Are we on course?” Zhelnikov asked.
“Yes. We are heading straight on the path that Win laid out, just not as fast as we’d hoped.”
“It will do,” Win said. “You can make more permanent repairs once we clear the battle space and there is no risk of detection.”
Zhelnikov clicked into Win’s suit radio on a private frequency. “Do you have any serum left?”
“Several ampoules, in the servo harness hopper feed. Why?”
“I want you to see if you can project onto one of those strange ships; find out more about them and who is behind this attack on the Sommen.”
“It is a risk. These things can detect my presence at the quantum level; think about how the door mechanism worked back at Childress.”
“Everything is a risk. We left a universe that made at least some sense, and are now in one of chaos. Do it, boy.”
Win gritted his teeth. It embarrassed him to think that the prospect of surveying the alien craft scared him, but it was the truth. I am afraid. Whatever the origin of these things, he recalled the sensation back at Childress, that whatever manned the station had no form of consciousness or emotion. They just were—a self-aware nothingness that had found its home within advanced systems and materials, divested of any suggestion that living creatures had been involved in their creation. Maybe these things now created themselves, designed their own systems, Win thought. Maybe they came from the spontaneous self-assembly of energy into matter, which, in turn, assembled its own purpose and assigned its own meaning to the universe. To them, the universe had become a big enough threat that everything should be eradicated—especially the Sommen. Even before reaching out, Win had a premonition of what he’d learn: machinery. These things had no more soul or sense of morals than his servo harness would have, were it to become self-aware.
“No.” Win unstrapped from his seat and opened the hatch.
“What do you mean, no?”
“If I reach out, there’s a good chance that not only will I be detected, but our position could be obtained. These aren’t the Sommen; I will not risk it. There is nothing to be gained.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to the ashram. There’s a better view.”
“You’re afraid,” said Zhelnikov.
“Yes. I’m afraid. And you’re too stupid to know that you should be scared too.”
After reaching it, Win clipped again to the hatch’s wheel and let go. His suit tether reached only a meter so he couldn’t move too far, but the sensation of flying in empty space made him smile, an illusion of freedom, just real enough to tease with its promise. At first Win kept his eyes closed, letting a lingering exhaustion from hibernation take hold and creep through his muscles; despite the tiredness, sleep refused to come. It tortured him with whispers and pledges of relief, delaying its arrival or, when it did, jolting him awake with instant nightmares of the Sommen, snapping his eyes open and forcing him to watch as the Higgins crept through space. The battle continued. In his absence, an additional fleet of Sommen ships had arrived to counter their enemy’s reinforcements and the two groups entangled with each other so that it became difficult to distinguish one from the other.
The line of distinction between my sister and me is bright and thick; there can be no confusing it. Win sank into mantras; no matter how many times he repeated them, the words lost their ability to calm, and a renewed sense of hatred sprouted within his chest; it filled Win with so much bile that he gagged, on the edge of vomiting. San and the other Proelians stuck in his mind like a hot needle. It pierced through the back of his skull and exited between his eyes, mocking him with the knowledge that he was now nothing. They robbed me of my fate and Zhelnikov cannot see it. There can be no victory in this pile of space-bound garbage, no matter how many repairs they make.
Win surveyed the Higgins’s stern section and noted its ragged hull, chewed almost beyond recognition by missile strikes, and even the sections untouched by kinetics showed the blisters of nuclear fire. But the sight wasn’t enough to quiet the voices in his head. I am a failed science experiment, and the men in the Higgins are too stupid to see it. He swung his head, turning helmet sensors toward the bow and filtering to highlight movement.
“Zhelnikov,” he radioed, whispering into his helmet mic. “We have a stowaway.”
“Who?”
“Not who. What. One of those things, what’s left of it, has latched onto our hull, near the primary bridge and its wreckage.”
Win watched as the mechanical thing’s articulated body wrenched back and forth, and cold blue sparks showered from where it had been ripped in two by Sommen plasma. There was no sign it detected him. Win risked closing his eyes, not reaching out but opening his mind in an attempt to sense field fluctuations, anything that might indicate their visitor had communicated with its fleet, alerting the thing’s brothers to the Higgins’s presence. Win sensed only emptiness. Soon the thing began punching its long arms into the Higgins’s superstructure, ripping pieces of shielding from the outer hull and starting its downward dive toward the ship’s interior.
“It’s moving into the ship,” he radioed.
“Has it alerted anyone to our presence?�
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“No. I sense no communication and there are no ships headed in this direction that I can see. It’s damaged.”
“Get into the ship and stop it; the captain will send help if we can spare it.”
“Stop it?” Win asked. “How? I’m going to make a guess that anything short of Sommen plasma won’t leave a dent.”
“Try.”
Win dove through the hatch, his fear threatening to make his hands tremble and lodging itself deep inside his chest to breed uncertainty. Zhelnikov was right: He had to try. No matter how disgusted he was by these men and the current situation, to fail to stop the attacker would result in all their deaths once it ripped the ship to pieces. And the Sommen part of his mind screamed at him that to fear is to betray everything he believed, the two parts of Win pitted against each other, ripping his psyche apart with internal conflict. He placed his gloved palm against the nearest bulkhead. Win felt the tremor of its movement, soft at first, but then more intense as the machinist’s creation headed toward him.
A Marine captain appeared next to Win, handing him a coil gun. “Have you used one of these?”
“I know how they work.”
“Where is it?”
Win pointed with the barrel of the carbine. “The bow section. It’s digging its way in this direction.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know. It’s a machine, with the intelligence of an advanced race and there is a high probability this will be the last time you or I speak. Whoever created them never gave up on super-awares; imagine if the human race existed for millions of years, constantly improving on artificial intelligence to the point where it took over our universe.”
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