“Do you want to establish a connection? The identity certificate is confirmed: Nigel Sheldon.”
Ozzie was crying as he laughed. “Tell him we’ll accept the charges.”
“Yo, Ozzie, how’s it hanging?” Nigel said. “You guys need any help down there?”
Both armored cars charged around the final curve in the road, and the Institute valley was directly ahead. The town had the look of a small elite university campus, with villas and apartment blocks colonizing the shallower southern slope in prim rows where their silvered windows looked out over the long white laboratories and engineering sheds that sprawled across the floor of the valley. All of it was dwarfed by the huge cylindrical starship sheltering inside a force field. The scaffolding that had surrounded its eight-hundred-meter length for over two decades had gone, revealing a light gray fuselage that the morning sun gave a satin sheen. Eight dark fusion rocket nozzles dominated its aft superstructure, their external casings inset with concentric thermal duct strips that were glowing a mild maroon as they kept the superconductor coils chilled. Several long blunt fins protruded from the fuselage, fluorescing a deep fuchsia purple as they maintained thermal stability within the internal tanks and generators. Up at the prow, the original tumorous cluster of force field generators had been supplemented by an elongated scarlet cone, fifty meters across at the base. Frost clung to long segments of the fuselage, revealing the outer walls of the deuterium tanks.
A single gantry pillar had been left standing just behind the prow. The MANN truck was parked at its base.
“The son of a bitch made it,” Alic said bitterly.
“We’d have been royally screwed anyway,” the Cat said. “I somehow don’t think these boys would let us pass.”
Soldier motiles had formed a broad line across Highway One and the surrounding ground half a kilometer from the rear of the Marie Celeste.
“Oh, shit,” Morton muttered; there must have been a thousand aliens waiting.
“Ready,” Stig said.
“Hit it.” Morton launched his three electronic warfare drones; the Cat launched her remaining pair. Stig and Olwen had changed the focus on the X-ray lasers; now they fired them in broad fans at the waiting aliens.
For a couple of seconds the soldier motiles were bombarded by false signals and insidiously corrosive software; X rays seared into their electromagnetic sensors. They adapted and filtered and flushed the digital viruses, but there was still a moment while they were purblind.
It didn’t matter. When their sensors regained full functionality and scanned the land in front of them nothing had changed; the armored cars were still racing along Highway One, three armor suits riding on the outside of one that was puffing out hot black smoke. The two vehicles suddenly braked hard, tires squealing as the gearboxes were slammed into reverse. Then they were turning, skidding around as if the concrete had iced over. They started to flee back down the road.
As one, the soldier motiles started running after them. The armored car that was leaking smoke suddenly juddered. It began to slow, sparks flying out from underneath along with thickening belches of smoke. Something inside it was clanging like a broken bell. The soldier motiles opened fire.
“FUUUUUUCK,” Morton yelled, and powerdived off the armored car. The sky around him erupted in a relentless blaze of malignant ion bolts. He hit the edge of the concrete and rolled perfectly, timing it so he recovered his footing in a half turn. Suit electromuscles propelled him into an immediate sprint, his body leaning forward at forty-five degrees. The force field reshaped itself, mushrooming out around his head and shoulders to act as a spoiler, providing downpressure from the air that rushed over him. He swung his hands in a near-Neanderthal gait, knuckles not quite touching the ground, but close.
Sensors caught Stig bursting out through the armored car’s front emergency hatch as its force field’s glow escalated to a scarlet climax. The Guardian sped away, moving with fluid ease in the low gravity. Behind him the soldier motiles concentrated their fire. The crippled armored car exploded.
Up ahead, Olwen’s armored car braked.
“Keep going,” Morton yelled frantically. “Get the fuck out of here.” Micromissiles streaked overhead, pummeling the slow-moving vehicle. “We can outrun them.”
“But—”
“Go!”
The armored car accelerated hard again, building distance.
“Outrun them.” the Cat laughed raucously. “You going to run away from the launch, too, Morty darling?”
He gritted his teeth inside his helmet. Ever since he’d seen the ship he’d been trying to work out how much it massed. A lot of it was fuel; he remembered that from the quick review he’d given the files. Despite that, a quarter of a million tons was a conservative estimate. Even with force field wings generating some degree of lift, igniting the kind of fusion engines that could produce that much thrust would be worse than letting off a strategic nuke.
He saw the dark tide of soldier motiles flow over the burning wreckage of the armored car. They were fast, but they didn’t have electromuscle support. They’d never be able to keep that speed going. Would they?
The Cat was keeping up with him, leaning over at an even greater angle. Alic was off to one side.
“There won’t be a launch,” he grunted.
“Oh, Morty, you’re priceless. These Guardian fuckups have blown every chance they had. This won’t be any different.”
“It has to be. Bradley has to win. The Starflyer can’t go free.”
“Then we should have brought some tactical nukes or a Moscow-class warship. Don’t you get it? This thing is smarter than us.”
“You. Not me.”
“Morton’s right,” Alic said. “It hasn’t launched yet. Bradley just has to keep it on the ground.”
“Men! Why accomplish when you can dream?”
“Fuck you.”
It took them three minutes to cover a kilometer. They didn’t use the road, it was too open. The ground alongside was rugged, with the grass and eucalyptus shrub offering a small degree of cover. They kept going for another fifteen minutes, until Morton’s laser ranger finally showed him they were widening the gap on the soldier motiles behind. “We need to get away from the road,” he said. “The other motiles are still up ahead. I don’t want to be caught between them.”
“Good idea,” Alic said.
Morton changed direction slightly, angling away from Highway One.
“How far do you figure they’ll chase us for?”
“More to the point, how much power have you got left?”
“My suit is down to eleven percent. The force field is a real drain.”
“Look, boys, we don’t have to—”
The sun went out.
Even with accelerant driving his thoughts, it took a second for Morton to register the monstrous anomaly. The light was draining out of the veldt, rushing away from him like an extinction event. “Huh?” He twisted to face the west and tilted his head up, aligning the main visual sensors on the Dessault Mountains. His knees nearly faltered with shock. “Not possible,” he gasped.
The Charybdis began to creak in protest as Ozzie shunted the acceleration up to fifteen gees. They were chasing a shallow parabola back up from the second lattice sphere. Behind them, nuclear explosions had pumped the plasma into a solid incandescent white sky. Sensors showed them the outer lattice sphere as back prison bars across the hazy stars.
An armada of Prime ships was curving around to follow them through the turbulent plasma, firing volley after volley of missiles. More explosions bloomed, and an indigo stain began to seep through the plasma as the energy levels built toward saturation. Masers and X-ray lasers left visible cerise lines through the diaphanous ions as they stabbed at the frigate.
Ozzie was feeding small random variations into the acceleration, evading the missiles’ target tracking function. A red mist was encroaching the edges of his virtual vision. He tried to keep his attention on various colored line
s that represented important criteria like velocity and closing distance. External cameras showed him a very large dark strut of the outer lattice looming in front of the frigate’s blunt nose. It was a hundred eighty kilometers wide, and stretched out to a junction with five other struts four hundred kilometers ahead.
“Nigel?”
“Contact lost,” the SIsubroutine reported.
“Well, I suppose that’s a good thing,” Mark said. “Proves the material is still electro-repulsive. This thing isn’t dead yet.”
“Right.” Ozzie changed direction again, heading straight up toward the strut. It was fifty kilometers away when he curved around to fly parallel to it; he didn’t dare try to get any farther in. Vast rivers of luminescence flickered on and off deep inside the dark material. “Come on, Nigel.” He reduced acceleration to a steady two gees.
“Do you think they’re—”
Outside the Dark Fortress, the Scylla fired a quantumbuster and immediately dropped back into hyperspace. The missile intercepted a Prime ship, converting a modest percentage of its mass directly to energy. For a brief instant, the radiative output of a medium-sized star contaminated space around the Dark Fortress. It sliced through the forty-eight wormholes MorningLightMountain had opened from its gas-giant settlements, obliterating the generators on the other side and anything else caught inside the beams. Around the Dark Fortress, every Prime ship flared like a comet as it vaporized, trailing dying molecules through the brilliant white void.
Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.
“Now that’s what I call hellfire,” Ozzie mumbled.
Below the Charybdis the plasma had turned a lethal pellucid violet. Visual sensors could see each of the remaining three lattice spheres. The core remained an impenetrable haze.
“Do you think the inner lattice spheres can withstand another blast like that?” Mark asked.
“Who knows, but Nigel was right. We were going to do that anyway when we knock out the flare bomb. Nothing to lose by doing it twice.”
“Nigel Sheldon’s pretty smart, isn’t he?” Mark said admiringly.
“Yeah.” Ozzie’s smile tightened. “Pretty smart.” He fed power into the frigate’s secondary drive, and dived straight down toward the second lattice sphere at eight gees.
The fourth lattice shell was made from a material that appeared to be completely neutral, devoid of any detectable properties, it didn’t even have any mass as far as human sensors could discover. All that existed was its physical boundary. Like the upper three lattice spheres, it remained completely unaffected by the energy deluge from the quantumbuster. Ozzie piloted the Charybdis through it without any trouble. He decelerated to a velocity vector that kept them stationary relative to the core, and extended every sensor.
The rings were in turmoil. They oscillated and stretched, rising and falling in and out of alignment through the ecliptic. The black cables that held together the outermost ring, the daisy chain, were flexing like lengths of elastic as they strove to contain the wild fluctuations of the lenticular disks. Inside that, the green ring that had been so uniform when the Second Chance recorded it was now undergoing curious distensions; bulges would suddenly appear, sending out slow ripples across the surface. The silver braids were nearly breaking apart; while the one of scarlet light was contaminated by dark fissures.
It was the ring nicknamed Sparks that was the worst affected. The river of emerald and amber lights with their cometary tails were being flung out of their simple orbit by a single dark contortion, like ions waltzing around a magnetic anomaly. It took them almost an entire orbit to drop back into the plane, only to be slung out again.
“There’s our bad boy,” Ozzie murmured. The quantum scan showed him the pattern of elongated distortion fields radiating out from a single point as they spun slowly along through the coruscating ring. “A genuine spanner in the works.”
“Target loaded,” Mark said. “Effect field pattern selected. It’ll stand off five thousand kilometers and spike the heart of that bastard.”
“You’re the man,” Ozzie told him.
“Launching.”
The Charybdis gave the faintest shiver as the quantumbuster shot out of its launch tube. Ozzie turned the frigate around, and accelerated hard up through the lattice spheres.
Bradley landed in the shallow drainage ditch at the side of Highway One. The soil was damp and squishy, absorbing his impact. He folded himself into a cleft and froze. His suit’s external chromometic layer painted him with low-tone grays and greens to match the grass tufts and mud he’d settled in. Every other system powered down. Thermal batteries absorbed his body’s heat, allowing the suit skin to adopt the same temperature profile as the ditch. A tiny beam of light washed in through a slit in his visor, illuminating his eyes. Outside the armored cars were skidding around. One sounded in a bad way. Their engine noise dopplered away. His breathing was loud in his ears, challenged only by his heartbeat.
The light flickered. Soldier motiles were running past him, several splashing their way along the bottom of the ditch. They were centimeters away.
And fate—mine, the Starflyer, humanity, the Primes—is decided by that tiny distance. But then my fate has taken stranger turns than this in the past. Perhaps the dreaming heavens will smile upon me today.
The movement outside his suit ended. Bradley switched on a lone sensor, and scanned around. There was no immediate sign of the soldier motiles. He stood up, and watched the alien army charge away. Some distance farther along Highway One an armored car exploded.
Keeping the suit fully stealthed, Bradley hurried toward the giant alien starship. He opened passive sensors, knowing the signal he would receive.
Not a sound or an image, at first, more a mélange of feeling—to those who knew how to interpret it. The complex electronic song saturated the air waves, broadcast from every direction to engulf the valley. Together the harmonics that surrounded Bradley had a unity that was remarkable in its complexity. The tunes rose and fell, meshing into a cohesive mind. Bodies, alien and human, sharing every part of themselves: memories, thoughts, sensations. He moved among them, receiving their extended cognizance, drinking it in. Watching the three humans in armor suits running along the road as we chase after them—concern that the human warriors should not be able to interfere with the launch. Observing the many technological facets of the refurbished starship, adjusting the systems as they interact with each other—eager for the long exile to finally end. Maintaining the force field around the ship—determined that no weapon would penetrate. Reviewing the sensors covering the valley—alert for transgressions.
The location and purpose of each body were individual, yet their thoughts were homogenized, replicating their originator. Direction, purpose, came from only one source: the Starflyer.
It moved from the gantry lift into the starship, awakening the giant machine in its entirety. Soon it would leave to vanish amid the stars. Safe. Free.
Bradley told the force field around the starship to admit him. Compliance was a logical thing to expect, given the Starflyer’s ultimate origin. The immotile rules all, nothing deviates from that. However, as the Starflyer was more sophisticated than a standard Prime immotile, it didn’t have the same reticence in allowing electronics to have governing functions over machinery. Electronics were subsidiary to it in the same way as motiles; it programmed them, it set their parameters. They obeyed it.
That was its flaw, Bradley knew, the same as every Prime. It did not understand independence nor rebellion. Its motiles, whether grown in congregation pools from its own advanced genetically modified nucleiplasms, or humans whose brains had been surgically and electronically subsumed to host its own thought routines, were a part of it. Their thoughts were its thoughts, copied and installed from its own br
ain. None of them deviated. It couldn’t conceive deviation or betrayal, so neither could they.
Security was a one-dimensional concept for the Starflyer. It took precautions to guard itself physically and politically from native humans as it insinuated its human motiles within their Commonwealth society. That was the level of safety it determined it required to insure its survival, a strategy that had been successful.
No human could hack into the electronic network of the Institute valley; as the processors were an extension of the Starflyer’s own mind, they only acknowledged orders that had an internal heritage. What the network and its processors did not have was the ability to discriminate between an order from a genuine motile and a human who remembered the neural “language” of the Starflyer.
In front of Bradley the force field protecting the Marie Celeste realigned its structure to allow him through. He jogged along the bottom of the deep grassy scar that the vast alien ship had scored as it slid along the ground before finally coming to an ignominious halt. Several soldier motiles were patrolling the base of the starship. Their minds told him where they were, the direction they were looking in, where they would look next. Their sensors and eyes never saw his suit’s stealth coating as he hurried into the shadows cast by the big fusion rocket nozzles. Proximity alarms watched passively as he told their processors his presence was legitimate.
The ship had been lifted gradually out of the scar by motiles and civil engineering machinery. A wide pad of enzyme-bonded concrete had been laid underneath to support the weight. Cradles gripped the lower fuselage, holding it off the ground. Bradley walked up the metal stairs on one of the cradles. An access hatch to the fusion engineering bay opened for him, and he ducked inside.
The initial findings on the Marie Celeste published by the Institute were accurate enough. It was comprised of fusion rockets, their fuel tanks, environmentally maintained water tanks containing an alien amoeba-equivalent cell, and the force field generators. From that, public perception remained locked on the knowledge that there was nothing else inside; certainly it possessed no life-support section, no “crew quarters.” A more detailed examination showed (unpressurized) access passages and crawlways remarkably similar to those humans would design into any ship. No maintenance robots were ever found. The first conclusion was that the passages were used only for construction.
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