Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.
There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.
Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.
“Remember me?” he asked.
Every motile in the Institute valley froze.
“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”
The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.
“Oh, I’m in here with you.”
Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.
“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”
Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.
“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”
Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.
Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.
“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”
The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.
Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
Outside the starship, darkness fell.
Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”
The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.
“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.
The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.
“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.
“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.
“Can’t see the barrier.”
“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”
“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”
“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”
For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.
“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.
“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.
“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”
“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”
“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”
“Not a clue.”
The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.
“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”
“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”
“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”
“But—”
“Home. With one slight detour.”
Morton’s virtual vision gave him the illusion of light and space. Without that he knew he would have fallen for the Siren call of insanity echoing enticingly at the center of his mind. As it was, spending hours immobile in the armor suit with no external sensor input at all was pushing him closer and closer to all-out claustrophobia. Actually, there had been one thing from outside that still managed to get through to him: the noise of the storm had been reduced to a hefty vibration by the meters of soil on top of him, one he could feel through the suit’s adaptive foam padding. The timer in his grid told him it lasted for three and a half hours before finally fading away.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said to Alic.
“Damn right,” the navy commander agreed.
The two of them had lain there in the darkness with hands clasped together like a pair of scared children. That touch allowed them to communicate. Morton wasn’t sure he could have held out without the contact of another human being. He didn’t even remember much of their conversation; giving each other potted histories, women, places they’d been. Anything to hold the isolation at bay and with it the knowledge that they were buried alive.
There had been no choice.
When the storm appeared from behind the mountains and swallowed the last pinnacles, they’d had four or five seconds at best before it hit them. Alic had fired his particle lances straight into the ground, blasting out a simple crater of smoldering earth. “Get in!” he yelled.
Morton had dived straight into the hole, cram
ming his suit up against Alic’s. The Cat hadn’t moved.
“Cat!” he implored.
“That’s not how I die, Morty,” she’d said simply.
He didn’t even manage an answer. Alic fired the particle lances again, collapsing the soil around them. The Cat had sounded sorry for him; out of all the weeks they’d spent together, that was the strongest memory he had of her now.
Once they started digging their way out, he began to appreciate her reasoning. His suit power cells were down to five percent, and the soil was packed solid. He vaguely remembered that if you were caught in a snow avalanche you were supposed to curl up, to create a space. There had been time for nothing other than the most basic survival instinct. The hole in the ground offered a chance at survival. The impossible wall hurtling down on him didn’t.
It took a couple of minutes to wiggle his gauntlet about and compact the earth around it. Electromuscles strained on the limit of their strength just to achieve that. After the hand came the forearm, and finally he could move the whole arm in a little cavity. He began scrabbling. It took hours.
“There was never this much soil on top of us,” he kept saying.
“Inertial navigation is fully functional,” Alic would reply each time. “We’re heading straight up.”
The power cells were draining away at an alarming rate as they wriggled and grubbed their way along. Heat was a big problem; the suits kept pumping excess heat onto their external surfaces, but the soil wasn’t a good conductor. It began to build up around them. One more problem Morton could do absolutely nothing about.
Seven hours after the storm arrived, Morton’s gauntlet pushed through into open air. He sobbed with relief and shoved like a maniac, battering the suit forward, no longer caring if it was good technique. Claustrophobia was creeping up behind him, refusing to let go. Soil crumbled away around him and he finally flung himself out of the hole and into early evening sunlight crying out with incoherent relief. He slapped at the emergency locks, shedding sections of the suit as if it were on fire.
Alic came stumbling out on all fours. Morton helped him off with the legs and shoulders. They hugged for a long moment, slapping at each other’s backs like brothers who had been torn apart for a century.
“We fucking did it,” Morton said. “We’re invincible.”
Alic drew back, and finally took a long look around. His expression became troubled. “Where the hell are we?”
Morton finally paid attention to their surroundings. His first thought was that they’d tunneled away for kilometers to emerge in a different place altogether, possibly a different world. They were standing in a desert; it didn’t have sand and sun-blasted stones, but the expanse of raw soil and dark stone fragments that lay all around didn’t have a single blade of grass or tree growing anywhere. Nor was there any evidence that life had ever visited this place.
He looked up at the mountains that barricaded the western horizon, and called up a map file, integrating it with his insert’s inertial navigation function. The peaks corresponded to the eastern edge of the Dessault Mountains just outside the Institute valley. They were in the right places, but they weren’t the right shape at all. Every crag and cleft had been abraded away, reducing them to tall conical mounds of stone. They weren’t as high as they used to be, either. The snow had vanished completely.
“That really was one hell of a storm,” Morton muttered. “I never took Bradley seriously before.” He looked to the east, convinced there should be some sign of it. The horizon was a perfectly flat line between the newborn reddish brown desert and Far Away’s glorious sapphire sky. “Probably gonna go all the way around the world and bite us again.”
Alic was looking at the gentle saddle that used to hold the Institute. “No sign of the Marie Celeste. I guess the planet had its revenge.”
“Yeah.” Morton started scratching the back of his arms. Just about every part of him was itching now. The sweatshirt and thin cotton pants he wore didn’t exactly smell too good, either. “What now?”
“We survived. There’s got to be someone else around here.”
Wilson watched the tail end of the storm flow away into the east. The mountains around the High Desert were hard to see now; they’d become the same color as the land. It was a beautiful view, the air the storm had left in its wake was perfectly clear, there were no clouds anywhere. A doldrum calm had enveloped the whole Dessault range. If he had a regret it was the way the storm had stripped the snow off the eastern mountains. Real mountains deserved snowcaps to complete their majesty.
“It’s over, Admiral,” Samantha said.
“Are you sure? That seems a very bold statement.”
“You didn’t see the starship launch, did you?”
“No, I didn’t.” He smiled at her conviction. “And you’re quite right. I would have seen the fusion drives if they had fired. Your planet had its revenge.”
“Thank you, Admiral, you made it possible.”
“I just hope that storm dies out soon.”
“We think it will break up in the Oak Sea; there’ll be ordinary hurricanes split off from it, but the main body will power down before long.”
“Nice theory. Did the Martian data help you come up with the figures?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very comforting for an old NASA man like me to hear. Thank you, Samantha. My congratulations to you and your colleagues.”
“Admiral, our original observation team should be with you in ten to fifteen hours. They’ll escort you down. If you could make your way to the southern end of Aphrodite’s Seat they’ll rendezvous with you there.”
“That’s very kind of you, Samantha, but I’m just going to stay here. I imagine it will be quite a spectacular sunset.”
“Admiral, uh, I don’t want to … Are you all right?”
He looked down at his legs. The blood had finally stopped seeping around the epoxy foam. They didn’t trouble him anymore; he could barely feel them now. Every now and then a big shiver would run along his torso. The lava he was resting on had become quite cold. “I’m fine. Tell your team to turn back. They’d just be wasting their time. I’m afraid I’m not quite the pilot I used to be.”
“Admiral?”
“You have a lovely and strange world here, Samantha. Now the Starflyer’s gone, make the most of it.”
“Admiral!”
Wilson closed the link. She meant well, but she’d want to keep talking. He didn’t need companionship now. It was quite a revelation after so long, but he didn’t fear death anymore, not with Oscar and Anna showing him the way.
They’d find his body, and extract his memorycell, and re-life him. He was sure of that. But it wouldn’t be him who lived on in the future. He’d never accepted that form of continuation in the way the Commonwealth-born generations did. That old twenty-first-century way of thinking was one very tough habit to quit.
But this isn’t a bad place for it all to end, not after three hundred and eighty years. I flew up the highest mountain in the galaxy and helped defeat the monster. Shame I didn’t get the girl. I suppose she’ll be re-lifed with edited memories. Maybe her clone and my clone will have a beautiful future together. Be nice.
The cold closed in slowly. Wilson kept staring down on the planet. Watching the shadows lengthen and the atmosphere far below haze to gold.
Big black shape sliding through the heavens, blotting out the stars.
This must be the end, then.
Pain, just when he thought it had all ended. Jolting from side to side. Space suits. Low gravity. A long black ellipsoid parked on the gray-brown regolith. Airlock open, stairs extended.
I crashed. On Mars. Is this the rescue party from the Ulysses?
“Admiral, stay with us. Come on. The Searcher’s in orbit, we’ll get you up to their medical facility in no time. Stay with us now. This is Nigel. Remember me? Hang on! Understand?”
What about the flag? There was no flag in the ground. I thought we did that. It�
�s always the first thing you should do when you land on a planet. Says so right there in the manual.
Mellanie didn’t want to open her eyes. She was frightened of what she might see. There wasn’t any pain left, but her body remembered it only too well. It ghosted around her, taunting, threatening to return. So much so she thought its absence might only be an illusion. She could still see the horror on Giselle’s face. The blood that surrounded her like a fine mist as she spun helplessly. Kinetic weapons pulping her flesh.
“Am I dead?”
Nobody told her she was.
There was light now. Dark red of closed eyelids. Sheets touching her skin. Hard patches on her arms. Most of her torso was numb. She could hear her heart beating.
That has to be good.
She drew in a breath, and risked a quick glance. The room was strangely familiar. It took a while for the memory to come back: Bermuda room, the mansion on Illanum. There was a big cabinet of medical equipment beside the bed, tubes and wires led under the sheets.
Oh, well, there are worse jails.
Someone was curled up on the couch in the big bay window, snoring softly. Sunlight filtering through the white gauze drapes shone on his ginger hair.
The sight of him made Mellanie smile fondly. Crazy boy. Why he was here puzzled her, unless he’d been confined to this room by Nigel.
Her virtual vision grid was in peripheral mode. She told her e-butler to refresh it and brought it up to full operative status. A great many squares were dark; mostly her inserts. “What happened to them?” she asked her e-butler.
“You have received extensive clone grafting,” it replied. “Damaged systems and OCtattoos have not yet been replaced. Some functional systems were removed.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 231