Stumbling over slickness, she procured the door key from the robe’s left pocket and slid it into the lock. As the mechanism clicked, she spared one last disdainful glance at Berkyavik’s bloody, half-eaten form, searching for words—but she could think of nothing to say.
She shrugged, swung the door wide, and stepped into the light.
Even at its nighttime gray, the hallway was bright enough to stun her, and for a second she had to stand still and blink away the shock. From the blur emerged the figures of the two Urd guards, still waiting obediently outside the door. Both were rigid with shock and incomprehension, jaws hanging open in an almost comical way—until she considered the rows of sharp teeth lining their interiors.
“Wh-where is Berkyavik-leader?” the Urd on her left clucked dully. It was the smaller, subservient male, obviously the stupider of the pair.
She bared her teeth in a vicious smile. “He’s dead.”
A scored-metal scream split the air as Grelshk lunged toward Shomoro, her taloned hands curled into hooks, golden eyes burning with rage. Shomoro swiveled calmly to her right and fired a bullet into the crimson cave of the Urd’s open mouth. She sidestepped the doomed creature neatly as Grelshk skidded to the floor, her throat pumping yellow blood.
Firlz tried to run. The slug gun in her hand kicked, splattering the male Urd against the wall in an ugly yellow starburst. He kicked once, twice . . .
The hallway was still.
“And so are you.” She crouched beside Grelshk’s corpse and plucked the holomap display from the Urd’s belt. She studied it long enough to find the route she wanted, then tossed the little square device away as she started down the corridor. It shattered against one wall.
Following the path laid down in her mind, Shomoro of the White turned the corner and headed for the docking bay.
Her nose told Shomoro she was getting close to the bay: the smells of new chrome, of coolant and compressed hydrogen fuel were becoming stronger by the second.
By an amazing stroke of luck, she had encountered no guard groups in the hallways after her first skirmish with the Urd. A couple of times there had been a Terran guard standing watch at a doorway or intersection—but they’d been alone, facing away from her. A single shot in the head or neck was enough to drop them. The hallways were too long and deserted for the sound to carry.
By the time she reached the door to the bay, her skin was prickling. This was a former research base, hurriedly retrofitted, and Shomoro suspected that was part of the reason she’d gotten this far without being picked up on surveillance. Yet the lack of alarms was itself alarming: surely some guard somewhere, watching some screen, must have noticed her escape?
Sticking her head carefully around the doorframe, she scanned the bay. It appeared empty, the White Arrows’ graceful ships unattended. The craft nearest her—perhaps five body lengths away—was a sturdy chrome disc ten meters across. Looked serviceable enough. Gun held in front of her, she entered the bay.
As she crossed the threshold, she felt a tingle of electricity flit over her skin, as though she’d passed through an invisible barrier.
The high-pitched keening of an automated alarm shattered the cold silence.
White Arrow soldiers poured in multitudes from doors that irised open in the innocuous white walls. As they opened fire, Shomoro broke into a limping run. The hot breeze of lasers strafed the air and the floor around her feet; she felt bullets graze her, raking stinging cuts over her back as she scrambled toward the cruiser. Slipping over the slick robe, she finally fell against the hull, hauling on the lever with all her remaining strength to open the hatch.
As it was swinging inward a plasma shot seared across her whole right side. The force of it slapped her back through the cruiser’s open door, her wounded half exploding with fiery pain.
The weight of this new agony was almost too much. For a second of eternity Shomoro lay paralyzed on the hull floor; she could only suck air in ragged gasps and watch through the open hatch as the Terran soldier who had fired the shot took aim again. She watched him line the sight up between her eyes, his finger tightening on the trigger . . .
She waited for a death that did not come. The hatch door slammed shut, absorbing the shot with a violent concussion that shifted the entire ship in its berth and hurled her against the base of the pilot’s chair. Groaning, she used the chair to pull herself up to the ship’s console, fumbling at the controls with clumsy hands until it emitted a beep. A holographic screen flickered to life before the darkened windows, asking her where she wanted to go.
A barrage of shots still pounded the hull, but it sounded far away and tinny; the immediate pain had fallen like a shroud over her senses. Her vision fuzzed in and out, darkening around the edges, as with shaking hands Shomoro punched in coordinates she’d almost forgotten and set the craft on autopilot.
Swaying on her feet.
Breath coming in shorter and shorter bursts.
Only when she felt the vibration of metal beneath her did she allow herself to collapse into the pilot’s chair.
One way or another, it would all be over soon.
Outside, warning lights drenched the bay’s white walls crimson as the ship’s engines powered up. Ships docked around it disappeared inside silver bubbles of protective nanoweave as the cruiser’s stern glowed orange and the whine of its engines built to a roar.
The White Arrow soldiers broke off firing, scattered in a mad dash for the exits. Not one had gone more than five meters when the ship fired its engines. The engine burn punched through the safety area around the ship’s cradle in a lethal fan of red-orange flame; flesh, metal, and uniforms shriveled to ash as the greater part of the base’s soldiers were incinerated. Reduced to messy black streaks splashed across the white walls, until it was impossible to tell what their original color had been.
With thousands of tonnes of force behind it, the cruiser shot out of the bay and into the night sky in a flash of yellow-white radiance. Its scarred and dented engine compartments trailed streamers of smoke, painting the sky inky black in the wake of its burn. When the base had disappeared from her screens, Shomoro let her eyes slip closed.
The dark behind them was her dark now; she would not resist its pull.
It took five months for the nanomachines she’d created to work their healing on her. Five months of silent but not inactive sleep; of dreaming through the months of her captivity; of purging herself of that place. Five months to cleanse her heart of the poison it had been accumulating for so long.
Periodically, the sounds of hunting parties filtered through from the ruined lab as the White Arrow troops who were left scoured the ruin for her. But they were blind to her safe room, and soon the hunters moved on.
When she finally woke from her long slumber, she called the machines she had built. As they helped her out of the artificial egg, steadied her, fed and clothed her, Shomoro realized again how she loved them: her creations, her metal and plastic children. Yet she knew that part of her life had ended a long time ago. It was time to leave.
The day came much sooner than she expected.
She had not been able to leave immediately; she was still too weak, her bones bruised, muscles atrophied. So Shomoro stayed for more weeks, exercising her withered muscles and feeding her shrunken stomach back to something like health.
When Shomoro entered the black-walled room that day, the machines crowded around her as usual. They did not have it in their mechanical hearts to realize the shift that had occurred in hers. She stood in the irised-open doorway, a makeshift cloth sack slung over her shoulder, filled with items scavenged from the ruin of her home: dehydrated food packets, a water filter, some antiquated navigation equipment the White Arrows had not bothered to destroy. In her hands was a large spool wound with a quantity of thick cord. She set the spool down and walked over to the nearest of her creations.
Its green lenses watched placidly as Shomoro stopped before it and began the complicated dance of command gestures she’d been practicing for weeks. The signed instructions had to be executed perfectly for the machine to understand; she had never used this particular sequence before, nor did she expect to use it again.
Understanding flashed between machine and Osk, and the robot began the process. Shomoro held still as the machine wrapped a tendril around her arm, its tip extruding a needle which slid like silk into the vein in the crook of her elbow. She grimaced as the needle pricked her flesh, more from the memories the sensation evoked than from pain. Watched, as the IV stretching from the machine’s carapace to the needle thrummed from the pressure of silvery fluid moving through it. Felt it entering her own veins.
The last thing to come through the needle was not fluid but a shock—a blue-white nirvana of electricity that shot a brief impression of coded instructions, curvy lines overlapping into a dark mandala, across Shomoro’s vision.
Her muscles jerked with the pulse, and then it was gone as the machine withdrew the needle. She noted with small satisfaction that the pinprick in her forearm was already invisible against her dark skin, cauterized by the sudden flash of heat. It was done.
She turned back to her machines. For a moment, her part as their creator, their mother, settled like a heavy weight on her soul—but with her next breath it was gone, dissipating into the stale air of the safe room. Her machines were mere husks now: as proud as she was of them, her inventions could not be allowed to exist apart from her anymore. At their heart they were nanotech, kin to the same technology that had left Za in ruins. And Shomoro knew that when she journeyed there, she would find in the wreckage the shattered remnants of her people’s happy dreams . . .
She shook the vision from her head. It was best not to stay any longer.
The hillside overlooking her little home was chilly with wind and approaching darkness, but Shomoro felt a warmth inside that had nothing to do with imagination. It was unlikely that cold or much else would be able to slow her down now.
Setting down the cloth sack, she took up the end of the orange cable which snaked away from her down the hillside. A small box fitted with a round button surmounted the end; its length was largely hidden now, fed through all the rooms of her base. She closed her eyes as she depressed the button.
It began as a spreading warmth, radiating from below; then as a roar; then as light, dark blue-green behind her closed eyes as it illuminated the blood vessels in her eyelids. She opened her eyes in time to see the holocaust wrapping itself up: a blackish red, smoldering crater had sundered the rock below her hillside, the radiant fireball of debris above it dissolving slowly in the air and falling back to the earth in smoking cinders.
Relief shot through with a deep, aching sadness seeped through Shomoro’s veins, alongside the nanites she had once considered her gift to the world. Now she knew better: nanotech was too big, too wonderful and too terrible to be owned by anyone. Neither the Osk nor the Terrans deserved to have it. Nanotech could not be controlled the way a simple machine could, any more than a living organism could be bent into a different shape. It was in the nature of life, whether organic or artificial, to choose its own path.
Shomoro would make that path her own; things would be different, now that her nano had become a part of her. And when she died, her secrets would go with her.
It’s time to go, Shomoro of the White whispered. And don’t look back.
I won’t, Shomoro Lacharoksa answered. She clasped her shoulders as a shiver ran through her; then she scooped up the sack and turned away, the glowing wreckage of her home a warmth on her skin as she began walking.
She did not look back.
12
Weeks passed, or was it months? Time seemed strangely altered inside Mose’s tiny room; more than once he suspected the drugs the Terrans gave him stretched his perception of time, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was he was a prisoner. He didn’t know how he could breathe in this place, or why the Terran government had saved his life. In the absence of any hard data, Mose’s pessimistic side took control. If he assumed the worst, he would not be disappointed.
He lay in limbo a long time. Every day was exactly the same: lights would come on in the walls on a predetermined cycle—no doubt calibrated to a low setting his captors thought would be comfortable to his eyes, though they felt like arc lights. The doctors would arrive an interminable time later, to run tests and inject him with various things. Mose barely noticed these visits: the medications blurred his thoughts and reduced the outside world to an attenuated haze. He lost whole days in hibernation, his mind immersed in artificial half-sleep.
The times when the doctors came to make what they called “calibrations” were more memorable. One of the Terrans would perform the briefest of physical exams, pressing on Mose’s chest and listening to the patterns of his breath with a small external monitor. The other would spend the entire time consulting the monitors embedded in the walls, taking notation from them onto a holofoil pad as he used his body to block the screens from Mose’s view. When the doctors weren’t present, the screens were kept covered by sheets.
Then would come the injection. The doctor near the screens would input a command, wait a few seconds, and remove a large syringe from a drawer in the wall. Mose had the suspicion that the substance inside was manufactured by the building’s medical suite in that small interim. His doctors had never seen fit to divulge the nature of the material they were injecting into his body, though he had asked—demanded—to know a number of times. The silver liquid in the syringes suggested an unsettling possibility which he had not yet allowed to coalesce in his mind.
Sometimes a spark of real anger rose out of his malaise. Mose would get so frustrated with his caretakers’ evasions, their outright refusals to tell him why he was here or even alive at all, that he would struggle to his elbows and groggily demand to see General Shanazkowitz. She seemed to be the one running this whole operation, the leader at the center of—of whatever this was. Mose imagined that if he asked her what was going on, she wouldn’t mince words or treat him like a hatchling. I want to see General Shanazkowitz. It became his everyday demand—his hopeless, helpless litany.
Sooner than he expected, Mose got his wish.
He was feeling fairly good that day. Most of his previous pain was almost gone, and he wasn’t nearly as drowsy as he was most days . . . perhaps he was developing a tolerance to the side-effects of his medications. Mose was no chemist; surveillance had been his specialty during the war.
The doctors came into his room sooner than usual, right after his breakfast had finished dripping down his IV tube. As they went about checking his blood pressure, heart rate, reaction times, they were silent. That silence was hiding something. Their movements as they performed the exams were unusually slow, as if there was something ahead they weren’t in a hurry to get to.
One of the doctors removed the IV, which had been there long enough to serve as another limb. Mose was so surprised that he forgot to wince as the needle slid out of his arm, leaving it with a feeling of incompleteness somehow. Then the two doctors bent and hoisted him out of the modified circular bed he’d lain in so long.
Though he was stronger than he’d been some weeks—or months—ago, it took both of the doctors to help him down the hallway. Outside the bed, they had paused to wrap him in pale green gowns, the overlong hems of which rustled on the white linoleum with each step. His bare feet made harsh slapping sounds on the floor.
The five meters to the hallway’s end might as well have been five light-years. As Mose realized the extent of his weakness, a small humorless smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. This was why these doctors were supporting him so fearlessly . . . what did they have to fear? He couldn’t even raise his arms, let alone unsheathe and employ his blades.
The door at the hallway’s end was white
-painted metal, unmarked except for a line of Terran script in black block letters. His English was clumsy, but he could read a bit if he went slow. He had time to make out the letters “P.S.S.” before one of the doctors swung the door open and awkwardly ushered him inside.
The room beyond was brighter than the white hallway, its walls, floor, and ceiling shellacked in a painful shade of silver that bounced light into Mose’s eyes. A silver slab faced one wall, a low platform attached to its front end. Two red circles were spaced evenly apart on the top of the platform. His bearers took Mose over to the slab and made him sit on it, his four legs dangling off the edges. They took his arms and placed each wrist over one of the red circles. As his skin contacted the platform, silver tendrils of flexible, steel-hard matter snaked out of the circles and tightly bound each wrist. The doctors backed away to stand on either side of the doorway, leaving him tethered in the center of the room.
He didn’t have long to wait. The chrome wall in front of him shimmered and sloughed away as though the metal had become molten, revealing another silver room beyond. Mose’s slab moved forward into the second room in a liquid glide that made him think of canals and the watercraft he’d piloted for pleasure in a happier time. It was as though the floor was not solid matter at all. Not metal, then, he thought. Probably some nano-manipulated substrate. Terran tech. The dramatic entrance had a staged feel, calculated to impress and intimidate him.
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