In the dream Tukar’ramin had described how the mechs would fall before the podia and the cutting Cosmic Circle, vanquished by life triumphant.
In the dream Quath had cried, You know our mission is empty! and the Tukar’ramin, shocked, fell crashing into brass and ceramic and gristle and withered bony parts. Thorax and antennae clattered on the warren floor. She fell and fell and fell—endlessly, authority squeezed to nothing beneath the crushing weight of remorseless time.
Awakening, Quath saw for a glimmering moment that her preoccupation with death held a clue. Somehow, this bore upon all events here at Galactic Center. But how? The small races of Philosoph that laced thinly through her gave no clue.
NINE
Once more the Syphon sucked hard. Again the planet’s husk cracked and spat vast plumes of brown dust.
It was fortunate that this world had no major oceans, or a different fraction of the crumpled crust would have been submerged with each Syphon firing, impeding the mines. That fact had helped select this world for the thermweaving. It overrode the absence of moons, whose ripping apart would have provided convenient building materials. What’s more, there was a curious, ancient orbital device at the equator, which the podia might find useful later.
But now, word came of disturbances aloft. The podia used the captured mech orbital station as a shipping depot. But something had now intruded into the depot, delaying transports. This news was buried in the rush of Hive labor. Quath did not bother herself with such large problems, though she still ached to work in orbit, above the seethe of dust and gravity. She did her tasks and sought solace in marveling at progress beyond her Hive.
Already the podia had captured a small fraction of this yellow star’s light. Their weaving proceeded apace in orbit, deploying broad planes ribbed with photosensitive silicon. When finished, the weave would be only a framework, of course, for later expeditions. They would render the planets into light-sopping materials—a tedious task—in preparation for harnessing the star’s total flux.
By the time that happened, Quath expected she would be long dead, and the dream of Starswarmers touching between galaxies in the Summation would be, for Quath, dust. The others did not see this, or care. It was one thing to know in an abstract way that one day you would die, and another to wake in the night and feel your hearts thumping. To delve into your subtask brains and feel the prickly oxygen entering bloodstreams, the slow sluggish purr of tissues rebuilding, a hydraulic tug where titanium met cartilage, the dull orange burning of stored calories…and know they will cease, you will plunge into blackness.
With repetition these somber moments lost some of their bite. Quath began to see herself as a simple being, humble before the brute facts of living. She labored with the ratlike robots, using her massive stapler when great strength was needed, followed orders, and kept to herself. From murmurs of transmissions in the Hive corridors she overheard more talk of Beq’qdahl’s successes. Beq’qdahl is rising, the myriapodia observed. As though Beq’qdahl were a confection baking, puffing itself up, and they were indirectly the cooks. To Quath these matters no longer stung.
Thus she was not disturbed, when work teams reorganized, that Tukar’ramin ordered her to accompany Beq’qdahl as an equipment carrier. Being a young Philosoph did not free one from the rub of the world.
Ahead rumbled the bulky Beq’qdahl, legs scrabbling on rocks.
Her crescents of phosphorus made a small splotch of day amid the night. Quath lurched behind, jumping at each tremor of the rock for fear that another shifting of the crust had begun. Overhead hung the Cosmic Circle, its aura dull when not in use. The sharp stars were eyes staring out of a swallowing abyss.
Quath labored forward under her load of acoustic sensors. The Tukar’ramin had given Beq’qdahl a complete analytical station, so that tests could be made in the field. The components were bulky. Quath also carried Beq’qdahl’s extra boosting rockets, for escape should magma spurt over the crumpled hills.
Quath supplied it. Dawn broke as the sun ripened behind thinning clouds. Quath thought of Nimfur’thon and their gambols on these lands, then sprinkled with green. A very long time ago.
From behind a tilted shelf of rock ambled a flock of animals. It was surprising, Quath reflected, that they had survived the land’s heavings. The next round of Syphon firings would surely end life on this world.
Something whined off Beq’qdahl’s high turret.
The animals quickly spread among the shattered boulders. Something thudded into Beq’qdahl’s flank. A pod jerked in spasm.
Another shot sang off Beq’qdahl’s bronzed turret.
Quath answered mildly.
Two quick bursts caught Quath in the side. She drew up a battered palp. A salty pus oozed forth.
Beq’qdahl’s shrill cry pierced the air. Her fifth pod split ripely and belched a foul smoke.
Quath abruptly pitched forward. Her rear bulkhead puckered around two steaming holes.
Beq’qdahl strapped on the blue cylinders. Sharp shots rang on her carapace.
She finished hurriedly and made ready. Near misses hummed in the air.
Quath felt a stabbing gouge in her third pod. The gray animals—no, Noughts, she corrected herself—were nearer. They were fanning out. Metal glinted in their small feelers.
When Quath glanced skyward again, Beq’qdahl was a yellow dot arcing toward the distant Hive. Quath knew that even if she had boosters, she would lose valuable moments overcoming her own subminds. Their fear of flying was almost unmanageable.
Resigned, she turned to study the Noughts with no weapons to repel them. Small pellets ate—snick! ping!—at her skin. She hoisted her own boosters and locked them into sleeves, shrugging off the small bites as the Noughts’ shots nipped at her. Small, but so many.
As she articulated a telescoping arm, something caught her attention. Her stapler gleamed in the dawnlight.
The humble stapler which drove forked brackets into the Hive rock. No weapon at all…
Quath started to run. And then stopped. The Noughts could follow, after all. If she stood she would retain at least her dignity, if not her life.
Quath turned and faced the enveloping tide of piping Noughts. Something in her wanted this.
She raised the stapler and sighted along it with three eyes. A Nought charged into he
r center of focus and she fired. The staple split a rock, missing the Nought. She corrected. Fired. Another miss.
Quath felt a strange soothing calm. Shots struck her palps, fracturing one away. Steadily she calibrated and aimed. The stapler jerked. A Nought crumpled and fell into a gully.
The next gray target bobbed and weaved. Quath compensated and caught it on the third shot, splitting the thing in two. Beneath the gray shell it oozed sap.
High, frantic calls piped from the Noughts. Many ducked behind outcroppings. Quath quickly shot three.
Their weapons peppered her, stings nicking at her concentration. She killed five more.
They crowded in now, skipping like mites from one shadowed refuge to the next. Staples plowed through the soft, unarmored Noughts.
Her side dimpled and a hard wave of pain lanced through her. She lurched, gasping. Oil bubbled from two pods. Her remotely actuated hydraulic cylinders did not respond. She was trapped here.
She dashed sideways to elude a wedge of them and a massed volley slammed her into a rock face. Her lenses fogged. Oxygen processors rasped. Fiery fingers pulled at her guts.
Here it is, Quath thought. I have met it. Blackness closed in.
Drifting…
Swimming…
Darkness came…slow…slow.
Yet time ticked on.
In her blurred sensate swamp Quath felt a brush of cool air, like the plasma wind which stirs the banks of dust between suns. Watery images floated in her eyes. She oxidized sugars with nitric acid, splitting open her internal mucus pouches to hasten the mix. She strained—
With a gathering rush her boosters fired, yellow columns singing. A cold fierce joy burst in her.
She landed unsteadily. Noughts swarmed after her. She set herself with a cool certainty and aimed. Fired.
Forked staples cut into the Noughts. Clanking, rumbling, surging, she moved—and boosted again, firing as she flew.
The Noughts in their gray suits exploded when the staples caught them. Guts spilled on crushed rock.
A pleasant fever swept over Quath as they fell under her hail of staples, puny voices screaming, rasping for a last suck of air.
Quath pushed them back across the field. Their firing slowed, ceased. They fled. She swiveled and searched out the few gray dabs remaining. They cowered in their hiding holes, bleating in fear, little better than animals.
Each became a small detail that Quath settled with the quick sharp stutter of the stapling gun. Each ended with a little cry, as if what awaited were a surprise.
When she sliced the last one through, Quath stood alone, gasping, her mind fuzzed. She attached a hook and line to a Nought body which was still in one piece and hauled it up for a better view. In the absolute silence of the battlefield her driving servo scratched, demanding oil. Her joints trembled with strain. The Nought body turned on the hook. Quath plucked at the gray skin. Filmy, it tore away.
The gray suit shucked off, much the way this world would soon become a husk. The Nought slipped free.
At first Quath saw only the gangling appendages with their awkward, splayed ends. Two for walking, two for manipulations. The joints were slight pivots, surely not capable of withstanding much stress.
Yet as Quath studied the creature she saw how the wrinklings and knottings of its skin told how the thing lived. Patches of curdlings at the midjoints of the shorter pods, evidence of wear. A funguslike growth above and below the eyes, to cup warmth about the small brain. Another dark patch, lower, to shelter a tangle of equipment.
Quath traced the fine pattern of fleece that wove about the body, following what she could see were flow lines water would make as the thing swam. A beautiful design. So this Nought was a swimmer, yet it could walk, after a fashion.
She clamped the skull and turned the spinal juncture until a click came. She sent a subsonic hum along the body. With care she lifted the skull. The skeleton came free, sliding up out of the meat.
To Quath this gesture brought into the air a fresh and wonderful vision. The chalky bones were not crude and heavy. They seemed delicately turned, fitting snugly together—thin where waste would slow the beast, strong where torques and forces found their axis.
The center held a finespun cage of calcium rods. Ribs. They blossomed into a brittle and precisely adjusted weave, a song of intricate design and wonderful order that Quath could sense trilling through the webbed intersections.
Yet this Nought-thing was a pest. It crawled on the ground and probably never noticed the stars. It had mastered at best the trifling resources of its pitiful little world. Its crude weapons were barely better than the teeth and hooves of dumb animals.
Quath spun the skeleton, marveling at it. Inside her a chorus swelled over her weak, doubting voices. She swept aside the bleak landscape of small-minded logic, the fears which had ruled her.
Here at last was the truth made manifest. Her faith returned.
Reason resonated here. A universe which spent such care on loathsome, useless Noughts surely could not make the whole drama pointless by discarding it all, by letting blackness swallow everything, by letting Quath’jutt’kkal’thon ever finally fail, fail and die.
PART THREE
A Matter of Momentum
ONE
Killeen smacked his gloved palm against the alien bulkhead. “Damn!”
Then he heard Jocelyn coming back and made himself take long, calming breaths. It was never a good idea to let an officer, even one as disciplined as Jocelyn, see the Cap’n in a pure, frustrated fit of anger.
“Nothing,” she reported. “Couldn’t see a damn thing happening anywhere in the ship.”
Killeen nodded. He had been certain the craft was completely dead to their commands, but they had to check every possibility. There was precious little else they could do.
He remembered that during the assault on the station he had regretted that, as Cap’n, he was no longer in the thick of things. Well, now his wish had been granted….
Their Flitter had been under way for over an hour. A steady throb of motors gave a slight acceleration toward the aft deck. In these skewed hexagonal compartments this was a particularly awkward orientation, intended for some odd mech purpose.
Jocelyn pulled herself deftly over a tangle of U-crosssection pipes that emerged from the floor and arced into the outer hull. Killeen peered into the mass of wires and mysterious electronic wedges that he had uncovered beneath a floor hatch. He called up his Aspects—Arthur for the electronics craftsmanship of the Arcology era, former Captain Ling for the starship lore of millennia earlier, and even Grey, aloof, sophisticated, so remote as to be nearly inaccessible. No matter who he summoned, none of the ancient personalities offered anything useful. Ling came the closest.
The external entity’s means of controlling this craft may be insidious…note how none of your precautions prevented Mantis from re-asserting itself, upon our arrival. Your mastery over Argo was illusory.
“You mean we never stood a chance,” Killeen said bitterly. “Never did, never will.”
Long ago, before my time, before Grey’s, before even the epoch of the great Chandeliers, it is said that our ancestors once challenged the mechs. Higher entities were forced to acknowledge our existence, rather than delegating our elimination to minuscule mechanisms such as you knew on Snowglade.
It was difficult for Killeen to picture a being like Mantis as “minuscule,” though Mantis itself had said that this was so. Killeen’ s mind could not encompass the heights Ling was implying—heights once assaulted by humanity before the long, grinding fall.
As for your present problem, there is a simple solution. A way to prevent the outside entity from controlling this craft.
“How’s that?”
By destroying its means of receiving instructions. Go outside and wreck the antennae.
Killeen laughed so coarsely that Jocelyn looked up from her useless labor under the floorboards. “Already thought ’bout that. We can’t get outside!”
Before Ling could respond he swept the irritating Aspect to the back of his mind. He tried again to call Shibo on comm.
Reception had improved since the last try, though it still faded in and out, washing her voice in soft static. To him it sounded beautiful.
—How are you doing?—she asked, tense with concern.
“Survivin’. I miss you an’ Toby. How is he?”
—Toby’s fine. He’s up here on the Bridge with me and Cermo. We’re trackin’ you.—There was a pause.—You’re still headed for rendezvous with the approaching ship. It’s hell just sitting here. Can’t budge Argo, come after you.—
“Did you try painting the hull with insulator? It might keep out whatever’s jammin’ the controls.”
—Yeasay. No good. It’s Mantis programs that’ve got us stuck here, embedded too deep.—Her level voice could not hide from him her tight apprehension.—Looks like that method worked on the other Flitters, though. They’re under our control now. We’ll have ’em charged up soon.—
Implied, but unspoken, was the fact that none would be ready in time to rescue Killeen and Jocelyn. Jocelyn reacted to this by spitting on the cabin wall.
“All right,” Killeen said. “Shibo, I want you to form up the Family. Issue provisions. Full field gear.”
—For what?—
“For abandoning the station. Take the Family away.”
—But Argo!—
“We’ll have to abandon Argo too. Detach the farm domes. We discussed that. They’re self-sustaining. Drag ’em along. But get out within twenty hours.”
—But we can defend the station!—It was Toby’s voice, rent with frustration, breaking in.
“Son,” Killeen said. “Get off the command comm.”
—I say we can take these damn mechs!—
Before Killeen could cut his son off, Shibo interjected agreement.
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