Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  —Yeasay. We’ll stay with Argo, fight off anything that comes.—Shibo’s voice was filled with fierce commitment. Her motivation warmed him, but it frustrated Killeen that he could not make her see.

  Lieutenant Cermo’s forceful voice joined in.

  —Fight higher-level mechs? From a fixed position? Crazy! Naysay!—

  Shibo’s reply sounded uncertain.—We’ll sucker ’em in, jump ’em.—

  —They’ll expect that!—Cermo spoke louder than necessary.

  —These mechs’re puny!—Toby interrupted again.—We took ’em easy.—

  Cermo’s reply was bitter.—Those were just night watchmen. Just wait’ll the Marauder class mechs show up. I tell you we can’t fight things at that level. Not from fixed positions. At least not without help from something like the Mantis.—

  —You Mantis-followers!—Toby grated.—Mantis’s mechs were gonna meet us here, you thought. Where were they? They got beat by something else before we ever arrived.—

  —Exactly my point! Whatever beat Mantis’s allies is gonna come back here soon. It’s already got th’ Cap’n.—

  “Cermo’s right,” Killeen told them, glad that his second lieutenant was showing some sense. He was about to add more praise when Cermo took a completely unexpected tangent.

  —Thanks, Cap’n. That’s why I say we head right now for broken ground. Head for territory where we know how to fight, like in the old days, and where we can find allies.—

  “You can’t mean…”

  —Yeasay! Head for the surface.—

  “No! Take the Flitters outward! You can reach the fourth planet. It’s got ice, carbon. We got some Aspects who ’member that kind of life. You can set up domes.”

  But Cermo cut in again.

  —Argo brought us here for a reason, Cap’n. Some of us say let’s go down and find out what that reason is.—

  “But those reasons may be obsolete! They probably are, if Mantis’s allies have lost. Anyway, what about the others in the Family? Those who don’t trust Mantis?”

  That had always included the majority of Argo’s crew. Killeen had long counted on their support to overcome the mysticism, or gullibility, of the faction willing to put its faith in the promises of a mech, even a “different” mech as unusual as Mantis. Killeen was confident peer pressure would bring Cermo around.

  But Shibo’s next words cut the deck from under him.

  —The majority say we should stand an’ fight for the station,—she said in a low, bitter voice he could barely make out.—But the Cap’n has convinced me we can’t. Given that, Cermo’s right.—

  “No! Take the Argo. Run!”

  —If we take the Flitters maybe I can find you later.—

  “Not much chance I’ll be alive long. Somebody wants a look at Jocelyn ’n me. Don’t ’spect it’s just friendly interest.”

  Cermo said,—Cap’n, we vote for goin’ down.—

  “And I say you don’t.”

  With less heat now Cermo sent,—The Mantis…—

  “We’re masters of our own lives, dammit!” Killeen shouted.

  —The Mantis had somethin’ in mind,—Cermo said stolidly.

  “So what? Think it planned that cosmic string? Shibo! What’s it doing?”

  In reply she sent a simulation picture that fluttered in his left eye.

  The revolving hoop shaded the entire planet. From the small opening along the axis dark pencil-thin strands shot upward. Both poles vented streams of matter. Yellow metal-lava struck vacuum and exploded into banks of fog. From the vapor came long, thin threads.

  “Looks like buildin’ somethin’,” Killeen said.

  —Gutting the planet while they do it,—Shibo agreed.

  Killeen said sharply, “You’ll do as I order. Shibo, you sounded the gathering call yet?”

  Shibo replied reluctantly,—Yeasay.—

  “Good. Now—”

  —I got Flitters ready, too. They’re set up for easy destination programming. Files on the Argo showed me how. I’ve got them set for planet approach.—

  Killeen saw bitterly that she had thought this through thoroughly. She could probably bring it off, too. Shibo was a wonder at ferreting out mechmind ways. “Naysay! Something awful’s going on here. Get away!”

  —Sorry, lover. You’re outvoted.—Shibo gave the words a lilt but he could feel her tension.

  “As Cap’n I—”

  —If you want legalisms, try this,—Shibo cut in sternly.—You’ve been shanghaied off. As acting officers we’re expressing the Family’s decision.—

  “Naysay! You can’t—”

  —Listen!—Her voice suddenly flared with genuine anger. He could imagine her suddenly widened eyes, her clenched teeth. Emotions seldom broke her calm surface but the effect was spectacular, like an unleashed force of nature.—We’ll try saving you. But we’re holding with our dream.—

  “Shibo, I want—”

  —Lover, you know I can’t just sit here and do nothing.—

  Killeen made himself pause. His frustration should be directed against whatever had seized this ship, not against this most precious of all women. “All…all right. No way I can stop you, is there?”

  Cermo answered with surprising warmth,—Naysay. None.—

  “Where’ll you go?”

  A pause. He imagined that she was holding herself in check too. The thin strand connecting them seemed to sing with unspoken thoughts.—You…’member that signal from New Bishop?—

  “Yeasay. Had human indices, you said.”

  —I got a better fix on it. Voices. Near the equator. We’ll try for that.—

  “Well…”

  —There’re people down there. That convinced a lot of us. If we can’t defend Argo, we’ll go down and join our kin.—

  It made sense. Killeen reluctantly admitted that Shibo and Cermo had logic and human fellowship on their side.

  “The string, though!” he shouted, pounding the console. “How can you get past it?”

  —It whirls round for a day or so, then stops,—Shibo said.—We’ll spread out from the station. When the string stops, we’ll hit the atmosphere.—

  “Too risky.”

  —Lover…—

  For a long moment they said nothing. The purr of static seemed almost like a background chorus to poignant, unspeakable thoughts.

  “When…when’ll you leave?”

  —Soon. We’re nearly ready. I…we’ll…try…pick you up…you…hide from whatever’s in that ship…if we can…get in close…otherwise…—

  Her voice faded in and out. Killeen listened intently for some last contact with her. Finally he switched off the static and realized he had been holding his breath.

  Jocelyn looked at him expectantly. Killeen had no ideas and did not want to show it. He clamped down his jaw muscles, knowing this gave him a stern look, but this time he valued it more because it compressed his helpless frustration.

  “They want to keep us in here till…” Jocelyn plainly could not think of a way to finish.

  “Yeasay. Till they can flush us out, step on us.”

  “Haulin’ us out this far, maybe they just want get some idea ’bout what we are, ’fore they go into the station.”

  “Seems reasonable. Mechs’re careful.”

  “Even dead, we’ll give ’em info,” Jocelyn said flatly.

  He saw her meaning. “Yeasay.”

  “We better get out ’fore we arrive.”

  Anger brimmed fresh in him. He needed to think but the blind rage seethed nearly beyond control. His hands ached to smash and tear.

  At that moment he saw the glimmer of an idea. Evolution’s mute legacy of hormones had made him get angry, and maybe that was the right thing after all. Use his rage, yes.

  “Let’s have some fun,” he said with a thin smile.

  “Huh?”

  “This ship’s got some onboard mind, even if we can’t reach it. Let’s give it a problem. A big problem.”

  Killeen
picked up a metal rod he had wrenched free from a mech loading mechanism. With a spurt of joy he brought it down on the U-shaped pipes. One, two, three blows—and a pipe dented. Fractured. Split to let hiss forth a green gas.

  “Seal up!” Jocelyn cried with alarm. They both twist-locked their helmets as the gas filled the ship with a billowing emerald fog.

  Distant warnings wailed, keening in his sensorium. Killeen waved Jocelyn to follow and moved as quickly as he could through the snaking tunnels of the Flitter. There had been a small side lock that they could not open, but now, if they confused the ship’s internal systems enough…

  The lock was a simple exit chute with a large dimpled cap. They had spent a lot of time trying to lever it open, and now Killeen simply slammed his metal rod into the thing. He chipped its finish and broke off the side flanges. Jocelyn had caught his meaning, too, and had found a shaft of heavy composite brass. She flailed at the lock with relish, grinning.

  After the first rush of rage Killeen reflected that this at least cleared their heads. It burned up oxygen, but he didn’t have much hope of using his full reserve anyway. He knew he had blundered badly and was going to pay for it.

  More alarms hooted through his sensorium, electromagnetic spikes of mech dismay. Killeen chopped down on power cables. Sparks jumped. He was wearing his rubber gloves to avoid the usual shocktraps but the surge still blinded him—breaking down the air, forking orange fingers into the deck. The green gas was thickening. Killeen smashed a panel of controls, denting the side and ripping wires.

  And the lock popped open. Killeen stared at it. Brilliant stars beckoned. He had only an instant before the whoosh of escaping air drew him headfirst toward the open lock.

  He windmilled his arms in the storm. This made him strike the yawning mouth sidewise, so it could not swallow him. Jocelyn slammed into his legs. He wrenched sidewise. That gave her a shove toward the floor, where she could grab at the base.

  But securing her cost him his precarious hold on the lip of the lock. The rising gale’s shriek clutched at him. He tried to sit up. A giant hand pushed him heavily back. Small mouths sucked at his arms, legs, head—

  Something struck him solidly in the neck and abruptly he was in the lock, battering against the side in a green-tinged darkness—

  —and was out, free, whirling away from the shining skin of the Flitter.

  Tumbling. Spinning.

  He vectored hard to correct his plunge. A jumble of impressions began to make sense.

  He hung on the dayside of New Bishop, far from the station. He was near a pole. Far below the ruddy twilight stretched shadows of mountains across beaten gray plains. Toward the equator green life still clung in valleys and plains, where forests thickened.

  All this lay behind the incandescent golden blur of the cosmic string. It spun with endless energy. One edge of it arrowed straight down toward the pole. The other side bulged out far beyond the planet’s equator.

  The hoop spun faster than the eye could follow. A hovering tapestry spread over the entire world. The polar axis was clear now. Killeen could see no dark jet of metal spewing up. But glinting craft lingered still.

  Now he was going to get a close look. He was nearly over the pole. Far away, nearly over the soft curve of the world, arced vast gray warrens. The fabricated fruit of the recently ejected core metal, he guessed.

  This he took in with the barest glance, unable to react—because something came looming into his view, swelling with the speed of its approach.

  The ship was far larger than the mech Flitter, which now floated like a helpless insect beside a predatory bird as the craft slowed and stopped. The comparison came to Killeen because of a certain tantalizing, evocative sweep of the larger ship’s lines. It had flared wings made of intricate intersecting pentagons, as though spun out from a single thread. Its forward hull bulged like a gouty throat. Blackened thrusters at its rear puckered wide. His Arthur Aspect remarked serenely:

  While the Flitter expresses mech rigidities, this huge craft seems sculpted to express underlying body symmetries. Aspect Grey tells me this is a characteristic of organic intelligence, not mech. Still, I fear these are not the familiar bilateral forms made by humans.

  “Jocelyn! There’s something out here. Hide!”

  Faintly she sent an answer,—Yeasay. Flitter’s nearly stopped anyway.—

  The ships now hung together. Killeen wondered if this had been their intended destination. If so, perhaps all their mad raging had only succeeded in getting him free a few moments early, as the Flitter was allowed to void its irritant.

  He jetted around the Flitter, calculating that the larger ship might miss him in the clutter of debris that had spewed from the lock. If he could somehow stay free, he might find out what manner of being flew the strangely shaped ship.

  Speculation ceased. A form rushed forth from a darkened oval hole in the craft’s side, moving far swifter than a human could. It headed for him.

  Killeen sped away. There was nowhere to go but he was damned if he would wait to be caught. His turn brought into view the pole again, and the golden glow of the spinning hoop below. The shimmering covered all of New Bishop except for the small open cylinder at the pole.

  Killeen tried to angle away from the onrushing form and gain the small shelter of the Flitter. A glance behind him showed that the thing was closing fast. He veered.

  At each darting turn it came closer, following him with almost contemptuous ease. It loomed so near now that Killeen could see bossed metal studded with protuberances. Between riveted coppery sections was a rough, crusted stuff that seemed to flex and work with effort.

  He realized abruptly that the thing was alive. Muscles rippled through it. Six sheathed legs curled beneath, ending in huge claws.

  And the head—Killeen saw eyes, more than he could count, moving independently on stalks. Beside them microwave dishes rotated. It had telescoping arms socketed in shiny steel. They ended in grappling arrays of opposing pads.

  The thing was at least twenty times the size of a human. A bulging throat throbbed beneath stiff-crusted graygreen skin. Its rear quarters were swollen as though thruster tubes lodged there. Yet they were also banded with alternating yellow and brown rings, like the markings of a living creature.

  Killeen guessed that this was what had been near the mainmind of the station. But that one had been much smaller. This was another order of being. It united the forms of both mech and life.

  This was all he could think before gaping pads clasped him in a rough but sure embrace.

  The thing brought him up toward its moving eye array. It studied him for a long moment. Killeen was so rapt upon the orange ovals that only after a moment did he notice the steady tug of acceleration.

  The thing was hurtling him forward. Not back to its ship, but toward the pole. It tossed him from one array of pads to another, letting him tumble for seconds in space before snagging him again.

  Like a cat playing with a mouse,

  his Arthur Aspect said mournfully.

  “What’s…a cat?”

  An ancient animal, revered for its wisdom. Grey told me of it.

  Killeen’s mind whirled, empty of terror or rage.

  He felt only a distant, painful remorse at all he was about to leave behind—Toby’s laughter, Shibo’s silky love, Cermo’s broad unthinking grin, the whole warm clasp of the Family he had failed, and would now die for in a meaningless sacrifice to something beyond human experience.

  He tried to wrench away from the coarse black pads. They seemed to be everywhere. A brutal weight mashed him down. A long, agonizing time passed as he struggled to breathe.

  He wondered abstractly how the thing would kill him. A crushing grasp, or legs pulled off, or electrocution…

  In sudden rage he tried to kick against the pads. He got a knee up into them and pushed, struck sidewise with his arms—

  —and was free. Impossibly, he glided away at high speed from the long, pocked form of worked steel
and wrinkled brown flesh. It did not follow.

  He spun to get his bearings and saw nothing but a hard glow. He was close to the hoop. No, not merely close—it surrounded him.

  Killeen looked behind him. Above, the fast-shrinking alien hung at the end of a glowing tube that stretched, stretched and narrowed around him as Killeen watched.

  He was speeding down the throat of the pipe made by the whirring hoop. Shimmering radiance closed in.

  He righted himself and fired his jets. The alien had given him a high velocity straight down into the hoop-tube. If he could correct for it in time—

  But the brilliant walls drew nearer.

  He applied maximum thrust to stop himself, even though that meant his fuel would burn less efficiently. His in-suit thrusters were small, weak, intended only for maneuvers in free-fall.

  He plunged straight down. The alien had so carefully applied accelerations that Killeen did not veer sidewise against the hoop walls. He was falling precisely toward the pole of New Bishop. Through the shimmering translucent walls he could see a dim outline of the planet, as ghostly as a lost dream.

  His thrusters chugged, ran smoothly for a moment, then coughed and died. He fell in sudden eerie silence.

  He had been simpleminded, thinking that the alien anthology of flesh and steel would kill him in some obvious way. Instead, from some great and twisted motive, it had given him this strange trajectory into the mouth of a huge engine of destruction.

  At any moment, he supposed, the tube would vent more liquid metal outward. In an instant he would vanish into smoke.

  Vainly he tried his sensorium. No human tracers beckoned. He grimaced, his breath coming rapidly in the sweat-fogged helmet.

  The shimmering walls drew closer. He almost felt that he could touch them, but kept his arms at his sides. He fell feet first, watching a small yellow dot between his boots slowly grow. His Grey Aspect said distantly:

  This is…wondrous work…such as I…never studied…comparable to the constructions…in ancient times…of mechs themselves…

  His Arthur Aspect remarked:

  We are inside the bore of the tube that stretches out along the polar axis. Let us hope the entire tube has been emptied by the alien mining operations. It appears we do have a quite exact trajectory. The alien sent us falling straight along New Bishop’s spin axis. We may well fall all the way through the planet.