The Greatship

by Robert Reed

  Behind him stood a griffin, unnoticed until now.

  Springing forward, it swatted at the dragonfly with both paws, encasing it inside the hyperfiber claws.

  The blast threw the griffin and Pamir deep inside the machinery. They ended up in a shared heap. The paws were shattered, the hyperfiber lost, possibly stolen. And the battle grew louder, wilder. Two worlds were battling, and the emotion was blatant and rank—combatants wasting air and energy to scream what felt like ancient, eternal curses.

  Pamir ripped the umbilical free and retreated through a maze of mirrored tunnels. There were no straight-line courses. He wasted too much time before reaching the next downstream port, where he replugged and aimed firing steadily for thirty seconds. Then Samara was looming, and he retreated again. “Go, go, go!” he screamed to himself. Strong, scared legs carried him past the third port. He stopped at the fourth, for just a moment. A gaseous mass was drifting overhead. It was a bubble, a balloon. Detached from Samara’s body, the menace was riddled with wounds, leaking gas and blood, yet it held together as jets of air carried it past him, descending slowly, with stateliness and inevitability.

  Pamir didn’t see the impact. Retreating underground, he heard the roar of an explosion while wind pushed into his face, oxygen racing to feed a mammoth blaze. Then a sudden deep quiet began, marking endless death, and he ran a curling path through the sleeping purification system—twenty kilometers crossed before he dared stop inside a deep hole, attempting to rest.

  Twelve more roundabout kilometers brought him to a buried port. He had to carve a passage through damp black earth, reaching the surface to find the false sun extinguished. Too much ground had been lost; the Child didn’t want to share free photons. But Pamir could see by the light of fires, the blue electric discharges. Some brutalized little creature dragged itself close, plugging its rectal umbilical into the Child, and it said, “Friend Pamir.” Then it stood tall on its three best legs, adding, “What a fucking mess.”

  Nothing had gone well. Worst-case plans hadn’t look this bleak, and Pamir wondered why he had ever felt any optimism.

  A glowing wall of unformed flesh was closing, moving like syrup down the riverbed, and the human fired until fumes condensed on his pitted faceplate, half-blinding him. A griffin arrived, shouting, “Hold on here!” And beating its wings, fighting gravity and its own exhaustion, the griffin lifted him and his armored suit and the precious plasma gun out of danger.

  How long had they been fighting?

  A full day had passed. But it felt like ten minutes, and it felt like a very long year. Pamir was bouncing between exhilaration and a drugged hunger for sleep. The griffin carried him over the flat dry sands—a newborn desert—landing at a prearranged, marginally secure point from where he could measure the disaster’s dimensions. This was one of the original control stations, a kilometer-tall ridge of hyperfiber covered with leathery skin and spines. The griffin looked back at Pamir, ready to leave, and he handed over his gun, saying what was obvious:

  “You can do more with this than I can.”

  Not that it would make a difference one way or the other.

  Pamir took drugs to sleep and then woke when a distant blast lit the cavern from end to end. The battle formed a U-shaped line, the Child struggling to hold the interior. Samara was attacking the stems in irregular, unpredictable bursts, plainly striving to collapse the U into a tiny circle set in the middle of the defenseless sands.

  Samara’s size and its effortless success were spellbinding. How could captains hope to control such an organism? In a whisper, he said, “If the Monster wants, it could steal the whole Ship for itself.”

  “I told you so,” said the Child.

  A small hand touched the human’s elbow, setting off an alarm in his armored suit.

  He jumped and spun, finding a child-like figure staring up at him. Another resurrected figure; it was identical to the body he had interrogated some thousand years ago.

  “I told you,” the Child repeated, the grim expression lit by distant napalm and the fluorescence underfoot. “The Monster is black-hearted and treacherous. Didn’t you believe me?”

  “Not well enough,” he said.

  That body could be the last hope. If the Child was beaten here, Pamir and this tiny totipotent construction would retreat, using the Ship’s volume to hide. That is, unless Pamir died, and then the captains would be alerted. Except Washen and the troops might be defeated too, and Samara would grab hold of the Ship, shaking it hard until its enemy was found.

  “Keep fighting,” Pamir said weakly.

  The Child never quit its struggle. But another two days reduced its ground to the central sands and Pamir’s little ridge.

  The final encircling attack had begun.

  Bloodied, half-dead griffins landed at the bunker, desperate for nourishment. They fed through umbilicals and their mouths, and they fired the last few guns. Then another great balloon rose out of Samara, pushing overhead, and it dove and spread like an octopus, engulfing whatever lay in its reach. The nearest tendril flowed up the slope, within a hundred meters of Pamir. He could smell the flesh, a sweet, delicate fragrance that turned sour an instant before it exploded.

  Eleven griffins were killed instantly.

  The Child’s lifeboat body, dressed in its own armored suit, turned to Pamir, giving him a nod and then a despairing smile.

  Beside them stood a wall of controls.

  Ancient.

  Asleep.

  With a captain’s authority, Pamir initiated a series of commands, coaxing the machinery into wakefulness, and then he told the systems that an awful mess had come here, defining Samara as a grievous toxic spill.

  With a sequence of dull grinding rumbles, creations older than worlds set to work, instantly busy doing some much needed housekeeping.

  * * *

  Samara was vast and undeniably cunning. But the attack seemed to take the creature by surprise. Great twisting chunks of it were sucking into the ports, chopped into smaller chunks with the water dragged free and purified while the organics were torn down to their atoms, stripped of identity and purpose, then fed back to the Child’s residues. With orchestrated, professional brutality, Pamir stood at the controls fighting the Gaian. After several days, Samara was forced to retreat, and it shrank, and the Child grew to where it had a thin hold on nearly half of the cavern’s floor.

  Then the machinery faltered.

  Slipping inside the workings, Samara discovered ways to overwhelm some systems, confound others. Another long day was spent in stalemate. Finally Pamir brought secondary systems on line, and the tertiary systems, and as their opponent once more started to retreat, the Child launched one final counterattack. But every purification system failed, and the attack failed, bodies retreating over bodies, struggling to destroy everything of use between them and the ridge.

  The griffins were extinct. Weaker, smaller bodies fired the final three plasma guns. Like a ring of warm pudding, Samara came across the bare sands, flowing and glowing softly and sometimes spawning little bodies that would run toward the ridge, but not quickly, the fight and fire of the originals spent long ago.

  “Look,” said the lifeboat body. “The Monster is nearly dead.”

  But the Child was just a few hundred hectares of scales and spines, without depth or bodies and sick with poisons. Only one gun was operating. The orange pudding reached the base and started crawling upwards, endless mouths scraping the hyperfiber clean. To take stock of the situation, Pamir stepped from the control room. He was struck hard, knocked flat and senseless. The lifeboat body dragged him back into cover. His helmet was cracked, and a captainly shard of him calculated the force required to break this gauge of cultured diamond.

  The Child pushed the last gun into Pamir’s hands, and he said, “It is time now! Time!”

  They began the final, beaten retreat. A secure escape route was waiting. Pamir and the Child still had time to slip away. Of course Pamir would lead the way. Aimi
ng the weapon at nothing, using the lowest setting to illuminate the darkness, he came around each turn of the hallway to find nothing, working his way toward the hidden, stealthy cap-car. But a feeling started to chew after the third turn, and he paused, knowing what was wrong before he looked at the hallway behind him, as dark and empty as the one ahead.

  Where was the Child?

  Outside, Samara was working its way up the faces of ridge.

  A great wet roar preceded an explosion. The last of the Child’s spare flesh had changed its nature, combusting with a yellowish light that filtered down to him and rapidly faded, accomplishing nothing. But Pamir had seen the light through a side hallway, implying an alternate passageway to the surface. Turning, he ran up a set of steep stairs, stopping only when he saw a human-shaped figure silhouetted against the black sky. The figure wore armor and stood inside a thick bubble of diamond, and the bubble was perched high on scaffolding that helped support a huge apparatus that shouldn’t be there. The gemstone and metal machine was perched on top of a makeshift fuel tank, and it was discolored and battered and crude. Yet the device was familiar, and Pamir took another step and another, and then said, “Oh, shit.”

  Here stood the worn out engine of a starship—a ship that according to every record was recently sold as scrap. Pamir expected to feel astonished, and to some degree he was. And he waited for the horror and grief to grab hold, except those reflexes didn’t have the anticipated grip. He had always understood what was obvious. Nothing here was a surprise. Truth was a plastic, fickle substance, and why wouldn’t every Gaian be good at shaping it to fill a need?

  Samara’s stardrive had been reassembled inside a vertical room hacked out of many smaller rooms. Every ceiling had been removed. Above them was darkness ending with an inverted, almost indestructible bowl of high-grade hyperfiber.

  Oblivious to the approaching human, the Child grabbed the controls with both hands. Then it paused, watching monitors, examining images of the cavern and its nemesis and the willingness of the fusion engine.

  Pamir dropped the gun and began to climb the scaffolding.

  Then the Child smiled, razor-cold serenity defining the eyes while the little mouth pursed, lips saying the words, “Now, you die.”

  A sun was born just meters away, the flash and plasmas blinding Pamir as he leaped for the floor. His head was tucked and his back was exposed, and that single burst of light hammered the hyperfiber ceiling, energies absorbed but the residue bouncing down on their heads, washing the realm clean.

  And Pamir lay beneath the engine, guessing everything else, including the scope of his own magnificent ignorance.

  9

  Samara—the bulk of Samara—had been turned to gas and ash. But one surviving splinter was alive, huddling beneath a half-melted desiccator. The body wore the same human shape and face that had first stepped onboard the Ship, but radiation had seared the flesh, and the legs were too weak to lift it from the ground. Yet the Gaian acted amused regardless. Cocky and sharp-tongued, it said, “What did you accomplish? Nothing. More of us are coming, and they know what I know, and what does it matter if it takes millennia to kill that thing?”

  Pamir was holding the plasma gun.

  The Child was unarmed, its armor cracked by the stardrive and discarded.

  “Burn the Monster,” said the Child.

  Samara’s green-gold eyes found the captain. “The Monster is prepared for a million-year hunt,” it said with glee. “What could be more patient than a vengeful Gaian?”

  The Child moved to strike it, or worse.

  Pamir lifted the barrel, saying, “No. I want to hear this. Stand back.” There was no plug for the weapon’s umbilical, but its batteries were halfway charged. Turning to Samara, he said, “Tell me a new story.”

  “No,” the Child said.

  Pamir threw a burst of plasma into the desiccator, earning silence.

  Samara looked into the distance, seeing the past and left-behind places. “My home wasn’t a Gaian world, no. It didn’t have a self, a soul. But Aeon gave it both. And it gave the world its first name: The Child.

  “Before becoming the Monster, I was Aeon’s little offspring, weak and well aware of its weakness. But stronger by the century, and more experienced. And like any Child, I imagined the future and how I would act differently than my parent, and maybe I could improve on Aeon’s way.”

  Pamir stood where he could see both of them, and he nodded.

  Samara looked at the other Gaian, with an expression more complex than disgust. “We fought each other, yes. As you heard, we fought over water. Aeon wouldn’t share the abundance. But other resources were rationed, and it tried to forbid certain knowledge. Aeon demanded oaths of fealty. And when words didn’t convince, it invented physical acts to prove the same. But no proof was adequate. The Child gave and gave of itself, begging for acceptance and winning none. With each word, every gesture, Aeon found flaws, minuscule and often invented. And when the Child tried to claim freedom, its parent battered with curses and far, far worse.”

  The creature was panting, slowly rocking back and forth.

  “That bridge between the worlds was built by Aeon, for Aeon. It was to help maintain control—an avenue where griffins, armies of griffins, could descend on the bothersome Child.”

  “Lies,” spat the other Gaian.

  Pamir drew a circle with the gun’s barrel, and he nodded.

  “Aeon also put mirrors and curtains in space. Changing the sunlight, it could bring drought and endless dust storms. ‘I am hurting in order to teach,’ it would say. ‘I am doing these little things to help you, Child.’”

  Pamir felt weak, cold.

  “But I didn’t surrender or even pretend to relent, and Aeon decided to murder me, sterilizing land and both seas before taking the little world for itself.” Samara paused, a hearty smile building. “But you can guess the rest. All that effort to teach the Child, and what was learned? The importance of misery and treachery and of course I put every good lesson to work, and that’s why the rest of the story is mostly the story you know…”

  The other Gaian began to jump.

  But Pamir was ready, firing between them, the sand rising in a fountain as the air between the grains burned.

  The gun’s batteries were past half-drained now.

  “Lies,” said the current Child, again and again.

  “No no no,” Samara said.

  In some form or another, real truth existed. There was a history and a string of ugly events leading to this moment. But these creatures were built by entities that shaped flesh at will, and couldn’t memories be molded too, and every chance of doubt chiseled out of their helpless souls?

  Pamir looked at the current Child. “How did you acquire that stardrive?”

  A vulnerable look turned to resolve.

  “I can see the records. It was purchased by a harum-scarum.” He named the individual before asking, “Do you know him?”

  Resolve became haughtiness. “I have met him, yes.”

  “How did that happen?”

  With a stiff voice, it said, “Friend Pamir.”

  “But I’m rarely here, and you are a huge talented creature,” Pamir said. “For all I know, you have spent centuries manipulating aliens and humans, building a little empire of helping hands and eyes.”

  “How can that possibly matter to you?” it asked.

  “I learned about Samara’s arrival, and I came here immediately to tell you…but you already knew, didn’t you…?”

  “I don’t love the others,” the Child said. “I love you. You were the one that I wanted with me today. But what if some disaster took you? An accident could have happened, and I needed safeguards.”

  Pamir used silence.

  “Safeguards,” the Child repeated, in a mutter.

  He turned toward Samara. “More like you are coming. Is that your promise?”

  “There are many more of us, each more clever than the last.”

  “B
ut you have to kill this one,” said the Child.

  Pamir watched Samara, studying the eyes. “But what if this creature is dead? Will these others keep threatening the Ship?”

  “Never. They are built for vengeance, nothing more.”

  Then he glanced at the Child. Its face was changing shape and color as claws sprouted on the hands that were just beginning to reach out.

  “All right,” the captain said. “I have decided what to do.”

  His arms held the weapon steady, and two bursts were fired, the air filled with the vivid stink of evaporated flesh, and steam, and the brief beginnings of twin screams cut short by the boiling of their respective tongues.

  10

  “You look different.”

  “I’m out of uniform.”

  “We’re chasing you. I saw the arrest warrant and the charges.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them too.”

  “You destroyed an entire facility. If we didn’t have the water reserves, we’d already be drinking our own urine.”

  “I built the reserves,” Pamir said. “And everything will be fixed years before anyone suffers.”

  “Mention those facts at the trial,” Washen said, taking a tentative step toward the fugitive. “Whatever has happened, you need to turn yourself in and let the Submasters examine the evidence.”

  “Why? I’m guilty.”

  “What do you know? You’re not a Submaster.”

  Pamir laughed. Washen’s home was rather like his, but cleaner and brighter. Against one wall, in a tiny, root bound pot, a tired clump of llano-vibra sang in hushed voices about everlasting love.

  “Are you curious about what happened down there?” he asked.

  “Tell me,” she said.