by Robert Reed
“Perhaps every answer is a little true,” Hawking liked to caution. “Just as every answer is a little bit of lie, too.”
Flying far above the hatch, Peregrine thought of his odd friend. But only briefly, and then he shoved the !eech out of his exceptionally busy mind.
“Projections,” he demanded.
His ship was still plunging, its hull pulled into a teardrop configuration, the skin superheated and his sensors half-blinded by the plasmatic envelope. But his crew devised a simple picture showing him vectors and projections of a future that looked ready to end in the most miserable way.
“Our target is accelerating,” his pilot announced. “I wish to abort before we collide with it.”
The black mass, smooth-faced and distinctly iridescent, was punching its way through a scattering of high clouds. Some of those clouds were alive—vividly colored bodies as light as aerogel and easily shredded. Other clouds were water stained gray and red with salts and iron, dead cells and other detritus pushed skyward by the mayhem. Their target was tiny compared to the entire hatch, but it was already the tallest feature, and nothing like it had ever been seen before. Raiders bound for distant hunting grounds were noticing it. Even from two hundred kilometers overhead, the energies and wild violence were obvious. And even from inside a cocoon of superheated gas, two human eyes could appreciate the beauty of so many frantic bodies doing whatever it was they were doing.
“I want to abort,” the pilot repeated.
Peregrine agreed. “But find the best way to hold us here, in its path. Can we do that?”
Instantly, the machine said, “Yes. But braking and circling will exhaust our reserves, and there won’t be enough fuel for both cargo and the journey home.”
Peregrine had guessed as much. “Let’s compromise,” he said. “Brake and assume a gliding shape. Where does that leave us?”
“Still dancing with the break-even point,” the pilot warned.
“So make some calls.” Peregrine named a few smart competitors approaching from more distant berths. “Pay them to wait above and share their spare fuel, when the time comes.”
The teardrop flipped over, its engine throwing out a spectacular fire. Every raider knew: Ships larger and more powerful than theirs could trigger retribution. Was that an innate reflex or a Polypond strategy? Nobody knew. But Peregrine’s ship was as close to the maximum size allowed, and if his plume exceeded the usual limits, even for a moment, a giant laser would pop to the surface on the unreachable sea below, evaporating his ship and then his body, and finally, his very worried skull.
But the burn went unnoticed apparently. Then the ship rested, pieces of its hull pulling away, forming dragonfly wings configured to work with the thickening winds. Each time they passed through one of the monomolecular skins, Peregrine felt a shudder. The vibrations worsened by the minute, growing violent and relentless, and after a point, numbing and nearly unnoticed.
Countless black bodies continued to rise.
At home, inside the city of refugees, an assortment of data sinks had survived from pre-war times. Even the best of them were incomplete. But inside the biological sections, Peregrine had found digitals of fish swimming in schools—a hypnotic set of images where tiny, almost mindless creatures managed to stay in formation, displaying grace and a singleness of purpose that never failed to astonish him.
This was the same, only infinitely more spectacular.
Those black bodies didn’t ride meat and fins, but used tiny rockets and stubby metal wings. Perfect coordination had built a flawless hemisphere better than five hundred kilometers wide. Peregrine’s best AI spotter singled out random bodies, carefully watching as they climbed to the outside edge of the school and then worked their way upwards, reaching the cloud’s apex before doing a curious roll, each shucking off its little wings before firing a larger rocket, then diving back out of sight through gaps too tiny to see from above.
“Identify one of them and see when it emerges again,” said Peregrine.
The spotter had already tried that, and failed. The bodies were too similar, and there were too many of them. But there was an easier, more elegant route. With the help of distant telescopes, the AI took a thorough census of the cloud, and then it let itself feel the gentle but precise tug made by that combined gravity. The precise size of the entire swarm could be measured, and with genuine astonishment, it admitted, “They are growing fewer, I think.”
“Fewer?”
“Every minute, a million bodies vanish.”
“Meaning what?” he asked. “The cloud is shrinking?”
“It grows, but its citizens are scarcer. And this has been happening from the outset, I would guess.”
The pilot was managing their long fall while the ship’s architect constantly adapted the shape and stiffness of wings, and the shape and color of the fuselage. To the best of its ability, the raider ship was trying to vanish inside the Polypond’s enormous sky.
“Will any little guys be left when they reach us?” Peregrine asked.
Yes. Billions still.
“But what happens to the others? Where do they go?”
Data gave clues. Neutrinos and the character of escaping light implied a fierce heat, x-rays and even gamma rays seeping free. There was no way to be certain, but the black bodies could be simple machines—lead-doped hyperfiber shells wrapped around nuclear charges, for instance. If those bombs were detonating, then the interior of that cloud was hell: A spherical volume perhaps one hundred kilometers in diameter with an average temperature hotter than the guts of most suns.
What would anyone want with so much heat?
“The cloud is a weapon,” Peregrine muttered, feeling horrible and sure. His first instinct was to glance at the rocket nozzle behind them, imagining the very worst: A bubble of superheated plasmas was being woven here, ready to be flung up and out into space. Like a child’s ball, it could be aimed for a target several thousand kilometers wide—the rocket nozzle—and after one soundless flash, the city would cease to be.
But how would the Polypond launch the bubble?
The AIs were scrambling for answers. It was the ship’s architect that imagined the next nightmare. What if the bubble wasn’t going to be thrown, but instead it was dropped? If it was flung down onto the Great Ship’s hull…the backside of the Ship, where the hyperfiber was thinnest…could it punch a hole into the hallways and habitats below?
Probably not, the majority decided.
But Peregrine and the architect wouldn’t give up their nightmares. Since the War ended, no one had seen energies approaching what was being seen today. But of course the Polypond could have been patient since the war’s end, silently gathering resources for this one spectacular attack.
Both solutions were possible and awful, and both were wrong.
The black cloud was still fifty kilometers below, and simulations were furiously working, and that was when a third, even stranger answer appeared with a withering flash of blue-white light.
In a blink, the top of that shimmering black mass parted.
Evaporated.
And from inside that carefully sculpted furnace sprang a shape at once familiar and wrong—a sphere of badly stressed, heavily eroded hyperfiber that was just a few kilometers across but rising fast on a withering plume of exhaust.
Making its frantic bid to escape: A starship.
“Reconfigure us now!” Peregrine shouted. “Whatever it takes, get us out of its way!”
6
On occasion, Peregrine and his inhuman friend discussed the Great Ship and what might or might be found within its unreachable interior. One despairing possibility was that the Polypond hadn’t destroyed the ancient vessel, but it had managed to annihilate both crew and passengers, leaving no one beside a few souls clinging to life outside. On the opposite end of spectrum sat the most hopeful answer: Life onboard the Ship was exactly as it had always been, peaceful and orderly, and the captains were still in charge, and the Polypond
had been defeated, or at least fought to a meaningful armistice. But if that was true, then for some host of perfectly fine reasons, nobody at the present was bothering to poke their heads out of the living ocean.
“But that doesn’t explain this new acceleration,” Peregrine would point out. “The engineers and captains…everybody everywhere…they assumed that these big rockets were the only engines. But plainly, they weren’t. Obviously, they weren’t even the most powerful thrusters available.”
“It is quite the puzzle,” Hawking conceded.
The acceleration was not huge, but making anything as massive as the Great Ship move faster…well, that was an impressive trick. “The captains found something new during the war,” Peregrine suggested.
“A talent hidden until now,” his friend added. “That notion has a delightful sourness about it, yes.”
Sour was sweet to the !eech.
Peregrine would narrow his gaze, imagining captains standing in a crowded, desperate bridge. “They wanted to outmaneuver the Polypond. That’s why they kicked the new motors awake, and now they can’t stop them.”
“That would be a compelling possibility, yes.”
But Peregrine didn’t believe his own words. “That still won’t explain why the captains don’t come out to get us. Even if they don’t suspect anybody’s here, they should send up teams to scout the situation…and even better, send messages home to the Milky Way…”
Long limbs acquired the questioning position. “Where would you expect the captains to appear?” Hawking asked.
“Inside one of the nozzles. I would.”
Silence.
Peregrine offered his reasons as he thought of them. “Because the Polypond can’t reach inside the nozzles. Because the captains could pretty easily work their way through the barricades and hyperfiber plugs. And because from the nozzle floor, they’d have an unobstructed view of the galaxy, and they would be able to measure our position and velocity—”
“The barricades are significant,” the alien cautioned.
“To us, they are. We don’t have the energy or tools to cut through the best grades of hyperfiber.” Shaking his head, he said, “From what I’ve heard, whenever my mother’s ship was damaged, she spent her free time trying to find some route to the interior. She explored at least a thousand of the old accessways leading down from here.” Every tunnel, no matter how obscure, was blocked with hyperfiber too deep and stubborn to cut through. “But if there were captains below us and if only a fraction of the old reactors were working…they could still punch out in a matter of years…maybe weeks…”
Silence.
“So there are no captains,” Peregrine would decide. Every time.
“Which implies what?”
“Somebody else is in charge of the Great Ship.” That answer seemed obvious, and it was inevitable, and it made a good mind usefully worried. Yet that answer was a most frustrating creation, since it opened doors into an infinite range of possibilities, imaginable and otherwise.
“Who is in charge?” Hawking would ask, on occasion.
A few powerful species were obvious candidates. But each of them would have sent teams to the surface. They might be different species, but they would be drawn by the same reasons and needs that humans would feel.
“Perhaps the culprit is someone else,” Hawking would propose. “An organism you haven’t thought to consider.”
Anything was possible, yes. Peregrine threw his ape arms into a posture that mimicked his friend’s, underscoring the importance of his next words. “Nobody here is looking for a route down,” he said. “What has it been? A thousand years since anyone has even tried.”
The three hemispherical eyes were bright and still.
“Once I get enough savings in the bank,” Peregrine said, “I’ll take up my mother’s other work. Just to see what I can see.”
“That could be a reasonable plan,” Hawking would say.
Most of the time, their conversation ended there. Peregrine often made that promise to himself, but he never had the resources or the simple will to invest in the luxury of a many-year search. Besides, he was the finest raider in the city, and raiders were essential. If he gave up his present work, the level of poverty everywhere would rise. Citizens would have to forego having children and new homes. At least that was his reliable excuse to wait for another decade or two, bidding time before setting out on what surely would be a useless adventure.
Hawking had never questioned Peregrine’s lack of action. But then again, that creature was ancient and eerily patient, and who knew how many promises he had made to himself during the last aeons, all bound up inside his powerful mind, waiting to be fulfilled?
One day, Peregrine surprised himself; he imagined a fresh candidate and a compelling logic that would explain the mystery.
“It’s the Great Ship,” he offered.
The !eech was silent, but there was a different quality to his posture, and even the crystalline eyes looked brighter.
“The Ship itself has come to life,” the young man proposed.
“And why would that be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it finally had enough of human beings at the helm, this damned Polypond trying to kill it, and all the rest of these unpleasant creatures running around inside it. So one day, it just woke up and said, ‘Screw you. From here on, I’m in charge!’”
“Interesting,” his friend said.
“And what if…?” Peregrine continued. Swallowing and then smiling, he asked, “What if we aren’t just following some random line? Instead of heading out into nothingness, the Ship is actually steering us toward a genuine destination?” Then he laughed in a tight, nervous fashion. “What if our voyage has only just begun, Hawking?”
There was a momentary silence.
Then his friend replied, “Every voyage has just begun. If you consider those words in the proper way…”
7
Buried in those old data sinks were schematics for a host of impossible machines—devices too intricate or demanding to be built by refugees and their children. Included were wondrous starships like those that once brought passengers to the Great Ship. Peregrine had always dreamed of seeing vessels like those, and judging by the spectrums, that’s what the apparition was: An armored starship equipped with a streakship drive, efficient and relentless, yet operating at some miniscule fraction of full-throttle. With just that whisper of thrust, the gap between him and it closed in an instant. Peregrine’s ship was a tiny, toyish rocket that barely had time enough to fold its wings and kick itself out of the way. The rising starship missed Peregrine by less than ten kilometers. The silvered ball of hyperfiber stood on a plume of hard radiations, the exhaust narrow at the nozzle but widening as it drove downwards, scorching heat causing it to exploded outwards into an atmosphere that was cooked to a broth of softer plasmas, stark blue-white fire betraying only the coldest of the unfolding energies.
“Run!” he ordered.
His pilot had already made that panicked assessment. Using the last shreds of its wings, the raider ship tilted its nose and leaped toward space, not following the starship so much as simply trying to keep ahead of the awful fire. The black mass beneath them continued to churn and spin, and the living ocean below everything could see the starship. Defensive systems were triggered. The burning air suddenly filled with laser bursts and particle beams and a host of slow ballistic weapons that could never catch their target. Whatever the reason for fighting, hatred or simple instinct, the Polypond employed every trick in its bid to kill its opponent. And that’s when Peregrine’s tiny ship was kissed by one of the lasers, a portion of his hull and two entire wings turned to carbon ash and a telltale glow.
“Reconfigure!” he screamed.
The AIs began shuffling the surviving pieces, pulling their ship back into a rough shape that might remain whole for another few moments.
But the main fuel tank was pierced, leaking and unpatchable.
“We can’t
make it home,” was the uniform verdict.
Peregrine had already come to that grim conclusion.
“Hunt for help,” he said. “Who’s close?”
“No one is,” he heard.
The surviving portions of the black mass were still churning, a few billion fusion bombs riding little rockets. It was a useless gesture, Peregrine believed. But then he noticed how the cloud was changing as it moved, acquiring a distinct pancake-shaped base above which a tiny fraction of the bombs were gathering, pulling themselves into a dense, carefully stacked bundle.
In a shared instant, the pancake below ignited itself.
The resulting flash dwarfed every bolt of laser light, and even the stardrive faded from view. A hypersonic slap struck the last of those bombs, destroying most but throwing the rest of them skyward at a good fraction of light-speed. Then as the bombs passed into the last reaches of the atmosphere, they gave themselves one last shove, rockets carrying them close enough that the starship was forced to react, shifting its plume slightly, evaporating every last one of its pursuers.
But the pancake burst had launched more than just bombs. A fat portion of the atmosphere was being shoved upwards, and soon it would stand higher than Peregrine had ever seen. More out of instinct than calculation, he said, “Try wings again, and ride this updraft.”
It wouldn’t lift them much, no. But the soaring maneuver would keep them at a safer altitude for a little while longer.