by B. V. Larson
Regardless of his lame jokes, his idea was a good one. I went to the other pinnace and opened it. Fortunately the AI recognized me. I was worried this boat would think I was dead too, but the brainbox either hadn’t been informed back then or our pinnace had updated it just now.
“Pinnace, bring up the records of this latest sortie.”
“Command accepted.” Soon I was watching a complete audiovisual recording of what had happened from several angles.
I saw an image of the bridge of Valiant. It was a shock to watch my crew in action without me in charge.
“We’re clear,” Hansen said from his pilot’s chair.
Sokolov stood behind him dressed in a fancy general’s uniform with a whole lot of medals and badges on it, many of which I didn’t recognize. To me he looked like a piss-ant dictator from some pre-Macro third world nation.
“Proceed,” he said, making a dramatic pointing-hand gesture.
Kalu stood close to Sokolov. She hovered right behind his command chair as if daring anyone else to come near. She had ditched her lab coat in favor of a too-tight outfit of smart cloth that clung to her like body paint. Once upon a time seeing her like that would have hit me in the groin. Now I hated her too much for setting me up and marooning me.
Nothing much happened on the way, so I fast-forwarded the video, now and again focusing on murmured conversations among the marines or common crew. They weren’t happy. It was hard to tell on the imperfect audio, but I think most of them were calling their new boss “Suckalot” behind his back. To me, that was a good indication they’d lost respect for him.
Good news.
But they hadn’t gotten to the point of mutiny yet. That’s the thing with disciplined troops. A bad leader who seems to have the law behind him has to do something really awful before they cross the line of outright defiance.
Hansen brought them in for a much better landing than I had, and the forty-odd marines and crew packed into the pinnace laboriously debarked. My people made quite a little army, but I wondered what they were supposed to fight? The marines had all their combat gear, but the Fleet personnel seemed out of place though they carried a lot of stuff with them including cutting lasers, braces, firefighting equipment, containers of constructive nanites and smart metal. It put me in mind of an expedition, which I guess it was.
I fast-forwarded again until I found out which window they’d entered.
“Come on, Kwon,” I said pointing as I clambered down from the pinnace. “It’s the middle one.”
“Here,” he replied, handing me my laser rifle. I plugged it in and slung it. Then he tried to give me a grenade.
“No,” I said. “Leave that behind. We’re trying to prevent damage, not inflict it. Besides, they already have a bunch of them.”
Kwon’s expression behind his faceplate turned sour, but he put the basketball-sized mini-nukes back aboard our pinnace. “I’m bringin’ cutters,” he said defiantly, hefting the molecular shears we used as anti-Litho weapons. “And some other stuff.”
“Fine. Just no nukes.” I detached a quantum repeater Marvin had given me and unrolled the smart metal wire between its two parts, setting one carefully below the window. When we went through, the line would extend through carrying our signals.
“Boss…” Kwon said, suddenly hesitant. “How do we know everyone’s not dead? Maybe the window killed them.”
“Sokolov survived for years inside. The recording shows him going through right here. Something inside might kill us, but I don’t think it’s this window.”
Kwon grunted. “Okay. Let’s go.” Before I could stop him, he launched himself through. I should have known he’d keep trying to protect me, in this case by jumping into danger first.
Taking a deep breath, I followed him.
We found ourselves in a rather ordinary-looking square corridor of golden stardust. I tried the quantum radio. “Marvin, do you copy?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Any progress?”
“I am always making progress, Captain Riggs.”
“I mean toward freeing Valiant.”
“Nothing significant.”
“Okay. Tell Adrienne hello and that I love her.”
“Passing personal messages is not an efficient use of my neural chains.”
“Fine, put Greyhound on. The brainbox can do it.”
“Since you are determined, I will pass on your pointless salutation,” Marvin said. “Marvin out.”
I shook my head and examined the passageway we occupied. It stretched out in two directions with no sign of how we’d just arrived. No window, no door, no nothing. I squinted one direction, and then the other in the dim light that seemed to come from everywhere.
“That way,” I said, choosing the direction we’d been facing when we arrived. It was an arbitrary decision, but it was as good as any other.
Kwon insisted on leading the way, so I set my HUD to wraparound mode and covered his back. Squeezing all 360 degrees of vision onto my forward display took some getting used to, but it was the next best thing to having eyes in the back of my head.
I could have sworn later we’d walked for half an hour, but my HUD chrono only registered a little over two minutes. With total illogic, it appeared that a full hour of battery charge had been used up. If this was how things were with Marvin’s dimensional stabilizers attached, I wondered how weird things would be without them.
“Suit,” I said, “search for contacts using passive sensors only. Display on HUD.”
“Searching.” A moment later, several yellow icons appeared, their color indicating they hadn’t been classified as friendly or enemy.
“Maybe that’s them,” Kwon said hopefully.
“Don’t bet the farm,” I replied. “Get moving. Our power won’t last forever.”
Kwon increased his pace. Sneaking was impossible in a battlesuit, so I figured we might as well attempt a tactical surprise by moving in quickly.
Half a mile later, our corridor finally ended and we learned what the yellow icons represented when a projectile narrowly missed us to ricochet past.
Beetles. Big ones, little ones. Lots of beetles.
They looked exactly like the ones that had chased Marvin some time ago.
-19-
The end of the corridor opened into empty space. One beetle loomed there, blocking our path. Black and brown faceted eyes, it was the size of a ground car.
My HUD teemed with contacts that moved unseen beyond the beetle in our path. The contacts were quickly identified and colored an angry red as my suit analyzed them and classified them as hostile.
Kwon didn’t wait around to see what was going to happen next. He charged the one in front of us, blasting his carbine straight at it. Unfortunately his bulky ass blocked my shot—but that turned out not to matter. This wasn’t a house-sized monster like the one that had chased Marvin around the Square.
Kwon’s splattering beams speared through its armored carapace and it flopped to the ground, legs twitching. A second later Kwon hit it like a freight train. The bug had to weigh more than a man in armor, but it nevertheless yielded to momentum and servo-powered strength as the big man slammed into it. Flying back like a tackling dummy, the bug slid ten feet, then twenty—finally, it tipped over the edge.
We moved up to see where it had fallen. We saw a big splat oozing dark ichor from the cracks in its shell—but there were others, too. A hail of horn projectiles struck us as we edged up to look over the precipice. We lifted our arms in front of our faceplates and retreated, cursing as a few dents appeared in the process. I was glad it was nothing worse.
Now we could see our passageway ended high up in the wall of in a huge room filled with cubes that were jumbled but always aligned, on one angle or another, with another cube. Some of the alien artifacts were stacked into ragged hills. Others seemed less random, forming stairways and arches as if a giant Ancient child had played with blocks.
Dozens of the beetles scurried here a
nd there. The nearest of them were converging on us. I wondered what they ate. We’d seen little other than stardust material and a bit of trash so far.
Kwon blasted the nearest beetle, and I joined him. We stayed back to avoid the worst of their returning fire, nailing each enemy as it came into view, until one of the big ones charged us. This one couldn’t be stopped by two laser rifles.
While I kept trying to burn through the thick armor, Kwon slung his rifle and unslung his cutter. Lifting the giant powered scissors in front of him, he sidestepped the monster’s rush and intercepted a hind leg. The blades snapped shut, and there was a horrible grinding sound as the machine bit deeply, cutting off a tree-trunk thick foot in seconds. The beetle stumbled, plowing into the wall next to me. I took the opportunity to drill it through one of its compound eyes, bypassing the armor and digging into whatever passed for its brain.
Another beetle grabbed Kwon in its jaws while he was distracted with chopping off legs, lifting him in its mandibles and squeezing. Fortunately his heavy armor held. Kwon grabbed the sideways pincers and roared with effort. Servos whined, multiplying his immense strength as he forced the mandibles surrounding its mouth apart.
I kept beaming the thing, trying to burn through one spot. “Quit playing with your pet, Kwon, and get out of the way,” I yelled.
A tongue-like probe speared at him skidding off the battlesuit, and Kwon kicked it. It glistened with slime: probably some kind of poison or digestive fluid. I was glad our shells were harder than the natural carapaces of these bugs.
Kwon was dropped to the deck. For a moment, the beetle reared up as if gathering momentum for its next attack. This exposed the softer underside of its head. I aimed and fired, holding down the trigger for a long, concentrated burst that hammered through its chitin. My fire penetrated its head, and the bug fell with its brains bubbling and steaming out of the hole.
The rest of the attackers were smaller, and we were able to blast each one in turn without resorting to extreme tactics. After a dozen died, they stopped coming, so we edged forward again.
Apparently the beetles were intelligent enough to communicate amongst themselves. Instead of pressing the attack, they pulled back. A growing semicircle of empty space with us at the center showed that they’d decided to stop losing any more of their number. In fact, many of them seemed to be departing in an orderly fashion through several of the many openings in this large room.
“Where do we go now, boss?” Kwon asked as he looked at the spectacle. “There are at least a dozen corridors, and we don’t even know if we’re going the right way.”
“We’ll try a little farther. Look for some evidence of our people’s passage.” Unfortunately the stardust was too dense and hard to show scratches or scuffs from the passage of armored humans. “My HUD’s got nothing but beetles,” I continued. “No radio emissions.”
“What about the quantum thingy?”
“Forgot about that—thanks. Suit, activate the quantum radio in receive-only mode. Integrate it into my primary channel. Display any sources.”
Obediently, my HUD displayed the repeater behind us. It also showed a strong source coming from one of the openings across the room. I had no idea what it might be. Maybe it was nonsensical because as far as I knew Valiant’s people didn’t have a quantum radio source. At least it gave us some kind of goal and was better than blundering around aimlessly.
Cautiously, we hopped downward from cube to cube. I felt like I was in a kid’s movie where the toys come to life and everything around them is big—and we were the toys. The beetles ignored us now, except for getting out of our way. They’d gained a healthy respect for us and were biding their time.
Our target opening led not to another corridor but to a series of rooms of various sizes—all cubes, of course. Fortunately all of the doorways were large enough to fit us. The interesting thing was the stuff we started to find.
We came across pieces of machinery, cloth, plastic, even paper—but nothing natural. No trees or plants or naked rocks, for example, though we found all sorts of processed goods.
“Looks like all of this was made by technological civilizations—probably debris from ships,” I said.
“Yeah, like Sokolov said. All that junk he found.”
“It’s been picked over,” I said, pointing at several places where the debris showed something had been removed. What remained was broken junk. “Look,” I said, pointing at a trail in the dust and detritus. “This has been disturbed recently.”
“Might be just beetles moving around,” Kwon said doubtfully.
“Maybe. But maybe this has been moved around by our people. Let’s keep going. It looks like that quantum source is getting stronger.”
After about a dozen rooms, we found the emitter. A squat metal device like an old washing machine sat in the center of a chamber. Unlike the other spaces, there was no other junk lying around. It had the look of something cobbled together expertly from varying technologies. Triangular flanges at the corners twitched this way and that as if moved by some unseen hand. Walking around it carefully, I couldn’t find any console, controls or screen. If I had to guess, I’d say it didn’t appear to be a product of human hands, but something about it seemed familiar to me.
“It’s operating,” I said, “whatever it is. I’m going to transmit a signal to it. Get ready to blast it if it does anything hostile.”
“Ready, boss.” Kwon aimed his weapon.
“Suit, send a low-power carrier wave on the quantum radio.”
“Sending.”
The triangular flanges all suddenly aligned themselves, their adjustments becoming much smaller. Otherwise there seemed to be no result.
“Suit, send the first ten prime numbers in binary. Display any response on my HUD.” This was an old first-contact protocol. Any technological beings should have discovered mathematics, the most fundamental language of the universe.
With no delay, the next ten prime numbers appeared on my HUD. “Well, we’ve made contact with something. Suit, initiate the standard first contact software to try to establish language-based communication.”
“Working.” Only a couple of seconds passed before the suit spoke up again. “I’ve established a link.”
“A link? What link?”
Abruptly my HUD displayed a shaky picture of Marvin. “Identify yourself,” he said.
“Marvin, this is Cody Riggs.”
“Cody Riggs, this is Marvin. Are you related to Kyle Riggs? If so, my records of his genealogy are incomplete.”
I stared at him, perplexed. “Marvin, don’t you know me?”
“How can I know you if I’ve never met you?”
A bad feeling came over me. Both Marvin and Sokolov had said the multidimensional maze was a bizarre place, and I suspected we’d barely started to scratch the surface of its weirdness.
“Wait a sec,” I said, holding up a hand. “Let me think.” After a long moment, I continued, “Marvin, are you inside the multidimensional maze of the Ancients?”
“Yes.”
“How long have you been inside?”
“That question is unanswerable because my ability to measure time has been compromised. Additionally, time flows at different rates and in various directions here.”
“Various directions? More than two, backward or forward?”
“Yes. Was my initial statement imprecise? There are multiple dimensions of time just as there are of space. Certain theories favor eleven, while others—”
“Skip that for now. What about alternate universes?”
“What about them?”
“Some cosmologists believe there are alternate universes alongside our own. Is that true?”
“Of course.” Marvin seemed smug.
“Then maybe you and I aren’t from the same universe. Or maybe we’re from different time dimensions, whatever that means. That’s why you don’t know me, but I know you. Maybe I don’t exist in your universe.”
“That is a
reasonable hypothesis.”
“How come we’re talking, then?” I asked.
“Quantum carrier waves extend among many universes and dimensions, but only under highly specific conditions. The maze of the Ancients provides an environment where such things are possible.”
“You mean the laws of physics are different here?”
“Yes. Sometimes—but not really. Actually, it depends.”
“On what?”
“On what physical laws the Ancients originally imposed in each locale. They were able to alter such things as easily as a ship captain changes a policy.”
“So it wasn’t easy, but they could do it.”
“Aptly put.” On the HUD, Marvin focused more cameras on me.
Something I’d heard Marvin say nagged at me. “Wait…you said the Ancients were able to do such things. But no longer?”
Marvin’s cameras and tentacles shuffled. “I hesitate to make a definitive statement, but all evidence points to them abandoning this multiverse for someplace else—perhaps another state of being or another multiverse altogether.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea.”
“Boss, we need to get going,” Kwon said.
I reached up to rub my face, forgetting I was in armor for a moment until my hand slapped my helmet. “No Kwon, this is important. The more I understand about this place the better decisions I can make. Marvin, if the Ancients are gone, what is the rest of this stuff? You—my Marvin—you told me once that the Square and the maze formed some kind of dimensional router.”
“That is not completely inaccurate. It’s a machine of many capabilities. The Ancients left it behind when they departed.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps it’s a long-term, unmonitored experiment. Perhaps they intended to come back but were unable. Or perhaps they simply don’t care and have moved on to more interesting things.”
It was easy to get caught up in cosmic mysteries, but I brought the conversation back to things I could use. “You—or a version of you—released an information worm into this communication system.”
“That seems like a very stupid thing to do.”