Marrow m-1

by Robert Reed

  ‘I know a place,” he confessed. “Not a bunker by design. But it’s got a roof Then he turned forward, muttering, “At least I hope it does,” as he wrestled the skimmer into a new course.

  Again, the woman touched him on the deadened shoulder.

  Was she going to tell him the time?

  But no, she only wanted to feel him. And as he massaged the last drops of energy out of the skimmer’s dying reactor, and himself, Orleans concentrated on the dim touch of her hand, treating himself to a fantasy older than their species.

  Remoras existed because the hull needed constant repair.

  What they did very well. But not perfectly. Speed was critical when a deep blast crater needed to be filled. Hyperfiber, particularly the better grades, was sensitive to a multitude of variables. And on occasion, mistakes were made. One layer went bad before it could cure, and already one or more new layers were on top, soft as flesh and as pliable. Freed volatiles made bubbles. Bubbles weakened the patch. But to tear out the newest work and repair the damage meant time lost, and worse, it gave the universe an opportunity to strike the comet’s grave with a second, perhaps larger comet.

  “Better to let the flaw remain,” Wune had said, speaking about hulls and about other matters, too. “Build around it, and preserve it. Remember: one day’s flaw will be another day’s treasure.”

  A spacious flaw lay far out on the ship’s leading face. Hidden tunnels led into a chamber large enough to hide every surviving Remora, and stockpiles of machinery and shop-made weapons had been delivered secredy over the last ten days, making a last-stand fortress out of someone’s long-ago fuck-up.

  Except Orleans would never reach it. His skimmer was barely able to fight its way within four kilometers of a smaller, less secure bubble. He had found it while visiting one of the tall bone-white memorials to read the names of dead friends—centuries ago, on some look-around tour. Beside the memorial was a frozen gas vent leading into the hull, into a cramped, lightless, and not particularly deep bubble.

  When the skimmer died, he shouted the obvious advice: “Run!”

  Lifesuits had strength, not speed. A dreamlike slowness and a dream’s sense of utter helplessness held sway, each man and woman pounding along a smooth and gray and essentially featureless plain. If not for the memorial, they would feel lost. The white spire beckoned from the first clumsy stride, and every eye that looked up could measure their progress, the minds behind the eyes thinking, “Closer. “The mouths saying, “Not far.’Everyone lying with a desperate earnestness, whispering to each other, “Just a few more seconds. Steps. Centimeters.” The sky was purposely ignored.

  The lavender fire of the shields was brightening, capturing greater and greater amounts of gas and nanoscopic dusts. The giant lasers continued pummeling hazards big as fists and men and palaces. And blotting out the usual stars was a single swollen red giant sun, ancient and dying, its mass already touching the ship, starting to pull at its trajectory.

  A brighter flash of light came from behind, startling everyone.

  The boys said, “Skimmer,” and nothing more.

  Orleans let himself slow, looking backward long enough to see darting shapes and more bursts of light. Lasers, and in the distance, the soundless delicious flash as nuclear mines detonated themselves.

  Then he was running again, falling behind everyone and thinking, “We have time,” when he knew full well they didn’t. An army of Wayward monsters were charging, and if the last timetable was right, they had barely three minutes left before…

  Before.

  Then he stopped his thinking and looked up, and again, quietly and confidently, he told himself, “Just a few more steps.”

  The memorial was too tall and close to absorb with a look, but it was still too far away to feel imposing. Orleans looked down again. He forced the servos in his legs to drain themselves fully with each stride, and he used his own muscles to lengthen the strides, and because it made him feel better, he cursed with each ragged wet breath.

  The milk-faced woman said, “Hurry.”

  He looked up again, realizing that he was falling farther behind.

  She said, “Faster,” and glanced back at him, one long bright arm waving clumsily.

  Orleans’s suit was in desperate trouble. He knew it before its own machinery confessed to any weakness, war and bad luck having eroded the servos in both legs, both falling within three strides of each other.

  “Piss away,” he cursed.

  His muscles lifted his legs and dropped them again.

  The suit was fantastically heavy, but their goal was finally close. Honestly, teasingly near. Orleans grunted and took another few steps, then had no choice but to stop and stand motionless, his deep perfect lungs sucking in free oxygen wrenched from his own perfect sweet piss and blood, feeding the black blood that needed a few moments to purge the muscles of toxins, bringing them back into something resembling fitness.

  His people were at the spire’s base, disappearing one after another into a tiny, still invisible hole.

  Again, quietly, the woman told him, “Hurry,” and turned and waved with both arms, her face just visible, something about its whiteness afraid.

  Orleans staggered, stopped. And as he gasped again, he turned his head and looked back over the ground that he had covered. Armored vehicles were skittering and skidding across the grayish plain. Following some Wayward logic, each was shaped like a bug, useless wings folded back and jointed legs holding weapons, one laser firing, a blistering fight sweeping over him and slashing into the memorial, then continuing on into infinity… the white spire melting near its base, tilting with a silent majesty, then collapsing without so much as denting the hull.

  A second blast melted the memorial’s raw base.

  Where was the woman, and the others?

  Orleans couldn’t see them, or anything but a sudden pool of melted hyperfiber. Maybe they were underground, and safe. He kept telling himself it was possible, even likely… and after a little while he realized that he was running again, legs trying to carry him away from a swift, relentless army.

  He couldn’t look more pitiful.

  He reached the edge of the molten goo, and because there was nothing else to do, he turned again and stared at his pursuers. They were almost on him. In the end, seeing that he was alone and defenseless, they were taking their time. Maybe he would make a valuable prisoner, the monsters were telling each other. Maybe the top monster Herself would reward them for capturing a tremendous criminal like Orleans.

  He took a long exhausted step backward.

  The hyperfiber was fantastically hot, and deep, and filled with bubbles of freed gases. But without an influx of energy, it was curing again. It would be sloppy, a very weak grade, and someday someone would have to wrench it off the hull and replace everything. Then build an even larger memorial, of course. But Orleans’s suit was hyperfiber, too. An excellent grade, if somewhat battered. It could withstand the heat. His flesh would blister and boil, yes. But if he could keep his diamond faceplate from bursting, then maybe… maybe…

  He stepped back once more.

  And stumbled.

  The weight of his reactors and recyke systems helped drive him partway under the surface, and the pain was vast and relendess, then in another moment, there was no pain.

  Orleans’s helmet and head were the only parts of him in view, and his face survived long enough to let his eyes stare up at that big glorious red sun, shrouded in the shields and the constant bursts of laser light… and then he was wondering if it was time, and maybe he should try to dive deeper…

  Suddenly, without the smallest warning, the shields evaporated, and every one of the giant lasers quit firing at the coming hazards.

  And one breath later, a sudden and fierce rain began to fall…

  Forty-seven

  Because they saw a Wayward car—a little machine patterned after a copperwing—Washen and the others climbed up into the epiphyte forest, into a camouflaged b
lind, watching from above as the car set down on the graveled shoreline. Because he could have been anyone, they kept hiding when a man with Pamir’s face and build jumped out, big boots kicking the gravel and a hard, tired voice calling, “Washen,” over the constant rush of the river. Because he was Pamir, and tired, he said to the forest, “I guess you thought again and changed your mind.” He shook his head, saying, “Good. I can’t blame you. I never liked this leg of our plan.” Then he lifted his gaze, somehow knowing exactly where to stare.

  Washen stood, shouldering her laser as she asked, “Could you see me?”

  “Long ago,” he replied with a crisp sense of mystery. Then he motioned at the car, telling her, “It’s stolen. Scrubbed and reregistered, if we did everything right.”

  Quee Lee and Perri stood. Then finally, Locke.

  A sudden dull shiver passed through the canyon. One of her newly implanted nexuses told Washen what she’d already guessed: a comet had impacted on the hull, instantly obliterating a thousand cubic kilometers of armor.

  “If you’re going,” said Pamir, “you’ve got to go now. Everything’s late as it is.”

  Quee Lee touched Washen on the arm, and with a motherly concern, she said, “Maybe he’s right. You shouldn’t do this.”

  They were filing down onto the gravel bar. To her son, Washen said,’Make sure you’re happy with things. Quickly”

  Locke nodded grimly, leaping into the hovering car.

  She reminded everyone, including herself,’We need bait, and we need it convincing. Delicious and substantial. What else can we offer but me?”

  No one spoke.

  “What about Miocene?” she asked.

  “She got your invitation twenty-three minutes ago,” Pamir reported. “We still haven’t seen any traffic that might be her. But it’s a long trip, and unplanned, and since she’s got to suspect an ambush, I don’t expect her to come too fast or follow the easy routes.”

  A massive shudder rumbled through the ship’s body.

  “The biggest yet,” was Perri’s assessment.

  The shields had been down for five minutes. “What’s the official explanation?’Washen asked.

  “Remoras are bastards,” said Pamir. “Officially, they’re proving themselves to be enemies of the ship, and in another ten or twenty or fifty minutes, repairs will be made, the shields will be restored, and within the day, every last bastard will be dead.”

  Boom, and then a sudden second boom.

  From inside the car, Locke shouted, “Everything’s ready”

  Washen jumped inside, paused and took a ragged breath. She was anxious, and it took a moment for her to realize why. No, not because she was the bait. Her thundering heart had nothing to do with any danger. In a perfect peace, she would feel the same way. She was returning to Marrow after more than a century’s absence. She was returning home, and that was enormous in its own right.

  Washen waved to Quee Lee and her husband.

  Then the steel door was yanking itself shut, and with a hurried, inadequate voice, she called to Pamir, “Thanks for these days.”

  Wayward security was thorough. Was seamless.

  And it was totally unprepared for an invasion of exactly two people: a famous dead captain and her even more famous son.

  “You’ve been missing,” a uniformed man declared, staring at Locke with a mixture of awe and confusion. “We’ve been looking for your body, sir. We thought you were killed that first day”

  “People make mistakes,” was Locke’s advice.

  The security man nodded, then stumbled over the first obvious question.

  Locke answered it before it was asked. “I was on a mission. At the insistence of Till himself He spoke with authority, and impatience. He sounded as if nothing could be more true. “I was supposed to recover my mother. By any means, at any cost.”

  The man looked small inside his dark uniform.

  Glancing at their prisoner, he said, “I should beg for instructions—”

  “Beg to Till,” was Locke’s sound advice.

  “Now,” the man sputtered.

  “I’ll wait inside my car,” promised one of the greatest, most honored Waywards. “If that’s all right with you.”

  He had no choice but to say, “Yes, sir.”

  The waystation was perched on the throat of the access tunnel. Traffic flowed rapidly up and down. Washen saw giant steel vehicles patterned after the familiar hammer-wings. The empty ones dove into the kilometer-wide maw, while others appeared beneath them, rushing fresh units into the gaps in the Wayward lines.

  The war’s carnage was relentless. And perhaps worse for the ship was the swelling, unstable panic among passengers and crew.

  Washen closed her eyes, letting her nexuses sip updates. Coded squirts. Images from security eyes and ears. Avenues and public plazas were filled with terrified, furious passengers. Angry voices blamed the new Master, and the old Master, too. Plus Waywards. Remoras. And that largest, most terrifying foe: simple stupidity. Then she watched dust and pebbles falling at one-third lightspeed, smashing Wayward vehicles as their terrific momentum was transformed into a brilliant light and withering heat. An army had charged into the Remora’s desperate trap, and it would be dead in another few moments. But a new army was coming to replace what was lost. Washen opened her eyes and watched the steel hammerwings rising up to the fight. And in that mayhem of coded messages and orders and desperate pleas, one small question was misplaced. Then a fictional but utterly believable answer was delivered, wrapped snug inside bogus encryption seals.

  The waystation’s AI examined the seals, and because of a subtle and recent failure in its cognitive skills, it proclaimed:

  “From Till, it is. And it is authentic”

  With a palpable, almost giddy relief, the Wayward told Locke, “You need to take the prisoner home. Great sir.”

  “Thank you,” Locke replied.

  Then he unberthed their car and dove after one of the empty hammerwings, accelerating until the rising hammer-wings blurred into a single dull line—all of Marrow seemingly rising up now, eager to behold a vast and exceptionally dangerous universe.

  “Changes,” Locke had promised.

  He had thoroughly described the new Marrow, displaying a good poet’s taste for sadness and Irony. Washen came with expectations. She knew that the compliant Loyalists had finished Miocene’s bridge, then with Wayward resources, the bridge had been improved, making it possible for whole armies to be transported through the fading buttresses. The old captains’ base camp housed the engineers who quickly rebuilt the access tunnel. Energy and every raw material had been brought from the world below. Lasers with a fantastic punch had widened the old tunnel, and the chamber’s own hyperfiber was salvaged and re-purified, then slathered thick and fast on the raw iron walls above. Then the same lasers were moved, digging a second, parallel tunnel barely wide enough for power and communication conduits. That was dubbed the Spine. It linked Marrow to the ship, making them one and the same.

  With a soft pride, Locke mentioned, “From here, everything is our work.”

  The tunnel suddenly became narrower, hammerwings missing them by nothing in the silent vacuum.

  “How strong is it?” Washen inquired.

  “Better than you would think,” he replied, his voice almost defensive.

  Again, Washen closed her eyes and watched the war. But the Waywards had retreated, or died, and most of the Remoras’ links were dead. There was nothing to see except the battered hull glowing red, radiating the heat of impacts and battles as well as the bloody glow of the passing sun.

  She shut down all of her nexuses, and she kept her eyes closed.

  Quietly, Locke identified himself to someone, then demanded, “I need immediate passage to Marrow. I have a critical prisoner with me.”

  Not for the first time, Washen asked herself:

  “What if?”

  Locke had offered to bring her here. On his own, without compliant, he had helpe
d find workable ways through the security systems—a journey that had gone remarkably well. Which made her wonder if everything was a ruse. What if Till had told his old friend,’I want you to find your mother somehow. For both of us. Find her and bring her back home, and use any means you wish. With my blessing.”

  It was possible, yes.

  Always.

  She remembered a different day, following their son into a distant jungle. Locke was obeying Till’s orders then. Unlikely as it seemed, it could be the same now. Of course, Locke hadn’t warned anyone about the rebellion coming, or the Remoras’ plan to scuttle the ship’s shields. Unless those events had also been allowed to happen, serving some greater, harder-to-perceive purpose.

  She thought about it again, and again, with a muscular conviction, she tossed the possibility aside.

  The hammerwing in front of them was slowing.

  Locke pulled around it, then dove for the still invisible bottom.

  Perhaps he guessed his mother’s thoughts. Or maybe it was the moment, the shared mood. “I never told you,” he began. “Did I? One of Miocene’s favorites came up with an explanation for the buttresses.”

  “Which favorite?”

  “Virtue,” Locke replied. “Have you met him?”

  “Once,” she admitted. “Briefly.”

  Their AI took control, braking their descent as they passed thousands of empty hammerwings docked and waiting for the next belly full of troops.

  “You know how it is with hyperfiber,” her son continued. “How the bonds are strengthened by taming little quantum fluxes.”

  “I’ve never quite understood the concept,’she confessed.

  Locke nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment. Then he smiled. He smiled and turned to his mother, his face never more sad. “According to Virtue, these buttresses are those same fluxes, but they’ve been stripped of normal matter. They’re naked, and as long as they have power, they’re very nearly eternal.”

  If true, she thought, it would be the basis of another fantastic technology.

  Her mind shifted. “What did Miocene think about his hypothesis?”