Gahre understood two awful facts about his situation. First, there was no help out here in this uncharted wilderness. In his wretched state it would take him a week to get back to the King's Highway, if he could make it at all, which was highly doubtful. Second, the toxins in his system would have to run their course. Ingesting hot water might be of some help to flush his organs. What he needed to find was a clear running water source and station his recovery there, where he could boil all that was needed to cleanse his wounds and wash his bandages for reuse, where he could monitor himself against infection and somehow nurse his own way back to health and full mobility.
He pressed on until the wet soppy terrain of the glen rose and gave way to flat rocky ground. There would be a ridge if he continued this way that could give him some bearing. The toxin was saturating his mind, veering it into dark and deathly visions. He could taste it: it filled his mouth and sinuses, subtle at first, but developing into overwhelming persistent taint so unnatural and horrid he'd do anything to rid himself of it. The closest thing he could compare it to was pine, as if he had consumed pine oil essence and its noxious fumes had permeated his brain.
Then the abdominal pains set in at either side below his ribcage, dull to aching, then to sharp, and from sharp to unendurable. He doubled over. He vomited. His nervous system was still shorting out and bursting thunderbolts along its channels. As this cruel progression played out, he stopped fearing that each attack would bring death, and began hoping that it would. The combination of all these effects was more suffering than any human body should ever have to endure. He did not know how he managed to will himself to press on in spite of them. He may be dying, but he was not dead yet, and he was pulling himself along by the faintest, fragile thread of hope.
The hallucinations grew more vivid and terrifying. He remembered the serpent that had threatened him on the islet where the two rivers met before it slunk away. And now recalled the other serpent swimming toward him in the water, how it had wrapped its black glistening form around his leg, sunk its fangs into his thigh, and injected its poison. He had stood there smiling like a fool, doing nothing to defend himself and believing all was well in the world. Serpents, serpents... they now roamed everywhere, they covered the ground and drooped and fell from the trees, all sizes and colors of them, writhing in all directions, staring into him with cold gray eyes.
“Stop! Stop stop stop!!!” He commanded with all his breath. The visions momentarily ceased. He reconciled himself with reality to what small extent he could and surveyed his environs. He indeed had reached a highland ledge. The dark redlit panorama featured a forested view of lower lands, carpeted in treetop. The land was flat east and west, but cleared on either side of a hill. The canopy of the hill was indeed odd, for it seemed to follow a neat parabola and was strangely uniform in height. His mind started into visions again, but he focused the will to dispel them. Something was very strange about this landscape; something was not what it appeared to be.
Slowly it struck him. That was no hill. That canopy was much higher than what surrounded it, and it was so neatly curved and uniform because... it was a single tree! The Great Oak! The etchings and tales of its grandeur had not been exaggerated. Impossibly, its crest covered miles.
He didn't know whether or not to believe his now frequently lying eyes, but the vision was stable and true; it did not morph and phase like the hallucinations. He collapsed onto the ground and with great strain removed his pack and lit from it a candle. The filth of his hand marred the pages of the guide as he flipped through them to the entry he sought. “The Great Oak is a holy site to druids, Dharmaists, and numerous sects throughout realms. It is a point of rare pilgrimage to only the most ardently devout who are willing to face the many perils it takes to reach this inhospitable and remote location of the deep southern wilds.”
He closed the book. He prayed to Fo and God and anyone else who might care to listen. Pilgrimage! If there were pilgrimages, there might be shelters, stores of food, blankets, medicine. The incline off the ridge was rocky but not exceedingly steep. Gahre determined he could navigate this descent, and trudged downward.
He was trembling in pain and reeling in hallucination by the time he reached the lower woodlands. If he stopped, they became worse, and he feared that to rest was to succumb to death. The woods cleared where the massive root structure of the Great Oak took over the terrain, its tendrils weaving in and out of the earth. He walked beneath arches looping 30 meters high. The trunk of the tree loomed into view, and was so large one's eyes had no sense of its roundness, but rather were faced with a fortress of bark that served as the foundation for gnarled branches as wide as grand rivers that wove their way so high into heaven they seemed to support very Clouds of Orion.
Gahre had never seen such a wondrous thing. And if he had to die, he could not think of a better place than this to do it. There were no signs of pilgrims or habitation among the metropolis of winding roots. But there were animal signs and caves and marshes and fields; a large and diverse ecosystem housed by a single organism.
Yonder, a red beam from the sky broke through the canopy and highlighted a section of root whereupon a figure sat. Its silhouette appeared to be that of a Buddha, much like the statues of the Dharma temples. He had prayed to Fo earlier, and perhaps he been heard! He limped and tripped his way toward it, and yes, it seemed to be a meditative figure carved from an upward root spur. If his mind were lucid, it would surely have no idea how a statue could save him, but it could no longer reason. A cloudy thoughtless instinct drove him toward it for simple lack of any other destination.
He desperately crawled through the living nightmare of reptilian horrors projected in hallucination all around him. When he reached the base of the statue, his eyes met the woody feet of it carved in anatomical precision, though cracked and covered in moss. With his last reserve of life-force he touched the foot and willed his head up to see the serene face of the Buddha, its eyes closed in placid meditation. At long last he felt a flicker of relief.
Then those eyes abruptly shot wide open.
Capacitor
The Kinetic Dream was in close range of the target along with what remained of the near probes. The sphere and the massive electrical disturbance that surrounded it were cracking and flashing violently on central holographic display. Mei felt the energy of it coursing through her body, giving her renewed vigor.
The positive readings of the electric field were off the chart, and their relative charge had risen substantially just by entering the vicinity of it. What an extraordinary feat to produce such an intense charge variance when hovering just above the surface of a star! They were still building charge, and their shield strength was increasing. It did nothing to stop the thermal acceleration process ravaging the ship, however. Yes, Mei had been telepathically monitoring the damage reports via halo ever since she found out Aru had stopped, and System had informed her that the probes could no longer be recalled to the Kinetic by cause of the bay entry doors having been welded shut. There were no heat sinks left; accelerated thermal seepage was already at work degrading the inner hull that surrounded them. The rarefied hydrogen ions were so plasmafied here that for the nanofraction of a second their nucleus held an electron, it skimmed by on the outermost energy shell of high density elements. Hydrogen with the outer electron shell of uranium! It was another observational first in this mission, but one that was slated to die with it. Because no matter how Mei sliced it up, by any and all objective assessment, they were completely and irrevocably fucked.
It was possible to build charge on the Kinetic by routing environmental energy to the internal quantum circuit that perpetually flowed through the inner hull ring, just above their heads. She had tried to recall the near probes to the Kinetic for this task in the hopes of charging them enough to survive a trip through the sphere's shielding and relay back more data. Since that was no longer viable, she recalled two probes back into the magnetosphere of the Kinetic and fired out highly insula
ted tether cables for them to connect to. Once they were charged to the Kinetic's full capacity she sent probe 4 forth to attempt a breach of the sphere's force-field.
They watched this approach on the central holograph. The probe sent back higher and higher voltage readings as it delved deeper into the wide electric field of the sphere. As it approached the force-shield, however, a jagged tendril of blue lighting lashed out at it, and there was a mighty white flash across the entire display. When it receded, all that remained of the probe was a radial outline of an explosion composed of fine debris particles.
“Shield Graze?” Aru offered. Mei had earlier discounted this rare and risky maneuver, but now she reconsidered it. In theory, if the Kinetic's force-shield came into contact with the sphere's, a clear path would be opened for the probes with the Kinetic taking the brunt of the discharge.
If there were any ship in the Taiji up to the task, it was The Kinetic Dream. The Kinetic was an electrical prodigy of a design, the pinnacle of Mnemtechian technology, but from the readings of the sphere it was clear that Mnemtech's grandest achievements still paled behind those of his creator Logos. These two titans of the Machine World were pitting themselves against one another in an epic test of technology. It was ironic that neither entity had anyway to know such a contest was occurring.
“Shield Graze!” she agreed. “Kinny, how many mobile engine thrusters do we have access to?”
“Commander, most have already been expelled from the shield ring when the thermal seepage rose to levels that threatened an anti-matter containment breach. We currently have 3 available to launch, and another 4 that are currently inaccessible but could be transported to online launch ports in the next 20 minutes.”
“Soft-launch what's available and have those mobile thrusters and all 5 nearprobes configured to enter the sphere's field the moment our shields make contact.”
“Aye, Commander. Proposed shield graze course on display.”
“Accept. Proceed at once!” she ordered.
“As she says,” confirmed Aru. “Authorize full all-systems authority to the Commander.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Mei, get in the shock chamber.”
“Aye, Captain. You too,” she agreed. The shock chambers were secured pods that protected a human from sudden g-force acceleration, vibrational shock, radiation, electrical discharges, and the like.
She stepped into the tall gray pod and let its soft cushiony innards firmly envelope her. She still had a small display window, ship control, and communications.
The Kinetic’s thrusters burned and they hurtled themselves at a tangential angle that would cause both bodies' respective inner layer force-shields to graze one another. They could expect a mighty discharge. It came fast. The pod stayed powered but the display died. She spent a minute in lonely silence, until the pod opened and released her.
Mei bolted out of it and back to her station. “Kinny, report!”
The holograph came back online and replayed the maneuver for them. Again a tremendous flash filled the display at the moment of impact. The Kinetic was treated to a massive power surge that had momentarily overloaded 40% of the ship's systems, many of which had still to come back online.
The central holograph sprang back to life with a full rendering of the sphere. Eight new points within its force-shield were highlighted.
“All probes and mobile thrusters successfully passed between the fields. They are reporting back and functioning normally,” System reported.
“Land 'em dammit. Get that surface materia analyzed!” she ordered.
“Aye, Commander.”
The probes gently dotted their way over the sphere's surface and set about their work.
“Initial analysis of surface material composition,” began System, “shows an unknown substance of hereto unknown composition. Fractal crystalline structure composed of iron, carbon, borate polymers, gold, and xenon at the core of the crystal. There is no known way to bond the elements in the configuration we're seeing by any known process of transmutation or nuclear fusion. The crystal fractals to 6 orders...”
“What does that mean?” Aru interrupted.
“It means that the shape of the crystal is repeated 6 times over as the observer zooms in microscopically.”
To illustrate, System displayed an animation of a large crystal, which when zoomed in on, was shown to be composed of smaller identical crystals, and so on for six iterations.
“Can we drill it?” he asked.
“This materia appears to be impervious to heat and radiation. Its dense cohesive structure is extremely hard and probably could not be penetrated by any conventional drill or laser outfitted on the nearprobes.”
Mei didn't want to waste any more time with analysis. “Run the drills, everything they've got. And let's see if we can magnetically anchor those mobile thrusters to the sphere, all three, evenly spaced along the equator.”
“Aye, Commander.”
“What are the thrusters for?” Aru asked her.
She pretended not to know exactly. “I just wanted to see if we could budge it, I guess. And maybe get some sense of its mass.”
“Do you mean fly it out of the corona alongside us?”
That had in fact been her thinking, but she'd been too embarrassed to directly suggest such a far-fetched idea. In retrospect though, she decided it didn't matter at this point. Far-fetched ideas ought just be dumped right on the table in this abject void of practical solutions.
“That might just work if we could secure enough engine thrusters to bring it up to escape velocity if we anchor them in somehow... God knows, that sphere is better shielded than we are.“
That was it! Aru's comment made something click into place in her mind. They were going about this all wrong. The solution... it was the most radical idea she'd ever had for a space operation, but it might just be their only hope.
“System, any luck on those drills or thrusters?”
“Negative Commander. The drills are wearing out with no sign of penetration. A trial burn of one of the magnetically anchored thrusters shows it slide along the orb causing a small precess of the axis but no change in the sphere's vector.”
“We're going about this all wrong,” she told Aru, then addressed System, “Kinny, give me an interactive macro-mechanical diagram of the Kinetic on holograph.”
“Aye, Commander.”
The Kinetic, was at its simplest, a wheel. It had a hub and five widening spokes that extended out to the inner ring of the ship.
“Superimpose the sphere over the Kinetic to scale,” she ordered.
The sphere image appeared to the fore of the Kinetic's, but not in the configuration she imagined. She pulled the sphere directly to the center of the Kinetic overlaying the hub and about 2/3rds of each spoke.
Aru saw where she was going with this. “Those hub spokes are segmented. System, show us the blowpoints on the spoke segments.”
A number of markings running up the length of the spokes popped onto the display. She highlighted a ring of blowpoints that ran more or less flush to sphere's circumference. The idea of segments and blowpoints was to prevent a physical collision from sending the ship careening off, not to expel the entire hub.
Aru told her more of what she already knew. “Those spokes are not just structural, they are energy conduits to the hub, the same hub that our polar energy jet runs through and serves as the capacitor that generates our force-shield, and which can't be generated without it. So what are you thinking here exactly?”
“I don't know, Aru! I'm figuring this out as we go. I guess I'm thinking we align our poles with the sphere and do a full thrust shield ram into its field.”
“We won't survive the discharge. You saw how that first probe vaporized.”
“Yes, but this is the Kinetic. We can absorb a charge.” Mei thought a moment, then it hit her. “Aru, you mentioned how the hub is a capacitor, yes?”
He read her mind, or maybe even got a step ahea
d of it, and pulled up the wide view that showed the sphere's force-field and the plasma cable that ran into it from the photosphere.
“We don't just expel the hub; we attach the mobile engine thrusters to it and fly it into position over the plasma cable, to absorb the incoming power,” he said.
“Kinny, how long would our hub, if removed and relocated to this position, cut off incoming power to the sphere?”
“Unknown, Commander. I would estimate seven minutes at most. I strongly suggest you do not expel the hub and leave the Kinetic unshielded in this environment. The thermal registers of the inner ring are already reading...”
“Shut up Kinny,” she said.
“Aye, Commander.”
She looked at Aru. He nodded and said, “We integrate the sphere into the ship as our new hub and shield generator.”
“You said it yourself: that thing is better shielded than we are.”
Of course there was no guarantee they could supply power to it or that it would work in that capacity at all. And even if they cut off the power source, the sphere surely had a tremendous capacitance of it own to discharge upon them. “Ok, let's do this! Kinny, soft-launch the remaining mobile thrusters and attach them to the hub below the blow points. Blow the hub and fly it into position over the plasma cable. Bring the Kinetic into polar alignment with the sphere and thrust her through the force-shield the moment that cable is cut. Proceed at once.”
“Aye, Commander.”
“Shock chambers!” Aru reminded her. She hugged him hastily then nestled back into her quiet cocoon.
DUALITY: The World of Lies Page 11