by Robert Reed
“Makes two of us,” a weak voice muttered.
She laughed for a moment.
“Madam? May I do anything to make you more comfortable?”
“The Great Ship,” she muttered. “I have to send a message to it … to Washen …”
Silence.
“I finally realized …”
“Madam,” a careful voice began.
“We can’t, can we?”
“Because our last two antennae were destroyed,” the AI reported. “We have no useful voice any longer, madam.”
Mere wept.
Then softer still, with a genuine tenderness, the machine said, “I could not be more sorry, my good dear friend.”
Twenty-two
The attack began with feint landings and exploratory bursts of laser light—six months of steady abuse gradually culminating in the final full assault. X-ray lasers slashed at the main shield generators. Clouds of iron dust descended, trailed by strings of corpulent tritium bombs that pounded at the hull and its defenses. But the ship made its essential repairs, and it made adjustments. The main engines shut down, and the towering nozzles fanned out in all directions, then they began to fire again in chaotic, wholly unpredictable patterns, the ship’s bulk shivering and rolling just enough to keep the polyponds guessing. Then to disrupt the assault, armored ships from three of the six ports attacked the nearest of the polypond buds. The enemy bodies were a hundred kilometers across—depleted sacks of water and salt, stone and fusion reactors, each encased inside an insulated foam sky. Each wore an engine significant enough to have flung them to this place, matching the Great Ship’s speed and trajectory. Each engine made for a tempting target, which was why Pamir decided to attack their enemy first, sending his fleet against the nearest, most threatening swarm.
“Reasonable,” Osmium allowed.
But the first swarm was only a fraction of the invaders’ force. The ship was surrounded by a deep haze of polyponds, tiny youngsters hanging close while the adults kept out of easy reach. Suddenly the haze parted before them, and plunging through the gap was an icy moon—a thousand kilometers across and accelerating into the hull.
Two of the great engines fired, fighting to shove the ship sideways.
The impact was vast and inevitable, and endurable, but it left an oblique crater near the ship’s limb. Hyperfiber absorbed the energies and melted, flowing outward, the crater wall reaching within a thousand kilometers of Port Alpha. Then the baby polyponds released swarms of little ships, tough organics wrapped around tougher machine guts, thousands sweeping across the blasted region, using that sudden blind spot to make their key assault.
Pamir deployed eight brigades of security troops.
Again, Osmium said, “Reasonable.”
Then with an inaudible command, the harum-scarum started a rebellion among the passengers. Panic and rage merged into a vicious riot in the ship’s deepest regions. Local authorities were swamped. There seemed to be no response but to send the reserve troops below, using their uniforms and glowering presence to regain a semblance of order.
But Pamir refused to fall for easy traps.
“No?” the security chief chided.
Sealing off the district instead, Pamir remarked with a grim little smile, “One fire at a time.”
“Very well.”
The polypond ships swept toward the port. Lasers and railguns demolished the first six waves, but another hundred waves pressed down after them, inevitably obliterating the defenses.
Pamir ordered a partial retreat.
“Coward,” the harum-scarum growled.
“Moron,” the Second Chair replied.
The assault was relentless. Polypond soldiers woven for this single moment made their attack, dressed in lifesuits built from high-grade hyperfiber. The soldiers died willingly, selflessly. It was like fighting a nest of ants or a flock of rage dragons. What mattered was the enemy lifesuits. Every casualty recovered by the polyponds was sucked out of her suit and the suit repaired and repopulated with a new soldier and an endlessly improving set of instructions.
The battle raged for weeks.
More bunkers fell, and then the upper reaches of the port itself.
At one point, Pamir noticed his companion staring at him, the breathing mouth puckering in anticipation. Why? Then a fresh assault began, and the black-clad defense troops managed to collect a few dead bodies and their lifesuits, sealing both inside quarantine coffins before shipping them to labs dedicated to the extraction of information.
When the coffins were cracked open, Pamir saw the joke.
He saw himself—a dozen big human frames wearing the rugged and strong and decidedly unhandsome faces, staring up at him with dead eyes. Eyes unimpressed by everything before them, it seemed.
“The Blue World took a taste of your cells,” said Osmium. “I assumed that it might find a use for your pitiful genetics.”
Pamir laughed for a long moment.
Again, the simulation gained velocity, crossing a few weeks inside one long breath. Nothing of substance changed. The equilibrium held steady. If he wished, Pamir could leap back in time, making adjustments before the next crisis. That was allowed by the rules. But he held to his last orders, using both troops and a new crop of robots to hold Port Alpha against the next onslaughts.
When the defenses broke, it happened suddenly.
The polyponds had been busy, building an elaborate fortress in the center of the fresh crater. While most of their weapons were trained on the port, most of their energies were spent tunneling into the battered hull, using ancient lines of weakness to bypass the defenses, slipping inside the ship through an obscure passageway.
Pamir was waiting for them.
With his reserves, he counterattacked. But it was a difficult position to defend, and when the fight seemed to be lost anyway, he gave a final command. A streakship had been refitted. Stripped of its sentient citizens, its giant tanks were filled with metallic hydrogen, and the powerful engines gave a little burp, sending the vessel on a tidy and very brief flight. The Great Ship’s gravity grabbed the projectile and sent it in downward. Like a cannonball, it fell into the center of the new crater, and a series of uranium bombs ignited the hydrogen, releasing one enormous and soundless and utterly cleansing blast.
“Reasonable,” Osmium said one last time.
The boarding party had been destroyed, one credible victory earned. But Pamir refused to feel relaxed, much less confident. “You know what these simulations accomplish, don’t you?”
“They show us what can never happen,” said the breathing mouth.
“Exactly.”
AS THE DOOR opened, the visitor gazed up at Pamir.
Circumstances had changed utterly since the day they had first met. Instead of being enemies, they were allies. Instead of being strangers, they knew each other at a glance. Yet there remained a sense of surprise, at least on Locke’s part. “I came to see my mother,” he sputtered, his gray face coloring for moment. It was the middle of the night, ship-time. “Did I interrupt? I’m sorry.”
“You did and don’t be,” Pamir replied. “Come in.”
The small man stepped inside his mother’s apartment. “I asked where she was. The bridge has standing orders to tell me … and the captain in residence said she was home …”
“She doesn’t expect you?”
“No.”
Pamir nodded. “Must be important.”
“Probably,” Washen’s son replied. “But I could be wrong.”
“Well then,” Pamir allowed. “I’ll track her down. Walk with me?”
“I’d rather wait here, sir.”
Pamir almost laughed, hearing that crisp little “sir” from the man. Obviously, Locke was surprised to find his mother’s lover strolling around her home. Maybe he felt a little miffed not to know. Had they done that good of a job of hiding their relationship? No, probably not. More likely, he simply didn’t pay attention to such matters. Too much time living
with the AIs, trying to think in their clean, nonhormonal ways, and this sudden whiff of real life left him unsettled.
Washen’s apartment was neither large nor particularly grand. Narrow hallways connected a series of round rooms. Every ceiling was a neat hemisphere of bright green olivine. Beyond the ceiling and walls, and beneath the stone floor, were more than a hundred meters of rock, and then a great bubble of moderate-grade hyperfiber—the true wall to this little abode that covered barely three hectares of tidy and familiar floor space.
Washen was in her bedroom, slowly dressing.
“You didn’t sleep enough,” he observed.
She was standing in the middle of the room, her uniform pulling itself up her long body and the dangling arms, the mirrored fabric rustling as it covered her small breasts and the beating heart. With a nod, she said, “I promise. As soon as this century is finished, I’ll sleep.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
With an earnest gasp, she said, “Do. Please.”
LOCKE REMAINED STANDING near the front door. Watching his manners and mood, Pamir came to the inevitable conclusions: The onetime Wayward was introspective and observant, smart in ways that the Second Chair could never be, and sweet in ways that Pamir never wished to be. Locke was embarrassed to be in the company of his mother’s private life. Yet his mind refused to let him dwell on those little thoughts. With a shake of the head, he returned to the primary subject. With a tense little smile, he said, “We have a final conclusion for you, Mother.”
“Final?” Washen asked.
“In a sense,” he said mildly, laughing for a moment. “Until we learn something else, of course.”
“This way.”
With her men following, Washen led them through a series of garden rooms—alien habitats each, including a small corner dedicated to Marrow life-forms—then they passed inside a spacious chamber meant for cooking and casual meals.
“Hungry?” she asked everyone.
Then to nobody in particular, she admitted, “I’m starving.”
Enough food for three was delivered. Pamir deferred to the dutiful son, sitting on the far side of the freshly grown table while Locke sat on his mother’s right, staring at a plate of spiced egg whites and lava bread.
The starving woman ate two bites.
“Do you want to hear our conclusions?” Locke muttered.
“First,” Washen said, “I want to hear about you. How are you, son?”
Silence.
The two of them were very much the same person, Pamir decided; they were intensely focused and successful because of it. And because of that intensity, they ended up frail in other ways.
“Okay,” she relented. “Show us what you have.”
“With your house nexus?”
Washen gave him access.
The lights dropped, and the inky ceiling was sprinkled with whiffs of soft light. He began by posing the question, “Is someone chasing the Great Ship?”
Pamir felt his heart kick.
“In these few years, we’ve analyzed the available data pools available to the captains, and private files belonging to passengers. We’ve also gone further, merging the data into a coherent, robust mass that can be used to hunt for traces of anything that might be a second ship or a trailing body, then using the new mirror fields on the ship’s trailing face, watching the Inkwell for any trace of unexpected disturbances.”
In the blackness, a point of light appeared, streaking toward them. Toward the Milky Way.
“We’re a little bit lucky,” Locke maintained. “When the ship was discovered, thousands of species built huge mirrors designed for no purpose other than to watch it.”
The tiny light was the Great Ship, and with a silent grace, it fired its engines, pushing itself into a close rendezvous with a dense white dwarf sun that deftly spun it off into the main body of the galaxy.
“Some of these species became passengers,” he mentioned. “And they paid the captains, in part, with knowledge.”
What seemed like an empty blackness was not. Suddenly the intergalactic realm was rich with objects, each wearing its own private velocity and implied history. Outside the dense swirl of suns were millions more suns—globular clusters of elderly, metal-poor stars, and lone wanderers, and sometimes the shredded hearts of little galaxies swallowed up ages ago by a predatory Milky Way. There were veils of dust and gas, thinner than inside the galaxy, and colder, but spread across a much vaster realm; and there were the scattered worlds without suns or heat, life or meaningful names. And everything baryonic swam through an ocean of scarcely felt particles—the fabled dark matter—all of which drifted comfortably inside the faint, barely perceived ocean of shadow universes and infinite potentials.
“If we assume pursuit,” Locke muttered, closing his eyes for a moment. “A pursuer,” he said as he opened them again. They were his dead father’s eyes, bright and busy, but it was his own voice remarking, “If there was a starship, and if it was larger than ten kilometers in diameter, and if it had a minimal heat signature, and the albedo of old hyperfiber … well, you would see it now. If it followed the Great Ship within a distance of a thousand light-years, give or take … I could point it out to you now, yes …”
Pamir studied the elaborate chart. No vector matched what was necessary, and none would.
“Of course the starship might have been smaller,” Locke allowed. “Or it was darker. But if it possessed any substantial mass, we would see it here.” A slice of the chart pulled closer. “The first probe to reach the Great Ship continued past, and there was a beacon on board. And there still is a beacon, though the signal has degraded significantly over the aeons. If there had been a trailing mass, we would have seen an unexpected course change in our probe. And that’s never happened, which reduces the useful mass down to—”
“Wait,” Pamir interrupted.
Locke paused, the busy eyes regarding him for a long moment.
“This is relatively simple work,” the Second Chair pointed out. “I know you had to marry up a lot of divergent databases, make allowances for different optics and different species, and then solve plenty of infinite-body gravitational problems. But still … how long have you worked on this … ?”
“Several decades,” the young man replied, bristling just a little bit now. “On a part-time basis.”
“I’ve told you about this work,” Washen said.
“Plenty of times,” Pamir agreed. “But you never shared results, and I guess I assumed …”
He abruptly stopped talking.
“Wait,” he muttered. “This is just an introduction. For my benefit, isn’t it?”
“That would be polite of me,” Locke said.
Pamir grinned, saying, “Shut up, old man.”
Locke nodded, an embarrassed smile flickering. “If a pursuer has been chasing the ship for billions of years … well, there are two sturdy conclusions. The pursuing ship has to have a working pilot and trustworthy engines; otherwise, it would have drifted off course long ago. Impacts against the Great Ship have tweaked its trajectory countless times. Multiply a millimeter shift by ten billion light-years, and the gap is enormous. And the second conclusion … if there is a pursuer, it has almost certainly fallen farther behind than a thousand light-years.”
Pamir saw the reasoning instantly.
But Locke felt compelled to explain himself. “A functioning starship follows the inert, pilotless Great Ship. Its velocity isn’t any swifter. Otherwise, the race would have been finished long ago. And it can’t be even slightly slower. For the same reason.” A pause. Then he said, “But even with a matching velocity, it will close a gap of anything less than five or six thousand light-years.”
The chart changed again, expanding backward in time while reaching into deepest space, following what was judged to be the most likely course for the ship over these last billions of years. Whatever the Builders had been, they obviously didn’t wish their creation bulldozing its way through star-ri
ch realms. The universe appeared as thin beery foam, every bubble formed by clusters of interacting galaxies. The ship always crossed the bubble walls at some thin spot. Passing through the Local Group was an aberration, and the Milky Way just happened to lie in its path. If the Great Ship was born in the early days of the universe, when space was tiny and highly compressed, no credible set of eyes could have seen clearly enough or far enough to make such a perfect shot. So maybe the Builders were lucky. Or as some souls had mentioned, on occasion and usually while drinking beery foams, maybe the Builders had built quite a bit more than this little ball of hyperfiber and stone, iron and empty caves.
Perhaps the universe itself was theirs.
“A good pilot,” said Locke, glancing across the table at Pamir. “A good determined pilot would study the ship, watch for impacts and the effects of passing masses. Because there would be a few wandering suns between the galaxies, and solar-mass black holes, and the usual detritus. The pilot would make its own tiny course corrections, using the same masses for its benefit. Everything is an estimate, naturally. I’ve spent years poring through the available data and star charts before I made my best guess. If there was a pursuer chasing after the Great Ship, it would have been less than ten thousand light-years behind. And with a little confidence, I can say it had to be more than three thousand light-years to the rear. A window of seven thousand …”
Locke paused, regarding Pamir with a measured amusement.
“Our trip through the Milky Way,” Pamir began.
“Exactly.” With a command, the chart changed a third time. The last hundred thousand years were accomplished in moments. The ship’s engines had ignited, perhaps for the first time ever. A white dwarf sun, cold and old, embraced the ship and flung it into a new trajectory. Then the captains rode their prize on a constantly changing course, using flybys and the big engines to achieve a wobbly course through the populated zones of the galaxy. No real momentum was lost, but like a swimmer navigating around endless buoys, their lead over the hungry shark had been significantly diminished.