by Robert Reed
After that sober note, she paused. Washen sat to one side, Pamir to the other. If they were displeased with her embellishment, at least they knew better than to show it to the multitude. In fact, Washen had the poise to nod agreeably—a tiny gesture invisible to most alien species and the most inattentive humans. Pamir preferred to squint, his heavy blocky face turning to brown stone. Was there ever a soul less comfortable in a captain’s uniform? The question posed itself in her very busy mind, and before any of her army of nexuses could react, she canceled the question, pushing back into the prepared text again.
“Now the Great Ship wears an ocean,” she admitted, triggering a series of honest images and scrupulously detailed graphics. “On both of our faces, we are covered by a body of water and other materials that measure a little deeper than one hundred kilometers.” The rain of buds had ended. In the course of a few odd days, what could well be the largest ocean in the galaxy had formed above their heads. “The ocean is blood-hot from the impacts, and above it is an atmosphere composed of water vapor and free oxygen and noble gases and a shifting array of synthetic molecules.”
Beneath the hull, one group of humans cursed wildly.
“Remoras,” she said to them, and to everyone. “You helped defeat the Waywards, and you suffered horribly for your courage and valor. And now, this. This insult. This new disaster.”
The Remoras had been pulled inside the ship. For the moment, they had been given quarters inside a hyperfiber cavern filled with a hard vacuum.
“But you will soon return to the hull,” she promised.
Did she mean it?
Honestly, there was no way to gauge her sincerity. Even the Master couldn’t be sure if she believed those words.
The fef were back inside their deep old homelands now.
To them, she said, “The hull is solid, because of you. Because of you, my friends, we can weather almost any abuse this rain can deliver.”
There. A lie.
But she covered the lie with an unprecedented admission. “I will not tell you everything I know. My friends. My colleagues, and my passengers. Because our enemy is at our door, listening to us with every available ear, and that’s why I will occasionally and purposefully lie to you, and I will lie to her, too.”
Pamir gave a tiny snort of approval.
Washen let her back straighten, as if trying to shrug off a small, stubborn ache.
Looking straight ahead, the Master could gaze up the length of the bridge. For the last time, captains stood at their posts. But that was a secret, of course. She didn’t let the thought linger, in the unlikely case that the polypond had some unsuspected talent. But if the monster could read minds, what chance did they possess?
None at all, she knew.
The captains wore their best uniforms as well as practiced, purposeful expressions, and obeying a discipline honed over the years, they hid every fear and raging doubt. The stakes were enormous, but for the far-flung audience, what mattered most was the sense of control—a normalcy clinging to places familiar and reliable. What mattered was the swagger of these uniforms, while the bodies inside were very nearly inconsequential.
The Master smiled at her billions.
In an instant, she measured their collective mood.
More than anything, what heartened her was the genuine peace that had emerged over the last few days. The polypond had arrived … and it was just one organism, they had finally realized. One enemy, and the enemy had brought war to the ship, and it was natural to bury old feuds for the moment, and forget recent arguments completely. The, Master presided over what suddenly resembled a kind of nation—a body of organisms possessed by a horrible sense of shared fate—and she couldn’t help but smile, and she couldn’t stop the smile from emerging on her radiant round face.
“And now, for each one of you, I have a personal message.”
This was something new.
“Over these last decades,” she began, “we have made ready for every possible contingency. We have envisioned every type of attack as well as the possible responses. That the polypond would genuinely wish to destroy the Great Ship … well, in our ranking system, obliteration was not deemed one of the more likely scenarios. But we made ready for it anyway, and being ready includes sculpting a message meant for each individual on board the Great Ship.”
The smile swelled, filling everyone’s vision.
Then a trick never used before was unleashed, and the Master, falling out of view, could sit back in her chair abruptly, almost trembling with a mixture of excitement and nervous fatigue.
The image of Pamir faltered, then faded away.
Then Washen gave the golden hand a touch, fingertips, then the thumb, caressing the dry smooth flesh.
“Go,” the Master commanded.
She wasn’t speaking to her First Chair. Washen didn’t need encouragement, nor did the other captains in the bridge. Except for a few hundred bodies, the entire facility had already been abandoned. Five other, equally capable control centers had been built over the last few years, in secret, and were already fully staffed and operational.
“Go,” she said again, to herself.
Washen was standing, offering a steady hand to the Master.
“With dignity,” the giant woman added. Then she gazed the length of the bridge, possibly for the final time, watching the captains calmly slip away to other places. And with tears flowing down her face—genuine and warm and glistening tears—she said again to her stubborn self, “Go please, darling. Now, and with dignity. Run.”
DATA BANKS RELEASED bottled images of the Master.
She appeared everywhere at once, as a multitude of convincing holos. Voices woven from her voice said billions of names, each pointed at the proper soul, and then with a familiarity that was artificial but impressive, and with a precision that couldn’t help but awe, she told each of her crew and every last passenger what he or she should do now.
Six harum-scarums were sitting at a table in a popular public avenue.
“Go home and stay,” the Master told two of them.
“For what good?” one woman asked. She was the woman who once pretended to eat that human, that very odd Mere creature, and with the same reliable obstinacy, she made a vivid sound with her eating mouth, while her breathing mouth asked, “For how long do I stay in that little place?”
“Years,” the Master promised. “If that’s what is necessary.”
Her companions were receiving their instructions, too. Like her, one man was to return home and remain there. Two more were ordered to travel to an entirely different portion of the ship, while the final harum-scarums had to hurry, taking their position inside an unused fuel line.
“Why there?” the woman snarled.
With a gesture, Osmium told her to mind her own narrow business.
In a great stew of languages, images of the Master were telling passersby to return home or to move to other, unexpected places. What the captains wanted quickly became obvious. Passengers were to scatter and then remain still. At every table and inside every species’ homeland, souls were being sent in entirely different directions. But even when she could see the obvious ugly answer, the woman found it difficult to accept.
For ages, nearly half of the harum-scarums had lived inside one of three districts. “But we’re being put everywhere,” she complained.
Quietly, Osmium said, “Yes.”
“If we are scattered like this—”
“Yes.”
He wanted her to be silent, but she couldn’t help herself. One hand reached across the tabletop, landing as a mailed fist. It was an image of strength and endurance for her species, while there was a contrary image of resignation and weakness. One after another, she straightened her fingers, her palm naked to an artificial sky that was already filling with winged creatures racing for the cap-car stations.
“We are weak, this way,” she muttered.
It was now just the two of them sitting at the table.
“Diffused,” she cursed. “Diluted.”
Osmium grabbed one of the diamond-bladed knives, wrenching it free from the struggling remains of their last meal.
“Weak,” she repeated.
He drove the blade into the tabletop, as a lesson.
She watched as the keen edge clipped one of her middle fingers.
“Make a fist,” he said.
“But I understand,” she countered. “We disperse so that all of us don’t die together.”
“A fist. Now!”
She jumped a little bit, and then to cover her fear, she sat forward and found the courage to ball up her fingers and palm.
Osmium reached high with the knife, aimed and thrust hard.
The woman felt a pain born entirely from her own mind. The hand had been missed, and by plenty.
Why?
“Because if we are dispersed, and diluted, and thin,” Osmium explained, “then not only will that help keep the harum-scarums from being decimated. It is also the very best way of ensuring that every species, small or large, will bear his share of the suffering.
“If it comes to that.
“If it comes …”
Twenty-nine
The blister was armored and wore every kind of camouflage, and there were several avenues of escape should either safeguard fail; but despite the elaborate precautions, plus the array of weapons and defensive systems that now adorned the towering rocket nozzle, no one inside the blister could relax. Everyone with a lung breathed in fast deep gulps, and those with hearts felt them squeezing hard or spinning wildly, blood of every sort filled with paranoid toxins, while every mind, machine or organic, was cluttered with compelling visions of doom. Yet despite all of that, each of the onlookers was thinking what Pamir happened to say first.
“Beautiful,” he said.
Then with a loud and coarse and genuinely impressed voice, he asked, “Have you ever seen anything so damned beautiful?”
The blister clung to the rocket nozzle’s outer surface. A platoon of security troops stood with the Second Chair and Conrad, along with an assortment of AI specialists. Six more of the ship’s main rockets were visible from their vantage point, all of them still blazing away, maintaining an enormous thrust that was barely changing their already terrific momentum. Fourteen fat plumes of plasma rose into a sky transformed: superluminal jets impacting against the Inkwell, blistering the dusts and ices and hydrocarbon relics, the energized atoms creating a many-hued glow that fell back over the ship’s trailing face, illuminating a landscape that had been utterly, utterly changed.
The hull lay hidden beneath the sudden sea.
And lying on top of the sea was a hot dense atmosphere laced with clouds lit from within by great bolts of lightning.
Another voice said, “Beautiful.”
A third said, “Wondrous.”
Then with an easy horror, Conrad declared, “No, this isn’t. It’s a fucking disaster. Awful, and ugly. And shut up.”
Pamir glanced at the Remora, then looked down again. The sea had swallowed everything except the moon-sized rocket nozzles: every Remoran city; every fef camp; every mirror and relay station; and each place with a name or number designation. All lay beneath more than a hundred kilometers of hot water and living mud through which slithered armies of machinelike bones … bones growing at a fierce rate, preparing for whatever was next. With eyes alone, Pamir could see the water churning, hinting at vast limbs stretching and newborn bodies practicing their carefully designed skills. the stood two hundred kilometers above the surface of the sea, yet he could see a winged object drifting between storm clouds—an avian creation that was larger than many starships.
Sensors peered into the monster’s body, tasting neutrinos.
A fusion metabolism, yes.
The blister suddenly shivered, rolling to one side. Pamir knew what was happening, and why, but he couldn’t entirely hide his discomfort. Obeying a thoroughly randomized schedule, every nozzle constantly changed its orientation, the giant rockets working to push the ship along a shifting trajectory, its rockets slowly, majestically, bending over to their mechanical limits. Like a fat man rolling down a wide set of stairs, they were throwing out a desperate hand, fighting every relentless force in a bid to miss hazards to come.
The Great Ship was flying almost blind now.
“Updates,” Pamir requested, and with his mind’s eye, he watched the best available data, fuzzy but alarming.
Small arrays of telescopes had been deployed on top of each nozzle, gazing backward in space. Neutrinos pierced the hull from all directions, and the few particles trapped in the deep sensors hinted at the locations and motions of nearby fusion reactors. And always, there was gravity. Laser arrays shivered in response to new masses. Subtle tides rose and fell in every sea, and a brigade of AIs did nothing but piece together these subtle clues, allowing the Second Chair to look ahead, watching for things only imagined so far. Things invisible, and hopefully they would always be so.
And there was one more tool, now and again.
“Five pods,” a voice reported. “Outbound. On the new trajectory.”
Pamir asked the chief engineer, “Status of the last five?”
“Emerging,” Aasleen reported. “Now.”
The plasma jets were brutally hot and swift, and tiny bodies composed of poor grades of hyperfiber could ride them like bubbles riding a fast river. Kept at the edges of the jet and aimed properly, the shells would degrade as they traveled outward, and when the bodies drifted free of the masking fire—many thousands of kilometers above the ship—the machines inside would be able to kick off their suddenly brittle shells, and for a moment or two they would watch whatever there was to see.
Colors, Pamir saw.
Buried inside a scorching red smear was the neat round dab of something cool. Not blue, exactly. But he thought of the Blue World. After a chase of several light-years, the first polypond was finally catching up with them—an expensive journey that had left it shriveled and, hopefully, depleted, but still alive, and still more than a thousand kilometers across.
Moments later, each of the pods was neatly obliterated by lasers.
And with that, a fat finger of hyperfiber was shoved into Pamir’s side.
Conrad shouted, “Look.”
A flash came from below.
“She’s finding our presents,” Conrad declared happily.
More flashes could be seen—sudden blurs of blue light sprouting under the sea. Some days ago, while they were quickly abandoning their cities, the Remoras left behind tokens: fusion bombs, and sometimes microchine corrosives. The bombs were the more spectacular gifts, though probably not as damaging. As the polypond tore into the diamond domes, these simple weapons detonated themselves, creating fierce bubbles of plasma that rose to the surface, exploding in geysers of sweet violet light.
“Look,” said the Remora. “I think she’s hurting.”
The sea began to roll over. The giant flying creature beneath them suddenly folded its enormous wings and dove deep, merging with a kilometer-tall wave and vanishing entirely. Dissolving. Then after another few minutes, the water grew still. A terrific momentum was absorbed or neatly redirected, and with a disgusted appreciation, Pamir wondered if they had done nothing but give their enemy a dose of free energy.
“She’s wounded,” Conrad maintained.
What was that avian body? Again, Pamir looked at the sensor data, replaying most of the body’s life at a rapid speed.
Aasleen intruded, warning him, “The new pods are about to break out.”
He barely heard her.
“We’ll get a good look ahead,” the chief engineer promised.
Pamir was studying the avian, paying closest attention to its death. Then along several different channels, he gave orders, making certain that the next avian would be watched even more closely.
“Look now,” Aasleen prompted.
Pamir blinked and changed nexuses.
Nothing.
Pamir triggered a shielded nexus.
“Yes,” the familiar voice answered.
“I have a target,” Pamir reported.
Osmium and a picked team were waiting below, hiding inside a subsidiary pumping station. “Show me,” he demanded.
But there wasn’t a second avian in view.
“With everything,” the harum-scarum inquired, “why that?”
What were his reasons? Pamir gave it some thought, then admitted, “I don’t know why. It’s a rare thing. It’s big, and lovely. And that’s why I think it must be important.”
There was a pause.
“Fine reasons, all,” Osmium finally declared.
Pamir turned to those standing with him, and using a calm hard voice, he said, “Make ready.”
To Aasleen, he said, “As soon as we acquire our target.”
And then to someone to whom he hadn’t spoken for hours, he said, “It’s time that we inflict some pain—”
“Agreed,” Washen replied.
Then after a pause, she said, “Careful.”
But Pamir had already silenced the extra nexuses, every sense and sensor, capacity and voice now focused squarely on those millions of square kilometers of churning, dangerous life.
THE TARGET WAS born inside a whirlpool that was the color and constancy of beef gravy. Its body was smaller than the other avian, only a kilometer long, deep but narrow like a knife blade—a chassis of diamond upon which was woven a careful assemblage of tough organics and sacks filled with scalding gases, plus tangles of superconducting neurons and dense organs of no discernible purpose. The body rode the whirlpool outward, letting the current accelerate it until the long, long diamond wings rose high, supplying just enough lift to yank it free of the polypond’s great body.