by Robert Reed
“Go.”
The first trace of change came across the nexuses, alarms wrapped around raw data, and that was followed a half moment later by images captured by a circle of immersion eyes. A hatch older than the Earth was opening, its hyperfiber cap separating along a thousand fissures, bending with the hidden hinges, then folding backward with an ease and elegance all the more astonishing because of what lay on top. One hundred kilometers of life squatted on the hatch, pressing down with pressure enough to crush steel and flesh. Water exploded downward into the waiting vacuum. With an expert eye, Washen picked out the shapes of key organs and fusion stomachs and the elastic bands and walls that always weaved their way through the polypond’s body. At Port Gwenth, the body had flowed unimpeded down the great shaft. This time the polypond made adjustments, strengthening the banded tissues and doping its fluids with smart gels, the ocean dropping slower this time, then slowing further, bowing downward in the middle while the edges clung stubbornly to the slick gray face of the shaft.
This time, the alien intended to move slowly, cautiously.
“Good,” Washen whispered.
Closed, the hatch covered hundreds of square kilometers. Even at full speed, the retraction required ninety-one seconds. Eyes emerged from the alien’s leading edge. The darkness beneath would appear cold and apparently empty. Probes and bioluminescent markers were dropped, and for a while they found nothing but an enforced vacuum and a familiar, probably reassuring chill.
Then the first warning came.
Aasleen’s projection had vanished, and the Master’s. Now Pamir showed himself, standing inside another portion of the ship. He was near Denali, inside one of the auxiliary bridges. With a keen amusement, he said, “Look. Our guest is beginning to worry.”
The only visible response from the polypond was a shimmering deep inside the body, bluish and faint.
Someone else said, “Now.”
Aasleen.
And then the shimmer vanished. Suddenly and everywhere, the belly of the polypond turned white. Washen’s view showed only the upper edges of the port, and even if she knew what was to come, the fierce glare took her by surprise. An instant later, the first jet struck, its rising plasma boiling the water and shattering the freshly made steam, then stripping the electrons from the screaming nuclei. The carefully crafted strength of the body was obliterated. Gels vanished. Membranes and carbon fibers surrendered. The sluggish flood turned into a torrent, and then the plunging water met a greater flood rising upward to meet it.
A hundred engines were firing.
And then another hundred joined the wildfire.
Through a tiny, heavily shielded eye, Washen looked downward. The project—a crash program with the emphasis on the ancient word “crash”—had involved the ship’s engineers and technicians. An army of them had fabricated hyperfiber braces and buttresses, testing them on the run, and then fastening to them the most potent engines held in storage. A fortune in starships had been stripped of their muscles, and fuel tanks had been adlibbed, and a lake of liquid hydrogen had been lifted from the deep tanks, using adapted pumps and empty tunnels.
Again, the Great Ship had an engine.
True, it was a clumsy, low-powered engine. But Washen felt the sluggish kick, and she allowed herself to smile, just slightly, which caused Pamir to shake his head, warning her, “It could all fall apart.”
But it wouldn’t. Aasleen was too smart, and Pamir was too lucky. And for all of her fears and her consumptive gloom, Washen couldn’t see any way that their enemy would be able to counter this very simple response.
Nor fight what was coming next.
Wanting to feed her pleasure, she asked her companion, “How’s your work moving?”
“Along,” he allowed.
“The timetable?”
“Holding.”
Again, Washen looked upward. The cumulative thrust of the stardrives—a carefully layered thrust meant to enhance its power and give its owners many options—was shoving up into the dying water. In principle, one hundred kilometers of liquid anything could resist the power and heat for a long while. But the boiled water kept turning into plasmas that expanded with a useful vigor, struggling to find any means of escape. And there was no place to go, save upward. The increasing thrust of the rockets gave the fire no choice, and despite the hundreds of cubic kilometers of water pouring in from all sides, only a tiny portion of that white-hot plasma could be quenched.
A scalding bubble formed and lifted, pushing away.
A second, much larger bubble grew in its wake, and feeling the insistent shove of the engines, it rose faster, merging with the first bubble before both of them vanished from view.
Washen allowed herself a small laugh.
AIs had dreamed of this moment, and their dreams weren’t too far removed from the truth. It wasn’t the third bubble that won out, or the fourth. The polypond was swift enough and clever enough to put up a struggle, at least long enough that Aasleen called the First Chair, warning her, “We’re going to have breaches.”
There had been too many little hatches to secure inside the port. Without time or enough hands, they had no choice but to risk a thousand fires scorching hallways and the nearby avenues.
“Thrust?” Washen asked.
“Ninety-four percent,” said Aasleen. Said a myriad of AIs and alert nexuses.
Throttle back, or throttle up? Washen posed the question, but she didn’t need to give either command. The next bubble of plasmas not only pushed to the surface, but it pushed down against the fierce pressure of the engines. In an instant, a wide cylindrical hole had been cut through the polypond, and the rising jet—a great cumulative body, stable and relentless—burst out into space.
A millimeter at a time, the ship responded.
With measurements exact and heartening, Washen felt them slowly, slowly changing course. The next black hole would have to match this new trajectory, and none of these bits of degenerate matter could hope to strike the ship’s center. And for as long as the engine blazed, the polypond was being injured—maimed, seared, cooked, and slowly changed into a lifeless vapor hotter than a sun.
Washen reached for Pamir.
The empty air let her hand pass. Then with a harsh little laugh, Pamir’s image said, “Hey. Do you want to see something really incredible?”
An alarm was sounding.
Suddenly an AI sage was calling to her by name.
“What—?” Washen began.
Then, she saw a face.
She saw her.
“Mere,” said a tangle of voices, surprise and amazement mixed with a thousand flavors of doubt.
YET EVERY TEST claimed the same result.
“As far as I know,” said the tiny creature, still naked and dripping, “I am she. And nothing more.”
Mere had appeared at Port Gwenth, emerging inside the chamber where the imprisoned and now-enhanced polypond mind had recently met with its long-lost Ooloo sister. Mere and the mind were at the room’s far end, still isolated by a series of demon-doors and sniffers and sleepless tools that killed everything dirty or suspicious. The polypond mind had fallen into what, for lack of a better word, looked like sleep. The woman needed rest, but she insisted on standing as close to Washen as possible. She was in pain, but it wasn’t just the misery of her wounds that made her wince.
“You need engines,” she muttered.
An autodoc was examining her flesh and broken ribs, measuring her against an ocean of data reaching back thousands of years.
“You have to dance,” Mere said, then she broke into a hard, aching cough.
Her immortal genes had been stripped away, or she had died and been recanted with just her human genes. Washen nodded, and with a genuine satisfaction, she told the creature, “We have an engine now.”
“Yes?”
The First Chair explained what had happened, but only to a point.
“That’s not enough,” the woman interrupted.
Was this Mere? Really?
“It’s not close to enough,” the tiny woman gasped.
Washen straightened her shoulders, and with a stiff, almost offended voice asked, “Why not?”
Mere told her.
And Washen quietly absorbed the news, always reminding herself that they didn’t know if this was truly her old friend or if any of these terrible words could be trusted. This drama might well be nothing but a calculated deception, the polypond throwing a trusted face and voice at the First Chair, trying to illicit some wrongheaded reaction.
“Did you hear me?”
Every word, yes.
“Washen?”
That was who I am. But who are you?
Then in a dead language, in Tilan, the little creature said, “Kill this body and look at my brain. If you doubt me—”
“No,” Washen said.
The First Chair stepped backward, and paused.
To nobody, she said again, “No.”
Pamir was standing beside her now, as a projection. And the Master Captain had appeared, along with Aasleen and Conrad and Osmium, and in another moment, the rest of the surviving Submasters. She ignored them. Consciously, she searched the available nexuses, finding the correct eye—one of the security eyes sewn into this chamber’s wall—and she looked herself from that narrow vantage point.
Aasleen looked tired, but Washen looked considerably worse.
Where that woman was thin, the First Chair was thinner. And with a voice that couldn’t sound older, she whispered, “All right then. I believe you. I believe.”
Forty-three
When Pamir was more criminal than captain, this had been one of his favorite haunts: Port Denali. The place had always worn a delicious reputation, boisterous and crude yet unexpectedly beautiful, rich with obscure species and dangerous humans who went about their little business with minimal supervision from the Powers-on-High. But change was the basic currency of the universe, and now Pamir was one of the greatest Powers, and his old friends and lovers had been scattered about the ship, the pure selfishness that had infused the port with its purpose now replaced by more impressive, infinitely more focused energies.
Brigades of harum-scarums were scattered across the glassy gray floor, and between them and hanging high above were starships. Tired old vessels from alien worlds, mostly. Machines just swift enough and durable enough to carry their wealthy passengers to the Great Ship. Each was being dismantled and the best of its pieces were being reassembled, then hoisted up into the lacework of hyperfiber being cobbled together far above. In another few weeks, with luck, this could have become the ship’s second ad hoc rocket. Or with a little more work, and with the harum-scarums at the helm, this peculiar fleet of scrap and inspiration could have taken the war back up to the surface again.
But weeks might as well be forever, Pamir reminded himself.
Osmium stood in the shadow of one tiny ship. Eyes like black glass stared off into the distance, while an internal eye watched the latest news. “The probes launch in another moment or two,” he reported.
Pamir climbed off the little cap-car.
Osmium closed his glassy eyes. Then the eating mouth made a vulgar sound, and the breathing mouth said, “I do not know.”
“What don’t you know—?”
“She is my old wife, or she is something else.” Mentioning Mere, he touched his groin through his mirrored uniform—a gesture fond and honest. “She is telling the truth, or she is lying. Or perhaps the truth lies somewhere between.”
As they spoke, a series of little probes were being shunted along several converted hallways leading to Port Endeavor. The probes had been prepared in advance, and then in a final frantic moment, they had been reconfigured. Their missions were narrowed, and every sensor was given the same small portion of the sky to study. But they were ready now. Hatches were thrown open, and finger nukes shoved both probes and their jackets of low-grade hyperfiber out into the maelstrom, and even as the hyperfiber began to shred and turned to dust, the machines were lifted, spinning out-past the polypond’s boiling self, streaking away from the ship and into the quiet and the cold.
The first data would arrive in moments.
Pamir felt his stomach tighten. A long hard look at his half-built fleet made him want to scream, giving a voice to his rage.
Osmium made a hard, injured sound.
Then with an almost human ache, he said, “She might not be my once-wife. But the little creature is telling the truth.”
“NOW WE KNOW,” Aasleen declared.
And then she fell silent.
Once again, the Submasters joined the Master on the auxiliary bridge—each one of them an image made real enough to capture their mood and infect their neighbors. The mood was worry and resignation and anger and determination, and running beside every other emotion, a genuine curiosity. Now they knew what was coming, but what did they know? Washen interrupted Aasleen’s concentration, saying:
“Details.”
In a breathless rush, Aasleen explained what they were seeing. Some of the probes had failed, and others were destroyed by the polypond’s weapons. But thousands of images were descending from the survivors, showing what looked to be a ribbon—a lovely silvery ribbon of lace, thin but opaque, and a little bowed at one, two, no, three points along an outer edge that never ended. The ribbon was more than a thousand kilometers wide and probably not much thicker than a hand, and it formed a perfect ring that was a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter—larger than the Great Ship by a factor of two—and it was a circular structure that was sturdy enough to spin, making a full rotation in just under ten seconds.
It was rotating at a tenth the speed of light.
In a breathless rush, Aasleen said, “This is something you design in school, as a baby engineer. This is the kind of machine every good student dreams up and assembles in the mind and as a simulation, and your teacher gives you a passing grade, nothing more, and she tells you, ‘But of course no species has time or the need for this sort of contraption.’ And you put your plans in a drawer somewhere. If you even bother to keep them. There are probably a trillion drawers in our galaxy filled with these kinds of ridiculous dreamy schemes, and honestly, I never believed I’d ever see any one of them made real.”
More details emerged. The hyperfiber was at least equal to the Great Ship’s best. The three bends along its length were generated by static charges and the subtle tugs of barely visible threads, and inside the center of the ribbon was a substantial mass—reactors and control nodes and probably some potent engines, too. The subtle bends in the ribbon were new features. Each bend grew more pronounced by the moment, and every captain understood what was happening: The great wheeling ribbon was being turned, repositioned to bring itself back in line with its very close target.
“Now we know,” Aasleen said again.
The Master asked, “What do we know?”
“How the polypond dismantles entire worlds,” the chief engineer replied. An appreciative smile came before a polite scorn. “We always assumed patience. Some kind of slow organic dismantling of the massive bodies that happened to fall into the nebula. But she doesn’t work slowly. That’s one of the lessons here. What she does … she builds a cutting implement … an enormous hyperfiber blade … then spins it up and pushes it close enough to its target that the planet’s own gravity brings it close, letting it slice home …”
She fell silent for a moment, her mind wrapped around the images.
“You can’t just cut a world to pieces,” she admitted. “It’s not that simple. Gravity would pull each piece back into the main body again. But of course, a blade doesn’t just cut. It heats. The energy of its momentum is transferred into the target, and if you’re cutting wood or steel, or a continent and the mantle beneath … the object of your abuse begins to gather up the energy, and everything melts in a relatively short period … in just a few centuries …”
Again, her voice faltered.
Aasleen had to feel con
fident about her numbers. When she was sure, she said with authority, “The blade would fall into the core, and then the polypond would yank it out again. And speed it up again. And let it fall again. And up again. And after enough of that business, the target would be a radiant drop of vaporized stone and metal, and by charging up the ribbon’s surface … oh, sure … the polypond could start lifting out whatever tastes useful, carrying it up into space …”
“But you’re talking about dismantling planets,” the Master began.
Pamir’s image stood next to Washen’s. They glanced at one another, anticipating what would be next.
“Our ship isn’t just rock and iron,” the giant woman reminded everyone. And then, even as she sensed her mistake, she said with an almost hopeful voice, “Even the highest grade of hyperfiber—even moving at relativistic speeds—won’t be able to cut far into our hull.”
Every Submaster was studying the data.
“The blade would degrade and shatter,” Aasleen agreed. “Of course, madam. Ever since apes made the first cutting tool, the blade’s hardness has always been a problem that confounds and inspires us.”
Along the edges of the great ribbon, at regular intervals, Pamir saw the regular marks of a telltale feature.
He said, “Shit,” under his breath.
The Master Captain noticed. A vast hand reached for a point on a display, enlarging it until the image began to blur. The blur was critical. Another probe had sent a tiny burst of laser light at this point of interest, and the light had struck an elaborate bundle of machinery whose only function was to continually replace itself, bringing up new matter from a buried reservoir jammed with raw ingredientsand relentless instructions.
“Shit,” said every Submaster, in a fashion.
“Those early black holes … the ones that the polypond threw into us … they were extras, apparently. Or she wanted to measure our guts, acquiring a better feel for her target.” Aasleen touched the same display, remarking, “If your saw is no tougher than the plank that you wish to cut, then you need to strengthen it. Glue bits of broken glass onto a cotton string. Or diamond dust fused to a steel blade.