by Robert Reed
“Or maybe, if you are very patient and exceptionally determined … and vast … you can impregnate your saw with a thousand tiny-mass black holes, highly charged so they can be controlled, and placed evenly along the blade’s leading edge … ready to slice into our hull, or anything else, working their way down and down …”
PAMIR ABANDONED THE meeting.
Still unaware of the disaster, the harum-scarums continuedto work, following a schedule and a broad menu of plans that could not have been more useless. Through a minor nexus, he kept tabs on what was being said. Of course the Master doubted that such a machine could ever work. And Aasleen answered every complaint with a responsethat couldn’t help but sound like gushing praise for their enemy. And Washen was talking to the empty image standing next to her, saying, “We need one good option.”
“There are none,” Pamir replied.
Then in a loud voice, he called out, “Osmium.”
The Submaster was still standing beside him. But it took a breath or two before Osmium shook loose from the others. He closed down the nexus linking him to the meeting and stared at his companion, puzzled, then curious, watching the motions of the ape’s fingers.
On the hull of a half-dismantled starship, dust had collected.It was a thick dust made of human skin and alien skin and scrap hyperfiber and other rich hints left behind by the vanished multitude. Pamir was drawing in the dust. With a desperate energy, he invented unworkable or outright fanciful solutions—most involving detonating the starships inside every port, leaving the Great Ship tumbling and gutted by their own hand.
“Not that way,” Washen whispered.
She was using a security eye, watching over his shoulder.
“Then you draw something better,” he growled. With a flattened palm, he began to wipe away his enormous drawing of the ship. Then he hesitated, muttering, “We need some other engine.”
“It won’t happen soon,” Aasleen interrupted.
Every Submaster was watching over his shoulder.
“The blade’s falling on us now,” the chief engineer reported. “Within the hour, it makes contact—”
“Here,” Washen interrupted.
With the projection of her hand, she took hold of Pamir’s hand, leading a fingertip as it drew a few elegant lines inside his rendering of the ship. Then with a hard and flat little voice, she explained what she meant.
Hearing the idea, Aasleen said, “Maybe. Maybe.”
“How did you dream up this improbable?” Pamir snapped.
With a tone as mystified as anyone’s, Washen admitted, “I do not know.” Her phantom hand bled into his, and again, with a quavering voice, she said, “Honestly, I don’t know where this came from …”
Forty-four
“This is what will happen.”
In a multitude of languages—as sound and as scent, flashing photophores and tactile caresses—she began her warning. And then with a mixture of ripping pain and the gravest concern, she paused. For a long moment, the great golden face was tight and slick, the wide eyes glistening with tears too stubborn to roll. Her mouth lay open, the pink meat of the tongue pushed between the extraordinarily white teeth, and billions of passengers and crew listened for the steady wet inhalation of the Master’s next breath. This will be awful, they knew. Very few could imagine what was next, but even the most peculiar species, isolated and unfamiliar with human ways, could sense that whatever followed would be horrible, and probably all of them would die.
“This is coming,” the Master Captain said. And then she showed them something impossible. She shared the most recent data about the blade’s size and density, its velocity and point of impact. “A degree port of the bow,” she described, and then after another deep breath, she added, “In another twelve standard minutes.”
Spellbound, her audience tried to absorb the news.
“Our finest armor is thickest at the bow,” she reminded them. But before anyone could take comfort in that fact, she said with a brutal confidence, “Our hyperfiber will be sliced apart by the revolving black holes. That much is certain. A white-hot fissure will open up, and before the wounded armor can flow back on itself, the polypond’s blade will cut into the plasma. Its rapid spin will increase the damage. We think the blade carries a profound electric charge, and most of our simulations show a flattened jet of superheated matter carried away from the ship. The loss of mass will be trivial, but of course, that is not the point.”
She paused again.
Breathed, again.
“We’ve dubbed the contraption the Sword of Creation. With each passage, its black holes will continue to acquire mass and destructive capacity. The hyperfiber behind them has been carefully shaped to accomplish this one task. The polypond intends to cut through the heart of our ship. In regions that are rich in rock and air, the damage zone will expand. Blast effects and cave-ins will obliterate everything in a zone as much as twenty kilometers wide. Which is why I have ordered a complete evacuation of the following districts …”
“Why run?” many asked themselves. “There’s no escape, so why prolong the misery?”
And then, as if she had heard their doubts, the Master interrupted her own thorough listing of doomed places. For an instant, something of the old cockiness reemerged. She had evolved into a complicated figurehead. Virtually everyone on board knew her personal history and the endless rumors. Washen was the real queen now, with the other Submasters wearing their own vast roles. But still, the Master was the face of the ship, and she was as much its voice as anyone. When she told everyone, “This is not finished,” they heard and smelled, saw and felt more than just her words. This was the face that every sentient soul could read at a glance, and a single glance provided just enough encouragement. Hundreds of thousands began retreating, even as the same face told everyone else, “Remain ready. At any moment, you may need to flee, too.”
Then with a sigh and another sad shake of the head, the Master reported, “If nothing changes, the Sword of Creation will reach Marrow in a moment less than two hours. And a few minutes later, the swollen black holes will begin to strike whatever sits at the center of that mysterious world. And at the very least, we will have the rare honor of learning what precisely it is that is down there.”
Then with a broad and weary smile, she added, “I have had many honors in my life. But this is one distinction that I would most gladly avoid.”
Forty-five
“The keenest blade is the blade never felt.”
Mere said the words in Tilan, then human, and finally in their original harum-scarum. Then she glanced at the face of an old-fashioned timepiece that Washen had only just given her—a round machine full of humming parts wrapped inside a dull silver case—and she carefully counted the seconds until impact. For a multitude of responsible reasons, she was being held in quarantine. Her new body was being tended to by an intense little autodoc. Stripped of every kind of nexus, she was reduced to watching events as they were projected into the longest wall of her chamber. But at least the feeds were immediate, uncensored and honest. Probes in high orbit above the ship watched the Sword from every angle. Straight on, the great machine was a delicate vertical shimmer—a taut line vibrating under some great pressure—and then the vibration would relax slightly, and the looming threat would suddenly vanish against the black of the nebula. But probes watching from one side or another saw an enormous ribbon of silk, perfectly round and possessing the illusion of stillness. Without features for an eye to follow, the mind couldn’t tell that the Sword was turning. And even with its enormous size, it looked remarkably insubstantial next to the Great Ship—like a child’s throwing hoop about to strike the indifferent face of a great wet stone.
The autodoc told her, “Relax,” and laced her shattered ribs with a healing agent. “And exhale now. Please.”
Mere blew out, wincing with the pain.
“Inhale now. Please.”
The pain diminished noticeably, or she was too distracted
to notice.
Beneath the Sword, the newborn sea was churning. Suddenly a narrow band of water developed a crease, fibers and gels and dams of woven hyperfiber forming a double wall that instantly began to pull apart. It was a reflex, she imagined. The polypond was fully prepared to die, yet its own flesh instinctively fought to save itself for another few minutes. Spending vast sums of energy and concentration, the entity dug a deep valley in its own flesh, exposing the original hull of the ship. For an instant, Mere could see the once-flooded telescopes, crushed by currents and the pressure, and the slick gray-white face of the deep, utterly useless armor. Then the Sword plunged into the breach, and for a long amazing instant, it hovered.
Rockets were firing at the hub, tweaking the Sword’s angle one last time. Then they abruptly stopped firing, some point of perfection achieved. Like a woman pulling a dagger into her own chest, the ship’s gravity yanked at the blade, and a scorching white light filled the screen.
A gentle tremor passed through Mere.
Was it the impact, or a personal nervous flinch?
“Do not move,” the autodoc advised. Then with a different voice, it assured her, “You will survive, darling, and so will the rest of us.”
Mere didn’t believe the words, but she couldn’t help but embrace the sentiment. She watched the screen, and the machine watched, too, with its extra eyes, and after a while, one of them said, “Astonishing.”
The word was inadequate, but every word would be. With each second, one hundred tiny black holes swept through the strongest matter known, gouging and cutting and setting the wreckage into churning motion, the quasi fluid rising into the sharp edge of the blade itself, feeling the carefully sculpted charge that grabbed hold of it and flung it outward. The jet formed a single stream, white and intense, and ethereal, and lovely in a horrible fashion. Tens of kilometers of hyperfiber were swiftly sliced away and left useless, and as the Sword cut deeper, it slowed its descent again. Rockets fired and fired harder, and the blade held its pace, and some critical point was achieved. Achieved, and obvious. Suddenly the white stream of plasmas was tainted with traces of yellow and amber, then a vivid burst of deep red. The black holes were burrowing through granite and basalt, and into atmospheres and water, too.
The autodoc had stopped working. Every glass eye was focused on images still thousands of kilometers removed from this place, and the spider-thin hands held delicate instruments up high, and a voice that could never sound anything but utterly confident asked, “What will we do? What will the captains do? How will Washen defeat this thing?”
A distinct, undeniable vibration caused the chamber to shake.
“She’ll destroy the Sword,” Mere offered. “Or knock it free and outrace it. I would guess.”
Neither spoke for a moment.
Then with a vaguely skeptical tone, the machine asked, “Is any of that possible?”
And then it dismissed its own question. “Every illness has its cure,” it declared. “How can I believe anything else?”
FIVE MINUTES MORE.
The tremors grew worse by the moment, insistent, then rough, then the roughest blows were punctuated with hard, sharp rumblings. Great explosions and little collapses sent vibrations traveling through the meat of the ship, many of them skimming along the base of the hull, arriving at Port Gwenth along with a growling groan that was felt more than it was heard.
Mere sat alone. Her frail little body had been patched as far as possible, and the confident yet terrified machine had hurried off, giving the excuse, “I have other patients who need me more.” Which was fine. Was best. When hadn’t Mere preferred solitude? But even as she told herself she was fine, a new voice found her. Soft and prickly, it said, “Hello,” then, “I was looking for you.” And Mere couldn’t help but feel genuine relief, turning in her seat, a hundred little aches meaning nothing and the sight of a human face—even this human’s face—winning a small but cherished joy out of her.
“Hello,” he said again, the pale yellow eyes growing larger. “My name—”
“O’Layle,” she interrupted.
He hesitated. For a moment, he glanced at the images on the long wall, and then he forced himself to step closer, asking, “Have we met?”
“Never,” she promised. Then she looked straight ahead again, studying the endless cutting and the vivid colors streaming out of the wound now. “But I studied you and your transmissions from the Blue World—”
“Oh, you’re the one they sent into the Inkwell. In secret.”
She nodded, not looking at him now.
“That’s why we’re in quarantine together,” he continued. “I heard about you. A little while ago, one of the captains explained … that the polypond spat you back at us …”
Already Mere was growing tired of this man.
“We’re much the same,” O’Layle continued, stepping close to her. Staring at the images of carnage, he said with a quiet, awed voice, “Both of us lived with her. As part of her.”
In a fashion, she thought.
Then he knelt, altogether too close. He insisted in pushing his face beside hers, remarking, “Both of us have served the alien. Each in our own way, naturally.”
Somewhere along the narrow lip of the Sword, an ocean was struck. Hydrogen was stripped of its electrons and thrown into space, a vivid white line marking the obliteration of billions of liters. Watching, Mere wished she were blind. Closing her eyes, she felt the ship shaking even harder now. Then the voice beside her named an alien species, and with a low laugh, he asked, “Do you remember them?”
“The !eech?” Mere said, “Yes, I do.”
“You are sure?”
“I studied them. Before they came on board, I went to their world and lived with them—”
“Because that’s what you do. With difficult species, yes.” His voice was happy, almost giddy. “You don’t know me, but I have heard much, much, much about you.”
Shut up, she thought.
Then Mere opened her eyes, concentrating on the wall, on the deepening gouge being chiseled into the heart of the ship. How much longer before the Sword hit the core? Glancing at the new watch that filled her hand, she whispered, “Forty-two minutes.”
O’Layle didn’t hear her, or he simply didn’t care about the time that remained. What he needed to say was, “I knew them, too.”
“Who?”
Then he said the name again. He clicked his tongue in a clumsy fashion, and then said, “Eech,” afterwards. “!eech,” he told her. And with a delight that was boyish, pure and nearly sweet, he boasted, “They once hired me for a task. A very important job. This was aeons ago, of course. But I should have remembered. I guess they must have done something to my mind afterward … some kind of selective amnesia …”
“Why are you telling me this?” she blurted.
But O’Layle wouldn’t answer her directly. More than forty minutes remained until the ship and possibly all of Creation was obliterated, and he invested a full two minutes boasting about the sums of money that he had been given and how he had been fooled. “After I did my job, they convinced me that it was an inheritance,” he offered with a low laugh. “It was so much money that it took me a thousand years to spend it, and all that time, I couldn’t remember that I earned it. I lied even to myself, telling others that it was a gift from a dead old friend—”
“The !eech went extinct,” Mere interrupted.
O’Layle winked at her, nodding.
“On this ship, at least,” she said, struggling to recover the details for herself. “Thousands of years ago, they suddenly vanished.”
“Oh, I know all about that.”
The tone should have scared her, but her soul didn’t have room for any more fear. Mere shook her head, one hand physically shoving at the much larger man. Then with a cracking voice, she asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“They’ve been asking about it,” O’Layle said. “About the !eech. Asking me these sharp little questions.
Prying at my head with fancy memory-enhancing tools. I truly hadn’t thought about that species in the last hundred centuries—it’s remarkable how much I had forgotten—but now it’s pretty much come back to me again.”
“What did you do for the !eech?”
He kept smiling. “They needed someone to help. You see, they had taken some sort of vote and decided … well, as you say … long ago, they suddenly became extinct …”
“You did that?” she spat.
He rolled his shoulders. Like an evil child, he said, “They were desperate. I remember that now.”
“You murdered the species?”
“If a species wishes to die,” O’Layle countered, “then it isn’t truly murder. Now is it?”
With both hands, she shoved at him. But the man refused to move, gazing at her with a look of pride and growing consternation. Finally, with a wounded voice, he asked, “What kind of monster do you think I am?”
Even as the ship fell apart around them, he had to tell her, “I didn’t have to kill any of them. I just had to make them seem dead to the universe. You see? That’s what I’m trying to explain.”
Forty-six
Very little had been brought to this obscure place. Half a dozen brigades of soldiers had brought their field weapons to help with security, and a team of engineers was working feverishly to complete the setup, and there was an ensemble of small machines wrapped around the single object that those machines had been built to serve. The First and Second Chairs also just arrived. There was no point in hiding any longer. What happened here, in a matter of minutes, would determine whether or not the ship survived. Washen and Pamir found themselves standing side by side, hands touching for a moment, then falling apart, and one of them repeated the word, “Improbable,” while the other nodded agreeably, allowing herself a slender smile and a determined sense of genuine confidence.