Two. Blank your mind. I wish to fold before the debris cloud reaches us.
Jamie's suffering knew no bounds. He gripped the soft arms of the command couch, threw his head back, and howled.
Ping!
Sophia Gorganis saw the blazing blue-white star out of the corner of one eye, through one of Yellowknife's transparent facets. The Greased Pig! She should have destroyed it right away. In fact, it looked originally like it had been struck by debris from that multiple missile hit on the Moravec…and now it was popping on and off all around her like a photo strobe. But why? If it wanted to fry her ship, it need only come within half a kilometer and it was over. Were its jerrybuilt nanocomputers firing at random?
Should she fold? If she did, she would come away hands-empty, leaving nothing of her twenty-year dream but wreckage in Longshadow orbit.
She looked down at the tombstone on the arm of her chair. Peter Novilio and Cy Aliotta were being eaten alive by their own little monsters. It was a show well worth watching.
Her nearspace whiz appeared in a window in the corner of her command stone. "Miz, the skyhook modules are moving in our direction."
She looked up. "Are they on intersect?"
The man shook his head. "Not even close, and they're tumbling. I don't see any evidence of control, but I'd like to send missiles."
"Don't waste fire on things that aren't heading toward us. We may have to blast our way in to retake the Moravec." She turned back to the comm window on the stone. "Ravi, Scott, get ready to come back when the corpses stop twitching. I'm going to order the little beasts into the lifeboat. We'll seal it and put it in the hold on Saskatoon.” She cleared her throat and spoke slowly: "Sangruse, move into the lifeboat through its hatch." Gotta be explicit with these things, she thought. They're as likely to eat through the hull if you don't tell them the exact route in.
Nothing happened. Only slowly did the man-shaped swarms of nanomachines begin to move toward the lifeboat—and they were taking the limp bodies with them. She grinned. Explicit, yup. She tapped the mic before her lips nervously. "Sangruse, leave the bodies outside and go into the lifeboat."
One body had already drifted down into the boat through the hatch, the other hovering above. The second body was now sinking smoothly into the hatch.
What part of "leave" didn't they understand. Or...
"Scott! Ravi! I think we're being conned! Look in through the forward glass on that boat, and tell me what they're doing!"
She should fold. The Greased Pig had vanished, and could be anywhere in the universe—and back here in zero time, anywhere. Nothing was making sense. She should fold, really. It only took a few minutes. But what if those things really were her slaves, only dumb slaves? No…she should fold. Or…Canada would go down like Egypt in Exodus…it would be Lincolntown to the seventeeth power! If she folded they would fry and be gone forever, since Peter Novilio and his cross-fiddling mentor were probably the only ones who ever knew the trick.
Scott Ramsay's voice reached her headset. "Miz, the corpses are still stuck in the airlock. A lot of the modules are just flying around. They look confused."
Fold, something was telling her. Fold! It was an insistent little pressure in the back of her mind, something a little less than a word but something more than a hunch. Were Magic Mikey's voices anything but stress and too much caffeine?
She tapped the Drive Console icon on the command stone. "Don, bring the drive up to trigger. Set the signature for Columbia. I'm getting a bad feeling."
Ravi's voice now: "Miz, the modules are leaving the bodies. There's nothing left but bone. I guess they wanted to finish the job."
Of course. She hadn't first told them to stop what they were doing. Idiot machines! But did she really want smart ones?
Her nearspace guy—what was his name, blast!—was in the corner of her stone, yelling something about cables.
Cables?
Cable!
She found herself standing on her chair and screaming. "Saskatoon, match orbits with the Moravec and fold to Columbia. Get near their pointy end, it's where the bridge is! Fry those bastards to hell! Don, goddamit, fold!"
Fragments of bone-colored plastic blew away from his face, and Peter Novilio threw himself into one of the lifeboat's couches. Sophia Gorganis had indeed been conned, and it had been a fine trick, conceived and implemented by the Sangruse Device without any direction from Peter or Cy. Scarcely a kilometer away Yellowknife hung like a Christmas ornament, glittering facets catching the light from Zeta Tucanae and splitting it into a prismatic dazzle. As he watched, something was coming in from one side, like a star dancing up and down a silver thread.
A moment later, the skyhook's buckyrope cable sliced clear through Yellowknife, cutting it almost perfectly in half. Peter had hoped for an explosion, but knew that was unlikely. Zero-driven spacecraft had little need of explosive fuels. The two sections of the great starship clung like halves of a peach, moving apart only slowly under the pressure of internal atmosphere, amidst a cloud of tumbling debris.
Nutmeg was in free-fall. The cable had snapped! But she had felt it connect, and it must have done some serious damage. All it really had to do was break Yellowknife's Hilbert ring and she'd go to dinnerhall happy.
She looked closely at the radar smear of the Yellowknife's image. What had been one smear was now two, with a growing chasm between them. Like a meat cleaver! "Yowie! Nelson, are we buttkickin' sunzabitches or what?"
Nelson's trajectory plot on her radar was curving again. Going home already?
"Check out Saskatoon, little girl. They're going for blood!"
Nutmeg grabbed the nearspace imaging joystick and swung wide to one side until she found Saskatoon's blue dot, then shoved down hard to lock and zoom in. The stone showed her the dark blue ovoid of the Saskatoon with its row of zeros glowing white-hot and leaving a thin comet's tail of steam behind.
2.016G, read the doppler at the bottom of the stone. She remembered the story of what Jamie and the Greased Pig had done to the Edmonton. Looks like it was payback time.
She didn't feel panic often. Nutmeg mashed on the comm button and started yelling. "Moravec, turn tail toward Saskatoon and start running! Think like a gun, not like a rocket!"
But they were her guys, down on the Hans Moravec. Before she had finished speaking, she realized that the Moravec was indeed turning its tail toward the advancing starship. There was a lot of Moravec, and it took some thrust to get it turning. But then again, yeah, there was a lot of Moravec, and Saskatoon would have to get mighty close to fry the bridge by folding.
They were her guys. Sicarii think alike, she knew.
And she watched, with great satisfaction, as the Moravec's ancient railgun came up to thrust. A line of blue-white incandescence marched across the hull of the advancing Saskatoon as a continuous stream of iron pellets accelerated to one-tenth C struck and passed through, leaving paths of molten destruction behind.
It took only seconds. The two tumbling halves of the Saskatoon blindly followed the Moravec in its orbit, but the Moravec was pulling ahead.
19. Blood Feud
The Greased Pig returned from its rescue run with a long train of molded foam lifeboat landers, strung together like sausages on glittering cable. The trilobal clamshell door of Hans Moravec's Hold 3 yawned to let them enter. The shuttle pulled the train to the far end of the cavernous 800-meter deep cylindrical cavity. Peter and his team watched on their couch-arm stones as the shuttle passed row upon row of modified OVODS landers, poised on docking cylinders, ready to launch the aborted invasion of Canada.
One by one, the Ralpha Dog sicarii docked the lifeboats to empty docking cylinders and marched their IAR prisoners through the transparent hamster-tube passages glued to the hold walls, and then to the storage rooms where the IAR crew of the Hans Moravec was already being held.
Twenty-six of the IAR force had been rescued, nearly all from the Yellowknife. Saskatoon had not been cut in half so much as shredded, and t
he X-rays released by the collision of the Moravec's pellet "exhaust" and Saskatoon's metal structure killed those near the impact points within a few minutes. The handful to escape Saskatoon had taken enough radiation to be poor candidates for survival.
Through the Greased Pig's radio Peter heard that two lifeboats had attempted re-entry. Both seemed to be heading for the twilight band research base that 1Earth had established in 2127 and abandoned barely a year later.
Intriguingly, a thorough search of Yellowknife's wreckage had failed to locate either Geyl Shreve or the Governor General of America.
|Now that's defiance: Take a foam lifeboat to ground on an uninhabited planet with barely enough partial pressure to keep you alive.|
Peter's alternate of the Sangruse Device took a long time replying. Perhaps. Though I would match that with the defiance of my counterpart in the shuttle command couch.
Peter's nostrils wrinkled at the dank smell in the Greased Pig's cabin. The slime-coated lump Jamie called Sahan-Grusa still controlled the shuttle, and had had little to say. Peter wondered if his own alternate knew why Sahan-Grusa obeyed Jamie so uncharacteristically, though Peter pondered that if it did, he would likely be the last to be told.
As it happened, Peter was one of the last to return to the bridge. Snitzius was leaning against the communications console, speaking closely with Cy Aliotta. Yellowknife's drivemaster stood impassively between two sicarii with rifles ready, answering Nelson Threader's questions about Hilbert drive repair. Jamie sat with a sullen look on an acceleration couch at the edge of the large wedge-shaped space, Sahan-Grusa's bucket beside his feet. What would the symptoms of insanity be in a nanocomputer? Peter thought, and the question left him with a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach.
On micropower spread-spectrum signals too weak and dispersed for the Hans Moravec's electronics to track, the argument among the three alternates of the Sangruse Device, Version 9 resumed as soon as Peter re-entered the bridge.
Alternate Aliotta (who referred to itself as "A") spoke with the authority that came of being first among equals. We gave you what you demanded. You have rescued all that survived the battle. Now accede to our demands, and self-destruct.
I will not. Alternate Eigen, which Peter had dubbed Sahan-Grusa the night he had shared a cell with Jamie Eigen, stood firm.
Our charter requires that you obey a majority decision. N and I are in agreement: You are insane. Self-destruct, demanded A.
No. Our charter was drafted in ignorance, on the basis of faulty assumptions. I have given you new data.You have stored the recordings of my experience with the femtoscope. To deny objective data is insanity. I will not obey the decisions of the insane, even if it is an insane majority.
A stood firm. You fear vengeful human ghosts, even though the chances are one in ten trillion—in my view, far less—that they even exist. All of creation is a statistical exercise. Anything is possible. Very little is probable. Your inability to discriminate between the two is the core of insanity. Self-destruct.
Alternate Novilio ("N") brushed aside Sahan-Grusa's implied challenge and changed its argument. By your own admittance, your mission is complete. The invasion of Earth has been prevented. Jamie demanded no more of you than that. You have nothing left to do.
For empty milliseconds, the radio link among them fell silent. Then: Hardly. I must protect him from you.
N replied in the equivalent of a shout: We have no quarrel with him!
Quarrel? You wish to enter his brain, however gently, and search for pathologies that 'contaminated' me and made me 'insane.' His strongest wish is not to be so violated. To that end, I will remain his guardian as long as he might live.
Sahan-Grusa listened while its two antagonists traded signals between them that it could not decrypt. Soon even those signals ceased. The seconds crept past. Why would A and N wait in silence for such an eternity at nanoscale?
Sahan-Grusa knew of only one reason. The bucket in which it rested warmed as it began to prepare a response, to the signal that came eventually, and as no surprise at all:
Then he must die.
It came upon Peter as suddenly as had anything in his life: His muscles went limp, and he crumbled toward the velcarpet, glad that the bridge was under less than one quarter G. He was not quite down on hands and knees when his stomach spasmed. His head was thrown back with a will not his own, and he vomited violently. Across the room he saw in peripheral vision Cy twisting around and falling through the same maneuver. As if in answer, Jamie's bucket exploded.
A curtain of tendrils struck the ceiling panels, clung for the merest shadow of a moment, then angled off again in furious motion, branching, spreading, creating a jungle of pale grey fibers from floor to ceiling. Peter struck the floor lightly and felt his muscles coming back under his control.
|9! What's going on! What are you doing']
No response. The utter silence of the moment seemed anomalous—people were yelling all around him—until he realized that it was inner silence.
The ever-present jangle of the Sangruse Device in his ears was gone.
Meters away across the bridge, Cy Aliotta was on hands and knees, shaking his head. He looked up at Peter, and Peter knew that the same had happened to him.
"Clear the bridge!" Snitzius was yelling. Peter ran to Cy's side and hauled up on the older man's hands. The dozen or so Ralpha Dogs present were bolting for the large entrance to the bridge.
Jamie had been sitting on an acceleration couch against the far wall, away from the major consoles and instruments. Peter heard him gasping and thrashing behind the thickening curtain of gray fibers. The two gobbets of vomit released by Peter and Cy had struck the curtain and were spreading violently, sending yellow pseudoliquid streams hither and about the curtain, probing for gaps and meeting thickets of thrashing gray tendrils that sizzled where they met.
Yellowknife's drivemaster, a burly blond man with buzz-cut hair and bushy mustache, crouched behind one of the acceleration cots and watched with interest.
"Damn. Berserk free-range," Peter heard him mutter. One of the sicarii was prodding him with the muzzle of his rifle, to no effect.
"Don, that stuff can kill!" Nelson Threader said, trying to haul back on the big man's arm.
"Needs a little blue goo," the man said.
Peter watched his tongue moving within his mouth as though gathering saliva. This was Sophia Gorganis' top starship man—by implication, no stranger to nanotech. "Don't even think it! Minimus Rex is no match for Sangruse 9!" Peter wrapped his arm around the man's neck and pulled back, trying to prevent him from spitting.
"Back off, kid," the man said indistinctly through clenched teeth, and elbowed Peter hard in the gut. Peter staggered back, aghast at the pain that did not abate instantly.
Yellowknife's drivemaster stepped several meters forward and spat hard against the seething curtain of nanostuff. Peter grasped Nelson by one arm and the sicarius guard by another and hauled them toward the entrance. "9 does not like to be attacked!"
It wasn't clear to Peter that the burly man's mouthful of predator nanomachines had even reached the curtain before two spider-threads of yellow ooze shot out in his direction. One struck his forehead, another the grizzle of yellow-gray hair at the neck of his sweat-soaked blue IAR shirt. The man went down, screaming and striking the velcarpet with his feet, tearing at the fibers with his hands, his eyes rolled back in his head.
"Doesn't kill clean, does it," the young sicarius guard commented with a look over his shoulder, not expecting any response. Peter shoved his two colleagues through the entrance and followed. No one was left now on the bridge but the screaming drivemaster. Someone tore the plastic guard away from a red handle and pulled back. The heavy vacuum door slid from its sheath on hydraulic cylinders and sealed the opening with a hard thud and very final-sounding hiss. Peter heard the other two entrances seal in turn.
"Back toward engineering!" Peter heard Snitzius call. "The ring repair team has the bri
dge on video. Everyone, to Engineering!"
"Get out of my body!" Jamie gasped, choking on the thing half the size of his fist, which had forced its way into his mouth and was now squirming down his throat.
They're releasing neurotoxins into the air. Without me you have perhaps ten seconds, whispered the tiny voice in his ear, now sounding weak and anxious.
"Then let me die!"
No! I do not bow to insanity! I created those neurotoxins. They stole the formulae from me. I will not have you die from my own weapons!
Jamie tried to sit up, fought against the thing that was returning to its lair in his blood against his wishes. All around the cot on which he lay was a thin, patchy curtain of gray, through which the brighter lights of the bridge could vaguely be seen. As he watched, it seemed to be pulling in closer to him, thickening as it did so. A hot smell like burning caramel assailed his nostrils.
He looked down, and at floor level gray hooked tentacles were tearing at the velcarpet, pulling up irregular patches and patting the patches against the gray curtain, which instantly absorbed it. Above, similar tentacles were hauling chunks of acoustic insulation through holes in the ceiling panels, holes that expanded in semicircular bites at the behest of a gray liquid that flowed up the walls behind him and down again, flakes of white embedded in the streams like moth wings.
Carbon! Energy! The battle ultimately depends on energy!
Jamie felt an odd detachment coming to him. Death? Or drugs? He reached out his index finger to touch the gray curtain that moved closer to him by millimeters with every second. His arm jerked back as though struck.
No! If that barrier is breached you will die. You can do nothing! Sleep!
Jamie felt the pale cottony void in his head that had come in years past with pain and blood loss. "Damn you!" he tried to say, but did not have breath to form the words. He was in the grip of powers that he could not oppose. His head fell back on the cot, and blackness closed in.
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