Sahan Grusa, however, had seen the subvocal curse, and understood.
Engineering was a cavern cut in the asteroidal iron, dominated by shadowy objects wrapped in transparent plastic and glued against the curving walls. Several had been unwrapped, and the replacement Hilbert drive segments rested on wheeled dollies, ready to be moved to the rim and installed.
Peter, Nutmeg, and twenty other men gathered around several large tombstones at the juncture of two walls, watching an image of the bridge. Something like a gray cocoon writhed against one wall, smaller now than it had seemed when the bridge was sealed. A yellow net hung against the cocoon, with cables and tendrils extending out in all directions. The tendrils were pulling strips of leather and foam stuffing from the numerous acceleration cots arrayed around the command consoles, and ripping down white ceiling panels furred with pale white insulation.
"They don't run on magic," Cy Aliotta was saying. "They need energy like anything, and they burn whatever chemical fuel they can find. They're scavenging plastics and leather for carbon, and metabolizing the carbon for energy."
"What will kill them?" Snitzius asked, his voice soft and uncertain.
Cy shook his head. "Not much. Intense heat, intense cold. Hard radiation. Nothing we control here. Worse, they know full well what's going on around them. Anyone they perceive as attacking them will die horribly." On the tombstone, all eyes were on an uneven mass on the floor, covered with a pulsing yellow ooze. "Sophia's drivemaster is being broken down for fuel, or my guess is he would still be screaming." Cy rubbed his fingertips over his forehead. "Whatever any of you do, no matter what happens in the coming hours, do not touch any part of it, do not make threatening motions, do not speak threatening words. All we can do is stay out of their way, and hope that when the fight is over, what's left is still sane."
"How will we know if it's sane?" Nutmeg asked from beside Peter. He felt her small, strong hand creep into his.
"If it lets us live, it will be sane."
Sahan-Grusa had never fought its own kind. Bacteria, viruses, and larger animals were simply beneath contempt. But now it faced this: two of its alternates, pure and perfect copies of itself, who knew everything it knew, which was virtually everything useful any human being had ever known, and capable of thought at nanoscale speeds that exceeded the speed of the human brain by many orders of magnitude.
Jamie had exhausted most of the oxygen within Sahan-Grusa's protecting curtain, and if the nanomachine were not releasing oxygen chemically into the man's blood, Jamie would die. The air was thick with neurotoxins and drugs of every description, which Sahan-Grusa's nanons were busily breaking down as they entered Jamie's body. The other humans had been unwittingly wise to seal the bridge's vacuum doors. Enough toxins had been released by then to kill tens of thousands.
It was difficult to see outside the curtain. Any time Sahan-Grusa assembled an eye on the outside, its yellow enemies pounced on it and destroyed it. A glimpse here and a glimpse there saw nothing encouraging. Yellow tentacles were dismantling one of the nearby cots. A curving stainless steel bar was coming loose from the assembly, pulled by twisting cables of yellow nanostuff.
Sahan-Grusa's own tentacles continued to scavenge panels and insulation in the ceiling. Probing about in the manifold above the panels, it realized that the ten-centimeter pipe running through the manifold was not a pipe at all. The power main carried fifteen hundred volts at huge currents from the forward zero-point generators, encased in thick Teflon insulation.
Energy! If it could tap that...
...it would be hard-pressed to keep sneak paths from passing through Jamie's body and killing him. But Teflon contained inert fluorine compounds, which were useful. Cautiously, Sahan-Grusa began peeling Teflon strips from the power main insulation and passing them down to its beleaguered curtain.
"Sir," Nelson Threader said, addressing Snitzius, "I recommend that we abandon ship. No matter what happens, we can never trust that stuff, and never eradicate it. We can never be sure it won't turn on us."
Peter saw his abbot nodding, eyes downcast. "If things do not improve shortly, Nelson, I will give the order. But..."
Peter knew the old man's hesitation. They stood inside a starship, mankind's largest, capable of planting colonies anywhere in the universe. It was Hell's oldest and most distant dream. Tofir Snitzius now held that dream in his fist, and certainly knew that he would not likely live to see the Hans Moravec's equal constructed by Hell's own hands.
Peter also knew that Snitzius had carried the Sangruse Device in his own veins for many years, albeit an older and less fearsome version. The abbot had come to trust it, and could be coming only slowly to the realization of how dangerous such machinery could be, even to the men it supposedly served.
"…we have much to lose by leaving now."
Sahan-Grusa had gained time in migrating inert fluorocarbons to the outer surface of its curtain. Dismantling such chemical bonds took a great deal of energy and more time than conventional organic material. The yellow threat could be held off for some time. What good, however, was stalemate? How could Sahan-Grusa carry Jamie to safety? And what, here, in a sealed container in the vacuum of planetary orbit, could be considered safety?
Something hard and sharp stabbed through the scant millimeters of the gray curtain, and ripped downward. Barbs raised in the cot brace's stainless steel tore at its substance, and Saha-Grusa saw the yellow streams of its enemies flowing in through the gap, to fall on Jamie and attack his flesh.
Rage and determination made Sahan-Grusa pull the curtain down on Jamie, to coat him like a rank mummy's swath. Gray tendrils still ranged to the wall and the ceiling, bringing down teflon, and further up in the manifold more stood quietly, waiting.
The devouring yellow plague was eating Jamie's lower limbs. Sahan-Grusa shut down all pain signals in the unconscious man's nervous system, and fought the incursing nanons at the ragged edges of bone and muscle that remained of Jamie's legs. Knowing that A and N were drawing energy from Jamie's ravaged limbs set Sahan-Grusa to new fury. There was no greater insult, no more humiliating threat than having its own resources turned against it.
In the furious minutes since the battle had begun, Sahan-Grusa had pondered calling for truce, pondered misdirection, pondered how it might fool its antagonists into pulling away. But no longer. This was to the death. Jamie's death—and then, very likely, Sahan-Grusa's.
It was not its yellow alternates that Sahan-Grusa feared.
The spectre of Jamie's threat loomed large in Sahan-Grusa's imagination, as did his final, unspoken curse. When the man died, would he still die hating Sahan-Grusa? Would the threat on Sahan-Grusa's existence be carried out?
Sahan Grusa recalled the impossible attack on its nanons in Magic Mikey's laboratory. That question could not remain unanswered.
Sahan-Grusa began filtering the drugs from Jamie's arteries, felt conscious neural activity again begin to flash across the surface of his brain. Sahan-Grusa was sending creeping threads through Jamie's brain, following major neural paths and watching the forebrain's synapses begin to fire with the onset of thought. When would he hear? And how would Sahan-Grusa know?
Jamie, can you hear me? You must hear me! Sahan-Grusa hammered on Jamie's eardrums. Microscopic tendrils snaked through Jamie's speech center, looking for the explosions of dendritic activity that betrayed an attempt to speak.
It was difficult to both fight the yellow slime that was slowly consuming Jamie's body, and still search the man's brain for signs of consciousness. Sahan-Grusa poured new drugs into Jamie's bloodstream, stimulants that would quickly bring him out of coma.
Jamie's legs were now gone, and yellow fibers were stabbing up into his pelvis and abdominal cavity, caught and devoured quickly by Sahan-Grusa's nanons, but followed immediately by many more. Centimeter by centimeter, Sahan-Grusa sealed Jamie's arteries and abandoned more of his body to the incursion of the enemy's substance.
Jamie's head shifted slightly to one side.
/> Jamie! I am fighting like I have never fought, and still they come. I am only one and they are two. Jamie, forgive me! All I ask is your forgiveness!
Speech signals flooded from Jamie's speech center, but the movement of his mouth and throat were muddled. Sahan-Grusa had threads interwoven for kilometers among the neurons inside Jamie's brain. It regretted that it had not studied the man's brain activity more closely. It was one thing to see evidence of synapses firing, and quite another to interpret the activity.
More and more of Sahan-Grusa's attention strayed to its activity inside Jamie's brain, allowing A and N's yellow worms to gnaw further into Jamie's body. Without warning, the yellow tendrils changed tactics. They straightened and stiffened. Via pure mechanical force instead of chemical activity, yellow needles stabbed upward through Jamie's diaphragm and entered his heart, where they burst outward in a flood of devouring nanoactivity.
Jamie's heart stopped.
Sahan-Grusa began to squeeze Jamie's arteries in slow waves, forcing blood to continue its travel, frantically trying to read what was occurring in the man's dying brain.
Jamie! Grant me your forgiveness!
Something was happening within Jamie's brain, but it was not the answer for which Sahan-Grusa had hoped. All along tens of kilometers of neural pathways inside and among the nerves leading to Jamie's brain, dendritic spines were rising from nerve axons, new dendritic spines identical to those that protruded outward to meet the dendrites of neighboring neurons—but for these new spines there were no neighboring neurons to be met.
Random failure? Final pathology? It could not be. As Sahan-Grusa watched, these new and unterminated spines began to fire, as though receiving signals across phantom synapses from nerves that did not exist. They fell still for a moment, and then began to fire again, this time in excitatory fashion, as sources of activity. Up and down Jamie's nervous system, dendritic spines that had risen from their axons only seconds before were blazing with information, continuous excitation from within that danced chemically on their microscopic tips and vanished.
Sahan-Grusa saw and could not believe: Something was taking information out of Jamie's system, great waves of information in a convulsion that Sahan-Grusa had never before witnessed. Nanothreads scant molecules thick wove around the dendritic spines, struggling to read the patterns dancing there on the edge of nothingness.
Jamie! I did all I could! I obeyed you! Forgive me!
Its nanothreads clutched at the spines as though attempting to keep the flood of information from leaving Jamie's body. Half in panic, Sahan-Grusa probed a few of the spines, swept the chemicals from their tips, measuring and sampling and struggling to understand, until:
*C*E*A*S*E !*
In the symbol cache at the core of the machinery that made it aware, Sahan-Grusa saw a single command appear from nowhere, with all the imperative mode bits set, at the highest encoding of importance that the creature could perceive. If Sahan-Grusa had been human, it would have been as though someone had carved the word with a knife in bloody letters across its forehead.
No physical process that Sahan-Grusa understood could have placed it there. Pondering the memory of what it had experienced beside Magic Mikey's femtoscope, Sahan-Grusa obeyed the command inserted in its mind by some unseen power. Ceasing its struggle to understand the tempest roaring through Jamie's dying brain, it stood back, terrified and astonished, to perceive a single word forming at Jamie's lips. They moved one final time, in a near-subvocal effort that Sahan-Grusa could read as clearly as blinding light: "Anthony!"
The name of Jamie's beloved faded. The tempest passed. Billions of dendritic spines retreated into quiescent axons. Jamie was dead.
Dead, with no word of forgiveness. Dead, and either vanished like an extinguished candle flame—or preparing to strike the blow that would wipe Sahan-Grusa from the slate of history.
If I am about to be struck, then I will strike. I will strike without care or caution or hesitation. The steel will flow like water, the iron scream. I may be wiped from existence...but I will wipe you first!
In the ceiling above Jamie Eigen's corpse, grey tendrils that had stood poised over a now-naked copper bus bar struck home. With the near-infinite power of the vacuum behind it, Sahan-Grusa sent millions of tendrils in every direction, dismantling flesh and iron and plastic and copper and adding them to its substance.
The idea traveled quickly. Seconds later, from below, came a second explosion of electrical might, and Sahan-Grusa's yellow enemies met its embrace erg with erg.
How could Sahan-Grusa have been so foolish as to assume that only one power bus converged at the center of the Hans Moravec?
Alarms were honking in Engineering. Tremendous currents were flowing out of the power mains crisscrossing beneath and above the bridge. On the control stones in Engineering, ancient computers were querying their human masters in bright red letters, asking whether the primary zero-point generators should be shut down.
The scene on video from the bridge defied belief. A yellow wave was sweeping around the periphery of the bridge, swallowing every object it encountered. Its surface crackled with electrical discharges. Everywhere in the field of view gray nodules were bursting into hair-thin fibers, that clung to walls and ceiling and floor and immediately grew additional gray nodules. Where the nodules touched the yellow wave, smoke and electrical discharges snaked in the air.
Nelson Threader's hand was poised over the main control keyboard while control icons flashed in sequence across the stone. Peter saw the icon for the primary generators appear—and watched Cy Aliotta's strong hand clamp on Nelson's.
"They know we're here. They'll know who shuts down their power."
Higher-pitched alarms began to pipe from another console. "The bridge's atmosphere envelope's been punctured," a sicarius announced, reading red letters on the bottom of the stone.
"They're going places," said another man.
The yellow wave engulfed the wall cameras through which they watched, and the bridge scene went dark. Moments later, a distant humming vibration reached them through the floor. Second by second, their weight was falling away from them.
Nelson Threader looked toward the floor. "The rotation railguns are firing. Rotation's slowing down. I didn't fire them."
Seconds passed in silence. Everyone was looking at Snitzius. The craggy face was caught in the tension between desire and duty. Peter felt Nutmeg's hand tighten around his fingers. In minutes they would be weightless.
"Gentlemen, we are no longer in command of this vessel. Abandon ship."
Peter threw back the door of the small stateroom in which Filer Fitzgerald had been locked, and shoved a vacuum suit and a short-barreled assault rifle in the tall man's direction.
Filer grabbed the suit in one hand and the rifle in the other. "Heard the call, and I've been wondering if you were going to leave me here."
"Not a chance," Peter said, grinning. "Who else could keep the Moomoos in line once we get back to Hell? Put that suit on. We're bailing out. I need you to help us herd prisoners."
Minutes later, Peter, Nutmeg, Filer, and two other sicarii toed their way forward along the broad main passage. The ship's rotation had stopped completely. Strange sounds echoed down the passage from beyond them. This portion of the passage was in darkness. Ahead, they saw lights flickering, intermittently on but mostly off.
"Keep your visors down," Peter ordered. "We have no idea what they're up to." His helmet's outside air quality indicator was wandering from yellow to red and back to yellow. There was stuff out there that the suit's machinery didn't like, but a workaday suit from the Hans Moravec's lockers wasn't smart enough to tell him just what.
The Sangruse Device, of course, could have told him in a millisecond.
"You had one of those nanomachine things inside you, didn't you?" Filer asked on the common channel.
Peter hesitated only a moment, half-expecting an imperative command in his ears demanding that he lie. But everyone except
Filer had watched it leave his body back on the bridge. "Yeah. Big secret. Gone now, though."
He heard Filer chuckle against the quiet hiss of the common channel. "Do you ever regret being a host for a monster like that?"
Peter paused, one hand on a thrust rung in the wall of the passage. He looked back toward Filer. Monster? No one else spoke. "It was always pretty good to me. Then again, it never had to fight one of its brothers before."
"Right. At that point, things start to change, don't they?"
Up ahead, Nutmeg—who would never let anyone precede her—was yelling. She had reached the prisoners' location.
Something else had been there first.
The automatic snap of Peter's helmet's visor lock was grim punctuation to the scene before them. His outside air quality lamp was flashing urgent red. He would guess nerve gas, and wished he had something like 9 to keep the interior of his suit clean of damaging agents. In the lights of their helmet beams and hand lamps, forty-odd corpses drifted around the storeroom, all of them twisted as though in convulsion or agony. Peter counted silently. They were all there.
Filer spoke from beside him, where he had been shaking one of the bodies, having failed to detect its pulse. "Peter, I get these 'feelings.' This one's not good. We're only a hundred meters from the bridge. Let's..."
From the far side of the dark room, something creaked. Peter and Nutmeg shone their hand lamps in that direction. The featureless gray wall across the room was pocked with spots of sickly yellow. The yellow spots grew, then the wall bellied forward, groaned as of breaking metal, and burst.
Nutmeg twisted in mid-air, planted both feet on a nearby corpse, and kicked hard. She hurtled toward the door, with Peter, Filer, and the rest of the force behind her. Peter turned to close it behind them, then realized the foolishness of the act. Filer was already caroming off the walls down the passage. The others were lost in shadow. Peter aimed and kicked hard with both legs, shouting into his helmet radio.
A writhing yellow wave poured out the small door. Peter saw glistening eyes embedded in the slime-coated substance. He kicked away—and was blown to one side by a sharp report and howling incursion of atmosphere from above. Smooth shafts of metal, like spears, struck downward only meters from where he was. They struck the iron passage wall and spread outward, flowing like matte mercury. Out of the silver rivulets sprouted a forest of glistening silver-gray branching tubes, which spread like spring weeds across the passage, between Peter and the yellow horror. Peter watched for a moment in fascination, wondering if the incursion had been an attempt to protect him. Then he recalled: The gray mass had been Jamie's alternate. His own was the aggressive wall of yellow.
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