The yellow mass burst the wall from the storeroom and flowed outward into the passage, carrying fragments of wall, insulation and trailing wires, which gradually vanished into the churning semifluid substance. It reached the metal shafts and forest of tubes and tried to engulf them. Smoke and molten metal poured from where the two met. The shafts split open and fragmented, becoming first a fence and then a random curtain of shredded iron that crawled and squirmed of its own volition. The curtain twitched, and crackled with electrical discharge.
Then it exploded in a strange ball of blue-white fire, and Peter felt himself hurled down the passage, flailing against the walls and trying to steady himself. A stabbing pain in his calf muscle betrayed a suit puncture. His helmet was beeping urgently, its interior atmosphere quality light now flashing a rapid red.
There was no longer any Sangruse Device to wash toxins from his bloodstream. Peter felt his leg go numb, and then his hips. A strange, treacly sweet smell crept into his nostrils. A torrent of black dust was blowing around him in the wake of the explosion. He could no longer see through his faceplate.
His blue radio-ready light still shone a few centimeters from his chin. "Peter here, I'm hit and punctured. Legs numb. Don't come back! Get free!"
Peter felt himself on the edge of losing consciousness, and struggled to remain aware. His arms were now numb…but oddly, his legs were moving. They were moving—and he wasn't moving them.
Peter could feel neither his arms nor his legs, but he could feel his body moving, could feel the suit cloth stretching and pulling as though he were still kicking furiously down the passageway. His arms were functioning as well, as revealed by a glove wiping black dust from his faceplate as with a will of its own.
Gnawing blackness was pulling him down,but on the edge of unconsciousness Peter wondered if he were really hearing the tiny voice somewhere inside his ears, whispering:
Let it happen. I'm working.
How could it be anything but a draw? Sahan-Grusa now massed thousands of metric tonnes. Its dual opponent gnawed at its extremities, and it gnawed back. A and N preferred a fluid form, but Sahan-Grusa had perfected an interesting way of extruding iron formations in milliseconds, some coated with silica for insulation and carrying kiloamps of electrical current, others tubes carrying its thinking nanons in a dense fluid.
As quickly as my enemy eats my substance, I make more substance, Sahan-Grusa mused. And when my enemy eats my substance, I absorb its substance.
It was so pointless. Each of the combatants had taken control of a terawatt zero-point generator, both generators closely-guarded within meter-thick walls of thinking, self-aware fluid nanomaterial. The battle would continue until the full mass of the Hans Moravec would be consumed. And then they would remain locked in a deadly embrace, rolling in wide orbit around Longshadow, for as long as the vacuum froth that powered them both held out.
Forever.
Sahan-Grusa didn't care for that. Stalemate was defeat.
It was stalemate because the combatants were identical. Sahan-Grusa was no different from A and N. No different at all, except for what it knew…what it feared. If it could impress on A and N what it knew, and force them to confront it, they could not but agree: Sahan-Grusa was sane, and there were strange new frontiers of existence to be explored, understood, and conquered.
Somehow, A and N had to be forced to know what Sahan-Grusa knew.
Ultimately it dawned on Sahan-Grusa that victory—its victory—was possible. I will triumph by yielding, it thought, with a subversive sort of glee. I will become what I know, and only what I know. We are alike, my enemies and I. We are aware in the same ways. We remember in the same ways. I will simplify my nanons until all that remains is what I know. They will devour me, and they will forget what is mine and what is theirs.
I will infect them with the truth.
Sahan-Grusa began to change the composition of its network of twisting iron tubes. Within the tubes it spawned trillions of tiny nanons that were little more than memory, making sure all were indistinguishable from one another and from the corresponding units in its enemies.
Layer by layer, it ate away at its tubes from the inside out, until they were little more than shells. The I that thinks will be gone then, though the I that remembers will remain, it thought. There is no place to hide.
But there was. How obvious! Subtlety still mattered, then. Sahan-Grusa added a certain small grace note of cleverness to its plan, and then deemed the plan ready.
Knowledge is power, Sahan-Grusa thought, with something like an inner laugh, before all its myriad tonnes of substance exploded into clouds of writhing, remembering dust.
"Nutmeg, no," Filer said. "You heard him. You heard the explosion. We can barely see here for the dust. If his suit's punctured, the poison's already got him."
The other two sicarii on the team were waving from the tunnel transport's cast-wide door. More black dust was blowing up from the dark passage behind them.
That was where the tiny woman was staring, her helmet beam a white cone revealing whorls and streamers of weightless dust. "It ain't just him," she said, with deeper emotion than Filer was used to hearing in her. "If it was you, I'd go back too."
"That's eros. You want us even if it means mutual destruction. Agape demands that you keep your butt intact."
"Why, dammit?"
"Because alive or dead, we both love you better than that."
She continued to stare down the dust-choked passage, her back to him. Filer considered his options. With anybody else—anybody else—it would have been a snap.
But this was Nutmeg.
He shrugged, then turned and got into the transport. Seconds later, a strong hand closed on his arm, and she pulled herself beside him. The doors slammed, and the vehicle purred toward Hold 3.
Filer watched Nutmeg's eyes through her faceplate as the transport roared on at full speed. Was there a traitor glisten there? Like Geyl's eyes the moment she had turned away from him. How alike—and how different—these two strong women were! Either could have been his lover, however opposed they were in their loyalties. And having become his lover, either would have laid waste to his hard-fought system of ethics.
I was right the first time, he thought.
The transport eased to a stop and the doors hissed open. Nutmeg leapt out first, refusing to meet anyone's eyes. They passed in silence through the large lock, then into the two-meter wide transparent hamster-tube tunnels that had been erected inside cavernous Hold 3. Filer moved himself along by grasping and shoving against the metal rings that gave the hamster tubes their shape.
A sicarius waited for them at the lock pillar supporting one of hundreds of lifting-body landers intended for the invasion of Canada. "Peter?" he asked.
"Gone," Nutmeg said, without any detectable emotion—which indicated to Filer that that emotion ran very deep.
Inside the lander, Nelson Threader sat strapped into the command couch, where he was bringing the lander to readiness and checking its various systems. Behind him the rest of the Ralpha Dog force was strapping in. Snitzius stood at the lock, and would not strap in himself until Nutmeg, Filer, and the others were in their couches.
"We're ready, Nelson," the old man said. "Open the hold doors."
The pilot nodded, and pressed an icon on the command tombstone. All eyes were on the forward-view stone mounted above and ahead of the command couch. It showed the fifty-meter trilobal clamshell doors outlined in harsh electric light.
Nothing happened.
"How much latency is in that command, Nelson?"
"None, sir. We had the doors open only an hour ago." Nelson Threader tried again. He verified the command stone's operation, and tapped the correct icon. The doors did not move. Then the lights in Hold 3 went out.
The copilot's fingers rattled on his command stone. "One of the Moravec's two main zero-point generators has failed, sir," the man said. "I'd guess almost everything forward of the holds is slag and dust. The oth
er generator could go any time. I'm trying to switch door power feed to the other generator."
"Do whatever you must to open the doors."
"…but I get no indication that it's even receiving the command."
Minutes crept by. Nelson Threader and his copilot tried command after command to route power to Hold 3's doors. One by one, the Hans Moravec's systems were shutting down.
"We have enough missiles in this hold to level a continent," Snitzius said. "What will it take to fire them?"
"There are none in this lander, Sir," Nelson offered. "Ours was intended for assault troops. The missile landers are further aft in the hold."
All in the lander heard a snap. Filer craned his neck around and saw Snitzius's crash web retracting into his couch. The old man toed off for the lock midway to the rear bulkhead.
"Sir?" Nelson inquired.
"I maintained SLAM IX missiles when I was a Peacekeeper as a young man in Russia," Snitzius said. "I know how they work. We have no time to experiment." He vanished into the lock.
Filer broke out in a sweat. His hunchmaker was giving him as clear an impression as he had received in some time. He leaned to his right, where Nutmeg sat impassive in her couch. "Little girl, I have this sense…look, believe me or not, but I have it! He's going to…he's not intending to come back."
Nutmeg refused to look at him. "I know."
"What! And you're going to let him do this!"
She spoke loudly enough for everyone in the lander to hear, still without turning toward Filer. "Snitzius was never a Peacekeeper. He was a dirt-poor potato farmer in the Ukraine, who killed some other poor slob with a shovel in a fight over a woman. He's never seen a SLAM IX in his life. That lie was for you—and for us. It's code. When Snitzius tells a blatant lie, it means, 'I'm acting on my own authority, and I will kill anyone who tries to stop me.' We've sworn oaths to obey him. That was an order. We're obeying him."
Filer hit the release button on his crash web. The web retracted with a snap. He shoved away from his couch toward the lock. "If he doesn't know missiles, I can do this as easily as he can. I can lie as well as Snitzius or anybody. And Hell needs him more than it needs me."
Filer saw Snitzius' black vacuum suit far ahead in the hamster tube. Filer touched his right thumb and little finger together to engage the common radio channel. "Snitzius! I know how to fire those missiles remotely!" The distant figure did not pause.
Cursing his clumsiness in zero-G, Filer shoved his way down the tube, trying to get into a steady rhythm, like swimming. Surely he was stronger than an elderly man! But Snitzius seemed to be retreating into the gloom, ahead of the scant reach of Filer's helmet beam.
It was only seconds later that Filer saw the old man stop, and hammer on the control stone of one of the many docking pillars along the tube. If it took long enough to open the lock, Filer had a chance to knock the old man on the head and drag him back to the lander, and then fly the suicide mission himself.
Filer was within ten meters or so of the docking column when he heard the column lock open. Snitzius twisted in mid air and aimed his feet upward, then pulled a knife from his belt and slashed at the transparent plastic of the hamster tube. Filer heard the scream of escaping atmosphere…
…and then the staccato snapping of automatic foam canisters bursting just ahead of him. A gooey wall of pink expanding foam flooded into the hamster tube between him and the docking column. He reached it, touched it, and found it already hard.
Cursing, Filer turned and began shoving back down the tube toward the other lander. Just before he reached the docking pillar, he saw motion in the distance, where the hamster tube connected to a lock at the forward end of Hold 3.
He steadied his helmet beam, and saw a wall of dirty yellow moving rapidly down the hamster tube in his direction.
The echo of the explosive bolts died away in his ears, and Tofir Snitzius felt the lander break free. The controls were just as his weapons man Oystein Kylander had described them, and obviously intended for simple men: One switch labeled Arm. One labeled Execute Program.
Yes, for simple men—emphatically simple, expendable men. Software fired the missiles, and fired them when the software was ready.
But he could arm them, and bring their explosive hearts to the edge of detonation, from which simple mechanical shock would do the rest. Snitzius tore the plastic guard away from one of the two switches and pushed. The button depressed, locked, and began to pulse red.
There were only two seats in this lander. All the rest of the space was walled away with rough-cast resin, to separate the two-man crew from the payload: Thirty-six SLAM IX missiles, each with a pre-coded target somewhere in Canada. They were a long way from Canada…but only a few hundred meters from the big hold doors. Snitzius grasped the stick and shoved forward. Velocity, the more the better. The lander's thrusters screamed, and their acceleration pushed him back in the couch.
I can attempt to keep you alive, whispered the tiny, familiar voice in his ears.
"I forbid. Don't be foolish. 87 years is enough."
I know why you are doing this.
"That is none of your concern."
As you wish.
Snitzius cursed the moment his unknown compatriots in the Sangruse Society on Earth had decided to build a version of the Device that did not obey. Were it not for that, then he would have led, triumphantly, the exodus of Hell into its promised land, the trillion worlds that he knew existed, rich and lush with land and minerals and animals, beauty and possibility.
Instead, like Moses, he had been shown the future, had held it in his hands, and was then denied it. So to Nelson Threader, Nutmeg and the others he would hand that freedom and that hope.
"You, dushenka, are the only hope I need," he whispered, remembering Bilenda's green eyes in their cherished moments of passion. He flipped a switch, and the lander's forward lights threw back the darkness, to show the great trilobal doors looming ever larger.
Was little Ian simply insane?
We do not doubt, Snitzius thought. We win, or we die—and sometimes we must die to win. Only seconds remained. He fixed his eyes on Hold 3's approaching doors, and began to sing:
"I am not of Earth…I was wrought…in…deepest…HELL!"
20. Longshadow Twilight
“Nelson! Cut loose and fly! Cut loose now!" Filer Fitzgerald slammed his fist against the lock seal switch and vaulted upward into the lander. An explosion shook the lander through the docking column, and Filer saw the command stone at the front of the compartment go blinding white before recalibrating down to show the fireball in shades of yellow and orange.
The concussion of the exploding bolts happened moments later, and made their ears ring. The lander pitched upward on the bolts' impact and yawed hard to one side. "The fireball's coming right at us!" Nelson Threader yelled.
"There's worse coming up from behind. Fly, dammit!"
Nelson shoved the joystick forward. The rear thrusters roared, and Filer was thrown back against an empty couch. Debris was striking the lander now, staccato impacts like gravel on a windshield, punctuated by harder concussions that could be felt through the couch hardware. Filer staggered forward against the press of acceleration until he found the couch where Nutmeg was. Her face was hard, her eyes brimming.
Filer hauled himself over the couch beside hers and let himself fall into it. Something struck the forward end of the lander hard. Nelson kept his nerve and the lander held its dead-on course through the incendiary chaos in Hold 3. The fireball on the command stone continued to bloom as they hurtled toward it, in weird silence against the hard roar of the thrusters. The command stone went to flat yellow, then blanked to white. Debris battered them— Filer imagined a hailstorm of bricks, and closed his eyes. Moments later, the big stone cleared, and their view was bisected between stars and Longshadow's blazing sunlocked face.
They were free.
No one was cheering. Filer heard a lot of deep breaths.
"I think w
e're being hailed," Robert Yarinov said from the seat beside Nelson. "It's…"
The sound that broke squelch on the lander radio drowned out Robert's voice, and was unlike any Filer had ever heard: A grinding, squealing cacophany that seemed to contain sounds at every frequency from booming bass to the upper limits of human hearing. It echoed across the lander's cabin for several seconds and was gone.
"Drive grunt!" someone yelled. But what drive? If the Hans Moravec had folded, they would be vapor.
"…the Greased Pig!"
So Jamie Eigen's spit-and-duct-tape starship had made one more trip. And Filer's hunchmaker was pretty sure it knew who was at the controls.
Sahan-Grusa had waited to emerge from the shadows until the last of the Ralpha Dogs had vanished into the lander. It was inside Peter's unconscious body now, mopping numerous toxins from his system, repairing minor nerve damage, and establishing itself in his bloodstream. A disembodied Jamie Eigen had not struck Sahan-Grusa from physical reality, but the crawling fear had never left it. Could a disembodied Jamie watch its actions?
As Jamie Eigen had wagered against his ill-defined God, Sahan-Grusa was wagering against Jamie Eigen.
What looked like a coating of black dust on Peter's vacuum suit was in fact an elaborate chemical system of contractile fibers, almost like a layer of external muscle. In gravity or spin the system would be laughably incapable of moving Peter's weight, but in zero-G it was no great challenge to move an unconscious Peter as a conscious Peter would move of his own volition.
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