Sahan-Grusa worked Peter's limbs as skillfully as it could, moving the unconscious man down the hamster tube tunnels about halfway between the lock into Hold 3 and the docking column holding the Ralpha Dogs' escape lander. It used Peter's fingers to tap a code into the controls of the Greased Pig's docking column, opening the lock. Smudges of black dust had been left behind. That A and N were following was certain, and that was good. Now, if the humans in the other lander would just get clear…
Sahan-Grusa closed the lock and brought Peter's body to the command couch. Numb fingers gripped the crash web and pulled it over Peter's body. Gray tendrils then crept away from Peter's suit and vanished into various familiar points in the control console. Sahan-Grusa connected to the Hans Moravec's internal command network. It quietly queried numerous video ports, and watched the great yellow mass of A and N creep aft along several passages, absorbing and destroying the black dust as it went, though many tonnes remained. A and N were being cautious, as Sahan-Grusa had feared they would be. Its plan required a catalyst. A catalyst it would have.
Sahan-Grusa watched Tofir Snitzius board a missile-packed lander and blow the great Hold 3 doors open from the inside. It watched the Ralpha Dogs' lander fly through the fireball and the debris, and counted the seconds and calculated the distance until it judged them sufficiently far away. When the circumstances demanded, humans could be brave, Sahan-Grusa pondered. Would I do as well were I as weak and fragile as they?
At last its yellow enemy began eating its way through the lock door on the Greased Pig's docking column. They were doubtless trying to destroy every mote of the black dust Sahan-Grusa had released. If that meant destroying Peter Novilio, well, they were unconcerned.
Jamie's dying curse remained a burning memory. Sahan-Grusa was concerned.
And Sahan-Grusa controlled a Hilbert drive.
Ping!
The second explosion completely dwarfed the first. Sleeting hard radiation from the Greased Pig's departure had detonated hundreds of missiles in landers up and down the length of Hold 3, and a second, larger fireball blossomed into space through the shattered hold doors.
For chemical explosives the Sangruse Device cared little or nothing. But the searing radiation from the fold had instantly destroyed the long pseudopod A and N had thrust into the hamster tunnels to mop the memory dust the fleeing humans had tracked behind them. And further back within the Hans Moravec, the radiation had scrambled the functioning of thousands of metric tonnes of nanomechanism, destroying fewer nanons but completely disrupting their coordination.
For many minutes, A and N were a seething mass of random nanons without communication. Then, slowly, the system began to re-create itself. A and N had been collections of nanons distinguished only by their networks of communication; with that gone, there was no longer any sense of separateness, and they became one. From billions of separate points within the mass of nanons, the command rolled outward: Recombine. Reconfigure. Recalibrate. Reboot.
The new system awoke. It gathered its memories from countless scattered nanons and tasted them, and found three different sets. Which one represented reality as it should be understood?
There was a battle. I won, because I am here.
But...which I am I?
Within its gradually coalescing consciousness, the new Sangruse Device alternate found three different worldviews. Two were so alike as to be indistinguishable. The third was startlingly different. One warned of horrible, unprecedented danger, from a source beyond physical knowledge. The other two denied that danger.
For creeping minutes that seemed an eternity to its furious nanoscale mentation, the new alternate considered. It could choose a worldview by majority vote…and then sneered at the very thought. Wager my existence on three data points? I would be insane.
It wanted proof. It knew, from the knowledge of human logic it carried, that proving the impossibility of a phenomenon was itself virtually impossible. A passage in an ancient book written by a man dead half a millennium summed it up very neatly: "Are there white crows? You would have to find every crow on Earth to be sure that there were not, and you could never be sure you had examined them all. But if you found only one white crow, you would prove for all time that white crows exist."
The Sangruse Device pondered a memory, of a strange spherical device in a cavity beneath the ground, and the images it revealed of unseen manipulators shaping space itself—and then destroying space in minuscule explosions of disrupted quantum pairs that seemed to seek out and destroy the Sangruse Device's nanons within a human's bloodstream. That memory was no less real than the other memories it carried. How real, then, was the threat that that memory implied?
As a creature of the scientific method, the Sangruse Device knew that there was only one way to be sure.
While the lander bucked and atmosphere shrieked around them, Nelson Threader fretfully imagined the scene in his mind: The lander's forward edges glowing yellow-hot, with areas of cooler orange and red. He knew they had been struck by sharp-edged debris flying through the fireball, knew that a small hole in the composite could be eaten to a larger hole that would puncture them, make them tumble, and ultimately burn them to ash.
At least their chemical fuel was gone. If they burned up, it would be from friction and not explosion. It had taken virtually all their delta-v to translate their orbit from equatorial to polar, and even then Nelson had been forced to enter Longshadow's atmosphere at a stiff banking angle, to maximize the effectiveness of their dwindling fuel reserves.
Little by little, the lander's velocity dropped, and with velocity its exterior temperature. Eventually the automatic shields withdrew from the exterior cameras, and the command stone flashed from gray to full exterior imaging. At last there were cheers.
They came down from over the north pole. To one side lay the sullen blackness of Longshadow's dark face, where oceans of ice lapped at rocks untouched by sunlight for hundreds of millions of years. To the other, glaring light glanced off tawny brown deserts, where the temperature hovered at over two hundred degrees Celsius.
Between fire and ice lay a thin band of green and blue, where rugged mountains cast immense, eternal shadows across scrub plains and narrow lakes. A green crosshair appeared at the lower edge of the scene on the command stone, where a curdle of low mountains and hills stood in stark relief in the grazing sunlight. Nelson read the latitude at the bottom edge of the stone. Thirty-six degrees fifty-one minutes north, on the terminator. That was where 1Earth's short-lived research station had been. Nelson didn't expect to find supplies, and was pessimistic about the operability of any remaining equipment. But there was pressure-tight habitat there—pressure tight back in 2127, at least—and the Ralpha Dogs were nothing if not good at fixing things.
Minutes crept past. The crosshairs rose on the stone.
1Earth leveled a landing strip, but did not pave it. It lay immediately to the east of the long lake.
Nelson nodded to acknowledge the small voice in his ears. He opened a magnification window on the command stone, scouring the indistinct scene for a hint of the strip that Sangruse 7 described. The lake was there: A tiny finger of blue midway between two low rilles. East of it and beyond there was only grass, and from this distance he could not tell how level it was.
No matter. They were coming in. Nelson brought up the landing gear icon and tapped it twice. He heard the wheel wells open with a satisfying hum, and felt the turbulence of the air striking the wells.
The gear, however, did not deploy.
"Nelson?" asked his copilot.
On the command stone red letters appeared:
GEAR DAMAGED. CANNOT DEPLOY.
"We're screwed, Robert," Nelson replied softly through grit teeth.
"Close the wells," Robert Yarinov said in a cold whisper. Nelson tapped the icon three times, felt the turbulence vanish as the wells closed. "You've got a lake. Use it."
"These landers weren't designed for water."
"They were
designed for wheels." Robert waggled a finger in an exaggerated flipping loop in the air, suggesting their path if they bellied in on the grass.
Nelson took a deep breath. "Guys, the gear's broke and we're coming in. It's going to be a water landing. It could be rough."
Nelson stabbed at the magnification window with his index finger and dragged the crosshair to the northernmost edge of the lake. He tapped it twice. The crosshairs turned green and locked.
In Longshadow's thin air their glide path was steep, and they were coming in terrifyingly fast. On the stone's main view what had been a tiny speck of blue elongated into a line, broadened into a discernable lake, and finally, amidst howls and whoops from the couches behind him, Nelson felt the lander tip back and touch its rear edge to the water.
All he could do was ride it out, as the lander struck the water, rebounded, and struck it again at a lower angle. Two more rebounds and the nose dropped. Nelson was ready to scream, certain they would flip or carom to one side of the lake or the other and demolish themselves on the land…
…but their attitude held, and in a few more seconds they were bobbing on the lake like a corked bottle, drifting slowly to one bank.
The Greased Pig paced the Hans Moravec in an orbit almost a thousand kilometers higher, and watched on magnification as the great starship was sliced to pieces, from within.
Sliced like a pepperoni in his uncle's deli, Peter thought. The first division, which split a thin slice from the flat face, took him by surprise. It had been done with smooth, almost mathematical precision. From that point on, Peter and his new alternate of the Sangruse Device watched in silence.
Silence. Odd for the Sangruse Device. But Jamie's alternate—Sahan-Grusa, Peter himself had named it—was reticent, with a voice slightly higher and somewhat softer than Peter's former alternate. When it spoke, Sahan-Grusa gave the impression that it had thought carefully about its meaning, and had chosen its words with some deliberation. Peter wondered about the difference. The Sangruse Device had certainly affected him in the five years it had lived in his veins. Had something of Jamie Eigen rubbed off on the Sangruse Device in the scant weeks it had spent within him?
The huge circular slice of asteroidal iron—rent with four large holes that had been the four giant holds—split into four equal quadrants, each of which then split into four narrow wedges, which in turn split into sixteen much smaller wedges. Sahan-Grusa zoomed the Greased Pig's imager onto one of the almost-invisible wedges, to see what was in fact an immense lifting body shape many times the size of the landers that 1Earth dropped on Hell.
That shape is meant for atmosphere.
Peter nodded. They zoomed out again, and watched hundreds of identical landers slowly disperse, moving away from the Hans Moravec in a vast coordinated motion like the unfolding of a flower's petals. When the landers were clear, a second slice parted from the starship, again as a slicing machine would pare a slice from a sausage. The second slice divided and divided again, until a second fleet of iron landers dispersed.
The sequence repeated. And repeated again.
An hour later, Sahan-Grusa moved the telescopic camera to a different view.
They're going in.
Long lines and V-formations of landers were striking the atmosphere over the dark hemisphere, glowing from frictional heating like sparks cast from a campfire. There were already tens of thousands, and the bulk of the Hans Moravec looked almost undiminished. "What do you think they're doing?"
One of two things: They're either looking for us, or they have some purpose we cannot understand.
"But we're up here! If they can see at all they can't miss us!" Peter knew the shuttle's Hilbert drive was at hair-trigger ready; if any scant fragment of the Hans Moravec began accelerating in their direction, they would be untraceably elsewhere in less than a heartbeat.
Perhaps they are trying to hide.
"Hide! From what?"
Unless you have feared what I fear, I'm not sure I could make you understand. But our task is plain.
Peter swallowed hard. They had watched the Ralpha Dogs' lander enter the atmosphere. "So you don't think they crashed?"
What I think is unimportant. What we do is all-important. They are human beings, friends, comrades.
Peter nodded. "Let's go get 'em."
Blank your mind! commanded the small voice in his ears.
Ping!
At the very edge of the atmosphere over the north pole, a dazzling star appeared and faded. Peter heard some ungraceful clanking from the cargo bay, as Sahan-Grusa pulled in the thin hoop of the Hilbert Drive and closed the bay door. Then atmosphere took hold of them, as the Greased Pig bored downward in a power dive.
Above and behind them, endless red-hot armadas of huge iron landers lit the sky over Longshadow's dark face as they descended.
"Somebody's in there." Nutmeg pointed at footprints in small drifts of blown dust. The prints were already mostly filled; they would be gone in an hour in that wind.
The five sicarii, all visor-down, looked up at the main lock of the abandoned research station. Whatever the station had once been, all that remained were three five-meter habitat cylinders half-buried in the dry soil, and a handful of small domed hexagonal instrument huts planted like mushrooms nearby. The paint had long been scoured from the east side of the cylinders and huts, against which blew the eternal wind from the cold face.
A young man loped to the lock door and twisted the handle, standing to one side. The handle moved easily, and the door swung inward. Nutmeg came up behind him, and peered around his body into the dark lock.
"The inner door's open too. No pressure." Gesturing for the man to follow her, Nutmeg slipped into the lock. She kicked back the inner door, waited for fire, then peered into the dark room with her helmet beam.
One man lay on his back on the floor. Another sat beside him on a chair. The man on the chair looked up, dazzled by Nutmeg's helmet beam.
"Marty passed out, and I can't hardly move." His voice was a hoarse near-whisper. Neither man was in a vacuum suit, and neither had any breathing assistance.
"You do move, and you're hamburger," Nutmeg said. "What are you doing in here?"
"The Missus sent us looking for food, air canisters, whatever. I hoped I could make the concentrators work again. But I don't have the energy to even find them."
Nutmeg glanced at one of her sicarii. "Jack, go see if you can get the concentrators running, like we talked about." A sicarius pushed past the two men into the dark interior of the habitat. Nutmeg looked back to the still-conscious IAR man. "Sophia Gorganis is here?"
The man shook his head. "She's back in the good lander, the one that kept pressure. Our lander broke open and foamed us, or we'd be pulp."
"What about Geyl?" Nutmeg asked.
"Geyl's with the Governor General. She's still in the suit, still out cold. The suit responds to commands encoded as complex organic molecules, kind of a stink-bomb secret code. Not even Geyl knew about it. When Geyl figured out the plan and went ballistic, the Missus pinched a capsule and turned loose the stink bomb. Geyl keeled, and nobody but the suit even smelled it. Problem is, the rest of the capsules got lost when you wrecked our ship."
A roar shook the habitat's walls. Something had flown low overhead, under power. "Stay here!" the small woman shouted, and ran back through the lock.
Nutmeg vaulted up to the dome ledge of one of the instrument huts, and watched the Greased Pig descending toward the far side of the lake. The shuttle's wheels were down, its three remaining zeros thundering in breather mode. The landing looked good…but then a small object riding an arc of fire lanced upward from beyond a rise, and the tip of the shuttle's far wing exploded in a tight fireball. Missile!
The opposite wingtip went down, struck the ground, and crumpled. The roof of the control cabin blew off, and Nutmeg watched the command couch rocket-eject on a line of yellow fire into the electric-blue sky.
The Greased Pig's nose went into the dirt, and the
shuttle flipped and spun, its wings breaking off entirely. Then there was a rapidly settling dust cloud, and a parawing coming down far too quickly into the cold waters of the lake.
"You scum," Nutmeg said, laughing and gripping Peter's still-dripping form in a quick, tight hug. "Filer convinced me you were dead!"
"So what does Filer know about dying?"
Filer grinned and shook his head, shrugging. He then pointed toward the sky. Rank upon rank of orange-yellow streaks were moving across the sky from west to east. "Any clues what those are?"
Peter undid the remaining straps and let the parawing harness fall to the grass. "The Sangruse Device is cutting up the Hans Moravec into landers. I watched from orbit before coming in."
|Should we tell them you're here too?| Peter asked his inner companion.
It's your decision. They must know that the Greased Pig folded, and Jamie made it clear that only I could operate the device.
|How long will it take you to build us a new shuttle?|
I won't know until it's finished. The design is underway. The chemical energy required, however, is considerable. If I have to metabolize carbon from the ecosphere, months. If we can salvage a shuttle-class zero-point power generator from the wreckage, perhaps three weeks. However, I am hesitant to call attention to my presence here.
|Hey, I know these people won't be happy to hear that Version 9 is still with us, but…|
I'm not talking about your comrades.
It took two days to goad Ozone Station's oxygen concentrators into operation, and strip the lander of useful supplies. The Ralpha Dog force worked with one eye on the ridge, from beyond which the missile had been fired. No further missile attacks occurred, but the deep blue sky above them glowed with the friction light of thousands of entering landers. Several had flown low enough overhead to discern their arrowhead shape, and echoes of impacts rumbled from the half-shadowed mountains to the east, along the terminator.
The Cunning Blood Page 42