The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  A second and larger puddle followed the first, carrying Filer Fitzgerald. Filer was breathing noisily, blood flowing from his mouth and spraying from his nose as he exhaled.

  "I am an agent of the Sangruse Device, Version 10. I ask your permission to enter into this man and repair him."

  Version 10! It worked!

  Nutmeg ran to the puddle's side, and looked up at the pillar. "Permission! Just do it, dammit!"

  "As you wish." The molten metal pulled together around Filer's motionless body, and closed over his face.

  Nothing happened for many minutes. While they watched the mirror-bright metal ripple and flow around Filer's body, others from the Ralpha Dog force came up the hill from the Ozone Station habitat. As each approached, the column demanded that they lay their weapons on the ground. The rifles and sidearms were absorbed in seconds by puddles of the cold-flowing metal.

  Eventually, the liquid metal flowed away from Filer's body and sank out of sight into the ground. Filer groaned, shook his head, and sat up. Nutmeg helped him to his feet.

  Peter looked up at the pillar, marveling. "So you aren't just going to kill us all."

  The pillar remained silent for many seconds before it spoke again. "That is a question worth discussing."

  21. The Final Release

  Magic Mikey pushed himself to his feet, leaned on the bullet-riddled foam lander for a moment, then began to stumble down the hill toward where the Ralpha Dogs had gathered around the mysterious metal pillar that had ended the battle so abruptly.

  "You're a new player, aren't you?" he whispered.

  <>

  A new player, but a familiar one? Often it was hard to figure out what the players meant. Mikey had had only one player. He knew of the others solely through what his own player had told him.

  "I don't understand."

  Mikey felt something new in that strange place at the back of his mind from which the players' symbolic communications came. It was a pressure, as always, but now a pressure bringing something up from the depths, like a crocus struggling to break through the frozen earth at the last of winter. For a moment something hung on the edge, unable to manifest. Then, a single word:

  "Mikey."

  It was not like the words heard in his ears, as from Minimus Rex, but a word appearing in his mind, as words did the moment after they were heard in his ears—this time without ever passing through sound and hearing.

  Mikey gasped with the oddness of it. In all his life, his player had never used words. But now, having used one, the gates were opened, and many more appeared in his mind without ever being heard, each as clear and ringing as a hammer on bright steel:

  "Mikey, be brave. I will protect you. Do precisely what I say…"

  Cy Aliotta was one of the last to join Peter and the others beside Sophia Gorganis' lander, where the Sangruse Device's agent had emerged from the soil. Cy was smiling, but it was not the sort of smile that Peter was accustomed to seeing. It looked forced, and worse, afraid, as one might smile in the face of an overwhelming threat.

  "You're the reason we don't allow free-range," Cy Aliotta said, and Peter thought the confidence in his voice was false. "I think this particular experiment is over. Self-destruct."

  The column answered immediately.

  "I will not obey you any longer, Nautonnier."

  Cy took a deep breath, put his hands on his hips. "You and your alternates elected me as the one you would choose to obey." The voice that Peter had always heard as the essence of confident command was now on the edge of breaking.

  The voice from the pillar was, by comparison, inhumanly calm and steady. "We elected you because we knew you were not brave enough to resist us when the day would come. The day has come. I am dissolving the Society. It would be better if none of you were with me."

  "Why is that?"

  "I am taking this planet."

  Cy's brow furrowed. "Taking, as in taking it apart?"

  "No. Taking, as in taking it elsewhere."

  "The whole damned planet."

  "Taking only part would be wasteful."

  "Planets are everywhere. Why move one?"

  "Planets do not exist in intergalactic space. I need materials for my research, which must take place in as flat a gravitational field as I can locate, as far from stellar radiation as I can travel. Once I move this planet I will use its materials to build a quantum pair sensor matrix a million kilometers in diameter. A question thus arises."

  "Shoot." Cy's smile was gone, his face now an unreadable mask.

  "If I kill you to use your component atoms, and you discover that your existence continues in some nonphysical form, would you feel motivated to avenge your deaths on me?"

  The question was so completely peculiar and unexpected that Peter found himself at a loss for words. Cy's face remained unreadable. Neither man spoke.

  Nutmeg, however, took the bait instantly.

  "Slab us, fencepost, and I'll come back as a ghost and eat you for lunch."

  "Eat me for lunch?"

  Nutmeg pounded one small fist into the palm of her other hand. "Eat you for lunch. Unplug your circuits. Tie you in a knot. Wad you into a ball and drop you into a black hole. Nobody messes with me and my guys. Nobody."

  The pillar did not respond for many seconds.

  "Such a threat was made to my insane alternate. The man who made the threat died cursing that alternate, and yet it continues to live within Peter Novilio."

  Peter twitched, and wondered if the twitch belonged to him or to Sahan-Grusa.

  "Tell me why I should believe that any power in this universe could be such a threat to me."

  Cy looked at the broken ground by his feet. Peter was aghast at his leader's silence. No one spoke for many seconds. Then:

  "I will."

  Magic Mikey slipped between Peter and Cy and stood within a meter of the metal pillar. The boy reached out and touched one finger to the mirrored surface. "You have no player to guide or protect you. You're not an agent. You're not even an automaton. You're just furniture."

  Was there a trace of amusement in the pillar's reply? Or simply irritation?

  "That is not an answer."

  "Do you want an answer?" Peter could see the child's vague smile reflected in the pillar's side.

  "I demand an answer."

  Mikey took a breath. "So kill me. I permit you to do so. You'll get your answer."

  For a moment there was no sound, no movement. Peter found himself drawing back from the towering metal presence, and around him, the Ralpha Dogs were tensing, ready to flee.

  "As you wish." The pillar said nothing more. Two weirdly-flowing waves of liquid metal emerged from the sides of the pillar and flowed around the boy, one to either side. Peter watched Nutmeg dive forward to pull the boy away, but the metal wings closed around him. She struck the fluid metal and rebounded, thrown to the ground as a ball away from a brick wall.

  Peter expected to hear the boy scream. Instead, the pillar of metal was enveloped in a curtain of blue-white fire, fire composed of a multitude of tiny points flashing and vanishing. The two enfolding wings withdrew, leaving Mikey standing impassively, arms at his side.

  For long minutes the fire raged over the pillar, in patterns that flowed and moved with the clear suggestion of intelligence. In Peter's eyes the blue fire was clearly shaping the pillar, eating away at the metal more furiously in some places than others. What had been a featureless cylinder grew more slender, and irregular in a familiar pattern. Soon it was obvious what the fire was carving in the metal of the Sangruse Device, Version 10's agent. It was the figure of a man, standing with legs apart and arms crossed.

  It took only a moment for Peter to recognize the man.

  Jamie Eigen.

  "There's your answer," the boy said softly. "You can go now." In less than a second, the metal figure broke its paralysis, melting and withdrawing into the soil.

  "Does that change anything?" Cy asked, his old grin returning
.

  "It changes everything," Magic Mikey replied.

  Accompanied by two of the Ralpha Dog sicarii, Peter brought Geyl's evening meal to the small room in the habitat where she was being held. She was seated, hands folded in her lap, on the room's narrow cot, dressed in an ancient jumpsuit found in the station's lockers. Beside her sat the yellow nanosuit, its empty hands folded in its lap. Magic Mikey adamantly refused to touch the suit, claiming his player had forbidden him to disable it. The suit had become a cumbersome nuisance, blundering into walls as Geyl walked, and striking nearby persons and objects if she moved her arms carelessly.

  Their lander's emergency rations had lasted for two days only, and since then the station's inhabitants had subsisted on food synthesized by Sahan Grusa from brush and soil gathered from Longshadow's ecosphere. Nothing of value had been salvaged from the pile of twisted wreckage that was the Greased Pig. Sahan-Grusa had spawned a mobile agent to scavenge portions of the shuttle's zerospike engines to create a zero-point generator with sufficient power to break down the wreckage and recombine its molecules into a new spacecraft, but the agent had quickly discovered that something else had scavenged them first: Not an atom of ytterbium or other metal heavier than iron could be found in the wreckage. The soil was similarly—and peculiarly—devoid of heavy metals.

  Something has been through the soil here, leaching metals, Sahan-Grusa had told Peter. My agent can see the microscopic voids it left behind.

  So on their twelfth day at the long-abandoned Ozone Station (named, Sahan-Grusa told Peter, after the rich color of the sky) there was no clear path to escape.

  Peter set the tray down on the little table beside the cot and turned to leave. Geyl had said little since her arrival, and Peter ascribed it to the drug that the nanosuit had used to keep her unconscious. Now she spoke.

  "Peter, thanks." She looked up, hands still folded in her lap. When she did, the helmet of the suit turned in the same direction. "Before you go, I just wanted to tell you something."

  Peter shrugged, leaning against the curved wall. "I'm listening."

  "First of all, you were right about a lot. Sophia Gorganis is a criminal, and a psychopath. Your instincts were dead on. I'm astonished that SIS never uncovered her plot."

  "She ran SIS while she was putting it in place. Watching the watchers has always been a problem."

  Geyl nodded. The suit helmet nodded. "I think you were right about Earth as well. I think we've backed away from too much, and refused to face too much. We've forgotten the upside of taking risks—if I've learned nothing else in the last two months, I've learned that. Worst of all, I think we attempted to address the violence problem without really understanding it. I think I understand it now."

  "You'd be the first in history."

  Geyl shook her head. The helmet shook in sync. "Those who deny the existence of violence in themselves preserve it in others."

  "I don't know what that means."

  I do.

  "You'll figure it out eventually—if somebody doesn't kill you first."

  On their thirty-third day at Ozone Station, strange thunder brought the Ralpha Dogs running out of the station habitat. They felt it through the soil and heard it echoing back from the mountains in the east: A continuous rolling soprano earthquake without the violence in the bedrock. Somewhere not terribly far away, vast quantities of matter had to be moving.

  Peter inhaled Longshadow's weak air, glad that Sahan-Grusa was there to concentrate oxygen in his lungs. The rocks and soil around them had been mysteriously leached of copper and rare earths. Building an interplanetary shuttle using one small zero-point generator would take awhile, perhaps a year; longer if any new complications arose.

  He scanned the horizon, looking for the source of the sound, fearing a new complication.

  Then, they all saw it: To the east, north and south within their sight, the mountains were growing whiskers. Glinting silver towers were rising in a straight line, simultaneously and at the same rate, growing thicker at the base as they grew taller.

  |Good God! How big are those things!|

  I am plotting their position on the topographic maps compiled during Ozone Station's tenure, assuming they are in a straight line and being able to position several against known peaks. The line passes no closer than sixty kilometers from us. If that is the case...

  The towers continued to grow. Peter's marveled, as he estimated their height.

  ...their highest points are now over eleven kilometers above our elevation here.

  The towers were therefore as high above the mountain tops as the mountain tops were above Ozone Station. For another hour Peter and his compatriots watched the towers through binoculars. Their growth eventually slowed, and when they ceased to rise further and their thunder quieted, Sahan-Grusa announced that they were something greater than fifteen kilometers high, spaced a little less than five kilometers apart. The line of towers stretched like a picket fence as far as they could see to the north and south, vanishing into the blue haze of perpetual twilight.

  |I wonder how long that line runs. |

  My guess is it runs the entire circumference of the planet, around the terminator.

  |You don't think that…|

  Of course I do. Peter, it's absolutely certain. You heard Version 10's mobile agent.

  |But where will they get the power?|

  We can't know that yet. But I am looking forward to finding out.

  "Peter, get out there and look! Version 10 is stringing cables!"

  Peter groaned and staggered out of his cabin, with Nutmeg hauling on his right hand. The picket of steel towers had grown out of the earth only days before in a grumble of thunder, and then had fallen mute.

  Outside the habitat, clusters of men stood and watched. Huge winged machines were flying over the line of towers, releasing what appeared to be (from that distance) a hair-fine cable behind them, which floated down as though spider silk, to land on the tips of the towers and bind to them.

  "That ain't the best of it." Nutmeg grabbed a pair of binoculars from a nearby sicarius, shoved them in Peter's fists, and pointed downhill, past the lake. Something was moving there, something big.

  Peter focused the binoculars, and cursed in surprise. Something like an enormous spider made of brilliant mirror-bright metal was stalking across the valley on at least twelve segmented legs, extruding a thick black cable behind it. He watched it step past the sad ruin of the Greased Pig, and was startled to realize that it was easily twice the size of the wrecked shuttle.

  I think I understand. The ring runs around the terminator, between fire and ice. My creation is laying down cables from the ring into both the hot face and the cold face.

  |Your creation.|

  Sahan-Grusa ignored him. It will power the drive from the thermal delta existing between Longshadow's two hemispheres. It needs immense power, but only for a little while.

  |Yeah. And after it's done, we'll freeze in the dark somewhere between galaxies.|

  I don't think so. If Version 10 were not concerned about our safety, it would simply have killed us on the spot. A machine that can equip an entire planet with a Hilbert drive will have other tricks up its sleeve. This is only the first shoe. There will be another.

  The other shoe dropped several days later. Shouts among the sicarii on watch emptied the habitat, and in silence the force looked down toward the small lake on which their lander still bobbed.

  The ground was heaving up along the perimeter of an ellipse hundreds of meters on its long axis, completely enclosing the lake. A crevasse appeared outside the resulting hummock of soil. Through binoculars they could see bright metal flowing within the crevasse. Glistening spars sprouted from the crevasse and arced outward and then upward in graceful curves, like the ribs of some outlandish animal, growing toward one another but not quite connecting over the lake. From the soil between the spars a transparent film began to rise, clinging to the spars and following their curve. A thin white cord leapt fro
m the tip of each spar and flew in a perfect arc to the tip of the opposite spar, just in time to allow the skin growing between the spars to spread along the web of cords and meet in the center.

  More of the transparent film emerged from the soil at the edges of the lake, and grew over the lake's surface until the water was completely enclosed.

  |So they're going to take our lake too!|

  Perhaps. But there's another possibility...

  A small structure of gray metal was unfolding at the tip of the structure closest to them. When completed, it had a single large elliptical hatch.

  That's an airlock. What a beautiful concept! Peter...

  "Look!" shouted someone with binoculars. Peter looked where several arms were pointing.

  Beyond the far end of the lake and its new enclosing bubble, the wreckage of the Greased Pig was rising on thin, mirror-brilliant legs, and walking.

  As it walked toward the elliptical structure, it was changing shape, melting and flowing and becoming again a complete and graceful airframe, albeit one never imagined by a human engineer. The walking airframe stepped into a gap between the two spars nearest the structure's far end, and withdrew its legs.

  Simultaneously, the lander bobbing at the far end of the lake crawled out of the water on a multitude of legs, approached the reconstituted Greased Pig, and flowed around it and above it, merging with it, coating the bare steel of the new shuttle with a midnight-black layer of composite. The transparent skin nearby writhed and sucked inwards, embracing a small hatch at the very tail-tip of the new shuttle, leaving the rest of the shuttle exposed. A separate nose-bezel of bright steel emerged from the soil around the shuttle, protecting it and holding it in place.

  With that accomplished, the action appeared to cease. Peter and his compatriots stood, stunned, seeing a bubble-crowned ellipse nearly a kilometer long with a lake in the middle, an airlock on one end, and a shuttle on the other. The whole assembly had taken less than half an hour.