A new rumble shook the ground, this time very near them. A few meters away, the soil heaved up, and a faceted ovoid of mirror-bright metal broke through the grass. It unfolded upward, fractally smoothing itself into a human figure, three meters tall.
Great blank eyes in a serene face looked down at them. "It is time that you left here. I have prepared a means to accomplish this.”
In less than an hour, the entire group stood within the elliptical structure, near one edge between the spars. All their weapons, including knives, had been confiscated and absorbed by Version 10. A defiant Sophia Gorganis stood between two Ralpha Dog sicarii with cudgels. Geyl and the empty nanosuit stood like twins some distance away. Close by the transparent film wall Version 10 had shaped thirty-four reclining cots in the soil, each with a foam lining and web.
|10 seems to want us to get a good view,| Peter observed. |Kind of a showoff, huh?|
Hardly. We all could have fit in the new shuttle. This is a show of force. 10 is making very sure that we know what we're up against, in case we cross its path again.
The metal titan stood in their midst. "You will need to web in shortly. The ascent will be slow and the acceleration will not be great, as we have abundant reaction mass in the lake. This device will reshape itself as it travels. Do not mistake such reshaping for failure. The device will not fail."
"Are you coming with us?" Cy Aliotta asked. "I'd like to learn more about the Sangruse Device, Version 10."
The titan's head turned toward Cy. "I am allowing Version 9.5 to remain among you. That will have to suffice." With that, the tall figure melted like quicksilver into the soil.
|9.5!|
Someone else's opinion...
Peter began to object, but a strong vibration beneath their feet reminded them of Version 10's warning. Each present reclined in one of the cots. Peter watched with some amusement as the empty nanosuit took its place in the cot beside Geyl, and drew the web over itself as Geyl did.
From beneath them welled a tremendous throbbing roar. Clouds of white steam billowed and writhed outside the bubble. Peter felt the forward end of the strange craft tip upward by forty degrees. The lake, imprisoned within an enclosure of the transparent film, surged backward but did no more than raise a gentle curve in the film at the rear shore. The sound and vibration redoubled, and the kilometer-long spacecraft lifted away from the ground, shrouded in a cloud of steam and dust.
As they rose and gained velocity, the cloud of dust from the soil cleared, and stronger sunlight dazzled off the transparent film enclosing them. The craft began a translation from upward to forward motion, and banked from a northern course along Longshadow's terminator toward the east and the planet's dark face. Peter briefly glimpsed the habitat cylinders of Ozone Station before all details on the ground vanished behind their expanding contrail.
Abruptly, the entire structure began changing shape. The spars that shaped the huge craft like ribs bowed outward, pulling the enclosing film downward toward the horizontal. The huge structure was flattening out, morphing from a fairly regular ellipsoid to something like a flattened disk, tapering toward the forward end. After less than a minute the spars were emerging almost horizontally from the steel hull that enclosed the lake and the soil on which they lay. The transparent film bubble had stretched enormously, now reaching out twenty meters or more from the soil's edge before curving upward with the spars.
The bubble now presents a lifting profile to the atmosphere, allowing us to rise aerodynamically with less acceleration. Very nice.
Peter nodded, speechless. He unsnapped the cot's web from his body and rose to his feet, now feeling something less than one and one half Gs pulling him downward and aft. One by one the others followed suit, as the craft's trajectory stabilized and grew less like a rocket's path than that of a large aircraft. The contrail thinned. The vibration of the initial rocket-assisted lift dampened to the howl of air concentrated, heated, and expelled as exhaust.
|Zerospike ramjets! 10 thought of everything!|
That's the whole point. Would you challenge something that could build a craft like this in less than an hour?
They broke through a layer of clouds and saw the peaks of distant dark-face mountains shining snow-capped in the orange light of the perpetual terminator. Turning aft, they could see the narrow green region between the sunlit desert face and the endless night toward which the craft was now traveling, at an acceleration so mild it no longer impeded walking. Peter moved to the very edge of the soil ellipse for a better view, peering outward and downward through the lifting-body wings formed by the metal spars and the transparent film.
Strange company approaches.
Peter turned away from the vistas below them, to see Sophia Gorganis walking toward him, followed by a sicarius guard with a club, and then the strange synchronized pair of Geyl and her nanosuit.
Peter stood well back from the Governor General. The roar of their takeoff had subsided considerably, and Sophia's voice had the booming quality to cut through it.
"Hey, Peter, bash in the back of my skull if you want, but with power like this behind you, you could still take the Earth."
Peter shook his head, trying to suppress a grin. The mountains were now an indistinct smear far below. The craft was passing into Longshadow's dark face, and the light was growing thin again. "The more I think about Earth, the less I think it's worth taking."
Geyl now stood on Peter's other side, looking impassively over the edge at the receding glare of Longshadow's sunlit western horizon. The suit stood behind her and to one side. Above them, bright stars could now be seen.
Peter heard Geyl speaking softly, but could not hear her against the roar of the engines beneath them. |What did she say?|
She said, My greatest flaw is that I don't understand treason.
Peter watched Geyl turn and walk away from the edge, her eyes on the ground, the nanosuit stumbling along beside her.
|And if you don't understand it, you won't see it, right?| Peter watched the great orange circle of Zeta Tucanae settle to the indistinct western horizon, distorting as it sank out of sight.
Neither can you change sides when the tide begins to turn against you.
|Is that a rebuke?|
Only if...Peter, turn around! I feel rapid footsteps!
Peter turned his body halfway to the right. Over his shoulder he saw Geyl sprinting toward the edge, arms together and forward, hands pressed against one another as though she were about to leap from a diving board. The suit ran beside her, its arms similarly raised.
|She's going suicidal on us!|
That seems unlike Geyl.
It appeared as though Geyl would leap over the edge meters to Peter's right, but in the last second she twisted on one heel toward the left and kicked hard, striking Peter and carrying them both over the soil edge and out between the spars.
Peter looked up as they fell, Geyl's arms around him, and saw the nanosuit, mimicking Geyl's motions, kick to the left and strike a body blow against the Governor General. Woman and nanosuit fell over the edge, Sophia beating on the yellow simulacrum with both fists.
Peter's back struck the thin transparent film that held their atmosphere. Most of Longshadow's envelope was now beneath them, and the film was drum-tight. Geyl's weight pressed the breath from him as the film stretched and rebounded. Geyl squirmed above him, slashing at the film savagely with her fingernails, obviously trying to tear it. Peter steadied himself against the film with one hand and struck Geyl hard against the side of her head with his other fist. Below him was blackness, and many kilometers below that, the frozen wasteland of Longshadow's dark face.
Less than two meters from him, Sophia Gorganis' bulk struck the film and rebounded once, twice, with the suit atop her, slashing at the film with its gloved fingertips. The force of Peter's blow threw Geyl away from him. She fell hard on her back, kicking against the film and flailing randomly with her arms.
On his other side, the nanosuit tumbled off
Sophia Gorganis onto its back, and struck the film with the backs of its gloves. Peter saw the glint of its claws touch the film.
The film parted neatly and bellied downward in a surge of escaping atmosphere. The suit rolled into the slit and vanished. Sophia Gorganis slid toward the slit, reached out with one hand toward Peter. Peter reached for her but felt himself jerked back, and his hand missed her hand by centimeters.
The Governor General of America rolled into the slit and fell, screaming curses. Peter saw her follow the suit into a brief moment of light from Zeta Tucanae, and then vanish into the impenetrable blackness of the dark face.
As quickly as the slit had opened, it healed. Peter felt Geyl's hands release his other arm. He stared at the blackness into which Sophia had vanished, and heard Geyl speak, close by his ear: "…but I understand why Dante put traitors in the centermost frozen circle of Hell."
Peter felt strong hands clamp down on one of his ankles, and he gripped Geyl's arm as Filer Fitzgerald pulled them to safety.
"You could have killed us both!" Peter yelled.
Geyl's smile betrayed considerable satisfaction. "I know. But it was worth the risk."
An hour later, in the soft light of many eggshell-colored luminous globes that had emerged like mushrooms from the soil, Version 10's protean spacecraft changed shape again. The spars flexed inward as they had originally grown, withdrawing the smooth winglike extensions that had assisted their climb out of Longshadow's atmosphere.
From their place at the edge of the much-diminished lake, Peter and his companions watched two new and much stouter spars emerge from opposite midpoints of the strange ship's hull and curve upward, meeting outside the transparent envelope. The new spars stretched outward, away from the hull, and became a ring, extending below the craft beyond where they could see.
Peter nodded, marveling. |A Hilbert drive too! Why am I not surprised? Though I find it a little odd that a thing that can throw together a spacecraft like this in half an hour can't somehow create a truly unpierceable film.|
The film is unpierceable. It warned me through your skin that it was about to fail, deliberately, beneath the Governor General. Version 10 waited until the suit's claws struck the plastic, so it would seem a natural failure. No one—not even Sophia herself—would assume foul play on 10's part.
|But Sophia's dead!|
Precisely. Therefore 10 had to be sure.
The random scattering of light globes on the ground changed color, going from soft white to a deep red.
"This must mean it's going to fold!" shouted Nelson Threader from some distance away. Always the pilot, Nelson was; and always the worrier.
Peter blanked his mind. The unseen engines beneath them fell silent, and acceleration ceased. By then Peter estimated that they were at least one hundred klicks above Longshadow's surface, and in the small planet's shadow. He felt himself drifting away from the ground, and reached down to grasp a handful of Longshadow's coarse grass, still growing in the soil within the bubble.
Ping!
Hell glittered like a brilliant blue lamp off to one side; Peter guessed it was still half a million kilometers away. He knew that they had seen the fold. A craft as large as this would appear brighter than the sun for some seconds, before the fold, even at that distance.
The bubble rotated so that the soil on which they stood was perpendicular to a constant-boost path toward Hell. Acceleration gently took hold of them, this time in silence. Zeta Tucanae was beneath the body of the craft and out of sight, and the stars shone brightly through the craft's transparent envelope. Peter traced the line from Hell down toward where the sun would be, and found the bright white star that was Longshadow.
"How long does it take to fold a whole planet?" Peter asked aloud.
Only seconds. Don't look right at it. For that time it will far outshine the star about which it revolves.
Peter nodded.
Abruptly, there was blazing, blue-white light. The bubble's film darkened and the stars vanished, but the dazzle that remained was still far more brilliant than the small F9 star to which Longshadow had long belonged. Peter's eyes watered, and he looked away, watching the crisp shadows it cast of thirty-one men and two women across scrubby grass and a mostly-empty lake.
It faded as quickly as it had appeared. The film returned to transparency and there were stars again. Longshadow was gone.
How odd, seeing such power weilded by a creature that would not have existed without me.
"Does that bother you?"
Not at all. It's gone looking for the Gaians. I'll stay here and watch.
"So you think that Mikey's players are the Gaians."
I will probably never know for sure. It is a reasonable hypothesis. And I am perfectly willing to let 10 take the risk of finding out.
Peter raised his hand to where Longshadow had glittered only seconds before. "Good luck, 10," he said aloud. "You'll need it."
Sahan-Grusa was silent for some seconds. Peter listened absently to the faint toll of bells echoing through his bloodstream, telltale of the creature's inscrutable thoughts. Then: Kick ass—just don't miss.
Peter chuckled. The others were drifting toward the bubble's forward extreme, where its shuttle's port beckoned. Acceleration had been building smoothly, and was already slightly over one G. The shuttle would separate from the bubble in only a few hours, and there was much to do.
"The ‘.5’ part of Version 9.5—that's everything you learned from Jamie and me, right?"
Don't flatter yourself.
"Jamie, then."
Silence.
Peter saw Nutmeg gesturing to him. He began walking toward the shuttle. "Well, I'll tell you what I think: Humanity is contagious, and you've got a pretty bad case. There's no cure, either."
More silence, with bells.
"It's ok. We'll try and find something to get your mind off it."
Talk about hell!
Peter looked to the zenith, where Hell's storm-streaked blue disk waited. "Works for me," he said, and was off at a trot to join the others for the short trip home.
—30—
About the Author
Jeff Duntemann has been published professionally since 1974, in both science fiction and technical nonfiction. His stories have appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, the Orbit and Nova anthology series, and several standalone print anthologies. Two of his short stories have appeared on the final Hugo ballot. His first hard SF novel, The Cunning Blood, appeared in hardcover in 2005. His fiction may be characterized as “Human Wave,” a term coined by Sarah Hoyt to indicate generally upbeat tales that place story ahead of message, and affirm rather than denigrate the human spirit.
On the nonfiction side, he has worked as a technical editor for Ziff-Davis Publishing and Borland International, launched and edited two print magazines for programmers, and has twenty technical books to his credit, including the bestselling Assembly Language Step By Step. He wrote the “Structured Programming” column in Dr. Dobb’s Journal for four years, and published dozens of technical articles in many magazines. With fellow writer Keith Weiskamp, Jeff launched The Coriolis Group in 1989, which went on to become Arizona’s largest book publisher by 1998.
After retiring from technical publishing in 2009, Jeff created Copperwood Press for new and reprint publications in several areas from history to SF and fantasy. Outside of writing and publishing, Jeff’s interests include programming, electronics, amateur radio (callsign K7JPD), astronomy, telescopes, history, psychology, and kites. Jeff lives in Colorado Springs with his wife Carol and four bichon frise dogs.
Read Jeff’s blog Contrapositive Diary: www.contrapositivediary.com
Follow Jeff on Twitter: @JeffDuntemann
…and Facebook: Jeff Duntemann
Also by Jeff Duntemann
In the Drumlins Saga:
Drumlin Circus
“Drumlin Boiler”
“Drumlin Wheel”
“Roddie”
On Gossamer Wings (by Jim Strickland)
Other SF and Fantasy:
The Cunning Blood
Cold Hands and Other Stories
“Whale Meat”
Souls in Silicon
Technical Books:
Assembly Language Step By Step (four editions)
Jeff Duntemann’s Wi-Fi Guide (two editions)
Degunking Windows (with Joli Ballew; two editions)
Degunking Your PC (with Joli Ballew)
Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses
The Delphi Programming Explorer (with Jim Mischel and Don Taylor; two editions)
Borland Pascal 7 From Square One
Turbo Pascal Solutions
Complete Turbo Pascal (three editions)
Nonfiction Web site:
Jeff Duntemann’s Junkbox (www.junkbox.com)
The Cunning Blood Page 45