Meloku no longer felt good about Osia taking control, about anything.
She did not have a chance to say so before the engines thundered, her couch slammed into her back, and everything weighed ten times as much as it should.
A signal crossed the shuttle. It was tight-beam, subdued, and just powerful enough to cut through the engines’ haze of interference. Meloku figured it was narrow-beam because her demiorganics picked up a much stronger signal than the receivers in the shuttle’s nose.
Not that she knew what that distance was. Her demiorganics could only determine a direction. It had not come from any of the satellites. Nor a ground source. The shuttle’s sensors showed nothing in that direction.
The signal was text only: “Rotate your shuttle one hundred seventy-five degrees negative yaw, three degrees positive pitch. As soon as possible, please.” Those directions would have the shuttle opposite its current orientation.
Meloku racked her mind, trying to think of where the signal might have come from. When Ways and Means had first visited this plane, it had gated a chain of stealthed observation satellites into orbit. Their arrival had caused a stir among the anthropologists she’d been embedded with. Those satellites had gone forgotten, derelict, superseded by the network of larger, more feature-complete communications satellites it had planted after its exile.
Not so derelict after all. The shuttle’s NAI didn’t even put them on its sensor displays. It classified them as space junk, beneath human attention. The signal had come from one of them.
They must have been the source of the eruptions in the sky. A check against the shuttle’s records confirmed it. The intruder was targeting the old satellites, destroying any above its horizon.
The second signal, when it arrived, allowed her to triangulate to confirm its origin. “We’re standing by to calculate a deceleration curve,” it said. After some time, a third added, pointedly: “As soon you’re oriented.”
The message must have come from Ways and Means. Their Ways and Means, not the intruder. She could hear the cadence of its voice even in text.
The shuttle had reached the Pacific now. The intruder had crossed over western Europe, trailing beam fire behind it. Meloku transmitted to Osia: “It wants us to decelerate?”
The intruder would catch them in an hour. Turning around, burning engines toward it would reduce that to minutes. With a spark of horror, she wondered if the intruder really was, somehow, Ways and Means. But it had no need to trick them into decelerating. Its combat drones were closing regardless.
Daylight glimmered light blue on the eastern horizon. Sunrise, already approaching. Except it wasn’t the right time of day. They should have been in night for a while yet. There was something else going on here. Something she wasn’t seeing.
Osia craned her neck. Her eyes, the most human part of her, shone under the cabin lights.
From that look alone, Meloku knew that any argument was already lost. Osia was going to do everything Ways and Means asked. It might have been another hallucination, but that instant the air between them split as cleanly as shattered glass. This was why she could never become a crewmember like Osia. Osia could not help but trust Ways and Means.
Meloku was not capable of it.
Two stars rose above the western horizon. Combat drones. They were much smaller than the shuttle, but their engines burned brightly.
Osia did not even give a warning to brace. She did not need to. Meloku clenched her seat webbing. Thrusters boomed along the shuttle’s starboard hull, slamming her sideways. The pain of a torn muscle seared up her thigh, hot as lightning, too fast for her demiorganics to stifle it. She was slammed again into her seat harness, and then to her side. Osia was juking, billowing hot thruster gas around the shuttle. She meant to confuse the drones’ targeting.
Darkness flickered across the monitors, pulsing in and out. Field projections. The shuttle had no defensive fields, but the fields it used to stifle atmospheric buffering could also scatter the shuttle’s engine exhaust and thruster gasses. They could obscure the exhaust plume’s origin, and make the shuttle that much harder to target.
A pillar of heat and light strobed through the exhaust cloud. Then another. The combat drones were firing. The beams missed the shuttle but raked the atmosphere, their trails lightning bolts of energized ions.
The nearest of the beams had passed only fifty meters away from the shuttle’s port wings. Meloku wanted to shout at Osia, scream that decelerating was just going to bring the drones closer. There didn’t seem to be a point.
Whether the shuttle went faster or slower, the drones were going to catch up. They could accelerate at a pace that would have killed Fiametta, Meloku, even Osia. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to land. They were going to die. Decelerating like this just meant that it would happen faster.
She had to at least know. When she found the presence of mind, she transmitted, “What is it?”
Osia said, “It must be one of Ways and Means’ backups.”
Meloku stared, drawing a blank for too long before the bolt of memory struck. Ways and Means had made backup copies of its mind, its memories. It had seeded them throughout the multiverse. She had the clearance to know about the program, if not the specifics. It had left them buried under icy rogue planetoids, or lost in stellar nursery dust clouds. A safeguard against accident and treachery. A guarantee of immortality.
That had all ended thirty years ago. The terms of Ways and Means’ exile had barred it from transplanar travel. Meloku said, “The backups should be dormant. They’re memories in jars. Even if one of them woke, it wouldn’t be able to build a planarship like that, not in just thirty years of scraping together infrastructure.”
“I know,” Osia said. “Someone must have built that ship for it.”
“Someone? Like who?” The planarships had been the crown jewels of the Unity, as powerful as they were expensive. “Who would have the resources?”
Meloku had been fixated on the satellites’ sensors for so long that she had lost track of the shuttle’s. When she turned her attention back to them, breath froze in her throat.
The sky to the east was luminous. The horizon looked aglow, as with sunrise. For an instant, Meloku thought she had fainted, lost time.
Meloku transmitted, “This can’t be getting worse.”
But the shuttle was where it should have been, crossing into the Pacific. Sunrise, real sunrise, should have been a long way away.
The satellites still saw nothing. The image only appeared on the shuttle’s cameras and sensors.
Osia said, “The intruder, whatever it is, thought it could use the satellites as a blind to trick us. Ways and Means figured that out a while ago. It tried to tell me.”
The arc of the Earth’s atmosphere hazed red and golden, and then white. It reflected off clouds and sky. The colors all matched spectra of antimatter engine exhaust.
Osia said, “But the truth is always more complicated than it will admit.”
It was an immense amount of engine exhaust. The engine plume blinded most of the shuttle’s sensors, but there was no hiding the bulk of the object behind it – or the shape of it.
Ways and Means crested the horizon, riding a blaze of light and searing radiation.
It was their Ways and Means. Its ten rectangular hull segments were half hidden under the sheet of engine exhaust, but visible. It should have been hours away.
It was decelerating hard. The shuttle’s NAI corrected its sensor maps, drew new flight paths. The deceleration curve they’d been given put the shuttle on a straight course to rendezvous with it.
The satellites still claimed to see nothing.
Osia said, “Ways and Means knew its satellites were compromised. It didn’t try to fight back. It let its enemy think it had won, and could use our satellites to blind us.” As much as Osia was trying to hide it, Meloku heard the excitement in her voice. Ways and Means could have retaken control of the satellite
s at any time. “It was a double-blind.”
Ways and Means had always stood just behind the stage, in the backdrop. It had waited until just now to pull the curtain back.
The satellites had lied to Meloku and Osia, lied to everybody, about where Ways and Means was. Ever since it had launched its shuttle, Ways and Means had been accelerating hard, dangerously hard, just behind. It had gone nearly as fast as the shuttle. Fast enough that all of its crew would have had to retreat to acceleration shelters.
The combat drones saw Ways and Means too late. They arced, maneuvering hard. Their exhaust flickered. They were trying to disguise their trajectory as Osia had.
They never had a chance. Ways and Means fired a full cannon barrage. Dozens of beam trails lanced through the drones’ wakes, seeking the combat drones. It was only a matter of time before lucky strikes intersected them.
Two sharp flashes marked their antimatter stores detonating.
Meloku gaped. An instant later, she regretted it. Her molars cracked on each other. A sharp pain split her mouth. Meloku tasted blood before she realized she had bitten her tongue. Osia swung the shuttle around, course-correcting from her juking.
She’d thought the satellites had been on the intruder’s side. So had the intruder. Ways and Means had let the intruder trust the satellites, and then, at just this moment – for her and Osia – had yanked that control away.
The intruder did not take long to figure it out. One of her sensor feeds vanished. From another vantage, she watched the satellite the feed had come from turn into a cloud of luminous vapor. Then her view pulled back again as that satellite, too, died.
Flashes of plasma studded the sky. The intruder was quickly, efficiently wiping out all the satellites in its reach.
Ways and Means was haloed by a cloud of exhaust bright as a star: a dark splotch of adjoining hull segments, silhouetted against the moonlit atmosphere. It must have been racing this way for hours. It must have burned through nearly all of its reserved antimatter by now. Its crew would have been strained close to breaking by the g-forces.
All for her, Osia, and Fiametta. Meloku took the risk of craning her neck, glanced to Fiametta. Most likely, just for Fiametta.
It didn’t make sense. Unless there was something they’d missed, locked up in that woman’s head. She looked back to Osia. Maybe she’d missed her guess, though. Maybe Osia and Ways and Means did have a special relationship. If Osia knew, she wasn’t talking.
Both Ways and Means and the shuttle were decelerating toward each other, hard as they could. It wasn’t enough. They were still going too fast. At this pace, the shuttle would still be moving at hundreds of kilometers per hour relative to the planarship when their paths crossed. That was a close match by the standards of orbital velocities, but not close enough for boarding. They would have to swing around and come back. More time in which they would be vulnerable.
They didn’t have it. The intruder had not slowed its pursuit. In fact, it had accelerated. It would rise over their horizon soon. It would not matter, then, that Ways and Means had come. If the intruder wanted to kill them, they would die. Juking and engine exhaust would not save them from a planarship’s cannon barrage.
Osia aligned their trajectory dead-on to Ways and Means’ underside. She did not intend to swing by for another pass.
Osia pushed their engines harder. Something in Meloku’s chest popped. A rib, her demiorganics confirmed.
Blackness swam around the edges of Meloku’s vision. She shut her eyes.
Later, she didn’t know if she’d opened her eyes, or if the g-forces had just pried them open. Consciousness had gone diffuse. Ways and Means seemed like it had only just crested the horizon, but now it was closer.
The sky was a swirl of white. Far below, between spackled clouds, the ocean reflected the planarship’s towering engine plume.
Ways and Means was fifty kilometers away. Forty. Osia had aligned the shuttle directly on one of the carbuncular hangars on the planarship’s underside. Still going too fast. At this pace, the shuttle would spear right through the ship.
Meloku ran through all of the solutions she could think of. A field couldn’t cushion their landing, not at this speed. The shuttle would slice right through it. Unless Ways and Means had far more warning than Meloku supposed, it wouldn’t have the time to fill the hangar complex with shock gel.
Ways and Means ceased its engine burn, briefly. It made a gap in its exhaust plume big enough for the shuttle to fall through. The shuttle would have melted if it hadn’t.
In a lash of light, the shuttle fell through the exhaust plume. The brilliant, billowing light pulled back. All at once Ways and Means was in front of the camera monitors: dark and gleaming, glaring. It was a shadow, a sharpness framed in its own white-hot exhaust. The razor edges of its hull glowed. All of its aft and port thrusters were firing.
Osia had not stopped the shuttle’s engines. The shuttle’s exhaust licked against the planarship. Where the plume touched Ways and Means, its hull turned scarlet.
Each hull segment was kilometers long, but they had passed the first before Meloku realized it was there. Up ahead, on an ever-increasing number of the cameras, she could already see the lumpen silhouette of the hangar complex.
Meloku timed its approach by her ragged breaths. One breath. Two breaths. Three. Ways and Means’ hull arced around the cameras. Before she could gasp, they had plunged in.
Osia finally cut the engines.
Warm light wrapped around them. The hangar’s interior was a smoothly shaded orange dome, decor from a decade Meloku had long forgotten. Far ahead, and below, a disc-shaped landing platform and a cluster of attendant buildings stood waiting.
The far wall rose ahead, racing closer. The side of the complex had been built to withstand survive high-velocity collisions. It had not been made to preserve the craft that caused them.
In the too-long moment Meloku had left, she guessed Osia’s intentions. Osia wasn’t invulnerable, but she could walk away from a crash that would kill Meloku and Fiametta. Even if her body was destroyed, her brain might survive.
Something blurred across the forward monitors.
Meloku slammed into her seat harness. Pain ripped through her chest, overwhelming her demiorganics’ ability to numb it. The shuttle’s prow tilted toward the shining, silver landing pad.
Osia fired the thrusters hard, barely correcting in time to avoid diving into it.
Another blur, another hard jolt. Something physical had struck the shuttle. On a monitor showing the shuttle’s aft, the hull around the engine housing had crumpled. Part of the shuttle’s substructure had bent.
When she’d made her mental list all of the technological answers to the crash, Meloku hadn’t thought of simpler solutions. Netting.
Ways and Means had thrown carbonfiber webbing across the interior of its hangar. Each strand was stronger than the shuttle’s hull. No doubt Ways and Means controlled the releases, would loose them the instant the shuttle had absorbed as much kinetic energy as its frame and its passengers could bear.
Netting. In the instant Meloku had to consider it, this seemed almost as bad an idea as just crashing.
On the next impact, one of the shuttle’s rear fins stove almost in half. This time, Osia really did lose control. The shuttle twisted, hard. The next impacts knocked them in opposite directions.
Meloku managed to close her eyes before things would have gone black on their own.
31
Even Osia lost consciousness during the crash.
The last thing she felt was the clack of the shuttle’s boarding ramp unlocking, and before the battered remnant of the shuttle even struck the landing platform. That was Ways and Means – always thinking ahead.
Her body shut down her nervous system to keep it from being disrupted by the shock.
When she came back – seconds later, according to her internal clock – the shuttle had collapsed around her. The cabin�
�s ceiling had bowed inward. One of the light strips had bent and broken. All of the monitor projections had vanished. The shuttle’s NAI didn’t answer her.
The shuttle had stopped moving. She was in freefall. Ways and Means had stopped accelerating. Diagnostics reported a great deal of shock and stress, but no permanent damage.
Had this been any other shuttle, it would have been smashed to titanium splinters. The high-speed shuttle had saved them. Its composite hull had been built with shock and high acceleration in mind. It wasn’t brittle, and had stretched before it broke.
Somewhere behind her, a hiss of air was dwindling to nothing. Sensors in her ears, behind her eyes, and every other pocket of air in her body reported a steep drop in cabin pressure.
She grabbed her seat harness, ripped it loose.
Meloku and Fiametta were both unconscious. Their harnesses had left deep, red abrasions. Their breathing was labored, pained. But they were alive. They had suffered no injury that Ways and Means could not heal.
The hiss of air died away. Internal and external pressure equalized. Ways and Means had projected containing fields over the shuttle’s crash site, and filled them with air. Osia did not need to guess that this was what had happened. She knew.
Data sluiced through her. At first, it was a trickle. Now it flooded corners of her mind that she had not realized had gone dry.
Ways and Means had asked her to open her demiorganics to it. She, reflexively, had accepted. She had not even been conscious of doing it. After thirty years away, her systems were lacing with Ways and Means’.
Had she breath, she would have gasped.
Though her demiorganic mind afforded her perfect memory, lacing her mind with its senses was the nearest thing to remembering something forgotten. Memory was tied indelibly with senses – with smell, with sight and sound. Ways and Means had a thousand senses she didn’t.
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