She felt the damaged landing disc outside, the wavering of the fields keeping them in an atmosphere. She saw, through hundred-eyed cameras, the shorn and crumpled wreckage of the shuttle. A static thrum of radio chatter channeled through her: orders, reports, crew yelling at each other. She could not see the whole ship at once, did not have the mental bandwidth, but she only had to focus on a place and she could perceive it.
With new senses, new ways of thinking. She’d left a part of herself behind on this ship. She had not realized, in the moment of separation, how big those parts had been.
The past thirty years had been a dream, an implanted memory. Walls she hadn’t realized she’d built in her mind crashed open. In an instant, she was much closer to the person she used to be.
She did not have the time to dislike it.
She felt the footsteps of two crewmembers as they approached. Sona and Verse. Sona had a bipedal body like Osia’s. Osia knew Sona’s name, but had never worked with her. Verse, though, she knew too well. E had a spiderlike body, with eight multiply articulated insectoid legs. While all of Ways and Means’ crewmembers were trained and ready for combat, e had been designed for it.
Before Osia left, Ways and Means had told her that her safety was at risk. Verse’s name had been at the top of its list of names to watch.
For a moment, Osia wondered if it was a coincidence that e had come. It had to have been, unless been Ways and Means had been more prescient about where she would land than seemed possible. She had chosen this hangar, not it. But Ways and Means had tricks she would never understand.
She felt Verse’s feet grip the surface outside as keenly as she would have felt her own. Verse and Sona scrambled up the boarding ramp. If Ways and Means hadn’t unlocked it before the shuttle lost its NAI, they would have lost precious time battering it open.
Verse and Sona rapped at the cabin door. The hatch was jammed. It had flexed inward and warped irrevocably during the crash. Osia braced herself against the edge of an empty acceleration couch.
She, Verse, and Sona worked as a team, battering the door from opposite sides, timing their blows to amplify each other’s. One side of the hatch popped lose. Sona peeled the hatch away like it was dead skin. She pushed it, spinning, into the next cabin.
The first person Sona looked at when she stepped through was Fiametta. Not Meloku, not Osia. Of course. Ways and Means could hide its priorities well enough, but its crew was less subtle. These two had been given orders to take care of Fiametta first.
She had to be why Ways and Means had sent them its precious shuttle, and ended the charade that it wasn’t in control of the satellites. It had given up a lot of tools and advantages. It must have been expecting something great in return.
“Acceleration warning,” Sona transmitted, as if Osia hadn’t received the same alarm herself. “Two hundred seventy seconds. Ways and Means is going to burn engines whether you’re ready or not.”
Osia ignored the condescension. She had not been back for ten minutes, and already she remembered how little she’d loved the politics.
Well, she was thirty years out of practice, but she hadn’t lost the art. She nodded behind her. Meloku and Fiametta were coming around, but they wouldn’t be able to move themselves. “I’ve been injured,” she said, pointing to her back. “Controlling the lower half of my body via radio. I’ll knock them around if I’m carrying them. You two grab them.”
She shouldered past them. Leaving them behind.
With them slowed by Meloku and Fiametta, she was free to race ahead, get rid of them. Find somewhere quiet to hunker.
She had only gotten as far as the boarding ramp before she realized Verse was following. Er spiderlike legs gripped the ramp’s sides, wrapped around it. The ramp shook with er imparted momentum.
Outside, the gradient of the hangar complex’s arching orange ceiling was so subtle that it looked like a sky rather than hull. A field shimmered around the landing pad, keeping their air in.
Ways and Means didn’t have artificial gravity, not like some of the other planarships, but it did have travel aids. The pad’s silver surface gripped Osia’s feet. The decks and bulkheads had a grip. Fields grabbed her heels and toes and kept her from vaulting away.
Lift terminals clustered on the pad ahead. Osia remembered her old gait without trying, lifting one leg at a time, and pushing just hard enough to slip loose from the field. Verse, with er multiple legs, could be even faster. But e kept pace.
Osia told er, “You should be helping Sona.”
“You don’t think Sona can handle them?”
Of course she did. “I can handle myself too.”
“I never said you couldn’t.”
Verse was baiting her. Trying to force her to clarify her point again and again, until Osia straight-out said that she didn’t believe Ways and Means had confidence in her. That she thought it had sent Verse here to watch her.
Osia could have dropped all pretenses, pointed that out, but that would only be further engaging with this idiocy.
She missed her boat. She would take a thousand years with Ira before more of this.
She stepped to the blank surface of the lift terminal. The wall parted for her and Verse as though it wasn’t there. All illusions. There was no lift platform waiting. Just a gray, empty shaft. It was lined with light strips, falling away to an infinite vanishing point.
The lifts did not operate in emergencies. The nearest would have taken too long to reach them. Faster to just run.
She and Verse plunged over the edge. For a second, Osia floated free. Then the gripping fields caught Osia’s feet again, pulled her around. She righted herself. From this perspective, the shaft looked less like a drop, and more like an infinite passage.
In the old days, Osia could have traveled in a blink. In another era, Ways and Means’ interior had been studded with gateways, miniature transplanar rifts. The crew had used them to travel from one hull segment to the next. An enormous and wasteful expenditure of energy which Ways and Means had undertaken because it could. The gateways had impressed its guests, certainly, but they’d been made to impress the crew. Make them feel wealthy and important.
Exile had changed that. Ways and Means had shut off those gateways. It could not maintain them.
Now there was only one acceleration shelter in reach. It was not the one she would have chosen. It was an observation lounge flush against the planarship’s exterior hull. With a big, wide transparent dome overlooking the stars.
The dome wasn’t a projection, wasn’t an image. It was a real window. A big one, and one of the few aboard ship. It was for those diplomatic guests who would not have been satisfied with a machine interpreting the view for them.
It was the last place Osia wanted to be during battle. They might as well have been strapped to the hull.
No choice.
She and Verse fell through the next hatch, into a broad and stark-white passageway. Osia broadened her senses, expanding them over the path ahead. A hiss of air raced ahead of them, filling each passageway before they arrived.
Ways and Means filled even empty cabins and corridors with a thin nitrogen atmosphere. It protected against vacuum erosion. Oxygen wasn’t included, though. It would have been foolish to fill a closed environment with a corrosive, combustion-fueling substance. Ways and Means was pumping it ahead of them, getting the space ready to accommodate Meloku and Fiametta. They, and the monk Niccoluccio Caracciola, were the only people aboard who needed oxygen.
The monk was somewhere here. Assuming he’d survived the acceleration. She reached back with the senses Ways and Means granted her. Yes. He’d survived.
Whatever surviving meant for him these days.
More sensor images streamed into her. Assuming Ways and Means and the intruder were done playing games with the satellites and that these images were accurate, the intruder had poured on even more thrust. It must not have had any crew at all. It was not yet ove
r their horizon, but it was close. Ways and Means had revised its initial acceleration warning, shaved thirty seconds. One hundred and twenty seconds left to get down and ready.
At no point had Ways and Means attempted to contact the intruder, or it them. Osia didn’t think it would hide that from her. They must have already known what each of them wanted, and that negotiations would be fruitless.
This could not have been the first time they’d had contact with each other.
She asked Ways and Means, “Is it you?”
“It is what it says it is,” it answered.
“You owe me more of an explanation.”
Verse surprised Osia by adding, “You owe all of us more.” So its crew, or at least er, wasn’t in on this.
Ways and Means said, “It is us as we could have been.”
That didn’t answer Osia’s question, but it got her part of the way there. Maybe that was the best she could ask at the moment.
The passageway emptied into another open lift shaft. She and Verse leapt across. She felt Sona not far behind them, carrying Fiametta and Meloku. Sona had tranquilized both of them.
The lift shaft irised directly open into the observation lounge. It was a half dome, thirty meters across, and dimly lit so that the few light strips didn’t drown out the view. A crystal sheaf of stars glimmered beyond the viewing pane.
The dome faced Ways and Means’ prow. The acceleration couches folded straight out of the deck. Reclining, passengers had to look straight up. The angle not only allowed them a view of space, stars, and worlds, but also forced them to see the planarship’s vast bulk.
Ways and Means had once hosted the most important people in the Unity. It had never missed an opportunity to remind them, subtly or otherwise, of its wealth and power.
Ways and Means’ interior was modular, infinitely reconfigurable, sliding about on tracks – except for spaces protruding from the hull like this one. This lounge couldn’t have been anywhere except where it was. So it had gone unused for decades. The air was freezing. It had just been pumped in after thirty years of exposure. The bulkhead heating vents rattled.
Osia ran her hand along the nearest couch. Ways and Means had not bothered to fill this part of itself with nitrogen. Years of vacuum erosion had taken their due. The fabric was ratty. A flaking, translucent layer peeled off in her hand, like dead skin.
With just her old senses, it would have been tempting to think of Ways and Means as abandoned. A wreck. She’d seen only Sona and Verse since she’d come aboard. Their footsteps echoed down empty passageways. Her datastream with Ways and Means allowed her to feel the thousands of other people aboard. They were folded into their acceleration couches, in shelters buried deep in the interior. Not safe – nobody aboard was safe – but secure.
A lot more secure than she was. Out here, hull breaches and radiation would fry her faster than them. Ways and Means shaved more time off its estimate. “Fifty seconds.”
The horizon had once again started to become luminous. The fringes of the intruder’s exhaust plume were rising.
Osia had cleared three acceleration couches of their dead-skin wrapping by the time Sona arrived. She carried Fiametta and Meloku each under an arm. Her face could not carry much of an expression, but she still glared.
Osia helped her place them, quickly strapped them in. “You didn’t need to tranquilize them.”
“We don’t have the time to deal with them,” Sona said. “Watching this won’t benefit them.”
Osia asked, “Will it benefit you?”
“Benefit me to tranquilize them?”
“To watch.” Osia clarified. “But you’re not going to tranquilize yourself, are you?”
Osia didn’t have the time for this, but she took it anyway. There was a medical kit stowed behind one of the bulkheads. She retrieved it. She just had time to set its drug dispersal kit to counteract the tranquilizer. One touch to Meloku’s neck. She left Fiametta alone.
Fiametta was a risk. An unknown. But Meloku was one of them. Annoying as she was, she deserved to know.
Neither Sona nor Verse interrupted. They were both busy strapping themselves to their acceleration couches. A flicker of narrow-band conversation pulsed between Sona and Verse. Osia caught a few radio snippets. Talking about her, of course.
She’d changed. They were starting to realize it.
Maybe she wasn’t the only one. Verse ended the conversation quickly. E told Osia, narrow-band, “We knew something was going to happen.” We meaning the crew. “But we didn’t know it was going to be anything like this. We would have tried to pull you out if we did.”
The fact that Verse felt she needed to apologize caught Osia more off guard than a left hook would have. She pulled herself into the nearest acceleration couch.
Verse added, “You, and everyone else on the surface.”
Narrow-band or not, Ways and Means heard everything aboard. “That was why we could not tell you.”
The intruder, engines burning hot and bright, broached the horizon. Osia yanked her safety harness over her.
The starscape vanished. The stars, the Earth, and the moon blinked out, leaving a shroud of black. Ways and Means’ hull stretched into the blank eternity. The planarship might as well have been alone in the universe.
Mirror fields had snapped into place, blocking all light from the outside universe – and the intruder’s weapons fire. From the outside, they were perfectly reflective. And on this side, perfectly black.
The instant Osia’s harness clicked into place, her acceleration couch slammed into her back.
Flickers of light rippled along the planarship’s hull. Blue-white candle flames, growing taller. Thrusters firing. Far behind them, the planarship’s engines roared. The sound caught up with them long after the acceleration slammed them into the couch.
The planarship’s sensors could not penetrate the mirror fields. It had to drop part of the fields in patches, in shades of opacity, to see. Any weakening in the mirror fields was an opportunity for the intruder to do damage. Ways and Means did its best to minimize that. It bent and distorted the light it allowed to reach it, warping it beyond recognition. The stars spiraled around the planarship. At intervals, there were two Earths, three suns.
Ways and Means transmitted a tactical map, drew it across the back of Osia’s mind. Lightning-hot ionized trails, beam signatures, strobed the atmosphere still between the planarships. There were dozens upon dozens of beam strikes.
The intruder had lost its shape, become a perfectly reflective silver sphere. It would have to reduce its defenses if it wanted to see, too. Ways and Means opened a sluice in its fields and returned fire, hoping to strike during a window of vulnerability.
The thrusters fired again. Ways and Means was rotating, turning its flat side toward the intruder. Less of its surface area would be exposed to the intruder should its fields fail. Each of its hull segments was far longer and wider than it was thick. A beam strike would find less purchase on the ship’s edges, find fewer vital areas. But it also meant that Ways and Means was leaving whole batteries of its own cannons out of range, unable to fire.
It expected to fight a defensive battle. In space warfare, that was almost always a losing one.
As powerful as mirror fields were, they limited the craft that used them. The fields could not block missiles or combat drones. Ways and Means could shoot them down with beams easily enough – but it had to see them first. That meant weakening its fields to look. And that would become riskier as the intruder got nearer.
A distorted Earth reappeared above Ways and Means, a dim ghost image stretched into infinity. It was only there an instant. After another period of darkness, the stars blinked in to replace it, twisted into a spiral. Both images were at a fraction of the luminosity they had been before. Ways and Means cycled through countless permutations.
The intruder would have to lower its fields too, to scan. But it had layers of fields: one to
protect the whole vessel, and two ovoids she’d seen earlier, protecting its weapons platforms. From the quantity of beams splitting the atmosphere, either of those weapons platforms could have outgunned Ways and Means.
She asked Ways and Means, “If that thing is your backup, how could it have hardware like a planarship? Who built it?”
Ways and Means said, “Not all of the other amalgamates accepted exile as easily as we did.”
“Easily?” On the day of its exile, the creature responsible for it had nearly torn Ways and Means’ mind apart.
“The other amalgamates managed to maintain communication after our exile. They intend to break the terms of their exile and challenge the creature that sent us here. They tried to persuade us to join. We refused.”
Thirty years ago, Osia would have figured Ways and Means would join such a coalition without hesitating. Even five minutes ago, she wouldn’t have been sure. But everything it had done since its exile had pointed away from acting like it once had.
Ways and Means said, “The other amalgamates have apparently been able to open small gateways undetected by our captor. They sent probes and self-replicating factories through. They must have found one of our backup sites. They persuaded it to join their side, and built it that vessel. And now they sent it to ‘persuade’ us.”
Osia reminded herself never to forget the ease and fluency with which Ways and Means lied to her. But if it wasn’t…
The monster that had broken up the Unity forced the amalgamates into exile. It had said it would be watching. If the other amalgamates had managed to trick it, or if its attention had slipped – that changed things in a way Osia had not allowed herself to consider.
Abruptly, she realized she did not want to go back to the Unity, either. Even if such a thing were possible. She would always be living in dread of that creature.
On Ways and Means’ map, a dazzling array of new signals spread away from the intruder. A bundle of combat drones. They burned across the sky, firing engines at rapid, random intervals.
They blinked across the map. The teleporting was an artifact of outdated sensor information. Ways and Means could only update the map as fast as it could scan through its mirror fields.
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