Ways and Means could not communicate its flight plan. The shuttle’s NAI did its best to guess. On the maps, its trajectory wrapped close around the Earth. If Meloku had trusted herself to speak, she would have sworn. The intruder had emerged almost directly underneath Ways and Means. Now Ways and Means was dropping altitude, getting closer to the intruder.
Fiametta stared, her jaw slack. She couldn’t have heard the alarms, but she knew what had happened.
Meloku felt she should have ordered the shuttle to do something. Dive. Run. She couldn’t think of anything. The shuttle remained placidly on course. There was nothing it could do.
Ways and Means was not firing back. It would have had to drop its defensive fields to get useful targeting data. The intruder had it outgunned. This close to the intruder’s superior weaponry, it wouldn’t have lasted long.
Meloku could not figure out what Ways and Means had planned. Maybe it was hoping to get close enough to land a lucky shot, score a beam hit against the odds.
Ways and Means maintained a complete mirror field. A one hundred percent blackout. No light, no signal, or pulse scans. It was the only complete defense against beam weapons. But the intruder was already launching drones and missiles. Ways and Means would have to reduce the opacity of its fields to see them, to shoot them down in time.
At this range, Ways and Means would need more than luck.
The intruder could have killed her and Fiametta several times by now. It hadn’t targeted any of the shuttles. When she trusted herself to speak, Meloku asked, “You don’t think any side here is right, either, do you?”
Fiametta didn’t speak, but nodded.
“If you’d be willing to go back to work for that thing, you’d better figure it out soon.” Meloku knew she wasn’t.
Before she could take that thought any further, the NAI’s map changed again. Ways and Means’ course was stuttering, redrawing several times a second. Like a signal with bad reception, it flickered up and down, high altitude to low. It drew closer to the Earth, and then widened again.
Meloku clamped her jaw shut. She would have assumed that Ways and Means was maneuvering. That wasn’t quite right. The only dimension changing was altitude. Had the planarship been maneuvering, its trajectory would have veered in every direction. This was more like a wave, up and down.
She glanced to the cameras. The glare of Ways and Means’ engine exhaust had faded. Then it brightened, and diminished again. She recognized the pattern. It was that of a ship running out of antimatter fuel. Its engines were struggling to function with a reduced stream of reactant.
That shouldn’t have been happening. It had said, before they’d left, that it enough antimatter fuel to complete its orbital insertion.
It had said it had enough antimatter–
On the map ahead, the blip of one of the other shuttles vanished.
The cameras dimmed. A brilliant white new sun erupted over the horizon. It shone over the Earth, reflected blindingly against the clouds and sea, and expanded rapidly.
The intruder’s mirror fields were on full by then, but mirror fields couldn’t have helped. A shockwave of superheated gas crashed into its side, through the fields, and across the intruder’s hull.
Its mirror fields flickered, losing opacity, as their projectors seared away. The shuttle’s sensors caught glimpses of it. The port sides of its three center hull segments glowed sunset-red.
Meloku understood an instant too late.
The blast had set off a chain reaction among the other shuttles approaching the intruder. All of them were laden with antimatter. This time, the intruder was even less ready. The radiation from each new blast pierced its mirror fields, searing its hull.
New stars detonated around the intruder. Then the mirror fields around one of its ovoid weapon platforms collapsed. For an instant, Meloku saw the dark bristling silhouettes of its cannons. Then they lost shape, melted, turned to slag.
The intruder still had plenty of weapons batteries left. They wouldn’t help. The antimatter-carrying shuttles had gotten too close. The most the intruder could do was shoot them down, which would rupture their antimatter tanks. Same difference.
It tried anyway. More stars flared to life. Beam fire seared the exosphere. Meloku could not help her flinch. The beams were not coming from Ways or Means or the intruder.
The rarefied atmosphere made it difficult to trace the beams’ path. The shuttle’s NAI told her they came from the new satellites. Or the things that Meloku had mistaken for satellites. That Ways and Means had told her were satellites.
Beams raked the intruder’s central hull. The “satellites” focused fire on the rear segment. Meloku knew what they were aiming for. Its antimatter storage. Its transplanar gateway generator.
Meloku tore her eyes off the monitors, looked to Fiametta. Fiametta’s cheeks had gone pale. As always, there was no telling how much Fiametta understood. If she had missed anything, she would never admit it. But Meloku figured she understood the basic fact that this had been a trap.
Nothing about the plan Ways and Means had told them had been the truth. Given the behavior of the other shuttles, all still heading for the intruder, they were probably the only two real people out here.
“Why?” Fiametta asked.
“How,” Meloku retorted. “Your inner voice. That implant. It’s not gone.”
“Of course it’s gone,” Fiametta said. “I felt it go. There’s just empty space in my head.”
Meloku said, “Osia thought it had burned itself out.” No. She had told Meloku it had. Fiametta’s surgeon had said he would remove the implant, but the surgery hadn’t happened – not that Meloku had ever known. “Your implant was playing dead.”
But if Osia had been fooled, Ways and Means shouldn’t have been. It had pretended otherwise. It had started laying the trap as soon as Fiametta had come aboard. Letting Fia’s inner voice think it had escaped notice.
That implant had forwarded everything it saw and heard to the intruder.
Maybe Osia had planted the seeds of that plan before they’d ever reestablished contact with Ways and Means. She could have thought of it the moment she’d scanned Fiametta’s implant. Osia had never, for a ghost of a second, considered letting Meloku know. Nor had Ways and Means.
Fiametta insisted, “My inner voice has been dead for weeks.”
“Your inner voice was still there, listening.” Meloku’s fingers tremored. She tapped the side of her head. “It must’ve found a way to get word back to the intruder. Ways and Means pretended it didn’t notice. But it knew your implant was seeing and hearing everything you did.”
Now Fiametta was getting it. Her lips tightened. The muscles in her neck were taut. “The conference,” she said. “Everything it did and told us. It wasn’t real.”
“It was a performance,” Meloku said. “For all of us. Put on to fool as many people as possible, but most of all to fool you. If you believed it, your ‘inner voice’ might believe it. It sent everything it heard on. It wanted the intruder to believe that we were coming down in force, that it could persuade our crew in the shuttles to join it.”
Gradually, in stutters, the intruder’s weapons fell silent. Both of its weapon platforms had been slagged. Barrage after barrage of beam fire bored into its fields. Then into its hull.
The beams focused fire on the aft hull segment, and then on the ligaments joining it to the rest of the ship. One of the ligaments cracked, split yellow-hot, a log burning to cinders. It spit molten debris.
The hull segment fell free, began to drift away. It must have housed its antimatter. The last thing Ways and Means wanted was an antimatter detonation of that size so near to the surface.
With that segment severed, its drones and satellite weapons would be free to destroy the rest of it.
Another shrill call split the back of her mind, loud enough to give her a phantom earache. It was a distress signal – from the intruder. A plea to surre
nder.
The opacity of Ways and Means’ mirror fields diminished minutely and briefly. It was just enough to let it peek out, for the first time since the battle had commenced.
A dozen confused signals spilled into space. They were from Ways and Means’ crew, Meloku realized. That was another reason to have kept the planarship enclosed in mirror fields, until now: to block the panicked calls from crewmembers once they realized what was happening. Calls meant for the intruder, to warn it.
Ways and Means had no doubt taken note of who had sent those signals. Doing this the way it had, it had rooted out mutineers and sympathizers among its crew as well.
Ways and Means jammed the intruder’s distress calls.
It kept to its original course, engines still flickering. Meloku’s shuttle picked up fragments of pulse scans, a detailed sensor sweep washing across the intruder’s hull. Ways and Means was taking its measure. Meloku’s breath caught. She could not let it out.
All of Ways and Means’ side and ventral cannon batteries opened at once. They hardly needed to aim. The intruder was in no state to maneuver, and close enough to be an easy target.
The beams burned right through the intruder’s hull. It turned what was left of it into a luminous nebular cloud, full of stars and dust. The debris billowed to nothing in the space of seconds.
On the tactical maps, the intruder’s blip disappeared. Yellow hazard icons sprang up where it had been. A field of high-velocity orbital debris. The shuttle’s NAI was still working to determine the extent of it.
To have converted so many satellites into weapons platforms, Ways and Means must have been working at it for a long time. Long before it had ever called their conference. Before she, Osia, and Fiametta had come aboard.
Meloku turned to Fiametta. “Do you understand now?”
Fiametta looked like a different person. The muscles in her cheeks had slackened. Her cheeks and lips were pale. Meloku had seen the same looks on corpses. Fiametta was in shock.
Osia’s voice returned. She sounded different this time. Clipped. She said, “All surface personnel, stand ready to evacuate. We will dispatch shuttles shortly.”
Meloku told Fiametta, “You can’t let it run your world if you ever get the choice. It lives to lie to you. Don’t go along with it. Don’t cooperate with it.”
Fiametta did not look at her. Impossible to tell if her words were getting through. Fiametta might not have been capable of listening.
Meloku was not as good a manipulator as Ways and Means, and would not have been if she could have. She could not make Fiametta’s choices for her. But she had to get this through.
Meloku said, “It will make you think you’ve made a choice when it’s already made it for you. You might as well be a lever in a machine. You won’t even know that you wouldn’t be you any more. It happened in the Unity all the time. It’s what the Unity was.”
Fiametta swallowed. She was not convinced, Meloku knew. She did not yet understand. Meloku wouldn’t have the time to convince her. But she had the time to start.
They had come from similar places. Meloku’s Companion AI had not been so different than Fiametta’s inner voice. They had both been divested of them. Fiametta was a fast learner. Faster than Meloku had ever been.
Meloku said, “It’s not something you can cooperate with, or gain from. It’ll take everything that made you unique, every choice you thought you made, and take it away from you. You won’t even feel it happen. If you ever have the chance, or the choice, leave it.”
Fiametta’s eyes flicked between the images of the Earth and the silhouette of Ways and Means. Ways and Means had stopped firing its engines. It was just a dark shape now, limned against the horizon and the still-approaching sunrise.
Fiametta would not look at Meloku. But Meloku still saw, in the spreading lines underneath her eyes, the shadow of her doubt.
She had learned. She might even have understood.
A subtler tone trilled in the back of her head. Ways and Means was signaling. The amalgamate itself, not Osia. It was even being polite, allowing Meloku the chance to accept the call.
The shuttle’s NAI had dutifully recorded everything she and Fiametta had said to each other. The cabin sensors could even trace the emotional tells in the constriction and dilation of the blood vessels under their skin. Ways and Means would have seen and heard everything.
Meloku accepted the call and put it on the cabin speakers so Fiametta could hear too.
“You pieced things together not an instant too late,” Ways and Means said. It must have trusted her a great deal to send her aboard the shuttle with Fiametta. It had believed that she would not figure out its plan too soon, or blurt it out in front of Fiametta and her inner voice.
To the extent Ways and Means had a tone, it sounded pleased. “You are very apt. We will hold to our promise. When you return, it will be our pleasure to welcome you as an officer and the newest member of our crew.”
“Wonderful,” Meloku said.
Fucking wonderful. What she had worked for, all her life, just as she’d wanted. She said, “I resign my commission.”
37
Though Ways and Means had given her the task of coordinating its shuttles, Osia had not needed to go anywhere special to do it. Her assigned shelter was little different than any other: a hemispherical hollow deep within the hull, shielded and armored. Thirty acceleration couches of varying sizes lined the deck.
The crew sharing her shelter shifted, uneasy. Osia closed her eyes, put them out of her mind, and focused on her work. Snippets of other conversations crossed her receivers.
So far as she could tell, she was the only one among them who had known most of the shuttles were empty. Ways and Means had taken care to limit communication aboard, institute radio silences, so that its crew would not have a chance to figure out that all of them were still aboard.
Ways and Means had not had to tell Osia. It dropped hints. She had pieced it together.
There had been a moment, when Ways and Means’ mirror fields had first dropped, when panic had seized her. Ways and Means’ “satellites” were hammering the intruder’s rear hull segment, trying to split it apart. For a long stretch of seconds, it had remained attached.
All of the intruder’s antimatter was housed there. If that much antimatter escaped containment… the release of energy would have seared away this world’s atmosphere.
If the intruder was serious about forcing Ways and Means to forgo its connection to this world, it would have done so.
It had not. It had still been trying to surrender.
The only reason it would have tried to surrender was that it knew itself. The creature Ways and Means had been, however many decades ago, would have allowed it to live. Maybe in exchange for some concession, maybe not.
Ways and Means had accepted its backup’s call. It had signaled that it was about to reply.
All around the planarship, though, Osia’s sensors had little trouble detecting power pumping to the ventral hull, to the cannon. So could the others around her. And then it had jammed the intruder’s transmission.
The radio silence that followed was a collective drawn breath, a stifled word.
Someone, somewhere – Osia did not even track where – started to say “But it’s…”
Ways and Means’ beams continued to pulse through the vapor cloud long after the intruder had died, seeking inactive combat drones and other traps.
The acceleration warning ended not long after. Osia’s seat harness released. The crew was free.
She pushed the webbing aside. Ways and Means had not told her its plan, not exactly. But it had let slip enough that it must have known that she would figure it out, and that she would be the first among its crew to do so. Had she been so inclined, she could have broadcast a warning to the intruder’s combat drones, blown the whole trap.
Until now, she had not believed Ways and Means had ever treated her differently t
han the rest of the crew. She saw things differently. It really did trust her more than them.
There had been no advantage to telling her what it had. None that she could see, anyway.
But it was always playing games whose rules she could never know.
The rest of the crew had no shortage of work now. Those among its crew who had tried to transmit warnings to the intruder had to be rounded up, and their bodies deactivated pending remedial education. Ways and Means could tolerate dissent, restlessness. Even, under certain circumstances, breaches of military order. But treason and mutiny were different.
Those among the crew who’d sided with the intruder would spend a long time having their opinions revised.
They would experience no pain. It would be for the better, Osia knew. But her demiorganics still had to repress a shudder.
Then there was repair duty and shuttle prep. Ways and Means was pulling its remaining agents off the surface. It had fewer shuttles than ever to ferry them. They needed temporary quarters. Why “temporary,” Ways and Means hadn’t said. It could have meant it. It could have been just a word.
And then there was warmaking. They needed antimatter, drones, war material. The antimatter production hoops needed to be working constantly. The other amalgamates were still trapped in exile. But they’d already found one small way out. They would not be trapped forever.
Ways and Means exempted Osia from the work. As far as it was concerned, she had just returned from a thirty-year field assignment. Her service had been exemplary; she had gone beyond the duty she had been called to perform. She had a great deal of accumulated leave time.
Osia felt as though she were dragging her feet as she moved down the passageways.
The damage to her body had been repaired the first day she’d come back. Ways and Means did not have the resources to build new demiorganic bodies, but it had prioritized what little it did have for her replacement parts. She had not thought about it much then. She’d had too many other distractions.
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