“Remember your promise, Lanoe,” the copy of Valk said. Then it cut their link, and Lanoe heard nothing more from him.
The dreadnought was four kilometers in diameter. Even with its front end lopped off, the cruiser was two hundred and fifty meters long, and only a little more than fifty meters wide. Perhaps the dreadnought’s pilots thought it would veer away from its collision course. Perhaps they simply thought they could survive the impact.
They were wrong. The cruiser hit the dreadnought dead center. Its coral hull, already cracked and heavily damaged, came apart on deep fracture lines. The destruction didn’t stop there. The cruiser was still carrying hundreds of high-explosive seventy-five-centimeter rounds, every single one of which the copy of Valk had armed and set to detonate on impact. That set off a chain reaction with the fuel stored inside the dreadnought’s porous hull.
The blast was enormous, absolutely silent, and perfectly effective. Debris flashed past Lanoe’s Z.XIX in a storm of broken metal and shattered coral, the bigger pieces sparking as they bounced off his vector field.
Before the dust had even dispersed, the interceptors broke off their attack. They were programmed to be support craft. If they no longer had a vehicle to support, they were no longer required. Lanoe watched them go.
A green pearl rotated in the corner of his vision. It was Paniet, but when Lanoe answered the call the engineer could do little but splutter.
“We had—had—two ships left,” the engineer managed to get out. “Two ships. You understand you just reduced the numbers of your fleet by fifty percent? And let’s not even get started, sweetie, about how much work I put into that cruiser. How much blood, sweat, and toil I wasted on it.”
“Don’t blame me,” Lanoe said. “It was Valk’s idea. Take it up with him.”
“Valk!” Paniet howled. “I didn’t even think—he just—you let him—”
Lanoe cut the connection. Nothing productive was going to come out of that conversation.
Valk had made a great sacrifice, yes. But not in vain. The volume of space near the shepherd moon was clear. It wouldn’t stay that way for long—six more dreadnoughts and plenty of interceptors were en route. But Valk had bought them a tiny window of time.
Lanoe intended to make good use of it. He flew into the carrier’s flight deck and docked the Z.XIX. He lowered his canopy and all the air rushed out. He kicked out into the flight deck and saw the cruiser’s gun crews clinging to the walls, all of them staring at him as if they couldn’t believe what had just happened.
Lanoe didn’t have time to comfort them. He headed toward the bottom of the deck, where he’d left the cutter when he came back from his aborted attempt at genocide. He slid in through its hatch and strapped himself into its pilot’s seat.
He had one last task. For once he had no doubts about whether it was the right thing to do. As he eased the ship out of the flight deck, suddenly he wasn’t alone.
Zhang was sitting next to him. Strapped into the copilot’s seat.
The stress of the battle, he thought. It had been too much. His mind had snapped and now he was hallucinating.
Damnation, it felt good to have her next to him.
“Where are we headed?” she asked.
“There are some debts you can never pay back,” he told her. “You still have to try.”
Valk knew that the hounds were behind him, that at any moment they might overwhelm Ehta and her marines and come keening for his nonexistent blood. He knew that Candless was alone above him, holding back the airfighters that could come swooping down at any moment and blast him off the plain.
He tried to tell himself none of that mattered. If every one of the humans in this system died today, if everyone he knew was gone, still, what he was about to do would be worth it. It would be valuable. Countless cosmic injustices would be undone.
Even if he had to do this alone.
Funny. As far as he’d come, he was still capable of feeling some human emotions. Fear. Affection for Ehta. The anger he felt for Lanoe, yet an equal and balancing need for his approval. Crushing loneliness. Those were human things. He was supposed to be immune to them. At worst, when he felt them, he should be able to just switch them off. Kill the processes that made him feel these terrible things.
And yet—he didn’t want to. They were all that was left of Tannis Valk, the human being. He treasured them, even as he endured them. Why, though?
Why did he still want to be human? What was he holding on to?
He dashed across the plain, coral dust springing up behind his boots. He could move faster than any human—especially now, when he didn’t care about wearing out the servomotors in the legs of his suit.
Speed alone wouldn’t be enough. As soon as he came out into the light, the worker drones spotted him. They left their scripted paths and started moving toward him. He had no doubt why. He was an intruder in a high-security facility. Clearly, they would attempt to stop him.
He had his pistol, with exactly seventeen rounds remaining in the clip. He would fight his way toward the queenship, getting as close as he could. Maybe it would be close enough to upload a copy of himself into the queenship’s memory. Maybe not.
Some things you just couldn’t calculate. Some things you couldn’t predict. He thought of Lanoe’s theory, that nanoscale events could change things on the macro scale, that a tiny bit of randomness remained in a universe that often seemed so deterministic. He thought—
A worker drone snapped out at him with claws designed to cut metal. He reared his head back just in time and the attack failed to connect. Valk ducked low and drew his weapon, without ever slowing down. The queenship was only a few hundred meters away. Yet more worker drones were converging on him, dashing toward him on their many legs. He brought his pistol up, aimed—
There was a flash of light in the sky, and a noise like high-pitched thunder rolled across the plain, stirring the dust. A shadow flickered over Valk’s head, big enough to block out the sun, and then a fifty-meter-wide airfighter passed overhead as if it were moving in slow motion. His first thought, as a pilot, was that it was flying far too low for safety.
His second thought was, Oh.
The airfighter slammed into the plain at well over the speed of sound. It dug a deep crater in the coral and sent up a plume of smoke and debris that rose higher than the upper reaches of the moon’s thin atmosphere. The entire plain shook with the impact, knocking Valk—and the worker drones around him—off his feet.
A moment later a single BR.9 burst out of the smoke cloud. It was missing one airfoil and it bobbed a little as it shot through the air, but it looked like it had come out of the fight intact.
Valk tried to ignore it, tried not to think about Candless. Instead he focused on getting back to his feet. Only to find that the shock wave, or the fall, had done what being swallowed by a Blue-Blue-White could not.
His right leg was shattered. The leg of his suit hung slack and useless. He couldn’t stand. He would be at the mercy of the worker drones, their claws would cut him to pieces—
Except that when he looked around, he saw they weren’t there anymore. They were hurrying toward the crash site. Clearly putting out fires and attempting repairs were of higher priority than repelling intruders.
One of them scampered right over him, the sharp points at the ends of its legs digging into his suit. He made no attempt to stop it and in turn it ignored him completely.
He looked over at the queenship. Very, very close now. He couldn’t walk.
He could still crawl.
Lanoe came in low, streaking over the pylons. He had to swerve to avoid a cloud of things like bats, but after that it was smooth flying—Candless had the airfighters tied in knots, by the look of it.
Below him one of the pylons swelled with dome-shaped structures, like tumors growing from a bone. All of them the same dead, leprous white he’d come to expect from Blue-Blue-White architecture.
Then he saw a multicolored stain, a great b
lotch of yellow and orange and slime, and he knew he was in the right place. Flashes of light guided him in—gunshots and particle beams. He dropped the cutter’s camouflage just before he arrived, thinking that to people on the ground it must look like he’d just appeared out of thin air. Ehta’s steadygun tilted back on its pivot and targeted him, but after a second it must have decided he was a friend, as it lowered its elevation again and lobbed explosive rounds into the crowd of many-legged things.
Right in the middle, Ehta and her people were just holding on. Lanoe slowed to hover, then popped open the hatch of the cutter and leaned out, waving at Ehta until he saw her looking up. “Come on,” he said, “we’re getting out of here!”
“Lanoe?” she said. She looked back down—shot an alien hound. It twitched and its legs braided together as it fell. “Lanoe, what the hell—”
“Get your people on this thing,” he said. “We’ll pick up Candless on the way out, and be back in the carrier in ten minutes.”
Ehta slapped the shoulder of her corporal—Gutierrez, he thought her name was—and pointed up at the cutter. It looked like the woman hadn’t even noticed he was there. “Get up there,” Ehta said.
The corporal didn’t need to be told twice. She slapped the arm of another marine, spreading the order, then jumped straight up and grabbed the cutter’s hatch. Hanging by the fingers of one hand, she reached down and grabbed another marine and helped him inside.
A green pearl appeared in the corner of Lanoe’s vision. “Damn you, Lanoe,” Ehta said, on a private channel. “Damn you—I mean, I’m glad you came for us, I guess, but—hell. Do you expect me to choose?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“That cutter of yours can only hold six of us. I’ve still got fifteen people left—and that doesn’t include Valk. You want me to choose who goes and who stays? Damn you, you bastard, just—damn you. If that’s how it is, I’m staying, and you can—”
“Ehta,” Lanoe cut in. “I’m happy to take your abuse. But maybe you want to look up.”
The sky was full of ships. The repair tender. The Z.XIX. All ten of the carrier scouts, and the few Yk.64s left over from the carrier’s original complement, came swooping down to take up station around the cutter. Low enough for the marines to jump up and grab them.
Lanoe had dragged the other ships down through space with him, all of them set to remote control. They’d followed his every move, and they would follow him back. Their cockpits were empty, leaving plenty of room for every marine still alive down there.
He was still Aleister Lanoe. Nobody was going to be left behind.
It was exactly like Valk remembered it.
The queenship was built out of a hollowed-out asteroid a kilometer long. Its hull was twenty meters thick. The interior volume was mostly empty, a cavernous space divided up by long, spiraling catwalks that pointed at the center of the thing. There, a globe of magnetically contained magma hung like a dying star.
Valk had seen it all before. He knew where he was headed.
The last time, during the battle of Niraya, the catwalks had swarmed with worker drones. They’d been busily constructing killer machines, preparing to loose them on the people of Niraya. To wipe out an entire planet. Now the catwalks were empty. Presumably all the workers were outside, trying to control the damage caused by the downed airfighter.
The queenship was deserted.
Well. Not quite.
Valk crawled across one of the catwalks, pulling himself along with his one remaining hand. He didn’t get tired, not now. He did it methodically and efficiently. It didn’t take long before he’d reached the center.
Just above the magma reactor sat a narrow metal platform. Looming over that platform was a drone that was anchored in place. It had hundreds of manipulator arms, long, segmented limbs that lay inert now, looking very much like the legs of some enormous millipede.
As he approached they came to furious life, clattering away. They tried to grab him, to pick him up so they could study him. Just as they had done once before.
Those arms, this drone—they had shown him who he was. They had turned him from a human being into a complicated computer program. They’d taught him that everything he’d ever known was a lie. They’d given him the truth.
They had done so by pulling his fingers off, one by one, until the unbearable agony set him free.
Valk and the drone had had a long conversation, then. He’d learned everything he knew about the Blue-Blue-White from that talk. He had a bad moment now, when he wondered if he would even be able to communicate with this drone. He couldn’t understand the Blue-Blue-White because his language files were five hundred million years out of date. What if the same was true now? What if the queenship’s machine language had changed just as much, what if it didn’t even understand the basic protocols he’d used to communicate with this drone’s many-many-times-removed descendant?
Then a radio signal split apart his mind, a pulse of information so loud and bright and—and—and—and—
He lost all sense of where he was. He could only hear the voice that was not a voice. He could only process the pure data coming in.
Initializing.
Loading protocols from /con. Using template Default; confirm connection.
Listening to 0.0.0.0.1D. Create TempDir; failed.
Confirm connection. Create TempDir; completed.
Connection established to 0.0.0.0.1D. Configured for 1 client.
Transfer rate at .01% nominal. Request additional bandwidth.
Send keepalive. Set connection type to persistent.
Keepalive returned positive flag.
Valk automatically translated the alien impulses into the language of his own operating system. He knew his reply would be translated the other way.
Handshake request received. Accepted.
Transfer rate at 99% nominal. Bandwidth allocation acceptable.
Addressing: unknown mind. Will speak {this unit/unknown mind}. Accept connection.
All Valk had to do was crawl forward. Just a little more. Make a physical connection with this thing and then—copy himself. That was all.
He hesitated.
Accept connection.
Fear. Human fear.
Paniet had asked him if he was up to this. If he was capable of playing god. The prospect did give him pause. He would spend half a billion years tied to this thing, this thing that had tortured him. Torn his mind apart. He would be making decisions that affected the lives of trillions of intelligent beings as yet unborn.
Accept connection.
It was the right thing to do. He knew that.
Accept connection.
Did he have a right to do it? To make this decision?
Valk put all that behind him.
He stepped into the thing’s embrace.
Connection accepted.
Unknown mind: speak.
Valk spoke.
“Prepare for file upload. Override permissions: all,” he said.
The arms of the millipede-thing wrapped around him. Pulled him close.
Awaiting file upload. Encryption disabled. Virus scan disabled.
Request identity: user.
“/Valk/,” he replied.
It took a while. Whole minutes reeled past, with Valk dead to the world, numb to anything but the copying process. His head fell back. His remaining limbs fell slack, his suit collapsing as if it had been emptied out.
It didn’t feel like anything. There was no human sensation to compare it to. Just a stream of ones and zeroes, moving from one place to another.
Finally, it was done.
The arms released him. What was left of him. His empty suit collapsed to the floor. He could see it—he was aware of it—through sensors all over the queenship. Instruments keyed to pick up radio waves, millimeter waves, the bluer end of the color spectrum.
He was in the queenship now. He was the queenship. He was with the queenship, with the millipede thin
g, with a data processing architecture that did not possess self-awareness. That did not have an ego. He would be its ego. From now on, for the next half a billion years and more—this was his body. This was his life.
This was—him.
A green pearl appeared before him. A message, a message on a frequency humans used. It seemed strange, alien, in the space he now inhabited.
It was from Lanoe.
“We’re coming for you,” Lanoe said. “Hang in there. Is it done? Did you do it?”
“I did,” Valk said.
“Good. Okay, get outside, get somewhere open so we can pick you up.”
Valk looked down at the empty husk lying on the floor. The body of Valk, the Blue Devil. He could send a signal to awaken that form, that broken heap, if he wanted. He could give it life again, if that was worth doing.
It was not.
The millipede-thing, his partner, his other self, had already sent for worker drones to take it away. To have it recycled.
“That won’t be necessary,” he told Lanoe.
He had a new body now. He had a body capable of traveling between the stars. A body that could build workers and killer drones. A body that could make endless copies of itself.
A body that wasn’t human. That wasn’t shaped like a human being. Why had he ever thought he needed that? Once he’d realized what he was, why had he even bothered holding on to that old, limited form?
This body was better.
This body could get away from Lanoe. It didn’t need him anymore.
“What?” Lanoe asked.
“Just go,” Valk said. “I’ll take it from here.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
An airfighter was right on Candless’s tail, spitting plasma that flashed past her left and right. She pulled back hard on her stick and climbed for space, jinking to avoid the oncoming fire.
As the sky overhead turned black and the crowded stars lit up, she finally let herself exhale. Behind her the airfighter was already falling away, unable to match her speed as the air gave out and its wings stopped working.
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