“In a way we can’t ever know, yeah. Everything’s temporary. Like the weather. The only thing that ever lasts is them.”
Viktor arched his heavy black eyebrows, bemused. “Interesting theory, m’dear. Makes our job out here maybe easier, though.”
His words jerked her out of her gauzy speculations. “What?”
“Bow shock coming closer and closer, and these things may be the cause. And we cannot hope to kill them.”
She nodded. “But they have killed one of us.”
“We have a job to do, and if we keep letting them damage us…”
Julia sighed. “We have to let them know that we mean business? I had hoped we could learn…”
“In way, makes communication job easier. We can damage them but not kill. So they learn.”
“Learn to…fear us?”
“Maybe best to think of them as animals—who don’t know about death, either. But they can learn to respect.”
She eyed him. The analogy to animals had a point. “Veronique…”
Viktor frowned. “Da. We are small, they large. They may respect us if we can hurt them.”
22.
FREE RADICALS
“I’VE GOT IT FIGURED,” Jordin called joyously. “I know what makes those lichen possible.”
Shanna was carefully maneuvering the captured Darksider toward the factory complex, using slight shoves across the soft starlit plain. But she, too, had wondered at the puzzle of how anything managed to live on a dab of ice under lower illumination than a flashlight. “Oh? Fill me in.”
“My chem-sampler ’bot—it’s fished up a whole soup of stuff, yeah—but the telltale is, this iceball is rich.”
“Um.” The Darksider was twitching, but her ’bot had it in three claws and wasn’t letting go. Whatever had made Darksiders, it had little appreciation for gravity. Her ’bot, on the other hand, could maneuver in a full Earth g if it had to. It was maybe a hundred times stronger than the Darksider, and she had to be careful not to cave in the Darksider carapace with too swift a movement. The two machines scooted slowly toward the spindly dark factory. “Uh, yeah?”
“It’s richer than Earthside ocean water. See, thing is, this iceball has been here in the dark many billions of years, doing nothing but sopping up cosmic rays. Free energy. The high-energy cosmic rays barrel into it and create ionized atoms. On Earth it’s warm enough that they find each other right away and recombine. Not here. The radicals stay frozen, ready for the lichen stuff to eat.”
“Yummy.” She brought the ’bot over the horizon, made it survey for suspicious movement, then went ahead. None of the Darksiders parked in front of the factory showed any reaction.
Like most tech guys, Jordin took any vague murmur as encouragement. “So the simple molecules can sometimes find others, build up more complex stuff—just like in our ocean, only at 50 degrees Kelvin. Amazing!”
She slowed and lowered the ’bot. A long moment of sliding silence, only her own breath rasping in her ears. No reaction from the lined-up Darksiders. So she let hers go. The captured ’bot settled to the surface, taking a full minute during which Shanna concentrated for any sign of reaction among the others. Jordin was talking organic chemistry, carbon and its many friends, her least favorite subject in university, and it went right by her.
“Not only that, the ice has plenty of uranium 235 in it. Another energy stock. That’s what this fungus stuff we see is doing—burrowing through the ice, collecting the U-235. Uses it for warmth, eats the organic compounds left by the cosmic rays—it’s a whole ecology. Ice worms crawl around and gobble up the fungus.”
“I don’t see any gobbling going on,” Shanna said warily. Her Darksider was shuffling forward toward its kin. “Things’re pretty slow out here.”
“Well, sure,” Jordin said with undiminished enthusiasm. “Low temperatures—but lots of time, maybe since the galaxy formed 10 billion years ago. The turtle beats the hare—it’s wonderful.”
“Hey, they haven’t beaten us yet.”
The Darksider convention was in slow motion. Hers lifted one of its odd, X-shaped grapplers and touched one of the others. A pale yellow spark arced. Nobody moved. Then another spark, but this time from the other Darksider to hers. “And they look like they’re communicating with jolts of electricity.”
This interested Jordin enough that he tapped into her ’bot sensorium. “Ummm, makes sense, kinda. So damn cold here you have to give somebody a smack just to get their attention.”
Shanna blinked. The Darksiders suddenly moved, forming a circle. They projected arrays of wires above their “heads”—knobby tool assemblies, really—and a sudden crackling came into her ears. “They’re sending something in microwaves,” she said. “A…buzzing.”
“Sure,” Jordin said happily. “They’re talking to their gods.”
“What?” She got the sudden impression that her Darksider had sent a status report, and now all of them were…praying? “No, maybe just reporting in.”
23.
PLASMA DRAGONS
FORCEFUL SAID FIRMLY,
Mirk added,
Instigator sent reassurance underlain with perplexity.
Ring shot back,
Instigator sent subtonics of admission-with-riposte:
Recorder said formally,
Instigator retorted,
Recorder spiked back,
They awaited a reply, but Instigator paused, puzzlement creeping into its emission.
Dusk ventured,
Instigator answered,
A tremor swept through them all, detected as fast ripples in the basic background magnetic field. The spatter of this fizzy noise sobered them.
.
Instigator said mildly, hoping to calm them all,
24.
CREATURES AS GAUZY AS LACE
“THEY’RE COMING!” JORDIN CALLED. “The big guys for sure. Lots of strong magnetic waves on the ship antennas.”
Shanna was watching the ’bots maneuver on dirty ice. “Damn! I want to see what they do next.”
“Look, the Beings made those.”
“Sure, but we can see the Darksiders.”
“Darksiders’ve called down their makers, I’ll bet.” Jordin was agitated. He pulled out of his sensorium hood and said directly to her, a meter away, “We’d better tuck in, and pronto.”
“Okay.” Shanna jerked her head out of the confines of the sensorium hood and looked around. In the mild, air-conditioned deck nothing seemed awry. Yet she knew huge things were coming, creatures as gauzy as lace but as deadly as a viper. “What’ll we—”
The deck shook. Circuits in the wall fizzed with overload currents.
“Julia!” she called. “What’re you—”
“It’s slamming us around. Hard.” Julia’s voice over comm had lost her usual calm, Great Lady of Space tone. That alone shook Shanna. “We’ve got to damage these damned things!”
“Damage?” Shanna felt a quick burst of irritation. She had felt that way, sure, but—“They’re trying to communicate! I think they’re monitoring this Darksider, learning from it. Even Veronique’s death, that might have been—”
“You don’t know any of this.”
“I…call it intuition.”
Julia’s tone was cool. “I felt the same way as you, but we must remember. They’ve done us damage, invaded a ship. They’re quite probably behind the bow shock that’s moving in. Viktor has convinced me that we have to put our mission first.”
You never know what goes on inside a marriage… “We don’t know that they’re behind the bow shock phenomenon.” Shanna struggled to keep this civil.
“We can’t kill them, I think. They’ve killed one of us. We have to make a show of force.”
“I don’t agree.”
“We’re under orders from Earthside to stop the bow shock from moving farther in, if I—we—possibly can.”
“Thanks for adding the ‘we,’ Cap’n.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Sarcasm is just one more service we offer out here—to newcomers.”
Julia’s voice was suddenly tight, controlled. “Captain, you will assist us. High Flyer has overall command of this expedition.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“And Viktor agrees with me.”
“I’m so surprised.”
Julia ignored this gibe. “I want us to coordinate our thrust vectors. To bring our exhaust plumes to bear on the same volume of space. That should maximize—”
“We’ve got to talk to them. I damn well didn’t spend a year on Pluto to see you just come in and—”
“You will comply, Captain. Switch on your full screens—I noticed from your internals that you’ve been too busy arguing with me to tend to business—and run the new software we got from Earthside. The signal-to-noise enhancer. So you can envision the magnetic structures.”
“We’ve got it up, sure.” Shanna frowned. “Why, what’s—”
“So we’ll know where we’re shooting.”
Shanna sucked in a dry breath, made herself breathe out—calm, calm—and nodded to the rest of the crew. Their eyes were white.
Jordin muttered under his breath and sprang to the central position on the bridge. They both strapped in as other crew dashed to their stations. Shanna watched the screens anxiously as the ship rattled and creaked with stresses.
Jordin and Mary Kay got the full software running, calibrated. Shanna studied the images. Was Julia right? She sensed the hand of Viktor in this shift.
On the screens the fluxes whirled and merged, mere digital analogs of a reality no human eye could grasp—beings bigger than continents, sweeping in on them like furious tornadoes with a grudge. Or were they? She felt them all swept forward, emissaries in a collision of beings that neither side could have foreseen. And I thought the zand were exotic!
Pluto had been a lot easier.
25.
SMOKE RINGS
JULIA FELT HER SHIP shudder. Considering its immense length and mass, this spoke powerfully of the net pressure even a filmy, lacelike filigree of magnetic field could exert.
“Let’s go!” she ordered Viktor. “Give them some prop wash.”
High Flyer surged onward, a relentless kick in the pants, accelerating on jetting coils of fresh, snarling plasma. The mottled iceball fell away. Far off, Proserpina, too, flared and followed. Between them snaked forth bright electron beams, marked by their gauzy radiance where they excited the clotted hydrogen that backed up from the raging bow shock. Starlight sprinkled the ship as auroral fires danced along its flanks. Energies born of magnetic fields pressed at them.
“I’m getting a lot of that same low-frequency hash,” Viktor said.
“The high-power stuff that started all this?”
“Da, is same.” He looked significantly at her. “Your creatures.”
“Hey, they’re not mine.” Though she had to admit to herself that she didn’t want to kill them. Still—“They’re drawing in close?”
“I’m not getting a good image.” Viktor thumbed over to the Proserpina link. “Send latest, eh, Jordin?”
Their screens brimmed with twisting shapes—slow, smooth. Julia had learned to make out structures in the shifting magnetic topo maps, like looking down on hills that kept moving around, growing taller or shorter, restless blobs. “Bunching up at our tail, looks like,” Julia said.
“Time to spring trap?”
Julia wondered. Poking them with the fusion drive’s lance might just get more of her crew killed. She doubted that anything could dismember such moving mountain-sized things for long. She called out, “Shanna! Come alongside us—we’ll have to use both torches.”
“Mine’s a lot less cutting than yours,” Shanna sent back. They were both gunning it and weaving together in programmed dodges, to throw off their pursuers. But flies can’t dodge trucks, as many windshields have proved. Julia could see big bunched masses of high magnetic fields converging on both ships.
“Let’s get close together, then turn our thrust at the maximum field points,” Julia said.
The idea of dueling with such beasties was laughable, and both their ships were like lumbering tank ships. But Viktor sent High Flyer into a long curve toward Proserpina.
“Punch that way!” Shanna called. “DIS—navigation override: DEC 48, RA 23.”
They seared the sky together.
Fuming, the magnetic whorls backed away. But the ships could perform this gravity-free gavotte only so long—then their plumes drove them apart. Long minutes ticked by as both crews watched their screens. Nobody moved, not even to get coffee. The magnetic stresses crept back in. Feelers filled the spaces.
“Damn!” Viktor said.
“We can’t do this forever,” Julia said.
“They’ll figure out a new trick,” Shanna said. “This is their turf.”
Julia took a long breath of the ship’s dry air, smelling the sweaty fear around her. Nobody spoke.
She had to get them out of this trap, this endless cycle of violence and terror. “That is not the point,” the fish said
.
“Yes, but how to break the…” She pursed her lips. Some problems just curve back in upon themselves, and that is the only solution.
Was that it? The figure that curves upon itself.
She said to Viktor, “The fusion equilibrium, it’s a torus, right?”
He was busy, and his fingers danced in useless, fretful patterns. “Is working fine, don’t worry.”
“Can you clean the system now?” she pressed him.
“What?” he sputtered. “We do that only to go to shutdown.”
“I know. You pulse the top magnetic fields, force the toroid down through the magnetic nozzle.”
“But only to finish the burn!”
“Do it.”
“What?” Disbelief.
“Now.”
He peered at her for a long moment. “It is our defense, the exhaust—”
“They gave us a humanlike figure. We could show them something like themselves. It’s all we’ve got.”
“But the danger! Will take time to reconfigure the drive, stabilize—”
“Now. Please.”
It took more long minutes, but he did it. The great circulating doughnut shape squeezed downward, heating further as it compressed through the knothole of the curved magnetic nozzle, and popped free.
It was hotter than the ordinary exhaust and brimmed with fresh virulence, burning saturation holes in their aft view screens. The doughnut expanded, cooled, and traceries worked along its slick surface. All this they witnessed on the same grid display that showed the magnetic structures. The toroid was small, tiny compared with the Beings. But it grew. Dimmed, cooled, but swelled as its magnetic field lines tried to straighten out. The plasma inside cooled, recombined, gave off a flash of blue light.
Shanna called, “What the hell is this?”
“Calculated risk.” Julia said it forcefully, but she was suddenly full of doubts. She had acted on impulse, on a hunch. She had done that on Mars before, and it had worked. But here…
She whispered, “Viktor, better start building a fresh toroid.”
“I will have to reset the induction coils, prime the Marshall guns—”
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