“Be careful, Peter,” said Sol. “Let Eledone do most of the work. He—it could still be booby-trapped.”
Alander acknowledged her caution with a grim smile. That was indeed a strong likelihood, given Axford’s nature. The ex-general would have a contingency plan for virtually every possible outcome of a situation, he was sure.
Axford’s body appeared unchanged from when it had been contained, but he treated it warily all the same. The insect-leg tools where Axford’s hand had once been hung limp and sinister in a tangle. Extending a toe, Alander touched the body gently at first, then more firmly when there was no response.
Again he noted a strange sense of resistance. The body wasn’t moving quite right, as though it weighed far more than it should.
Hardly surprising, he thought, given that there’s probably an entire hole ship buried in there.
He pushed harder, noting how the body listed slightly around a point low in its abdomen. He jumped back slightly when Axford’s head lolled to one side, as if turning to face him. But the android’s eyes and expression were free of accusation; the look of surprise for when Alander had caved in Axford’s rib cage remained frozen on his face. The movement had simply been a result of the body shifting.
He took a deep, calming breath before addressing the hole ship. “Eledone, I want you to cut into Frank’s body. I don’t care how; use a field effect or something.”
“Where would you like the incision to be made?”
“Above the waist of his uniform,” he said, pointing. “Just along the seam there.”
Something shimmered in the air as an invisible blade sliced along where Alander indicated; everyone watched on in silence as the thick, black material parted and peeled back. The skin of Axford 1313’s body looked little different than that of any other android, but Alander watched it warily all the same. An incision yawned on the dead man’s belly, opening like a lipless mouth. There wasn’t much blood; Axford had been dead long enough for it to settle. Alander stared in mute fascination as Eledone cut smoothly through fat and abdominal muscle to the gut.
“I have encountered an obstruction,” the hole ship said after a few minutes of cutting.
Alander leaned closer. “Wipe the mess away. Let me see.”
Gore parted to reveal a gleam of white that clearly wasn’t bone.
“I don’t believe it,” breathed Inari from behind him. “The bastard could’ve taken us home at any time.”
Alander pointed. “Eledone, I want you to remove that object—the hole ship—from Frank’s body. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Peter.” Shimmering forces enfolded the corpse as the gash across its midsection widened. A matching incision formed a cross down its belly. Axford’s body bent backward. A thick layer of tissue folded neatly away. Like a surreal caesarian section, a white sphere bigger than an adult human’s head and slick with gore bulged out of the cavity. It popped free with a hideous squelching sound and hung motionless in the air.
Behind it, Axford’s body straightened and slid to one side, no longer relevant.
Alander walked around the mini-hole ship. It was hard to believe, close up, that he was standing in front of the entrance to an ftl vessel. It looked like nothing more than an oversized marble spattered with red paint. He was at a loss for a moment to know how to get inside it. If he convinced it to expand to its normal size, it would blow their cockpit to pieces.
The solution, when it came from Sol, was so obvious that he was annoyed for not having thought of it himself.
“Eledone,” she said, “is it possible for you to merge with Axford’s hole ship while it’s in this state?”
“Yes, Caryl.”
Alander glanced at Sol, who simultaneously shrugged and nodded, as if to say: What have we got to lose?
He acquiesced with a nervous sigh. “Okay, Eledone, do it—but make sure you keep its interior separated from ours.”
Alander stepped back as the miniature hole ship drifted toward the outer wall of the chamber. A dimple puckered up to meet it, swallowing the blood-smeared globe with a single gulp. He felt a soft vibration thrum through the deck beneath his feet, but there was no other indication of what was going on out of sight. Powerful technology flexed, twisting matter into unusual shapes and sending energy coursing along new pathways.
Silently, a door appeared in the wall opposite him. Oval and opaque, it awaited his approach.
“Open it, Eledone.”
There was a slight puff of air as pressures equalized. Alander stepped forward to peer up the short corridor leading into Axford’s hole ship. He couldn’t see anything untoward, but he stepped through the door with caution, nonetheless.
The floor jolted beneath him. He stopped to steady himself, and glanced questioningly over his shoulder at Sol.
“External,” she assured him. “The Trident must be really be taking a hammering.”
He nodded, relieved that he hadn’t triggered some mass-destructive device but concerned also that they weren’t making any real progress toward escaping. Taking another deep and tremulous breath, he continued into the hole ship, walking forward into the cockpit where he was hoping he’d find something that might be of use to them.
The cockpit turned out not to be the usual white space he’d expected. The walls were lined with glass-covered alcoves and frosted storage containers. He had to think hard before he remembered where he’d last seen anything like them. Their lines were harder, metallic, not the smooth roundedness of the Spinner tech. They had an almost military air. That they were of human origin, not alien, seemed obvious.
There was a line of nine white spheres along one wall, each identical to the one Alander had found in Axford’s gut. His mind reeled at the implication. Hole ships within hole ships within hole ships, he thought. The chain could go forever with just one entrance to the “real” universe.
He tried to open one of the alcoves, but it was firmly sealed shut. Through the frosted glass he could make out a faint shadow, a vaguely human form, but he couldn’t discern the face. The alcoves were linked by cables to a bank of SSDSs covered in flickering displays. They moved rhythmically, hypnotically.
As he bent down to examine the cables, the purpose of the alcoves came to him. They were android breeders, sometimes referred to as ovens among nanotechnicians. He hadn’t seen one since entrainment days, although each survey mission had one built into the core vessel. But he’d never seen so many in once place before!
“Why the hell would he...”
Before he could finish the question, the answer had already occurred to him.
“Peter?” Startled from his thoughts, Alander wheeled around to see Sol standing in the entrance. She came forward when he faced her. “I didn’t hear anything dramatic happen after you came in, so decided it must be—”
She, too, stopped to stare at the ring of android breeders. There were twenty in all, each containing half-grown androids. Alander didn’t have to check to know whose androids they were.
“So much for weapons,” Sol said, looking slightly pale.
Alander could understand her discomfort. “He wasn’t along to help us at all, Caryl. He never even thought we stood a chance, right from the start. That’s why he was constantly trying to get away. That fucker was here to colonize.”
Sol shook her head. “But for you, he might’ve gotten away with it, too.”
“I still might,” said a voice from behind them.
They spun around together to find Axford standing between them and the doorway.
Sol took a surprised step back. “But you’re dead,” she said.
Alander looked past him, up the short corridor leading outside. Axford 1313 was visible, still splayed where he’d left him.
“Thirteen-thirteen is dead,” Alander said. “This is a different one. Right, Frank?”
Axford affected a relaxed smile, belying the functionally vicious handgun he was pointing at them. “I’m 1041,” he said. “Nice to see you again, Caryl.�
�
“You’ve been here the whole time,” she said. “Thirteen-thirteen was just the courier. You’re the payload.”
“The seed, if you like. I was watching through his senses when you killed him. I thought about revealing myself then, but I figured it was safer to wait. You might not have guessed the truth. If you hadn’t, I would have been free to leave whenever the ftl environment had settled down.”
“You’re not going anywhere now, Frank,” said Sol.
“I don’t think you’re really in any position to threaten me, Caryl.” Ten-forty-one looked down at his handgun; then, surprisingly, he tossed it aside and faced Alander. “I know that I probably can’t kill you now, but I have a feeling you’re going to let me go anyway.”
“You’re very much mistaken, I’m afraid,” he said.
“Maybe.” Axford glanced at Sol. “But I don’t think so.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You still think you’re going to succeed, Caryl,” he told her. “You might be right, you might well survive. But me, I know I’m going to survive, here and in many, many other places. We’re all going to meet up eventually and begin expanding.” His voice was cold. “I told you once that it’s a big galaxy, that we could coexist peacefully. I wasn’t lying, either. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Treat me badly, and it’ll be your worlds I colonize first.” He shrugged. “The choice is yours.”
Alander stepped forward, fists clenching.
“I’m warning you, Caryl,” said Axford, backing away. “Call off your pet freak right now.”
Alander laughed. Physically attacking the ex-general had never been his intention; he was just going for the weapon Axford had discarded. He picked it up and hefted it in one hand.
“What’s this?” he asked. “A PEP gun like 1313 had?”
“Much the same.”
Alander looked at Sol. With one smooth motion, he raised the gun and aimed it at Axford. “What do you think, Caryl? Should we lock him up, or just shoot him now and be done with it?”
“He has a point,” said Sol with an uncomfortable reluctance. “We’re not in a position to make enemies of him, Peter.”
“Don’t let him intimidate you,” he said. “He may be able to breed, but so what? We can breed, too, and there are more of us than him. Remember, we have the advantage of a wider gene pool. It takes more than determination to survive. We have the breadth of experience. We have hybrid vigor.”
Axford smiled. “Maybe so. But that’s not enough, either. It’s a dog-eat-dog universe out there, and you have to be the dog that bites first, or you end up getting bitten. Personally, I don’t think you have what it takes.”
Alander tightened his grip on the weapon. He could feel the floor of the hole ship shaking beneath him. Whatever was happening to the Trident, it was only getting worse. They didn’t have all day to stand around arguing about who deserved to survive in the long term.
Are we immortal, Lucia had asked him once, or destined to die a thousand times?
Alander fired. He wasn’t an expert shot, but at such close range, it was effective enough. The noise was deafening, the flash of light blinding. He barely blinked, and Axford was on the floor, a bloody mess contained by his I-suit where his head had once been.
“Jesus—!” Sol flinched from the violence. “My God, Peter. You killed him!”
“That was the idea.” He lowered the weapon, aware of sweat on his palms, weakness in his knees, and a tremor all down his gun arm. He didn’t feel sick, and he didn’t feel guilty, but he was immensely relieved that he didn’t feel powerful, either.
She went over to check Axford for a pulse. Like Alander, she obviously wasn’t prepared to take any chances when it came to the ex-general.
“Two down,” she said, standing. “God only knows how many more to go.”
Alander couldn’t take his eyes off the gruesome pulp bubbling beneath the invisible skin of the I-suit. He lowered the weapon, shaking his head. “This morning, I’d never killed anyone before. Now I’ve killed two people.”
“The same person, twice,” said Sol, stepping up and taking the gun from him. She still looked a little pale. “If it makes you feel better, Peter, don’t think of him as a person. He’s a plague. You did the right thing.”
She didn’t sound completely convinced.
“I’m not much of a person, either,” Alander said. “Part human, part Yuhl, part Praxis.”
“We become what we have to in order to survive. That’s the rule, isn’t it? And if we’re not who we intended to be when we set out, if we don’t like what we are—” She shrugged. “I suppose extinction is still an option.”
“Sol!” Inari’s voice echoed down the corridor. “You need to see this!”
Her face set in worried lines, she took a second longer to check on Alander. “Are you going to be okay?”
He nodded, surprised to be so certain. Killing was not something his original would ever have countenanced, under any circumstance, yet he felt okay with what had happened. There had been no alternative.
“Good,” said Sol, stepping past him. “We’ll clean up this mess later.”
He followed her slim, posthuman lines up the corridor to Eledone’s cockpit where, on all the screens, they saw a glowing circle widening in the chamber’s wall, red gold around the center and blinding white in the middle.
“Rescue?” said Sol hopefully.
“There’s no response on any of the bands.” Samson shrugged nervously. “Whatever it is, though, Sol, it’s a hell of a lot more powerful than we are.”
Alander fought an encroaching sense of numbness as everyone stared mutely at the screens, waiting for the next surprise.
2.3.5
Since the explosion that had almost claimed her and an ambush sprung by a swarm of red-edged disks as vicious and fast as the much larger cutters. Lucia had continued her journey with extreme caution. The urgency with which she was driven to reach Peter hadn’t faded, but she couldn’t afford to be reckless. Getting herself destroyed wouldn’t do anyone any good.
She guided the golden spindle through buckling tubes and between crumpling bulkheads. The I-suit she had built to contain herself had contracted into a gelatinous sphere, its base state when not occupied by her thoughts. It was as useless to her in the Trident’s inferno as an umbrella would have been in a tidal wave.
The sonar ping drew inexorably closer. Despite dead ends and the growing threat of demolition, she wound her way to an area dominated by giant pumpkin-shaped vessels. Each was roughly the same volume as her spindle and was connected to its neighbors by glassy threads, many of which had shattered under stress. Among the glinting fragments and the groan of tortured matter, the ping continued to sound, weak but steady.
Working her way through the giant vessels, she soon managed to isolate which one Peter and the others were trapped in. But then another problem presented itself: How the hell was she meant to get them out? There were no obvious signs of an opening anywhere to be seen, and she possessed no weaponry of any kind, nor was she equipped with tools advanced enough to cut into anything harder than aluminum. Her frustration mounted. To be so near to Peter and yet—
Light suddenly flashed behind her—extremely white and extremely hot. She turned instantly, terrified by the realization that she had let her guard slip. She was still very vulnerable in here; if she was to get the others out of this situation, as well as herself, then she needed to keep her wits about her.
Before she could flee, something brilliant and white swung around one of the pumpkin-shaped vessels and came to an abrupt halt directly in front of her. Rays of coherent light radiated out from it like halos in a spiritual vision, almost as if searching the space around it, roaming and tasting it in the way that an ant’s feelers tasted everything they touched. The powerful beams passed over the surface of her golden spindle, and she felt herself physically flinch.
But the beams of light ignored her, swinging forward instead to concentr
ate on the side of the vessel containing Peter. Merging as one, the beams pumped inconceivable levels of energy into the side of it until the dark material began to glow.
“There are people in there!” Lucia cried, pushing herself forward to intervene.
“I know, Lucia,” replied a voice in heavy, hard-pitched English. “I can help them.”
A dizzying sense of unreality swept over her at the sound of the voice. “Caryl?”
“I am Thor.”
“You’re—? But—”
“We are not so different, Lucia.”
Actually, she thought, realization of what must have happened sinking in, that probably couldn’t be farther from the truth. If the Starfish had given Thor something similar to what the Spinners had given her, then they were staring at each other from completely opposite sides of the fence.
The ship before her was football-shaped, with a hole at one end, and barely half as large as she was. The coherent glare seemed to come from the skin itself. It radiated an organic sheen, as though in constant motion even when floating motionless. That gave it a slightly blurred edge, as though it wasn’t quite all there.
Nevertheless, a common past did unite them; they had both been humans first, before circumstance had led them astray. Underneath the gold Spinner shell and the cold light of whatever Thor had become, they were undoubtedly human still.
The vessel containing the hole ships she’d been chasing was beginning to heat up, an orange glow growing brighter where Thor’s beams converged. The glow spread until its center was too white to look at. Harsh electromagnetic noise filled Lucia’s receivers, sounding so loud that she began to worry that it might attract attention.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked.
There was no reply from Thor. Half the vessel was glowing now, and still the barrage didn’t let up. Lucia wondered what the chances were of inadvertently cooking the hole ships contained within. How much heat could they take?
Without warning, Thor’s beams suddenly spread apart, and the blasting of the vessel ceased. Lucia’s senses took a second to recover from the glare, but once they did, she saw that the vessel now looked uncannily like an eye painted in garish false color; the brightly glowing patch surrounded a circular black hole where the exotic material had failed.
Heirs of Earth Page 30