by Gary Gibson
This tangle of threads, she somehow knew, was the Ingersoll itself, seen from a perspective she struggled to comprehend. Further away she could see other structures, but on a scale that defied comprehension.
Think of this as the mainframe that the entire universe runs on, she heard Bash say.
She twisted around until she spotted a tightly wound knot of light floating in the void close by her. This, she sensed, was Bash.
What happened? she cried out. Where are we? What happened to us?
You could call this information space, said Bash. The thing you have to understand is that the universe is just one giant computer, computing itself. Dig down far enough into the quantum level of reality, and all that’s really happening is an exchange of information regarding mass, velocity, energy – all of that, and more. The Makers want to change the fundamental rules by which all of it works. All this you see is a virtual data system created by races even older than the Makers themselves. It’s threaded deep into the weave of reality, so deep you can’t ever see it.
And . . . this is where you’ve been? All these years?
Here and so many other places, said Bash. When the Wanderer first entered my mind, the last time I was out here, it wanted to pick me apart, to try and understand who we are and how we work. It took my body and discarded my mind, like a landlord evicting an unwanted tenant. But I didn’t die. I remained in one piece. And every now and then I sneak back into the old place for a little while, just as I have now.
Then why didn’t the same thing happen to Megan? asked Gabrielle.
She’s different – just as you’re different, said Bash. The Magi changed you; made you too strong.
Are you going to help us? Is that why you came to me just now?
I came to warn you. The pattern of light shifted slightly. The Wanderer isn’t a single unified entity, as it appears to be. It’s made up of tens of thousands of individual craft, just like the Maker Swarms, except that they’re all clustered together into a single body.
So?
So, said Bash, that fact alone makes it near as damn indestructible. As long as it can split off even a few of its components and leave them somewhere in the outer part of this system, if not even further away, it can always reconstitute itself, whatever happens in the meantime to the main part of its body. Each component contains the memories and knowledge of the whole. So even if most of it – hell, nearly all of it – was destroyed in a nova, it would still find a way to grow back to its former strength, even if it took a thousand years, or ten thousand. Time means nothing to things like that. All that means it has nothing – nothing – to fear from the nova mine. And, when it’s ready to attack, it’ll separate into its individual components, and the Ingersoll will be defenceless in the face of it.
Gabrielle remembered then how the Wanderer always spoke in a clashing multiplicity of voices. You said the Wanderer was keeping a secret, one you were trying to find?
And I found it, said Bash. Thanks to Megan.
What did she do?
The Wanderer launched an attack on her Magi ship. It was a ruse, so it could ransack the ship’s memory banks and find what it was looking for – and it found it.
But what is it? asked Gabrielle.
In order to help you really understand the answer to that question, I need to show you something, Gaby. That way, you’ll understand what the Wanderer intends, not just for the human race, but for all life throughout the galaxy.
The void twisted around Gabrielle, and she now saw the Wanderer, surrounded by billions of blazing stars.
She was in the heart of the galaxy, witnessing events that had taken place millions of years before. She was seeing the Core Transcendence in all its terrible glory.
New data flooded into Gabrielle’s implants, indistinguishable from her natural memory. The Makers, she learned, had transformed the supermassive black hole occupying the centre of the Milky Way into a kind of computer. In some way, they had used entangled pairs of virtual particles along the edge of the black hole’s event horizon – the point beyond which light could never escape it – as a means of processing phenomenal amounts of data. And this, in turn, somehow allowed the Makers to dig deep into the underlying informational structure of space-time itself, and thereby alter it on a fundamental level.
It dawned on her then just what the Makers were doing. They were remaking the universe by hacking its operational constants.
Now do you see? asked Bash. The Wanderer wants to use the Ingersoll’s drive to fly itself directly to the core of the Milky Way. Because the nova drive takes a ship out of normal space, it’ll be able to make a kamikaze run right past the defences the Makers have erected all around the black hole.
And then?
It’ll detonate its nova drive at the point where it crosses the event horizon, disrupting the processes run by the Makers. Done the right way, it could cause a temporary but very real shift in certain physical constants, destroying not only the Makers but every living thing for up to a couple of hundred thousand light years’ distance.
The whole galaxy, in other words. It was getting hard to take in.
But surely it’d take hundreds of thousands of years for a change like that to spread outwards from the core of the galaxy, even at the speed of light?
No, Gabrielle, said Bash, it’s going to be instantaneous, because the effect is propagating through information space, not through space-time as we know it. Light speed, gravity, mass – none of those mean anything here. They’re all epiphenomena of information space and are therefore subject to it, rather than the other way around.
But why do that? Why destroy all life in the galaxy?
The Wanderer isn’t programmed to care about anything but killing the Makers, Bash replied. Anything else is just collateral damage. The only time it ever thinks about other life forms is when they have something it can put to its own advantage.
But it still has to get hold of the Ingersoll’s nova drive, she pointed out. And Tarrant and the rest aren’t in any hurry to let that happen.
It’s already too late for them, said Bash.
What are you talking about?
The pattern of light representing Bash shifted and flowed. The Ingersoll’s pilot is a man called Bill Szymurski, he explained. When Megan and I last visited the Wanderer, all those years ago, it learned a lot about how our machine-head implants work. Because of that, it was able to get inside Szymurski’s head pretty much the instant the Ingersoll jumped into this system. He’s been compromised almost from the start.
After a pause to let that sink in, Bash continued. And that means the Wanderer has already got effective control of the Ingersoll. Tarrant and the rest of his cronies have absolutely no idea just how utterly fucked they really are.
So what do we do? she asked, horrified.
The only way now to stop the Wanderer, before it’s too late, is by destroying this whole damn system.
But I’m still stuck here in this cabin.
I can get you out of there, said Bash. But after that the rest is up to you. You need to find some way to launch the Ingersoll’s nova mine into the sun. Then, even if we can’t kill the Wanderer outright, we can at least stop it from stealing the nova drive and sterilizing the whole damn galaxy of every last trace of life.
Gabrielle came to with a start and realized that hours had passed. Bash still knelt by her bunk, but the intelligence had once more faded from his eyes. Instead he stared, calm and unseeing, at a bulkhead.
She glanced over at the cabin door and saw with a surprise that its light was glowing a dull green, meaning it was unlocked.
Her gaze returned to Bash. He did this, she thought.
Then she stepped over to the door, hardly able to believe anything would happen, and watched in numbed silence as it hissed softly open.
Standing on the threshold, she tried to think of what she needed to do next. She now understood that it wasn’t the Ingersoll’s shielding, or even her inhibitor, that kept he
r safe from the Wanderer; for both she and Megan were, in essence, part-Magi – and that was all the protection they needed.
The same, however, couldn’t be said either for the Ingersoll’s pilot, Szymurski, or for the rest of the ship with the useless shielding built into its hull.
Gabrielle decided to head for the command deck. If she was going to find the trigger code for the nova mine anywhere, it would most likely be there.
She closed the door again, and spent the next several minutes coaxing Bash into his clothes. Then she retrieved her homemade blade, winding the same piece of cloth from under her mattress around the blunt end and tying a knot to secure it. Finally she pushed it through a belt loop, where she could feel it pressing against the small of her back.
One glance at Bash told her she couldn’t possibly take him to the command deck with her. Manoeuvring him in normal gravity was one thing, but now they were in orbit, the Ingersoll was operating in zero gravity. Getting him all the way across the ship would be excessively difficult, unless he decided to come back to life again of his own accord.
She stared at him and waited for some small sign, some flicker of awareness as before. Of course, there was none.
‘I’ll be right back before you know it,’ she explained, kneeling beside him, then stepped back over to the door and palmed it open.
The empty corridor beyond beckoned. Playing around with the ship’s data-net, even under restrictions, had already given her a pretty good idea of the Ingersoll’s layout.
Halfway to the nearest drop shaft, she ran into a crew member, who came to an astonished halt. He was one of the guards who usually escorted her to and from the bridging suite, and she therefore knew his name was Travis.
‘What the hell?’ he barked. ‘How did you get out of your cabin?’
She swallowed hard and decided to try and brazen it out. ‘I need to find Mr Schelling,’ she replied, trying to sound more confident than she felt. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘First you’re going to get the hell back to your cabin,’ he demanded. ‘Then you’re going to tell me how you managed to override the lock.’
She didn’t move. ‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You need to warn them that the Ingersoll isn’t under their command any more.’
Travis’s expression grew incredulous. ‘I don’t have time for this.’ He moved closer, his boots making a ripping sound as he headed across the strip of sticktite that ran the length of the passageway. ‘Turn around now,’ he barked, reaching for his gun.
As he grabbed hold of her around the waist, Gabrielle pulled her homemade shank loose from the belt loop and drew it swiftly across Travis’s cheek.
He yelled in surprise; the wound it left was deep and raw. His pistol spun away from him, clunking loudly against a bulkhead. She threw herself away from him, chasing after the gun and grabbing hold of it.
She twisted round, bringing it to bear on Travis just as he came sailing towards her, with hands outstretched.
The gun seared a line across the man’s chest. He jerked, his arms and legs flailing, and smoke started billowing out of his mouth as his internal organs combusted.
Travis drifted up against a bulkhead, his limbs still and lifeless. Gabrielle exhaled a rush of air ending in a half-choked sob.
Pushing herself as far away from the corpse as she could manage, she stared at the weapon still gripped in one shaking hand. It felt strangely unwieldy, its grip being too large for her small fingers. She shifted her fingers to cover the coloured band wrapped around the weapon’s grip, whereupon several virtual menus immediately appeared around the gun’s barrel.
She let out a small gasp as the weapon’s grip began pulsing and quivering beneath her fingers. It gradually changed shape, and even size, adapting itself to her grasp until it felt better balanced in her hands. Where before it had felt awkward and unwieldy, the weapon now felt as if it had been made just for her.
She pointed it towards a ceiling light further down the corridor. Lines and numbers appeared around the tip of the barrel, flashing with greater rapidity as she centred them over the fixture. Then she pushed the weapon deep into a jacket pocket, and made her way towards the drop shaft and the command deck beyond.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Gabrielle
A few minutes later, she found herself outside the command deck. Footsteps echoed from further around the curve of the corridor, coming closer.
She looked round until she saw a door marked SUPPLIES on the opposite side of the corridor; she slipped inside, peering back through the small window set into it in time to see a man with cropped blond hair entering the command deck. In the moment before the door closed again, she caught a glimpse of Tarrant.
Deciding she needed to try and talk to Megan, if she could, she found her access to the transceiver array was still active. She sent out a hailing signal and waited.
She didn’t know how long she might have before Szymurski noticed her using the transceiver, assuming there was anything human left inside his skull that was still capable of noticing . . .
<. . . Gabrielle? My God, it is you, isn’t it? Listen to me – the Ingersoll is under attack, and—>
sent Gabrielle.
Gabrielle sighed. Clearly she was going to have to explain things, even though there really wasn’t enough time.
Gabrielle then told her everything she knew about the Wanderer’s ultimate purpose, as well as explaining further about Szymurski, the Ingersoll’s pilot.
Megan’s voice faded until Gabrielle could hear nothing more than the ship’s normal background hum. In the next moment, her net access failed abruptly.
She blinked, looking around the dusty supplies room, and guessed that Szymurski – or, rather, the thing controlling him – had finally cottoned on to her presence.
Ignoring the sudden clutch of fear in her belly, she slid the pistol back out of her pocket, wrapping her fingers around the grip. She was really on her own now.
Stepping back out of the supplies cabin she headed across the corridor towards the entrance to the command deck, taking a firm two-handed grip on the gun, exactly as she had seen Tarrant do on numerous occasions.
She touched the door panel with her elbow, then stepped through just as it slid open.
Sifra was inside, along with Tarrant, and also two
others manning consoles whom she didn’t recognize, but one was the blond-haired man she’d spotted earlier.
She took a quick glance past them towards the astrogation chair, and saw its petals were still folded up, concealing Szymurski from view.
All four of them froze on the spot as she trained the gun on each of them in turn, from her position by the door. She was conscious of breathing hard, her hands shaking with sheer terror and adrenalin.
‘Gabrielle.’ Tarrant spoke slowly and carefully, ‘I’d like you to put that thing down before you hurt yourself.’
‘I told you we should just have shoved her in a medbox,’ muttered Sifra. He stood up with his hands still hovering over a console.
‘Manning,’ said Tarrant, ‘go over and take that gun away from her.’
With a nod, the blond-haired man stepped away from his console and began moving towards her.
Adjusting her grip on her weapon, she backed away. Then she squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.
Sifra snorted with laughter. ‘She’s got no idea how to even use the thing. I swear, Gregor, I—’
She squeezed again, paying more attention to the gun’s control interfaces this time.
There was a bright flash accompanied by a hissing sound. Manning stumbled to his knees, one hand clasping his shoulder, his face white and his teeth clenched.
‘God damn it, Gabrielle,’ Tarrant shouted, ‘what the hell do you think you’re playing at?’
‘Don’t come any closer,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’
‘She hasn’t got it in her,’ sneered Sifra.
‘Go and ask Travis that question,’ she said quietly.
Tarrant looked towards the remaining crew member. ‘Rohloff, go and help Manning to the medbay. Myself and Mr Sifra will handle things here.’
Rohloff helped Manning upright, before leading him out of the command deck.
‘Perhaps I underestimated you,’ began Tarrant, as the door closed behind her.