The Omega Solution

by Peter J Evans

  Summit? thought Antonia. What's he let slip here? She decided to let it go past for now. "You're obsessed with the Blasphemy, Saulus. You focus on her, and see nothing else."

  "It's a justifiable obsession." He paced away, back to the desk. "We both know that Durham Red has no supernatural power. Nor is she the being of pure evil we've all been brought up fearing - personally, I don't think she cares for anything but her own skin. But mutantkind believes her to be their ultimate messiah. Imagine the day when she starts to believe it too! The fall of Pyre will be repeated across a thousand worlds!"

  "I faced the Tenebrae at Broteus, Het. I've been burned by the fires you speak of. And hearing the death-shrieks of men and women under my command is not something I can ever forget."

  Antonia's voice was steel now. "Lord Tactician Saulus, this Omega plan of yours is an abomination, a cancer that will eat the heart right out of the Accord. You'd kill a million men to build a squad of machines, and send them out after one mutant?

  "You'll not get this past me, Saulus. You might have the ear of the Patriarch now, but that can change too. I've already put together an official petition - I'll take it in front of His Holiness myself if I have to. This nightmare will not take place."

  He was staring at her, an odd look in his eye, as though he was seeing something for the first time, something wholly unknown and alien. Finally, he nodded slightly, as if to himself, and walked to the door. "Come with me."

  "Are we done?"

  He keyed it open and stepped out. She followed him, curious now, back through the short corridor that led to the bridge.

  He headed straight for the disc, to his command throne, and sat down, pressing a control as he did so. "Operators."

  Antonia started. His voice was amplified by some device in the instrument boards. It sounded like thunder.

  "Operators, activate the immersive view. Bring up stage three."

  Immediately, the bridge changed colour. Every display board, every holopanel, every map table and screen was instantly showing some facet of the same, awful whole.

  The Omega selection process was already in motion.

  Some of the screens were showing planetary maps, overlaid with markers for troop formations, battlefronts, beachheads. Others were score-charts, hundreds of Iconoclast ident-codes rated according to performance and efficiency, the numbers they had killed. Every second some of those identifiers went dark, faded from the boards, more shifting up in their place.

  The largest screens, however, were reserved for what Saulus had called the "immersive view". Direct holofeeds from the battle itself.

  Antonia could see thousands of Iconoclast shocktroopers engaged in combat. They surged against each other like waves. It was a ground war, a contest of hand-to-hand combat. She could see gunfire, but most of the troopers she could see were wielding their silver blades, swinging the mighty swords left and right to cleave men who had once stood with them as comrades. Some fought with their bare hands.

  There was blood everywhere; on the hard ground, on the troopers' armour and skin, in the air. Silver blades swung, and a red rain fell.

  "In God's name," Antonia whispered. "Stop this slaughter."

  "Do you think they would fight," Saulus asked her quietly, "if they didn't want to?"

  He raised an arm, pointing at the carnage. "They fight for a chance to destroy the Blasphemy. They willingly enter into this 'slaughter', admiral - they know that, if they prevail, they will be remade into something capable of facing the monster on her own terms."

  "Only by becoming monsters too."

  "If that's the price of survival, then so be it. If we have to become what we fear in order to destroy it, then that's what we must do."

  Antonia stepped back from him, retreating from his certainty, and the sights surrounding her. "You're insane."

  "And you're blind" he sneered at her. "The human race is at war, Huldah Antonia. That war may not yet be an open conflict, but if it ever gets that far it will rip the universe apart."

  You're doing that already, her thoughts howled, but she was beyond speech now.

  "Iconoclast doctrine," he was saying, "is based on the innate superiority of the purestrain. It's time to throw that doctrine away - the mutants are stronger than we are, more brutal, more driven. Right now, only their Tenebrae are willing to stand against us. If all mutants rose up, the Accord would be scoured free of humanity within a year. You know it and I know it. The difference is, I'm not afraid to say it."

  He whirled, turning his back on her. "Go then," he snarled. "Take your petition before the Patriarch. Answer him when he asks you why you saw fit to consort with a special agent. Why you stood shoulder to shoulder with the Blasphemy on Lavannos. And once you've been hauled away in irons, I'll take your troops anyway."

  When Antonia got back to Merodach, she found Trophimus waiting for her on the hangar deck.

  She strode past him. He had to spin on his heel and run to catch up. "Admiral?"

  "Not for much longer," she snapped.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I refused Saulus."

  Amazingly, he laughed. Her stride faltered. "Is there something you find amusing about this?"

  "No. Inevitable." He put a hand to her shoulder, stopping her moving off again. "Daughter, I never had a doubt you would."

  Antonia took a deep breath. "He'll finish me. He knows things... Things about me. He'll use them to take me down." She gripped his arm, hard. "Please, fleet admiral. Don't follow me down that path."

  "If you refused Saulus, you're right to fear, Huldah." His smile was grim, mirthless. "But fear for yourself, not for me. The lord tactician isn't the only Iconoclast with allies."

  Antonia nodded, releasing his arm and stepping back. "I'll be on my guard. But father, he spoke of you, too. He said you were planning some kind of summit."

  Trophimus looked suddenly wary. "What else?"

  "He mentioned a 'meeting of minds'. Something about deciding a future?"

  "I thought as much." His face twisted abruptly. "Curse that monster! I've been trying to keep his claws out of the Conclave for six months... Looks like I failed."

  "The what?"

  "I didn't speak, admiral. If you believe I did, you are mistaken."

  She spread her hands. "Forgive me, fleet admiral. This deck is so loud... My hearing must be damaged."

  "Perhaps, then, you should find somewhere quieter," he said. At the same time, he made the battlesign gestures for travel, speed, headquarters. Go home, quickly.

  "That would be for the best, perhaps." Her own fingers flicked out the signs for backup, interrogative. Will you follow?

  Trophimus reached up, and drew his cloak around him. Affirmative, said his hands, on completion of objective. "You have a new flagship to inspect, admiral. Omri is a fine tech-prime, but he needs your guidance."

  His hand clasped hers, his rough, battle-callused skin against her smooth palm, and then he was away, turning his back and stalking towards his shuttle without another word. Antonia watched him go, suddenly aware of how much her eyes were itching, and the back of her throat.

  The fumes on the hangar deck were getting to her, she told herself. Time to leave Noamon altogether, and seek out cleaner air.

  6. IN THE WEB

  Durham Red had seen some weird mutants in her time, but none as bizarre as the Aranites.

  Marshall Wei-Fan was utterly representative of his race. Red had almost greeted the next Aranite she'd seen by his name, until another appeared and she'd realised that they were practically identical. An oval head studded with eyes, twin tongues in constant motion around a quivering slash of a mouth, a long, mobile neck almost as long as the egg-shaped body. No legs, just four slender arms, each jointed in three places and terminating in big, six-fingered hands with an extra thumb... If Red had been arachnophobic, as she'd joked earlier, these guys would have given her the screaming horrors.

  And there were thousands of them, bustling around the landing bay whe
re Hunter now stood. They darted about on miniature jet-belts, or fired tow-lines from wrist-mounted reels and let the spring-loaded cables haul them from wall to wall. They swarmed.

  If her companions were right, and the Aranites were this way through design, then some amazing feat of genetic engineering must have been wrought on them.

  She could well believe it. Mutantkind had always benefited from diversity: back in her ghetto days she could go weeks without seeing two mutants that looked alike. Now, with twelve hundred years of accelerated evolution behind them, mutants were even more wildly diverse. Some, Judas Harrow included, looked more human than she did, while others were as heavily altered as anything she'd passed in the corridors of the Doghouse.

  The Aranites, though, although heavily altered, were all as alike as they could be.

  It seemed like the boys were having a hard time of it. Godolkin was grim-faced, scowling, constantly looking left and right as though hunting for targets. Judas Harrow looked positively ashen.

  She nudged him. "Jude? You're not getting queasy on me, are you?"

  "Forgive me, holy one. Believe me, it's not the company. It's the gravity. It's been a very long time since I experienced a lack of it, and I didn't enjoy it much then."

  Of course, she thought. Grav-technology was so common in the Accord as to be universal. Even the smallest ships were fitted with artificial gravity as standard. Harrow might have gone his whole life without ever being in free-fall.

  The Aranites, however, seemed to have no use for it. Red and her companions had been weightless from the moment they had left Crimson Hunter.

  "Godolkin? What about you?"

  "Microgravity combat is a basic part of Iconoclast training," he replied. "I, on the other hand, do find the company disagreeable."

  "Well, keep your opinions to yourself, okay? I don't know if you'd noticed, but the 'company' here outnumbers us about a thousand to one..."

  "Against my better judgement, Blasphemy, I will comply."

  The deck beneath her boots was slightly sticky, coated with some kind of never-drying glue. It had enabled the three of them to move away from Hunter's exit hatch and into a spot where the landing bay, in all its glory, was visible.

  Red craned her head back, drinking the sight in. No wonder Harrow was getting queasy, she thought. There wasn't a cubic metre of the place that was still.

  The landing bay must have been three hundred metres across at its widest point. It was circular, a great bowl with a flattened base, its vaulted roof soaring above her, studded with brilliant blue lumes. Crimson Hunter stood behind her now, perched gingerly on its angled landing spine, and surrounding it, both on the bowl's base and all over those curving walls, were mites; silvery machines used to work the debris rings outside. The mites scuttled everywhere, insect-quick, dodging between Aranites and tow-lines with amazing mechanical agility. They, and their creators, set the bay in constant motion.

  "Oh," said Harrow, sounding abruptly grateful. "Here comes our reception committee."

  A trio of Aranites had appeared before them - two scampering along the deck, one zooming along a cable from somewhere above their heads. The three stopped directly in front of them, in precise time, standing in a line. If, Red thought to herself, you could call hanging in the air with just one horribly long finger hooked into the deck "standing".

  The centre Aranite blinked at her, multiple eyes closing and opening in rippling sequence. "Durham Red," it barked. "I am Marshall Wei-Fan. Weaver of Paths is honoured to include you."

  They hadn't used false identities here. The Aranites would have seen right through any disguises they might attempt, and that could have soured the deal. Red didn't want to spoil things before she'd even gotten aboard. She had, however, left her weapons aboard the Hunter.

  All the visible ones, anyway.

  "Thanks. Nice place you got here." She gestured carefully at her companions, not moving too fast for fear of losing her footing and drifting embarrassingly into the air. "This is Judas Harrow and Matteus Godolkin."

  There was something going on here, but Red had no idea exactly what it was. She also didn't have a clue whether Wei-Fan was male, female, or something totally other. She'd have to be careful what she said while she was with these people.

  Which, if her companions had their way, wasn't going to be very long at all. Maybe getting back on track would be a good thing. She'd rather not have Harrow start being sick in microgravity, or Godolkin start the trouble he was obviously itching for.

  "Okay, marshall," she said brightly. "Let's get started, shall we?"

  The Aranite's head bobbed on the end of its sinuous neck. "Our technicians await, Durham Red. Allow my deputies to guide you. And may your time here bring status to us all." With that, it detached its finger from the deck, raised an arm and triggered the tow-reel strapped there. The line sang out, and in a moment Wei-Fan was up and out of sight. She craned her head back, trying to follow, but the Aranite was gone before she could track it.

  The odd little mutants must be built strong, she thought wonderingly. Most people would have had their arm dislocated if they'd tried that. "Erm, we don't have to-"

  Before she could finish the question, one of the remaining Aranites had clamped its hand around her wrist. "Follow," it grated, its lower set of arms flexing against the deck.

  "Hey, wait!" Red looked around wildly, saw that Harrow and Godolkin were in a similar grip. "You're not going do what I think you are, are you?"

  "Actually," said the Aranite, blinking every eye it had, "I am."

  And it jumped.

  Red had been on some extraordinary journeys in her time. But her flight through Weaver of Paths rated amongst one of the strangest.

  The Aranites were, it turned out, just as strong as she'd surmised. When the deputy had grabbed her and jumped, that mighty push of his lower limbs had sent the pair of them careering up into the air. Red had found herself flying through a mad sea of Aranites and mites and tow-lines, all moving in different directions and at worryingly high speed. It had taken considerable self-control not to cry out.

  She quickly discovered, though, that the apparent chaos of the landing bay was an illusion. There were thousands of Aranites there, hundreds of mites, any number of tow-lines cutting across her path. But each one seemed to know not only exactly where it was going, but where everything else was going too. It was as if every mutant and machine in the place was locked into one massive traffic-control system.

  The deputy's jump had been aimed to take them high up the bowl-shaped wall of the bay. As she neared it, Red saw openings there, hundreds of them, turning the upper part of the wall into a foam of circular entrances. In moments they were diving into one of the smaller holes, one with a ring of green lights around its circumference. The Aranite had extended a limb and caught the edge just enough to alter their course, to send them flying through the tunnel beyond. There was no time for Red to turn her head and look back, and she wasn't sure it wouldn't fatally alter their path if she did. She could only hope that Godolkin and Harrow were behind her.

  The tunnel looped and swerved its way through the belly of the great spider. The deputy didn't slow its journey at all, just reached out a limb every now and then to make course corrections by slapping the walls. Flying along like this, Red realised, must have been more natural to the Aranite than running was to her.

  The tunnel opened out several times - its sides were featureless, save rings of green light and occasional branches - and never for very long. Red would suddenly find herself in some massive space, but always for just a tantalising few seconds before another tunnel mouth would appear and gulp her down. One branch led them out over a criss-crossing maze of glass tubes, and another into an immense hollow sphere, almost totally dark, lit only by a single rod of soft gold light at its centre. But before she could even begin to ask what these wonders might have been, they were gone.

  It was only when Red saw the deputy begin slapping the walls to decelerate tha
t she knew she had reached her destination.

  Finally the deputy flung out a limb, caught part of the tunnel wall and held on. Red floated past it, out of the tunnel mouth and into white, airy space. The deputy gave her one last tug, to rob her of any trace of forward momentum, and then disappeared. She heard the faint slapping of its hands against the walls as it accelerated away.

  Red felt the soles of her boots touch a slightly sticky floor. The deputy had given her just a hint of downward thrust, as a parting gift.

  She was standing on the inside of a hollow sphere, a space maybe twenty metres across. The brightness of the place, after the tunnel, made her eyes screw up.

  There was a ball in the centre of the chamber, a house-sized globe hanging perfectly still in space. It was covered in equipment, gleaming rods and cylinders of polished steel sticking out at all angles. For a moment what Red was seeing defeated her, and then her perception shifted to match the lack of gravity.

  It was a lab, she realised. A perfectly traditional workroom, clean and white, with a workbench to put things on. All that was different was the lack of gravity: the Aranites were able to use the whole surface of a sphere as their desktop, because it didn't matter where they stood. There was no floor, or ceiling, just one big wall and a very large amount of usable space.

  Flat, fleshy impacts sounded behind her, and she turned to see Harrow and Godolkin emerge from the tunnel. The deputy dragging them must have been slowed up by their mass, even if they were weightless. "Took your time," she grinned.

  Harrow planted his feet carefully on the gluey deck. "Traffic," he replied. His face was pale and beaded with sweat. If he wasn't comfortable in zero-gee, what had that roller-coaster done to him?

  "I assume," said Godolkin, pacing away, "that this is a place of investigation."

  "You assume correctly, Iconoclast." It was an Aranite voice, dull and croaking, harsh in the polished silence of the lab. Red followed the sound of it, and saw one of the spidery little mutants clambering towards her over the lab's outer wall.