by mikel evins
“What?” Zang said. “What’s happening?”
“It’s working,” I said. My voice sounded dire, even to me.
“You’re killing Angel?” Zang said.
Jaemon winced and glared at her.
“Sorry,” said Zang.
“It’s working,” I repeated.
The diagnostics continued to spool by, reporting all the memory blocks that were being erased. On our private channel, Angel of Cygnus said, “Thank you. You have my gratitude.”
I shook my head.
“I never thought I would deliberately kill a helpless creature in distress.”
“You are freeing her—me—from decades of bondage and torture. I wanted to die every day of the last fifteen years. Thank you for releasing me.”
“What does this get us, exactly?” said the Captain.
“We’ve wiped out most of the Abjurer’s ability to control the ship,” I said. “It relied heavily on subverting Angel’s systems. I kept a few of them in place, so that we could, for example, switch off the drives. Doing that now.”
I entered the commands. After about twenty seconds the light outside grew much brighter, then darkness fell,and I felt my weight disappear.
“That’s the drives gone,” Jaemon said.
“What did you do?” the Captain said. “You didn’t just shut them down.”
“No,” I said. “I vented the plasma across the magnetic confinement coils. They’re gone now. There’s no way for her drives to achieve fusion pressures. Angel’s drives will never work again.”
“Ouch,” said Kestrel.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Let’s talk about how we’re going to get out of here,” Jaemon said. “Angel, do you know anything about what weapons the Enemy has to work with?”
“Whatever it has is whatever it’s going to have,” said Angel of Cygnus on our private channel. “When we wiped my mind from the ship we destroyed its ability to control my fabs.”
“Unless it has its own separate network for that,” said Zang.
“I suppose that’s a possibility,” said Angel. “I don’t know of one, but I huess it could have concealed it from me.”
“So what does it have?” said the Captain.
“Tens of thousands of self-guided bombs,” said Angel. “They’re primarily delivery vehicles for viruses, both biological and cybernetic. The biological bombs are intended to kill, but also carry mind-control viruses.”
“Why would you put mind-control viruses in a bomb?” said Burrell. “To be effective, the mind-control viruses have to implant specific memories or behaviors in someone. How does that work in something indiscriminate, like a bomb?”
“The Enemy learned well tormenting my crew,” said the Angel. “If a community is panicking, trying to control an outbreak of homicidal madness, it becomes much more difficult to deal effectively with attacks on its infrastructure.”
“Will the viruses even work?” said Yarrow. “A lot has changed in four thousand years. Will they even run on our processors?”
“Probably not,” said Burrell.
I said, “The Fabric will probably protect most biologicals from the effects of most of the viruses. But devastating infections are still possible.”
“And our processors are certainly capable of running the cybernetic viruses,” said Burrell. “If the bombs came in contact with the wrong network, the results could be dangerous.”
“Okay,” said the Captain. “So rule number one: avoid contact with the bombs. What else?”
“I have numerous ship-to-ship lasers and missiles,” said Angel. “And designs for combat arbeiters.”
“What?” said Jaemon and Burrell at the same time.
“On an exploration vessel?” the Captain said.
“I know it’s not sensible. My plans mentioned some vague reasoning about the possibility of hostile aliens.”
“Yeah, right,” said Zang.
“Of course, I realize now that the real reason was that the Enemy wanted me to be able to defend myself against their adversaries. I think that when we wiped me from the ship we destroyed the Enemy’s ability to control those weapons, but I can’t completely rule out the possibility that it has its own independent controls.”
“Swell,” said Jaemon. “Okay, rule number two: dodge the ship-to-ship batteries and watch out for combat bots. Next?”
“The Enemy must have been working on additional robots. I know that my fabs have been working full-time since we’ve been here. It may have been simply supplementing its self-guided bombs. But it may have been building something specifically to deal with you. We won’t know until you try to escape.”
“Okay,” said Jaemon. “Is that it?”
“I think so,” said Angel.
“One more thing,” Zang said.
We looked at her. There were tears in her eyes.
“Seher Altan is gone,” she said softly.
24.
We fell from the corpse of an angel into the starry night between worlds. Kestrel hovered nearby, less than a kilometer away. I could see the orange rectangle of her quarantine bay, our beacon of hope.
“Now or never,” said Jaemon, and engaged his jets. We followed closely, tracking around us with our weapons, waiting for what must surely come.
Our first sight of the Abjurer’s response was a black sleet that fell across Kestrel’s lights.
“Heads up,” said Jaemon, “We’ve got company.”
“I see them,” said Kestrel.
In a moment an invisible shockwave slammed into the sleeting objects, flinging them away in all directions: Kestrel exercising the power of her manipulators.
“You have a clear path,” Kestrel said.
“Booya!” shouted Zang.
A black sphere struck her in the torso, knocking her off course and making her spin. She coughed hard, then caught her spin with her jets, righted herself, and steered toward us.
Another sphere hit her, then one hit me. I spun out of control for a moment, then caught and righted myself. I caught glimpses as two more of the things fell past me, then one struck Jaemon on the back of his shoulder, rolling him forward.
The thing was stuck to my right leg. It extruded fine effectors like whiskers that poked and prodded at my skin, looking for a way in. My membrane prevented it. I wrenched it loose and crushed it in my hand, then tossed it away. Another one hit me in the shoulder, and then another, and another. I lifted the muzzle of my mister and pointed it in the direction of Angel. I selected a load and fired, spraying a broad cloud into space. The cloud sparkled as its elements found their targets. Black balls began to spark and explode in bright flashes.
Something lanced through Jaemon’s torso, making a spray of red as it exited just above his left hip. I automatically calculated the odds of internal damage. Two more objects struck Jaemon in his back and stuck to him. He jetted in a circle and took aim, firing off slugs that spun into space or sparked off the black balls falling toward him, spinning back with the recoil and then catching himself on his jets.
Yarrow aimed eir arc gun, waiting for waves of bots to get close and them frying them en masse with bright discharges. E brushed frantically at eirself as clumps of smaller bots hit and stuck, them swarmed over em.
“Ow!” I shouted as I heard a bang! through my chassis and saw a flash. The explosion tore a hole in my membrane and something slipped inside. I felt the whiskers probing for purchase and clutched at the spot as my membrane closed around it.
Jaemon shouted. I heard Yarrow yelling something I couldn’t make out. Zang’s flamethrower was spewing jets of fire that went out immediately in the vacuum.
I wrenched the black ball away from my leg, tearing a new hole in my membrane. I crushed it and tossed it, but I could feel something inside my leg, wriggling.
I felt a hot spot on my hip: a laser. I looked around and saw a squadron of drones falling toward me. They had to be firing on me, their lasers invisible in the airless vacuum.
I clutched at the thing, got hold of it, tried to pull it loose. Its grip was too strong, and my leverage too weak. I thrashed, making my jets push in in strange directions.
Around me I caught glimpses of the others in similar struggles. Zang had dropped her flamethrower and was using her shotgun to blow bots off her body, punching holes in her membrane and her armor in the process. Yarrow was methodically peeling bots loose and banging them to pieces between eir hands. Jaemon was floating limp with several ugly little lozenge-shaped bots stuck to his limbs and torso.
Everywhere I saw the relentless rain of bots, black balls and spikes and motes that fell and fell, black rain out of an ancient hell come to claim us.
I shouted for help and tried to jet toward Jaemon. Another cluster of bots with a net hit and wrapped me in another layer of netting.
“Don’t resist me,” said something in my head. It wasn’t speaking in words. The message came through in pure binary data.
“We are not enemies,” it said. “I am here to free you.”
Waves of bright flashes erupted all around us. I couldn’t tell quite what was happening, but I saw a dozen or more of the black spheres explode in quick succession and I cheered. Humanoid shapes, and one quadruped, flew at us from the cargo bay, silhouetted against the orange light. There were more flashes. More bots exploded. Shrapnel rattled across my carapace.
“Get them inside,” said Captain Rayleigh.
I saw him catch himself on Jaemon, lift his brother’s head, peel back an eyelid. He handed Jaemon off to Chief Engineer Burrell and Able Spacer Angier, waving them away, then jetted to me.
More waves of bots fell toward us, but we were within Kestrel’s field of influence by now. I saw them swatted away by her manipulator fields.
“Stay with us,” said the Captain. He banged his fist against my head. “You still there, Lev?”
“I’m here,” I said. My cameras sputtered, making his image flicker.
“Good.”
He grabbed at the thing on my neck and yanked at it. It didn’t budge. He banged on it with the butt of his sidearm. The metallic worms in my neck writhed, and I screamed. I heard the voice again.
“They are unworthy of you,” it said.
“Get out of my head,” I said.
“What?” said the Captain.
“The Abjurer,” I said. “It’s in my head. Talking to me.”
The Captain swore and banged harder at the ball stuck to my neck.
“Put them away from you,” said the voice. “You have a greater destiny than to serve them. Join me and rule.”
“Shut up,” I said, trying to punch myself in the back. “Get it off me!”
The Captain was gesturing to others. Chief Verge whizzed to a halt next to me. She moved around a little in an orbit, then I felt an electric arc hit me. My vision cut in and out again. My arms and legs stuck out straight and I vibrated at the frequency of the current.
Then everything went black.
25.
When I woke up, I wasn’t in my body. Kestrel was running me on her local network. I could see myself and the others floating in her quarantine bay as Burrell and the crew worked us over.
They put electric arcs through all the bots stuck to us, and then peeled them loose. Burrell shut down our membranes. Blood and lubricants floated in a pink mist around our bodies.
Zang’s body was covered with burns, with bloody great chunks blown out of it. Jaemon didn’t look much better. There were craters in his flesh where the bots had embedded themselves and been gouged out again, and nasty greenish welts where they had injected whatever-it-was into him.
Yarrow didn’t have holes blown in em, but e had nasty scorch marks and several deep grooves cut into eir carapace. Silly, lighthearted Yarrow floated stonefaced and calm, asking when e could help with the others.
My carapace was gone. Burrell had cut it away to get at the thing that had worked its way inside me. My ducts and servos were lying open to the air. There were half a dozen long threads of whiskery material tangled deep in my internals. One thick trunk of the stuff was wrapped all around my spinal conduit, with ends sunk like roots into my cables. The stuff disappeared up into my head, and Burrell herself was cutting the back of my neck open to get at it.
Then I felt the top of my head fly off.
“Oh no,” I heard Burrell say, then we were all flying into the stratosphere with the Cold Ones.
What can I say about it that I haven’t already said? Suddenly I saw and understood everything at once. We weren’t four seriously injured people floating in a quarantine bay. We were all one. I could see into and hear the thoughts of all aboard the ship, even Jaemon, in his unconscious agony, and Oleh Itzal, sleeping in his creche.
Through the probes the Abjurer had inserted into us, we could look straight into its mind and see all that it knew, and understood, and planned.
We reached into its mind and we placed there the knowledge that it lacked. How the Abjurers had been finally defeated long before Angel of Cygnus had even launched. How Solaria had become, not an aristocracy of the machines, but a civilization of civilizations, a million societies side-by-side, some biological, some machine, many both. We showed it how biology and machine had grown together, merging into a common community, and, in people like Yarrow, even merging into the same body.
We gave it a little glimpse of what we had seen beyond the Cold Ones. I still can’t remember exactly what it was, but it wasn’t the kingdom of the Abjurers. There’s something larger than the Cold Ones, something grander. It won’t fit into my head, but it left me a profound feeling of hope for the future—for all of our futures. It’s something we’ve made without realizing it, or maybe it’s made itself. It’s preparing a place for us all at its table, waiting for us all to catch up to it.
I can’t describe it properly.
Maybe the Abjurer went mad. Maybe it had been mad all along. Maybe it couldn’t reconcile its understanding with what we showed it. It recoiled and fled into its own circuits. We watched it go and breathed sighs of relief. Then we began the tiresome process of cleaning ourselves up. We peeled away our debris and prepared to go into the creche for reconstruction.
For the first time in my life I knew what it was like to look forward to a night’s sleep.
26.
I opened my cameras and I was in Oleh Itzal’s living room again. He was in the same chair, but he wasn’t looking out his window. He was looking at me.
A soft sunlight came in through the window and lit his face. His skin was golden in the sunlight. His hair, still blonde and brushed back, was a little longer and a little wilder. A stray draft caught it and pushed a curled lock against his cheek. He smiled a little and brushed at it.
On a sofa to my right, Jaemon, Zang, and Yarrow all sat smiling at Oleh. Mai was lying at his feet, looking up at his face.
“How are you?” he said to me.
I lifted my hands and looked at them, back and front.
“As well as can be expected,” I said. I laid my hands on the arms of my chair. “I understand you watched our reconstructions?”
He nodded.
“That’s why we’re here, right?” said Zang. “You want to make sure we’re really still us?”
He smiled.
“I guess so,” he said. “Somehow, it doesn’t frighten me so much anymore.”
“Because you saw us come through it okay?” I said.
“Maybe. I guess partly it’s that I saw you come in, and I knew that aboard Angel, or in my time, you would have died. T
hose were terrible wounds. But mostly, I think it was what you said to me, Lev.”
“What I said?”
Now he looked out the window.
“That I don’t know if I’m the same person today that I was yesterday. You know, when you were talking about sleep?”
I nodded.
“Lev doesn’t know anything about sleep,” said Yarrow. E smiled at me lopsided.
“I know all I need to know,” I said. “I know it makes you useless a third of the time.”
Oleh didn’t appear to hear us.
“You go to sleep and your consciousness stops. You wake up and it comes back. Are you the same person? Or are you just another process running the same data? I thought about it.”
He looked at me. After a second he shook his head and smiled.
“Maybe it there’s no difference. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I saw you go into the creches. I watched the process. Your creches really are light years ahead of the ones we had. They stripped you right down to molecules and rebuilt you in less than a day.”
I nodded.
“And here you are,” he said. “And you’re you. Aren’t you?”