The Dreaming Stars

by Tim Pratt

  “Whee, I’m flying,” Shall deadpanned. “I see cold space and cold rocks in space and… lots of little hot things. Very little, and very hot. They are specks, they are motes, they are dust. I think there’s some mineral content in there… They could be fragments of a ship, I suppose, but I hate to think of the force necessary to pulverize them so thoroughly. Let me get closer and I’ll grab a sample and see what the precise chemical composition of this dust is.”

  The probe had small thrusters, and they fired, adjusting the orb’s course more to Shall’s liking. Callie watched as the probe slowly approached the cloud, a shimmering fuzz of red against an infinity of black.

  The orb cut its thrusters, and Callie zoomed in the view until the screens were filled with a blue ball against a field of red. “All right,” Shall said. “Let’s eat some dust and… huh. That’s not good.”

  Callie leaned forward. “Shall? What is it?”

  “They’re… corrosive. The particles are breaking down the probe. I don’t understand it. They’re not acidic. I… Callie, the cloud, it’s moving. It’s swarming me, it’s breaking me down, it’s…”

  The blue orb was suddenly surrounded by the red, and within seconds, the blue had vanished entirely.

  “Communication with the probe lost,” Shall said. “That was unpleasant.”

  “What the hell is that crap?” Callie said.

  Shall sounded remarkably calm. “It’s a nanomachine swarm, Callie. They’re hot because they’re tiny matter-conversion engines. The dust disassembled our probe and turned it into… more dust. That swarm is eating the asteroids, and maybe anything else it encounters, rearranging matter at the molecular level – maybe the atomic level – to enlarge itself.”

  “That’s unreal.” Callie stared at the jittering motes on the screen. Humans and Liars both made use of nanotech, especially in medical technology, but they’d never managed to realize the science-fictional dream of utility fog, molecular machines that could alter matter at the atomic level to create anything you needed. Callie hadn’t thought scientists ever would create such technology – as far as she could tell it was just the old dream of alchemy updated, the idea of turning lead into gold and mortality into eternal life. A place for people to put their dreams and try to allay their fears. Of course, no one had ever created the nightmare corollary to utility fog, either: gray goo, out-of-control nanomachines that transformed everything in their path into more of themselves.

  The Axiom could create machines like that, though. They’d been able to alter the fundamental laws of physics, at least in localized areas, generating artificial gravity and controlling inertia. They’d injected nanites into Sebastien’s brain and cut away his empathy and sense of proportion, among other things, with wicked precision. What was the creation of a little gray goo to beings like that?

  “This is it,” Callie said. “That swarm is what killed the ships and the surveyor teams.” All those people, miners and auditors and the members of Q’s church, they’d all been broken down and turned into… more of the swarm. Members of the Church of the Ecstatic Divine like to talk about dissolving their consciousnesses into a single universal mind, but Callie didn’t think this was the sort of thing they’d imagined.

  “We have to warn Owain!” Q said.

  Callie silently cursed. She’d forgotten Q was on the channel. At least no one had actually mentioned the Axiom. But if this swarm was part of some Axiom project, and humans came out and investigated, that could awaken the aliens (or their security systems, more likely) and make things even worse. The Axiom had probably already destroyed one planet out here. If they didn’t proceed carefully, Taliesen system might end up with a second asteroid belt – this one a lot closer to their sun.

  “The swarm should be a lot bigger, though, if it’s been out here eating asteroids for, what, at least six weeks?” Shall said. “Before the probe was destroyed, I detected a sort of… wisp of heat, leading out of the system. I thought it was just the outer edges of the cloud, but… Oh no. Captain, the swarm is moving. It’s approaching us. I think it noticed us.”

  Callie’s blood thudded in her ears. She considered opening up a wormhole with their personal bridge generator so they could escape, and swearing Q to secrecy later, but it was too dangerous. The opening of the bridge wasn’t instantaneous, and the bridgehead didn’t close immediately after they entered it, either – what if some of the swarm reached them, and came through the bridge to Owain? Even a handful of this dust could destroy the whole planet, given time. The bridge generator had originally possessed an emergency system that opened up a wormhole automatically when the ship was in danger to allow its escape, but they’d deactivated that system after it sent them light years away, into orbit around a ruined Axiom planet: the escape had almost been more dangerous than what they were escaping from. Callie was glad they’d turned that feature off. Spreading this poison dust to some random point in the galaxy would be disastrous. They’d have to escape by conventional means. “Fire EMP torpedoes. Q, get out of here, head back to Owain as fast as you can. Drake, follow her. Let’s outrun that swarm.”

  Three electromagnetic pulse torpedoes burst from the Raven and arrowed toward the swarm. The torpedoes were low-velocity, because they were designed to disable the electrical systems on enemy ships, not tear holes in their hulls. There were failsafes that prevented the torpedoes from going off while the White Raven was within their field of effect, so they wouldn’t cripple themselves, but she set the pulse to trigger as soon as the torpedoes reached a safe range.

  The swarm got to the torpedoes before that happened, though, and they were devoured before Callie’s eyes. Janice groaned, and Shall softly said, “Shit.” Callie didn’t even know if an EMP would work against such nanomachines, but she’d hoped the pulse might at least thin out the cloud. No such luck.

  The White Raven was a fast freighter, made for high-end courier jobs, and improved beyond its impressive base specs to function as a skip-tracer, security escort, and pirate-killer. Drake got the ship turned around quickly, the reaction wheels whirling mightily… but it just wasn’t fast enough. Shall said out loud what Callie had already silently determined from the data streaming on her terminal: “The swarm is going to overtake us, Callie!”

  They were going to die. Callie knew it with a cold and chilling certainty. You couldn’t fight nanomachines. You couldn’t shoot them – there was nothing to shoot, and any projectiles you fired would just become more of the swarm. A nuke might destroy the cloud, or part of it, but at this range, the Raven would destroy itself in the process – and Q’s ship, too. There was still hope for her. Maybe the swarm would take long enough eating the White Raven for Q to get away. That was the best-case scenario at this point: that their death would aid someone else’s survival.

  They were falling into the heart of a volcano. They were being lowered into a pool of acid. They were a feast for the devouring darkness.

  Elena, Callie thought, with an infinity of sorrow. Knowing Elena would die was worse than dying herself. Was there time to reach Elena? To end, at least, in her arms? No. Not even close.

  How would it feel, to be disintegrated by a swarm of tiny machines? Maybe it wouldn’t hurt. The swarm would eat the hull first, after all, and let the vacuum come rushing in. The contents of the ship, crew included, would spill into space. They’d die quickly, exposed to the vacuum, but the swarm would eat their bodies in time. There’d be nothing left of them.

  “Contact,” Shall said. “I… They’re all over us. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Fuck,” Drake said.

  “Finally,” Janice said.

  The viewscreens went red, covered by the cloud of motes. The dots weren’t really red, Callie knew – they were invisible, microscopic flecks of rapacious almost-nothing – but it was better, somehow, to see the thing that was about to kill them.

  “It’s been an honor to serve with you all,” Callie said. And then, for maybe only the tenth or twelfth time in her
life, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Chapter 16

  Callie almost kept talking, because what else should a captain do in the last moments but try to give some comfort to her crew? At the very least she should profess her love to Elena. Elena would probably appreciate that… for the couple of minutes she had left to appreciate anything.

  Except there were no alarms going off. If a swarm of nanomachines was eating her ship, chewing up the hull, there should have been alarms going off – all manner of beeps and wails and klaxons. The shimmering red still covered the viewscreens, but they were still viewscreens, and not gaping holes full of murder-dust. “Shall? Why are we not dead?”

  “I have no idea, captain. The swarm approached us, the cloud enveloped us, and now… the cloud is streaming away.”

  “Does it only eat… uninhabited things?” Elena said over the comms.

  “If it’s that picky, then it couldn’t have killed the surveyors and the auditors,” Callie said. “It seems like a hell of a coincidence for there to be two deadly mysterious things happening out here in the asteroid belt.”

  The red motes receded from the viewscreens, leaving darkness behind. “The swarm is coming toward your ship now, Q,” Shall said.

  “Oh, good.” Q’s voice was understandably tense. “Should I jump up and down and wave my arms and shout ‘occupied’ so the swarm knows there’s a person in here?”

  “The swarm shouldn’t know anything,” Shall said. “Unless it’s made for more than just self-replication. A percentage of the motes could be sensors, I suppose. That makes sense, in terms of choosing targets better… maybe the swarm can only manipulate matter on the molecular level, and not the atomic – then its requirements for new material would be more specific. Maybe the swarm ate some people because it needed to collect organic molecules that weren’t present in the asteroids? But, no, carbonaceous asteroids are the most common ones out here, and humans are mostly carbon. There’s plenty of calcium and oxygen out here, too. Maybe they needed nitrogen for something, but that makes up such a small part of human bodies… The swarm is about to contact your ship, Q.”

  Suddenly alarms did scream – but across the comms, from the Peregrina. “Uh, Captain Machedo?” Q said. “I turned my ship around, trying to rush back to Owain like you said, and now my sensors show microscopic hull breaches where the swarm is making contact, at the back of the ship – sorry, uh, aft? The holes are self-sealing, but… no, there go the seals.”

  “Get into your environment suit now!” Callie said. “Get off that ship! Shall, launch the canoe and go get her now.” There was a distant thunk as the canoe dropped from the White Raven’s belly, with Shall’s favorite many-armed mining-drone body clinging to the top, as usual.

  Q stared at the screen, wide-eyed, her face bathed in pulsing red lights from the ship’s emergency system. “I… My suit is in the next compartment, in a locker next to the airlock. I can’t get there now. The cockpit is sealed. There’s… That part of the ship is exposed to vacuum.”

  “Her ship is about a quarter gone already,” Janice said. “The cloud is getting bigger, too.” The viewscreens shifted to a different set of the Raven’s external cameras, allowing Callie to see Q’s ship. The swarm wasn’t lit up in red in this view, and so the Peregrina seemed to be simply melting away, like cotton candy dipped into a stream.

  Q closed her eyes and murmured to herself. Callie couldn’t make her prayers out, apart from a mention of the Green Lady. Q opened her eyes, and locked her gaze with Callie’s. “I wanted to die on Owain,” Q said. “I wanted to be buried on a planet I helped bring to life.”

  Stephen’s voice cut into the channel, eerily calm. “Shall, how long before the canoe reaches her?”

  “Barely more than a minute, XO, if the swarm doesn’t try to eat me first, but I don’t see–”

  Stephen ignored him. His voice was as solid as a mountain. “Q, we’re going to shoot out the window of your cockpit. You’ll need to lie down on the floor so we don’t hit you by accident. When the window breaks, you’ll be sucked into the vacuum. Don’t be afraid. Shall will grab you and put you into the canoe before any harm comes to you.”

  Q shook her head. “That’s… No, that’s insane, I’ll die–”

  “No you won’t.” Calm, calm. That’s why Callie had made him XO, and why he was a good surgeon: chaos and crisis made Stephen more steady, not less. “You can survive up to two minutes in space, Q. We’re going to give you a countdown, and when we hit zero, you’re going to exhale, hard – expel every bit of breath from your lungs. Do you understand?”

  Q stared at Callie, who did her best to put on an encouraging face. Q’s eyes glistened. “I don’t know if I can–”

  “Do you trust me, Q?” Stephen said. “After last night, do you?”

  She wiped her cheeks, then nodded. “I do.”

  “Get me a firing solution, Shall,” Callie said. “An expanding ballistic round that will knock out her cockpit window and not hit her.”

  “Lie down now,” Stephen said gently.

  Q nodded and dropped below the view of her camera. The canoe appeared on the viewscreen, approaching the front of Q’s ship, which was now easily half gone. The swarm hadn’t noticed the canoe – yet.

  “Counting down from five,” Shall said. “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

  “Exhale!” Stephen shouted.

  The round struck Q’s ship at an oblique angle, blowing a door-sized hole in the nanoglass, without leaving an exit wound – the remnants of the round were embedded in the ship’s ceiling. That kind of round was made specially for knocking holes in ships without going through-and-through: it was designed to disable pirate vessels without totally destroying them.

  Fragments of Q’s cockpit spewed out into space, chunks of metal and plastic and her terminal – and one human figure came tumbling out along with the rest. Shall’s many-armed probe launched from the canoe and had her within seconds, grabbing her and darting back to the canoe’s airlock, depositing her swiftly inside. The little ship was on its way back to the Raven before the airlock was even closed after her, Shall’s drone body squatting on top of the opening like a guard dog. “She’s secure.”

  “I’ll meet you in the cargo bay,” Stephen said. “Elena, come down? I’ll need your help.”

  Callie watched as Q’s ship gradually vanished, like a sandcastle eaten away by the incoming tide. Why had the swarm killed the Peregrina and not the White Raven? It didn’t make any sense.

  Then, suddenly, it did.

  “You can survive for two minutes exposed to space, huh?” Callie said. Their ship had withdrawn some distance from the asteroid belt, and the swarm hadn’t followed them, appearing content to return to snacking on the asteroid belt after it finished eating the Peregrina.

  Q was unconscious, strapped down in a hospital bed, next to Sebastien. She looked and sounded bad – her skin was puffy and badly sunburned, and her breathing was raspy – but she was alive.

  Stephen sighed. “Honestly? More like ninety seconds. To survive without permanent damage. In theory. That’s if you don’t have any air in your lungs to expand when you hit the vacuum – if you don’t exhale first, your outcomes are far worse, because your lungs burst, which is not conducive to continuing life.” He reached out as if to touch Q, but then stopped, his fingertips just short of her swollen skin. “She exhaled, fortunately. But hypoxia causes loss of consciousness in ten to fifteen seconds. Your skin begins to swell within fifteen seconds, as the water in your tissues expands. She had on a tight-fitting jumpsuit, which helped mitigate that at least. There’s a bit of frostbite around her nose and mouth, where the moisture boiled off and then sublimated, and we’re close enough to the star even way out here that solar radiation gave her a mild sunburn. But it could have been so much worse, Callie. If she’d been out there much longer her blood would have boiled.” Stephen closed his eyes, and his lips moved soundlessly for a moment, in some prayer of his own. Then he looked at Ca
llie, and she was shocked to see tears glistening at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t want to lose anyone else. My entire congregation on Meditreme Station wasn’t enough?”

  “Do you need to take Q back to Owain?” Callie said. “We could open up a wormhole, and send you two back through in the canoe. When you get to the ground, just tell them her ship had a catastrophic failure on the journey and you brought her back for care.”

  Stephen considered, then shook his head. “It’s tempting, but it isn’t medically necessary. Shall reached her fast. Once her swelling goes down, she’ll be basically recovered. Sore, and tender, but entirely functional. Also… I think Q would be furious if she woke up back home. We talked a lot, that night on Owain, and we’ve kept talking on private channels during the journey out here. We got very close, very quickly, which is an advantage of my church, when you take the right sacraments. There’s nothing more important to Q than figuring out what happened to her congregants, and making sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else. She’s in the business of making things work, and this whole problem, these disappearances, it’s a terrible failure point in the system. She can’t abide that.” His eyes narrowed. “And, personally speaking, I’d like to destroy whatever sent that swarm here. Do you think it’s the Axiom?”

  “I am entirely one hundred percent certain it’s the Axiom,” Callie said. “At least, I’m sure the swarm is Axiom technology, originally. As for what unleashed it… that I don’t know. It could be humans or Liars, playing with Axiom technology they found. Or even setting it loose by accident. I can imagine someone stumbling on an Axiom facility, opening the wrong door, and finding themselves disassembled by the swarm before they realize what’s happening.” She looked at Q’s swollen face. “But… I don’t think it was an accident. There’s intentionality here. The swarm isn’t just mindlessly devouring. It has mission parameters and rules of engagement. I think the swarm is part of one of those millennia-long Axiom projects Lantern told us about. I don’t know what the sleeping uglies are working toward, or why they need a matter-conversion cloud to do it, but whatever their plan, it’s probably not good for any other living things in the system. Speaking of things that aren’t good for living things…” She nodded toward Sebastien. “How’s our other patient?”