by Tim Pratt
“Nonsense. They are nothing. Cowards, unfit to serve the masters. They gave up on Vanir, didn’t they?”
“Only because every ship they sent failed to come back, and they eventually decided there must have been some terrible malfunction with the bridgehead there, but they sent scores of expeditionary missions first. The missions they send here will return, though, with news of a mystery, and they will investigate that mystery. Cowards? Centuries ago the humans sent hundreds of primitive ships, barely crewed, out into the dark, in the faint hope that they might find planets where their kind could survive, and keep their species alive when their home world seemed in danger of dying. Does that sound like cowardice to you?”
Trogidae fluttered his pseudopods. “You are a child, elder. Do not presume to tell me my business. Protecting the work of the masters is my vocation and my religion. You’ve spent too much time with humans – you have become like them. You admire the vermin.”
“I’ll need the codes,” Lantern said. “The ones that allow safe approach to the engine of the Dream.”
“Why do you imagine you need such a thing?”
“I’ll stop the swarm. I’ll switch it off.”
“Ha. Fool. Do you imagine there is a switch to throw, a button to push, a lever to yank down? The great masters slumber in this physical realm. Do you imagine they rouse themselves to send out the gatherers? How absurd. The controls are located inside the Dream.”
Oh, shit, Callie thought.
Lantern was unperturbed. “Then we’ll just have to destroy the machine itself.”
“Ha! Codes or not, the swarm won’t ignore you if you try to damage the Dream, and whatever pitiful damage you do, they will repair, using your ship and your body as raw material.”
“Then I’ll… I’ll warn the colonists.”
“Mention the existence of the great masters to the humans and our superiors will punish you so thoroughly you’ll feel like an exhibit in the museum of subjugation.”
Lantern rose up on her walking tentacles, dignified. “I won’t tell them anything about the Axiom. I can say that some Liar experiment in programmable matter got out of control, and that they’re in danger, and need to evacuate. I’ll help them escape–”
“Oh, no, elder infant. It’s too late for that. I have monitoring stations out in the asteroids and throughout the system, disguised as small asteroids, the size of pebbles – small enough that the gatherers hardly bother with them. I’ve been watching their progress. The gatherers aren’t intelligent, but their programming is complex. Several ships came from the direction of Owain, after all. The gatherers became… curious about that – or perhaps they fear interruption. For whatever reason, they’ve sent a delegation ahead to the planet. A small cloud of gatherers, moving slowly, conserving energy, but by the time you make it back and organize an evacuation, it will be too late. The swarm doesn’t even have to reach the planet to make your plan fail – it just has to reach the bridgehead, and devour the base that allows the gate to be opened from this side. That will happen before you even reach the asteroid belt from here.”
Callie silently swore. She’d thought they had more time to deal with this – Shall’s calculations said the swarm would be slowly chewing its way through asteroids for weeks or even months, leaving ample time to organize an evacuation if their attempt to stop the Axiom project failed. She hadn’t planned on the swarm adapting. Now the humans were the ants again, annoying the swarm with their frequent incursions, and the swarm was following them back to their nest.
Trogidae sidled closer to Lantern. “You should join me, Elder Lantern. You can do something that’s actually meaningful with your life. Take one of the escape pods, and give yourself to the swarm. Become part of the mind of the masters.”
“Join you?” Lantern fluttered her pseudopods derisively. “Is that your plan? To give yourself to the Dream? The gatherers have been active for weeks, and you sent your people to die some time ago – what are you waiting for?”
“I… Nothing. I’m not waiting. I’m preparing. I want to ready myself, spiritually, to enter the Dream in my… purest state…”
“Sacrificing for the masters is easier when it’s someone else you’re sacrificing, isn’t it, elder?” Lantern said. “You sit here, and feast, and float, and meditate, and revel in your own cleverness, but when it comes down to it, you’re afraid to give yourself to the swarm, because you know it will hurt to die. You know even if you become part of the Axiom’s Dream, it will be the end of your dreams, and your pleasures. You want to stay forever in this – the moment before the dream begins.”
Trogidae rose up. Callie had never been in a room with a Liar this size. They were usually the size of toddlers – this one was more like the size of a tiger. “You were not invited here. The courtesies I have extended to you, as a fellow elder, begin to seem ridiculous. Soon enough, I will dissolve into the Dream. I won’t allow you to meddle, and I grow tired of your voice. If you refuse to join the Dream willingly, I will shove you into a pod and launch you there myself.”
Callie fired several darts into Trogidae’s body just as he reached out to grab Lantern with several thick tentacles. The elder listed, stumbled, and then fell to the floor in a tangle of limbs and robes. His many eyes slitted, blinked, and then closed.
“I hope that was OK.” Callie turned off her active camouflage, shimmering into bright blue visibility. “I felt like we’d moved past the ‘useful information’ portion and into the ‘deranged ranting’ part of the program.”
“Your timing was excellent,” Lantern said. “I can use the elder’s biometrics to unlock the computer systems and find the access codes he mentioned, and any other information about this engine of the Dream.”
“What do we do with the elder once you’re done using his tentacle-print to open the files?”
“We’ll do what he wanted. Put him in a pod and launch him toward the Axiom station, so he can become part of the Dream.” Lantern picked up a portable terminal from the room’s workstation and carried it over to the elder’s body.
Callie blinked. “Whoa. You were pretty opposed to me executing Elder Mizori last year.”
“I have the authority, as the leader of a cell sent on a fact-finding mission by my superiors, to pass this judgment.”
“OK, but it’s not like you actually believe your superiors deserve that authority.”
Lantern pointed to the elder with a trembling limb. “This… This monster sent an entire cell of junior initiates to their deaths, knowingly, without remorse, without cause, because it suited his vanity! His hunger for reflected glory!” Lantern let out a keening sound – not from the artificial voicebox, but from her own mouth – and Callie hunched her shoulders, because it was a sound of such pure anguish and sadness.
Lantern’s own cell was populated by young Liars rescued from the incubators of an Axiom facility, and she took shepherding the younger generation as a sacred trust. No wonder the loss of those young truth-tellers hit her so hard.
The keening cut off abruptly. “I am happy to do it if you do not wish to take part. I can find a power loader to help me move his body–”
“No, Lantern.” Callie spoke softly. “I’ve got this. You focus on finding the information we need.”
Lantern pressed the elder’s pseudopod to the terminal, then said, “Just a moment, let me change the authorization to my physiology instead… there. We don’t need… that… any more.” Lantern gestured at the unconscious Liar, then bustled off to begin her work.
Callie picked up the elder. It was like lifting an octopus-shaped sack of gelatin, but she was strong, and she lugged the elder out into the hub, and toward the pod bay. Some weightlessness right now would come in handy. The pods were round fishbowls in a hangar near the top of the hub, each one in its own cylindrical tube with its own airlock. She got the outer and inner doors open, then shoved Trogidae into one of the pods, not bothering to secure him in the seat before she sealed him in. His ungainly tangle o
f pseudopods made him look sad and shapeless and harmless, which just proved you couldn’t tell much by looks. She called Lantern on their comms. “He’s in a pod.”
“I’ll take care of the rest,” Lantern said.
Callie left the hangar, and she was halfway down the hallway when she felt the vibrations and heard the thump of the pod being fired, launching the murderous elder into the devouring darkness of the Dream.
Chapter 23
Elena and the others on board the White Raven had listened in on the events on the Liar station, through Callie’s comms. When Lantern clambered out of the canoe, Elena was there to greet her. “Are you all right?” Elena said.
Lantern fluttered her pseudopods in a gesture of uncertainty. “I did what was necessary, with leaden limbs. Or, you would say, a heavy heart? To take a life is no small thing, though Trogidae treated it like one. I should… go review the data I found on the station, with Ashok, and Shall – and Sebastien. Would you send him?”
“Oh. Of course. I think he’d be happy to help.”
“His happiness is of little importance to me, as long as he can render assistance. He is the closest thing we have on this ship to the mind of the Axiom.”
Elena didn’t like the sound of that, though she knew it was fair enough, in its way. “I’ll let him know.”
Lantern bustled away, and Callie hauled herself out of the canoe next. Elena said, “How are you?”
“Pessimistic.” Callie began to strip off her bright blue suit. Elena was glad – that color made her think of poison dart frogs. “Lantern says we can probably get past the terror drones, and make it to the station’s central hub, but what do we do once we’re in there?”
“Are there Axiom inside? Like, physically? Or are they just… uploaded digital minds?”
“They have real bodies, apparently. Lantern said they could change their physical forms to a remarkable degree, but they do still have physical forms – having strong bodies that can crush and devour their enemies is important to them, and anyway, the best housing for their terrifyingly complex minds is a biological one. The Axiom are sleeping, or at least reclining, in life-support pods in there, plugged into the Dream, just like those hardcore Hypnos addicts who put themselves on IV drips and get auto-nurse beds to turn them over so they won’t get bedsores while they do marathon sessions. Except in this case, the Axiom have been in the Dream for thousands upon thousands of years. Apparently they solved the whole ‘physical immortality’ problem a long time ago, which is why they’re concerned about surviving heat death.”
“So… what’s the plan? We go in there and tear open their pods and stab them all in the neck, if they have necks?”
Callie smiled, but it was a weak effort. “I’m game to try, but I don’t imagine the codes we found to get us past the terror drones will protect us if we start actively smashing stuff up. There’s no telling what kind of defenses those slumber-pods have – the records Lantern was able to access are pretty short on details. It’s not like we’ve got schematics of the place or anything.” Callie sat down on a crate in the cargo bay, radiating exhaustion and worry. “The swarm doesn’t just build more computing power. It also does repairs. According to the records on the base, the swarm is always hovering around the engine, touching things up, doing maintenance, maintaining the life-support pods inside. If we break something, the swarm will just fix it. We need to turn the swarm off to save Owain, and the controls to do that are only accessible inside the Dream of the Axiom.”
“Ugh,” Elena said. “What are you going to do?”
“I did what captains do best: I delegated. I called Shall and Ashok and told them to work with Lantern and figure out a solution.” She shrugged. “I’ve got a couple of really smart engineers and a big fancy AI at my disposal. Just because I can’t find a solution doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“There’s no solution,” Ashok said at family dinner.
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” Callie said.
“We can probably destroy the station,” Ashok said. “The White Raven is pretty solid when it comes to firepower. That would kill all the Axiom lurking on board, and them being dead is a good outcome. But… we don’t know if killing them would save Owain. No reason to think it would, really, knowing how the Axiom like to leave their automated systems running even in their absence. The swarm is programmed to go out, to gather, to come back, and build. Even if we destroy the station, the swarm is out there, heading to Owain, and it might just keep eating stuff, and rebuild the station, whether the Axiom inside are dead or not.”
“Is there any way we can fight the swarm itself?” Callie said.
“If we can get our hands on a terror drone, without disabling it too badly in the process, Lantern and I can try to use its disabling weapon – it knocked out the ship’s systems, and our brains, so it might work on the swarm, too. If we can render the swarm inert for even a little while, we can try to destroy it. Even dust will burn. Of course, if the disabling blast doesn’t work on them, they might see us as hostile, and come eat us.”
“Even if it does work, how would we know we got the whole swarm?” Callie said. “If even one speck survives, a single replicator, it can regrow the whole swarm in, what, hours?”
“Yes,” Ashok said. “That’s why I said there’s no solution. It’s awfully hard to know if you’ve burned every single speck of dust in the system.”
“I have an idea,” Sebastien said.
Callie looked toward him, and the drones buzzing around his head. They made her think of those ancient cartoons, where, when someone got knocked hard on the head, little birds would appear and fly and chirp around them. Sebastien had been knocked on the head, all right – inside and out – but she was desperate. “What’s your plan?”
“There’s an on-off switch for the swarm inside the Axiom’s Dream,” he said. “So let’s go into the Dream and turn it off.”
“Elegant in its simplicity,” Stephen mumbled.
“How do you propose we do that?” Callie said.
Sebastien shrugged. “I can’t speak to the technical requirements, but you’ve all used the Hypnos. How is the Dream any different, at least conceptually? Find a way to plug yourselves into the Dream, go find the controls for the swarm, and turn them off. With the swarm disabled, we can destroy the station without fear of it being rebuilt.”
“That’s a… huh.” Ashok scratched his chin. “I mean, it’s not a good idea. But it’s an idea. Obviously we know almost nothing about Axiom physiology or how their brains work. You’re not going to be able to climb into an Axiom pod and plug into the Dream the way they do. Best case, you’d melt your brain. But… it’s not like we lack experience combining Axiom technology with human and Liar machinery. Lantern and I have done a bunch of that, with the bridge generators, the artificial gravity, the short-range teleporter, all kinds of things, and we’ve worked out a lot of the basic principles.” He leaned forward, warming to the idea. “If we could find a way to patch our own Hypnos rig into the Axiom system, we could theoretically use our hardware to project ourselves into their sensorium. I have no idea what an alien VR landscape would be like, what sensory data they take in, but Lantern says the Axiom had all the same senses we have – they just had more. A human mind might not be able to process all the information coming at it in the Dream, but I bet we could set up filters to strain out extraneous information so you could at least function. It would be the equivalent of going into a cheap Hypnos arcade, with low-resolution rigs and lag and everything.”
“Do you think that’s possible?” Callie asked Lantern.
The Liar waved her pseudopods in assent. “I do. Axiom technology is highly adaptable. They didn’t use just one sort of body – they had many forms, and altered their physiology often, to adapt to different circumstances. Any virtual reality equipment they built would require multiple forms of input to accommodate those variations. Patching in hardware developed for use on humans… I won’t say it’s a
trivial problem, but it’s possible, especially given our experience hooking the bridge generator into the White Raven’s systems.”
“The difference is, if you burn out a Tanzer drive, you can take it out and get a new one,” Elena said. “If you burn out someone’s brain, they’re dead.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Sebastien beamed at her like she was a student who’d made a good point, which annoyed the shit out of Callie. She was never going to like that guy. “I would be happy to help you there. My… unique mental architecture… might make me better suited to navigate their virtual world. At the very least, I stand the best chance of understanding how to operate the controls for the swarm – I grew quite adept at operating Axiom systems during my time on their station.”
“He is right,” Lantern said. “His grasp of their engineering principles far exceeds even my own.”
“No way am I letting you loose in the Dream,” Callie said.
Sebastien nodded. “I know. You won’t even let me prepare your food – you certainly won’t let me near the controls for a swarm of galaxy-devouring nanobots. I accept that. Isn’t it possible for two people to enter the Hypnos together, though, inhabiting a single avatar?”
“Sure,” Ashok said. “There are some cooperative games like that – one person controls the avatar, and the other sort of whispers in their ear. Or two people take the form of a ship, say, and one of them pilots it and the other handles the guns, but they’re essentially working together.”
“That’s my proposal,” Sebastien said. “We enter the Dream. Callie gets to control our avatar. She decides what we do, where we go, and when we leave the Dream. I’ll be a passenger, offering advice and suggestions.”