Assemblers of Infinity

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The guard froze. She turned to meet Pritchard's gaze, but the major general could read nothing in her eyes. Would she shoot? How deep were her convictions? How deep were his own?

  Pritchard cocked the pistol. "Drop it."

  After a blistering pause, the guard set her gun down on the floor.

  Celeste threw herself at the keyboard again and began entering the complicated access code that would trigger the ring of nuclear weapons.

  In the holotanks, Dvorak and Trace stopped at a towering crystalline structure that pulsed with deep blue lights. Trace reached up to point at something.

  Calmly, Simon Pritchard turned toward Celeste's console and pulled the trigger, aiming into the controls. Then he pulled the trigger a second time, and a third.

  Glass, plastic, and metal shards flew into the air as the flatscreen burst and the covering of the control panels shattered. Splinters of debris sprayed out, cutting Celeste's cheeks and arms as she staggered backward.

  "No!" she screamed in frustration and despair. "Don't you understand!"

  She glared at him in stunned fury.

  Then, a low buzz came from the speakers, unnoticed for a moment with the echoes of gunshots. Within seconds, it built to a roar that screeched out on all wavelengths.

  "It's coming in on every receiver!" Fukumitsu shouted.

  The enormous signal continued to increase, deep and rumbling like a thunderstorm in a bottle. Something of immense power had been transmitted from the great petals of the Daedalus complex.

  "Blocking all channels!" one of the technicians shouted.

  Pritchard wavered. On one of the wall holoscreens, he saw the image of the completed bowl of the Daedalus structure like a gigantic antenna. A transmitter. The enormous construction was designed to broadcast back to its creators and the whole Galaxy that it was finished. It was ready.

  But ready for what?

  "Like an all-clear signal," Pritchard whispered to himself. "Now all we've got to do is wait for a response."

  Everyone fell silent in Mission Control. Pritchard found a seat and slumped into it. He flicked the gun's safety back on, and let the revolver drop to a shelf on one of the consoles. He closed his eyes. He did not want to have to look at Celeste. Not right now. He could not face her.

  The air around him stank of burned gunpowder. He wondered if history would paint him as a hero or a traitor. It would all depend on how the aliens answered the call.

  Celeste paid no attention to him. She had fallen to her knees on the floor, bleeding from a handful of minor cuts. She stared at the red on her hands. "Now it's too late," she said, over and over. "It's too late ...."

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  CHAPTER 41

  MOONBASE COLUMBUS

  Bernard Chu had blocked out the communication channel to Earth as the roar rumbled through the speakers in the control center. The technicians stood in their places.

  "Get me Salito's hopper over on Farside! Now! Get a confirmation that Salito and Zimmerman are all right." He raised his voice to break through the chatter in the control center.

  "Uh, Bernard -- " Newellen said, trying to interrupt.

  "I've got an answer from Salito!" one of the other techs said.

  "Put her on! I want to know what just happened over at Daedalus!"

  "Bernard," Newellen said again, more insistent, "that transmission didn't come from Farside. The L-2 relay is ringing as much as all our other instruments, but not from Daedalus."

  "What are you talking about, Lon?"

  Cyndi Salito's voice burst through the open channel. "Holy shit, Columbus, what was that!"

  "Are you all right?" Chu demanded, turning back and forth as everyone shouted at him in the same moment.

  "Sure -- nothing happened here. Other than that transmission we heard."

  "Bernard," Newellen interrupted. "I've got it pinpointed. That signal did not come from here at all. It's Mars! It was broadcast from Mars!"

  Chu could not find words to respond as chilling thoughts winked into his mind. Of course, how could they have been so parochial? If, as Erika Trace and Jordan Parvu had suggested, the alien builders were indiscriminately beaming automata across the Galaxy, looking for any place to land and begin construction, how could they hit Earth's Moon and nothing else? Why wasn't Earth itself hit? The Daedalus construction must not be the only such alien monument being built in the solar system, nor was it even the first completed.

  The Daedalus nanomachines had been working double-time to repair the damage caused by his nitro and rocket-fuel bomb. It wouldn't be long before the Daedalus transmitter sent its own message. He thought of Newellen's comparison to a giant microwave oven -- and then he wondered if Celeste was going to push the nuclear button after all.

  He clapped his hands. "All right, listen up. Salito and Zimmerman, I want you to take off. Get away from the crater. Now! Get to a safe distance."

  Salito broke in. "Ooops, something's happening here. Seismic sensor just started dancing."

  "A moonquake?" Bryan Zimmerman's voice crowded over hers.

  "I think the antenna is moving!"

  Chu scowled with impatience. "Cyndi and Zed, did you copy? Lift off, now. Safe distance."

  The people in the control center milled around, staring at Chu.

  Finally, after a too-long pause, Salito's voice came back.

  "Uh, we're not too keen on leaving Erika and Jason abandoned inside there. We know they're still alive."

  Chu crossed his thin arms over his chest. "Dr. Salito, if they are inside the radio cavity when a signal of that magnitude is broadcast, they will be fried by the radiant energy. If you are not shielded, you will also be killed. At the very least, all systems on your hopper will be shorted from the EM interference. And we don't have another hopper to come rescue you. Do you understand me?"

  Bryan Zed's voice remained flat. "Sir, don't you think we should go in after them?"

  Dammit, Chu was getting tired of everyone trying to be a hero. "No!

  Four stupid deaths are worse than two. Get going. That's an order!"

  "All right," Bryan Zed finally replied.

  Moments later, when the hopper lifted off and turned its panoramic cameras down across the alien complex on Daedalus crater, they all watched as the huge glassy petals of the transmitter dish began to slowly swing around.

  --------

  CHAPTER 42

  THE DAEDALUS CONSTRUCTION

  Jason scanned the dim tunnels and the flashing, exotic structure embellished with the matrix of circles.

  Then the fireworks started.

  Ripples of blue light streamed along the tunnel walls, like annular waves of energy spewed from the strange machine. A flash of brighter intensity burst out, followed rapidly by a third.

  "What's happening?" Erika whispered.

  Jason stared. The first thought that came to his head seemed the most likely and the most frightening. "Powering up, I think."

  The tunnels behind them held nothing, just conduits streaming to the surface, toward the gossamer bridges that connected the deep catacombs to the giant Daedalus antenna. It would take a long time for them to get back to the hopper, following Erika's fiberoptic thread -- if they could even manage to get back up from where they had fallen. Somehow, he didn't think they would have time for that.

  Another burst of light rippled along the translucent walls. "This doesn't seem like a good place to be, whatever is about to happen," he said.

  "There's only one place to go," she said. "And that's down."

  "Come on, then." Jason stumbled forward. "Hurry! No telling how far away we have to go before it's safe." He stooped to set down the heavy diagnostic pack. No way was he going to carry that thing at a dead run.

  On the surface, he knew Cyndi Salito and Bryan Zimmerman were sitting on Ground Zero -- in more ways than one -- but he knew of no way to warn them.

  They would have to fend for themselves.

  The two of them bounded around the panels behind the weird
building, through an intersection, to the tunnel beyond. Erika's illumination bobbed through the murky catacombs. She pointed the light to a series of openings in the wall. The beam skipped from entrance to entrance. "Which direction?"

  "The lady or the tiger," muttered Jason. "Maybe it doesn't matter." He looked behind them, but he could not see through the darkness. He turned back to Erika, then on impulse, he headed into the middle opening. "Only one way to find out."

  Erika entered the tunnel beside Jason and stopped. "Wait!" She reached behind her to where the fiberoptic line was attached to her suit, disconnected it, then let the end drop to the floor. "I hate to do this, but if there's going to be some big energy surge through the tunnels, I don't want to be wearing an antenna hooked up to my suit!"

  Jason hesitated. They would now be cut off entirely from the outside world, unable even to transmit out. And they wouldn't be able to follow the strand back to the surface like a lifeline. He shivered at the thought of being lost down here in the dark.

  "Oh well, it didn't work for Hansel and Gretel either."

  Leaving everything behind, they hurried onward.

  The next opening turned out to be an archway, tall and narrow. As they passed under it, Jason heard static clicking over his suit radio, then his suit suddenly grew slack and more comfortable. "What the -- ?" He checked the heads-up display beamed on the inside of his faceplate.

  "That sounded like your electrostatic curtain back at Columbus," Erika said. "Snap, crackle, and pop."

  Jason studied his suit display. The readings confirmed his suspicions.

  "I'll be damned! We just entered an atmosphere. That must have been some kind of screen to hold in gases."

  Erika took a moment to answer. "I wish you hadn't left the diagnostic unit. We could tell what the atmosphere consists of."

  Jason checked his air gauge. "I'm not taking off my helmet to check.

  We've got plenty of reserve in our tanks for a while." He drew a deep breath, pumping up his courage.

  They entered a sprawling chamber, vaster than anything else they had seen under Daedalus. Erika's light never quite illuminated any one object, but showed enough to leave them both awestruck. Jason couldn't tell the scale of what he saw -- the ceiling and walls were too far away for him to judge distance.

  He tried to make sense of incomprehensible images: soaring buildings that twisted in odd helixes, glittering crystalline structures taken from a distorted Escher woodcut, rectangular plates that extended at random angles from the floor, arches that looped unsymmetrically.

  They stood trying to absorb the sight, made even more difficult by Erika's tiny exploratory light. Finally Jason whispered into the suit radio.

  "Sensory overload." He swept out a spacesuited arm that moved freely now in the pressurized environment. "My brain can't comprehend any of this stuff."

  Erika switched off the light. The dull UV glow had increased enough for them to make out hazy forms. "Much brighter here. I can almost see."

  "So what does that mean?" he asked.

  "With the atmosphere? I bet this is where the aliens live."

  Jason's first reaction was to turn tail and run. But the only path that they had found led back to the unprotected corridors -- and something was going to happen out there. He could feel it. Not that the Rube Goldberg contraptions here made him feel any calmer.

  It took a few seconds for his heart to stop pounding, but when no bug-eyed creatures came swarming out of the buildings, he calmed down. He tried not to let his voice crack when he spoke through the helmet radio. "So where do you think the aliens would be? Or is this just a staging area, waiting for a colony ship to arrive?"

  "How can there be any aliens yet? They just sent their nanocritters to build this place."

  "But what about this atmosphere? Why else would your nanocritters fill this place with gas -- presumably breathable to the aliens -- and keep it enclosed with some sort of barrier if it isn't meant to house living things for a few decades yet?"

  "I don't know." She was quiet for a while as their eyes grew used to the dark. "Hey Jase, see that building over there?"

  Jason squinted through the darkness. He couldn't see as well as Erika.

  "I only see one thing that looks anything like a building -- kind of low, flat-roofed?"

  "That's it."

  Erika switched her light back on, driving back the dark blue haze.

  Under harsh white light, the place appeared no friendlier. She moved the light slowly over the underground metropolis.

  Visions of old "sci-fi" movies flashed through his mind -- long tentacles emanating from flying saucers, death-rays smoking the ground, scantily-clad women gasping in horror as they were kidnapped from Earth.

  Fighting back the paranoid snapshots from his imagination, Jason took hold of Erika's arm. "Come on. Let's finish looking around."

  They moved to the low-slung building, passing weirdly shaped objects on the way. The things reminded Jason of displays in modern art museums, conceptual sculptures that had meaning to the artist and little else. For all Jason could tell, the objects might have been anything from streetsigns to water closets. Erika's light scattered off the objects, making the curves and shadows look even more exotic.

  After skirting a gnarled tower that twisted up from the floor, they arrived at the building.

  "Okay," said Erika, "how do we get in?" The walls appeared to be one continuous flow of black-speckled weave. As they looked closer, the building's edges appeared more rounded than sharp, as if extruded upward from the floor.

  Jason stepped forward. "If it's really sophisticated, maybe it'll let us inside when we approach. You know, less work for the users. At least that's the way I'd design things." He walked up to the building, but nothing happened. He touched his helmet against the wall. No opening appeared.

  He kept close to the building and moved along the wall. "The door could have a sensor that prevents anything other than the builders from entering. To keep out alien dogs and cats."

  "Maybe it isn't even a building," said Erika. "How about a water tank?

  Or a humongous foot rest. Who knows?"

  Just as Jason reached the end of the building, an opening dilated, melting outward in a plastic flow. "There," he said. "I knew I'd find it."

  Erika flashed the light around as she joined him at the opening.

  "Should we go in?"

  "What have we got to lose now?"

  When they stepped into the building, the bluish tinge increased in intensity, as if they had stepped into some kind of greenhouse. Row after row of bubble-covered boxes filled the area -- each item presumably assembled where it stood by the nanocritters. The translucent boxes were crowded next to each other, basking in the UV.

  He stepped up to the nearest bubble-box and extended a gloved hand.

  Erika held the light steady; Jason could hear her rapid breathing over the radio. "Careful, Jase."

  As he got closer to the bubble, he said, "What do you think is in here

  -- plants? A mineral bath?" He bent closer, then froze, suddenly recalling a vision of hideous Hollywood alien parasites hiding in eggs, waiting to latch onto the faceplates of hapless space explorers.

  "Can you see inside?" Erika didn't offer to look herself.

  Jason's glove touched, then passed through the surface of the bubble.

  He jerked his hand back. "What the hell?"

  "Hey, look!" Erika directed the light over the tops of the bubbles in the room. As the beam of light hit them, they glowed brightly, became more transparent. "I bet our light is too far down in the spectrum for the aliens to see, so maybe this is their equivalent of an infrared image to us."

  Not touching the bubble, Jason bent over to see into the box through the bubble field. "Give me a little more light here?"

  Erika brought the light closer. "My God ...."

  The box held a pale gray thing, not more than a few centimeters long and a centimeter wide. At first it looked like a plant,
a mutated piece of asparagus, but as Jason watched in horror, the thing twisted in its box.

  "It's an incubator," breathed Erika. "These things are alive."

  Jason watched wordlessly. It took a few seconds, but he could make out signs that the thing in the incubator was being nurtured -- tiny black threads ran across the bottom of the box, connected to the creature's outer membranes; black fluid ran from a miniscule tube to the bud at one end of the creature's length; the box jittered, keeping the creature constantly in motion.

  Erika took a step back. She flashed the light into the rows of incubator boxes around her. Jason drew in several breaths, recalling how many similar buildings they had seen inside the enormous cavern. How many embryos were being grown here?

  His next thought was that the creatures' parents might be somewhere around, giant versions of the same entity ready to charge in and devour the two of them for disturbing the ... nursery. He looked around the place; nothing moved, nothing seemed different from when they had first come in.

  "What are they doing -- growing, feeding, or what?" Erika's voice sounded shrill inside his helmet. "What if we set off some sort of alarm? What if they know we're here?"

  Jason tried to comfort himself at the same time. "If there are any aliens, we should have set them off a long time ago."

  Erika edged toward the opening. "Let's go," she said. They backed out of the building, leaving the incubators behind. "Back up to the surface, see if Columbus got any of our transmissions."

  As they stepped back into the primary chamber, Jason felt more and more uneasy. They were still surrounded by silent, UV-laced darkness. He somehow sensed that they had violated a growing ground.

  Erika flashed her light from side to side in jerky spurts. Nothing had changed, as far as they could tell. Everything remained quiet. "I don't like this. I don't have a good feeling about this anymore," she said. Jason could hear the sound of her breathing grow quicker.

  "Don't make it any worse," said Jason.

  "Let's get out of here." Her words sent a chill running through Jason, like an ice cold razor that sliced across his skin. He knew they were just getting jumpy, feeding on each other's growing panic.