The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “We are not sure of the effect our weapons would have. Captain Calvert does not wish to fire upon an unarmed ship.”

  “His views will change when the sunscoop’s fusion drive is pointing at the Lady Macbeth. Tell him that the dominion of Danversi-YV has suffered the loss of two sunscoops in the last fifteen years. They have been much weakened by this: their alliance has shrunk, diminishing their influence.

  They will be the first rim dominion to fail once I have the faster-than-light drive. That makes them the most desperate to obtain it for themselves.”

  “Understood.”

  The Mosdva glided out into a large junction chamber that had seven tubes radiating away from it.

  “This could be interesting,” Ione told the others. “Judging by the position of two of these airlock hatches, the tubes behind them lead up into the knot. If they are tubes.”

  “We have your location,” Liol replied. “You’re only a hundred and fifty metres from an inhabited surface tube.”

  The Mosdva launched themselves from the bulkhead rim one after the other, heading unwaveringly for the first airlock hatch that led into the knot.

  They cut an oval of carbon-based composite out of the centre and went through.

  “Looks like we’re avoiding the locals,” Ione said.

  It was completely dark inside the tube. When the first serjeant squirmed through the hole its helmet sensors picked out six broad beams of ultraviolet light coming from the Mosdva up ahead. They were moving fast along the wall of the tube.

  “I recognise this surface,” Ione said with as much excitement as her bitek neurones allowed her to generate.

  The walls of the tube were made up from the same baked-sponge material that the Tyrathca had used in Tanjuntic-RI’s zero-gee sections. The serjeant’s armoured gauntlets could fit into the regular indentations, allowing them both to swarm up the tube after the Mosdva.

  “No such thing as coincidence,” Joshua said.

  “The airlock ahead is a different design,” Ione said. “Not like those on Tanjuntic-RI, but not like the ones we’ve just come through, either.”

  The hatch at the centre of the bulkhead was a thick titanium square, with fat rim seals and piston-like hinges. It was three metres in diameter.

  Her infrared sensors showed it was a lot warmer than the tube walls.

  The Mosdva had stopped at the bulkhead to apply small sensor patches to the metal. “The next section is in use,” Quantook-LOU said. “I wish to avoid contact for now. We will go outside.”

  A patch of the ossified sponge was scraped off the wall with a power tool, revealing the glossy inner casing. They cut through it with a laser and slid out.

  Ione switched her helmet sensors to infrared. They were deep inside the convoluted knot. She could see no order or pattern; tubes criss-crossed through space leaving small irregular gaps which were caged by thick struts, forming a bird’s-nest filigree around her. Brilliant red threads revealed heat conduits running outside the tubes, while magnetic sensor imagery overlaid the translucent emerald lines of power cables.

  “Plenty of activity here,” Ione said. “But every tube is solid and opaque. Can’t see in yet.”

  “What about where you’re going?” Joshua asked. “Any ideas?”

  “Not a chance. This is just too big a tangle to see more than a hundred metres in any direction.”

  Thick strips of the sponge material had been laid lengthways along each tube, allowing them to move about easily. The Mosdva started off with little fuss. Ione’s guidance blocks told her they were moving still deeper into the knot.

  After two hundred metres the clutter of tubes came to an abrupt end. The centre of the knot was a cavity over two kilometres broad. A cylinder eight hundred metres in diameter filled the centre, its hubs fixed to the surrounding tubes with heavy magnetic bearings, allowing it to rotate slowly. A band of regular triangular ridges covered twenty per cent of the outer surface up at one end. Ione’s infrared sensors showed the band glowing a soft uniform pink, much warmer than the rest of the shell. A radiator disposing of the cylinder’s internal heat. Which meant the systems inside were functional.

  “Well, well,” she said. “Look at this. Somebody still enjoys a gravity field to live in.” She scanned her sensors round. The cavity around the cylinder resembled a spaceport maintenance bay, gantry arms and support girders stuck out of the surrounding bulwark of tubing, threaded with conduits and hoses. They ended in sturdy clamp rings that sprouted long drill bits, inert and folded inwards like defunct sea anemones. Most were empty, though some of the clamps were gripping lumps of jet black rock.

  They’d been cut like diamonds, with hundreds of small sheer facets. There was no standard shape or size. One piece was so large it needed ten gantry arms to hold it in place, its contoured surface following the curve of the central cylinder. Most required only two or three clamps, while there were scraps that had been skewered by just a single drill bit. Units of machinery were clinging to the rock, so dark and cold they could have been complicated freak outcrops. Except for one, in the middle of the largest chunk, which glowed salmon pink with internal heat.

  “A refinery of some kind,” Ione guessed. “I think most of this rock is carbonaceous chondrite.” As her sensor sweep continued, she picked out several dense magnetic fields. The equipment producing them was mounted on bulky platforms that encircled the cylinder. They looked like fusion drive tubes.

  “Who lives here?” she asked Quantook-LOU. “It’s the Tyrathca, isn’t it?”

  “This is Lalarin-MG. It is their designated location. I am displeased to find that they are still alive.”

  “But you hate them, they’re your old slave masters. I thought you’d killed them off. That’s what you implied.”

  “Those that remained at the end of the time of change grouped together in their enclaves. They became difficult to dislodge. It was not worth challenging their defences. We excluded them from contact with the newformed dominions, and allowed them to decline in isolation. Only those that were the largest still exist.”

  “That’s incredible,” Samuel said. “They’re like the grain of sand in an oyster; the Mosdva simply grew around them.”

  “A very big grain,” Sarha said. “Take a close look at that cavity. I’ll bet you it was all asteroid rock when the diskcity was built, probably with a biosphere cavern hollowed out in the centre. They’ve had to refine it away over the millennia to supply themselves with fresh minerals, and the cylinder is most likely what the biosphere evolved into. They couldn’t expand like the Mosdva, so they just kept to the same size. We know they can keep that kind of society running indefinitely. Tanjuntic-RI was fully operational for the same length of time as this enclave. Except that one day they’re going to run out of rock to consume.”

  “That fits what I can see, except for the rocket engines,” Ione said.

  “Why keep them functional when you need to expend every effort to maintain a highly artificial environment in adverse circumstances?”

  “They might have been spaceship rockets originally,” Liol said. “Not any more. I think they were adapted into the defence system Quantook-LOU mentioned. Don’t forget, the Mosdva revolution happened when the diskcities were in their embryonic stage. The enclave asteroid would already be attached to the rest of the cluster at that time. If you use a fusion plume like a flame thrower, it would have caused havoc, completely broken apart the asteroids, destroyed the new inhabited tubes and thermal exchange mechanisms. The Tyrathca didn’t have anything to lose, but the Mosdva sure did. So both sides agreed to the isolation.”

  “And the Tyrathca being unimaginative SOBs, kept their end of the threat in full working order all this time,” Ashly said. “Fusion plumes could still do a lot of damage to a diskcity, even today.”

  “Except they’re not all in full working order,” Ione said. “I can see ten, of which only three have magnetic fields.”

  “Yes, but the Mosdva don’t know that.” />
  “They do now.”

  Quantook-LOU and the Mosdva bodyguard were on the move again, crawling along the tubes around the circumference of the cavity. Ione set off after them. “Looks like we’re heading for the hub of the cylinder,” she said. “He must be planning on going in to meet them.”

  “I’m beginning to respect old Quantook-LOU,” Joshua said. “He’s been pretty linear with us. Coming straight to a Tyrathca civilization is a good indication he genuinely wants to get the almanac for us.”

  “I wouldn’t attribute his behaviour entirely to fair play,” Syrinx said. “Our appearance gave him a simple choice. Go for the number one position, or see Anthi-CL be absorbed by someone else’s unifying alliance. He doesn’t want the almanac data, he needs it desperately.”

  “You never used to be this cynical.”

  “Not before I met you, no.”

  Joshua chuckled, wishing for the first time ever that he had an affinity bond. Not that he needed to check his own crew. Liol would be covering a grin, while Sarha would be casting a sly look his way and Dahybi would pretend it was all going way over his head.

  “Trains are moving again,” Beaulieu said. “The ELINTs are tracking five; they all started in the last ten minutes.”

  “So tell us why that’s bad.”

  “They are all within a hundred and fifty kilometres of the Tyrathca enclave, and are heading towards it.”

  “Jesus! Wonderful. Ione, did you get that?”

  “Confirmed. I’ll tell Quantook-LOU, not that we can speed things along much at this point.”

  The serjeants were now climbing along a tube directly underneath the end of the cylinder, an uncomfortable position. The gap was gradually narrowing as they approached the hub, and the cylinder’s monstrous inertia had become terribly apparent. Ione knew if she was fully human she’d be having constant memory recall of the day when she got her hand caught in her bicycle wheel (six years old, and she’d reached down to try and move a jammed brake block before Tranquillity could stop her). As it was, she could just appreciate the associative link.

  “We will enter here,” Quantook-LOU announced. The Mosdva stopped around an airlock hatch in a web junction. One of them placed an electronic module over the rosette keypad on the rim. After a moment, the module’s green LEDs displayed a string of figures. They were tapped into the keypad, and the hatch locks disengaged, allowing it to swing down into the airlock chamber.

  “We will go first,” Quantook-LOU said.

  Ione waited until the cycle had run, then both serjeants pushed down into the chamber. The inner hatch opened into the junction. Her suit sensors had to disengage filter programs to adapt to the light inside. It was white. She wondered how the Mosdva would cope with that—if they could actually see colour. Not that the question was high on her agenda.

  The junction was a sphere thirty metres across, with seven hatchways set into it. Ten soldier-caste Tyrathca were standing around it at conflicting angles, their hoofs wedged deep into the sponge indentations, holding them perfectly still. They were pointing thick maser rifles at the Mosdva group.

  Chittering and loud agitated whistles rang through the air as Quantook-LOU talked insistently to the single Tyrathca breeder who was standing among the soldiers. The distributor of resources had taken his suit helmet off.

  “What are they?” the breeder asked, its hazel eyes had locked on the serjeants.

  “Proof of what I say,” Quantook-LOU replied. “They are the creatures who have come from the other side of the nebula.”

  “What Quantook-LOU says is true,” Ione said. “We are happy to meet you. I am Ione Saldana, one of the crew from the starship Lady Macbeth.”

  Several of the soldiers rustled their antennae when she spoke. The breeder was silent for a moment.

  “You speak as us, yet your shape is wrong,” it said. “You are not a caste we know. You are not a Mosdva either.”

  “No, we are humans. We learned your language from the Tyrathca who came to our domain on the flightship Tanjuntic-RI. Do you know of it?”

  “I do not. The memories of that age are no longer passed on.”

  “Bloody hell!” Ione exclaimed over the general communication band.

  “They’ve junked their records.”

  “It doesn’t mean that at all,” Parker said. “The Tyrathca pass useful memories down the generations via their chemical program glands. The details from fifteen thousand years ago are hardly likely to be relevant enough to be maintained in that fashion.”

  “He’s right,” Joshua said. “We’re after their electronic files, not family legends.”

  “I would like to mediate with the family that governs the electronics of Lalarin-MG,” Quantook-LOU said. “That is why we are here.”

  “Tyrathca and Mosdva do not mediate,” the breeder said. “It is the separation agreement. You should not have come here. We do not come to your dominions. We maintain the separation agreement.”

  “What about the humans?” Quantook-LOU said. “Should they be here? They are not a part of the separation agreement. The universe outside Tojolt-HI has changed for Mosdva and Tyrathca. A new agreement must be mediated. I can do this. Allow me to mediate. All will benefit, Mosdva, Humans and Tyrathca.”

  “You may mediate with Baulona-PWM,” the breeder said. “Two of your escort may accompany you, and the humans. Follow me.”

  The tube which the breeder led them down was six metres in diameter, with a cable stretched along the centre supporting clusters of lights at regular intervals. All the Tyrathca walked along the walls as though they were in a gravity field. Their whip-like antennae were waving about with vigorous sweeping motions, like undersized wings. Ione realized the breeder’s antennae were much longer than those of the Tyrathca she was familiar with.

  “We always believed them to be balance aids,” Parker said. “It would appear low gravity has encouraged their reuse.”

  Her sensors swept over the breeder. It was about ten per cent smaller than Confederation breeders, although it appeared fatter. A smattering of the scales on its sienna-coloured hide had turned pale grey, and there were small lumps on its leg muscles. Its breathing seemed to be mildly erratic, almost as if it was wheezing. When she checked the soldiers, they had similar blemishes. Two of them were also running a temperature.

  “They haven’t come through the isolation as well as the Mosdva,” she said.

  “Small population base,” Ashly said. “They’ll be running into inbreeding problems. Couple that with the kind of medical difficulties which you get from exposure to freefall, and they’ll probably have a high number of invalid eggs. Considering they don’t have a research base to examine and counter the problems, they’ve done well to survive this long.”

  The last tube opened out into the rotating airlock. It was a layout remarkably similar to the one in Tanjuntic-RI, a long cylindrical chamber with three large airlock hatches at the far end leading into Lalarin-MG and a pressure seal halfway along. A low rumbling sound vibrated through the atmosphere as the giant cylinder revolved.

  The flightship design was carried over on the other side of the airlock.

  A waiting freight lift was flanked by archways leading directly onto spiral ramps.

  Everyone crowded into the lift together, and it started to descend.

  Gravity built slowly, causing trouble for the three Mosdva. They had to remove their spacesuits entirely to free their hindlimbs, allowing them to stand on them and their midlimbs. It wasn’t easy; their club-like hind feet were evolving away from dexterity, while their midhands were almost too delicate to carry half of their body weight. When the lift reached the base of the cylinder, gravity was fifteen per cent Earth standard.

  The Tyrathca were perfectly comfortable with it; Ione reprogrammed her suit actuators to take it into account, making sure the serjeants didn’t go power leaping and compensating for the coriolis factor. Quantook-LOU staggered slowly, moving his limbs with painful unfamiliarity. His two
bodyguards were a little better off; they had prosthetic midlimbs to take the weight. Servo mechanisms whined loudly with their every movement.

  Ione wondered what kind of strain weight was putting on their organs and heart.

  The lift doors opened, revealing the interior of the cylinder. Ione had to bring more filters on line to compensate for the glare.

  Lalarin-MG was a single open space enclosed by a cyclorama of aluminium alloy. The floors were fully occupied by rank after rank of buildings, the standard tapering towers of all Tyrathca settlements. Here, though, they were built out of some jet-black composite; thick pipes and knobbly segments of equipment protruded from the walls, as if they were machines rather than residences. Countering that impression were lush vines with broad, droopy emerald and lavender leaves that scaled the walls, sprouting rings of large hemispherical turquoise and gold flowers. Thin strata of mist drifted up from the grid of streets, merging together into an unwavering pearl-grey haze as they curved their way towards the axis.

  Every rooftop supported a battery of brilliant lights which shone directly upwards, their broad beams intersecting within the haze and diffusing slightly before they illuminated the section of floor directly overhead.

  The cylinder’s sheer endwalls were simple circles of moss, broken into an elaborate tessellation pattern by structural reinforcement ribs and interconnecting spars. A slender axial gantry ran the length of the cylinder. With one interruption.

  “Oh my God,” Ione said. “Can everybody see that?”

  “We see it,” Syrinx said.

  In the absolute centre of the cylinder, suspended from its tips by the axial gantry, was an effigy of the Sleeping God. From tip to tip it measured two hundred metres, giving it a diameter of a hundred and fifty at the flared central disk. Originally the surface had been given a polished metallic sheen, now it was streaked by thick runnels of algae, with tufts of sickly brown fungi sprouting from pocks and cracks. Both spires were mottled by encrustations of lichen.