“But you said you had friends here, people who could help Yarrow.”
“They’re here all right,” Wendigo said, shaking her head. “Just hope you’re ready for them.”
On some unspoken cue they emerged, spilling from a door which until then I’d mistaken for one of the surrounding porticos. I flinched, acting on years of training. Although wasps have never intentionally harmed a human being—even the enemy’s wasps—they’re nonetheless powerful, dangerous machines. There were twelve of them, divided equally between Standardist and Royalist units. Six-legged, their two-meter-long, segmented alloy bodies sprouted weapons, sensors, and specialized manipulators. So far so familiar, except that the way the wasps moved was subtly wrong. It was as if the machines choreographed themselves, their bodies defining the extremities of a much larger form, which I sensed more than saw.
The twelve whisked across the floor.
“They are—or rather it is—a queen,” Wendigo said. “From what I’ve gathered, there’s one queen for every splinter. Splinterqueens, I call them.”
The swarm partially surrounded us now—but retained the brooding sense of oneness.
“She told you all this?”
“Her demons did, yes.” Wendigo tapped the side of her head. “I got a dose after our ship crashed. You got one after we hit your ship. It was a standard sporehead from our arsenal, but the Splinterqueen loaded it with her own demons. For the moment that’s how she speaks to us—via symbols woven by demons.”
“Take your word for it.”
Wendigo shrugged. “No need to.”
And suddenly I knew. It was like eavesdropping a topologist’s fever dream—only much stranger. The burst of Queen’s speech couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second, but its afterimages seemed to persist much longer, and I had the start of a migraine before it had ended. But like Wendigo had implied before, I sensed planning—that every thought was merely a step toward some distant goal, the way each statement in a mathematical proof implies some final QED.
Something big indeed.
“You deal with that shit?”
“My chimeric parts must filter a lot.”
“And she understands you?”
“We get by.”
“Good,” I said. “Then ask her about Yarrow.”
Wendigo nodded and closed both eyes, entering intense rapport with the Queen. What followed happened quickly: six of her components detached from the extended form and swarmed into the train we had just exited. A moment later they emerged with Yarrow, elevated on a loom formed from dozens of wasp manipulators.
“What happens now?”
“They’ll establish a physical connection to her neural demons,” Wendigo said. “So that they can map the damage.”
One of the six reared up and gently positioned its blunt, anvil-shaped “head” directly above Yarrow’s frost-mottled scalp. Then the wasp made eight nodding movements, so quickly that the motion was only a series of punctuated blurs. Looking down, I saw eight bloodless puncture marks on Yarrow’s head. Another wasp replaced the driller and repeated the procedure, executing its own blurlike nods. This time, glistening fibers trailed from Yarrow’s eight puncture points into the wasp, which looked as if it was sucking spaghetti from my compatriot’s skull.
Long minutes of silence followed, while I waited for some kind of report.
“It isn’t good,” Wendigo said eventually.
“Show me.”
And I got a jolt of Queen’s speech, feeling myself inside Yarrow’s hermetically sealed head, feeling the chill that had embraced her brain core, despite her pilot augs. I sensed the two intermingled looms of native and foreign demons, webbing the shattered matrix of her consciousness.
I also sensed—what? Doubt?
“She’s pretty far gone, Spirey.”
“Tell the Queen to do what she can.”
“Oh, she will. Now that she’s glimpsed Yarrow’s mind, she’ll do all she can not to lose it. Minds mean a lot to her—particularly in view of what the Splinterqueens have in mind for the future. But don’t expect miracles.”
“Why not? We seem to be standing in one.”
“Then you’re prepared to believe some of what I’ve said?”
“What it means,” I started to say—
But I didn’t finish the sentence. As I was speaking the whole chamber shook violently, almost dashing us off our feet.
“What was that?”
Wendigo’s eyes glazed again, briefly.
“Your ship,” she said. “It just self-destructed.”
“What?”
A picture of what remained of Mouser formed in my head: a dulling nebula, embedding the splinter. “The order to self-destruct came from Tiger’s Eye,” Wendigo said. “It cut straight to the ship’s quackdrive subsystems, at a level the demons couldn’t rescind. I imagine they were rather hoping you’d have landed by the time the order arrived. The blast would have destroyed the splinter.”
“You’re saying home just tried to kill us?”
“Put it like this,” Wendigo said. “Now might not be a bad time to rethink your loyalties.”
Tiger’s Eye had failed this time—but they wouldn’t stop there. In three hours they’d learn of their mistake, and three or more hours after that we would learn of their countermove, whatever it happened to be.
“She’ll do something, won’t she? I mean, the wasps wouldn’t go to the trouble of building this place only to have Tiger’s Eye wipe it out.”
“Not much she can do,” Wendigo said, after communing with the Queen. “If home chooses to use kinetics against us—and they’re the only weapon which could hit us from so far—then there really is no possible defense. And remember there are a hundred other worlds like this, in or on their way to the halo. Losing one would make very little difference.”
Something in me snapped. “Do you have to sound so damned indifferent to it all? Here we are talking about how we’re likely to be dead in a few hours and you’re acting like it’s only a minor inconvenience.” I fought to keep the edge of hysteria out of my voice. “How do you know so much anyway? You’re mighty well informed for someone who’s only been here a day, Wendigo.”
She regarded me for a moment, almost blanching under the slap of insubordination. Then Wendigo nodded, without anger. “Yes, you’re right to ask how I know so much. You can’t have failed to notice how hard we crashed. My pilots took the worst.”
“They died?”
Hesitation. “One at least—Sorrel. But the other, Quillin, wasn’t in the ship when the wasps pulled me out of the wreckage. At the time I assumed they’d already retrieved her.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
“No, it doesn’t, and . . . ” She paused, then shook her head. “Quillin was why we crashed. She tried to gain control, to stop us landing . . . ” Again Wendigo trailed off, as if unsure how far to commit herself. “I think Quillin was a plant, put aboard by those who disagreed with the peace initiative. She’d been primed—altered psychologically to reject any Royalist peace overtures.”
“She was born like that—with a stick up her ass.”
“She’s dead, I’m sure of it.”
Wendigo almost sounded glad.
“Still, you made it.”
“Just, Spirey. I’m the humpty who fell off the wall twice. This time they couldn’t find all the pieces. The Splinterqueen pumped me full of demons—gallons of them. They’re all that’s holding me together, but I don’t think they can keep it up forever. When I speak to you, at least some of what you hear is the Splinterqueen herself. I’m not really sure where you draw the line.”
I let that sink in, then said: “About your ship. Repair systems would have booted when you hit. Any idea when she’ll fly again?”
“Another day, day and a half.”
“Too damn long.”
“Just being realistic. If there’s a way to get off the splinter within the next six hours, ship isn’t it.”
/> I wasn’t giving up so easily. “What if wasps help? They could supply materials. Should speed things.”
Again that glazed look. “All right,” she said. “It’s done. But I’m afraid wasp assistance won’t make enough difference. We’re still looking at twelve hours.”
“So I won’t start any long disneys.” I shrugged. “And maybe we can hold out until then.” She looked unconvinced, so I said: “Tell me the rest. Everything you know about this place. Why, for starters.”
“Why?”
“Wendigo, I don’t have the faintest damn idea what any of us are doing here. All I do know is that in six hours I could be suffering from acute existence failure. When that happens, I’d be happier knowing what was so important I had to die for it.”
Wendigo looked toward Yarrow, still nursed by the detached elements of the Queen. “I don’t think our being here will help her,” she said. “In which case, maybe I should show you something.” A near-grin appeared on Wendigo’s face. “After all, it isn’t as if we don’t have time to kill.”
So we rode the train again, this time burrowing deeper into the splinter.
“This place,” Wendigo said, “and the hundred others already beyond the Swirl—and the hundreds, thousands more that will follow—are arks. They’re carrying life into the halo, the cloud of leftover material around the Swirl.”
“Colonization, right?”
“Not quite. When the time’s right the splinters will return to the Swirl. Only there won’t be one anymore. There’ll be a solar system, fully formed. When the colonization does begin, it will be of new worlds around Fomalhaut, seeded from the life-templates held in the splinters.”
I raised a hand. “I was following you there . . . until you mentioned life-templates.”
“Patience, Spirey.”
Wendigo’s timing couldn’t have been better, because at that moment light flooded the train’s brushed-steel interior.
The tunnel had become a glass tube, anchored to one wall of a vast cavern suffused in emerald light. The far wall was tiered, draping rafts of foliage. Our wall was steep and forested, oddly curved waterfalls draining into stepped pools. The waterfalls were bent away from true “vertical” by Coriolis force, evidence that—just like the first chamber—this entire space was independently spinning within the splinter. The stepped pools were surrounded by patches of grass, peppered with moving forms that might have been naked people. There were wasps as well—tending the people.
As the people grew clearer I had that flinch you get when your gaze strays onto someone with a shocking disfigurement. Roughly half of them were males.
“Imported Royalists,” Wendigo said. “Remember I said they’d turned feral? Seems there was an accident, not long after the wasps made the jump to sentience. A rogue demon, or something. Decimated them.”
“They have both sexes.”
“You’ll get used to it, Spirey—conceptually anyway. Tiger’s Eye wasn’t always exclusively female, you know that? It was just something we evolved into. Began with you pilots, matter of fact. Fem physiology made sense for pilots—women were smaller, had better gee-load tolerance, better stress psychodynamics, and required fewer consumables than males. We were products of bioengineering from the outset, so it wasn’t hard to make the jump to an all-fem culture.”
“Makes me want to . . . I don’t know.” I forced my gaze away from the Royalists. “Puke or something. It’s like going back to having hair all over your body.”
“That’s because you grew up with something different.”
“Did they always have two sexes?”
“Probably not. What I do know is that the wasps bred from the survivors, but something wasn’t right. Apart from the reversion to dimorphism, the children didn’t grow up normally. Some part of their brains hadn’t developed right.”
“Meaning what?”
“They’re morons. The wasps keep trying to fix things of course. That’s why the Splinterqueen will do everything to help Yarrow—and us, of course. If she can study or even capture our thought patterns—and the demons make that possible—maybe she can use them to imprint consciousness back onto the Royalists. Like the Florentine architecture I said they copied, right? That was one template, and Yarrow’s mind will be another.”
“That’s supposed to cheer me up?”
“Look on the bright side. A while from now, there might be a whole generation of people who think along lines laid down by Yarrow.”
“Scary thought.” Then wondered why I was able to crack a joke, with destruction looming so close in the future. “Listen, I still don’t get it. What makes them want to bring life to the Swirl?”
“It seems to boil down to two . . . imperatives, I suppose you’d call them. The first’s simple enough. When wasps were first opening up Greater Earth’s solar system, back in the mid-twenty-first century, we sought the best way for them to function in large numbers without supervision. We studied insect colonies and imprinted the most useful rules straight into the wasps’ programming. More than six hundred years later, those rules have percolated to the top. Now the wasps aren’t content merely to organize themselves along patterns derived from living prototypes. Now they want to become—or at least give rise to—living forms of their own.”
“Life envy.”
“Or something very like it.”
I thought about what Wendigo had told me, then said: “What about the second imperative?”
“Trickier. Much trickier.” She looked at me hard, as if debating whether to broach whatever subject was on her mind. “Spirey, what do you know about Solar War Three?”
The wasps had given up on Yarrow while we traveled. They had left her on a corniced plinth in the middle of the terrazzo, poised on her back, arms folded across her chest, tail and fluke draping asymmetrically over one side.
“She didn’t necessarily fail, Spirey,” Wendigo said, taking my arm in her own unyielding grip. “That’s only Yarrow’s body, after all.”
“The Queen managed to read her mind?”
There was no opportunity to answer. The chamber shook, more harshly than when Mouser had exploded. The vibration keeled us to the floor, Wendigo’s metal arms cracking against the tessellated marble. As if turning in her sleep, Yarrow slipped from the plinth.
“Home,” Wendigo said, raising herself from the floor.
“Impossible. Can’t have been more than two hours since Mouser was hit. There shouldn’t be any response for another four!”
“They probably decided to attack us regardless of the outcome of their last attempt. Kinetics.”
“You sure there’s no defense?”
“Only good luck.” The ground lashed at us again, but Wendigo stayed standing. The roar that followed the first impact was subsiding, fading into a constant but bearable complaint of tortured ice. “The first probably only chipped us—maybe gouged a big crater, but I doubt that it ruptured any of the pressurized areas. Next time could be worse.”
And there would be a next time, no doubt about it. Kinetics were the only weapon capable of hitting us at such long range, and they did so by sheer force of numbers. Each kinetic was a speck of iron, accelerated to a hair’s breadth below the speed of light. Relativity bequeathed the speck a disproportionate amount of kinetic energy—enough that only a few impacts would rip the splinter to shreds. Of course, only one in a thousand of the kinetics they fired at us would hit—but that didn’t matter. They’d just fire ten thousand.
“Wendigo,’’ I said. “Can we get to your ship?”
“No,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We can reach it, but it isn’t fixed yet.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll lift on auxiliaries. Once we’re clear of the splinter we’ll be safe.”
“No good, either. Hull’s breached—it’ll be at least an hour before even part of it can be pressurized.”
“And it’ll take us an hour or so just to get there, won’t it? So why are we waiting?”
“Sorry, Spirey, but—”
Her words were drowned by the arrival of the second kinetic. This one seemed to hit harder, the impact trailing away into aftergroans. The holographic frescos were all dark now. Then—ever so slowly—the ceiling ruptured, a huge mandible of ice probing into the chamber. We’d lost the false gravity; now all that remained was the splinter’s feeble pull, dragging us obliquely toward one wall.
“But what?” I shouted in Wendigo’s direction.
For a moment she had that absent look, which said she was more Queen than Wendigo. Then she nodded in reluctant acceptance. “All right, Spirey. We play it your way. Not because I think our chances are great. Just that I’d rather be doing something.”
“Amen to that.”
It was uncomfortably dim now, much of the illumination having come from the endlessly cycling frescos. But it wasn’t silent. Though the groan of the chamber’s off-kilter spin was gone now, what remained was almost as bad: the agonized shearing of the ice that lay beyond us. Helped by wasps, we made it to the train. I carried Yarrow’s corpse, but at the door Wendigo said: “Leave her.”
“No way.”
“She’s dead, Spirey. Everything of her that mattered, the Splinterqueen already saved. You have to accept that. It was enough that you brought her here, don’t you understand? Carrying her now would only lessen your chances—and that would really have pissed her off.”
Some alien part of me allowed the wasps to take the corpse. Then we were inside, helmeted up and breathing thick.
As the train picked up speed, I glanced out the window, intent on seeing the Queen one last time. It should have been too dark, but the chamber looked bright. For a moment I presumed the frescos had come to life again, but then something about the scene’s unreal intensity told me the Queen was weaving this image in my head. She hovered above the debris-strewn terrazzo—except that this was more than the Queen I had seen before. This was—what?
How she saw herself?
Ten of her twelve wasp composites were now back together, arranged in constantly shifting formation. They now seemed more living than machine, with diaphanous sunwings, chitin-black bodies, fur-sheened limbs and sensors, and eyes that were faceted crystalline globes, sparkling in the chamber’s false light. That wasn’t all. Before, I’d sensed the Queen as something implied by her composites. Now I didn’t need to imagine her. Like a ghost in which the composites hung, she loomed vast in the chamber, multiwinged and brooding—
Federations Page 20
