_____
The Kriani’s two robots clung to what would be the ceiling, if the ship were in flight. They cut into the hull, working to expose the ship’s AI core. Sparks flew around the room on straight trajectories and bounced off the shining hard controls and the two seats where Tarkos and Bria had sat while flying the ship. A metal net fixed to the floor held a seething mass of the ship’s small repair robots, which struggled to get free.
“You will stabilize the core while it is removed from the ship,” the Kriani transmitted again.
Tiklik had little social experience, but it could reason through this scenario. If it could not offer assistance, it would be destroyed. The Kriani negotiated with Tiklik as one slave to another: do or be cast aside. So Tiklik did not explain to the Kriani that the core systems were quantum key locked to Tarkos and Bria, and so inaccessible even to a Kirt AI.
Tiklik reached out and interfaced with the ship’s network. The core computer was there, a presence as dominant in this network as the brown dwarf was in the space outside. But also the many other systems of the ship, less guarded but no less important, were in the network.
The Ulltrian robots pulled away the panel, exposing a long white cylinder bound tightly in glowing fiber cables: the core, the mind of the starsleeve.
“This will require a significant period of preparation,” Tiklik said.
The Kriani only blasted him again with a dense pulse of radar, a gesture Tiklik felt like a shove.
_____
Although Tiklik had never been given permission to run critical ship systems, penetrating these proved easy. Tiklik simply used the cryptolinks it had overhead Tarkos and Bria use. In seconds, Tiklik felt the whole starsleeve; all the ship’s sensors opened in its mind.
Tiklik could see outside. An Ulltrian ship floated there, its black hull wrapped like wings around the starsleeve. Small robots moved over the hulls and leapt back and forth in the space between ships. The stars beyond whispered quietly the song of their fusion. Below, the huge brown dwarf glowed dimly, its minimal light reflecting off the starsleeve and being soaked up by the dark Ulltrian ship. No signal, no call came from the ocean world where the Harmonizers, if they were still alive, now explored.
Tiklik turned its attention to the starsleeve’s mind core, which appeared to Tiklik as smooth, impenetrable, and quiet. The starsleeve’s computer was a strange thing. Barely self-aware, it had no motivations of its own other than to serve, to move the ship out of real space when and only when asked, and only as asked. But, in its own way, it was as sophisticated as Tiklik.
“You will signal when you have stabilized the core so that it can be removed,” the Kriani radioed so strongly it seemed like a scream.
Tiklik turned its attention back to the bridge, and looked with its own eyes at the Kriani that floated nearby. “The machine cannot be controlled through manipulation of its own mind,” Tiklik transmitted. “But I can control its interface. I could tell the core that it is still in place, while you remove it from the starsleeve.”
The Kriani turned its featureless helmet, a gesture that seemed to convey impatience. “Do it immediately. Then as our contractual arrangement specifies you will be returned to space.”
Tiklik considered, its future simulations churning frantically. The rational course was clear. This Kriani would destroy Tiklik if it did not cooperate. Furthermore, the Ulltrians would win the coming war and annihilate the Alliance. The expected utility of cooperation with the Ulltrians, though uncertain, far outweighed the expected utility of resistance.
Tiklik thought of Eydis’s words. Put your expected utility calculator to sleep. Let reason be still. Keep only your perceptual apparatus awake and in real time. And just listen. Just feel.
Tiklik stopped thinking about the future. For long seconds, it simply floated, experiencing the ship, the feel of the robots crawling inside and outside the hull, the blaring of the Kriani’s radio, the whistle of the brown dwarf below and the whisper of the stars beyond….
Tiklik took control of the core’s interface.
A moment later came the explosion.
CHAPTER 8
Pala Eydis stood at the entrance to the bay. The bay door was open, and water rippled and tossed in the square pool. The blue glow shed from the ceiling was so dim that she could see the ghostly luminescence of the organisms swimming just below the water’s surface. The station shuddered again, and sea sloshed onto the floor. She had heard Tarkos’s warning that the station sank now, and she knew the sea would encroach into the bay, squeezing the remaining atmosphere to equalize the pressure. Eventually, only a few bubbles would remain, crushed against the ceiling, and then the station would collapse and the debris would settle onto water that had compressed till it had the hardness of iron. But long before that happened, the Ulltrian that remained here would leave.
Or rather it would try to leave. Eydis had her own ideas about that.
The black Ulltrian ship crouched before her, covered with barbed spikes that bent back to vicious, uneven blades. It looked more like a thing designed to tear flesh than to traverse space. As she stared, it shifted. The barbs on its hull twisted slightly, bristling. She caught her breath at the terrifying sight. It made the ship seem like a huge, predatory spider, watching her patiently, waiting for her to step forward into its lair.
But Eydis also smiled—a brief, nervous smile, but a genuine one. Because she knew this ship. The Ulltrians had called this class of ship Krau-kadga. Space gnasher might be the best translation. She had studied the design, and had seen one on the Ulltrian homeworld—broken, half gutted, but still with many functioning systems. And she had studied, and mastered, those systems.
“I know you,” she whispered. “And I know an old monster is in you.”
A protesting beep told her that Tarkos had fallen out of communication range. The hull of the city and the growing span of water were not permitting the cruiser to transmit inside, she assumed. Telemetry from Bria’s suit told her the Sussurat still breathed, and now approached her, growing closer. That would mean Bria had made it to the end of the spoke, and hurried along the outer ring. But Bria would not be here soon. Eydis turned on her radio.
“Commander?”
The Sussurat grunted.
“I’m at the ship,” Eydis said. “It’s a design that used to hold a single Ulltrian, sometimes along with one Kriani servant.”
She activated the quantum computer wrapped inside her gut. Her implants felt around the ship, touching its fields. Nothing. No information, no communications channels. Just a hiss of random noise.
Eydis took a deep breath. Had any human ever been so alone? Thousands of light years from Earth, in the dark bay of a sinking station on a sunless planet, she faced a black ship that housed an evil monster. She shook all over. The hammering of her heart sounded loud in her ear, thundering in the soft sounds of the space suit. But she whispered to herself, “I’m going to do this. For my brother and mother and father. For Iceland. For the Atlantic. For our sun and sky. For the Earth.”
She set her suit to a multiband transmission, and said, very slowly, in the gutteral, snarling language of the Ulltrians, “I am the human Pala Eydis, and I declare myself your equal, and call you to fight me here, limb to limb.”
No response. The ship remained quiet. The Ulltrian might be so appalled by the challenge that it simply hit her with a particle beam from the ship, smearing her across the bay in an instant. But then it might not. It might take her seriously, and feel compelled to come outside to fight. Or it might just pause in curiosity.
And it needs its samples, she told herself. It wants trophies.
“What said, human?” a voice growled in her ear. Bria. “What do?”
Eydis would have liked to explain to the Sussurat that she was tricking the Ulltrian into opening its ship, so that she could try to hack its systems. But she did not trust the security of their transmission protocols, and she knew sound vibrations could be read off a helmet. She told
her suit to mute the Sussurat’s transmission, and translate them to text in the corner of her visual field. Again she transmitted at the ship, “I am the human Pala Eydis, and I declare myself your equal, and call you to fight me here, limb to limb, or submit to my domination.”
A crack of thick, blue light appeared on the underside of the hull, between the three legs that held the ship off the deck. The blue light spread, outlining a rectangular door. The barbs in the rectangle folded back into the metal surface, and then the rectangle hinged down till one edge lay on the deck, forming a ramp.
She held her breath. The ship was open. Its shields came down. She could suddenly hear its systems, transmitting their incessant buzz.
A long moment passed, while her hopes trembled on the edge of despair. Then her quantum computer chimed silently in her brain: it had achieved a clasp with the systems of the space gnasher class ship. She made a fist and bounced it off her thigh, triumphant and relieved. She told her computer to transmit the protocol program she had prepared.
A single black leg, like the limb of a huge black spider, reached down and tested the ramp.
Eydis could not help herself: she began to pant. The sound of her own breathing filled her helmet, a sound like panic. The bottom of her visor fogged over. She tried to slow her breath, but it made her feel like she might suffocate. So she let herself gasp.
It was coming now. An ancient, evil thing.
But no. A second leg stepped down on the ramp. And she saw then that the legs were too short, with only a single joint. She recognized the shape of them then. A Kriani. One of the slaves of the Ulltrians. Its ant-shaped body came fully into view now as it stepped down the ramp and faced her. Radar pinged off her suit. Behind the Kriani, a robot of black metal dropped down from the ship and then crept along the deck, an obscenity of knives and pencil thin arms, walking on four blade-like legs.
The Kriani spoke in heavily accented Galactic. “I have come to collect you.”
“You think I’m helpless,” Eydis whispered, in English, mostly to reassure herself. “Your master is going to be surprised. Because I come with your own secrets, wrapped in my ape skull. And I know how to use them.”
_____
An e-year before, Eydis had found a space gnasher ship in the soft ground before an old tower in the abandoned city of Kir-DaKu.
Long ago, Kir-DaKu had been an important city on Dâk-Ull, the Ulltrian homeworld, the world that most Galactics called The Well of Furies. The denizens of that planet, the Kriani, once the slaves of the Ulltrians, called the city the Abomination Nexus, because when the Ulltrians still dwelled on that world, they had made their war plans from its low, obsidian buildings. The Kriani forbad Eydis to enter the center of the ruin. But Eydis had received permission to study a temple on its outskirts. And that had been enough.
The gleaming stone towers of the city had tumbled. Thick, inhospitable brambles grew to clot the streets. Dâk-Ull was a world punished by hurricane winds, frequent quakes, and fiercely aggressive organisms. Nothing abandoned could last in the perpetual onslaught of the unforgiving environment. The temple she had been permitted to study—one of countless shrines to war and evolution on Dâk-Ull—lay also in rubble, its great blocks pulverized to small stone strewn in the shadow of a leaning black tower a hundred meters high.
The Kriani had given her permission to excavate. The Kriani there hated, both officially but also with genuine feeling, the past in which the Ulltrians dominated their world. Though the Kriani were often strange to Eydis, this hatred she found very easy to understand. The Kriani had been more than slaves of the Ulltrians. They had also been food for their young: Ulltrian larvae grew within a Kriani host, parasites metaphorizing into carnivores that chewed their way to birth and ate their dying host when free. What Eydis struggled to understand was not the hatred of the Kriani, nor their desire to push their history aside, but the way in which at one time, eons before, the Kriani had found their fate normal.
Official rejection of the values and institutions of the Ulltrians meant that where the Kriani permitted Eydis to investigate, she had free reign. History, with all its horrific details, they would leave to citizens of the Galactic Alliance. The Kriani needed the Alliance, and giving scholars like her a place on Dâk-Ull was a small price to pay for a chance at future membership in the Alliance.
So Eydis had dug in solitude, when the winds fell below hurricane force and the sky did not hammer the ground with green hail. Day after day, her excavation robots lifted burnt rocks, plotting out a three-dimensional model while they worked. She reviewed the materials, managed the speed of their excavation, and struggled to decipher the writing on scraps of metal they found. It was slow work, mostly without novelty.
Until they unearthed the probability field generator.
A robot had stopped working, and doglike it stood in the rubble, a light on its head blinking. It shifted as she approached, as if it were proud to show her what it had found. And there before it, in a heap of crushed stone and shreds of something like plastic, lay a black barb, as long as her leg, broken but still connected by black cables to something under the rubble.
She knew immediately what this meant. There was a ship here. Likely a gnasher class, not only the smallest ship the Ulltrians had made, but the smallest ship with probability drive ever made in the known galaxy. Such a ship could be had only by the most powerful of Ulltrians—what were called, in their own language, “Clade Masters”—a phrase with all the weight for Ulltrians that “King” would have had among those who believed in the divine right of monarchs.
For a moment, Eydis turned in place, looking around. She felt a momentary fear that someone else had seen it. The Kriani would claim any such find immediately. This was precisely the one kind of thing they wanted to reclaim from their past: technology that could be studied and used. But there was nothing moving among the hard, spiked plants that made a low cover stretching to Kriani settlements huddled on the horizon.
She almost felt disappointment. Part of her, she realized, had looked around with a natural human drive to shout in triumph, to thump her chest and say, “I’ve done it! I’ve struck a great find!” She threw her arms up and smiled, fighting back a shout.
She got to work. She sent mole robots down, to make a few strategic measurements. They bored small tunnels, the width of her fist, until they hit the hull. From their return data, she discerned the ship’s orientation—it lay flat on its belly, having no doubt crashed right through the temple wall during the battle when the Ulltrians were driven off their own homeworld. It would have a single hatch, under the nose.
She called all the robots of the dig. They hurried to her, a pack of eager metal canines. She gave them new programs, releasing all their safety protocols. They tore at the earth, indifferent to the damage to their own limbs. Before second dawn, when the world’s dim neutron star rose above the horizon, a narrow tunnel went down from one corner of the temple, through brown stone and hard-packed soil, to the black nose of the ship.
She crawled into the dark, hands before her, her supplementary oxygen tanks scraping at the tunnel ceiling. Dust quickly covered the lenses of her breathing mask. She pushed on, till her hand hit one of the black probability flanges under the ship. She held up her light.
This time she did shout aloud: another lucky break. The door to the ship was slightly ajar, damaged from the crash. That would mean much of the interior would be destroyed, but if it had been sealed, she would have no way to get inside without revealing to the Kriani that she had already done so.
The robots had dutifully cleared sufficient space under the ramp. One of the robots now pulled the ramp down at her command. She pulled a cloth from inside her suit and carefully polished the robot. Then she sent the robot up the black ramp, its lights blazing as it entered the ship.
She watched through the robot’s eyes as it climbed to the top of the ramp and paused. She stared around, taking in the full pan of its cameras.
The base of a
seat was before the robot, a black saddle that would stretch all the way to the front of the ship and the backup hard controls. The low robot could not see to the top of the seat, but along one side four gray husks of legs hung down.
An Ulltrian. The pilot, a Clade Master, lay dead within.
She made the robot climb a pipe that ran along the wall, moving slowly, carefully. A fall in here would do no harm to the robot, but it would leave a distinct mark.
At the limit of the wall, the robot swiveled its head around and peered down. The whole Ulltrian lay there. Though it had rotted away from internal bacteria, and the shell of it had mostly collapsed, she could see that it had been huge, large even for a Clade Master. The Kriani, she had no doubt, would know this Ulltrian by name. It would have committed atrocities recorded in some Ulltrian tome shelved now in their neglected Library of the Tides.
Eight legs, four on each side. The two claw-like prialps around its head were out of view, probably having fallen off to lay on the floor. Its eyes were collapsed, the hard lenses cracked and gray. Its tail, sometimes called a “stab,” lay fallen over its back. She could see that it had been so large it must have been hard for this Ulltrian to walk with the organ suspended over itself.
To a terrestrial eye, the stab resembled a scorpion tail, and the Ulltrian might have seemed like a giant scorpion, but with an irregular gathering of huge eyes at its front and flanking its mouth. Some human scientists had tried to call the stab a penis, but the name did not stick. The Ulltrians were ambi-sexual; they exchanged sperm through clasped stabs, in mating rituals so violent that limb loss was common, and death not unheard of. Then when the fertilized clutch of eggs reached maturity, the Ulltrian attacked a Kriani with the stab, and injected one or two eggs inside its abdominal cavity. The size of a stab was a sign of honor, but some Clade Masters, she suspected, had become like peacocks, weighed down by the display of their rape organ.
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