Eternity's Mind

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Garrison and Orli, by damn!” said a gruff, bearded man on the comm screen. “If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t have found this cluster. Come in and keep us company. We’d be happy to show the Princess around, if there’s something she’d like to see.”

  As the Prodigal Son headed toward the Kellum headquarters ship, Orli and Arita were far more interested in the bloaters. Orli rubbed her temples. “Can you hear it?”

  Collin closed his eyes, held his treeling, and concentrated, but shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Arita didn’t need to make much effort. “It’s there—not exactly words, but thoughts and images.”

  Orli added in a rush, “I sense a great grandeur, but also fear. Even pain.”

  “Something’s hurting them,” Arita said.

  “Is it the Shana Rei?” Seth said. He turned to DD. “Are there any shadow clouds nearby? I want to hear what they’re hearing.”

  The compy said, “The Prodigal Son only has basic sensors, Seth Reeves. I cannot pick up whatever Orli and Arita are hearing.”

  Arita stared at the hundreds of quiet, drifting nodules, formless sacks in a main cluster with outliers extending like bread crumbs off into space. Orli came up beside her at the main windowport. “The outliers eventually connect to other bloater clusters across interstellar space. There’s no telling how many there could be, or how far they’re linked.”

  “Like the trees in the worldforest mind,” said Collin.

  Arita stared at her friend. “Very much like that—only bigger.”

  Once their equipment was in place, the Kellum operations had expanded with reckless energy. Zhett Kellum and Patrick Fitzpatrick had deployed every possible piece of machinery to extract ekti-X from the bloater sacks. In only a short time they had already harvested nearly half of the cluster.

  Orli’s face showed a deep concern. She whispered to the windowport, at the strange silent nodules. “What are you trying to say to us? We’re here. What is it you want?”

  Arita gritted her teeth, trying to concentrate, shoulder-to-shoulder with Orli. She felt a booming need … and an anger, and a knowledge that she could not grasp. “These bloaters are more than sacks of stardrive fuel.”

  Roamer scout pods flitted around. Several small ships escorted the Prodigal Son to where the operations were busiest.

  Suddenly one of the nodules sparked and flashed, triggering an adjacent flare. Then several others across the expanded cluster blinked with bright flashes. With each flare, Arita felt the connection in her mind intensify.

  While she stared in deep concentration, Arita thought about what Collin had said about the interconnected trees in the verdani mind, the clusters of bloaters, the sparkling signals, and she caught her breath. “I know what they are! The bloaters aren’t just drifting plankton. They are … giant cells, like neurons. Millions of them connected in a network across space.”

  Orli’s mouth dropped open with understanding. “That’s it! They’re cells, all interconnected into a large…” She fumbled for words.

  Arita answered for her. “It’s a mind. An immense mind spread out over the galaxy … and now it’s finally awakening.”

  CHAPTER

  95

  EXXOS

  The shadows descended upon the disease library of Pergamus, but they let Exxos do the dangerous work.

  The black robot fleet, with thousands more ships than were necessary for such a small target, closed in to capture the virulent specimens held inside the domes. Exxos had promised the Shana Rei that this one relatively minor sortie would give them a lethal biological arsenal to kill more victims than dozens of planetary massacres like Relleker, Wythira, and Earth ever would. Although he and his counterparts relished the feel of actual blood on their pincers and the sound of screams, merely inflicting death was a sufficient reward in itself.

  To achieve their objective, the robots needed to keep the disease specimens intact, but the human personnel in the facility were all fair game. Exxos did not plan to leave any of them alive—except for Tamo’l, who was already connected to the Shana Rei. She would be retrieved alive and then imprisoned inside an entropy bubble like Rod’h, where she would be analyzed, tested … dissected if necessary.

  The other victims, though, were going to be mere sport.

  For a world containing so many dangerous specimens, Pergamus had laughably insignificant security, and the black robots would easily dismantle it all. The black ships swooped in, opening fire. The mercenary ships were there to scare away occasional interlopers, not a full military fleet. Some of the defenders took potshots, racing in and opening fire, but robot ships overwhelmed them and tore them to shreds. The rest of the mercenaries fled without even trying to put up a fight.

  Exxos knew his primary goal was to retrieve the biological specimens from the laboratory domes. His secondary goal was to kill the researchers, while the lowest priority was to chase down the few straggler mercenaries. He realized, however, that he had more than enough robot fighters to accomplish all three of those goals. Therefore, a hundred Exxos counterparts streaked after the fleeing security ships and hunted them down one by one.

  The shadow cloud swelled in space, looming like an eclipse over Pergamus. The hex cylinders waited there, pulsing with entropy. The Shana Rei throbbed out, calling to Tamo’l, who was trapped inside one of the domes below. She struggled to drive them away, but Exxos would find her. If not, the shadows would simply come in and engulf her, as they had captured Rod’h.

  This isolated planet had no standing military force, and the creatures of darkness could have taken their time and englobed the entire world in hex plates as they had done at Kuivahr. But that was not necessary. Exxos and his robots would achieve their goal with a straightforward ground assault. Hundreds of angular ships swooped down to the surface.

  The toxic Pergamus atmosphere would not bother them. The angular vessels landed on the desolate landscape, and the beetle-like robots emerged from their ships and advanced on clusters of finger-like legs. The soft and fragile humans who huddled inside their domes had no place to go, nowhere to run. Crimson optical sensors glowed bright as hundreds of Exxos advanced toward the complex.

  As he moved toward the surface domes, Exxos picked up different communication bands, heard the shouts for help, the frantic distress signals, all of which were pointless. He filtered through the overlapping conversations, used them to identify specific targets—although that mattered little, since Exxos intended to conquer it all, kill them all.

  High above the planet, robot ships surrounded the Orbital Research Spheres, which also contained deadly plague specimens worth retrieving. Nothing would be wasted. Each such disease would have its use. The scientists trapped inside shouted for rescue, but the black ships closed around the spheres. Robots would slice open the satellite labs, kill the scientists with explosive decompression, and take whatever they could find.

  Then Exxos realized that the panicked ORS transmissions were more than the mere fear of capture. One of his counterparts—another robot that was exactly him—on the outside of an orbiting sphere, worked at disassembling the airlock hatch. Other robots swarmed over the laboratory globe.

  Then they simultaneously understood that the emergency sterilization procedures had been initiated inside the spheres. The countdown was nearly finished.

  A voice from the surface crossed the comm, addressing the trapped ORS scientists. “This is Tom Rom. I appreciate your efforts. There is obviously no escape, but we dare not let your specimens fall into enemy hands. The flash will be swift.”

  The scientists screamed, and then sterilization bursts rippled like blossoms of intense energy, one after another after another. High-intensity gamma-ray bursts flooded the orbiting laboratories, vaporized the humans inside, destroyed the equipment, and annihilated every single microorganism. By the time the robots broke through the hulls, the laboratory spheres were dead and completely useless. Exxos was infuriated.

  Now, on the surface, as he
stood outside the nearest dome, he extended his cutting tools and powerful pincers, meaning to rip through the metal walls to reach their specimen vaults before the prizes could all be disintegrated.

  Four humans in silvery exosuits emerged from the dome. Carrying long jazer-pulse rifles, they opened fire on the encroaching black robots. Exxos felt three of himself die, all circuitry overloaded; even their shielded cybernetics could not withstand the jazers. But many more robots surged forward, and the desperate human defenders fell back and continued to fire. They killed four more robots before they themselves were torn to ribbons of flesh and protective fabric.

  Exxos continued cutting through the armored wall of the lab dome, ripping through the metal plates, slicing apart structural beams. He didn’t bother to use the sealed doors, which might have been booby-trapped. Instead, the robots tore directly through the wall, and as soon as they breached the barrier, poisonous atmosphere flooded in.

  Exxos and his counterparts marched inside, where they would find all the biological weapons they needed to obliterate the human race.

  CHAPTER

  96

  TOM ROM

  The robot invasion force swarmed over the Pergamus domes, and Tom Rom could do nothing to stop them. With such numbers and weaponry they would easily blast and tear their way through any armored walls. The trapped researchers were desperate to find some way to evacuate, yet they had no place to go. Saving them was not Tom Rom’s priority.

  But he would save Zoe—at all costs.

  Barricaded behind seventeen quarantine layers, isolation doors, and airtight barricades, she should have been the safest person on Pergamus, but Tom Rom saw the robots’ relentless march, watched how they peeled open the research domes like ripe fruit. No, even her central isolation dome would not protect her. He had to rescue her. He didn’t have much time.

  Since he had helped develop and install the interlock systems himself, he could at least override the flash-sterilization procedures designed to purge all life inside each dome in the event of a breach. Feeling the urgent need to get to Zoe, he deactivated the sensors so that when he blasted through the walls, he wouldn’t trigger a complete self-destruct.

  He pressed a shaped charge against the next interlock, applied protective dampening seals to his ears, then retreated to safety. After he heard the thump of the explosion and the groan of collapsing metal, he raced back in before the smoke had cleared. He used a makeshift crowbar to peel away the breached barricade. Then he ran to the next wall, applied another charge.

  Fifteen layers to go.

  High above, the shadow cloud eclipsed the sky, much different from the Shana Rei threat he had experienced at Kuivahr. Here at Pergamus, the creatures of darkness did not try to encapsulate the planet. Instead, the black nebula simply loomed there while the robot marauders did their work.

  Hordes of beetle-like machines scuttled across the landscape. Tom Rom pushed aside any debilitating panic that would interfere with his efficiency. No time for that. There were so many steps—so many impossible steps—involved in getting to Zoe.

  He broke through three more walls, kept pushing his way deeper.

  And even after he broke through all those protective barriers, he still had to take her back out, get to his ship, then escape from Pergamus, in the midst of an overwhelming attack.

  He blasted wall after wall, ever closer to the center. On the intercom he said, “Five levels to go, Zoe. Be ready.” He systematically worked his way through more layers.

  Zoe had emerged from her dome only two times since sealing herself inside: the first time, when she’d flown up to the Orbital Research Sphere to see him as he lay dying from the Onthos plague, and the second time when she had gone to Theroc to bargain with King Peter and Queen Estarra for Iswander’s plague data.

  This time it wasn’t by her choice. Tom Rom would force her to go, if necessary. He had to take her out of here.

  He blasted through the next barricade, and the next. The smoke, residual explosive fumes, and hot metal made it hard for him to see or move. Tom Rom burned his hands as he pried the wall away, but he didn’t feel the pain. He kept moving, muttering under his breath, “I’m coming, Zoe.”

  He realized that the black robots could have just vaporized the entire facility from the air, but instead they pursued a ground assault. Therefore, he concluded that they had come here to steal the deadly diseases for some purpose of their own. He understood how lethal the specimens were and realized that these enemies of humanity would likely use them to kill billions. He felt obligated to stop them, if possible—but only after he saved Zoe. She was his first priority, and he didn’t even consider rationalizing why.

  When the robot attack had first begun, Tom Rom used the admin console to prepare the Pergamus defenses. He triggered the sterilization shutdown routines for all the Orbital Research Spheres, because he knew they were easily vulnerable. He was deaf to the pleas of the isolated researchers in space; their lives had been forfeit from the moment the shadow cloud arrived, so he wasted no time with guilt. Tom Rom decided they would prefer a gamma-ray flash to being torn apart by Klikiss robots. When the orbiting labs detonated, the deadliest Pergamus specimens were eradicated.

  Here on the surface, hundreds of black robots had already broken into the first armored dome, a section devoted to cancer research. Cancer was a disease deadly to humanity, but not contagious and nothing the robots or the Shana Rei could weaponize—but they didn’t know that yet. He would let the robots be distracted while he rescued Zoe.

  After blasting through the next sequence of levels, he used the intercom, shouting to be heard over the constant alarms. “Zoe, stay away from the hatch—I’m going to blow it open. Take whatever shelter you can find.” He gave her a few seconds, but he could afford no more time.

  When the blast tore down the final wall, he charged in, ducking low through the smoke. Previously, in order to join Zoe, he had needed to endure hours of decontamination procedures. Now he had forced his way through all seventeen barriers in less than twenty minutes.

  While the smoke cleared, Zoe rose from behind the shelter of her desk, scrambling to put a breathing mask over her face. She looked pale. “I don’t want to leave here.”

  “I know.” Tom Rom grabbed her arm. “But you have to. I won’t let these things kill you.”

  She didn’t resist. She simply needed to hear him tell her this was their best, their only choice. She grabbed a small duffel that she had stuffed with a few things she insisted on taking along. “Then I’m ready.” She was shuddering. “I thought this place would stay protected and safe.”

  Tom Rom said, “Now it’s neither. We’ll have to go out on our own. You and I have survived that way before. We can do it again.”

  She groaned. “But Pergamus … all those years, all those specimens. We can’t just leave my collection!”

  Tom Rom urged her toward the hole in the wall. “But we will. We’ve got to get to my ship.”

  They were probably already out of time—and yet, realizing why the robots must have come here, a heavier responsibility made him hesitate. “Wait for me, Zoe,” he called, and ran to the main controls inside her central chamber. Time to set the sterilization routines throughout all the facilities.

  He knew the access and emergency triggers, and he couldn’t let these specimens fall into the hands of the inhuman enemy. He set the self-destruct mechanisms, timed vaporization blasts that would erase every cell, every virus, and every data set in the domes.

  When designing the system, Tom Rom had required each dome to be triggered separately, so that a lone terrorist couldn’t destroy the entire facility in a single attack. Now, though, the interlocks worked against him and caused a maddening delay. His fingers were trembling, but he steadied himself. He didn’t have time for panic. Panic could cause mistakes.

  When each of the fifteen domes was prepped, he adjusted the countdown to give enough time to reach his ship—barely enough time.

  Ove
rhead, the Shana Rei shadow cloud loomed in the sky as if intending to smother the planet. Black tendrils reached down toward the surface.

  He joined Zoe out in the corridor and forced her along. Running, they ducked through one blasted wall after another. Carrying her duffel, she was disoriented, but not just from the terror and the chaos. She simply hadn’t been outside her chamber often enough to know the layout of her own research dome.

  “My ship’s engines are powerful, and I know how to fly. I have the incentive.” He gave her a hard look. “I have to warn you, though, we could just as well die on our way out.”

  Zoe ran along. “You’ll save me.”

  He steeled himself and silently swore that he would not let her down.

  CHAPTER

  97

  XANDER BRINDLE

  The Relleker salvage field was already a disaster, but Elisa Enturi’s arrival made the situation worse. Xander felt a deep chill go down his spine. He turned to Terry. “What the hell is she doing here?”

  Terry was aghast. “Kett Shipping broke all ties with Iswander Industries because of her—and now she wants … a job? We’re just supposed to forget everything she did?”

  Roamer salvage ships closed around Elisa’s ship, which hung there, waiting. Xander couldn’t comprehend what she could have been thinking.

  “Our unemployment situation isn’t that desperate,” Xander muttered. He gathered his courage and opened the comm. “Elisa, I don’t know what you had in mind, but you’re an outlaw and a murderer. There’s no place for you here.”

  A grizzled, hatchet-faced old woman, Annie D, grumbled on the comm screen, “Take her into custody and haul her ass back to Newstation where she can face justice. We’ve got enough ships.” Annie D wore an eyepatch over her right eye, which she had lost due to ocular cancer. Med techs could have replaced the eye, but she seemed to prefer the affectation of the patch. Now, her visage looked fierce.

  From his battered ship, old Omar Selise barked, “Stand down, Enturi—we outgun you twenty to one, and we have no incentive to exercise restraint. The Duquesnes were friends of mine.”