The tunnel was broadening. A shimmering golden passage flared gradually as he gazed between his boots at shards of light that rushed toward him. More vast lava lakes, brimming with angry reds. The injury to the whole axial length had brutally shoved great masses together, making the walls around him froth with the planet’s jagged orange wrath.
Again he thought of what would happen if he could do nothing up ahead. The cool logic of dynamics would, Arthur said, fling him back into the core. The heat would kill him on the next pass. Or if it managed only to send him into delirium, there would be another cycle, and another, and another…. He would bob endlessly, a crisp cinder obeying simple but inexorable laws.
Instantly he was swimming in light.
Stars bloomed beneath his feet. A bowl of brilliant gas and suns opened as he shot free of the planet’s grasp, above the twilight line. After the sultry darkness this sky was a welcoming bath of colors and contrasts.
Out, free!
He could feel his suit cool as it lost heat to the cold sky. It went ping, pop as joints contracted. Wrinkled hills rose above his head, the whole landscape stretching as it drew away. Here, too, was the stripped look, as though the polar ice had only recently been vanquished.
The golden walls fell away from him on one side, but in front of him the radiance did not fade or recede. It was much closer. He had gained some significant speed, then.
But now he was losing his speed along the tube. He watched the planet above his helmet turn into a gigantic silvery bowl. The dawnline cut this bowl in half. A ruby sky-glow of dustclouds and stars dominated the wan day.
As he rose the world’s curve brought into view a far-off scruff of woodland and stark, jutting mountains. Fluffy white clouds clung to shallow valleys.
His rate of rise dwindled. The far side of the hoop-tube was bending away. In front of him the glow was brighter. He took a few moments to be sure he was in fact curving over along with the hoop walls. Could he see the flicker of motion from the rapidly rotating string? He had begun to think of the walls as solid, and now he became aware of their gauzy nature.
The cosmic string can exert pressure only when it is very near you, of course. You will not in fact strike the cosmic string itself, I judge.
“Thought you said it’d take off my hand.”
I have conferred further with Grey. She believes that normally a string would function like a scythe. However, this highly magnetized string is different. Until now you were moving with respect to the string at high speeds. Now you will have a low relative velocity, but only for a brief moment. At such speeds the string’s magnetic fields will repulse your metallic boots and suit.
“Huh.” Killeen supposed this was good news, but the Aspect spoke as though this was just another dispassionate physics problem. “Look, you save any that cooler stuff?”
Yes, I had anticipated that we might need another push. But there is very little. I needed it all to keep us from losing consciousness back there, and so—
“Get ready.”
Already he could detect no further shrinking in the wrecked face of New Bishop below. He must be near the top of his swing.
“Fire it!”
He felt the jetting pressure at his back. The glowing hoop-tube curled away like an opening funnel. Beyond he could see the gossamer surface generated by the globe-spanning cosmic string. It appeared now to wrap the world in a rib-bony stranglehold.
The venting at his spine gurgled to a stop.
Whuum-whuum-whuum, the magnetic rotor sang.
Vibrant, intense glow spread all around him. He wind-milled his arms and brought his boots down toward the golden surface. It pulsed with freshening energy.
He felt as though he were a fragile bird, vainly flailing its wings above a sheet of translucent, wispy gold. Falling toward it. Performing his own sort of experiment…
The impact slammed him hard. It jarred up through his boots like a rough, wrenching punch. He had crouched, letting his legs absorb the momentum. Suddenly he was shooting along the surface of the sheet.
It has conveyed impulse to you, an infinitesimal fraction of its spinning energy.
Killeen felt himself loft slightly higher. Then he came down toward the sheet again. He had shot sidewise, away from the polar axis, going out on a tangent like a coin flung off a merry-go-round.
He hit again. This time the jolt twisted his ankle. It felt like a hand grabbing at him, then losing its grip. But it gave him another push—outward.
I estimate you are gaining significant velocity from these encounters. It is difficult to calculate, but—
Killeen ignored the tiny piping Aspect. His ankle ached. Was it broken?
He had no time to bend over and feel it. The shimmering plain came rising toward him again, hard and flat.
He grunted with pain. The shock caught his feet and flung him off at a steep angle, twisting him with a sharp, wrenching stab.
You will have to be more careful as you set down upon it. It can convey spin, but if your velocity is not aligned with it, there is a vector coupling, a torque—
“Shut up!” He did not want to set down on the golden surface again, the ghostly curtain that could clutch and break him like a stick.
But the velocity he was picking up from the thing flung him sidewise, not up. Only his rebounding kept him above the flickering radiance. If he slipped, tumbled, went shooting across the damned thing as he spun out of control—
The flickering golden sheet rushed at him.
He struck solidly. This time his left leg shrieked with distress and he barely managed to kick free. The strobing glow seemed all around him. He was going to hit again.
He windmilled. This time the shock was not as great but the muscles of his left leg seized up in an agonizing spasm.
Blinking away sweat, a weakness came over him. His ears rang. He wearily spun himself again, slower this time because the motion hurt his leg.
He expected to hit quicker but the jolt did not come. He looked down and could not judge the distance. The glow had dimmed. It took a long moment before he realized that the sheet was curving farther away from him, wrapping down to follow the arc of the planet.
He was free. Out. In the clean and silent spaces.
We are on a highly elliptical orbit, I gather. It should take us at a significant angle with respect to this hoop-plain. I cannot calculate the details, so it may be that we will return within its volume.
“Never mind,” he said, panting.
We will need the information in due time, however, and—
“I doubt it. Look up.”
Obsessed with its own mathematics, the Aspect piped with surprise as it responded to what Killeen saw.
Above them floated the sleek metallic body of the cyborg.
SIX
Quath made her way cautiously through murky warrens.
After the buoyant vault of space, these tunnels and cramped corridors weighed heavily on her, their air clotted and musky. Around her surged the endless parade of working podia, bound on their relentless missions, clattering and banging against one another in their haste. Lesser beings of russet scabrous shells scampered underfoot, bound on their menial tasks. They had been hatched in the bodies of native animals, to save the Hive’s resources. Genetically programmed, they worked with fanatic purpose, as though they knew their own short lifespans.
Quath, though, went slowly. The presence inside her throbbed. The Nought kicked and fought, its puny jabs an irritant impossible to ignore. Her ceramic sensors saw it as a burning tangle of infrared deep in her guts.
But it was not this small nettling that bothered Quath. She knew what lay ahead of her, and so dawdled, picking at her cilia as though grooming herself. Some tiny hatchlings approached and Quath let them police her carapace. They caught microparasites, which were the inevitable inconvenience of strange worlds: native mites who had already learned to feast on the leaky joint sleeves and porous sheaths of the podia.
Soon, too soon,
the great glowing cavern of the Tukar’ramin opened before her. Its murky mouth seemed to swallow all the certainties of her life.
*You have done well,* the Tukar’ramin greeted her from high in the glistening webs.
Quath preened at this ruby-flavored compliment, until she saw that Beq’qdahl had entered simultaneously from another of the innumerable tunnels that gave onto the Tukar’ramin’s underbowl. Beq’qdahl did an artful dance with her many legs, accepting the Tukar’ramin’s words as if they were directed at her alone.
*What breed of Nought is this?*
*Doubtless so, for it engaged that station and co-opted the mechs there. I had understood that we had total control there. Yet these Noughts infested with humiliating ease.*
There was no doubt, from the grammatically past-imperative hormonal inflections, that Quath and Beq’qdahl were among those humiliated.
Quath suppressed the impulse to cock her pods into a gesture of total apology and mercy-plead. Instead, she quickly transmitted a set of images and sensory details of the thing. These were taken after she had stripped it of its suit and weapons, back inside their ship.
*Doubtless some such business. Absence of a pelt does suggest a highly sensory life, serving as it does to expose the surface nerves optimally.*
*We cannot be too careful here,* the Tukar’ramin said slowly. *This Nought may have intelligence and mastery beyond its apparent mawkishness.*
Quath ventured to release a scent of confidence, edged with dangling, frayed filigrees of mature concern. She was about to add that she had kept the sample Nought for further study, when the Tukar’ramin continued thoughtfully, plainly without registering Quath’s words.
*Well that you disposed of them all, then. They are oddly able. Even one might cause hindrance to us.*
Both Quath and Beq’qdahl fell silent. Quath struggled to find a way to agree and yet not divulge the truth, so she was glad when Beq’qdahl said,
The fierceness of this declaration could not cover the underlying sweet cut of self-doubt that Beq’qdahl leaked from her unruly hind glands.
*Reentry fires, you mean?*
Quath bristled at Beq’qdahl’s use of I when they had both done the searching. She quickly felt better, though, when the Tukar’ramin said forcefully, *You should have savaged them all!*
Beq’qdahl choked with mortification and farted a foul cloud of orange fear. She managed to get out,
*You were senior, Beq’qdahl. Can you assure me that these Noughts, who may even have the power to voyage between stars, are vanquished?*
This was a deft diplomatic sally, mingled with pious fogs of humble oil, Quath thought. But it brought Beq’qdahl no credit.
*Then set about making sure of your task.*
*You are senior in experience. You both now sport six legs. Quath seems to be gathering her wits quite ably. I suppose you may call upon her for assistance. She acquitted herself well—perhaps better than you.*
Burnt-yellow splashes of barely suppressed anger/anxiety shot up and down Beq’qdahl’s thorax, but her voice remained crustily formal. Pleased, Quath glimpsed a tinge of bluegreen envy betraying Beq’qdahl in her milky proboscis hairs.
Beq’qdahl asked.
*What? What?*
Quath saw at once that Beq’qdahl had miscalculated. Waves of an unknown emotion jetted down from the Tukar’ramin. *Pursue these Noughts! Drop your mining. I have received word that the Illuminates themselves have taken notice of these events.*
The very mention of these august entities stilled the chilly air of the great rock cavern.
*Beq’qdahl, do not seek to vainly augment yourself when a vital mission awaits.*
*You can begin with a task of some risk, since your errors precipitated this trouble. Witness—*
Into Quath came a picture of the station. Beside it, now clamped firmly by crosshatched stays, was the Nought ship.
Beq’qdahl began,
Chords of vexed concern sounded through the unfilled spaces of the image, sucking Quath along with the Tukar’ramin’s
*This little vessel is their conveyance. You ignored it. Perhaps some still cower within. Your task is to cleanse this craft. Inspect, analyze! Find its inner minds. Flay them open for my inspection.*
Startled beneath this torrent of stench-commands and acrid air-cuts. Beq’qdahl tried to protest.
*Go! Now!*
The sudden spitting-green anger of the Tukar’ramin startled Quath. She was grateful that Beq’qdahl caught the force of it, a yellow-white jet that scoured through Quath’s senso- rium. Beq’qdahl, in the full stream, backed away with trembling legs.
The Tukar’ramin did not dismiss them, in fact took no further notice of the two scurrying forms. They scrambled away as the Tukar’ramin’s bulk tugged itself up glistening damp strands into lofty darkness.
Quath felt Beq’qdahl’s jittery, addled state as the two scuttled away. On a subchannel Beq’qdahl sent her preliminary thoughts about logistics, search patterns, weapons—assembled impressively quickly, considering the blistering she had received.
Quath’s thoughts submerged beneath a rising distress. She broke away from Beq’qdahl and fled down a narrow shaft, letting herself fall in the hushed cool air until the depths of the warren rushed past. Somehow her petrifying fear of heights did not occur in the cramped chute. Heights in the open—or, far worse, flying—terrified her race. Beq’qdahl had overcome this, another reason to despise her.
Her magnetic brakes pulsed. A passing food-cloud brought stinging encrustations to her eyes—yet it was as though she ambled in a dream.
She registered nothing, consumed by the unspoken lie that she now carried within. The Tukar’ramin and Beq’qdahl and all the podia assumed that she had snuffed out the Nought after taking samples from it. They would expect immediate scrapes of skin and nuggets of brain, to better understand the pests.
But the Nought rapped against her inner steel partitions. It thrashed and jerked and emitted foul odors. Perhaps the thing had even excreted inside Quath. What a risk to incur, all for Nought!
Quath’s levered arms began to pry open her innermost carrypouch to pluck out the Nought—but she slowed, tugged by flickering doubt…and stopped.
This puny thing was indeed the same breed of Nought which she had slaughtered with valor in defense of Beq’qdahl. In the moments after her victory she had studied the carcass of such a Nought. That had helped her to cast off her fear of dea
th.
So for this one last Nought she felt an odd sense of connection. She had told herself at first, on the way down from orbit, that keeping the Nought alive was simply a way to be sure her samples were fresh. But once in the smoky, constricted warrens, she had begun to feel vague musings, strange lacings of sensation, canted views of her world.
It was the Nought. At this intimate range, her probings of it had overlapped the Nought’s own surprisingly complex sensorium—which felt to Quath like a spherical coil of brightly colored threads, writhing like languid serpents.
Try as she might, she could not penetrate the knot. A small, oily pocket of exotic zest now seeped into Quath’s mind. She could not give it up. Not yet.
The thing inside interlaced with Quath’s electro-aura, giving forth images and undefinable tangs. They led her down into a labyrinth of airless corridors, lit by scattershot, smoky fogs, brooding silences, lurid accelerations down unseen gradients. This small creature dwelled in a slanted universe blurred by currents, hormones, scents.
Something in this tilted world caught in Quath. Blunt wedges of pinched obstruction bloomed bony-hard inside her. Her pale certainties splintered. The already shifty terrain of her oblique interior landscape warped and canted.
But she had no choice, Quath thought. She must. The Tukar’ramin would banish Quath forever if she knew, cast her into a starved life of ragged foraging in the ruined lands beyond the Hive….
Worse, she could not merely yield it forth, no—too late for that. Quath had to slaughter the unfolding thing within her. Hide it. Mash the body into paste, pack it into porous walls where it could never be found, or recognized, or understood.
Could she? Quath teetered on the brink.
SEVEN
Killeen could barely breathe.
He swam in a cloying fluid, but when be opened his mouth to gasp it did not fill with the syrupy acid-tinged gelatinous stuff that surrounded him, buoyed him, made his every movement sluggish and impotent.
Tides of Light Page 17
