Both Lektereenah and Loptoheen seemed to understand. Fei went on.
“We believe our tiny warriors can move the m’jeete away from the time manipulator. Or at least isolate and contain them well enough for us to move in and began researching the device. Of course, this must be done so that the environmental effects of the enemy are stopped…already we have suffered flooding and severe storms along southern Hainan and Guangxi and Fujian provinces. And the earthquakes…Xiamen has suffered extensive damage already. Our efforts must succeed. Once this is done, assuming it is done, we want to develop a protocol for how to conduct this research. You have ideas as well?”
For quite some time, awkwardly at first, but then with greater facility, the Ponkti and the Chinese worked out a program of research for how to deal with the Coethi time manipulator.
Loptoheen removed a new echopod from a side pouch and offered it to Fei. “Zzhh…from Omt’or…we have information on Tailless fight with m’jeete…on Seome. This helps….”
Fei took the pod and studied it. “We’ll listen…perhaps this will help.”
Lektereenah said, “Ponkti are like pal’penk…treated as pets. Omt’or, Eep’kos, all kels…think us animals…slow, stupid, we fight in tuk…now Ponkti here use m’jeete to travel other place and time.”
President Li seemed to understand. “China has also suffered much at the hands of the imperialists.”
The details of the arrangement were laboriously worked out. Fei watched as Li put his signature to some document and she wondered if the Ponkti even knew what had been agreed to. They understood sounds and scents, not printed documents. They seemed almost as aggrieved as Li portrayed the Chinese but still she wondered. If China couldn’t trust other nations, what made the President think she could trust a race of talking fish?
But she said nothing for the truth was that the Ponkti needed the Chinese and the Chinese needed the Ponkti. It was a marriage strictly of necessity.
Lektereenah and Loptoheen returned to their kip’t, submerged and were gone in moments. Li stood along the railing watching and then turned to Fei.
“How is the operation at Reed Banks going? Any word from Admiral Hu?”
Fei motioned for an assistant. “I’ll check—"
Once out of the submarine tunnel and maneuvering into deeper water, Lektereenah said, “These Tailless are different, are they not, Loptoheen? They wish to use the m’jeete device, as we do.”
“For different reasons. I don’t trust them, Affectionate Metah. But we need them. The m’jeete we can’t defeat without help. And we don’t want Mokleeoh and the Omtorish or the other kels to know too much about what we’ve found here.”
“Agreed. The Tailless will push the m’jeete back for us. After that, we’ll go back to Keenomsh’pont and gather all Ponkti together. We’ll come back here and leave this cursed world Urku for some other time and place. Send a message to the Kel’em…encoded. I don’t want anyone else to know about this: We vish’tu in five mah…all tu’kelke of Ponk’t. A great decision is upon us. Send that now.”
Loptoheen spoke the words into the repeater bulb and the message went out across the Ponkti repeater net encrypted as the Metah had commanded. Picked up and re-transmitted in the lyrical dialect of the repeaters, the words moved rapidly across the Indian Ocean and the southern Atlantic and arrived at the Muir seamount several days later.
What Loptoheen didn’t know was that the Omtorish had long ago deciphered the Ponkti code. When the songs and words Loptoheen had sent finally arrived at Keenomsh’pont, Omtorish repeaters routinely recorded its contents and forwarded them on to Mokleeoh’s staff.
The details were quickly decrypted and translated and made available to the Metah of the Omtorish in a few hours.
Mokleeoh listened grimly. She was furious at what she heard.
A dim blue-white phosphorescent glow suffused the sea directly ahead of Kunming, washing out all other seabed detail. Dr. Li Kejiang and Dr. Chu Zuwon stared raptly at the fires of nanoscale combat playing out a hundred meters ahead of them. Beside them, Xi Linping had driven the tiny warriors directly into the heart of the Coethi swarm. Though the master bot of the warriors had been well programmed on nanoscale combat tactics and was thought to be capable to prosecuting the engagement autonomously, Xi liked to keep tabs on how the battle was going. He selected an acoustic viewing mode on his board and after a few moments of blurred and confusing chaos, a grainy image settled down and the Kunming crew stared in fascination at life in the world of molecules and atoms.
"In we go," Dr. Li said.
Xi was impatient. He decided to do a little piloting himself and pulled up closer in his seat, flexing his fingers, grasping the side stick controllers.
"That's our target, Dr. Li. Dead ahead--" Xi could scarcely contain himself. Piloting the tiny warriors into battle always made his blood run hot.
"Closing…eight thousand microns…" he breathed. "I'm aiming for that cliff between the clusters, okay? After transit, I’ll send the rep command. I don’t want to get caught short if I run into bad guys."
Dr. Chu acknowledged, manning the template controls. "Replication starts just after transit."
The master bot—sometimes, as a joke, they referred to it as “The Chairman,”-- grabbed a phosphor group and pulled it aside, then squirted through into the cluster of molecules. At once, the imager was filled with long whippy chains of molecules.
"Carbons--the place is thick with them--" came a voice behind Xi. It was Dr. Li.
"Exactly," Xi said. He tweaked a stick controller, sending the ‘Chairman’ hurtling toward the target.
"Sounding pressure change," Chu said. Hello? What the hell was that? "We may have company… ready your defenses."
The assault convulsed out of the tangle of atoms in a frothy blur. An army of Coethi assemblers fell on the Chairman and his brood with little warning.
"Mechs!"
"I see 'em!" Xi cut the master bot’s speed in half; instinctively, he lunged for the config controls. "Make a cage…effectors out max!"
"I'm sending it!" Chu shouted. On a side panel of the IC control, she punched out commands to reconfigure the swarm, with a shield of fullerene arms, bristling like a porcupine.
"That should do the trick."
A single command to the master bot would multiply the swarm in seconds. Xi was probing by feel alone, eyes fixed on the imager, his fingers twitching over the keyboard, eager to grab a stick but not just yet. He forced himself to be still, let the situation evolve. Beside him, Chu smiled in spite of herself. Code and stick men were all alike. Trigger-happy by nature.
Like Sun Tzu once said, know the enemy and know yourself; then you shall not fear even a hundred battles.
Like a dog sniffing fear, Xi chose that very moment to trigger the ‘Chairman’s’ attack.
"Replicate now!" he yelled.
Chu toggled the rep switch and the imager screen careened and shook with the ferocity of a trillion trillion assemblers grabbing atoms.
Now ten meters away, moving toward battle on picowatt propulsors, the Chairman detected the instruction. The entire operation took only a few seconds. In that time, the rep cycle was executed one quadrillion times:
Sever perimeter covalent bonds
Unfold lattice atom chains
Re-position carbon groups
Extract valence electron and attach to last carbon group
Assemble hydrogen group at attached valence electron
Position carbon group at hydrogen atom
Increment counter for next carbon group
The swarm of Chinese mechs closed with Coethi and flung themselves against the enemy.
Newly armed, the Chairman seized a phosphor group on the nearest mech's effector and twisted atoms until the bonds broke. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the disrupter zapped the enemy mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. Coethi shuddered and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap
. It was a maneuver Xi had practiced a hundred times in the sim tank back at the Institute.
Across the seabed, trillions of replicants duplicated the same tactic.
"Take that!" Xi was exultant, twisting his sticks left and right. His fingers flew over the controls, managing config, pulling more molecules to add shielding, all the while fighting off thrusts and slashes from the enemy mechs.
The water churned and burned and frothed with furious combat.
Yet unseen by anyone, a small force of Coethi mechs had detached from the main formation. Faintly detected but not really noticed, the force exited the primary swarm and beat its way at flank speed toward the Kunming, now less than ten meters away. The approach of this detached force was so slow that it never triggered any alarms.
Xi, Chu, Li and Yang stared at the speckling blooms of light winking on and off…the imager captured the sound and fury of nanomech battle and converted the acoustic waves to visual. It was like watching some mad kaleidoscope of swirling dots, washed with brilliant daubs of color.
"Like a thousand battles of Verdun," Li said. "All in a space the size of a walnut. Incredible--"
"Reading high heat signature," Chu reported. "The grid's registering something like a hundred thousand picojoules, and rising."
Xi acknowledged the figure. "This vortex is emitting like a supernova." He refreshed the imager with more data.
And still unnoticed, the small detached force of Coethi mechs had reached its objective. Slowing to transit the outer layers of the submarine’s HY-200 steel hull, the force passed through the lattice clusters and surfaced like a fleet of miniature subs inside the tetrahedral matrix of carbon and silicon molecules. There they floated for a few seconds, until the replication order came.
It was damned frustrating, dealing with one bot after another but Xi tried not to show it. He'd tried several tactics to find out what Coethi was doing as it built structure and continued fitting out the time manipulator but this swarm was smarter and more aggressive than any he’d ever encountered before, seemingly always one step ahead of them. When Xi tried to outmaneuver, the enemy swarm countered. Every maneuver seemed to be anticipated; it was quickly evident that Coethi was programmed to defend itself and wouldn't give up control of its swarm without a fight. And to make matters worse, he'd been unable to grab an enemy mech for analysis.
It was Dr. Li Kejiang who saw the pressure spike from the compartment sensors, a fraction of a second before the swarm breached the last critical threshold of structural integrity.
"Ah…Xi, something seems to be--"
At that moment, Kunming’s hull gave way and thousands of tons of seawater poured in at a velocity high enough to incinerate the air.
The submersible crumpled like a paper cup and her interior pressure was explosively expelled in a huge tortured bubble. Frantic cries and screams were strangled before they could be heard.
The entire crew died in less than two seconds.
A hundred meters away, Lektereenah, Loptoheen and Yakto were startled by the convulsive violence of Kunming’s demise. They watched soberly as the wreckage descended slowly to the seabed, trailing corkscrews of bubbles as her interior bulkheads were steadily mangled in a tortured rending of metal and carbon polyfiber.
“The Tailless craft is destroyed,” Loptoheen said.
The three of them shot over to the wreckage as it settled to the bottom and nosed about the debris. Bodies crushed by the pressure drifted about.
“They’ve all died,” Lektereenah decided. “Their craft protected them but it collapsed.”
“The m’jeete, Affectionate Metah…perhaps we should withdraw,” Yakto warned. He had seen a shapeless cloud of what looked like silt moving toward them. The cloud was backlit with the fires of nanobotic activity, looking like a miniature thunderstorm moving across the rock outcrops. “The enemy creatures are heading for us.”
The three Ponkti left the Kunming behind and headed off toward Ponkel’te.
“The Tailless above will know what happened,” Loptoheen said. “Others will come.”
Lektereenah stroked hard, saying nothing for awhile, content to let her thoughts come as they would, pumping through her mind with each stroke of her fins and flukes. Yakto and Loptoheen struggled to keep up.
Half a beat away from the Ponkti settlement, the Metah had made up her mind. “We can’t do this ourselves. Contact the repeaters. I want to send a message.”
“What kind of message, Affectionate Metah?”
“A plea for help. Send it without code, to all kels. If we are to make use of the time manipulator, we need the Omtorish, the Orketish, the Sk’ort, everybody. We can’t defeat the m’jeete ourselves and the Tailless are worse than useless.”
Loptoheen replied, “At once, Affectionate Metah…I’ll get the echopods and you can record the message.”
Twenty-five thousand beats away, Chase and Tulcheah were cruising leisurely back and forth through a realm of steam vents, a short distance outside Keenomsh’pont, when Tulcheah pulled up short and stopped. She hovered, listening.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Chase stopped too. “Hear what? I don’t hear anything but these vents sizzling and popping.”
“Repeaters…a different kind of message—” she strained to make out the words, mouthing what she could make out….”—it talks of a great disaster…the Tailless have been defeated…the m’jeete expand …Ponkel’te had to be evacuated…Kel’metah, it’s a plea…the Ponkti need help.”
The two of them went straight back to Keenomsh’pont, to the Labs and there encountered Likteek, an echopod already in hand. The scientist held up a fin.
“I’ve already got it here,” he told them, showing off the pod. “It’s a repeating message…I was on my way to see the Metah…she’s summoned the Kel’em. You too. Come along—”
Chase left Tulcheah inside the Lab and followed.
Mokleeoh had convened the Kel’em, the council of Omt’or’s elders, near an elaborate coral bed that looked to Chase like two racks of antlers engaged in some kind of struggle. The Metah’s quarters were set off by bubble curtains and well-guarded by a small detail of nervous prodsmen.
Others were assembling as Likteek and Chase arrived.
Mokleeoh played the echopod recording Lektereenah’s message for all to hear.
“We knew the Ponkti were building other settlements. We knew they had discovered an unusual nest of creatures—the Ponkti call them m’jeete—near their settlement. And some kind of machine, similar to what the Umans had back on Seome…a time device. Kel’metah Chase—” she acknowledged Chase hovering nearby—"has explained that he thinks this device works in a similar manner to the great wavemaker, perhaps on a smaller scale. If so, that means the device can create a small Farpool, azhpuh’te, a whirlpool and gateway to take those who enter to other times and places. But Lektereenah can’t defeat the m’jeete by herself or with her Tailless allies…they ask our help. They ask for all kels to help. We must debate…and decide.”
Telpy’t the Arguer was always good for a caustic comment. “Let the Ponkti drown in their blood, that’s what I say. Why should we help them…they attacked Omsh’pont with Tailless weapons. They took the mekli priestesses hostage and invaded the sacred waters of the Pillars. They’re an insult to all of us…let them be.”
A chorus of assent circled the gathering. As the debate went on, the Metah’s servlings circulated among the elders, providing ertleg claw and tong’pod for refreshment. Chase availed himself of a generous portion of everything, earning a disapproving look from Likteek.
Chase shrugged, muttering, “A hero’s gotta keep up his strength.”
Another elder—Chase didn’t know him—spoke up. “Yet we’re all Seomish, aren’t we? The kels have their differences. But this isn’t Seome. Urku’s a new world, new ideas, new ways of thinking and relating. Maybe we should send help.”
Now Likteek cut in. “We know nothing of the m’jeete. Until we have
data, we shouldn’t make a hasty decision.”
Telpy’t spat. “Likteek, you’ll be collecting ‘data’ until the day you die…even beyond if you can. Let the Ponkti strangle on their own mess.”
Throughout the discussion, Mokleeoh munched thoughtfully on ertleg and drifted quietly at one edge of the gathering, hovering over some coral branches in such a way as to scratch her underbelly. Two servlings soon came forward to help the Metah scratch an itch she couldn’t reach. Chase had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of Seomish nuzzling and licking each other even as they met in solemn conclave and made grave decisions.
Kind of like the President and his Cabinet crawling all over the floor of the White House, licking each other’s behinds, he had once explained to Angie. Disgusting and mesmerizing at the same time.
Now Mokleeoh turned to Chase. “Perhaps Kel’metah has something to add.” She shooed her servlings off and they scooted out of sight.
Chase had always been somewhat intimidated in Kel’em meetings. It was like being in Sunday School, and being told to recite Bible verse in front of everybody. Still, the Metah had asked.
“Maybe we should look at this a different way,” he told them. “Maybe the m’jeete can’t be defeated by any kel. Maybe we should work with the Tailless and form a joint mission to do this. Think of it like this: my descendants, the Umans we encountered back on Seome, were in a battle with these same creatures, the Coethi. They knew how to fight them. What if we go to the Tailless and propose this…some kind of joint operation to isolate and contain the Coethi? I’m sure the Tailless have weapons and technology we can only dream of. If we work together, instead of fighting each other, we achieve two things. First, we have a better chance of beating back or at least controlling the Coethi. Second, we develop ways of working with the Tailless and cooperating with them to do things together. The Ponkti have inadvertently given us a great opportunity. Seomish and Humans face a common threat. We have to work together if we expect to defeat it.”
The Farpool_Exodus Page 33
