by Robert Reed
The Master tried to answer.
But a knife had been shoved into her throat, Miocene grunting with the exertion. Then grasping the gold hilt with both hands, she gave it another thrust, smiling as the blood jetted across her, as the spine and cord were suddenly cut in two.
Thirty-five
With a bright whoosh, the laser fired.
A whiff of coherent light boiled away half of Pamir’s fist.
But he kept swinging what remained, feeling nothing until his blackened flesh and the blunt ends of his bones struck the stranger’s face, a dazzling sharp pain racing down his arm, jerking loose a harsh little scream.
The other man grunted softly, a look of dim surprise coming to the grayish face, to the wide gray eyes.
Even without both hands, the captain had a thirty-kilo advantage. He drove with his legs, then his right shoulder, shoving his opponent against the sealed elevator door and pinning the arm with laser flush to the body… a second whoosh evaporating a portion of his ear and the edge of his captain’s cap… and Pamir screamed again, louder this time, his good hand smashing into the squirming body, punishing ribs and soft tissues while he flung the man’s hairless head against the hyperfiber door.
With a heavy clatter, the laser fell to the floor.
Pamir absorbed blows to his belly, his ribs. Then with his good hand, he grabbed the other man’s neck and yanked and twisted, squeezing until he was certain that not a breath of oxygen could slip down that crushed throat. Then he used his knee, driving bone into the groin, and when a look of pure misery passed across the choking face, he screamed, “Stop,” and flung the man back up the hallway.
The laser lay beside Washen’s clock.
Pamir reached with his bad hand, realized his blunder, then too late, put his good hand around the weapon’s handle, the whiteness of polished bone braced with the archaic heft of forged steel.
A booted foot, hard as stone, kicked Pamir in the face, shattering both cheekbones and his nose.
He felt himself flung back against the door, and lifting his good hand, he fired, a sweeping ray of blackish-blue light cooking his opponent’s other foot.
The man collapsed, and moaned quietly for a breath or two.
With his own trembling legs, Pamir pushed against the slick door, forcing himself upright, watching the stranger’s face grow composed. Resigned. Then once again, a look of defiance came into the gray face.
“Kill me,” the stranger demanded.
“Who are you?” Pamir asked.
No response.
“You’re a luddite, aren’t you?” The captain said it with confidence, unable to envision any other explanation. “Washen was living in one of your settlements. Is that it?”
A blank, uncomprehending expression gave him his answer.
“What’s your name?” he asked again. Gray eyes glanced at Pamir’s epaulets. Then with a low croaking voice, the man announced, “You’re a first-grade.”
“Pamir. That’s my name.”
The man blinked, and sighed, and said, “I don’t remember your name. You must be new to the captains’ ranks.”
“You know the roster, do you?” Silence.
“You’ve got a big memory,” Pamir allowed.
The silence acquired a distinct pride.
“But then,” Pamir added, “Washen always had an excellent memory, too.”
At the sound of her name, the man blinked. Then he stared at Pamir, and with a forced calmness, he asked, “Do you know my mother?”
“Better than anyone else, nearly.”
That statement puzzled the man, but he said nothing. “You resemble her,” Pamir confessed. “In your face, mostly. Although she was a lot tougher, I think.”
“My mother… is very strong…”
“Is?”
Silence.
“Is?” he asked again. Then he picked up Washen’s clock, using the two surviving fingers on his battered hand. The pain was constant, and manageable. He dangled the silver machine in the air between them, saying, “She’s dead. Your mother is. I found this and nothing else. And we looked everywhere, but we didn’t find a body.”
The man stared straight up, showing the ceiling his contempt.
“It happened inside the leech habitat, didn’t it?” Pamir guessed he was right, then asked, “Did you see her die?”
The man said, “Kill me,” again, but without as much feeling.
His burnt foot was healing itself. A good luddite wouldn’t possess such talents. And for the lack of any better guess, Pamir said, “I know where you’re from. From the middle of the ship somehow. Somehow.”
The man refused to blink.
But Pamir had a sense of what was true, impossible as it seemed. “How did you climb up here? Is there a secret tunnel somewhere?”
The eyes remained open. Under control.
“No,” the captain whispered. “I was digging a nice wide hole toward you. Almost all the way down, and that’s how you got up here. Am I right?”
But he didn’t wait for a response. On a secure channel, Pamir called the foremachine working inside the hole. Quietly and confidently, the AI told him, “Everything is nominal, sir. Everything is as it should be.”
Pamir shifted channels, as an experiment.
Again, “Everything is nominal, sir.”
And he selected a third channel—a route and coding system that he had never used before—and the response was a perfect, seamless quiet that caused him to mutter, “Shit,” under his breath.
His captive was flexing his growing foot.
Pamir cooked it again, with a lance of blue-black light. Then he pocketed the clock and grabbed the man by an arm, promising him,’I’ll kill you. Eventually. But we’ve got to look at something first.”
He dragged the man to his cap-car.
Racing his way along a roundabout course, Pamir tried to contact the Master. An AI’s voice responded. A constricted, heavily encoded image of the bridge and a rubber face appeared just past the car’s window. “Be brief,” was the response.
“I have an emergency here,” Pamir explained.’An armed intruder—”
“One intruder?”
He nodded. “Yes—”
“Take him to the nearest detention center. As you were instructed—”
“What instructions?”
A genuine discomfort spread across the sexless face. “A first-degree alarm has been sounded, Captain. Did you not hear it?”
“No.”
The machine’s discomfort turned to a knifing pain.
“What’s going on?” Pamir demanded.
“Our alarm system has been compromised. Plainly”
Pamir asked, “What about the captains at the feast?”
“I’ve lost all contact with the Great Hall,” the machine confessed, almost embarrassed. Then it hesitated abruptly, and with a different tone, it said, “Perhaps you should come to the Master’s station, sir. I can explain what I know, if you come to me immediately”
Pamir blanked the channel.
For a long while, he sat motionless, ignoring his prisoner, considering what he knew and what he needed to do first.
More than a century ago, after the discovery of the camouflaged hatch, the captains constructed a blind inside the local pumping station. Like any good blind, there were a dozen secret ways to slip inside it. Like anything built by captains, the facility was in perfect repair, every sensor off-line but ready to come awake with the proper codes from the approved people.
Pamir slipped into the blind without incident. But he didn’t bother with sensors; his own eyes told him everything.
Rising up the fuel line were dozens, perhaps hundreds of odd cars, windowless and vast, shaped like some kind of predatory beetlelike creature and built from a bright gray metal. Steel, perhaps. Which made them exceptionally strange vehicles, and impressive. He calculated their volume and the possible numbers of bodies stuffed inside each of them. Then staring at his prisoner, Pamir said not
hing. He stared and waited until the man looked back at him, then he finally asked, “What did you want?”
“My name is Locke.”
“Locke,” he repeated. “What do you want?”
“We’re the Builders reborn,” said the strange little man. “And you’re one of the misguided souls in service of the Bleak. And we are taking the ship back from you—”
“Fine,” Pamir growled. “It’s yours.”
Then he shook his head, adding, “But that’s not what I’m asking, Mr Locke. And if you’re half as smart as your mother, you know that perfectly well…!”
Pamir took them on another roundabout journey.
Inside a secondary fuel line, he pulled to a stop, then used the laser to surgically maim his prisoner. With Locke left harmless, he sprayed emergency lifesuits over their bodies, and after a few moments to let the suits cure, he unsealed the main hatch.
The cabin’s atmosphere exploded into the vacuum.
Pamir scrambled into the open, removed a tool kit, then gave the car a random course and an unreachable destination. Then he dragged Locke out of the car before sealing it again, and together, they watched it accelerate into the blackness.
A valve stood beside them. Built by unknown hands, unused for billions of years, it had been left open, seemingly just for them.
Pamir dragged his prisoner after him. Then he tripped a switch that slowly, slowly closed the valve.
The tertiary line was a kilometer long, ending at a tiny, never-used auxiliary tank. And past that tank was the world-sized ocean of hydrogen.
Walking rapidly, carrying Locke on his back, Pamir started to talk, his voice percolating through the spray-on fabric. “She isn’t dead,” he said. “There was a fight, and I assumed that if she was there, she was obliterated, or someone recovered her body. But Washen was left behind, and you never found her. Did you? You came back to that alien house for a reason. Your first chance in more than a century, and you ran back there to look for your mother. For Washen. One of my oldest, best friends.”
Locke took a deep, pained breath.
“We searched. If anyone fell from that habitat, we should have found them. A heavy body spat out by the decompression would have had a small horizontal vector. That’s why we looked directly beneath the alien house.” He was halfway running, thinking about how much time they had and what he would do if he couldn’t find any help. “Are you listening to me, Locke? I know something about how much abuse a person can take. And if we can find enough of your mother, she’s alive again.”
Silence.
“You were there, Locke.” Pamir said the words twice, then added, “The hydrogen has currents. Slow, but complex. And like I said, we were looking for a whole corpse. Because that’s what was easiest. But if there was just a small piece of her, like her head, the decompression would have given her a terrific horizontal vector. Her poor head would have frozen in moments and fallen hard in the darkness, dropping straight to the icy bottoms, and if that’s the case, the two of us could find her. The search equipment is still there, ready to try. It just needs to know its target—”
“She was cut into several pieces,” said the man’s close, soft voice. “Her head, with one arm still attached. We recovered the rest of her.”
Pamir waited a moment, then said, “All right, then.”
He said, “That helps us a lot. Thank you.”
Then after a sympathetic pause, he asked, “Who did that to her, Locke? Who treated your mother that way?” A deep, brooding silence.
Then with withering, practised pain, Locke admitted, “My father… Diu… was trying to kill her…”
Pamir heard a deep breath, a shallow gasp.
Then an anguished voice asked, “Is there any method you know, First-grade Pamir? Is there any way to kill a memory that you can’t forget…?”
Thirty-six
The rumor was sudden and spectacularly fantastic, and if only a little bit true, its consequences would be nothing short of momentous. The common first reaction among passengers and crew was to laugh at the whole silly notion, and mock it, and insult the soul who dared tell the foolish story, and perhaps beat him senseless, or piss on his lying face, or in some other species-specific way prove one’s doubts about what was clearly, utterly impossible.
“The Master Captain is dead!’ said billions of soft, nervous voices.
How could she be? She was too wily and much too powerful to die!
“All of her captains have been murdered! At their annual dinner! By armed strangers coming from a secret part of the ship!”
How could any of that be true? How, how, how…?
“And now these strangers have stolen control over the Great Ship!”
Which was just absurd. Of course, of course. The ship was too strong and far too large to be conquered by any force. Certainly not in a day, and with such little fuss, too. Where were the Master’s security troops? And her tough old generals? And more to the point, where were the AIs and the other elaborate machines whose only duty was to serve that giant human woman? How could such a deeply ingrained, fiercely loyal army allow an invasion to succeed in a thousand years, much less inside a single day?
For a full ship-day, that was the gist of almost every public and private conversation—abbreviated wild rumor countered with hard-headed doubt.
But the rumor had its own life, gaining breadth, depth, and a kind of robust logic.
On the second and third days, and particularly on the fourth, lowly mates and certain engineers offered new clues. What had happened wasn’t an invasion. Not precisely. It more properly resembled a mutiny, the ringleaders being one-time captains. The Vanished had returned from the dead, it was said. At least some of the missing captains had rematerialized, led by that axe-faced Submaster. That Miocene woman. In the avenues and parks, along the seashores and inside dream parlors, passengers told this new story and wrestled with its consequences. Who was Miocene? In memory, she was the quiet and efficient and apparently bloodless First Chair to the now deposed Master. And that was about all she was. Every biography written about the woman was sold ten billion times, at least. Most read only the highlights. Only enough to recognize the woman’s ambition and her obvious powers. If anyone could overthrow the Master Captain, it was her First Chair. That was the obvious verdict. Who else in Creation had intimate knowledge into every security array, every communication system, and the ship’s wellsprings of power?
But Miocene didn’t come home alone. She brought an army of loyal and tough soldiers who were deployed in the opening hours, trapping most of the ship’s troops in their barracks or surprising them in the field. A few witnesses described pitched battles and soldiers killed on both sides. But even the largest stories involved small units and minimal damage. Most of the ship’s weapons failed before they could be fired, sabatoged by security codes that the Master herself had set in place—codes meant to protect the public and the captains should those weapons find the wrong hands embracing them. A few units loyal to the Master managed to slip away, merging with the general population. But they were scattered and leaderless, without the tools necessary to hurt any enemy.
About the old Master and her captains, no one seemed to know.
One comforting tale was that the old leaders were still alive, in some diluted form or another. Perhaps they weren’t conscious or whole, but they were still capable of being reborn again… should Miocene, in her wisdom, decide to consider them harmless…
About the new Master and her staff, even less was known.
From where did they come?
A thousand rumors told the same basic story: the Vanished must have left the ship, probably against their will. Then on a mysterious high-technology world, Miocene gathered up the tools and army and fleets of star-ships necessary to catch up again. Where her fleet was today, nobody knew. Everyone agreed that the main ports were quiet; the Great Ship had been passing through a thinly inhabited region around an active, modestly dangerous black hole
. And it was hard to imagine that little ships could have caught them without being seen. But didn’t that explanation make far more sense than that silly noise about secret chambers and worlds hiding within the ship’s heart?
And yet. Travelers reported seeing enormous bug-shaped cars rising through a certain basement district. On that first day, and each subsequent day, there was a relentless parade of the steel machines gaining speed as they climbed, swarming for the Master’s station and every other essential hub.
“They have to be coming from somewhere,” was the sluggish verdict, delivered in spoken words and structured scents and soft flashes of dumb-founded light.
“Somewhere’ meaning a place below them.
Deep inside the fuel tanks, some assumed. While others preferred more fantastical locations, including a secret chamber or chambers buried in the ship’s iron heart.
On the mutiny’s fourth day, this mysterious place acquired a name. Marrow. Suddenly, everyone was whispering that odd old word, in ship-terran and in the full multitude of other ship languages. That word appeared so suddenly and in so many places that souls with a taste for conspiracy decided that the knowledge, genuine or false, had come directly and with purpose from whoever was in charge.
There was a world hiding inside the Great Ship, voices claimed: a hidden realm, and wondrous, and undoubtedly powerful.
Tantalizing details about Marrow started to rear up into the light.
Open-minded, undisciplined species embraced the revelation. A few even celebrated it. While others, deeply conservative by nature or by choice, ignored everything said and every wild implication.
As a rule, humans were somewhere in the middle.
There were small, modestly bothersome events. Some districts went dark as key reactors failed, power rationed to the most essential systems. Communications became snarled everywhere for the next four days. It was a time of modest chaos. But generally, little changed. Ancient passengers and crew went about the rituals of their lives, habits ingrained over the millennia and not so easily dropped. Even when the public corn-networks failed completely, there were still private pathways where electrons and structured light could send good wishes and viable currency and the lastest, best gossip. Then those little outages seemed to be finished, and the corn-networks found their feet again, and the last rumors of armed combat turned stale and were generally forgotten. It was the mutiny’s ninth day, and the public mood, as measured by twenty-three subtle means, was on the rise in every district, every major and minor city, and in most apartments and alien habitats and occupied caves.
