Ultra-hard radiation poured through the outer lattice sphere, decimating the ships and missiles inside. Safe in the umbra of the electro-repulsive matter, the Charybdis flew onward unharmed as the radiation sleeted down on either side of the massive lattice strut.
“Now that’s what I call hellfire,” Ozzie mumbled.
Below the Charybdis the plasma had turned a lethal pellucid violet. Visual sensors could see each of the remaining three lattice spheres. The core remained an impenetrable haze.
“Do you think the inner lattice spheres can withstand another blast like that?” Mark asked.
“Who knows, but Nigel was right. We were going to do that anyway when we knock out the flare bomb. Nothing to lose by doing it twice.”
“Nigel Sheldon’s pretty smart, isn’t he?” Mark said admiringly.
“Yeah.” Ozzie’s smile tightened. “Pretty smart.” He fed power into the frigate’s secondary drive, and dived straight down toward the second lattice sphere at eight gees.
The fourth lattice shell was made from a material that appeared to be completely neutral, devoid of any detectable properties, it didn’t even have any mass as far as human sensors could discover. All that existed was its physical boundary. Like the upper three lattice spheres, it remained completely unaffected by the energy deluge from the quantumbuster. Ozzie piloted the Charybdis through it without any trouble. He decelerated to a velocity vector that kept them stationary relative to the core, and extended every sensor.
The rings were in turmoil. They oscillated and stretched, rising and falling in and out of alignment through the ecliptic. The black cables that held together the outermost ring, the daisy chain, were flexing like lengths of elastic as they strove to contain the wild fluctuations of the lenticular disks. Inside that, the green ring that had been so uniform when the Second Chance recorded it was now undergoing curious distensions; bulges would suddenly appear, sending out slow ripples across the surface. The silver braids were nearly breaking apart; while the one of scarlet light was contaminated by dark fissures.
It was the ring nicknamed Sparks that was the worst affected. The river of emerald and amber lights with their cometary tails were being flung out of their simple orbit by a single dark contortion, like ions waltzing around a magnetic anomaly. It took them almost an entire orbit to drop back into the plane, only to be slung out again.
“There’s our bad boy,” Ozzie murmured. The quantum scan showed him the pattern of elongated distortion fields radiating out from a single point as they spun slowly along through the coruscating ring. “A genuine spanner in the works.”
“Target loaded,” Mark said. “Effect field pattern selected. It’ll stand off five thousand kilometers and spike the heart of that bastard.”
“You’re the man,” Ozzie told him.
“Launching.”
The Charybdis gave the faintest shiver as the quantumbuster shot out of its launch tube. Ozzie turned the frigate around, and accelerated hard up through the lattice spheres.
***
Bradley landed in the shallow drainage ditch at the side of Highway One. The soil was damp and squishy, absorbing his impact. He folded himself into a cleft and froze. His suit’s external chromometic layer painted him with low-tone grays and greens to match the grass tufts and mud he’d settled in. Every other system powered down. Thermal batteries absorbed his body’s heat, allowing the suit skin to adopt the same temperature profile as the ditch. A tiny beam of light washed in through a slit in his visor, illuminating his eyes. Outside the armored cars were skidding around. One sounded in a bad way. Their engine noise dopplered away. His breathing was loud in his ears, challenged only by his heartbeat.
The light flickered. Soldier motiles were running past him, several splashing their way along the bottom of the ditch. They were centimeters away.
And fate—mine, the Starflyer, humanity, the Primes—is decided by that tiny distance. But then my fate has taken stranger turns than this in the past. Perhaps the dreaming heavens will smile upon me today.
The movement outside his suit ended. Bradley switched on a lone sensor, and scanned around. There was no immediate sign of the soldier motiles. He stood up, and watched the alien army charge away. Some distance farther along Highway One an armored car exploded.
Keeping the suit fully stealthed, Bradley hurried toward the giant alien starship. He opened passive sensors, knowing the signal he would receive.
Not a sound or an image, at first, more a mélange of feeling—to those who knew how to interpret it. The complex electronic song saturated the air waves, broadcast from every direction to engulf the valley. Together the harmonics that surrounded Bradley had a unity that was remarkable in its complexity. The tunes rose and fell, meshing into a cohesive mind. Bodies, alien and human, sharing every part of themselves: memories, thoughts, sensations. He moved among them, receiving their extended cognizance, drinking it in. Watching the three humans in armor suits running along the road as we chase after them—concern that the human warriors should not be able to interfere with the launch. Observing the many technological facets of the refurbished starship, adjusting the systems as they interact with each other—eager for the long exile to finally end. Maintaining the force field around the ship—determined that no weapon would penetrate. Reviewing the sensors covering the valley—alert for transgressions.
The location and purpose of each body were individual, yet their thoughts were homogenized, replicating their originator. Direction, purpose, came from only one source: the Starflyer.
It moved from the gantry lift into the starship, awakening the giant machine in its entirety. Soon it would leave to vanish amid the stars. Safe. Free.
Bradley told the force field around the starship to admit him. Compliance was a logical thing to expect, given the Starflyer’s ultimate origin. The immotile rules all, nothing deviates from that. However, as the Starflyer was more sophisticated than a standard Prime immotile, it didn’t have the same reticence in allowing electronics to have governing functions over machinery. Electronics were subsidiary to it in the same way as motiles; it programmed them, it set their parameters. They obeyed it.
That was its flaw, Bradley knew, the same as every Prime. It did not understand independence nor rebellion. Its motiles, whether grown in congregation pools from its own advanced genetically modified nucleiplasms, or humans whose brains had been surgically and electronically subsumed to host its own thought routines, were a part of it. Their thoughts were its thoughts, copied and installed from its own brain. None of them deviated. It couldn’t conceive deviation or betrayal, so neither could they.
Security was a one-dimensional concept for the Starflyer. It took precautions to guard itself physically and politically from native humans as it insinuated its human motiles within their Commonwealth society. That was the level of safety it determined it required to insure its survival, a strategy that had been successful.
No human could hack into the electronic network of the Institute valley; as the processors were an extension of the Starflyer’s own mind, they only acknowledged orders that had an internal heritage. What the network and its processors did not have was the ability to discriminate between an order from a genuine motile and a human who remembered the neural “language” of the Starflyer.
In front of Bradley the force field protecting the Marie Celeste realigned its structure to allow him through. He jogged along the bottom of the deep grassy scar that the vast alien ship had scored as it slid along the ground before finally coming to an ignominious halt. Several soldier motiles were patrolling the base of the starship. Their minds told him where they were, the direction they were looking in, where they would look next. Their sensors and eyes never saw his suit’s stealth coating as he hurried into the shadows cast by the big fusion rocket nozzles. Proximity alarms watched passively as he told their processors his presence was legitimate.
The ship had been lifted gradually out of the scar by motiles and civil engineering machi
nery. A wide pad of enzyme-bonded concrete had been laid underneath to support the weight. Cradles gripped the lower fuselage, holding it off the ground. Bradley walked up the metal stairs on one of the cradles. An access hatch to the fusion engineering bay opened for him, and he ducked inside.
The initial findings on the Marie Celeste published by the Institute were accurate enough. It was comprised of fusion rockets, their fuel tanks, environmentally maintained water tanks containing an alien amoeba-equivalent cell, and the force field generators. From that, public perception remained locked on the knowledge that there was nothing else inside; certainly it possessed no life-support section, no “crew quarters.” A more detailed examination showed (unpressurized) access passages and crawlways remarkably similar to those humans would design into any ship. No maintenance robots were ever found. The first conclusion was that the passages were used only for construction.
Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.
There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.
Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.
“Remember me?” he asked.
Every motile in the Institute valley froze.
“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”
The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.
“Oh, I’m in here with you.”
Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.
“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”
Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.
“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”
Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.
Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.
“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”
The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.
Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
Outside the starship, darkness fell.
Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”
The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.
“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.
***
The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.
“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.
“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.
“Can’t see the barrier.”
“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”
“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”
“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”
For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.
“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.
“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.
“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”
“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”
“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”
“Not a clue.”
The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.
“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”
“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”
“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”
“But—”
“Home. With one slight detour.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Morton’s virtual vision gave him the illusion of light and space. Without that he knew he would have fallen for the Siren call of insanity echoing enticingly at the center of his mind. As it was, spending hours immobile in the armor suit with no external sensor input at all was pushing him closer and closer to all-out claustrophobia. Actually, there had been one thing from outside that still managed to get through to him: the noise of the storm had been reduced to a hefty vibration by the meters of soil on top of him, one he could feel through the suit’s adaptive foam padding. The timer in his grid told him it lasted for thr
ee and a half hours before finally fading away.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said to Alic.
“Damn right,” the navy commander agreed.
The two of them had lain there in the darkness with hands clasped together like a pair of scared children. That touch allowed them to communicate. Morton wasn’t sure he could have held out without the contact of another human being. He didn’t even remember much of their conversation; giving each other potted histories, women, places they’d been. Anything to hold the isolation at bay and with it the knowledge that they were buried alive.
There had been no choice.
When the storm appeared from behind the mountains and swallowed the last pinnacles, they’d had four or five seconds at best before it hit them. Alic had fired his particle lances straight into the ground, blasting out a simple crater of smoldering earth. “Get in!” he yelled.
Morton had dived straight into the hole, cramming his suit up against Alic’s. The Cat hadn’t moved.
“Cat!” he implored.
“That’s not how I die, Morty,” she’d said simply.
He didn’t even manage an answer. Alic fired the particle lances again, collapsing the soil around them. The Cat had sounded sorry for him; out of all the weeks they’d spent together, that was the strongest memory he had of her now.
Once they started digging their way out, he began to appreciate her reasoning. His suit power cells were down to five percent, and the soil was packed solid. He vaguely remembered that if you were caught in a snow avalanche you were supposed to curl up, to create a space. There had been time for nothing other than the most basic survival instinct. The hole in the ground offered a chance at survival. The impossible wall hurtling down on him didn’t.
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