Defender Hyperswarm

by Tim Waggoner

  Hastimukah returned the Prana’s smile. “I’d like that.”

  The Prana held up his hand in a gesture of farewell…

  … and they found themselves once more on the bridge of the Janus.

  “Welcome back,” Memory said.

  Kyoto blinked several times, trying to fight off a dizzying sense of disorientation. Her body felt thick and heavy, as if she was unaccustomed to being encased within its flesh. The holoscreen showed the image of a large Prana that hovered almost nose to nose with the Janus, and Kyoto knew that she gazed upon the Prana’s actual form. She looked at the Prana’s armored, eyeless face and tried to reconcile the appearance of this insectine monster with its gentle aspect in the Daimonion, but she couldn’t do it. Even though she knew better, she couldn’t help seeing a damn Bugger when she looked at him, and she felt ashamed.

  Bowing its head in a fashion that struck Kyoto as kindly and forgiving, the Prana slowly withdrew and rejoined the Manti clustered around them.

  “Are you two all right?” Kyoto asked. Her tongue felt swollen and awkward, and her voice sounded too loud, almost as if she were shouting.

  “Other than needing some time to adjust to being back on the physical plane,” Mudo said, “I’m fine.”

  “Same here,” Hastimukah said.

  “You’ll be glad to know there will be no long-term effects from your experiences in the Daimonion,” Memory said. “You should all feel back to normal within an hour or so.”

  On the screen, a number of Prana detached from the sphere until they’d created an opening large enough for the Janus.

  “There’s our exit,” Kyoto said. She took hold of the joystick and eased it forward. The Janus started toward the opening, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed. Kyoto had not found her visit to the Daimonion as enjoyable as Hastimukah, and she didn’t want to waste any time getting out of there. As soon as the Janus had passed through the opening in the Prana sphere and reemerged into hyperspace, she breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Memory, the Prana told us that you know what we have to do next,” Kyoto said. “Is that true?”

  “Yes, Mei. Thanks to the Prana, I have all the information we need to deliver the symphysis. Would you like me to lay in a course for the Weave?”

  “Please.” Kyoto wasn’t sure how, or even if she should ask her next question. “And you don’t have a problem with us helping the Prana?”

  Since Memory was now half Manti, Kyoto didn’t know how the AI would react to the idea of the Prana’s plan to “heal” the Prime Mother. Memory could just as easily take the view that they planned to deliver a psychic bomb that upon detonation would alter the Prime Mother’s mind, in a sense performing a kind of telepathic lobotomy. And if that’s how Memory saw their mission, Kyoto knew she would never help them fulfill it. In fact, she might well try to prevent them from succeeding—by any means possible.

  “Of course not, Mei. Why would I have a problem with healing the Prime Mother?”

  “No reason, just asking.” Kyoto could detect no hint of deceit in Memory’s voice, but then she was an AI and could make her voice sound any way she wanted it to. Kyoto supposed it was possible that the Prana had done a bit of reprogramming when they’d uploaded the mission data to ensure Memory’s cooperation, but then there was no way to know. She figured they had no choice but to take Memory at her word and hope she carried out her part of the mission.

  “Is there any way for us to get a message to General Adams?” Kyoto asked. “He should know why the Janus’s test flight is going to run longer than scheduled.”

  “Not with the stargates offline,” Memory said. “We could record a message in a probe and launch it back to realspace. But it would emerge at a point far distant from the Solar Colonies, and the general would never receive it.”

  “Never mind, then. The general will just have to stay in the dark until we get back.” One good thing: if Adams didn’t know what they were up to, he couldn’t worry about them… or order them to abandon the mission.

  Kyoto yawned and realized she felt bone tired. How long had it been since they’d lifted off from Mars? She wasn’t sure. Not only was it difficult to mark the passage of time in the unvarying sameness of hyperspace, she wasn’t even certain time functioned the same way here as it did in realspace. She checked her wrist chron and saw that it was long past her bedtime, and she hadn’t eaten anything since the morning.

  “How long until we reach the Weave, Memory?”

  “Approximately fourteen hours.”

  “Does the Prana’s data indicate any dangers between here and there?”

  “Aside from a couple of areas where the mass shadows are a bit tricky to navigate around, no. But I’m confident I can handle them.”

  “Good.” Kyoto released her seat restraints and stood. She turned to Mudo and Hastimukah as she stifled another yawn. “I’m going back to the galley to get something to eat. You’re both welcome to join me.” Afterward she’d try to grab some shut-eye. One of the things she’d learned fighting against the Manti was to grab food and sleep whenever you could, because the opportunities for both were often too far and few between.

  “Memory, let me know if anything requires my attention. Emphasis on ‘requires’.”

  “You got it, Mei.”

  “Uh, pardon me, Kyoto,” Mudo said, “but I believe I’m in command of this mission.”

  Kyoto put her hands on her hips and looked at Mudo. “All right. What are your commands, Doctor?”

  Mudo glanced around the flight cabin, as if he were trying to think of something to say. Finally, he nodded and said, “Carry on.”

  Kyoto suppressed a smile. “Yes, sir.”

  She walked to the rear of the cabin and started down the ladder that led to the galley, hoping she could stay awake long enough to choke down a protein square or two. She had a feeling she was going to need all the energy she could get by the time they reached the Weave.

  As soon as Kyoto began eating, she felt more awake. Maybe it was the food, or maybe it was because Mudo and Hastimukah had decided to join her. Or maybe it was simply because this was the first opportunity they’d all had to relax since liftoff, and they didn’t want to sleep through it.

  The galley was a cramped room with a small round table, two benches to sit on, and several food storage units built into the walls. The crew quarters—which consisted of four bunks and a single lavatory in an equally cramped room—were next door.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said most of the Janus was taken up by the hyperdrive and Memory’s hardware,” Kyoto said.

  “Don’t forget your Defender,” Mudo said. “Still, I didn’t expect to take the Janus on an extended tour of hyperspace. If I had, I would’ve installed more comfortable seats.” The scientist shifted his rear and grimaced.

  Kyoto had finished off three protein squares and was now sipping a container of water. Hastimukah was on his tenth protein square—surprising, considering he currently possessed Aspen DeFonesca’s trim figure. The alien noticed Kyoto staring at him, gulped down the last of his protein square, and smiled apologetically.

  “Sorry. The nanocolony inside me needs nourishment, too. The food on Residuum ships contains special additives just to feed nanoparticles, but without them, I’m forced to eat quite a bit more than I normally would.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mudo said. “We brought plenty. And as lousy as they taste, you’re welcome to them. The only thing worse than modified soy protein is unmodified soy protein.” The scientist shuddered at the thought.

  “Really? I find them quite tasty.” Hastimukah grabbed another square from the platter in the center of the table, bit off a large hunk, and started chewing. “Rather reminds me of the deep-root we used to eat on Bergelmir. You could only get to it during summers, when the ice fields weren’t so thick.”

  They fell silent while Hastimukah finished eating. Eventually, Mudo said, “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

  Kyoto finished the l
ast sip of her water before asking, “What is?”

  Mudo made a vague hand gesture. “This. Life… existence… our mission…”

  Kyoto groaned. “I don’t do existential, remember?”

  Mudo smiled. “Indulge me this once, Kyoto. It’s all such a line of tumbling dominoes, isn’t it? Except even that comparison doesn’t fit, because the dominoes are always set up intentionally in a specific pattern. But existence is far less neat than that. Think of it: if we had positioned the stargate near the Earth Memorial a few kilometers away from where it was finally placed, the Manti might never have discovered it, and they might never have found a way back into our system.”

  “And if you hadn’t chosen to speak to me at the protest yesterday, Commander,” Hastimukah added, “I might not have contacted you last night. And in that case, I never would have learned of the Janus’s journey and could not have stolen aboard in the guise of Ms. DeFonesca.”

  Kyoto joined in, warming to the topic. “And if you weren’t here to give Memory a dose of Residuum nanotech, we never would’ve escaped the mass shadow after we first entered hyperspace. The Janus would’ve been destroyed, and Dr. Mudo and me along with it.”

  “And without the nanotech, Memory wouldn’t have become merged with the Manti biomaterial,” Mudo added. “The Prana might not have detected the Janus then, and we would’ve been caught in Rhea’s catastrophic return to realspace.”

  “And we would not now be bearing the symphysis to the Weave,” Hastimukah finished. “The chain of events does seem rather miraculous when one thinks about it.”

  “Preposterous is more like it,” Mudo said.

  Kyoto put her empty water container in the recycling bin. “One of the first things they taught us at the Defender Academy was that you can do all the planning you want to before a battle, but once the blasting starts, all those plans are shot to hell. A battle is like a sped-up microcosm of life. You have to adapt constantly to changing and unforeseen circumstances if you want to keep from getting your ass blown off. Those who can adapt the fastest—and who are damn lucky to boot—are the ones who stand the greatest chance of surviving.”

  “In other words, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans, eh?” Mudo said.

  Kyoto smiled. “Something like that.” She stood. “Now, if you gentlemen—if I can apply that term to you, Hastimukah, considering the body you’re wearing—will excuse me, I’m going to try to catch some sleep before the next domino falls.”

  She sits within a pit at the precise center of the Weave, antennae caressing the living strands created from the genetic material of untold thousands of extinct races, her every touch sending and receiving vast oceans of information. Clustered around her, seeing to her physical needs—delivering sustenance, carrying away waste, grooming and pleasuring her, and most importantly, tending to her eggs—are her attendants, the Chula. She created this caste for just these purposes, and they have no other thought, no other desire than to serve her, the Prime Mother. Their work is vital, for it frees her to concentrate on the information that courses through the Weave like heart’s blood. So much… so much… Sometimes she wonders how she ever manages to keep up with it all.

  For example, in the Quatara system, the dominant species is on the verge of discovering how to effortlessly transform matter to energy and back again. Such a capability might well prove a serious threat to her children, so the Prime Mother immediately dispatches a Swarm to harvest the Quatarans. Elsewhere in realspace, a race of artificial constructs called the Gan, originally designed for warfare, turns on its makers, completely destroying them. The constructs are of no use to the Prime Mother as they cannot supply genetic material, and since their primary goal seems to be the peaceful contemplation of esoteric mathematics, she decides to leave them alone—for now.

  At the moment, though, her greatest concern is the species that inhabits the Sol system: the humans. Some time ago they discovered the means to enter the Realm of Shadows, and so of course the Prime Mother commanded they be harvested. The first swarm she sent enjoyed only limited success, seizing the human homeworld, but failing to destroy their colonies. The Second Swarm thinned the population in those colonies quite nicely, but it too was stopped before finishing its task. Worse yet, the doorway to Sol’s system was closed to her children, and she feared they might never finish harvesting the humans.

  But then a new doorway was found—one that allowed her children to use the humans’ own stargates against them. She dispatched a third swarm, but though it struck with savage swiftness, still the human colonies endured, and her children found themselves once more barred from Sol’s system. In all the long eons since she gave birth to the Manti, never has a single species proved so… so vexing!

  In frustration, the Prime Mother releases a burst of psychic energy, killing a number of Chula instantly. Without pause, their corpses are gathered up and added to the Prime Mother’s endless stream of nourishment. She doesn’t notice. She’s too busy listening to a new bit of information that has just made its way to her across the reaches of the Realm of Shadows. It is a communication signal, primitive and weak, but still intelligible. The message begins: “Greetings, Prime Mother. My name is Memory…”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Kyoto dreamed of a zoo full of Manti. The Buggers were trying to break free of their ferroceramic cages, and holographic mothers and fathers grabbed their holographic children and ran, screaming synthesized screams. Kyoto came flying up in her Defender and fired upon the Manti, but all that came out of her pulse cannon were broken toys and eyeglasses like the kind Mudo wore. The objects bounced off the Manti’s carapaces without causing so much as a single scratch.

  As Kyoto soared over the zoo, the Buggers burst out of their cages and attacked the holograms, which only moments before had been staring and pointing at them in horrified delight. The Manti grabbed their simulated victims with real foreclaws, bit into them with real mandibles, and the holopeople screamed as they exploded in a flash of light and were gone.

  Kyoto brought her ship around for another pass, intending to deploy fastlock missiles, but before she could fire the weapons, the Defender began to lose speed. Suddenly the ship broke apart into millions of tiny pieces as the nanoparticles that comprised the G-7 could no longer hold together. Kyoto fell to the ground in a shower of tiny gray globules. She reached for her sidearm and instead grabbed hold of an old holopad. She screamed as the Manti gathered beneath her, lifted their heads, and opened their mouths wide.

  It was feeding time at the zoo.

  “Wake up, Mei! You’re needed on the bridge!”

  Kyoto opened her eyes, and for an instant she didn’t know who or where she was. But then she remembered and wished she diddn’t. At least Memory had rescued her from that weird dream.

  She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “What’s wrong? Are we under attack?” Even if they were, she was too groggy to care. She felt as if she’d gotten only a few minutes of sleep, though her wrist chron said it had been three hours since she’d closed her eyes.

  “We’re not under attack, at least not yet. There’s a ship approaching. Hastimukah says it’s the Eye of Dardanus, the vessel that brought him to the Solar Colonies.”

  That tidbit of information snapped Kyoto fully awake. A Residuum starship was here in hyperspace? Coming toward the Janus?

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bunk and planted her feet on the floor. She stood, her rest-starved muscles protesting quite vigorously, but she ignored the discomfort. The other bunks were empty, though the covers were mussed on two of them. Either Mudo and Hastimukah didn’t need as much rest as she did, or they hadn’t been able to fall asleep.

  “On my way, Memory.”

  Kyoto left the sleeping quarters, walked through the Janus’s cramped galley, and climbed the metal ladder to the flight cabin. The holoscreen had been activated, and Mudo and Hastimukah were staring at the image of a gray, wedge-shaped object that didn’t loo
k much like a starship to her.

  She stumbled past them and fell into her pilot’s chair. “What’s going on, gentlemen?”

  “That’s the Eye of Dardanus,” Hastimukah said. “I believe Captain Kryllian and his crew have come to retrieve me. Probably because I didn’t bother to get approval from the Ascendancy before joining your mission.”

  “Wonderful,” Mudo said. “Not only are you an imposter and a stowaway, you’re also a deserter.”

  Despite the situation, Hastimukah grinned. “I prefer the term ‘on unofficial leave.’”

  “That thing’s a ship?” Kyoto said. “It looks more like a gigantic blob of mucus.” Then she remembered an element of her dream. “That gray stuff is nanotech, isn’t it? The entire ship is made out of it.”

  “Yes,” Hastimukah said. “And appearances to the contrary, it’s extremely powerful and swift. More than a match for the Janus, I’m afraid. We should contact Captain Kryllian so I can give myself up. Once they have me in custody, they should leave you alone to deliver the symphysis and complete the mission.”

  Kyoto didn’t like the idea. Hastimukah may have intruded on this mission, but as far as she was concerned, he’d become a vital part of it. But if what he’d said about the Dardanus’s capabilities was true, there was no way she could keep Kryllian from taking Hastimukah back.

  “Memory, can you think of any way—”

  Kyoto was interrupted by the chirping of the ship’s comlink. They were being hailed. She sighed. It looked like they’d run out of time to come up with clever ideas. “Put the signal through, Memory.”

  The holoscreen switched views. It now displayed a picture of a human in a vacc suit standing next to a giant shrimp. Kyoto wasn’t sure which was more surprising—the sight of the oversize crustacean or the fact that the man was General Adams.