Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  He rubbed absently at his sensory tears. “It hasn’t interfered with human ships before.” Sypaon, Null Boundary, Nesseleth: all had glided unhindered through the guarded nebula. “I think the Well only attacks if it’s been attacked.”

  “But if it is infested with Chenzeme protocols, it’s not human.”

  Lot shrugged. “Maybe the Well doesn’t know that yet.” Foresight and deductive talents were facets of consciousness and didn’t exist in the Well. The Well learned only by the harsh, irrefutable pain of experience.

  “It’ll hit the city first,” Clemantine predicted. “Even without weapons, it has enough momentum to shear the elevator column. The Well might pith it then, but for us it’ll be too late.”

  NULL BOUNDARY CONTINUED TO ACCELERATE. Its changing course promised to bring it deeper into the Well, in a path that would burn through the sparse wisps of the upper atmosphere. Clemantine muttered and cursed over the poor course options available to them. At best, they could get back to Silk in some twelve days … not that they were supplied for it.

  Lot decided to offer a suggestion. Swallowing his misgivings, he spoke in what he hoped was a reasonable voice. “If Null Boundary’s infested, it won’t do us any good to return to the city. He’ll get there before us, and there won’t be a city left.”

  “It’s not your home!” Urban exploded.

  “Sooth.” Lot leaned back, watching the great ship’s brooding image slowly grow on the screen. “But if we burn all our fuel to match course with the great ship, we might still be able to get inside—”

  “Save your own skin?”

  “Yeah. Even if Null Boundary’s been made into a Chenzeme weapon, it’s still got the structure of a human ship. And that means it’s hollow. Made for us. Not like the ring. There’s no place there to even be, unless you rewrite yourself into an alien mind. Null Boundary has an inside. We might be able to approach its neural centers; maybe even … communicate with it.”

  Kona had twisted around in his seat. “Could you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Sypaon—”

  He turned to Clemantine. “Could we get a download of Sypaon?”

  Her chin snapped back and she let out a sharp, popping breath as she broke her atrial links. “A download into what? Besides, if Null Boundary really is a Chenzeme weapon, then it’s a plague ship. We’d die within minutes of boarding.”

  Kona watched her closely. “Minutes might be enough.”

  “It took Sypaon four centuries to understand the swan burster.”

  “She had to learn the system. Lot inherited it.”

  “I don’t think the interior will be defended,” Lot said. “No one’s ever boarded a Chenzeme device before. How could they, when there’s never been an inside? If these weapons are unconscious systems, that—like the Well—learn only through experience, then we might be able to take advantage of a naive interlude… .”

  “And do what?”

  “What the Well does: restructure its protocols.”

  THERE HAD BEEN DUST IN THE AIR DUCTS. Statically attracted wads of molecular machines, forever trading information. He remembered choking on them until his lungs bled.

  Dreaming dust. A system replete with information, but operating without foresight, without consciousness. Selective processes rewarding survival.

  The key to neutralizing Chenzeme weaponry was written in the dust. If Lot could only read it, he might activate it himself. Frustration surged through him. All the information in the world might be contained on the shelves of a library, but if one isn’t able to read, the information may as well crumble to dust… .

  Lot could read the dust … but only when he was spread thin, his vision linked to the communal web. He could write with dust too, through the linkage of his sensory tears.

  Alta’s face loomed blue and eerie in his memory, its tenuous membrane on the verge of an explosion of toxic fog. The phantom could carry him under. “Ord?” he asked softly.

  The DI slid out from under his chair, gliding up its tentacles and onto the armrest. “Yes Lot?”

  He glanced anxiously around the cabin. Clemantine and Kona were glassy-eyed, involved in some internal debate. Urban’s chin was drooping against his chest while the insane aura of dreams drifted from him.

  Lot swallowed his misgivings, telling himself it would be all right, the Communion couldn’t reach this far. Softly: “Did you get a record of the phantom’s physical structure?”

  “The record was forwarded to city library.”

  “Can you access it?”

  “Yes Lot.”

  The Communion can’t reach this far. “Can you synthesize it?”

  “Yes Lot.”

  “Do it for me, Ord.”

  Its face twisted up in an expression of pained confusion. “Bad job, Lot. No good.”

  “I know it. But I need to.”

  “Not safe.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” he whispered fiercely. He hated being put in the position of arguing for something he didn’t really want to do. Couldn’t somebody just stand behind him for a change? But Ord wasn’t really somebody. “You want to keep me safe. Well, we’re all going to die if you don’t help me. Now, Ord.”

  It seemed to struggle with the decision. He thought he caught a glint of silver in it. His eyes widened. Did the robot have a flicker of consciousness too? The cult virus was an opportunist, feeding even in the spare nooks and crannies of an aging dull intelligence.

  Apparently, Ord reached a decision. “Good Lot. Smart Lot. Now?”

  Fear burst through Lot in a sordid flush. Then it was away, leaving cold sweat as a tidal mark. “Yes Ord. Now.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned back, so he did not see the rain though he felt its misty touch against his sensory tears, anxiety tripping through brief moments. Then those perceptions vanished. He sank into a sea of dust. He almost choked, feeling blind and crippled. The liquid flow of data he’d experienced in the Well was nonexistent here in the dry nebular roof. Insight flashed across his awareness in spurts. Dust bearing history. History borne on dust. Slowly, he lowered himself to the pace. Different modes for different environments, all interconnected, shaking hands one to one to one, only rarely winking in lightspeed data transmissions throw and catch, dreaming dust circling Kheth, selective processes defending a system where the destabilizing influence of consciousness need not exist. In the tumultuous, evolutionary exchange of data within the living microbial dust, myriad ways had been found to strip the instinct from a Chenzeme machine, to feed new protocols to the alien cells, to corrupt their purpose. Lot felt his arteries running tens of thousands of miles long. Clever structures flowed through them, spilling into his fixed memory … while on the periphery of his awareness he felt the winking presence of the human ghosts as they railed in their unmet need. It was an old message, hours, perhaps even weeks in transit. He would be long gone before they could react, a minor god winking briefly into existence, determined to remain forever unmoved by supplications that would destroy him.

  LOT ROUSED SLOWLY, FORCED BACK INTO THE WORLD by the pressure of hard acceleration. Urban was looking at him, his face drawn, the muscles in his neck standing out like cords. “You were dreaming again.”

  Lot grunted, still absorbed in the graceful geography of the charismata that sculpted Chenzeme moods. “Where are we going?”

  “To catch Null Boundary.”

  And no going back. They could get aboard the ship, but even if they lived, the shuttle would have no fuel reserves to bring them home.

  It’s not your home.

  The pursuit burned up another day. Time enough for a thin layer of dust to collect on the seat backs after seeping through the shuttle’s supposedly impermeable walls. Lot brushed at the stuff and breathed it in. Breathed it out again, setting the glinting specks swirling in the air, tiny judges, forever untouched by mercy or forgiveness.

  CHAPTER

  35

  BOARDING NULL BOUNDARY WAS NOT A CHALLENGE. It had
ceased to accelerate, and its hull was stationary. At the bottom of a deep pore penetrating the ship’s insulation, a set of bay doors stood open. Clemantine edged the shuttle through the tunnel, then settled it against the mechanical locks. The ring of metal on metal resounded through the cabin.

  As soon as the decision had been made to pursue the ship, Kona had set the shuttle’s small factory to making skin suits for all of them. The design he ordered was thicker and heavier than the version Gent had used. Lot slipped it on, clothing himself in an intelligent skin. The sculpted entity occupying Null Boundary had clothed himself in the hull of the ship. But he had not become the ship. Instead, he’d stubbornly maintained his own identity. In the face of the Chenzeme threat, stubbornness had become an essential survival trait.

  Lot pulled up his hood and sealed it. No one could predict what traits would be essential the next day, the next year, the next millennium. The future remained opaque at all wavelengths; chance and selection still ruled. Whether he chose to deny that fact or face it, its essential nature could never change.

  CLEMANTINE WENT FIRST. SHE STRUNG A LINE from the shuttle to a wide cargo lock, whose outer door stood open in apparent invitation. Lot hooked a short tether to the line, then glided across, carrying Ord’s quiescent form on his shoulders. Kona and Urban followed. The lock was bigger than Lot’s breather. When they were all inside, Clemantine closed the outer doors. Air flooded the chamber. The skin suits sniffed at it, chattered between themselves for several seconds in rapid machine twitters, then announced that the air was breathable. In fact, the ship’s atmosphere registered quite high on the quality scale, receiving demerits only in the very low percentage of water vapor and in the ambient temperature, which hovered near freezing. Ord woke, though it seemed uncomfortable in the absence of gravity, and it continued to cling to Lot.

  The inner door of the lock opened. In free fall there could be no true up or down. Yet Lot’s first impression of the corridor that greeted them was that it was a shaft, plunging directly to the heart of the ship. Close by, the walls glowed soft white, but the illumination faded with distance.

  “Awfully convenient,” Clemantine said, her voice buzzing over the comm-system in Lot’s suit. “Do you get the impression we’re expected?”

  Kona edged into the shaft. “Maybe the bastard is prepared to talk. Come on. There’s not much time.”

  “Wait,” Lot said. He ordered his hood to open. Kona protested, but Lot cracked the seam anyway. Cold air stung his cheeks. His breath steamed. He moved his head slowly back and forth, then frowned in confusion. “Nothing.”

  Kona hesitated a moment longer, then opened his own hood. “You’d be able to scent a Chenzeme presence?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Damn, but we could be wrong about everything.”

  THEY TRAVERSED THE SHAFT RAPIDLY, MOVING EVER INWARD toward the ship’s core. The walls lit up ahead of them, darkened behind. Lot felt his cheeks begin to chap in the cold. He’d just pushed off from a recessed handhold when he realized the shaft had come to an end. He tried to stop his flight, but his glide path had taken him temporarily out of reach of any grips. He shot past Clemantine, out the end of the tunnel and into the core chamber beyond, where he hit the far wall with a gentle thud. When he bounced back Clemantine caught his hand, arresting his momentum.

  He looked around cautiously. This chamber was much larger than the one aboard Nesseleth. Its walls were clean, opaque crystal surfaces, glowing softly like the tunnel walls, though the air here was warmer and more moist. For the first time, Lot caught a faint trace of foreign presence.

  Kona edged past his shoulder, dropping in a slow whirl through the chamber’s center. He looked around, his arms akimbo while his braids danced medusa-like around his head. “Still skulking, eh Nikko?” he said into the silence.

  As if summoned by this taunt, a swarm of pixels suddenly appeared: thousands of tiny points of light that shifted and fluttered in a slow, dramatic assembly until finally a figure coalesced from the cloud.

  Lot looked it over in close detail. It was huge, brooding, and not quite human. Where a man would have skin, this being was covered with minute blue scales. His long, long, fingers and toes twitched like a restless spider’s legs. His head was smooth and hairless, the eyes obscured behind overlying crystal lenses, the nose quite small. His mouth was set in a hard, unforgiving line, while around his shoulders a small blue membranous cloak shivered and flexed.

  “Cheap drama for the primitives,” Kona said. “Nikko, you haven’t changed.”

  “I have.” Nikko’s voice was deep, stern.

  Lot started in surprise as he realized this was more than a visual representation. He could detect Nikko’s presence in the Chenzeme way. Data packets peppered his sensory tears, just as they had that day Sypaon had come to him in the city library. Colors flashed in his optic nerve, without coalescing into discernable shape, but still carrying a cross-clade meaning: a livid rainbow spray of hatred. “Kona,” he whispered. “The Chenzeme influence is here.”

  The Nikko-creature’s gaze fixed on him. Lot could read no expression on his face, but the air carried suspicion, and a flood of questions that seemed to form wordlessly in his mind so that he was shaking his head “no” before Nikko said anything aloud. That evoked silent packets of laughter. “You learned this in the Hallowed Vasties, didn’t you?” Nikko asked. He chuckled. “I returned there once.”

  “Would that you had stayed there,” Kona snapped.

  “Daddy …” Urban clung to the tunnel mouth, his caution a weak accent to Nikko’s bitter aura.

  “You bastard,” Kona growled. “We didn’t die when you abandoned us here. Have you come back now to change that outcome?”

  Lot sensed a momentary flicker of confusion. “I didn’t want to leave you,” Nikko said, his voice remote, as if he were reviewing historical records, and drawing his conclusions from them. “I’d hoped you’d be safe here … for a time.”

  “You left us with nothing!”

  “I left you clean, when I was not.”

  Lot felt his skin prickling with unseen parasites burrowing into his blood, his bones. He cried out, slapping frantically at his arms before he realized the effect was an illusion, only a replay of something Nikko had endured.

  The image glared at him. “What are you?”

  “Leave him alone,” Kona warned.

  Nikko’s short cape began to bunch and climb around his neck. “He’s not just a refugee from the Hallowed Vasties.”

  Lot pressed instinctively against the wall. He imagined he could feel tiny hands reaching for him, poking at him, exploring his cellular structure. Ord tapped at his cheek in soft concern.

  “He’s not human,” Nikko said. “Why have you brought him here?”

  “Because we thought we might need him—to translate from the Chenzeme syntax that guides you, Nikko. Where is the infection that has turned you into a weapon against your own people?”

  “I’ve destroyed it.”

  Kona might have been expecting any answer but that one. He was taken aback in surprise.

  The image flexed its membranous cloak, letting it flutter in the laden air. “You were right, Kona. I was infested, even before Heyertori. I did bring the Chenzeme. Not knowingly. Not intentionally. But innocent motives cannot excuse the crime.”

  His image slowly shrank to more human proportions as he described how he’d discovered the infestation on the exodus from Heyertori. Tiny automata had been budding off his hull, dropping behind into the vacuum where they began to send out faint signals in the Chenzeme dialect. “I had to sterilize them, and to accomplish that, I first had to put you aside.”

  “So you chose Silk?” Clemantine scoffed. “It was a dead city.”

  “It wasn’t dead. The city was alive and thriving. Only the people had been—”

  “We are people!” Clemantine burst out. “We could have died, just like they did.”

  Lot felt as if a cord were pulling tighter
and tighter around his throat. “You could have,” Nikko answered. “It was a chance.”

  Suddenly, the pressure eased. Lot gasped. Kona shook his head. “That may be true, and it may be forgivable. By the Unknown God, we live in desperate times. But you did not even tell us. Why?”

  The image looked away, its blue-tinged face absolutely still. Suddenly, Lot knew he would not answer, not in words. Still, Nikko’s reasoning burst against his sensory tears: green flecks of guilt on muddy gray slopes of self-loathing, washed over by staunch, stubborn white sheets of pride. “He felt shame,” Lot announced, in a low, defiant voice.

  Nikko’s queries snapped hard against his sensory tears. “What are you?”

  Again, Kona turned the subject. “You’re not driven by the Chenzeme influence now?”

  Nikko chuckled faintly. “We are all under the Chenzeme influence, Kona. They’ve shaped our minds, and defined our values, and we’ll never escape their meddling until we’ve destroyed them all. You think I’ve aimed this ship at your city, don’t you?”

  “You’ve served the Chenzeme before.”

  “I hunt them now. Don’t worry. I’ll slip safely past Silk. No harm will come to your people through me.”

  “Then what are you after?”

  Vivid hatred, like fire in the air. It reverberated within Lot’s own alien neural structure, and suddenly he could see their goal, a loathed beacon in the night sky. “It’s the ring,” Lot whispered. His gaze darted to Kona. “He’s going to attack Sypaon.”

  Kona cocked his head in abject confusion. “That’s impossible. Nikko, you don’t have weapons for that.”

  “I have this ship.”

  “You’re going to ram it?” Urban blurted. “Why?”

  “You have to ask? It’s no longer dead. I felt the flux in gamma radiation. It’s been brought back on line.”

  “Sypaon has control of it now!” Kona said, his hand chopping angrily through the air. “She’s not Chenzeme.”

  Lot shifted uneasily. Nikko caught his doubt. Dark amusement popped over an opaque wall of certainty. “You’re not sure about that, are you?”