The Shattered Sky

by Paul Lucas

  The mainstream nanites in my body were quickly becoming vastly outnumbered. What they needed were fresh troops. But the Cephalopods had scoured the interior of the ship of the Nanotech Matrix. That meant that the only source of mainstream nanites were Louis and the Myotans and their equipment.

  They took out their rations, biscuits and dried meat and fruit, and jammed it into my open wounds. Then they poured what remained in their canteens over my head and chest. Then they urinated on me, concentrating their streams on my upper torso. When all that was exhausted, they cut open their hands and bled on me. As a last resort, some spit on my body until their mouths were dry.

  As I said, in a way it was utterly disgusting. But each and every gram of all that material and liquid was crammed full of mainstream nanites.

  Suddenly renewed by the metaphoric cavalry, the mainstream nanites in my body launched a renewed offensive against the Weird nanites, this time having no shortage of material to replicate themselves with. The nanites trying to preserve my most vital organs worked overtime maintaining proper body temperature around them even as the heat from the nanite war began cooking the rest of my tissues.

  I took a quick glance at the estimated forces. The odds were more even now, but the outcome was still in doubt. The Weird nanites were spearheading a massive assault on my brain. I directed the Matrix nanites in my skull to set up what defenses they could, enzyme moats and nerve-impulse mine fields, while I directed some of the Matrix reinforcements out of my body and across a few millimeters of flooring to attempt a flanking attack.

  If the Matrix nanites won and my brain was still functioning, they could rebuild the rest of me from what materials that remained. Biscuits, blood, urine, dead nanites, what have you. If the Matrix nanites lost, then whatever happened to the rest of my body did not matter anyway.

  The ship shuddered violently from an impact far more powerful than from any sandcaster. People on the bridge went flying, my body, already being decimated, flung a half meter in the air and carelessly crumpled against the wall. The nanites within my body were also flung about along with my bodily fluids, changing the outcome of a thousand microscopic skirmishes precariously. My flanking attack was suddenly in doubt; did enough get across the floor and back to my body to make a difference?

  "What in the Shards was that?" the Myotan commander shouted.

  "A missile, I bet," Louis said. "The 'Pods have finally got it through their heads that their sandcasters aren't going to flush us out, so they're upping their firepower."

  "But I thought the hull was metallic UTSite! Missiles cannot hurt it!"

  "Conservation of momentum still applies! They hit the ship with enough force and they'll throw us around in here like eggs in a cement mixer!" He spat out a long string of frustrated invective then directed his next words at me. “Gossamyr! What’s happening? Can you power up the ship’s systems?”

  “What?” The Matrix placed my words in his mind.

  “We need to use the external cameras and see what's going on out there!”

  “I will see if I can do it.” Any system connected to the Nanotech Matrix I could theoretically access through the my interface. That was the way these ships had originally been designed, with the Matrix as the primary means of control and the work stations the KN and the Cephalopods used were meant merely as emergency back-ups.

  Thankfully the system did not need the user to be overly specific or technical with directions. I thought at the crystal: Power up the ship and let me see outside.

  The crystal acknowledged my order. Complying. Secondary batteries charging, main matter-antimatter reactor beginning priming sequence. Specify quadrant and angle for viewing.

  I do not know! Just give me the widest possible view of the Spaceport outside!

  My vision was abruptly hijacked by a stark, wide-angled view of the spaceport from the ship’s far aft. The ‘Pod ship floated a full kilometer away, pulsing what looked like giant grayish-brown spittle at the ship’s fore end several times a second.

  “The 'Pod ship is still firing one of its sandcasters, but I do not see any more missiles yet..”

  “Good,” Louis said. “They may not want to use too many of those here. In space there's usually a minimal activation distance it has to travel before it arms. At this range the missiles will have to be live coming out of their launchers. They could detonate right in their faces.”

  I shifted my sight back to the ship’s interior. “What are we going to do?” Louis was the one who was familiar with aspects of space combat, so I trusted his judgment. Even with my expanded consciousness, I was still mostly preoccupied with directing the thousand small battles still waging within my tissues.

  "I don't know," Louis admitted after some hesitation, suddenly realizing all eyes were on him. He shifted his weight uncomfortably. He and D’Artagnan were the only ones familiar with this type of technology, and D’Artagnan was busy trying to salvage the ‘Pod equipment left on board for use in case of a possible boarding. “All right. Gossamyr, we’re going to have to lift off. We’ll have to try for one of the other docking cradles."

  My metaphoric throat suddenly went dry. “You expect me to fly this thing?”

  “Isn’t that what the Cephalopods were expecting you to do?”

  “They did not trust me that far. The most they did was have me float it up three meters.”

  “Well, you can fly it with the crystal, can’t you? Otherwise, we’re going to be stuck here until the ‘Pods surround us and figure a way in by themselves.”

  Louis quickly explained that I should be able to get the ship to interpose itself between the Cephalopod ship and a convenient docking cradle long enough for us to secure a hasty retreat. It was a fairly vague plan, but it was the only one we had.

  I told everyone to hold on to something as I gave the order through the crystal to lift the ship. Luckily the ship's main reactor only needed a few more seconds to prime fully. I had sailed the sacred winds for most of my life, either with my own wings or in one of my husband’s gliders, but I had never felt such a sickening lurch in my bowels as when that ancient vessel pulled itself free from its magnetic moorings with an echoing moan. The rest of the Myotans seemed to react in the same way. Louis said the electromagnetic fields of the repellers might have had something to do with it, that our kind might be unusually sensitive to such things.

  The pelting on the hull intensified. A quick check through the crystal showed that the ‘Pod ship was firing at us with everything it had. I even saw bright dazzles of light as its lasers played over us. Then my outside vision started to fuzz.

  I switched my perceptions to back inside and told Louis. He swore himself red-faced. “Goddamit, so that’s what they’re doing!”

  “What?”

  “Destroying the Matrix Nanites on the outside of the ship. The ship‘s in vacuum, so they couldn’t sterilize it with fire like they could the inside corridors. With exterior nanites gone, we’ll be blind. We don’t have auxiliary systems, and it will take too long for the ship to replace the nanites to do us any good. Make sure the crystal keeps only one side to the Cephalopods at all times. That way at least half of the ship won’t be blind.”

  I did as he suggested and slowly moved the ship toward a docking cradle on the far side of the Spaceport. We had to move slowly, not only to keep the unhit side oriented away from our attackers but to make sure we did not impact anything. I only had the external view of the unhit side to go on.

  Suddenly, the constant pinging on the hull stopped. “Did they run out of sand for their casters?” I asked.

  Louis grunted. “Maybe. Maybe not. I have a bad feeling about this. Can you rotate the ship around a bit so you can see what they’re doing?”

  I nodded and told every one to brace themselves. The deck canted up slightly as the ship rotated a small slice of its underside up enough to bring the Cephalopod ship into view. It was slowly backing up to the massive airlock doors that opened the Spaceport to space. The portal ov
er it cracked down its center and slowly pulled apart, revealing the reflected light of the Shards beyond.

  No, I suddenly realized. The pinpoints of light were too small and too still, to be Shards. They were occasionally blotted out by the darkness of the slowly-moving true Shards caught in the immense shadow the MegaShard, but there were still so many of them that they filled the sky.

  I realized for the first time in my life, I was looking at the stars.

  An odd pain made me wince in my computer womb and forced me to once again pay full attention to the war inside me. The good news was that the nanites from my lower extremities--feet, legs, hips, and so on--had finally arrived at my upper torso in large enough number to be effective. They formed a near-solid line of defense as the Weird nanites retreated from the attack of the mainstream nanites coming from all the foreign organic material higher up. My heart, lungs, liver and such looked like they would be saved, even if most of my digestive tract would have to be rebuilt or repaired.

  Odd, that I could feel so dispassionate about large portions of my body being so badly decimated. But I knew with a confidence I could have never possessed as just my meat-self that the Nanotech Matrix was more than capable of reassembling all of that as good as new.

  But I quickly saw the source of my pain: the Weird nanites had fallen back to my spine, using the bone and cartilage there as a defensive line, eating at my nerves for raw materials. The nerves there were firing uncontrollably with vast amounts of input they could not quantify. If I had been in just my meat body, the agony would have been indescribable.

  Still, victory there was assured enough that forces began diverting toward the battle going on at the base of my skull. The nanites I had sent to flank the Weird forces were making a heroic stand, using hit and run tactics to divert enough forces to prevent the enemy from making an all-out push through my skull.

  Still, all this distracted me just long enough that I almost missed the Cephalopod ship drop something onto the floor of the Spaceport. It looked strangely like a large, elongated metal egg. The ship continued its slow, steady retreat up to the airlock doors.

  I reported it, downloading the image into Louis' visual cortex. Louis’s eyes grew wide in alarm. “My God.”

  “What?” I was beginning to get irritated at his constant outbursts that explained nothing.

  “That thing has to be a missile warhead! A nuke! They must be planning on blowing it once they’re safely outside the airlock doors.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Its the only thing that makes sense. They can’t get to us any other way.”

  “But the UTSite hull will withstand the blast, correct?”

  “You weren't listening earlier, Gossamyr. The hull will survive intact but we won’t. When the shockwave of that blast hits us we’ll be smashed about like rotten eggs inside here.”

  Spirits. “What can we do?”

  “I don’t know. Can we beat them to the airlock door?”

  “I do not think so. They are between us and it, and the doors look like they stopped so the opening is just barely wide enough to accommodate their ship, but not ours.”

  “Can you get the crystal to access the bay doors?”

  “I will try...” A heartbeat later and the gigantic airlock doors began responding to my command. “I got it!” I exulted even as I gave the command to move the ship around our enemies to the openness of space.

  Our progress proved smooth until the Cephalopod ship suddenly canted its position and seemed to detach a portion of its bow, which shot straight for our Builder ship. I did not even have time to shout a warning before it hit.

  The entire Builder vessel lurched to one side, the deck under us jumping wildly. We all fell in a tangle toward the opposite wall, shouting and screaming. The lights flickered for a brief moment.

  The impact shook all the warring nanites within me loose once again. My carefully planned maneuvers were suddenly useless, as mainstream and Weird nanites scattered and mixed. Now it was all a free for all, a melee, as nanite savagely tore into nanite, raising the temperature of my flesh to near the boiling point.

  It took the Myotans many long heartbeats to disentangle themselves. The news was not good. Many were injured, including broken bones and one soldier with a wing pierced when he fell onto a protruding gun barrel. Some were unconscious.

  Louis was not among the badly injured, thank the spirits. “Gossamyr!" He shouted. “What happened?”

  “I think they hit us with something—-a smaller ship, it looked like.”

  “You mean a lander? Shit! I wasn’t expecting that! We’re too close for their missiles, but I could see where ramming us with a multi-ton ship’s boat would do some damage!

  “The ship is actually damaged,” I told him. “The hull’s intact, of course, but internally, some systems are responding sluggishly.”

  “Never mind that! What about the ‘Pods?”

  I checked. It did not look good.

  “They are almost out the airlock. Maybe a minute or two, at the most. They have regained control of the door mechanisms, apparently. I could try to override them again.”

  “Would it do any good?”

  I shook my head. “I do not think so. They are too close, and the doors move too slowly.” Once outside, they did not need the doors to close. They could hide behind the UTSite bulkheads and blow the warhead knowing they would be fully protected.

  Louis swore, hot and ragged. “What the hell can we do, then? We could try, um, ramming them.”

  “That would probably kill us as surely as the bomb.”

  “We have to try! We don’t have any other options left.”

  I thought furiously. Another massive impact would be all the opportunity the Weird nanites would need to make one final push to penetrate the castle walls of my skull. And when my brain fell to their control, I would lose control of the crystal, and the ship in turn. Everyone here would die, and nothing would stand between the Cephalopods and reaching the surface to wreak havoc on all the Llexans.

  Reaching the surface...

  I swung my ship’s eye view at the deck below the ship. Of course!

  I quickly consulted the crystal. “Open the doorways to the surface.” Kalen had mentioned the Cephalopods had done it before. If they could, why not we?

  Accessing, the crystal replied.

  “Hurry!” I urged.

  Initiating decompression procedures.

  “What? Explain.”

  Evacuating atmosphere from interim chambers for first stage of habitable surface insertion…

  “How long will that take?”

  1073 seconds for first stage…

  “That’s too long! Just open all the doors to the surface! Now!”

  Emergency override authorization required.

  “You have it!" I plumbed the memory of the Matrix for the codes required and shoved them at the crystal's AI. "Now, Override!”

  Complying.

  Below the ship I saw the UTSite floor of the spaceport crack along invisible seams. We were in vacuum and of course heard nothing, but I could easily imagine the millennia-old metal and gears creaking and groaning under the immense task I had suddenly set for them.

  The cracks grew into chasms of darkness and then, surprisingly, shafts of yellow sunlight speared upward from their depths.

  I spared a quick scan of the Cephalopod ship. It had stopped halfway out the airlock.

  Warning: Atmospheric decompression effects imminent. Secure all hands.

  “What--?”

  The ship was slammed again, this time from below. This impact was of a fundamentally different nature. After the first horrific, bell-ringing blow the force hitting the ship lessened but did not stop.

  Again the nanites in my system were thrown about. But, thankfully, more and more reinforcements were arriving through my recently-liberated spinal column. It looked like I was going to live after all--provided we could avoid the nuclear bomb that was set to detonate a mere few
hundred meters away.

  After only a heartbeat I realized what was happening. On the surface kilometers below (above?) us, great cracks had appeared in the ground. Tons of earth and debris, deposited near the entrance over millennia, had fallen in, its trajectory sped on not only by gravity but by the enormous winds propagated by a very large portal suddenly opening into pure vacuum.

  Outside, soil and rock and debris from the ruined city below us flew up from the floor. I hastily moved the ship to a lee in the barrage until it fully dissipated. I canted the ship enough so I could look at the airlock above us. The small crack of the airlock still open was quickly becoming clogged with debris. I saw no sign of the Cephalopod ship.

  No, that was not true. I saw parts of it scattered here and there around the airlock. It had been hit square-on by all the debris from the surface as thousands of tons of debris all tried to cram out the airlock at once. We had been a bit off to the side, and had only been clipped by a small portion of the barrage. The Cephalopods had caught the full brunt of it dead-on. The vessel would have been hit by the equivalent of a thousand tons of matter from the Builder city above.

  That was the end of the Cephalopods, at least for now.

  "We got them!" I exulted at Louis' mind.

  "Was that the bomb that just hit us?" Louis shouted. "It couldn't have been. Gossamyr, what about the bomb?"

  Spirits, the bomb!

  I had been too distracted by the unexpected hail from the surface and my own inner battle. I quickly found the bomb again.

  It was unscathed, also off to the side of the access doors.

  “Get us to the surface!” I screamed at the crystal. “Now!”

  Beginning ascent.

  “Go faster! As fast as you can!” I shouted into the minds of all my companions. “Everyone grab hold of something! Anything!”

  Louis shot me a dirty look. “Would you mind telling us what the hell hit us?”

  “Not now!”

  The ship canted down at a sharp angle and shot toward the largest crack in the floor at a mad speed. Wind buffeted us madly, but thankfully most of the loose debris around the portal had apparently already been sucked through. I had a brief glimpse of hundreds of Underworld levels flashing past, then a bright light as we passed the interface level. Sunlight shone above us.