Perhaps, she thought, the entire mess was part of the test. What if everything from the Spinners to the Starfish was nothing more than a deadly filter, a wringer through which new civilizations were squeezed to see if they’d make it out the far side—a cosmic litmus test designed to weed out the weak? That the final outcome of that test might crucially hinge on the decision she now had to make left her feeling more than a little uncomfortable.
The Source rose over her until it seemed to hang directly overhead. She wasn’t sure if she had a body in the illusion anymore. She was aware only of the Source and a vague impression of creeping branches around the edges, as though a forest were overtaking the orchard. Her mind was perfectly clear, though. She couldn’t claim disorientation as an excuse for whatever decision she wanted to make.
Was the alien mind laughing at her as she wrestled with the decision? She didn’t want to die, and she did want to be the superior Hatzis. But at the same time she was the leader of the team sent to save humanity. How could she turn her back on that mission, on her duty and her crew? What right did she have to shun that responsibility and send another in her place?
She remembered the conversation from which the Nexus had chosen its name. “We’re going to need to find some sort of command nexus or communications conduit,” she had told Inari. “If we can tap into either of those without getting ourselves killed...”
As always, it was the last part that was proving the most difficult. But it wasn’t impossible. With the Nexus’s help, she could become that conduit. And who knew? Maybe she wouldn’t die in the process. Or maybe it was craven to hope for life when the lives of so many others were at stake. But she had to give herself some chance. Otherwise the decision was literally taken out of her hands. The mental model that Sol had given her—the sense of self that craved originality and perpetuity—simply would not let her kill herself.
But if on such a craven decision the worth of humanity hung, then she couldn’t find it in herself to think that a bad thing. Humanity wasn’t noble or proud. It would happily sell out its benefactors in order to stay alive even a day or two longer. It would accept a halfhearted sacrifice, made under extreme duress.
“Very well,” she said. “I accept your deal. What do I have to do?”
NOTHING, CARYL HATZIS. IT IS BEING DONE TO YOU AS WE SPEAK. YOU WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO EXPLAIN TO THE OTHERS WHAT IS HAPPENING, THEN YOU WILL BE ON YOUR WAY. BUT MAKE IT BRIEF, CARYL HATZIS. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE.
The faintly amused tones of the Nexus carried her down a slippery slope of unconsciousness. The branches closed around her; darkness spiraled inward. Barely did she have time to be afraid when she was gone and only the conduit remained.
2.2.5
The rapier-thin, silver skewer slid through Thor’s head as cleanly as a hypodermic needle. Alander could only stare in shock, trapped as he was in the anti-impact fields and half-deafened by the sound of Eledone’s electronic screams of protest at the intrusion. A fine mist of blood erupted from the entry and exit wounds, spraying the cockpit and those around. The impossibly sharp tip of the skewer glinted evilly in the white light of the cockpit, wavering slightly as Thor’s body spasmed and flailed as though receiving a powerful electric shock.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the skewer withdrew and disappeared through Eledone’s hull boundary. The hole in the wall quickly sealed, but Thor wasn’t so lucky. Blood and gray matter bulged out of her head wounds, kept grotesquely in place by her I-suit. Everyone stared helplessly at the android as her eyes rolled back and her limbs sagged limply at her side.
“Eledone!” Sol yelled. “Let us go so we can help her!”
The keening hole ship obeyed, although it shuddered around them as though revolted. Thankfully it had the presence of mind to keep Thor afloat as the rest of them dropped to the floor. She hung between them, to all appearances dead. Alander approached her warily, aghast at Thor’s bloodied head and face. The lightning-fast plunge and retreat of the skewer had the same callous impetus as someone testing a roast turkey to see if it was done.
The screens around them began to flicker. The hole ship was slowly recovering. The images were still hazy and ill defined, but he could make out the branchlike appendages of the attacking ship retreating. The warped stars reappeared, the light of alien suns returned.
“Is she—?” Gou Mang’s eyes were wide, unable to look away from the blood bulging from Thor’s forehead, held back by invisible forces.
Sol reached out to touch the android’s throat and shook her head. “Her heart’s still beating.”
Thor didn’t respond to the touch.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” Cleo Samson eyed the walls as though expecting another spike at any moment. “This is insane.”
“Insane or not,” said Inari, “the fact remains that it is happening. And unless we want to end up dead like her, then I suggest we try to figure out—”
“Look at Thor,” said Axford. “Something’s not right.”
“Yeah, she has a hole through her fucking head,” snapped Gou Mang. “That’s about as far from being right as you could possibly—”
“Look closer,” Axford cut in again, angered by Gou Mang’s hysteria. “Something’s happening to her!”
Alander peered curiously at what Axford was indicating. The skin looked perfectly normal at first, until he realized that it was shifting and changing in minute increments. Freckles were drifting; veins were stretching. It was like watching a wax model melt in free fall: there was no dripping or gross deformation, just a slow, subtle mixing.
Everyone stepped back when they noticed minutely thin filaments begin to stretch outward from the surface of her skin, swaying and reaching for open air.
“That’s nanotech!” Inari gasped. “She’s been infected with something!”
“The I-suit is keeping it in,” said Sol, although she, too, took an extra step back, just to be on the safe side.
“For how long, though?” asked Gou Mang. “That thing pierced Eledone’s hull like it was nothing more than a balloon. How can we be sure this won’t do the same to the I-suit?”
“She’s right,” said Axford. “We should eject her from the ship before she has a chance to infect us all. The farther away from me she is, the better I’ll feel.”
“No one’s getting ejected,” said Sol firmly. “She’s hurt, for crying out loud! She needs our help right now.”
“For all we know, she could already be dead,” Axford argued. “They could be keeping the body alive until they’ve fully taken it over.”
“I don’t care, Frank!” Sol returned, wheeling on him. She was passionate, determined, but Alander could hear uncertainty behind her words. “We aren’t abandoning her until I’m convinced we have no other choice—not while she’s still got a heartbeat! Eledone! I want Thor isolated from the rest of us. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Caryl.”
Sol and Alander were pushed aside as a bubble appeared around Thor’s floating body. The bubble merged with the cockpit walls and then withdrew. It took only a second for the wall to heal behind the bubble and for the space between Sol and Alander to be cleared again. There was a slight vibration through the floor as part of the hole ship split away from the rest.
“I have separated into two unequal sections,” explained the AI. “I have given Caryl Hatzis her own life support and environment protection.”
A screen opened behind Axford, showing the interior of the excised hole ship. In it was visible, from several angles, Thor’s body.
Sol took a deep breath. “Okay, now that’s been taken care of, maybe we can look at the situation more rationally.” She looked meaningfully at Axford. “Any suggestions?”
“Yeah,” said the ex-general. “I want the air in here scrubbed, and I want every surface renewed. I don’t want any chance of us getting infected also.”
“That task has already been performed,” said Eledone. “There exists no locus of infection by the invasi
ve agent.”
Happy with the AI’s diagnosis, Alander returned his attention to the screens depicting Thor’s body. It was now as smooth and colorless as a lump of white cheese. Even as he watched he could see the blood that had pooled around her wounds turn a deep black and retreat inside her.
“What the hell was that thing?” he muttered. “What did it do to us?”
“It was a sort of anti-intrusion response, I think,” said Axford. “Analogous to an immune system. An intruder is noted and injected with a pathogen designed to destroy it. If we hadn’t isolated the pathogen so quickly, we might all be in the same situation as her right now.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just destroy us outright?” Alander asked.
“Not if it wasn’t in their interest to do so. It might attract too much attention—or there might be delicate regions nearby.”
“This is sounding less and less like ecology,” said Inari, “and more like biology.”
“The perils of analogy,” said Gou Mang. Her face was pale and shocked, making the rhyme obscenely incongruous. “It singled out Thor as though it knew she was our leader—and that scares the crap out of me.”
“She’s the only thing that scares me at the moment,” said Axford, his eyes still on the monitor. “And I’m not about to let myself believe this is over until she’s a long way away from me.”
“That’s only part of the problem,” said Sol. “If that thing notices that its plan hasn’t worked, it could come back and pick another one of us and do it all over again. How do we prevent that from happening?”
“Any volunteers for the boss’s job?” joked Samson grimly.
On the screen, Thor was turning a milky color. Her I-suit ballooned outward. Strange flashes came from random points across her skin, as though the nanotech that had infected her was scintillating. The only thing that identified her as even remotely human was her shape. Everything else—mission uniform, features, hair—had been absorbed.
“I’ll do it,” said Sol after a few moments of silence. “I’ll take Thor’s place—at least until we have a better idea of what’s going on.”
No one objected. Alander put a hand on her arm and gripped it tightly, reassuringly. Her brief smile told him she appreciated the gesture.
“Maybe it’s time we reconsidered going home,” she said. “We’re completely out of our depth. There’s nothing we can do here except get ourselves killed. That we haven’t yet speaks more about our luck than our skill. Sooner or later, that luck is bound to run out”
“We’ve already had this discussion,” said Axford.
“Things have changed, Frank. When we—”
“Wait a minute,” Gou Mang interrupted. “Check this out, everyone.”
She indicated the screens showing views of the Starfish fleet. The alien vistas were ever-changing, magnificent, and mysterious. The fiery sunlike object appeared to be in the grips of a magnetic storm. Vast tendrils of plasma looped up and out around its equator, falling back down half a turn or more later. The strange arcs overlapped, rising and falling, so that it looked like the object was trying very hard to create a ring system like Saturn’s, but failing due to its high gravity.
Trident ships wove through the rings, almost as though shepherding them. The massive vessels were accompanied by types Alander had never seen before: rippling deltas; curved cylinders; structures like old atomic models, composed of rods and spheres in haphazard clumps. He couldn’t tell if they were habitats or vessels in their own right.
As he watched, the backdrop of stars, distorted as though by heat haze, suddenly shifted to new configurations. The fleet, and Eledone with it, had moved.
Inari laughed humorlessly. “This just keeps getting better and better”
Her words fell into a frustrated and frightened silence. The enormity of what they were attempting was finally sinking in. The Starfish were so far advanced that any hope of communicating with them seemed ludicrously naive. Sol was right; they were way out of their depth.
“It’s just one surprise after another,” said Gou Mang.
Alander shook his head. “I think I’m beyond being surprised.”
Barely had he finished saying this when Thor sat up and looked at them from the screen.
* * *
Sol hadn’t been watching the screens on that side of the cockpit. Her attention was focused on the, sunlike object. The plasma loops seemed to be settling down now that the Starfish fleet had completed its jump. Activity was increasing across the strange collective.
It was only when Alander cried out in surprise that she turned to see Thor moving. The infected android was resisting the restraining fields and trying to stand. For a moment, she struggled ineffectually, then appeared to give in.
“Yes, Caryl.” Eledone’s voice startled everyone in the cockpit. Then, on the screens, they saw the fields holding Thor in place relax and place her gently on the floor.
“Eledone, no!” Sol barked. “Disregard any orders—”
“Do not be alarmed, Sol.” The voice boomed through the hole ship cockpit, filling it like water. On the screen, Thor’s body straightened, facing them emotionlessly.
“Thor? Is that—is that you?” said Alander.
“I was Caryl Hatzis,” said the voice. Thor’s nanofactured flesh swirled like the atmosphere of a milky gas giant. “Now I am the conduit.”
“The conduit?” asked Sol. “What does that mean?”
“I am to stand between you and the Source of All. I will convey—” Just for an instant, the creature before them seemed to fumble for words. “—Your message.”
“Convey our message to what?” Sol stared at the screen in something very much like despair. She wasn’t used to being so far out of her depth like this. It was frightening.
“There is no time for explanations,” Thor went on. “I must leave now.”
“But will you return?” Sol asked.
Thor didn’t respond. Instead, she raised an arm to point at one of the walls of her habitat. It shot out like a spear, fingers stretching to a fine point and piercing the wall with no apparent effort. Thor’s body collapsed to a ball that flowed like liquid through the hole in the wall and was gone in an instant. The screen shifted to an outside view showing the much smaller sphere of the habitat. An elongated milky smear moved rapidly against the backdrop, darting away from the habitat at first, then looping back to engulf it, ballooning outward in an impossibly large mouth and enclosing the habitat completely. The balloon collapsed, leaving a fat ovoid in its wake. A hole puckered open at one end, and strange energies suddenly stirred the vacuum.
Blurring with speed, almost too fast for Eledone to follow, the thing that had once been Thor jetted away from them. Telemetry followed it against the inconstant backdrop. Sol watched, stunned, as it performed a smooth course correction, sending it on a collision course with the fiery object at the heart of the fleet.
“Where the fuck is it taking her?” Gou Mang asked weakly.
“To the Source, I guess,” said Sol.
“Two minutes to impact,” Eledone announced.
“What do we do now?” asked Inari.
She shrugged. “I suppose we sit and wait.”
“But how will we know whether she’s succeeded or not?” said Gou Mang.
“If the Starfish stop wiping out our colonies, then I guess we can assume she got through to them,” said Alander.
“I don’t know about you guys,” said Axford, “but I, for one, don’t like the idea of sitting here out in the open waiting to see if she succeeds or not. Personally, I’d rather move and wait elsewhere.”
Sol nodded. “I’m inclined to agree. Eledone, take us away from here. Nothing too conspicuous, okay?”
“Understood, Caryl.”
The hole ship moved off on a curving course to one side of the injured cutter. Forgotten in all the drama, the mighty ship was looking decidedly threadbare. Its skeleton was visible in some places, while in others great gouts
of outrushing gases obscured everything. Intense magnetic fields spun around both poles, sending auroras rippling down its flanks.
“One minute,” said Eledone.
Thor had vanished off the screens, but passive detectors still picked up a trace of her on more exotic frequencies. Her passage appeared to be slowing as she approached the sunlike object, but Sol knew that to be an artifact of relativity. She was traveling so fast that she would arrive at her destination before the radiation she emitted would reach the hole ship.
Eledone plotted a projected course for the others to follow and maintained a countdown based on the assumption that her course wouldn’t dramatically change.
“Ten seconds,” said the AI. Then, following a slight pause: “Three, two, one... contact.”
“That’s it,” said Sol when the symbol representing Thor reached the edge of the sunlike object.
“And now what do we do?” asked Inari.
“We wait,” said Sol. “Just like I said.”
“For how long? It could take hours, days.”
Sol faced Inari. “Unless you’ve got a better—”
A blinding white light silenced her. She reeled back, covering her eyes. It didn’t do any good; the light was blazing from all around her, even inside her eyelids as though every nearby atom was pouring out photons by the trillion.
Then the coruscation was gone, and normality returned.
“I think we just had a visitor,” said Sol, stepping up to the center of the cockpit. “Look.”
She indicated one of the screens on which three words were written: You may witness.
“Was that—?” Gou Mang started, but clearly didn’t know how to finish the sentence.
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