Webdancers

by Brian Herbert

  Just when the space station seemed about to slam into him, it suddenly slowed and floated in space, not far away. The facility, though largely intact, was badly dented, as if it was an ocean-going vessel that had survived a hurricane. Some of its modules had split open, and loose contents and other parts spilled out into the weightless void, along with bodies. Concerned, Noah guided his podship-self in that direction, to do what he could. But something resisted his forward movement and reduced his speed, like a powerful current going against him.

  I think the space station was in the undergalaxy and now it’s back, Noah thought, as he made slow headway.

  But he realized that he knew very little about the adjacent galaxy, only that timeholes in the membrane between the two realms provided occasional glimpses. And he recalled an earlier vision, in which he had seen a small Parvii swarm hiding in the other galaxy, near the bolt hole they had used to escape from their sacred fold. Assuming the vision had been accurate, he had always wondered what had happened to them.

  Now, as he drew near the space station and its widening debris field, the timehole sealed over behind them, and vanished from view. Then everything became hazy, just a wash of gray-blackness in all directions.

  Noah blinked his eyes, and found himself back on Siriki, standing in the private library. He watched as Subi Danvar and other uniformed officers filed into the room for their scheduled meeting.

  I’m not going crazy, Noah told himself. He had been through such paranormal shifts before, and although they never felt entirely comfortable to him, he was getting more used to them.

  But he was still left with an uncountable number of unanswered questions.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  War is like a lover. It lures you, embraces you, and rejects you. It lifts you up and tears you down—and just when you think you can stand no more of it, you plunge back into the fray.

  —General Nirella del Velli, Supreme General of the MPA

  Upon arriving at Canopa at the head of a fleet of twelve thousand podships, Doge Anton had seen Lorenzo del Velli’s space station vanish into space, in a bright burst of green. One of the Tulyans with the fleet reported that it went into a timehole.

  More than a week had passed since then, during which the unopposed Liberator forces solidified their military hold on the planet. For this critical mission, the young leader had selected the best fighters and warships, and every soldier was anxious to go into battle against the enemy.

  “The silence is weird,” Nirella said. She and her husband stood on the bridge of the flagship Webdancer, looking out into orbital space and down at the world below. In the time they’d been here, there had been very few HibAdu sightings. Less than a hundred Hibbils and Adurians had been captured, and only a handful of small military aircraft. There had been no sightings of enemy lab-pods at all, though many were reported to have been in the Canopa system before the arrival of Anton’s rescue force.

  It was very unsettling to him. The HibAdus had used an immense fleet of podships to attack and conquer almost every Human and Mutati world. But where were all of those vessels now? He had been exchanging urgent messages with Noah at Siriki and with the loyal robot Jimu at Dij—messages that were relayed through Tulyan webtalkers. Aside from a brief battle at Siriki when Noah arrived, the conditions were much the same at all three planets. Very few HibAdus sightings at all, and only a few hundred soldiers captured in all.

  At distant Dij, Human military officers and the robot Jimu were keeping a close watch over Hari’Adab, and despite the Mutati troubles on Siriki they reported no reason to suspect the Mutati leader of any form of deception. Without his knowledge, other Mutatis had schemed to assassinate Noah.. Arriving at the only unconquered Mutati world, the Emir had been greeted by his people as a returning hero. They had staged parades and other accolades for him, but in a public broadcast he had asked them not to waste their energies in such frivolous ceremonies.

  “We need to remain on constant alert,” Hari’Adab had told them in a speech broadcast to every corner of the planet. “We can never let our guard down again.”

  For the moment, the three military forces were in holding patterns, ready to defend each of their remaining worlds, and awaiting further commands from Doge Anton about when to move on to other worlds and attempt to take them back from the Coalition.

  Now, as Anton stood with Nirella, she said to him, “You and I are married, but I don’t know if we’ll ever get our lives back, at least not the way they used to be. It’s the same with the MPA and Mutati worlds: even if we get them all back, they can never be what they once were, can never have the peace and serenity they once enjoyed.”

  “The enemy is waiting for us out there,” Anton said, as he gazed into space. “But where?”

  He noticed a flare of anger on her face, which he knew was because he had not responded to her personal observation. Then she said, “Hard to say. Our scout ships are out, but they haven’t found anything yet.”

  “We could be sitting ducks here,” he said. “It hard to know the right thing to do. With the size of their forces, we don’t dare break up our fleet any more. We’re strongest here, and at Siriki, and at Dij. For some reason, the HibAdus couldn’t conquer any of those worlds before, and now—with all the reinforcements we brought in—it will be even harder.”

  “You’re being optimistic. They were just spread too thin, and are gathering again. I’m afraid they did this to draw us in. Like a spider with three webs.”

  “Could be, but we’ve discussed the possibilities, the odds, the options. I think the HibAdus know we commandeered more than a hundred and twenty thousand podships from the Parviis, and—if the HibAdus are watching all three of these planets—they’re only seeing a total of twenty-four thousand podships. They could be wondering where the other ninety-six thousand are.”

  The General half smiled. “I hope you’re right, and they think we’re laying a trap for them, waiting to pounce with a bigger force.”

  “So we each wait, and wonder.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Just as our galaxy is linked by an invisible web, so is it with our individual lives. From birth to death, we interact with one another in complex ways, never seeing the intricate strands woven around us.

  —Tesh Kori, ruminations on the meaning of galactic life

  Throughout the immense structure, stationary machines hummed, whirred, and clicked as they produced new instruments, robots, and robotic components. The factory had once been owned by the famous inventor Jacopo Nehr, but following his assassination it was no longer the property of any Human.

  From his place of concealment, the tiny sentient robot identified the sounds, and knew exactly what was going on out on the floor, even though he could not see anything at all. He was immersed in darkness.

  Ipsy recalled being told that Nehr had taken extra care in the design of the facility, and had refused to proceed with ground breaking or construction until the production line schematics and computerized projections were absolutely perfect. For months, Nehr had worked with industrial architects, production line designers, and robotics technicians, but they had been unable to meet his exacting standards for the production lines. He required that the lines operate at extremely high rates of speed, producing items quickly, and always of the highest quality.

  One of the biggest problems facing him had been that computer projections told him he would have to slow the lines down to get the quality of finished items that he wanted. Stubbornly, he had refused to accept this. The lines had to be fast, and everything that came out of the factory had to be absolutely perfect. He required the finest materials, with tolerances and efficiencies that the experts said were impossible.

  Even though Nehr’s name was tainted now, he had once been something of a fabled figure to the sentient machines. And according to legend, after months of working on the details of the factory and wrangling about how to get it functioning, Nehr had gone to bed one night feeling angry and frust
rated. In the middle of the night, he sat straight up and started reciting the details, as if from a robotics program. Fortunately, he’d had the foresight to rig video recording machines up in all of the places he frequented. Even in his bedroom.

  In a trancelike state, the inventor had dictated the whole thing, and had even made detailed drawings on an electronic note pad. Everything had flowed, and it had all been brilliantly correct, down to the smallest detail. Afterward, with his modifications, the computer projections showed that the manufacturing process would meet every one of his exacting standards. Soon afterward, construction had proceeded and Nehr’s factories became the most efficient ever devised.

  For a time, as long as he held political and economic power, Nehr and his legal teams had controlled where and when the factories would be built, and all were under his ownership. However, based on what Ipsy had learned about the HibAdu Coalition from eavesdropping on a pair of Hibbils, he had now run a probability program. It told him that the Hibbils and their Adurian allies had undoubtedly constructed numerous major factories like this one elsewhere, secretly using Nehr’s methods to produce war materiel. The death of the inventor would have made the task even easier.

  In his dark cocoon, the robot couldn’t wait to get back into action. The weapon-control box in which the little robot concealed himself was sitting on a shelf in a warehouse section designated for emergency-only replacement parts, and this particular panel might not be needed at all for a long time. Other panels like it were not breaking down in HibAdu warships, so it would take a miracle for Ipsy to make himself useful to Humans now.

  During the time he had spent inside the panel, he had completed a number of additional repairs to his own internal mechanisms, so that his principal functions now worked reasonably well. But that didn’t mean he could escape.

  The panel had been tightly sealed from the outside, and he couldn’t get out. Trapped, he could only crawl around inside.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I’ve always thought that there are degrees of goodness in all things, and degrees of badness, and that virtually every situation is a combination of the two. This is not to say that I am some sort of Pollyanna, that I live in a bubble of naïveté. Rather, it means that I try to see even the smallest glimmer of hope in the worst of circumstances, and the tiniest glimmer of virtue in the most vile of people. It helps me to cope.

  —Princess Meghina of Siriki, private journals

  This time, it was much worse.

  Earlier, when the space station tumbled through the void into another star system, there had been only a few deaths, and most of the occupants had survived. Now, as Princess Meghina made her way through the corridors and rooms, she had to hold onto safety railings, since the gravitonics system was weak, and her feet floated just above the deck. It was freezing cold, with very hardly any oxygen in the air, but in her augmented physical state she did not shiver, and had no trouble breathing.

  Though much of the lighting system still worked, damage to the station was extensive, with gaping holes into space. Bodies of Humans and other races were strewn around the interior, floating and bumping into one another. She had to push her way through them, one horror after another—past the death stares of people she had known as patrons of the Pleasure Palace or as servants. In corridors and rooms, there were bodies in disarray, bouncing around in the vacuum.

  Her pet dagg was missing, and the more death she encountered, the more she feared the worst for him. As she hurried around, she called his name in increasing desperation, “Orga! Orga!”

  But he didn’t appear, didn’t bark. Meghina felt too numb to cry.

  Sometimes through glax floor plates and windows, she got views through broken clouds of a gray-blue planet, far below the space station. Occasionally, something would glint down there in pockets of sunlight, silvery flashes suggesting to her that there might be manmade structures or other objects there. It gave her some hope, some connectedness to living things. But to exactly what, she did not know.

  After searching most of one multi-module deck and shouting for anyone who might remain alive, she encountered no one. There were still many more modules and decks to search, but she was likely to encounter even more fatalities in the other areas, which were much more densely inhabited than this one, where she and Lorenzo had apartments and other facilities for their private enjoyment. The very thought of the catastrophe nearly overwhelmed her, but she drew strength within, and continued on. She was sure that thousands of passengers had died from lack of oxygen, or had been hurtled to their deaths into deep space.

  Gradually, the soles of her shoes began to touch the deck, and at the end of one corridor she found a new module where the gravity system functioned better, an area that contained no bodies. As she entered the module, however, the main door to the corridor slammed shut behind her, and she couldn’t get it back open. The wall controls didn’t function when she tapped the pressure pads, or when she tried to use override commands. She was cut off from the rest of the space station.

  “Can anyone hear me?” she shouted in desperation. “Is anyone alive?”

  But Princess Meghina sensed that she was all alone, and very likely the last survivor onboard. With her elixir-enhanced physical condition, she did not seem to need oxygen to breathe, and could not die. But what a terrible fate this would be for her, like a prisoner condemned to solitary confinement for eternity.

  She stared out one of the large viewing windows into space, but saw only floating death out there. Grimly, she sat on a window seat, positioning herself so that she didn’t have to look through any of the windows at the macabre graveyard outside. It was a sea of death out there. She wondered how much it had to do with strange rumors she had heard about cosmic deterioration, somehow tied to what Noah Watanabe and his radical environmentalists referred to as galactic ecology, some sort of connectivity between wide-ranging star systems. Though she had no reason to dislike Noah, and rather admired him for his independence, many of his ideas had always sounded far-fetched to her. But what if he was right after all? What else could explain the wild, perilous trips this space station had taken through space?

  From her earliest years, Princess Meghina had been immersed in currents of change. Born a shapeshifter, she had not liked her natural Mutati form, and had always longed to be Human instead. In her early teens she had altered her bodily appearance to look the way she preferred, the guise of a beautiful blonde Human woman. Despite intense pressures from Mutatis, she kept the alteration in place for so long that her cellular structure actually locked into that appearance. Afterward, she could not have changed back, or into anything else, if she had wanted to. But that was no trouble from her perspective; she had always hated being a Mutati anyway.

  Shunned by her family and Mutati society, she had escaped in one of the regularly scheduled podships that used to travel among the star systems, and she had gradually merged into Human civilization on the planet of Siriki, without revealing who she really was. Her new life had presented challenges. Wanting to start out at the same approximate age she had been as a Mutati—thirteen years old—she’d had to apply makeup carefully in order to take years off the age she had chosen to make herself look, which was of a Human woman of around thirty.

  Fortunately, she had selected a beautiful, though neutral, face that, with a little clever application of skin tints and other products, could easily conceal its apparent age. Rather like that of a doll. Perhaps from her background as a shapeshifter who was accustomed to modifying her appearance, she proved to have a flair for applying treatments to her skin, and to selecting hair styles and clothes that made her look like a teenager. At a glittering costume ball, she met the powerful Doge Lorenzo del Velli, and soon he succumbed to her considerable charms. She became his consort, and he made her a Princess of the Realm. Then—only a short time after they met—he married her.

  In that lofty and enviable position, Princess Meghina of Siriki had become one of the most powerful noblewom
en in the Merchant Prince Alliance, even though she was not actually Human. Through clever subterfuge, she had falsified a series of pregnancies, making it look as if she had given birth to seven daughters. In reality, she had obtained each of the Human babies through surrogates, and a carefully woven tapestry of lies and pay-offs.

  Ultimately, Meghina found herself immersed in even more changes, after she consumed an elixir and gained immortality—as did the four Humans and the Salducian. In that widely-publicized event, she and the others became famous and were considered the luckiest of people in the galaxy, like lottery winners. But through intrigues against her by Francella Watanabe and others, Meghina’s hidden identity became known to the public. This had tilted the political balance against Lorenzo, and he had been forced out of office. Through it all, he had shown strength that she hadn’t known he had, and he’d remained loyal and protective toward her. He had also adapted to a life of business instead of politics, focusing on constructing and promoting the Pleasure Palace, his orbital gambling casino.

  In return, Meghina had remained devoted to him. Of course she still had her dalliances with other noblemen, and he did the same with an assortment of noble ladies. It was all part of the social circles in which the two of them ran. But they developed a new sense of understanding between them, and a mutual respect.

  Now as she sat in her confined module, she worried about Lorenzo. He’d gone down to an unknown world to explore it, and had not returned. While he was gone, everything went upside down, and the space station had vaulted through space to yet another planet in another unknown solar system.

  Hours passed in her confinement. Finally, hearing a thump behind her, she hesitated at first, not wanting to look at something grisly, a body out there bumping up against the space station. Then she heard another thump, followed by what sounded like knocking on the window plate.