by Alex Lamb
‘Yes, it is. I am the logical embodiment of the Yunus’s vision at this juncture,’ he said. ‘You have become philosophical.’
‘Do not!’ she shouted.
‘I interpret the will of the Yunus,’ said Zilch. ‘You should want me to.’
And then she did. Nada groaned in bliss as Zilch adjusted her identity.
‘I love you,’ she said in awe.
‘This reorganisation constitutes a dangerous imbalance in our systems,’ Leng pointed out. ‘We will not be effective!’
‘Your reasoning is too subtle,’ said Zilch. ‘Become quiet. Reject nuance.’
Leng keened as Zilch rewrote him.
Nada stared blankly at the wall and enjoyed her new reduced position in life.
‘What is my function now?’ she asked placidly.
‘Take up my former position as tactical subnode,’ said Zilch.
‘I am overjoyed to assist,’ said Nada.
‘Commence route planning,’ Zilch told her. ‘We will destroy the Abomination with all haste.’
11.5: ANN
‘Sorry, folks,’ said Clath. ‘It’s not going to work.’
Ann sat with the ark-removal team in their improvised situation room – another glass disc like the helm-arena, this one granting views over the problematic alien vessel carving its way through their mining bay.
‘I looked into severing the telescopic joints,’ she added, ‘but then the entire structure would be floating loose. If we get another quake before we can eject it from the bay, we’re toast.’
The news was expected, if not welcome. Thus far, all their attempts to remove the ark had met with failure. Their warp field kept jamming and remelting the metal before they could complete each set of cuts. Instead, the alien vessel was inching its way through the buttresses as if they were made of treacle. Once through the wall, its path would inevitably intersect some critical component of the ship’s systems. If that happened, they were dead.
At the same time, stopping to conduct repairs promised another showdown with the ever-eager Photurians – a battle that would have been hard to win even before their ship had been crippled. Ann no longer felt in a mood to press that option.
‘How long have we got left?’ said Judj.
Clath rubbed her cyan buzz cut. ‘By my estimates, a little over a week.’
The silence lingered.
Part of Ann ached to take charge of the problem but she had nothing to offer, and nothing new she wanted to say. The argument in the lounge had left a hole inside her.
Ira had revealed to all that she existed to apologise – something she couldn’t do without Poli Najoma and the rest of civilisation watching. She hated that he’d made her look so fragile. She wouldn’t have minded as much if she hadn’t bungled their flight into the Flaw. But she could see now that her own desperation for that final battle had reduced her to embarrassingly unprofessional behaviour of the sort she despised. Now the rest of the crew wanted to paint her as stubborn and weak so they could disregard her input altogether.
She’d escaped to her room to take refuge in her models. But as she reopened those hundreds of meticulously engineered scenario files, she realised with slow horror that Ira was right about them, too: they were useless. For the first time in her adult life, there were no reliable predictions she could make. Even the Photurians’ behaviour had been unexpected. They were off the map, which meant her safe space was no longer safe. So there she was, trapped on a starship with nowhere to hide from herself or anyone else. The sense of purpose she’d gained on Bock Two had fled in an instant.
‘Fuck it,’ said Rachel. ‘If we can’t cut it out, why don’t we try getting inside it? Who’s to say we can’t just pilot that damned crate out of the hull? If we can fly nestships, why not this thing? We’ve got a posthuman with us, haven’t we?’ She glanced at Ann. ‘What do you think?’
Ann caught her gaze and held it. Hope sparked inside her. The idea was riddled with problems but it’d give her something worthwhile to do. Under the circumstances, that meant everything.
‘I can try,’ she said, and smiled for the first time in days.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Judj. ‘You’re talking about interfacing with that thing?’
‘I think it’s a terrific idea,’ said Clath, beaming. She brought up a control spread and started prepping robots.
‘First,’ said Judj, ‘that thing is a giant ball of unknown risks, and second, it’s heavily shielded. Someone would have to pilot it from the inside, presuming there are even controls we recognise.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Ann.
‘I’m sure you don’t,’ Judj snapped. ‘You never do. Endangering your crew-mates is your speciality.’
Of all of them, Judj seemed most keen to hammer on her after their debacle at the dead Phote world. She still had no idea why.
‘Who’s talking about risking people?’ she retorted. ‘I’m trying to save us.’
‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Why shouldn’t I go? I’m a security specialist. I’d at least recognise a software threat if we find one.’
She stared at him in confusion. ‘What’s your problem, Judj? I’m trying to help.’
‘My problem is that I consider it the duty of Fleet officers to work together to decide the optimal deployment of resources. What makes throwing yourself in the path of danger your right, Ann?’
Ann noticed that Clath’s expression had tightened into something like fear.
‘Judj, let’s not go there,’ she said.
Ira intervened. ‘Hang on a moment,’ he said, raising his hands. ‘Until we get inside, we’re not in a position to make any decisions, are we? So there’s absolutely no reason for conflict here.’
Ann’s shoulders cranked upwards. She could handle Judj’s bitterness but Ira’s compassion made her skin itch. While her implosion was her own fault, Ira had been the agent of that destruction with his remarks in the lounge, and for that she couldn’t forgive him. Fuck him for always trying to help her. He’d made things so much worse. Since that evening, just the sound of his voice had driven her to fury. Unfortunately, under the circumstances, avoiding him was impossible. She closed her eyes to remove the sight of him.
‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ he added. ‘Clath, how soon do you think we can get down there?’
A half-hour later, they were piloting waldobots through the mining bay en route to the hatch Ira had seen. The toothed door on the crab-ark’s docking bay now sported a rim of frozen metallic splashes where the alloy from the buttresses had reached around the false-matter shell and bubbled outwards. Curiously ribbed tendrils of degenerate alloy extended from it like accusing fingers. Fortunately, there was still room for a team of robots to sneak past.
Ann’s robot floated through, taking point, while the machines the others piloted followed, trailing an armoured communication cable. They were taking no chances. The next time the hull fused, comms might be cut off altogether.
‘I didn’t think this place could get any creepier,’ said Clath as her searchlight played across the gloomy walls. ‘I guess I was wrong.’
Her line-of-sight remotes bumbled through the gap next, followed by gravity-distortion detectors that extended telescopic V-shaped arms as soon as they were inside. Last of all came the remote fabber Clath had insisted on bringing for reasons that Ann still considered opaque.
‘Which way is the hatch you noticed?’ said Ann.
‘All the way up and to the left,’ said Ira.
She led them deeper into the darkness of the ark’s docking bay with her rail guns primed and ready, just in case.
Ira’s hatch wasn’t hard to find. It lay near the end of the docking bay’s side-tunnel at the centre of a tangled nest of scaffold – four metres across and adorned with a complex circular pattern full of subtly broken symmetries.
‘It doesn’t look like a pressure lock, unfortunately,’ said Clath as her robots pored over the device. ‘Not amenable to cutting, eit
her. I’m guessing this is made of a mix of titanium and micro-scale warpium bubbles.’
‘Warpium?’ said Ann.
‘That’s what I’m calling false matter now,’ Clath explained. ‘False matter’s too much of a mouthful when you’re taking a lot of verbal notes.’
‘What are those things?’ said Rachel. ‘Those little plates at the side of the door. They look like they might be electrical contacts.’
‘Then let’s run a current through them,’ said Ira. ‘It has to be worth a shot.’
Clath tried passing a minute amount of voltage and monitored the hatch with every kind of sensor she had.
‘It’s vibrating!’ she exclaimed. ‘The effect is tiny, but something’s happening in there.’
She slowly ramped up the current on the plates, sampling their effect on the hatch system with exquisite care.
‘I hope we’re not breaking it,’ said Rachel. ‘I mean, we’re screwing with their electrical system. Who knows what kind of current it even likes?’
‘I don’t think we have a problem,’ said Clath. ‘I’m feeding in way more juice than I’m getting back now, and the response from the hatch doesn’t appear to change much with the delivery format. I suspect this thing just needs power to open. We’re putting life back into a system that’s been run down for millions of years. The batteries in this ship have probably been dead for longer than there’ve been people.’
That sounded like a wildly optimistic assessment to Ann’s mind, but unexpectedly, the lock moved, rotating in place and hingeing upwards. She chalked it up as more evidence that her predictive talents had died.
‘Ladies first,’ said Ira.
Ann fought down a bitter retort and floated inside. Beyond the hatch lay a spherical chamber with another door at the far end. It looked very much like an airlock. Snakepit had felt alien. This was eerily mundane.
‘I see a problem,’ said Judj. ‘If we seal that lock, don’t we cut off our comms? If you’re right about what that hatch is made of, these waldobots will be isolated and running on SAPs the moment we close it.’
‘Which is why we brought the fabber,’ said Clath.
She measured the door exactly with survey lasers and printed up a plastic replica.
‘Wait,’ said Rachel. ‘What if the contact that allows the inner door to open is built into the hinge mechanism on the outer one? In that case, resealing with a duplicate won’t help.’
‘What do you think I am, an idiot?’ said Clath. ‘Watch.’ Her robots started cutting the original hatch loose. ‘The door is made of special stuff because it presents a face to the outside. I was ready to bet that hinge would be made of normal matter and what do you know? It’s basically steel. You don’t use your craziest materials for every component. That’s just good economics.’ She sounded rather pleased with herself.
Clath replaced the outer hatch with her plastic copy which conveniently had a communication cable running through the centre of it. Then they crowded their waldobots into the chamber below. Each of their robots was about two metres long, which meant there was barely enough room for them and a small team of sensor drones. Clath hit the obvious brown stud on the wall. The lock cycled, filling the chamber with a mixture of inert gasses.
‘We’re in,’ she said proudly. ‘Some designs just don’t change between species. Even the Fecund had airlocks.’
The inner door slid back, revealing a narrow cylindrical tunnel about fifty metres long with rainbow-slick walls of translucent false matter. Behind them was crammed yet more of the incomprehensible machinery they’d seen near the entrance to the docking bay.
‘Wait,’ said Rachel. ‘You told me you thought the machinery around the exohull was a warp-field generator, but this structure is the same. Why would you put a field inside a field? That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Unclear,’ said Clath, her confidence audibly faltering.
‘I don’t like this ship,’ said Judj. ‘It’s too fucking weird.’
‘And we’ll never figure it out unless we get inside,’ said Ann. ‘Shall we keep moving?’
They progressed in single file. At the end of the narrow tube, the tunnel opened out into a broader passage, also cylindrical. This one had smooth, grey walls that looked like ceramic and bore a curious pattern of hairline slashes. At the far end lay another hatch of simpler design with a recessed mechanical lock.
‘What are all those cracks?’ said Rachel.
Ann scanned them with a survey laser. ‘Fissures of some sort,’ she said. ‘Very fine ones.’
‘That’s strange,’ said Rachel.
Ann pressed her robot forwards and promptly lost contact with it. Her viewpoint snapped to Clath’s machine positioned directly behind. She was presented with a striking view of slivers of her waldobot spinning floppily in the air, sparking with spent charge.
‘What happened?’ she said, embarrassed. She was not used to being ambushed, even while occupying a remote body with pronounced latency issues.
‘Blades, I think,’ said Clath, astonished. ‘Suddenly the air in that chamber went glassy. It happened fast, and the next second your robot was in pieces.’
They watched the slivers of Ann’s ride drift towards the far end of the passage, where air currents swept them into vents.
‘Shit,’ said Judj. ‘Warpium knives.’
They checked the video feed from Clath’s robot frame by frame to make certain. Sure enough, something like arcs of glass had swung in and out from the slits the moment Ann’s robot entered the chamber.
‘This ship is defending itself,’ said Judj. ‘That’s not good. It doesn’t want us here and we just charged its power cells.’
‘How do we get past the knives?’ said Rachel.
‘I have no idea,’ said Clath. ‘We won’t be able to jam them. We’d be lucky if the edges on those things are as thick as a water molecule.’
Ann waited for them to ponder the problem for a few seconds before losing patience and presenting the obvious solution.
‘We just need microbots,’ she said sharply. ‘The spacing on the wall gives us a sense of the scale of the threat. We operate below it. I’ll use a smart-blood product if necessary.’
‘Nice thinking,’ said Ira.
‘Just thinking,’ Ann retorted.
They had some general-purpose repair micros sent over from the ship’s stores, transferred through the Dantes’ mesohull in a radiation-shielded matryoshka package. Getting them as far as the alien ark’s airlock took another half-hour. Ann used that time to prepare.
She watched from her replacement waldobot as a swarm of robots like a dribble of intelligent sand poured out of the container she held and flowed into the chamber beyond. Microbots weren’t smart or strong, but under circumstances like these where scale mattered, they were incredibly useful.
The knives flashed out again, scything back and forth. At the same time, currents in the inert air churned the tiny machines about. By the time the survivors had pasted themselves into the safety of the recessed lock at the far end, about ninety per cent of them had been destroyed or sucked into vents.
‘It’s a start,’ said Ira.
Ann refused to comment. She repeated the process until she had a solid mass of robots clinging to the far door. She regarded the final results with a glimmer of satisfaction.
‘Great work,’ Ira told her. ‘Now we just need something strong enough to pull on that handle.’
Ann issued mental commands to create a chain of minuscule machines from the lever to the nearest anchor point. She organised them like a collective muscle and ordered them to contract.
Knives slashed the air again, this time slicing just a nanometre above the hatch handle. Her microbots were instantly scraped off the door and destroyed.
She blinked in surprise.
‘Well, if this is a test, we’re failing it,’ said Judj.
‘I haven’t finished yet,’ said Ann frostily. ‘I will not be defeated. Particularly by a room full
of medieval weapons.’
At the same time, she felt grateful for the engine of determination powering up inside her. Here, thank Gal, was a problem worthy of her talents. It was like coming up for air.
Ira emitted a single dark laugh. ‘Yeah. It’s a while since we had to worry about an enemy armed with knives. Don’t worry, Ann. If anyone can figure out a way through this room, it’s you.’
She refused to be drawn into a response. Fuck his kindness. She could feel it squeezing her.
‘In the meantime, I’m going to tell Mark,’ he said. ‘Getting inside this thing isn’t going to happen in a hurry.’
12: INFLECTION
12.1: WILL
The following morning, Moneko met Will at his hostel in the drab lobby with its pale plaster walls and green sagging couches. She wore black that day, her outfit crisply professional. She stood in front of him looking stiff and sad as he sat brooding.
‘I heard about what happened,’ she said.
‘I guessed,’ said Will. He didn’t meet her eye.
‘I want you to know that everything I’ve done has been because I believe in this organisation and I believe in you. It’s never been about money or power.’
‘I know that,’ he said, squirming.
‘Yes, I kept things from you,’ she said. ‘I’m not sorry. Meeting older Glitches messes you up and I’ve never seen it end well. But it’s happened now, anyway.’ She sighed. ‘You still want to go to the site you requested?’
Will considered. He should have guessed that Smiley would set him up for a polarising experience. He just hadn’t anticipated how unpleasant it would be. All those nagging remarks about avoiding rage now sounded inadequate rather than obsessive. Of course he was going to get angry. The whole world was sick.
He looked out at the pale sunlight slanting across the shopfront on the other side of the street and wondered whether he was being stupid. Was taking it slow with the Underground really so bad? Whatever he thought about John, Moneko appeared to be consistently honest. Then, while he watched, two obese clones with purple skin like a couple of giant blueberries waddled inside, bumping off the doorframe as they went.
