by Alex Lamb
The fall of giants stopped. Barring a little gore-splatter, the mechs remained in perfect condition. They started backing away from the slaughter towards their stations. Then, as they reversed, about half of them slowed and halted.
‘I’m getting security warnings,’ said Judj. ‘The ship is under soft assault.’
He started typing frantically on Ann’s touchboard.
‘How is that possible?’ said Ann. ‘Do we have any comms kit left up there?’
‘No, all the hardware is Subtle tech,’ said Clath.
‘So how can he be hacking it? With what?’
‘Through the mechs, I think,’ said Judj.
‘We needed help from the Transcended to even access their systems,’ Ann insisted, ‘so how can he be doing it? Balance may be powerful, but he’s not magic.’
‘I have no idea,’ said Judj. ‘But it’s happening.’
While she watched the camera feed, the mess on the floor reassembled itself into a large, sticky slug. It started crawling down the corridor with the mechs on either side as a robot escort.
The door ahead of them crashed shut, barring their way. The temperature in the passage then rose by several hundred degrees as it was scoured with radiation through emitters buried in the ceiling structure.
‘Got him,’ said Judj.
Ann watched the slug boil and slough to the floor. The mechs, however, didn’t stop. They started scything at the door seal, their arms bouncing off the warpium-composite barrier, leaving nothing but tiny scratches. At that point, the Balance slug appeared to catch fire. It flickered oddly, as if it had been packed with ingots of magnesium.
‘Another security problem,’ Judj warned. ‘Shit! He’s fluorescing and hacking the ship via the vid-link. Sorry, folks, show’s over.’
Ann’s feed went dead, while Judj worked more frantically than ever. She flicked her view to the system-status indicators and watched crazy traffic start to build up around the temperature sensors in the passage.
‘Gravity machine control is not responding,’ Clath warned. ‘He’s going to break the outer envelope!’
Judj grunted. ‘Got it,’ he said. ‘The fucker is capitalising on quirks in the ark’s cache architecture to synthesise software agents for himself. The little buggers are semi-autonomous.’
‘But how?’ Ann insisted. ‘How can he possibly understand their hardware that well?’ And then she groaned as she figured it out. ‘Of course – he’s been out between the shells for days,’ she warned. ‘The dilation on his side was far less and all the outer-shell machinery probably isn’t security guarded from underneath. Balance may have been praying for a chance like this. For all we know, he’s been planning for weeks.’
Ann jumped back through the system using simple voice commands and looked at the sensor data they’d been receiving from the outer shell since they started the gravity machine. Sure enough, the packets had been getting heavier and stranger for the last ten minutes. They’d been too distracted to notice as they dashed down the twenty or so storeys to the lake level. Who could say what ten minutes translated into in Balance-time?
She glowered at the results and knew then that it had been a mistake to come down here, just like it had been a mistake for them to join her in the ark. Ira, bless his heart, had made the wrong choices for all the right reasons, and she’d gone along with them.
The gravity increased suddenly, crushing her to the floor. She cried out as her leg twisted and almost blacked out as she impacted with the ground. Around her, the others dropped like proverbial flies.
Stars skittered across her vision as her cheek ground itself into the ceramic paving. She should have fought Ira. She shouldn’t have given in. She’d seen that he was overdoing the protectiveness like every male since the dawn of time but hadn’t wanted to shut it down because, in truth, she cared about him, too.
A message boomed over their shared channel.
‘If Cuthbert comes out and faces me instance to instance, we can end this,’ said Balance. ‘Otherwise, you’re all dead.’
19: FUSION
19.1: WILL
Will watched his friends slump to the floor. The moment Ira proposed shutting down the inner shell, he’d suspected it would come to this. He grabbed Judj’s security interface and raced for the armoured bulkhead that lay between him and Balance. As he sprinted in the punishing gravity, he assessed the situation with an array of subminds and started compensating for Balance’s hacks.
It was already too late. Balance had managed to do precisely what Will had failed to achieve last time – slide control-handles into every available subsystem before making his killer move. He’d simply had more time than them to get his shit together, even if it had been spent trapped in a gravity-distorted hellscape.
But Will had not been idle in the intervening minutes. He’d scoured his internal data stores to find out what would actually kill the machinery that he and his enemy were running on. Not much. Temperatures over fifteen hundred degrees, high-intensity X-ray bursts, magnetic fields of forty-five tesla and above – that sort of thing. The military pseudo-life he was using was packed with clever nano-scale silicate structures that could continue to coordinate under the most ridiculously austere conditions.
Which meant that only one kind of battle would count – mind to mind. Will’s Underground code and denialware shield versus whatever thread-hacking tools Balance had brought. However, making that kind of attack required living long enough to execute it.
He focused his soft assaults on the alien mechs. At the same time, he opened the door between himself and Balance. A blast of heat washed out as the barrier rose. Will took in the sight of his enemy and had to hand it to the Willworld’s scientists. They’d done a remarkable job. His opponent had been scorched, irradiated and flattened. There was nothing left of him but smears on the walls and floor, yet the bastard was still managing to hack an alien starship. Clearly his thread was intact even if his body was a mess.
The mantis-mechs marched at him but froze as Will pinned them with a thought. They started up again, then lurched back to a halt as Will adjusted his mental grip. Every moment of control interference required a machine-gun bombardment of tailored data packets.
‘Take that suit off or I’ll slice it off for you,’ Balance warned over the public channel. ‘We’re going to do this mind to mind.’
Will hesitated, worried by his enemy demanding his preferred approach. It suggested angles he hadn’t yet seen. He bought time while his mind raced.
‘On the condition that you leave my friends alone,’ he said. ‘You must have figured out by now that we’re not your enemy.’
‘Fine. Whatever. Just hurry up and drop your blocks.’
Will stalled again. This was too easy. Something was wrong.
‘There’s no time to negotiate!’ said Balance and shifted the focus of his attacks. One of the mechs darted forward before Will could stall it, slicing off his arm. At the same time, a tendril of black Balance-goo leapt out from the nearest wall like a frog’s tongue to connect with his exposed tissues.
Balance rammed himself into Will’s computing substrate with all the subtlety of a speeding macrodozer. Will screamed and roared his fury at the same time, diving in to attack Balance’s mental pattern while his link to the rest of the ship slid out of reach.
19.2: NADA
The flight back to New Panama took five weeks. The monstrous ship they were carrying played havoc with their engines, dumping pseudo-velocity every time they acquired a respectable speed. Meanwhile, the humans cowering inside it remained adamantly hidden. Nada wondered what sick little delusions could possibly have motivated them to hide for so long. At the same time, the warped clutch of cells she’d brought with her made her feel ever weaker and more frustrated.
Nada had gone to desperate lengths to defeat it. She’d even set up an approximation of her identity in one of their spare ship-brains to integrate with the Usurper’s tangled mess and analyse it from within. It
was as close as she let herself get to Monet’s repulsive act of brazen cloning.
Such a move would have caused panic in her crew had she revealed it, not least because of the potential digital-infection risk. So Nada had kept the experiment tightly secured, retaining only the narrowest of diagnostic channels to its container. And then she’d let her experimental copy dive deep into the Usurper’s code, becoming infested with Monet’s filth so she could monitor how it changed. Fortunately, it was helping. Piece by piece, her copy was slowly unpicking the travesty that had been made of their beloved Protocol.
Her crew, meanwhile, had gone from jubilation back to exhaustion. Leng struggled to maintain the functionality of his officers under the endless sequence of engineering alerts. Nanimo’s reports hadn’t fared much better.
When she finally dropped warp at the edge of the New Panama System without a solution to the home world problem, she felt a sting of failure scraping at the joy inside her. If only she had built her copy-experiment a few weeks earlier.
‘Help will be on hand now,’ Leng remarked enthusiastically. ‘The problem of the Usurper’s cursed control-system will be solved. Let that provide you with adequate satisfaction.’
Nada wished it were that easy. The only person who could take her frustration away was the Yunus.
‘Send the arrival message,’ she ordered.
Their hail sang out across the system while they powered down to wait for orders from one of the perimeter stations. None came. The maximum wait time for a Photurian fleet response slid quietly by without them intercepting any traffic from the colony. The silence stunned her. New Panama was the busiest system in all of Phote space.
‘Circumstances at New Panama must have changed,’ Leng mused.
‘Evidently,’ said Nada.
They had received no advance warning of a change in communication protocols, and had only been out of command contact for three months. It seemed an extreme change of standards to have been made spontaneously.
‘We will proceed inwards aboard the Infinite Order,’ she told Nanimo. ‘The carrier will follow along with the alien ark, using minimised warp-bursts to enter in-system space.’
‘Yes, Superior Nada.’
Nada pressed on into the system, leaving one of her prized gifts behind, her mind fizzing with rising fear as they dived into the star’s cluttered neighbourhood. What if she’d simply come too late? Could the colonies of her own kind have died already? While that struck her as profoundly unlikely, she’d seen too many dead homeworlds of late to completely disregard the possibility.
To her immense relief, a reply from New Panama eventually arrived. It had taken so long because it had come straight from the colony itself rather than any outlying station.
‘Nada Rien, this is Colony Custodian Jinak Wenshun. Your arrival is acknowledged. No fresh orders await you.’
And that was it. Nada found the paucity of information in the message inexcusable, and the idea that no superior node existed at so large a colony was ludicrous. She replied with questions.
‘Where is your instance of the Yunus? What has happened to the perimeter stations? Why has no fleet strategy been registered?’
Yet another hour came and went before her message could hit the colony world and a light-lagged reply make its way back out to her.
‘Events have moved rapidly in your absence,’ he said. ‘The planet has been temporarily placed under minimal survival conditions to support the Yunus’s new push against Galatea. All spare resources have been diverted to that project. As your survival was not anticipated and fleet resources have already been deployed, your ships were not allocated to missions.’
The implications of the message chilled Nada’s blood. Minimal survival conditions? What did the coordinator mean? Rather than tolerate another upsetting reply, she refrained from asking until she reached a parking orbit from which she could ascertain the situation for herself. Once there, she pinged the root node of the planet’s mind-temple.
What she learned made her reel. The Yunus had drained the planet of almost all its healthy Photes and biomass. His new plan entailed besieging Galatea with a permanent orbital presence and millions of drones, utterly dominating their local space until the colony crumbled. For this, he required megatons of anthrocapital and so had denuded all available colony worlds of their stabilising populations.
The evisceration of New Panama had happened almost two months ago, and already Fatigue was claiming great swathes of the viable units that remained. Towns had been emptied, home-tubes starved of biomatrix, machinery removed. The planet had been allowed to slide to the brink of oblivion.
[Why?] she demanded of the temple and scoured its structure until the answer became clear.
The Yunus had come to believe that without a massive injection of fresh hosts, the Utopia would collapse. Their programme to sustainably reproduce Photurians via natural means had been a failure, as expected. The project to secure the population of Earth had been his last hope.
His decisive moment came when Nada vanished into the Zone. He determined that she’d failed in her mission and that the desperately needed hosts were never going to arrive. At that point, the Yunus defaulted to his backup plan: the unrelenting assault of the greatest remaining source of hosts until a fresh population could be acquired.
‘But I did not fail!’ Nada screamed.
Leng’s avatar-bead came and hovered anxiously beside her.
Nada felt … betrayed – an emotion of human origin yet unspeakably pure in its intensity. She stared down at what had once been the most stable and successful of all the Photurian worlds. It was the one place where they’d managed to construct a mature defensive node rather than relying on human methods of weapon construction. This colony had been the jewel of the Utopia, the boldest and brightest of worlds. And now it was dying.
There would be no support minds for her control-system problem. There would be no grand delivery of her gifts. There would be no moment of re-editing to adjust her uncomfortable sense of ambition. There would be no replacement of her exhausted crew. There would be no communion with her fellow fleet nodes. There would be no new orders. Because her superior, the Yunus, had left her for dead.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Nada shrieked, her fingers grinding into her cheeks. ‘I have changed the fate of the human race and now have no orders to follow? This is unacceptable!’
The colony custodian couldn’t tell her. He lacked adequate data. Nada was better equipped to determine the next course of action than he was.
‘It is not that bad,’ Leng warbled. ‘Remember that we have been away for months. Naturally, the war has progressed. What did you expect?’
‘For the Yunus to honour his promise!’ Nada yelled. ‘The Yunus has wrecked this world! The Yunus has neglected my contribution!’
In a bolt of clarity, Nada knew that the Yunus must have lied to her from the start about his plans. A move of this magnitude would have taken months to organise. He must have started while she was out running blockades around Earth. And when he met with her, he had concealed the truth, because that was the kind of behaviour individuality permitted. Because he erroneously imagined it would make her more effective than telling her what was really going on.
Nada could barely contain her fury, even though it was directed at her beloved and perfect superior node. Her future, regardless of his reasons, had been sold out.
‘The Yunus’s wonderful new orders may be inferred from context,’ Leng suggested, ‘even if they were not specifically delivered. We should leave immediately to join the push at Galatea. Our weapons will add strength to his assault.’
‘What of the ark?’ Nada demanded. ‘We cannot reach Galatea in a timely fashion and transport it at the same time. Which means it must remain here. Which means that it would be left with an inadequate defensive perimeter. Which means that the Abomination and the Thief of Souls would be able to escape. Which means that we would have failed in our original objective! Furt
hermore, what, in the name of all joy, is the point of attacking Galatea if there are no viable colonies left for us to return to once the planet has been taken?’
‘Surely he intends to rebalance the colonies once he has acquired a new population,’ Leng offered. ‘We may—’
‘No!’ Nada screamed. ‘Be silent. Do not disturb me until I can recover poise.’
She changed him to make him comply. It didn’t take much, given how riddled with irrelevant affection for her Leng had already become.
She sealed herself into her vesicle to think and rocked back and forth in her crevice. Her dissonance mounted once again, rising to a deafening roar inside her.
19.3: MARK
‘Oh my God, we lost Will!’ Clath wailed.
Mark regarded the others from where he lay near the frozen lake. The gravity had slacked off already but his friends’ faces were still blank with shock. Nobody had a clue what to do next. They were out of tricks, out of weapons and out of time.
He wheezed like a punctured accordion and knew that the gravity attack had not been good for his suffering lungs. His body was finally failing. It amazed him that it had lasted this long.
Yet while they had perhaps just minutes left to live, Mark didn’t want Palla’s death on his conscience. She’d infected herself with spores from his body and nobody had the tools to save her except maybe himself. At this point, nothing else mattered. He grabbed the puzzle in his sensorium and applied Palla’s edits. Without the Dantes to connect to, would there be enough Transcended code in his roboteering interface to run the program? There was only one way to find out.
‘Fuck you,’ he told the aliens in his head. ‘Please save her,’ he added and dived in.
The world fell away. The Transcended software took over and Mark discovered what it felt like to be converted to the Photurian Utopia. It was as if someone had plunged a needle made of happiness into the centre of his brain. No matter that his body was sick. Who cared? Opening the puzzle was utterly, ruthlessly, evisceratingly great. He gasped. Nada had been right. It really was joy. There was no denying it.
