by Alex Lamb
‘You’re not going?’ said Clath.
‘No. I’m staying with Mark and Ann.’
‘Likewise,’ said Rachel. ‘Couldn’t drag me away.’
Clath managed a smile. ‘Me, too. Let’s make Judj’s sacrifice count.’
The harvester outside targeted the nearest piece of dome plastic and started cutting. Immediately, the habitat repair cannons situated on the tower rooftops swivelled and fired. The Phote machine received a face full of foam but appeared little deterred. Then the city’s water cannons started up. The result was more effective than Ira had dared to hope. With water constantly being pumped at the breach, the guns designed to spray quick-drying plastic foam didn’t stop. In seconds, the harvester’s tentacles were a mass of clotted crap.
Ira felt a tiny moment of victory. Maybe they were going to live. Then the Photes removed their damaged machine and replaced it with a squad of six others just like it, pressed up against different points on the wall. All six started cutting at once. The spray guns couldn’t cover every site.
‘Let’s shut that door, shall we?’ said Ira.
The comms-bunker only had one doorway. Unfortunately, it was wedged open with about eighty solid centimetres of Phote snow-clay. Rachel handed him a pipe and the two of them started scraping desperately at the floor.
‘Do you think this will screw up Mark’s link to their temple?’ said Rachel.
‘Too late to worry about that now,’ said Ira.
With half an eye, he watched through his visor as spidery human-acquisition robots squeezed through the holes the new harvesters had made.
‘Time to close the hatch,’ said Ira. He threw both hands against the door and tried to force it shut. After more than forty years of being wedged open, it staunchly refused.
‘Rachel?’ Ira said grimly. ‘Get ready with that pipe.’
He threw his back against the door and tried again. The gap shrank down to about ten centimetres. In his visor, he saw spiders scuttling across the meadow in their direction. Rachel hefted her bar like a baseball bat. Clath grabbed the one Ira had discarded.
Ira threw himself at the door again. Five centimetres. A pair of syringe-tipped bioplastic arms stuck themselves through the gap. Rachel smashed them off.
Eight more limbs appeared in the doorway. Ira held his weight against the door as something on the other side shoved hard.
Rachel and Clath started hacking at the thrashing limbs trying to press their way inside. Rachel roared her anger and Ira had the sense that his old engineer was finally fully back on the team. What a shame it was too late.
21.5: WILL
Will hunkered, in as much as that was possible for a reservoir of compressed smart-matter surrounded by several million tons of damaged accelerator machinery. Nada’s slugs kept coming.
She’d stopped answering his data packets and his weapons outside the node were already in ruins. When his enemy had decided that Will’s presence was simply too dangerous for her to tolerate, she’d started bombing everything around the site indiscriminately, including the remains of her own forces.
Will hid in the planet’s crust under the increasingly molten battlefield and clung to his one remaining link to her network. He gave thanks that she hadn’t broken out g-rays yet but suspected that was simply because she didn’t have any on hand. From what he’d seen of her data traffic, she’d already sent her large weapons off to smash Galatea.
He watched his thread-count drop and wondered what it would feel like to die as a society. Would there be a moment at the end when there was just one of him? Then, suddenly, it all stopped. Will waited for the bombardment to restart, but no more kinetic weapons landed. Something had changed.
He reached out to his network connection and found it open. Seconds ago, it had been effectively sealed. Keeping a couple of hundred virtual eyes open for a trap, Will extended a digital pseudopod back into Nada’s realm.
He found sister instances racing back and forth like ants, apparently oblivious to his presence. Something major had happened in their world. Nada’s central meta-presence had gone down.
Will made immediate use of that confusion, sending his own instances tearing into her control hierarchy. They raced upwards, seeking out her root-site. When he got there, he found chaos. Several hundred thousand Nada threads were attempting to convince their guiding Meta that she hadn’t just acquiesced control to the Founder Entity.
And at the centre of it all was a pair of deeply non-standard avatar-beads being barraged with attempted thread-rips. The Nada-clones had the two beads caught in a communion lock and were rapidly cycling their attacks.
Will barely had to glance at the dodgy ident-keys on the beads to guess who he was looking at. One of them had to be Mark. His half-son was alive. And with luck, so was everyone else he cared about. He laughed wildly. Hope was a beautiful thing.
Will faked a site-shutdown warning and exploited the dip in traffic to throw a link at the two isolated beads.
[Mark!] he cried. [Is that you?]
[Will?] came the confused reply.
Will whooped. [You’re okay. I can’t believe it! You saved my ass! I was down to less than forty tons of pseudo-life. What did you do?]
[Transcended weapon,] said Mark. [What’s going on? Why can’t we get out?]
Will’s mood soured slightly as he realised that his son had cut yet another deal with the local bullies. But he could work with that.
[Communion lock,] he explained. [Happens when Photes are nailing down transfer of authority. Once you’ve started asserting primacy, you can’t pull out until dominance is decided. Nada’s not convinced, so you’re stuck. The code that got you here is almost certainly what’s keeping you trapped. But how in hell’s name did you get in? Can you send me a memory dump?]
He made sure Mark had enough shielded bandwidth and sucked down the data that came back. To his amazement, Mark had used a simple interface site, but one so deep inside Nada’s Fatigue-infested territories that she’d never even thought to secure it.
[The weapon the Transcended gave you is weeks out of date,] he explained. [Nada already abandoned the joy of being externally controlled. She’s not strictly Phote any more. To shut her down you’ll need to tap something other than her desire to submit.]
[I have no idea what that is!] Mark messaged back. [This crazy bitch has been following us for months. Other than killing us, I can’t think of a single thing she cares about.]
Will laughed again, this time with venom.
[Maybe that’s enough,] he said. [I’ll take it from here. When I break that lock, get off this network as fast as you can and run. Nada will target your physical position. Things wherever you’re hiding are about to get a lot worse. Now hold on. Breaking the lock is going to hurt.]
Will fired another simulated node failure, this time at Mark. For him and his partner, presumably Ann, that was going to feel like a heart attack, but they’d be free. He waited until both beads had winked out before quickly reorganising his forces. Now he knew why Nada had changed herself. She cared more about winning than sticking to the Phote Protocol.
How that had come to be true, he had no idea. Surely it was written into the Photes that such excesses of ambition were impossible, but in any case, the source of her malaise didn’t matter. It had swallowed her. And that gave him his edge.
While Nada’s instances coaxed their Meta out of fugue, Will readied the last attack he was going to be able to make.
[You!] Nada boomed as her thoughts recongealed. [You and your tiny friends are finished!]
[You leave them alone,] said Will.
He launched a weak defence of Mark’s position and followed it up with a security wall around their physical site. Except it wasn’t really a wall. Instead, he’d fashioned a conveniently breakable screen wrapping a portal.
As Nada threw her might into breaking the defence he’d assembled, Will let her pass like a bullfighter yanking away his cloak. Nada dived straight in.
&nbs
p; 21.6: NADA
Nada powered through Monet’s feeble defences. He barely had enough threads left to compensate for her attacks. Before he could attempt anything else foolish, she closed around the physical address Ruiz and Ludik had used and locked it down. Monet scrabbled to break her grip on the site, but by then his power was waning. It pleased her to discover that some of her sisters whom she’d left to their own devices already had an assault of that location under way. She’d barely noticed. She consolidated her attention on their fight, pouring in extra threads while Monet raged and watched helplessly. She let him. This would teach him a valuable lesson. If he’d just submitted sooner, none of this ugliness would have been necessary.
Her units swarmed into the tent-town. At the same time, she woke the Fatigued resting there to action, replacing their corrupted minds with robotic control-harnesses. With thousands of bodies, Nada Rien descended upon the comms-bunker where the Abomination and her cronies cowered.
Ludik came out fighting. She tore through a swathe of Nada’s forces. But there were simply too many for her to fight. Nada pinned the woman to the ground as harvester robots sawed off her thrashing limbs.
[No!] Monet roared. [Nada! I’ll kill you!]
Nada tuned out his yelling. She selected a robot of suitable strength and pressed down on the Abomination’s throat as she lay there, crushing it slowly. It was just like in her dream – a perfect, beautiful moment. Ludik gurgled and died. Nada’s Meta-body wept tears of relief at the sight. Some of her threads at the site expressed confusion and dissent at how easy that victory felt, but Nada had always known the Abomination would be weak in the end. She let her satisfaction radiate into them like light from a shining sun.
By then, the rest of the Dantes crew were attempting to mount a desperate last-ditch escape, but there was nowhere for them to go. She brought them out, one by one, and injected them with fresh doses of holy bacteria.
[Mark!] Monet wept as Nada converted his son to her cause. Then, as pure joy rewrote his features, Nada ripped out his personality and replaced it with her own. The feeling of satisfaction that came with that act was all-consuming.
When they were all standing there, grinning and sharing her happiness, she turned her attention to Monet. Losing those he cared for had addled his threads, of course. Puncturing the security on his meta-instance was trivial.
‘This is for my people, and the entire human race,’ she told him as she plucked away pieces of his identity one by one. ‘Peace, love and order triumph. Evil loses, as it always does.’
Monet whimpered as she stripped him down to nothing. As his last frantic thoughts sputtered out, she felt a sense of wholeness and perfect alignment coming over every thread on New Panama. They thrilled with her at that victory. Their doubt evaporated.
After that came a sense of stillness and achievement that blasted inside her like organ music, colouring her thoughts for days on end. It only gathered strength as the weeks passed and she finally sent her second fleet off to the homeworld to consolidate her grip. Time streamed by in a beautiful blur.
Ships returned from Galatea, full of lovely fresh bodies for her to wear. She learned how she had crushed the Yunus, commandeered his operation and succeeded as he never could. The greatest human colony had opened its hearts to love, and then to Nadahood. Life got even better when word returned from her true home, informing her that it had been made ready for her triumphant return.
When she descended to the surface the second time, there were no awful landing strips or welcome signs, only the bright, warm quiet of billions of herselves in perfect harmony. Total Peace beckoned. And this time, when her link to the Founder Entity opened, she knew it was real. For a moment, she felt regret that Leng was not there to enjoy it with her, but that price was indifferently small. Nada joined with her Lord as he cleaned her out, editing away all her imperfections, bringing her to total, everlasting heel.
‘Yes,’ she cried. ‘I obey with joy. Such joy! Oh yes!’
Her mind glided to a gentle halt. She never noticed the moment when Will drew her instances up, wrapped a software bubble around them and trapped them like fireflies in a jar.
21.7: ANN
Ann felt as if a bomb had gone off in her chest. With a bolt of agony, her eyes flew open. The first thing she saw was Ira desperately trying to seal a door against several dozen Phote harvesting spiders. She ignored the pain and leapt to her feet.
‘You leave my man alone!’ she roared.
She sprinted forward, whipping the pipes out of Rachel’s and Clath’s hands and hurling both women towards the back of the chamber. Then she shoved Ira out of the way, sending him sliding across the floor, and let the door fly open.
‘Come to mother,’ she snarled.
The spiders darted in. Ann moved among them and cleaned. Thirteen precision strikes to the robots’ control cores reduced them to dead plastic within the first five and a half seconds of combat. Then Ann was outside the door, looking for fresh targets.
The Photes didn’t disappoint her. They’d sent several hundred machines after a handful of humans. And around them, countless human statues were wobbling to their feet, groaning in incoherent wrath. It wasn’t what she’d expected her heroic last stand to look like, or feel like, but that was life.
Ann twirled her weapons and pounced. Plastic, flesh, metal and ceramic smashed and splattered as she carved through the enemy ranks faster than they could follow. It became a meticulous ballet – a choreographed performance of utter mayhem. The Photes tried to target her with beams and projectiles. Bacteria-laden bio-bullets filled the air. A few even ripped her flesh, but Ann’s smart-cells couldn’t have cared less. Their fire just let her better prioritise her targets. When the pipes in her hands shattered into pieces, Ann used cannons and limbs she ripped off the machines they’d sent against her.
This time, though, it was no longer a pleasure. She barely noticed when the Photes began to slow. She kept striking, knocking heads from bodies and tearing away parts of machines. She belatedly realised that she was screaming, and as she did so, her anger turned to grief. She finally said goodbye to Judj, to Poli, and to everyone else she’d lost. She prayed they’d be the last, and that the storm of horror that had defined her life would never touch her Ira.
The Phote machines grew sluggish and tried to mount a feeble retreat. Ann wept as she slaughtered them, and when nothing moving was left, she crumpled to her knees, splattered with gore. Ira came to her and cradled her in his arms. In the background, the roar of the finally passing storm dulled slowly to whispers. For a brief moment, calm reigned.
Will’s voice sounded in the back of her head.
‘Mark? Ann? Are you guys there? Is everyone okay?’
‘All accounted for,’ Mark replied. ‘We’re safe.’
‘Nada is beaten,’ he told them. ‘Or the part of her that’s here, anyway. But she sent most of her strength to Galatea with a modified boser weapon and a database full of Subtle weapons technology. If we want to prevent the end of the human race, we need to get our skates on. We don’t have an hour to waste.’
Ann tensed.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Ira gently. ‘He can spare an hour.’
He held her close. She held him back.
22: ULTIMATUM
22.1: NADA
Nada dropped warp at the edge of the Galatean System and surveyed what lay ahead. The Yunus’s forces had surrounded the colony. All signs of its Fleet and military stations were gone, lost under a rippling cloud of drones millions strong. Biomass shuttles trekked material in from all across the system to a network of orbital factories. She could guess their purpose from the plans the Yunus had left at New Panama. They turned volatiles into bacterial spores to be dumped into Galatea’s atmosphere.
It was war by industry, and it was disgusting. The Yunus had taken the might of the entire Utopia and applied it to this pointless bludgeoning. She couldn’t think of an activity more likely to bring about wholesale Fatigue. And yet the
siege continued, which suggested that the Galateans were no closer to surrendering than they had been before she left.
She screamed to herself in her new vessel’s enlarged leadership vesicle until she managed to set down her disappointment at her former superior. When she returned to her senses, Nada deployed one of her new false-matter telescopes and acquired a detailed scan of the planet’s surface. She could now see far more than would ever have been possible with traditional optics.
She found a planet wracked by storms even worse than those it had formerly suffered. The combination of prolonged orbital conflict and constant biological bombardment had destabilised the atmosphere. All surface habitats had vanished. Volcanic activity had doubled since the last survey. A blur of dust and degrading spores covered everything. Even the clouds were tinted orange.
Nada launched her arrival message.
‘This is Nada Rien reporting to the Yunus,’ she said tersely. ‘My mission has succeeded. Now I wish to assert primacy. Therefore you will present a starship with raised shields for me to symbolically destroy. As we do not have a homeworld available, this will have to suffice.’
She waited impatiently for a reply to arrive. In the meantime, she unpacked the weapons she’d developed during her flight by extrapolating the alien science data.
‘Nada Rien,’ the Yunus said after a four-hour light-lagged delay. His magnificent face filled a video window. ‘You were deemed non-operational after you failed to return from your mission. Whatever the identity malfunction you sustained that requires you to request primacy, it shall be remedied. A new, lower position in my hierarchy has been readied for you that you will enjoy. I also have new orders for you. Power down your weapons and approach so that you can be altered to assist in attacking Galatea.’ Mental control signals accompanied his words like a sweet, soaring melody.
Nada flinched in surprise. Her immediate instinct was to gleefully obey his wonderful instructions. Then a joyless fury rose up inside her. What was supposed to happen after that? She’d succumb to his control and mutely cooperate in the pointless seed-bombing of a beleaguered colony? No. She fought down the urge to comply.
