by Gary Gibson
She stared dumbfounded at it. ‘He did?’
‘He well understands the necessity of the extensive rebuilding of his neural pathways that must be undertaken,’ the Librarian continued. ‘And, yes, it is also an opportunity to interrogate his implants for more information about the Wanderer and the Core Transcendence. We know very little about the civilization that created the Wanderer, after all.’
Bash returned a week later and she found, to her delight, that he seemed to be more aware of his surroundings than ever before. He was even able to speak a few simple words, though that clearly exhausted him, and after less than a minute his eyes would drift away from hers, staring at some unseen horizon. His full recovery, assuming the ship was successful in aiding him, was clearly going to be long and protracted. There would, she realized with sadness, be none of those sudden bursts of lucidity that Gabrielle claimed to have experienced in Bash’s presence.
When he vanished a second time, she tried to suppress her anxiety over what changes the ship might be making to him, and instead distracted herself by linking into the Magi ship’s external senses and watching the face of the galaxy shift and morph with each successive jump across unimaginable gulfs of space. Before long, the Calafat-Holt Cluster, in which the Wanderer had been hiding for so long, had visually shrunk to nothing.
She thought often of Gabrielle’s baby, Evie, and knew her duty was to find her. Knowing that the Maker Swarm had to be dealt with first did nothing to reduce her heartache every time she thought about what might have happened to the child.
Bash this time returned to her after a period of little more than a day, and his disappearances and subsequent reappearances would soon become a regular occurrence. She could never predict how long he might remain with her on each occasion, and she fought to suppress the fear that these absences might grow longer and longer, until finally he never returned at all.
She dreamed, on one occasion, of wandering through a house where some of the rooms were left forever in darkness, while others remained brightly lit. Somehow or other, she realized upon waking, she had been dreaming about Bash. But each time he returned – and, to her relief, he always did come back – he seemed a little more voluble, a little more his old self, until eventually the intervals between his absences grew longer and longer, and then they ceased entirely.
But, as much as it gladdened her to see him restored, it was clear that something had changed in him. He was quieter, more withdrawn, no longer as effusive as he had once been. But, then, she had changed as well; death, as she had long since learned, tended to do that to a person. And for a long time Bash had been more dead than alive.
Then, just a few months away from their final encounter with the Maker Swarm, the ship detoured to pick up a passenger.
Like all its kind, the Atn reminded Dakota of a giant turtle crossbred with a scrapheap. It now stood before them, in yet another docking bay inside the Magi ship which had not existed until moments before. Its massive wedge-shaped head swung from side to side as it regarded first Dakota, then Bash and finally the Librarian. A scratchy and abrasive sound, like a heavily distorted trumpet, eventually emanated from it.
‘It says hello,’ explained the Librarian, standing on the creature’s other side.
‘That was saying hello?’ joked Bash. ‘What the hell does it sound like when it’s angry?’
He enunciated each word very carefully, in the manner of someone unused to exercising their vocal cords. His voice still faltered occasionally even now, and had not yet regained the quiet strength that Dakota remembered.
The Librarian regarded him with a perplexed expression, then turned to Dakota to say, ‘I’ve prepared quarters for our guest.’
‘Just to be clear,’ persisted Bash, ‘you’re seriously telling me this thing can really stop the Swarm?’
‘We believe, or at least hope, it can,’ the Librarian replied, ‘with the aid of data we recovered from the Wanderer regarding the means by which that entity once destroyed an entire Swarm.’
‘Right.’ Bash nodded, still looking far from convinced. ‘A bunch of Magi ships specially designed for the purpose couldn’t pull it off, but this septic tank on legs can . . . how, exactly?’
Dakota failed to suppress a grin. ‘You know,’ she said to the Librarian, ‘you really haven’t been very forthcoming on just how this is going to work.’
‘Or about our stopping here,’ added Bash. ‘You might have mentioned it sooner than you did.’
They hadn’t been told about this rendezvous until just a few days before, when Dakota had noticed, from her regular monitoring of their progress across the galaxy, that their faster-than-light jumps were becoming shorter and shorter, arrowing in on a particular region deep in interstellar space, and half a dozen light years from any star. Even when the Magi ship had matched course and speed with an Atn clade-world – an asteroid converted into a combination of living quarters and space-bound manufactory – the Librarian had been vague as to why.
‘We now understand,’ said the Librarian, ‘the means by which the Wanderer destroyed another Swarm. By using that method, we have been running simulations to identify the optimum approach to neutralizing this Swarm, and it became rapidly apparent that our greatest chance of success in doing so lies with the Atn. We would have been more forthcoming before now but, until we felt sure of engaging the strategy with the highest chance of success, there was really very little to tell.’
‘But there’s still just the one of him?’ Bash insisted. ‘Or her. It. Whatever.’
‘I’m guessing,’ said Dakota, ‘this has something to do with the Atn’s original purpose. I mean the reason they were created.’
‘Huh?’ Bash stared at her.
The Librarian glanced over at him. ‘A long time ago,’ it explained, ‘the first Atn were fashioned out of a Maker Swarm’s components.’
‘Seriously?’ said Bash, looking between the two of them as the Atn shifted and rumbled and turned its head this way and that. Dakota wondered if it understood what they were saying.
‘They were the Magi’s first attempt at destroying the Swarms,’ Dakota explained. ‘They essentially reprogrammed a Swarm in order to hunt down other Swarms, but somewhere down the line they forgot their purpose.’
‘How do you know all this, Megan?’ he asked.
‘From my previous life,’ she said. ‘I found out a lot about them from a Shoal member I met a couple of times. And it’s not Megan any more, remember?’
‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘I keep forgetting.’
Sure you do, she thought. Bash was clearly having a hard time dealing with her sudden re-adoption of her previous identity.
‘The Atn essentially evolved to become a new species,’ the Librarian continued. ‘They were only one of many possible solutions to the problem of the Swarms – solutions including the Magi ships.’
‘So why not reprogram the Atn again, and get them to wipe out the Swarms?’ asked Bash.
‘They’re a sentient species,’ said Dakota, ‘and they possess free will. So you can’t just go randomly repurposing them like that.’ She cast a wary look at the Librarian. ‘Please tell me that’s not what you’re intending to do.’
‘No,’ the Librarian reassured her. ‘Our friend here –’ it reached out to pat the alien’s flank – ‘is going to do something much more interesting.’
‘Well, whatever the hell it’s going to do,’ said Bash, watching as the creature suddenly lurched towards the exit leading from the docking bay, its joints scraping and rasping with every movement, ‘it’s either going to be fucking spectacular or the biggest anticlimax in history.’
Once they resumed their voyage towards the Swarm, their Atn passenger immediately began a long and laborious process of rebuilding itself. The quarters created for it by the Librarian resembled nothing so much as a garage constructed by a blind man, crammed as it was with various engineering implements that moved and operated according to the Atn’s will. She and Bash ma
de a point of visiting it on occasion, watching in wonder as the Atn replaced first its limbs and then its carapace, until it resembled something chillingly close to a Swarm component. If it was even aware of their presence, it showed no sign of it.
Eight long weeks after picking up their passenger, the Magi ship came within range of a red dwarf system where the Maker Swarm had paused on its journey. They were all feeling drained by the enormous stress of waiting for the confrontation ahead, and tried to distract themselves in their own ways. Bash thus spent much of his time scanning the Accord’s tach-net relays for information about home, catching up on news and, he claimed, trying to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of his life. Sometimes they talked but, when they did, she still had the uncanny sense that his mind was somewhere else.
She could hardly blame him. They were a single ship going up against something capable of destroying entire civilizations, after all, and she had seen and suffered too much to be able to share fully the Librarian’s apparent confidence in their Atn passenger.
The red dwarf grew closer with each successive jump, until finally they emerged into normal space about 30 AUs from the star, out towards the edge of the system. Even this far out, the local environment proved to be infested with the Swarm’s countless components, all sucking up the energy necessary for their next mass jump across the Perseus Arm and closer to humanity.
As the Librarian informed her and Bash, there were somewhere in the region of three to four hundred million of the components. Each one was a single node in a distributed network that together made up a single, vast machine intelligence.
And yet, thought Dakota, they still didn’t know why the Swarms had been set their task of laying traps for intelligent life. And, until they knew, nothing would change; for there would always be Swarms, and other forms of life would always be threatened by them. What little Bash had gleaned from the Wanderer concerning the Swarm was, she felt sure, only one small part of a far larger picture.
‘You have no idea how much being here terrifies me,’ said Dakota. They were inside a shared datascape, flying through a real-time simulation of the red dwarf system and amidst the Swarm components in their millions. ‘The last time I got anywhere near this Swarm, I wound up dead.’
‘I don’t think it even knows we’re here,’ said Bash, his mood sombre now that he had seen exactly what they were up against.
Rather than being randomly scattered throughout the system, the greatest number of components were gathered around the star itself. They were arranged in distinct clusters, linked by rivers and channels composed of others of their kind, streaming back and forth.
‘Don’t be fooled,’ she said with a shiver. ‘It knows we’re here.’
When Dakota first died – before waking in the Demarchy, prior to her escape and finding a new identity – she had gone in search of this very same Swarm. She had made the mistake of bringing one of its components on board, only to discover too late how it had infiltrated the Magi ship she had then been piloting. In the last moments of that life, a copy of her complete mind-state had been transmitted to other Magi ships – one of which had resurrected her.
And now she was back to confront the same Swarm a second time. She had, she realized, come full circle.
‘I wonder sometimes how many of me there are,’ she said quietly.
She felt rather than saw Bash’s frown. ‘What?’
‘Other versions of me,’ she said. ‘Other Dakotas.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Remember what I told you: the Magi ships all have copies of my mind stored deep in their memory banks. There could be other Dakotas wandering around right now, and I’d never know.’
‘I’ll admit,’ said Bash, ‘I’d feel pretty strange if there were other versions of me out there, somewhere. But why on earth would it ever make more than one of you? Hell, having to deal with just the one seems bad enough.’
She swiped him with a ghostly virtual limb, and then remembered the Librarian discussing how it had simulated ways of dealing with the Swarm. She found herself wondering if a simulated Dakota had taken part in any of them, and if that other her had known . . .
Dakota? Bash? They both heard the Librarian calling to them, as if from far away. It’s time.
They watched the Atn as it tumbled away from the Magi ship. They were far enough away from the red dwarf and the components swarming around it that the star wasn’t much more than a particularly bright point of light amidst countless others. But a cluster of some tens of thousands of components was busily dismantling a small rocky planetoid for its raw materials, and the Atn aimed itself towards them, soon disappearing out of range.
‘Now what?’ asked Bash.
‘Now we wait,’ said the Librarian, ‘for the infection to take root.’
Dakota woke several hours later and knew immediately that something had changed. She sat up on her bed and locked into the ship’s senses, seeing the way the streams and clusters of components surrounding the star had become fragmented and twisted out of shape. Space around the star was now filled with sparkles and blooms of light.
‘Do you see it?’ asked Bash, rushing into her cabin unannounced, with an excited grin on his face.
‘I see something,’ she said, pulling herself to her feet, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’
‘The damn thing’s at war with itself,’ he exclaimed, almost beside himself. ‘The components that haven’t been compromised by the Atn are attacking the ones that have. That’s what all the light is – they’re shooting at each other.’
She closed her eyes and accessed the ship’s real-time simulation of the surrounding stellar environment. The ship had colour-coded those components that had been infected with a viral copy of the Atn’s mind-state. They showed up red, while the unaffected components were indicated by tiny points of fluorescent white light. Something about those flowing and shifting patterns of colour made her think of blood cells.
They watched in fascination as, over the next several hours, more than half of the Swarm was subverted and taken over by their Atn passenger. Each subverted component became a new recruit to its enemy’s cause, quickly destroying or infecting its neighbours; brilliant beams of fusion energy flashed through the stellar night, destroying components in their thousands on either side. Space around the star soon filled with glowing clouds of superheated debris, as the battle slowly approached its conclusion.
When Dakota finally emerged from her datascape, many more hours later, she went to find Bash in his quarters. He emerged from his own datascape looking weary but happy.
‘I can hardly believe what I’m seeing out there,’ said Dakota, taking a seat beside him on his bed.
‘We are pleased to say that matters are progressing even more satisfactorily than expected,’ said the Librarian, making her jump. She turned to see it had appeared as if from nowhere at the far end of the room.
Bash stared at the entity, momentarily speechless, then shook his head. ‘You know,’ he groused, ‘one day I’d like to see you actually walk through the door instead of just materializing out of thin air like that. Gives me the damn creeps.’
‘This is really how the Wanderer destroyed a Swarm?’ asked Dakota. ‘By altering one of its own components?’
The Librarian nodded. ‘Not so difficult, perhaps, since the Wanderer and the Swarm are so similar in many ways. A case of parallel technological evolution, each finding the same optimal solution to a particular set of problems. The Atn were clearly the perfect delivery system for the exploit discovered by the Wanderer. Another few hours, and only ashes and wreckage will remain.’
‘So why didn’t the Wanderer just grab one of that earlier Swarm’s nova drives back when it had the chance?’ asked Bash.
‘Current observations show each Swarm component destroys its drive before becoming fully compromised. Presumably that earlier Swarm did the same when the Wanderer attacked it.’
‘So if not for that,’ said Dakota
, chilled at the thought, ‘the Wanderer might have got what it wanted long ago.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bash, his expression jubilant. ‘We can go home now.’
She shared his joy, despite a bone-deep tiredness. The threat of the Swarm had been hanging over her for so long she barely knew how to adjust to its absence. With it destroyed, she could go home to a people who might never know how close they had come to extinction.
But home to what? she couldn’t help wondering, even as Bash reached out to pull her into a rib-crushing hug.
EPILOGUE
One year later
The air was much warmer here on the floor of the chasm, a full kilometre beneath Jarô’s surface. Dakota took off her heavy long-coat and glanced upwards, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sky, but saw only a narrow strip of azure streaked with red and obscured by whirling vortexes of dust from the desert far above their heads.
Her gaze dropped lower, following the dark framework of a funicular railway that reached all the way from the upper rim of the chasm to its floor. She and Bash had travelled aboard one of those cars, accompanied by such a cacophony of juddering gears and creaking metalwork that she had wondered if perhaps the whole thing might not simply fall apart around them before it sent them plummeting to the ground.
The air pressure this far beneath the surface was sufficiently high to obviate the need for protective gear, or for even a breather mask to reduce the risk of anoxia, since the atmosphere was otherwise entirely breathable. A town called Amuza Urbo nestled on the chasm floor, its buildings abutting or even climbing the steep walls, like ivy composed of steel and carbon. There was an organic fluidity to the architecture, too, that made this comparison more than apt; for many of the buildings, she had learned, were the product of advanced gene tech, being the distant and highly modified descendants of earth-bound trees and coral reefs.
The streets were packed with people dressed in brightly coloured finery, dancing to music that echoed off the lofty cliffs surrounding them. There were vendors everywhere, selling street food that smelled exotic and enticing to Dakota.
