Leon, standing, looked at his hand. He’d crushed the stress ball from the bowl of “fruit” on the table that was entirely comprised of stress balls, smashing the compressed rubber sphere into bits that exploded across the room, echoing the explosion on the hologram display. “She needed to know where the barrier was, how to get to it,” Leon explained, “or she’d be trapped on the other side forever. And as the gamers in that quadrant knew nothing of the boundary, at least consciously, she needed to send her nanites far and wide to gather the intel she needed. She had to drill down to the quantum realm of their brains, past their own conscious resistance, for any clues the children had that they didn’t know they had. Any information cloaked and hidden in the ship. She had but a femtosecond to access that information, process it, and make use of it, before security protocols shut her down. It was a brilliant move, assuming she can resurrect herself, and assuming it came to anything.”
They watched as Cassandra rematerialized herself from the fog of destruction, her nanites putting her puzzle pieces back together, her numerous hive mind arrays overseeing those nanites still able to coordinate their functions with one another. This was not a stunt anyone else on the Nautilus could pull off. Cassandra had been genetically engineered from the get go to do things only she could. And that technology was proprietary; those who made her had died, taking their secrets with them. And connected to the All like this, she was a force to be reckoned with.
Or at least she was.
She appeared to be struggling just to get out of the children’s sand box of a Stage 3 civilization.
Leon grabbed another stress ball from the bowl on the table, started squeezing it and pacing as he awaited her next move, his eyes glued to the hologram.
Remaining in alien form, Cassandra headed toward the still-invisible barrier with foot thrusters built into her bodysuit, powered not by conventional thrust, but by wormhole technology. She was warping space about her to chew through space-time. It occurred to Leon just how rudimentary and necessary such a mundane tool would be to traverse a trans-galactic civilization in a reasonable timeframe, sans the aid of a ship. That these alien kids came with these bodysuits suggested how benign and stable the civilization considered the technology.
It only slowly dawned on him that those weren’t body suits so much as an epidermis grown to function as a flexible body armor. Even more remarkably, the wormhole boots were also not fitted on, but grown, biologically, as a genetic adaptation.
What in the hell had Leon and his people gotten themselves into?
The crew vented from the dragon ship earlier that had escaped the explosion was in hot pursuit of Cassandra, convinced payback was in order for a crew mate that had turned. The kids were laughing, patting one another in what seemed like the alien version of a high-five. Their utterances were translated by Solo on the fly. It was likely Mother that had hacked their language, but Solo could access her better than any of the other crewmates, even Leon, to Leon’s consternation. He projected the words, or their closest equivalent, on the holo screen in English, like watching the subtitles in a movie.
“Monster viciousness,” said one of the alien children.
“Yeah, she’ll get extra points for that,” replied his friend.
“Why didn’t we think of that?” asked a third.
“I don’t know, because we’re not suicidal,” said a fourth.
They all chuckled. There was something unduly sinister and un-playful in that laughter.
“We can’t let her get away from us,” said the fourth.
The seriousness in their tone as the youths spoke conveyed nuances of fear—perhaps of reprisal and punishment, or an unforgivable sense of failure, or both. Yes, shame was definitely piggybacking on that signal. The Nautilus was translating nuances into tonal values Leon could both read and hear.
“We survived that blast and the others didn’t. They’ll have to give us some points for that, some respect,” said the fifth alien youth.
“It was dumb luck, and they’ll see it as such,” said a sixth.
“They’ll think it better that we had died, less shame on our families,” said a seventh. These last three to speak up seemed another clique of chums within the larger pack of seven.
The kids picked up the pace, closing the gap further on Cassandra, powered now it seemed on pure rage.
It appeared as if they were all sharing the same wormhole now, as if locking in the particular channel she was on. The tunnel merely widened to accommodate them all.
“Why is she going out there? We’re not permitted out there,” said the seventh.
“That’s probably why. Hoping we’ll drop off,” replied the sixth.
“Guess again,” said the fifth.
They continued to close the gap. Cassandra continued to check behind her, but so far had taken no additional measures to ensure her escape.
At the last possible split-second, in a sliver of time so small, Solo had to slow the feed down so the rest of those in attendance in the Nautilus’s war room could process what was happening, Cassandra dropped out of warp speed, letting the first of the kids overshoot her. She grabbed hold of a thorny extrusion of his breast plate, flying under him like a sucker fish. By the time the kid slowed to match, Cassandra had let go, allowing herself to be slingshot to the other side of the barrier at the very moment the kids were pushed back from it.
“So that’s why we’re not allowed out here. Some kind of barrier,” said the seventh.
The alien pack of youth saw their quarry being chewed up by the barrier. They still couldn’t see it but its presence could be inferred by the sparkling lights about Cassandra. The way her body was growing smaller… as if she were being eaten alive to feed the energy reaction on which the shield depended.
“She’s done for,” said the first of the alien youth who had spoken up earlier.
“We get points for driving her into that bug zapper, right?” said his friend, and the second to speak up earlier.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” said the third.
Leon and the others continued to watch as Cassandra made it to the other side of the barrier. Even with the assistance of the wormhole to cut through it—hinting at how big that “cell membrane” was—what arrived at the other side was a shriveled up mess. The Nautilus projected the stats for them.
No life signs.
“Beam her aboard, Mother,” Leon commanded.
Cassandra’s charcoaled body materialized on the boardroom table, still in the toughened alien outercoat, before she morphed back into herself to gasps all around.
She was their greatest fighter. And she had been bested by kids, and an AI that might not even be fully sentient, just smart enough to serve its purpose.
Ajax trembled as if suffering from hypothermia.
The others had their faces buried in their hands or kept looking away in one fashion or another, unable to sustain contact with the truth.
“Revivable?” Leon asked.
Mother’s response also came in one word, “No.”
“Dematerialize her and print her a new body, please,” Leon instructed. “And make sure she retains all her memories up to the last microsecond.”
The body dematerialized in front of them.
“Give her some time. I’ll see her when I see her,” Leon said, still talking to Mother. “I don’t want her back in here just yet, even if you have to come between us.” Leon knew a complete body replacement was no do over. The psychological scars carried over. She might never again be as effective as she once was. Though, knowing Cassandra, she’d just be more fighting mad than usual. And Leon needed the calm and time to think before taking on a riled superweapon on two legs.
He took his seat—fell into it was more like it. The one positive takeaway he could think of was that the other dragon ships that had come up on Cassandra’s initial scan were not even sealed; they were exposed to space because this species was adapted to fighting off-world. Those ships would not ha
ve decompressed, but more importantly, may not house solar systems worth of real estate within them. The ship Cassandra penetrated may well have been a disguised hub for the entire sector, kept low key so as to remove a target of opportunity. Maybe Cassandra had gotten lucky and managed to deal a more damaging blow than she realized.
“Solo. I believe we’re overdue for catching the show on channel two,” Leon said, again keeping the emotions out of his voice, but his clamp on them had to be obvious to everyone in the room.
Channel Two came up.
Still rebounding from the latest blow to their psyches, the chorus did not sing in harmony this time, sounding out of tune, and as if they were each reading from different lines of the score: Cronos’s “Oh my God!” overlapped DeWitt’s “Please say it isn’t so,” and Patent’s “We can’t possibly be seeing right.”
Ajax, who should have known to remain silent, was sure to get in the last words. “Shoot me now.”
The others in the room in all likelihood couldn’t get their mouths to move; shock frequently accompanied a loss of bodily functions.
SEVEN
BEYOND THE BARRIER FIELD
The nun materialized without incident—at least in a manner of speaking.
She beheld the abandoned installation. It was like something out of Rendezvous with Rama, the old Arthur C. Clarke novel, the rotating cylinder hollowed out to support life inside. The city was sculpted out of the entire periphery of the cylinder on the inside; it was as much over her head as under her feet. Instead of sky, she looked up at lakes, rivers, trees, and parks.
Though she couldn’t see with the visual acuity necessary to flesh out the details of what was going on above her, she assumed it was much the same as what was going on about her. The city was at war with itself. Robots of every imaginable shape and configuration crawled up the skyscrapers, in through windows, out through doors, all shooting at one another.
It was urban warfare as designed by a civilization advanced enough to spit these cylinder worlds out like lozenges, pain pills for a people that could only feel at peace in battle.
Only the inhabitants the world was meant for had since moved on. There was nothing here but automatons, whether they looked biological or not; her scanners told her as much. They may even have served once in a protective capacity, but in the absence of outside stimuli, had turned on one another.
Even the park settings, with their lakes and trees and grass, were teaming with vicious animal life quite protective of their territory.
The nun drifted over the park as she drifted over the city, ghostlike.
The locals had not detected her presence.
The most likely explanation was that she was not worthy of detection; a complete non-threat.
She didn’t linger long.
In a flash, she teleported to the next setting.
She realized even before getting there that she had managed to find herself in one of the low-rent districts of the trans-galactic civilization. She was looking at planets, solar systems, artificial habitats long since abandoned because they had been used up, not worth refurbishing. The old tech on display easier to abandon than to upgrade.
The device used to spit out these cylinder worlds had broken down, in the middle of spitting out the latest “lozenge” which had stuck in its throat. The device, as the capsule, looked weather-beaten, bashed by asteroid collisions, charred by solar radiation and failed energy shielding.
The nun, drifting now among the stars, beholding the countless capsules still floating in sync, caught up in one another’s artificial gravity fields—or rather gravity-resistance fields, realized this section of space was analogous to a graveyard.
Some of the capsules were in the process of colliding into one another, metal rending, exposing the contents inside one or another capsule, before one or both of them exploded. Evidently, the gravity-resistance fields were collapsing on capsules whose maintenance had long been foregone.
She’d set her autonav to keep moving her quickly across the terrain. But there was little hope of making it out of the low-rent district. The abandoned “suburb” had an outer membrane that even now the nun could feel pressing against her, thwarting her efforts to move about inside it so readily, even if she couldn’t actually see this membrane.
Her access to the All remained uncompromised—but only in so much as it included just what was inside the membrane surrounding this suburb, or cell block of space-time. Whoever had built it either didn’t want local residents knowing of what lay beyond, or didn’t want anyone else in the intergalactic civilization fretting about things best left forgotten. Or both.
That was the only reason the nun knew that the past relative to the present and the future within this intergalactic civilization—or at least this part of the past—stretched for an entire galaxy, suggesting that this race liked to keep things neat and from bleeding over into regions or territories earmarked for other purposes.
The nun kept jumping from one location to the other to see what else she could learn, feeling foiled nonetheless that her mission had largely failed. What intel she could gather would be of little value. The Nautilus had blindly shot her across the outer perimeter of the alien civilization hoping to get lucky, but luck just wasn’t in the stars for the nun this time out.
The nun materialized next just beyond the event horizon of the massive black hole at the spiral galaxy’s core. It was gobbling up the countless space stations—many planet-sized, from solar system after solar system—colonized and used up worlds and suns were included in the mix.
She gasped.
They’d actually programmed the black hole to clean up the mess left behind in this galaxy. An automaton, immune to the black hole, was dialing up the black hole’s spin even now, incrementally, by firing salvos, helping the black hole to be more efficient at its job of devouring this sector of space-time.
Once the galaxy had been gobbled up by the black hole, possibly the alien civilization responsible for all this would rebuild.
The sight was strangely mesmerizing to behold, as mesmerizing as it was terrifying in its implications: a civilization advanced enough to convince the most powerful force known in nature to do its bidding.
As to the Christmas tree baubles, the beautiful trinkets hanging on the tree of life, only partly masked by the bright suns strung in various constellations about the tree, like so many draped tassels…seeing the black hole devouring them—each one a treasure that Earth would be only too happy to chance upon—was no less humbling.
Doubtless there were technologies on those space stations and on those worlds that though antiquated from the perspective of this trans-galactic civilization, might still be of use to the Nautilus and its crew, to say nothing of Earth. The nun took solace in the thought.
She engaged the space-warping tech in her mind, that they’d stolen from the crashed alien ship they’d encountered in The Star Gate mission, so she could stuff every morsel of intel into her mind. Her access to the All allowed her to download the detailed engineering schematics of every artificial habitat, every space station, and world.
The trick would be getting home with this intel. Could it be trafficked beyond the membrane sealing in this quadrant of the universe?
Besides her, Cassandra was the only one with this space warping mind, but she too would have faced the same engineering problem. If that boundary functioned like any other cell membrane—designed to keep certain things in and leave certain things out—the nun didn’t like her chances.
Teleporting in, the nun did not have to pass through the cell boundary, but teleporting out was not a luxury afforded her.
Knowing Cassandra, she was out here somewhere, as well, perhaps some other galactic suburb of the transgalactic civilization, or TGC. It was not like her to play second fiddle to anybody; the sheer idea that the nun could be bolder and brasher than her, beat her to the first punch, would have boiled Cassandra’s blood.
If Cassandra were in the alien TGC,
she was experiencing the same COMMS outage with the Nautilus the nun was.
There was only one real hope.
Solo.
Though the extent of his mind power was unknown, even to the Nautilus, for his mind existed in multi-dimensional space—whereas the Nautilus’s did not—the nun was not hopeful. Very likely Solo was taking in data streams from both of them right now. That kind of bandwidth, even for someone who could stuff the intel away in other dimensions until he could process it in this one…
Well, some hope was better than none.
Even if the intel itself might be next to useless.
Let’s hope Cassandra has fared better.
She wondered if Cassandra could sense the boundary as she could. Probably not. The nun suspected she could sense it because she was built to interface with the Nautilus. Her AI aptitudes would, as a consequence, be much higher than Cassandra’s.
Another mixed blessing.
The AI the nun sensed that was the membrane intelligence enclosing this galaxy was crude, primitive, but deadly.
It did the one thing it was designed to do—protect cell integrity—all too well.
The nun had zero chance of crossing it alive.
Not a matter of huge concern. Back on the Nautilus she could always be assured one more bioprinted body. But without access to the intel she’d gleaned, this reconnaissance mission would be a complete failure.
The thought would have turned Cassandra into a rabid dog. The nun pitied anyone and anything coming between Cassandra and her mission.
The nun just didn’t have the mind power to waste; she was built for efficiency. Those kinds of emotional outbursts served no purpose. Simply hit reset and start again was her credo.
Moving Earth Page 5
