by Robert Reed
In whispers, grunts, and farts, songs and violent shouts, they told the Master that they were scared and sick of feeling this way, and when would she get the shields to work again, and when could their lives be their own again . . . ?
Miocene heard none of them.
Wild dark eyes stared at the watchful captains, and at Washen, and at Washen's betrayer son. But the only face Miocene could see was streaking down the access tunnel, approaching the bridge now. That pretty face was smug, then hopelessly distracted, then it was enraged by something that it saw in the distance, then smug again when the problem resolved itself. And finally, with a strange, almost embarrassed smile, Till met his mother's stare, looking up at one of the car's security eyes, remarking to his companion, 'I think she understands . . . finally, finally . . .'
Virtue shrank as if expecting to be beaten. Then with a low, desperate squawk, he said, 'I had no choice, madam. My love. No choice, ever—'
Miocene fled the falling car.
Returning to the Temple, rejoining the captains, her oldest mouth took a deep, useless breath before declaring, 'I've been an idiot.'
Washen nearly spoke, then seemed to think better of it.
Aasleen tried to comfort the Master. 'We couldn't have imagined it, much less believed it,' she remarked, thin black fingers caressing her own astonished mouth. 'Assuming that there really is such a thing as the Bleak, and the ship's its prison . . .'
Miocene put her arms around herself and squeezed hard, and sobbing, said, 'No. No, I don't believe this. No.'
How long had tears been running on her face?
Washen looked at the other captains, and quietly, with a comforting matter-of-factness, she explained, 'This was a trap. Maybe there is a Bleak under us, and maybe not. But there are creatures called Waywards, and they've taken charge of my ship, and I want that to end. Now.'
In crisp, clear terms, she described the hydrogen river falling toward them, and she estimated when gravity would bring the river this far. Of course the base camp overhead would be obliterated. And the diamond blister. And the bridge. Then the cold fluid would turn into a horrific rain, static electricity or someone's forgotten candle starting a great fire. Marrow's oxygen would try to consume the flood, transforming hydrogen into sweet water and a fierce heat. But the fuel tank was vast, and eventually, there would be no more oxygen. Eventually the frigid rain would fall unencumbered onto the ash and iron, and the dead, and the Wayward civilization would be dead . . . and after a moment's pause, Washen added, 'There's only one other choice. Or two.' She was staring at Miocene again, feeling enough confidence to bristle. 'Your total surrender,' she offered. 'Or I suppose, if you can, you could kick the wall of the access tunnel, kick it good and hard, collapsing it and destroying the Spine and plugging everything before the flood reaches us.'
A perverse pleasure took hold of Miocene.
She was still weeping, still miserable. But even as she pushed the tears across her swollen, unfamiliar face, she felt a smile forming. With a cold horrible joy, she told Washen, 'You're clever, yes. I see how you stole those pumps and valves. I couldn't steal them back again. Not in time, probably. But when I look up at those pumps, do you know what else I see? Do you know what's happening up there?'
Washen gathered herself, then asked, 'What?'
Miocene linked with the chamber's holoprojection, and she showed them. In an instant, after a silent command, the captains found themselves inside an observation blister on the ship's backside, surrounded by towering rocket nozzles that were doing nothing. Except for the steep, almost lazy tilt to each of them, they seemed perfectly ordinary. But even as a dozen voices begged for explanations, fires large enough to broil worlds rose up out of them, plumes of gas and light racing for the stars.
Every nozzle was firing.
No captain could remember a day when every engine was needed, and with a confused amazement, they asked for explanations.
'It's my son,' Miocene confessed.
Again, she grabbed hold of herself, and she squeezed, angry hands jerking at her swollen, useless flesh, yanking until vessels burst and blood flowed from beneath her hard fingernails.
'When we made the last little burn, I thought I was the one controlling the engines,' she muttered. 'And Till let me believe whatever I wanted to believe . . .'
Washen stepped close enough to touch her. And with a crisp voice, she said, 'I don't care about Till. I want to know . . . why he is firing the engines NOW!'
Miocene laughed, and sobbed, and laughed harder.
Then Washen swept her long hands through her dark hair, and in the words of every pilot about to crash, she whispered, 'Oh, shit.'
Fifty-three
A BRUTAL CHILL took Washen by the throat and by the belly, and for a slippery instant she found herself waiting for the panic. Hers, and everyone's. But the enormity was too much, and it hit them too suddenly. Among the captains, only Miocene seemed able to grieve with the proper anguish, collapsing to the steel floor, hands clawing at her thick neck as she sobbed, incoherently at first, then muttering to herself with a robust, unexpected confidence, 'This is my catastrophe. Mine. The universe will never forget me. or forgive me. Ever.' 'That's enough,' Washen growled.
The captains whispered to one another and moaned under their breath.
Washen yanked at the woman's hands and hair, forcing the anguished eyes to look up at her. Then with the sturdiest voice she could manage, Washen said, 'Show us. Exactly what's happening. Show us now.'
Miocene closed her eyes.
The captains found themselves standing on the ship's leading face, staring up at a senile red sun that seemed large and frighteningly close. But they had several billions of kilometers left to cross. At one-third lightspeed, the journey would take fifteen hours, and according to exacting plans drawn up centuries ago, they would miss that sun's hot atmosphere by a comfortable fifty million kilometers.
With each passing second, their course was being changed. Was being mutated, and in dangerous ways.
'If the engines keep burning,' said Miocene, eyes still clamped shut.
The image leaped ahead fifteen hours. The ship dipped into the sun's outer fringe - a warm plasma, thinner than most worthy vacuums. The hull could absorb both heat and trillions of little impacts. But simple friction had to alter the ship's velocity even more, and in another blink, the captains were falling toward the dying sun's tiny, infinitely dense partner, its mammoth gravity twisting the hull until it shattered, the ship's ancient guts strewn into a hot accretion disk, every lump and particle destined to fall into that great black nothingness, leaving the universe entirely.
'No, no, no!' Locke cried out.
'What about the Bleak?' asked dozens of voices.
With a doubting voice, Aasleen suggested, 'It'd be destroyed, maybe.'
But black holes existed in the earliest universe, created in the swirls and eddies of hyperdense plasmas. Washen reminded everyone, 'The Builders could have done this. But they knew best, and what they did instead, whatever the reason, was throw the ship out where there were very few, if any, black holes.'
The overhead image dissolved, the Temple surrounded them again.
Washen glanced at the high ceiling and base camp. Then she stared at Miocene, and she quietly asked, 'Are you sure you can't stop the engines?'
With a vivid anger, Miocene said, 'What the fuck do you think I'm doing? I'm trying to stop them now. But the engines don't know me, and I can't cut Tills hold on them!'
'Then why is he coming here?'
Silence.
'If there's nothing we can accomplish,' Washen continued, 'why doesn't Till just huddle close to the engines, and wait?'
The crying woman's face grew calm. Reflective.
After a long moment, astonishment took her. 'Because it isn't my son,' she sputtered. 'Of course. He isn't the one who's controlling the engines.'
The Bleak, Washen realized. Fifteen billion years as a prisoner, and of course you'd want
the helm at this pivotal, perfect moment!
Miocene gazed up at the diamond bridge, at the blister and the Spine. The Spine was allowing something in the depths of Marrow to give captainly commands, and as she accepted that impossibility, she asked, 'If I can bring down the bridge, Washen - cut the connection with Marrow - do you think you and your allies could sabotage enough machinery quickly enough to save us . . . ?'
Washen started to say, 'I don't know'
An abrupt, almost gentle whump was heard, and felt, and the steel floor moved just enough to make people look at their feet.
'What did you do?' Locke asked.
Miocene rose with a tired majesty, her reddened eyes blinked a few times, and with an exhausted voice, she said. 'The array that controls the quakes. It's an old system, and it's always been mine. They couldn't steal it from me without my feeling the thief's damp fingers.'
A second tremor passed through the Temple.
Smiling at her own wicked, nearly infinite cleverness, Miocene announced, 'The iron's tired of sleeping, I think. And I don't believe we have that much time.'
A WORD AND glare gave the captains every available lift-car, and every car on the bridge, empty or filled, immediately began falling toward the Temple.
'Did you know the array has failed?' the administrator squeaked. 'That's the city's plate had already shifted five meters?'
Miocene considered, then said, 'I know. Yes.'
'Do I put key staff" on the cars? To save them?'
The woman meant herself, naturally. And with a quiet indifference, Miocene told her, 'Yes. Of course. But remain here until the others can assemble. Understood?'
'Yes, madam. Yes—'
They boarded the largest car. Washen sat between Miocene and Locke, and she took a half-breath before the car jumped skyward, the air squeezed out of her. Then the entire bridge jerked sideways. The car's walls scraped against the tube. Someone gave a shout, and Washen realized that it was her own voice. She had cried out. And Locke reached up against the acceleration, finding the strength to lay a massive hand on her hand, a sad sturdy voice telling her, 'Even if we die, we might win.'
'Not good enough,' she replied. 'Not nearly' Again, the bridge bucked and rolled around them. Miocene made a sound, a low voice whispering to someone.
Washen let her head fall sideways. But no, the old bitch wasn't speaking to her. She was muttering to someone only she could see, her face simple and composed, and in a strange, chilling way, happy.
Washen started to ask, 'What are you doing—?'
But then they were inside the buttresses, and insane, and the car was yanked and kicked, and an unreal screech dwarfed every holler and curse, the tube surrounding the car twisted by the shaking, and slowing, nearly stopping entirely before some auxiliary system found the muscle to carry them to the top.
Doors opened with a soft, anticlimactic hiss.
Captains vomited bile and unfastened themselves, then vomited bile-scented air when they stood. Then everyone staggered out onto the open diamond platform, into the dim gray light of the nearly deserted base camp.
Two men stood waiting. Virtue wept without dignity or the smallest composure. Till, in perfect contrast, was staring at Miocene, his cold expression growing colder as he quietly remarked, 'You don't have any appreciation for what you have done, Mother. None.'
'What I'm doing,' Miocene replied, 'is saving the ship. My ship. That's all that matters here. My ship!'
The boyish face stiffened.
Then, softened.
The bridge screamed beneath them, and it pulled, and the platform plunged a full meter, then caught itself.
Washen looked down. What resembled rain clouds at first glance were billowing columns of smoke, countless fires started by the brutal, endless quakes that were tearing through the thick crust, shattering the iron plate along every weakness.
She looked up again.
A comforting hand fell on Virtue's shoulder, and Till said, 'Into the car.' He gave a soft shove, then added, 'If you wish, Locke. You can return with us, too.'
Locke straightened his back. He didn't reply.
'Then die here,' was Till's pronouncement. 'With the rest—'
Miocene lifted a hand.
Stuck into that swollen mass of flesh and nexus and bone was a small laser. It looked insubstantial. Worse than useless. Almost pathetic. But Washen knew that it could incinerate a man with a shaped flash, leaving nothing. And she knew from Miocene's face that she meant to kill her son.
The shot was never fired.
Another bolt of light came from above, evaporating her weapon and her hand. But instead of shock or pain, Miocene seemed filled with a wild, indestructible power. Bending forward, she screamed and drove with her legs, with her new bulk, slamming into her son exactly as the bridge twisted again, a seering of purple light obliterating her trailing leg.
Washen dropped down.
Then looked overhead.
She saw the Wayward soldier. Golden, was it? She saw him standing on a high catwalk, aiming the big laser with a professional calm. Quick bursts, too fast to count. Then she looked back at Miocene, watching as the woman wailed, vanishing in whiffs of boiled blood and white-hot ash.
Dying, she clung to her son.
Near death, she still managed to mutter, 'Till,' with a desperate voice. Soft, in the end. Doomed, and sorry. 'Please,' her boiling mouth whispered. And then, nothing.
A last surgical burst of light obliterated the head and the Masters mirrored cap, and late by a half-moment, her son turned to see the car and its sole occupant drop away without the slightest warning.
The bridge's machinery was failing. A safe-mode took Virtue racing downward, trying to save the precious car.
Miocene had delayed her son just enough.
Washen stared at Till, watching an impossible thought play itself out on that appealing face. How could this happen? What great purpose did it serve? In a voice meant for someone else, Till asked, 'Now what do I do?'
If there was a reply, Washen didn't hear it.
But something must have been heard, or at least thought. Because without hesitation, Till flung himself into the open door, and a moment later, the door closed and the bridge jerked sideways one last time, it and the Spine shattering just beneath the camp's diamond blister, plunging sideways toward the burning face of Marrow.
Eventually the liquid hydrogen would fall.
Captain spoke about making plans. About taking cover, or perhaps finding a car that might survive the storm. But Washen didn't take part in the plan-making, occupying herself by sitting with her legs crossed, watching nothing but the slow patient turning of her clock's little hands.
Asaleen thought she was crazy.
Again, to himself, Locke spoke comfortably about death's embrace.
Promise, then Dream, tried to thank Washen for pulling them off Marrow. 'We never thought we'd be anywhere else again,' they confessed. 'And you did your best.'
Even Golden joined them, offering his weapon in surrender, then spending the next few minutes watching Marrow boil and explode.
Finally, Washen closed her clock.
And with a nonchalant importance, she rose.
Everyone watched as she stepped out into the open and looked up. But wasn't it too soon for the cold rain? Then they saw her waving at something overhead, and every captain and both of the Waywards looked up together, watching in stunned silence while a fleet of whale-shaped vessels began to slow, making ready for a hard landing.
Pamir was first to step out.
Perri and ten armed harum-scarums followed.
Aasleen immediately recognized Pamirs craggy face, and she laughed, and she said, 'What is this? Don't you know there's a flood coming?'
Pamir lifted his eyebrows, grinning. Then he took his first good look at Marrow.
'Oh, I turned off that flood.' he remarked in a casual voice. 'Long ago,' he said. 'A lake of hydrogen inside that big long tube of vacuum . . . well, it evap
orates as it falls. Believe me, we swam through what's left of it, and we probably won't get two drops here.'
Sounding insulted, Dream asked Washen, 'What about your threat? About sending down that killing flood?'
'I'm not that cruel,' Washen replied. 'I don't murder helpless worlds.'
Pamir shook his head and threw a long arm around Washen, pulling her close. 'You wouldn't have?'
'I just like to tease worlds now and again,' she added, smiling and weeping in the same instant, thinking that never in her long, strange life had she ever felt so tired . . .
THE BUILDERS
EACH OF MY engines screams and spits fire, and those titanic, withering energies translate into the gentlest of nudges. I hear nothing but a quiet coaxing voice trying to whisper me nearer to that swollen, dying sun. And I obey the voice. I obey even when I foresee a collision with its tenuous atmosphere. Even as I feel pricks and little deaths within my body, I obey the simple laws of motion and force and inertia, dipping nearer to the sun, and nearer . . . a bracing, wondrous fear taking hold of me . . .
An engine dies.
Then, two others.
Deep inside me, a series of hard bright explosions collapse fuel lines and fuse screaming pumps. The surviving engines continue to burn, but softer now. The gentle nudge has diminished to a gentle breath from behind and beside me.
But still, I fall toward the sun.
My fear loses its wonder.
Gradually and thoroughly, a wild panic seizes me.
With a sudden clarity, I watch the great war against my engines. Every act of violence is too small to matter, or slightly misplaced, or simply ill-timed. The cumulative effects are slow to gather, hard to perceive. Finally, in agony, I rally myself trying to come to the aid of my companions.
Perhaps in tiny ways, I am felt. Heard. Believed.
A Remora considers a thousand valves, and as I whisper my advice, she closes the only valve that does lasting good.
A magnetic bottle, billions of years old and never ill, fails abruptly, at the best possible moment, spewing shards of anti-iron into a spiking facility working at full throttle.
Human engineers assassinate AIs who won't listen to reason, then replace the machines at their posts.
