Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  Harp, their squad leader, pointed back along the surface of the shack. "I can see Captain Cassels's group. They're headed for the Banshee."

  The cart drifted to a stop a meter from the shack. Michael switched off the infrared view and turned on his helmet light. The ferrofluid was a dull black, and until he reached to touch it, he wasn't sure he was seeing it. The surface indented slightly under his touch, but he couldn't penetrate it with his glove.

  "No surprise we can't get through here," said Harp. "They'd want to control the placement of doors. Where's that photomosaic, Professor?"

  Michael waited while they located an airlock. He was scared, in a completely different way than he was used to. This alien artifact was potentially more dangerous than any he and Herat had investigated— but the chief danger here was Man, not the alien.

  Still, he told himself, this is what I've been waiting for. Ever since Kimpurusha, he had been wandering, waiting to come full circle. Now, finally, he had his chance to strike at the conquerors of his home. This time he would get it right.

  Harp drew them over the curve of the shack to where one of the Lasa's distinctive airlocks sat nested in the spiky black skin of the shack. The soldier unclipped a hunt bot from his belt and pushed it through the resilient liquid. Michael tried to open an inscape window to it by habit; of course that didn't work in this military situation. He brought up his HUD and peered at the tiny image it projected ahead of him.

  The inside of the shack was mostly one open space, lit by red laser light. For a moment Michael thought he was looking at some kind of computer-generated cartoon, however, because the interior of the place was overlaid with layers of ghostly image. Three dimensional ghosts shimmered as the hunt bot moved from its position by the airlock. It was as if some ectoplasm had been shaped into the cylinders and planes of giant machines, all faint and trembling. Through these vast ghosts moved tiny objects similar to the hunt bot.

  "No hostiles visible," said the soldier who was piloting the bot. "Shall we go through, sir?"

  "Standard penetration maneuver," said Harp. Two of the soldiers flipped through the lock, then Harp and the last soldier. Without comment, Herat followed. Michael grabbed the autotroph's canister and was the last through.

  Now he saw with his own eyes what the bot had reported. He could see all the way across to the other side of the shack, but hazily, as though a giant hologram were projected inside the shack. The hologram of a colossal, intricate machine…

  As he watched, one of those little Lasa bots swept by, not four meters away. As it passed, the contours of a half-visible girder swayed, and seemed to gain solidity.

  "What…?" He appealed to Herat. The professor chuckled in delight.

  "You've never seen the inside of a three-d printer before, have you, Bequith? I believe we're looking at a new cycler, or part of one. It isn't being built, so much as condensed atom by atom. The bots used a combination of magnets, laser holography and vapor deposition to create the entire thing as a single object. Incredible."

  He couldn't tear his eyes away from the sight. Over the weeks or months, the elemental material harvested from the Twins would be breathed into this space and manipulated by subtle forces to come to rest here, there; to join with neighbors to become solid, or form the boundary of such a solid. The whole cycler was a single thing, so much more tightly integrated than humanity's modular machinery that its structure rivaled the organic.

  Or exceeded it…

  "There's air," said a soldier. "Not great, though, and low-pressure. A mix of helium, hydrogen, and oxygen."

  "Keep helmets on," said Harp. "Which way, Professor?"

  "Um?" Herat too had been staring. "Ah. To our left, I believe. I think there's another chamber there." Where he pointed, blackness shimmered beyond the phantom machinery. Another wall of ferromagnetic liquid? They drifted in that direction, hunt bots roving ahead.

  "I still don't understand what they're building here," Herat muttered. Michael didn't take the verbal bait; he was too busy trying to keep his flight straight while hauling along the autotroph canister.

  "I mean, the tethers around Osiris and Apophis won't produce enough power to launch a cycler," the professor went on. "So then, what is this?" He gestured at the slowly coalescing machinery in the center of the shack.

  "A colony," somebody else said. Michael was startled at the thought— but maybe it was true.

  "They might have spent most of their energy to launch the Envy, and then this is being provided as a home for whomever the Envy manages to find on its ring," Michael suggested.

  "Halt," said Harp. They were approaching the wall that separated this half of the shack from the rest. Michael could see circular airlocks at regular intervals around the wall. The rest was ribbed and spiked ferrofluid, all conforming to the invisible shapes of the magnetic fields that held it in place.

  He knew there were no living beings here, unless the other half of this structure held habitats. If it did, this would be the only settled spot in the Twins' system, which made no sense.

  The hunt bots reported no human presence here, not even that of other bots. Crisler's people must have decided to leave this gestation chamber to do its work without interference. That was a lucky break.

  They sailed up to one of the airlocks, and Harp repeated the procedure of sending a bot through it first. Michael was nervous— expecting at any moment that some trap of Crisler's would be sprung on them. Nothing happened, and the bot proceeded to beam back pictures of the new space.

  The second half of the shack was a single large space, like the first. But while the first contained only the ghostly shadows of machines materializing, here the objects were fully made. The entire space was crammed with a giant, bulbous, and somehow insectile thing. It was vaguely egg-shaped, Michael thought, with circular holes in the end closest to the bot. Those could be weapons… or engines.

  The entire white skin of the thing was covered in intricate, multicolored lines of text— but not, Michael realized with a shock, the spiky red writing of the Lasa.

  "That's Chicxulub," said Herat. Michael could hear disbelief in the older man's voice, an echo to what Michael himself felt.

  "It is a cycler," Michael said doubtfully.

  "It can't be," insisted Herat. "Look at it, it must be incredibly massive— built with all kinds of unnecessary metal plating and girders…"

  "It's a drop ship!" exclaimed Harp. "Like our interceptors."

  "No… Too delicate for that. And way too big. I have no idea what it is," Herat concluded. Normally mysteries excited him, but he seemed more uneasy than pleased at this particular one. "But if not Lasa…"

  Michael laboriously turned the autotroph canister until the little window pointed toward the cycler-or-whatever. "Translate that," he instructed the autotroph being.

  The bulk of the giant machine obscured whatever else might be in the chamber. Harp took them through the airlock cautiously, but so far there was no sign of hostiles. But as the hunt bots shot away to explore, Michael spotted something far down along the curve of the ship. "White light," he said to Harp, pointing. "There."

  Harp deployed countermeasures, and they began crawling slowly along the inside wall of the chamber, flat invisibility shields held overhead. Gradually, the source of the white illumination revealed itself.

  Here was Crisler's base of operations. Two small balloon-habitats had been inflated inside the shack, one against its outside wall, and one half-encircling the nose of the giant machine— which Michael stubbornly decided must be a cycler, regardless of what Herat said. The habitats were a patchwork of white, made of the same stuff as the Banshee's habs. In several places each was transparent; Michael recognized the material the soldiers used for temporary bubble airlocks.

  The habitat attached to the shack wall was small, probably subdivided into no more than two rooms. The one encircling the cycler's nose was much larger; it looked like it held as much volume as two floors of the Banshee's habs.


  "Guards visible," said one of the hunt bots. "Cameras on habs."

  "Seen." Harp gestured to two of his men. "Auto-aim on the bot's signal. Get ready to take out those cameras."

  "Whatever you do, don't hit the artifact," said Herat.

  Michael had to laugh. "Have you deciphered the writing yet?" he asked the autotroph.

  "That which I have seen," it said. "There is much that is not visible from this point. I must be allowed to circle the vessel—"

  "Not now—" Michael forgot whatever else he'd been about to say. He was looking in the direction of the habs, and had noticed a change in the white glow coming through the plastic.

  "Sir," he said, "parts of the hab are pulsing. Pulsing red."

  Harp cursed. "It's an alert! They've seen us. No more time for subtlety, boys. Fire."

  "Wait!" shouted the professor. "Maybe it's not us they spotted, but Rue's party."

  At that moment they lost the feed from the lead hunt bot. Michael looked around his shield, to behold a very strange sight. Where a moment ago the air within the cavernous space of the shack had been empty, now a long line of tiny glowing beads lay strung between the balloon-hab on the shack's wall, and the mangled smoking wreck of the bot a hundred meters closer. In the second or so Michael stared, he saw some of the little beads vanish, while others seemed to split in two, or begin to drift.

  "Behind your shield, Bequith, that was a laser shot!" shouted Harp. A moment later the black hull material next to Michael exploded into vapor before splashing back to heal itself. "We're under fire! Infrared lasers! Target and fire, men!"

  Around him, Harp's men popped up to shoot, then retreated behind their shields. The shields began to smoke and shake, but there was no sound, and nothing to see— except, when Michael looked down by his foot, where that second shot had hit the hull he saw a little constellation of glowing blue spheres, none bigger than his thumbnail. They drifted, serene and self-contained, like newborn stars.

  Fire. He was seeing fire. The laser shots were igniting the hydrogen/oxygen mix that filled the shack. But what would have become a Hindenberg-class inferno under gravity behaved quite differently here.

  His shield warped; he felt the heat through his gloves. Michael felt a surge of fear and adrenaline as it finally hit home the kinds of energies that were aimed at him. He drew his laser and cleared a window in his shield to shoot through. He had been dreaming for months of what his first combat against the R.E. would be like; now that it was here his mind was fixed only on the moment.

  Behind him, the autotroph being was speaking, but he had no time to listen as glistening, mirror-clad men began flipping into the air from the balloon-habs, and more threads of flaming air converged on him.

  * * *

  "PREPARE TO ABANDON ship," said Rue. The tungsten plate under her feet was glowing hot in places, and its edges had become ragged from laser fire. The constant battering by the Banshee's laser defense system had knocked the plate past the construction shack, and Rue had gotten her people to focus their hand jets on firing tangentially to their course. The trick had worked; the construction shack was eclipsing the Banshee. After a last few agonizing seconds, the lasers of the Banshee vanished behind the black curve of the shack, and they were safe.

  "Everybody kick off," she said. "Head for the shack." They dove for it: Rue, Rebecca, Mina, Blair, Barendts, and the three remaining soldiers. One of them was waving his sensors at the black hull.

  "I read energy discharges," he said. "A firefight, looks like."

  "Any way to tell who's who?" she asked.

  "One group is small, appears to be pinned down by one wall. The other group is near the airlock where we saw a bunch of men headed earlier."

  The shack was just a big blot to Rue. "Which is closer?" she asked.

  "We're equidistant. But we need to get to an airlock anyway, Captain."

  "No, we don't." Rue sighted along the quilted surface of the shack. The material's bubblelike surface clearly showed the patterns of magnets that underlaid it. "Target your lasers on the exact center of the dome of hull material directly ahead of us. We'll make ourselves an airlock there."

  "Ma'am?"

  "Just do it!"

  She couldn't see the beams, but four glowing spots appeared on the hull, quickly converging into one. Then suddenly the hull wasn't there anymore. In its place a blast of black droplets was spewing into space, revealing a three-meter hole in the shack's hull.

  "Quick! Before it heals itself!" She jetted through the black rain and found herself in a vast space lit by red light and galaxies of little blue stars. Air was rushing around her, trying to push Rue back through the gap, and spiraling with it came thousands of those little stars. She and Jentry had played with flames like this when she was young and she knew what was about to happen: As the beads were sucked into the moving air they merged and became tongues of fire. For a few moments Rue was licked by a passing inferno.

  Her people were through, and just in time as the array of magnets supporting the hull shifted and the ferrofluid reached out to close the wound they'd made. The long tongue of flame halted, became a large irregular ball shape, then died from the inside out. Its outermost skin fractured into hundreds of tiny beads, which began drifting away as if nothing had happened.

  New lines of stars appeared— one, two, four, all lancing through the space around her. Rue and her people were floating, vulnerable, in the crossfire of a battle.

  "Where?" shouted Barendts. "What the hell is all this?"

  The swirling clouds of firebeads made it hard to see, which was probably good just now, she thought. One thing Rue did make out was a standard balloon-hab, attached to some kind of very large machine dead ahead. "Make for that!" She jetted toward it.

  One of the marines screamed as his suit jetted white fire. Barendts whirled and fired back along the telltale line of firebeads joining the dying man to a blurry figure near a balloon-hab attached to the shack's hull. He was rewarded with a jet of fire at that end. "We're dead unless we get inside now!" he shouted.

  Rue reached for the white surface of the balloon-hab. No time for niceties this time: She shot the material with her laser, burning a long ragged tear in it. Despite the pain in her hand, she used her gloves to force the tear in. Pushing against the air that was coming out, she climbed through.

  Big flapping white sheets were flying at her. She dove to the side, cursing, and dragged at the things to keep them from covering the breach. Balloon-habs were a bit too efficient at sealing leaks, sometimes. The others clambered through her hole one after the other, then rolled out of the way while the white panels slammed against it and glued themselves into an uneven patchwork.

  "This— this is the new ship," panted Mina. "They've attached this hab to the nose of the new cycler as a place for the crew during takeoff. The theory is that once the cycler's at speed it'll calve off a bunch of its own habs, the way Jentry's Envy did. At that point they'll have it make up a human-friendly one, like you did. Then they can move out of the habs."

  They hung in a small pie-slice of a larger doughnut-shaped structure. This chamber was crammed with crates of supplies. "Who's they?" asked Rue, eyeing the lack of space. "Crisler can't be moving the whole Banshee crew in here."

  "Some of the science team, and marines loyal to Crisler," Mina said. "He'd be returning on the Banshee with the real prize."

  "Real prize?" Rue gestured around to indicate the whole vessel they had come to. "This isn't it?"

  "No. There's something else— but I don't know what it is. Only that it's small enough to be carried by one person."

  "We'll worry about that later," Rue said. "If Corinna and Evan are here, we have to find them." She pointed to a pressure door that separated this tiny room from the rest of the hab. "We go through that. Now."

  * * *

  THERE WERE A good ten of Crisler's marines hunkered down next to their balloon airlock on the far side of the shack. Even with the nose of the cycler between them, there
was little cover here. Michael was wreathed in a gas of bubbling black ferrofluid; laser shots had half destroyed his shield and he had several burns on his suit. Both sides were laying down a covering fire to prevent the other from getting out of sight behind the cycler.

  "The ancient pact is turned on its head," said the autotroph. It had been silent until now; it must have completed translating the Chicxulub script that covered the outside of the ship.

  "What have you learned?" Herat asked it.

  "Professor, this is hardly the time," said Michael incredulously. Their little squad was outmanned and outgunned, and Crisler's men might get reinforcements through the airlock at any moment.

  "No better time," said the professor. "Now, tell us what those inscriptions say."

  "The ancient pact is turned on its head

  The hermit who carries the lamp now hands it on

  The god who devours his children comes now for those who sought to defy him."

  "Ancient pact? Hrm, don't know about that," said Herat. "But the hermit who carries the lamp? Lamp Bearers? It's talking about the Lasa!"

  "Fascinating, professor, but—"

  "Whoa, what's that?" shouted one of the soldiers. Michael peeked out from behind his shield, in time to see several space-suited figures explode through the shack's wall, to the accompaniment of gouts of fire.

  "It's our boys, back from the Banshee!" One of the newcomers took a direct hit from a laser, flailed, and went still. "Give 'em cover, men!" shouted Harp. They all began shooting.

  Michael didn't fire. He was too busy puzzling out what had just happened. Somehow, they'd targeted one of the magnets holding up the ferrofluid. As he watched, the lattice of magnets rearranged itself, and the whip of fire that had been exiting into space choked as the wall reappeared.

  "That's it!" He leaned out, and aimed carefully— not at the mirrored shields of the marines that the others were targeting, but at a square black block several meters above them. Though his heart was pounding and he was sure he would be hit at any second, he waited until he was sure he had the shot, then pulled the trigger.