Eternity's Mind (29 page)

Patton interrupted her, “General, sorry to remind you, but after Relleker, the
Kutuzov
's stockpile of sun bombs is only at twenty-five percent. We haven't been resupplied yet.”

Her heart sank. “Then we better use what we have, and use them well.”

“The
Okrun
has a full load,” Admiral Haroun said.

Handies still hadn't responded, and his ship continued to accelerate away from the battle.

Lieutenant Tait said what was growing obvious to all of them. “He's running.”

Keah yelled on the comm to the
Rafani,
“Damn you, Handies, get back here. We need your sun bombs!”

When the Juggernaut fled from the concentrated CDF ships, the bugbots chose a new target. A thousand black ships swooped after the
Rafani,
and Admiral Handies devoted all his power to speed. At the last minute he diverted power to the shields. The robot attackers were so numerous they eclipsed the Juggernaut.

Keah shouted uselessly at the comm screen. At last she saw the
Rafani
's gunports opening up to launch sun bombs, but the bugbots cut the Juggernaut to pieces before the weapons could fire, destroying the vessel—along with its complement of weaponry—before a single sun bomb could detonate.

“What a damned waste!” she hissed.

“We're ready with ours, General,” said Patton. Haroun acknowledged as well.

Another four Mantas were destroyed in the space of ten seconds before she could order the launch of the sun bombs.

Part of the bugbot horde remained behind like crows pecking at corpses on a battlefield. They tore apart the rest of the LOC. At a rough guess, Keah had already lost half, maybe two-thirds of the CDF.

At last the spray of nova explosions blossomed out, each blast disintegrating hundreds of attackers. Several of Haroun's sun bombs overshot the robot ships—intentionally so, Keah realized—and erupted inside the oncoming shadow cloud. One searing explosion carved a giant obsidian crater in the nearest Shana Rei hex cylinder.

Keah had no time to cheer, though. The second wave of sun bombs detonated, and shock waves smashed into the fragments of the LOC. The last CDF defenders backed away, trying to outrun their own weapons. Some of the nova explosions sent the Mantas into tailspins, causing damage; any ship that could not recover quickly was overwhelmed by the black robots.

“Launch round three!” Keah shouted. Explosions flared, nearly blinding her. “Again!”

“These are our last ones, General,” Patton said.

At least Admiral Haroun kept firing.

Keah sat on the bridge and felt hot tears burning in her eyes. “Again,” she muttered, knowing it was useless.

The enormous Shana Rei shadow cloud engulfed the already-dead LOC and kept rolling forward.

Keah gave orders for the
Kutuzov
and the
Okrun
to back away and continue firing. She sent out a general broadcast demanding any other ships, any help for this last stand. Hundreds of thousands of bugbot craft roared past the orbit of the Moon, heading inward. Some black robots engaged the last CDF defenders, but the rest hurtled ahead.

The shadow cloud also had its target. Keah knew that the creatures of darkness wanted Earth.

And she remembered exactly what had happened at Relleker.

 

CHAPTER

47

KOTTO OKIAH

The small survey craft left the bright nebula behind, edged past the boundary, and dropped into a dark and silent nowhere in the underbelly of the universe.

Once inside the vast emptiness of the void, the survey craft held itself together, which pleased Kotto for obvious reasons. He had been afraid that altered laws of physics might not allow the component atoms to stay together.

KR and GU remained attentive, their optical sensors fixed on the ship's controls.

Just inside, Kotto brought the survey craft to a full stop, though the darkness outside remained unchanged. “Let's assess. Always a good idea to assess. It'll keep us from getting lost.”

“We are studying and mapping, Kotto Okiah,” said GU.

“We can still see the exit prominently,” KR said.

With some relief, Kotto nodded. The slash of the ionized nebula gases behind them was a bright spot on the rest of the void. “Study our systems. Everything still functioning properly?” He picked up no reliable readings dead ahead, no frame of reference, no perspective. He scanned twice, then tapped the gauges, hoping they would reset. “Functioning perfectly, but there's nothing to detect.” He looked out into the blinding distance. “I suppose that means if we
do
find something out there, it'll be glaringly obvious.”

The compies studied the navigation systems. “We are ready to proceed, Kotto Okiah.”

“Better drop a marker buoy here, just in case.”

“The buoy can also serve as a signal amplifier,” KR pointed out.

“Then let's figure out if we can send a signal back through before we wander off and get lost.” Kotto activated the comm. “Hello, Fireheart Station, this is Kotto Okiah. Hello? How are you? Can you hear me?”

After an uncomfortable second, a static-distorted reply came from Station Chief Alu. “Your signal is faint, but we read you.”

“Faint? That's disheartening, since I'm right here on the doorstep and broadcasting at full strength.”

Another voice broke in. “Kotto, this is Shareen—be careful.” The signal strength wasn't sufficient for him to receive video images, so he had to strain to hear her words through the audio. “What's it like in there?”

“I will be sufficiently careful, don't worry. Right now, it's just dark and empty. Nothing exciting … not even anything very interesting, but I have a lot of exploring to do. You two just figure out how to fix the greenhouse before I get back. I already gave you the solution.”

“We will, sir.” It was Howard's voice.

He heard only further static, and then Alu's voice trickled through, “Don't forget to leave your sun bombs there on the threshold.”

“Of course I'll remember. I've got scientific research to do, and I'd rather do it without a couple of doomsday devices aboard.”

He let the compies complete the task. They moved delicately, using precision systems to drop the warheads in the void, where self-anchoring engines would keep them in position near the boundary. Kotto nodded and sent another signal back out. “Sun bombs deployed, primed, and ready to go—but please don't blow them up and slam the door shut until I get back out.”

Alu's response was garbled, but it sounded reassuring. After another blast of static, Howard's voice said, “Be careful, sir.”

“I believe your partner already gave me that advice.” He looked at the two compies beside him in the cockpit. “I will keep it in mind as I explore.” They would be out of communication range within minutes, but he had known he would be on his own. As an inventor, he had always considered himself a sort of explorer. Now the title was official.

The survey craft headed into the inky, indiscernible blackness. Even though he didn't see any corners or obstacles that would make him lose the way home, he told the compies, “Mark our course very carefully.”

“That will be difficult,” said GU. “There are no points of reference. Once we leave the opening behind, we will be completely disoriented.”

“Then drop more breadcrumb transmitters.” The small spheres emitted a regular series of pings, and he had loaded a hundred of them aboard the survey craft. It should be easy enough just to connect the dots and follow them back out, provided that signals traveled in predictable ways in this void.

The dark emptiness did seem to have slightly different laws of physics, a fact that Kotto would have found fascinating if he hadn't been in the middle of it. Flying onward, the survey craft eventually lost sight of the opening back to the Fireheart nebula, which was unnerving. The bright normal universe had been like a safety beacon, but now he seemed to be flying through the heart of a deep cave at the bottom of a black hole.

“For the sake of science I want to gather groundbreaking data.” He turned to the compies. “For the sake of history, make sure the sensors are recording everything.”

“There is nothing to record, Kotto Okiah,” KR said.

He raised a finger. “Ah, but this is a
nothing
unlike anything we've ever seen before.”

As they traveled for five more hours (subjective time) seeing nothing but … nothing, Kotto began to lose heart. They had already deployed twenty pingers, and he began to worry that this void had nothing to see, nothing useful to bring back, which wasn't a particularly exciting accomplishment. He focused on the screens, then gave up, instead pressing his face against the windowport and staring with his own eyes. The lights shining out from the craft vanished into the darkness, illuminating nothing. The only discovery he made was that the impenetrable darkness gave him a headache.

Then the void structure began to change, and the blackness took on a different character, revealing angular forms that were like the hidden breaths of shadows. The walls of the emptiness were clustered with black crystals and ebony fracture lines.

Kotto wondered if he had begun to hallucinate, after having been in complete sensory deprivation for so long. He reached out to grab the arms of both compies, reassuring himself that they were real, that he hadn't lost himself in some mental fugue.

He pointed at the screen and asked the two compies, “Can you see geometrical shapes out there?” He feared they were just ghost images, something he had wished into existence.

Their optical sensors glowed, and neither KR nor GU answered for a long time. Finally, KR said, “They appear to be lines and angles … extended hexagonal cylinders.”

“Or our circuits could be malfunctioning in this alternate universe.” GU sounded far too cheerful if that was indeed the case.

“I'm not imagining them—those are the Shana Rei, and they're here.” He dropped his voice to a hushed whisper, as if that might make a difference. “It looks like they're just hanging in the void, unprotected … sleeping.”

“Has there been evidence that the Shana Rei sleep, or otherwise go dormant?” KR asked.

Kotto waved away the compy's concern. “They look vulnerable, and they haven't noticed us. It's like we've found their secret lair,” he whispered.

“What good does that do us?” GU asked.

“I'm not a military expert, but what if the CDF could surprise them here? Sneak up from behind and blast them in their little nest? I can just imagine what General Keah would say.”

“Shall we try to make a transmission, Kotto?” asked KR. “With sufficient signal strength we might be able to get the message out through our relay buoys.” The compy reached for the controls of the comm.

Kotto grabbed KR's plastic arm. “No! We don't want to shout and wake up the Shana Rei.”

The survey craft kept moving, passing the hard-to-discern black hexagons, then moving onward at a great, immeasurable distance. The survey craft didn't have an Ildiran stardrive, but the entire concept of travel seemed different here. It didn't matter which direction he flew—Kotto had a hard time determining direction at all.

Soon, the void was empty even of the Shana Rei, and Kotto let out a sigh of relief. Safe … for now.

As they kept flying, he had the compies scan in all possible directions. The sensors returned occasional anomalous details, stray energy readings that made no sense and did not match what he saw. He scratched his head and tried to interpret the reading, hoping for a new flash of inspiration, such as when he had thought of how to save the greenhouse and the worldtrees. Alas, those insights were now few and far between.

Meanwhile, as he stared, Kotto grew dizzy. He felt as if they were spinning, whirling, descending, then accelerating upward, even though the ship's stabilizers and internal readings indicated they were flying level. He held on to the compies again, reassuring himself that they were stable.

Outside the ship, he began to see flares of color, blossoming greens and yellows, accompanied by a flash of purple and blue. He rubbed his eyes, sure he was imagining it because the black had been so unrelenting—but these were more than just capricious flares from behind his retinas. Faint glowing lines connected brighter spots in a tracery that imposed a framework upon the formless void.

“Do you see that?” he asked.

This time neither compy hesitated. “Yes, Kotto. We do.”

There were faint blurry nexus points like smudgy fingerprints that someone had left on the unblemished black, and the blurs pulsed and brightened in a random pattern. Were these echoes, a faint backwash through the wall of the universe?

Kotto tried to use his own abilities, but had to ask the compies, “Can you discern a pattern? Are those points organized somehow?”

“Not that we can detect,” said GU.

“Well, it isn't the Shana Rei,” he said. “This feels like something different.” Again, he kept wondering if he might be imagining or hallucinating, but he felt the overwhelming presence of a sleepy interconnected mind … something awakening. Something astonishingly powerful.

“We'd better have a look,” Kotto said.

 

CHAPTER

48

TOM ROM

Zoe had sent him to investigate an abandoned Klikiss planet to gather more specimens and observations, and there were many such worlds to choose from. When the insect race had departed after the Elemental War, they left behind ancient cities, empty worlds, and far too many mysteries.

Tom Rom decided to go back to Eljiid, the backwater planet where he had obtained the original samples of Klikiss royal jelly from preserved cadavers in the ruins. Since Eljiid had only a small research settlement, he expected to slip in and out with little interference. It would be easy.