Further: Beyond the Threshold (38 page)

We reached the lift, and I tried once more to convince Amelia to come with us, but she refused. As the doors of the lift cage slid shut, her voice became faint and laced with static.

::Be careful out there, RJ,:: Amelia said, sounding distant and small. ::And for God’s sake, hurry!::

The lift stopped moving, and the doors slowly slid open.

::We’ve made it!:: Bin-Ney said before the energy blast from the Iron Mass spear sent him falling back to the floor, his mantle completely immobile.

A quartet of Iron Mass stood directly in our way. They seemed as surprised to see us as we were them, only faster than us on the draw.

“Damn it!” I swore. My cap gun was already in my right fist, and I aimed it at one of the Iron Mass and the projector cuff on my left arm at another, and as I leaped to one side, I opened up with both.

Jida jumped to the other side, firing off rounds of plasma toroids, catching one of the Iron Mass squarely in the chest.

Bin-Ney still lay on the ground, immobilized by the first blast, and while Jida and I plugged away at the Iron Mass before us, one of them lurched forward, driving the tip of his spear toward Bin-Ney’s chest. Before I could react, the spear struck home, the blow stopped by Bin-Ney’s mantle, but the force of the impact keeping him pinned to the ground.

One of the Iron Mass collapsed in a heap, a hole blown in his black insect pressure suit. Though the stuff was armored, the projectors were able to penetrate it, but it was taking repeated shots in the same general location to pierce the surface.

I took a shot to the knee, freezing my leg from the hip down, and Jida was spun momentarily by a shot that connected with her shoulder, but both of us were able to continue firing.

The Iron Mass continued to hammer at Bin-Ney’s mantle with his spear, and while he hadn’t broken through yet, I didn’t like the idea of waiting to see how much abuse a mantle could take. Continuing to fire with my cap gun at one of the standing Iron Mass, I had my projector emit a cutting arc, which shot half a dozen centimeters from my wrist like a knife of flame. Lurching to Bin-Ney’s side gracelessly, my leg frozen like a cast beneath me, I sliced down through the handle of the Iron Mass’s spear, cutting it in two, and then backhanded the projector up and across the Iron Mass’s chest and neck, opening up the armor and depressurizing the suit.

The other two Iron Mass finally fell, irregular holes blown in their carapaces, and only Jida and I were left standing.

We helped Bin-Ney to his feet and instructed our mantles to go flexible again. Then we headed for the canyon wall as fast as we could.

The climb was long and difficult, scrambling over the scree, but at length, we finally reached the top. Ahead of us in the distance, we could see the edges of the cairn forest and knew that the
Compass Rose
lay just beyond.

::Ha!:: Bin-Ney shouted in triumph. He turned and looked back toward the mining platform below. ::You thought you could stop us, but you—::

His words were cut off as a gout of blinding white light slammed into his chest, cutting through his mantle and the body beneath, blazing up and out his back into the twilit sky.

I grabbed Jida’s arm and dragged her to the ground beside me. Peering over the edge of the canyon, we could see a number of Iron Mass pouring from the door of the lift beneath the platform, those in the lead hefting the large cannon that had ended Zaslow’s life only a short while before.

::Come on,:: I said, scuttling back away from the edge, dragging Jida with me. ::We need to get out of here.::

When we’d gone beyond the line of sight of our pursuers far below, Jida paused just long enough to cast a glance back at the lifeless body of Bin-Ney on the ground. ::Assuming we get back to the
Further
and Bin-Ney is restored from backup, I need to make a point of telling him to keep his damned mouth shut when escaping from overwhelming odds. He’s just tempting fate, and clearly fate can’t resist the challenge.::

We hauled across the lifeless wastes of the pulsar planet as fast as we could go. Though we had a head start on our pursuers, they vastly outnumbered us, and we’d nearly exhausted our projectors’ reserves of plasma and the capacitor charges of my cap gun. If it came to another firefight, we wouldn’t last long.

On we raced under the gray sky, the dead star circling slowly high overhead. Somewhere up there the
Further
drifted in her orbit. Had she come under attack by the Iron Mass’s “houseship” yet, or did they still keep their menacing distance?

Ahead of us loomed the cairn forest, the orderly rows of towers wider at the tops than at their bases. Just to the other side of the cairn rose a high ridge, and beyond that we’d find the
Compass Rose
, nestled in a low valley.

::…ptain! Can you hear me?:: crackled a voice in my ear.

My pace not slacking, I answered, glancing to Jida to see if she was getting the signal, too, and her nod indicated that she was. ::Maruti?:: ::Oh, glorious!:: the chimpanzee answered. ::Xerxes, whose vision is considerably better than mine, for all that ey has no eyes, just caught sight of you.:: Jida and I raced on. I realized a considerable advantage of communicating by subvocalization was that one need never try to talk when out of breath. It was a good thing, because with my aching lungs and the stitch in my side, I doubted I’d be able to string together more than a few words, if spoken.

::Where are you?:: I asked.

::Just inside the edge of the cairn forest, Captain,:: Xerxes answered.

::Can you get to the ship? We need to get out of here.::

::Not quite yet, Captain,:: Maruti said.

::
What
?:: Jida snapped.

::We’ve made a surprising but profoundly disappointing discovery,:: Maruti said.

::I told you so,:: Xerxes put in.

::Never mind the cross talk, just tell me what it is,:: I said.

::Well, in the cave system, we found the remains of a downed ship. It’s millennia old, almost entirely cannibalized, with only fragments remaining.:: Maruti’s tone was strange, an odd mix of disappointment and excitement.

::A terrestrial ship?:: Jida asked.

::Sadly, yes,:: Xerxes answered, with a nonvocal sigh. ::Just another bit of flotsam from the Diaspora, it appears, and no sign of extraterrestrial intelligence.:: ::So why can’t you get to the ship?:: I asked. ::What’s the delay?:: ::Do you recall the unicellular organisms responsible for the cairns?:: Xerxes asked.

::No, I’ve forgotten all about them,:: I answered hotly. ::Yes, of
course
I remember them. What about it?:: ::They’re terrestrial in origin, too,:: Maruti said. ::We’ve worked out their genetic sequencing, and it’s clear they were derived from terrestrial strains of radiation-resistant anaerobic bacteria. They were engineered to survive in this environment by the survivors of the crashed ship.:: ::Whyever for?:: Jida asked.

::Xerxes was right about the autoinducers. The bacteria has been designed as a kind of biological distributed computing system, with the individual organisms acting in tandem, using signal molecules to pass information back and forth.:: ::What information?:: I asked.

::We’re currently taking readings, so a picture is still emerging,:: Xerxes said, ::but the forest appears to contain almost ten zettabytes of information. Even though the processing speeds involved in organic molecular signaling would mean extremely low clock speeds, that amount of data is sufficient to store a number of uploaded human consciousnesses.:: “
What
?” I sputtered, talking out loud, echoed and transmitted out via interlink.

::It’s our supposition that the minds of the surviving crew exist in the bacteria network as a kind of gestalt, an organic equivalent of a digital incarnation emulation like your friend Amelia.:: Just the mention of her name stung, but I didn’t let it slow me down.

::And you can’t leave yet because you think you’ll be able to…what?:: ::We think we can save them, Captain.:: Maruti’s tone was energetic, hopeful.

::I was afraid you were going to say that.:: I continued on, my feet pounding on the gray surface. I chanced a glance back over my shoulder and saw the Iron Mass following just at the edge of vision, with only the undulating surface of the planet preventing them from firing off another round with their light cannon.

Jida and I reached the edge of the cairn forest, but I rounded it to one side and continued ahead to the ridge beyond.

::OK, here’s the plan,:: I said. ::The guys behind us don’t know that you two are on the planet, much less where you are. So you’ve got exactly as long as it takes for me and Jida to get to the
Compass Rose
and get off the ground to get this bacteria farm uploaded. Whether you can or not, I expect you to be ready to roll when we fly over, and then we’re getting off this rock. Agreed?:: ::Captain, I think that—:: Maruti began.

::Good,:: I said, cutting him off. ::We’ll see you momentarily.::

Jida and I crested the ridge and saw the
Compass Rose
lying directly below us, escape just within our grasp. Then my faceplate went completely opaque as a gout of white light blazed between us, a shot fired from the Iron Mass far behind us. Jida’s wordless howl rang over the interlink channel, rattling around in my head.