Heirs of Earth (14 page)

There was nowhere that he could immediately see that looked like a centralized command area, analogous to a brain, or the equivalent of a bridge, where living officers might congregate to command the giant vessel. There had to be such a point, and automatic assumptions sent him to the center of the craft, looking for a spine connecting the poles or some sort of interior disk from which such an operation might be coordinated. But nothing leapt out at him. There, as everywhere else, he saw only a tightly compressed tangle of spaces and structures, profoundly knocked about by the stresses of battle.

“Something up ahead.”

Samson’s voice wrenched his attention back to
Eledone.
At first he thought she meant that something was approaching them, but she was watching a different aspect of the probe’s telemetry than he was. She was pointing at the region ahead of the probe, in the vein. The turbulence was increasing steadily, and radar showed the edges of what might be a tear in the vein wall ahead.

“It’s being sucked in,” she said.

“Can’t it fight the flow?” Alander asked.

“Fighting the flow would draw more attention to it than simply going with it,” Thor replied. “There’s no evidence to suggest that following it would be dangerous.”

“Personally,” said Sol, “a change of scenery would be good. I think it’s learned as much as it’s going to where it is.”

Alander nodded, although he felt uneasy about the change of environment. Thus far, the probe hadn’t been attacked in the vein, and it had managed to supply them with some excellent data. It would be a shame to lose that advantage too soon.

As the probe drew nearer the tear, telemetry brought back glimpses in visible frequencies of another chamber beyond. This one had been breached and hung open to vacuum. The superheated fluid filling the vein sprayed in a violent stream from the tear, filling the vacuum with crystalline particles and cooling plasma. Shadowy, insubstantial wisps hung around the tear, drifting like seaweed with residual momentum. Again Alander couldn’t make out if they were actual
things
or artifacts of the radar. Strange electromagnetic emissions growing stronger around the probe didn’t provide an answer either way.

The turbulence increased as the probe was caught by the current pouring through the rent, and Alander found himself briefly reaching out to balance himself as the ragged walls fell by in a blurred and giddying rush. Then they were past, and the probe was tumbling in free fall through a glittering vacuum, gathering a dizzying view of the space around it. He glimpsed dark, ribbed, cathedral-like walls slumped in alien angles under a ceiling of spikes and hooks, many of them melted or shattered. He received the distinct impression of myriad eyes gleaming back at him from the dark spaces of that crowded, complicated topography, although he was sure he had to be imagining them. There was no sign of the vast, hanging things that he’d glimpsed on radar, but there were several floating structures that hung independent of the walls in the center of the space. Like elongated, lozenge-shaped barges, they extruded hairlike structures that glinted at their tips, seeming to signal in alien frequencies with unimaginable rhythms.

He switched from the radar to the visual view, letting his eyes digest the scene more naturally, but a bright flash on the radar drew his attention back. When his gaze had settled there again, the source of the flash was gone.

“Did you see that?” asked Gou Mang.

“I’m not sure,” said Alander. “I think—”

He stopped when the flash came again: a hard, well-defined image that appeared in an instant, then disappeared as quickly, leaving an echo behind it like the afterglow of phosphor dots.

“What the fuck is it?” Thor muttered after the thing appeared a third and fourth time, on each occasion in a different part of the probe’s field of view.

Almost as though it’s circling the probe, thought Alander.

“This doesn’t look good,” said Axford.

“I’m inclined to agree with you on that one, Frank,” said Thor.

“Is there any way to call the probe back?” asked Samson as the hard echoes increased in frequency. The glimpses were beginning to overlap, creating the impression that the probe was surrounded by myriad strange, bright points.

Thor shook her head. “Not without giving ourselves away.”

The probe obeyed its internal instructions as best it could. When allowing itself to tumble innocently didn’t divert attention, it fired its NRTs to move away from the mysterious objects. The glimpses followed it, seeming, if anything, to become more urgent and more closely defined. Alander began to feel distinctly threatened on behalf of the probe. Hard and metallic, the flickering shell was unlikely to be a welcoming party.

The end, when it came, was sudden. Two hard echoes jumped progressively closer to the probe, as though testing for a reaction. There was little the probe could do to defend itself. When attempting to run away failed a second time, the hard echoes contracted around the probe in an abrupt, bright rush, then the feed went dead. Every screen in the hole ship froze at the last recorded frames, then slowly faded to black.

“Damn it to hell,” said Thor. She sounded more resigned than angry.

“What were those things?” asked Samson.

“Let’s take a closer look,” said Sol. “
Eledone
, replay those final images.”

The hole ship obliged, bringing the screens back to life. Alander studied them with the others, puzzling over the sharply defined radar echoes. Images in other frequencies were less clear. Some showed faint patches that might have been evidence of camouflage against the chaotic background; others showed nothing at all. Most enigmatic was deep infrared, which revealed strange, three-dimensional, crosslike shapes rotating slowly in the distance, apparently unconnected to the radar ghosts but made significant by the fact that they appeared at no other frequency.
Hidden watchers?
Alander wondered.
The minds behind the radar weapon?

“
Eledone
, what was it exactly that killed the probe?” Axford asked.

“I have insufficient data to answer that question,” replied the hole ship, scrolling technical information down a screen for anyone who wanted to see. “I can, however, tell you that the hull interface was breached in three places shortly before transmission ceased. A massive invasion followed, compromising all systems.”

Alander pointed at a screen showing the path followed by the alien weapons. “That looks like the way crystals grow through a supercritical solution.” Damage spread in straight lines from each puncture point, dividing and dividing again until everything in their path was overwhelmed. “I’m guessing nanotech.”

“Not the usual Starfish MO,” said Axford knowingly.

“Maybe the yellow dots and blue lances are too energetic for in here,” said Inari.

“In
this
raging soup?” Axford indicated the vein with its gases and molten metals through which
Eledone
was still tumbling. “I doubt they would make any difference whatsoever.”

“Then what does all of this tell you?” asked Thor.

Axford 1313 shrugged. “I’ll let you know when I’ve made up my mind.”

“I suggest you do it quickly,” said Sol, nodding at the screens showing the demise of the probe. “Because that hole the probe went through lies ahead of us, if we keep going with the flow, and presumably whatever killed it is still there. Unless we want to end up the same way, I suggest we figure out just what we’re going to do about it—and
soon
.”

“How long before we reach the tear,
Eledone
?” Thor asked the hole ship.

“Unless we use our NRTs, approximately three hours.”

“That’s not very long,” Inari pointed out unnecessarily.

“Which is all the more reason to not waste time dwelling on it,” said Thor. “Inari, I want you and Gou Mang to go over the telemetry, find anything we missed. Frank, Cleo, take a closer look at that attack data; if we can work out exactly what it is, maybe we’ll find a way to combat it. Sol, Peter, you might be able to find something we haven’t considered. And I’ll try to shift this bloody ship without getting us all killed.” Her gaze swept around the cockpit, taking in every member of the Crew. Alander felt a shiver run up his spine at her sudden resemblance to Sol. “Any objections?”

No one spoke.

“Right. Let’s get started and see if we can’t find a way out of this goddamn mess.”

2.1.3

“Go on, Rob. Tell me more about what you’ve found.”

Lucia was only half listening to Rob Singh as he burbled on about his research. The rest of her was concentrating on building herself a new body—and, perhaps, a new mind into the bargain.

“Well, it’s not as though I’ve actually found anything, per se,” he said. “It’s just an idea. All I did was ask for blueprints of the gifts from the Library. Now, normally, the Gifts are as stubborn as the UN Security Council when it comes to giving out secrets. Or rather as stubborn as the Security Council
used
to be, anyway.”

She detected a note of both sadness and incredulity in his tone, and she sympathized with him. It didn’t seem real to her at times that Earth had been destroyed, and not by the Starfish, either. Humans and their AI descendants had been the ones who had brought about the planet’s destruction, crushing it to dust and then sweeping it away as though it had never even existed. All that remained of humanity was a few creaky engrams struggling to survive in an exceedingly hostile universe.

“What was so different about this time?” she asked as the Surgery continued to follow her detailed instructions.

“This time I asked for blueprints of individual sections of the gifts, spindle by spindle,” he said excitedly. “And the Library quite happily gave them to me. You can call up schematics of the layout in here, for instance, or the Gallery. If you wanted to know the exact placement of every chair in the entire installation, the Gifts will provide it. It’s only when you ask for technical information about sensitive areas that they clam up.”

His telepresence robot rolled across the floor, flexed its limbs, and hopped up onto an examination table. Lucia was watching from a point low in the opposite wall. The robot, like a strange, skeletal dog, appeared to be looking straight at her.

“We could have done this ourselves, of course,” he went on. “But no one bothered, I guess, because we just assumed it wouldn’t tell us anything. But I did it anyway, out of curiosity. Sometimes you only find new things by looking at the obvious in a new light. It sounds trite, but it’s true.”

“And what did you find, Rob?”

“Hidden spaces,” he said. He paused for effect, and she thought she could sense the hint of a smile in his voice. “Great big chunks of
nothing
that we never suspected were there. I know we always knew there were things we didn’t know about the gifts, physically speaking, but we didn’t think any farther than that. I mean, consider the hole ships. They have ftl communicators, and they don’t need a structure like this to contain them. They have AIs, too, without having to devote an entire spindle to their operation.”

“There’s an awful lot of space for so little equipment, in other words.”

“Exactly!” The robot hopped down from the table and began to trundle around the room. “This spindle, for example, contains the Surgery—but what else? Sweet effay, that’s what. And those blank spots comprise no less than
eighty percent
of the spindle’s total volume. That’s a whole lot of nothing, Lucia. If you’re anything like me, then you can’t let go of the idea that there has to be
something
in all that space.”

“Such as?”

The robot effected a shrug. “I don’t know. The Gifts refuse to talk about those spaces, and I sure as hell can’t find a way into them. But just knowing they’re
there
tells us something, don’t you think?”

The Surgery chose that moment to advise her that the building of the new body was complete. Rob’s robot rolled to the middle of the room, directing its attention to the opposite wall, where a door was opening.

Lucia changed her pov to allow her to see it, too, although she didn’t raise her hopes too high. It was a long shot at best, albeit one worth trying. She wasn’t sure she’d understood half of what the design interface was telling her, or even begun to grasp the ramifications of the changes she’d suggested.

All reservations disappeared, however, when the door was fully open, revealing a small alcove and the newly designed I-suit floating in it.

“Fuck me, Lucia,” Rob muttered in amazement. His voice sounded breathless over the telepresence link. “You did it!”

The I-suit looked like nothing so much as a thick-skinned soap bubble, discernible only as a vague shimmer in the air. Faint rainbows danced across its surface as Rob’s robot rolled closer and raised camera stalks to view it more closely.

“Wait until the others find out!” he exclaimed. “None of us even considered creating
another
I-suit—”

“I’d prefer it if the others didn’t find out just yet Rob,” she cut in.

His camera stalks raised and twisted around the equivalent of a frown, she guessed. “Why not?”

“I’m not ready yet.” She regarded the I-suit with apprehension, unable to shake the idea that maybe she’d got something wrong. But she knew she couldn’t hold back indefinitely. There was only one way to find out if it truly worked or not. “I’d like to test it out first.”

Exercising pathways through the gifts she’d become increasingly familiar with, she sent her pov through the walls of the Surgery and into the I-suit enclosure. She felt links reach out to touch the new structure, its arcane nature bending to approximate new forms, new pathways. She’d tried to program the process as precisely as possible, but without knowing the medium she was working with, it was hard to predict what the result would be. What were the I-suits made of, exactly? Were they matter, energy, or pure information? No one knew, and that ignorance was dangerous, especially when her very life might be on the line.

She pushed forward, tentatively. There was no resistance. Suppressing the misgivings stirring at the back of her mind, she abandoned all caution and plunged in, mentally keeping her fingers crossed.