Heirs of Earth (36 page)

Alander couldn’t take his eyes off the gruesome pulp bubbling beneath the invisible skin of the I-suit. He lowered the weapon, shaking his head. “This morning, I’d never killed anyone before. Now I’ve killed two people.”

“The same person, twice,” said Sol, stepping up and taking the gun from him. She still looked a little pale. “If it makes you feel better, Peter, don’t think of him as a person. He’s a plague. You did the right thing.”

She didn’t sound completely convinced.

“I’m not much of a person, either,” Alander said. “Part human, part Yuhl, part Praxis.”

“We become what we have to in order to survive. That’s the rule, isn’t it? And if we’re not who we intended to be when we set out, if we don’t like what we are—” She shrugged. “I suppose extinction is still an option.”

“Sol!” Inari’s voice echoed down the corridor. “You need to see this!”

Her face set in worried lines, she took a second longer to check on Alander. “Are you going to be okay?”

He nodded, surprised to be so certain. Killing was not something his original would ever have countenanced, under
any
circumstance, yet he felt okay with what had happened. There had been no alternative.

“Good,” said Sol, stepping past him. “We’ll clean up this mess later.”

He followed her slim, posthuman lines up the corridor to
Eledone’
s cockpit where, on all the screens, they saw a glowing circle widening in the chamber’s wall, red gold around the center and blinding white in the middle.

“Rescue?” said Sol hopefully.

“There’s no response on any of the bands.” Samson shrugged nervously. “Whatever it is, though, Sol, it’s a hell of a lot more powerful than we are.”

Alander fought an encroaching sense of numbness as everyone stared mutely at the screens, waiting for the next surprise.

2.3.5

Since the explosion that had almost claimed her and an ambush
sprung by a swarm of red-edged disks as vicious and fast as the much larger cutters. Lucia had continued her journey with extreme caution. The urgency with which she was driven to reach Peter hadn’t faded, but she couldn’t afford to be reckless. Getting herself destroyed wouldn’t do anyone any good.

She guided the golden spindle through buckling tubes and between crumpling bulkheads. The I-suit she had built to contain herself had contracted into a gelatinous sphere, its base state when not occupied by her thoughts. It was as useless to her in the Trident’s inferno as an umbrella would have been in a tidal wave.

The sonar ping drew inexorably closer. Despite dead ends and the growing threat of demolition, she wound her way to an area dominated by giant pumpkin-shaped vessels. Each was roughly the same volume as her spindle and was connected to its neighbors by glassy threads, many of which had shattered under stress. Among the glinting fragments and the groan of tortured matter, the ping continued to sound, weak but steady.

Working her way through the giant vessels, she soon managed to isolate which one Peter and the others were trapped in. But then another problem presented itself: How the hell was she meant to get them out? There were no obvious signs of an opening anywhere to be seen, and she possessed no weaponry of any kind, nor was she equipped with tools advanced enough to cut into anything harder than aluminum. Her frustration mounted. To be so near to Peter and yet—

Light suddenly flashed behind her—extremely white and extremely hot. She turned instantly, terrified by the realization that she had let her guard slip. She was still very vulnerable in here; if she was to get the others out of this situation, as well as herself, then she needed to keep her wits about her.

Before she could flee, something brilliant and white swung around one of the pumpkin-shaped vessels and came to an abrupt halt directly in front of her. Rays of coherent light radiated out from it like halos in a spiritual vision, almost as if searching the space around it, roaming and tasting it in the way that an ant’s feelers tasted everything they touched. The powerful beams passed over the surface of her golden spindle, and she felt herself physically flinch.

But the beams of light ignored her, swinging forward instead to concentrate on the side of the vessel containing Peter. Merging as one, the beams pumped inconceivable levels of energy into the side of it until the dark material began to glow.

“There are people in there!” Lucia cried, pushing herself forward to intervene.

“I know, Lucia,” replied a voice in heavy, hard-pitched English. “I can help them.”

A dizzying sense of unreality swept over her at the sound of the voice.
“
Caryl?
”

“I am Thor.”

“You’re—? But—”

“We are not so different, Lucia.”

Actually,
she thought, realization of what must have happened sinking in,
that probably couldn’t be farther from the truth.
If the Starfish had given Thor something similar to what the Spinners had given her, then they were staring at each other from completely opposite sides of the fence.

The ship before her was football-shaped, with a hole at one end, and barely half as large as she was. The coherent glare seemed to come from the skin itself. It radiated an organic sheen, as though in constant motion even when floating motionless. That gave it a slightly blurred edge, as though it wasn’t quite all there.

Nevertheless, a common past did unite them; they had both been humans first, before circumstance had led them astray. Underneath the gold Spinner shell and the cold light of whatever Thor had become, they were undoubtedly human still.

The vessel containing the hole ships she’d been chasing was beginning to heat up, an orange glow growing brighter where Thor’s beams converged. The glow spread until its center was too white to look at. Harsh electromagnetic noise filled Lucia’s receivers, sounding so loud that she began to worry that it might attract attention.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked.

There was no reply from Thor. Half the vessel was glowing now, and still the barrage didn’t let up. Lucia wondered what the chances were of inadvertently cooking the hole ships contained within. How much heat could
they
take?

Without warning, Thor’s beams suddenly spread apart, and the blasting of the vessel ceased. Lucia’s senses took a second to recover from the glare, but once they did, she saw that the vessel now looked uncannily like an eye painted in garish false color; the brightly glowing patch surrounded a circular black hole where the exotic material had failed.

“Come out while you are able!”

“Thor?” Sol’s voice was filled with surprise and reservations. “Is that you?”

“There is no time, we must leave now.”

“She’s right,” put in Lucia. “The Trident isn’t stable. It could blow at any time.”

“
Lucia?
” It was Peter’s turn to be surprised.

“It’s good to hear your voice,” she said, feeling a surge of relief. “But we’ll have to save the pleasantries until later. We need to get you out of here before anything else goes wrong.”

“This is a matter of high priority,” said Thor.

Space-time shook around them as something massive exploded farther down the spine of the Trident. Gravitational shock waves stretched the matter around them, tugging symmetries askew, then snapping them back into place.

A seven-sided hole ship emerged from the gap in the side of the vessel, its whiteness in stark contrast to the blasted matter surrounding it.

“Follow me,” Thor instructed them. With a swirl of light beams, she spun on her axis and accelerated into the distance. The multiple hole ship followed as best it could, looking decidedly clunky in comparison. Lucia brought up the rear, unwilling to stray too far from her charge as they made their escape from the disintegrating ship.

* * *

“Who’s boss now?” asked Samson wryly
as she piloted Eledone in Thor’s wake.

“I’d say
she
is,” Sol said, pointing at the screen. “I mean, look at her. She’s—”

Words escaped her.

“Changed?” supplied Alander.

She nodded. “Yes, changed.”

The truth was that she felt humbled. She had assumed all along that engrams were incapable of change. Even when she tinkered with them, meddled with their operating assumptions, they were still hampered by the overseer that ran them, constantly bringing them back into line when they strayed. She had hoped to find a way around these restrictions but hadn’t yet managed to do so. It had taken alien intervention to achieve it with Alander first, and now Thor.

Exactly what had happened to Lucia, she didn’t know, but the way the liberated spindle was dogging
Eledone
and the tone in Lucia’s voice when she had asked about Peter suggested that she hadn’t so much changed herself as changed her home.

Still, hybrid vigor, as Alander had suggested, might well be what they needed to survive in the short term as well as the long. And right now, she was quite happy to clutch at whatever life raft came her way.

Temperatures skyrocketed as they wound along narrow passages and through folding chambers. Conditions were soon as bad as they had been in the wounded cutter. There was no hope in this case, though, that the disintegration was self-inflicted. No recycling for the mighty ship, she assumed. There was no sign of the Pllix anywhere. The Trident was a victim of the laws of physics.

She hadn’t seen physics in action like this since Sol System had been destroyed. Great rents opened around them, sending fragments of wall and ceiling flying like ashes in a bonfire.
Eledone
bucked as it rode the explosive flow. The white point of Thor vanished in a howling, rumbling shock wave that gradually overtook them and shook them like a die in a cup. She could hear the battered hole ship’s voice, barely audible over the noise, complaining of damage, and beyond that a deep moaning sound that issued from God only knew where. For all she could tell, it could have been the dying groan of the Trident itself.

The shock wave dispersed around them as it expanded, and Thor reappeared, glowing like a sun through clouds. The rumble faded, and
Eledone
ceased its litany of complaint. The moan ceased, also, its origins never determined.

As
Eledone
’s sensors recovered, what remained of pi-1 Ursa Major took shape around them.

“Oh, my God,” Alander breathed.

Sol silently echoed the sentiment.

The system’s primary was spent. Its remains consisted of two expanding sheets of gas and energy, sandwiching the ecliptic all around its equator. Some of the expelled matter had cooled, lending a mottled, blotchy appearance to the debris. The rest burned with a reddish, angry glow, except for two striking, blue-yellow jets emerging from where each pole had been, half-visible through the murk.

Sol’s first impression of the system was how much darker it appeared to be. With the primary sun destroyed and its energy spread out over a vast volume, the amount of visible light was limited. That, however, only cast the ongoing battle into sharp, shadowless relief. Violent flashes and streaks still flickered from hundreds of locations, blue- and red-shifted by extreme velocities and exotic warps in space-time. The extended flash that accompanied the final breakup of the Trident falling rapidly behind them was barely enough to illuminate vast clouds of gas and debris around it, even for a second. Similar clouds bubbled everywhere Sol looked, expanding and merging wherever hostilities had broken out.

And the planets! She shook her head, disbelieving her eyes. Even after the death of the sun, she still had trouble accepting the scale of this battle. Stars were violent places, by nature turbulent and changeable, but planets didn’t normally blow up or expel vast chunks of their atmosphere in energetic plumes.

Yet they, too, were gone. The Earth-like inner world, Jian Lao, had been reduced to dust. The atmosphere of the bigger gas giant had been stripped away and its core broken up into millions of jagged and treacherous chunks. Trails of molten debris and plasma marked the locations of the remainder of the planets. Once-molten cores were reduced to glowing cinders, while ring systems and moons were indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble filling the system.

Pi-1 Ursa Major was essentially dead, but the fight between the two super-races carried on regardless.

“I can’t get my head around this,” Inari said tonelessly. Her eyes were glazed as she stared at a view of the Source of All in the middle reaches of the system, just outside what had once been the habitable zone. Its sunlike appearance was gone. Now it looked like a flickering fluorescent tube tied in a knot around something dark and sinuous that coiled in and out of its glowing folds. A luminous mist enshrouded it making it hard to tell what precisely was going on. Sol was reminded of a human zygote, its cells dividing, growing, then dividing again.

“Where are we going?” asked Samson into the hushed cockpit piloting the hole ship with the control stalk.

Sol shook her head. “I have no idea, but keep on Thor’s tail as best you can.”

Thor arced smoothly until she was pointing up into the northern plume of gas and stellar debris. Accelerating at many dozens of
g
’s, the three vessels were soon moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Debris rained on shields that had never, to Sol’s knowledge, been used for such purposes.
Eledone
was used to traveling through unspace, not the real universe, where at such velocities a single molecule could tear an unprotected ship apart.

“She’s taking us out of the zone of interference,” Lucia reported. “We’re unable to use ftl here, in the light cone of the explosion. We can’t escape until we get outside it.”

“But how are we meant to get outside the light cone when we can’t travel faster than light?” asked Samson.

“The disturbance is not symmetrical in space,” Thor replied. “There are irregularities.”

“And we’re heading for one of those?”

Sol waited almost thirty seconds before it was clear that Thor wasn’t about to answer.

“She seems more and more like you every day, Sol,” Samson commented.