“The keenest blade is the blade never felt.”
Mere said the words in Tilan, then human, and finally in their original harum-scarum. Then she glanced at the face of an old-fashioned timepiece that Washen had only just given her—a round machine full of humming parts wrapped inside a dull silver case—and she carefully counted the seconds until impact. For a multitude of responsible reasons, she was being held in quarantine. Her new body was being tended to by an intense little autodoc. Stripped of every kind of nexus, she was reduced to watching events as they were projected into the longest wall of her chamber. But at least the feeds were immediate, uncensored and honest. Probes in high orbit above the ship watched the Sword from every angle. Straight on, the great machine was a delicate vertical shimmer—a taut line vibrating under some great pressure—and then the vibration would relax slightly, and the looming threat would suddenly vanish against the black of the nebula. But probes watching from one side or another saw an enormous ribbon of silk, perfectly round and possessing the illusion of stillness. Without features for an eye to follow, the mind couldn’t tell that the Sword was turning. And even with its enormous size, it looked remarkably insubstantial next to the Great Ship—like a child’s throwing hoop about to strike the indifferent face of a great wet stone.
The autodoc told her, “Relax,” and laced her shattered ribs with a healing agent. “And exhale now. Please.”
Mere blew out, wincing with the pain.
“Inhale now. Please.”
The pain diminished noticeably, or she was too distracted to notice.
Beneath the Sword, the newborn sea was churning.
Suddenly a narrow band of water developed a crease, fibers and gels and dams of woven hyperfiber forming a double wall that instantly began to pull apart. It was a reflex, she imagined. The polypond was fully prepared to die, yet its own flesh instinctively fought to save itself for another few minutes. Spending vast sums of energy and concentration, the entity dug a deep valley in its own flesh, exposing the original hull of the ship. For an instant, Mere could see the once-flooded telescopes, crushed by currents and the pressure, and the slick gray-white face of the deep, utterly useless armor. Then the Sword plunged into the breach, and for a long amazing instant, it hovered.
Rockets were firing at the hub, tweaking the Sword’s angle one last time. Then they abruptly stopped firing, some point of perfection achieved. Like a woman pulling a dagger into her own chest, the ship’s gravity yanked at the blade, and a scorching white light filled the screen.
A gentle tremor passed through Mere.
Was it the impact, or a personal nervous flinch?
“Do not move,” the autodoc advised. Then with a different voice, it assured her, “You will survive, darling, and so will the rest of us.”
Mere didn’t believe the words, but she couldn’t help but embrace the sentiment. She watched the screen, and the machine watched, too, with its extra eyes, and after a while, one of them said, “Astonishing.”
The word was inadequate, but every word would be. With each second, one hundred tiny black holes swept through the strongest matter known, gouging and cutting and setting the wreckage into churning motion, the quasi fluid rising into the sharp edge of the blade itself, feeling the carefully sculpted charge that grabbed hold of it and flung it outward. The jet formed a single stream, white and intense, and ethereal, and lovely in a horrible fashion. Tens of kilometers of hyperfiber were swiftly sliced away and left useless, and as the Sword cut deeper, it slowed its descent again. Rockets fired and fired harder, and the
blade held its pace, and some critical point was achieved. Achieved, and obvious. Suddenly the white stream of plasmas was tainted with traces of yellow and amber, then a vivid burst of deep red. The black holes were burrowing through granite and basalt, and into atmospheres and water, too.
The autodoc had stopped working. Every glass eye was focused on images still thousands of kilometers removed from this place, and the spider-thin hands held delicate instruments up high, and a voice that could never sound anything but utterly confident asked, “What will we do? What will the captains do? How will Washen defeat this thing?”
A distinct, undeniable vibration caused the chamber to shake.
“She’ll destroy the Sword,” Mere offered. “Or knock it free and outrace it. I would guess.”
Neither spoke for a moment.
Then with a vaguely skeptical tone, the machine asked, “Is any of that possible?”
And then it dismissed its own question. “Every illness has its cure,” it declared. “How can I believe anything else?”
FIVE MINUTES MORE.
The tremors grew worse by the moment, insistent, then rough, then the roughest blows were punctuated with hard, sharp rumblings. Great explosions and little collapses sent vibrations traveling through the meat of the ship, many of them skimming along the base of the hull, arriving at Port Gwenth along with a growling groan that was felt more than it was heard.
Mere sat alone. Her frail little body had been patched as far as possible, and the confident yet terrified machine had hurried off, giving the excuse, “I have other patients who need me more.” Which was fine. Was best. When hadn’t Mere preferred solitude? But even as she told herself
she was fine, a new voice found her. Soft and prickly, it said, “Hello,” then, “I was looking for you.” And Mere couldn’t help but feel genuine relief, turning in her seat, a hundred little aches meaning nothing and the sight of a human face—even this human’s face—winning a small but cherished joy out of her.
“Hello,” he said again, the pale yellow eyes growing larger. “My name—”
“O’Layle,” she interrupted.
He hesitated. For a moment, he glanced at the images on the long wall, and then he forced himself to step closer, asking, “Have we met?”
“Never,” she promised. Then she looked straight ahead again, studying the endless cutting and the vivid colors streaming out of the wound now. “But I studied you and your transmissions from the Blue World—”
“Oh, you’re the one they sent into the Inkwell. In secret.”
She nodded, not looking at him now.
“That’s why we’re in quarantine together,” he continued. “I heard about you. A little while ago, one of the captains explained … that the polypond spat you back at us …”
Already Mere was growing tired of this man.
“We’re much the same,” O’Layle continued, stepping close to her. Staring at the images of carnage, he said with a quiet, awed voice, “Both of us lived with her. As part of her.”
In a fashion, she thought.
Then he knelt, altogether too close. He insisted in pushing his face beside hers, remarking, “Both of us have served the alien. Each in our own way, naturally.”
Somewhere along the narrow lip of the Sword, an ocean was struck. Hydrogen was stripped of its electrons and thrown into space, a vivid white line marking the obliteration of billions of liters. Watching, Mere wished she were blind. Closing her eyes, she felt the ship shaking even harder
now. Then the voice beside her named an alien species, and with a low laugh, he asked, “Do you remember them?”
“The !eech?” Mere said, “Yes, I do.”
“You are sure?”
“I studied them. Before they came on board, I went to their world and lived with them—”
“Because that’s what you do. With difficult species, yes.” His voice was happy, almost giddy. “You don’t know me, but I have heard much, much, much about you.”
Shut up, she thought.
Then Mere opened her eyes, concentrating on the wall, on the deepening gouge being chiseled into the heart of the ship. How much longer before the Sword hit the core? Glancing at the new watch that filled her hand, she whispered, “Forty-two minutes.”
O’Layle didn’t hear her, or he simply didn’t care about the time that remained. What he needed to say was, “I knew them, too.”
“Who?”
Then he said the name again. He clicked his tongue in a clumsy fashion, and then said, “Eech,” afterwards. “!eech,” he told her. And with a delight that was boyish, pure and nearly sweet, he boasted, “They once hired me for a task. A very important job. This was aeons ago, of course. But I should have remembered. I guess they must have done something to my mind afterward … some kind of selective amnesia …”
“Why are you telling me this?” she blurted.
But O’Layle wouldn’t answer her directly. More than forty minutes remained until the ship and possibly all of Creation was obliterated, and he invested a full two minutes boasting about the sums of money that he had been given and how he had been fooled. “After I did my job, they convinced me that it was an inheritance,” he offered with a low laugh. “It was so much money that it took me a thousand years to spend it, and all that time, I couldn’t remember that I earned it. I lied even to myself, telling others that it was a gift from a dead old friend—”
“The !eech went extinct,” Mere interrupted.
O’Layle winked at her, nodding.
“On this ship, at least,” she said, struggling to recover the details for herself. “Thousands of years ago, they suddenly vanished.”
“Oh, I know all about that.”
The tone should have scared her, but her soul didn’t have room for any more fear. Mere shook her head, one hand physically shoving at the much larger man. Then with a cracking voice, she asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“They’ve been asking about it,” O’Layle said. “About the !eech. Asking me these sharp little questions. Prying at my head with fancy memory-enhancing tools. I truly hadn’t thought about that species in the last hundred centuries—it’s remarkable how much I had forgotten—but now it’s pretty much come back to me again.”
“What did you do for the !eech?”
He kept smiling. “They needed someone to help. You see, they had taken some sort of vote and decided … well, as you say … long ago, they suddenly became extinct …”
“You did that?” she spat.
He rolled his shoulders. Like an evil child, he said, “They were desperate. I remember that now.”
“You murdered the species?”
“If a species wishes to die,” O’Layle countered, “then it isn’t truly murder. Now is it?”
With both hands, she shoved at him. But the man refused to move, gazing at her with a look of pride and growing consternation. Finally, with a wounded voice, he asked, “What kind of monster do you think I am?”
Even as the ship fell apart around them, he had to tell her, “I didn’t have to kill any of them. I just had to make them seem dead to the universe. You see? That’s what I’m trying to explain.”