Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (49 page)

As Null Boundary passed beyond the ring’s grip, the crushing pressure vanished, leaving only the relatively mild push of the ship’s continuing acceleration. “By the Unknown God,” Clemantine whispered again, shifting far enough to the side that Lot could peel himself free of the wall.

“And damn all the Chenzeme,” Kona added.

Lot rubbed at his arms. His muscles felt numb, indicating his medical Makers had gone to work on the radiation damage. He caught sight of the aft image wall.

Behind them, the swan burster still rotated from zero to one against the gleaming background of the blue-green Well. But its shimmering silver surface had been burned to volcanic red—a red-rimmed eye slowly closing over a plain of twisted darkness. Lot watched it, feeling himself set loose, adrift in the core as Null Boundary ceased to accelerate.

I
N NATURE, THERE WERE SO MANY STRATEGIES
for survival. The mitochondrial analog was only one, yet through the fusion of Chenzeme and human it had given rise to Lot, and Nikko, and even Sypaon, though for her it had failed. Though the ring still existed—its charred hoop still enclosing an inexplicable circle of twisted space-time—the Chenzeme cells that had been its mind and motivation were gone, and Sypaon was gone with them. The burster was a dead artifact, shining only dully with reflected light.

Why
Sypaon had to die was still not clear to Lot. But perhaps there never were any real reasons.
Survivors survived
. And who could predict what combinations of traits would slide past the twin filters of rogue chance, and dire necessity?

Lot wasn’t at all sure of his own success. He didn’t even know how success should be measured amid the endless chain of disasters that marked the progress of life. Maybe success never could be measured except in the transcendent power of a moment, the grace of an hour, or a day, short spans of hallowed time like brief poems, sparkling gems set in the flowing matter of space-time.
There is no finish line.
Only a collection of small victories, and the choice to go on. Choice was a privilege not shared by the Well or the Chenzeme marauders—

—and perhaps not even by the magnificently unbalanced human inhabitants of the frontier. Free will might be only an illusion generated by the unseen selective events within the human subconscious. But Lot chose to believe it was not. It seemed the ado thing to do.

EPILOGUE

R
ADIATION HAD DAMAGED THE FARSIDE OF THE
W
ELL
. There’d been a limited defensive reaction there, but it hadn’t spread to the city. The ados seemed chastened by the swan burster’s demise. The exodus to the planet had stopped. Negotiations had started. Kona conceded that they might tap the planet’s resources after all, if they went about it carefully. He said this as Null Boundary carried them ever farther from the city.

The ship’s solenoids had been damaged during its sprint through the nebula. Nikko had chosen to conserve his limited fuel reserves. Null Boundary coasted now, on a trajectory that would eventually carry it out of the system, while packs of repair Makers set about the task of reconstruction.

Lot asked permission to stay. He didn’t see that anyone had a choice about it, but it seemed polite to ask. Nikko shrugged. “If you want to take the chance.” With the ship’s insulation gone, the outer halls were exposed to a constant sleet of hard radiation. So Nikko promised to convert sections of the cold-storage facilities into housing.

Kona seemed satisfied with the arrangements. He extended a hand to Lot. “You’re free now. For a while.” Lot clasped his hand, though he couldn’t make sense of Kona’s bittersweet mood. “I wish you luck, son. And stealth. There are still Chenzeme weapons out there.”

Lot’s confusion must have shown on his face.

“We’re going back,” Kona explained gently. “Null Boundary has the facilities to generate the code.”

“
Sooth
.” Lot nodded in understanding. Kona’s atrium could assemble a copy of his persona and translate it to electromagnetic code. Lot knew it was possible for Kona to do the same thing with his physical structure. Kona, Clemantine and Urban could return to Silk on a data stream that would be preserved in storage until new physical copies could be prepared. But only information would be transferred. The matter that had formed itself into the man before him would not go anywhere. “You’ll have to stay here too,” Lot pointed out.

Kona shook his head. “I’ve always had an aversion to a bifurcate existence. With only this one version of myself, I’ve already been at the root of too many disasters.”

Lot nodded. Then he looked to Urban and Clemantine. “And you?”

Clemantine grinned. “Those charismata are wonderfully persuasive things.” Lot didn’t believe her for a moment. “I’m going back with Kona, son. But I’m also staying here—if Nikko will have me.”

Nikko’s image shrugged, as if it meant nothing to him—though Lot could tell that wasn’t true. Nikko had been alone for a long time.

Urban shifted uneasily. Lot could taste his anxiety, and guessed what was coming. But for once he guessed wrong. Urban stunned them all when he announced: “Daddy, I’m not going back at all.”

Kona’s shock was a palpable rain against Lot’s skin.

“There’s no place for me in the city,” Urban said defensively. “You know it.”

“We have the planet now.”

“That’s not enough.”

The argument went on for over an hour, but in the end it made no difference. Their parting was bitter, and Lot held himself to blame, though Clemantine assured him he was not.

Several days after Kona had gone, Nikko startled them by appearing in physical form. He announced that most of the repair work on the coils had been done, and he invited them to walk the hull with him.

Lot was surprised to learn that Nikko required no skin suit: his scaled hide kept him intact under vacuum. The short membranous cloak that grew on his shoulders displayed its purpose by rolling up over his nose and mouth, where it served as an organ of respiration.

They emerged through a small lock onto what was now the outer hull. This had been an inner wall before Nikko’s assault on the swan burster. It had the look of a virgin surface, bearing none of Null Boundary’s fabled scars.

Spurning a safety line, Nikko set out first, skating from handhold to handhold on his long prehensile toes. There was no rotation to contend with. Still, Lot preferred to be cautious. He anchored himself with a long tether secured to a handhold near the lock. Urban and Clemantine clipped to the same line; then they set out after Nikko.

Null Boundary still coasted within the nebula. It loomed behind them as a wispy, white presence. But they were nearing its edge. Ahead of them, beyond the sheltering span of the working ramscoop, the nebula was hardly visible. That was the direction called
swan
. There, a plethora of stars blazed against the dark molecular clouds that traced the inner edge of the galaxy’s Orion Arm.

“Turn around,” Nikko said. He spoke through his atrium, his voice arriving over the skin suit’s comm-system.

Lot had almost caught up with him by this time. He anchored himself with a second tether, then pushed gently at the hull, so that he rose in a slow ascent above the plane of the ship. Urban and Clemantine had fallen several yards behind him. He could see them, silhouetted against the nebula.

“
Now
,” Nikko said. In magnificent silence, a blue fire stabbed from Null Boundary’s distant stern, a fusion torch that sliced ruthlessly through the filmy nebula, burning dust, and the history bound up in it.

For a while they watched in silence. Their acceleration was almost too small to notice at first, but gradually it began to mount. Finally, Urban’s voice came doubtfully over the comm. “I don’t understand. The magnetic coils are sweeping a huge path through the nebula, and the jets are vaporizing even more material. Why do the governors tolerate that level of damage?”

Lot frowned. He’d never thought about it in quite this way before, but the nebula must be an almost irresistible target to a ramship. With an abundance of raw materials ready to harvest, and hydrogen for fuel, what ship could resist an investigation? He’d always seen the nebula as defensive, but it could also be interpreted as a lure.

“Probably, the Well recognizes scales of disaster,” Clemantine mused. “The nebula’s bigger and simpler than the planet, so it takes more damage to solicit a reaction.”

Lot shook his head, unsatisfied with that suggestion. “The best way to defend the Well would be to simply disassemble any approaching ship. Break it down to dust.”

“You couldn’t do that soon enough with anything moving at relativistic velocities,” Urban said.

Nikko chuckled darkly. “Anything moving at relativistic velocities would burn itself up in micro-collisions on the system’s edge.”

Lot squinted at the milky haze behind the ship. “So maybe this is a sundew.”

“What?” Urban asked.

Lot’s hand swept in an expansive gesture. “Like a sundew attracts flies by offering nectar, the nebula attracts ships.”

“A sundew eats flies. The nebula doesn’t eat ships.”

“But it captured the ring.”

“One ship in thirty million years.”

Clemantine added her agreement. “Most Chenzeme weapons attack on a hyperbolic orbit. Sypaon’s ring was probably the exception, culled because it assumed a circular orbit before attacking. Anyway, Nesseleth and Null Boundary were both able to leave the system.”

“And they both returned.”

“For their own reasons.”

Lot nodded in grudging agreement. “Sooth.”

Still, there was something tantalizing in this image. . . .

His eyes widened, as insight flooded him. “It’s infesting them!” He turned around to look at Nikko. “The Well is infesting the Chenzeme weaponry—and not just those weapons that come through the nebula.” He recalled his experience with Sypaon, when she showed him the workings of the ring, and let him feel the ecstatic mingling of alien cells in a multiplex information dump as the robotic weapons met one another in the void. “The dust could attack any information system. Infest it with Well protocols. When the weapon meets its own kind in the void, the information is spread—and spread again at the next meeting, and the next.”

Urban sounded unconvinced. “But the Chenzeme must have developed defenses against viral pirates.”

“I know I have,” Nikko said in a cynical voice.

Lot countered that: “You’re not Chenzeme.”

For some reason, Nikko found that funny. He laughed, while a blush warmed Lot’s cheeks. Lot turned back toward the nebula. Still, he was determined to make his point. “Think about it,” he urged. “Evolution runs at a fast pace in the Well. Variation is forced; clades are blended. Keys capable of corrupting the Chenzeme system have already evolved, and they continue to evolve.”

“But the Chenzeme are still out there,” Nikko pointed out coolly.

“Or their weapons anyway.” It was an important distinction.

“Right,” Urban agreed. “They’re here . . . in the Chenzeme intersection.”

“Meaning, not in the Hallowed Vasties?” Clemantine asked.

Lot could see bright blue reflections from the fusion torch as Urban turned around. “Yeah. So maybe we live on a border, where the Well is taming the Chenzeme threat.”

Cautiously, Lot nodded. “That’s what Jupiter believed.” He hesitated, remembering. Jupiter had said the Well belonged to the peacemakers. “Maybe he was right.” It pleased him to think Jupiter had seen that truth, even if others eluded him. He’d wanted to find shelter, a sanctuary from the failures of the Hallowed Vasties and the lingering evil of the Chenzeme. He’d been
trying
. And maybe that wasn’t enough excuse for what had happened, but it was better than nothing.

Clemantine had resumed her crawl across the hull. “New populations of weaponry must still be coming into this area, from some other direction,” she said.

“It could be,” Urban said. There was a rising excitement in his voice. “Do you think they’re still out there? Nikko?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jupiter said the war was over,” Lot added.

“But somebody modified the cult virus to work on us.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe!” Urban snorted. “You believe it.”

“Sooth,” Lot admitted.
A gift from the void
. “But we don’t know the direction, or how far.”

“
Far
,” Nikko whispered.

Lot turned again to peer at him, feeling a chill of anticipation on his spine. Nikko hovered above the plane of the ship, a black, almost human shape marked by random blue highlights. “You’ve been to look?” Lot asked.

“I set out once.” By the way he said it, Lot knew he had not gotten far.

“We’re a frontier people,” Urban said. “It doesn’t matter how far we go, because we don’t ever come back. Once we cross the void, we’re gone.”

“That’s true,” Clemantine said softly. She settled on the hull near Lot. “Nikko? What do you say? You’re not looking to return again to the Hallowed Vasties?”

Nikko laughed softly. “I think not. Not this time.”

Lot gazed once again at the clouds of dust and the luminous stars that lay ahead of them. A thousand years down the Orion Arm, the Hallowed Vasties would fade to less than a legend. “Do you suppose anybody’s still ahead of us?” he asked.

“I hope not,” Urban said, with a feral note to his voice that set Lot’s heart beating faster. “More than anything, fury, I hope we’re the first ones standing on this shore.”