Heaven's War (44 page)

“Well, what would we be learning?” Rachel said.

“You’re eager for more unfounded speculation?” Zhao said, remembering the talk in the tunnel.

“Sure!”

“I assume,” Zhao said, “that these are races the Architects know.” He waved farther down the row of exhibits. “It may be that we’re looking at the Architects themselves.”

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “My dad told me a little about the ones he’d met, and these don’t look right.”

“Here’s a question,” Pav said, gesturing to Yvonne. “Why did your voices guide us here? So we know all these aliens if we run into them? It’s not like we can talk to them—”

“It’s more than that,” Yvonne said abruptly. “There is something these races all have in common—”

“Hey, what about this one?” Rachel said.

Zhao realized that Rachel had separated herself from the group. She was standing in front of a being far off to the side.

All of the half-dozen aliens Zhao had seen could be classified as strange, but this one was strange in a unique way. It looked a bit like a human-sized anteater, all legs and snout and spindly arms…but either wearing a garment composed of fractal elements, or—

That
was the unusual thing: This alien was naked! Zhao also realized that, approaching it, he saw no related planetary display.

His training in espionage had sensitized him to dangerous situations. Right now, all his internal alarms were sounding—

Rachel reached for the creature. “When does the image change…? Oh!” The image didn’t change; Rachel actually touched the face of what now appeared to be some kind of lifelike statue.

“Get away from there,” Yvonne said.

“Why?” Rachel said, turning back to her. “It’s not like it’s going to—”

It moved!

“Rachel!” Pav shouted. He shot toward her, swiftly moving her out of the anteater’s immediate reach.

The alien unfolded itself, head swiveling right and left, as if recording the positions of each human. To Zhao, it seemed to be measuring their distance and threat potential.

He wished for his Glock. He wished he carried something more weaponlike than an empty water bottle.

With the others, he backed away carefully. He allowed for the possibility that the alien was not hostile…but would take no chances. “Yvonne, what is this thing?”

“I’m getting the name ‘Long Legs,’ that’s all.”

“What does it do?” Rachel said.

“Nothing good,” Yvonne said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Pav snapped.

“All these other exhibits, the voices in my head just sort of drone on. This one…it’s like an alarm went off.”

As if to demonstrate its hostile nature, the Long Legs extended its arms, showing multifingered appendages, like fingers with nasty “claws.” With more speed than Zhao would have believed, it sidled toward the opening. As it did, the Long Legs sliced through the exhibit next to it, destroying it, and not seeming to care.

Now it blocked the exit. Then it began to close on them.

Cowboy rushed forward at this point, barking savagely. The Long Legs stopped, as if to recalibrate.

“Any ideas, anyone?” Zhao said.

“Upstairs!” Yvonne said. “Uh, this way!”

She waved them toward the darkest corner of the museum. Zhao realized there was a ramp back there. “Everyone, go!”

He pushed Rachel. Pav shouted, “Cowboy, come on!” The dog held its ground right to the moment when the Long Legs swiped at it, the tip of its claw grazing his fur. Cowboy yelped and retreated.

Zhao let Rachel, Pav, and Yvonne head up the ramp first. It wasn’t chivalry, but practicality: Yvonne was the only one of the four with any idea what lay upstairs.

And Zhao wanted another look at this Long Legs. Was it trying to grab them? Touch them? Kill them?

He almost regretted it. The alien charged directly toward him, one arm extending so far its claws missed him by only half a meter.

He made it up the ramp with a speed that was surely his personal best.

The second story was dark, no windows, filled with objects that might be machines or furniture, he couldn’t tell. “Keep going!” he shouted. He could hear the Long Legs chittering up the ramp a few steps behind him.

“Next ramp’s on the far side,” Yvonne said, leading the way.

Another story. Lighter here, as if the walls were translucent. Another collection of boxlike objects, like personal possessions placed in storage.

But the Long Legs was still in pursuit.

To the top.

They emerged on the roof of the museum, but a roof unlike any Zhao had ever seen. It wasn’t flat, for one thing, but rather bowed, as if the space underneath were a flattened dome. Nor were there any pipes, vents or power lines—no obvious infrastructure.

“It’s still coming!” Rachel said. She was hugging the dog, who looked as tired and frightened as the girl.

Pav had worked his way to the edge. “Can we jump?”

“Where to?” Zhao said. “Every other structure is higher! Or too far away!”

“How about down?” Rachel said. “Gravity is lower here, right?”

“Not enough, honey,” Yvonne said. “We’d be lucky to just break our legs.”

“That doesn’t leave us any options,” Pav said.

The Long Legs emerged. It was probably his imagination, but to Zhao the creature looked bigger.
It’s your senses telling you you’re going to be sliced and diced by something big and nasty.

Then it hit him. “Everyone, back up to the edge!” he said.

“What good will that do?” Yvonne said.

Zhao didn’t answer. He watched the Long Legs approach, searching for a weakness. “It’s got some of that plasm on it,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s helpful,” Pav said.

It wasn’t—yet. Maybe never.

“Spread out!” Zhao said, “as close to the edge as you can, as far apart as possible. Rachel, you and the dog, next to me!”

He was pleased that the others followed his suggestion. In moments they were arrayed across one side of the roof…the Long Legs would be able to reach only one at a time.

Zhao was first. He had positioned himself closest. “Come on, you ugly piece of shit…” The Long Legs was within three meters.

Then he said, “Rachel, the dog!”

Rachel let Cowboy loose. It charged the Long Legs from behind.

The alien swiveled its head and whipped both arms around to deal with the attack—

—giving Zhao the opening he needed to hit it from one side.

Knocking it off the roof.

“Way to go!” Yvonne shouted.

They looked down. The Long Legs lay in three distinct pieces. “Wow,” Pav said. “I bet he felt that.”

What Zhao felt was triumph. Ever since volunteering to go in search of Rachel, he had felt lost, out of place, and useless.

No longer.

As they watched, however, tiny bits of the three segments of the shattered Long Legs
began to crawl toward each other
. It was like watching a time-lapse movie of a building being built.

“What the fuck?” Pav said.

“It’s reassembling itself,” Zhao said, amazed.

“Well,” Rachel said, “let’s not stick around to watch.”

They headed for the ramp going down.

So Dash needed their help.

That was Zack’s takeaway from several hours of terrible sleep and intermittent conversation between Zack, Valya, and Dash, with a bit of help from Makali.

Quizzing Dash was the only useful activity available to them, especially as they were hampered by lack of oxygen. They had tried the Tik-Talk several times and failed to get any kind of response from the human habitat, which was no surprise. “They’re essentially walkie-talkie tech,” Scott said. “We’re way out of range, and even if we had another Tik-Talk close enough for a signal, the rocks here would probably kill it.”

“So it’s a paperweight,” Zack said.

“Until we get closer, yeah.” It was easy for Zack to get curt with Dale Scott, but in this case, his anger was triggered by worry about Rachel. Bad enough to have lost one parent for the second time…What must she be feeling, having her father lost somewhere on Keanu, out of touch?

Then there was Harley, not only worried about what had happened to Zack and what that might mean for the Houston-Bangalore group’s survival…but just having to answer all the questions about where Zack went.

And now their new alien friend was in trouble. He had a plan, however, which reduced itself, in Zack’s mind, to several one-word steps.

“Escape” was part one. Specifically, get out of this prison cell in the Sentry Beehive annex.

“Transit” was next. Get
through
the Sentry habitat.

The third was “Locate,” as in find the NEO’s control center or
a
control center. That was followed by “Reboot.”

“Why do we need to reboot anything?” Zack had asked.

For the next fifteen minutes, Dash recounted the failures of the Keanu system over the past many cycles. “I think he means a century,” Valya had said. She had been working to convert Sentry definitions of time and measure to figures humans could use.

Zack put the question directly to Dash. “How can you tell?”

“Terminal habitat loss,” it said, which sounded terrifying in its blandness. “Random generations,” whatever that meant, though Zack suspected it had to do with resurrections and Revenants. “Equipment failures.”

That was clear enough.

It had been difficult for Zack to conceive of the technology on display in Keanu—propulsion, the creation of environments, access to an entirely unknown form of universal information, the ability to manipulate that information.

The idea that it wasn’t working properly…yikes.

It added more urgency to a situation that was already quite urgent.

So, “Reboot.”

Then, the final step, which was even more disturbing. “War.”

“You mean, armed conflict?” Zack said, not really sure the term had been correct.

“The warship is infected,” Dash had said, clearly struggling with the right terms. “It must be disinfected in order to function properly.”

“Sounds more like fumigation than a war,” Zack had said to Valya. “What or who is the enemy?”

“Pillagers,” Dash said.

“Or Reivers,” Zack blurted. During their time together on Keanu, Megan—channeling the Architect—had mentioned “Reivers,” just the sort of vaguely Irish word she would have used for entities that could be pillagers or destroyers or wreckers.

Valya looked at him. “You know this term?”

He explained, then said, “Ask Dash who the Pillagers or Reivers are.”

“The Builders’ enemy,” was all Dash would say.

“Okay, I think that’s the best we can hope for,” Zack told Valya. “Is it my imagination, or is everything really slow with Dash?”

“I would imagine that translation at this level—even for human languages it requires tremendous bandwidth—creates a lag.”

“Sure,” Zack said, “if we were using our level of technology.” He nodded at Dash. “These people are centuries or millennia beyond us. And it’s not just speech. It’s
everything
. Movements, too.”

Makali had been busy fiddling with the black box from
Brahma
. Now she said, “It’s the problem of scale, one of the things we investigate in exobiology. Muscle response times and even the transmission of thought in beings of different sizes.”

“As in, ‘a brontosaurus would be slow to react’?” Zack remembered a statement like that from a comic book he had read when he was thirteen.

“Something like that.”

He thought it was exactly like that, especially based on his experiences with the even larger Architect…which had been, no fooling, really slow of foot.

“If you’re going to talk
about
Dash rather than
with
him,” Valya said, suddenly assuming the role of hall monitor, “shouldn’t we let him go about his business?”

“Sorry,” Zack said. He addressed the Sentry. “How does your connate DSZ relate to the Reivers?”

“Ally,” Dash said. It rose at that point, as if fatigued by the interrogation—or just dismissing further questions.

“‘Ally’ of which party? The Reivers or us?”

But Dash returned to its pool without answering.

“I think you offended him,” Valya said.

Zack wasn’t going to debate that with Valya. He turned to Makali instead. “Not a whole lot on which to base a plan of action.”