Heirs of Earth (15 page)

There was a wild, disorienting moment when she seemed to exist in two locations simultaneously: in the strange, semantically real but purely hypothetical spaces of the gifts and at the same time in an entirely different place. Sensory information bloomed in her mind, bringing her a flood of sights, sounds, and sensations. She felt as though she was expanding, inflating like a balloon, and for a moment the notion of bursting terrified her.

“Lucia?” Rob’s voice seemed to reach her through new channels now, and she opened her eyes to see the robot staring up at her its posture one of almost comical surprise. “Is that
you
?”

She took a step forward, her new body moving with perfect ease. She felt warm, physical,
complete.
Her “skin” felt the movement of air around her; the soles of her feet registered her weight and adjusted automatically to keep her balance, and the index and middle fingers of her left hand were crossed, just as they had been mentally.

She brought them up in front of her face, staring at the shimmering, transparent reality with something approximating awe and amusement. She was actually
inside
the I-suit! At her instruction, it had molded itself to take her form without requiring an actual body to do it. She was a thing of energy, or exotic matter, or woven energy, or whatever the hell it was the I-suits were made of. She found herself not caring about the details. All that mattered was that her mind had a home!

“It’s incredible,” said Rob. “How do I get one?”

No doubt, she thought, that was what everyone would ask. But she didn’t like the thought of throngs of people queuing up for their new bodies, especially when at the moment at least, she was the only one who knew how to operate the I-suit creator. She had other things to do—escapes to plan.

“I still don’t want anyone knowing just yet, Rob,” she said. “Let’s just wait until we’ve finished exploring, okay?”

“Come on, Lucia! This is too damned important
not
to tell anyone!”

She felt a pang of guilt for wanting to protect her privacy, but she couldn’t help it. “At least let me build you one first, and show you how it’s done. That way you can show the others yourself.”

She could sense his hesitation in the awkward stiffness of the robot. “That wouldn’t be right,” he said eventually. “There are people who should go ahead of me. Thor and the others—they should have had new bodies like this before they left.”

“They already have I-suits. And the Hatzises who stayed behind and all the others who tell us what to do—most of them have I-suits, too. It’s people like you and me who don’t have them, Rob.” She noted the revolutionary edge creeping into her words and forced herself to tone it down. “Let’s hold onto this just a little while longer, okay? I don’t want to feel like a circus freak when word gets out.”

His hesitation was longer this time. She thought he might actually agree. A superfluous pilot forgotten upon the arrival of the Spinners, his only raison d’etre now was to explore the mysteries of the gifts, and it must have been frustrating for him to have to do so via the clumsy medium of a telepresence robot, enduring slight communication lags and other inconveniences. How much easier, he must have been thinking, to actually
be
there, touching things with his own hands.

Whatever his answer was to be, though, she never got to hear it.

An earsplitting siren suddenly filled the halls of Spindle Four. Lucia in her new body and Rob in the robot both looked up in surprise.

“That’s the Starfish alarm!” Rob’s voice was filled with disbelief. “But they’re not due here for another day!”

“Then they’ve obviously come early.” Mortified at the thought of alien destroyers about to rain destruction down upon them, she had to force herself to think clearly. This wasn’t the time for panic. If she was going to survive, she would have to be cool and resourceful.

But what could she do? What resources did she really have to defend herself against such an enemy? She hadn’t worked on how to make or steal a hole ship yet, so she had no means of escaping from the system.

She mentally shucked off the defeatist thought. She wasn’t about to give up. Her head might have been on the chopping block, but she would not concede defeat until the ax itself had fallen. There
had
to be a way out of this!

The gifts
, she thought, wildly.
I still have them! There must be something they can do.

“Come on!” She grabbed the robot by a bundle of limbs and tugged it along after her. Her I-body ran smoothly and naturally, without tiring.

The instantaneous transfer point linking Spindle Four to the Hub wasn’t far from the Surgery, but she didn’t know how much time she had. For all she knew, the Starfish might already be on top of the gifts, snapping their skyhooks to drop the wreckage down upon Rasmussen’s surface. The clock of her doom was ticking, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

There has to be a way....

Lucia repeated the mantra in her head over and over as she ran, half expecting with each footfall for the world to crumble into ruins around her. She reached the door leading to the Hub with Rob’s robot still in tow, firing concerned questions at her, all of which she ignored. She plunged through the door, and within a heartbeat found herself in the Hull. Only then did it occur to her that she might have been leaping straight into a ruined spindle, and therefore to her death. But there wasn’t time to dwell on the morbid. She needed to act fast.

To do what, though?
she wondered. Looking around at the circle of doors, she realized she had no idea where to go next. There was nothing for her in the Library, the Science Hall, the Map Room, or the Lab, and the Surgery was about as useful as the Gallery. The Dry Dock was still empty—she ascertained this by reaching out with her I-body senses to touch the gifts, and realized instantly that no hole ship had arrived since last she’d checked—and the Hub itself was nothing more than a gateway. That left only one door.

“Lucia!” The telepresence robot struggled in her hands as the slight lag of the
Marcus Chown’s
transmitters caught up with its new location. “My God, Lucia! They’re—!”

With that, the robot went limp and silent. Far away, through her alien senses, she felt the
Marcus Chown
die, its engrams with it.

Fear struck her, then, deep and energizing. She’d never felt anything like it before. Adrenaline she knew she didn’t possess seemed to course through her new, electric body. Her thoughts flew at unprecedented rates. Whatever alien processor was now running her engram, it had considerably more power than anything UNESSPRO could have built. Time seemed to freeze as all the possibilities passed before her a second time, and death grew nearer by the nanosecond.

She faced the door that was her one remaining option. Black and peeling in places, it was a door she’d sent her mind through many times before, although she had never physically crossed its threshold.

She thought of shadows—the shadows that stirred in the deep places of the gifts, places even she had barely touched.

She asked herself where shadows might live, where one might go to join them.

She knew instantly what she had to do.

Abandoning the inert robot, she quickly made her way to the pitch-black door and reached out for the handle. It felt decidedly strange to see her hand moving out before her, barely visible apart from the faint gleaming of the waterlike surface.

A ghost before my time,
she thought bleakly as her hand gripped the handle.

Would there be anything for her when she stepped through? She could sense the malignant alien forces gathering, building up like a thunderhead, preparing to sweep her presence from the universe. But she couldn’t hesitate. For better or worse, she opened the door and plunged into the Dark Room.

There was nothing to greet her but a dark emptiness. She bodily threw herself deeper into the room, risking directions she had hitherto feared to travel. The blackness was an abyss, and its depths held things beyond her comprehension. Always before she had stayed near the room’s the entrance, wary of going too deep and never being able to find her way out again. But now it no longer mattered. Now she welcomed the unimaginable depths of the impossibly black void.

I’m here,
she called into the darkness. Dark shapes began to swirl around her, one moment like mist, the next like the coils of giant snakes. Deep in their heart she thought she detected eyes gleaming out at her.

The world around her shuddered violently as the Starfish destroyed one of the neighboring spindles. The shock wave rang along the superconducting cable connecting all the alien stations. The end had begun. Within moments, she knew, she would be staring into a void of a different kind altogether.

Can you hear me?
she called into the dark.
Can
anyone
hear me?

Silence.

Listen to me! It’s time to move on!

She felt despair, then, at the thought that her instincts had been wrong, that the strange illogic that had led her here had been as flawed—as human—as all the others who had attempted to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding the gifts.

Another shock wave rocked the spindle. She felt like weeping, but her new body didn’t have the capacity for that. She was shaken, rattled, gripped by pressures she couldn’t begin to fathom.

Help me!
she cried.

As the Starfish closed in on her refuge, alien weapons poised to erase her from the universe, a voice spoke to her out of the darkness:

“THIS IS THE FINAL GIFT WE BRING.”

Something dark and unfathomable thrust itself into her mind, and time stopped.

2.1.4

“Fifteen minutes.” Thor’s voice rang out in the cockpit

Sol glanced up, then returned to the task at hand, desperately searching for a way out of the fix they were in. At many times her normal clock rate, it seemed as though days had passed since Thor had given them their deadline. In that time, she and Alander had considered all manner of exotic possibilities. The radar ghosts were presumably some sort of seek-and-destroy countermeasure to prevent intruders from wandering freely through the cutter. That they were still functioning despite the centralized failure of the giant vessel wasn’t so far-fetched: the only way to regulate such a structure would be to allow some systems a measure of autonomy. The radar ghosts could be a localized chapter of a global system that staggered on while the cutter died around it. That could take days, perhaps even weeks. While there was still energy in the system—as was evidenced by the veins of molten metal roiling outside
Eledone—
many of its subsystems could still function.

Sol had no doubt that they were dealing with the bottom of the security chain. She was equally aware that, in order to complete their mission, they would have to find a way to the top of that chain, and that meant not only surviving this challenge but also using it to their advantage. Security wasn’t just about eliminating threats but gathering intelligence, as well. They had come bearing information that could benefit the Starfish; if they could find a way to communicate with the radar ghosts, then they might just be able to take that first step along that security chain. The trick, of course, was staying alive long enough to do that.

“What about neutrinos?” said Alander. “They’re hard to detect; they’d make a good security medium.”

“Good thinking,” said Sol.

Together they trawled through the data from the probe. While neutrino emissions weren’t something it had been programmed to note, its detectors did register a strong flux in the chamber on the other side of the breach. The exact source was hard to pin down, though. It could have been symptomatic of any number of natural processes. Still, it was something.

“
Eledone
, can you produce neutrinos on demand?” she asked the hole ship.

“I am able to modulate some of my internal processes to facilitate such a request.”

“How long would that take?”

“Approximately two hours.”

Sol shook her head in frustration. Even if they determined that neutrinos lay at the heart of the ghosts’ communication system, and if they decoded the transmissions and worked out how to convey the message they needed to get across,
Eledone
still couldn’t give them a transmitter until well after the deadline.

Alander obviously shared her frustration. “We might as well just hold hands and think happy thoughts at them for all this research is achieving.”

The levity provoked a pang of annoyance in her, but she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t really blame him. She herself had been fighting a sense of creeping despair for the last half hour. So far the mission had hardly been a success, and they still had such a long way to go.

“Okay, time’s up,” said Thor in a tone like a death knell. “What do we have? Gou Mang, you first.”

“There’s evidence of heavy camouflage in place around the ghosts as well as the things in the background,” said the android without preamble. “We did manage to tease a few details out of the data and came up with a better model of what the ghosts actually look like.” An image appeared in the screen behind Gou Mang. It showed a quicksilver shape oscillating between a lumpy sphere and a vicious, spiked ball. “The ghosts—and there
are
many of them, not just one jumping rapidly from place to place—appear to oscillate regularly between these two forms. We don’t know why, though. And the oscillations don’t appear to be related to the period of their jumping through unspace. We haven’t been able to determine if they have centralized intelligence, or if they’re just obeying simple flocking behaviors. That’s all.”

Thor looked to Axford. “Frank?”

“As far as the attacks go, we don’t have much data to go on,” he said. “The progress of the nanoagent through the probe does suggest a nanotechnological process, but without an actual sample we’re working blind. We don’t know what processes it uses to replicate, what might block it, or even what methods of attack it employs.
Eledone
has a number of antinano systems, but none of them helped the probe. It’d be a long shot going up against these things without more info.”