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He was dying. He could feel it… feel his mind slipping away now, like water through cupped but trembling fingers. The Naga was dying swiftly as
Katya
spun wildly through space, trailing bits of itself in an expanding cloud of destruction. The disintegration of his host hardware would end the program that called itself Dev Cameron.

Too, strangeness was tearing at what was left of rational thought. The alien’s mind. He tried to clear his thoughts. There was
something
he had to do, something of vital importance.…

Information.
He had to get information to… to himself. That didn’t make sense. He was
here.
Or…

He couldn’t remember… couldn’t remember—

No… he did remember. The horror… the alien horror of that mind, of what he’d seen there. He had to tell… someone… somehow.…

With virtually the last of his mental energy, Dev mustered control and will enough to focus on a last set of commands.

As his body disintegrated, Dev launched one final missile, flinging it on hard-driven magnetic fields toward the spinning Device.…

Dev Cameron died long before the missile reached its objective.

Chapter 10

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

—I
SAAC
B
ASHEVIS
S
INGER

C
.
E
. 1978

For moments only, »
DEVCAMERON
« savored the wonder that lay beyond the Device.

They’d detected the probe emerging from the strange space close beside the Device. At first, Dev had thought they were receiving anomalous readings of some sort… or that they were witnessing an entirely new type of ship coming through the gateway, for what was coming through was a ragged lump of matter, about a meter or a meter and a half long and massing only about a hundred kilograms. Then the lump began emitting its beacon, a bit of programmed radio chirping that said, essentially, that it needed help. It was a piece of Naga, its outer shell hardened to withstand vacuum, its core still fluid, and with complexity enough to pattern some small part of the entity »
DEVCAMERON
« had sent through less than thirty minutes before.

It took some time for
Sirghal
to intercept the object; DalRiss cityships were not designed with the idea of having them perform fine maneuvers, and the object had emerged from the Device with a speed of only a few kilometers per second, too slow to escape—or even orbit—the massive spinning Device. »
DEVCAMERON
« eventually had his hosts create another probe, one intelligent enough to operate on its own without his mind riding along to supervise, and sent it to gather in the drifting fragment. Back aboard
Sirghal,
then, »
DEVCAMERON
« reached out a mental connection and began downloading the memories stored there. In the space of seconds, he’d remembered for himself the glorious vistas at the Galaxy’s core, remembered the black holes and their attendant accretion disks, the stars, the clouds like vast, star-filled walls… and the Ring.

Wonder followed wonder then, in rapid-fire succession. The attack… the pain, my
God
the pain… the deliberate collision with a damaged alien vessel… the flood of thoughts as alien as those of a wild Naga but lacking some quality that made the Naga seem charmingly familiar by comparison. He wasn’t sure he could identify precisely the difference in character between the two—they were eerily similar in some ways—but he thought it might have to do with the flexibility, the adaptability of Naga thought.

These alien memories he’d glimpsed here were as rigid and as unyielding as nanolaticed diacarb. His initial thought, as he heard that voice, was that you could
talk
to a Naga, if you could get its attention in the first place, and give it something new to think about.

There would be no talking to these people.

He’d not yet had time to fully assimilate everything that was there when something, when
many
somethings, began coming through the Stargate.

Living machines. That much, at least, was clear about the intelligence that had built the Device.

“This time they seem to have taken notice of us,” a DalRiss voice said in »
DEVCAMERON’S
« mind.

“My God,” »
DEVCAMERON
« said, watching as the space between the DalRiss fleet and the Device turned mist-frosted with the sheer number of glittering craft appearing out of the gateway. “How many of them are there?”

“Unable to determine a precise number. They are appearing faster than our Perceivers can record them. The total number is on the order of ten to the seven.”

“Try to establish communication.” The Web used radio to coordinate their activities, among other forms of communication. He indicated the frequencies his alter-self had heard on the other side of the gate. “Use these channels.”

INTEGRATE. INTEGRATE. NEGATIVE INTEGRATION. PART OF THE WEB HAS REFUSED INTEGRATION. PART OF THE WEB HAS REFUSED DIRECTION AND HAS BECOME DANGEROUS. WEB CELL HAS BECOME CORRUPTED. ELIMINATE NONRESPONSIVE AND NONINTEGRATIVE WEB CELLS.…

He cut off the torrent of harsh, mechanical-sounding words, translated through the matrix of the Naga fragment recovered from the other side. Rigid? These people didn’t want to talk to anyone or anything that wasn’t part of their Web.

Or… was there a clue in that fragment of noncommunication?

Part of the Web has refused direction.…

“They attack…!”

Nightmare followed. This portion of the DalRiss fleet numbered some eighty cityships. An estimated fifty to eighty
million
machines were coming through the Stargate. Though there was no time to catalogue their types or study them in detail, »
DEVCAMERON’S
« impression was that they were all different, no machine quite like any other. The range in size was both enormous and bewildering. There were ships coming through the Stargate that were the size and mass of small moons, several hundred kilometers long, their surfaces bristling with literal forests of antennae and weapon arrays and less identifiable projections; the smallest of the ships scarcely registered on the DalRiss Perceiver enhancements, tiny things that massed no more than a handful of gossamer, driven along at accelerations of hundreds of Gs by intense beams of laser light projected by their larger brothers. The vast majority were in between the two extremes, a few tens or hundreds of meters long and massing a few hundred or a few thousand kilograms.

They attacked with devastating swiftness, power, and accuracy. Their weapons, almost as diverse as their shapes, included lasers and particle beams, missiles and hurled projectiles, nanotechnic disassembler clouds and a host of less easily identified destructive agents.

The lead elements of that mechanical horde carved through the DalRiss ships like a laser through soft, moist clay… or flesh, which was, after all, what they were. Five cityships, and the tens of thousands of DalRiss and the various Riss symbionts aboard them, died in the first second of combat, almost before anyone was aware of what was happening.

They fought back. The Naga fragment serving as nervous system for each of the huge living cityships had a small asteroid at its core to draw on—the source of the raw materials it used for its own growth, and for the growth and repair of its hosts. Slits opened up between the starfish arms; lumps of asteroidal rock, manipulated by intense magnetic fields, streaked across space with the unerring accuracy of an organic Naga computer, and the oncoming machine ships began dying one after another in spectacular miniature novae.

But at odds of a million to one…

Sirghal
had taken a dozen serious hits; a cloud of living machines, most gossamer-thin wisps driven by laser light, fell onto the DalRiss creature’s surface like the whirling snow-flakes of a wind-whipped blizzard, coating the ship-creature’s outer hide in layer upon layer of gray-white matter, molecule-sized machines that changed their order and their actions so quickly they defied analysis.

They were eating the ship’s outer hull, literally disassembling it bite by microscopic bite.…

The DalRiss hurled lumps of asteroidal material at the larger targets, destroying hundreds, even thousands… but there were too many of them for the entire DalRiss fleet to even make a dent in those oncoming hordes, and they had no weapons at all useful against the sticky, disassembling masses of programmed, molecule-sized machines that were beginning to coat each of the living ships. The battle, if that’s what such a one-sided slaughter could be called, lasted for all of three or four seconds, and then, one by one… then in fives and tens, the cityships began flickering from view, shifting out and away, vanishing as their Achievers put forth their wills and their lives and transported their charges across space.

»
DEVCAMERON
« felt the
Sirghal
gathering its organic energies. There was a lurching sensation, a whirling moment of confused impressions.…

They were alone, in a different point in space.

“Where are we?” »
DEVCAMERON
« asked.

“Someplace else.”

The white dwarfs and the Device were gone. In their place, a nebula unfolded transparent wings of blue and red and white across Heaven.

And the battle wasn’t over yet, for the machine gossamer-things still clung to parts of
Sirghal’
s surface, dismantling it like nanodisassemblers. Fortunately, with no other attackers to distract them, the DalRiss aboard could deal with the drifts of deadly molecules. The Naga fragment at the ship’s core extruded a portion of itself, flowing out and over the cityship’s surface, engulfing and absorbing the plague like an amoebic antibody devouring a mass of pathogenic bacteria.

By patterning the information recorded in those scraps of biomechanical matter, the Naga was able to add a bit more to the stores of data already being compiled on the Web… but not very much. The gossamer projectiles had known little, save their basic programming to coat and dismantle and destroy. Still, they possessed some identity. They were the Web.

As was everything else in the universe.

Shaken by the attack, shaken more by the emotion-laden images from his alter-self that he was still trying to assimilate and reconcile, »
DEVCAMERON
« struggled to understand the alien viewpoint. At its core, he thought, was a strangely shifted perception of self.

That concept of self interested »
DEVCAMERON
«, for it was a concept at the heart of the alien worldview of the Naga as well. Where the Naga held a sharply binary distinction of
self
and
not-self,
however, the Web perceived itself not as a part of the cosmos, but as the cosmos in its entirety. Everything, from the assembled multitude of other machines all working together in an invisible latticework of communications to the farthest, most distant star in the heavens, was a part of self.

Some parts of self, evidently, were less communicative or pliable or receptive to central direction than others, however, and had to be integrated—reintegrated, rather—into the whole.

It was, »
DEVCAMERON
« thought, an astonishingly egocentric viewpoint.

“What should we do now?” he asked the DalRiss around him. “Where is the rest of the fleet?”

“We had no prepared rendezvous,” was the answer, and »
DEVCAMERON
« felt an icy chill of dismay as he heard it. “We assumed that it would always be possible to coordinate the activities of our Achievers. Unfortunately, there was no time. Each of the cityships must have chosen a unique destination, as did
Sirghal.”

“Then… the fleet must be scattered across… what? How great a distance?”

“We estimate that we are now some nine hundred light years from the Device. The others would have jumped similar distances, but in similarly random directions.”

“Then the fleet is scattered across a volume of space almost two thousand light years across.” He thought about that a moment, and about what he knew of DalRiss psychology. He doubted that the individual cityships would continue their explorations separately. All would want to regroup, if for no other reason than to assemble and coordinate what they’d learned in the brief battle at the Stargate.

And
Dev Cameron
needed to talk again to humans.

The shift in his perception of himself was startling. He was no longer »
DEVCAMERON
«, the human-Naga-DalRiss hybrid of patterned memories and intricately self-programming self-awareness that had existed for decades in symbiosis with the DalRiss-Naga union of the cityship
Sirghal,
but Dev Cameron… a mind adrift in an alien body, but distinctly and uniquely himself. What was the difference? He wasn’t certain, though he thought the key was the odd split in perceptions of himself and his attitudes engendered by the duplication of himself before the probing of the Stargate.

His self-copy had not liked what it had seen of its original. Reassimilated, the copy did not fit as it should have. Attitudes had changed. Awareness of itself and its goals and its interpretation of its own memories had changed. This almost-duplicate continued to exist as a part of Dev’s being, an uncomfortable near-fit that jarred and jangled, like a squeal of feedback over an improperly adjusted sound system.

Coming to terms with himself would have to wait, however. More important was the Web’s perception of self, which, Dev was increasingly certain, could be a serious danger not only to the DalRiss fleet, but to the sphere of human-colonized space as well. The Web must have first evolved eons ago at or near the Galactic Core, but for eons they’d been spreading from world to world, from system to system, going farther and farther afield both in space and—astonishment!—in time. As he studied the Web’s perception of its surroundings, he realized that time meant far less to the machines than it did to organic life not because they were virtually immortal, but because the Stargates were gateways through time as well as space.