The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (191 page)

There was plenty of variety, too, ranging from trees that could have come direct from the forest of any H-congruous world, to the bizarre purple chimneylike tubes, as well as a host of alien species like the flexible globular lattice that Orion had landed in. Ozzie half expected to see a ma-hon growing amid the profusion of exotica.

Covered by the thin layer of loam was an equal diversity of polyp strata, dull ash-gray bands interlocked with stone-brown bulbs and creamy intestinal clusters, knobbly gentian ropes and open-ended maroon cones with puddles of dank water lying at their base. Blue-speckled hazel protrusions in the shape of button mushrooms were common, although they were all over two meters in diameter.

Johansson had been right to call these creations reefs, Ozzie thought. The trees, as they swiftly realized, lived in perfect symbiosis with the polyp. There was no deep layer of soil to support the roots; instead they were supplied with water and nutrients by the coral itself. In return it must slowly absorb the loam formed by their fallen, rotted leaves to regenerate itself.

There were glades, wide patches where no trees grew, filled with bright sunlight. Here the thin sandy soil sprouted a few tufts of grass, or straggly plants giving a curious impression of lifelessness amid the luxuriant growth of the jungle. Each time they came across such a feature they stayed close to the fringe of trees, as if they’d grown afraid of the empty sky.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where such uncertainty rose from. Anything could exist in the gas halo, descending on them without warning out of that infinite blue expanse.

“Do you think there are paths here?” Orion asked. “You said Johansson walked back to the Commonwealth from a reef.”

“There could be,” Ozzie admitted. Indeed he was carrying his rucksack in case they did wander onto the start of a path. He’d insisted on the boy and Tochee carrying their essentials as well. They had so little equipment and supplies left they simply couldn’t afford to lose any more. Deep down, he was hoping they really would start the long walk off the reef midway through one of these expeditions. That yearning was a direct reaction to his circumstances. All he was focusing on these days was simple survival. He’d been traveling for so long now he had grown terribly weary of it. The starship had surely flown to the Dyson Pair and returned by now. It was a depressing thought that the answer would be waiting for him when he returned home, a brief historical note within the unisphere.

When he did catch himself indulging in such wistful speculation he grew angry. After enduring so much he
deserved
to find the adult Silfen community.

“I know when we’re on a path these days,” Orion said. “I can feel it.”

“I believe I may share that awareness,” Tochee said. “There is no logic to the knowledge, which is difficult for me, but I sometimes find an inner certainty.”

Ozzie, who had possessed that particular trait for some time, kept quiet. The really good thing about getting home would be dropping Orion and Tochee off in a decent hotel and getting
the hell
away from their constant inane chatter.

The handheld array reported they were drawing near to the geometrical center of the reef; it was hard to define the exact point outside of an area a couple of hundred meters in diameter, although they were certainly halfway between the tips of both end spires. A good visual clue was in the size of the trees, which were getting a lot taller.
Why, though? Is the center the oldest part? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Nonetheless, their trunks were massive here, several meters across, leaving the ground directly beneath them arid and dusty. The surrounding polyp had cracked, with long dead flakes lifting up like jagged teeth around the bark. Overhead, the ceiling of branches and leaves was so dense that the light had reduced to a pale uniform gloaming.

“It’s lighter up ahead,” Orion said. A glare of sunlight was filtering past the trunks. They walked toward it, squinting after so long in the gloomy silence of the great trees.

The light came from a clearing over a kilometer wide. For once there was a blanket of greenery covering the ground, a plant as tenacious as ground eldar but with slim ankle-high jade-green leaves that rustled like rice paper. A fence of the purple polyp tubes formed a neat perimeter, towering above the thick trees, each one curving around high above them so their ends were aligned horizontally out across the reef.

“They’re chimneys!” Orion declared. White vapor was oozing out of each one, twirling away above the treetops. Ozzie recalled the odd riverlike ribbons of cloud they’d seen on their approach.

Orion immediately dropped down and pressed his ear to the ground.

“Friend Orion, what are you doing?” Tochee asked.

“Listening for the machines. There must be factories in the caves down there.”

“I do not detect any electrical or magnetic activity,” Tochee said.

“Calm down, man,” Ozzie said. “Think about this: Factories to make what?”

Orion gave him a puzzled look, then shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Okay, then. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“There is something in the middle of the clearing,” Tochee said.

Ozzie used his inserts to zoom in. A squat black pillar stood by itself in the middle of the rustling sea of leaves. “Now that’s more like it.”

Orion got there first, leaping on ahead, each giant step sending him gliding three or four meters through the air. Ozzie took more cautious steps, keeping a wary eye out on the sky above, while Tochee slithered along at a modest speed.

The pillar was three meters tall, standing on a broad patch of bluish polyp devoid of any soil or plants A ring of symbols had been engraved halfway up, made from long thin strokes curving at all angles, with several orbital dots. All the grooves and indentations had been filled with a clear crystal. Ozzie scanned them with the handheld array, and whistled at the result. “Diamond. That’s one mother of an expensive anticorrosion application.”

“What kind of runes are they?” Orion asked. The symbols bore a slight similarity to ideograms, but not in any human language. “Is it like a signpost for paths?”

“I don’t have any reference,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Tochee?”

“I regret not.”

Ozzie began to scan the ground, which was solid enough. None of his sensors could detect any kind of cavity beneath the pillar. Nor was there any electrical activity, no circuits buried just below the surface. He gave the pillar an aggravated look as an excited Orion hurried around it, the boy’s eager fingers tracing the lines on all the symbols. Then Ozzie looked back across the open expanse of the glade, an unwelcome conclusion dawning in his mind.

“Shit!” Ozzie spat brutally. “Shit shit shit.” He aimed a kick at the base of the pillar. It hurt his toe, so he kicked it again, harder. “Ouch!” Kick with the other foot. “I do not fucking believe this, man.” All the frustration, all the rage that had been building inside him, was rushing out; vented on this one simple artifact. He hated it for what it was, everything it represented.

“What’s wrong, Ozzie?” Orion asked quietly. The boy was giving him an apprehensive glance.

“What’s fucking wrong? I’ll goddamn tell you what’s wrong.” He kicked the pillar again, not quite so hard this time. “I have spent months in the wilderness, eating crappy fruit when all I wanted was a decent steak and fries; actually, I don’t just want it, I
dream
of it. I’m walking around in rags like something out of the stone age. I haven’t had sex in, like, forever. I’ve been sober so long now my liver is feeling healthy. I’ve been flushed off an ocean in the biggest cosmic joke there ever was. But I put up with it, all this crap, because I know you—yes YOU—are watching and guiding me along, and manipulating the paths so that in the end we’ll meet up. But, oh no, you’ve got to have one more go at making me feel humble, one more time making me the butt of your stinking lame-ass, so-called humor.” He thrust a finger out toward the pillar. “I do
not
think this is funny! You got that? Are we clear on the meaning of NO, here?”

Orion gave the clearing a timid look.

“Friend Ozzie, who are you talking about? I can see no one else here but us.”

“It’s watching. Aren’t you?”

“Who?” Orion pleaded.

“The adult community. The real Silfen.”

“Are they?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Orion turned back to the pillar. “So what is this?”

Ozzie sent a long breath rattling out through clenched teeth as he tried to calm down. It was hard. If he didn’t let his anger burn, he knew he’d wind up curled up in a ball weeping in sheer frustration. “Nothing. The most stupid insignificant piece of nothing on the whole goddamn reef. I used to respect the dude who came up with the design for the gas halo, I mean it is like
impressive.
Now, I think they’re the most anally retentive morons in the whole galaxy. You want to know what this is? Why it’s so completely visible, standing here all by itself, with the sunlight shining on it like it’s some kind of celebrity? It’s the reef’s goddamn serial number, man.”

MorningLightMountain detected the approaching ships while they were still fifteen light-years distant. Twenty of them were approaching the staging post star at four light-years per hour, the fastest human ships it had observed so far. That was to be expected. They had no alternative but to send their best weapons against the staging post.

Part of its main thought routines noted that every time some part of itself encountered human starships, they always flew faster than the previous time. The rate at which humans developed and advanced their technology base was atypical of their society as a whole, which appeared so disorganized, with numerous instances of leadership class and administration class
corruption.
Study of the mined data and human personality animations it had enacted showed that certain small clusters of individuals were capable of high-level organization within specialized fields. During the frequent outbreak of wars while they were still confined to their original planet, the “weapon scientist” groups were always deferred to by the leadership class, and given disproportional resources to complete their tasks.

It decided the leadership class must have reverted to its old behavior pattern and allowed the weapon scientist class increased access to resources. That development would have to be watched carefully; humans with their wild imagination might be capable of producing very dangerous hazards at a strategic level rather than the tactical level that they had engaged at so far. Fortunately, MorningLightMountain still had weapons capable of devastating entire star systems, which it had so far held in reserve. With preparations for the second incursion almost complete, it was now ready to use them against Commonwealth star systems. This time there would be very little resistance from the humans. The radiation would kill them all off, while leaving their industry and buildings intact.

MorningLightMountain refined and analyzed its sensor data, learning what it could of the distortions generated by each ship, the nature of their energy manipulation process. It began to prepare its defenses, halting the flow of materiel and ships to the new twenty-three worlds. Seven hundred seventy-two wormhole generators on the three remaining original asteroids orbiting the interstellar wormhole began to adjust their configuration; as did the five hundred twenty generators so far completed on the four new asteroids it had established. Force fields were strengthened around all the settlements containing immotile groupings. Weapons installations were brought up to full readiness. Attack ships moved to their departure locations.

The human starships began to slow. They came to a halt twenty-five AUs distant from the interstellar wormhole, and emerged into real space. MorningLightMountain immediately opened twenty wormholes around each starship. Six hundred missiles were launched through each one, followed by forty ships. It then modified the wormholes again to try to prevent the starships from escaping within their own wormhole, a technique perfected during the first stage of its expansion into Commonwealth space.

As soon as the human starships powered down their faster than light drive systems, they became immensely difficult to detect. Missiles were unable to lock on to anything. The sensors on all MorningLightMountain’s ships struggled to pick up any radiation emission; radar was completely ineffectual. Only the wormholes themselves were able to provide some guidance, their distortion waves revealing faint echo traces, though even those were elusive, never giving the same return pattern twice. The entire assault floundered.

Then a new distortion point appeared. Another. Five more. Within twenty seconds, three hundred small human vehicles were approaching the interstellar wormhole at four light-years per hour. As MorningLightMountain had predicted, the humans were using the same attack process they had used so effectively above Anshun.

Thousands of immotile group clusters began modifying the energy structure of the asteroid-based wormholes, aligning their openings on the faster than light missiles, interfering with their own exotic energy structure. Erratic bursts of radiation erupted along the missiles flight path as the conflicting distortions clashed, their overlap leaking back into spacetime.