The Greatship (55 page)

There was nothing to add after Peregrine’s laughable attempt to say, “!eech.”  Hawking fell into perfect silence, indistinguishable from countless other silences; and Peregrine responded with his own purposeful quiet.  He was sitting at one end of hanger, working with the latest data about hatches and general Polypond activity.  His friend stood near the raider ship.  Which was less animated, that sleeping machine or the alien?  Hours and even days might pass, and the creature wouldn’t move one antenna.  Yet Hawking claimed to never feel lonely or bored.  “A respectable mind always has fascinating tasks waiting in its neurons,” he would say, which was perhaps why his very odd species lacked the words to describe painful solitude or empty time.

The day’s hatches were distant and scarce.

Peregrine finally gave up the hunt.  He sat at the end of the diamond blister, feeling the cold of deep space while studying the ever-changing scenery below.  Clouds were gathering between their home nozzle and the next, the thinnest and lightest clouds shoved high above the others.  This happened on occasion, and it meant nothing.  But the result was a splotch of deep blackness, larger than a healthy continent and unpromising to the bare human eye.

Just to be sure, Peregrine played with infrared frequencies and flashes of laser light, making delicate measurements.  Something inside that blackness was different, he noticed.  Straight before him, something was beginning to happen, and that’s why he wasn’t particularly surprised when the clouds began to split, bleeding a strange golden light that was brighter than anything else in view.

Through his own telescope, he saw the vanguards of the rising hatch.

Moments later, on a shielded line, an AI expert contacted him.  With a navigational code and simple words, the machine changed the complexion of Peregrine’s day and week.

“This interests,” it said with a flat, desiccated voice.

Peregrine found himself with a worthy topic.  “I thought I was lying to that woman,” he told Hawking.  “About having intuitions, I mean.  But look at this hatch.  Look at the diversity.  And that’s without being able to see much of it yet.”  His heart was pounding, his voice quick and growing happy.  “I don’t know if anybody has seen, ever…a hatch as big and diverse as this one…”

Hawking did not move, but the hemispherical eyes absorbed the data in a few moments.  Then the complicated mouth of tendrils and rasping teeth made a series of little motions—motions that Peregrine had never seen before, and chose to ignore for the moment.

“I’m leaving,” the human announced.

Every raider with a working ship would be embarking now.

“It’s going to be a rich day,” he said, throwing himself into the first layer of his flight suit.

Finally, Hawking spoke.

“You are my friend,” said the alien, nothing about his voice out of the ordinary.  “And from all that is possible, I wish you the best.

Simplicity was the hallmark of a raider’s ship.   The hull was made from diamond scales bolstered with nanowhiskers, all laid across a flexible skeleton of salvaged hyperfiber.   Resting in its berth, Peregrine’s ship held a long, elegant shape reminiscent of the harpoons that populated ancient novels about fishermen and lost seas.  But that narrow body swelled when liquid hydrogen was pushed into the fuel tanks.  One inefficient fusion reactor fed a lone engine that was sloppy but powerful.  The launch felt like the endless slap of a monster’s paw, brutal enough to smash bone and pulverize the sternest living flesh.  But like every citizen, Peregrine was functionally immortal, blessed with repair mechanisms that could take the stew inside a flight suit and remake the man who had been sitting there.

His body died, and time leaped across a string of uneventful minutes.

Opening new eyes, Peregrine found himself coasting, climbing away from the Great Ship.  Six AIs of various temperaments and skills made up his crew.  In his absence, they had continued studying the available data.  One served as his pilot, and even when Peregrine reclaimed the helm, the machine waited at a nanosecond’s distance, ready to correct any glaring mistakes.

Inside any large hatch, bodies came in different shapes, different species.  The AI most familiar with mercantile matters pointed at the center of the hatch.  “These gull-wands match those we saw fifteen years ago.  Their wings had some good-grade hyperfiber, and nearly ten percent of the collected hearts were salvageable.”

Gull-wands had tiny fusion reactors in their chests.  One reactor was powerful enough to light and heat a modest home.

“How much could we make?” Peregrine asked.

An estimate was generated, followed by an impressed silence from every sentient entity.

But then Peregrine noticed a closer feature.  “Over here…is that some kind of cloud?”

“No,” was the best guess.

The mass was black along its surfaces, swirling in its interior, and through cracks that were tiny at any distance came glimmers of a fantastically bright blue-white light.

“Anything like it in the records?”

There was an optical similarity to clouds of tiny, extremely swift bodies observed only eight times in the past.

“In my past?”

“Not in your life, no,” one voice replied.  “During the city’s life, I mean.”

“Okay.  What were those bodies made of?”

That was unknown, since none had ever been captured.

“So pretend that’s what we’re seeing,” he said.  “Estimate the numbers in that single gathering.”

“The flock is enormous,” another AI reported.  “In the range of ten or eleven billion—“

“That’s what we want!” Peregrine exclaimed.

Skeptical whispers buzzed in his ears.

But the human pointed out, “Everyone else is going to be harvesting gull-wands.  Hearts and hyperfiber are going to be cheap for the next hundred years.  But if we find something new and special…even gathering up just a few of them…we could pocket several fortunes, and maybe even upgrade our ship…”

His crew had to like the sound of that.

But the pilot warned, “Reaching the target will entail burning a large portion of our reserves.”

“So do it now,” Peregrine ordered, releasing the helm.

And for the second time in a very brief while, his fine young body was crushed into an anonymous jelly.

There was no perfect consensus about what the Polypond was—undiminished foe, mad psyche divided against itself, or the spectacular carcass of a once great foe.  And in the same fashion, there were competing ideas about the place and purpose of the hatches.  Since the rising bodies had mouths and were often seen feeding, maybe they were a favorite means of pruning old tissues and reviving what remained.  Or they were infected with some new, improved genetics that had to be spread through the greater body.  Maybe they had a punishing function, retraining regions that their Polypond master judged too independent.  Unless of course hatches were exactly what they appeared to be:  Biological storms.  One or many species were enjoying a season of plenty, and working together, those countless bodies would rise into the highest atmosphere, spreading their precious seeds and spores as far as physically possible.

“Perhaps every answer is a little true,” Hawking liked to caution.  “Just as every answer is a little bit of lie, too.”

Flying far above the hatch, Peregrine thought of his odd friend.  But only briefly, and then he shoved the !eech out of his exceptionally busy mind.

“Projections,” he demanded.

His ship was still plunging, its hull pulled into a teardrop configuration, the skin superheated and his sensors half-blinded by the plasmatic envelope.  But his crew devised a simple picture showing him vectors and projections of a future that looked ready to end in the most miserable way.

“Our target is accelerating,” his pilot announced.  “I wish to abort before we collide with it.”

The black mass, smooth-faced and distinctly iridescent, was punching its way through a scattering of high clouds.  Some of those clouds were alive—vividly colored bodies as light as aerogel and easily shredded.  Other clouds were water stained gray and red with salts and iron, dead cells and other detritus pushed skyward by the mayhem.  Their target was tiny compared to the entire hatch, but it was already the tallest feature, and nothing like it had ever been seen before.  Raiders bound for distant hunting grounds were noticing it.  Even from two hundred kilometers overhead, the energies and wild violence were obvious.  And even from inside a cocoon of superheated gas, two human eyes could appreciate the beauty of so many frantic bodies doing whatever it was they were doing.

“I want to abort,” the pilot repeated.

Peregrine agreed.  “But find the best way to hold us here, in its path.  Can we do that?”

Instantly, the machine said, “Yes.  But braking and circling will exhaust our reserves, and there won’t be enough fuel for both cargo and the journey home.”

Peregrine had guessed as much.  “Let’s compromise,” he said.  “Brake and assume a gliding shape.  Where does that leave us?”

“Still dancing with the break-even point,” the pilot warned.

“So make some calls.”  Peregrine named a few smart competitors approaching from more distant berths.  “Pay them to wait above and share their spare fuel, when the time comes.”

The teardrop flipped over, its engine throwing out a spectacular fire.  Every raider knew:  Ships larger and more powerful than theirs could trigger retribution.  Was that an innate reflex or a Polypond strategy?  Nobody knew.  But Peregrine’s ship was as close to the maximum size allowed, and if his plume exceeded the usual limits, even for a moment, a giant laser would pop to the surface on the unreachable sea below, evaporating his ship and then his body, and finally, his very worried skull.

But the burn went unnoticed apparently.  Then the ship rested, pieces of its hull pulling away, forming dragonfly wings configured to work with the thickening winds.  Each time they passed through one of the monomolecular skins, Peregrine felt a shudder.  The vibrations worsened by the minute, growing violent and relentless, and after a point, numbing and nearly unnoticed.

Countless black bodies continued to rise.

At home, inside the city of refugees, an assortment of data sinks had survived from pre-war times.  Even the best of them were incomplete.  But inside the biological sections, Peregrine had found digitals of fish swimming in schools—a hypnotic set of images where tiny, almost mindless creatures managed to stay in formation, displaying grace and a singleness of purpose that never failed to astonish him.

This was the same, only infinitely more spectacular.

Those black bodies didn’t ride meat and fins, but used tiny rockets and stubby metal wings.  Perfect coordination had built a flawless hemisphere better than five hundred kilometers wide.  Peregrine’s best AI spotter singled out random bodies, carefully watching as they climbed to the outside edge of the school and then worked their way upwards, reaching the cloud’s apex before doing a curious roll, each shucking off its little wings before firing a larger rocket, then diving back out of sight through gaps too tiny to see from above.

“Identify one of them and see when it emerges again,” said Peregrine.

The spotter had already tried that, and failed.  The bodies were too similar, and there were too many of them.  But there was an easier, more elegant route.  With the help of distant telescopes, the AI took a thorough census of the cloud, and then it let itself feel the gentle but precise tug made by that combined gravity.  The precise size of the entire swarm could be measured, and with genuine astonishment, it admitted, “They are growing fewer, I think.”

“Fewer?”

“Every minute, a million bodies vanish.”

“Meaning what?” he asked.  “The cloud is shrinking?”

“It grows, but its citizens are scarcer.  And this has been happening from the outset, I would guess.”

The pilot was managing their long fall while the ship’s architect constantly adapted the shape and stiffness of wings, and the shape and color of the fuselage.  To the best of its ability, the raider ship was trying to vanish inside the Polypond’s enormous sky.

“Will any little guys be left when they reach us?” Peregrine asked.

Yes.  Billions still.

“But what happens to the others?  Where do they go?”

Data gave clues.  Neutrinos and the character of escaping light implied a fierce heat, x-rays and even gamma rays seeping free.  There was no way to be certain, but the black bodies could be simple machines—lead-doped hyperfiber shells wrapped around nuclear charges, for instance.  If those bombs were detonating, then the interior of that cloud was hell:  A spherical volume perhaps one hundred kilometers in diameter with an average temperature hotter than the guts of most suns.

What would anyone want with so much heat?

“The cloud is a weapon,” Peregrine muttered, feeling horrible and sure.  His first instinct was to glance at the rocket nozzle behind them, imagining the very worst:  A bubble of superheated plasmas was being woven here, ready to be flung up and out into space.  Like a child’s ball, it could be aimed for a target several thousand kilometers wide—the rocket nozzle—and after one soundless flash, the city would cease to be.

But how would the Polypond launch the bubble?

The AIs were scrambling for answers.  It was the ship’s architect that imagined the next nightmare.  What if the bubble wasn’t going to be thrown, but instead it was dropped?  If it was flung down onto the Great Ship’s hull…the backside of the Ship, where the hyperfiber was thinnest…could it punch a hole into the hallways and habitats below?

Probably not, the majority decided.

But Peregrine and the architect wouldn’t give up their nightmares.  Since the War ended, no one had seen energies approaching what was being seen today.  But of course the Polypond could have been patient since the war’s end, silently gathering resources for this one spectacular attack.

Both solutions were possible and awful, and both were wrong.

The black cloud was still fifty kilometers below, and simulations were furiously working, and that was when a third, even stranger answer appeared with a withering flash of blue-white light.

In a blink, the top of that shimmering black mass parted.

Evaporated.

And from inside that carefully sculpted furnace sprang a shape at once familiar and wrong—a sphere of badly stressed, heavily eroded hyperfiber that was just a few kilometers across but rising fast on a withering plume of exhaust.

Making its frantic bid to escape:  A starship.

“Reconfigure us now!” Peregrine shouted.  “Whatever it takes, get us out of its way!”