“Why not just leave a bigger bomb?” Cermo said. “Kill us total.”
Toby spread his hands. “Maybe they thought they’d catch us.”
Killeen shook his head. “They master enormous energies. If they wanted to kill, they’d have done the job.”
“So why’d they want to catch us?” Cermo asked.
Toby said quickly, “And the explosion, maybe it was just to make us think we had gotten away, that we were okay.”
Killeen pursed his lips, still pacing tensely. “Mechs think we’re pretty dumb. Could be.”
“Something else, too,” Toby said, listening to Shibo. “That bomb spoke our kind of talk. Not this ancient lingo.”
Killeen stopped pacing and regarded his son with interest. “Yeasay—it didn’t rummage around among dialects. Something told it how we talk.”
“So . . . they’re coming to scoop us up?” Real fear edged Cermo’s words.
“Depends on what level mech we’re dealing with. The stupid rat-catcher type they used against us on Snowglade—”
“They’re not subtle enough,” Toby said. “But the Mantis . . .”
Killeen and Cermo exchanged a glance. The Mantis had already loomed into legend for Family Bishop, the most intelligent mech they had ever met. It had hounded them, using its elaborate electronic illusions. They had thought it was just a better killer, but the Mantis itself showed them, in a horrifying moment, how it used humans in its “works of art.”
“Y’know,” Toby mused, “Quath told me once that the mechs, they don’t send their best down to kick us around on the planets. They just use the dregs.”
Cermo bristled. “They send ’em, we kill ’em. Mechs big, mechs small, don’t matter.”
Killeen stared off into space, and Toby knew he was seeing again the long history of humiliations Family Bishop had suffered at the hands of mechs. Together they had witnessed human bodies used by mechs as biomachine parts. As lubricants. As decorations. As bloody, twisted chunks of what the Mantis thought was beautiful.
“Yeasay, Cermo—they could be coming to scoop us up,” Killeen said. “Or worse.”
“We got to run,” Cermo said.
“Yeasay.” Killeen turned to a wall screen. It spilled with swirls of brooding dark and smears of blazing luminescence. The plane of the galaxy, alive with deadly energies and shrouded histories.
“But where?”
SIX
The Song of Electrons
Toby stood on the hull and gazed out, through the gliding stellar majesty toward True Center. The entire galaxy spun about a single cloud-shrouded point. So much brimming brilliance, made to waltz by a hub of remorseless dark.
Already the ship was gaining momentum, cutting across shrouded dust lanes and bringing fresh splashes of light into view. Toby felt a smoldering anger at the mechs who were approaching on blue-white exhaust plumes, driving Argo to flee. They were relentless, riding their lances of scalding plasma, an age-old enemy that would hound down any remnant of humanity. They had been just a light-day away, hiding somewhere in the churning murk.
Even in this swirl of stars there was little chance to escape. Argo’s long-range scanners had picked up mech exhaust images coming from several directions—cutting off the easy orbits, the ones out and away from the Center.
So their trajectory was being pressed ever-inward. Toward the black hole that squatted at True Center. A trap.
Toby had listened to his Isaac Aspect consult even older, scratchy Aspects, and then go on about the huge dark star, but it all seemed so strange, so impossible. Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had been swept into it by the tides of gravity and dusty friction. Once, civilizations had thrived around those lost suns. As their parent stars were swept inward, to be baked and shredded and devoured, whole alien races had been forced to flee or die.
Isaac’s history lessons were pretty sparse about those distant times. Much was imagined, but little known. Some civilizations had escaped, Isaac said. They had made strange, metallic colonies that harvested the great energy resources here. Ahead of Argo lay such refuges. Cities of the center—alien, enormous, forbidding. Greater than Chandeliers, and far older.
He shook himself and turned to his task—coaxing Quath in for the Family Bishop Gathering. The bulky alien labored with the last walls of her intricate nest, stacking the bricks in a sheltering nook where two farm domes met.
“Come on, big-bug, it’s about to start.”
Quath hefted a thick slab without apparent effort. <It is your species’ ceremony. [untranslatable] I show respect by not attending.>
“It’s more like a brawl with rules. Anyway, the Cap’n wants you there to speak.”
<An honor I must decline, eater-of-vermin.>
“Look, dung-master, this is important.”
<More important for you to return inside.>
“Huh? Why?”
<Witness with both your hindbrain and forebrain—the song of electrons.>
Toby followed Quath’s double-jointed gesture. Now that he swept his gaze around, he picked out a soft, ivory glow all around Argo. It danced and shimmered, like a mist blown by an unseen wind. “Pretty. So what?”
<Those are high-energy electrons which strike our magnetic shields. As they are brushed aside, they emit their own small howls of outrage. Photons of dismay and discomfort.>
“Yeah, life’s tough. Still, so what?”
<We encounter many more such electrons now. There are multitudes, near the galactic core. Their radiations will soon make it unsafe for you to walk this hull.>
