“Of course not. That’s why we’re keeping them, mounted here, so someday, when we meet someone who can read them—”
“Yeasay, yeasay—but till then, they’re just puzzles, right?”
Toby shook off the skeptical twist of her mouth and stood for a long moment just staring at the tall, gray slabs and their strange curly writing. Cool, solemn. Lines like wriggling snakes. Why did they fill him with longing?
Besen was getting restless, so they went on to the Bridge. Slipping in was easy—a nod and a wink. Together they stood in the shadows, watching the screens for long hours.
Besik Bay. Mysterious, murky, like the slag from a monstrous furnace.
Somehow this cinder-black place orbited safely around the black hole. At times its orbit swung through the disk below, where it sucked in matter. A thicket of magnetic fields, coarse-woven like cloth, protected it. Then it broke free of the disk and soared above, slowly circling high above the fury. How it persisted, a dust ball in a skillet of slow-stirred liquid iron, no one knew.
Argo now prowled the inky recesses of the immense Besik cloud, awaiting the arrival of the mech ships. Their hull cooled. The ship’s lean metal sinews relaxed, shortening, sending loud strums and pops through the corridors. The air lost its prickly ozone smell. But the banks of grainy dust and gas could not protect against sophisticated sensors forever.
“How long you figure we got?” Besen whispered.
Toby shrugged, wanting to appear more casual than he was. One thing he had learned early as a boy—no point in loading up tension in your muscles. And no point in showing it even if you did. He casually rolled his shoulders, trying to let go of the tightness there. “Depends on what the mechs can see in here. We’ve got lots of tech designed to dodge and blind—but who knows what the mechs’ve got?”
“How come this cloud has been here so long?” Besen waved at the huge, dense ridges of murk. “How come the black hole doesn’t grab it?”
“Quath said something about it being artificial. A place to shelter ships, left here from ancient days.”
“But who’d take the trouble to build some dustball like this?”
As if in answer, silvery lightning arced from the dust bank ahead. Besen persisted, “And why?”
Toby shrugged again. She insisted, “We ought to find out.”
“Look, we’re rats living in the walls of this place. Ignorant vermin, to the mechs.”
“That’s no reason to stop learning.”
“Sure—but a smart rat pays attention to staying alive.”
Killeen stood at the center of the Bridge. Activity revolved around him with officers coming and going, dealing with the many strains on Argo’s systems. Toby knew his father’s skills were being tested to the limit, but what troubled him more was Killeen’s stiff, almost glazed look. He wished he could guess what was going on behind those flinty eyes.
And then such matters seemed soft and small and trivial, as the first mech ship burst into view. Boxy. Ribbed struts. Machined gray angles. It jetted straight out of a towering, gloomy mass—and began to turn toward Argo.
The Bridge stirred uneasily. The mech ship was under high magnification and Toby could not tell if it was even armed—until it launched a stubby missile at them.
Argo went on full alert. Wall screens displayed collision time estimates, defense options, maneuver possibilities. And then the missile was gone, evaporated by a defensive bolt from Argo. The Bridge crew cheered, but Killeen did not even smile. Toby found he was holding Besen’s hand tightly.
Other mech ships burst into view. They approached Argo on complex paths, designed to make it hard to shoot at more than one at a time. Even though Killeen ordered the ship to maximum acceleration, they drew nearer.
Long moments ticked by. The mechs did not fire. Officers on the Bridge speculated that the mech ships did not want to waste fire power on Argo’s defenses until they got overpoweringly close. But that made little sense, Toby thought, since the humans were so outnumbered.
Ships darted and swooped. They seemed eager to force Argo out of the cloud, down a long lane of cindery dust. Toby could feel Argo’s straining engines as a steady trembling in the bulkhead behind him. Killeen gave orders quietly, stone-faced.
Then something quick and glowing swept past Argo, coming into view as a brilliant white line, like a vibrant, moving scratch on the wall screens. The Bridge crew gasped. It was the Cosmic Circle, as the Myriapodia called it—and now Toby saw its true scale.
This close, the segment seemed straight. Toby called up his Isaac Aspect as the luminous line slowly drew away toward the mech ships. He had seen this hoop before, at the last world they visited, but he had never understood it. “What is that thing?”
I would have been happy to instruct you at any time, if you had only inquired—
“Come on, spill—and make it quick and simple.”
Very well, though you will miss much very interesting materiel. These were called “cosmic strings” by the ancients, though as you see they are really loops. My older, nested Faces do not resolve this oddity.
“What’re they for?”
They are not for anything—they are natural. They formed early in the universe, as compact folds in space-time. Like the wrinkles that form in the ice of a frozen pond. They are only a few atoms wide, but very long. Think of them as a natural resource, born of the Big Bang.
“A few atoms wide? Come on! This one blazes away like a star.”
That is because it passes through the strong magnetic fields here, which drives electric current through the string, lighting it up.
“I don’t get it,” Toby mind-whispered to his Aspect. “Must be hard to carry, even if it’s thin. Why haul it around?”
In many ways, the most useful of all tools is the knife. This is a blade the size of a world. Imagine what you can cut with it.
Toby did not have to imagine. He had seen it core a whole planet. Now the hoop sped toward the mech ships, escorted by the spiky-shaped ships of the Myriapodia. The hoop ebbed and flowed with latent energies.
Suddenly the Myriapodia released it and the great scythe shot forward. It wriggled and looped, so fast the eye could hardly follow. Quick knots formed, raced around the rim, and dispersed in flashes of amber and blue. The mechs tried to flee, to dodge.
Too slow. The vibrating hoop passed through them, snaking and looping to catch each ship as it sped by. After its passage, the mech ships looked the same, even under high mags. But then as Toby watched a mech ship began growing, getting longer. It had been cut in half. It was trying to hold itself together, using the supple, shiny metals mechs preferred.
They could not hold. The ship split in two, scattering fragments and exhaling a plume of orange gas. Shards spun away.
Toby thought of the strangeness of nature which left thin, glowing hoops, like a signature of whatever had made the whole universe. And how life taught itself to use the signatures, to its own ends.
