“It wishes to erase the information you have brought back,” the raccoon said serenely. Though its claws dug into his shoulder, he noticed.
“Damned determined,” Nigel said.
“It knows what is at stake.”
“Well, I don’t, and—” At that moment he saw a possibility.
“Nikka! Let’s go! To your goddamned Causality Engine.”
She looked at him in stark disbelief. He yanked on her arm. She stumbled after him, across the yard.
Snapped limbs from the orchard covered the white steel console. He tossed them aside with furious energy. “Got power stored?” he shouted against the roar.
She nodded, lips compressed. She pressed her wrist to the command slot, began sequencing. “Why?”
“Cauchy Horizon!” He pointed to the nearest wormhole mouth. It bristled with sparks, discharges sprouting like electric-blue hair.
“What? That’s a theoretical—”
“Does that look theoretical to you?” When the rapidly dodging wormhole apertures zoomed near each other, the air fried with orange energies.
Nigel pointed at the nearest wormhole opening, a foggy sphere that shot across the sky. “Push that one!”
She aimed the device. Sheets of numbers and graphics slid across the console face. “Where?”
“Toward the other—but no, wait!”
The mouths yawned, pulsed. The Grey Mech was below them but with the erratic paths they followed—it should be possible—
“There! Aim it up—and to the left.” He pointed wildly. The right geometry would occur only for a second.
A wormhole mouth screeched down the sky, shredding clouds and debris, tossing off spurts of orange.
Its twin followed, the other end of the unimaginably long corridor seeking to find itself. To close, to marry, to then contract into a singularity of event-space, intact to itself for a time beyond duration—
“Now—there. Quick.”
She fired the gravitational transducers. The pulse knocked them flat. Popped their eardrums, brought blood from nose and ears.
Nigel rolled, caught up against one of the ceramic cylinders. He looked up to see the nearest worm mouth rushing toward its other end. The air between them fractured, sparked, broke down. The net momentum took both wormhole apertures downward—toward the Grey Mech.
A sandpaper rasp, rising. Tendrils of shooting energy frayed between the two mouths.
And splitting the space between them, where the quantum foam began to erupt with spontaneous particles, the Grey Mech tried to flee.
Too slow. Far too slow.
THIRTY-ONE
A Wherewhen String
I attribute it to your hunting strategy,” the raccoon said.
They were sitting on the ruined front porch. A wrecked landscape smoked as far as the eye could see, cracking as it cooled.
“As I understand it, all evidence suggests that you hunted in groups, and were unafraid to take on quite sizable game, such as mastodons.” The raccoon smacked its lips appreciatively at the fish Angelina had given it, freshly defrosted. “Your method, though, was not to rely upon brave displays of courage.”
“Sounds insulting to me,” Benjamin put in.
“Not at all.” The raccoon looked startled, the first time Nigel had seen that expression. He was learning to read the supple meanings the creature could impart to the merest curl of its full black lips. “That was inventive.”
“How do you know?” Nigel asked. He was all soreness and fatigue, but did not want to so much as lie down until he understood what had happened here. Then he was going to sleep for the rest of his life, if not longer.
“I am of your phylum. I know the courses of evolution.” Scooter licked itself scrupulously. “Long ago, your species shouted and waved sticks and ran after your prey. Typical grazing animals spook easily, run well, then tire. They soon stop and go back to cropping grass.”
“Yech!” Angelina grimaced. “Nobody eats meat.”
The raccoon gave her a baleful glance. She hastily added, “Well, I don’t include fish.”
The raccoon went on. “Most carnivores who fail to make a catch on their first lunge also lose interest. They rest up a bit, and wait for another target to amble by. Your species did not. That promised the qualities we wished to harness. Alas, they were present in only a fraction of you, so we had to select just the right circumstances.” It regarded them all as though they were museum exhibits. “And individuals.”
“To do your dirty work?” Nikka said with a glint in her eye.
They were waiting. Inside, Ito’s body was cycling through the diagnostics that would see if he could be fully restored. They had gotten the needed tech from ruins beyond the next line of hills, a small fraction of the town still standing. Now there was time to sit and think.
Nikka’s mind was restless, awaiting news of whether her son would come back to her. And this confident raccoon irritated her quite a bit.
“Instead, your species would pursue the same prey to its next stop. Surprise it again. Run it until it outdistanced you. How those grazers must have hated you!” It cackled suddenly.
