The metallovore prunes less efficient photovores. Its ancient codes, sharpened over time by natural selection, prefer the weak. Those who have slipped into unproductive orbits are easier to catch. It also prefers the savor of those who have allowed their receptor planes to tarnish with succulent trace elements, spewed up by the hot accretion disk below. The metallovore spots these by their mottled, dusky hue.
Each frying instant, millions of such small deaths shape the mechsphere.
Predators abound, and parasites. Here and there on the metallovore’s polished skin are limpets and barnacles. These lumps of orange-brown and soiled yellow feed on chance debris from the prey. They can lick at the passing winds of matter and light. They purge the metallovore of unwanted elements—wreckage and dust that can jam even the most robust mechanisms, given time.
All this intricacy floats on the pressure of photons. Light is the fluid here, spilling up from the blistering storms far below in the great grinding disk. This rich harvest supports the mechsphere that stretches for hundreds of cubic light-years, its sectors and spans like armatures of an unimaginable city.
All this, centered on a core of black oblivion, the dark font of vast wealth.
Inside the rim of the garish disk, oblivious to the weather here, whirls a curious blotchy distortion in the fabric of space and time. It is called by some the Wedge, for the way it is jammed in so close. Others term it the Labyrinth.
It seems to be a small refraction in the howling virulence. Sitting on the very brink of annihilation, it advertises its artificial insolence.
Yet it lives on. The mote orbits perpetually beside the most awful natural abyss in the galaxy: the Eater of All Things.
An Abyss of Time
Interior state: a place cloudless and smooth, without definition:
The mechanicals are converging, Nigel.
“You feel them?”
Clearly. They can now manifest themselves in magnetic vortices.
“Bloody dexterous, they are.”
I can feel them. Something bad is coming.
“Thanks for the warning, m’love. But I’ve got to bring the lad Toby up to speed, and it’ll take a while.”
There is nothing you could do for me anyway.
He smiled without mirth. “All too true.”
I will alert you if the energy densities change for the worse.
He nodded and the space without definition vanished.
He was back in a bare room, sitting opposite a young man, trying to frame the immense story that had led him to this moment.
—nothing you could do—
He remembered another time, long ago.
He and Carlos stood on a dry ridge of bare rock and looked out over a plain. This was not a world at all but a convoluted wraparound of space-time itself. Its sky curved overhead, a bowl of scrub desert.
Still, it felt like a place to live. A remarkable, alien-made refuge. Dirt, air, odd but acceptable plants.
They talked about finding a way to live here, in a hard, dry place twisted and alive in a way that rock was not.
Carlos had just made a good joke and Nigel laughed, relaxed and easy, and then Carlos plunged forward, his shoulder striking Nigel’s arm. Carlos went down with his head tilted back, as if he were looking up at the sky, a quizzical expression flickering as the head brushed by Nigel and down and hit face first on the baked dirt. Carlos had not lifted his hands to break the fall. He slid a foot as he struck.
The noise that had started it all was ugly. It seemed to condense out of the air, a soft thump like an ax sinking into a rotten stump.
As Carlos pitched forward something rose from his back, a geyser of skin and frothy blood. It spattered over the back of the tunic as the body smacked into the dirt. The thump, Nigel realized later, was the compact explosion of electromagnetic energy, targeted a few centimeters below the skin.
As Nigel dropped to lower his profile he got a good look at Carlos. One was enough. Then he ran, bent over, hearing the harsh following buzz of the electromagnetic pulse tapering away as he zigzagged behind some jagged boulders.
