Drifting…
Swimming…
Darkness came…slow…slow.
Yet time ticked on.
In her blurred sensate swamp Quath felt a brush of cool air, like the plasma wind which stirs the banks of dust between suns. Watery images floated in her eyes. She oxidized sugars with nitric acid, splitting open her internal mucus pouches to hasten the mix. She strained—
With a gathering rush her boosters fired, yellow columns singing. A cold fierce joy burst in her.
She landed unsteadily. Noughts swarmed after her. She set herself with a cool certainty and aimed. Fired.
Forked staples cut into the Noughts. Clanking, rumbling, surging, she moved—and boosted again, firing as she flew.
The Noughts in their gray suits exploded when the staples caught them. Guts spilled on crushed rock.
A pleasant fever swept over Quath as they fell under her hail of staples, puny voices screaming, rasping for a last suck of air.
Quath pushed them back across the field. Their firing slowed, ceased. They fled. She swiveled and searched out the few gray dabs remaining. They cowered in their hiding holes, bleating in fear, little better than animals.
Each became a small detail that Quath settled with the quick sharp stutter of the stapling gun. Each ended with a little cry, as if what awaited were a surprise.
When she sliced the last one through, Quath stood alone, gasping, her mind fuzzed. She attached a hook and line to a Nought body which was still in one piece and hauled it up for a better view. In the absolute silence of the battlefield her driving servo scratched, demanding oil. Her joints trembled with strain. The Nought body turned on the hook. Quath plucked at the gray skin. Filmy, it tore away.
The gray suit shucked off, much the way this world would soon become a husk. The Nought slipped free.
At first Quath saw only the gangling appendages with their awkward, splayed ends. Two for walking, two for manipulations. The joints were slight pivots, surely not capable of withstanding much stress.
Yet as Quath studied the creature she saw how the wrinklings and knottings of its skin told how the thing lived. Patches of curdlings at the midjoints of the shorter pods, evidence of wear. A funguslike growth above and below the eyes, to cup warmth about the small brain. Another dark patch, lower, to shelter a tangle of equipment.
Quath traced the fine pattern of fleece that wove about the body, following what she could see were flow lines water would make as the thing swam. A beautiful design. So this Nought was a swimmer, yet it could walk, after a fashion.
She clamped the skull and turned the spinal juncture until a click came. She sent a subsonic hum along the body. With care she lifted the skull. The skeleton came free, sliding up out of the meat.
To Quath this gesture brought into the air a fresh and wonderful vision. The chalky bones were not crude and heavy. They seemed delicately turned, fitting snugly together—thin where waste would slow the beast, strong where torques and forces found their axis.
The center held a finespun cage of calcium rods. Ribs. They blossomed into a brittle and precisely adjusted weave, a song of intricate design and wonderful order that Quath could sense trilling through the webbed intersections.
Yet this Nought-thing was a pest. It crawled on the ground and probably never noticed the stars. It had mastered at best the trifling resources of its pitiful little world. Its crude weapons were barely better than the teeth and hooves of dumb animals.
Quath spun the skeleton, marveling at it. Inside her a chorus swelled over her weak, doubting voices. She swept aside the bleak landscape of small-minded logic, the fears which had ruled her.
Here at last was the truth made manifest. Her faith returned.
Reason resonated here. A universe which spent such care on loathsome, useless Noughts surely could not make the whole drama
pointless by discarding it all, by letting blackness swallow everything, by letting Quath’jutt’kkal’thon ever finally fail,
fail and die.
PART THREE
A Matter of Momentum
ONE
Killeen smacked his gloved palm against the alien bulkhead. “Damn!”
Then he heard Jocelyn coming back and made himself take long, calming breaths. It was never a good idea to let an officer, even one as disciplined as Jocelyn, see the Cap’n in a pure, frustrated fit of anger.
“Nothing,” she reported. “Couldn’t see a damn thing happening anywhere in the ship.”
Killeen nodded. He had been certain the craft was completely dead to their commands, but they had to check every possibility. There was precious little else they could do.
He remembered that during the assault on the station he had regretted that, as Cap’n, he was no longer in the thick of things. Well, now his wish had been granted….
Their Flitter had been under way for over an hour. A steady throb of motors gave a slight acceleration toward the aft deck. In these skewed hexagonal compartments this was a particularly awkward orientation, intended for some odd mech purpose.
Jocelyn pulled herself deftly over a tangle of U-crosssection pipes that emerged from the floor and arced into the outer hull. Killeen peered into the mass of wires and mysterious electronic wedges that he had uncovered beneath a floor hatch. He called up his Aspects—Arthur for the electronics craftsmanship of the Arcology era, former Captain Ling for the starship lore of millennia earlier, and even Grey, aloof, sophisticated, so remote as to be nearly inaccessible. No matter who he summoned, none of the ancient personalities offered anything useful. Ling came the closest.
The external entity’s means of controlling this craft may be insidious…note how none of your precautions prevented Mantis from re-asserting itself, upon our arrival. Your mastery over Argo was illusory.
“You mean we never stood a chance,” Killeen said bitterly. “Never did, never will.”
Long ago, before my time, before Grey’s, before even the epoch of the great Chandeliers, it is said that our ancestors once challenged the mechs. Higher entities were forced to acknowledge our existence, rather than delegating our elimination to minuscule mechanisms such as you knew on Snowglade.
It was difficult for Killeen to picture a being like Mantis as “minuscule,” though Mantis itself had said that this was so. Killeen’ s mind could not encompass the heights Ling was implying—heights once assaulted by humanity before the long, grinding fall.
As for your present problem, there is a simple solution. A way to prevent the outside entity from controlling this craft.
“How’s that?”
