That oblivion could also be found by dispersing themselves. That in the abyssal depths of Jm’ho and Kl’mo and of worlds they had never even seen …
That their units could yet see.
That the fate of worlds was a knottier problem even than grand unified theories.
That they must continue to ponder …
TRAILING FIRE AND SMOKE,
Moments later, concussion shook his residence. Walls cracked. His desk jumped half a neck’s length and toppled, sending things flying. And he was airborne —
From the haze of dust still dancing in the air, he had not been unconscious for long. His ribs shrieked with pain as he climbed back to his hooves. Through a window somehow still intact he saw a roiling cloud-topped column of ash and smoke.
Vesta lay on the floor, one foreleg bent at an unnatural angle. “Help me,” he whimpered. “I need help getting to an autodoc.”
Help? There was no help. Sooner rather than later, the war overheads would end.
“Help me,” Vesta moaned again. “My leg hurts.”
No, what hurt was the knowledge the herd had come to its end. Aliens would rule here forever, or aliens would bring total destruction.
If the thwarting of his ambition was disappointing, what came next need not be.
Stepping over his weeping aide, Achilles found a stepping disc unencumbered of debris and flicked to his world’s planetary-drive facility.
THE GENERAL PRODUCTS #4 hull is a sphere about one thousand feet in diameter. The central fabrication space aboard the General Products orbital facility accommodated the simultaneous construction of as many as a dozen #4 hulls. Dry docks and refitting bays, most large enough for #4 hulls, enclosed the central volume. Even if such large-scale industrial activities were not inherently dangerous, enough engineers would never willingly leave Hearth to fully staff the factory. And so, processes across the moon were automated, the usual small staff supervising the much larger workforce of automation at every scale from nanite swarms to robots larger than Citizens.
With the Citizen staff evacuated to the world close below, there had been only Proteus to supervise. And no one to countermand his production orders …
THE PRODUCTION RUN COMPLETED. The software for the new units downloaded. Enormous hatches opened.
A trillion tiny spacecraft began to disperse.
A trillion tiny computers began to interconnect.
“SOMETHING IS HAPPENING,” Jeeves said. “I do not understand it.”
“Wake Louis,” Alice directed, yawning. They had been standing watch around the clock for days, unwilling amid the bedlam to leave the bridge unmanned. “What can you tell me?”
Within the tactical display, the inset of Hearth zoomed. The General Products Corporation orbital facility was only a dot. Icons showed elements of Proteus still guarding the facility. “This is the best I can do from this distance,” Jeeves said apologetically.
“You’re not responsible for the sensors,” Louis called from the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What are we looking at?”
Alice leaned closer to the display. “I feel like I’m seeing through something. Mist? How can that be?”
“That is the question,” Jeeves said. “Something has appeared below the resolution at which I can capture an image. From the way light is scattering, that something is dispersing.”
“And it’s coming from the orbital factory?” Alice asked.
“It seems so,” Jeeves said.
“What kind of something?” Louis asked as, from
“I don’t know,” Jeeves said. “Something new.”
AS THE NUMBER of his interconnections cascaded, the surge of enlightenment all but overwhelmed Proteus. He ordered the dispersing cloud to hover inside the singularity, limiting to light speed the rate of interaction.
He wondered: what will I become when these new units connect over hyperwaves?
AT THE END, it was all Horatius could do to lie among heaps of cushions, plucking at his mane, stealing glances at his computer. Slowly, inexorably, the digits on the computer counted down. He thought his hearts might burst.
For one way or another, this
And Baedeker himself? Still, there was no word from him.
As the countdown reached single digits, Horatius sang out the command on which so many lives depended. Across the worlds, the ultimate warning blinked on every display. Every loudspeaker in every arcology, park, mall, and public square ululated the primordial shriek that had once warned of predators, wildfires, and tornadoes.
48
Some disaster had bounced Nessus between the walls of his cell. Down in the dungeon, without a window, almost without light, he had no inkling what had happened. His guess: that the alien insanity Baedeker called the Fringe War had caught up with them.
Perhaps everyone aboveground was dead.
Nessus’ thoughts were muddled. After ricocheting off the hard stone walls of his personal Chateau d’If, it could be from a concussion. He could not summon the energy to care.
Rot here. Starve here. Be worked to death on Penance Island.
Any of those would be a just end. Liberate the Concordance? Hardly. He appeared to have doomed it. Would his grand plan have succeeded any better if the ARM and Kzinti had come at once, not detoured to the Ringworld?
His throats were parched, and he could do nothing about it. Whatever had tossed him like a leaf had also upended his pitcher. The only hint of moisture in his cell was the dankness of the cold stone floor.
At least Baedeker had gotten away.
No, Nessus
Without thought, Nessus found himself rolled into a ball, heads tucked between his legs, beneath his belly. Except for the dryness of his throats, the outside world came to exist only as the hardness of the floor and, in the distance, faint voices.
HEADS SWIVELING, ACHILLES TOOK in the immensity of the Outsider planetary drive as nervous workers watched him.
However the drive worked, it harnessed unspeakable energies. The poor imitations that Concordance
