structures from solid diamond. Other Nestbuilder swarms would arrive and occasionally occupy the new nests. There seemed no purpose to this activity, but for tens of thousands of years they had been host to a smaller, cleverer species known as the Slugs. Small communities of Slugs — anything up to a dozen — lived in warm, damp niches in a Nestbuilder’s intricately folded shell. They had long since learned how to control the host’s behaviour and exploit its subservient technology.
Irravel studied a Slug now, crawling out from under a lip of shell material.
The thing was a multicellular invertebrate not much larger than her fist; a bag of soft blue protoplasm, sprouting appendages only when they were needed. A slightly bipolar shadow near one end might have been its central nervous system, but there hardly seemed enough of it to trap sentience. There were no obvious sense or communicational organs, but a pulsing filament of blue slime reached back into the Nestbuilder’s fold. When the Slug spoke, it did so through the Nestbuilder: a rattle of chitin from the host’s mouthparts which approximated human language. A hovering jewel connected to the station’s lexical database did the rest, rendering the voice calmly feminine.
‘A personal matter? A vendetta? Then it’s true.’ The mouthparts clicked together in what humans presumed was the symbiotic creature’s laughter response. ‘You are who we suspected.’
‘She did tell you her name was Irravel, guy,’ Mirsky said, sipping black coffee with delicate movements of the exoskeletal frame she always wore in high gravity.
‘Amongst you chordates, the name is not so unusual now,’ the Slug reminded them. ‘But you do fit the description, Irravel.’
They were near one of the station’s vast picture windows, overlooking Aethra’s mighty, roiling cloud decks, fifty kilometres below. It was getting dark now and the stormplayers were preparing to start a show. Irravel saw two of their seeders descending into the clouds, robot craft tethered by a nearly invisible filament. The seeders would position the filament so that it bridged cloud layers with different static potentials; they’d then detach and return to Stormwatch, while the filament held itself in position by rippling along its length. For hundreds of kilometres around, other filaments would have been placed in carefully selected positions. They were electrically isolating now, but at the stormplayer’s discretion, each filament would flick over into a conductive state: a massive, choreographed lightning flash.
‘I never set out to become a legend,’ Irravel said. ‘Or a myth, for that matter.’
‘Yes. There are so many stories about you, Veda, that it might be simpler to assume you never existed.’
‘What makes you think otherwise?’
‘The fact that a chordate who could have been Markarian also passed this way, only a year or so ago.’ The Nestbuilder’s shell pigmentation flickered, briefly revealing a picture of Markarian’s ship.
‘So you sold weapons to him?’
‘That would be telling, wouldn’t it?’ The mouthparts clattered again. ‘You would have to answer a question of ours first.’
Outside, the opening flashes of the night’s performance gilded the horizon, like the first stirrings of a symphony. Aethra’s rings echoed the flashes, pale ghosts momentarily cleaving the sky.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘We Slugs are amongst the few intelligent starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy. During the war against intelligence, we avoided the Inhibitors by hiding ourselves amongst the mindless Nestbuilders.’
Irravel nodded. Slugs were one of the few alien species known to humanity that would even acknowledge the existence of the feared Inhibitors. Like humanity, they’d fought and beaten the revenants — at least for now.
‘The weaponry you seek enabled us to triumph — but even then only at colossal cost to our phylum. Now we are watchful for new threats.’
‘I don’t see where this is leading.’
‘We have heard rumours. Since you have come from the direction of those rumours — the local stellar neighbourhood around your phylum’s birth star — we imagined you might have information of value.’
Irravel exchanged a sideways glance with Mirsky. The old woman’s wizened, age-spotted skull looked as fragile as paper, but she remained an unrivalled tactician. They knew each other so well now that Mirsky could impart advice with the subtlest of movements, expression barely troubling the lined mask of her face.
‘What kind of information are you seeking?’
‘Information about something that frightens us.’ The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation flickered again, forming an image of… something. It was a splinter of grey-brown against speckled blackness — perhaps the Nestbuilder’s attempt at visualising a planetoid. And then something erupted across the surface of the world, racing from end to end like a film of verdigris. Where it had passed, fissures opened up, deepening until they were black fractures, as if the world were a calving iceberg. And then it blew apart, shattering into a thousand green-tinged fragments.
‘What was that?’ Irravel said.
‘We were rather hoping you could tell us.’ The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation refreshed again, and this time what they were seeing was clearly a star, veiled in a toroidal belt of golden dust. ‘Machines have dismantled every rocky object in the system where these images were captured — Ross 128, which lies within eleven light-years of your birth star. They have engendered a swarm of trillions of rocks on independent orbits. Each rock is sheathed in a pressurised bubble membrane, within which an artificial plant-based ecosystem has been created. The same machines have fashioned other sources of raw material into mirrors, larger than worlds themselves, which trap sunlight above and below the ecliptic and focus it onto the swarm.’
‘And why does this frighten you?’
The Nestbuilder leaned closer in its column of microgravity. ‘Because we saw it being resisted. As if these machines had never been intended to wreak such transformations. As if your phylum had created something it could not control.’
‘And — these attempts at resistance?’
‘Failed.’
‘But if one system was accidentally transformed, it doesn’t mean…’ Irravel trailed off. ‘You’re worried about them crossing interstellar space, to other systems. Even if that happened — couldn’t you resist the spread? This can only be human technology — nothing that would pose any threat to yourselves.’
‘Perhaps it was once human technology, with programmed limitations to prevent it from replicating uncontrollably. But those shackles have been broken. Worse, the machines have hybridised, gaining resilience and adaptability with each encounter with something external. First the Melding Plague, infection with which may have been a deliberate ploy to bypass the replication limits.’
Irravel nodded. The Melding Plague had swept human space four hundred years earlier, terminating the Demarchist belle epoque. Like the Black Death of the previous millennium, it evoked terror generations after it had passed.
‘Later,’ the Nestbuilder continued, ‘it may have encountered and assimilated Inhibitor technology, or worse. Now it will be very difficult to stop, even with the weapons at our disposal.’
An image of one of the machines flickered onto the Nestbuilder’s shell, like a peculiar tattoo. Irravel shivered. The Slug was right: waves of hybridisation had transformed the initial architecture into something queasily alien. But enough of the original plan remained for there to be no doubt in her mind. She was looking at an evolved greenfly — one of the self-replicating breeders she had given Captain Run Seven. How it had broken loose was anyone’s guess. She speculated that Seven’s crew had sold the technology on to a third party, decades or centuries after gaining it from her. Perhaps that third party had reclusively experimented in the Ross 128 system, until the day when the greenfly tore out of their control…
‘I don’t know why you think I can help,’ she said.
‘Perhaps we were mistaken, then, to credit a five-hundred-year-old rumour that said you had been the original source of these machines.’
She had insulted it by daring to bluff. The Slugs were easily insulted. They read human beings far better than humans read Slugs.
‘Like you say,’ she answered, ‘you can’t believe everything you hear.’
The Slug made the Nestbuilder fold its armoured, spindly limbs across its mouthparts, a gesture of displeased huffiness.
