Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.
There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.
Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.
“Remember me?” he asked.
Every motile in the Institute valley froze.
“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”
The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.
“Oh, I’m in here with you.”
Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.
“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”
Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.
“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”
Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.
Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.
“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”
The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.
Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
Outside the starship, darkness fell.
Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”
The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.
“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.
***
The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.
“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.
“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.
“Can’t see the barrier.”
“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”
“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”
“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”
For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.
“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.
“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.
“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”
“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”
“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”
“Not a clue.”
The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.
“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”
“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”
“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”
“But—”
“Home. With one slight detour.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Morton’s virtual vision gave him the illusion of light and space. Without that he knew he would have fallen for the Siren call of insanity echoing enticingly at the center of his mind. As it was, spending hours immobile in the armor suit with no external sensor input at all was pushing him closer and closer to all-out claustrophobia. Actually, there had been one thing from outside that still managed to get through to him: the noise of the storm had been reduced to a hefty vibration by the meters of soil on top of him, one he could feel through the suit’s adaptive foam padding. The timer in his grid told him it lasted for three and a half hours before finally fading away.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said to Alic.
“Damn right,” the navy commander agreed.
The two of them had lain there in the darkness with hands clasped together like a pair of scared children. That touch allowed them to communicate. Morton wasn’t sure he could have held out without the contact of another human being. He didn’t even remember much of their conversation; giving each other potted histories, women, places they’d been. Anything to hold the isolation at bay and with it the knowledge that they were buried alive.
There had been no choice.
When the storm appeared from behind the mountains and swallowed the last pinnacles, they’d had four or five seconds at best before it hit them. Alic had fired his particle lances straight into the ground, blasting out a simple crater of smoldering earth. “Get in!” he yelled.
Morton had dived straight into the hole, cramming his suit up against Alic’s. The Cat hadn’t moved.
“Cat!” he implored.
“That’s not how I die, Morty,” she’d said simply.
He didn’t even manage an answer. Alic fired the particle lances again, collapsing the soil around them. The Cat had sounded sorry for him; out of all the weeks they’d spent together, that was the strongest memory he had of her now.
Once they started digging their way out, he began to appreciate her reasoning. His suit power cells were down to five percent, and the soil was packed solid. He vaguely remembered that if you were caught in a snow avalanche you were supposed to curl up, to create a space. There had been time for nothing other than the most basic survival instinct. The hole in the ground offered a chance at survival. The impossible wall hurtling down on him didn’t.
It took a couple of minutes to wiggle his gauntlet about and compact the earth around it. Electromuscles strained on the limit of their strength just to achieve that. After the hand came the forearm, and finally he could move the whole arm in a little cavity. He began scrabbling. It took hours.
“There was never this much soil on top of us,” he kept saying.
“Inertial navigation is fully functional,” Alic would reply each time. “We’re heading straight up.”
The power cells were draining away at an alarming rate as they wriggled and grubbed their way along. Heat was a big problem; the suits kept pumping excess
