Even though the Spline’s weapon ports must be open now — even though the warship from the future must look like some fleshy wall across the sky, massive and menacing, to the natives of this era — a lone matchstick craft was coming at them out of the flotilla of ships, flaring along a two-gee curve straight for the Spline.
Jasoft Parz could hardly believe it.
The ship was about a mile in length. Its drive-fire plumed from a block of comet ice; from the block emerged a long, delicate, open-frame metal stalk, tipped by a clear lifedome. The dome was a pool of subdued light; Jasoft could almost imagine he could see humans moving about in the dome, actual people.
Jasoft recognized the design from the research he’d performed for the dead Governor. This was a GUT ship, driven by the phase energy of decoupling superforces. It looked so
Something moved in Jasoft, lost and isolated as he was in the grotesque eyeball of the Spline.
There had to be something he could do to help.
He pushed away from the lens. With short, heavy strokes in the thick entoptic fluid, he cast about the eye chamber, looking for some way to damage his Spline host.
Berg rattled down the translucent singularity-cannon tube.
The barrel seemed to be sheltering her from the blazing red light of the starbreaker assault, but its surface proved to be slick and unyielding; her hands or feet could not gain any kind of purchase on the walls of the tube. So she kicked out at the walls as she collided with them, jamming herself as hard as she could against the opposite side: anything to generate a little friction. She knew the lower mouth of the tube was six feet above the crystalline floor of the inner chamber. Berg tried to twist in the tube so she’d land butt-first, protecting her head and arms -
She plummeted out of the cannon.
The plane of singularities, diamond points in a lattice of blue-white light, rushed up to meet her, slammed into her back.
For long seconds she lay there spread-eagled, staring up at the Xeelee-material dome. Cherry-red light glimmered in distant cannon mouths.
She gingerly moved her legs, wriggled her fingers. There was a cacophony of pain, but nothing seemed to be broken. Her lungs, back, and chest felt like a single mass of bruises, though; and it was hard to expand her lungs, to take a decent breath.
It felt nice to lie here, she thought, just to lie here and to watch the light show…
Starbreaker light flared anew beyond the dome — no, she realized with a shock; now it was shining
She’d postpone blacking out until later, she decided.
She rolled over and climbed painfully to her feet, ignored the clamoring stiffness, the pain in her legs and chest.
The hollow heart of the earth-craft was a hive of activity. Friends ran everywhere carrying bits of equipment, working control panels, shouting instructions to each other. But there was no chaos, or panic, Berg saw. The Friends knew exactly what they were doing. There was something of the air of a great installation — a power plant, perhaps — in the throes of some crisis.
In the commotion no one seemed to have observed her unorthodox entrance. There was damage around her, evidence of the huge assault; close to her there was a burned-out control console, two young, gaunt bodies splayed over it.
A cannon tube flared, forcing her to shield her eyes; a pair of singularities hurtled out of the plane beneath her feet, dazzled up into a cannon tube, and soared beyond the dome like ascending souls. She felt the plane beneath her shudder as the whole craft recoiled from the launch of so much mass.
And now there was a rush of noise above her, like the exhalation of a giant. She glanced up. The damaged area of the dome was beginning to glow white-hot; around a quarter of the dome was sagging, losing its structural integrity under the sustained Spline assault.
There was a smell of burning.
Berg recognized a man — a boy, really — the Friend Jaar, who’d taken Poole on his sightseeing tour of this place. Jaar was working at the center of a little group of Friends, poring over slates that bore what looked like schematics of singularity trajectories. There was soot and blood smeared over his bare scalp, and his jumpsuit was torn, begrimed; he looked tired, but in control.
In a few strides Berg crossed the chamber. She forced her way through the knot of people and grabbed Jaar’s arm, pulling away his slate so he was forced to look at her.
Irritation, overtension, crossed his face. 'Miriam Berg. How did you get in here? I thought—'
'I’ll explain later. Jaar, you’re under attack. What are you doing about it?'
He pulled his arm away from her. 'We are finishing the Project,' he said. 'Please, Miriam—'
She grabbed his shoulders, twisted him around so he was forced to face her. 'Look above your head, damn it! The Spline is using starbreakers. The whole damn roof is going to implode on you, Xeelee material or not. There’s not going to be time to finish your precious Project.
Wearily he indicated the frantic motion around them. 'We set up a crash schedule for the implementation of the Project, but we’re falling behind already. And we’ve lost lives.' He looked up; he seemed to flinch from the failing dome.
'Why don’t you use the hyperdrive?'
'The hyperdrive has already gone,' Jaar said. 'Its components were stored in the structure of the dome; we lost operability soon after the start of the assault—'
'Jesus.' Berg ran stiff fingers through her hair. So there was no way to run; they could only fight. And she wouldn’t be fighting merely for the good of humanity, but for her own life… 'All right, Jaar; show me how these damn singularity cannons work.'
Jasoft Parz felt rather proud of himself.
He wasn’t a scientist, or an engineer, by any stretch of the imagination. But, he was finding, he wasn’t completely without resource.
In his life-support box he’d found a spare skinsuit. Using a sharp edge from the box he’d sliced this apart, assembled it into a little teepeelike tent; the substance of the skinsuit, trying to restore its breached integrity, had sealed itself tight along the new seams he’d created.
He fixed the little tent over a Spline nerve-trunk. He used the facemask of the reassembled skinsuit to pump the tent full of breathable air, creating a little bubble of atmosphere in entoptic fluid.
Now he cast through the contents of the life-support box. Maybe he’d have to take the mechanism apart, to start his fire…
The Spline warship hung over the lifedome of the
Michael Poole stared at it with something approaching fascination: quite apart from its dominating physical presence there was a vague obscenity about its mixture of gross, swollen life and mechanical deadliness. Michael was reminded of myths of the past, of the undead.
No wonder Earth had been — would be — held in thrall by these things.
Michael glanced at Shira. The Friend, exhausted, disheveled, crushed by the GUT drive’s continuing two-gravity push, lay flat in the couch next to his. Her eyes were open — staring up — but unseeing. A clean blue glow flickered at the edge of his vision, somewhere close to the perimeter of the lifedome.
Harry’s disembodied head drifted like a child’s balloon. 'What was that?'
'Verniers. Attitude jets.'
'I know what verniers are,' Harry grumbled. The head swiveled theatrically to peer up at the Spline. The huge sentient warship was now drifting away from the
Michael leaned back in his couch and folded his hands together. 'I preset the program,' he said. 'The ship’s turning. Right around, through one hundred and eighty degrees.'
'But the GUT drive is still firing.' The head glanced up at the Spline again, closed one eye as if judging distances. 'We must be slowing. Michael, are you hoping to rendezvous with that thing up there?'
'No.' Michael smiled. 'No, a rendezvous isn’t in the plan.'
'Then what is, for Christ’s sake?'
'Look, Harry, you know as well as I do that this damn old tub isn’t a warship. Apart from a couple of Berry-phase archaeological image retrieval scanning lasers, I’ve nothing apart from the ship itself that I can use as a weapon.' He shrugged, lying there. 'Maybe if I’d brought back a few more samples from the Oort Cloud, I could throw rocks—'
'What do you mean,' Harry asked ominously, ' ‘apart from the ship itself’?'
'After all this two-gee thrust we’ve a huge velocity relative to the Spline. When we’ve turned around there’ll be only a couple of minutes before we close with the Spline; even with the GUT drive firing we’ll barely shed any of that…
'Do you get it, Harry? We’re going to meet the Spline ass-first, with our GUT drive blazing—'
With slow, hesitant movements, Shira raised her hands and covered her face with long fingers.
'My God,' Harry breathed, and his Virtual head ballooned into a great six-foot-tall parody. 'We’re going to ram a Spline warship. Oh, good plan, Michael.'
'You’ve got a better suggestion?'
An image flickered into existence on the darkened dome above them: the Spline warship, as seen by the Crab’s backward-pointing cameras. The gunmetal-gray light of the Spline’s hull glittered in Harry’s huge, pixel-frosted eyes. 'Michael, as soon as that Spline lines itself up and touches us with its damn starbreaker beam, this ship will be a shower of molten slag.'
'Then well have died fighting. I say again: Have you got a better suggestion?'
'Yes,' said Harry. 'Your first idea. Let’s run back out to the cometary halo and find some rocks to throw.'
Beyond Harry’s huge, translucent head the Spline’s motion seemed to have changed. Michael squinted, trying to make out patterns. Was the rolling of the warship becoming more jerky, more random?
Come to think of it, he’d expected to be dead by now.
Was there something wrong with the Spline?
