Eternity's Mind (31 page)

Destroy Earth. Destroy the human race. Destroy the worldforest. Destroy the Ildirans. Soon, the entire Spiral Arm would be empty, quiet.

Even though the human military tried their best, the Lunar Orbital Complex put up very little resistance. Many CDF ships were easily destroyed; some tried to flee, but the robots chased them down and wiped them out. The human General rallied her defenders, foolishly assuming that she could have an effect. The military ships would have been better off just to flee before the black robots chased them down. Instead, they seemed intent on mounting a fruitless attempt to protect Earth. Exxos found it convenient that they stayed so his robots could destroy them all at once.

From their shadow cloud, the Shana Rei emanated destructive waves of entropy, and the hex cylinders continued their attack. The black nebula swelled beyond the rubble of the Moon, heading toward Earth.

Another scatter of sun bombs from desperate CDF ships annihilated three thousand black robot ships, and although Exxos did not feel any personal loss, they were all
him.
It was as if
he
had just died three thousand times. But it was of no consequence, because a million of him still remained.

He did, however, experience a dip in their combined secret processing power … and that might delay his plans against the Shana Rei. Before their recent near extinction, Exxos and his comrades had formulated an exotic plan deep within their circuitry, connected only through coded bursts that were—he hoped—undetectable to the shadows. Now that he had a million identical processors in his resurrected robot horde, they all worked together to develop their entropy nullifier, a chaos-crystallization device. It would precipitate out the randomness and cause the very entropy that comprised the Shana Rei to freeze and solidify—just as physical matter had frozen out of energy during the beginning stages of the newborn Big Bang.

The quantum calculations were complex and nearly impossible—but Exxos now had enough computing power to accomplish the impossible. It would just take time. With every instance in which he lost thousands of robots, however, he could feel their combined mental power diminish slightly.

Exxos was patient. He had always been patient. The other robots continued their work quietly, without raising any Shana Rei suspicions. Once the shadows became the final victims, the Spiral Arm would belong solely to the black robots. It was all quite elegant. The shadows would be gone, just as the Klikiss were gone … just as the Ildirans and the humans would be gone.

The universe would be perfect.

Destroying Earth would deal a deadly blow to the human psyche, but there would still be an extraordinary amount of work to do afterward, hunting down the vermin in their widely separated colonies. If only there were a better way to spread the destruction and wipe out the entire race …

But Exxos and his robots were methodical—and very effective at slaughter. His computer mind liked to project many moves into the future, but Exxos also needed to focus on his immediate priorities.

As the shadow cloud engulfed the Lunar Orbital Complex, Exxos concentrated his myriad battleships, and they swooped down toward the main target.

Earth.

 

CHAPTER

51

JOCKO KRIEGER

The new sun-bomb factories had been constructed outside of the Lunar Orbital Complex, far enough away to be safe. Jocko Krieger had considered it a good idea, recalling the last deadly—not to mention, embarrassing—detonation when one of the weapons had gone nova right there in the facility.

Isolated from the bustle of the LOC, the workers at the primary factory station and the four satellite facilities felt like pariahs, kept at arm's length from the main complex. The weapons scientists and the sun-bomb workers had often grumbled.

They weren't complaining now.

Inside their metal-walled stations, the current work shift of twenty-seven men and women watched in horror as the swelling shadow cloud and the fleet of robot warships wiped out the entire LOC. Krieger and his crew hid like rabbits in their holes, drawing no attention to themselves.

Krieger bit the ends of his fingers. He watched as the CDF unleashed all the weapons they had, but were still decimated. They witnessed tens of thousands of robot casualties, maybe even a hundred thousand—and it still wasn't enough to force a retreat.

Inside the assembly facility, Krieger paced and sweated. There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do. They watched in dismay as everyone in the Lunar Orbital Complex was eradicated, two Juggernauts destroyed, countless Manta cruisers disintegrated as if they were no more than fluttering moths.

“At least my sun bombs worked,” Krieger said, breaking the appalled silence inside the meeting chamber where most of the workers had gathered. “Proof of concept.”

“Always thinking about yourself,” said his deputy, Lynne Gwendine, a talented but prickly woman who had been hired for her competence, not her patience. Over the past month, Gwendine had grown more disrespectful and less tolerant of Krieger's endless demands for higher productivity. He had expected her to request a transfer or simply quit any day. Now it didn't look as if that day was going to come.

“Just pointing out a fact,” he said. “General Keah used our weapons appropriately, but sun bombs were designed to fight against the Shana Rei. They just happen to pack a huge punch with that many black robots crowded in one place.”

A panicked deputy from one of the satellite stations transmitted to Krieger's dome. “What do we do? Most of the CDF is destroyed. We've got to call for rescue—”

Gwendine lunged to the comm station and roared across the channel, “No transmissions! Do you want to call attention to us? We're safe if they don't notice us!” She shut down the intercom, and they all sat shivering in huddled silence. “Idiot.”

“Maybe we should hold our breath, too,” Krieger said sarcastically.

Gwendine shot him an annoyed glance. “You may not wish to survive, Dr. Krieger, but the majority of us do.”

“Oh, I want to survive, don't misinterpret my comment.” He certainly hoped the robots didn't swoop in and pick them off; they could easily blow up the main dome and the satellite stations in swift staccato bursts. He and his staff had no defenses against such an attack, although they did have a complement of forty-two completed sun bombs ready to launch. They should have been loaded aboard General Keah's ships, but there had been no opportunity.

Hundreds of thousands of robot ships swept past the ruins of the LOC and streaked toward Earth. The first wave of enemy battleships had already started the devastation there. From their hiding place, Krieger could hear terrified transmissions as the populace begged for help or rescue, calling on the CDF to protect them—although General Keah had already done her best. A handful of warships had survived, but they wouldn't last long if they continued to attack the immense robot fleet head-on.

“We're safe here, aren't we?” asked one of the workers, as if Dr. Krieger could see into the future and make an accurate pronouncement.

Gwendine cut the man off. “As long as we lie low.”

The shadow cloud swelled huge and black, filling an enormous volume of space as it moved, coming closer.

The Shana Rei let the robots be their cannon fodder and take the brunt of the resistance like rabid dogs that would attack any target. The black nebula oozed through from another dimension, surrounding the cluster of hexagonal cylinders like a cocoon. The cloud swelled and roiled, growing blacker and larger, as if it drew strength from the destruction.

Maybe it does,
Krieger thought. If the Shana Rei were entropy incarnate, perhaps they did feed on mayhem. That would explain a lot.

The huge cloud began to move toward Earth, drifting close to the sun-bomb factories.

From their hiding place, Krieger and his workers stared as the hex ships cruised past. The facility computer systems began to flicker, and the lights went down as the backwash of Shana Rei chaos began to ruin their power systems. One of the satellite domes frantically tried to send a signal, but it jittered into a hiss of static: “… life support—” Then it fell silent.

Gwendine shook her head. “Comm systems are down too.”

With their lights out and systems down, Krieger could see through the windowports, the black cloud and the creatures of darkness inside it, rolling forward.

“Dr. Krieger,” said a technician in a warbly voice. She swallowed hard. “All our life support is offline.”

It didn't surprise him. His mind raced as he reached the obvious conclusion. As the Shana Rei shadow cloud cruised past, all the technical systems would be ruined, and Krieger doubted their major systems could be repaired in time. These secondary facilities had small reserve power blocks, but not enough to keep them alive for more than half a day. Without immediate backup, they were doomed.

He gazed across space at the silent glowing wreckage of CDF headquarters and saw the battle beginning at Earth. Thousands of ships tried to evacuate while countless robots closed in, intent on preventing them from getting away.

No one would bother to rescue a handful of workers in these hidden facilities. Krieger knew they were stranded here. They were already dead … a slow, cold, suffocating death.

He let out a long, determined sigh. “Oh hell, I was never good at keeping a low profile anyway.”

He looked at Gwendine, who seemed extremely annoyed, but for once, the annoyance was not directed at him. “I know what you're saying,” she muttered.

“We have forty-two sun bombs—nuclear-driven, and we know they're still functional even in the vicinity of the Shana Rei.” He drew a deep breath. “We can either die here quiet and whimpering, with nobody to notice, or we can go out with a bang.” He nodded toward the ominous obsidian cylinders that loomed so close as they moved past on the way to Earth. “Look up there.
That
is why I designed the sun bombs in the first place.”

The workers turned to him, pale and terrified, some determined, most of them stunned. Gwendine just said, “This isn't a democracy, Krieger. You're in charge, so make up your mind.”

He did.

Before the Shana Rei could pass too far away, when the hex cylinders were at the optimal distance for a concentrated surprise barrage, Jocko Krieger launched the sun bombs. All of them.

The glowing pinwheel spheres spun out of their storage depot. The mechanical launchers were sufficient to activate the cores and hurl them within range. Even if the entropy scrambled their guidance, Krieger knew he didn't have to be precise. It was close enough for a small exploding star.

Crackling, sparking, and expanding with activated plasma, forty-two of the devices sprayed out in a deadly hailstorm toward the Shana Rei. “I just want to see that we were effective, at least for a second. Full filters on the windowports!”

The view darkened, momentarily blinding them, but then the sun bombs detonated like firecrackers in blindingly fast succession. The shadow cloud filled with newborn suns. Some explosions directly impacted the black cylinders, while others simply burst into a searing flare nearby, and the furious shock wave ripped into the hexagonal sides.

The Shana Rei ships shrank, clearly damaged, some broken apart, but the sun bombs faded all too quickly.

The still-powerful shadow cloud lurched toward them, but Krieger was grinning.

“You always were a showoff,” said Gwendine.

Waves of entropy hammered the station as well as the satellite facilities. All technical systems had already failed, but now even the physical integrity began to fall apart. Chaos increased. Seals crumbled. Joints collapsed. Structural members dropped away, and within moments all systems failed catastrophically.

The shadows engulfed the facility as it fell apart, hull plates spinning off into space, atmosphere venting explosively, fuel reservoirs exploding, until even the components disintegrated into their individual atoms.

Then the wounded cloud moved on toward Earth.

 

CHAPTER

52

JESS TAMBLYN

Inside Academ, the wentals were awakening with an energetic glow. The elemental force had been mostly dormant for nearly two decades, but their defensive response against Elisa Enturi had shown that they were indeed aware, even agitated.

After he and Cesca finished classes and sent the students to conduct engineering experiments with the Teacher compies, they paused at an open ice patch on the sealed corridor wall. Working with his fingers, Jess peeled up the edge of the flexible polymer film to expose the naked ice, and the pale glow brightened. He and Cesca touched the frozen surface.

“It feels so weak,” Cesca said.

Jess sensed a definite tingle there, a fizzing undertone of energy boiling up. “But stronger than it has felt in a long time. I wish we knew what they're thinking.”

Years ago, their bodies had been infused with the elemental water, but the uncontrolled force had made their very touch deadly. He and Cesca had expended all that energy when they fought and defeated the faeros. Now, as Jess touched the pure ice, it seemed
yielding.
He pushed harder, and the ice gave way, parting for him. Cesca's hand sank in next to his. Together, with their hands surrounded, they could feel throbbing, like the heartbeat of the comet.

“Are they awakening because of the Shana Rei?” Cesca asked. “The shadows already fought the hydrogues inside Golgen, and they've attacked the verdani and the faeros. Could the wentals be at risk, too?”

“Maybe they're waking up to join the fight.” Jess felt a grim chill. “That means Academ might be in danger. And our students.”

The Teacher compy KA met them in the corridor, fully repaired from Elisa's stunner blast. “You have a visitor, Jess Tamblyn and Cesca Peroni. Someone wishes to withdraw a student. Seymour Dominic requests his daughter Kellidee to work in their bloater-extraction operations.”