Sunborn (36 page)

    What else was moving out there? Wrecked ships of bygone eras. Debris and detritus. Deep and Dark.
Deep and Dark...

    The two were indeed out there, spiraling around, almost as though they, too, were trying to find their way out of the Mindaru maze. Could they convey information to the ship? Could she make contact with them?

*

   
Daarooaack felt repeatedly frustrated in her attempt to help the quick-ones through the maze. And now she couldn’t quite find her own way through. What was it about this place, about the disturbing thing at its center that seemed bent on drawing everything to itself? Since the small vessel had been destroyed, and the main vessel of the quick-ones had begun moving evasively, Daarooaack had stopped trying to stay too close. She was wary of interfering.

    But she felt something odd—a presence she thought had disappeared with the destruction of the smaller vessel. Was it still alive? She thought the being might be attempting to communicate. She called to Deeaab, and asked him to reach out and sense what she was feeling. Maybe Deeaab could understand.

*

   
Bandicut felt a sudden tension from Charli. /What is it?/

   
/// I’m feeling something...

   
Delilah trying to communicate with Deep.

   
There’s some translation difficulty...

   
Deep doesn’t speak halo.

   
The stones are trying to help. ///

   
There was a sound like a rush of wind around Bandicut, and a tingling sensation in the wind, and in his wrists. He heard, (...follow...way out...) more rushing sounds (...nothing...no help...flee...flee...)

    Bandicut was speechless for a few moments. And then, because Antares was looking at him questioningly, he blurted out what had just happened. “Delilah’s alive, and trying to show us a way out. But I can’t understand much of what she’s saying, and I have no idea if it’s genuine. Napoleon, are you picking up any of this?”

    The robot clicked a few times. “Negative, Cap’n. If Delilah has instructions for you, I am unable to translate or evaluate them. I am sorry I cannot help. Recommend pitch up twenty degrees and left ten.”

    Antares said suddenly, “I can help.” Bandicut blinked and looked at her. “
I can feel
 Delilah trying to speak, to guide you. I may be able to sense what she’s trying to say.”

    “Can you translate to flying directions?”

    Antares stood close behind him, with a hand gripping his shoulder. Her breath sighed close to his ear: “I’m getting it—not in words, but a feeling—a tactile image. Down, and a little more to the left. More...” As Bandicut moved the stick cautiously, he could feel her body language. “Now ease to the right, and down a little more...”

    Napoleon maintained silence for a few minutes, and then interrupted only to say in a strained voice, “Cap’n, we’ve picked up the pursuer now.” A new display window opened at the bottom of the viewspace. A coil of light was spiraling out of the darkness. It was following them, and it was growing in size and brightness as they watched.

    “
Damn.
 What is it, Napoleon, can you tell?”

    “Unknown, Cap’n. It seems very energetic. Probably dangerous.”

    “How long till it catches us?”

    “At present speeds, three to four minutes.”

    Bandicut tightened his grip on the stick.
Three minutes...

    Antares’s grip on his shoulder tightened, too. “Delilah thinks if we don’t make any mistakes, we might be able to evade it. Ready to pitch up, and a hard right, not yet...
now
.”

   
Hard over.
 Following her pressure, Bandicut took the ship tightly through its turns, sweeping through an invisible course under the sullen glow of the distant Mindaru object, as the coiling snake of light pursued.

*

   
Li-Jared bounded through the twisted corridors, trying to make his way back to the bridge. He had picked himself up off the floor and gotten out of the little service chamber in time to see the squirming corridors stabilize. But though they’d stopped tearing themselves apart, they remained a twisted mess. He was running through a funhouse maze, with the occasional direction called to him by Copernicus, who otherwise seemed very busy.

    At last, he turned a corner and realized he had found the arc that held their quarters and the commons. And down at the end of it should be...

    He burst onto the bridge with a shout, and found his companions almost funereally quiet. Bandicut was hunched over the controls; Antares was hunched over Bandicut’s shoulder; Ik was crouched, staring at the images of glowing adversaries in the viewspace. Ik’s hands were trembling, and going repeatedly to the stones in his temples. “I’m back,” Li-Jared said. And then he saw the fiery pursuer growing in the display window, and recognized it at once as the thing he had seen earlier, only closer now. A
lot
 closer.

    Falling into place between Ik and Napoleon, Li-Jared watched Bandicut’s precise flying maneuvers and thanked the moon and stars that he was not the one flying.

*

   
Bandicut was having trouble breathing—not because of the difficulty of the flying, but because through Antares he was feeling the distant presence of the doomed Delilah. He felt the sadness, and the loss, and the determination to see the ship safely away. And the fear that the Mindaru thing would get to them first.

    He could almost visualize what they were trying to do now, threading the labyrinthine path through the Mindaru web. If they made each turn just so, through the twists of the dimensional layers of n-space, they might just make it out ahead of the pursuer. A roller-coasterlike turn was coming up, and at Antares’s nudge, he dipped and climbed and banked over, flying almost wholly by images Antares channeled into his mind.

    “Cap’n, I’m detecting Deep and Dark, at eleven o’clock high and low!” Napoleon called.

    Bandicut glanced—and saw Deep at the lower position, streaking along something that looked like a dull red river. Bandicut was tempted to follow. But that was Deep’s path, not theirs, and when the impulse came from Delilah and Antares, he swung away to the right. A glance backward showed the spiraling light still gaining on them.

    “Cap’n, I’m reading a major power spike in the core section. We may be in danger of—”

    In the middle of Napoleon’s words, the viewspace went blank. The bridge lights dimmed. Bandicut felt the response in the joystick stiffen, then go dead. “Mokin’ A.
Nappy!
”

    For a heart-stopping moment, the only sound was the soft intake of Antares’s breath, and Napoleon’s ticking. At last the robot answered, “Cap’n.”

    “Yes!”

   
Tick tick.
 “Copernicus has shut down the AI.”

*

   
Time stood still while Bandicut’s heart hammered out of control. Finally he shouted,
“What do you mean, he shut down the AI?”

    A blue-green LED flickered on Napoleon’s face in the near-darkness. “I’m sorry, Cap’n, but it was necessary to prevent the AI from destroying the ship. The AI was initiating a power overload.”

    Bandicut opened his mouth to speak, but a great vise around his chest kept him from saying anything. He looked down in the dim light, broken only by the emergency strips, and stared at his hand, still gripping the dead joystick.

    “He stopped the overload, and...zeroed out the AI. Cap’n.”

   
“We have no AI? No control?”

    “He’s hopeful he wiped out the infection,” Napoleon said, in a rapid-fire voice. “He is working on reestablishing controls. Which do you require first—viewing, maneuvering, or life support?”

   
“View—
no! Maneuvering!
Then life support!” Bandicut forced himself to focus. “Antares, don’t stop. We have to do this blind.”

    Antares had never let go of his shoulder or moved from her trancelike concentration. “Turn coming up,” she whispered.

    “Quickly, Napoleon, I need this control stick
working
...”

   
In about one second,
 Antares whispered in his thoughts.

    “Hold...yes, Cap’n...
now.
”

    Following the image in Antares’s thoughts, he angled and twisted the joystick ever so slightly. Though the viewspace remained dark, he could see in his mind’s eye the coiling serpent of the adversary, almost upon them—and then, directly before them, a steep drop like the universe’s tallest roller coaster, into the narrow funnel of an n-spatial gravity well. He snapped the joystick forward and they pitched over and shot down the long raceway.

    Though he could see it only through Antares’s eyes, or perhaps Delilah’s, he felt the spiraling arm of the enemy reach out for them—and
miss,
as the ship rocketed through the tiny opening in the Mindaru web. With an almost tangible
whoosh,
 they shot through the funnel, and down a river of space and time. He had no idea where they were going, but he felt the Mindaru web vanish in the distance behind them, and he felt the connection with Delilah vanish, as well.

    The last thing Bandicut heard before a dizzying twist of n-space fogged his awareness was Napoleon’s voice, muttering,
“Oh shit...”

Chapter 23

The Translator Speaks

    Julie Stone listened with tangled emotions as the translator spoke. The four who gathered close to the artifact in
Park Avenue’s
cargo bay mostly just listened. The two crewmen in back stood like statues. Lamarr had tried once or twice to interrupt. Julie felt a certain sympathy for his lack of success; she had questions to ask, too. But the director was now listening politely, though with an expression of skepticism.
    The translator had been explaining John Bandicut’s efforts to save the Earth.

   
“...His claims might have seemed extraordinary. But John Bandicut intercepted a massive object on a collision course with Earth, and he saved your world from near-certain disaster. He gave up his life as he knew it to rescue your planet.”

   
Julie’s stomach clenched. There it was again—John Bandicut gave up his life
as he knew it?
 What was that all about? John had slammed into a comet. How was that anything but “giving up his life,” period?

   
*John Bandicut is lost to your solar system,*
the stones said softly.
*But his work may not be ended, nor is ours. There are more dangers. Dangers we must act on...*

    Julie closed her eyes. /What do you mean, lost to our solar system?/ But the translator had moved on, explaining what it had been doing since its arrival on Triton.

   
“...We joined Triton while it orbited the fifth planet of another star system, half a billion years ago. It was the world of the Rohengen. And it was their war, a war we tried to stop, that knocked Triton out of that orbit and into interstellar space. For eons we floated in the cold, before finding your sun and Neptune. As we watched the evolution of your solar system, we also watched the emergence of your civilization. We saw eras of life on your world destroyed by asteroid impact. We knew the same could happen to your species—whether by chance or by deliberate action. The latter most concerned us, though we had no clear evidence it had happened, even when we sent John Bandicut to intercept the comet.”

   
“What do you mean, no clear evidence?” Lamarr growled, speaking for the first time in a while.

   
“We knew the comet’s trajectory, but were unsure whether there was an intelligence guiding it. We’re still unsure. But we know this—there
is
an agent in the solar system representing an unfriendly power, and it was observing. When the comet was eliminated, this agent began moving.”

    “What sort of agent are you talking about?” Lamarr asked. “How can you know all this, if you were buried in the ice on Triton?”

   
“While we were underground, we observed.”

   
“It seems like that would be pretty difficult.”

   
“We used slagged metals dispersed through the Triton crust to effect a large sensor antenna. That enabled us to monitor movement of objects throughout the solar system.”

   
Lamarr cocked his head. “We have hundreds of instruments studying interplanetary space. Are you saying that this method detects things that we can’t?”

    The translator’s black and iridescent balls whirled through one another.
“You do not observe in the interstitial layers of n-dimensional space, as we do.”
Lamarr’s mouth opened, but he said nothing. Julie felt a moment of dizziness.
“In three-space, it would indeed be nearly impossible to see this object. We tracked it by certain signature ripples on the fabric of n-space. Even so, it only became visible when it initiated a course maneuver shortly after the comet was destroyed. That behavior alone was enough to identify it as almost certainly one of the Adversary.”

    Lamarr glanced at Julie as though to ask, Did you know about this? “Adversary? Who or what is the Adversary?” He stood very still for a moment, as if the full meaning were just sinking in. “Are you saying we’re involved in some interstellar—?”

   
“War, yes. A struggle that has been going on for more than a billion years. A struggle that has cost the lives of more than a thousand planetary civilizations.”

   
Julie drew a sharp breath. She tried to absorb that, and found it impossible. “
What
are they, these—what did you call them?—the Adversary? Where are they from?”