The Killing of Worlds (26 page)

“I am sorry that you were disappointed by the
Lynx
‘s victory,” she finally said.

“No, we were glad, Senator.”

She looked up at him.

The biosuit shuffled from side to side.

“Try to understand. We of the Axis are all hopeful monsters. Mutations who hope one day to contribute to the germ line.”

“Monsters,” she agreed.

“As are you, Nara Oxham.”

“What do you mean?”

“In your ability, your madness, you are one of us. If synesthesia implants had been invented a few hundred years earlier, before apathy treatments existed to cure you, all those with unexpected reactions to the process—brainbugs, photism, verbochromia, even your empathy—would have been cast aside as mad, as were my ancestors. The descendants of these unfortunates, people like you, would be in the Plague Axis now.”

For a moment, Nara was revolted at the thought. Her condition was not genetic, but the result of untried technology. A small percentage had unexpected reactions to any new technique.

“I’m not a mutation.”

“You are. The last hundred years have shown that reactions to synesthesia implants are often inherited. Your kind are a genetic anomaly, one that was hidden until the environment changed. Synesthesia revealed you.”

The plagueman fell silent, letting her digest his words. She could almost grasp his viewpoint, unfamiliar though it was. So much lay hidden in the human code, revealed only by events. It was like the rain forests of Vasthold, whose vast reservoirs of protein structures routinely delivered up new drugs and bioware, but only when the need for them became apparent. Irrational design, it was called: plumbing diversity for random answers.

Events could make a monster—or a savior—of anyone.

But Nara had never thought of herself that way.

“Possibly,” she said.

“But you shamed us, Nara Oxham. You faced down the Emperor, as we did not.”

She laughed bitterly. “Now you decide you don’t want a new race of mutants? After the point is moot?”

“We realized even before Laurent Zai’s victory that we had gone too far. Our thinking had been changed by cowardice. We were afraid to oppose the sovereign.”

She shrugged. “So you say.”

“Allow us to prove it, Nara Oxham.”

“How?”

He shuffled toward her, held out his hand. Oxham no longer felt compelled to hide her disgust, and she stood and pulled away.

“Any vote you wish, Senator, we will side with you.”

Nara raised her eyebrows. The War Council was structured around a natural four-to-four split, the three opposition parties and Ax Milnk against Loyalty and the three dead. The Plague Axis held the deciding vote. She realized now that the Emperor had planned it that way. When they had confirmed the War Council, the Senate had thought the Plague Axis a natural ally to the living, not knowing of the pressures that the Axis suffered from the Rix blockade, not realizing how the Emperor could bend them to his will. But the sovereign had overplayed his hand; his attempted genocide had turned them into guilty, regretful accomplices.

“You’ll vote the way I say?”

The biosuit nodded. “We will, once, when you ask it.”

“I’ll let you know. But however many votes it takes, there must be no more genocides.”

“None,” the plagueman agreed.

That was something, Senator Oxham thought. She had an ally. Perhaps this war didn’t have to be a bloodbath. If the man were genuine, perhaps it was time for a gesture.

Swallowing, Nara crossed to where the representative stood, and put her hand on the shoulder of the suit. It was as cold as a dead man’s arm.

“What do you want from me in return? Surely not just absolution,” she said softly.

The biosuited man turned away from her, faced the darkness of the Martyrs’ Park, and cleared his throat, a very recognizable sound.

“If you would favor us, Nara Oxham, we do have a request. Perhaps your particular ability is merely happenstance, a slip of a few angstroms in the implant procedure. But if not, then maybe your empathy can be added to the germ line.”

He turned to her.

“So one day, in your own time, we would like you to have a child. Or give us what we need to make one.”

A child, she thought. More madness in this universe, another Oxham addicted to the passions of the crowd, addicted to drugs to maintain sanity, given to loving broken men light-years distant. This was like some fairy tale, a firstborn promised to demons. She shuddered.

“Give me your vote when I ask it,” she said, “and I’ll consider it.”

Another hopeful monster for the cauldron.

Laurent Zai watched the object in the bridge airscreen, his mind fighting against the mesmerizing undulations of its surface.

Now that the
Lynx
was closing with the thing, simple telescopy revealed a level of detail that had been invisible to active sensors. The wild dunes that played across its visage had grown far more active since Marx’s probes had imaged them. The object was definitely alive now, clearly possessed of some inner, animating presence.

Zai could sense the compound mind in its movements. Somehow, the Rix had found a way to mirror the data of an entire world, to compress and transmit it, and house it in this strange arrangement of matter. The planet had merely served as an incubator, virgin soil in which to culture the first of a new species of the compound mind, one able to move across the stars. The Rix takeover of Legis was not an invasion.

It was a breeding program.

And the Apparatus was afraid of a few transmissions escaping Legis? Here was the data of the entire planet, wrapped up and ready for shipping back into Rix space. Every aspect of Imperial technology and culture would be open for other Rix minds to probe and pick apart, a living model of the enemy brought back as spoils of war.

Only the unlikely survival of the
Lynx
had given the Empire a chance to stop this obscenity from returning home.

“Charge the photon cannon,” he ordered.

“Aye, sir,” said Gunner Wilson, his fingers already moving as he spoke.

Zai had left the overtly hostile act of readying his weapons until now, hoping to disguise his intentions as long as possible. Thus far, the
Lynx
had sent out only unarmed scout probes and minesweepers, as if gathering information were the frigate’s only mission. Who knew how naive this newly born mind might be?

Of course, the data they had already obtained might prove valuable once analyzed. The virtual matter of which the object was composed was far beyond any technology the Empire had ever created. What they discovered here might begin to unravel the mystery of how it worked. Even an oblique understanding of the underlying science would be a war prize for the ages.

“Launch ramscatter drones.”

“Launched, sir.”

The ship didn’t respond with the usual recoil as the drones left. The launch rail was still not repaired, so the drones went forth under their own power. Between their slow start and the frigate’s nearly matched velocity with the object, what few ramscatters the
Lynx
still possessed wouldn’t achieve much of a collision vector. But they hardly mattered. Zai was sure that energy weapons were the key here. Data Analysis was certain that whatever else it might be able to do, the object could definitely make its outer layers very hard. It was probably impervious to kinetic energy. Still, it would be revealing to observe how it reacted to powerful explosives.

“Any changes, Tyre?”

“No, sir.”

The DA ensign was up here on the bridge. Fighting an unpredictable foe, Zai needed analysis without the usual filters. The captain dipped into Tyre’s synesthesia channel. Damn, the woman was going to burn out her second sight, if not her brain! Amanada Tyre was overlaying visible-light telescopy, a dozen drone viewpoints, and the object’s wildly gyrating chromograph all at once. How could she comprehend anything amid that torrent of data?

Zai blinked the images away. i.

Well, if Tyre wanted fireworks, he would give her some.

“Hit it with the first wave,” he ordered the drone pilots.

“Aye, sir,” came an unfamiliar voice.

Even for these inconsequential and stupid ramdrones, Zai wished that Jocim Marx were here. The man brought an intelligence to his warcraft that was irreplaceable. Besides Hobbes, Marx was the
Lynx
‘s most valuable officer. But the man was still down in sickbay, stricken with whatever overload had afflicted his brain after being caught in the path of the transmitted compound mind.

The airscreen view widened, opening to include both the
Lynx
and the enemy, the vector marks of the ramdrones between them. A few seconds later, the drones scattered, solid green arcs splitting into a hazy multitude of trajectories as they approached the object.

“In three, two …”

As the missiles struck, a gasp of surprise swept across the bridge. For a moment, a part of the object’s surface froze, as suddenly motionless as video stopping on a single frame. The hundreds of dronelet impacts flared red, rose petals scattered across frozen ocean waves, then disappeared without leaving a mark.

With the threat to the object passed, the dunes jumped into motion again.

“What was that?” Zai asked.

“I’m not sure, sir,” Tyre said slowly. “The object became something. Definitely a crystal, but I have no idea of what the matrix was composed of.”

“Nothing showing on the chromograph?” Hobbes asked.

“There is, ma’am, but it’s not a recognizable element.”

“Transuranium,” Zai muttered. They knew that the object might be able to create unknown elements well past the upper reaches of the normal periodic table. They would be metals, of a sort, but with unlimited half-lives, and therefore non-radioactive. Data Analysis had worked feverishly to determine what characteristics such exotic substances might possess with hundreds or even thousands of electrons in stable orbits, but such basic research was impossible when the elements themselves had never existed—couldn’t exist except within the object itself.

“No, sir,” Tyre said a moment later. “I don’t think that’s it.”

She said nothing more.

“Tyre? Report.”

Her head started nodding quickly, her hands flickering with gestural commands like an autistic child.

“I see it now, sir,” she said breathlessly. “The atoms of the object’s armor have fewer than a hundred electrons, but they aren’t configured in the usual way.”

“What’s ‘the usual way’?” Hobbes asked.

“In spherical energy levels,” Tyre said. “Look.”

The periodic table appeared.

Godspite, Zai thought. In the heat of battle with a Rix mind, and they were going to get a chemistry lesson. This was why DA was always kept off the bridge. He raised his hand to wave the apparition away.

But then the rectangular table turned into a spiral. Zai’s hand froze.

“Electrons orbit their nuclei in set energy shells,” Tyre explained. “Orbital quanta, in effect. But the object’s virtual matter seems to be breaking that law. According to our probes, the object’s surface was briefly composed of an element with new quantum states, new sub-shells. Transuranium means it’s off the high end of the table. But this element was on top of the table. On the z-axis, like when imaginary numbers add another dimension to a number line.”

The elemental spiral extruded itself into a conch shell, rising up like some periodic Tower of Babel. At each story of the structure, the familiar elemental groups gained new members.

“I think the object’s surface armor was composed largely of carbon,” Tyre said. “Or something with an atomic number of six. But with a crystalline structure much more complex than diamond.”

“It was a hell of a lot harder than diamond, too,” Hobbes added, “and with a higher melting point. The drones had zero effect, and they would have burned through diamond as easily as cloth.”

“Send in the second wave, Hobbes,” Zai ordered. “And get that apparition off my airscreen!”

Tyre’s diagram winked rudely out, replaced by the arcing lines of the remaining drones. They plummeted into the object, which froze again to repulse their blows. This time, it seemed to the captain’s eyes that the efficiencies of the object’s metamorphosis were greater: Only the exact position where each dronelet struck became motionless. The rest of the ocean raged on unaffected.

“I see,” muttered Tyre, drinking in the data.

Zai ignored her. “Give me fifty terabits from the aft photon cannon,” he ordered Gunner Wilson. “Dead center.”

A targeting dot appeared on the object.

“Ready at your command,” the gunner said.

Zai started to give the order, but the words stuck in his throat.

The bridge’s main airscreen, his personal synesthesia, even the backup hardscreens surrounding the shipmaster’s chair all showed the same, unbelievable thing.

The object had disappeared.

Though stripped of sight and his position in the chain of command, Data Master Kax still possessed illusion.

The flying dust of optical silicon had ravaged only his eyes. The optic nerve and the brain centers were completely functional. Indeed, once the
Lynx
returned to Legis, implantation of a pair of artificials would be a trivial matter.

Most importantly, the tiny receivers that allowed synesthesia, the gateways to second sight, were still active. These devices surrounded the lamina cribrosa, hundreds of them in a man of Kax’s profession, unscratched by the glass fragments that had destroyed his normal vision.

Kax followed the battle from sickbay, drifting among the views of various drones, watching over young Tyre’s shoulder as she constructed experimental models of the object’s virtual matter. Occasionally Tyre would query him, asking for advice or confirmation, using sign language to conceal the conversations. Kax had become an invisible confidant to his own replacement, like the helpful ghost of an ancestor.

Then the object disappeared.

Telescopy showed nothing but background stars; the throughput of x-ray spectroscopy was flat; infrared showed only the cold of space.