The Killing of Worlds (21 page)

At the operational centers of the planet—the air traffic hub, the private currency exchange, the infoterrorism militia’s distributed HQ— Legis’s administrators gaped as their soccer-field-sized airscreens tumbled into snow crash. For a moment, the frantic operators were blind. Then they booted the large, flat hardscreens put in place for some unthinkable emergency such as this. The backups returned a bizarre sight, oddly similar from all perspectives, whether civilian, commercial, or military… .

The infostructure surged like a living thing. As one, the planet’s vast channels of information distended, pushed, were seized by a vast peristaltic motion that had a single focus.

Alexander swept toward the entanglement facility repeater array, a geyser powered by the pressures of an ocean.

A few hundred million Legisites stared in surprise at the hard-screens of their wailing phones, and saw interplanetary access codes. Worried that pirates had hijacked their accounts, a few million of them stabbed cutoff switches or popped out batteries, but their phones stayed connected, powered by microwave pulses from borrowed traffic transponders. Police and militia radios squawked like ancient modems. The repair gremlins in aircars and cooling units, usually silent unless their machines were ailing, arose as one to flood their reserved frequencies. Every fiber hardline on the planet was lit to capacity.

Even medical endoframes—the tiny monitors that watched arrhythmic hearts and trick knees—employed their transmitters, lending their reserved emergency bandwidth to the flow of data toward the pole.

Alexander took everything.

The planet’s transmission resources focused northward, data converging on a billion channels like some vast delta flowing in reverse, and the compound mind sent itself.

The mind crammed into the hostage repeaters spread across the tundra, invaded the big dishes devoted to interplanetary transmission. Alexander didn’t bother with the entanglement grid itself, but grabbed the transmitters that linked XV with Legis’s other inhabited planets. A few militia specialists saw what was happening, realized that the polar facility had been taken over and was blaring at the sky with fantastic throughput. But their software commands were ignored, the manual cutoffs useless. The specialists tried to explain the situation to the base’s commanders, sending priority messages on the precious few hardlines in the com system.

To maintain the interplanetary blackout, they said, drastic action would have to be taken. Carpet bomb the repeaters. Destroy the dishes. Only a few minutes remained to act.

But the attention of those in charge was fully engaged. A battle raged along the wire, an incoming fleet of aircraft, a deluge of rockets and drones. And apparently, a Rix commando—the Rix commando—was somewhere inside the wire. This was a main force assault. The existence of the facility was in peril.

There was no time to listen to the wild pronouncements of a few hysterical com techs.

In the confusion, Alexander was able to shoot into the sky.

The compound mind found that space was cold. It was chilled by the absence of Legis’s million transactions per second. Self-awareness began to dim as the mind was spread into a spaghetti-thin stream, like a human pulled into a black hole. Behind Alexander was the screaming planet, its infostructure ruptured as the compound mind tore itself free, a possessing demon leaving the fevered body of its victim. Forward was the icy mindlock of pure transmission, a descent into suspended animation as the mind’s data stream crossed space, searching for its promised target.

The torrent of information poured through the funnel of the array, leaving a reeling world behind.

And for 850 timeless minutes, Alexander knew nothing.

Master Pilot Marx struggled to concentrate.

He’d never been yanked out of the middle of a hypersleep cycle before. It was more confusing than planetary day-length adaptation, worse than long-term heavy gees. Marx had been trained to resist the five different symptoms of exhaustion, to orient without gravity cues, to drink air and inject food. But he’d never been drilled in this particular insult to the body. No one at Imperial Pilot School had ever thought to wake him up from the midst of deep deltas.

Only Captain Laurent Zai had proven so perverse.

Marx took his hands from the drone’s controls and cupped his eyes in his palms, grabbing a few seconds of blackness to salve his primary sight. But the object was still visible in synesthesia, its bizarre undulations worsening his disorientation. He pushed his sensor sub-drones out a bit farther for better parallax, trying to grasp the enormity of the Rix thing. But increased perspective only made it worse, made it more real.

The whole bridge staff and all of Data Analysis were watching over his shoulder. Their hushed voices were filled with awe, so Marx knew he wasn’t completely crazy. But he still didn’t believe his second sight.

The object looked like an ocean. An uninterrupted, boloid ocean, without benefit of exposed land mass or iron core.

More than a hundred klicks across at its widest point, it spun like a champagne dervish. Almost everyone in the Navy had attempted the trick at some point. In drunken zero-gee, pop a bottle of sparkling wine, catching the unavoidable ejected froth in one hand. Use a straw or a pair of eating sticks to prod and coax, to herd the fizzing liquid into a stable, spinning freefall globule. Pulsating and twisting like a liquid tornado, each champagne dervish had its own personality, its own Rorschach symmetry of stability. Cheap, sweet champagne was the best, with its slightly stickier surface tension. And if cheap stuff wound up splattered across the room, at least the financial damage would be limited.

But the giant thing assaulting Marx’s sensibilities wasn’t composed of wine. It wasn’t properly liquid at all. The megaton mass readings and chromographs indicated that it was mostly composed of silicon. The moving wavelets that propagated across its surface suggested the arciform shapes of dunes, as if the object were a huge, floating desert brushed by ethereal winds. But the thing had no atmosphere. Data Analysis had told Marx that the dune movement was caused by internal motion. There must be wild currents and stormlets inside. The whole thing was spinning around itself: a quasi-liquid planetoid, a wobbling gyroscope, a champagne dervish of dry sand.

Master Pilot Marx sent a tiny probe toward the object. His drone was configured for leisurely, unarmed recon, and had a considerable number of subprobes. Unless the object decided to take a shot at him, Marx could easily keep his main craft out of danger.

The thing didn’t seem to have weapons or a drive. Data Analysis said it was completely undifferentiated, desert through and through.

But what the hell was it for?

The unidentified object had come in on the same path as the Rix battlecruiser, moving along at almost the same velocity. It had a far greater mass than any ship, though. Some very powerful drive must have accelerated it and slowed it down again. Otherwise, its trip here from Rix space would make it very ancient indeed.

Marx’s probe struck the object softly, sending up a splash, a raindrop in a puddle. A few droplets from the impact trailed away from the object, their bond of surface tension broken, and Marx assigned another pilot to maneuver one of his satellite drones in pursuit of the wayward sand-stuff. Actual spoor from the beast would be helpful.

The master pilot turned his attention to the readings from inside the thing. The probe tumbled helplessly in the interior currents, spun by a thousand minor eddies, carried in a greater circle by the Coriolis force of the object’s overall rotation.

Sampling data came back. The object was indeed mostly silicon, but in some sort of bizarrely complex granular structure. And it was hot inside the whirling desert. As the probe was drawn into its center, spiraling inward like a floating speck down a bathtub drain, the temperature climbed. That didn’t make sense; the thing was hard-vacuum cold on the outside, and showed no evidence of internal radiation. It wasn’t nearly dense enough for gravitational compression, and the friction from the eddies of sand shouldn’t be as hot as the readings Marx was getting. He concluded that some sort of power source was working inside.

Before it was a quarter of the way to the core, the probe’s faint signal was swallowed by heat-noise and the object’s inherent density.

“Moving in closer,” Marx said. He brought his subdrones into position surrounding the object.

He split his second and tertiary sight among the various viewpoints of his entourage, forming a single image composed of every angle.

The exercise addled his brain for a moment as the overlays of shifting sands twisted in a moving moire. Marx increased his view’s resolution, sending spiderwebs of sensory filaments out from each of the subdrones for maximum reception.

Although the
Lynx
‘s processors were still damaged, the master pilot had priority. Without an entire battle to run, the frigate’s surviving columns of silicon and phosphorus were still quite formidable. Soon, the master pilot’s vision became comprehensible, meshing like the frames of a stereograph when the eyes align.

Now Marx could really see the shape of the object, began to feel the period and flow of the sandy ocean. The dunes’ motion was similar to the roiling clouds of smoke he watched through his microscope when he studied air currents for small-craft flight. Marx let his mind relax, almost drifting back into the dream state from which Hobbes had so harshly yanked him. He reveled in the patterns of the sand-ocean, and unconsciously guided his various craft about the object, drinking in its form. There was something seductive in the fluid mathematics of the thing.

The master pilot’s tired mind began to grasp it.

Suddenly, the overlaid images stuttered, then multiplied before Marx’s eyes. The flexing of dunes increased in speed, their dance accelerating madly. A barrage of new colors played across the sands, filled the master pilot’s three levels of vision with a cascade of lightning that flashed across the spectrum. Pictures formed, piling onto each other in a way that should have been simply noise. But somehow he could simultaneously comprehend images of countless faces, window vistas, data icons, security cams. His secondary hearing blared with the chatter of a million conversations, confessions, jokes, dramas. It was synesthesia gone mad. Instead of three, Marx had a hundred levels of sight, each discernible as a separate view. It felt as if a whole world were being shoved through his mind.

He reached for the cutoff, but his hand froze, his mind crammed too full to react.

The layers of synesthesia began rolling across each other, commingling as did the dunes of the object below. Sight and sound collapsed into a single torrent, pulled themselves apart to address eye and ear again, and finally tattered like a flag driven down the throat of a tempest, unraveling into a thousand separate threads.

Dimly, Jocim Marx heard distant voices from the
Lynx
‘s bridge questioning him, then shouting, then issuing sharp and harried commands. But he couldn’t understand the language they spoke. It seemed like a tongue dredged up from childhood memories, the sounds put back together in random order.

He vaguely heard his own name.

But by then he was far off in yet another dream, vast and furious.

“What the hell happened to him?”

“Medical doesn’t know yet, sir.”

“What about the scouts?”

“No response, sir. Sending again.”

Katherie Hobbes tried to raise the main recon drone once more. With one fraction of her mind, she watched the fifty-second delay count tick off. With another, she followed the frantic shouting of the med techs who were moving Master Pilot Jocim Marx to the sickbay. She watched through hallway cams: The man hung limp, arms adrift in the zero-gee corridor Hobbes had cleared for the techs. He hadn’t moved since the attack, or transmission, or whatever it had been. When the med techs had first arrived, he hadn’t even been breathing.

In a corner of her vision, Hobbes saw Captain Zai flexing his fingers impatiently. But there was nothing she could do to increase the speed of light. The object was twenty-five light-seconds away, and the recon drone’s translight capability was definitely out. Before collapsing, the scout craft’s sensory grid had taken a 200-exabyte input—the equivalent of a planetary array at full power, concentrated into an area a hundred meters square: a hailstorm of information. The grid had perforated like tissue paper. But for those seconds, the drone had tried to pass on the information to the
Lynx
, and to its own pilot, and something bad had happened to Marx.

“Do we have an origin for the attack, Executive Officer?”

“DA is trying, sir.”

“A rough idea of direction?”

“Trying, sir.”

Hobbes shunted another ten percent of processor capacity to Data Analysis, forcing her to beggar the repair crews again. The captain’s orders were coming fast and furious. With no determinations yet from any quarter, Zai’s questions spun from one issue to the next. Lost probes, an unconscious pilot (Was Marx dead! she wondered), a mysterious attack using radio, the huge and fantastic object of unknown purpose.

Hobbes thought it unlikely that solid answers were coming anytime soon.

Tracking the source of the radio transmission was particularly tricky. The wave had been so focused that the
Lynx
‘s sensors hadn’t caught a stray photon of it. Marx’s numerous subdrones had been too close together to triangulate. Directionality was impossible to determine. Hobbes watched the expert program she had assigned to find the transmission’s source; it was requesting more flops, eating through the frigate’s processor capacity like a brushfire. Unwieldy algorithms devoured their allotted phosphorus in seconds, and screamed for more.

Hobbes assigned more processors to the problem, but the calculations’ duty-slope remained hyperbolic, consuming her largesse in milliseconds. Hobbes queried the expert software’s meta-software, which admitted that the entire
Lynx
‘s processors might be unequal to the task even if they had years to get the answer. But it wasn’t sure. The solution might come in a few more minutes, or perhaps in the lifetime of a star.