The Killing of Worlds (22 page)

Perhaps a little common sense was in order.

“Sir? There’s only one place in the system that could generate a transmission burst of that magnitude.”

Zai thought for a moment.

“The Legis interplanetary array?”

She nodded.

“Raise the Imperial contingent there,” he ordered.

Hobbes tried. But nothing came back. She sent hails to the few Navy bases that were equipped with their own short-range entanglement grids. Again nothing.

The planet was off-line.

“There is no translight response from Legis XV, sir. Zero.”

“My god. What’s our delay?”

“Eight hours one-way, sir,” she estimated.

The captain thought for a moment. During those seconds of silence, the med techs reported to Hobbes that Marx was now breathing on his own. His brain wave diagnostics looked hot and unconscious, like a man in badly calibrated hypersleep.

ExO Hobbes noted that a marker in her vision was blinking, had been blinking for fifteen seconds, and she flinched. She had missed the return point for the drones’ message delay.

“Sir, the drones have failed to respond again. I’ll try—”

Zai interrupted her. “Send a general order to all
Lynx
personnel on Legis, via light speed. I want a report on the planet’s comsystem status. And have DA monitor the civilian newsfeeds; see if anything’s happening.”

Hobbes’s fingers moved to comply with the orders, but faltered. She couldn’t think of the protocol phrase for Zai’s order. A report on the planet wouldn’t make sense to the recipients unless they knew what was going on. They were marines, not planetary liaisons. If they asked for clarification, seventeen hours would be lost.

In the meantime, a flurry of priority markers were flashing. Repair crews demanding the return of their processor space. You idiot, Katherie, she thought. She’d never freed the
Lynx
‘s computers from their potentially endless tracking calculations. The expert program was spinning its wheels while a hundred other systems needed processor power.

Her mind froze, overwhelmed for a few seconds.

Hobbes realized that she was losing control. Her fingers would not move.

One thing at a time, she commanded herself.

She released the processor capacity to repair. Shot the Legis news-feeds to a rating in Data Analysis. Looked up at the captain, taking a moment to frame her thoughts.

“Marx is breathing, sir. The drones aren’t responding to light-speed hails. And … and I think I may have reached task saturation.”

Her eyes dropped. She struggled to compose the captain’s message to the marines on Legis, realizing what she had admitted. But it was an absolute in her training: An executive officer must report her own failures as she would those of the crew.

Hobbes felt the captain’s hand on her shoulder.

“Easy, Executive Officer,” he said. “You’re doing fine.”

She breathed slowly. Zai’s hand stayed, offering its gentle pressure.

“Priority, priority,” came a voice. Ensign Tyre.

“This had better be good,” Hobbes answered.

The young ensign spoke with absolute confidence. “We’ve amplified the final signals from the recon drone’s satellite craft, ma’am.”

Hobbes’s eyebrows raised. The smaller drones with Marx’s craft had their own transmitters, but they were weak and light-speed, intended to be relayed through the main recon drone. Hobbes couldn’t remember if she’d ordered anyone to look for their transmissions.

“You have to see it, ma’am,” Tyre said. “It is priority, priority.”

“I heard you, Ensign.”

She ran Tyre’s video in a corner of secondary sight, simultaneously scanning the Legis newsfeeds of eight hours ago, Jocim Marx’s diagnostics, and composing a message to the marines on Legis. She kept this last simple: “We can’t raise the translight array. What the hell is going on down there?”

But through it all, Tyre’s video caught her attention.

What was that?

She reran it, and felt her mind stuttering again.

“Captain.”

“Hobbes?”

“I need to show you something, sir,” she managed.

Hobbes cleared the big bridge airscreen. Only at that scale would anyone believe this. She played Tyre’s video there, huge and undeniable.

Floating before them was the object, rippling with the sharp lines of dune-shadows from the distant sun. Marx’s crafts were a constellation around it. For a moment, the feed was perfectly clear, the images coming through the main drone. Then the radio burst killed it, and the detail on the object’s surface disappeared. But the gross undulations of the object’s perpetual sandstorm were still visible, caught by the subdrones, which had apparently survived a few seconds longer.

The object began to flex, to change shape.

“Is that a transmission artifact, Hobbes?”

“Not according to DA, sir. This is at one-tenth speed, by the way.”

The boloid shape twisted, squeezing its own mass from one extremity into another, like some multichambered hourglass designed to record gravity shifts over time. It shot out geysers that plummeted back still coherent, arches of running sand. The object’s surface seemed abuzz with motion, covered with tiny explosions like an expanse of ocean in driving rain. Or perhaps it was forming fractal details that were lost in the low resolution.

Then, just as the object’s wild gyrations seemed to be subsiding, sixteen clearly defined columns of sand shot out from it. Each targeted a separate drone, plucking them from space like hungry pseudopods, reeling them into the object’s depths as the picture degraded stepwise—one drone dying after another—into noise.

Then the screen went dark.

The bridge was silent, stunned.

“Executive Officer.” Zai’s voice filled the quiet. Hobbes swallowed, wondering if she’d been foolish to have displayed this monstrous event to the entire bridge crew.

“Sir?”

“Reset the repair priorities.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want acceleration in one hour.”

That was utterly impossible. But Hobbes was too overwhelmed to protest.

“Yes, sir.”

Her fingers formed the necessary gestural commands. Somehow, the shock of what they’d just witnessed made it all easier. It was as if the troublesome higher functions of her brain—logic, comprehension, anxiety—had been erased by that mad and awesome image. All that remained of Hobbes was a smoothly functioning machine.

But in some deep place she heard the screaming of her own fear. And the afterimage of the object’s frenzy stayed frozen in her mind, like some troublesome bum-in of secondary sight that could not be erased.

The thing had come to life.

Another wave of torchfish struck him.

The channel that joined bay and tide pool had become a torrent, the tide rolling wildly back and forth between the two bodies of water. Bright fish shot past him like grains of radium in some glowing hourglass.

Jocim Marx looked up.

The moon catapulted across the sky, sucking the oceans of the world along.

Jocim plunged his spear into the sand and clung to it, fighting the current with all his strength. He couldn’t remember which way the water was going, to bay or tidal pool. Both seemed to have grown as vast as oceans, their shifting mass choking the raging channel in which Jocim found himself. He knew that he could not let go, couldn’t let himself be pulled into the open sea.

Marx looked down, and saw a finger of red join the streaming darts of light.

It was his own blood. The fish were biting him again.

The tracers of rushing light increased, multiplied, climbed an exponential slope. Jocim held on, screaming at the transient violations of small, sharp teeth. The gushing water pulled his spear into a hyperbole, lifting his bleeding feet from the sandy bottom.

The sky was red, he saw.

The ocean begged for him to let go. Its tidal strength stretched him out from the spear as if he were an arrow notched upon a bow. The ocean was full of a trillion tiny lights, a trillion voices and images and snatches of effluvial data. It raged with angry journal entries and impulsive sell orders and terrified calls to the police. The ocean wanted to consume him, to lose Jocim in its vast reservoirs of information.

Jocim Marx felt his legs disappearing, shredded by the hungry, passing fish.

His blood curled into the ocean, was turned on the lathe of its currents into a spiral jetty of red.

But he held on.

The torchfish had opened his gut, and were nipping at his flailing entrails, carrying away his soft tissues like a furious wind stripping a dandelion. Bright bullets from some limitless firearm, the fish raked the flesh from his chest, pounded furiously at the insufficient armor of his ribs. They consumed Jocim’s heart again.

And finally only his arms were left, then simply a pair of hands holding on with a ghastly singularity of will.

But then the tide slackened. The torrent began to slow, and the spear unbent and lifted up its disembodied, defiant cargo.

Jocim Marx felt himself coming back together. His arms grew from the indomitable hands, eyes and face beginning to re-form, the wild scattering of his flesh and bones reversing. And he knew that by the time the moon would rise again, in a few minutes, he would be ready and whole.

And the channel would rage at him again.

“What do we know about this object?”

Captain Laurent Zai directed this question at Amanda Tyre. The young ensign held his eyes steadily, he noticed. She no longer needed Hobbes as an intermediary.

“On a gross scale, sir?” Tyre answered. “Its volume changes constantly, but averages roughly four hundred thousand cubic kilometers. The outermost layer of sand spins about once every six hours, but like a star or a gas giant, different depths rotate at different rates. Its internal currents are far more variable than any natural phenomenon. Its motion is mathematically chaotic.”

“I believe we had noticed that, Ensign,” Zai offered. “What’s it made of?”

“Mostly empty space, sir. It would float in water, assuming it didn’t saturate. No denser than a sugar cube.”

Zai noted that Tyre paused here, as if allowing for a moment of surprise, aware that her words unsettled the old psychological association between mass and power: Anything light couldn’t hurt you.

“Based on the physical sampling effected by one of Marx’s probes, most of the material content of the object is silicon. This silicon is structured in units about a half-millimeter across—the size of grains of sand. Each grain is composed of many extremely small layers, and doped with various other elements.”

“Doped?”

“Yes, sir. Presumably to change the conductivity of the silicon. Like the semiconductor materials in a pre-quantum computer.”

Zai narrowed his eyes.

“Tyre, do you think this object is one giant processor?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

She offered her ignorance without apology. Zai was glad to see she was not a speculator, as so many in Data Analysis tended to be.

“How does it move?”

“Before the transmission event, the motion was simply centrifugal, sir. The outer layer seems to be adhesive in some way. Like a water droplet’s surface tension.”

Zai nodded. Everyone had noticed how much it looked like a champagne dervish.

“But when the object… consumed the recon drones, that movement was obviously some other process.”

“Obviously,” Zai muttered. “Any ideas?”

“I, um, have suggestive data to relate, sir. And some possible interpretations to offer.”

“Please,” Zai said, smiling. Perhaps Tyre was a speculator after all, but at least she was a cautious one.

Tyre gestured, and a background-radiation chromograph appeared in the command bridge’s table airscreen.

“This was recorded by the
Lynx
‘s passive sensors twelve minutes ago, a few seconds before the transmission event. That big spike is silicon. The smaller one up here is arsenic.”

“Arsenic? So, it could be a semiconducting processor,” Hobbes said. “Or at least a storage device.”

Zai nodded. Of that, he had grown fairly certain. He was waiting only for the civilian transmissions from Legis to confirm his fears.

“Yes, ma’am,” Tyre answered. “It’s a computer. But it’s a great deal more.”

She gestured, and the chromograph multiplied into a time series, propagating along its z-axis to become a spiky, chaotic mountain range.

“Here are the first few seconds of the transmission event. Note that the elemental makeup of the object changes.”

Tyre leaned back from the table, folding her hands.

Hobbes was the first to speak. “Changes? You mean to say it transubstantiated in a matter of seconds?”

Zai looked at the airscreen, trying to remember his stellar mechanics courses at the academy. That was the last time anyone had asked him to interpret a chromograph. “What elements are we looking at?”

“These spikes are metals,” Tyre said, airmousing a set of harmonics descending from the tallest peak. “Vanadium, electrum, and titanium in correct proportions to create superplastic adamantum. And this is a bit of mercury, possibly for some sort of inertial guidance.”

“Guidance? Motile alloys?” Zai said. This was too much to believe.

“Yes, sir. The structures that plucked Marx’s drones from space had to have some sort of orientation device, and a powerful armature. The object’s transubstantiation seems sophisticated enough to create such devices on the fly.”

“No,” Hobbes said quietly.

Zai narrowed his eyes. The Empire had transubstantiation devices; in industrial settings, lead could be turned to gold in useful quantities. Some isolated gas-giant outposts with access to thermal energy sometimes made metals from hydrogen and methane. The process was obscenely energy-expensive, but generally cheaper than shipping bulk metals in starships. And of course, there were always exotic new transuranium elements being created in laboratories.

But this level of control—elements from across the periodic table on demand—was fantastic.

“Why didn’t we realize this sooner?” Hobbes asked.