Tides of Light Read online

  —I can’t tell what the signals say. Might be suit comm amped way up. Like somebody talkin’ to a crowd.—

  “Try getting a fix on it.”

  —Yeasay, lover.—She added a playful laugh and he realized he was being too brusque and Cap’nly.

  “You can get even in bed tonight.”

  —That an order?—

  “You can give the orders.”

  —Even better.—

  He laughed and turned back to the spectacle.

  His mind skipped with agitated awe. It had been sheer bravado, he thought, to name this sun Abraham’s Star. A tribute to his father, yes, and with a sudden wrenching sadness he wished desperately that he could again talk to Abraham. It seemed he had never had enough time to learn from his father, never enough to tap that unpretentious certainty that Abraham had worn like a second skin.

  He recalled that weathered yet mirthful face, its casual broad smile and warm eyes. Abraham had known the value of simple times, of quiet days spent doing rough work with his hands, or just strolling through the ample green fields that ringed the Citadel.

  But Abraham had not been born into a simple time, and so he had come to be a master of the canny arts humans needed. Killeen had absorbed from him the savvy to survive when they raided mech larders, but that was not what he remembered best. The wry, weary face, with its perpetual promise of love and help, the look that fathers gave their sons when they glimpsed a fraction of themselves in their heirs—that had stayed with Killeen through years of blood and fear that had washed away most of the Citadel’s soft im- ages. He could not recall his mother nearly as well, perhaps because she had died when he was quite young.

  And what would Abraham say, now that his son had named a star for him that was a caldron of vast forces, beside which humanity was a mere fleck, a nuisance? Some promised land! Killeen grimaced.

  The hoop had finished its first revolution and begun the second, hastening. Its inner edge did not lie exactly along New Bishop’s axis but stood a tiny fraction out from it.

  As Killeen watched, the cosmic ring finished its second passage, revolving with ever-gathering speed. The hoop seemed like a part in some colossal engine, spinning to unknown purpose. It glowed with a high, prickly sheen as fresh impulses shot through it—amber, frosted blue, burnt orange—all smearing and thinning into the rich, brimming honey gold.

  —I’m picking up a whirring in the magnetic fields,—Shibo sent.

  His Arthur Aspect immediately observed:

  That is the inductive signal from the cosmic string’s revolution. It is acting like a coil of wire in a giant motor.

  “What for?” Killeen demanded, his throat tight. Without ever having set foot on it, he felt that New Bishop was his, the Family’s, and not some plaything in a grotesquely gargantuan contraption. He called up his Grey Aspect.

  I cannot…understand. Clearly it moves…to the beck…of some unseen hand…I have never heard…of mechs working on such a scale…nor of them using a cosmic string…To be sure…strings were supposed…in human theory…to be quite rare. They should move…at very near the speed of light. This one must have…collided with the many stars…and clouds…slowing it. Someone captured it…trapped with magnetic fields.

  Arthur broke in:

  A truly difficult task, of course, beyond the scope of things human—but not, in principle, impossible. It merely demands the manipulation of magnetic field gradients on a scale unknown—

  “What’s your point?” Killeen demanded. Though the Aspect talk streamed through his mind blindingly fast, he had no patience for the smug, arched-eyebrow tone of Arthur’s little lectures. Equations fluttered in his left eye. They were leakage from Arthur; or maybe the Aspect thought much mumbo jumbo would impress him. Killeen grimaced. The Aspect had now assimilated Grey’s memories and was working with them. Grey’s dusty presence faded as Arthur continued crisply:

  Simply that the cosmic string is clearly employed here in some sort of civil-engineering sense. Shibo detects the strong inductive electromagnetic fields generated by its revolving, but surely this cannot be the purpose. No, it is a side effect.

  “Why slice in when the cut seals up right away?”

  Indeed. A puzzle, surely. Still, I can admire this object for its beauty alone. Grey tells me that they ascribed the very formation of the galaxies, and even whole clusters of galaxies, to immense cosmic strings, at the very dawn of our universe. Rings were once truly, cosmologically huge. Galaxies formed from the turbulence of their passing, like whorls behind a watercraft. As time waxed on, cosmic strings twisted on themselves, breaking where they intersected. Coiled strings did this repeatedly, proliferating into many lopped-off loops—such as this magnificent fossil, apparently.

  “Look, what’s that thing doing?” Somewhat miffed, Arthur said coolly:

  We will have to deduce its function from its form, obviously. Note that the absolutely straight inner edge of the hoop stops short of exactly lying along the planet’s axis. This cannot be a mistake, not with engineers of this ability. Clearly this offset is intended.

  The hoop revolved faster and faster. Through Shibo’s comm line he could hear the distant whump-whump-whump of magnetic detectors in the control vault.

  “Why line up along the poles?” Killeen persisted.

  I would venture to suppose that this quick revolution evokes a pressure all around the polar axis. The faster the string revolves, the more smoothly distributed is this pressure. It slices free the rock close to the axis. This liberates the inner core cylinder it has carved away, frees it from the planetary mass farther out. The results of this I cannot see, however.

  “Humph!” Killeen snorted in exasperation. “Let me know when you have an idea.”

  THIRTEEN

  He returned to the labyrinth of corridors within the station’s disk. Over comm he summoned two more squads to explore the Flitters. They met him at the bay and he gave instructions for trying to revive the craft. The Family might need to flee soon. How they could get past the revolving hoop to reach New Bishop, though, he had no idea. Maybe the cosmic string would go away. Maybe it would stop. All he could do was be sure the Family had the capability to move swiftly and then pray that some opportunity came from that.

  Around him midshipmen and other crew hurried, searching for the right cables, calling raucously on the comm lines for input from the Argo’s ancient computer memory. Commandeering mechtech was always chancy, dangerous business.

  Killeen saw that the first squad had breached the incoming Flitter’s hold. They were prying forth crates. No time to see what these held; he ordered the space cleared in case they should need it. He was uncomfortably aware that they had taken the station at a particularly lucky moment. Some vast experiment was going on around New Bishop, and they had sneaked in while attention was focused on that. Whatever called the tune in this star system was distracted. But for how long?

  Killeen fell to helping one work gang unload cargo. He enjoyed the heft of real labor, using his hands, and it cleared his mind for some unsettling questions.

  Had the course settings of Argo somehow taken this cosmic string into account? He remembered that the Mantis, years ago, had conferred with the recently revived intelligences buried in Argo—human-programmed machine minds of undoubted loyalty to humankind. Had the Mantis set this course for Argo, knowing that they would arrive when the golden hoop was at work?

  It seemed fantastic, so specific a prediction at such a range, like describing the clouds over a particular mountaintop five years hence—but not, he supposed, truly impossible. Such ability, if real, simply underlined again the unreachable heights of machine intelligence. Killeen accepted this without a second thought; he had never known a time when the predominance of mech minds was not obvious.

  Killeen thrust speculations aside. Events rewarded the prepared, and he intended to act.

  “Come on,” he called to one of the newly arrived squads. “These ships—try figurin’ them out.” He
led them toward the Flitter which had just arrived. The squad unloading it had been forced to rejack the ship into the power cables from the station in order to get the cargo-hold doors to open.

  “Cap’n, put me in charge,” Jocelyn said at his elbow. “I’ll get this one up’n runnin’.”

  About her eyes there was a concentrated look of unbending discipline. She was one officer he could rely on to do a job on time and without error. Lean and fit, the Argo years had not softened her. She was trouble only when she got to talking with the others.

  “Good,” he said. “I want as many Flitters running as we can manage.”

  “Enough so can carry all the Family?” she asked.

  “Yeasay.” She had already guessed his intention. They were too exposed here. The station was some sort of shipping nexus in an economic scheme he could not imagine, but he knew that whatever truly ran the station would not long tolerate them. Their victory over the mech attendants had been exhilarating but too easy. The true governing intelligence was elsewhere.

  As if to confirm this, Shibo broke in on comm.—I’m picking up another ship coming at us. Moving fast. It’s a lot bigger, too.—

  “Time to pay the piper,” Killeen said, repeating a mysterious phrase his long-dead mother had used. The last musician had vanished from the Family a century ago.

  Jocelyn had heard the comm on overlap circuit. “Think it’s a boarding party, Cap’n?” she asked sharply.

  “Um-hmm,” Killeen said. He did not like being prompted by crew, especially when they were right.

  “We can take them right here, when they come into the bay,” she said.

  He shook his head. “They won’t be that dumb, whoever they are. Even ordinary defensive mechs, barely better than navvys, would see that.”

  “We can catch ’em as they come in over the disk,” she persisted.

  “If they come that way. Suppose they dock up at the end towers?”

  “There?” She frowned. “We haven’t got out there yet. Hadn’t thought…But what’d be the point, puttin’ a dock that far away?”

  “Boardin’ when there’s trouble down here, that’s why,” Killeen said irritably. He disliked discussing tactics with crew, even officers, because they kept him from clearing his mind of all extraneous ideas. He needed to concentrate, decide on the best odds in the battle he knew was coming. There could be no other meaning to another, larger ship coming along the same trajectory that the Flitter had followed.

  “Got that first craft up and running?” he asked.

  “Uh—” Jocelyn touched her left temple and conferred with her squads over comm. “Yeasay, Cap’n. The other Flitters will take a while. Y’know—rev up, check out, things like that.”

  “But the first one?”

  “It’s ready.”

  “Good. Let’ s move it out from the station.”

  Jocelyn blinked, surprised. “Uh, why?”

  Killeen gave her a mirthless smile. “Just do it.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Do it, Lieutenant.”

  “Yessir!”

  Killeen made his way up through the open cargo hold of the Flitter just as the doors began to close behind him. He wanted to get a full view of the station, and this was a quick way. It would be a while—he checked with Shibo and got an exact figure, 1.68 hours—before the large craft could arrive.

  He wanted to see what he could use for maneuver, what the station could do as a defensive fortification. The immense crackling energies that worked over the disk surface would presumably not hinder the humans as they moved and fired at the incoming antagonist, since they had not reacted to the Argo as it approached. But he could be sure of nothing.

  He wormed his way through narrow dark passages and soon he was in the cramped control room, a geometrically precise cylinder densely rimmed with electronic gear.

  Jocelyn was floating beside some complex mechtech. “I’ve just ’bout got it revved up, Cap’n,” she began. Then something abruptly shifted. Killeen could feel ratcheting signals course through his own sensory net.

  The Flitter moved under him.

  “What—?”

  Jocelyn’s eyes widened. “I—I dunno. This ship’s movin’—but I didn’t start it.”

  Killeen sprang to the end of the long cylinder. It was transparent and showed the wide loading bay beyond…which was drifting silently away.

  “We’re pulling out.”

  Jocelyn cried, “But I didn’t—”

  “I know. Something else is.”

  The loading bay coasted away and he saw that they were backing out the entrance tube. The Flitter buzzed and clicked under them, finding its head.

  Killeen switched to general comm. “Unjack all Flitters!”

  Faint confirming replies came back.

  “What’s doing this?” Jocelyn asked, punching in commands on her wrist module. They had no effect.

  “That big ship coming toward us. It’s overriden our work.”

  “Maybe we can get out.” Jocelyn tried to open the cargo-bay doors. No response.

  “We’re trapped,” Killeen said. His mind raced through possibilities. Did the approaching ship know humans were inside here?

  There must be an emergency exit from this craft, something manually activated. The design of the Flitter was strange, seeming to follow no pattern of bilateral symmetry even though the exterior features and hull did. He would have to explore it carefully and see what resources they could marshal.

  Whatever was coming would probably unlock the Flitter to see what sort of vermin it had caught inside. He had a quick image of himself and Jocelyn being plucked forth and held up to the light by something immense and terrible.

  Jocelyn gazed with a pale, stricken expression out the viewport. They were out of the bay now and the Flitter had made a powered turn. Now it accelerated steadily away from the station, which turned in luminous silvery glory below them.

  Jocelyn gritted her teeth but did not give way to excitement. She was a good officer. Killeen knew she thought she should rightfully be Cap’n. Women had usually led the Family, and Jocelyn had been Cap’n Fanny’s best lieutenant.

  But her normally brisk voice shook slightly as she turned to him. “Why’s…why’s it want this Flitter?”

  “We’ll find out,” Killeen said.

  PART TWO

  Starswarmer

  ONE

  Clinking

  clacking

  jittering,

  Quath strode the slashed land.

  A final hill loomed between her and the Syphon. Quath articulated widely, legs grating, yawning—and surged over the apex.

  A stone outcrop shattered against her underbelly and ground away with a brittle shriek. Quath tuned out the wail of tearing metal, even as she felt the alloy rip. A storage vat popped, the sulfuric mix gurgling out.

  She peered ahead. There, blooming skyward in golden plumes, would grow the Syphon.

  came a burst in Nimfur’thon’s sweet-sour tongue.

  Quath spat in reply, though hissing with warm friendship to take the sting from her jibe. To call anyone one-legged was a deep insult within the elaborate status-conventions. But the image of anything hopping about on one pod was also funny enough to be a joke among friends.

 

 

  Nimfur’thon sent.

 

 

  Quath rumbled on, edging closer to the place where the Syphon would come. Already clouds writhed red and tortured overhead. The golden carving line had already passed once within view. Soon it would reappear, casting stark shadows. It could sear if Quath and Nimfur’thon got too close.

 

  When she and Nimfur’thon had boa
sted and challenged each other to come out here they had both been brave beyond question. Now Quath felt timid strains lacing her speech, fed from her subminds. Those were always cautious. They demanded incessant consultation. They made basso doubt and hesitation ride out beneath her carrier wave. She hated how these unwanted clues to her inner nature slipped through her filters, making her easy to read.

  Nimfur’thon said confidently,

  Quath stopped to measure her position, using fixes on two nearby peaks. No moons circled this world; for easy navigation, she sighted on the high station captured from the mechs by her brood. This glimmering spoil of warfare pleased Quath’s subminds, a sign of their thundering success on this world. They had deftly gutted the mech-station superintendents, the Horde of Podia descending with complete surprise and zestful courage. Quath was proud to be part of such a daring thrust into an inner mech province.

  Quath surged downhill—clanking, jingling, ringing—as her pods found footing on skittering stones. She arrowed on Nimfur’thon’s peeping redness. Calmly, letting no color into her warble, she said,

 

  Quath’s mind clogged for an instant as she sensed a servo whine hotly—eeeeeeii—in a forepod. She thought of the Tukar’ramin safely working in the Hive, beyond the brimming ridgeline. She and Nimfur’thon should be there, celebrating with the rest of the Hive’s brood.

  Quath had tramped these hills many days with Nimfur’thon as they labored together. They had struggled with the fluxtube cannisters. Nimfur’thon had splintered a pod bone when a bulkhead tipped over. She had been unable to walk without agony until Quath fetched an artificial replacement.

  Nimfur’thon’s new pod shaft worked better than her natural organic one, as usual. Quath envied Nimfur’thon the fresh pod, making her faster; she had no natural pods left at all. Nimfur’thon’s long, prickly body gleamed with purpose, nearly all of it covered in metallic cowlings.