Battlemind (2 page)

“I’m registering enough rads out there to fry us all in a microsec or two,” Warstrider Valda Harrison added. “I hope to hell these magshields hold.…”

“Zero out that talk,” Kara said, a little more harshly than she intended. In the midst of such splendor, such immensity, it would be easy to become overawed and lose any sense of purpose or focus. “Let’s keep our minds on the job.”

“It’s not like the machine bastards can hear us,” Lieutenant Pellam Hochstader said. The tall, bearded lieutenant was Second Squadron’s commander. “We
do
have secure commo freaks here.”

“I wonder what this empty part was like,” Third Squadron’s Lieutenant Ran Ferris added thoughtfully, “when it was all full of stars?”

“Poetry later, Ran,” she said, but she knew he’d caught the warmth in her mental voice. “Right now, we’re here to kill things.”

“If we can find the gokkers,” Kemperer added.

The immediate absence of any opposition added to the void’s oppressiveness… and the haunting mystery that permeated it. The emptiness was explained easily enough, of course. There were multiple black holes here at the Galaxy’s center, burrowed away at the very center of the thronging beeswarm of stars that formed the core of the Milky Way. Hanging in the far distance, some three hundred light years away, was the object long known to Earth-based astronomers as Sagittarius West, centered on the fierce and tiny pinprick of Sagittarius West*, the precise gravitational center of the Galaxy’s great spiral, a compact accumulation of some millions of solar masses at the heart of a sweeping spiral of violently heated gas. Much closer at hand, a few light days away at most, was a smaller but stranger denizen of the zoo of strange objects at the Galactic Core, the fifteen-solar-mass black hole known since the late twentieth century as the Great Annihilator. Those two massive and enigmatic objects, Sag West* and the Annihilator, had long before swept this innermost core of the Galaxy’s central bulge clean of most stars and gas.

The cavern was not quite empty, however. Periodically—every ten million years or so—in-falls of gas from the molecular cloud ringing the Core spiraled in to the cavern’s heart and coalesced in a dazzling spray of new star formation, a short-lived starburst, relatively speaking, as the infant stars were then drawn on to fiery and tortured deaths in one or another of the Core singularities. Evidence of past star-burst periods was still visible as ghost remnants of exploded stars, and by the handful of thinly scattered survivors of the hungry singularities isolated by distance.

Here, too, were worlds, those clots and crumbs of matter at the Galactic Core too small to accumulate mass enough for a star. Some were gas giants, others rocky or icy bodies ranging from earth-sized worlds down to sand and gravel, all barren and radiation-seared. Many had been transformed into cometlike objects with long, silvery tails as the radiations of this place blasted atmosphere or subliming water vapor into space.

And there were worlds—or things—stranger still: a neutron star flung from the Core eons past at incredible speed, made visible by its wake through the dense plasma of the Core, a tail one hundred light years long; great arcs of plasma that looped and plunged through heaven, some reaching thousands of light years out beyond the Galactic poles and delineating the Galaxy’s magnetic fields of force; the tattered remnants of ancient explosions that must have given the entire Galaxy a quasar’s brilliance.

Against so vast and yawning a chasm, against such arresting cosmic splendor, it seemed incredible that Intelligence could manifest itself in any visible way. Even on worlds like Earth, where the megopoli sprawled inland from the coasts for hundreds of kilometers and the sky-els stretched from the equator far out into space, it was possible to look down from orbit and be hard-pressed to see any sign that Man had left his mark on the face of the planet at all. Here, the scale was vaster by many orders of magnitude, and yet Kara could see definite hints of…
order…
and of artifacts vast on a superhuman scale. Most of the stars remaining within the Core cavern were stragglers, randomly adrift, and yet
some…

Kara, frankly, was having trouble ordering and processing all that she was seeing. The scale of this place, immense beyond human comprehension, had left her a little dazed and feeling very small. The very large in the natural order of things she could accept, even appreciate, but the artificial nature of some of what she was seeing was stunning, even crippling when it was suddenly revealed to any mind programmed through human scales and values.

With an effort of will, through the link established by her personal Naga fragment, she could shift her center of awareness to any surface of the vehicle or receive visual input from a full three-sixty in three dimensions. Looking astern, she could see the slender, gleaming silver thread of the Gate the reconnaissance force had just come through. As straight as a laser beam, it stretched like a razor’s slash across more than one thousand kilometers, a two-kilometer-thick cylinder containing the mass of hundreds of suns, packed to densities approaching those of a neutron star, then set to rotating about its long axis at relativistic speeds. The process warped the spacetime matrix in its vicinity, opening countless hyperdimensional pathways. Kara and the others of the Phantoms had followed one of those paths to reach this place, located some twenty-five thousand light years from the worlds known to Man. The largest structures devised by human engineering were the sky-els that connected the surfaces of most human-inhabited planets with their synchorbitals, but the tallest of those, though considerably longer than the Stargate, were insubstantial wisps of gossamer in comparison to that space-rending colossus.

Yet even the Stargate paled by comparison with the scale of some of the engineering evident in this alien place. Here, entire stars were being moved, herded from place to place like immense, grazing animals, the process evident in their regimentation, in the geometrical perfection of their alignments with one another. She could see stars arrayed in circles, in polygons, in precisely ordered clusters, as though they’d been penned awaiting some deferred judgment.

And the Great Annihilator—with only a minute fraction of the mass of the black hole at True Center, yet the focus of inconceivable and inexplicable energies and phenomena—was itself ringed by an artificial construct, a structure of some kind just barely glimpsed at this distance, a ring of pinpoint lights and nearly indiscernible supporting structures in a rigid and geometrical array.

Strangest was one particular string of stars describing a great, gently arcing curve reminiscent of the twist in the shell of a nautilus or the curve of a galaxy’s spiral arms. Kara counted forty-three stars in that one line, each precisely and evenly spaced from its neighbors, the whole vast array stretched across the sky from the zenith and terminating at the radiant core of the Great Annihilator. Those few close enough to Kara’s location to show a tiny disk revealed, on optical magnification, that one side had been induced to flare with the blue-white intensity of a nova, while the opposite hemisphere seemed darkened and blotched by comparison. As nearly as she could tell from this distance, someone, some
thing
had somehow manipulated those stars, exciting them to blow off vast and continuous flares on only one side—in effect transforming them into titanic guided missiles moving ponderously and unstoppably through space. And as for their destination…

Kara had the distinct and thoroughly uncomfortable feeling that the Web intelligence was deliberately guiding those stars, nudging them one by one and in perfectly regimented order into the maw of the Great Annihilator. It was chilling. The builders of this place, the machine intelligence known to humanity only as the Web, had built a ring around one of the black holes at the Galaxy’s heart and now were steadily feeding it suns.

My God,
she thought, watching through full-extended sensors.
These things toss stars around the way we would throw a ball. Star miners, star drivers, star destroyers… and we’re challenging them for control of the Galaxy.…

So immense were the energies marshaled there that it was hard to tell what was the result of intelligent planning, and what might be the workings of natural forces, of physics on a galactic scale. Those vast arcs of plasma showed a regularity that might well suggest deliberate manipulation… or simply reflect the order stamped by intense magnetic fields on clouds of charged particles.

The Web, it was now known, was an extremely old machine civilization, one mat presumably had arisen as the product of organic intelligence in the very dawn of the Galaxy’s existence, though whether as tools of that intelligence or as the next step in its evolution was still unknown. For some billions of years, the machines, a lifeform of their own now in every way that mattered, had been quietly building here at me heart of the Galaxy, wielding forces that humanity could only wonder at. The scope of their engineering prowess was staggering.

Perhaps most unsettling of all was the knowledge of the sheer, inhuman
patience
the Web must possess. It was using gravity and the ability to transform stars into rocket-powered projectiles to herd dozens of suns across hundreds of light years—a process that must have taken untold millennia to begin with and would take many more to complete. The scale of what Kara was seeing here, the ring around the Annihilator’s accretion disk, the mass of the rotating Stargate, all spoke of a civilization mat thought in terms of millions of years, of eons rather man of decades.

What kind of mind could think in such terms?

And how could it be outthought and defeated?

Kara was still trying to assimilate, to comprehend what mat kind of power meant. There was so much Man yet had to learn about me Web and about what the Web was trying to accomplish, both here at me Galactic Core and beyond, in the quieter backwaters of the Galaxy’s far-flung spiral arms. It was possible, though not certain yet, that the Web had created the huge spinning constructs called me Star-gates. Two were known, the first locked between me mutually orbiting white dwarfs that were all mat remained of the star called Nova Aquila, a second here at the Galactic Core.

And mere were hints of others, she knew, scattered across me length and breadth of me entire Galaxy.

But that’s Daren’s worry,
she thought, thinking briefly of her half-brother back at Nova Aquila.
And Dev’s.…

The thought of Devis Cameron, of what he had become, sent a shudder through her consciousness. He, of all humanity, had been the first to see this place… in a way. She’d studied the records returned to human space by the probe he’d sent through the Nova Aquila Gate. But it was so hard to think of him as…
human.
She swiftly turned her thoughts to more immediate matters.

The other warstriders continued their high-velocity sprint across the void, though there was no way to tell by looking at the stars or nebulae about them that they were moving at all. An hour ago, they’d entered a carefully mapped and plotted hyperdimensional pathway opening close by the blurred silver surface of the Nova Aquila Stargate; a timeless instant later, they’d emerged here, hurtling at high speed into the void of the Core. Though they possessed plasma thrusters for maneuvering, their primary drives grasped local magnetic fields, intensifying them, manipulating them to provide both velocity and changes in course.

A world expanded from pinpoint to dusky sphere ahead. It was a barren and radiation-scorched place, utterly and forever lifeless—at least insofar as life could be defined as collections of organic chemicals. From space, the surface appeared to be a mottled patchwork of black rock and pale white-and-tan salts, its face peppered with craters and slashed time and time again by literally world-wracking collisions. As Kara drew closer, it became apparent that here, too, the machine rulers of this realm had stamped their imprint in the lifeless chaos of rock and desert. The surveys of this place, based on data gleaned by robotic probes, had designated the world as Core D9837.

She hit the first traces of air, a thin haze of vapor about the burned-over world. There was scant atmosphere here—mostly carbon dioxide and a scattering of other heavy gases—but her entry speed was so high that her stricter struck flame as it stooped toward the world, scratching a white contrail across its deep blue-violet, light-tortured sky.

To left and right, above and below, the other striders of the reconnaissance company hit atmosphere as well, but Kara was scarcely aware of them as she rode her strider down the long, flaming shaft of incandescence, sensing through her biolink with the machine’s AI the searing buffeting she was taking during the approach. Fire stood frozen in the sky overhead, looped in titanic streamers, arcs, delicate filigree traceries of energy, and in the spiraled magnificence of the Great Annihilator. Below, the face of a planet nearly as large as New America or Earth lay in rad-seared desolation, its surface curiously worked and reworked by processes unimaginable into vast, sprawling, and subtly alien geometries, shapes worked out in near-right angles, glowing strips of light, and convoluted mechanisms arranged in patterns not easily retained by merely human memory.

The contrails of her comrades appeared, glowing gently, though the light here was uncertain. Core D9837 orbited no sun but was an orphan, a mote adrift with other crumbs left over from the rubble of an extravagantly wasteful Creation. The only light was the soft and ruddy glow from the background stars, highlighted here and there by the sharper brilliance of blue-white flares or hotter suns, or by the softer arc-light glow of the Annihilator’s polar jets.

The other forty-seven warstriders of the Phantoms rode their own craft toward landing, burning off excess speed in glowing friction with the atmosphere. Operating now strictly according to programmed instructions loaded into their striders’ AIs, the warcraft descended in gradually flattening trajectories, steering by powerful magnetic fields interacting with the magnetic fields of this world and this alien, flame-ridden sky. Part of their mission was survey mapping; strider AIs processed streams of data as they overflew a strangely shaped and ordered topology, a gray terrain that should have consisted of stark, raw deserts, barren canyons, heat-weathered mesas—and probably once had been just that—but which at some point in the remote past had been extensively reworked.