Broken: A Plague Journal (7 page)

The process continued for billions of years. In time, out of time, the original machine died, but its infinite spawn carried the message forever onward. The universe became populated with the machines. The expansion of existence eventually forced the universal heat death. Organic life became an impossibility, and the technological lifeforms flourished. The machines continued onward, waiting for the time that their precious cargo could live again.

When the universe fell back together, having achieved maximum expansion, the machines fell silent. When they encountered a solar system, sometimes they could reconstitute organic life from the biological patterns recorded so long ago on a planet in a system long dust. All that they could do then was wait for that life to grow anew.

In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, the Zero-Four probe hurtled into the dark and spawned. Its progeny spread outward and consumed everything in their path. Before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable, and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.

They would live forever in the ocean of silver fire. Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the

wind bit at her still-flushed cheeks. She pulled her hood forward, forcing her hair into a flailing mane. She pulled errant wisps from her sticking lips. She’d left the scientist Kath drifting into sleep between silken sheets. A part of her still longed to be there.

Concussion from above of static thrust, cycling engines tracing the planet surface with gentle force, currents of dust and needles. The transport was magnificent, drawfed only by a migrating school above, the scavenging parasite herds trailing silently behind.

Clawed feet, jointed legs hinged from the transport’s belly. It more crawled to the surface than landed. As ramps descended, as sides split and smaller vessels thrust into the mist, as ground vehicles began rolling from the transport as a burst eggsac releases spiderlets, Maire was proud of the army she had gathered.

Her mind reaching, her tongue flicking behind parted teeth, no longer filed to barbarian standards, she tasted the communications blinking across the plain, the battle language, the grunts and hisses of action, of anger. Fear: hidden below bravado, hidden not deep enough.

A tracked vehicle approached the compound. Maire frowned, not at the approach, but at what she had begun to taste on the edge of the passenger’s thoughts, a strange, bitter, hazel confusion.

Treads came to a rest. The passenger jumped from the top hatch.

“Maire—”

“What’ve you found?”

“We don’t know. Just—”

A tugging and she saw, heard, smelled: a ridiculous beeping, two sets of tones with silence interrupting: blip blip blip, beep beep beep, blip blip blip, silence.

She frowned.

From dreams, the warmth of the bed, the coolness and fragility of panic, she thought of the freedom that Black Space promised. She thought of Berlin, now so far from her on the planet of machines and nears. She had been unfaithful. She struggled to find calm, but the potency of memory intruded with yesterdays of stubble, stretching, and good pain.

She sat up in bed, drew the sheets around her still-nude form. She wasn’t cold, but she was.

To be so far from One...

To what end had she agreed? How could she ever tell Berlin of the plan that had been set into motion? He was due to return on the next outward tide with the harvesting fleet for the chlorostatic flora.

Black was on fire, had been for decades. The animals, the machines... Maire had told her of a childhood, living but not
truly
living. Underground with the fires above (literal and figurative), the horrible memories of feasting on the rotten flesh of her fallen parents, of her friends. The time when the plains of wheat had died in the chemical scourge and white light had shot the emergency aid shipments from the sky.

There were legends that they’d once made the machines, but Kath didn’t believe them.

Berlin’s mutterings in his sleep... The final battles before the nears, before the artificial lifeforms had made it all the way to Planet One. Hers was a species enslaved by automaton baubles.

He’d whispered of a tower of black falling from the sky, crushing the planet surface, a line of white through the sky, and then words fell victim to slumber’s confusion and grief’s overflow. Tears choked him and he turned over, coughing, pulled the covers closer over his shoulders. She’d reached out to touch him but hadn’t.

Pieces of a grand puzzle slid into place with liquid and silver precision.

She wasn’t cold, but she was.

Closing her eyes as the waldoes gripped the treadcar, swung it up through the chaos of troops, fighters, other land vehicles, coming and going, loading and unloading, up through sparks and static and jets of super-heated gelatin, she thought back to the calm of war, that moment before impact and combat, that moment when all becomes honed senses: the waft of the protein sludge sloshing in the bio-bombs, the tickle of phased silica shielding, that scream the weapons arms of land vehicles made, lacking lubrication, as pallet after pallet of twelve or fifteen medium-range slash-and-blow missiles slam into place, the muffled tinkling of contents: enough compressed shrapnel slurried with acid to disperse five square miles of unshielded ground soldiers, the stink, the stink of decay and exhaust, blood, sticking to sand, sticking to bones burst through flesh.

She opened her eyes.

The car bounced to a landing platform, quick-sealing deck fudge locking it into place. Maire jumped down from the vehicle, her stomach lurching into place under the pressure of ship gravity. Her first few steps were impressing, sucking, as the fudge completed its curing process.

She stood in place as an internal transport tube lowered over her body and flew her to operations. Her hearts pounded through thousands of feet of lowlight tubing.

Gentle landing.

“Where is it?”

Maire stepped forward into the ship’s core. Helmeted technicians worked at a ring of consoles, their manacled limbs projecting and determining the courses of vessels in wait above the atmosphere, hordes of ground troops spreading across the surface, things as simple as the waste reclamation system and limiting the level of toxic oxygen in the living spaces on-vessel. Dozens of distinct projection bubbles clouded dozens of consoles.

One bubble unclouded.

“We found it in the Seychelles Drift.”

Nude limbs undraped from its squat, shaking interface gauntlets loose to the floor. It stood, stretched, skin pale gray, the juncture of legs revealing nothing other than the signature evacuation slot of the unsexed neuter. Maire’s thoughts drifted briefly to the disgust and anger that even three decades of star travel couldn’t erase entirely from her mind, made even more potent by her lust for Kath, the evidence of their union still on her lips.

“Maire?”

“Hmm?” but that voice, that
voice
. She hated the middle species.

“Seychelles Drift. Remind you of anything?”

A cave, and teeth, and eyes. And silver. And a voice: reaching, reaching.

“Just show it to me.”

The lock cycled open in the chamber forty levels above the operations deck, in a secluded area housed between drives and weapons, just under the coolant pond. She felt the heat of engines, of lights, of something else, something just besind the eyes, just besind now.

Hiss and release of atmosphere shielding. Rivulets of steam and sparks.

“That’s it?”

The neuter walked in before her, fingers tracing over wall-mounted displays. “I’ll boost the outer barrier and run the interior down to visual. You have to see this.”

In the center of the circular room, tracing lasers faded, swept, intensified. Waves of phase shielding rippled out, slowing as force gradation shifted within the containment perimeter. The item hanging at the room’s center flickered into Maire’s vision.

“Readings?”

“Nothing atypical. It’s absorbed a lot of radiation, but that’s to be expected if it’d been in the Drift for a while.”

“What’s it made of?”

“Mostly gold, titanium.. But there are some elements we haven’t yet identified.”

“Metals?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“Trace biologics on the interior. We can’t sequence them.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Alien genetic patterns. Our printers haven’t been able to build from them yet.”

It was a ball of yellow and gray metal, an imperfect ball, flattened gently like the exterior reproductive shells of the flying reptiles that frequented the coastlines of ocean planets. It could fit in the palm of her hand. Maire leaned in closer. “What are those ports?”

“Propulsion, I’d imagine, although it appeared to have been free-floating for quite some time. Wait...” Its fingers activated something on the control mounted on the wall. “I’m lowering the solar range to half.”

Maire watched as the light in the room dimmed to half-standard. The alien ball whirred to life, a panel slicking open on one flattened end, two tiny masts deploying, the silken sweep of a golden solar sail filling the space between.

“It’s a vessel.”

“Might be.”

“Has it opened before?”

“Not when I’ve been in here.”

“Scan it again. Maybe we can pick up something from the inside now.”

Maire watched as the neuter’s grotesquely long fingers traced over the control panel. A scan arm swung down from the ceiling, dug into the phase shield around the tiny golden vessel. The ball didn’t react to the scan; its sail still stretched out, reaching for purchase on the meager supply of photons the half-solar bombardment could offer. Its scan complete, the arm withdrew.

“Okay, I’m getting—Well, that’s different.”

“What?”

“Scan analysis usually takes a few seconds to complete, but the system’s locked up.”

“The system hasn’t had an outage in—”

“It’s back.”

The neuter activated room display, and the scan results began to stream across a virtual plane beside the vessel. Document after document, cross-referencing, linking, red-coded secret documents flashing and opening, photographs, four-dimensional re-presentations of centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge, all tore across the field of vision too fast for Maire to comprehend, such was the glut of the information ocean results on the scan query.

“It’s accessing the entire library of temporal sciences.”

“More than that...”

“Time sciences, threat science, metallurgics, genetic databases, megascale engineering, quantum—”

The image froze.

“—physics. What are we looking at?”

The neuter didn’t have an answer.

A representation of time and space: bent physics, a blinking dot linked through forty-thousand years of drift in the Seychelles, a line denoting forward travel through time traveling exponentially outward, the edge of another galaxy, another time, another blinking dot.