Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (47 page)

Dust. It clung to the nebula’s pebbles through static attraction, forming clumps that were too large to be carried off by Kheth’s mild stellar wind. At relativistic speeds, every pebble was a potential bomb. Yet no clump could accrete to more than a few ounces in size, before attracting the attention of the butterfly gnomes that lived within the cloud. They would descend upon the aggregate, lashing it apart with an electric charge.

Dust clung to hulls too, and to the hides of any object that ventured within the system.

It seemed likely the nebula was an artificial construction. Yet Sypaon had overlooked it. She’d come here only for the swan burster, its weaponry and its promised secrets dazzling her into a debilitating tunnel vision. There was so much more here than Chenzeme fossils. Information streamed in slow chemical currents through the dust, flashing occasionally into the electromagnetic spectrum astride erratic signals barely distinguishable from the static. Halfway down the sheltered Well, human lives burned in the warm infrared, oblivious of the whispered exchange. Dust sifted past them, falling through the atmosphere, into oceans, taken into the colloidal flow, perhaps rising again with storms, escaping the atmosphere aboard some unknown ferry. Information was traded and adjustments were made in feedback reactions working on alien protocols encoded in the dust, long ago, while the Communion waited: alert, patient. . . .

The dust was alive
. Lot wondered why he hadn’t understood that before.

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THE SECOND DAY
, Clemantine announced: “That bitch Sypaon may have been right.” Fear popped in sensual bursts around the dead calm tone of her voice. “Null Boundary has begun to accelerate.”

“Within the nebula?” Urban asked. “It’ll tear itself apart.”

“Not this far in,” Clemantine said. “Inside the Well’s orbit the nebula is thin.”

Kona had his eyes closed, an intense expression on his face. “Modify our course to match—”

“That would be suicide. We’re operating on no fuel margin.”

K
ONA RADIOED THE GREAT SHIP AND RECEIVED REASSURANCES
that seemed nonsensical, given the circumstances. He contacted Silk, and was informed that Null Boundary’s new course would bring it deep within the orbit of the elevator column.

At that point, Null Boundary ceased to respond.

Clemantine cut the engines to conserve fuel. Their rendezvous was blown and it was a fair question now if they’d have enough reserves to carry them back to Silk. A sheen of sweat began to accumulate on her face, as—with eyes closed—she frantically ran calculations, seeking a workable course.

Kona threw off his straps and turned to Lot. “You warned us about this ship before. What do you know of it?”

Lot shook his head helplessly. “Not much. It seemed wrong. Different. Not like the city. Or even the ring. I thought . . . maybe it was an enemy of the cult.”

“And now?”

He shrugged. “It still could be. I don’t know.”

Urban had been uncharacteristically silent for most of the trip, but he stirred now. “It’s hard to tell sometimes what things really are on the inside. When you want to hide, you try to look like your enemy. Sypaon lives inside the burster. The cult virus lives inside Lot.” He stared at the seat back in front of him. “It’s easy to get close to your enemies if you look and feel and smell exactly like them.”

Kona’s teeth clicked together. “Damn the Chenzeme! Damn even their memories—”

“Then you think the ship’s been infested?” Clemantine demanded.

Kona glared at Lot. “It fits, doesn’t it? A Chenzeme neural system inside it,
mimicking
something human.”

“Then the Well will neutralize it,” Clemantine declared with rather artificial optimism. “It neutralized the swan burster.”

They both looked at Lot, as if he had some magic atrial access to that era of prehistory and could confirm her speculations.

He shook his head. All he had was doubt. “It’s different from the ring.”

“You don’t think the Well will interfere with it?” Kona asked.

He rubbed absently at his sensory tears. “It hasn’t interfered with human ships before.” Sypaon, Null Boundary, Nesseleth: all had glided unhindered through the guarded nebula. “I think the Well only attacks if it’s been attacked.”

“But if it
is
infested with Chenzeme protocols, it’s not human.”

Lot shrugged. “Maybe the Well doesn’t know that yet.” Foresight and deductive talents were facets of consciousness and didn’t exist in the Well. The Well learned only by the harsh, irrefutable pain of experience.

“It’ll hit the city first,” Clemantine predicted. “Even without weapons, it has enough momentum to shear the elevator column. The Well might pith it then, but for us it’ll be too late.”

N
ULL
B
OUNDARY CONTINUED TO ACCELERATE
. Its changing course promised to bring it deeper into the Well, in a path that would burn through the sparse wisps of the upper atmosphere. Clemantine muttered and cursed over the poor course options available to them. At best, they could get back to Silk in some twelve days . . . not that they were supplied for it.

Lot decided to offer a suggestion. Swallowing his misgivings, he spoke in what he hoped was a reasonable voice. “If Null Boundary’s infested, it won’t do us any good to return to the city. He’ll get there before us, and there won’t be a city left.”

“It’s not
your
home!” Urban exploded.

“Sooth.” Lot leaned back, watching the great ship’s brooding image slowly grow on the screen. “But if we burn all our fuel to match course with the great ship, we might still be able to get inside—”

“Save your own skin?”

“Yeah. Even if Null Boundary’s been made into a Chenzeme weapon, it’s still got the structure of a human ship. And that means it’s hollow. Made for us. Not like the ring. There’s no place there to even
be
, unless you rewrite yourself into an alien mind. Null Boundary has an inside. We might be able to approach its neural centers; maybe even . . . communicate with it.”

Kona had twisted around in his seat. “Could you do that?”

“I don’t know. Sypaon—”

He turned to Clemantine. “Could we get a download of Sypaon?”

Her chin snapped back and she let out a sharp, popping breath as she broke her atrial links. “A download into what? Besides, if Null Boundary really is a Chenzeme weapon, then it’s a plague ship. We’d die within minutes of boarding.”

Kona watched her closely. “Minutes might be enough.”

“It took Sypaon four centuries to understand the swan burster.”

“She had to learn the system. Lot inherited it.”

“I don’t think the interior will be defended,” Lot said. “No one’s ever boarded a Chenzeme device before. How could they, when there’s never been an inside? If these weapons are unconscious systems, that—like the Well—learn only through experience, then we might be able to take advantage of a naive interlude. . . .”

“And do what?”

“What the Well does: restructure its protocols.”

T
HERE HAD BEEN DUST IN THE AIR DUCTS
. Statically attracted wads of molecular machines, forever trading information. He remembered choking on them until his lungs bled.

Dreaming dust. A system replete with information, but operating without foresight, without consciousness. Selective processes rewarding survival.

The key to neutralizing Chenzeme weaponry was written in the dust. If Lot could only read it, he might activate it himself. Frustration surged through him. All the information in the world might be contained on the shelves of a library, but if one isn’t able to read, the information may as well crumble to dust. . . .

Lot could read the dust . . . but only when he was spread thin, his vision linked to the communal web. He could write with dust too, through the linkage of his sensory tears.

Alta’s face loomed blue and eerie in his memory, its tenuous membrane on the verge of an explosion of toxic fog. The phantom could carry him under. “Ord?” he asked softly.

The DI slid out from under his chair, gliding up its tentacles and onto the armrest. “Yes Lot?”

He glanced anxiously around the cabin. Clemantine and Kona were glassy-eyed, involved in some internal debate. Urban’s chin was drooping against his chest while the insane aura of dreams drifted from him.

Lot swallowed his misgivings, telling himself it would be all right, the Communion couldn’t reach this far. Softly: “Did you get a record of the phantom’s physical structure?”

“The record was forwarded to city library.”

“Can you access it?”

“Yes Lot.”

The Communion can’t reach this far.
“Can you synthesize it?”

“Yes Lot.”

“Do it for me, Ord.”

Its face twisted up in an expression of pained confusion. “Bad job, Lot. No good.”

“I know it. But I need to.”

“Not safe.”

“I’ll take the chance,” he whispered fiercely. He hated being put in the position of arguing for something he didn’t really want to do. Couldn’t somebody just stand behind him for a change? But Ord wasn’t really somebody. “You want to keep me safe. Well, we’re all going to die if you don’t help me. Now, Ord.”

It seemed to struggle with the decision. He thought he caught a glint of silver in it. His eyes widened. Did the robot have a flicker of consciousness too? The cult virus was an opportunist, feeding even in the spare nooks and crannies of an aging dull intelligence.

Apparently, Ord reached a decision. “Good Lot. Smart Lot. Now?”

Fear burst through Lot in a sordid flush. Then it was away, leaving cold sweat as a tidal mark. “Yes Ord. Now.”

He closed his eyes and leaned back, so he did not see the rain though he felt its misty touch against his sensory tears, anxiety tripping through brief moments. Then those perceptions vanished. He sank into a sea of dust. He almost choked, feeling blind and crippled. The liquid flow of data he’d experienced in the Well was nonexistent here in the dry nebular roof. Insight flashed across his awareness in spurts. Dust bearing history. History borne on dust. Slowly, he lowered himself to the pace. Different modes for different environments, all interconnected, shaking hands one to one to one, only rarely winking in lightspeed data transmissions throw and catch, dreaming dust circling Kheth, selective processes defending a system where the destabilizing influence of consciousness need not exist. In the tumultuous, evolutionary exchange of data within the living microbial dust, myriad ways had been found to strip the instinct from a Chenzeme machine, to feed new protocols to the alien cells, to corrupt their purpose. Lot felt his arteries running tens of thousands of miles long. Clever structures flowed through them, spilling into his fixed memory . . . while on the periphery of his awareness he felt the winking presence of the human ghosts as they railed in their unmet need. It was an old message, hours, perhaps even weeks in transit. He would be long gone before they could react, a minor god winking briefly into existence, determined to remain forever unmoved by supplications that would destroy him.

L
OT ROUSED SLOWLY, FORCED BACK INTO THE WORLD
by the pressure of hard acceleration. Urban was looking at him, his face drawn, the muscles in his neck standing out like cords. “You were dreaming again.”

Lot grunted, still absorbed in the graceful geography of the charismata that sculpted Chenzeme moods. “Where are we going?”

“To catch Null Boundary.”

And no going back. They could get aboard the ship, but even if they lived, the shuttle would have no fuel reserves to bring them home.

It’s not your home.

The pursuit burned up another day. Time enough for a thin layer of dust to collect on the seat backs after seeping through the shuttle’s supposedly impermeable walls. Lot brushed at the stuff and breathed it in. Breathed it out again, setting the glinting specks swirling in the air, tiny judges, forever untouched by mercy or forgiveness.

CHAPTER

35

B
OARDING
N
ULL
B
OUNDARY WAS NOT A CHALLENGE
. It had ceased to accelerate, and its hull was stationary. At the bottom of a deep pore penetrating the ship’s insulation, a set of bay doors stood open. Clemantine edged the shuttle through the tunnel, then settled it against the mechanical locks. The ring of metal on metal resounded through the cabin.

As soon as the decision had been made to pursue the ship, Kona had set the shuttle’s small factory to making skin suits for all of them. The design he ordered was thicker and heavier than the version Gent had used. Lot slipped it on, clothing himself in an intelligent skin. The sculpted entity occupying Null Boundary had clothed himself in the hull of the ship. But he had not become the ship. Instead, he’d stubbornly maintained his own identity. In the face of the Chenzeme threat, stubbornness had become an essential survival trait.

Lot pulled up his hood and sealed it. No one could predict what traits would be essential the next day, the next year, the next millennium. The future remained opaque at all wavelengths; chance and selection still ruled. Whether he chose to deny that fact or face it, its essential nature could never change.

C
LEMANTINE WENT FIRST.
S
HE STRUNG A LINE
from the shuttle to a wide cargo lock, whose outer door stood open in apparent invitation. Lot hooked a short tether to the line, then glided across, carrying Ord’s quiescent form on his shoulders. Kona and Urban followed. The lock was bigger than Lot’s breather. When they were all inside, Clemantine closed the outer doors. Air flooded the chamber. The skin suits sniffed at it, chattered between themselves for several seconds in rapid machine twitters, then announced that the air was breathable. In fact, the ship’s atmosphere registered quite high on the quality scale, receiving demerits only in the very low percentage of water vapor and in the ambient temperature, which hovered near freezing. Ord woke, though it seemed uncomfortable in the absence of gravity, and it continued to cling to Lot.