Echoes of Earth (32 page)

“And you think we’ll be any better?”

He indicated the screen. “At least you’re closer to the Spinners in terms of development.”

“We’re still a long way away from an ftl ship this size. A thousand years, maybe more. And according to what you’ve told us, this is nothing but throwaway technology for them, according to your testimony. Our extra century’s development on yours doesn’t look like much from that perspective.”

He stared at her.
Throwaway technology?
He hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. It was true, and it was in the SSDS files, but he hadn’t handed them over yet. How could she possibly know?

Maybe she had accessed the files through means he wasn’t aware of. Maybe she had accessed
him.
The thought sent a ripple of apprehension down his spine. What was he if nothing more than a mobile SSDS unit, buried in flesh? If she could access one, there was no reason she couldn’t access another.

“You said they would reply immediately,” she said.

“Huh? Oh, yes, I did.” He turned away.
“
Arachne,
has there still not been any reply from Adrasteia?”

“Nothing as yet.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No.”

He felt confused for a moment, dizzy. The knowledge that advice was just a minute or two away had sustained him through the mission thus far, even if he had needed to ask for it only once before. Perhaps they had been held up for some reason, or the transmission either way had failed to get through.

“Resend that last transmission,” he said. “Try again.”

The wait was interminable, this time. He paced the interior of the cockpit with Hatzis watching him curiously.

Was she in his head, going through his thoughts as a programmer might scan a hard drive? He could feel nothing out of the ordinary, just a rising sense of alarm.

No one else...

Another ten minutes passed, and there was still no reply.

“Should we be worried?” Hatzis asked.

He stopped pacing and ran both hands across his scalp. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I just... don’t
know
.”

“Perhaps we should return to the Frame,” she suggested, standing up in front of him. “It will be easier for me to communicate with the Vincula there.”

“And easier for you to think?” he asked, meeting her gaze.

“Yes,” she said awkwardly. “That, too.”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe I should leave you here and go make sure everything’s all right. It will only take a couple of days.”

“Don’t be hasty, Peter.” Her eyes didn’t leave his, and he received the distinct impression that she was trying to tell him something. “Go back to the Frame first. We’ll decide from there.”

He opened his mouth to snap at her—”
We’ll decide? Whose decision is it, anyway?
”
—
but turned away instead.

“
Arachne
, I want you to take us back to our previous location in the Frame.”

The screen went blank. Once they were under way, he felt Hatzis’s hand on his shoulder. He took in a breath sharply at the sensation: It was the first genuine physical contact with another person he had ever experienced.

“Don’t leave the ship,” she said, and he could tell that this was
her
speaking, her original, not the distributed, unknowable mind that called itself Caryl Hatzis. “Whatever they say—whatever
I
say, Peter—
don’t
leave the ship.”

He turned and stared at her, wanting to ask her what she meant while the brief moment that she was out of contact with the rest of herself lasted. But he didn’t have enough time. Behind her, the screen cleared; the hole ship had arrived.

A cold feeling rose steadily in his chest as she took her hand off his shoulder and stepped away from him.

2.1.6

Hatzis was silent. Rage blossomed in her like a solar flare
when Alander’s bizarre means of transportation returned to the Frame. Everything seemed to be spinning: the hole ship, the habitat where her original had met his engram, the plots and counterplots drawing in around her, and her mind, trying to fathom what was going on as much as what might happen next.

The trouble was, she didn’t know who she was most angry at: the Vincula, the Gezim, or herself.

“The little bitch,” snarled Jetz, cutting loose with some retro-invective of his own. “Did you
tell
her to warn him?”

“Of course not,” she said, not hiding the frost in her voice.

“But you allowed her to.”

“She was out of contact! I had no control over her.”

“Ten seconds of freedom, and she goes out of control. Is that what you’re expecting me to believe?” The contempt in his eyes, expression, and every other nonvocal means of communicating was suffocating. “I’ve always said you kept her on too long a leash.”

“Fuck you, Laurie. Fuck you
and
the Vincula. You have no right to tell me how to manage my affairs.”

“That’s just it,” Jetz snarled. “You aren’t managing your affairs at all!”

The worst thing about it was that she couldn’t really argue the point. Her original’s tactic had been both inspired and intensely inconvenient. Why she had done it, the greater Hatzis could see; her original made no bones about hiding her deep-seated feelings about the Vincula and its all-pervasion through the system. Yet when she had regained contact with her original and what had happened spilled out, she made no attempt to administer discipline or inhibit any further such actions. Her original was part of
her,
and functionally lobotomizing that part would make her less...
her.

But it hadn’t made things easier at all.

The Gezim plex were on their way, creeping all too rapidly inward from the edges of the Frame. They looked like a bizarre army of mutant nematodes: millions of many-limbed, shape-shifting worms using the struts and intersections of the structure as anchor points to accelerate themselves further toward their target. And the inevitable response was building. It had been a long time since a war had been fought in Sol over an object in just one physical location, but the Vincula wasn’t toothless. Old engines were stirring, shrugging off their peacetime uses and remembering why they had been made. All over the Frame, especially wherever the Shell Proper provided peak resources, clusters of spikes grew, tides of nanocombatants spread in sweeping shadows, odd energies gathered.

Meanwhile, Peter Alander, handicapped more by the limitations of his body than any additional dysfunction, was staring at her original with a look of growing realization.

“We
have
to get in there,” said Jetz, metaphorically slapping a fist into his palm. All pretense at humanity was fading; he was no longer trying to hide the corposant behind the corpse. He was an Urge. He was the carrot that moved the donkey forward—or the stick, when he needed to be. He was a vastly complex being with almost a hundred component minds and a temper to match hers.

But he wasn’t the only Urge.

“Sel,” she said, turning to Shalhoub who had been lurking in the background, watching the entire affair and radiating something approximating satisfaction. Maybe he would still listen to her. “Give us more time, please. If we move now, we’ll only confirm my original’s suspicions.”

Shalhoub looked on calmly. “She brought it on herself, Caryl,” he said. “I agree with Laurie: It’s now or never. We don’t have a choice.”

A murmur of agreement rippled through those in attendance. Hatzis was appalled see to just how many of them were watching: Lowell Correll, Rob Singh, Kathryn Nygard, Betty van Tran... Now more than ever she really
was
at the center of things.

“We have decided,” said Jetz. “So be it.”

“Matilda!” She used a private path through the data maze within and surrounding the Frame to call her friend. If it wasn’t too late, she might at least be able to make
someone
see reason.

“Hello, Caryl. Sticking around to watch the show? Should be spectacular.”

“You don’t have to do this, Matilda.”

“Oh, but I do. I don’t consent to what the Vincula is doing. I never have before, and this time it’s substantially worse. To allow it to proceed would be wrong, Caryl. Complacency is complicity.”

“But if you—”

“But
nothing,
Caryl! This technology is far too important to sweep under the rug, and that’s exactly what the Urges would have us do. And why? So they can think about it. But we haven’t got time to
think
about it. We’re rotting here—all of us—in the galaxy’s largest open grave. I don’t know about you, but I need to get out. I need to move—
now.
It’s our chance to act, Caryl.”

The tone of Sulich’s voice told her that the time for negotiation and playful activism was gone.

“But with the Gezim?” she asked feebly.

“They’re as good a tool as any.”

“They’re going to lose!”

“What can I say?” said Sulich, shrugging. “We like a challenge.”

She killed the line.

As Hatzis watched the spreading tide of combat plexes and nanotech response, she couldn’t quell a rising sense of panic that was independent of her povs, that was from
her.
It was like the Spike all over again.

With all the cunning and strength garnered in over 150 years of software warfare, the Vincula attacked the hole ship, intending to wrest control from the alien AI and “liberate” the data contained within. Viruses of every known configuration sought to worm their way into the unknown interface, first by passive audio channels—the ship had to be listening by some means in order to hear Alander’s instructions—and then via contact nanoprobes fired at the hull. Hatzis’s original became an unknowing colluder, her very body broadcasting viruses as fast as it could make or relay them. As the Vincula’s only access point in the craft itself, she played a key role in the assault.

This displeased the greater Hatzis enough to pass on the details to Sulich. Sel Shalhoub was a hypocrite if he thought that this attack on one of her povs was justified, when her attack on his wasn’t.

The Gezim’s response was immediate. Plex dissolved in a hundred locations across the Frame, releasing agents that attacked the struts and girders of the massive construct, eating into it like acid. Hatzis watched, horrified, as holes appeared in the scaffolding. She couldn’t tell what was happening to the missing mass at first; the Frame material was designed to be chemically neutral, so, without wholesale transmutation—likely to be out of the reach of such quick-working agents—there was no way it could be used as explosives or fuel. But she hadn’t counted on the ingenuity of the Gezim, long used to working with meager resources. When large chunks of the Frame, freed by the mass-eating agents, began moving of their own accord, she would have liked to get a closer look to see what was actually going on.

But at that moment, the Vincula’s attack on the hole ship failed. All transmissions from the interior of the cockpit abruptly ceased, and she lost contact with her original. It had somehow sealed itself up, preventing any form of intrusion. Maybe they had hit a vulnerable point, she thought. Then again, maybe they had simply annoyed it. Either way, it had cut them off before they’d had chance to do any real damage. Any damage at all, perhaps.

She watched as the exterior of the ship suddenly changed. The black cockpit dived into the white core, whose surface began to undulate, as though it were a membrane resonating to some unheard tone. Peaks started to form across its rippling skin, until they stood out sharply from the rest of it, like spikes. These spikes—a warning if she had ever seen one—rotated around the sphere every second or so, almost challenging anyone to approach.

A shudder rolled through the outer Frame, transmitted to its heart as a deep vibration. She directed her attention back to the Gezim attack. Approximately 1 percent of the Frame had been broken up by the acidlike agents. Many of these fragments were now on collision courses with the rest of the Frame. If they weren’t stopped, they would cause more damage, potentially letting loose more fragments to cause more damage. The shrapnel would spread, leaving a growing wound behind it. Maybe it would tear the Frame apart, the Shell Proper at its heart with it.

But how were they doing it? The simplicity of the plan surprised her, when she worked it out. The material of the Frame was chemically inert, but not
mechanically
inert. The agents had fashioned tightly wound springs, levers, and counterweights that nudged the fragments they had freed into slightly different orbits, orbits that would bring them into collision with other sections of the Frame. They were using the Frame’s own mass against it in a way the Vincula clearly hadn’t anticipated, judging by the confusion of its response.

Instead of attacking the agents themselves, as the Vincula countermeasures had initially concentrated their efforts, they needed to do something about the fragments. Thousands of tuglike effectors were belatedly swinging into action from all across the structure, converging on the fragments in order to nudge them into safer orbits. Many of these tugs were themselves attacked, their sensors, guidance systems, or thrusters altered in ways to make their motions chaotic. The damage spread to 3 percent of the total area of the Frame.

This didn’t sound like much, but Hatzis wondered how much damage the structure could sustain before it became unstable. Even without any effort from the Gezim, internal stresses and tides could take a small nick and widen it until the Frame was torn in two. She imagined the network of girders adrift in the sky, ripping into pieces as the vast structure was pulled from its orbit, spiraling helplessly into the sun. Perhaps she was overdramatizing the situation, though; maybe the scenario wouldn’t be so grim. The Frame might simply tear into a number of sections, each establishing its own orbit to form a sort of artificial asteroid belt around the sun. But that wasn’t the point.

The destruction of the Frame would be a major blow to the Vincula’s confidence, one she doubted it could survive. And whether the Gezim could step in to fill the breach was unknowable at this point (although with Alander’s gifts and the promise of human expansion, it was certainly a possibility).