Engineering Infinity (32 page)

Ish had seen nomad ships in dock
at Isin. There were ramships no larger than canal barges that could
out-accelerate a troopship and push the speed of light, and ion-drive ships so
dwarfed by their fuel supplies that they were like inhabited comets, and
fragile light-sailers whose mirrors were next to useless at Babylon, and every
one was unique. Ish supposed you had to be crazy to take it into your head to
spend a lifetime in a pressurized can ten trillion leagues from whatever you
called home. There wouldn’t be many people as crazy as that and also able
enough to keep a ship in working order for all that time, even taking into
account that you had to be crazy in the first place to live in the rubble
around a star when you could be living in a city.

But that wasn’t right either.
Because most of the people that in Babylon they called nomads had been born out
there on their planets or wherever, where there were no cities and no gods,
with as much choice about where they lived as a limpet on a rock. It was only
the crazy ones that had a choice and only the crazy ones that made it all the
way to Babylon.

The nomads Ish was hunting now,
the assassins somewhere out there in the dark, he thought were almost simple by
comparison. They had no gods and could build no cities and they knew it and it
made them angry and so whatever they couldn’t have, they smashed. That was a
feeling Ish could understand.

Gods and cities fought for
primacy, they fought for influence or the settlement of debts. They didn’t fight
wars of extermination. But extermination was what the nomads had raised the
stakes to when they attacked the Corn Parade and extermination was what Ish was
armed for now.

- There, said
Sharur’
s voice in his ear. - There is their weapon.

In the X-ray spectrum
Sinkalamaïdi-541 was one of the brightest objects in the sky, but to human
eyes, even augmented as Ish’s had been at Lagash, even here, less than half a
million leagues from the target, what visible light it gave off as it cooled
made it only an unusually bright star, flickering as it spun. Even under the
magnification of
Sharur’s
sharp eyes it was barely a
disc; but Ish could see that something marred it, a dark line across the sickly
glowing face.

A display square opened, the dead
star’s light masked by the black disc of a coronagraph, reflected light - from
the dead star itself, from the living stars of the surrounding cluster, from
the Old Galaxy - amplified and enhanced. Girdling Sinkalamaïdi-541 was a
narrow, spinning band of dull carbon, no more than a thousand leagues across,
oriented to draw energy from the dead star’s magnetic field; like a mockery of
Ninagal’s ring.

- A loop accelerator, the ship
said. - Crude but effective.

- They must be very sophisticated
to aspire to such crudeness, said Ninurta. - We have found the sling, but where
is the slinger?

When straight out of the temple
orphanage he’d first enlisted they’d trained Ish as a rifleman, and when he’d
qualified for Surface Tactical School they’d trained him as a vacuum armour operator.
What he was doing now, controlling this platform that had been shot down an
electromagnetic rail like a corn can, was not very much like either of those
jobs, although the platform’s calculus of fuel and velocity and power and heat
was much the same as for the vacuum armour. But he was not a Surface Tactical
anymore and there was no surface here, no city with its weak gravity and strong
spin to complicate the equations, only speed and darkness and somewhere in the
darkness the target.

There was no knowing what
instruments the nomads had but Ish hoped to evade all of them. The platform’s
outer shell was black in short wavelengths and would scatter or let pass long
ones; the cold face it turned toward the nomad weapon was chilled to within a
degree of the cosmic microwave background, and its drives were photonic, the
exhaust a laser-tight collimated beam. Eventually some platform would occlude a
star or its drive beam would touch some bit of ice or cross some nomad sensor’s
mirror and they would be discovered, but not quickly and not all at once.

They would be on the nomads long
before that.

- Third company, Ninurta said. -
Fire on the ring. Flush them out.

The platforms had been fired from
Sharur’s
catapults in an angled pattern so that part
of the energy of the launch went to slowing
Sharur
itself and part to dispersing the platforms in an irregular spreading cone that
by this time was the better part of a thousand leagues across. Now the
platforms’ own engines fired, still at angles oblique to the line joining
Sharur’s
course to the dead star.

Below Ish - subjectively - and to
his left, a series of blinking icons indicated that the platforms of the third
company were separating themselves still further, placing themselves more
squarely in the track of the dead star’s orbit. When they were another thousand
leagues distant from
Sharur
they cast their weapons
loose and the weapons’ own engines fired, bright points Ish could see with his
own eyes, pushing the weapons onward with a force beyond what even the hunters’
augmented and supported bodies could withstand.

Time passed. The flares marking
the weapons of the third company went out one by one as their fuel was
exhausted. When they were three hundred thousand leagues from the ring, the
longest-ranged of the weapons - antiproton beams, muon accelerators,
fission-pumped gamma-ray lasers - began to fire.

Before the bombardment could
possibly have reached the ring - long before there had passed the thirty or
forty grains required for the bombardment to reach the ring and the light of
the bombardment’s success or failure to return to
Sharur
and the platforms - the space between the ring and the third company filled
with fire. Explosions flared all across Ish’s field of view, pinpoints of
brilliant white, shading to ultraviolet. Something hit the side of the platform
with a terrific thump, and Ish’s hand squeezed convulsively on the weapon
release as his diagnostic screens became a wash of red. There was a series of
smaller thumps as the weapons came loose, and then a horrible grinding noise as
at least one encountered some projecting tangle of bent metal and broken
ceramic. The platform was tumbling. About half Ish’s reaction control thrusters
claimed to be working; he fired them in pairs and worked the gyroscopes till
the tumble was reduced to a slow roll, while the trapped weapon scraped and
bumped its way across the hull and finally came free.

- Machines, machines! he heard
Ninurta say. - Cowards! Where are the
men
?

Then the weapon, whichever it
was, blew up.

34822.7.16 4:24:6:20 - 5:23:10:13

Moving image,
recorded at 24 frames per second over a period of 117 minutes 15 seconds by
spin-stabilized camera, installation “Cyrus,” transmitted via QT to COS
Liberation,
on Gaugamela station, and onward to Community Outreach
archives, Urizen:

From the leading edge of the
accelerator ring, it is as though the ring and the mass that powers it are
rising through a tunnel of light.

For ten million kilometres along
the track of the neutron star’s orbit, the darkness ahead sparkles with the
light of antimatter bombs, fusion explosions, the kinetic flash of chaff thrown
out by the accelerator ring impacting ships, missiles, remotely operated guns;
impacting men. Through the minefield debris of the ring’s static defences,
robotic fighters dart and weave, looking to kill anything that accelerates.
Outreach has millennia of experience to draw on, and back in the Community a
population of hundreds of billions to produce its volunteer missionaries, its
dedicated programmers, its hobbyist generals. Many of the Babylonian weapons
are stopped; many of the Babylonian ships are destroyed. Others, already close
to Babylon’s escape velocity and by the neutron star’s orbital motion close to
escaping from it as well, are shunted aside, forced into hyperbolic orbits that
banish them from the battlefield as surely as death.

But the ring’s defenders are
fighting from the bottom of a deep gravity well, with limited resources, nearly
all the mass they’ve assembled here incorporated into the ring itself; and the
Babylonians have their own store of ancient cunning to draw on, their aggregate
population a hundred times larger than the Community’s, more closely knit and
more warlike. And they have Ninurta.

Ninurta, the hunter of the
Annunaki, the god who slew the seven-headed serpent, who slew the bull-man in
the sea and the six-headed wild ram in the mountain, who defeated the demon
Ansu and retrieved the Tablet of Destinies.

Sharur
,
the Mace of Ninurta, plunges through the battle like a shark through minnows,
shining like a sun, accelerating, adding the thrust of its mighty engines to
the neutron star’s inexorable pull. Slender needles of laser prick out through
the debris, and
Sharur’
s sun brightens still
further, painful to look at, the ship’s active hull heated to tens of thousands
of degrees. Something like a swarm of fireflies swirls out toward it, and the
camera’s filters cut in, darkening the sky as the warheads explode around the
ship, a constellation of new stars that flare, burn and die in perfect silence:
and
Sharur
keeps coming.

It fills the view.

Overhead, a blur, it flashes past
the camera, and is gone.

The image goes white.

The transmission ends.

6. Surviving
weapons

It was cold in the control
capsule. The heat sink was still deployed and the motors that should have
folded it in would not respond. Ish found he didn’t much care. There was a slow
leak somewhere in the atmosphere cycler and Ish found he didn’t much care about
that either.

The battle, such as it was, was
well off to one side. Ish knew even before doing the math that he did not have
enough fuel to bring himself back into it. The dead star was bending his course
but not enough. He was headed into the dark.

Ish’s surviving weapons were
still burning mindlessly toward the ring and had cut by half the velocity with
which they were speeding away from it, but they too were nearly out of fuel and
Ish saw that they would follow him into darkness.

He watched
Sharur’
s
plunge through the battle. The dead star was between him and the impact when it
happened, but he saw the effect it had: a flash across the entire spectrum from
long-wave radio to hard X-ray, bright enough to illuminate the entire
battlefield; bright enough, probably, to be seen from the cities.

Another god died.

There was a sparkle of secondary
explosions scattered through the debris field, weapons and platforms and nomad
fighters alike flashing to plasma in the light of Ninurta’s death. Then there
was nothing.

The ring began, slowly, to break
up.

Ish wondered how many other platforms
were still out here, set aside like his, falling into Apsu. Anyone who had been
on the impact side was dead.

The weapons’ drive flares went
out.

The mended icon was still where
he had fixed it. Ish shut down the displays one by one until his helmet beam
was the only light and adjusted the thrust bag around the helmet so that the
beam shone full on the icon. The look in the Lady’s eyes no longer seemed
accusatory, but appraising, as if she were waiting to see what Ish would do.

The beam wavered and went dark.

Babylon City 2:78 233” S:2 54” /
34822.10.6 5:18:4

Record of
police interrogation, Suspect 34822.10. 6.502155, alias Ajabeli Huzalatum
Taraämapsu, alias Liburnadisha Iliawilimrabi Apsuümasha, alias “Black,”
Charges: subversion, terrorism, falsification of temple records, failure to
register as a foreign agent. Interrogator is Detective (Second Degree) Nabûnaïd
Babilisheïr Rabi?ila.

Rabi?ila
:
Your people are gone. Your weapon’s been destroyed. You might as well tell us
everything.

Suspect
:
It accomplished its purpose.

Rabi?ila
:
Which was?

Suspect
:
To give you hope.

Rabi?ila
:
What do you mean, “hope”?

Suspect
:
Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

Rabi?ila
:
A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will destroy them.

Suspect
:
Do you think they’ll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands
of mortals. Nothing Anshar’s soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing
you do to me.

Rabi?ila
:
You’re insane.

Suspect
:
I mean it. One day - not in my lifetime, certainly not in yours, but one day -
one day you’ll all be free.

7. A soldier of
the city

A ship found Ish a few months
later: a ship called
Upekkhâ
, from a single-system
nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to
itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant “equanimity,” was
an antimatter-fuelled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in
diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very
slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been
launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its
way back to the star the Congregation called
Mettâ
.
The star’s name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of
the Congregation, meant “kindness.”