Eternity's Mind (52 page)

A year ago, she had nearly died from the Onthos plague, weak, delirious, and she had survived only by immersing herself in bloater protoplasm. Orli still remembered that heady, mysterious baptism, and now the same sensory flood was happening again. When she had been swallowed up in that embrace, Orli had touched a part of the immense slumbering mind. Now, that mind continued to make contact with her.

Arita seemed just as entranced, and the two women connected as well, although they didn't understand how. But they each realized that the space mind was being extraordinarily careful in its contact with them, attempting to control itself so as not to harm them.

Without words, Orli understood that Kotto Okiah had encountered a similar thing, opening himself to whatever Eternity's Mind wanted to share—but his brain had been wiped out by the enormity of the imparted knowledge. The bloaters and their connected sentience now struggled to show restraint in an effort to communicate with Orli and Arita. She understood that the entity was also attempting to touch the Ildiran
thism
network, as well as the verdani mind that struggled against the Onthos blight—also a manifestation of the shadows.

Now that Orli was more aware of the threat to the cosmos, she could grasp the extent of the Shana Rei infiltration into the real universe—and what she saw terrified her. The space mind was fighting back with inconceivably powerful defenses, crushing the emerging shadow clouds and burning away the darkness.

But the shadows were everywhere …
everywhere.

Orli also realized something else: even though Eternity's Mind was awakening and should have been increasing in power, it experienced constant stabs of pain, ripples of debilitating agony. Something was harming its components even as it tried to save the cosmos.

Another great flash from the bloater nuclei, and suddenly Orli's connection was broken. She blinked and collapsed into her seat in the Kellum HQ ship. Perspiration covered her. Beside her on the Roamer bridge, Arita was also reeling. They shared their thoughts, connected with the pain of the bloaters, the growing mind.

DD hummed in front of her, concerned. “Would you like a drink of water, Orli Covitz?”

But she shook her head. Arita had the same reaction. Collin was deeply concerned, stroking her forehead. “Can you explain?” he pressed. “What did you just experience?”

Arita looked at Orli and asked, “Why is the space mind in pain? It's struggling to fight the Shana Rei, but all that pain…”

As Orli stared through the windowport of the Kellum operations center, looking at the extraction operations, she did understand. “Eternity's Mind is in pain because it's being systematically slaughtered.”

Outside, the Roamer ships finished draining another bloater sack, filling their ekti tanks and then towing away the flaccid discarded husk.

“Cell by cell,” she said. “And we're the ones killing it.”

 

CHAPTER

99

ZOE ALAKIS

Somehow, they made it to Tom Rom's ship.

The robot assault on the Pergamus installation continued, like a murderous swarm of mechanical insects tearing apart a rival hive. They broke into a third research dome, and the screams of the scientists and disease techs inside reached a crescendo, then fell silent as the sudden influx of unbreathable atmosphere killed most of them, while others fell victim to the marauding robots.

“Hurry!” Tom Rom pulled Zoe's arm as they raced aboard his ship. She nearly dropped her satchel of rescued belongings, the only thing she took from Pergamus. All the rest would be destroyed; she knew it.

“I set the timer. The sterilization blasts will go off in only a few minutes,” he said, “and I need to get you to a safe distance.”

Zoe saw the mayhem behind them, thousands of skittering robots and the looming shadow cloud in the sky. “What
is
a safe distance? And where?” She did not mean to be sarcastic.

“Leave that to me.” He urged her into the back compartment to find a secure place as he grabbed the piloting controls.

Zoe felt disoriented and numb. Perhaps it was shock, not just from the violence all around her, but from the singularly horrifying idea that she was out of her sterile sanctuary, that she had already been exposed to the countless lethal organisms on the outside. Even after all this fighting, even if Tom Rom managed to escape the attacking robots, the universe itself was still hostile to human life. The smallest microorganisms would attack her, unseen. Everything wanted to kill her.

But she could not fault Tom Rom's decision. By escaping, they would live for another day at least. That was the mantra she and Tom Rom had gone by when they'd left the ruins of Vaconda two decades ago, when her entire life had changed.

Black robots began to cluster outside the hangar as Tom Rom dropped the barrier field and raced forward for takeoff. His ship lurched ahead, and the heavy-thrust engines kicked in, but the robots were swarming toward them. Though the beetle-like machines looked hulking and sluggish, they moved with surprising agility.

His ship plowed down dozens of them on his way out of the hangar. Smashing their metallic bodies and scattering segmented parts, he rose up into the fume-filled sky of Pergamus. But Zoe saw they weren't free yet.

Several robots on the ground spread open their carapaces, extended metallic wings, and launched themselves into the air after the escaping ship. Tom Rom was able to dodge and use his weapons at the same time. He picked off the nearest robots that threatened their flight, then concentrated on getting away.

The Pergamus sky was full of angular black ships, and they closed in, seeing him as prey. The robots had not let any other Pergamus ships get away, and they had no intention of letting this one slip through, either.

Zoe was thrown to the deck as Tom Rom made a barrel roll to avoid enemy weapon blasts. She slid against the back bulkhead, skinned her knee. He called over his shoulder, “Strap yourself in! I don't want to worry about you right now.”

Zoe picked herself up, tried to balance on unsteady legs. “You always worry about me.”

She lurched to the rear compartment, retrieving her satchel with its packed specimens. She stowed it by the engine wall and secured it with a strap to the deck; then she fought her way back to the cockpit, dropping into a seat near Tom Rom, fighting against the acceleration and the jarring evasive maneuvers as he tried to get away. Her body felt lighter now, and her heart was pounding; adrenaline sang through her bloodstream. She was terrified, but this was also exciting. She felt startlingly alive!

She wondered if this was why Tom Rom enjoyed the perilous tasks of collecting specimens for her. But with Pergamus destroyed, her samples, her data, her collection would be wiped clean. She would either have to start a new facility from scratch, or simply give up. Tom Rom wouldn't let her give up. At least she had managed to save that rarest and deadliest of microorganisms, the Onthos plague.

A metal swarm of robot ships closed in. Tom Rom chose his targets with great precision and opened fire—not to defeat the robots but to blast a hole in their cordon so he could fly through. Still, the ships came racing after them.

The first countdown ended, and one of the research domes below flared bright as the gamma-ray sterilization burst obliterated everything inside and wiped out the encroaching black robots within a hundred-meter radius. Tom Rom didn't even flinch from the nearby blast, but the robot pursuers reeled in identical surprise, as if all of their cybernetic minds were somehow connected. Tom Rom took advantage of the disorientation among the enemies, and he altered course and accelerated away, looking for a chance to streak upward.

Then the second dome thumped with the sterilization protocol. The Shana Rei cloud kept growing larger in the sky. Pseudopods pushed down toward Pergamus as if to engulf the research domes in black fog.

Tom Rom roared along the surface, putting distance between himself and the research station. Hundreds of robot ships came slavering after them.

The third research dome collapsed under a sterilization burst.

“All specimens had to be destroyed,” Tom Rom explained to her. “We can't let the black robots and the Shana Rei turn them against the human race.”

“Such a loss,” Zoe said. “But that is why we designed the emergency protocols.” She had the utmost confidence in him, but her heart was heavy. She felt as if she were leaving a significant part of her soul behind.

As he raced away, Tom Rom's face was drawn, his jaws clenched, his focus hyperacute. He flew the ship as she had never seen anyone fly before. After he had gone more than a hundred kilometers away from the Pergamus outpost, racing low over the bleak and rugged landscape, he angled upward in a steep climb. He spoke clipped words in the high Gs. “I hope we're far enough from that shadow cloud so our ship can reach orbit. From there, I'll activate the stardrive and get you out of here.”

In the chase, he had eluded many robots, but more followed, sticking close with a ruthless mechanical determination. Another fifty robot vessels dove through the sky, closing in on this one insignificant ship. Zoe wondered why they felt she and Tom Rom were so important … or maybe they just didn't want to let even a single target escape.

Tom Rom gambled, adjusted the fuel supply in their engines, then dumped part of the reserve into the reactor chamber, which gave his vessel an unexpected turbo boost. He lurched ahead of the robot ships, disorienting them. Their energy blasts went wild—but even more robots swooped in front of them just as their ship reached the edge of the atmosphere. The robots opened fire, and Tom Rom couldn't dodge them all. A blast struck the starboard engine, and an explosion rocked the compartment. Shrapnel and deck debris flew in all directions. Zoe cried out, holding on to her seat.

Tom Rom struggled to keep flying. His hands raced over the controls, activating emergency systems. “Just a minor hull breach,” he said. “I've sealed it from the outside with an automated slider plate, but we've lost one engine. My speed will drop unless we can get to high orbit.”

“They're coming too fast for that,” she said.

The robot ships closed in with a vengeance, sensing a kill, and Zoe didn't think they were going to let Tom Rom have his way.

Behind them, she saw the shadow cloud swelling into the Pergamus atmosphere as if it thrived on the poisonous gases. The nebula looked like a sluggish sea creature, an ebony starfish folding over the remaining domes of Pergamus as if it meant to absorb them.

Another sterilization blast finished its countdown and seared a hole through the shadow cloud, but the Shana Rei quickly healed the gap and pressed forward.

More robots closed in on their fleeing ship as Tom Rom soared at high acceleration up to the fringe of space. Zoe saw with astonishment that he had tears pouring down his face, and she knew he was heartbroken, convinced that he had failed her. She wanted to reach out and clasp his shoulder, or maybe just hold him if they were both going to be vaporized.

But he hadn't given up yet—and so neither would she.

He blinked and stared ahead, abruptly changing course. “What the hell?”

Space in front of them was suddenly filled with flying objects, huge gray-green organic nodules with broad wings. Breathtakingly huge organic mantas swooped in, appearing out of the interplanetary emptiness, flying on bizarre extended flaps that somehow caught light or cosmic rays, or just sailed on ripples of gravity manipulated by their own internal forces.

“Bloaters!” Tom Rom said. “I've heard of the metamorphosis, but…”

Like a flock of strange flying plankton, the transformed nodules closed in to attack the shadow cloud.

 

CHAPTER

100

ADAR ZAN'NH

Solar Navy warliners and CDF ships gathered at the verge of the dimensional opening, where colorful nebula gases streamed down into the blackest trapdoor of the universe.

As the fleet waited on the brink, Adar Zan'nh stood at the rail of the command nucleus. His crew betrayed anxiety and tension, but he made a physical effort to draw the strongest strands of his own
thism
to shore up the confidence of his fighters.

From the
Kutuzov,
General Keah transmitted, “You ready for this, Z?” She showed him a cocky, determined grin, but he saw her swallow hard.

“Once more into the breach,” Anton Colicos muttered in the command nucleus. Zan'nh did not recognize it as a quote from the Saga of Seven Suns.

He reminded himself of the massacre at Wythira, the battles he and Keah had faced at the Onthos system, the surprise Shana Rei attack at Plumas, the destruction of the Hiltos Lightsource shrine, the mindless mob uprisings in Mijistra … all the terrible things the poisonous shadows had done to the Ildiran race.

He was angry enough. He was strong. “It must be done.” The Solar Navy and the CDF would strike a blow for revenge—a significant one, he hoped. He said to his entire maniple, “Forward. All helmsmen, match speed into the void and keep our forces together. General Keah, will you join us?”

“You bet your ass, Z.”

He frowned. “I have no intention of making such a wager, but I understand what you are saying.”

The ships entered the void. Zan'nh braced himself, and his crew fell silent, holding their breath. Rememberer Anton's eyes were full of fascination. Even the log recordings from Kotto Okiah's expedition gave only sketchy data about what lay inside that vast empty dimension. But if the Shana Rei went to ground there, it was a chance for the Solar Navy and the CDF to strike a mortal blow.…

Once they crossed the threshold into that darker universe, Zan'nh felt the immediate change around him. It wasn't that the strike force was lost, but after the warliners crossed into the void, he no longer felt connected to the overall
thism
network. The Mage-Imperator was always there with strength and confidence that every Ildiran could feel. Here in this void, suddenly Adar Zan'nh and the Solar Navy crewmembers went deaf to the rest of their race. They could only feel the group of soldiers accompanying them.