Netlink (41 page)

She’d been floating there, keeping pace with the slow-moving
Gauss,
throughout the long moments of the battle. Hearing one warflyer call for help, she’d started maneuvering her remote closer. Then she’d heard Kara’s voice responding, saw the second flyer approach, saw the first warflyer explode and the second go spinning into space after a desk-sized chunk of metal hit it.

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought that must be Daren’s sister aboard that damaged flyer since it was Kara’s voice she’d heard responding to the call for help. Not that that mattered, one way or another. The pilot might be dead, was
probably
dead after the impact Taki had just witnessed, but if there was even a chance that he or she was still alive…

Accelerating, she moved toward the quickly retreating flyer. She’d not been able to practice with the remote nearly as much as she would have liked, and her only experience before today had been in simulation.

Still, it was impossible to tell that this was not a simulation as she moved faster and faster through space, the only indication of her swiftly mounting speed the rising flicker of numbers at the lower right edge of her vision that read off her speed relative to the
Gauss.
After a few moments, however, the tumbling warflyer, centered now in flashing green brackets squarely in the center of Taki’s field of view, had stopped dwindling, was even growing larger, from a winking pinpoint of light to a tiny, crumpled toy shape in me distance.

“All flyers,” a voice said over the tactical link. “All flyers, return to your ships at once!”

She ignored the voice. It didn’t apply to her. She was still safely inside the
Gauss,
while the probe hurtled into the wreckage-strewn night.

It was difficult to keep track of the damaged Cutlass, though. Space was filled with sparkling, glittering, hurtling things, and only the flashing brackets assured her that she was still on target. Every few seconds, something clanged against her outer hull. Inwardly, she cringed with each impact, but after a while she began ignoring them. She couldn’t read her instruments well enough to know which of those graphic symbols drifting across her field of view represented dangers and which were simply in the way.

Control of the probe, fortunately, was very nearly as simple as looking at something and thinking hard
go there.
The AI running her interface with the equipment handled the problems of calculation, maneuver, and control, and warned her with a flashing string of characters—or a voice speaking in her ear—when something she was trying to do was not possible.

It was a surprise, then, when the probe spun end over end with disconcerting suddenness, and she found herself staring back toward the
Gauss
as her drive kicked in, decelerating her with savage thrust. The probe, lacking weapons, life support, and control equipment, with more room for reaction mass and less structure to move, was far more maneuverable than a Cutlass. Manned warflyers, in fact, were limited to short periods of twenty or thirty Gs of acceleration, and that was possible only because their pilots were packed into nano jelly like babies in the womb. The probe, with no physical pilot aboard to damage, could deliver a brutal eighty to ninety Gs of acceleration.

It was the only factor that made catching and matching vectors with the runaway Cutlass possible.

She was dismayed when she saw how much the
Carl Friedrich Gauss
had dwindled in apparent size. It looked like scarcely more than a toy now, its spine long and in places made bulky by towers and superstructure, with the blocks of her hab mods showing alternating patches of sunlit gray and black shadow as they turned. A pinpoint of dazzling light erupted on one of her superstructures, flaring larger, then fading away. The ship was taking a battering as the battle continued.

In the distance, other Confederation ships glowed from the effects of multiple impacts; she recognized the angular lines of
Karyu
—but only barely. The ryu carrier’s silhouette had been horribly transformed by the bombardment, and as she watched, a dazzling blue beam swept across the Confederation flagship’s side, slicing deeply into her hull.

Then the probe flipped over again, and she was close alongside the smooth, black, organic curves of the damaged Cutlass. It was still tumbling, showing first its smooth-rounded prow and then the tangled, rip-shredded ruin of what had been its drive module. An arm extended from its side like the bent limb of a dead tree.

Each time the prow swept past, only a few meters away, she could read a name picked out in cursive script on the prow:
Kara’s Matic.

“Kara!” she called, engaging a communications channel. “This is Taki Oe! Can you hear me?”

There was no answer, save the far-off murmur of other voices on the Net. Swiftly, she unfolded an arm of her own, reaching out.

“Warning! Warning!” her probe’s control AI sounded in her ears. “What you are attempting may exceed the recommended stress tolerances of the equipment.”

“Fuzaken-ja neyo!”
The phrase was a curt and rather rude expression meaning approximately, “Don’t screw around with me!” It also carried a warning, something like, “Don’t think you’re better than me!” Whether the AI understood the subtle nuances of the phrase or not, it allowed her to reach out and grab the tumbling warflyer’s dangling arm. The nanomorphic clamp molded itself to the other craft; the Cutlass’s momentum wrenched at her.

The shock made her dizzy—not from the actual impact, but from the wrenching tumble of the sky about her head as the probe, less massive than the Cutlass by about one third, picked up part of the warflyer’s spin. Warning lights flared along the side of her visual field, and a voice informed her with irritating calm that the probe’s manual controls were damaged.

She hung on, however, ordering the AI to cancel her spin. It was
trying;
the stars kept spinning past her field of view, but slower now as the AI worked her thrusters, using tight, short bursts to gradually kill the rotation.

More red lights, and another warning. The joints in her wrist and elbow were giving way, stressed by the rotating mass she was trying to arrest. Damn it,
no!
She would
not
let go!

Suddenly, the warflyer’s arm shifted, swung around, and molded itself to Taki’s mechanical arm, just above the elbow joint. Kara was alive!

Their rotation ceased. She could see the
Gauss,
tiny now against the stars just above the looming black bulk of
Kara’s Matic.
She cut in her thrusters… and was dismayed to watch the distance to the
Gauss
continue to increase.

She would have to kill their joint velocity outward first, before they could start heading back.

“All warflyers!” the voice from the
Gauss
said again. “Emergency alert! We are pulling out! Everyone get back on board immediately.”

“Wait!” Taki yelled. “I have a damaged warflyer out here! Its pilot is alive!”

“Who is this?”

“Dr. Taki Oe. I’m a xenologist off the
Gauss,
operating Remote Probe Five. I have a damaged warflyer at…” She hesitated, translating the coordinates on her view, then reading them off to the unseen listeners. “The pilot is alive!”

“Wait one, Dr. Oe,” the voice said. “Okay, hang tight! We have some flyers coming to assist you!”

“We’re decelerating,” she said. “Listen, don’t leave without us! The pilot is Lieutenant Hagan!”

“I don’t care who it is,” another voice said. “We’re not leaving one of our own!”

“Hagan!” another voice said. “Did you say Lieutenant
Hagan?”

“I’ve got her warflyer, the
Kara’s Matic,
right here,” Taki said. “I’m trying to stop her velocity, but I may not have enough reaction mass left to do it!”

“Go ahead and burn every drop,” the new voice said. “This is Lieutenant Ran Ferris, and I’m going to be there before you know it! I’ll get her back!”

“Hurry—” Taki said. She was looking now at something else, something beyond the still-dwindling shape of the
Gauss.
Her course outward had taken her away from the battle, and away, too, from the golden cloud that had so transfixed them all when they’d first arrived in this volume of space.

Her new position gave her an excellent vantage point, looking inward toward the double sun, the Device, the glowing cloud. From here, it looked as though the cloud were slowly transforming itself, changing shape like an immense, space-borne amoeba.

And like an amoeba, it was reaching out, spreading itself wide across three dimensions, sending long, almost liquid-looking pseudopods out and over and around the entire human-DalRiss fleet.

In another few moments, the fleet would be engulfed completely in that glittering, deadly cloud.

Dev once again felt himself losing his grip on his own humanity.

For a time, after the incomplete merging with his downloaded self, and then later, while he’d been back on New America with Katya and Vic and other humans, he’d almost felt as though he’d recaptured much that had been lost, the caring for people, the knowledge of them as individuals instead of as
abstractions,
as sophisticated self-directing programs running in jellyware assemblies of chemicals picked and shaped by evolution. But all of that was slipping away now, lost in something, in an awareness much vaster than his own.

The power, the despair, the sheer volume of the Net was waking up.

And Dev was a part of it.

On one level, he was still aware of himself as Dev Cameron; the memories were all intact, his ego, his awareness of self, all was still there. But on a much deeper and more profound level, he was… something else, something
very
else. A being, a supremely powerful being that was at one and the same time the sum and far more than the sum of all of those billions of human and AI minds riding the Net with him.

It was almost trivially clear what had happened. Nakamura’s Number—and what a limited and simplistic concept
that
was!—suggested a transcendental change in complexity and in scope and in power when a parallel processing system surpassed just over one hundred billion individual sub-units. That number—and it was, he realized now, not the number itself but a kind of critical mass of information processing power—had been surpassed moments before, and the increase had just given birth to a new mind.

Dev was not that mind, though by virtue of his position on the Net and the fact that he was feeling it happen as it took place, he could sense its dawning awareness… not mind only, but
Mind.
The new being was self-aware and intelligent, a pervasive and far-flung presence omnipresent and omniscient within the universe it occupied, a universe defined by the worlds and interlocking computer nets from which it arose. Dev could sense that being as an ant might dimly sense a human standing astride its anthill, vast beyond comprehension, so vast it could be perceived more as a natural force than anything alive. Indeed, Dev doubted that any other mind linked in on the Net was aware of the new birth… and he questioned at first whether the Mind was aware of anything so insignificant as humanity.

Once, long ago, Dev had been a god. His linkage with a planetary Naga had given him physical and mental powers far beyond the ken of humanity, and memories of that time still could make him tremble inside. Commanding physical forces that could destroy ryu-class starships in planetary orbit, however, was nothing compared to this, an Overmind derived from the mental activities of a hundred billion individual intelligences, yet no more aware of or limited to the scope of its component parts than was a mind derived from a hundred billion nerve cells… or than a living cell with its complexities of DNA and mitochondria and golgi bodies and proteins was limited to the scope and reach and ability of individual atoms. An associative, a hive mentality, could be thought of, possibly, as the sum total of all of its separate parts. This, however, was something far more, a synergy that went immeasurably beyond any piecemeal assembly of separate consciousnesses.

The Netlink Overmind cared nothing for the thoughts or despairs or hopes or needs of its individual components. It couldn’t even hear them.

It had—it
was
—a Mind of its own.

But at the same time, it clearly was aware of the current problem. Part of its being resided within the hundreds of starships now battling the alien Web, and that part of its being was threatened by the Web’s embrace.

Dev tried calling to it… uselessly. It could hear his linked thoughts no more than it could hear any of the other teeming, chattering minds still oblivious to its presence.

Perhaps, though it arose from those minds without being an associative or shared mind, it could draw on the totality of information stored by them. Dev felt something, a brushing against his consciousness, and knew without knowing how he knew that some part of his own memory had been tapped.

And the Web associative stopped.

It would not, Dev thought, have been possible without the human-DalRiss fleet that had so held the Web’s attention, focusing it on the physical rather than the immaterial, the interactive network of signals flickering from ship to ship throughout the fleet—and by way of the I2C back to all the populated worlds of the Shichiju.

It might not have been possible, too, without the Combined Fleet’s massed firepower. Those five moon-sized Alpha-class craft, Dev realized now, had been more than communications centers, but powerful information processing nodes larger and faster and far more powerful than any single AI in human space. Two of the five were still processing data, but more slowly now, for large parts of their interiors had been reduced to molten slag by the bombardment of nuclear missiles and hurtling bits of magun-slung rock striking at relativistic speeds. The damage to this local expression of the Web had been more serious than was suggested by a simple analysis of numbers alone. It was reacting more slowly, and with less decision, a wounded giant limping from its wounds… but still powerful beyond belief.