Morgan's Choice (40 page)

“This is remarkable,” Ravindra said. “Your
warriors die, you just make some new ones.”

The
Yogin
beckoned, one long finger waggling at them. They followed
it along a line of cylinders containing embryos at different stages
of growth. Some looked empty, the content still invisible to the
naked eye. Morgan zoomed in and for a moment watched the cells
divide. Others held the familiar curved fish-like form and yet
others looked like normal human babies.

They walked on, into another section where
the bodies in the cylinders looked complete, or almost. A gash
here, a missing limb there.

“
Those which are not so badly damaged are
placed into cylinders to repair their injuries.”

So a hospital of sorts. “How do you fit the
processor?”

“
It is done at a next to final stage. The
skull is opened, the true brain is put in place and then the
warrior is returned to a vat to enable the tissue to heal and knit.
Look at that cylinder. You will see where the tissue is healing
just above the eyes.”

A narrow red line circumscribed the bald
head. The creature floated, motionless, its eyes closed. The true
brain, huh? Something to run the body and a black processor that
could be manipulated from afar.

“Do you recycle everything?”

“
Yes. We collect all damaged material if
we can; the fragments from fighters and assault ships damaged in
combat.”

“But that’s not always possible. And even so,
it couldn’t be enough, could it? Is that why you’ve taken ships in
transit?”

“
Enemy ships are always legitimate
targets. You must understand. When I came here I began to test the
worlds for suitable planets for Makers. I encountered ships before
I found habitable planets. When I tested, I found they were
primitives so I destroyed them. I realized I had work to do here
and appropriated their resources for my own use.”

Work to do. Kill on sight.

“Do you have weapons systems?” Ravindra
asked.

“
I have my warriors and they have their
ships.”

“But weapons here? Missiles? Energy weapons?
How could you rearm? Do you build your own armaments?” he said.

“
My warriors build their own ships and
their own weapons. I have no need of missiles or weapons. This ship
was never built as a warship. I am an emissary, sent to pave the
way. But I can defend myself.”

The soft voice changed. Alert, menacing.
“
What is
this? A war fleet approaches.”

Morgan saw through Artemis’s
sensors.
Vidhvansaka
with
four frigates.

“
The primitives have come to try to
destroy me. You have lied to me.”

Shrieking, screaming pain seared through
Morgan’s senses. She jammed her hands to her ears but the pain
battered her implants, drilling through her nerves. She sank to her
knees, sobbing.

“Stop. Please stop.”

Chapter
Forty-Six

“What is it?” Ravindra had lifted her. “What
can she do? Fight it, Morgan, you can fight it.”

She heard his voice, a deeper sound through a
piercing red fog. He was right. It was just noise. She
concentrated, fighting the pain. Sound, it’s just sound vibrations.
She adjusted her sense of hearing, decreasing the band width. The
pain receded enough for her to function properly.

“Okay,” she said, panting. “I’m okay.”

“Time to go.” He put his hands on her
shoulders. “Can you drive this thing?”

She swallowed, forcing down her heart rate
and examined the driver’s position. “Yes. The seat slides
back.”

“You know where to go?”

“Yes.”

He swung a long leg into the back of the cart
and hunched down inside. “Let’s go.”

She drove out of the door and swung left
along the corridor toward the elevator. Artemis seemed to be busy
elsewhere, her presence in Morgan’s mind less concentrated. One
more turn.

Yogina
warriors advanced, weapons pointed.

She stopped the first three. They halted,
frozen in mid-stride, obstructing the ones behind them.

“Get me a weapon, Morgan.” Ravindra had
ducked below the rim of the cart.

Teeth gritted, she blocked two more warriors
as she snatched two weapons. Others crowded up behind.

Ravindra grabbed one gun from her while she
tucked the other into her belt.

“Keep to one side.”

He popped up over the top of the vehicle
and sprayed the energy beams. The warriors fell like nine-pins, ten
destroyed in a moment. He picked up a couple more of their guns and
tossed them to Morgan. “We might need these.”

“
You will not escape me, primitive. You
will die. Your weapons cannot touch me.”

“I will not allow you to kill him, Artemis.
You’ll have to kill me first.”

The sonic waves in her head went away
completely, replaced by a touch that was almost a caress.

“
Stay, Morgan. I am sorry I hurt
you. You are a Maker. Do not leave me.”

“You’re wrong about them. They’re not
primitive, they’re just fallible people. Like your Makers. Talk to
them. Listen.”

The entity howled its rage.
“
I am
Artemis. I cannot be wrong. They fire their puny weapons and I
throw their power back at them. I am invincible. Go then. Die with
them.”

Morgan let out a breath. The presence in her
mind had almost gone, now just a lingering menace, like smoke from
a smoldering fire. Too early to be over-confident. And yet they’d
been given a chance.

“Looks like we’re being ignored.”

The ship started to vibrate, almost humming
at a low frequency that set her teeth on edge, pulsed in her
muscles.

Ravindra felt it, too. He glanced around him,
tense and nervous. “What’s happening?”

“
I don’t know,” she said, negotiating
around the fallen
Yogina
to get to
the elevator. The doors stood open. “She seems distracted.
Vidhvansaka’s
out there with four frigates.
She showed me two frigates on their way in attack
formation.”

He hissed in a breath. “Morgan, if this is
the blue lightning, we must try to do something. She’ll destroy the
fleet.”

“I’ll try and find it.” The hum came from
somewhere not too far away. “This way.”

She drove down one corridor and then another,
following the sound. This was the right direction, but they were
too high. She found an elevator and pressed to call a car. Morgan
selected the next floor down, climbed out of the cart and waited
while the doors opened. Still too high. One more, then. She punched
the button for the next level down and darted back into the
elevator.

“This way.” She drove the cart down the
corridor to the right, the noise rising to a crescendo as they
approached. The passage ended at a platform overlooking a vast pit
where a colossal black cylinder hung suspended. She’d seen it on
one of the screens in the control room.

They left the cart and walked out to the
middle of a movable gantry spanning the pit. Controls, simple
levers, were set into the railing. She pushed down on a lever. A
hook suspended on a cable under the gantry began to lower. Wrong
lever. She tried the second lever and the gantry moved. Fine, that
was simple enough, left to go left, right to go right, push harder
to go faster. She drove above the left end of the cylinder. Looking
down on the device, she enhanced her vision to pick up the
details.

Hundreds of red filaments like tree roots
extended from the ends of the pit and combined and thickened until
the network converged into a point in the center of the shorter end
of the cylinder. The very air throbbed, the gantry vibrated to the
rhythm. The red filaments glowed, positively pulsing with
energy.

“What’s at the other end?” Ravindra said. “Is
that going to be blue?”

She stared at him. Wow. The blue tendrils
that could stop a ship. If he was right, red went in, blue went out
and the process happened in the middle.

“Let’s go see.”

This time he drove, manipulating the
levers with precision until they were above the other end of the
cylinder. A single blue pipe came out of the center, then branched
into four.

“I think it’s an energy sink,” she said,
raising her voice above the deep hum. “The ship absorbs whatever
energy is thrown at it and stores it here. And then it can generate
a shield or…” Her gaze traveled over the blue pipes. “Or power the
ship or send out energy to destroy.”

Yes, it made sense, a way to recycle
energy. Perhaps this was the ship’s shield generator, too. Somehow
she didn’t think
Artemis’s
makers
had ever intended this device for the use the ship made of
it.

The hum stopped suddenly. Morgan exchanged a
glance with Ravindra in the unexpected silence. The black cylinder
hadn’t moved, hadn’t altered. Sound, a different, distant sound
like a whooshing hiss, filled Morgan’s head. She turned to Ravindra
but he stared around him, as puzzled as she.

As suddenly as it started the noise
stopped.

“
They cannot defeat
me
.” Smug.
“
They are
primitives with nothing to match me
.”

Morgan saw through Artemis’s sensors again.
Two ships destroyed. So that’s what they had just experienced. Two
ships.

“She’s just blown away the two frigates.”

Ravindra bared his teeth. “We have to destroy
this thing.” He stared down at her. “Is there nothing you can do?
Reprogram the ship?”

Supertech magic. She almost smiled. “No,
Ashkar. I don’t have time to work out the structures and in some
respects this entity is more powerful than I am. We’ll have to
think of something else, something physical.”

Something physical. Pipes to allow energy
flows.

“Valves. It must have valves to direct the
energy to where it’s needed. There would have to be an overflow,
too. If we can close the valves, weld them shut…”

His teeth showed white in an evil grin.
“Excellent. There have to be tools somewhere. Look for a store room
or something.”

She drove the gantry back to the
corridor.

He leapt off and searched, examining the
walls. He pulled open a door on the platform and beamed at her.
“Tools. What do you need?”

Tools, some familiar, some not, hung neatly
in their appointed places. How long had it been since anyone had
used these? Artemis wouldn’t need them. Maybe they’d hung here for
thousands of years. She shoved a recognizable spanner, a hammer, a
ring holding four pieces of oddly shaped material that might be
keys, into her belt and the pockets of her suit. She’d have to work
it out down there.

Ravindra drove the gantry and stopped over
the blue pipes. She peered over the side. The pipes must have been
every bit of fifty meters below where she stood. And from there
down to the deep-shadowed bottom of the compartment was another
fifty meters.

She swallowed, her heart beating a little
faster. “You’ll have to lower me down with that crane.”

He frowned. “No. I’ll go.”

“Why? Because I’m a woman? Get over it. I’m a
Supertech.”

He scowled. “Because I’m stronger, faster and
taller than you. You just tell me what to do.”

Morgan, you
idiot
. She pushed down
the silly, reflex anger and raised a placatory hand. “I’m sorry. I
can’t tell you without at least looking. I guess we all of us have
to do what we were designed for. And this one’s mine.”

His eyes still glittered. “Get it done,
then.”

Heart in mouth, she climbed over the railing.
The pit yawned beneath her. One slip and she’d bounce off the pipe
if she was lucky. Grasping the railing, she reached out with her
foot. The hook swung just beyond her reach. A little bit more.

“Let me lower you.” He lay down on the gantry
and grabbed her arms in an iron grip. She gazed up at him, met his
eyes and concentrated on her foot. He lowered her. Her foot hit the
cable. Just a little more and the hook took her weight.

“Okay,” she said, panting. “Let the hook
down.”

He stood and pushed the lever. She sank
between the walls, hands tight on the cable. But she wouldn’t be
able to do that when she arrived. How would the
Yogina
have done this? The clang as the hook struck the
thick pipe echoed.

“All right?” Ravindra’s voice sounded a long
way away.

“Yes.”

The pipe fanned out into four. One of them
must be, had to be, an overflow. She pulled out the spanner. The
head matched a hexagonal shape on each pipe. On one pipe, the shape
was raised. The only one open? She wished she could be certain. How
did you keep them closed? Surely there had to be a locking
mechanism for safety. Each hexagonal head had a strange-shaped hole
at the center. She snagged the key ring thing out of her pocket.
They would fit, one for each pipe. Would they lock the valves down?
She hoped so. One hand on the cable, Morgan reached out a leg. Too
far away. She’d have to jump. Maybe she should let him do
it.
What, and
admit I was scared?
Not
a chance. This one’s mine, she’d said.

She swallowed, steadied herself, let go of
the cable and leapt for the pipe.

The hook swung. Her foot slipped on the
pipe’s curved surface. Fear raced down her spine as, arms flailing,
she tried to regain her balance. The
Yogin
weapon she’d tucked into her belt flipped out and fell for
far too long until it clanked onto the distant bottom of the
cylinder housing. Something swung within reach of her desperate
hands. The cable. She grabbed at it with shaking hands and missed.
Her foot slipped and she slid over the blue metal, fingers
scrabbling for a hand hold. She heard Ravindra shout her name.
Something caught her hand. She grabbed hold of the key pattern in
the valve. She was going to die. She would fall down there and
die.