Tides of Light (19 page)

Killeen picked up a metal rod he had wrenched free from a mech loading mechanism. With a spurt of joy he brought it down on
the U-shaped pipes. One, two, three blows—and a pipe dented. Fractured. Split to let hiss forth a green gas.

“Seal up!” Jocelyn cried with alarm. They both twist-locked their helmets as the gas filled the ship with a billowing emerald
fog.

Distant warnings wailed, keening in his sensorium. Killeen waved Jocelyn to follow and moved as quickly as he could through
the snaking tunnels of the Flitter. There had been a small side lock that they could not open, but now, if they confused the
ship’s internal systems enough…

The lock was a simple exit chute with a large dimpled cap. They had spent a lot of time trying to lever it open, and now Killeen
simply slammed his metal rod into the thing. He chipped its finish and broke off the side flanges. Jocelyn had caught his
meaning, too, and had found a shaft of heavy composite brass. She flailed at the lock with relish, grinning.

After the first rush of rage Killeen reflected that this at least cleared their heads. It burned up oxygen, but he didn’t
have much hope of using his full reserve anyway. He knew he had blundered badly and was going to pay for it.

More alarms hooted through his sensorium, electromagnetic spikes of mech dismay. Killeen chopped down on power cables. Sparks
jumped. He was wearing his rubber gloves to avoid the usual shocktraps but the surge still blinded him—breaking down the air,
forking orange fingers into the deck. The green gas was thickening. Killeen smashed a panel of controls, denting the side
and ripping wires.

And the lock popped open. Killeen stared at it. Brilliant
stars beckoned. He had only an instant before the
whoosh
of escaping air drew him headfirst toward the open lock.

He windmilled his arms in the storm. This made him strike the yawning mouth sidewise, so it could not swallow him. Jocelyn
slammed into his legs. He wrenched sidewise. That gave her a shove toward the floor, where she could grab at the base.

But securing her cost him his precarious hold on the lip of the lock. The rising gale’s shriek clutched at him. He tried to
sit up. A giant hand pushed him heavily back. Small mouths sucked at his arms, legs, head—

Something struck him solidly in the neck and abruptly he was in the lock, battering against the side in a green-tinged darkness—

—and was out, free, whirling away from the shining skin of the Flitter.

Tumbling. Spinning.

He vectored hard to correct his plunge. A jumble of impressions began to make sense.

He hung on the dayside of New Bishop, far from the station. He was near a pole. Far below the ruddy twilight stretched shadows
of mountains across beaten gray plains. Toward the equator green life still clung in valleys and plains, where forests thickened.

All this lay behind the incandescent golden blur of the cosmic string. It spun with endless energy. One edge of it arrowed
straight down toward the pole. The other side bulged out far beyond the planet’s equator.

The hoop spun faster than the eye could follow. A hovering tapestry spread over the entire world. The polar axis was clear
now. Killeen could see no dark jet of metal spewing up. But glinting craft lingered still.

Now he was going to get a close look. He was nearly over the pole. Far away, nearly over the soft curve of the world,
arced vast gray warrens. The fabricated fruit of the recently ejected core metal, he guessed.

This he took in with the barest glance, unable to react—because something came looming into his view, swelling with the speed
of its approach.

The ship was far larger than the mech Flitter, which now floated like a helpless insect beside a predatory bird as the craft
slowed and stopped. The comparison came to Killeen because of a certain tantalizing, evocative sweep of the larger ship’s
lines. It had flared wings made of intricate intersecting pentagons, as though spun out from a single thread. Its forward
hull bulged like a gouty throat. Blackened thrusters at its rear puckered wide. His Arthur Aspect remarked serenely:

While the Flitter expresses mech rigidities, this huge craft seems sculpted to express underlying body symmetries. Aspect
Grey tells me this is a characteristic of organic intelligence, not mech. Still, I fear these are not the familiar bilateral
forms made by humans.

“Jocelyn! There’s something out here. Hide!”

Faintly she sent an answer,—Yeasay. Flitter’s nearly stopped anyway.—

The ships now hung together. Killeen wondered if this had been their intended destination. If so, perhaps all their mad raging
had only succeeded in getting him free a few moments early, as the Flitter was allowed to void its irritant.

He jetted around the Flitter, calculating that the larger ship might miss him in the clutter of debris that had spewed from
the lock. If he could somehow stay free, he might find out what manner of being flew the strangely shaped ship.

Speculation ceased. A form rushed forth from a darkened
oval hole in the craft’s side, moving far swifter than a human could. It headed for him.

Killeen sped away. There was nowhere to go but he was damned if he would wait to be caught. His turn brought into view the
pole again, and the golden glow of the spinning hoop below. The shimmering covered all of New Bishop except for the small
open cylinder at the pole.

Killeen tried to angle away from the onrushing form and gain the small shelter of the Flitter. A glance behind him showed
that the thing was closing fast. He veered.

At each darting turn it came closer, following him with almost contemptuous ease. It loomed so near now that Killeen could
see bossed metal studded with protuberances. Between riveted coppery sections was a rough, crusted stuff that seemed to flex
and work with effort.

He realized abruptly that the thing was
alive
. Muscles rippled through it. Six sheathed legs curled beneath, ending in huge claws.

And the head—Killeen saw eyes, more than he could count, moving independently on stalks. Beside them microwave dishes rotated.
It had telescoping arms socketed in shiny steel. They ended in grappling arrays of opposing pads.

The thing was at least twenty times the size of a human. A bulging throat throbbed beneath stiff-crusted graygreen skin. Its
rear quarters were swollen as though thruster tubes lodged there. Yet they were also banded with alternating yellow and brown
rings, like the markings of a living creature.

Killeen guessed that this was what had been near the mainmind of the station. But that one had been much smaller. This was
another order of being. It united the forms of both mech and life.

This was all he could think before gaping pads clasped him in a rough but sure embrace.

The thing brought him up toward its moving eye array. It studied him for a long moment. Killeen was so rapt upon the orange
ovals that only after a moment did he notice the steady tug of acceleration.

The thing was hurtling him forward. Not back to its ship, but toward the pole. It tossed him from one array of pads to another,
letting him tumble for seconds in space before snagging him again.

Like a cat playing with a mouse,

his Arthur Aspect said mournfully.

“What’s…a cat?”

An ancient animal, revered for its wisdom. Grey told me of it.

Killeen’s mind whirled, empty of terror or rage.

He felt only a distant, painful remorse at all he was about to leave behind—Toby’s laughter, Shibo’s silky love, Cermo’s broad
unthinking grin, the whole warm clasp of the Family he had failed, and would now die for in a meaningless sacrifice to something
beyond human experience.

He tried to wrench away from the coarse black pads. They seemed to be everywhere. A brutal weight mashed him down. A long,
agonizing time passed as he struggled to breathe.

He wondered abstractly how the thing would kill him. A crushing grasp, or legs pulled off, or electrocution…

In sudden rage he tried to kick against the pads. He got a knee up into them and pushed, struck sidewise with his arms—

—and was free. Impossibly, he glided away at high speed
from the long, pocked form of worked steel and wrinkled brown flesh. It did not follow.

He spun to get his bearings and saw nothing but a hard glow. He was close to the hoop. No, not merely close—it surrounded
him.

Killeen looked behind him. Above, the fast-shrinking alien hung at the end of a glowing tube that stretched, stretched and
narrowed around him as Killeen watched.

He was speeding down the throat of the pipe made by the whirring hoop. Shimmering radiance closed in.

He righted himself and fired his jets. The alien had given him a high velocity straight down into the hoop-tube. If he could
correct for it in time—

But the brilliant walls drew nearer.

He applied maximum thrust to stop himself, even though that meant his fuel would burn less efficiently. His in-suit thrusters
were small, weak, intended only for maneuvers in free-fall.

He plunged straight down. The alien had so carefully applied accelerations that Killeen did not veer sidewise against the
hoop walls. He was falling precisely toward the pole of New Bishop. Through the shimmering translucent walls he could see
a dim outline of the planet, as ghostly as a lost dream.

His thrusters chugged, ran smoothly for a moment, then coughed and died. He fell in sudden eerie silence.

He had been simpleminded, thinking that the alien anthology of flesh and steel would kill him in some obvious way. Instead,
from some great and twisted motive, it had given him this strange trajectory into the mouth of a huge engine of destruction.

At any moment, he supposed, the tube would vent more liquid metal outward. In an instant he would vanish into smoke.

Vainly he tried his sensorium. No human tracers beckoned. He grimaced, his breath coming rapidly in the sweat-fogged helmet.

The shimmering walls drew closer. He almost felt that he could touch them, but kept his arms at his sides. He fell feet first,
watching a small yellow dot between his boots slowly grow. His Grey Aspect said distantly:

This is…wondrous work…such as I…never studied…comparable to the constructions…in ancient times…of mechs themselves…

His Arthur Aspect remarked:

We are inside the bore of the tube that stretches out along the polar axis. Let us hope the entire tube has been emptied by
the alien mining operations. It appears we do have a quite exact trajectory. The alien sent us falling straight along New
Bishop’s spin axis. We may well fall all the way through the planet.

Killeen tried to think. “How long will that take?”

Let me calculate for a moment. Yes, I retained the data on New Bishop which Shibo announced…which yields…I am performing the
dynamical integral analytically…

Across Killeen’s field of view appeared:

Time to pass through to the other side of the planet is 36.42 minutes. I would advise you to start a running clock.

Killeen called up a time-beeper in his right eye, set it to zero, and watched the spool of yellow digits run. He could make
no sense of them, and in his life had never needed more than a rough estimate of minutes elapsed—and then only when timing
the beginning of an assault. Let the Arthur Aspect read it. Time was of no importance when the outcome was so barrenly clear.

Quath’jutt’kkal’thon surged with pride.

Powerful acceleration pressed her into the rough webbing. She sang to herself of the adventure to come, the first fruit of
her new status in the Hive.

Beq’qdahl called,

Quath could have tapped into the general ship’s electroaura, but she chose to lean forward and watch through the optical port.
They were well above the smooth blue curve of this world. The Cosmic Circle hung still in the distance, gray and serene. Soon
it would begin winding up again. More core metal would be needed for…She searched the starry dark.
There!

The thermweb was a slate-dark lattice, hard to see. Some strands of it were nearly complete, knotted at the intersections
by pearly bonding dollops larger than mountains. The
total span showed a distinct arc and its far edge lay beyond the horizon.

Quath narrowed her vision. She could see podia working on the immense girders and vaults—forming, shaping, cutting, polishing.
Soon the thermweave would be ready to harness the outpouring solar energy of the nearby star, and the mission of Quath’s race
could carry on with its inexorable momentum.

But first there were minor details to clear up. Quath and Beq’qdahl had been sent up in this shuttlecraft to take care of
a nuisance which had infested the former mech orbital station.

For Quath this was a great honor. She had distinguished herself in the battle with the Noughts. The Hive’s supreme arbiter,
the Tukar’ramin, had witnessed Beq’qdahl’s cowardly flight. So Quath had been decorated with gaudy new additions to her body
parts, including two fresh legs. In the corridors she was spoken of as Quath-the-Terror and She-Who-Fights.