Pierre
didn’t need to look at a clock to know they were on borrowed time. This was the
vulnerable phase, with Jen and Dimitri deep inside the ten-kilometre maze of
tunnels they’d detected eight hours earlier. If trouble arrived, there was no
fast way to get them out. And if they found a live Machine, they’d probably
both be killed anyway, and he and Ukrull might have to go to Plan B and attempt
to destroy the planet, though they wouldn’t have been the first to try. But
Kalaran had been specific, as always. Retrieve a dormant Machine relic. Don’t
activate it, just retrieve it. Pierre assumed Kalaran could control it, dissect
it, and get what he wanted from it, without unleashing the plague of Machines
again. But then he didn't entirely trust Kalaran, even less his mate, Hellera.
He glanced across at Ukrull, his two and a half-metre-long lizard-like travelling companion,
who was chewing on something unsavoury,
some kind of meaty bone that didn’t smell too good.
“You miss daughter,” Ukrull said, in
his rock-grinding bass voice.
Pierre had hoped to have more time
with Petra before leaving again, having only just rediscovered her after all
these years. But the war was headed their way, its front nearing Esperia where
Petra and the rest of humanity lived.
Pierre stared at his hands, nearly
back to normal, fleshy on the outside, some hairs even starting to grow. Hellera’s
gift, or punishment; it wasn’t clear which way she’d intended it; a retrovirus
that was making him human again, though so far his intelligence clung to Level
Ten. He suspected that would change as his physiology reverted. But for now his
palms were still platinum flow-metal, as was half his nervous system. He had
more in common with the dead civilization beneath him than most. He wondered;
if Hellera hadn’t intervened in his ongoing metamorphosis, would he have become
like the Machine race? But then he’d never had any desire to rule the galaxy or
purge it of ‘organic impurity’ – something of a hypocrisy given that the Machines
apparently relied on a tiny amount of organic metal for their higher conscious
processes. Nor had he arrived at the conclusion that order and logic were
better than the semi-chaos of most living species. But perhaps Hellera had done
it because he reminded her of the Xera, and though the probability of his evolution
into pure machine intelligence was small, the consequential risk was too great.
“Do you remember them, Ukrull?”
Ukrull crunched through the bone,
shattering it, a brown jelly-like substance oozing around his yellow incisors.
“Not that old.” He munched noisily.
“But you have ancestral memories,
don’t you?” Pierre knew it was true; all species above Level Twelve had such
memories to avoid repeating former mistakes. One of Kalaran’s gifts to the
advanced species in the galaxy.
Ukrull put down the bone, flicked
his rust-coloured
tongue over his lips and eyes, and settled back, his three-digit fore-claws
resting on his tan underbelly. His crescent-shaped pupils narrowed till his
eyes were almost pure yellow. “Bad time. Almost lost all. Machines relentless.
Cell and DNA principle. Each Machine made of smaller ones: nano-size to Titan,
inter-stellar city-ships. Machines originally hard-coded to defend galaxy at
any cost." Ukrull looked distant for a moment. "Lost perspective.
Spread fast. Mined gas giants for Trancium, hyper-conductive flow-metal, very
tough, memory structure in-built at atomic level. Organic species got in way.”
Ukrull had never talked about it
before. Pierre guessed he did so now due to the proximity to the planet where
the final battle had taken place. “What happened then, between the Tla Beth and
the Kalarash?” This was what both Kalaran and Hellera had refused to tell him.
The Kalarash, Level Nineteen, had been the progenitors of the galaxy, seeding
and nurturing life for eight million years, and had just handed over power to
the Level Seventeen Tla Beth, when the Machine race emerged, Level Eighteen.
Either the Kalarash or the Tla Beth must have created them, or at least
fostered their development. Pierre had his suspicions as to who had unleashed
them.
“Mistake,” Ukrull said. “Misjudgment.”
He shifted position, his equivalent of sitting up, leaning forward. He fixed
Pierre with snake-like eyes. “The Tla Beth –”
A klaxon sounded and their heads
both snapped towards a holo-display that popped up in the front of the cramped
cabin, showing seven bright red dots at the outer limits of their sensor
capability. Pierre and Ukrull both uttered the same word.
“Incoming.”
* * *
Jen
was growing impatient, but at least she’d found Dimitri. Together they walked
along black empty tunnel after black empty tunnel, the path always twisting and
turning, their lights shining twenty metres ahead before a curve cut them off.
“How long has it been, Dimitri? Any sign of those two drones?”
They’d dispatched six fist-sized
drones to explore the network, and one had gone missing. They re-directed
another to take its place and… ditto, which was why they were walking in the
direction both drones had taken. It didn’t seem a super-intelligent plan to
her, but they had none better. The other four drones were painstakingly mapping
out the catacombs, as she thought of them, far more extensive than she’d first estimated.
“Switch off your lights,” Dimitri
said.
“Getting romantic all of a sudden?
There’s a time and a place, you know, not to mention a near vacuum down here.”
She smirked beneath her visor, but she complied and turned off the helmet torch
beams. At first she saw nothing, but then she detected a faint turquoise glow
up ahead. They both stood, watching. The pale light strobed, very fast, almost
imperceptibly. It struck her as odd, because she wasn’t sure the Machines would
need light. Was something else down here, also come to find a relic? But it
didn’t add up. The tunnels had been here a long time. If the Machines were
active again they’d have replicated and the tunnels would be brimming with
them. They weren’t. And then it struck her: what if, after the Machine-Organic
war, something had been left here to guard the planet and its secrets? It would
have to be something very old, a long-lived species. She had a hunch which one.
“Whatever it is probably already
knows we're here,” she said. Flicking a switch, she directed comms back along
the tunnel pathway to the bottom of the shaft, where she’d left a relay to the Ice
Pick. The channel was dead. Now there’s a
surprise.
“Looks like it’s just you and me,
Dimitri.”
“I’ll go first,” he said.
She sighed. “Dimitri, you’re the
brains, I’m the merciless killer, remember?”
He laughed, but moved aside to let
her pass as they both re-activated their helmet lights. She took the nanosword from
her belt and held it ready in her right hand. As they rounded a second bend the
light grew stronger, flooding from the entrance to a larger chamber. On the
ground were two silver smudges. So much
for the drones. Jen stood behind them, realised what was inside the
chamber, then stepped across the threshold, Dimitri a pace behind her. Before
them was a Tla Beth.
Jen had heard about these Level Seventeen
creatures, erstwhile rulers of the galaxy after the Kalarash had largely
disappeared two million years ago, right after the battle that had ended where
she and Dimitri now stood. She’d seen fuzzy images of the Tla Beth, but had
never met one before. It floated a couple of metres above a raised dais. The
Tla Beth at first sight was spherical, with vertical metallic strips rotating
around its core, some clockwise, some anti-clockwise. The bands looked sharp,
giving her the idea that if she tried to reach inside, her arm would be sliced
off. The bands also shifted colour and brightness, creating the strobe effect,
so that she had to concentrate to see the Tla Beth’s ‘body’. It looked like a
rounded hourglass, the top half almost pure white, the lower half almost pure
black, tiny motes of black and white drifting in the respective halves.
She knew Dimitri would be thrilled,
and sure enough he strode past her to get a closer look. She put her nanosword
away; it would be of no use against a Level Seventeen being. But a cacophony
erupted inside her head, making her reel backwards, eyes squeezed shut with
pain, as if a shard of ice had just splintered through her skull. It shut off,
and she found herself in Dimitri’s arms – he’d caught her, his dark brows
meshed, his face a picture of worry.
“It accessed your node?” he asked. “It
tried to communicate with you, didn’t it?”
Jen watched excitement break through his
concern. She didn’t mind; besides, talking to a Level Seventeen being was
pretty cool. Letting Dimitri help her back to her feet, she nodded gently, the
pain melting from her forehead. Then the Tla Beth tried again, slower, less
compressed.
Husk? She stared at the dais, and
noticed something on it, a flat oblong shape, the size of an old-style
briefcase. Christ, they let one survive!
Her instinct was to slice through it with her nanosword. But she understood
what the Tla Beth had transmitted. No tech must be allowed to touch the
remnant, as it could be used by the dormant Machine as an energy source – no
wonder Ukrull had refused to land his ship. On reflection, tech probably
included her nanosword. Better to bury the damn thing then.
But the Tla Beth had asked her a
question, and their imminent survival might depend on her answer. Focusing,
with eyes closed, she thought a reply: , imaging his ship in her
mind – since she had never actually seen the Level Nineteen being in the flesh.
A shot of black ink spurted into the
upper half of the Tla Beth, and the creature descended towards them. Jen’s head
spun, then the Tla Beth calibrated properly for her brain.
“It’s asking me if it’s time,” she
said to Dimitri, who was excluded from the conversation. “Oh, and we have to
keep any tech away from that.” She pointed, and watched Dimitri’s eyes sparkle.
He took a step toward it but hit a force field and bounced back off. She wasn’t
surprised: Pierre had told her the Tla Beth used force fields all the time,
even for fine manipulation tasks. This one could kill her and Dimitri in an
instant, if it so chose.
“How long has it been here? And what
are the tunnels for?” Dimitri asked, massaging the spacesuit material around
his right knee.
She concentrated on Dimitri's
questions, so the Tla Beth could perceive them. But it wasn't easy; Jen wasn’t
a natural at nodal communication.
“Same response,” she said. “It asked
if it is time.” Jen didn’t add that it was probing her memory, images from
recent and past events flashing past in the background of her mind. It had also
asked her about the other ships, but she didn’t know what it was referring to.
Dimitri’s gloved hand went to the
lower edge of his helmet – she knew he wanted to stroke his goatee, as he often
did when deep in thought.
“We need to give an answer, Jen. It could
mean time to destroy the machine, time to activate it, or time to transport it
somewhere else.”
A tremor beneath her feet rocked
her, so she had to steady herself. “Did you…?” But she could see from Dimitri’s
expression that he’d felt it too.
She whipped out the sword and flicked the
electric blue nano-blade to point at Ukrull’s craft, which was jumping around
like a mosquito, avoiding heavy weapons fire. she transmitted.
A tactile alarm on her belt told her the
other four drones had just stopped transmitting. Within seconds, the holo
showed silver ellipsoids spiriting upwards from the planet’s surface, from the
borehole, homing in on the seven ships. Each of the enemy vessels was quickly
engulfed by a blue cloud that crystallized around its host. She’d originally
trained as a biologist, and it reminded her of an antibody attacking an
uninvited pathogen. The firing stopped, the encrusted ships drifting in space,
dead or dying. She blew out a long breath. Now she knew what the tunnels had
been for – they hid defences, ones she and Dimitri had not been allowed to see.
She transmitted again to the Tla Beth:
Then added.
After a few seconds Pierre came online.
“Jen, Dimitri, are you okay? Ukrull says you’re with a Tla Beth. Is it true?”
Jen looked at the creature, its black and
white halves stabilized again, its bands rotating calmly. “It’s a Tla Beth
alright. Has some cool toys. Think it wants to share?” She noticed Dimitri
circling the dais, his hand by his hip, testing the force field with an
outstretched forefinger. She tried to ignore what he was doing.
“What species just attacked us?” she
asked.
“We didn’t recognize the ships at first,
but the Tla Beth confirmed they were Level Sixteen, Nchkani, more powerful than
the Ice Pick, but no match for Tla Beth weaponry.”
Jen mentally filed away the intel of a
Level Sixteen race joining Qorall’s side; bad news indeed. “Pierre, it keeps
asking if it’s time. Does Ukrull know what it means?” Jen waited. She guessed
the Tla Beth and Ukrull would be communicating at a far greater speed than
humans could tolerate.
“Jen, Dimitri,” Pierre said. “You need to
run back to the shaft. Go now.”
Pierre’s voice sounded shaky. Jen
swallowed.
“What’s happened, Pierre? Why –”
“Just run! Holy –”
The channel went dead.
Jen whirled around to see Dimitri staring
at the Tla Beth. Its bands had stopped moving, and the air around it shimmered.
Abruptly there was a screeching, banshee-like noise in her head. Her hands went
uselessly to the sides of her helmet. Her legs buckled and she dropped to her
knees. Tilting her face upwards she saw a micro-storm of jagged jade lightning
surrounding the Tla Beth. Its hourglass body swirled black and white, and then
Jen felt like she’d been stabbed in the stomach as a deep scarlet cloud mushroomed
inside both halves of the Tla Beth’s body, swirling like blood in water. The
Tla Beth screamed through her node, sending her head crashing backward onto the
floor. Jen’s instincts told her it was fighting for its life. She shook
violently as if her entire nervous system was in spasm. She bit down on an urge
to vomit; throwing up inside a space suit would hardly help matters.
An arm scooped around her waist and
picked her up as if she was a rag doll. The ground skated along underneath her
to the rhythm of Dimitri’s powerful stride, making easy progress in the low
gravity. She felt something warm and sticky trickle from her nose and her ears.
But tears also came; the connection with the Tla Beth was still there. It was
in terrible pain, shocked at what was happening, and the realization that the
external attack on the Ice Pick had
merely been a lure to find and kill it. A cascade of images, some making no
sense to Jen whatsoever, flickered in her mind’s eye. The Tla Beth had lived
for aeons, and
yet she sensed that same dread of any being about to die, who still had so much
to do. This Tla Beth had been a star engineer, painstakingly creating new
systems where life might take root and flourish. She saw nebulae condense into star
fields, planets sculpted into habitable worlds, oceanic habitats precipitate in
open space, held together by force-fields while they were ferried to barren
waterless star systems, Dyson spheres the size of Earth’s solar system, and
even a ring-world slowly turning around an ice blue star; wonders she had never
imagined. But there was something else.
For the last period of its life – the
time-frame impossible to gauge accurately but possibly tens of thousands of
years – it had been the guardian of this tomb planet, and its secret. And then
its mind remembered she was there, and Jen had the feeling that a god-like
creature was staring at her, seeing everything she was, her life, her thoughts,
her very being, and through her the species she represented, all in an instant,
judging her and humanity. It transmitted a fast thought-stream through her
node:
She felt its life-force sputter, then it
seemed to rally one last time. It said two more words to her, then with a
feeling she equated with compassion, it cut her mind loose. Jen's body stilled,
sadness welling up at the loss of such a super-being.
Dimitri was almost knocked off his feet
by a massive quake. A curtain of blue flame rushed over them, burning itself
out in a second, never really hot, she gathered, instead pure energy on some
wavelength she’d probably never comprehend. A whirlwind of black and white
confetti flushed through the tunnel as if expelled by one last gasp of life.
Myriad tiny motes settled on her and Dimitri before melting like snowflakes,
until the space around them was clear again, and Jen knew simultaneously that
the Tla Beth was dead, and that they were hidden from Qorall’s sensors.
They reached the drop shaft, and Dimitri
set her on the ground. Nothing happened for a while. If Pierre and Ukrull were
still in control, they’d have lifted them out of the hole using the Ice Pick’s
gravitic scoop. She gazed upwards and thought there must be some visual
after-effect from the nodal transmission. The entrance, ten kilometres above
them, was green. Space itself was green, if it was still normal space. She’d
heard about Qorall’s fondness for ‘liquid space’.
“He’s changing the rules of the game,”
she said, still feeling weak.
Dimitri knelt next to her. “I fear Qorall
himself is here. Only he and his ship could do this.”
Then
we're screwed. That was
when she noticed what Dimitri was carrying in his other hand: the husk, a dull,
harmless-looking slab of grey metal, the last remnant of the Level Eighteen Machine
race, the Xera.
“We can change the rules of the game,
too, if we so desire,” he said.
She thought about it, as another impact
rocked the planet. “Qorall’s trying to destroy it, along with us in the
process.” She took a breath, staring at the remnant. Kalaran, I hope this is the right thing to do.
She got to her feet, remembering the last
words the Tla Beth had transmitted. And deep down she felt it was right, even if there would be hell
to pay later. Probably sooner.
“It’s time,” she said.
Dimitri nodded, his eyes flattening, so
she knew he was smiling. “You know me, my love. I’ve always wanted to open Pandora’s
Box.”
She handed him the nanosword. Re-activating
the blade, he gingerly touched the black, flat object with the tip of the
nanosword. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then the blade blazed purple and
was gone. Dimitri studied the hilt, but Jen already guessed it was drained. She
watched the box, waiting. A single point of light shone faintly, dead centre on
the top side, then began to stretch into a line, reaching towards the edges of
the box. She knew what it meant. It was going to open.
“Dimitri, time to go.”
They set off, jogging back into the tunnels,
following the last map the drones had provided, heading down to the deepest
level. As she began to sweat with the effort of running, she thought of Pierre
and Ukrull, and prayed they’d escaped. But her mind kept swinging back to the Machine
husk. Although there was no sound or light behind them, and she was sure
nothing was following them, at least not yet, the back of her neck prickled,
and she had trouble controlling her breathing. She lengthened her stride.
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