The Galactic Center Companion, page 6
“I’m coming in!”
Acceleration kicked him in the back. Black Sam felt a moment of reeling dizziness, the sensation that he was in fact falling straight down the side of a massive building.
The Snout coiled its nose toward him.
As the steel-ribbed thing diverted its attention, he deliberately triggered his jet exhaust into overload.
Fuel jammed in the hourglass fluting. The chamber squeezed, belched.
A thick wad of incandescent crimson rage spat behind him, throwing Black Sam up into the green-streaming sky. His wake billowed into Snout-blinding red brilliance.
“What the—” Shagfoot yelled.
“I’m coming in with a cut!” Black Sam called.
Hard Ella was groaning with effort, thrashing against the Snout. Black Sam turned and plunged downward. The Snout would take a few seconds to decipher the overloads he had given it—a sonic boom for its acoustics, the crimson glare for its infrareds.
He slammed onto the Snout’s ribbed mainbeam. Thump! Plates buckled under his shocks, just behind its infra-eyes.
Black Sam thumbed over his cutter and swept his right arm to carve a neat circle around Hard Ella. The Snout bucked, trying to shake him off. It had just grasped a tasty morsel of Hard Ella’s suit—high-grade alloys—and probably thought some other ore-sniffer was trying to snatch the prize away.
No time to convince it otherwise. Black Sam sent quick spokes of cutter-jab into the exposed circuitry near his boots. Components sizzled. The Snout bucked again, hard. It reached for him with its coiling black snakelike flex-borers.
But Hard Ella was free. Black Sam’s cutter had sheared away the ore-seekers. She took a quick step off the Snout’s acoustic dish, to get clear of reflected backwash, and hit her thrust bottles. Whoosh! Black Sam got away, too, as she shot into the sky.
He burned away from there on full bore. There was a small icy spot in the center of his back—the chill of fear. It came every time he cut away from a fight with a mech.
If the Snout unlimbered electron-beam defenses, he knew it always aimed for the spine. Snouts didn’t know much about humans. They did recognize a bipedal morphology, though, with a central neural axis. Snouts would figure he was just an adapted form that hung its primary limbs and subunits from the long spine.
Which was a halfway decent description, except it left out the fact that he was alive, not a machine. So the Snout would go for the most exposed vital part, figuring the central axis would be shielded with polycarbon but still vulnerable to a shock-impact weapon.
If it came, the bolt would be pulse-compressed, designed for the max pile-up shock stress at the spine. Black Sam felt the icy circle move downward as he vectored over, pushing at high ram for the hills.
Nothing came.
Not that he would ever register it. The electron beam pulse would turn his organs to jelly before his neurons got the story. Comforting knowledge, in a way.
When he cleared the ridgeline he swooped down behind the first slag mound. A shot whooshed by overhead, the air crackling in its wake.
“Missed me!” he called, though he knew no Snout bothered to understand manspeak.
He ignored a Rooter chugging away as a glassy heap of waste nearby, seeking some alloy or stim. He realized he had been holding his breath. He panted, searching the sky. Purple worms crawled at the edges of his eyes.
There was Hard Ella, scooting for the far mountains. She hadn’t said a word, just kept on riding her amber flame toward their regroup point.
Against the flowing ivory fluorescence of the void above, she was a dark mote. The streaming gossamer sky river hung in the blueblack bowl, the Mandikini. It seemed that she was already in its billowing currents, voyaging.
The Snout was a mere passing incident to her. Hard Ella had earned her name long ago. She sought the great turbulent swells above, relentlessly.
#
Snouts were bad, but not the worst. She had been lucky.
And getting away had used up scarce suit supplies without yielding a single clue about where sunflower fields were. They weren’t getting any breaks lately.
Black Sam didn’t want to bring it up that night, when they and the others of the family lay sprawled and sated in the Trough.
“Maybe should go back, track that Snout,” he said carefully.
Hard Ella shook her head quickly, shiny black curls tumbling in the low gravity. “Nosir noway!”
“Might have been some actuators.” Black Sam sucked on a chem feeder. “We’re short on those.”
“Why?”
“ ‘Member that Snout lasyear? Ripe full of ’em.”
“Heyno I say,” Shagfoot interrupted. He rolled over, grunting, crimping his chem leads but not noticing. “Th’ Snout was carryin’ for t’others. ‘Member?—actuators all in pouch. Enough actuators in ’im for hunnert Snouts.”
Black Sam rubbed his stubbly beard, tasted the cloying sweetpap he had scrounged for supper. “You’re guessin’.”
Shagfoot cracked a gleeful grin. “So’s you.”
Black Sam leaned back, tired. He didn’t have much stomach for an argument. He intended to enjoy this quiet place while he could.
After the Snout trouble, they’d found this Trough, tucked back in an old gully. It was old but still in use. The big moly-alloy doors had been crimped in by something outsized. Six of them had ventured in, scampering like mice through the rows of vats and repair modules and iron-ribbed casements. Nobody knew what half the gear did. But the place was empty and still, which is all they had to know right now.
The Marauder-class machines sometimes stopped in at the Troughs to resupply themselves with crude chemical foods, or get their limbs lubed, or clip in components. If none came for ten thousand years—and Black Sam had seen some Troughs where that was so—the air would still reek of coarse carbo-wheat, the auto displays would still offer themselves, electrical auras would continue to entice vagrant machines. Troughs lasted, all right.
Some said Troughs were immortal. Some said they were made by the first crude machine civilizations to come to the center of the galaxy, and were a kind of fossil. Others argued that Troughs filled a function, or else would have been wiped out by natural selection.
Black Sam and Hard Ella and Shagfoot had considered none of this. They weren’t theory people. So they first reconned the broad pitted plain outside, baked hard by its blue sun. There were no Snouts or Trompers or Wigglies in the neighborhood. Or so Shagfoot said—he carried the ’tector gear. They made sure no machines were docked to lay up in it for at least a night.
So they unsuited, breathed free, scratched, ate, relaxed. Hard Ella found a vat of sweet yeasting stuff, its foamy yellow head rich in protein. Wigglies usually ingested chem foods, to nourish the bioparts they had inside. Trompers used the Troughs’ blue-green lichen, which grew in long strands from the high, arched ceiling. Shagfoot said Snouts had living polu-bind joints, and ate big slabs of mossy black stuff to replace their abraded tissues.
There was no reason humans couldn’t get some good from the stuff, even if the milky dark yeast drink tasted like fried, salted grease.
“Crap-pap,” Black Sam said finally, spitting out some. It stained Shagfoot’s overalls tar-black.
“You break, you fix,” Shagfoot said, too zotted on extenso-bread to care. He shucked off his grimy overalls, grinning, and tossed them to Black Sam. “Clean, too.”
“Gotta go back to a Casa,” Black Sam said. He would take his time, they both knew.
Casas had true food, designed for humans by the Dads. But Casas were rare, ancient. “Can’t drink this slop an’ hunt sunflowers all day.”
“Have to,” Hard Ella said cuttingly. “We’re down to maybe a kilo of Kickers.”
Without Kickers as stimulants, they couldn’t respond to crises, like the Snout. And the last Casa they’d been in had run out of Kickers, would take ten days to grow a new batch.
“Better us get on sunflower then, fast,” one of the Brothers said lazily.
Black Sam nodded, feeling woozy from fatigue, but prickly too. Something was sending up warning flares in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t tell what, just yet. “Maybe we should break up, hunt in wider circles,” he said carefully. “Better odds—”
“Family stay together—that Dadsay!” Hard Ella’s clipped words made other Brothers and Sisters sit up, weave back from their private visions. Most were jacked into ’tainment cubes, drifting on visions a millennium old.
“Dadsay, not allsay,” Black Sam put it squarely. It was one thing to follow the advice of their revered and longdead fathers, for that encoded advice had kept them alive now for years upon years. But it was another to not think for yourself. Black Sam said all this rapidly, not letting Hard Ella interrupt, and finished: “Is now time for wesay!”
“Black Sam stand for Dad?” Hard Ella asked bitingly.
“I say things flat,” Black Sam answered, looking around at the Family, making eye contact to see if they were with him. “No need you walk on them.”
“Call vote?” Hard Ella asked.
“Nosir!”
“Want replace Dad with Black Sam?” she persisted slyly.
“Sometimes allsay better than Dadsay. We find no sunflower, then we eat in crap-pap Trough for another season.”
Nobody took those words easily. They remembered the days of living in Casas, those tunneled-out, shadowy caverns left by the Dads of long-days before—times stretching back centuries, to the era when men had walked large in the center of the galaxy, been lords of the streaming energies that laced the sky.
Now they were reduced to scattered tribes, the wandering Families. New breeds of self-building machines had moved from star to star near the galactic center, hopping among the closely orbiting worlds. The machines sought more materials to build themselves, expanding by Darwinian pressures into the energy-rich lands that once had been held by men.
Some of the Dads said that the new machines had always been in the Center, were far more ancient than men and women. The tale was that the massive Trompers and vast Lectors had been gone for a thousand years, working in close to the black hole that was the true dark source of the Center. The machines had labored there to change the disk of accreting dust and gas, to fashion it to intelligent—that is, machine—uses.
To all this, humanity was incidental, unimportant.
Black Sam could not judge the wisdom of the Dads, but he knew how hard things had been the last few years. The black hole that chewed its diet of dust only a few light-years away was waxing again, blooming blue-hot, poking a glaring hole in the sky. Snaky streamers broke from it, gouges of orange and jet-yellow. Black Sam had watched these flame-spikes strike their world’s upper atmosphere, their splashing luminosities spreading desolation.
They called their planet Berg, for reasons known only to the Dads. Once it had provided rich loam and water. Now the searing Eater in the sky baked all to dust, and the Families rummaged their own once-rich lands for food.
Humans had lived in balance with the machines for a millennium, as testified by the ancient Troughs. But now the mechs spread everywhere, devouring.
“Yousay not wise,” Hard Ella said sardonically.
“Sometimes is onlysay,” Black Sam said, trying to keep his voice flat and calm, because that was the way to beat her.
She was older, had been raised by Dad and Mom to lead. The Family knew that. But she wavered at the hard moments, sometimes, and they knew that too.
“We stick, we hold,” Hard Ella said.
“Stick and starve,” Black Sam began. “If we search wider, find—”
Then a faint tinny sound came and he knew what had alerted them. Something coming.
“Flank it!” he whispered.
The others roused instantly from their stupors, bone-tiredness swept away on an electric adrenal surge.
The inky bays of the vast old Trough held a thousand hiding places. The Family faded into them, weapons plucked from their clips.
Black Sam had kept his hydraulic boots on. He leaped for the high girders. He landed amid flakes of rust and the worn-out blue from machine carcasses. He hunkered down and aimed a ramrod launcher at the main corridor.
Down the shrouded lane came something slick. It had a narrow ferret head and was folding its shiny wings as it scurried. Black Sam recognized the sectioned, tapered body: a Crafter.
No need to be careful with it. It could fight well if alerted, but here, boxed in...
A blue bolt struck it in the side. Black Sam fired an instant later, driving an iron bar into its hind shank.
It reared, tried to unfold its wings, spun its treads with frantic energy—and died with an eerie whine.
They picked it clean in minutes, yanking free plates and servos, booty used to maintain their own suits.
Black Sam didn’t care for the obvious; he had aimed his ramrod for a vital choke-point in the circuitry. While the others scavenged, he carefully shut down the Crafter inboard cyber-defense mechanisms, so the thing could not fry its own memory. The Crafters had long ago evolved internal circuits to protect their own expertise, from men and rival machines alike. The dead took their secrets with them.
“Read the mechsay,” Hard Ella ordered.
“Have.” Black Sam cut away an ebony board of chips he could use.
“Goodsay?”
“No map. Only senso-memory.”
“Damn!” Hard Ella lost her careful air of leadership, smacked the Crafter’s polished manifold with her palm.
“Can read, though.” Black Sam smiled, eyes twinkling.
“Do.”
“Have.”
Suspiciously: “And...?”
“Last entries show valley. Big mountain in view.”
“Can you—?”
Black Sam nodded. “Recognize it from three, four years back.”
“So?”
“In one frame is sunflowers.”
#
They vectored in along five axes, to confuse any defenses. But there were no Lancers or Zappers on duty, and nothing rose to meet them.
Probably because the sunflower field was just beginning. Dutiful crawlers hauled raw materials in from distant mines. Drones ran the makeshift factories which reduced the ore. Crafters fashioned it into silicon platelets, boron circuitry, electroplated capacitors, slick Mylar sheets, orange sealant cores.
At the center of this blur of activity were spindly, wasplike mechs. They assembled the flowers: great fields of yellow rectangles, marching remorselessly to the horizon.
The Family invaded each autofactory, kicking in doors, searching for supervisors. The few they found had no defenses. The mechs froze in rigid, comic postures when Shagfoot fried them with crackling storms of microwave noise.
“Easy,” Hard Ella said, her voice confident as they crossed the parched valley.
“For a while,” Black Sam said. He eyed the horizon uneasily.
The intricate system of roving mechs, laboring Crafters and endlessly varied functionaries—all this was guided by an unseen hand, the overmind of the planet. Or so said the Dadspeak, when the Family tapped into it.
Black Sam doubted that the overmind still controlled all the machines. The returning robo-horde from the black hole had brought rogue breeds with special functions. They roved and worked, following their own unspoken drives. Renegades.
“Somebody’ll send malf-tenders to fix this field,” Black Sam said.
“Not before we’re fargone,” she answered crisply. “Come on!”
The flowers were high-efficiency energy-storing panels. They did not trap the solar light that fell on Berg from its waxing blue-green star, as would ordinary panels. Instead, they were fashioned to harvest the electron flux of the streaming silvery river overhead.
For this was the huge project the Dads had long spoken of: to harness the great reservoir of energy that flowed a short distance farther from the sun. The overmind had known of the ripening of the Eater, and of the plasma jets that spewed from it. Everywhere on Berg, mechs hastened to partake of it.
Hard Ella had driven the Family, to sup some trickle of the wealth to come. They were mere humans, no match for the vast strength and knowledge of the machine armies. But once they tapped into the prickly light of the great currents above—the Mandikini, the Dads called it, and old Earther word for an ancient river of water—then there were swarming riches to plunder.
To hijack. To give them back some shred of their dignity, in a world where machines regarded humans as mere irksome vermin.
#
Black Sam labored with the others. It was sweaty grunt work, and they were afraid at every moment that a bright plume would flare in the sky, and Lancers descend to run riot.
They had to put together a ship that could carry them into high orbit around Berg. There, the electrical vortices were rich, notblunted by Berg’s air. They broke some Crafter hulls down into parts, attached launcher pods from a half-built hulk nearby, and worked a hundred routine miracles—all in a passing day. All aided by sunflower energies.
Black Sam had no clear idea of exactly how the mech ecology of Berg used the sunflowers. The Dadsay spoke of times when the Eater blossomed in the sky, and was answered by sunflowers of Berg. The sunflowers were lofted into the ivory flux of relativistic electrons—churning magnetic whirlwinds that swept by Berg—to intercept some small fraction of that flow. Somehow the consuming energies of the Great River aloft were harnessed by the sunflowers, and their wealth conveyed down to the mechs of Berg; but the Dads knew not how, or at least left nothing in the Dadspeak to instruct their children.
“Think you of how we plunder, once we walk the sky?” Shagfoot asked Black Sam as they worked.
“A little.”
“And Hard Ella?”
“What of her?” Black Sam was tired, irritable.
“She’ll knownot until we get there, I guess.”
“We must plan!” Black Sam slapped two cowlings together and popped the interlacings, finishing a hull seam.
“No time!” Shagfoot’s face crinkled with wry mirth, as though he had seen everything before in his long life and was only amused by the torments of their rude, low existence. Black Sam wished he had some of that quality. He could not forget the glories of the time of the Dads. He hungered for it.
