Blade, page 22
part #4 of Inverted Frontier Series
In reality, snug tethers held her bound to Elepaio’s hull as the outrider coasted through a swift descent to the Labyrinth. Pinned there with her: Shoran, Jolly, and Tio, all of them sheltered from the direct assault of Hupo Sei’s blazing radiation by the black shadow of a thin sun shield newly grown from the hull.
Clemantine flinched—they all flinched—at the ping of an alert announcing a radio message from Riffan: “Ah, well, bad news on this side. It seems you’ve upset the Inventions with this adventure. Ashok is frantic and insistent that the Labyrinth is unstable and too dangerous to visit. Ro Az Ra Ni is demanding you return to Dragon.”
“We can’t,” Clemantine said simply. “Not until Argo comes back.”
“Right. Well, they want you to wait at the moon.”
“We can’t,” Clemantine repeated. She had been checking on Urban’s progress. “The moon’s chambers are already filled with silver.”
“The Inventions are exaggerating the danger,” Shoran added. “While I wouldn’t want to live at the Labyrinth, every recent observation indicates it’s stable enough that we can risk a short visit.”
Riffan’s reply sounded puzzled: “Vytet said the same thing. Honestly, I don’t know why they’re so upset. But Ashok demanded I pass on this warning. I asked if there was some other hazard, but they would not name one.” A moment’s pause, then he asked, “Shoran? You had this expedition in mind for a long time, didn’t you? I boarded Argo too early. I should have gone with you.”
<><><>
Clemantine puzzled over the news of Ashok’s distress. The Labyrinth was unstable, yes. It had to be, given its composition: an uneven and slowly rotating agglomeration of shattered megastructures, some pressure-welded together, the whole riddled with fissures and caverns, and subject to its own strange and variable gravities. In time, tidal forces would likely tear it apart. But in the short term—and given that years had passed since any new matter had been added to it—the Labyrinth had reached a reasonably stable balance.
She concluded they would be safe enough.
Tio spoke by radio on their shared channel, “Shoran? You do have an exact destination in mind?”
A low chuckle. “Oh, I’ve done the work.” She shared with them a map of the Labyrinth’s vast and complex surface. “I’ve pinpointed promising sites for exploration. I say we start at the site closest to the edge of dawn. Since the Labyrinth has only a slow rotation, that’ll give us a long period of daylight.”
“Sounds good,” Clemantine said, trusting Shoran’s judgment.
The others agreed, and Elepaio continued its swift descent. After a time, the outrider’s DI announced, “Separation in three minutes.”
At Shoran’s instruction, the little outrider had used the time of their transit to synthesize go-packs—a task that reduced its reserves to a dangerous level. But they would cycle the packs back in when they were done.
Clemantine sank into the soft gel at the center of her go-pack. “Ready?” she asked.
Everyone acknowledged that they were, and as Elepaio veered off, they descended the final three kilometers together, braking gently against the pull of the Labyrinth’s gravity.
Shoran had chosen to explore a narrow canyon, one scarcely a kilometer long but roughly three times deeper. It had been formed by the convergence of the polished gray wall of a megastructure with what looked to be a massive tower that might once have been part of a Celestial City. Only a hundred fifty meters or so separated those walls at the surface—a distance that further narrowed with depth.
Shoran said, “I want to drop all the way down, gain an overall perspective, and explore on our way out.”
Arrayed in a loose horizontal line, they entered the crevice and began to descend. Black shadows striped the dull-white face of the tower wall, cast by a succession of ledges protruding at twelve-meter intervals. Clemantine could not guess if those ledges were meant to be decorative, or to connect one tower to another, or intended for some other purpose entirely. Looking down, she could see that after the first kilometer, the pattern changed.
By unspoken agreement, they kept closer to the tower than to the megastructure with its dull geometry.
They had dropped half a kilometer when Jolly called out, “Hey, look at that! Down below, where the striped shadows stop. Doesn’t that look like life to you?”
Without waiting for an answer, he let his go-pack fall faster, plunging heedlessly past the tower wall, leaving the others behind.
Clemantine didn’t like it; she wanted him to stop. She started to remonstrate with him, to demand that he wait, to warn him against incautious actions: Jolly—!
But she caught herself. This was not her expedition and Jolly was no longer a child. Even so, she wasn’t going to let him charge ahead alone. So she accelerated her own descent, caught up with him, and then braked when he did, coming to a halt a full kilometer below the surface.
Here, some cataclysm had sliced away the tower’s outer wall, exposing geometric rows of window-like openings of different sizes. Perhaps a cross-section of corridors and utility tunnels? The ‘life’ Jolly had spotted was evident: round, pillow-like encrustations that lined the window openings, leaning out just far enough to catch some sunlight, their black glassy surfaces shot through with streaks of rainbow colors.
“I bet they’re alive like the glass forest at Volo’s Landing,” Jolly declared.
“Maybe.”
Tio and Shoran joined them, and together the four of them peered past the pillows.
Clemantine had guessed that each window marked a separate passage, and maybe it had been that way once, but not anymore. Inside the tower, she saw only a single expansive cavern. Tens of thousands of tiny pinpoint lights, multicolored, filled that great hollow space like stars.
“Are the lights moving?” Shoran asked.
Clemantine said, “I think so.”
“Yes,” Jolly affirmed. “I can see two of them moving toward each other . . . touching . . . their colors changed! They are alive.”
“I don’t understand what this is or why it’s here,” Tio said. “I know the Inventions found a few pockets of microbial life in this system, but nothing like this.”
Jolly shone a light into the cavern, slowly panning it around. Wherever its bright beam touched, it washed the color out of the pinpoint lights, turning them into pale, glinting beads—beads that slid along a complex web of thin sparkling threads.
“Maybe this is an Invention,” Jolly suggested. “Maybe it’s a failed Invention that the others abandoned.”
“This might be why the Inventions didn’t want us to come here,” Shoran said. “Maybe they worried we’d abort the project if we learned life existed here.”
“I don’t know if this is really life,” Clemantine said, frowning. “Or just some remnant art project? The beads are warmer than ambient, but I’m not picking up any kind of electromagnetic activity from them or from the black pillows.”
“We can’t enter this chamber without breaking the threads,” Tio observed.
“Sooth, so let’s keep going. See how far this web extends and if there’s anything else that—”
Clemantine broke off, looking down, looking past her feet, two kilometers to the canyon floor—or what she had thought was the floor. She saw now that what she’d taken for the bottom was only another ledge, though much wider than the ones above so that it partially blocked the canyon’s narrowed throat. And despite the lack of sunlight, she could see now that the canyon continued, deeper than the map had shown. She could see this because the smooth wall of the megastructure, where it ran below the ledge, had lit up, faintly, briefly, no more than a couple of seconds—as if with reflected light.
The others had seen it too. Tio said, “This isn’t right. The Labyrinth isn’t alive. It’s just frozen matter. There shouldn’t be any activity here.”
“The cavern lights look blurred now, like they’re vibrating,” Jolly announced. He descended a meter or so to a section of wall not yet colonized by the pillow things, and he pressed his gloved hand against it.
“Nothing,” he reported, disappointed. “If there’s a vibration, I can’t feel it.”
Shoran said, “The lights are stable now.”
“Keep watching,” Jolly told her. “I’ll let you know when there’s another— There! Another flash from below.”
Clemantine held her breath.
A second? Two seconds later? Shoran said, “Right! The cavern lights are blurred again.”
“And I can feel a vibration, like a concussion,” Jolly said. “It’s fading now.”
“And the cavern lights are stabilizing.” Shoran started to move. “I want to know what’s going on down there. If there are rogue Inventions mining down there, we need to warn them.”
“That’s not what it is,” Tio argued. “There’s no such thing as rogue Inventions.”
But Shoran was already descending, dropping swiftly, with Jolly right behind her.
“Come on, Tio,” Clemantine urged him. “We need to stay together.”
<><><>
They passed row after row of encrusted windows without finding an end to the rainbow starscape of pinprick lights. And down below, the flashes continued, firing every fifteen seconds or so until they had dropped a full kilometer. Then the flashes stopped.
Clemantine caught herself holding her breath again, waiting, waiting, waiting for the flashes to resume . . .
Tio suddenly shouted, “Hold up! Stop where you are. Stop now and listen to me. I think I know what this is—and you don’t want to get any closer.”
The earnestness of this demand affected even Jolly. He had pulled ahead of Shoran, but now he stopped his descent. As he looked up, his faceplate went black in the sunlight—an emotionless void that called up an unwelcome memory of Kuriak’s robotic instantiation.
Tio said, “I think it’s irks.”
“Irks?” Shoran echoed from where she floated some eighty meters below. “What is that?”
A hint of motion drew Clemantine’s gaze down past Jolly, all the way down to where a black snaking thing crawled tentatively up and over the edge of the wide ledge. Still a full kilometer away. Their own long, dense shadows hid the full shape of the thing as it continued to emerge. Still, Clemantine could see enough to feel sure its structure included tentacles, several of them, each with a wide pad blossoming at the end.
Irks?
Suddenly a kilometer did not seem nearly far enough.
Chapter
35
Tio spoke. Soft, swift words. An argument with himself. “There shouldn’t be irks here. They were exterminated in the inner system.”
From Clemantine, a soft hiss of frustration. “Was that before you left?”
The tentacled thing had withdrawn, out of sight for the moment, but the flashes did not resume. Whatever had been going on down there had stopped.
Tio did not take the time to answer her question. He barked out instead, “Jolly! Shoran! Get back up here. We need to evacuate.”
The tension in his voice ruled out argument. The two boosted, but not without questions.
“What are we dealing with, Tio?” Shoran demanded.
And Jolly guessed, “It’s rogue mechanics, isn’t it?”
“Exactly that.”
Tio explained it quickly, “The Inventions have their own un-sayable designation, but I call them IRKs—Infinitely Reproducible Kludge. Construction robots, set loose long ago in the outer system to collect matter for the Labyrinth and to make more of their own kind. They weren’t meant to be infinitely reproducible, but—”
“We get it,” Clemantine assured him. “Runaway tech.”
She moved away from the wall, out into the open where Shoran and Jolly no longer obscured her view of the ledge.
Ah, there it is again. The tentacled thing. The IRK. She had a better view of it now. She counted six long arms around a central disk. No . . . a pouch, not a disk. Perspective was difficult to judge in that unfamiliar setting, but instinct told her the IRK was large. She guessed its pouch to be a meter across, at least, and its tentacles four or five meters long.
Still a few more seconds until Shoran and Jolly would reach them. “Tell me more, Tio.”
In swift anxious words, he complied. “It was the Originalist faction. They developed the IRKs. Used them to gather the matter for the Labyrinth. And it all worked flawlessly, for centuries, until something corrupted their programming. They started ‘gathering’ matter from habitats they had been instructed not to touch. In just the first wave of attack hundreds of cohorts were extinguished and recycled.”
“And this flaw in their programming—it was never corrected?”
“The Originalists tried. It didn’t work.”
As Shoran and Jolly drew even with them, Tio triggered his go-pack to rise. “Now let’s go!”
“Follow him,” Clemantine urged, waving Shoran and Jolly on. “Everyone go. I’ll come behind.”
“What I don’t understand,” Shoran said, “is why we’re in danger, when there is all this matter around us for the IRKs to gather?”
Tio scoffed. “Think about what we are! In our bodies and in our gear we are in possession of rare elements essential for the creation of new IRKs—and that’s what they hunt us for.”
Clemantine lingered, risking a few more seconds to watch the activity below.
The IRK had crossed the ledge to the tower wall. Now it began to climb: two tentacles stretching, reaching up ten meters or more to somehow grip a section of smooth wall visible between two encrusted openings. It hauled its central pouch up, flipped over, extended two more tentacles, found another section of clean wall, and secured a new grip. All within sparse seconds.
How does it sense us? she wondered. Was it sight? Or more likely, it had detected their electromagnetic signature.
Two more IRKs crawled up from below. They climbed onto the ledge and then, with astonishing speed, they scrambled across it, to follow the first one up the tower wall.
Shoran’s voice: “Those fuckers are fast, Clemantine. You need to move. Do not make me come back for you.”
“Sooth. I’m right behind.”
She triggered her go-pack to rise, initiating a two-kilometer ascent to the canyon rim where Elepaio would be waiting. The canyon walls flowed past, faster and faster as she expended propellant, accelerating against the Labyrinth’s light gravitational pull—but only for a few seconds, until the DI that oversaw the operation of her go-pack announced, “Remaining propellant is insufficient to sustain this rate of acceleration.”
And it throttled her back.
By the Unknown God!
But of course the long, slow descent into the canyon must have used a significant proportion of her propellant. She looked down at the IRKs, wondering at their energy source. They were climbing so damned quickly! Actually gaining on her now.
“Get me to the rim— No . . . get me to Elepaio in the shortest time possible. A hard deceleration at the end is acceptable. Coordinate with the other go-packs.”
“Understood.”
She held her breath, hoping for a nudge of additional acceleration—but it didn’t come. Evidently, the DI had already maximized propellant use—and the IRKs were still closing.
“Hey, why are we slowing down?” Jolly demanded angrily.
“Because if we run out of propellant, we fall,” Tio told him.
Clemantine looked up at them, her faceplate instantly darkening. Shoran, Jolly, and Tio. Three indistinguishable silhouettes against the glare of daylight, and beyond them, the canyon’s distant rim.
Shoran said, “This race is going to be close.”
Sooth.
Clemantine signaled Elepaio. Was there time to synthesize small defensive bots? Scout-bots with an explosive payload?
The answer came back: there was not.
And then Elepaio issued a warning accompanied by the image of an unknown object coming in low and fast from over the Labyrinth’s short horizon.
Shit!
Clemantine immediately suspected more IRKs, their tentacles coiled, packed together in what looked to be a transit pod.
“Archive a ghost with Elepaio,” she ordered the others. “We may not be getting out of here.”
At the least, they could keep a memory of this ill-fated expedition.
“Corruption and chaos!” Shoran swore, her voice low with a depth of anger Clemantine had never heard from her before. “Ashok knew. Ashok and Ro Az Ra Ni, they both knew. This is why they didn’t want us to come here. They knew there were IRKs here, but they didn’t want to admit it.”
Maybe so, but irrelevant now.
She watched the IRKs. No doubt now. They didn’t require reinforcements. Their relentless pace would close the gap long before the go-packs reached the rim.
At the edge of her vision, a sudden silver glow. My skin suit? Its gleam had been barely perceptible in daylight, but now it looked bright to her eyes. A shadow must have fallen across her.
From Shoran?
No.
She saw movement on the tower wall beside her: a scattering of deep black, oblate shadows. Again she looked up, saw the three go-packs. And all around them a cloud of tiny objects growing swiftly larger. Evidently, the transit pod had delivered its payload.
Tio, outraged: “What the hell is that? It’s not IRKs.”
“Some kind of reinforcement,” Shoran growled. “In the form of a swarm.”
Tio again: “They’re coming right at us.”
“Then we get out of the way!” Clemantine told him. “Pick a direction and move laterally! We’ll follow you.”
“Acknowledged.”
She told herself the objects were small, that they couldn’t carry much propellant. And she hoped that by shifting trajectories, the swarm would be forced to quickly expend everything it had.
Of course, such maneuvers drained their propellant too. Regardless, they followed Tio’s lead as he moved sideways along the wall in an attempt to get out from under the swarm. But the shadows moved with them, shrinking in size as the swarm drew near—and as the IRKs closed on them from below. The IRKs were so close now Clemantine could see every detail of their long striated tentacles.
