Blade, page 27
part #4 of Inverted Frontier Series
His efforts only affirmed that in their current state, no command of his could persuade the missiles; they did not even acknowledge him. Probably, they didn’t sense him at all.
Urban felt a touch against his arm and the touch of another mind: the Cryptologist, her consciousness still entangled with his. Maybe it always would be. She grasped his thoughts, comprehended the situation.
He whispered to her, “I can’t stop them.” A soft maddened chuckle followed these words. “This is Lezuri, emerging from oblivion to strike at me . . . even after he helped us make this Blade.”
He abandoned the missiles to reach for her. He clasped her hands, gazed into her eyes. “What happens when two blades make contact?”
A moment’s hesitation, then her hands squeezed his. Her answer came in swift nervous words. “A stabilized blade will be unbalanced.”
He nodded, acknowledging this. It was what he’d suspected.
“But I don’t think that’s the hazard.” She stared at him, her pretty eyes wide with fear and uncertainty. “The Blade is so much greater than the bloom of a missile, I think it could absorb the shock, channel the energy, and survive. No, it’s the dark ring that’s vulnerable. Take out the dark ring, and the Blade will collapse.”
He nodded, and prepared a message for his ghost on the high bridge, and for that version of her on the high bridge of Griffin.
“It’s not over,” he promised her.
<><><>
That version of Urban on Dragon’s high bridge received an unexpected query from Ro Az Ra Ni: *Those cohorts assigned to observe the project request access to the telemetry streams from the two auxiliary vessels approaching the project site.
No hint of excitement disturbed that bland voice, not even for the creation of a world. Here, now, that absence of emotion angered Urban—and damn the illogic of it! It angered him too that the envoy blithely assumed all was well, that the missiles were observational platforms, the equivalent of outriders and nothing more.
They are weapons, you fool!
An unfair rebuke born of frustration and kept tightly confined within the privacy of his mind. He made no answer to the envoy and blocked all further communication. He had no time for it as a new message arrived, the one he’d been waiting for, from his avatar.
It began with a terse explanation of the situation. It ended with a stern conclusion, *I can’t stop the missiles. It’s up to you to destroy them.
By the Unknown God!
No doubt now. This was an attack, a delayed strike, Lezuri rising up out of the past—but the Blade itself was not the target. In less than a minute, both missiles, angling in from “above” and “below” and still accelerating, would pass inside the Blade’s perimeter—though not closely enough to it to be a direct threat. Instead, their converging trajectories confirmed what his avatar had said. The missiles’ attack was aimed at the dark ring.
Urban shook off all regret for what must be done. It would take him just two quick shots to nullify the threat. Briefly, he considered coordinating with the Cryptologist, but dropped the idea. Given the light-speed lag, coordination would take significant time—and there was no need for it. Dragon’s philosopher cells were already tracking and extrapolating the missiles’ trajectories. They could destroy both in the time it would take to get a reply from Griffin.
So, on his own, he commenced a counterattack. To shock the philosopher cells into readiness, he flooded the field with a cresting sense of urgency—only to find his influence had withered.
Not now, he prayed. But his prayer could not erase the mistake he had made mere seconds ago, when he had allowed the philosopher cells to feel his gratitude for sweet victory. An emotion so alien to the cells that they had rejected it, and then rejected him by severing almost half of his hundred thousand links.
But even half a hundred thousand could make a significant argument. Fixating on the missiles, he directed:
– mark: target one –
– danger: it threatens! –
– mark: target two –
– danger: it threatens! –
– calculate sequential strikes –
– kill it –
The philosopher cells had already developed targeting solutions, continuously updated. Now, primed by that preparation and excited by the force of his demand, they responded just as he intended. The gun swiveled, acquiring target one. The reef trembled as it generated the power needed to strike.
Yet consensus did not follow. Instead, as his argument cycled around the field, its intensity faded:
– kill it –
– kill it –
Now a mere proposition, one to be considered and puzzled over and objected to:
New arguments emerged as the philosopher cells—so changed, they were now averse to wanton destruction—debated among themselves the merits of such an action. Urban recognized his own recent thoughts circulating: the missiles seen as thinking beings, long-time allies with a fascinating existence of their own.
Fiercely, he objected:
– no! –
– they threaten –
But this argument gained no traction.
With precious seconds slipping past and his frustration mounting, Urban reached out to Clemantine, messaging her: *I need you on the high bridge!
And he launched his argument again:
– mark: target one –
– it threatens! –
– KILL IT –
A demand immediately and forcefully countered by a coalition of philosopher cells—
—collapsing his argument as a more popular one took hold.
In the midst of this, Clemantine arrived.
*Help me, he growled. *They refuse to fight.
*Who are we fighting?
*The missiles! They’re aimed at the dark ring.
The anchoring dark ring, the element that stabilized the gleaming blade.
*It’s Lezuri’s deep programming, he explained. *They won’t allow another blade, and I can’t override.
He let his fury pour through the links, and he renewed his argument:
– identify: enemy –
So many once-powerful cell lineages had been culled: reduced in number or eliminated altogether, their memories and their aggression gone with them, leaving the Cryptologist’s newly forged cell lines to dominate the field. And still, many other original lineages survived with their memory of a time when such missiles pursued Dragon at Verilotus. Clemantine had held the high bridge then. She remembered that time too.
Following Urban’s lead, she recalled the memory, brought it to the surface, shared it around the field, emphasizing the rage that encounter had ignited and the ensuing desire to:
– KILL IT! –
Instantly, an objection arose. These missiles were not those missiles.
These missiles had long been part of the fleet.
Urban sensed Clemantine’s shock at this resistance and her sudden comprehension of how much the philosopher cells had changed since she’d last visited the high bridge. He did not share with her the guilty knowledge that his own thoughts had hardened the philosopher cells against this attack.
*We need to bypass the cell field, Clemantine concluded. *Take direct control of the gun.
*Sooth.
Shifting to the library, Urban summoned the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic. He explained in terse words what he needed. “I don’t want to just isolate the gun like we did at Prakruti. I need an interface that will let me aim it and make the kill.”
A slight, cynical, disbelieving smile from the Bio-mechanic. “All we did at Prakruti was cut off the flow of energy. You’re asking me to hijack this ship’s nervous system.” He shook his head. “You have no idea how complex such an interface would be.”
“Just tell me if you can do it.”
“Even if I could, it won’t last. The philosopher cells will reverse any changes I make. You know that. It’s why you’ve always commanded this ship from the high bridge.”
“That doesn’t matter! It doesn’t have to last. I just need this now, while there’s time left.”
“There isn’t time,” the Engineer said. “Not nearly enough time to design and implement an interface of such complexity.”
Urban looked from one to the other, desperate to hear some other answer. None came.
He shifted back to the high bridge where he found himself still striving to persuade the philosopher cells with harsh argument:
– revulsion: false ally –
A pause to tell Clemantine, *No go. We’re on our own.
Then he drew from his imagination a vision of destruction, of what must happen if the missiles were not stopped and he showed this to the philosopher cells. But they rejected it, recognizing it as a guess based on a physics neither he nor they understood—and the speeding missiles crossed the perimeter of the Blade.
A moment later, a tenth of a second, no more, one of the missiles blossomed. It transformed, instantaneously, into a sphere of white light. A huge sphere. Twenty-thousand kilometers across and still just a bauble against the vast circle of the Blade.
The two phenomena did not overlap but they unbalanced one another anyway. A bridge of white light jumped from blossom to Blade in the fractional second of the blossom’s existence—and the Blade raged with brilliant light. A wave of light that appeared to shoot in two directions around the ring, though Urban guessed that to be an artifact, a light-speed delay, and that the whole ring blazed at once, charged with the immense energy admitted from some other reality in the moment of the missile’s cosmic breach.
Clemantine spoke in quiet awe. *It’s too much. The Blade’s destabilized. It’s going to burst—or collapse.
Urban believed it. He looked on in terror. But the passing seconds belied her words. The full circle of the Blade now flared brilliant white, but it held—and terror gave way to confusion.
What had happened? Why had the missile blossomed when it did, long before reaching the dark ring? Was it chance? Did it hit some unseen bit of debris?
The unified fury now flooding the philosopher cells suggested otherwise. Accusations and admonishments were being directed outward, expressed in intricate patterns of light:
*It was Griffin, Urban concluded. *Griffin struck the missile.
And Dragon continued to chastise and threaten the smaller courser over that action.
Now a message from Pasha, addressed to the entire ship’s company: *Look at the Labyrinth.
The Labyrinth? The Labyrinth no longer existed. It had come apart in the moment of the Blade’s creation, its matter falling outward, slowly accelerating toward the dark ring’s newly created gravity well.
Urban looked anyway, and astonishment seized him because the movement of debris was now far faster than it had been before and it was still visibly accelerating. Had the huge influx of energy in the Blade increased the dark ring’s effective gravity? It must have—and that would affect HS-569 too. The little moon’s orbit had been decaying before. Now, it was truly falling.
<><><>
One down, one to go, the Bio-mechanic thought, as Griffin’s gun swiveled, preparing to target the second missile.
With the Cryptologist, he occupied the high bridge. He was peripherally aware of a rising storm of incomprehensible radio communications traveling between Invention habitats. But in the brief span before Griffin could take a second shot, it was Dragon that seized his attention.
From the vantage of the high bridge, he watched Dragon signaling in an intricate pattern of light interpreted by Griffin’s philosopher cells. Through them, the Bio-mechanic perceived Dragon’s philosopher cells as a living presence, and himself, embedded among them.
No. Not himself.
It was Urban’s presence and Urban’s thought that he sensed. But this was a narrow distinction. In a moment, what had been Urban’s thoughts became his own. Insight touched him, so that now he recognized the missiles as thinking beings—sentient, purposeful, endowed with their own fascinating existence.
Deep empathy flooded him.
But no! That was not his memory. That thought belonged to Urban. Yet the Bio-mechanic shared it now, just as he and Urban occasionally shared subminds; they were that close.
*What are you doing? the Cryptologist demanded of him.
Her sharp voice shocked him back to an awareness of where they were and what needed to be done. But he was also aware that the infectious empathy that had leaped from Dragon to him had already moved on, crossing over to Griffin’s philosopher cells. That was what the Cryptologist had sensed.
And as the cells analyzed it and reacted to it, the Bio-mechanic felt their defensive posture fade. Doubt set in. Questions arose.
– negate that! – the Cryptologist snapped.
And refocusing the philosopher cells on the second missile, she demanded:
– KILL IT! –
But the gun did not fire.
<><><>
“What is going on out there?” Urban demanded, bracing against a quake that shook the gray chamber hard enough that he would have fallen if he wasn’t already sitting on the floor. The gravity, light as it was, shifted weirdly, sickeningly.
“It is most likely I was wrong,” the Cryptologist said calmly, almost resigned. “The Blade may have been hit after all, and become unstable.” After a slight pause, she added, “Send a ghost now. I’m sending mine.”
<><><>
Aboard Griffin, the Cryptologist received her ghost. Its memories—its astonishing memories—blended with her own, but did not assuage the anger that afflicted her. A rare, hot anger that grew fiercer still, now that she understood all she had been through and all she stood to lose.
Urban had told her to be ready—ready to destroy the missiles—and she had been. She had not taken the time to coordinate; she had simply exerted her will over the philosopher cells. She was Griffin’s will. In that capacity, she had directed the cells to strike the closest missile, expecting Urban to take out the other. But he had not. And she could not.
Though Griffin’s philosopher cells had the target marked, though the gun swiveled under their direction as they tracked it, they refused to fire.
*What did you do? she demanded of the Bio-mechanic.
He had done something. She’d felt it. He had introduced some strange argument and the field had abruptly changed. The philosopher cells no longer acknowledged her authority as other-self. They had somehow acquired a will of their own and now the aggression she demanded of them was gone, replaced by something else, by . . . shame?
An unprecedented state!
*It’s because of Dragon, the Bio-mechanic said. *An argument from Dragon. An infectious argument.
She listened to the cell field and perceived the truth of what he said. Her philosopher cells had been persuaded by Dragon’s harsh criticism—communicated in patterns of light and full of righteous anger—to reject her authority because she had erred. She, as the entity they deemed other-self.
Other-self had given in to archaic hostility.
Other-self had attacked a trusted ally as it moved to evaluate the hazard of a new creation.
Other-self demanded further violence against a second ally.
Other-self must be rejected.
With guilt in his voice, the Bio-mechanic confessed, *The argument in favor of the missiles began with Urban. A sense of empathy that jumped to me.
She gathered herself. Did the reason matter now? No, it did not. Not with time slipping away. She said, *We have to force a counter-argument.
Only a little time left to do so. Though more than 300,000 kilometers lay between the dark ring and the bright halo of the Blade, the missile was transiting that gap at an absurd velocity, an interstellar velocity, leaving her not half a minute to persuade the cells.
She tried:
– identify: ally; not ally; false ally –
– revulsion: false ally –
– it threatens! –
She envisioned the hazard: what would happen if the missile reached the dark ring and blossomed. Then she made her demand:
– cease observe/learn –
– target: false ally –
– kill it! –
– KILL IT! –
The Bio-mechanic added his influence and a new consensus began to build, a rising wave of force and ferocity—
The wave collapsed, neutralized by an even stronger coalition:
She tried again. Again. But Dragon’s argument had destroyed her.
A stale message arrived from Urban, pleading with her to strike the second missile, to strike now.
*It’s too late, she answered him. *We’ve lost.
<><><>
Urban’s ghost escaped from the falling moon, blending with that version of him on Dragon’s high bridge, so that he knew now the fullness of what would be lost when the Blade failed—his blade—the foundation of a world, made at great cost to himself.
Never again!
He would never have even the choice to create a blade again because when this Blade failed, he would also lose himself—his avatar, that is—his irreplaceable silver-endowed avatar, the anchor of his existence since his time on Verilotus. And not only his avatar, but the Cryptologist’s too. That most complex version of her would be lost forever if he, or she, could not stop the second missile in its plunging assault on the dark ring.
