Exodus, page 64
“Find out how many,” Gyvoy said. “Whatever you have to do.”
“Depend on it.”
The Ovar swept out into one of the factory assembly lines—a giant empty space running through the center of the factory, thirty kilometers wide and seventy long. It was almost like being out in the open forever of Kingsnest again. The walls withdrew in every direction, leaving the Ovar surging through darkness.
“Where now?” Koa asked.
“Along to the other end; it’s seventy kilometers away. And keep the lights shining ahead. It’s not quite as empty as it looks; there are a lot of gantries in here.”
Finn felt the Ovar fly a tight curve, and the cannon spotlights returned to the wall. It was a smooth, dark gray substance that had a faint metallic grain, and there was no sign of airkombu growing anywhere on it.
They came across the first gantry a minute later: a featureless black column extending out at right angles to the wall. Another followed almost immediately. Then another. The Ovar had to slow down so they could dodge around them.
A Dave sent one of the spotlight beams scouring along a gantry. It ended a couple of kilometers away, merging with a huge curving grid.
“An Archimedes Engine,” Finn said. “Well, the stress structure, anyway. This is the start of the assembly process.”
Fifteen kilometers later there was another Archimedes Engine. This one had more systems installed; even some sections of the outer hull were in place. The gap between them and the assembly line wall was narrower, and more gantries stretched across it. It took a while, but he realized the engine was bigger than the previous one.
“How big are these things?” Elsbeth asked.
“About twenty-five kilometers,” Finn answered, going with the flow of knowledge his brain had accommodated during the neural contact. “They’re cylindrical, but with conical ends—here, anyway. I think they change shape a bit when they’re deployed.”
“Okay, so question two: How the hell did the Elohim get them out of Kingsnest when they finished building them?”
“That’d be the polar ports,” Koa said jauntily. “We got us some really big airlocks at both the poles. The iris doors are eighty kilometers across, and the chambers underneath are over two hundred kilometers long.”
“That’s going to take a lot of pumps to get the air out,” Ellie decided.
“Oh, yeah, it’s like a metal city stuck to the inside of the shell.”
“You’ve seen one?”
“Nah. Never been in an air current that’s carried us there. Heard tales, though. We all have.”
The third Archimedes Engine was a lot further along the construction process. At least sixty percent of its hull was complete. Again it was progressively larger than the first two. Do they mutate as they get built? Finn wondered. Worse, for the Ovars, the shorter gap between its hull and the wall was now a clutter of gantries. None of them were smooth anymore; their surfaces had been twisted by helical ridges. The Changelings had to go slowly to weave themselves around the columns.
Koa followed Finn’s instructions and flew to the far end of the Archimedes Engine.
“That one,” Finn said happily, guiding them to a gantry that didn’t seem any different from the rest. But he knew. This is what being psychic must be like, he thought. “Right down at the base, look.”
“Gotcha,” Koa said.
She took them in close, with the spotlights revealing that the flared base of the gantry column was inset with broad archways.
“Dave, you stay out here with Koa and Kaizen and watch our backs,” Gyvoy said. “Dave, you’re with us.”
They flew in a close formation over to the column.
“Sensors on three-sixty coverage and run the feed through your suit manager’s tactical analysis the whole time,” Gyvoy said. “This place can’t be deserted.”
“Why not?” Ellie asked. “It’s not exactly jiving.”
“There’s got to be a reason not many airboats ever make it back from the factories, and it can’t just be pirates. You heard Jazon; there are nightweid down here.”
“What are they?”
“Let’s not find out, yeah?”
They drifted through one of the archways, with Dave taking point. The chamber it led to was an order of magnitude larger than those they’d ventured in earlier. Its surface was like a storm-tossed sea, where every wave had frozen into place at the instant it reached peak ferocity. The next one was divided up by sheets of pale yellow glass, none of which quite stretched across the full width.
Finn just couldn’t get the idea out of his mind that the factory was more a living thing than a technological structure. Some residual impression from his connection, the way everything functioned at an autonomic level, knowing what it was supposed to do.
The huge fourth chamber was one that gave him an impossible déjà vu. Instead of the indentations of the previous factory chamber where he’d established a neural connection, this one had walls of cream-colored bulges the size of a human. Each one was crested by a mushroom-shaped interface bulb. He knew what they were because a memory that wasn’t his portrayed the chamber filled with dozens of implausibly tall, spindly humanoid figures, comprised only of dark shadows, each with their hands resting on a bulb.
“This is it,” he whispered reverentially.
“Yeah, it kinda looks right,” Gyvoy agreed.
“I got movement,” Bensath said. He was hovering next to a slit between the bulges. Two spyflies zipped out of his suit silo and through the slit. The chamber on the other side was choked with thin poles in a convoluted three-dimensional maze. Things were moving through them in jerky motions.
“Ghosts,” Dave grunted.
“Dave, Iarik, take point,” Gyvoy said. “Go now. Maximum denial. Bensath, Ellie, Elsbeth, cover the other entrances, full sensor scan in all surrounding chambers. They’re not going to be alone.”
The gamma cannon on Finn’s left forearm powered up. He opened the shoulder mini-missile launcher and selected proton-boosted warheads. His suit fans propelled him toward an opening in the wall.
“Finn! Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Gyvoy stormed.
“Checking the chamber through here.”
“Stop dicking around. Your job is the operating system. Get your arse into whatever CI is running this place and find what we need to know. Making sure you can do that uninterrupted is our job.”
“But—”
“Go,” Ellie snapped. “We got this.”
Explosions bloomed in the chamber Dave and Iarik had flown into, throwing dazzling light back through the entrance along with the multiple roars of the blasts.
“Now, Finn,” Gyvoy directed.
Finn chose one of the bulges away from any entrance and glided over to it, his gauntlet segments opening. The bulb was three times broader than his hand. He slapped his palm down on top—
Contact.
His small mind was adrift in an ocean of thought routines, a tiny speck of flotsam perilously close to being submerged, there was so much of it. Not another sentient personality, but a presence—a mind—which matched his impression of the factory being alive in a way he could never fathom.
I am overwhelmed. Lost. Yet purpose remains. Above all, I am here to help my fellow humans. I wish to liberate them from the cruel kindness my family and all the others have inflicted and endured for so long.
The factory’s presence in all its immeasurable glory began to encroach upon him. It had a certainty he could never emulate, an existence that was rooted in and derived from reality itself.
It is beyond the physical. Nonetheless, somewhere within lies the means to our liberation.
Finn stopped trying to understand and navigate what he could perceive, and simply let himself be suspended within. His soul was poised on the edge of eternity, looking on with wonder.
Curious routines came questing out of the mind’s core that was nowhere and everywhere—some insignificant part acknowledging his presence. Somehow he knew the routines that were involving him. That primal gift, his instinct for correlation, allowed a tenuous gold-glowing thread of connection to grow. Slowly and surely, he sank and expanded to join with the core. Not the place—there was none—but the knowing that allows worlds to be set free from the gravity prison of their star.
I feel it, but I don’t understand.
And answered himself: That you are here means you do understand, for it is one.
Are you Elohim?
I am liberation, the fulcrum upon which Archimedes rests his lever—
“Finn!”
—the bedrock—
“Finn. Fuck, Fiiiinn! We have to go.”
—upon which you apply the force.
Ah, like so.
The gold thread stretched and broke, ends coiling away through the routines as they faded away, delivering him at lightspeed back to—
Finn screamed at the terrible loss, his limbs juddering helplessly. Instead of the magnificent sedate presence of the factory, there was—
Explosions. The rapid-hammer buzz of magpulse muzzles. Lnc alerts blazed in his visor as alarms reverberated around his helmet. The chamber thick with smoke. An armor suit flashed past, blood drops spraying out of a scorched gash in the thigh.
“What the fuck?” Finn gasped. The yearning to return to the serenity of the factory routines was stronger than physical pain.
“We have to go,” Ellie yelled. “Now!”
Finn’s tactical display tagged her suit as the one towing him from the interface bulb. There were big jagged holes in the walls, opening into the chambers beyond. Mechanical debris was whirling past him in churning jets of overheated air. He could see it was all busted shards of Ghosts: bent and heat-tarnished limbs, shattered torsos, molten droplets still oscillating and puffing out vapor.
“What happened?” he gasped.
“They come in waves,” Ellie said in a sob. “Each one is bigger. We’ll never survive the next. We have to get out.”
“R-r-right. Okay.”
“Did you get it?” Gyvoy pleaded. “Sweet Asteria, Finn, did you?”
“I…I think so. Yes. Yes, I understand the operating system.”
“Then move it.”
Dave fired a stream of glowing kinetics through a fissure into another chamber. Finn’s jetpack started accelerating him. His suit’s weapons systems went active. He was completely disoriented, so he just followed Ellie; Ellie who had muzzles protruding from both forearms. One of her silos had been crushed, her armor splattered with oily black fluid, a strip of blue sealant smeared across the battered casing of her right hip, curving around over her abdomen.
They swept into the next chamber, which Finn vaguely recognized as the way they’d come. It was another jumble of wreckage tumbling wildly through the smog-layered air.
“What the hell happened here?”
“I told you,” Ellie growled. “They just keep coming.”
“But—” That was when he finally read his visor’s time display. “How long?”
“What?”
“How long have I been connected?”
“Two and a half hours.”
That’s not possible.
“We’re exiting now,” Gyvoy said. “Come and get us.”
“En route,” Dave said.
The armor suits plowed through more debris swirls, then they were out in the vastness of the assembly line. Glaring lines of projectiles slashed across the gap between the wall and the unfinished Archimedes Engine. They strafed gantry columns, strike points rupturing into violet plasma spheres. Energy beams stabbed out, long rigid lines fluorescing a pale rose-gold in the damp air as they chased invisible targets.
Finn had no idea what was happening. Target graphics were jumping about in his display as if the tactical routine was glitching in manic stutters. Abruptly Kaizen swooped around a gantry column. Her carapace had multiple impact pocks and scorch lines where she’d been hit. The Dave riding shotgun in her mandibles opened fire at hidden attackers. His cannon projectiles ripped huge chunks of assembly line superstructure apart.
Gyvoy and Iarik launched themselves from the wall. All Finn could do was follow helplessly, checking that Ellie was close. Koa appeared, barrel-rolling around a column. Then both Changelings were hovering directly in front of the Diligent team, the rear of their passenger cavities irising open. Finn saw Dave slam down into the mandible cage and reach for the cannon. He throttled his own suit forward toward Koa, almost crashing into the sides of the cavity.
“We’re in. Go!” Gyvoy commanded.
The Ovar took off at high speed, heading for the far end of the assembly line, where they’d come in.
Gyvoy and Ellie were snapping open the ammunition cases they’d brought, slapping fresh magazines into their suit’s loading apertures. Finn watched the precise mechanical dance in a daze. “Two and a half hours?”
“Yes,” Ellie said irritably. “Crap, Gyvoy, I’m down to eight percent power.”
“Just run a cable to the power cells,” Gyvoy grunted. “Charge and fire together if you need to.”
Ellie pulled a cable from one of their cylindrical power cells they’d brought and plugged it into her suit.
“I could have helped,” Finn said meekly.
“Will you get it into your dumb head that we are your bodyguards for this mission?” Gyvoy shouted.
“Sorry.”
“Trouble,” Dave said.
Finn told his suit manager to access Dave’s sensor feed. The Silicate was looking back along Koa’s flank to the battered gantries they were fleeing from. Several fires were seething in puncture holes, casting an orange radiance to create a sickly sunset effect within the gap between the Archimedes Engine and the assembly line wall.
The Dave looked forward. A couple of kilometers in front of them, the gantries were sprouting sub-columns to create a lattice that was slowly getting tighter.
“They’re going to cage us in,” Finn realized in alarm. He could see the new sub-columns were also sprouting thick strands that were starting to weave together.
Dave’s scan detected hundreds of Ghosts jolting along all the strands in a broken-clockwork motion. As the resolution grew, Finn could see why. Every Ghost was made up of mismatched parts—long limbs, short limbs, fat limbs; heads that didn’t match the torsos. It was an army that had kept itself going by cannibalizing every component from its weakening members. Watching them muster on the thickening cage of struts was like seeing soldier ants working in conjunction.
“We’re not going to get through that,” Elsbeth said flatly. “There’s too many of the bastards.”
“I’ll fix this,” Gyvoy said coldly. “Koa, get us to three hundred meters out from that grid, then turn around and open for me.”
“Errr, you sure about that?” the Ovar asked nervously.
Gyvoy went over to one of the smaller cases he’d brought and opened the lid. “I sure am.”
Finn could see a couple of squat one-shot missile launchers inside, but something about them was indisputably wrong. The shape was easily recognizable, but the material…It was like a furry skin, one that glowed with bioluminescence from the tip of each bristle.
“What are those?” he asked uneasily.
“Remnant Era slowbombs. This is the good stuff, not the cheap shit Travelers sell to everyone else. Didn’t you ever wonder what weapons we keep back for ourselves, and why? Well, here’s where you find out.” He pulled the first launcher out of its packing cradle and crouched down near the back of the cavity.
“Thirty seconds,” Koa said.
The Ovar banked hard and spun around. Her rear segments peeled apart. Finn stared through the opening, seeing the giant lattice that the factory had grown. He understood not how, but certainly why the response had come about. Somewhere in among all those layers of routines was an autonomous response, the body marshaling its antibodies to prevent further harm. This was a harmonized action between the Ghosts and the structure itself, gathering to extinguish the incursive anomaly.
Thousands of the animated scrap Ghosts clung to the struts, eager for the incursion to come within range, as the factory constricted the space along which they flew.
Gyvoy fired his first missile. It didn’t seem particularly slow, streaking across the distance in a couple of seconds and detonating against one of the columns. Nor was the explosion impressive—a sphere of bright light, but barely five meters wide, engulfing a couple of crab-like Ghosts. But it didn’t fade. If anything, the sphere’s radiance began to intensify.
Gyvoy picked up the second launcher and fired. The missile struck fifty meters from the first.
“What?” Finn grunted. He’d expected something a whole lot more impressive than a small explosion with no discernible blast wave. Although…Is that first sphere still expanding?
“Never get in my way, motherfuckers,” Gyvoy snarled brutally.
The two explosions were definitely expanding—fast enough now that the surrounding Ghosts couldn’t move out of the way before the glaring surface enveloped them.
“Asteria’s arse!” Finn said. He could see the struts and column material disintegrating as the plasma surged into them.
“It’s a disassociation field,” Gyvoy said. “Doesn’t work in a vacuum, because it needs solid matter to conduct it. Atoms along the wavefront collapse when they’re hit and pass the effect into the next atom; think of it as a pure nuclear virus. Not even ultrabonded material can withstand it.”
“What stops it?” Finn asked in alarm. The explosion spheres were each a good seventy meters across now. Koa was obviously thinking the same way, as she started to move farther out.
“Don’t worry; the blast is energy limited. It has a maximum three-hundred-meters diameter.”
The dazzling spheres merged, then began to dim. A few seconds later there were only a pair of broad overlapping holes through the columns and struts. A thick vapor ripple, beset with static fizzles, shook the Ovar as it raced outward.
