Now something different. The manifestation was encountering resistance-a storm of matter that it could not avoid. A threat! Surely nothing that could endanger the manifestation, but the relentless barrage of dense particles had halted its advance, forced it to change each of the incoming projectiles. Neutrons were stripped away in an instant, metals changed to insubstantial gaseous elements, but the entity felt its power waning.
This threat had to be neutralized.
To do that, it needed to feed.
34
King grasped Brown by the collar and hauled him erect. The gambler might not have had any clue about Pradesh’s actual agenda, much less any ability to alter its outcome, and dragging him around was probably going to end up being more trouble than it was worth, but he’d gone through too much to take the bastard down. He wasn’t about to simply turn the man loose. A single bullet probably would have resolved the dilemma, but that wasn’t King’s style.
“Chesler! Grab him.” King pointed to Pradesh. As the Alpha Dog mercenary moved into the room, King thrust his captive into the corridor. He kept one hand on Brown’s collar and the other on the grip of the Uzi pressed against the base of the gambler’s spine, pre-empting any displays of resistance on the latter’s part. As he made his way back toward the casino, the noise of the disturbance outside grew more intense, though not quite loud enough to drown out Pradesh’s insane cackle.
A black hole, he thought. A black hole with a brain, no less. God damn it. Why can’t the crazies just stick to weaponized Ebola and suitcase nukes?
Five years ago, he probably would have dismissed Pradesh’s claim out of hand, but he’d seen a lot of impossible things since then-mythological monsters, Neanderthals, golem. He’d survived them all. Hell, he’d found a way to stop them all.
The screams had dwindled by the time he reached the casino, and when he threw open the door to the aft deck, he found it empty. Or rather, almost empty. Three human forms were visible, standing at the railing and seemingly gazing out at the dark water. But they didn’t move. The three appeared frozen in place, as still as statues. King resisted the urge to make a closer inspection; he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what had happened to them.
The distinctive crack of an unsilenced Uzi grabbed his attention and he instinctively drew back against the superstructure, looking for cover. The shots had originated along the port side of the riverboat. As far as he knew-and he had taken a crash course in physics as part of Deep Blue’s new intensive educational program for Chess Team-black holes didn’t use semi-automatic weapons. Something else was going on. He dragged Brown behind him toward the corner and peeked around it.
His first impression was that someone had blocked access to the deck with a black velvet curtain. Ten feet high, with shadowy protrusions spread out behind it, the thing didn’t look like any kind of black hole he’d ever read about.
Pradesh must have gotten bad information. It was impossible to see a black hole because their gravity was so strong that no light could reflect back to reach the human eye. Nor did this apparition appear to be causing any gravitational or relativistic disturbances. This thing, as weird as it was, could not be a black hole.
And if it’s not a black hole, maybe bullets can hurt it. He hefted his own Uzi and started to take aim, but something brushed past him before he could pull the trigger.
Pradesh.
The hacker had broken free from Chesler’s grip and dashed past King toward the dark shape. He spread his arms wide as he ran toward it, shouting: “I’m ready!”
As soon as he touched the thing, Pradesh stopped moving. King didn’t notice any other distinctive physical changes, but something was different. The hacker’s sudden silence and lack of movement was profoundly unnatural.
“Guess that ‘mind of God’ stuff didn’t work out for you,” King muttered. “So much for infinity and beyond.”
Suddenly, Pradesh disappeared. It was as if he were nothing more than a human shaped balloon popped by a needle; one instant he was there, and then nothing. King was still trying to digest this when he realized something had changed. The dark shape was moving. Toward him.
Tentacles snaked out along the deck, pulling the thing along with a smoothness that concealed just how fast it was moving. King barely had time to pull back from the corner before the writhing tendrils reached that spot.
He spun and aimed for the gangplank and the waiting Zodiac, heaving Brown ahead of him. A glance over his shoulder showed the thing creeping relentlessly onward, following him-or so it appeared-like a bloodhound. Then he saw Chesler, riveted in place and staring at the dark mass-not literally turned to stone, but petrified nonetheless. King almost called out to the Alpha Dog contractor, but he knew it was already too late.
He pitched Brown into the Zodiac and followed, shoving the rubber boat away from its mooring as he heaved himself over the inflatable gunwale. The black shape slid past Chesler, missing him by mere inches, and oozed onto the gangplank, just as King fired up the outboard.
The water around the riverboat was crowded with passengers who had sought escape from the dark shape by leaping overboard. Many of them were struggling to stay afloat, the cold water and their sodden clothes conspiring to sap their strength. Several heads turned in King’s direction in the instant that the outboard roared to life; frantic hands grasped the sides of the rubber boat. King felt a pang of guilt as he opened the throttle and pushed through their midst.
The shadow thing was right behind him, pulling itself across the surface of the Seine as if the water were no different from the solid deck of the riverboat. Its tentacle-like protrusions barely left a ripple as it reached out again and again to draw itself forward. The screws of the Zodiac’s motor were gradually propelling the craft faster than the shape appeared capable of moving, but if King stopped to help even a single beleaguered swimmer, the thing would catch him. Moreover, he knew that he wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor by performing a rescue; the creature, whatever it was, was coming after him, and King had a pretty good idea why.
The swimmers he’d already passed thrashed desperately to get out of the thing’s path, and for the most part, none felt its deadly touch. A few unlucky souls however lost the race and vanished in an instant as the tendrils brushed them. Then King saw something that all but confirmed his hypothesis.
A tendril snaked out to the shape’s left and plucked a man from the water. King only caught a glimpse of the man’s horrified face as he was pulled back, still very much alive, into the dark mass, but he nonetheless recognized the victim as one of the ten who had received a quantum phone from Brown earlier in the evening.
He recalled Pradesh’s words. I gave it a brain. The hacker had been only half-right about that. His quantum computer had awakened the black hole, or whatever it was, and evidently imparted some rudimentary degree of awareness to it, but it didn’t literally have its brain — the quantum computer network-and correcting that condition was its only priority. It was hunting down the quantum phone devices, collecting them together and integrating them physically into its being.
King knew less about quantum physics than he did about black holes, but he knew that one of the most difficult concepts for the novice physicist to grasp was the idea of quantum colocation. Experiments had proven that subatomic particles could literally be in two places at the same time. Pradesh’s quantum computer seemed to take advantage of this property; the hacker had said the device didn’t have a physical location, but what he had really meant was that it existed in ten different locations simultaneously; the ten quantum phones. The dark shape was evidently entangled with the quantum computer, linked to and benefiting from the artificial intelligence subroutine, but it needed more. It needed to be in physical contact with the computer. That was the sole reason it had come to the riverboat, where all ten recipients of the devices were clustered together like fish in a barrel. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe that with each assimilation, its intelligence multiplied.