The process that animated the body of the silvery pseudogirl was more like electrophoresis than chemistry, but it was vulnerable to attack. It was damaged now; but she was not dead. The great wings were broken and useless, but her limbs still moved, the inappropriate angel face still showed its bleak, proud expression.
She was in great pain; that is to say, all the sensory nets of the edited body were transmitting messages of malfunction, damage and warning. She did not perceive them as a human perceives a toothache, a sensation so blinding that it can lead to suicide; but they did not interfere with the few pleasure-bound processes left to her: reminiscence, forevision, contemplation. In the sense that these messages were pain, she had experienced pain from the moment she floated out of the tachyon receiver on Aurora. All edited members of her race did. There was no way to rearrange their structures into forms viable in atmosphere and low-G that was comfortable for them.
Time was when Aphrodite had experienced pain only infrequently, and in ways that were soon mended. Time was when she had lain with her sisters in the icy methane slush of her native planet, absorbing energy from the radioactive elements that swam about them, growing, learning from the tutorials of her orthofather, competing in the endless elimination battles of her race that finally won her her choice of assignments and ultimately led her to the Aurora and its imminent doom. Her race was not greatly interested in astronomy; they had known almost nothing of it until the first T’Worlie probe survived the crushing pressures of their atmosphere and brought them into contact. From the surface of their enormous planet, there were no stars to be seen. Even their aircraft never reached an altitude beyond the dense yellow-grey clouds.
What brought her to Aurora was the trait that her whole upbringing had trained into her: the competitive need to go farther and do more. It was not goal-oriented. It gained nothing from victories except the opportunity for further victories. And the only victory now open to Aphrodite was to survive; and there was but one way to do it - by preventing the launching of the probe.
She calculated she had strength enough left to destroy the two organic creatures in her way, but only just; and only if she acted now.
It was Pertin who saw her first: he froze with his hand on the release lever, and it was Doc Chimp who acted. He flung himself on the pseudogirl. “Hurry up, Ben James!” he shouted. “She’s too strong for me—” And his voice stopped, punctuated with a screech of pain as the silvery arm thrust him away like a cannon-shot. The chimp went flying into the floating wreckage of the Scorpian robot. The soft, frail dome of the skull, so cleverly mutated nearly into the shape of man’s own, impaled itself on a steel shard, and the thoughtful, considering brain was destroyed.
Pertin hardly even saw it. He was past the point for sorrow. It would be easy to let the pseudogirl destroy him. At least one life would be saved, her own. His no longer counted. He could hope for a few days, a week or two at the most, of being able to move and breathe. But what would it be like? Increasing pain. Hopeless fear. Regret. Envy-
He pressed the lever just as her fingers touched him.
The instant sharp slap of the explosion was the last sound he ever heard.
At the second Ben James Pertin pressed the release explosive shears cut the aft end of the ship free. The canopy flew out and away. The air puffed into emptiness. The probe rocket dropped free and began to align itself with the now near great disc of Object Lambda.
The first thing Pertin felt was the sharp pain of the explosion, then the second, longer, more deadly pain as the air pressure dropped to instant zero and his own blood and body fluids, the air in his own lungs, the gases dissolved in his blood tried to expand to fill the enormous emptiness all around. He caught a glimpse of the silvery girl, arms, legs and broken wings flailing, as she shot past him, careened off the jagged edge of metal where the shears had cut the probe satellite free and ricocheted out into emptiness. If she made a sound, he could not hear it.
There was no longer a way for him to hear sound. There was no longer a continuous medium of air to carry it.
He had just a glimpse of the huge near surface of Object Lambda - the body he had called “Cuckoo” - as it hung like a great dull circle in the empty sky, cutting off one spiral limb of his own, eternally lost, Galaxy.
He did not see the orienting jets of the satellite spurt carefully controlled measures of flame to position it for its final thrust.
He did not see the great violet flare of the fusion rockets that began to slow it. He could not see any of that, because by then he was dead.
Neither he nor anyone else in the probe ship saw the great series of flares as the satellite fought to slow itself. Aurora flew on, back towards the Galaxy, without power, containing only the least flickerings of life for a few of its beings. The probe left it as it drew more and more rapidly away. The distance between them was millions of miles before the satellite made its first meteoric contact with the outer layers of that anomalously thick atmosphere around Cuckoo.
It was a spectacle worth watching, if there had been eyes left in Aurora to see. The satellite plunged through a carefully planned chord of the atmosphere. Its ablative surface burned and tore away in a flare like all the Fourth of July fireworks in man’s history going off at once. But there was none to see, not Sirian eye nor Sheliak sensors, not T’Worlie nor Earthman nor alien of any kind; where life remained at all, it lacked strength for curiosity, and it would not remain very long.
Fifty thousand years later Aurora might pass near some sun of an outstretched spiral arm. But by then it would no longer matter to anyone, except as a historical curiosity from a time about which no one any longer cared.
6
Some days later, the sensors on Sun One reported that the probe was in a stable orbit. The beings on Sun One responded with pleasure; everyone was delighted that the project was a success.
Now stable, the probe began to do the work for which it had been designed.
The complex H-bomb sequencing units and the small, strong pressure-plate shock absorbers fell away, responding to remote controls from Sun One. They would never be used again.
The tachyon-receiving unit began to emit a stream of tiny metallic shards, none larger than a few inches in its greatest measure.
When some hundreds of them were through, floating like a metallic mist around the drone, a quick small machine came through and began to catch them and link them together. Time passed, hours and then days. A queer box-like shape took form and became a larger tachyon receiver, ready for action.
From tens of thousands of light-years away an angular, crystalline machine flashed along the tachyon patterns and emerged in the new receiver. It was not alive. Was not even a robot, or a proxy like the purchased people. It was simply an automatic machine that sensed certain potentials and charges, double-checked the strength of the materials and the solidity of the joints, directed the hummingbird-sized construction machine to correct a few faults and then reported that Cuckoo Station, the orbiting body around what had been called Object Lambda, was now ready to be built.
A few hours later the first girders of a thousand-metre revolving wheel were being joined together.
Plates appeared to surround the girders with an airtight sheath. Machines arrived to be stored in them. Atmosphere was pumped through to fill the chambers. The handling machines were busy, taxed beyond their capacities; more handling machines were sent and soon the orbiting station was whole, supplied, and being-rated.