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Security was a one-dimensional concept for the Starflyer. It took precautions to guard itself physically and politically from native humans as it insinuated its human motiles within their Commonwealth society. That was the level of safety it determined it required to insure its survival, a strategy that had been successful.

No human could hack into the electronic network of the Institute valley; as the processors were an extension of the Starflyer’s own mind, they only acknowledged orders that had an internal heritage. What the network and its processors did not have was the ability to discriminate between an order from a genuine motile and a human who remembered the neural “language” of the Starflyer.

In front of Bradley the force field protecting the Marie Celeste realigned its structure to allow him through. He jogged along the bottom of the deep grassy scar that the vast alien ship had scored as it slid along the ground before finally coming to an ignominious halt. Several soldier motiles were patrolling the base of the starship. Their minds told him where they were, the direction they were looking in, where they would look next. Their sensors and eyes never saw his suit’s stealth coating as he hurried into the shadows cast by the big fusion rocket nozzles. Proximity alarms watched passively as he told their processors his presence was legitimate.

The ship had been lifted gradually out of the scar by motiles and civil engineering machinery. A wide pad of enzyme-bonded concrete had been laid underneath to support the weight. Cradles gripped the lower fuselage, holding it off the ground. Bradley walked up the metal stairs on one of the cradles. An access hatch to the fusion engineering bay opened for him, and he ducked inside.

The initial findings on the Marie Celeste published by the Institute were accurate enough. It was comprised of fusion rockets, their fuel tanks, environmentally maintained water tanks containing an alien amoeba-equivalent cell, and the force field generators. From that, public perception remained locked on the knowledge that there was nothing else inside; certainly it possessed no life-support section, no “crew quarters.” A more detailed examination showed (unpressurized) access passages and crawlways remarkably similar to those humans would design into any ship. No maintenance robots were ever found. The first conclusion was that the passages were used only for construction.

Right at the center of the tanks there was a chamber with a life-support system. The Starflyer lived in that, fed with base cells and purified water from the tanks. It didn’t need additional space to move about in; there were no leisure and recreational facilities that any human would have needed during a centuries-long flight. All it did was receive information and supervise the ship’s systems. When necessary it would ovulate nucleiplasms into a freefall vat to grow space adept motiles that would be dispatched on repair assignments. After they had completed their task they would be recycled into nutrients for the base cells in the tanks. Every century a new immotile would be created to house the Starflyer’s mind as the old body aged. All this in a chamber of thirty cubic meters. Easy for a preliminary examination to miss in a volume of twenty-five million cubic meters, especially as it had been badly damaged during the landing.

There were no lights inside the engineering bay, another aspect contributing to the myth of the ship being “solid machinery.” Bradley turned his infrared sensors up to full resolution, and made his way along the cramped passage. It branched several times, some openings like vertical chimneys leading up to the center of the ship. Climbing would take too long for him; he found a corridor leading toward the prow and moved as fast as he could. The corridor walls were open girders. Beyond them, the ship’s major segments were held together inside a simple gridwork. The individual beams of metal were shaking as the fusion drives worked down their ignition sequence. In two minutes the ship would lift from this world to the clean emptiness of space.

Bradley clambered out of the corridor and began to worm his way up through the narrow gap between a deuterium tank and some car-sized turbo pumps. The mindsong of the Starflyer remained perfectly clear to his receptors, even wedged into the lightless metal cavity.

“Remember me?” he asked.

Every motile in the Institute valley froze.

“You do, don’t you? I made sure you wouldn’t forget me.”

The mindsong altered, reaching out into the brains of each human motile contained within the Starflyer’s mental empire. Questioning. Processors ran checks on themselves to see where the aberrant harmonics were coming from.

“Oh, I’m in here with you.”

Outside the ship, the song faltered, withdrawing.

“You didn’t think I was going to miss this moment, did you? I want to be with you when we launch. I want to be certain. I want us to be together when we die.”

Suspicion strengthened until the mindsong became loud enough to exert a painful phantom pressure on Bradley’s ears.

“Bombs, kaos software, biological agents. I forget which. They’re hidden somewhere on board. I don’t remember where, or how long I’ve been here. Perhaps I never went away.”

Over the strident turmoil of the mindsong, Bradley could hear motiles scrabbling along passages. Thousands of them were set loose, swarming like rats, seeking any clue to his whereabouts.

Bradley waited in the pitch-dark as the Starflyer’s thoughts thrashed into doubt and wrath. Waited as the minutes ticked away. The fusion rockets held their ignition sequence.

“Will you launch? I wonder. Flee to the safety of space knowing I can’t survive long. Hope the redundant systems will suffice after the sabotage. Or will you stay? The damage can be repaired here on the ground. Of course, the Commonwealth elite know you exist now. They will be coming in their super-ships. You would not survive their vengeance.”

The mindsong rose to a howl of fury.

Bradley looked down. Below his feet, a motile was standing in the corridor, sensor stalks curving up to gaze on him. It exploded into motion, clawing its way up the girders.

“Too late, I’m afraid.”

Outside the starship, darkness fell.

Bradley smiled, the gesture’s warmth pouring like a balm into the discordant mindsong. “You can never know us. Only a human can truly know another human. The rest of the galaxy is doomed to underestimate us. Just as you have done.”

The hull sensors saw the solid wall of the megastorm sweep out of the High Desert. It towered briefly above the mountains before enveloping them and blasting down into the Institute valley. For a few seconds, the force field over the Marie Celeste resisted the savage assault, radiating a vivid ruby light until the titanic battering overloaded its generator. A sixteen-kilometer-high wave of sand and stone traveling at five hundred kilometers an hour crashed down on the naked starship.

“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.

***

The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.

“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.

“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.

“Can’t see the barrier.”

“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”

“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”