Ahead, the corridor curved. A burst of red light flashed off the smooth, clear walls. It flashed again, and again. Avir's steps quickened. The footsteps of the Security Beholden echoed as they marched behind her.
She rounded the curve and the pulse of light hit her right in the eyes. Dazzled, she dropped her gaze and raised her hand. She saw the reflection of another flash on her own boots. The shadows under the surface of the corridor roiled as if in response. The intensity of the light faded as her faceplate darkened.
At last, Avir could look up again. She stood less than a meter from a cavernous opening. The corridor came out near its ceiling, but the floor, if existent, was invisible. The far wall was likewise lost in shadow. From darkness to darkness stretched more of the Ancestors' veins. Avir knew they must be enormous, but the cavern around them made them look like silken threads. They crossed each other and spread out again at every angle. It was a geometrician's dream. It was the work of a thousand spiders over a thousand years. The ruby light flashed down the threads like bottled lightning. A single strand flashed on the edge of her line of sight. A dozen lit up right in front of her. Ten meters below, five, now ten, now twenty, horizontal strands pulsed with light and then blacked out all at once. Pulses of light raced up and down the verticals, chasing each other through the network of threads.
Peripherally, she noticed a platform in front of her, obviously made for movement into the vast network. Flat balconies and bubbles that could have enclosed rooms were supported by the threads. This was a complex. People, the Ancestors or the artifacts, traveled into the heart of this gigantic web of light and…did what?
"There is yet more work in the heart of the Ancestors. May those hearts be revealed to me. May my eyes see the wonder of the work…" It took Avir a moment to realize her voice was reciting the Second Grace. She closed her mouth but her eyes couldn't stop straining to measure and define the impossible wonder spun out in light and glass in front of her.
Then her heart began to thud heavily against her rib cage. It was too much. It was too big and too incomprehensible. As precisely as she could manage, she turned around and shouldered her way between the Security Beholden. The ruby light pulsed and flickered against the corridor's curved walls, each beat raising the level of unreasoned panic inside her. She didn't dare run, but she didn't know how she'd hold herself to a walk.
They were in a hollow world. A hollow world with veins and nerves, and who could know what else. But it lived. She knew that with an utter certainty. Like the artifacts that grubbed on its surface searching for their lost function, it lived.
Avir almost gasped with relief when she crossed the thresholds into the first chamber again.
The Unifier grinned at her. "Something else, isn't it? And I'll tell you what, those lights? They weren't there when we got here. That didn't start up until we got Broken Trail down here."
Avir tried to collect herself, but didn't feel very successful at the attempt. Her mind was full of light and threads. "Explain what you have done."
Apparently ready to accept his prisoner status, the Unifier described the hunt for Stone in the Wall's genetic relatives and how Broken Trail was led to the "control bank" to lay her hand on one of the spheres that still remained in the bank's sockets. He went on to tell about how the lights had switched on in both the chamber and the cavern, and how the artifact had lain in a stupor since then and he wasn't sure she was ever going to come out of it.
Avir didn't realize how chilled her cheeks were until she felt the heat of anger rising in them.
"Do you realize what you have done!" she demanded. "You animal without Lineage!" Her fists clenched. "You played with the work of the Ancestors without even a preliminary test? Without a survey or any kind of analysis! You thought you could just…"
"We were in a hurry," he said blandly. "We'd had word your lot was coming down like vengeance on this place for no particular reason, except maybe the people."
Little by little, Avir clamped down on her emotions. This was not just unseemly, it was unacceptable and grossly unproductive. The Unifier had to be questioned thoroughly by experts. The Reclamation Assembly had to be notified of these developments at once. Measures had to be taken to secure the human artifacts, all of them, immediately, from the Imperialist clutches. Teams had to be brought down here as quickly as possible.
All time was gone. It was already too late. The race had started without them and now they could only run to catch up.
I am child of the Lineage. I will not see the work of the Ancestors end at the hands of the Imperialists. I will not.
Now the real work begins.
14—Aboard the U-Kenai, Hour 14:23:45, Ship's Time
"This is the truth. This is what we learned too late. We should not have made them Human. Even a little bit of Humanity was too much."
—Fragment from "The Beginning of the Flight", from the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives
As it turned out, they didn't even feel the collision. There should have been a long, slow, grinding crash, but there wasn't. There should have been the sound of straining metals and ceramics, but there wasn't. One minute the screens were full of filthy ice, the next minute they were black.
Adu felt the smooth surface of the control boards under his hands and for a moment wished Dorias hadn't decided to house him in the android. It was convenient, but it was isolating. If he had been loaded into the ship itself, then he would have been able to know where the hull stresses were as soon as the ice touched the ship. He could have compensated for them instantly and monitored them where compensation wasn't needed yet. He would have known everything, without needing to call up the data, or turn his head, or wait while his mind processed what his eyes saw.
Next to him, Eric Born and Aria Stone blinked at the blank screens.
Eric looked down at Aria in the communications chair. "Now what?" he asked her.
"Now, we push it toward the Realm. What's supposed to happen is the heat exhaust melts the ice as we push and we slide father into the shell. When we get to the Realm, we head to ground looking like a great, hulking lump of ice." She frowned. "Did I say that right?" Her hand fell onto her pouch of stones and she jerked it away.
"I, for one, hope you did," said Adu. "Although what they'll think when they see a lump of ice going this fast, I don't know."
"We'll just have to hope the satellites don't think." Eric stretched his arms over his head until his joints popped.
"They're Vitae satellites," Adu reminded him. "How can we be sure what they do?"
Eric swung his arms down. "Adu, that's not really helpful."
"My apologies, Sar Born."
Eric nodded and, almost absently, stroked the curve of Aria's shoulder. "Let us know when we have to strap down," he said, and he left the bridge. Aria stood. Her concentration focused on Adu, but she said nothing. She just followed Eric Born out of the chamber.
Adu shifted himself to make room for the work being done inside his skull. Most of the processing right now was actually being done by the Cam programs. It was able to calculate the angles and bursts of thrust needed to push them around the binary, keeping their "tail" angled away from the suns. They would fly into the system between the satellites, and get just a little too close to the planet. Its gravity would grab hold of them and drag them down. Nothing surprising. Nothing unnatural. Nothing to rise from the ashes and craters.
Adu tried to be content. He tried to draw comfort from the fact that he would be able to fulfill his parent's first instructions. Down in the Realm of the Nameless Powers he'd be able to find out the origin of the Vitae's plans.