Ghora looked from Viktor to me, me to Viktor. Yukiko looked like she was starting to catch on.
“Man, when they built you they really got it right.” I resisted the urge to whistle in appreciation. “You’re even more optimized than me.”
“Sunday,” Lian said.
“He wants to be deprecated,” I told her. “Wants to know how it plays out. That’s his whole life, his—epic quest. It’s how he justifies the fact that he didn’t just walk away when he had the chance.” I had to smile. Had I really been arrogant enough to think myself the only one who’d had doubts? The only one who needed a bit of extra incentive? “He wants to know how the story ends, and we were about to tear it up halfway through.”
She looked at me strangely. “I’m glad.”
“Glad?”
“That it wasn’t you. I’d hoped, if it came to that…” Lian nodded, slowly. Her gaze flickered, steadied. She turned it on her betrayer. “And are you feeling better now, Vik? Safer, now that your epic quest is back on track?”
“Ignition in forty corsecs.”
“Oh for fucks’ sake Chimp just shut up!” Yuki barked.
“No, no, let it talk.” Li smiled faintly. She seemed strangely calm for someone who’d just watched so many centuries of careful conspiracy crumble to dust. “Enjoy that feeling, Vik.” She stepped toward him: the bot surged forward a few centimeters, muzzle quivering.
Lian didn’t take her eyes off Viktor. “Enjoy it while it lasts. Which should be another—”
“Ignition in twenty corsecs.”
“—more or less.”
Viktor frowned. “Li, you do understand, yes? I disabled the time-jump.”
“I believe you,” she said. “But I bet that’s all you did.”
“What?”
“Ignition in ten corsecs.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She put a hand on his cheek. “We’re dead anyway. All we get to choose is the exit strategy.”
“Five…”
She stood on tiptoe, whispered—
“…four…”
“I forgive you.”
“…three…”
—and kissed him.
“…two…”
Viktor blanched. “Chimp—”
“…one…”
And something kicked us hard in the side.
There’s a sound in the archives: mournful and lonely, like the sinking of a ship or the slow cracking fall of a giant redwood. It’s the voice of a sea creature, vaster than anything that ever lived on land. Once, long long ago, it filled the ocean with its sounds. Back then people seemed to think of it as a kind of song.
The sound Eriophora made was a little like what might have come from such a creature, screaming in pain.
The hatch slammed shut. Red icons sprayed across my BUD like arterial spatter. Down tilted, and split into two parts. The weaker pulled us off-balance, whispered up the wall and across the ceiling and faded away. The stronger did not move, and kept us anchored to the deck.
I heard a soft thump at my side and turned to see Lian Wei sprawled bonelessly across the floor, a perfect cauterized hole smoking in the center of her forehead. Viktor’s bot hovered restless at the door, guiltless and lethal. So this is what happens, I thought distantly, when cost-benefit drops below threshold. Somehow I’d expected greater subtlety.
“Stay calm,” Chimp told us against the rising shouts and panic, against muffled sirens sounding out in the corridor. “Stay calm. Stay—”
I didn’t recognize that alarm. I’d never heard it bef—yes, yes I had. Way back in training: a proximity alert. I’d never heard it used in-flight, though.
“There’s been an incident,” Chimp reported and I thought, No shit, really? because I’d been tagging those bloody icons fast as I could, opening one window and then another, building an ever-growing palimpsest of catastrophe in my head.
Down in the Uterus: a great smoking hole in the firing chamber, rads off the scale. The log said Singularity achieved but it wasn’t floating in the core like it was supposed to be, and it hadn’t left via the birth canal as it had been designed to. It had shot out at an angle, punched a proton-sized hole through the containment hoops, exited stage right leaving a scalding mix of Hawking and gamma in its wake. It had slipped effortlessly through seven kilometers of solid rock and escaped into the void.
How the fuck—
The hatch unlocked, swung wide. “Please follow the bot,” Chimp said with utmost calm. “We have a small window of—”
Another exploding icon: aft ventral bridge suddenly offline, and a heat spike under one of the fab caches. Something about a forest fire, an instantaneous explosive ignition of five hundred thousand cubic meters of air and cellulose and vaporized machinery…
“Fuck you!” Ghora yelled, “I’m not going anywh—” And he wasn’t, because now he was on the deck next to Lian, a cauterized crease along his left cheek ending in a wet steaming socket where his eye used to be.
The bot turned and ticked.
“There’s little time to argue,” the Chimp said. “Please follow the bot.”
We followed. I stumbled into the corridor with everyone else, trying to keep up with the icons blooming in my head. (Somewhere deep aft, dimly registered: the rumble of awakening thrusters.) Singularity ignited, but not quite to specs: realized mass just a fraction too low—
Lian. Oh Lian, you crazy bitch.
Her hacked graser hadn’t fired prematurely. It hadn’t fired at all.
And when 242 out of 243 apocalypse beams shot simultaneously at that precise central point, the vectors almost balanced. When one out of 243 grasers hadn’t fired, all that explosive mass-energy pushing out found one small spot that didn’t push back quite so hard…
There’d been a Plan B after all.
As simple as a clock and a laser, maybe, a tiny sun-hot beam to cut 172’s powerline at the very last moment. There wouldn’t have been much room for error: a photon’s trip to the end of the circuit and back. A microsec, maybe two. More than that and the Chimp would’ve caught it and canceled the burn.
She wouldn’t even have had to build an active trigger for the damn thing, just set it to go off regardless. If Plan A carried the day, no harm done; a fried line to a device that had already served its purpose.
If Plan A failed…
Now the newborn smaller singularity was doing a crazy carousel dance around the ancient larger one that drove the ship. Both looped chaotically towards Nemesis. Tactical scribbled a tracery of conics with too many foci moving way too fast, threads of amber and green, dotted and continuous, staggering ever-deeper into tidal gradients that would tear us to rubble long before we hit the event horizon. Eri rolled ponderously on some halfassed axis; one of our freshly minted gates rose in my sky like a jagged steel rainbow, a great thick hoop of angles and alloys slewing up and left across the horizon.
The proximity alert, I remembered. The thrusters. But they’d fired too late against too much mass, and the vectors were just too fucking skewed: rock ground against alloy and suddenly the sky was full of tinfoil, tumbling across the heavens in a slow-motion blizzard. The gate fell ponderously to stern, bleeding metal; we lumbered to starboard, bleeding atmosphere.