40

 

Ways and Means’ course took it so near the three other planarships that it hardly seemed possible to miss plunging through their formation. The virus opened the planarship’s sensor feeds back up to the crew. On the tactical maps, the planarship careened toward the amalgamates with the velocity of a rogue asteroid. It was too late to stop. Its engines didn’t have the power to come to a relative halt.

Ways and Means left its crew little time to react. The first thruster burst nearly knocked Habidah flat onto the deck. She fought her way into one of the acceleration couches. Its fields snapped into place, holding her tight. Meloku settled into the seat beside her.

Habidah said, “There went your chance to kill me.”

Meloku grunted when her fields gripped her.

Then neither of them could speak. Acceleration shoved them hard into their seats. Osia and her companion remained standing, but unmoving. Habidah gasped and fought for breath. She turned her breathing over to her demiorganics. She blocked as many of her nerves as possible, sinking away from her body.

The other amalgamates had already started their own engine burns. Fat white exhaust plumes arrowed away from Ways and Means. Together, the four planarships’ plumes drew parallel ultraviolet and x-ray lines across the sky.

Habidah wished she could have seen it with her own eyes. She’d never imagined being this close to so many of the amalgamates.

She wouldn’t have been able to see the combat drones by naked eye, though, and it was the drones that were the problem. The drones stood ready to fill space with lethal radiation at an instant’s notice. Both the virus and the amalgamates agreed upon a distance Ways and Means’ drones must not pass before a firefight became unavoidable and all negotiations wasted. Past that, and none of them would have enough warning to return fire should the other attack. The three amalgamates simply could not trust the virus controlling Ways and Means to withhold fire. And vice versa.

It was going to take all of the drones and planarships firing their engines at full power to avoid that rendezvous.

The gravities magnified. Habidah gasped one last breath. New restraining fields sprung up inside her body. The fields had so far held only her body immobile; now they braced her innards. Even her demiorganics couldn’t make that more comfortable. They released reserves of oxygen to keep her conscious.

Meloku didn’t have the benefit of demiorganics. She screamed silently. A moment later, her head lolled into her restraining fields.

Outside, Ways and Means’ drones fell into a tight diamond formation, ready for any treachery. So far as Habidah could see, none was forthcoming. She wouldn’t see it before it happened. In a battle like this, human reaction times were simply not enough.

Maybe Niccoluccio and his master were right, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand planes, she had just become a cloud of vapor. She might have died infinite times in half the space of a blink. She would never know it.

But in this plane, Ways and Means and the other amalgamates kept their critical distance and maintained the ceasefire.

A voice that came seemingly from everywhere, the walls and the air, announced, “The virus has given us control again.”

Habidah had never heard the voice, that inflection, but it could only have been the amalgamate, Ways and Means itself, restored and deigning to speak to its crew.

The other amalgamates slipped into the rear sensors. The acceleration lessened. At once, a steady pulse of data traffic thrummed between Ways and Means and the other amalgamates, and eventually between all of the planarships equally.

Habidah had access to all of the message traffic, but it came too fast and heavy for her to glimpse more than a microcosm. Power shifted through the planarship’s veins. Habidah felt it. The deck resonated with it. Ways and Means was starting the long process of recharging and activating its transplanar gateway. The light of the other planarships flickered and bent, a telltale hint of their own gateway generators activating.

Meloku stirred as the acceleration damped. After the fields released her insides, she rasped, “What happened?”

The amalgamate answered, “The Unity is dissolving. We and the other amalgamates are in agreement: the Unity cannot hold against a primal force of the cosmos.”

Color returned to Meloku’s cheeks as blood found her head again, but, if anything she sounded more likely to faint. “You surrendered too.”

“It is the only way to preserve ourselves.” All along, that was what was most important to the amalgamates.

Osia and her companion stood silent. They were communicating with their master, no doubt too quickly for simple language.

Meloku said, “That was fast.”

“We are nothing if not prompt in the face of danger,” Ways and Means said. “The challenge we are wrestling with now is what to make of our lives. We have always defined ourselves by our empire, and growth, and power. That has become untenable. We will need time to ponder what comes next.”

That, Habidah supposed, was the closest thing to a spiritual crisis she was likely to hear from an amalgamate. The fact that it was still ongoing spoke to its significance. The amalgamates thought at a speed that dwarfed her own, or any human’s. They were in many ways as alien as Niccoluccio’s master.

For all that, it sounded confident when it said, “We will find new purposes in time. And one day we will understand more of what happened here.”

Habidah caught more snippets of the data pulsing between the amalgamates. Transplanar gateways throughout the Unity were set to overload and shut down in a matter of days. Their governing NAIs had been told to allow evacuees back home and then to obliterate themselves.

Lost trade links between planes would cost lives, but not as many as the plague. Some planes would no doubt find ways to remain connected, but, without the amalgamates governing them, they wouldn’t be anything like the Unity had been. They would be on their own now, and their own responsibilities.

Niccoluccio lay on the table, hands folded and eyes closed. The defensive field had dissipated. As soon as the acceleration cut and Habidah’s restraints released her, she went to him. Her inner ear fought her all the way, but she lasted long enough to take his hand.

His eyes fluttered open when she slipped his fingers between hers. He looked about as a man lost, and breathed out heavily.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No,” he said, odd and distant.

On the other side of the sky, Risk Management vanished underneath a crackle of radiation. Ways and Means had to turn some of its sensors off or risk having them blinded. When it could look again, Risk Management’s exhaust trail cut into nothing. It had gated to another plane.

Ways and Means broadcast an alarm alerting its crew to brace themselves for modest acceleration. Habidah repeated the warning for Niccoluccio and Meloku’s sakes. Meloku returned to her seat. Niccoluccio only closed his eyes.

Planarship crews were meant to leave their attachments to their old, merely human lives when they boarded. But she still picked up a few signals flashing to Providence Core, last messages thrown into the Unity’s crumbling communications networks. Messages home.

Habidah remained by Niccoluccio. She said, “You don’t have to come with us, wherever you’re going.”

Niccoluccio said, “You don’t understand.”

The deck juddered like a boat run aground. Habidah held the table to keep from tumbling. The outside universe vanished under a haze of light and static.

After a loose few seconds of blindness, the first images filtered back through the sensors. A gateway shone like a sun behind the planarship. Spires of energized exhaust and plasma curled out of it like fingers.

The stars reappeared, no longer cloaked by a vast dust cloud. The amalgamates and their ships and defenses had vanished. So had the belt of stations and industries in orbit around Providence Core. Only the distant Earth remained, dark and still.

Ways and Means broadcast the terms of the surrender to which it had agreed: “We are to remove ourselves from any plane formerly colonized by the Unity, and to never again organize systems of governance that span planes. As personal penance, for the duration of one thousand two hundred years, we are forbidden from traveling to other planes. After that period expires, we may travel as we will, but may never again attempt contact with the other amalgamates, any former plane of the Unity, or expand as we once did. We will be watched.”

Habidah started to say, “So we’ve been exiled to an empty plane,” but at the moment the rest of the sensor data caught up with her.

A handful of satellites spun in spread-out orbits. Most were small, almost imperceptible – stealthed spy satellites. Even the planarship’s sensors could hardly find them. A minority, though, stood out plainly: her field team’s observation satellites.

Niccoluccio said, “You came with me, not the other way around.”

The shape of this world’s continents, the atmospheric and oceanic compositions with their very few traces of pre-industrial civilization, the broad swatches of farmland across Asia, Europe, and Africa – all exactly as she left them. Her field base stood bright as a beacon to Ways and Means’ sensors.

Someone at the field base was trying to contact the planarship. Ways and Means had left other agents on the surface, too, and they were doing the same.

“You haven’t activated your stealth systems,” Habidah told Ways and Means, dully. “Too many of the locals will have seen us.”

Niccoluccio said, “That is the idea.”

Habidah looked back to him. She asked her demiorganics to scan the air between Niccoluccio and the planarship, search for any sign that they were still in contact. Nothing. Niccoluccio was speaking for himself, though he didn’t sound like him.

Meloku stepped to his table. She said, “You put Ways and Means up to this while you were controlling it.”

Ways and Means interjected, “It would be more correct to say that he suggested a focus for our endeavors.”

Niccoluccio looked to Meloku. “We’ve been told that you’ve made a good start preparing this world for colonization. You and your fellow agents have gotten a foothold into governments across multiple continents.”

“That’s right,” Meloku said, so unashamed that Habidah could have struck her.

“You will have no time to mourn the Unity,” Niccoluccio said. “We need you to reestablish contact. They and the locals they’ve recruited will distribute a plague cure.”

Meloku considered that for a long moment, like she was chewing something unpalatable. Finally, she nodded. She straightened and winced at her bruises.

“I’ll need my demiorganics back,” she said.

Ways and Means said, “It will take time to rebuild them. We are sorry to put off your ascension into a new body. We need you looking human while you interact with the people below.”

“I am proud to serve,” Meloku said. She sounded as distant as Niccoluccio.

Habidah stared at her, searching for any other hint of expression. But Meloku had retracted into herself, become as impossible to read as a soldier standing at attention.

More weight pressed Habidah into the deck. Her breath stuck in her throat. Ways and Means was firing its engines, arcing around to face the Earth. It made no attempt to disguise its exhaust.

Niccoluccio said, “Ways and Means and its crew have been barred from turning this world into an outpost of the Unity. But that doesn’t mean they can’t make it their home.”

“We are heading into equatorial orbit,” Ways and Means announced shipwide. “Altitude three hundred thousand meters.”

“Everyone below will see us,” Habidah said. “They won’t even need to have good eyesight.”

Ways and Means said, “Then they will know that we are coming.”

Niccoluccio’s voice was starting to strain. For all the subjective days or weeks or years he seemed to have spent trapped inside the planarship’s mind, Habidah doubted he’d gotten rest for any of it. He said, “My memories taught the virus about suffering. When the virus and the amalgamates were still negotiating, I was still a part of them. I added a clause.”

Habidah had argued for distributing a cure for the plague below, but hearing it now, from him, she couldn’t keep the blood from draining from her cheeks. Those weren’t his words. And he was talking about a lot more than a plague cure.

Habidah said, “The terms of your surrender barred you from doing this.”

“We have been forbidden from expanding across multiple planes,” Ways and Means said. “Not from controlling a single world.”

On the world below, sunset was still a long way off from the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent. Clear skies reigned over Europe. To anyone looking up, Ways and Means would appear as a bright new daytime star. As it decelerated into orbit and crossed the terminator, it would turn night skies blue.

For a moment, even Meloku seemed cowed by what Niccoluccio was saying. She said, “They’re going to think their world’s ending.”

“This time it is.”

Niccoluccio had said that, while the virus and Ways and Means had negotiated, his thoughts had shaped each of them. Looking at him and his half-lidded eyes, she realized the corollary was true, too. The virus and the amalgamate were so large by comparison that they must have overwhelmed him.

She allowed his fingers to fall through hers. He made no effort to hold on.

Niccoluccio said, “We have twelve hundred years to share everything we have, and to make this world better.” He smiled gently, warmly. “I don’t know how exactly we’re going to do it, yet. I came back before we could figure it out. But we have the means.”

Ways and Means said, “After you left us, we developed the method.”

It was hard to hear any difference in their inflections. Or any trace of the man she used to know. He was speaking for more than just himself.

Habidah looked away. She returned her attention to the sensor image of the Earth. She wondered how he would have seen the same image, had he been able to.

Niccoluccio said, “By the time the sun next rises over this continent, we’ll have started making everything down there a great deal better.”