They didn’t panic. Later, that would be what Paul remembered most clearly about those first seconds after the engines failed, and he was hugely proud of his crew for the way they responded. Rizzo, Thula, Meia, Steven, Alis—each contributed to the diagnostics check, trying to determine the source of the failure. They worked fast, constantly communicating with one another, each telling the others what had been done and what was about to be done.
And all the time Paul watched as the Corps pursuit ship came around in a fast arc to bring them into its sights.
It was Meia who came to the correct conclusion before the others.
“Our systems have been targeted,” she said. “We’ve lost propulsion, weapons, and navigation, but life support and ancillary power are untouched. We’ve been carefully disabled.”
Paul looked past the cockpit screens to the sphere, which had slowed its approach and commenced a lazy orbit of the Nomad. Beyond it waited the alien vessel.
“That won’t be much consolation when we’re dead,” said Thula, who was tracking the Corps ship.
“We’re in their sights,” said Steven. On the cockpit screen, the Corps vessel turned from green to red.
“They’re firing!” said Rizzo.
And they were. From the underside of the pursuit ship appeared two balls of light: torpedoes. The Nomad’s computer instantly calculated their trajectory, and offered a series of avoidance measures for the pilots to take, none of them applicable for a ship that had no engines upon which to call.
The torpedoes exploded, but long before they had gotten anywhere near the Nomad. Paul and the others watched the blasts ripple in a convex shape and disperse, as though the missiles had been fired from inside a great bubble, and their power had failed to breach it. Immediately after the explosions, the pursuit ship gave a lurch and lost all momentum. It too had been crippled by an outside agency, apparently completely immobilized, and nobody had to look very far to figure out just what that agency might be.
A series of thuds came from the body of the Nomad.
“What is that?” asked Paul.
“The thing circling us has fired a number of devices,” said Steven. “They’ve attached themselves to our hull.”
Meia turned to look at Paul.
“We’re being scanned,” she said. “My CPU has detected it.”
“She’s right,” said Alis. “They’re moving through all non-organic systems.”
“But this ship is immune to scans,” said Paul.
“Not any longer,” said Meia.
“It’s not only non-organics,” cut in Syl. “I can sense them examining me too.”
It was an odd feeling, and she could only compare it to a kind of caress. It was intrusive, but not entirely unpleasant. She closed her mind to the probing, just in case, but she believed the scan to be physical, and not in any way attuned to psychic activity.
“I don’t feel anything,” said Thula.
Suddenly there appeared before him an image of his own body, skinless but identifiable by the shape of his nose, which had been broken so often when he was a boy as to be highly distinctive. Thula could see his lungs pumping, his heart beating, even the twitch of individual muscles. Then the image was magnified rapidly, until within seconds Thula was staring into the deepest workings of his brain, watching as synapses flared.
He risked a quick glance away, and saw that all of the others were also staring at maps of their bodies in varying stages of magnification. Only three were different from the rest. The brief glimpse that Thula got of Meia’s insides was much like Alis’s, and showed pale tubes and hints of circuitry, alongside unidentifiable organs that were part mechanical and part laboratory-grown flesh. When the scan reached Meia’s brain, the patterns revealed were more regimented than his, and the paths taken by the electrical pulses more ordered. He wasn’t entirely surprised. He’d never considered himself particularly logical.
Then there was Syl. Her brain scan showed nothing—nothing at all. It was like looking at a ball of dough. A scan of a dead person’s brain would probably have revealed something similar.
The projections vanished and the Nomad’s lights began to flicker on and off. The food processors and heaters powered up, then just as quickly ceased to function. The chemical toilet flushed. Doors opened and closed of their own volition.
“They’re deep in our circuitry,” said Meia.
“Why?” asked Paul.
He saw Meia discreetly plug herself into the Nomad’s systems.
“Careful, Meia,” he said.
Meia jolted as she connected with the ship’s computer, but she quickly recovered herself. Her eyes danced in their sockets, flicking back and forth, up and down, following code unseen by the rest of them.
“They’re searching,” said Meia.
“For what?”
“Contamination. It’s extraordinary. This is scanning on a subatomic level. We have nothing like it. It’s—”
Meia spasmed, and her head began to shake uncontrollably. Her hands opened and closed repeatedly, and then the shaking spread to her entire body.
“What the hell?” said Rizzo.
It was Paul who acted first, yanking the connector from Meia’s arm and breaking the link with the ship. Meia flopped in her seat. A trickle of white fluid mixed with red leaked from her mouth where she had bitten deep into her artificial flesh. Alis moved from the copilot’s seat to examine her.
“Meia?”
Meia’s lips moved. She reached up with her left hand to wipe the mixture of ProGen blood and Mech plasma from her mouth. She looked embarrassed at the sight of it.
“I’m okay,” she said.
“What happened?” asked Paul.
“They didn’t like me looking over their shoulder while they went about their business,” said Meia.
“Did you pick up any hint of who or what they are?”
“No.”
“They are many,” said Syl.
They all looked to her. She was fiddling absently with the scruffy brown locket she wore around her neck on a strip of leather.
“That’s all I know,” said Syl, pulling the amulet backward and forward on its string. “I’ve heard them. There are billions on that ship.”
“How is that possible?” asked Rizzo. “It’s big, but it’s not that big.”
“I don’t know,” said Syl. “But it’s the truth.”
Nobody argued with her. Already they knew better than to do that.
Around them, the Nomad began to hum as its engines powered up again. Seconds later, they felt it begin to move. Paul turned to his brother questioningly.
“It’s not us,” said Steven. “I didn’t touch anything.”
“We’re not in control,” said Meia. “They’re bringing us in.”
“What about the Corps ship?”
Steven examined the screens.
“No sign of movement there. It looks like it’s staying where it is, for now.”
Paul walked to one of starboard windows. He could see the other vessel as a shard of silver hanging in space. And then, as he stared at it, a mesh began to appear, so fine that, for a moment, he thought that it was an imperfection on the glass. It slowly extended until it surrounded their pursuers in a honeycombed oval.
Thula joined him at the window.
“It doesn’t look like we have the same thing around us,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Do you think that’s good or bad news?”
“Relatively speaking,” said Paul, “it’s probably good. In reality, though, this is all bad news.”
“When do you think we might start getting some good news?” asked Thula.
“Not anytime soon.”
Thula considered this.
“I hate space,” he said at last. “And I reckon space hates me right back.”