End of the Circle Read online

  She aimed a finger across the table at Scott. “You betrayed me! You told me you loved me!”

  Scott held his breath.

  Marlene was about to continue, when her body was seized by a violent paroxysm. The two majors flanking her leapt from their seats as she began to fade from view.

  “Don’t touch her!” someone warned.

  As if anyone was about to.

  Scott thought he might pass out, but just then Marlene rematerialized, skin tinged green and expression vacant. Her right hand was still raised but pointed out the viewport. She regarded the table for a long moment, as though challenging anyone to speak. But it was Marlene herself who broke the spell her brief disappearance had cast.

  “There,” she said finally with utter contempt.

  Scott joined the others at the table in following her finger.

  “Ra-anaath’s Star?” Obstat stammered. “Your queen is inside the black hole?”

  “You asked to know,” Marlene said flatly.

  “Christ,” Louis Nichols muttered. “Veidt wasn’t kidding when he said the Ark Angel isn’t built for the trip.”

  “I know how difficult that was for you, Scott,” Vince said after Marlene had been taken from the room. “But we had to know. You understand, don’t you?”

  Scott looked up at him, face drained of blood. “And is she going to understand that I was lying just now?” He sighed heavily. “I’ve sentenced her to death, Commander. I’ve killed her.”

  Dr. Penn almost laid a hand on Scott’s shoulder but withdrew it. “She had to remember who she was, son. The shock was necessary. You couldn’t have prevented it, anyway. She belongs to her own kind, not here, divided, trapped in two separate worlds.”

  Scott uttered a sardonic laugh. “A lot of good it did us, Doctor.” He motioned with his chin toward the viewport. “The SDF-3 is out of reach.”

  “Haydon doesn’t seem to think so,” Louie said into the silence. “Look,” he explained as heads turned, “I realize that any directional coordinates we could coax from the Awareness would be useless now. But Haydon’s obviously convinced that it’s possible to follow the lead, no matter where it ends up.”

  Vince shook his head. “If you’re thinking that I’ll risk taking this ship into that …” he said, indicating Ranaath’s Star.

  Louie held up his hands. “I’m not. I was only going to suggest that instead of pilfering coordinates, we steal one of those ships.”

  Minmei was crying when she left the music room. But what she had first assumed to be a rapturous outpouring brought upon by the harmonies of the clones’ psalms she now understood to be tears of sadness. The ancient songs had awakened an aged hurt inside her one she could not be certain was even hers, but it touched her as though it was and was connected somehow with Rem.

  The tears were flowing patently by the time she rushed blindly onto the lift, where she ran straight into Lisa Hayes Hunter.

  “Minmei,” Lisa said, surprised. “What’s wrong?”

  The odd thing was that the sight of Minmei’s tears actually helped to dam the flow of Lisa’s own. Relieved by her exec only moments before, Lisa had nearly fled the bridge like a lovesick adolescent, crushed by the discovery that a romance meant to last an eternity was not even going to survive the football season! She was at a loss to explain just what had brought the nosedive on—some aftereffect of the argument with Rick, perhaps, or just plain concern for his well-being planetside—and she was headed for the nursery to press Roy to her breast with a vengeance.

  “Do you want to talk about it, Minmei?” Lisa asked, feeling that the situation was awkward all of a sudden. Their friendship had been on a steady decline since Lisa and Rick’s wedding day. The Sentinels campaign hadn’t helped, nor had Minmei’s fling with T. R. Edwards and her subsequent retirement from public life. But Lisa had heard that Minmei had been on the mend, thanks to Rem. And hadn’t Rick mentioned something about her singing again?

  Well, maybe it was one of those artistic mood swings, Lisa started to tell herself, when Minmei said, “It’s Rem.”

  Lisa eyed the young woman who had slipped onto the lift behind Minmei and was off to one side now, pretending disinterest in the conversation. The woman had security written all over her.

  “Come on,” Lisa said, leading Minmei off the lift at the med deck. “Now tell me what happened,” she added, a few steps down the quiet corridor.

  Minmei sniffled and ran the back of her hand under each eye. “That’s just it, Lisa, I don’t know what happened. I just, it’s just … I’m feeling like he used me. Just the way everyone else has done for my whole stupid life.” She took a deep breath. “The singing hasn’t helped me. It’s made me feel worse about everything. He just wanted me to sing so he could take his little trip down memory lane.”

  Lisa waited for her to continue.

  Minmei sniffled again. “It’s for Zor,” she said dismissively. “He thinks the old Tiresian songs will jar memories of Zor’s early experiences on Tirol and Optera.”

  “Optera?” Lisa said, thinking suddenly of the planet below. A planet that had appeared out of nowhere.

  “I just keep feeling he’s betrayed me somehow,” Minmei explained, sobbing. “He doesn’t love me. He probably never loved me.”

  Lisa was not listening. Some half-formed realization had begun to vie for her attention, a thought she could not quite assemble. But before she knew it, she had taken Minmei by the upper arms and was shaking her. “Did Rem tell you why it’s so important he recall Zor’s memories?”

  Minmei looked up, startled.

  Lisa dropped her arms at her sides and exhaled.

  “Minmei, listen to me. I’m on my way to the nursery right now because I feel like Rick’s been lying to me about something. That he’s really in love with that little idiot Sue Graham or someone. But I know that isn’t true, even if he has been acting like a complete jerk.” She looked into Minmei’s eyes. “And I’m sure Rem hasn’t betrayed you. It has something to do with this place, Minmei. Something we haven’t considered yet.” She gnawed at a finger, remembering Roy. “It’s even begun to affect the children.”

  Minmei looked ashen. “Oh, please, don’t tell me that,” she said, turning to face the corridor wall. “You can’t tell anyone, Lisa,” she added, “but I’m carrying Rem’s child.”

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  Although Wilfred Gibley is most often credited with the discovery of machine mind and the development of cyber-interface technology (See Shi-Ling’s “Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide”), Nichols was to become the movement’s principal advocate and spokesperson. Evidence suggests that Nichols himself may have been working along similar lines as early as May of 2031, when he wrote: “It was Bowie [Grant] that started me thinking. He used to say that he thought of music, like mathematics, as this place somewhere out there that adepts could tune into. And that the key signatures and notes and scales were actually solid things you could approach in that realm. So I thought: Why couldn’t it be the same for data? After all, what’s mind but a union of music and math?”

  Bruce Mirrorshades, Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

  Hodel, commander of the Karbarran flotilla, counted down the seconds. He thought about Cano, the brother he had lost when the N’trpriz had been destroyed, and wondered how many others he would grieve for before the battle was through.

  Haydon IV had yet to respond to the ultimatum, although the Tiresian, Cabell, claimed to have been in touch with a high-ranking official planetside who had affirmed that no prisoners would be released. The Haydonite had also warned against the use of force to achieve that end. In his capacity as amateur historian, Hodel was inclined to believe him. He was as conversant as any with the facts regarding the Mo’fiint Incident, in which 870 dreadnoughts at the command of a would-be empire builder had attempted to add Haydon IV to her long list of conquests. Eight hundred and seventy ships annihilated in a matter of minutes … But history was just that,
or so the Karbarran High Authority had admonished Hodel when he had brought the Mo’fiint Incident to their attention. So, in his capacity as battle group commander, he was expected to disregard any Haydonite counterthreats communicated to the Ark Angel and accept on faith that history mattered only to the victors.

  Moreover, it was obvious from the recordings made during the N’trpriz’s final moments that K’rrk had committed a series of tactical blunders. He had failed to break off communication with Haydon IV’s artificial sentience and had thereby allowed the Awareness access to the ship’s onboard Tiresian-manufactured AI—which in turn had been based on Haydonite designs!

  This time in there would be no such contact. The Awareness had been given ample opportunity to respond; the deadline had not been met, and it was time therefore to actualize the threat. Haydon IV would be given no second chance.

  And neither would the ships of the flotilla.

  Hodel buried the thought behind a confident scowl and rose from his command chair as the zero-line display triggered battle-station sirens throughout the ship.

  “Order all ships into attack formation,” he growled to his communications officer. “Full ahead, on my command, Ntor.”

  “Aye, sir,” Ntor responded from her station. “Sekiton drives at maximum power, all systems enabled.”

  The battle plan was a straightforward one now that the safety of the hostages was no longer considered a mission priority. Haydon IV was simply to be beaten into submission. The loss of the five hundred or so merchants and traders planetside would be regrettable but acceptable.

  Colonel Mo’fiint had felt no need to justify her actions when she had given the order to attack Haydon IV. The goal, after all, had been conquest.

  Much as today, Hodel thought.

  “Planetary reconfiguration in process, Captain,” the science officer advised. “Haydon IV is disengaging from the moon. Weapons’ nacelles retracting. We are being scanned and targeted.”

  Hodel swiveled to study displays. The giant artifact was rotating to face the flotilla, its matériel transfer tubes traversing local space like twin cannons. “Standard evasion, Ntor,” he directed forward. “Close all communication frequencies.”

  “Repositioning of the labor droneships, Captain,” the science officer updated. “They are being deployed to repel strikes directed against the surface.”

  Hodel growled to himself. “Order fighter teams away as soon as we’re within range.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Hodel watched the forward screens. “All right, Ntor, let’s clear a path for them. On my mark …”

  Aboard the Ark Angel, Louie Nichols and his crew of comic-crazed compjockeys were headlocked into that part of the ship’s AI mainframe linked to the commo device Veidt had left in Exedore’s care.

  The data room was a yard sale of consoles, monitors, slave decks, sensory boosts, psi-amps, and enhancers; a tangled nest of F/O lines, power leads, and interface cables, with the team members positioned about like switches and relays—some sprawled on the floor beneath tables, cranial cyber-ports studded with titanium plugs and alloy adapters, others cross-legged atop tables and racks, fiddling with tuning knobs, keying input, fingering touchscreens, but loving every minute of it, thrilled to be back where they belonged, ghosts in the mind of the machine.

  Vince Grant had just sent word that the Karbarrans were making their move and that Haydon IV was readying what promised to be a crippling response. It had been Louie’s signal to commence an attack of his own devising, not directed against the planet, however; but against the psychodynamics of its ruling artificial intelligence. With luck, the Awareness would be too busy attending to matters of defense to notice Louie and his cowboys’ subtle approach, too preoccupied carrying out the timeless dictates of its enigmatic programmers to realize that someone was toying with its emotions.

  Louie, Gibley, Strucker, and the rest were not going in so much on-line as they were on-wave, in an attempt to grapple with the Awareness where it lived, loved, and loathed. Unified, the discorporate raiders aimed to plant the seeds of self-doubt, to stir a bit of regret, to suggest a path to redemption.

  To inject a virus if all else failed.

  Louie could feel the cyber surge as he punched into machine mind, the hands to which his thoughts were now only remotely connected hovering over the console’s directional cross and touchpad, his hands-on-trigger-and-stick. The cyber-surge was the rush of a crimson-tipped stimulant, a kick clear out of the world. He could feel Stirson and Shi-Ling headlocked into the same vibe, telepathic twins flanking him like recklessness and daring, an upside Scylla and Charybdis.

  Machine mind was dimly lit, boundless but crowded with the color-coded spires and sentry towers that guarded Ark Angel’s mainframe cores. Below was the network’s familiar grid of pulsating lights, data highways for the grounded and uninspired. Louie laughed as he soared above bridges and constructs, executing flyboy rollovers between mainframe pillars and pyramids as he closed on the access link to Veidt’s device.

  Exedore’s computer construct was over the horizon, stuck in the real stuff, blazing a trail for the team. Louie thought he could almost detect the Zentraedi’s fingers hammering overhead like thunder in that weatherless domain.

  Down the link into the device, a jump fueled by thought from ship to reconfigured world, into a much smaller space—a foyer of a kind, an antechamber defined by the dark maws of derezz gates, the looming shadows of security fences. Gibley’s construct slid to a halt nearby, freaked by the sight, wavering like the filament in a shaken bulb. Exedore was giving it his all, hacking away with commands, but there were defensive commands beginning to line up behind the walls: retaliatory icons ordered in by executive decision.

  Louie steeled himself, hands set for play in the Ark Angel’s dreamscape. Gibley, Strucker, Stirson, and Shi-Ling were eager trotters, panting at the start of the course.

  An access window suddenly flashed transparent.

  Exedore had punched through.

  Gibley’s construct took the point as the Awareness deployed its net.

  Time to fry, Louie thought.

  * * *

  “I’ve found a way in!” Exedore announced, hands raised above the keyboard in surprise.

  “Yeah, and I’ve found a way out,” Dana told him from the front threshold as repeated blasts shook the room. The laser fence disabled, the Praxians had already gone through to lend support to the Karbarran revolt.

  The ursinoids had streamed out of their cells only moments before at the sound of the first surface explosions, stacking bodies in the thresholds until the lasers were overworked, then flooding into the central confinement area armed with everything from furniture parts to sheets of alloy torn from the walls.

  Most of level four was pure chaos. The Haydonite jailers had trained their forehead weapons on the mob and successfully decimated the Karbarran front line. But like the lasers, the hovering guards were soon overwhelmed and felled by body blocks and staggering paw-hand swipes.

  Dana ventured that the Awareness itself was being overwhelmed by coordinated strikes launched by the ships of the Karbarran battle group. Haydon IV’s big brain could not effectively oversee confinement zone security when it was busy fending off plasma bolts and safeguarding the spherical ships its factory had been spitting out. The laser fences had been the first to go, control of the jailers had been relinquished, and Exedore was telling everyone that he had secured a route into the heart of the central computer. It was a sure thing, then, that Louie’s team would be able to follow Exedore in and loose their poisons.

  In the meantime, Dana thought she might be able to assist both Louie and the Karbarran flotilla by opening up yet another front. At her insistence, Exedore had ferreted out the whereabouts of the power management terminals that controlled production of the sphere ships’ stardrives. Readouts indicated that a few of those drives had already been installed, but most were still under construction. The way Dana saw it, Haydon and his h
ibernating brethren were not going to be thrilled to learn that someone had crept up the beanstalk and made off with the golden goose, or in this case, one of the ships built to whisk them off to their planned retirement community. But if she could arrange it so that the drives never reached the ships, the Ark Angel crew would be long gone before Haydon figured out what had happened.

  Of course it would have been better still to incapacitate Haydon’s alarm clock, or at least set the wake-up time forward a couple or three centuries, but Exedore had not had any success in zeroing in on that part of the Awareness, much less in divining just where Haydon was sleeping it off.

  “So who’s joining me?” Dana asked, wielding a table leg in one hand. “We got some labor droids to decommission.”

  “It’s important that I remain here,” Exedore said without taking his eyes from the monitor screen.”

  “You keep doing what you’re good at, Exedore.” She glanced at her parents, standing side by side behind the Zentraedi. “What about it? Mom? Dad?”

  Aurora stepped forward while the Sterlings were casting uncertain looks at one another. “I’ll go with you,” she told Dana.

  Dana adopted a dubious look. “That’s good of you, kid, but I don’t know.”

  “Remember the spores, Dana,” Aurora said, reminding her of the mindlink they had once shared across a near arm’s length of galaxy.

  Dana nodded. “Glad to have you aboard, sis.”

  Max and Miriya adopted determined expressions. “All right, Dana, you win,” Max said.

  She quirked a smile at them. “Yeah,” she said, “now I remember you guys.”

  “Fools,” Vince said under his breath, “crazy fools. It’s a suicide run.”

  Spherical bursts erupted in the darkness outside the bridge viewports. The Ark Angel had removed herself a safe distance from the battle, but even so it was apparent that the Karbarrans were sustaining heavy losses. Their strafing runs across Haydon IV’s split hemispheres had succeeded only in riling the planet’s defense arrays, which were responding mercilessly. Fortunately, the Karbarran commander had had sense enough to keep the factory-produced sphere ships between his own flotilla and the artifact’s in-close plasma cannons. That at least had assured that the Awareness would fall into a push-pull dispute with its own programmed imperatives—to protect the planet from attack while at the same time safeguarding the ships it had assembled from the metallic stuff of its host/captive moon. As a result, Haydon IV had been forced to be uncharacteristically circumspect with its initial retaliatory salvos, and many of the Karbarran dreadnoughts had survived.