Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (48 page)

The inner door of the lock opened. In free fall there could be no true up or down. Yet Lot’s first impression of the corridor that greeted them was that it was a shaft, plunging directly to the heart of the ship. Close by, the walls glowed soft white, but the illumination faded with distance.

“Awfully convenient,” Clemantine said, her voice buzzing over the comm-system in Lot’s suit. “Do you get the impression we’re expected?”

Kona edged into the shaft. “Maybe the bastard is prepared to talk. Come on. There’s not much time.”

“Wait,” Lot said. He ordered his hood to open. Kona protested, but Lot cracked the seam anyway. Cold air stung his cheeks. His breath steamed. He moved his head slowly back and forth, then frowned in confusion. “Nothing.”

Kona hesitated a moment longer, then opened his own hood. “You’d be able to scent a Chenzeme presence?”

“Maybe.”

“Damn, but we could be wrong about everything.”

T
HEY TRAVERSED THE SHAFT RAPIDLY, MOVING EVER INWARD
toward the ship’s core. The walls lit up ahead of them, darkened behind. Lot felt his cheeks begin to chap in the cold. He’d just pushed off from a recessed handhold when he realized the shaft had come to an end. He tried to stop his flight, but his glide path had taken him temporarily out of reach of any grips. He shot past Clemantine, out the end of the tunnel and into the core chamber beyond, where he hit the far wall with a gentle thud. When he bounced back Clemantine caught his hand, arresting his momentum.

He looked around cautiously. This chamber was much larger than the one aboard Nesseleth. Its walls were clean, opaque crystal surfaces, glowing softly like the tunnel walls, though the air here was warmer and more moist. For the first time, Lot caught a faint trace of foreign presence.

Kona edged past his shoulder, dropping in a slow whirl through the chamber’s center. He looked around, his arms akimbo while his braids danced medusa-like around his head. “Still skulking, eh Nikko?” he said into the silence.

As if summoned by this taunt, a swarm of pixels suddenly appeared: thousands of tiny points of light that shifted and fluttered in a slow, dramatic assembly until finally a figure coalesced from the cloud.

Lot looked it over in close detail. It was huge, brooding, and not quite human. Where a man would have skin, this being was covered with minute blue scales. His long, long, fingers and toes twitched like a restless spider’s legs. His head was smooth and hairless, the eyes obscured behind overlying crystal lenses, the nose quite small. His mouth was set in a hard, unforgiving line, while around his shoulders a small blue membranous cloak shivered and flexed.

“Cheap drama for the primitives,” Kona said. “Nikko, you haven’t changed.”

“I have.” Nikko’s voice was deep, stern.

Lot started in surprise as he realized this was more than a visual representation. He could detect Nikko’s presence in the Chenzeme way. Data packets peppered his sensory tears, just as they had that day Sypaon had come to him in the city library. Colors flashed in his optic nerve, without coalescing into discernable shape, but still carrying a cross-clade meaning: a livid rainbow spray of hatred. “
Kona
,” he whispered. “The Chenzeme influence is here.”

The Nikko-creature’s gaze fixed on him. Lot could read no expression on his face, but the air carried suspicion, and a flood of questions that seemed to form wordlessly in his mind so that he was shaking his head “no” before Nikko said anything aloud. That evoked silent packets of laughter. “You learned this in the Hallowed Vasties, didn’t you?” Nikko asked. He chuckled. “I returned there once.”

“Would that you had stayed there,” Kona snapped.

“Daddy . . .” Urban clung to the tunnel mouth, his caution a weak accent to Nikko’s bitter aura.

“You bastard,” Kona growled. “We didn’t die when you abandoned us here. Have you come back now to change that outcome?”

Lot sensed a momentary flicker of confusion. “I didn’t want to leave you,” Nikko said, his voice remote, as if he were reviewing historical records, and drawing his conclusions from them. “I’d hoped you’d be safe here . . . for a time.”

“You left us with nothing!”

“I left you clean,
when I was not
.”

Lot felt his skin prickling with unseen parasites burrowing into his blood, his bones. He cried out, slapping frantically at his arms before he realized the effect was an illusion, only a replay of something Nikko had endured.

The image glared at him. “What are you?”

“Leave him alone,” Kona warned.

Nikko’s short cape began to bunch and climb around his neck. “He’s not just a refugee from the Hallowed Vasties.”

Lot pressed instinctively against the wall. He imagined he could feel tiny hands reaching for him, poking at him, exploring his cellular structure. Ord tapped at his cheek in soft concern.

“He’s not human,” Nikko said. “Why have you brought him here?”

“Because we thought we might need him—to translate from the Chenzeme syntax that guides you, Nikko. Where is the infection that has turned you into a weapon against your own people?”

“I’ve destroyed it.”

Kona might have been expecting any answer but that one. He was taken aback in surprise.

The image flexed its membranous cloak, letting it flutter in the laden air. “You were right, Kona. I was infested, even before Heyertori. I
did
bring the Chenzeme. Not knowingly. Not intentionally. But innocent motives cannot excuse the crime.”

His image slowly shrank to more human proportions as he described how he’d discovered the infestation on the exodus from Heyertori. Tiny automata had been budding off his hull, dropping behind into the vacuum where they began to send out faint signals in the Chenzeme dialect. “I had to sterilize them, and to accomplish that, I first had to put you aside.”

“So you chose Silk?” Clemantine scoffed. “It was a dead city.”

“It wasn’t dead. The city was alive and thriving. Only the people had been—”

“
We
are people!” Clemantine burst out. “We could have died, just like they did.”

Lot felt as if a cord were pulling tighter and tighter around his throat. “You could have,” Nikko answered. “It was a chance.”

Suddenly, the pressure eased. Lot gasped. Kona shook his head. “That may be true, and it may be forgivable. By the Unknown God, we live in desperate times. But you did not even tell us.
Why?
”

The image looked away, its blue-tinged face absolutely still. Suddenly, Lot knew he would not answer, not in words. Still, Nikko’s reasoning burst against his sensory tears: green flecks of guilt on muddy gray slopes of self-loathing, washed over by staunch, stubborn white sheets of pride. “He felt shame,” Lot announced, in a low, defiant voice.

Nikko’s queries snapped hard against his sensory tears. “What are you?”

Again, Kona turned the subject. “You’re not driven by the Chenzeme influence now?”

Nikko chuckled faintly. “We are all under the Chenzeme influence, Kona. They’ve shaped our minds, and defined our values, and we’ll never escape their meddling until we’ve destroyed them all. You think I’ve aimed this ship at your city, don’t you?”

“You’ve served the Chenzeme before.”

“I hunt them now. Don’t worry. I’ll slip safely past Silk. No harm will come to your people through me.”

“Then what are you after?”

Vivid hatred, like fire in the air
. It reverberated within Lot’s own alien neural structure, and suddenly he could see their goal, a loathed beacon in the night sky. “It’s the ring,” Lot whispered. His gaze darted to Kona. “He’s going to attack Sypaon.”

Kona cocked his head in abject confusion. “That’s impossible. Nikko, you don’t have weapons for that.”

“I have this ship.”

“You’re going to ram it?” Urban blurted. “Why?”

“You have to ask? It’s no longer dead. I felt the flux in gamma radiation. It’s been brought back on line.”

“Sypaon has control of it now!” Kona said, his hand chopping angrily through the air. “She’s not Chenzeme.”

Lot shifted uneasily. Nikko caught his doubt. Dark amusement popped over an opaque wall of certainty. “You’re not sure about that, are you?”

Lot swallowed hard and looked away, made guilty by his doubts.

“Tell me,” Nikko urged. The others waited too.

Lot drew a deep breath, groping for words that would describe his vague suspicions. “It’s the Well. It classifies Sypaon as the enemy, right? So it keeps her neutralized. But it hasn’t done that to me, or to you, Nikko. She
says
she’s human. But the Silkens couldn’t even talk to her before I came.”

“You translated from the Chenzeme?”

“Sooth,” Kona said cautiously. “He was the link.”

“Where did
you
learn it?” Lot asked.

Nikko lifted his chin, while the cloak on his shoulders went utterly still. “From the weapon that I mated with in the void.”

Lot shuddered. He could remember asking Sypaon,
What have you learned?
And her laughing answer:
Evil
.

“You survived it,” Kona said softly, wonderingly.

“It survived too.” The way Nikko said it: as if that alone constituted another crime. “I can destroy this one, before its self-repair is finished.”

Revenge
. It was a human aspect, a facet of consciousness unknown to the Well or to the plundering servants of the Chenzeme. Jupiter had unleashed his assault Makers on the column, to no real purpose except revenge.

Lot shook his head. “Let it go,” he urged Nikko softly. “Sypaon can’t use the ring. It’s harmless, and it’s not worth dying for.”

“I wasn’t planning on dying.”

Urban shifted slightly. “Then what are you going to do?”

N
IKKO ACTIVATED THE CHAMBER WALLS
, providing them a full view beyond the ship. Null Boundary skimmed past the Well, brushing the upper atmosphere. Nikko informed them that they’d safely passed the elevator column, though Lot never saw it. Sudden acceleration slammed him back against the soft gel image wall at the chamber’s aft end. He hung there like a fly trapped on the paddle of a sundew, struggling to breathe.

Beyond Nikko’s hovering figure, he watched an image of the tumbling swan burster. Sypaon must have finally guessed their purpose. On Lot’s shoulder, Ord stirred. “Message, Lot.”

“No.”

Sypaon ignited the ring just as it began to fully open to a circle in their perspective. It glowed brilliant white as it entered the excited state that would feed its gamma-ray burst. Brighter and brighter it grew, its light spreading in a twisted sheet across the dark interior, until its luminescence surpassed the display’s parameters and the optical system was forced to translate to safer artificial colors. Lot could see a spot of darkness at its center.

Nikko’s worry moldered in the chamber. “It will fire on us.”

“It can’t fire,” Lot whispered, past the constricting grip of acceleration.

“You deserve it, you bastard,” Urban croaked.

Nikko did not deny it.

The ring loomed before them, growing larger until soon it overwhelmed the scale of the display. The spot of darkness at the ring’s center also seemed to expand in size as they drew nearer. Null Boundary’s prow was aimed at its center. Were they going to pass through? Lot had not known that was possible. The space inside a ring was warped by severe gravitational gradients. . . .

But the central eye? He knew starlight could pass through there unmolested. But could the same be said for Null Boundary?

“Message, Lot,” Ord repeated.

Lot closed his eyes, trying to calm his pounding heart. “Okay then! Say it.”

He flinched as Sypaon’s voice hissed in his ear: “
My purpose is satisfied if you die with me. Come forward. The geometry will tear you apart.
”

Lot looked at Nikko, but his image didn’t waver.

“She’s right,” Clemantine warned. “You’re going to kill us.”

“I did try to avoid picking you up,” Nikko reminded.

“A small courtesy gone wrong.”

“Not for the first time.”

“We’ll live if we keep dead center,” Kona said.

The eye was a circle of flat geometry. Lot had seen stars shining there during evenings in the city that now seemed long ago. But the eye was also a rotating target. Nikko would have to thread the ship exactly through its middle.

The dark circle loomed before them, continuing to expand until it dominated the image wall. Faint stars became visible within that space. The ship’s hull groaned in a dark metal voice as they entered into it. “By the Unknown God,” Clemantine said. “I can feel it.”

Lot could feel the presence of the ring too. It grabbed him, slamming him across the aft wall to the chamber’s right side. Clemantine came down on top of him. He felt caught in the bite of an invisible vise clamped across the length of his body, all his muscles, his organs, and his nerves crushed and ready to snap as Null Boundary brushed the ring’s plunging gradients.

A holographic image of the ship suddenly appeared in the center of the chamber. Nikko loomed over it, watching it closely, waiting. . . .

“
Now!
” Nikko shouted in a distorted voice that seemed to enter only into Lot’s right ear.

Null Boundary shuddered. On the holographic image, Lot saw the flash of hundreds of small explosions all around the ship’s hull. Null Boundary’s hide and all his outer insulation shattered into thousands of tiny pieces that rocketed away from the ship in a storm of white-hot debris, leaving behind a glowing red, but intact, inner hull.

The crushing pressure climbed. Lot felt as if his lungs had flattened, as if his brain had flowed over to one side of his skull. The air that pooled around him moved liquid slow against his cheeks. His eyes had distorted too. The displays all blurred as the jettisoned debris rocketed outward, accelerating down the ring’s twisting gravitational gradient. Lot watched the debris shift into red, then infrared as it sped toward impact with the burster’s active surface. It hit, and beneath the crushing energy of impact the Chenzeme cells that coated the ring flared into plasma. Beyond the core chamber, alarms screamed overload as Null Boundary was swathed in an expanding bubble of radiation. The image walls flushed white. Lot told himself the ship’s core would shelter them from the worst of it. Then the wavefront was past, and a starfield could be seen again across the prow, veiled by the milky light of Kheth’s nebula.