Netlink (16 page)

Realization chilled… and brought a sharp stab of wonder with it. That odd clustering of novae in one small portion of the sky within a single forty-year period noted by human astronomers early in the twentieth century.…

Swiftly, Dev downloaded all of the data he had access to on novae, with particular emphasis on their distances from Earth and on when they’d been recorded on Earth. The individual novas were scattered across an incredibly vast area of space. Nova Aquila was twelve hundred light years away and had exploded in about
C
.
E
. 700 for its light to reach Earth in 1918; another fast, bright nova in the same general part of the sky was Nova Cygni, which had shone in Earth’s skies in 1920 and was about four thousand light years distant. An odd recurrent nova, WZ Sagitta, had erupted first in 1913 and then again several times after that, and was three hundred light years from Earth. There were dozens of other examples. The clustering in space was odd, of course, but the clustering in time was odder still. Working backward, those three novae had actually exploded in about
C
.
E
. 1600,
C
.
E
. 700, and
B
.
C
.
E
. 3000… and yet the outward expanding shells of light marking their detonations had all reached Earth within the same seven-year period.

Swiftly, he studied record after record. Clearly, the Web was working in time as well as in space, detonating stars in such a way that, despite their separations in space, the light of the various explosions was merging, traveling outward
together
in a vast shell expanding at the speed of light.

The shift in perspective required by this realization staggered Dev. His first thought, that there was something special about Earth’s position, he discarded almost at once. Superficially, it might appear that those stars, if destroyed deliberately, had been exploded at varying times across varying distances so that their light signatures, their funeral pyres, would all reach Earth at roughly the same time, but Dev was seeing the information now in a new and grander perspective. Earth, or its location, had nothing to do with the timing of those novae; what had been coordinate was the placement of the expanding shells of light radiation.

Seen from a distance of some tens of thousands of light years, those expanding wavefronts of light might resemble a number of nested bubbles… a structure, in fact, vast beyond belief, constructed entirely of photons.

Dev had absolutely no idea
why
such a thing would be constructed, or what purpose it could possibly serve. Unlike the rare supernovae, which could briefly outshine all of the other stars of their galaxy combined, novae were not especially brilliant when seen from a great distance away. Nova Aquila, when it exploded almost two thousand years ago, had briefly shone over 400,000 times more brilliantly than Earth’s sun; at its brightest, it had been brighter than every other star in Earth’s sky except Sirius… bright, certainly, and unusual for its extreme change in brightness, but in practical terms it was simply another point of light in the sky.

What could the purpose of these nested bubbles, expanding out through the Galaxy at the speed of light, possibly be?

Study it closer.
What
are you seeing?

The merging of bubbles would be different along different axes of the multiple shells’ propagations, of course. There was still a coincidence, somehow, in the fact that so many wave-fronts of exploding stars should be jammed up together as seen from Earth; viewed from a different direction, they would not reinforce one another that way.

Reinforcement? The word triggered a new idea.

Certain novae seen from Earth seemed to nest together that way in space and in time; as he added the records of more and more novae to his calculations, however, Dev saw that there were in reality many axes extending in different directions through the galaxy, their shapes defined by expanding, closely nested bubbles of light. You had to be selective in what you were looking at to see the patterns; where the waves piled up together in space and in time—such as the peculiar alignment of novae seen from Earth in the early twentieth century—there
was
a kind of reinforcement, like the lock-step march of wavelengths in a laser; elsewhere, expanding bubbles intersected rather than reinforced, causing rippling patterns of interference.…

Interference patterns, like those in some titanic holographic record. Now
there
was an idea.…

There was no time to think more about it, however. One of the DalRiss, linked to a Perceiver, announced the appearance of yet more machines, some ten light minutes away.

The distance was illuminating. If the light of their arrival was reaching the
Sirghal
only now, they must have materialized in this part of space ten minutes ago… or within a minute or so of
Sirghal’
s escape and arrival. Somehow, the Web had tracked them across almost a thousand light years of space.

He couldn’t imagine how. He didn’t think they used K-T space, the way human stardrives did, nor did they seem to use the same space-folding techniques employed by the DalRiss. He’d assumed they needed the Stargate to open gravitationally warped pathways or wormholes across the light years—past them, rather—but as he watched, machine upon malevolent space-faring machine was appearing out of empty space.

They could have been projected there by the Stargate, he realized. Possibly, they were using it as a kind of one-way slingshot, hurling these vessels after the fugitive DalRiss. That implied a staggering control of space and time, to be able to launch a pursuit fleet across nine hundred light years and be accurate in targeting to within ten light minutes.…

More horrifying still was the determination behind that feat. If it was true they could only cross distances of light years by using the Device as a kind of one-way launcher, this new wave of machine-vessels was in fact here on a suicide mission, with the expectation that none of its members would ever be able to return.

“Quick!” Dev thought to those minds watching with his. “We must jump again!”

“We need time to orient our Achievers. Another random jump could lose us among the stars forever.”

“Nor is there assurance that we could escape,” another voice said. “If they could track us once, perhaps they can track us through unlimited transitions.”

“We can’t fight them,” Dev said. Already, the Web machines numbered in the tens of thousands, and all were accelerating rapidly toward the
Sirghal.
Was the same thing happening to the other DalRiss survivors at this moment, scattered all across this part of the Galaxy? “Our only hope is to jump, and keep on jumping until we lose them.”

“And then?”

“And then,” Dev continued with a determination born of dawning fear and horror at the scope of this threat, “then—after we’re very sure that we’ve lost them—we must return to human space. I think they need to know what we’ve found out here.”

“I hope it is possible to lose them,” a DalRiss voice said doubtfully. “To have followed us this far implies a staggering level of technological achievement, either in calculation, or in the ability to track or observe across vast distances.”

“Agreed. But I’m inclined to believe that they need the Device to send their machines across light years.” He watched the horde gathering for a moment. “If we don’t move fast, though, they won’t have to track us, will they?”

Before the horde reached them, then,
Sirghal
vanished, losing itself among the stars.

It would be a long time before the DalRiss found themselves once more.

Chapter 11

The unresting progress of mankind causes continual change in the weapons; and with that must come a continual change in the manner of fighting.

—
The Influence of Seapower upon History

A
LFRED
T
HAYER
M
AHAN

C
.
E
. 1830

Kara stood in the fresher, one hand lightly touching once again the unfamiliar outlines of her face, an unconscious reassurance that her
jissai no men,
her “reality’s face,” was still in place. It was still hard to believe that that was
her.

Since only Japanese were permitted on Mars, Kara had assumed a Japanese persona. Her Naga, with the same mutability that allowed it to mold bone and tissue into electronic sockets and other hardware, or transform her skin into psychedelic colors, lights, and patterns, had literally reshaped her face, right down to the fine structure of the bone itself. A painful process, that, except that her Companion could control input from her nervous system during the reworking of her features and filter out the pain. But it did leave her face feeling…
strange,
unfamiliar, and even after three weeks it was still a shock when she looked in a mirror.

Her face now literally was a
men,
both face and mask, as well as her passport to a forbidden world.

Only Nihonjin—people of Japanese ancestry—were allowed to set foot on the world now called Kasei. Even in synchorbit the activities of visiting gaijin businessmen were carefully supervised. This restriction extended even to non-Japanese citizens of Dai Nihon—Greater Japan—those citizens of Singapore, the Philippines, Vancouver, and the other Earthside outposts of the Empire that were Japanese in name, but not in ancestry. To walk the sands of Kasei, you had to trace your ancestry back to the Home Islands.

Which was why Kara was traveling in disguise. She’d first taken a commercial liner from New America to Eridu, a voyage of thirty-six light years and some five weeks. There, she’d taken passage aboard the Imperial liner
Teikoku
for the three-week passage to Sol. She’d been traveling aboard one ship or another for two months now, but she was finally at her destination. An hour before, she’d checked into the Sorano Hoteru, Aresynch’s largest hotel. Spin gravity here was set to about one-third G, the same as that on the Martian surface.

Sergeant Vasily Lechenko was here too, along with three other volunteers from the Phantoms’ 1/1. The way she’d heard it, he’d point-blank refused to step back even when the CMI personnel in charge of ops preparation had pointed out that his 193-centimeter, 104-kilo mass was not the norm for the Japanese phenotype.

Kara was glad the big sergeant was so stubborn. He made an impressive-looking Japanese businessman, all hard muscle beneath his Naga-reshaped facial features and a tan and white Sony business uniform. He and his men would be her security backup as she penetrated the Kasei Net, and they would be her one chance of getting out of this place again when she was done.

Security at Aresynch was tight, and smuggling weapons in had been a problem. She took a final look around the fresher, as she’d already checked her room, paying special attention to the nooks and crannies of the room’s small fresher closet, sink, and toilet. Had the Naga residing within her detected the carrier wave of a hidden transmitter, it would have silently and inwardly alerted her. But there was nothing save the normal radio traffic that could be expected in a building such as this.

There were, of course, no guarantees. A television pickup constructed through molecular nanotechnics could be the size of the head of a pin, and listening devices were smaller still. Her one hope of security lay in the fact that too many people passed through this station every day for Imperial Security to bother tracking them all.

In the fresher, she stood in front of the sink, removing a small can of hair spray, a travel hair dryer, a solid gold brooch, and a pocket TV-computer from her toiletries case and laying them out on the counter. All of the articles worked as advertised and, indeed, the hair dryer, brooch, and the TV were exactly what they seemed to be.

The hair spray was something more. With pressure from her thumb and a deft twist, she popped the can’s base off; inside, tucked into a small recess, was a wad of pale gray clay just a little larger than her thumbnail. Placing the clay on the counter next to the opened can and the other items, she wet her finger under the tap, then transferred a few drops of water to the substance.

At the water’s touch, the clay began foaming, and Kara could hear a thin, sizzling hiss. In another moment, the dab of clay had doubled in size… then doubled again. Carefully, Kara nudged the gold brooch across the counter until it just touched the foaming goo.

Within fifteen minutes, the goo had eaten her brooch. It took another hour to dissolve the television, the hair dryer, and the spray can. She didn’t stay to watch. Instead, she went back to the main room, where she sat at the computer access, exploring Aresynch. She spent two hours calling up maps and diagrams, and playing the self-guiding tutorial on the public access system.

When she returned to the fresher, the goo had evaporated completely, leaving only a trace of powdery residue, like talcum. The pocket television appeared unchanged; the gold and the lead it had concealed were gone completely; the plastic hair dryer, however, no longer looked anything like its original form. In its place was a small, sleek hand gun, just the size of Kara’s palm.

The TV and pistol both went into a jumper pocket. Carefully she brushed the nanoresidue into her hand and disposed of it in the toilet. Taking a final look around to be certain she’d left no incriminating evidence, she closed up her case and switched off the computer. Standing inside the hotel room door, she pulled out the television and thumbed the color adjust tab; seconds later, the screen answered with a silent, printed message: OK.

It was time to go.

Tai-i
Genji Ishimoto thought of it as a sea.

Though he was pure Japanese, the son of a respected Nihonjin architect, Ishimoto had been born in Jaffna on the north coast of the Imperial Dependency of Seiron—the former Sri Lanka. From the age of ten, his passion had been gill diving in the crystalline waters first of his home island, then farther afield, in the Maldives, the Philippines, and even the Great Barrier Reef. He’d joined the Imperial Navy because its education benefits would help him get both the downloads and the references he needed to get work on one of the big undersea colonies, Oki-Daito, perhaps, or the fabulous Ryoku-gyoku.