Zima Blue and Other Stories (53 page)
Not that it really mattered now.
A third geyser had erupted behind me, and a fourth ahead, boxing me in. Slowly, the four points of fire began to converge. I stopped, but kept holding Yarrow. I listened to my own breathing, harsh above the basso tremor of the drumming ground.
Then steel gripped my shoulder.
She said we'd be safer underground. Also that she had friends below who might be able to do something for Yarrow.
'If you weren't defecting,' I began, as we entered a roughly hewn tunnel into the splinter's crust, 'what the hell was it?'
'Trying to get home. Least that was the idea, until we realised Tiger's Eye didn't want us back.' Wendigo knuckled the ice with one of her steel fists, her suit cut away to expose her prosthetics. 'Which is when we decided to head here.'
'You almost made it,' I said. Then added: 'Where were you trying to get home from?'
'Isn't it obvious?'
'Then you did defect.'
'We were trying to make contact with the Royalists. Trying to make peace.' In the increasingly dim light I saw her shrug. 'It was a long shot, conducted in secrecy. When the mission went wrong, it was easy for Tiger's Eye to say we'd been defecting.'
'Bullshit.'
'I wish.'
'But you sent us.'
'Not in person.'
'But your delegate--'
'Is just software. It could be made to say anything my enemies chose. Even to order my own execution as a traitor.'
We paused to switch on our suit lamps. 'Maybe you'd better tell me everything.'
'Gladly,' Wendigo said. 'But if this hasn't been a good day so far, I'm afraid it's about to go downhill.'
There had been a clique of high-ranking officers who believed that the Swirl War was intrinsically unwinnable. Privy to information not released to the populace, and able to see through Tiger's Eye's own carefully filtered internal propaganda, they realised that negotiation - contact - was the only way out.
'Of course, not everyone agreed. Some of my adversaries wanted us dead before we even reached the enemy.' Wendigo sighed. 'Too much in love with the war's stability - and who can blame them? Life for the average citizen in Tiger's Eye isn't that bad. We're given a clear goal to fight for, and the likelihood of any one of us dying in a Royalist attack is small enough to ignore. The idea that all of that might be about to end after four hundred years, that we all might have to rethink our roles . . . well, it didn't go down too well.'
'About as welcome as a fart in a vac-suit, right?'
Wendigo nodded. 'I think you understand.'
'Go on.'
Her expedition - Wendigo and two pilots - had crossed the Swirl unchallenged. Approaching the Royalist cometary base, they had expected to be questioned - perhaps even fired upon - but nothing had happened. When they entered the stronghold, they understood why.
'Deserted,' Wendigo said. 'Or we thought so, until we found the Royalists. ' She expectorated the word. 'Feral, practically. Naked, grubby sub-humans. Their wasps feed them and treat their illnesses, but that's as far as it goes. They grunt, and they've been toilet-trained, but they're not quite the military geniuses we've been led to believe.'
'Then--'
'The war is . . . nothing we thought.' Wendigo laughed, but the confines of her helmet rendered it more like the squawking of a jack-in-the-box. 'And now you wonder why home didn't want us coming back?'
Before Wendigo could explain further, we reached a wider bisecting tunnel, glowing with its own insipid chlorine-coloured light. Rather than the meandering bore of the tunnel in which we walked, it was as cleanly cut as a rifle barrel. In one direction the tunnel was blocked by a bullet-nosed cylinder, closely modelled on the trains in Tiger's Eye. Seemingly of its own volition, the train lit up and edged forwards, a door puckering open.
'Get in,' Wendigo said. 'And lose the helmet. You won't need it where we're going.'
Inside I coughed phlegmy ropes of thick from my lungs. Transitioning between breathing modes isn't pleasant - worse than usual since I'd breathed nothing but thick for six weeks. But after a few lungfuls of the train's antiseptic air, the dark blotches around my vision began to recede.
Wendigo did likewise, only with more dignity.
Yarrow lay on one of the couches, stiff as a statue carved in soap. Her skin was cyanotic, a single, all-enveloping bruise. Pilot skin is a better vacuum barrier than the usual stuff, and vacuum itself is a far better insulator against heat loss than air. But where I'd lifted her my gloves had embossed fingerprints into her flesh. Worse was the broad stripe of ruined skin down her back and the left side of her tail, where she had lain against the splinter's surface.
But her head looked better. When she hit vac, biomodified seals would have shut within her skull, barricading every possible avenue for pressure, moisture or blood loss. Even her eyelids would have fused tight. Implanted glands in her carotid artery would have released droves of friendly demons, quickly replicating via nonessential tissue in order to weave a protective scaffold through her brain.
Good for an hour or so - maybe longer. But only if the hostile demons hadn't screwed with Yarrow's native ones.
'You were going to tell me about the wasps,' I said, as curious to hear the rest of Wendigo's story as I was to blank my doubts about Yarrow.
'Well, it's rather simple. They got smart.'
'The wasps?'
She clicked the steel fingers of one hand. 'Overnight. Just over a hundred years ago.'
I tried not to look too overwhelmed. Intriguing as all this was, I wasn't treating it as anything other than an outlandish attempt to distract me from the main reason for my being here, which remained killing the defector. Wendigo's story explained some of the anomalies we'd so far encountered - but that didn't rule out a dozen more plausible explanations. Meanwhile, it was amusing to try and catch her out. 'So they got smart,' I said. 'You mean our wasps, or theirs?'
'Doesn't mean a damn anymore. Maybe it just happened to one machine in the Swirl, and then spread like wildfire to all the trillions of other wasps. Or maybe it happened simultaneously, in response to some stimulus we can't even guess at.'
'Want to hazard a guess?'
'I don't think it's important, Spirey.' She sounded as though she wanted to put a lot of distance between herself and this topic. 'Point is, it happened. Afterwards, distinctions between us and the enemy - at least from the point of view of the wasps - completely vanished.'
'Workers of the Swirl unite.'
'Something like that. And you understand why they kept it to themselves, don't you?'
I nodded, more to keep her talking.
'They needed us, of course. They still lacked something. Creativity, I guess you'd call it. They could evolve themselves incrementally, but they couldn't make the kind of sweeping evolutionary jumps we'd been feeding them.'
'So we had to keep thinking there was a war on.'
Wendigo looked pleased. 'Right. We'd keep supplying them with innovations, and they'd keep pretending to do each other in.' She halted, scratching at the unwrinkled skin around one eye with the alloy finger of one hand. 'Clever little bastards.'
We'd arrived somewhere.
It was a chamber, large as any enclosed space I'd ever seen. I felt gravity; too much of the stuff. The whole chamber must have been gimballed and spun within the splinter, like one of the gee-load simulators back in Tiger's Eye. The vaulted ceiling, hundreds of metres 'above', now seemed vertiginously higher.
Apart from its apex, it was covered in intricate frescos - dozens of pictorial facets, each a cycling hologram. They told the history of the Swirl, beginning with its condensation from interstellar gas, the ignition of its star, the onset of planetary formation. Then the action cut to the arrival of the first Standardist wasp, programmed to dive into the Swirl and breed like a rabbit, so that one day there'd be a sufficiently huge population to begin mining the thing; winnowing out metals, silicates and precious organics for the folks back home. Of course, it never happened like that. The Royalists wanted in on the action, so they sent their own wasps, programmed to attack ours. The rest is history. The frescos showed the war's beginning, and then a little while later the arrival of the first human observers, beamed across space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught the wasps. From then on things heated up, because the observers weren't limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution in realtime.
That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up to date, give or take four hundred years of the same.
But the frescos carried on.
There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally - like medieval conceptions of Eden - there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with weird animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.
'Seen enough to convince you?' Wendigo asked.
'No,' I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning my neck, I looked up towards the apex.
Something hung from it.
It was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete; the other was only fully formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.
'You know what this is?' Wendigo asked.
'I'm waiting.'
'Wasp art.'
I looked at her.
'This wasp was destroyed mid-replication,' Wendigo continued. 'While it was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I'd put it in human terms I don't know--'
'Don't even think about it.'
I followed her across the marbled terrazzo that floored the chamber. Arched porticoes surrounded it, each of which held a single dead wasp, their body designs covering a hundred generations of evolution. If Wendigo was right, I supposed these dead wasps were the equivalent of venerated old ancestors peering from oil paintings. But I wasn't convinced just yet.
'You knew this place existed?'
She nodded. 'Or else we'd be dead. The wasps back in the Royalist stronghold told us we could seek sanctuary here, if home turned against us.'
'And the wasps - what? Own this place?'
'And hundreds like it, although the others are already far beyond the Swirl, on their way out to the halo. Since the wasps came to consciousness, most of the splinters flung out of the Swirl have been infiltrated. Shrewd of them - all along, we've never suspected that the splinters are anything other than cosmic trash.'
'Nice decor, anyway.'
'Florentine,' Wendigo said, nodding. 'The frescos are in the style of a painter called Masaccio; one of Brunelleschi's disciples. Remember, the wasps had access to all the cultural data we brought with us from GE - every byte of it. That's how they work, I think - by constructing things according to arbitrary existing templates.'
'And there's a point to all this?'
'I've been here precisely one day longer than you, Spirey.'
'But you said you had friends here, people who could help Yarrow.'
'They're here all right,' Wendigo said, shaking her head. 'Just hope you're ready for them.'
On some unspoken cue they emerged, spilling from a door that until then I'd mistaken for one of the surrounding porticoes. I flinched, acting on years of training. Although wasps have never intentionally harmed a human being - even the enemy's wasps - they're nonetheless powerful, dangerous machines. There were twelve of them, divided equally between Standardist and Royalist units. Six-legged, their two-metre-long, segmented alloy bodies sprouted weapons, sensors and specialised manipulators. So far so familiar, except that the way the wasps moved was subtly wrong. It was as if the machines choreographed themselves, their bodies defining the extremities of a much larger form, which I sensed more than saw.
The twelve whisked across the floor.
'They are - or rather it is - a queen,' Wendigo said. 'From what I've gathered, there's one queen for every splinter. Splinterqueens, I call them.'
The swarm partially surrounded us now - but retained the brooding sense of oneness.
'She told you all this?'
'Her demons did, yes.' Wendigo tapped the side of her head. 'I got a dose after our ship crashed. You got one after we hit your ship. It was a standard sporehead from our arsenal, but the Splinterqueen loaded it with her own demons. For the moment that's how she speaks to us - via symbols woven by demons.'
'Take your word for it.'
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