Robert Reed - Marrow

Marrow was one vast, uninterrupted city.

And despite being warned, Washen felt a sudden sadness.

“Till listened to Virtue’s worries,” Locke reported. “Listened to every one of them, and he looked concerned throughout. But do you know what he said to that man? What he said to all of us?”

Obeying some inaudible command, their car dove toward the bridge, toward an open shaft. Toward home.

“What did Till say?” Washen muttered.

“ ‘These buttresses are too strong to be destroyed that easily,’ he told us. ‘I’m certain of it.’ Then he showed his smile to each of us. You know how he smiles. ‘They’re simply too strong,’ he repeated. ‘That would be too easy. The Builders don’t work that way…’ ”

From the breathing mouth came a long whistle, hard and sharp, plainly excited. Pamir growled, “Quiet.”

As if it were necessary; as if anyone could possibly hear them inside here.

“She comes,” said the translator fused to the harum-scarum’s chest. “I see the false Master. One little shot, and she is forever removed.”

“No,” said Pamir. Then he announced to everyone, “We will wait. Wait.”

He was speaking to five hundred humans, including seven of the surviving captains, and perhaps twice as many harum-scarums. But this was a mammoth facility, and most of them were busy attacking the last-moment work with their ad hoc training and a professional desperation. Booby traps had to be found and disabled. Machinery that hadn’t worked in billions of years had to be awakened, in secret. And this team’s actions had to be married to the actions of twenty other teams, each operating at a key note, everyone pushing to meet a timetable that looked more fanciful with each worried breath.

Again, the harum-scarum said, “I will shoot her”

“Shoot yourself,” Pamir snapped.

That was a savage, dangerous insult; suicide was the ultimate abomination.

But the alien had known Pamir for a long time, respecting him in a joyless fashion. He decided to absorb the insult without comment. Instead, an enormous finger pointed to a tiny knot of data moving rapidly down the fuel line, and with a slow, reflective whisde, he told the human, “This is the false Master’s vehicle. It is. And with the reigning confusion, no one will miss her until it is too late. If you allow me—”

“Expose us?”

Both mouths closed tight.

Pamir shook his head, disgust mixed with a burning fatigue. “Miocene isn’t an imbecile. Mask your scan to make it look Wayward, then examine that car as it passes. She won’t be on board. Even in a hurry, she knows better.”

The alien made ready, big hands and an obstinate mind sending out a string of crisp instructions to hidden sensors.

Pamir hunkered closer to the viewing port, watching the Waywards’ steel vehicles rising and falling past their hiding place. Miocene’s cap-car was a tiny fleck of hyperfiber, barely visible to the naked eye and past them in a half-instant. He waited another few moments, then asked, “What did you see?”

“A passenger.”

Pamir nearly flinched. Then he thought to ask, “What sort of passenger?”

“Composed of shaped light,” the harum-scarum confessed. “A holo in the false Master’s likeness.”

A single nod was the only gloating that Pamir allowed himself. Miocene probably slipped inside one of the empty troop cars, telling no one her whereabouts… in case her enemies were waiting en route…

The gloating quiet was interrupted by a sudden deep rambling.

In the distance, humans and harum-scarums called out to each other, asking, “An attack? Or another impact?”

“An impact,” barked several knowledgeable voices. “How big?”

“How bad?”

A fat comet had struck not far from Port Erindi, and scanning the early data, Pamir knew it was a huge blast. A record breaker. He fought the urge to call the Remoras, to order Orleans or whoever was left to bring up the shields again. But it was still too soon. “Keep working,” he told everyone, including himself. And he stared at images stolen from farther below, picking one of the steel machines at random, watching it plunging into the access tunnel’s mouth, rushing past the waystation where Washen and her son had lingered, waiting for permission before vanishing into those impossible depths.

Suddenly, with absolutely no warning, one of the team leaders whispered into his ear. “We’re ready here. The big valve is ours.”

And in the next instant, another voice—the translated boast from a harum-scarum engineer—announced, “We’re prepared here. Against much greater odds, and unseen, and ahead of schedule.”

Pamir let himself think: It’s going to happen…!

His heart responded, swelling and pounding hard against his throat, his voice nearly breaking when he asked the alien beside him, “How are we?”

“Close,” the whistle promised.

A pause.

The next whistle was a curse. “A stranger’s shit,” said the harum-scarum, an instinctive rage rising, then collapsing again.

“What’s wrong?” Pamir asked. “Don’t tell me it’s the pumps…”

His companion said, “No.”

A fat, spike-nailed thumb pointed, showing him that one of the rising vehicles was slowing in front of them, deploying antennae and sturdy lasers, armored soldiers already marshaling inside its injection airlocks.

“My scan—” the harum-scarum moaned.

“Or its a routine patrol,” Pamir offered. “Or someone noticed their power being funneled away.”

The alien moaned, saying, “If it was me, I will shoot myself.”

Pamir said, “Fine.”

He backed away from the viewing port and viewing screens, stepping out onto a gangway that he helped build just a century ago. People were specks, almost unnoticed in the darkest corners. The giant pumps looked close in the ancient gloom, and they were deceptively simple: slick balls and eggs of hyperfiber wrapped around machinery vaster than any heart, and fantastically strong, and durable enough to wait for billions of years before they took their first thunderous beat.

This was the same pumping station that the captains had used as a blind. The Waywards had searched it thoroughly, and with good captainly tricks, they had tried to secure it. On occasion, they sent patrols. But there were only so many soldiers, and there were thousands of kilometers of fuel lines begging to be guarded, and there was a war to wage, and they were always too much in a hurry to dismande the sophisticated camouflage that Pamir had helped install.

In a whisper, he asked his team, “How soon?”

“Ready,” said a few.

“Soon,” others promised.

Then he returned to the port and screens, estimating how soon the Waywards would be shaking his hand.

“Ready,” said another voice. And another.

The harum-scarum remarked, “With what we have now, we can do it.”

Fewer pumps than ideal, and not every valve in their control. But yes, they could do it. What he had dreamed up in Quee Lee’s apartment and what had always felt slippery as a dream… it was a genuine reality now… somehow…

Both of the alien’s mouths opened, and the air-breather whistled, “We must now. Remove these monsters from the universe.”

Pamir said nothing.

Again, he looked through the port, watching the bug-shaped chunk of steel aligning itself for an assault. Then he glanced at a snoop screen. A bright sparkle marked another descending car, this one dropping faster, showing not so much as a breath of caution.

Pamir told his ally, “No.”

Then he told every team in a thousand-kilometer radius, “Finish your preparations. Do it now.”

The alien gave out a sharp, furious whistle, the translator having the diplomatic sense not to explain what had just been said.