Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

"That wasn’t even you, you bloodless worm!" Selman hissed.

"Oh, you noticed?" The other four were approaching; two of them were hefting large potted plants, a choice of weapon more alarming for its strangeness than its bulk. "None of this was necessary," Tchicaya said. "Whatever grievance you had, we would have given you a hearing."

"We gave our arguments peacefully," Selman replied. "Hours ago."

"What arguments? Evolutionary imperatives, and winning back territory? We’re the ones who’ve lost two thousand systems. You haven’t lost a single ship."

"So you expected us to sit back and do nothing? While you betrayed your own species, and wiped out the last vestiges of humanity?"

Tchicaya was still struggling to come to terms with the rebels' origins. To pass as ordinary travelers at all, they must have translated themselves into versions that ran on their Qusps, as well as their Trojan-horse brains. Lying in wait, impotently watching their other halves act, must have been a deeply unpleasant experience. The neural versions would not have been able to follow much, if any, of what was spoken around them — even when the words passed through their own lips — so the Qusp versions would have had to brief them later, whispering in private in their native tongue. Coming prepared to survive their own preemptive digital lobotomies had been prescient, though. Tchicaya was almost certain now that the builders possessed halt switches for all the ship’s Qusps; that would have been the method they’d hoped to use against the rebels heading for the hub, before changing their mind and sending Rasmah and the others in pursuit.

The other four anachronauts stood before Tchicaya. One of them, Christa, said, "Let him go, and back away."

"Or what? You’ll beat me to death with your rhododendron?" Tchicaya asked the ship, "What is that? Is it one of yours?"

"Originally, but it’s been tweaked."

"Into something dangerous?"

"There’s nothing obviously harmful being expressed in the leaves or stalk."

"And the roots?"

"I have no way of knowing about the roots."

Christa repeated, "Let him go, and back away. This is your last chance."

Tchicaya asked his Exoself if it could relieve both rebels of their pots without spilling the contents. It could make no promises.

He said, "I have nothing to gain by retreating."

Christa glanced down at Selman, her mask of grim resolve melting for an instant. She was stranded in a deranged, alien world, and she believed she was about to die.

Tchicaya said, "We can — "

She raised the pot to her shoulder, and started to shake the plant free. Tchicaya told his Exoself to keep as much as it could from falling; he sprang forward, grabbed the stalk, and forced the plant back into its container. As Christa toppled backward, his Exoself had him reach out with his other hand and secure the pot around the roots.

As he did this, in the corner of his eye he saw another anachronaut swinging the second plant by its stalk. The roots were already free of the pot, and the soil around them was falling away. Between the gnarled gray fingers of the roots were dozens of swollen white nodules. Tchicaya told his Exoself to prevent the nodules from coming into contact with anything solid. It knew how fast he was capable of moving, and how fast he needed to be. The task, it declared, was impossible.

The anachronaut slammed the roots of the plant down on the floor.

Tchicaya lost everything but his sense of motion. He was deaf and blind, falling, waiting for an impact. He’d been thrown into the air, so he had to come back down to the ground eventually. That made sense, didn’t it?

The impact never came, but his vision was restored in an instant. His suit had turned fully opaque to protect his eyes; now it had decided that it was safe for him to see again. He was outside the Rindler , falling away from it. He could see the damaged walkway narrowing into two hourglass waists on either side of the ruptured section, pinching it off, stopping the flow of air. A skein of filaments was already beginning to crisscross the wound.

He looked around for the anachronauts. He spotted one in the distance, silhouetted against the borderlight, sharing the velocity he’d acquired from the Rindler 's spin but separated from him by the force of the blast. The limbs were fixed at unnatural angles; he was looking at a corpse. All the ships' bodies could switch modes and cope without oxygen, but between the explosion and the exposure to vacuum there’d been no prospect of anyone surviving unprotected. The rebels had had more time than anyone else to think about putting on suits before endangering themselves, but they’d apparently decided not to bother. That was either willful martyrdom, or the expectation that, whatever happened, no one was going to be left alive to come and rescue them.

Branco spoke. "Are you all right?"

"I think so." If his suit had been damaged at all by the blast, it had since repaired itself, and his Exoself reported nothing more than bruising to his body.

"I’ll send the shuttle after you."

Tchicaya said, "Thanks." He waited, watching numbly as the necklace of the ship continued to recede. He was tumbling slowly around an axis that almost coincided with the direction of his motion; the Rindler never vanished from sight, but the horizon between the border and the stars wheeled in front of him.

Branco said, "Plan A might not be possible. They’ve glued the shuttle’s release bolts in place."

Tchicaya pondered this, dreamily amused for a moment. The sheer strangeness of his situation had induced a sense of detachment; it was a struggle to think his way back into events on the ship.

"What’s happening at the hub?"

"We reviewed what the climbers were doing earlier, in the instrumentation bay," Branco replied. "They were building a particle detector, with some powerful superconducting magnets. Which are now part of the devices they have with them."

"The fuel must be shielded, though? Against stray magnetic fields?" The antimatter portion was kept in a purely magnetic container; that had to be robust.

"Do you have any idea how many orders of magnitude difference there is between stray interstellar fields and the strongest artificial ones?"

Tchicaya took this question to be rhetorical. "How close are Rasmah and the others?" He didn’t want to look for himself; he just wanted Branco to give him the good news.

"They’re close. But the rebels are already at the hub, setting things up."

"And you believe they might be capable of spilling the fuel?"

"We can’t rule that out. It will depend how good their device is. If they’re smart, and if they have time, they could pump energy into two different flows that the containment fields couldn’t restrain simultaneously."

Tchicaya said nothing. He closed his eyes. He’d screwed up, he’d let his guard down with the anachronauts, but Rasmah was unshakable. She’d stop them, if she got the chance.

Branco said, "We’re now seeing flows developing in the fuel." His voice betrayed no hint of panic. After the loss of the Scribe, he’d told Tchicaya that he’d been through local death seven hundred and ninety-six times, but even if he was immune to existential qualms, the prospect of losing contact with the border had to be painful. "Listen to me carefully. There’s no way we’re going to get the shuttle free in the next few minutes, but we could use the debris-clearance laser to burn through the tether that’s holding the module to which the shuttle is docked."

"What good would that do? The whole module is swarming with rebels."

"There are five known rebels — who we’ve managed to contain by reconfiguring some walls — but there are also three other people. All three are declared Preservationists, but they might still be your allies. If I throw the module clear of the Rindler , and everyone else is lost, they might get the shuttle free. And if the Rindler survives, at least they’ll have a chance of getting back to us."