Gregory Benford - Across the Sea of Suns

Carlos began, What are —

Nigel sent a signal back into the passage they had left. Crimson light burst upon them. A crackling of electromagnetic death ricocheted through their comm lines.

“Implosion devices I cooked up,” Nigel said. “Spits out electromagnetic noise. I’ve been dropping them every hundred meters.”

Nikka said, I see. It will burn out these creatures?

“Hope so.”

It did. The swarms who staffed the Watcher had once been made to defend it against intrusion. But time works its way even with stolid machines. Those which wore out were replaced, but each time the basic instructions were engraved into fresh silicon or ferrite memory, a small probability existed of a mistake. The weight of these errors accumulated, like autumn leaves blown into a chance pocket of a backyard, making improbably dense piles.

So the minions of the Watcher had devolved. They were slow, sluggish, and dumb in just the deadly crafts of battle that life could never afford to neglect. Humanity’s penchant for warfare now paid off.

It took hours to work their way through the Watcher. Small machines launched themselves at any moving figure. Some exploded suicidally. Others jumped from ambush. Mines detonated, ripping at legs and lungs.

Nigel played cat and mouse down the dark corridors. He used stealth and tricks and, to his own vast surprise, stayed alive.

More men and women launched from the base on Pocks. They slipped aboard like pirates and joined battle.

In the end the machines retreated. Running, they were even less able. They were blown apart or fried with microwave bursts. Every machine fought to the very end. It was obvious that whatever had designed the Watcher had not thought deeply about the chance that it would be boarded. After all, the vast ship was intended to bombard planets, perhaps even kindle suns to a quickening fire. Hand-to-hand fighting was not its style.

Still, over half of the humanity that entered the Watcher left as corpses. Many more groaned and sweated with deep wounds. Others bit their lips at the pain and swore with ragged, angry pride. The last machines they found, cowering now in dim hiding holes, they smashed with great relish into small, twisted fragments.

Much of the Watcher labyrinth they would never understand. It was a forest of glazed surfaces, nested cables, inexplicable tangles of technology alien to all humanity’s avenues of thought.

But they did understand the small ship they found.

It was buried near the center of the vast complex. It had a curious blue-white sheen, as if the metal were fired in some unimaginably hot furnace. Yet it opened easily at a touch of a control panel.

Carlos said, “It’s not the same design as the rest of this Watcher. Looks finer, I’d say. The Watcher is solid but crude. This thing …”

Nigel nodded, The craft was a hundred meters long, but still seemed tiny and precious compared with the monstrous Watcher. And its arabesqued surfaces, its feeling of lightness and swift grace, conveyed its function.

“It’s a fast ship,” Nikka observed, passing a hand over circuits that leapt into amber life.

“I agree,” Nigel said. “The Watcher’s a blunderbuss. This is a stiletto. Or maybe an arrow.”

Carlos touched the hard, dimly alabaster-lit surfaces of it. They stood in what had to be a control room. Screens blossomed into unintelligible displays when they approached. “Robots flew it, I guess,” Carlos said. “Must’ve built the Watcher around this.”

“Perhaps.” Nigel calculated. They had already found evidence that the Watcher was very old, perhaps as much as a billion years. Radioactive isotope dating techniques were fairly accurate, even for such long durations. If this ship was older, it implied a machine civilization of vast age.

“I wonder if we could use it? Figure out the controls?” Nigel wondered.

Carlos brightened. “Sail it to Earth? My God! Yes!”

“Earth?” Nigel hadn’t thought of that.

They were all intensely aware that they were like fishermen swallowed by a whale.

Somewhere in the huge Watcher was the guiding intelligence. Its minions destroyed, it had withdrawn. But it would not give up.

Eventually it would find a way to strike back at the vermin which had invaded it. The Watcher had time. It could move subtly, deliberately.

The corridors took on a brooding, watchful cast.

No one went anywhere alone.

It took three days to find the core.

A crewman led Nigel to the small, compact room near the geometric center of the Watcher’s huge mass.

“Looks like an art gallery, I’d wager,” Nigel said after a long moment of surveying the curved walls.

It was a wilderness of tangled curves. Nothing sat flush with the walls. Small, ornate surfaces butted against each other, each rippling with embedded detail. Patterns swam, merged, oozed. A giddy sense of flight swept over Nigel as he watched the endless slide of structure move through the room.

“This is where it thinks?” he asked.

A crewman said at his elbow. “Maybe. Functions seem to lead into here.”

“What’s that?” A hole gaped, showing raw splintered struts.

“Defense mechanism. Killed Roselyn when she came in. I got it with a scrambler.”

Nigel noticed that some of the panels were spattered with drying brown flecks. The Watcher was exacting a price for each of its secrets.

He sighed and pointed. “And that?”

The crewman shrugged.

A pattern came and went, as though it was a huge ocean wreck seen deep beneath the shifting waves.

It was first a line, then an ellipse, and now a circle. Its surface piped and worked with tenuous detail. Somehow the walls seemed to contain it as an embedded image, persistent against the passing shower of lesser facts. Nigel frowned. An unsettling, alien way to display information. If that’s what it was.

Again came the sequence. Line, oval, circle, oval, line. Then it struck him. “It’s the galaxy.”

“What?” Nikka had just arrived. “What is all this?”

“Watch.” He pointed. “See the broad line of tiny lights? That’s the galaxy as it looks from the side. That’s the way we see it from Earth, a plane seen edge-on. Now watch.” His lined hands carved the air.

The line thickened, winking with a cascade of lights. It swelled into an oval as other data sped across the image, like clouds rushing over the face of a slumbering continent. Fires lit in the oval. Traceries shot through it. It grew into a circle. Strands within it flexed and spilled with light.

Nigel said, “Catch the spiral arms? There. Faint out-lines against those bright points.”

“Well …” she looked doubtful. “Maybe.”

“See those blue points?” Dabs of blue light stood out against the other tiny glows. Evidently they were all stars. But … “I wonder what those stand for?”

“Other Watchers?” Nikka asked.

“Could be. But think. This is a map of the whole damn galaxy.” He said it quietly but it had an effect on the others now crowding into the cramped room. “Seen from every angle. Which means somebody—some- thing —has done that. Sailed far up above the whole disk and looked down on it. Charted the inlets of gas and dust and old dead suns. Seen it all.”

In the silence of the strange room they watched the galaxy spin. It moved with stately slowness. Grave and ghostly movements changed it. Sparks came and vanished. Dim gray presences passed across its face. Lingered. Were gone.

Then a specialist Nigel knew slightly, a wiry astronomer, said, “I think I recognize some of the pattern.”

“Where?” Nigel asked.

“See that quadrant? I think it’s ours.”

A segment of the galaxy did seem to Nigel, now that the astronomer pointed it out, slightly more crowded and luminous that the rest. He frowned as thin mists seemed to spill liquidly through the pie-slice segment. “You recognize stars?”