S. Swann - Prophets

Over to her right, where the Protean egg/seed was, there was a violent flash of purple light and a blast of hot air. Hot embers and gravel shot by the doorway and Tetsami had to duck inside to avoid being pelted. When the light faded, a nasty mechanical whine filled the air.

“What the hell?”

“We’re too late. They blew it up.”

Tetsami wasn’t so sure about that. She ducked outside to look in that direction.

They hadn’t blown it up.

The matte-black ellipsoid hadn’t moved, but the ground around it had. It now floated at the center of a ten-meter-diameter crater that was nearly hemispherical. The perimeter of the crater encompassed the area where the heavy mining equipment had been. Of the mining lasers, or the tons of earth that had been underneath the Protean seed, there was no sign. As Tetsami watched, the near-mirror surface of the hemispherical crater crumbled as the soil began collapsing back into the hole.

“Somehow,” Tetsami whispered, “I think it didn’t need our help.”

The mind focused on the anger, a stable rock in the swirling maelstrom of emotion that filled its empty world. Whatever was responsible for the destruction of Xi Virginis—whatever intelligence was behind the cloud that had damaged the egg—that entity had to pay. The mind didn’t know how, but it clutched to that single desire.

The mind would see that entity cease to exist. It would erase it from the face of the universe. It would destroy the thing on an altar of the mind’s righteous fury.

With the anger, came focus and a dim awareness of the universe outside the egg.

The mind could not use all the egg’s senses at once, but it realized that if it focused on a narrow array of the sensory capability, it could see, after a fashion. Despite the subjective eternity in which the new mind had floated in the dark womb of the egg, it had in fact only been 2.38 seconds since the mind had revived.

As slow as the new mind moved in comparison to the old, it still had time to assess the presence of the mining lasers pumping terawatts into the egg. That energy had been absorbed and used by the lowest autonomic functions of the egg to repair the physical damage. The lasers themselves, as pure energy weapons, posed no threat to the egg itself.

However, the mind knew their purpose. The beams were an attack.

Like the cloud.

The mind reacted before it even understood the ramifications of the act. It extended one of the quantum fields enveloping the egg out to a diameter past the extent of the mining lasers. Space rippled, tore, and reformed in a shell around the egg, letting out a flash of light as a sphere of matter ten meters in diameter was twisted elsewhere . The energy required to destroy the lasers was barely balanced by the release of energy caused by the vanishing matter.

What have I done?

The mind did not understand its own actions. It had acted without thinking and had done something violent, aggressive, and probably counterproductive. Reviewing the record of the incident, it could see that human beings had piloted the lasers.

It had been under no risk, but it had killed nine people.

The anger leeched out of it as it wondered what it had become.

Tetsami heard Flynn’s panicked thought, “What the hell IS that thing?”

Tetsami started taking slow steps backward. She knew what it was, conceptually, but seeing the thing there, a matte-black hole in reality hovering over the crater, ignited a visceral fear. One nasty thought in her direction, and both she and Flynn could cease to exist.

“Freeze!” someone yelled at her. “Drop the shotgun!”

Tetsami glanced behind her and saw a trio of Sheldon’s security goons leveling more shotguns at her. She spread her arms, holding the gun by the barrel to keep them from freaking out and shooting her.

“I’m not your biggest problem,” she said.

One of the other guards had already come to that realization. He was looking past her, where the egg/seed was. “Fathers save us,” he whispered.

Klaxons sounded throughout the compound. Someone in the stellar security staff must have just realized that they were down three mining lasers and one prisoner.

The first guard decided to stay on task, though. “Drop the gun, Flynn, and get on the ground. I will shoot you.”

“Do what he says, Gram.”

“Don’t rush things, kiddo.”

She did her best to remain calm and move slowly. No need to add to the chaos. She slowly knelt down, arms out, still holding the shotgun by the barrel.

“I said, drop the fucking gun!”

She carefully laid the gun next to her as she lay facedown on the ground.

One of his friends yelled, “Holy shit!” and started pumping shells toward the crater.

A distraction was a distraction, and Tetsami used it to roll away into a drainage ditch next to one of the prefab buildings. More shots exploded above and behind her, but none came near her. She scrambled out of the mud and crawled up to the lip of the ditch to look over back toward the crater.

The floating black seed was leaking. Black poured out of it, spilling into the crater below it, oily tendrils that seemed almost tears in the fabric of space.

“Why the hell are they shooting at it?” Tetsami whispered.

“Do you see the same thing I do? It ATE those mining lasers.”

“Yeah, and a shotgun shell is going to do what, exactly?”

The three guards must have come to the same conclusion, as the firing ceased. They stood, facing the crater, as the egg dissolved into a viscous pool in the crater.

“Did they shoot a hole in it?” Flynn sounded confused.

Tetsami shook her head. Whatever was happening, it was not that simple. The black pool in the crater was no longer the black nonstuff that had made the egg. She could see reflective highlights and ripples. There was something there.

No. Tell me you aren’t going to do that, she thought as one of the guards knelt down and poked the substance with the barrel of his shotgun.

Black tendrils shot up the barrel, crawling across the man’s arm before he could react. His two companions stumbled back as a net of shiny black threads wrapped every surface of his body. He didn’t move, aside from a tense vibration. His eyes bulged as the net seemed to tighten, the threads forming it thinning.

For a moment it gave every appearance that the net was going to crush the man alive. Then the threads constricted and pulled into his flesh. His head snapped back and he released a strangled gurgling sound. His body shook as the tendrils withdrew along his arm and down the shotgun.

He collapsed backward as the last black filament let go of the gun barrel. He fell into a fetal position on the ground, hyperventilating. The parts of his skin that Tetsami could see bore a fine webbing of welts that corresponded to where the fluid web had penetrated.

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Tetsami answered Flynn. She inched along the ditch on her stomach, away from both the crater and the guards. The guards, at least, were paying her no attention. Their focus was divided between dragging away their fallen comrade, and keeping an eye on the black-filled crater.

The black began rolling out of the crater. The liquid spread out, over the lip, in a strangely geometric webwork.

The guards ran, pulling the welt-covered guy to his feet so he could stumble along after them. Tetsami pushed herself to her feet, but she felt a thundering panic in her gut that wasn’t wholly her own.

“We got to get out of here!”

“Damn it, Flynn, that’s what I’m doing. Let me drive!”

However, Tetsami hadn’t done quite enough to accommodate Flynn’s emotions. She felt him desperately grasping for control as she tried to run up out of the ditch. Their nervous system spasmed from two sets of conflicting motor instructions, and both of them took a running face-first tumble into the ground. Gravel dug into Flynn’s face and tore the meat of his left arm though his shirt.