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Dust Traffic
It was a pinprick next to the barrel of The Ship - Mara, she thought, and felt her skin pebble with fear-bumps - a rough sphere made visible only by it the light show that flashed around it, curves and ribbons of glimmering light snapping and reeling like some deep-sea exotic, the ship an absence at the center of an abstract sculpture. This garish night-fish was drawing closer to the needle of Mara, at a lazy pace that seemed almost strolling through void.
Minion looked away from the mesmeric display, choking fear and uncertainty, feeling the liquid cold of analytical detachment slip through her. Her mind pivoted at an unseen angle, and the drama and garish display seemed to be muted. Equations and chunks of text whirred in her inner eye, dissecting and weighing. Her hands sprang to panels, the click of fingers and slap of palms forming a music she was oblivious to.
The tumblers were inhibited by electrogravitic fields - she and the Wards of Innovation had made sure of this failsafe. Obviously the other was also exploiting this feature, unless it was of nonsolar origin: the thought put a shiver through her, but she waved it away in digust. Everything about its trajectory suggested origin from the planet, in spite of its peculiar design - indeed, she was sure that the colorful moire about her counterpart was evidence of the function of photosynthetic generators, even if they were not in the characteristic panel formation. Her foe was not some unknownable fiend from stories; nevertheless, she was unable to grasp why anyone would interfere. Her training as Minion, as a Minion, crushed this idle speculation: there was a task at hand.
Calm, steady, she improvised an inversion of the available sensors, casting their perspectives both out and in, seeking the characteristic spheres and parabolas of a projected electrogravitic field. Once she had located the generator, she might be able to disrupt it. With a precise jab, she commenced the scanning sequence. As the results mapped themselves onto a three-dimensional model of local space, her calm evaporated, her jaw hung open, and her hands fell slack against the panel-board. There was no single source, no tidy geometric aura. Fields registered as spots of light outside, inside, all about Mara. The spheres of the tumblers were on the schematic, curled into their passive spheres, powdered with light.
The ship, the other, though, was nothing but a cloud; it had no underlying shape. With a limp hand she began zooming and scanning, coaxing the sensors closer to her target. She knew what would come with the results, but nonetheless could taste bile at the back of her throat, feel her hand creep up to massage her neck.
The cloud, the other, was a nanotechnological mass, sustaining itself by raping radiaton from empty space. It had wound about Mara like a jellyfish, the tentacles ejaculating themselves inside, stopping the core's fusion process and the tumblers in one step. The central cloud, though, had only just reached the hull, and was plowing its way inside. As it breached just behind and beneath her cabin, the sensors fully registered its details.
At the center of that haze was a lifeform like her, not merely in the sense of humanoidity, but so close as to be a brother, bearing the genetic markers of one bred Minion by the Wards, the chromosomal analomies that had marked her, and her parents before her, as both saviours and outcasts from the species. It occurred to her that the shape of the idea, the approaching nightmare, should have informed her immediately. It was not merely a fellow monstrosity of the new physics, but a device molded by the same creative eye as the tumblers, a fellow contributor to the Great Project.
The walls bulged gently, a cartoon-like birth, allowing passage to a slender young man in a torn black uniform. Fear and shock perfecting her perceptual apparatus, and in an instant she absorbed the shredded and burnt military uniform, dabbed with stanches of blood, the hollow cheeks and protruding ribs, knotted and singed black hair. The ash of malnutrition was over his dark skin, and gave him the air of a dead man. His black eyes, set in a mass of bruises and cuts, were dull and unreadable. He fumbled, produced an antiquated pair of wire-rimmed glasses from a pocket within his top-coat, and donned them. They were slightly crooked, and contributed to Minion's inability to ascertain whether his gap-toothed smile displayed genuine affection or utter derangement.
[ 16-02-2002: Message edited by: [monkeys violating the temple] ] |
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