She said, “I’m going into cold sleep.”
His eyes snapped open. “No.”
“Yes. I’m going to skip ahead to when the engineering phase of the gee deck is done. The Engineer estimates two more years to finish the assembly of the inner cylinder, the rotational mechanism, the permanent supply lines, the heat sinks. Then it’ll be my turn to assemble the interior landscape.”
The Bio-mechanic had warned her it would take an additional year to complete the interior and lay in material reserves. After that, they would finally be able to waken their company of archived ghosts.
She said, “I’m looking forward to the future, Urban. I’m eager to start my project. So I’m going to jump to that point in time.”
“But what am I supposed to do while you’re down?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just two years. Aren’t you the one who voyaged alone across six centuries?”
He sighed a heartfelt sigh. “I was younger, then.”
“You’ll get by,” she assured him. “You’ll be there on the high bridge whether I’m awake or not, whether I’m there or not. Nothing will change. And if you need to, you’ll adjust your time sense so the years don’t burden you. I know you’ve done it before.”
He sighed again, gazing at her unhappily. “The times in between matter too.”
“We’ll have time,” she insisted. “We’ll be okay.”
THIRD
Time heals all.
It is an ancient aphorism that surfaces in your mind as if by chance.
You are aware that a billion seconds have gone by since you resolved to take revenge. A billion seconds spent in reconstruction of your ravaged memories.
A billion seconds.
More than enough to know that time does not heal all, that it cannot, because the circumstances that created you will not exist again in any future you can foresee.
Judged strictly, the aphorism is false.
You understand though that the aphorism is not meant as a binary true/false statement. Instead, it is intended as encouragement in the process of recovering from grievous emotional wounds. That you are aware of this distinction reflects the progress of your own slow recovery.
You walk the tunnels that honeycomb the cold crust of your world; miles of tunnels restored or rebuilt. Thousands of miles more lie still in ruins but you will get to them in time, if time allows. At this time, you focus your mind on what you’ve accomplished, not what remains to be done.
Re-grown in ordered ranks on walls and ceiling, are the thin, crystalline leaves of your computational strata. Now, as always, your mind works to gather scraps of data and memories from the ruins.
You organize what you find, analyzing and testing as you do so, seeking to place it all again into proper context although with no outside means to cross-check results, you know there will be errors.
Still, you do your best and second by second your mind recovers. You remember more and more. You are capable of more and more.
Another billion seconds, and you have used resources stored in the subterranean ocean to grow telescopes, and subsurface silos to house them. When the silos open, you look out on the cosmos for the first time since she destroyed you. You map the position of your world and realize: There is not time enough.
You are light years from anywhere. No star holds you within its gravity well. She has cast you away, flung your world into the void. You are alone, alone, alone. Stranded, with no way back.
Terror stirs deep within the biological structure of your ancestral mind. You experience it and then the sense of shame that follows it—shame of both your fear and your defeat.
You could cut both fear and shame from your persona but why would you? The old passions sustain you. They give you all the reason you need to go on. So you remind yourself that her cruelty, her jealousy, her fury, marooned you here.
This helps to focus your mind.
You continue your observations. You hunt through your shattered memories, seeking astronomical data and eventually you are able to recognize the closest stars, map their relative positions, and determine your precise location in both space and time.
Quite a lot of time has passed, but less than you would have guessed.
In the course of your astronomical survey you observe a hint, a glint, a tiny reflection where you are sure no reflection should be. For eight and a half million seconds you watch it as it moves against the background stars.
Does she regret her fury? Has she sent some monstrous servant to look for you, to fetch you back? No. Wishful thinking, that.
More likely some other entity observed your defeat, your disgrace, and is coming now to pick over your bones.
You ponder this as you walk the corridors of your wounded mind—and you prepare. You hide your presence, disguising the telescopes so that the surface of your world once again appears to be that of a dead and airless rogue world.
There will still be an infrared signature, but that will be attributed to the subterranean ocean cooling only very slowly with the passage of time.
Another aphorism: The best defense is a good offense.
You begin to prepare.
You will never be more than a shadow of your former presence. Still, you remain formidable.
Chapter
11
Three point six years out of Deception Welclass="underline"
From his solitary post on the high bridge, Urban observed an anomalous flash of pale blue light. He saw it through the composite mind of the philosopher cells. A brief, bright flare ahead of the courser, slightly offset from its trajectory.
Furious speculation erupted among the hull cells. The memory of a similar incident circulated among them, a familiar memory, one that Urban shared. Like the cells, he’d seen that same spectrum of light flare and die before. He knew what it meant.
He replicated into the library, sending the rage and frustration rising within him safely away from the cell field, while the copy of his ghost that remained on the high bridge reconfigured, taking the form of the imperturbable Sentinel.
In that form, he sensed the alarm winding through every cross-threaded conversation among the philosopher cells, and their growing awareness of impending danger. He entered the conversation. Determined to soothe the field, he introduced the same argument at a hundred thousand points:
– hold –
– calm –
The composite mind of the philosopher cells had recognized the flash of light as the visible energy emitted by the explosion of an outrider. Urban didn’t know yet which one.
A faction of cells wanted to interpret the incident as a hostile attack, but a far larger number sought consensus for the proposition that what had happened was a fluke, an accident, the result of a collision with a high-speed fragment of matter—a conclusion Urban encouraged.
No reason to believe otherwise. No evidence of another hostile presence anywhere in the Near Vicinity.
Even so, the cells were correct. The hazard was not ended. The danger they anticipated would come from secondary effects that required time to play out.
A report streamed in. Relayed at light speed through the array of outriders, it arrived only a few seconds after the light of the explosion. Each outrider had appended a signature as the report passed through its data gate.
Urban received the report in the library. A submind shared news of it to the high bridge. On both timelines, he noted the signatures of only the three nearest outriders. Khonsu, the closest, Artemis next, and then Lam Lha. Pytheas had been stationed beyond Lam Lha. The absence of its signature told him it was Pytheas he’d lost.