And they attack and kill each other…
Even the slow drag of evolution could produce some nasty predators.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s at the top of the heap.’
‘One of them,’ Dragon replied. ‘Call them the alpha predators.’
‘Have you been here before?’ Mika abruptly asked.
‘I didn’t need to come here to know this place,’ Dragon replied. ‘That thing out there is a version of me, only not so rational and friendly.’
Mika decided to let that go and returned her attention to the hints her scanners were providing. She checked the conferencing unit’s database, quickly finding the reconstructing program she required, input scan data already collected, and set her computer to input further data as it came in. Essentially the program was putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw with many pieces missing, repeated and sometimes changing shape, colour and other EM output. Slowly the menacing visitor out there began to grow on her screen, and slowly measurements revealed its awful scale.
Hanging upright in the murk, the overall shape of the thing was of a chrysalis but, since in reality it stood eight miles high, a lot of surface detail was only revealed by zooming in, and a lot had yet to be included by the program. In a moment detail spreading over its surface revealed it to be encaged in bones of Jain coral; however, what those bones encaged seemed no discrete being. In the area below its head were tangled vinelike masses sprouting those familiar demonic flowers. Down in its lower end were large coils of wormship, slowly turning like some strange engine. The middle of this chrysalis shape seemed to consist of masses resembling those baglike organs Mika had seen gathering like nervous sheep underneath Dragon’s skin. Long Jain tentacles wound their way through this as if keeping it all knotted together. The thing’s head bore chrysalis horns, and presently its massive batlike wings were folded on its back. That it looked so devilish struck Mika as an unlikely coincidence but one she could not yet explain.
‘Looks… spooky,’ she opined.
‘The structural formation of biomechanisms often bears similarity to evolved creatures since it often adheres to the same basic rules,’ Dragon replied pompously.
‘Wings and horns?’ said Mika.
She noticed how the other sphere was dropping back and, checking her instruments, she detected power surges within it.
‘The horns are merely sensor arrays positioned outside the main body so as to negate internal interference, and there are two of them to provide the same function as binocular vision in humans. Those wings are a form of drive using U-tech and electrostatic repulsion. They look like the wings of some evolved creature simply because that shape finesses control.’
‘Yeah, right.’
As if to demonstrate this point, the huge biomech began spreading those same appendages. They looked something like those of a bat though much deeper, in shape tapering down to the monstrous thing’s tail end. As they expanded, the accretion dust before them flowed down their forward surfaces, while some swirling activity ensued behind. A visual distortion also extended from the bones and abruptly the huge thing was falling towards them. A white laser lanced out from the other Dragon sphere. Mika saw it bend for a moment, then track across and abruptly puncture some electrostatic shield, before splashing onto one of the extended wings. The biomech spun as if hit by some solid projectile, and in doing so released a cloud of small gleaming bubblelike objects. These orbited their source for a moment before abruptly accelerating away — only a few of them heading towards the offending Dragon sphere. The laser snapped out again and again, hitting these approaching objects. Bright detonations spread nuclear fire through the surrounding accretion matter. Before the radiation degraded her view, Mika saw a hard-field spring up under one of these detonations, then flicker out. Now all she could see were shadowy images of the giant biomech and the other Dragon sphere swinging in a wide orbit about each other, while the energy readings between them ramped higher and higher. She noticed her own sphere was now accelerating.
‘Will your companion be able to stop it?’ she asked.
‘For long enough,’ Dragon replied.
‘Long enough for what?’ Mika asked, not really expecting a straight reply.
Dragon’s silence did not disappoint her.
After a moment she realized that the ambient light outside the conferencing unit had risen. Directing her sensors toward her presumed destination, she picked up the tail end of a burst of radiation with an easily recognizable signature: solar wind. Collecting data on her screen from radiations far outside the human spectrum, she quickly built a picture of a distant mottled orb flashing like a faulty bulb. She felt it a privilege to be present, for here was a sun in the process of accruing enough matter to enable it to ignite its fusion fire. Like some massive engine turning sluggishly as it draws on a flattening battery, the sun was coughing and spluttering. Fusion fires were burning around its surface or breaking through the surface from inside, only to go out with gouts of oily smoke, each cough or splutter burning lighter elements to an ash of iron of sufficient quantity to construct tens of thousands of space stations, while the oily clouds were blasts of hard radiation capable of denuding such space stations of life.
Considering that last fact, Mika began to map magnetic fields within sensor range. As expected, she saw that Dragon was bending the solar wind about itself. Unexpectedly she discovered that numerous other objects within range were doing the same and the largest one was directly ahead. She now focused on this one and began to clean up an image. After a few moments she ran diagnostic tests and searches on her instruments, for surely the image they were returning could not be right — some fault in the programming perhaps?
‘Our destination,’ Dragon informed her.
Mika gazed at an immense mass resembling numerous blooms of stag’s horn coral. For a moment she couldn’t understand why the appearance of this thing had impelled her to run those diagnostics, since it seemed no more unusual than the biomech the other Dragon sphere was now battling. Then she realized why: she instinctively felt this place to be the epicentre, the point where Jain technology had first bloomed within the accretion disc, a point where reality seemed increasingly thin, and where something utterly alien lurked on the other side.
This was somewhere she really did not want to be.
14
Scanning and sensing. Humans and most Terran animals use their senses to pick up information about their environment from that environment’s own products. In this way their information-gathering is passive and they are not ‘scanning’. However, there are examples of Terran fauna who do scan: bats with their echo-location and cetaceans with their sonar. Humans, as tool users, have found their own ways to scan now. Be that with a primitive torch or sonar or radar, they inject some energy into their surroundings to gain data from the portion of energy that is bounced back at them. When it comes to AI spaceships, the sensorium for both scanning and sensing has grown to encompass nearly all of the EMR spectrum. Ship AIs can sense most wavelengths of radiation, and they can emit most wavelengths for the purpose of scanning. They can shine a torch into the dark, beam radar pulses, fire off laser radiations across a wide spectrum for numerous specific purposes, and even plot gravity and density maps of surrounding space and the underlying U-continuum.
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Upon instruction the nineteen thousand eight hundred and twenty wormships began to gather at the coordinates Erebus had chosen. As distinct vessels, still with swarms of returning rod-forms about them, they fell towards this centre point and began to link together. First just three wormships closed on each other, tentacle ends connecting like multiple plugs and sockets, loops of snaky structure tightening like linked arms; three wholes joining and commingling.