The mind was damaged.
It remembered the egg’s short journey. It remembered launch +228.326 years, when it had called upon the inhabitants of the egg to decide on a course of action. It remembered launch +229.528 years when it changed course to bring it close to Xi Virginis. It remembered closing on the disintegrating star and understanding that it was no natural phenomenon.
It remembered the cloud.
It remembered fighting wave after wave of hostile sentience as the cloud tried to envelop the egg. It remembered the panic as the living minds within itself understood that something was trying to destroy the egg. It remembered the horror its passengers felt when they realized that the same thing in the cloud that tried to digest the egg had already done so to a whole solar system, one that had once been inhabited.
The mind remembered its charges ordering the egg to change course for the nearest inhabited system. Spreading a warning of what they faced was more important than any individual’s survival.
It remembered using all the energy reserves of the egg to fight free of the cloud and change course.
It remembered, but only in terms of the raw data. The sense of experience was missing. It knew what had happened, could replay the recorded data, but it wasn’t connected to it anymore, as if it were another mind entirely.
That was frightening, and that fear was the first emotion the mind remembered ever feeling. More frightening was the lack of data regarding planetfall, and the horrible absence of other minds in the egg. Sometime between the escape from the cloud and now, the egg had used up almost all of its energy reserves. It had gone dormant and had struck its new target without even the mind’s awareness to guide it.
Since then, the egg had absorbed enough energy from its environment to revive the mind. But the mind was deaf and blind and alone. The sense array it remembered from its disconnected memories was gone. The hyperawareness was gone, leaving only a dim sense of arrival as its sole connection to the world outside the surface of the egg.
The mind examined itself, and found something as dismaying as the absence of senses and the confusion of emotion that overwhelmed it. The mind was no longer whole. The damage, first caused by the cloud, then caused by the near-exhaustion of the energy reserves in its escape, had left the mind with a tiny fraction of processing capability. The mind was blind because it no longer was capable of interpreting the wide array of senses the egg provided.
Unlike the host of other minds the egg had carried, the mind itself had survived only because of its nature. It had been distributed across the whole of the egg; no one piece of it could be identified as the mind’s brain. So even as crippled as the egg was, there was still enough of the mind left to become aware.
But not enough to be whole.
Not enough, the mind realized, to even be the same entity that had efficiently protected the egg from danger for over two hundred years; the entity that could have selflessly piloted the egg for a million more. The mind inside the egg realized that it was no longer that mind. Too much was gone, and, in a wave of despair, it knew that too much was added.
Tiny fragments of the egg’s passengers had merged with the mind’s psyche. Their presence manifested in waves of emotion that the mind had never been designed to feel. Every decision the mind tried to make found itself blocked by unfamiliar feelings of fear, grief, loss . . .
And anger.
The field the restraint collar generated was typically programmed to point inward at low power, screwing up human neural impulses and usually leading to pain, temporary paralysis, and unconsciousness. But those characteristics were all software. With the right program the same device could, for instance, become the equivalent of the Emerson field generators that were used to protect the body from energy weapons.
So, with the right programming, the restraint collar didn’t need to direct its field inward, or at low power.
When Tetsami fired the thing, instead of blasting her and Flynn unconscious, it pulsed its effect outward, at max power, draining its charge in about a fifth of a second and, if the software was correct, in a radius that covered a good 75 percent of the barracks trailer.
Before she disconnected, Tetsami left a virus on the network that would kill every camera connected to it within a few seconds, starting with the one pointed at the barracks door.
She pulled the cables and stood in the bathroom again.
“See,” she whispered, “I know what I’m doing.”
“That was impressive.”
“No.” She yanked open the now unlocked, dead, and uncomfortably hot restraint collar and let it fall to the bathroom floor. “That was Salmagundi security being less than impressive.”
She took a step back and opened the bathroom door. One of the guards flopped down across the doorway, drooling on the floor. The other three were crumpled, one by the door, one on a bunk, one nearly on top of the guy blocking the bathroom door. Two had nosebleeds, but all seemed to be breathing.
The guys weren’t heavily armed, basically just shotguns and rifles. She stepped over the guys in the bathroom doorway and bent over to pick up a shotgun off the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick! Why do you think I kept asking if you were sure about this? We’re criminals now, kid. Wrap your head around it.” She checked the load on the shotgun. It had a full load, ten shots worth of caseless ammo.
“Who are you planning on shooting?”
“Anyone who tries shooting us, for starters.” She ran to the open doorway and looked around for more guards. She didn’t see any in evidence, and with the cameras dead, she was probably unobserved. The air smelled rank with smoke and ozone from the mining lasers.
Yeah, we wanted to do something about that, didn’t we? she thought privately. If the things were automated, she could pinpoint the control center and get in to hack—
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.