It seemed like a good idea, if he could get to his feet.
Now that the web’s advance seemed complete, he tried to push himself upright. But his ankle collapsed under him with a blinding flare of pain.
Shit! I’m sorry, Gram.
Just shut up and crawl.
Flynn crawled, putting distance between himself and the web as fast as he could manage. It didn’t feel nearly fast enough.
He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the enveloped buildings moving, folding in on themselves. He stopped and stared, because they weren’t collapsing. Instead the walls fragmented and each piece slowly turned on an impossible axis, as if each building was a puzzle box being manipulated by an unseen giant. Also, like the web itself, the motion seemed to replicate itself on smaller scales, each rotating fragment itself formed by dozens of smaller rotating fragments. The material of the buildings changed character from dull utilitarian metal into something lighter and more reflective.
Like a cloud, or a snowstorm—
Damn it, Flynn, move your ass!
Someone had decided that two outbuildings turning into rolling cloudbanks constituted a threat. Shots came from the direction of the perimeter fence, some striking too close for comfort.
“Don’t those idiots realize how well that worked the first time?”
“As you point out, they’re all too much the same person. They keep making the same mistakes.”
Flynn pushed himself to try and put at least one building between him and the shooters.As he did, he saw something streak through the air toward the closest alien building/cloudbank.
A missile? Flynn thought.
The missile sailed through it, and buried itself in the surrounding woods before exploding. Flynn felt a hot wind as the roar of the explosion rolled past him.
The hole in the cloud healed itself.
Then the air was alive with missile tracks. Flynn curled into a ball and covered his head as explosions began echoing across the compound. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Heat burned his back and he could smell his own hair smoldering. His ears rang with the almost continuous roar of the missile strikes. They rang until he could hear nothing else but the ringing.
He stayed like that until he realized the ground was no longer shaking, and his back wasn’t on fire. The ringing persisted, and he whispered, “Hello?”
He could hear his own voice. He wasn’t deaf.
Flynn rolled over and faced what should have been the sky. It took several moments to make sense of what he did see. Above him, he saw the underside of a semitransparent hemisphere two or three hundred meters in diameter covering most of the central portion of the temporary camp, a dome centered on the point the egg had landed.
The skin of the hemisphere shimmered various shades of blue as missiles from the outside collided with the semitransparent shell. The weapons broke soundlessly against the perfectly curved skin in cascades of blue-and-violet-tinted flames and smoke.
“Gram?” Flynn whispered.
“Yeah, I see it, too.”
“What is—” Flynn’s question was interrupted by a low voice that didn’t sound human.
“It is coming.”
Flynn lowered his gaze and faced a man, or something in the shape of a man. The speaker stood under the shimmering blue dome, in the midst of what had become a landscape of fractal crystalline geometry.
The man was naked, hairless, and his skin was shiny midnight black, showing no fine detail. He stared at Flynn with featureless black eyes and, when he spoke, he flashed teeth that were perfect black mirrors.
“It is coming here,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Harbinger
Fear the new, but fear more the obsessive grasp on the old.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
There comes a point where the debate ends and you must pick up a gun.
—DATIA RAJASTHAN (?-2042)
Date: 2526.5.30 (Standard) Salmagundi-HD 101534
The Great Triad had been in continuous session for thirty days. Representatives from each Triad from each region across Salmagundi were here; over a hundred men and women, carrying the memories and experience of tens of thousands, representing the whole of the planet.
Alexander Shane, the oldest human being here, bore fifteen tattoos across his brow; more than anyone else living. Seven of those marks represented people who had borne at least as many when they had lived. The combined wisdom of a thousand of Salmagundi’s past citizens informed every word he spoke, every move he made. As the senior among them, he was the one to preside.
He sat, with the others at a great circular table in one of the many great rooms in the Ashley Hall of Minds. There were other halls where they could have met, in other cities, but the authority of the Great Triad came from their persons, and not their location. Ashley happened to be closest to the reason they met.
Alexander watched the debate, contributing little of his own wisdom. He felt the pervasive panic as much as anyone else here. The presence of the offworld object threatened everything that their ancestors had built here.
“We are relying on the words of this singleton Flynn Jorgenson as to the nature of this invader,” one of the younger women spoke. She only had ten tattoos across her brow and her hair still had hints of brown in the midst of the silver. “It could be prelude to an invasion.”
“We’ve seen no evidence of this,” someone countered.
“No,” she replied. “But Mr. Jorgenson’s statement is at odds with the facts. The trajectory of this object does not lead back to the old systems.”
“It had been traveling for centuries,” another woman said, “and could have maneuvered any number of times before entering our space.”
“Where it came from is irrelevant,” a man agreed from across the room.
“It is only irrelevant if it is not a harbinger of a greater threat,” she told them all. “Need I remind you where its trail points back to?”
“Coincidence,” someone muttered.
“No evidence at all—”
“You are looking for problems where there are none—”
“Once it is destroyed—”
Alexander let the dialogue shoot back and forth without enforcing any rules of order. A limited amount of chaos was necessary so that when the final consensus was reached, every member could feel their voice as having been part of coming to it.
Usually, though, consensus was quicker in arriving. Rarely did the members’ opinions diverge on anything of substance. However, this session was as anomalous as the event they debated.
What concerned the woman, and a substantive minority of the Grand Triad membership, was the fact that the review of what records existed showing the object’s entry into the system revealed a path that led from the direction not of the of Confederacy, but of a star that had vanished from Salmagundi’s sky a decade ago.
Alexander remembered the event from three different points of view: his own and two more that had been bequeathed to him from the Hall of Minds since then. It had been a subject of interest and debate in Salmagundi’s scientific community a decade ago when Xi Virginis winked out of the sky. Then, the debate in the Grand Triad had been whether to expend the resources to investigate. There had even been a half-dozen advocates for building a tach-ship to send to the Xi Virginis system.