The Guardian brought its radar sense to maximum acuity, tightened the beam down as far as it would go. Yes. This was the real target, the one being shielded and hidden by all the Adversary’s trickery. The target was maneuvering in a complex pattern, but the Guardian could shift course far more quickly and move much faster. It could catch the enemy in just a few seconds. Eager for the kill, it put on more speed.
Aboard CC43
The cargo ship fired its attitude jets again, even as the main engines continued to fire at maximum thrust. Dr. Yuri Alexandrovich Sakalov felt his tired old body being rattled about like a pea in a pod, despite the best efforts of the restraint system. It did not matter. True, if he survived, he would be covered with bruises from head to foot. But he was not going to survive. If there was any subject on which he was expert, it was the behavior and abilities of the Close-Orbiting Radar Emitters. And if a CORE decided to hit a ship, no amount of maneuvering was going to save it.
Yuri Sakalov tried, in the midst of the thundering chaos, to think through his life, as it ended. He had regrets, many of them. Things he had done, and had not, women he should have loved, mistakes he should not have made. And yet. And yet.
He was just about to die trying. Surely that counted for something.
The ship lurched suddenly, the engines cut out for a few seconds, and fired again. Sakalov frowned. What was the point of all these wild gyrations? It could not gain them anything but a few seconds of futile respite.
Soon now. He knew it would happen too fast for him even to be aware of it. The multi-megaton mass of the CORE would be moving faster than a bullet when it struck. There would not even be time for pain when it—
The Guardian smashed into the target, this time half-expecting another undetectable impact. But this time the Guardian struck a large mass moving at high velocity. Not enough to kill the Guardian, of course, or even to do it significant harm, but the impact was violent enough to stun it, confuse it, knock it off course.
Huge explosions ripped through the target, engulfing the Guardian in a shockwave of shrapnel and gas and heat and light that dissipated almost immediately. Debris of all sizes and descriptions tumbled through the sky.
And suddenly, where there had been two large bodies moving through space, now there was but one, surrounded by a cloud of wreckage.
Though still disoriented by the force of the impact, the Guardian felt pleased with itself.
It had destroyed an agent of the Adversary.
Or at least, so it thought.
Nineteen
CORE Feelings
“Gerald MacDougal and I had another argument concerning the nature of the Charonians tonight. (What else of comparable importance is there to talk about? Know thy enemy, and all that.) Gerald says we must be extremely wary of any tendency to consider any particular Charonian as an individual. Better to think of the COREs and Singularity Rings and Carrier Drones and other forms as different castes of bees or ants than as different species. Some of the MRI theorists say the Charonians are less individualistic than ants.
“I am not so sure. I have spent years observing and tracking various Charonians, and I have concluded they have a bit more individuality—a bit more personality—than a line of ants going after bread crumbs.
“Gerald has his own theories, needless to say. He says that the Charonians don’t really seem to have the idea of the individual, but that this does not prevent them from being individuals. He says it is a mistake to regard the idea of the individual as being some sort of opposite to the idea of the group.
“I pointed out that one person apart is qualitatively, as well as quantitatively, different, from a group of people, and it is well established that group behavior in humans is fundamentally different from individual behavior.
“He said that each member of a given group, while conforming to group behavior, can behave as an individual at the same time. Five thousand people walk north along the crowded avenue, and five thousand more walk south, all more or less managing to give way and step aside and cooperate so everyone keeps moving. Yet each of those ten thousand cooperative beings regards himself or herself as a single person, wholly unaware of cooperating, each intent on his or her own business.
“Nor is the cooperation perfect. People run into each other, arguments flare up if too many people want to get in the same door at the same time. Groups compete within themselves.
“But the cells in the human body likewise cooperate and compete. Sometimes they react at cross-purposes to each other. Sometimes they will even attack each other. Certainly that is individual behavior. But is the cell aware of it?
“A talk with Gerald always leaves me questioning assumptions I never knew I had. In a way, it’s a shame he never entered a seminary. He would have given the lecturers headaches.
“Groups and individuals. Another one of those damn dichotomies that seem utterly clear until you start looking closely at the borderlines. Do my cells know they make up a human being? If they do know, do they care?
“Maybe the Charonians are not a group, but a billion individuals who have self-awareness and don’t know it. Or maybe humanity is a group-being, a mass mind whose individual units are unaware of their collective consciousness.”
Sianna Colette opened her eyes from a restless, dreamless, sleepless fog of unconsciousness. Her hands still hurt. She looked at the open palms of her hands, and the deep red welts in her flesh where her fingernails had sliced into the base of her palm. Clotted over now.
Had she really done that to herself? She had bit her lip, too, somewhere in there. She ran her tongue over the bite, and it stung.
At least she was not bleeding anymore. Just as well. Tiny spots of blood were splashed all over the permod’s interior and her clothing as it was. Her face must look a sight.
She shook her head from side to side, trying to clear it, and rubbed her face with a grubby, bloody hand. How long had it been? It seemed as if she had been in here for weeks at least, but that was not possible. The life-support system could not have kept her alive that long— unless they had been lying to her. Maybe they had hooked up some sort of supply module alongside her permod, once she was inside. But why? Why the hell would they want her to stay in space for that long? Some secret plan to send her someplace even worse than NaPurHab? Maybe they had diverted her craft, sent her on a direct path to rendezvous with Terra Nova.
No, she told herself. It was bad enough being claustrophobic. No sense getting paranoid into the bargain. No. The clock display must be right, and it had only been two days. Was she running a fever? She put a hand to her forehead. She felt hot, and God knows her mouth was dry, but she couldn’t really tell.