But the information he sent just seemed to drop into a black pit—and Wade recognized despair. He understood then just what his other half awaited: the enemy. Death. He increased the pressure on his weapon’s trigger, but found he could not pull it back all the way, because then the irrevocable decision would have been made. The pause lasted only microseconds—but an age in Golem terms. Then Zephyr’s agonized cry filled the room, and the Golem sail fired its particle cannon. The turquoise blast struck Wade in the chest, hammering him back against the wall.
I’m going to die, he realized, I waited too long.
On the planet Hive, up on its promontory, the building resembled a World War II concrete pillbox, with horizontal windows gazing slit-eyed across the lowlands. Beyond the bare and mounded earth surrounding it, which further lent the appearance of a recently installed machine-gun post, lay dying algae gathered in green and yellow drifts amidst the vines, wide-leafed rhubarbs and cycads. Snairls, ranging from the size of a man’s head to creatures as large as a sheep, grazed on this abundance. The air immediately around the building seemed filled with smoke, but closer inspection revealed this to be clouds of hornets, killing each other.
Physically infiltrating the ancient mind’s redoubt had been impossible at first, so the young mind’s only means of access had been either by conventional inter-hive radio or by intercepting and interpreting spillover transmissions between individual hornets. The former means had slowly degraded—the ancient mind’s communications becoming increasingly contradictory and opaque—and the latter was swiftly following the same course. The old mind was clearly fragmenting. But now that very fragmentation offered an opportunity to actually get inside both the redoubt and, by intercepting direct hornet-to-hornet transmissions, the ancient mind itself.
The six hornets did originally belong to the old mind, but the youngster had isolated them, shutting off their radio communication with the rest of the mind, then inside them installed transmitters tuned to his own mental coding, but also linked to their original transmitters. Such a ploy could never work on a guarded mind, for such minds constantly monitored their own function. The six of them flew into the swarm gathered around the redoubt, and through their faceted eyes the young mind observed hornets attacking each other in mid-air, chewing in with mandibles or stinging each other to death. Now entering this swarm, the youngster began to pick up straight-line neuro-radio transmissions between hornets, and found that the mental coding of the old mind was beginning to vary. The young mind identified six variations: five still very close to the original, but one that was wildly astray. He lost four of his own six hornets to attacking insects before confirming that the attackers all used that disparate code. The old mind was now fully divided into two parts: one finite and hostile, the other in the process of breaking into yet another five. The surviving two spies finally entered the redoubt.
Inside it, paper nests grew like bracket fungi from the walls, layer upon layer of them, shelf upon shelf. In here the battle was horribly intense and the floor piled deep with dismembered hornet bodies. The young mind noticed that the hostile hornets were all issuing from one particular conglomeration of nests and, though they were the aggressors, they were losing because the defending nests contained five times their population. But the place contained not just paper nests and drifts of hornet corpses. Fluorescent nano-circuitry adorned the walls, linked to various machines scattered here and in the labyrinth of rooms beyond: furnaces, U-space transmitters, self-contained robotic laboratories and manufactories.
The young mind lost another of its two remaining spies, chopped to pieces by two attackers, that hornet’s vision fading as its severed head fell to the crowded floor. The surviving one, settling on the curved cowling over a manufacturing unit for hornet crystorage boxes, he now fully opened to the surrounding neuro-radio traffic. Insane screaming fed through, along with a viruslike mental program aiming for division, for partition. The youngster swiftly realized this program was no new creation, but in fact one older than the human race. Trying to hold his own sanity together, the young mind attempted to withdraw, tried to shut down the terrifying link. Underneath the screaming he detected a deep sadness—and a decision being made. From one of the slitted windows, a communication laser swivelled on gimbals and began firing. Also, an enclosed lens-shaped autofactory developed hot spots as contained furnaces were deliberately overloaded. Paper nests began to burn. The last com the young mind received from its spy in the bunker was the feeling of mandibles closing between its thorax and its tail, and a wall of flame falling towards it. Meanwhile, from other eyes at a distance, the young mind watched smoke and flame belch from the redoubt.
The old mind had chosen death rather than dissolution.
Wiping dust off his gun against his shirt, Janer tried to study its displays even as he ran. He passed Olian Tay, who was leaning against a wall and gazing back towards the vault room, raised a hand to her, then nearly fell flat on his face as Zephyr’s particle-weapon fire lit up ahead of him. No time to pause. He reached the vault room door and stepped through, aiming his gun at Zephyr, looming upright with wings fully spread, turquoise flame blazing from its eyes. He glimpsed Wade over to one side, pressed up against the wall and burning. Then the fire suddenly ceased.
Janer pulled the trigger of his weapon; everything seeming to happen with nightmare slowness.
Too slow.
The Golem creature could move just as fast as Wade, yet it chose not to. Zephyr’s head was turned slightly towards Janer as the singularity generated, encompassing the sail in a collapsing sphere. Then, a light as bright as the sun, a wash of heat, and a blast that flung Janer back out into the corridor. He was slammed against the wall and began to slide down it but, his body already toughened by the Spatterjay virus, he remained conscious.
Why such a blast?
Then he realized: power supplies inside the Golem sail for itself and its weapons. He was lucky the explosion had not taken out the whole building. He lay there for a moment feeling dazed, then reached up tentatively to touch the burns on his face, and to check if there was still any hair on his head. Within the vault room he observed falling ash and gleaming fragments of ceramal scattered across the floor. One distorted claw, which had obviously been outside the sphere, now rested on a pile of charred sprine crystals. He was still staring at that when some blackened object dragged itself slowly around the door jamb.
‘I should not have been fast enough,’ Janer said. ‘It was Golem.’
Wade was missing everything from below his sternum, and his metal bones still glowed at that severance point. His remaining syntheflesh was blackened to a crisp, and fell off in smoking chunks as he moved. He paused, made some clicking and buzzing sounds.
‘You—should—not — havebeen,’ Wade finally agreed, tiny embers glimmering in the air before his mouth, his skeletal jaw making chewing motions.