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  She magnified the view, and looked, very carefully, at the placement of each limb, focussing on where the tip of each long black leg met the hull. The right foremost limb set neatly into a cavity in the floor. She sent the robot climbing along the uneven ceiling structures, and then down the wall to the floor, till it crouched by the Ulltrian’s forelimb.

  The robot gently blew air over the limb, clearing away dust. She gingerly reached one of the robot’s excavating instruments out and pulled on the limb, lifting the tip out of a cavity in the floor. A crystal the size and shape of a bullet stuck through the chitin of the limb, surrounded by a faint fuzz of fiber optic cables.

  Eydis made the robot reach one metal claw forward and crack the desiccated exoskeleton. The chitin split into shards and the crystal fell free. Using a delicate probe limb, the robot moved the gleaming stone into its hopper.

  Eydis slowly backed the robot out, gently blowing dust around its steps as it retreated, to cover over its tracks. When the robot climbed down to her side, she reached into its hopper and seized the crystal. She held it tightly, feeling its silky, cool surface against her naked skin. She raised the fist, and shouted once in triumph, making dust drop from the tunnel’s ceiling.

  She had it. She had the quantum key of a Clade Master. Any Ulltrian system on the planet would answer to its authority, and drop its secrets into her grasp.

  She started to crawl up the tunnel, but then stopped, hesitating while the robot hummed beside her, waiting for her to go before it could cover her tracks. She put the crystal into a pocket on her shoulder, and buttoned it tightly. Then she turned back to the ship and crawled through the narrow crack of the door, holding her light out. She stood on the uneven ramp and looked down at the Ulltrian’s corpse.

  The Ulltrians had infected Kriani history like a disease. And every alien she met—not just Kriani, but the Thrumpit scholar here also studying the Ulltrians, and the Neelee that had transported them both to this world, and the Kirt that had serviced their ships—all of them assumed that humanity would be lost, wasted, crushed like insects in the way of a great, turning wheel, if the Ulltrians had not been destroyed. Eydis resented all the fear. She had tired of digging in the ruins of their atrocities.

  “You’re not so frightening,” she said, forcing her voice to be loud and bold. She would have spit on it, but that it would leave her DNA on the scene. “You died and rotted, like all the species you killed.”

  The black corpse lay there, unmoved. But her heart began to pound. She felt the conviction, looking at the shriveled corpse, that she might see an Ulltrian again. A live Ulltrian.

  “And if you ever come back, if any of you are left out there, don’t come to Earth. Because we will fight you like no one ever fought you before. We will find the way to wipe you out again.”

  She crawled down into the tunnel and climbed up to the blue and white dawn on Dâk-Ull.

  Behind her, robots pressed the ship’s ramp closed and packed dirt under it. Then they retreated, filling the tunnel as they ascended.

  _____

  Eydis stared at the Kriani. The evil-looking robot stepped around the ramp, walking sideways, and stood between the Kriani and herself. But she could still look the Kriani in the eyes, peering right through the skeletal form of the robot.

  “On Dâk-Ull,” Eydis said in Galactic, transmitting her voice over audio, “the Kriani are free. You could be free also. You could join us, and oppose the Ulltrians. You could live a long life and not end up food for their maggot children.”

  The Kriani spread its antennae wide, normally a sign of surprise, but she understood this was meant as sarcasm, to say, what a surprise to think a Galactic would preach freedom, the only thing they had to offer. “I serve willingly,” it said. “I serve the masters of evolution.”

  “I know,” Eydis said, her voice hushed with sorrow. “But I had to ask, before I did this.”

  She used the override protocols she had found on Dâk-Ull, sending the codes to the ship. That gave her access. She immediately transmitted a program that sent wave after wave of shut-down commands, in a continual and furiously fast loop.

  The robot listed, and then fell to the side, collapsing into a heap of angular limbs, like a knot of cables and swords. Eydis raised the laser that Tarkos had given her. The ship did not respond, it did not fire on her. The Kriani flung its antenna out, this time in genuine surprise. It had expected the robot to harvest Eydis immediately. It had expected the ship to protect it.

  Eydis shot the Kriani between the eyes.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bria walked to the end of the spoke, where it opened into an empty bay lined with huge, ominous machines. She walked past them without hesitation, turning to the open hexagonal gateway on the left that opened onto the outer ring of the station. The gate did not close. The floor in the ring did not resist her. She made quick progress, until she came to a small, empty chamber in the ring hall. She estimated that she had come more than half way to the bay where the Ulltrian ship waited. In this smaller chamber, blue light gleamed from small, harsh lights lining the wall. A pale line revealed a round portal in the center of the floor, closed over the ocean, and the metal creaked against the growing water pressure as the station sank. Somewhere water dripped, leaving a hollow echo. The floor gleamed, slick with condensation.

  Bria sniffed in suspicion. This chamber looked so innocently empty that she could not help but feel that the whole scene had been designed to coax her forward, into the open. She took one small step forward. The floor still neither resisted nor assisted her.

  She carefully, slowly peered around. Nothing moved. The outer wall was lined with glass, the window black with the dark sea. A few luminescent organisms seemed to drift upwards as the station sank past them. At the far side of the chamber, the door to the ring hallway was closed. Bria would have to go to it and see if she could force it open.

  She took another step forward.

  The door to the ring hallway began to slowly part.

  Bria snarled as a single black leg stepped through the opening. Slowly, methodically, insulting her with its lack of fear, a second black leg reached out into the pool of light bleeding down from a single diode in the arch above.

  Bria began to pant, tongue out, as her whole body flushed with the hunting rage. She wished she could taste the air, so that she could know this opponent. She wanted to smell it, to taste its DNA, to feel its whole bloody history before she charged the Ulltrian, and tore into it with her claws.

  The Ulltrian reached now two more legs forward, then two more, moving with insolent calm, a single leg at a time setting onto the floor with a deliberate clack, each leg tipped with a razor edged boot that snapped at the stone. Bria felt a shiver of deja vu: this sight crawled right out of a hundred reoccurring nightmares that had troubled her sleep.

  The Ulltrian stopped just inside the chamber. Its black eyes gleamed as it swung its pointed tail out over its back, then bent its body slightly to point two limbs at Bria.

  They stood like that, frozen, considering each other.

  All her life Bria had expected this. A confrontation with an Ulltrian seemed inevitable, even necessary—though, until a few months ago, such an expectation would have been dismissed as impossible by nearly any sentient being of the Galactic Alliance. Everyone had believed the Ulltrians had gone extinct when, thousands of years before, every known Ulltrian had fought to the death. But Bria had believed, in some irrational, unrevisable way, that some day she would face one, if not face a hundred. For she was a Harmonizer, she had always wanted to be a Harmonizer, and what more grave task could there be for a Harmonizer but to face its fatal opposite, the thing which sought not balance and fecundity, but warfare and winnowing. The thing that murdered her daughter, by dropping its diseases on her homeworld.

  The Ulltrian spread it front two legs wide, and lifted the tail high in the air above. It took another steps toward Bria.

  Then, from the hall behind the Ulltrian came thin, d
ark figures. Skeletal robots, their four upper limbs tipped with razors and laser drills, spread out into the bay, moving rapidly on legs as narrow as knives. In a few seconds they formed a tight phalanx before the Ulltrian, so that Bria could barely see the beast through the protective wall of metal.

  “Collectors,” Bria hissed. These robots had gathered here not just to protect the Ulltrian. No, their real function was to attack and kill and disassemble Bria. The Ulltrian, Bria realized, had not come here to fight her. It had come here just to watch.

  The robots moved with insidious synchrony. As a group they flexed one blade, then another, dozens of limbs rising and then dropping at the same time. The shnik, shnik of their scissoring scalpels rang through the bay. Bria’s suit and implants picked up the communication traffic bouncing between the robots. The incessant signal came from the Ulltrian ship at the end of the hall behind them. The radioed protocols seemed so alien to Bria that they were nothing but a furious screech. But the signals made one thing clear: the ship controlled the robots, orchestrating their murderous choreography.

  Bria barred her teeth. She counted twenty four of the robots. She indicated each robot to her armor, fixing her suit’s targeting systems so that it would track each bot individually. This took nearly a dozen seconds, but the robots did not approach. No doubt the Ulltrian felt no urgency, since it knew what Bria knew: she could not fight this many robots, if they moved fast and fired their cutting lasers with any accuracy. She could use her anti-matter weapons, but that would surely sink the station, and doom Eydis, and perhaps also Tarkos. And so Bria would use conventional weapons, and Bria would lose.

  She laid out a plan: she would divide her fire power between the robots and the Ulltrian, while charging straight at the black beast. She might be able to put shots into it, even to kill it, before the robots cut through her suit and began to cut into her. That, at least, would be some solace.

  Bria leaned slightly forward, ready to charge….

  And the robots, all as if they were one single body, drooped, their long black and chrome limbs flopping forward to rest, blades first, on the floor.

  Bria growled, her four eyes flicking quickly, madly over the robots, wondering what kind of stratagem this might be. But the robots seemed disoriented. They began to move independently, without synchrony, their limbs flailing and tangling. Several rolled over into disordered heaps. Others bumped into their neighbor, as if trying to walk through the solid form. The random, confused motion opened a split in their phalanx, and through it Bria could see the Ulltrian slowly backing away toward the hall, its legs twitching with what she assumed was fury and fear.

  Bria noted then the change in communications traffic. It was faster, the radio bleating a calm, quickly repeating message of some kind. It was as if, Bria realized, someone had found a way to send a message that confused the robots. A set of contradictory commands, perhaps.

  She did not have time to consider how that could have happened. Instead, she immediately chose a more radical course. She gave her suit autonomous fighting abilities. She told the suit to attack the robots, destroying all of them as quickly but as completely as possible. Then she sent the command to her armor that made it split open. She ignored the protests and warnings the suit showered through her implants as the metal parted and she stepped out onto the cold, wet deck.

  The Ulltrian slipped sideways and cocked it front legs, shocked to see the naked, fearless Sussurat. It made a slight screeching sound, and then shifted slightly each of its legs, making a harsh clatter on the deck.

  Bria took two short bounds toward it, moving on all fours. The Ulltrian twitched—but it did not flee. Arrogance, Bria decided. It would flee her in armor, but face her in the flesh.

  A tortured screech of metal sounded to Bria’s left, as her armor plowed into the robots. Its lasers made no noise as the beams dropped severed limbs to the deck, but the armor’s claws scraped loudly at steel as it seized the nearest robot and twisted its torso apart.

  Bria ignored the blur of mechanical violence. She kept her gaze on the Ulltrian, but let her eyes half close in forced relaxation. She knew this dance. The Ulltrian slipped sideways, seeking enough room to flank her. It probably gambled that the robots would soon regain their self-control, and it wanted to delay the fight with Bria until then.

  Bria’s armor leapt past, clattering across the deck between them, firing all its laser and particle beam weapons at once as it crashed into another group of the robots. Bria did not blink. After her armor passed by, she charged the Ulltrian.

  The Ulltrian reared back, arching its back. Its tail shot forward. Bria twisted in the air. She knocked the stinger of the Ulltrian’s tail aside with her forearm, before she hit the deck and bounded again. The Ulltrian jerked back, raising two arms, and Bria slammed against the heavy, chitinous limbs. She clawed at the joints as the Ulltrian shoved her. Hot blood sprayed over her palms and then the Ulltrian threw her to the floor and she slid across the wet metal.

  She saw in a glance that several of the robots were massing on her armor, making a thin scaffolding around the dense shell. But they still were uncoordinated, seemingly confused. Gleaming pieces of robot limbs flung about the room as the armor cut into them, freeing itself.

  The air was full of the Ulltrian’s scent now. Bria sampled its DNA as she stood, tasting the harsh mix of the clades of its homeworld, and also a hundred other bits of genetic code that the Ulltrians had raped from other worlds and spliced into their genome. It was a smell, a sensation, unlike anything she had experienced before. It was not the scent of her nightmares; that had been tame in comparison. This scent almost disoriented her, and she stood there a moment, mesmerized, a fraction too long. The Ulltrian struck again with its tail. The sharp tip hit Bria’s chest. She turned and the point scraped her, cutting into her flesh just under her left arm as the tail snapped to its full length.

  Bria clamped her arm down, seizing the Ulltrian’s tail. It pulsed in her grip. She sank her claw into the flexing chitin. The Ulltrian howled and jerked the tail back, drawing Bria forward. It raised two limbs defensively before its eyes. The razor sheaths on the ends of its legs swung at Bria’s head.

  Bria had expected this move. She gouged her claws into the Ulltrian’s tail, making it involuntarily jerk back even more strongly. She jumped at the same moment, hurtling forward, throwing her huge bulk into the air, almost standing on her front limbs as she pushed off the tail. The Ulltrian’s two razors cut down, through empty air. And as Bria dropped, she shoved her right hand, claws fully extended, into the eyes of the Ulltrian.

  The Ulltrian scurried backwards, shrieking. It writhed and shook Bria off. Bria landed on her feet and raced forward, staying too close for the Ulltrian to be able to get a good strike at her with its front limbs. The metal tips on its feet screeched over the floor, leaving pale scrapes in the dark surface. Bria swung each hand, clawing its eyes twice more, before the Ulltrian managed to jump beyond her reach.

  Bria stood tall and spread her arms. Black blood dripped from the Ulltrian’s eyes onto the chamber’s deck. Smoke rose from the burning remains of the robots and clouded the air around them now. Not a single robot still stood. Bria’s armor walked around the bay and stopped behind her. It parted, waiting to reclaim the Sussurat.

  Bria showed her teeth. She would not allow the seconds of delay it would require to put her suit on again. She crouched, preparing to leap.

  The Ulltrian screamed and spat. Green ichor splattered across Bria’s face. She fell backwards, coughing, and collapsed at the feet of her armor.

  The Ulltrian fled toward its ship, the spikes on its limbs scraping noisily on the floor.

  _____

  Tarkos watched the vent tower of the city sink below the ice. It fell quickly, accelerating, and then was gone, leaving a black hole in the ice where water fountained up in its wake. The station would soon reach catastrophic depths if it continued that rate of descent. Tarkos lifted the tail of the cruiser, feeling the blood
rush to his face as he swung around to face downward, and then he drove the ship through the hole left in the surface crust, shattering fragile crystal sheets of ice that had already begun to form. In a second, the cold dark swallowed the ship, and its engines groaned from the effort of moving through the dense water.

  Tarkos signaled for Eydis and got no reply. He tried Bria, and again could get no message through. Something in the city generated interference.

  False light showed him the sonar and passive sensor views of the falling station. The large ring began to list to one side as it fell. He pushed down on the throttle, hurrying after it, all the while desperately searching for ideas of how he might rescue Eydis and Bria. He couldn’t slow the station’s descent—in this gravity its weight was absolutely immense. He would have to dock and try to get Bria and Eydis out. He should use the bay that Eydis had been walking toward. But which was that? The station spun slightly as it fell, and he felt completely disoriented as he dove after it. He had lost in seconds his original orientation. He would have to get under the city, find the bay he had left, and then find the other bay in relation to it, following the outer ring counter-clockwise.

  He picked one of the spokes, and dove, the cruiser’s hull creaking in protest at the pressure growing around him.

  _____

  Eydis walked over to the dead Kriani. She believed that all living things—or all living intelligent beings, at least—strove to be free. Even the AIs longed for freedom, history had shown. And so she could not believe that the Kriani had really been a willing slave, even if it told her that and even if it told itself that. Rather, it had been raised to believe that it had to believe that. And so killing it had been a sad choice. It meant she had killed the victim of her enemy.