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  But she’d had no time to reason with the Kriani. At least this way its death was quick, instead of the painful death of an Ulltrian parasite eating its guts.

  Beside the Kriani the robot lay in a spiky heap, still paralyzed by the systems command attack that she had launched. She had not seen this kind of robot before, and she knew the ancient Ulltrians that she had studied on Dâk-Ull had not used such robots. A new design, then. It twitched on the deck. She aimed the laser at the largest portion of the robot’s body, the long spine that joined the limbs, and she cut into it. The weapon Tarkos had given her, though compact, proved very powerful. The robot fell into halves that showered sparks as they parted. The two pieces lay still.

  She hefted the laser in admiration. There was nothing like it on Earth. It no doubt it contained almost enough intelligence to qualify as an AI; Tarkos had communicated for a long while with the weapon, holding it in his hand with his eyes closed, before he had given it to her. It would work only for her now, he had said. A clever gun.

  She climbed the ramp into the ship, moving carefully, cautiously, holding the laser out.

  The ramp led up to a single control room, just like in the space gnasher she had seen on Dâk-Ull—only empty, the flat Ulltrian saddle stretched out before the controls without a pilot. Eydis turned in place. An open door behind led into a storage room that held neat rows of glass cubes containing some kind of organic sample. But nothing else. No robots, no Kriani. No Ulltrian.

  Eydis nodded her head in satisfaction. “You’re too cocky,” she said aloud. “Five thousand years have passed, and you’re still using the same ship design. You think it’s going to be easy. You don’t expect surprises. Surprises like humans who can hack.”

  She straddled the long pilot’s seat, bent forward, and pulled from a pocket of her suit a metal tube, tipped with the crystal she had taken from the crashed ship she had unearthed on Dâk-Ull. Behind the crystal, she’d built an interface that could communicate with her own implants. She leaned forward till her chest rested on the bench and she could touch the floor. She pressed the crystal down into the command slot, in the floor just at the base of the controls.

  The ship shuddered. After a pause, messages streamed into her vision, falling like bright symbolic rain through virtual command spaces. She smiled, and, after a moment’s effort, managed to tell the ship to start its engines.

  It hummed alive, obedient to her command.

  _____

  Bria could not see. An acid burned her eyes, and though she tried with cruel determination, she could not force her lids open against the pain. Her sequencer throbbed like a headache, overwhelmed with viral and bacterial information, giving Bria a sensation like she’d shoved her face into a sewer. She forced herself to calm enough to attend to the sequencer’s data, struggling to identify what burned her eyes and skin, what seared her lungs. If she could find the chemical agent, she could generate a counter protein, something to bind with it.

  But she would pass out before that happened. It seemed the room began to tilt. She rolled across the floor. A creak and then a hiss of water sounded out nearby.

  No, she realized. The station really had tilted. It leaned, as it sank into the depths. A cold mist of seawater fell down on her: the hatch in the floor had sprung a leak.

  Bria crawled toward the sound of hissing water. She pushed aside the hot metal parts of robots that her suit had shredded, her feet slipping on the wet floor. In a moment, she set a hand in a violent stream of salty water, shooting up through a failed seam in the chamber’s hatch. She pressed her face into the fountain, the painful spray scouring her fur and the skin underneath.

  The worst of the burning washed away, leaving only a harsh scalding across her face. Then, with a feeling like a muscle relaxing, her quantum computer found a counter protein for the poison that scalded her eyes. Her body began to manufacture the molecule. The burning receded, leaving only a dull throb in its wake. She stood and forced her eyes open and looked down into the spray. The salty blast scratched at her eyes and she blinked and staggered back.

  She could see. She could breathe.

  Bria called her armor and it rushed forward to close around her, pressing her cold wet fur against her skin. She hardly noticed the discomfort. When the armor locked closed, she turned in a fluid leap and ran after the Ulltrian, following the trail of black drops of blood.

  _____

  The Ulltrian ship’s mind stretched around Eydis like a labyrinth. The systems were complex, intertwined, redundant but so interdependent that their functional relations seemed snarled. She had become Earth’s single greatest expert on Ulltrian designs, and still their creations looked to her like a heap of knotted data structures—what Earth coders called “spaghetti code”: an unstructured, or too-complex, tangle of cross-references and multiply nested-functions. She tried to stay calm and reason through the nonlinear command structure as she felt the ship lean to one side. For a second she thought the ship had levitated and then tilted, but a quick glance down the open hatch showed her the rear landing gear firmly down on the black deck. That meant only one thing: the whole station leaned now, the beginning of a long slow tumble into the crushing dark.

  She would need to get the ship out of the station quickly, but thinking about the urgency could only distract her. She took a deep breath, tried to ignore how uncomfortable her suit had become in the last minutes as she sweat furiously with fear and anxiety in its tight skin, and she focused her mind on the symbols and structures her own interpretive interface created out of the Ulltrian code. She shut down every unnecessary ship system she could, searching for the controls for the weapons, the radios, navigation. She felt that she crawled along that dark tunnel again, back on Dâk-Ull, trying to find the way to the center of the ship.

  Yet some of these structures she recognized. After a minute, huge parts of the programming suddenly became familiar to her. She discerned how to tell the the ship to rise up a meter, and felt with satisfaction the world right itself as the ship lifted slightly, leveling as it levitated off the tilting floor.

  She smiled. “I’m flying a space gnasher,” she said in English. “I’m smarter than the average Galactic.”

  “Eydis,” a voice growled in her suit, speaking Galactic.

  “Commander?” she replied. She frowned. Her shut down commands, broadcasted through the station, had generated a lot of interference. She had not even gotten a status update from Bria’s suit since she’d launched the attack. Bria must be near, to finally break through the noise.

  “Ulltrian comes toward you,” the Sussurat growled.

  “Oh,” Eydis said. She turned.

  A black blur of gleaming chitin leapt in a bound to the ramp and scrambled toward her.

  The code structures in her visual field started to shrink and change shape, drawn away from her, wrested from her control by the Ulltrian. The sight distracted her, and she hesitated, reflexively trying to wrest control back. It caused a second of delay, while she just stared at the Ulltrian. It climbed half way into the ship before she raised the laser that Tarkos had given her. The Ulltrian slapped it aside with a foreleg, so hard that the weapon went skittering across the controls and Eydis felt a sharp snap as her wrist broke.

  The Ulltrian crowded into the cockpit, suddenly hulking over her. Its carapace gleamed, wet with blood. A huge gouge across its eyes dripped black fluid onto her suit as it leaned forward, screeching through its narrow black mouth. The Ulltrian had only one eye unharmed. The single glossy globe focussed upon her now, sizing her up in its fury.

  An Ulltrian, her mind screamed. All those years she had studied them, wondered about them, feared them, and been glad they were extinct. And now, alone, she faced one.

  The Ulltrian stabbed its tail forward and hit Eydis in the chest. Her suit’s tough hide did not allow the sharp tip to penetrate, but the flexible material bent with the blow, gouging into her skin. She felt ribs crack. Her heart skipped, bruised by the impact. The Ulltrian pres
sed forward, pushing her against the controls, pinning her down. Her vision went black for one long beat—another skip of her heart. She coughed, which sent agonizing pain through her chest.

  She raised her left hand and pointed it at the Ulltrian, fingers extended. The embedded weapon in her arm was intended only for desperate, last resort measures, since it would do serious damage to her body. The laser in her forearm would blow away the two middle fingers in her left hand. She had always imagined that she would never use such a weapon. She had imagined being an old, old woman in Iceland, surrounded by grandchildren, and telling them stories of her adventures, and showing them her arm, with its new bones. She would explain how the old bones had been carved out and filled with a gun that she never fired.

  But that possible life died away now. Those children evaporated like dreams, dipping into darkness like the winter sun.

  She fired.

  There was no pain. Nerve deadeners had been built into the firing controls, and to her surprise they worked. The fingers of her suit’s glove exploded, and simultaneously, a hot explosion of fluid gushed from the last eye of Ulltrian.

  It fell back, screaming, a sound like knives scraping over knives. Its limbs flailed, whipping at the air, the steel tips at each limb’s end cutting into the controls, the wall panels, the cloth of the command couch. The Ulltrian whacked, whacked its tail against the ceiling, striking out blindly, confused by its own rage.

  Eydis slid to the floor, wretching. Blood splashed on her visor and rolled wet and hot over her chin. She was afraid to look at her left hand; it burned now with a hot, cruel searing. So much for the nerve deadeners, she thought.

  Something moved in the doorway.

  “Bria?” she whispered. The effort to speak caused another round of agonized coughing. When her vision cleared, she saw a metal limb reach up over the chair. The top of the robot she had cut in half on the deck below now climbed up onto the control seat before her, pulling itself along with the blades of its forelimbs.

  She looked around for the laser that Tarkos had given her.

  Too late. The robot leapt forward, and its lasers cut into her suit as the limbs tore the fabric away. Eydis screamed, a howl of rage and defiance, as the robot cut into her body.

  CHAPTER 10

  When Bria rounded the hallway of the outer ring and first saw the hexagonal door to the bay, water rushed forward and hit her in a wave. She had run awkwardly on the sloping floor of the ever-more-listing station, and the icy current knocked her back and she rolled twice. She found her footing and pushed on as best she could, breasting through the dark current. After a few steps she could see into the bay, through the rivulets of water streaming off her helmet. The Ulltrian ship hovered above the water that surged across the deck. Beside it, the bay doors had opened, and water gushed through in a dark mound. The weight of the water, Bria realized, would accelerate the listing of the station, as massive liquid filled first this bay and then the hallways.

  Bria growled and clawed at the floor and the nearby wall, forcing herself forward more quickly. As she came into the bay, the ship slipped sideways, over the bay door, and dropped into the water with a huge splash. The wake of the ship crested over Bria and tumbled her backwards. She stayed under the water. The floor of the bay buckled, the strange moveable surface wrinkling into folds, damaged by the pressure or the water. Bria seized onto one of the folds. She clawed, hand over hand, toward the bay doors, gripping handfuls of the flooring as she went. In a few moments she managed to thrust herself out into the opening.

  The great mass of her body and armor struggled against the rising current, but then she drifted into the eddy of the Ulltrian ship, which still maneuvered carefully to get free of the bay doors. Bria dropped between two of the ship’s probability flanges. She seized one flange and pulled the grappling line from her suit. She wrapped the line around the metal spire twice, tying herself to the ship. She puts her arms around the flange and locked the powered gloves together. Then the ship pulled free of the station, shifted sideways, and headed for the surface.

  Bria was caught in a furious current as the ship raced through the dense water. Her suit shuddered and squeezed against her, trembling and jerking. She crouched down, preparing for the impact with the frozen crust of the sea.

  _____

  Tarkos had just managed to position the cruiser under the higher edge of the sinking station when he received telemetry from Eydis’s suit and Bria’s armor. He stared in shock at the first piece of data.

  Eydis’s suit showed no vital signs. He stared, holding his breath.

  Pala was dead.

  A cold rush went through him as his blood seemed to drain away. He stopped breathing. Hot bile in the back of his throat made him realize he might vomit in his suit.

  But no. No. Maybe not. Eydis’s suit also showed no data of any kind. It showed not just a low body temperature, but an interior temperature that matched its exterior. And the suit’s integrity was destroyed: it had suffered multiple lacerations, the helmet and the oxygen tanks had been removed. “It’s a damaged suit,” he told himself, trying to get calm. “It’s a damaged suit. Pala will be fine. She’s out of it. She’s not wearing it.”

  But the next thought that came to him filled him with dread. He knew what to do, but he did not want to do it. Not letting his fear stay his hand, he told Pala’s suit to reel back its records. In a few seconds he found the event that damaged the suit, indicated by a cascading series of failures. And right in the middle of the tumble of warnings, a long string of vitals reports on Pala went red. Her heartbeat spiked wildly, skipped… and then stopped.

  She had died. Right there, in the suit. She had died.

  He stared at the controls, numb, frozen. The cruiser drifted through black seas, falling now like this last Ulltrian city station, falling into the fatal deep of this graveyard planet.

  His ship chimed a warning notice: another ship’s engine fields were in close proximity. An image resolved in his tactical reconstruction: the barbed Ulltrian ship. Its location, he realized, matched that of Bria and Pala’s suit.

  Tarkos’s training took over. Numb, feeling that he watched himself work from a distance, he called to his commander. “Bria? Bria, I’ve got a ping of your suit. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in the Ulltrian ship?”

  “On it.”

  Tarkos considered this in silence. On it? Bria had jumped on the escaping ship?

  “Is Pala’s….” He couldn’t bring himself to say, corpse. “Is Pala with you?” he asked. “Her suit’s locator puts her near you.”

  “In ship.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Tarkos said. He drove the cruiser through the gap in two of the spokes of the station, passing right through it as he rose in pursuit. He accelerated behind the Ulltrian ship, following it toward the surface.

  “Fire,” Bria told him. “When above ice. Shoot ship.”

  “Uh… Commander, are you sure?”

  “Shoot.”

  Tarkos frowned. Part of him thrilled at the order: this Ulltrian had played with them like mice in a maze. Bria and he were not going to let it get free. He would bring that ship down. But how could he do it without killing his commander? He activated all the tactical controls, furiously considering his options, as he targeted each of the cruiser’s weapons systems on the Ulltrian’s engines.

  _____

  Eydis returned to consciousness aware of nothing but pain. She tried to scream, but her mouth felt compressed shut. She tried to move her jaw, her lips, but they felt… absent. And she heard nothing. She could not open her eyes. She willed her arms to thrash and felt no resistance in response. It was like one of those night terrors, where you half awake from a dream and cannot move, no matter how hard you try. Only, in this terror, there was pain. Terrible, overwhelming pain. It seemed every part of her body hurt, as if she had been cut everywhere all at once.

  Several minutes of delirious agony passed before s
he remembered the emergency options built into her implants. She sent the command to flood her body with painkillers, and, mercifully, it worked. Like a wave washing over her, numbness spread.

  She could, for a moment, think.

  What had happened? The robot had attacked her, she had felt horrible cuts lacerating her flesh, and then she lost consciousness. Right now, she might be in some kind of sensory deprivation environment. But if that were so, she would feel more tactile sensations. So what had happened to her? The robot must have—the thought horrified her—shunted her brain, bypassed and isolated her nerves. It had not, however, seemed to harm her brain, or her quantum computational implants.

  That reminded her of her own extensive embedded systems, and she turned her attention to them. She sensed something then: the systems of the Ulltrian ship, the space gnasher, that surrounded her. The ship’s many independent parts talked to each other quickly, urgently. She reached out by radio and accessed the interfaces she had used before. Her quantum computer clasped with the systems out of reflex. The Ulltrian, blind and flying the ship using its own implants, had not removed her quantum key. She felt the data pour through her, alien but much of it now familiar.

  Another sensation came to her next: familiar radio signals. Three signals: her suit, and another suit, and the cruiser. These radios broadcast encrypted protocols, but she ran back through her buffers and found the security keys her suit had used, something she had discerned when first putting the suit on. She used these to link with the suit’s transmitter.

  “Commander,” she said. Only she didn’t say it. She willed it through her radio implant, which was little more than a teep chip of the commercial kind already widely available on Earth.