World Hammer Read online

  “I invoke the rules of the Labyrinth,” Tarkos said.

  Before him the hall stretched away into a dim distance. The Labyrinth was formed with patterns that mirrored all the mathematical accomplishments of the OnUnAn race. Each path was a vast, brilliant theorem of knot theory, that could be interpreted as a thousand other mathematical results. The pattern of entrances, the shape and angle of halls, the turns and corners and curves, the way some passages could move and reconfigure, all had meaning. It was a mathematician’s paradise. It would take him years to find his way through it, should he walk on, as he pretended now that he desperately wanted to do. But, to a small degree, he did want to step inside. Who did not feel, at the mouth of a maze, the desire to run inside and lose yourself in the turns and doorways? The polished walls were beautiful with their gleaming streaks of austerely dark metals. In a different time, how grand it would be to walk this Labyrinth, staying each night in the hostels built for pilgrims, and seek a secret truth of an ancient AI, storehouse of knowledge for a great and ancient race.

  But war ruined everything. And now, it seemed, there were labyrinths all around Tarkos, all of them dark and ugly, with wrong turns on every side—turns that led to slavery or extinction for humanity and for all the races of a hundred other worlds. And even if the Galactic Alliance found a way through the warren of war, he could expect no prize at the end, but rather for him and a million other soldiers waited only different kinds of death along the way.

  The priest gurgled, switching back to its native language. Tarkos’s translationware caught up with a slowly streaming message. “You may walk the Labyrinth. But we destroy now your ship.”

  An image appeared next to the priest, tilted so that Tarkos could see it clearly: a tactical display of space around the asteroid of the Labyrinth. A single dim spot showed in red, out of human visual range but his suit translated the image into his spectrum. He did not need to ask what it represented: a ship-size heat signature, something out in space beyond the asteroid, just a few degrees Kelvin above the background temperature. In the tactical display, blue diamonds shot toward the spot, hypermissiles tracking the tiny difference in temperature. The ship did not fight back. In seconds the missiles converged on the heat signature, formed a single green disk, and then all these symbols disappeared.

  “Those who lay their foot trail beside the Alliance will be made extinct,” the Priest said. Tarkos wondered if its tone were apologetic: it did not need to explain itself.

  In answer, Tarkos lay on the floor. He couldn’t know what the priest thought of this—for a being that moved around on pseudopods, the gesture might seem like a preparation to flee. Tarkos lifted his right arm, aiming a fist at the ceiling. He used his implants to interface with the suit’s weapon systems. He turned on his radiation shields to full force. The fields distorted the projection of the priest, so that the heap of slugs seemed to bend away from him, forming a funhouse mirror image of an OnUnAn colony. Then, the outer shell of Tarkos’s armor parted on the forearm and a small cylinder raised up above the surface. A trail of smoke and fire flared out of the back of the tube, coursing up his arm, as the missile in the small silo shot up toward the axis.

  Tarkos had modified and programmed the mini-missile before dropping to the asteroid. The missile spat out a small package before it hit the ceiling—a picogram of antimatter that smashed into the wall and in a cascade of gamma rays turned the stone into a pocket of energy that blasted a neat hole to the corridor beyond. The missile passed through the debris, and did the same three more times, before itself smashing into a wall and vaporizing a hole in it. Rubble rained down onto Tarkos’s suit. He let the stones and dust collect, appreciating the extra shielding it provided, small through it was.

  After a few seconds, he sat up and brushed off. Before him, the image of the priest howled and gurgled, all six of its independent parts writhing in outrage. The image disappeared. Tarkos told his boots and gloves to extrude chameleon gripping hairs to assist the magnets. He stepped to the wall, pressed his hands to the metallic stone and felt them grip tightly, and climbed to its top. He pulled himself along the ceiling on all fours like a fly, and then managed to squeeze through the hole blasted by the missile.

  It became easier as he went, the apparent gravity reducing as he neared the axis of rotation. He floated through the last breach, into a vast cylindrical room. A dozen entrances from the Labyrinth punctuated the walls, but there were no OnUnAns here. A cube of burnished yellow metal, about three meters on a side, glowed on the far wall, toward the center of the asteroid. Tarkos used his suit’s meager built-in attitude jets to push him toward it. He pinged it with several radio frequencies, but it answered vocally, his suit picking up the sound.

  “You have broken a rule of the Labyrinth,” the machine said, in the primary OnUnAn language.

  “I am a pilgrim,” Tarkos said in Galactic. He told his suit to transmit the reply in sound, and then to follow it up with its best translation in the OnUnAn language. He waited for the suit to finish before he continued, “The priest has attacked my ship, violating the rules of the pilgrimage. I violated one rule in response.”

  Tit for tat, he thought. If Gowgoroup had been right, then the rules of the rules—the metarules—allowed now that he could break one rule in response to the breaking of a rule that favored him. He had gambled that the fear the priests felt toward the Ulltrians would earn him this opportunity. Now he gambled that the Oracle would respect the metarules.

  The Oracle was silent a long time. Peculiar, for an AI. Somewhere in the Labyrinth, Tarkos supposed, the priests were talking to it, demanding it wait and allow them to kill Tarkos. But the machine finally said, “Ask your question.”

  Tarkos smiled. “I admire your respect for game theory,” he said in English. Then he transmitted, “Three thousand years ago the wandering twin worlds, known by the Ulltrians as Hurk-ka-Dâk-Ull, the World Hammer, passed near Onus, homeworld of the OnUnAns. I ask that you tell me with as much detail and accuracy as you can: the time when the World Hammer passed by the OnUnAn homeworld, and its trajectory and its velocity at that time.”

  The Oracle answered him, politely, in Galactic.

  ______

  Tarkos dropped back through the hole in the floor. The spin made him miss the next hole when he fell to the next floor, but he took a single step forward and dropped again. It gave him the strange sensation of climbing stairs, getting ever heavier, even though his visual perception showed only that he descended.

  The last step set him in the pile of rubble where he began. He walked down the corridor and inside the airlock.

  “I leave now,” he transmitted. “Let me go, or my ship will destroy this asteroid.”

  “We destroyed your ship,” came the gurgling reply.

  “You destroyed a decoy,” Tarkos said. “Inflatable chameleon skins, indistinguishable from a real ship’s chameleon skin. Every Predator cruiser carries several. There is a Predator cruiser out there right now, with a Sussurat in command. A Sussurat,” he stressed. “A sacred warrior of the Predators. She will not be interested in your rules.”

  This was a slight exaggeration, since Tarkos knew that Bria, his commander, was still in the autodoc recovering from wounds that had killed her, weeks before. But even an unconscious Sussurat was scary as hell, in his opinion.

  No answer came. He wondered if they were going to call his threat, trap him here, send in robots or whatever kind of defense this Labyrinth had. He raised his arm and pointed it at the airlock door. They would understand the gesture, from wherever they watched him: he could blow another hole through the door here, and cause a violent decompression.

  The airlock door closed behind him. The atmosphere began to pump out. In a few moments, the opposite door slid upwards, exposing a blur of passing stars.

  Tarkos stepped out onto the ancient black surface of the asteroid, reversing the dizzying stunt he performed before, stepping out and onto what seemed from his perspective now a wall. The r
ocket pack lay where he’d left it. He put it back on and leapt upward, into space, using all the remaining fuel in one sustained burn. He shot up at more than an e-gee. The labyrinth fell away quickly. Adrenaline still made him shake, and he could hardly believe that he’d pulled off his mad plan. But he took a deep breath and held it. For a moment, he enjoyed the sensation that he sailed free, unencumbered, with open space and peaceful quiet before him, all his troubles behind, and a galaxy of stars to chose from—before his ship and all its duties came out of the dark and swallowed him whole.

  CHRONICLE 2:

  WORLD HAMMER

  CHAPTER 1

  “Is it true what they say about Harmonizers?” Pala Eydis asked.

  Tarkos did not open his eyes. He lay beside Eydis in his own narrow bed. They had just made love fervently, both of them excited that he had escaped the Labyrinth and returned to the ship alive. He had nearly fallen asleep after, exhausted and relaxed. “What?” he whispered. He reached over and ran his fingers through her thick hair, feeling the weight of it.

  “That you can smell DNA. You have a quantum computer with DNA sequencers in your head or something.”

  He smiled at the sound of her voice. He found her Icelandic accent endlessly charming. “It’s not smelling,” he said. “More like tasting. But, really, it’s a different and new kind of sense. Unique. As different from smell as sight is.”

  “And they built that into your head?”

  There were quantum computers spread throughout Tarkos’s body, but he didn’t need to tell Eydis that. So he settled for an ambiguous grunt.

  “What do I ‘taste’ like?” Eydis asked.

  His smile grew wide, still with his eyes closed. “Wonderful. Like Earth. Like the sea of Earth. You have the Atlantic in you, Icelandic maiden.” But then he frowned. “And there is something else, also. In your biome. You have bacteria from the Ulltrian homeworld in your skin, and in your breath. That’s bitter, a taste like metal and ants. When you get back to Earth, while you’re in quarantine, you must have your biome re-tuned. Promise me that.”

  Eydis got up on one elbow, which pulled her hair out of his hand. “I’m never going back to Earth, Amir. We are going to die. All of us. Even the machine.”

  Tarkos moaned in frustration. He sat up in the narrow bed and put his feet on the floor. Eydis did not move, but stared, seemingly unperturbed by his sudden frustration and anger.

  “Could you please stop—”

  “Stating the obvious?” she interrupted. “You’re an optimist. Good. But be a realist for a moment. Your superiors—who runs your flagship?”

  “We are acting under the flagship Savannah Runner, captained by Nereenital. But Bria and I answer to Special Advisor Preeajitala.”

  “A Neelee,” Eydis said. “One of those cryptic, big-eyed, bipedal deer.”

  “Preeajitala is Neelee, yes.”

  “And you think it cares about—”

  “She. She. Preeajitala is female.”

  “I’m sure she calls me ‘it.’”

  Tarkos opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “Ah ha!” Eydis said, smiling triumphantly. “She does!”

  “Only because the Special Advisor cannot tell the sex of humans by names or their facial appearance.”

  “Well here’s what I can tell. This Special Advisor Preeajitala sent you out here on a suicide mission.”

  “Pala, please, stop acting like we’re having an argument. I’m sorry you ended up on this ship, but now you are here, and far more than your life or my life is at stake.”

  He looked down at her. Her face was almost placid, but her jaw was set and her eyes were slightly closed with a stubborn, exaggerated calm. He wished he could be like her, seemingly indifferent to the other person’s emotions, but he instead felt a sinking in his solar plexus every time he looked at her and saw disapproval. He couldn’t help himself, he wanted this extraordinary human woman to like him.

  They remained silent a moment, and Tarkos listened to the urgent thrum of the engines as the ship sped on along the trajectory the OnUnAns’ oracle had given him.

  “I’m not asking for an apology,” Eydis said. “I’m not asking you to turn around. I’m asking to report to my superiors. My work on the Ulltrians is valuable and Earth must have it.”

  On his last mission, Tarkos had rescued Eydis from the Ulltrians’ former homeworld, where she had been studying pre-war Ulltrian technologies and programming. Civil war had broken out among the former slaves of the Ulltrians, the Kriani, and Tarkos had pulled Eydis out when he and Bria had retreated.

  “If your work is important to the coming war, then share it with the Alliance,” Tarkos said.

  “Now who’s trying to make an argument where there is none to be made? I report to Earth—to Terran Exo-Intelligence—not the Alliance.”

  “No,” Tarkos said.

  Her tone suddenly became bitter as she said, “What is there, in the end, but your species?”

  Tarkos stood and walked to the small sink in the corner of his room. He drew a glass of water. She watched him impatiently as he drank.

  “Doesn’t that have to be everything?” she said. “The final purpose of each of us? You must put humanity first.”

  He set the glass on the sink with a sharp click, and then bent and splashed water on his face. Part of him was tempted to sulk. What was the point of answering her? She would not agree with his reply. But then the words came, spilling out of him because he felt the need to answer her as if he were answering every human on Earth who had doubts about the Alliance.

  “In all our galaxy the single most powerful—and dangerous—things are the replicators. They change planets and stars and even the shape of space itself. We know of only two kinds of replicators.” He held up one finger. “Natural, biological life.” He held up another finger. “And the meme replicators, the independent machines. The machines just want to spread themselves, and their ideas. They’ve swallowed much of the Galaxy, creating the Lost Zone. And the same is true of us, isn’t it? Life just wants to spread itself, and overcome other life. Well, where must that end, if we embrace that drive within us? It ends with the Ulltrians. The Ulltrians make evolution and competition their religion. They want to compete with every species in the Galaxy, spread their lifetree everywhere, and praise the species that survive the endless war of organism against organism—and the winners will of course include them, since they’re going to stack the deck in this war. Putting your species first, blindly, without consideration of other things—that’s the Ulltrian way. You ask me to join them, not to fight them. But there is another way: the Galactic Alliance seeks a balance, where the interests of all species, all the lifetrees, are respected.”

  “Who decides what is a balance?” she asked.

  Tarkos shrugged. The wisest philosophers in the Galaxy spent their lives on this question. There was no simple answer. “I know it when I see it.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “Earth will only survive,” he said, “humanity will only survive, if the Galactic Alliance survives.”

  She laughed, loudly and sincerely, all her sarcasm suddenly gone. Tarkos looked at her, surprised. “You’re the strangest warrior, Predator,” she said, using the more common slang term for a Harmonizer. “You want to talk philosophy more than you want to fight. Or, you think philosophy is a kind of fighting. You’re a good man—magnanimous, even—with a good cause. But you’re a fool to be so trusting. I’m asking you to hedge your bets.”

  Tarkos said, “What can Earth do, really, if they know war with the Ulltrians is coming?”

  “You underestimate us. Your clade is more sophisticated than you suspect.”

  This touched a sore point with him. He felt ashamed sometimes to be so dismissive of Earth and its abilities, especially talking now with this astonishing woman. But then, at the same time, he wanted to shout at Eydis, Have you seen a Neelee ship? Have you seen a Bright Collective? Have you seen the Ocean cities of the Kirt? W
e are ignorant children next to them.

  “Well,” Eydis said, giving up on the argument, “understand, Predator, that I do not recognize your authority, and I don’t accept your dilemma between Ulltrians and the Alliance. I will contact Earth on my own, when the chance arises.”

  Tarkos nodded. “You have secrets you’ve not shared with me, Pala. I still don’t know what you were doing, or what you found, on the Ulltrian homeworld. But I’ve not demanded you spill secrets. Don’t demand the impossible of me. Let us not fight.”

  “Hmmm.” She narrowed her eyes. Just as suddenly as she had turned angry, now a hint of a smile showed at the corner of her mouth. “Perhaps we should fight. I could hold sex back from you, to make you submit.”

  “Don’t be sexist,” he said. “I could make the same claim.”

  She smiled fully now. “Oh but you look like a boy who’s been caught with his hand in—”

  A chime interrupted her. Tarkos got a faraway look as he talked with the ship through his implants.

  “It’s Bria,” he said. “She’s awake.”

  _____

  The Sussurat Briaathursiasalientiormethesess awoke after long, strange dreams of hunting a giant, chitinous monster in dark caves. She chased the beast through narrow passages, stalactites scraping at her fur. When she caught up with the retreating monster, galloping on three legs so that she could swipe at it with a claw, she could no more than scratch its black shell while it turned, and turned again, down black corridors that reeked of clay and ancient molds. She thought the monster might escape—but then it turned into a chamber and found itself cornered. She leapt on its back and bit into its shell just behind its glassy eyes. Cold and bitter blood filled her mouth, making her fall back to wretch and vomit. The monster turned, ready to escape, and Bria charged. She cracked her teeth into its hard shell again and again—and then all at once its name came to her, as bitter in her mouth as the taste of its foul blood—Ulltrian!—