World Hammer Read online

  And she awoke.

  Shimmering glass arched over her face, its surface bright with data that faded as her ragged, nightmare-excited breath fogged. She focused through the glass, to look beyond it. Above her stretched metal and lights, cables and conduits. The space slowly became familiar. That was the metal ceiling of the cruiser. She was not on her home world. She was not in any cave. She lay in the autodoc.

  “Report,” she croaked. Her throat barely worked: it made an incomprehensible sound. She tried her implants, and the autodoc immediately downloaded a full case history into her head.

  She had died from blood loss, caused by a wound to the primary artery of her left leg. She’d been put into the autodoc already dead. Brain damage had been minimized by her implants, but still the autodoc had taken a dozen days to reconstruct the neural pathways from her atrophied, oxygen-starved neurons.

  She blinked, thinking this through, trying to remember. Where had she been?

  The Well of Furies.

  She’d been on the Well of Furies. Homeworld of the Ulltrians, before the Ulltrians had fled it, eons before. She’d had a crew of five: herself, the human Tarkos, the Kirt astronomer Ki’Ki’Tilish and the old Kirt AI Tiklik’al’Takas, and the OnUnAn ambassador Gowgoroup. The OnUnAn had killed Ki’Ki’Tilish. Bria had pursued the OnUnAn, and it had planted a bomb that drove shrapnel through Bria’s leg. She remembered walking for a bit, till she collapsed from blood loss. And after that, she remember nothing.

  After that, she’d been dead.

  Bria touched the low glass. It silently lifted away and then slipped back into the wall. She swung her feet over the edge of the autodoc. A wave of throbbing pain went through her head, making her skull seem ready to burst. The autodoc, still wired to her thigh, shot her with painkillers. She growled and pulled the IV hose and tossed it aside. She stood, wobbling, then dropped to all fours to keep her balance.

  Tarkos clambered down the steep ladder into the cruiser, descending from the starsleeve, the ship that carried the cruiser between stars. He stopped a pace away. The human showed his teeth, but his eyes narrowed, and the sad little patches of scruffy fur above his two small eyes pressed together. Bria concentrated, her thoughts coming slow. What did this human expression mean? Teeth, upcurving lips, furrowed little brows?

  She remembered now: if the corners of the lips turned toward the eyes, then the teeth were shown in the human expression of happiness or joy or just pleasant submission. Smile, in his language. And the furrowed brow was a sign of concern. So: the human showed joy to see her alive, but concern over her condition. That was appropriate.

  The room filled with the pungent, sharp smell of humans. The human woman was not there, but her smell was all over Tarkos. Bria sat back on her haunches, and Tarkos took a step forward. He seemed, Bria realized with alarm, to want to embrace her. But he stopped a pace away.

  “Welcome back from the dead, Commander.”

  “Where?” she croaked.

  “We have passed through and beyond OnUnAn space.”

  Bria lowered her head close to him, till her breath blew hot against Tarkos’s face.

  “Why?”

  “The data we got on the Ulltrian Homeworld, and some additional data I got from the OnUnAns, reveal that the World Hammer is just past OnUnAn space. I reported to the Savannah Runner, but then set course for the World Hammer.”

  “Distance?”

  “The World Hammer is about six e-days—uh, about five Sussurat days—from current location. Subjective ship time.”

  Bria ran a claw over her face. “Crew?”

  “Three of the six parts of Gowgoroup survived, and are confined to quarters. And…” He gestured upwards, toward human quarters in the starsleeve, “and Pala Eydis is well.”

  “AI?”

  “Tiklik’al’Takas is on the ship, mostly unharmed.”

  Bria blinked, all the gesture she felt capable of. A terrible weariness settled on her. She wanted to be alone. It was too much. She had been dead and, and….

  The human stepped over to the autodoc and pressed a panel. It sprung open and he reached inside, to draw out a black chain: the necklace Bria always wore. Involuntarily she touched her throat, only then noticing its absence.

  “I’m sorry, Commander,” Tarkos said. “This fell off you when I struggled to get you into the autodoc. I didn’t see it and I stepped on it in my armor.” He held it out. The small box on the chain was broken open, and through a crack Bria could see the first fangs and the tuft of fur she had saved to make this keepsake of her lost daughter.

  Bria seized the chain. Her head reeled. She almost toppled over. Tarkos held out his arms to help her, but she found her balance and stepped back, away from his embrace.

  She lurched toward the steep stairs, then had to reach and grab the rail to catch herself in the middle of a fall. She steeled her resolve. Enough of being dead or ill. Favoring her left leg, which felt tight and weak, she climbed up and out of the cruiser and into the bridge of the starsleeve. Tarkos followed.

  Tarkos had left the wall of the bridge projecting a forward view. Bria stared out at the onrushing suns, strange stars as far from her homeworld Sussurat as they were from Tarkos’s sun. She looked a long while, as if considering them.

  “Prepare report,” she told Tarkos. He moved his head, making it totter on its perilously thin neck. This means agreement, she remembered. Good. The human looked surprised, his eyes bulging and white, when she turned and left him alone on the bridge.

  In the hall, she saw a dark shape near her own quarters: Tiklik’al’Takas, the Kirt AI that travelled with them as their expert in wandering planets. Behind it, the other human stood. The human lifted an arm in greeting. The black robot shifted slightly on its four thin limbs, but made no other sign. Bria ignored them both and pushed into her room.

  She turned in place, looking around, as if expecting to find some answer in the barren little cubicle. When the door closed, and she knew she could not be heard, she roared.

  She had been dead. She had been dead.

  All her adult life, she had hoped that she would meet her oldest daughter, her most beloved child, Treuntilliasussarius, in death. Treunti’s dark fur would glisten in the sun of the afterworld. Her scent would fill and overwhelm Bria’s nostrils. They would finally be together again.

  And even if all the old legends of the afterlife were foolish dreams of her species’ youth, as Bria had in fact always believed, she still had hoped that she would at least dream of her daughter, as the last of her mind died. She had hoped that, as she faded into oblivion, she would enjoy the precious delusion that Treuntilliasussarius was with her again.

  But no. She had not dreamed of the daughter she lost. She had not dreamed of Truenti’s gray fur or her flashing sea-green eyes or her wild, life-affirming scent.

  Instead, she had dreamed of the filthy Ulltrians. She had dreamed of their putrid blood in her mouth as she gnawed them to death.

  The Ulltrians had killed her daughter, five thousand years after their defeat, with a disease they left on Sussurat. And now the Ulltrians had infected Bria’s nightmares, and took her daughter even from her dreams.

  Bria squeezed the necklace in her huge fist. She growled, a throaty whisper in her homeworld’s language. She swore again what she’d sworn a hundred times before: she would have her revenge. For the world Sussurat, for the Alliance, for the balance of all life, and for her dead daughter. She would destroy the Ulltrians. She would kill them all.

  _____

  When Tarkos left Eydis alone, hurrying to meet his commander as the Sussurat rose from the autodoc, Pala Eydis dressed and walked out into the hall.

  Tiklik’al’Takas, the ancient Kirt robot, stood near the door. It stood on three legs, holding its fourth leg in the air, unmoving, seeming to point at nothing. The robot had lost three of its six legs on their last mission; and it appeared to find the manufactury of the starsleeve inadequate, for it had forged only a single replacement, and walk
ed now on four limbs.

  The robot preferred to spend its hours traversing the single U-shaped hall of the starsleeve with glacial slowness. The slow time was an eery habit the robot had formed during its long years of traveling in deep space, when in an earlier career it had been a probe searching for wandering planets. The sight always unnerved Eydis—and she knew it had the same effect on Tarkos—since the creature moved so slowly that it seemed sinister and unnatural. You could almost mistake it for a sculpture, there in the middle of the hallway, but then, out of the corner of your eye, you would sense, more than see, that it moved.

  If she spoke to it, it would drop into real time to answer her, and that seemed somehow an intrusion, like waking the thing from a slumber. But the short span of time remaining to them all impelled her to talk to it anyway.

  “Tiklik,” she said, almost whispering. She watched as the tip of the raised leg moved down, accelerating until it touched the floor. “I hear you human Pala Eydis.”

  “When we were talking last, you said you have at least a thousand q-bits of quantum computation capacity, along with the linear bounded automata in you, am I right?”

  “That is correct. You also have several hundred q-bits of quantum computational capacity in your body,” the robot observed. “There are rare earth elements throughout you. They bend magnetic fields as you pass. It reminds me of the times I passed iron-core worlds.”

  “And you have a hyperradio, built into you still, don’t you?” she asked.

  “My hyperradio is integrated with my primary linear bounded automaton. It could not be removed.”

  “I need to send a message to Earth, Tiklik. Seven terabytes. It must be shielded and encrypted. It must be sent several times—say, three times—to ensure transmission. Tightest beam possible.”

  “That is a very large energy cost and would require several hundred standard time units,” Tiklik said.

  “If you could do that, Tiklik, I could help you. You could become a citizen of Earth, and we would ensure that you were returned to space.”

  The robot seemed to be considering it, but then from around the bend of the hall came the hulking form of the Sussurat commander. Eydis looked at the huge and dangerous creature, like a gray polar bear with four eyes. Eydis raised a single hand in a nervous wave. The Sussurat ignored them both and pushed into its quarters.

  “Think of what I have said, Tiklik’al’Takas,” Eydis said. “Later, we can discuss this more.” She walked to her quarters, knowing the robot expected no goodbye.

  CHAPTER 2

  They turned off the probability drive five days later, falling back into actual space at one percent c, and then kept the ship under a quarter e-gee acceleration.

  Bria had been, if such a thing were possible, even more reticent than usual while they traveled. Tarkos did not hear her voice again until they dropped into space and his commander ordered them all into spacesuits and onto the bridge. Now Tarkos and Bria sat side by side in full Predator armor, while behind them Eydis stood in a simple vacuum suit, helmet under her arm. The robot Tiklik’al’Takas crouched near the door, its black legs folded neatly at its sides. In its quarters, now transformed into a prison cell, the three remaining parts of Gowgoroup were given an emergency decompression shelter—little more than an airtight sack with its own atmosphere supply.

  “There?” Bria growled at the robot. She had allowed Tiklik access to passive sensors of the starsleeve, and the Kirt-built AI shifted from side to side, a praying mantis testing the wind, as it considered the inputs.

  “There are two occlusions zero, zero, zero degrees ahead, approximately ten to the ten standard units distant,” the robot finally said.

  “Right on target,” Tarkos said. “The OnUnAn Oracle did not lie.” And, he thought, we’ve been in actual space for a few minutes and we’re still alive. That bodes well.

  “But how do you know it is the World Hammer?” Eydis said.

  “My original purpose was to explore a starless volume of space of four cubic k-light-years, seeking to locate drifting sunless planets,” Tiklik said. “Eight hundred others like me did the same. Our data indicate that there is a mean average of no more than one sunless planet per thirty cubic light-k-years of space. The probability of finding a sunless planet here, at random, is insignificant. The probability of finding a pair of appropriate mass is incomputably small.”

  Bria grunted agreement. Then she said, “Leave starsleeve here. Disperse probes. Take cruiser to World Hammer.”

  “Alright,” Eydis said in English, before raising her voice and saying, in careful, slow Galactic. “I alone among us know the Ulltrian language and their history. I demand that my duty to serve Earth and my duty to serve the Galactic Alliance be respected, and that I be allowed to accompany you to the World Hammer.”

  Tarkos looked at her in surprise. Eydis had made an expert appeal: Bria could not deny a sentient being its request to serve the cause.

  Bria growled but did not object. Eydis bowed her head slightly, a small gesture of thanks. She ignored Tarkos as he glared pointedly at her, trying to make his admonition clear. He had hoped and expected that Eydis would stay on the starsleeve, in a safely distant orbit. She would have some chance to survive then.

  “I consume no resources, have insignificant mass, and might also provide useful assistance,” Tiklik began.

  Bria opened her mouth to answer, but a chime sounded in Tarkos’s head, a note from the ship.

  “Incoming signal,” Tarkos said, his voice betraying worry. A signal out here was a bad sign. If they were lucky, it just was local comm traffic. But it could mean they had been spotted and signals were being sent around as a result. He opened operational data in his mental workspace, but also turned to the hard controls of the bridge and had the data take over the screen. “It’s weak. So weak that it may have been running since we came into actual space and the ship only just sorted it out.”

  “Why would they transmit anything?” Eydis asked. “They’re trying to hide, right?”

  “The ship’s communication protocols say it’s a package,” Tarkos said. “It appears to be algorithmic information.”

  “You mean it can run on a Turing-capable machine, or a Q-computer?” Eydis asked.

  Tarkos nodded. “But so far as the ship can tell right now, it could be anything. An interactive message. A greetings protocol. A virus.”

  A virus.

  Both Tarkos and Bria turned their heads at the same time and looked at Tiklik. “Stop integrating with the passive sensors,” Tarkos told the AI.

  Tiklik did not answer. The robot’s limbs trembled, as if it strained under a weight. It slowly rose, its torso now vibrating. Small ports on the robot’s flank opened and closed, emitting a blue light.

  “Disconnect from the passive sensors,” Tarkos told it again, standing. He waved to Eydis, indicating she should step away from the robot.

  The AI struck out with two of its long, black legs. One hit Eydis and flung her aside. The other knocked Tarkos back into his seat. Bria sent the command for the port door to close, but Tiklik leapt backwards through the narrow crack before the door shut.

  Tarkos shouted in frustration. Bria said, “Transmitting.”

  “What?” But Tarkos saw the information stream now through his own mental workspace: Tiklik transmitted some code. The signal would be faint, coming as it did from inside the starsleeve. But the robot was running for the port airlock. If it got into space, it could surely pinpoint their location for the Ulltrians. The AI was about to kill them.

  _____

  Tarkos scraped through the doorway, not waiting for it to open all the way. The starsleeve was a small ship, with a single u-shaped hall that met at the bridge. The robot was already out of site, around the hallway’s bend.

  As he ran for the airlock, Tarkos grabbed the small box which clung to the right hip of his armor. It opened at his request, emanating a bright, flickering light. He reached inside and pulled out a device shaped like a D, the
straight part of which pointed away from him and which held a seething, gelatinous glob of sparking, hissing plasma. The device trembled in his hand, a blue-white glare blazing from its outer face. Holding it was like holding a lightning bolt.

  “Put that away!” a voice shouted in his helmet. Pala Eydis.

  He turned and found his fellow human two paces behind, running after him. She wore her spacesuit but in her rush had left her helmet on the bridge. “You’ll destroy Tiklik if you touch him with that coherent plasma bolus. You might even hurt your own ship, if Tiklik then touches a wall.”

  They rounded the bend. Three meters before them, Tiklik clung to the wall by the airlock, two of its arms thrust through a panel that it had broken open. Bria had locked the airlock doors, but the robot tore at the control cables in a fury, trying to force a local manual override. The door slipped open and the robot scurried inside, a spider hurrying into a hole. Tarkos caught up to the airlock just as Bria cut the starsleeve’s acceleration. His feet lifted from the floor and he grabbed at the doorway with one hand. His fingers held but his legs swung away on his momentum. The plasma weapon crackled and shuddered in his other hand, filling the airlock with an evil glare. Eydis shot past him, and then grabbed his left foot, stopping her drift.

  “Tiklik,” Tarkos transmitted. “Tiklik, are you being controlled? Can you stop this? Try to stop this!”

  The robot did not answer. In the airlock, it jerked free another access panel. Its narrow black limbs whipped at the exposed cables.

  “Tiklik, I pulled you from the seas of Dâk-Ull. Both of us would have been crushed there, in the ocean, if we hadn’t helped each other. I pulled you out. Let me pull you out again. Tell me how to help you.”