Sixteen battleships from the Archipelagic fleet were scattered like jewels across the velvet of space near Ventus’ trailing trojan point. They kept the regulation two hundred kilometers distance from one another, but to the Desert Voice, watching from the window of a cutter approaching the flagship, they seemed very close. Each was the size of a mountain, and harnessed energies capable of reducing the surface of Ventus to char. The Voice had a good grasp of the scale of things here, and knew that even a thousand such ships could not boil the rock of Ventus and Diadem down to the mantle, unless they spent decades nudging asteroids and comets into a collision-course with it. And that crude attack was bound to eject colossal amounts of potentially infected debris into stellar orbit, which could hide the escape of one or more of the Winds’ ships now being built on the moon.
In all the boiled magma seas the navy proposed leaving behind here, there was good odds that some tiny pocket of cool stone would preserve grains of mecha, perhaps too small to be seen, that might regrow all of Ventus again, given a thousand or a million years. The corollary to that was that if 3340 had began to infest the Winds with the algorithms of a resurrection seed, then 3340 itself might reappear here, in a millennia or an epoch.
Marya Mounce had told the Voice that all of Ventus had come from a package of nanotech assembler seeds massing less than twenty kilos. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Armiger, so much more complex a being than the Winds, had the potential to regrow from himself a god.
The cutter docked gently with the side of the flagship. For a moment the Voice felt a pulse of empathy with the ship—she knew what docking felt like to a starship. Then the spell was broken as the door before her slid open, and a uniformed human glided in.
The man led her past steel bulkhead doors as thick as she was tall, and into the narrow buttressed interior of the battleship. There were no straight lines here, nor any corridor longer than ten meters. Everything was organized in tight armored cells, each with its own power supply and life support. To kill the crew of a ship like this, you had to literally batter it to pieces. The Voice was awed by the strength of the vessel; she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have it as her body.
They passed honeycombed cells full of fluid, where humans wearing inscape gear floated in seeming sleep. The consciousness of these men and women lay outside the ship, in swarms of micro-and macro-missiles, or in system-wide simulations where they targeted and tracked every object bigger than a grapefruit.
Her guide left her at another set of pneumatic pressure doors. As these valved open, the Voice heard the sounds of angry debate coming from the chamber beyond.
“Look at that pattern! It’s obvious they’re ready to make a run for it.”
“To you, maybe,” said another. She recognized the timbre of the voice as belonging to an artificial intelligence. There were other beings like herself here. The Voice stepped inside.
It was impossible to gauge the dimensions of the chamber, because the walls had disappeared under a holographic projection of the Ventus system. The planets were all pinpointed with arrows, and to her upper left floated a rotating box containing a zoomed-in view of Ventus and Diadem. Dozens of tiny specks representing ships hung in the black space of the main display. Many of them trailed Ventus in its orbit, like a wreath of fog left behind it.
Diadem was almost obscured under a cloud of thousands of specks.
“Ah, our Diadem expert is here,” someone said. The Voice looked behind herself; no one had entered after her.
Fifteen men and women floated under the system display. About half wore uniforms and moved with the cat-like grace of cyborgs. Four more were holograms of generic human beings; each wore a complex heraldic symbol on its chest showing which faction of Archipelagic politics it represented. These were artificial minds whose attitudes and intentions were controlled by the aggregate will of millions or billions of humans back home. True to the principles of Archipelagic politics, however, each perspective on an issue held only one vote. These beings were not as powerful as they might at first seem.
Of the remaining three, one was not known to the Voice. The woman appeared to be a pilot. The last two were Marya and Axel. When she saw them the Voice glided immediately over to them.
“Now that you’re here, we can ask the burning question,” said one of the cyborgs. He wore admirals bars on his shoulders.
“How many copies of you can Diadem produce per day? And how many in total?”
The Voice blinked. “I— I’m not qualified to answer that.”
“Come on now. You were there for weeks. By your own admission, you wandered over hundreds of square kilometers. You were a line starship. You must have assessed their production capability.”
Marya put her hand on the Voice’s arm and smiled. “If you don’t know, don’t guess. It’s all right.”
A little reassured, she said, “I only caught glimpses of the vacuum areas. I was pretending to be alive, so I stayed in the main labs most of the time.”
“Yes, yes, we know that. But you must have seen the other facilities, or walked around them, or under them. You must have seen materiel moving back and forth. Robots. Commerce, even. What scale is it on? What are they capable of?”
“Well, I did get a good idea of how much they put into refining the terraforming techniques. And I did see a lot of evidence of other activities.” She paused to calculate. “If they abandoned everything else they were doing? —Which they wouldn’t. But if they did… they could probably produce two thousand copies of my original plan per week. It’s a whole world, after all, if small.”
The admiral nodded. “It’s consistent with what we’re seeing. They’re using all of Diadem then. They’re moving to a war footing.”
Argument broke out among the others. Axel leaned close and pointed to the cloud of dots around the image of Diadem. “See those? Copies of you. Ships. And there’s more arriving by the second.”
The Voice gaped. Ventus’ little moon was englobed by a vast fleet of ships—all copies of herself. All, if the one she had touched was any indication, capable of star travel.
“But how many in total?” asked one of the holograms. “Are they turning Diadem into a giant factory? And are they doing the same to Ventus?”
“Well, that’s the question. Our Ventus expert says they wouldn’t do that.” The admiral gestured at Marya. “Her institute’s AI’s agree.”
“All of Marya’s co-workers were captured by the Winds,” Axel whispered. “They were all taken to Diadem, presumably. So she’s the reigning expert now.”
“This is insane,” said the Voice. “How are we going to—”
“My question for the Desert Voice,” said the admiral, “is, do you recognize any of these structures? Are they like what you saw on Diadem?” He waved his hand, and a new cube appeared overhead. This one showed a telescopic view of the limb of Ventus’ horizon. Square solar mirrors hung in the black sky like fantastic butterflies, and down below, just beyond the terminator on the nightside of Ventus, lay a lozenge of sunlit land.
Diaphanous scarves of glowing light, like solidifying aurora, could be seen spiralling down towards the planet in the vicinity of the sunlit oval.
“It’s the swans!” The Voice vividly remembered them closing on her, and how they had crushed and devoured her body. “Are they attacking something?”
“That’s what we want to know. Are they attacking, or are they building? Did they hang like that over the shipyard you saw on Diadem?”
“No. This is something else.” She concentrated on the daylit side of the terminator, until she could make out the shapes of a continental edge there. “That’s Iapysia they’re over. It’s very near where I set Calandria and Axel set down originally.”
“More to the point,” said a hologram, “it’s roughly where we think Armiger is.”
“Well,” said the admiral. “You heard our experts. They’ve never built ships before.”
“They’ve never been threatened like this before,” the Voice protested. “They’re doing this because we’re here. If we went away they would turn back to running the terraforming system.”
The admiral grimaced. “Well, you came late to the discussion. We’re not sure they’re maintaining the system anymore. That’s the point.”
The Voice turned to Axel. He shrugged. “They think Armiger may have taken the Winds over already. It would certainly explain that.” He pointed to the fleet. “As to what they’re doing on the surface…”
“We think they’re starting to modify it to his standard,” said one of the AIs. “If Diadem can be turned into a giant factory, so much more so with Ventus itself. Worse—it could be turned into a single giant organism.”
“3340.”
“Exactly. Your friends don’t believe it. They’ve been petitioning to go down there and investigate. But based on the numbers you’ve just given us, we don’t have time. If 3340 is back, and it starts converting Ventus itself, there could be geometric growth of these ships.”
Marya shook her head angrily. “They’re just protecting themselves against you! They can see you, sitting out here like vultures.”
“If that were the case, then they wouldn’t be putting themselves in position for a run to escape the system.” The hologram pointed at the specks trailing away from Ventus. “They’re ready to fan out—maybe carry resurrection seeds to every other world in human space. We’d never be able to stop 3340 then.”
“Have you asked the swans what they’re doing?” Marya asked.
“Yes. They don’t answer. We’ve tried sending probes in but that fleet of theirs blows them away before they get close enough to see anything. We have no way to find out what’s going on.”
The admiral sighed. “Since we can’t learn more, I think it’s time to make a decision. I presume the consensus is to cauterize the threat now?”
The others, all save Axel and Marya, nodded.
A slow horror crept over the Voice. “Because of what I said… you’ve decided to kill everyone on that world?”
“It’s not your responsibility,” said the admiral. “Don’t worry about it.”
She could only hang there, stunned. She didn’t even feel Axel put his hand on her shoulder until he pushed her into motion.
In moments they were outside the chamber, and Axel began cursing viciously. She heard Marya gasping, “They can’t! They can’t!” over and over.
“They will,” said Axel quietly. “The people down there mean nothing to them. After all, it’s only a few million; that many people die in the Archipelago every second.”
“If anything’s happening, it’s the Winds fighting Armiger themselves! If we could only prove that. If only one of our ships could get past the swans and see…”
In her mind’s eye the Voice could picture the entire holo display from the conference room; she remembered the position and trajectory of each and every ship, and she knew something she had neglected to tell the admiral. The Voice had been inside the nervous system of one of the Winds’ ships; she knew their tactics, their transmission frequencies—and their recognition codes.
She took a deep breath. It wasn’t fair, she thought bitterly; she had wanted the first real action she took as an individual to be on behalf of her new human side. Nonetheless, for the first time in her existence the Voice felt she was acting by and for herself when she said, “But you do have a ship. Me.”
*
Armiger and Galas stood on a shoulder of land in the foothills of the coastal mountains. They were gazing out at the plains below. It was night—or at least, it was behind them. The plains were in day.
“How can we fight power like that?” murmured Galas. From here, the full extent of the daylit square was visible. They were just outside its western edge, but it was moving, slowly, in their direction. A cluster of vagabond moons shone bright silver high in the vast tapering cube of glowing air.
“There,” said Armiger, pointing. Squinting where he pointed, she made out a low cloud of dust hugging the eastern end of the square.
“What is it?”
“An army, marching. It would seem Parliament still pursues you.”
His voice was neutral—bland, even. He had been like this ever since Megan’s death—withdrawn, but as strong-willed as ever. He had ridden them hard for the past several days. Galas had been afraid that if she showed an instant’s weakness—if she gave him even an inkling that she couldn’t keep up—he would abandon her. It wasn’t that he no longer cared about her, he just seemed so completely focussed on his goal that the present moment had no reality for him.
Recognizing this in him brought a chill to her heart; she had been that way once, and not just for a day or a week. As they rode, Galas spent long hours withdrawn herself, remembering her youth after the death of her mother, for the first time seeing it from the outside, as if hearing about someone else’s tragic past. She did not like what the objectivity revealed.
They rode and rode through grassland dotted with small forests, hour after hour until she lay draped in the saddle, her thighs and lower back a blaze of pain, sure that she would slide off the saddle with the horse’s next step. At some point during that odyssey they had left the plains behind, and now they were scarcely a day’s ride from the Titans’ Peaks.
She spared a glance behind her. Treetops jabbed above the crest of the plateau where they camped, and beyond them mauve cut out shapes she had at first mistaken for storm clouds shone pearly in the reflected light from the plain. The foothills ended in a huge, knotted pair of snow-capped peaks with a deep notch separating them. Lower peaks receded to the south and south, becoming more rounded and lower as they went.
She knew this twin mountain, had spent time there listening to the subterranean roaring of the desals at work. She had never imagined she would see the Titans’ Gates in the light of a Wind-made day.
“We are trapped.” She said it fatalistically.
Armiger waved negligently at the shining plains. “We needn’t fear the humans. They won’t be able to scale the Gates, unless they’re riding in the moons themselves. As to the Winds—well, making day in the night like that is a pretty minor trick.”
“Minor? Can you do it?”
“Not from here. It’s trivial if you’re in orbit.” He shaded his eyes again.
“Armiger.” He didn’t seem to notice her, until she reached out and put a hand on his arm. When he finally turned to face her, she said, “Why have we come here?”
When he didn’t answer immediately she said, “We’ve been riding for days. We’ve barely even spoken. I confess for a time I was content just to be escaping—escaping anything, and everything. But the truth is, I’m sore, stiff and weary beyond belief. If you gave me no good answer as to where we’re going or why, I’d just as soon lie down and wait for those things to find me.”
He smiled slightly and briefly. “I find it hard to talk about it. Not because of any emotional thing… no, it’s because 3340, who gave me the impulse to begin with, made me to be reluctant. Do you understand the concept of conditioning?”
She smiled ironically. “You ask Queen Galas that?”
“All right, then. I’ve been conditioned not to talk about it. But I no longer work for 3340…” He glanced over at her quickly, as if startled by something—or afraid.
Interesting, she thought. “Who do you work for now, Armiger?” she asked quietly.
“One question at a time. You asked why we were here. Look.” With a sweep of his arm he indicated the fang-tooths of the Titans’ Gates. “Even before I met Jordan Mason I thought this place might hold the key. It is the nexus of physical power for the western end of the continent. Here the desals have their power plants and desalination stacks. This is their interface with the Winds of the ocean, who are incredibly strong as well. This is the transfer point for hundreds of underground highways, and there are giant data stores and genetic stockpiles buried deep within the mountains. You probably never got a hint of that when you were here—it’s all well hidden.”
She shook her head. “One time a local priest took me on a tour around the lip of a vast pit. He said it was bottomless. A hot wind comes up out of it, and you can hear a sound like constant thunder coming out of the depths. I found it disturbing. I never went back.”
“Yet it was the desals who spoke to you. They reached out to do so. According to Mason, they wish to serve, and they are the enemy of those.” He gestured to the vagabond moons. “We will make them our allies. The Titans’ Gates are a fortress, and you and I are about to experience our second siege, my queen.”
She hugged herself against a sudden chill. “Don’t call me that. I brought my people low.” Angry and grief-stricken, she turned and started to walk back to their camp. The horses were visible in the firelight; both were looking in her direction. “And what are you going to do with the world once you’ve got it?” she shouted back to Armiger. “How will you succeed where I failed?”
“I can do what you could not,” she heard him say. “I can conquer the Winds. The ones Mason calls Mediation will be our fist converts.” He followed her and when she sat down by the fire, he sat too.
“I am no longer Mad Queen Galas—just Mad Galas, I suppose,” she said. “But my madness is nothing compared to yours if you expect to lay your hands on each and every Wind in order to turn them to your cause. That is what you intend to do, is it not?”
“In a sense.”
“Then why haven’t you done it? Where is your army? You’ve said that Jordan had the last piece of the puzzle you needed. So now that you know all you need to, why are you not commanding the heavens to part and the seas to recede?”
He looked down. “It’s not that simple.”
“Ah! That phrase is Male for `I’m afraid to’.”
“There is some key piece missing,” he admitted. “I have yet to figure it out. But when I do…”
“Yes? When you do, what? You’ve been coy about that all along, Armiger. What, exactly, are you going to do?”
He stared pensively at the stars. “The Winds are sur-biological, nanotechnological entities. Each component mechanum is infinitesimal, the size of a human cell. Each carries in it a tiny computer—a thinking machine—and communications devices. The mecha communicate with their brethren using a very large number of codes. These codes are certified each by the next higher layer of the organization, from the tiniest particle all the way up to the desals and the Diadem swans. The Winds recognize one another by comparing the digital signatures on the transmission codes. If the code is not signed by the next higher authority, it is not valid. But that next higher authority cannot issue codes without the authorization of the layer above it, and so on up the ladder. Most of the communication between the Winds consists of trading new authorizations. They do it on an unconscious level.
“To command the Winds, you must speak their language. To speak their language, you must have a valid signature on your messages. Ever since arriving here I have been looking for a way to either fake the signatures, or acquire the highest-level signing authority.
“Somehow, Jordan Mason has gotten a high-level authority in the eyes of the Winds. —Not the highest, but very high. I suspect ordinary humans can’t get to the highest level. I copied his implants exactly, which should make my messages indistinguishable from his. But they’re not—somehow the Winds recognize his but not mine. That is what I’m trying to figure out now.”
“That is dazzling,” said Galas. “But it’s not the answer I asked for. What will you do when you have this ‘signing authority’?”
He hesitated. “What would you do?”
“Can you remake the world? —Turn night into day, heavy into light, black into white? What can you do?”
“I can’t change gravity,” he said with faint smile. “But I can change the atmosphere, or strip it away entirely. I can drain the seas, if I want. I can change the surface of this world into practically anything.”
“Can you free my people from poverty and grief?”
He shrugged. “That would be among the easiest things I can do.”
“Will you?”
Armiger hesitated again. He put down his soup bowl. “Should I?” he asked. “Be careful how you answer.”
“I’m tired of political answers to questions like that,” she said. “And tired of philosophical ones. All I know is I’m tired and hungry and afraid, and in that I am finally one with the majority of my countrymen. There is not a single person out there,” she gestured at the dark countryside, “who would not say, ‘save me from the cold, and the dark, and the beasts outside and in’.”
“Is that all you want for them?”
She turned to look at him. He sat now with his hands dangling between his knees, his face expressionless. She was suddenly acutely aware that she was the only human being seated at this fire.
“You could do it,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer.
“But then… the real question is, what do you want to do?”
Armiger didn’t answer for a long time. Finally he said, “I guess that depends on who I am.”
“This god 3340 you’ve spoken of—what did he want you to do with Ventus?”
“He saw Ventus as a resource waiting to be tapped. But not an efficient one, as it stands. Most the Winds’ energy is being put into maintaining the artificial ecology—a complete waste as far as 3340 was concerned. The first thing it would have had me do was abandon the terraforming system.”
“Abandon…? What would that mean, for us I mean?”
“The air would become poisonous with time… rivers would dry up, the oceans become toxically metallic. Some kinds of life, like fungi and bacteria, would run rampant, others would die. Everything would eventually be choked out, if it even lasted that long, because 3340 wanted to use the mecha to make the entire surface of the planet into one giant machine—a god device.”
“For what purpose?”
“Ventus was to have been a staging area for an assault on the human Archipelago. If 3340 had conquered even a tenth of the Archipelago, it would have become unstoppable. Eventually it might have consumed the entire galaxy.”
“But 3340 is dead,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So you won’t do that my world.”
He looked her in the eye, expressionless. “I will not,” he said, a bit too vehemently.
“I wish I could believe you.”
He looked surprised—the first real emotion he’d shown in days. He squinted at her through woodsmoke. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because you’re very, very angry, and I’m afraid you don’t know it.”
That made him pause. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said finally.
“She is dead, Armiger.”
He just looked at her.
“You don’t know how to grieve, do you?” she asked.
This time he grimaced, but that was all.
“I forget sometimes that you have no experience in it.” She smiled sadly. “Neither did I, the first time; no one is prepared. So we usually end up with scars; I suppose mine are no worse than anyone else’s. If I am to honour Megan in any way, I guess it should be by heeding her lesson. She was offended that I… fell apart… after we escaped. I thought she couldn’t possibly know what I was feeling. Now I realize that she saw that I thought this, and that was what offended her. After all, she lost a husband, but she carried on.
“At the time I thought she was making light of my pain. She must be asking me to shrug it off, like I had done with the pain of my mother’s death. It took me many years to learn how bad a mistake that had been. But no, she was asking for more courage than I was willing to show. She was asking me to feel it all, and keep going anyway.”
“I am not one of you,” Armiger said. He didn’t elaborate.
“You’re acting exactly like one of us,” she countered.
He didn’t answer.
“The sooner you start believing it the better off you’ll be, Armiger. You’re going to have to face the pain, and sooner rather than later would be best.”
He squinted at her through woodsmoke. “Why?”
“Because if you are as powerful as you say you are, your anger could destroy my world.”
“Only my human side can be angry.”
“But pardon me for saying so, my general—it’s your human side that makes you do what you do.”
He stood up abruptly and stalked a few meters away. Encouraged, she said, “Listen to me. If you respect Megan, you should follow her example too.”
“By doing what?” He sounded indifferent, as though intent on some task. Galas almost smiled.
“By letting it all in. All the pain, the sorrow, the anger. You’ve got to let yourself feel it. Otherwise, it’s going to act through you whether you know it or not.”
He murmured something; she wasn’t sure, but it sounded like, “That’s not what I’m afraid of having act through me.”
Galas felt infinitely weary. Her own grief was raw and close enough that she had little strength to fight his. She lay down on her bedroll and gazed up at the few stars that were visible through the perpetual dusk sky.
“I’m afraid,” she heard herself say. She knew she was not speaking for herself.
“Jordan Mason,” said Armiger. “I need you to find me now.”
Galas rolled on her side and looked past the circle of firelight. Armiger stood with his hands raised to either side, and now lines of light flickered at the ends of his fingers. These seemed to tear away and coalesce into rolling balls, like tumbleweeds. She saw several bounce across the ground, fading. A faint rustling sound came from the undergrowth around her.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“I am building a larger body—more sense organs, independent hands and eyes. The Winds or their slaves might fall on us at any time. We need guards—a perimeter. I am making that.”
Galas lay back, shivering. What had she just been speaking to? A man? No… she was the only human being on this hillside. She might as well be talking to the stones.
She closed her eyes, determined to see and hear no more today.