Her first word was, “Shit.”

A week later, she muttered, “This is it … how it is …”

“What is?” an AI asked.

Silence.

“What can I do for you, madam?”

“Who are you?”

“Your navigator.”

“Who else is there now?”

The AI listed the survivors, including itself, and the dead, which included the machine that had untangled the alien memory.

“What about the fragment?” Mere moaned.

Still tucked inside its diamond envelope, it was kicked free by the explosion, drifting nearly a thousand kilometers from the habitat before an industrious fragment tracked it down and wrestled it back again. Twice now in the fragment’s life, it had survived a high-velocity impact.

“Makes two of us,” a weak voice muttered.

She laughed for a moment.

“Madam? May I do anything to make you more comfortable?”

“The Great Ship,” she muttered. “I have to send a message to it … to Washen …”

Silence.

“I finally realized …”

“Madam,” a careful voice began.

“We can’t, can we?”

“Because our last two antennae were destroyed,” the AI reported. “We have no useful voice any longer, madam.”

Mere wept.

Then softer still, with a genuine tenderness, the machine said, “I could not be more sorry, my good dear friend.”

Twenty-two

The attack began with feint landings and exploratory bursts of laser light—six months of steady abuse gradually culminating in the final full assault. X-ray lasers slashed at the main shield generators. Clouds of iron dust descended, trailed by strings of corpulent tritium bombs that pounded at the hull and its defenses. But the ship made its essential repairs, and it made adjustments. The main engines shut down, and the towering nozzles fanned out in all directions, then they began to fire again in chaotic, wholly unpredictable patterns, the ship’s bulk shivering and rolling just enough to keep the polyponds guessing. Then to disrupt the assault, armored ships from three of the six ports attacked the nearest of the polypond buds. The enemy bodies were a hundred kilometers across—depleted sacks of water and salt, stone and fusion reactors, each encased inside an insulated foam sky. Each wore an engine significant enough to have flung them to this place, matching the Great Ship’s speed and trajectory. Each engine made for a tempting target, which was why Pamir decided to attack their enemy first, sending his fleet against the nearest, most threatening swarm.

“Reasonable,” Osmium allowed.

But the first swarm was only a fraction of the invaders’ force. The ship was surrounded by a deep haze of polyponds, tiny youngsters hanging close while the adults kept out of easy reach. Suddenly the haze parted before them, and plunging through the gap was an icy moon—a thousand kilometers across and accelerating into the hull.

Two of the great engines fired, fighting to shove the ship sideways.

The impact was vast and inevitable, and endurable, but it left an oblique crater near the ship’s limb. Hyperfiber absorbed the energies and melted, flowing outward, the crater wall reaching within a thousand kilometers of Port Alpha. Then the baby polyponds released swarms of little ships, tough organics wrapped around tougher machine guts, thousands sweeping across the blasted region, using that sudden blind spot to make their key assault.

Pamir deployed eight brigades of security troops.

Again, Osmium said, “Reasonable.”

Then with an inaudible command, the harum-scarum started a rebellion among the passengers. Panic and rage merged into a vicious riot in the ship’s deepest regions. Local authorities were swamped. There seemed to be no response but to send the reserve troops below, using their uniforms and glowering presence to regain a semblance of order.

But Pamir refused to fall for easy traps.

“No?” the security chief chided.

Sealing off the district instead, Pamir remarked with a grim little smile, “One fire at a time.”

“Very well.”

The polypond ships swept toward the port. Lasers and railguns demolished the first six waves, but another hundred waves pressed down after them, inevitably obliterating the defenses.

Pamir ordered a partial retreat.

“Coward,” the harum-scarum growled.

“Moron,” the Second Chair replied.

The assault was relentless. Polypond soldiers woven for this single moment made their attack, dressed in lifesuits built from high-grade hyperfiber. The soldiers died willingly, selflessly. It was like fighting a nest of ants or a flock of rage dragons. What mattered was the enemy lifesuits. Every casualty recovered by the polyponds was sucked out of her suit and the suit repaired and repopulated with a new soldier and an endlessly improving set of instructions.

The battle raged for weeks.

More bunkers fell, and then the upper reaches of the port itself.

At one point, Pamir noticed his companion staring at him, the breathing mouth puckering in anticipation. Why? Then a fresh assault began, and the black-clad defense troops managed to collect a few dead bodies and their lifesuits, sealing both inside quarantine coffins before shipping them to labs dedicated to the extraction of information.

When the coffins were cracked open, Pamir saw the joke.

He saw himself—a dozen big human frames wearing the rugged and strong and decidedly unhandsome faces, staring up at him with dead eyes. Eyes unimpressed by everything before them, it seemed.

“The Blue World took a taste of your cells,” said Osmium. “I assumed that it might find a use for your pitiful genetics.”

Pamir laughed for a long moment.

Again, the simulation gained velocity, crossing a few weeks inside one long breath. Nothing of substance changed. The equilibrium held steady. If he wished, Pamir could leap back in time, making adjustments before the next crisis. That was allowed by the rules. But he held to his last orders, using both troops and a new crop of robots to hold Port Alpha against the next onslaughts.

When the defenses broke, it happened suddenly.

The polyponds had been busy, building an elaborate fortress in the center of the fresh crater. While most of their weapons were trained on the port, most of their energies were spent tunneling into the battered hull, using ancient lines of weakness to bypass the defenses, slipping inside the ship through an obscure passageway.

Pamir was waiting for them.

With his reserves, he counterattacked. But it was a difficult position to defend, and when the fight seemed to be lost anyway, he gave a final command. A streakship had been refitted. Stripped of its sentient citizens, its giant tanks were filled with metallic hydrogen, and the powerful engines gave a little burp, sending the vessel on a tidy and very brief flight. The Great Ship’s gravity grabbed the projectile and sent it in downward. Like a cannonball, it fell into the center of the new crater, and a series of uranium bombs ignited the hydrogen, releasing one enormous and soundless and utterly cleansing blast.

“Reasonable,” Osmium said one last time.

The boarding party had been destroyed, one credible victory earned. But Pamir refused to feel relaxed, much less confident. “You know what these simulations accomplish, don’t you?”

“They show us what can never happen,” said the breathing mouth.

“Exactly.”

AS THE DOOR opened, the visitor gazed up at Pamir.

Circumstances had changed utterly since the day they had first met. Instead of being enemies, they were allies. Instead of being strangers, they knew each other at a glance. Yet there remained a sense of surprise, at least on Locke’s part. “I came to see my mother,” he sputtered, his gray face coloring for moment. It was the middle of the night, ship-time. “Did I interrupt? I’m sorry.”