THREE

Besik Bay

Toby didn’t like to take advantage of his being son of the Cap’n, but there were times when he couldn’t resist.

This was one. They were running for their lives now.

Every wall screen in Argo showed how close pursuit was. The mech ships were gaining on them. A narrow gap, getting slimmer. Their boxy, jumbled construction betrayed no concern for line or craft. Indeed, as Jocelyn explained, mech ships weren’t like bottles carrying passengers. They were multiple, interlocking machines, without even a single, intact skin of metal. The basic unit of organic forms was the individual. For mechs, single operating systems the size of cities were perfectly ordinary. And these ships were huge, misshapen bundles.

Behind them came the Myriapodia craft with their immense ivory hoop suspended between them. The mechs did not turn to attack the Myriapodia. And Argo now fled into the shadowy tendrils of the immense Besik cloud.

Bravado and loud talk dwindled away. Family spoke quietly in small, worried knots around the cafeteria. Toby didn’t want to sit idly and wait for news, so whenever he could fake an excuse, he slipped up to the Bridge. If he stood at the back, the Bridge officers didn’t notice him, or else they gave him a wink and passed on. Cap’n’s son, who needs trouble?

Naturally, Besen wanted to come, too. Toby had yet to master the skills of dealing with women, as opposed to girls—and Besen was most definitely a woman. In the Family, a woman was one who displayed ability at a wide range of practical matters, not just in the kitchen or in bed—though they were no slouches there, either. Girls and boys were just that—but women and men were crew. With appropriate rituals to mark the change. So he found it impossible to not take her along.

They stopped for a moment in the small Legacy chamber. It was really just a cranny tucked into the flowing corridor walls, and Toby came there often. Besen had hardly ever been, and said so. He was shocked.

“But these are the Legacies!”

“Well, sure,” she said half-apologetically—and then her eyes flashed defiantly. “But they’re just some slabs with writing on them. Not even writing anybody can read, right?”

“Of course not. That’s why we’re keeping them, mounted here, so someday, when we meet someone who can read them—”

“Yeasay, yeasay—but till then, they’re just puzzles, right?”

Toby shook off the skeptical twist of her mouth and stood for a long moment just staring at the tall, gray slabs and their strange curly writing. Cool, solemn. Lines like wriggling snakes. Why did they fill him with longing?

Besen was getting restless, so they went on to the Bridge. Slipping in was easy—a nod and a wink. Together they stood in the shadows, watching the screens for long hours.

Besik Bay. Mysterious, murky, like the slag from a monstrous furnace.

Somehow this cinder-black place orbited safely around the black hole. At times its orbit swung through the disk below, where it sucked in matter. A thicket of magnetic fields, coarse-woven like cloth, protected it. Then it broke free of the disk and soared above, slowly circling high above the fury. How it persisted, a dust ball in a skillet of slow-stirred liquid iron, no one knew.

Argo now prowled the inky recesses of the immense Besik cloud, awaiting the arrival of the mech ships. Their hull cooled. The ship’s lean metal sinews relaxed, shortening, sending loud strums and pops through the corridors. The air lost its prickly ozone smell. But the banks of grainy dust and gas could not protect against sophisticated sensors forever.

“How long you figure we got?” Besen whispered.

Toby shrugged, wanting to appear more casual than he was. One thing he had learned early as a boy—no point in loading up tension in your muscles. And no point in showing it even if you did. He casually rolled his shoulders, trying to let go of the tightness there. “Depends on what the mechs can see in here. We’ve got lots of tech designed to dodge and blind—but who knows what the mechs’ve got?”

“How come this cloud has been here so long?” Besen waved at the huge, dense ridges of murk. “How come the black hole doesn’t grab it?”

“Quath said something about it being artificial. A place to shelter ships, left here from ancient days.”

“But who’d take the trouble to build some dustball like this?”

As if in answer, silvery lightning arced from the dust bank ahead. Besen persisted, “And why?”

Toby shrugged again. She insisted, “We ought to find out.”

“Look, we’re rats living in the walls of this place. Ignorant vermin, to the mechs.”

“That’s no reason to stop learning.”

“Sure—but a smart rat pays attention to staying alive.”

Killeen stood at the center of the Bridge. Activity revolved around him with officers coming and going, dealing with the many strains on Argo’s systems. Toby knew his father’s skills were being tested to the limit, but what troubled him more was Killeen’s stiff, almost glazed look. He wished he could guess what was going on behind those flinty eyes.

And then such matters seemed soft and small and trivial, as the first mech ship burst into view. Boxy. Ribbed struts. Machined gray angles. It jetted straight out of a towering, gloomy mass—and began to turn toward Argo.

The Bridge stirred uneasily. The mech ship was under high magnification and Toby could not tell if it was even armed—until it launched a stubby missile at them.

Argo went on full alert. Wall screens displayed collision time estimates, defense options, maneuver possibilities. And then the missile was gone, evaporated by a defensive bolt from Argo. The Bridge crew cheered, but Killeen did not even smile. Toby found he was holding Besen’s hand tightly.

Other mech ships burst into view. They approached Argo on complex paths, designed to make it hard to shoot at more than one at a time. Even though Killeen ordered the ship to maximum acceleration, they drew nearer.

Long moments ticked by. The mechs did not fire. Officers on the Bridge speculated that the mech ships did not want to waste fire power on Argo’s defenses until they got overpoweringly close. But that made little sense, Toby thought, since the humans were so outnumbered.

Ships darted and swooped. They seemed eager to force Argo out of the cloud, down a long lane of cindery dust. Toby could feel Argo’s straining engines as a steady trembling in the bulkhead behind him. Killeen gave orders quietly, stone-faced.

Then something quick and glowing swept past Argo, coming into view as a brilliant white line, like a vibrant, moving scratch on the wall screens. The Bridge crew gasped. It was the Cosmic Circle, as the Myriapodia called it—and now Toby saw its true scale.

This close, the segment seemed straight. Toby called up his Isaac Aspect as the luminous line slowly drew away toward the mech ships. He had seen this hoop before, at the last world they visited, but he had never understood it. “What is that thing?”

I would have been happy to instruct you at any time, if you had only inquired—

“Come on, spill—and make it quick and simple.”

Very well, though you will miss much very interesting materiel. These were called “cosmic strings” by the ancients, though as you see they are really loops. My older, nested Faces do not resolve this oddity.