Toby said, “Not all of them are making those sounds, though. See?”

Jocelyn nodded. “It’s the ones that are connected to those bright lumps.”

Toby’s Isaac Aspect fluttered for attention, and Toby let him out:

These are the stuff of remote history. I heard of them as a boy. Conferring with Zeno now, I believe I may perceive the essence. They are an early life form composed of magnetic vortices, laced with some hot matter. A primitive mode. They feed on the flares and plumes which jut above the disk, like tasty spring flowers from a lush field.

“Doesn’t look like they’re enjoying dinner much,” Toby said sardonically.

The sudden intrusion of the star’s mass has flooded them, sucking some down into the fierce disk, where they die.

“How come the Magnetic Mind doesn’t die, then?”

It is far greater, larger, finer than these simple, primitive fibers—or so history says. I know little of it. The Mind is vastly old, and reveals no secrets except by necessity. Humans before the Chandelier Era tried to discover some facets of it, and were singed for their trouble.

Toby grimaced. The shrieks and wails were strangely gripping, as each thin voice had its moment, sobbed forth a song beyond understanding, and then faded into the flickering static as the disk plasma reached up, bloated with digesting starmass—and dragged in the delicate jade streamers, swallowing them in fire. They had lived too close to the edge of grand ferocity, and now paid the price. They struggled frantically against the scalding splashes, gaining small and momentary victories, but in the end they slid into blazing oblivion. The star’s shredded mass was plunging inward through the disk, wreaking havoc among the slender, lacy beings.

Toby watched their distant deaths, and despite the gulf separating him from those reedy cries, he felt a strange connection. Such truly alien forms could never be brethren. They were separate nations, but still caught with humans in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of splendor and travail. Beyond matter itself, gifted with extensions of the senses no human could ever comprehend, they none the less shared the veiled dignity of being forever incomplete, of always emerging, a common heritage of being finite and forever wondering.

But the rest of the Bridge was staring beyond the splashes of color from the disk. Now visible, coming toward them, was the hexagonal of ships flown by the Myriapodia. Once more they held between them the shimmering pearly hoop, a weapon bigger than worlds.

“What’s going on?” Killeen wondered out loud. “Where’s Quath?”

Jocelyn added, “Even that cosmic string seems small here.”

The Myriapodia ships bore down upon the Argo relentlessly. They accelerated along the magnetic field lines, invisible slopes that steepened by the minute, pitching down toward the inner edge of the blazing accretion disk.

Into the pit of hell. The air brimmed with hard, dry heat. Toby gulped and wondered if he would live out the next day.

SEVEN

A Taste of the Void

As Toby heard them recounted later, the next hours on the Bridge were electrifying. He wasn’t there to see them, though. On a ship, chores have to be done on time—no excuses. Not even battle releases all of a crew to gape and thrill.

His assignment was seeding one of the seared agro domes. A team of five sweated beneath the blue-white violence in the dome’s sky, glowing from near the Eater of All Things. They had to keep the complex biodiversity here limping along, so plants that had perished under the sting of radiation had to be replaced, and new ones watered, nurtured, sheltered. Hard, ground-grubbing work.

It was a relief, in a way, after the tension of the Bridge. Using your muscles was sometimes easier than using your overstretched mind. He felt the ship moving under him as he toted and dug and fetched, knew that something was happening.

More mechs, he later learned. On the Bridge screens they appeared as flickering images, barely detectable by Argo’s systems. The earlier mech craft had been simple compared with these. It stood to reason. Some higher-order mech-tech had driven humanity from space. These were probably the type—surprisingly small, quick, elusive. They plunged down the jet after Argo and dispersed. Argo’s detectors lost them entirely.

They attacked from several angles, using strategies Killeen and the others could not even understand. Toby heard only a brief rattle of strange static in his sensorium, and then a whoosh as the dome above him vanished.

The hit took the dome’s air in a howling, hollow rush. Toby gasped for air and got nothing. He went spinning up, away from the soil, which rose after him in a dirty storm.

The wailing gale ebbed as he windmilled his arms, rotating to face upward. A huge hole in the dome swelled before him. He snatched at a broken strut, got it, hung on.

I’m dead, he thought quite clearly. Already his lungs heaved, wanting to breathe.

A painful jab in his leg. A sharp sliver stuck from it, flung by the whistling air. He swung by one arm from the strut, smacked into another.

Angry shouts in his ear—on comm, but no time to listen.

Ears throbbed with pain. Then no more sounds. Air all gone.

He launched himself downward. There was a self-sealing airlock there, already closed. That kept the whole ship from vac’ing out from a single breech.

But it was a long way down and purple flecks danced at the corners of his eyes. They made crazy, enticing patterns and he spent some time trying to figure out what they were trying to say. The dirt below looked no closer and his arms in front of him flapped fruitlessly, like clothes drying in a warm breeze.

In his mouth a metallic, flat bite. The taste of the void.

Purple flies filled his vision. Then a sharp spark of yellow.

Lightning. Playing in the bowl. Licking at bodies as if tasting them.

He dodged away from the slender fire. It missed him and seared the bulkhead beyond.

Ears drumming, fighting to keep his throat closed, chest searing. The soil was closer, in fact very close, and then it hit him in the face. His lungs convulsed but he refused to open his mouth, let his last ball of breath escape into the emptiness.

Scrambling, tumbling, off balance but going on anyway. Across the powdery dirt. Streamers of vapor bursting from the ground, a gray fog.

Ears pounding, hammering his head. In his sinuses, spikes of agony.

The square lock, wobbling. Hard to keep it in focus, stand it upright by tilting his head. While his legs plunged and worked, pounding him forward.

Hands out in front. They hit the lock door and punched a big red plate. The emergency entry dilated. He dived through it.

The first sound he heard was a whisper, then a high-pressure roaring. His ears popped. Only then did he wonder about the others in the dome.

By the time he got his bearings back, it was too late. The other four in the dome never made it to the lock.

Two went through the big hole in the dome and were forever lost. The lightning had fried two more.

Nobody knew whether the lightning was a mech weapon or just natural. Despite the damage to their internal electrocoupling, Argo’s tech recorded the two selves in enough detail to provide Aspects in future chip-life.

Small consolation, Toby thought. He felt guilty for not thinking of the other four, for not helping them.