“What for?” Killeen demanded, his throat tight. Without ever having set foot on it, he felt that New Bishop was his, the Family’s, and not some plaything in a grotesquely gargantuan contraption. He called up his Grey Aspect.

I cannot…understand. Clearly it moves…to the beck…of some unseen hand…I have never heard…of mechs working on such a scale…nor of them using a cosmic string…To be sure…strings were supposed…in human theory…to be quite rare. They should move…at very near the speed of light. This one must have…collided with the many stars…and clouds…slowing it. Someone captured it…trapped with magnetic fields.

Arthur broke in:

A truly difficult task, of course, beyond the scope of things human—but not, in principle, impossible. It merely demands the manipulation of magnetic field gradients on a scale unknown—

“What’s your point?” Killeen demanded. Though the Aspect talk streamed through his mind blindingly fast, he had no patience for the smug, arched-eyebrow tone of Arthur’s little lectures. Equations fluttered in his left eye. They were leakage from Arthur; or maybe the Aspect thought much mumbo jumbo would impress him. Killeen grimaced. The Aspect had now assimilated Grey’s memories and was working with them. Grey’s dusty presence faded as Arthur continued crisply:

Simply that the cosmic string is clearly employed here in some sort of civil-engineering sense. Shibo detects the strong inductive electromagnetic fields generated by its revolving, but surely this cannot be the purpose. No, it is a side effect.

“Why slice in when the cut seals up right away?”

Indeed. A puzzle, surely. Still, I can admire this object for its beauty alone. Grey tells me that they ascribed the very formation of the galaxies, and even whole clusters of galaxies, to immense cosmic strings, at the very dawn of our universe. Rings were once truly, cosmologically huge. Galaxies formed from the turbulence of their passing, like whorls behind a watercraft. As time waxed on, cosmic strings twisted on themselves, breaking where they intersected. Coiled strings did this repeatedly, proliferating into many lopped-off loops—such as this magnificent fossil, apparently.

“Look, what’s that thing doing?” Somewhat miffed, Arthur said coolly:

We will have to deduce its function from its form, obviously. Note that the absolutely straight inner edge of the hoop stops short of exactly lying along the planet’s axis. This cannot be a mistake, not with engineers of this ability. Clearly this offset is intended.

The hoop revolved faster and faster. Through Shibo’s comm line he could hear the distant whump-whump-whump of magnetic detectors in the control vault.

“Why line up along the poles?” Killeen persisted.

I would venture to suppose that this quick revolution evokes a pressure all around the polar axis. The faster the string revolves, the more smoothly distributed is this pressure. It slices free the rock close to the axis. This liberates the inner core cylinder it has carved away, frees it from the planetary mass farther out. The results of this I cannot see, however.

“Humph!” Killeen snorted in exasperation. “Let me know when you have an idea.”

THIRTEEN

He returned to the labyrinth of corridors within the station’s disk. Over comm he summoned two more squads to explore the Flitters. They met him at the bay and he gave instructions for trying to revive the craft. The Family might need to flee soon. How they could get past the revolving hoop to reach New Bishop, though, he had no idea. Maybe the cosmic string would go away. Maybe it would stop. All he could do was be sure the Family had the capability to move swiftly and then pray that some opportunity came from that.

Around him midshipmen and other crew hurried, searching for the right cables, calling raucously on the comm lines for input from the Argo’s ancient computer memory. Commandeering mechtech was always chancy, dangerous business.

Killeen saw that the first squad had breached the incoming Flitter’s hold. They were prying forth crates. No time to see what these held; he ordered the space cleared in case they should need it. He was uncomfortably aware that they had taken the station at a particularly lucky moment. Some vast experiment was going on around New Bishop, and they had sneaked in while attention was focused on that. Whatever called the tune in this star system was distracted. But for how long?

Killeen fell to helping one work gang unload cargo. He enjoyed the heft of real labor, using his hands, and it cleared his mind for some unsettling questions.

Had the course settings of Argo somehow taken this cosmic string into account? He remembered that the Mantis, years ago, had conferred with the recently revived intelligences buried in Argo—human-programmed machine minds of undoubted loyalty to humankind. Had the Mantis set this course for Argo, knowing that they would arrive when the golden hoop was at work?

It seemed fantastic, so specific a prediction at such a range, like describing the clouds over a particular mountaintop five years hence—but not, he supposed, truly impossible. Such ability, if real, simply underlined again the unreachable heights of machine intelligence. Killeen accepted this without a second thought; he had never known a time when the predominance of mech minds was not obvious.

Killeen thrust speculations aside. Events rewarded the prepared, and he intended to act.

“Come on,” he called to one of the newly arrived squads. “These ships—try figurin’ them out.” He led them toward the Flitter which had just arrived. The squad unloading it had been forced to rejack the ship into the power cables from the station in order to get the cargo-hold doors to open.

“Cap’n, put me in charge,” Jocelyn said at his elbow. “I’ll get this one up’n runnin’.”

About her eyes there was a concentrated look of unbending discipline. She was one officer he could rely on to do a job on time and without error. Lean and fit, the Argo years had not softened her. She was trouble only when she got to talking with the others.

“Good,” he said. “I want as many Flitters running as we can manage.”

“Enough so can carry all the Family?” she asked.

“Yeasay.” She had already guessed his intention. They were too exposed here. The station was some sort of shipping nexus in an economic scheme he could not imagine, but he knew that whatever truly ran the station would not long tolerate them. Their victory over the mech attendants had been exhilarating but too easy. The true governing intelligence was elsewhere.

As if to confirm this, Shibo broke in on comm.—I’m picking up another ship coming at us. Moving fast. It’s a lot bigger, too.—

“Time to pay the piper,” Killeen said, repeating a mysterious phrase his long-dead mother had used. The last musician had vanished from the Family a century ago.

Jocelyn had heard the comm on overlap circuit. “Think it’s a boarding party, Cap’n?” she asked sharply.

“Um-hmm,” Killeen said. He did not like being prompted by crew, especially when they were right.

“We can take them right here, when they come into the bay,” she said.

He shook his head. “They won’t be that dumb, whoever they are. Even ordinary defensive mechs, barely better than navvys, would see that.”

“We can catch ’em as they come in over the disk,” she persisted.

“If they come that way. Suppose they dock up at the end towers?”

“There?” She frowned. “We haven’t got out there yet. Hadn’t thought…But what’d be the point, puttin’ a dock that far away?”

“Boardin’ when there’s trouble down here, that’s why,” Killeen said irritably. He disliked discussing tactics with crew, even officers, because they kept him from clearing his mind of all extraneous ideas. He needed to concentrate, decide on the best odds in the battle he knew was coming. There could be no other meaning to another, larger ship coming along the same trajectory that the Flitter had followed.