Peripherally, she noticed a platform in front of her, obviously made for movement into the vast network. Flat balconies and bubbles that could have enclosed rooms were supported by the threads. This was a complex. People, the Ancestors or the artifacts, traveled into the heart of this gigantic web of light and … did what?
“There is yet more work in the heart of the Ancestors. May those hearts be revealed to me. May my eyes see the wonder of the work …” It took Avir a moment to realize her voice was reciting the Second Grace. She closed her mouth but her eyes couldn’t stop straining to measure and define the impossible wonder spun out in light and glass in front of her.
Then her heart began to thud heavily against her rib cage. It was too much. It was too big and too incomprehensible. As precisely as she could manage, she turned around and shouldered her way between the Security Beholden. The ruby light pulsed and flickered against the corridor’s curved walls, each beat raising the level of unreasoned panic inside her. She didn’t dare run, but she didn’t know how she’d hold herself to a walk.
They were in a hollow world. A hollow world with veins and nerves, and who could know what else. But it lived. She knew that with an utter certainty. Like the artifacts that grubbed on its surface searching for their lost function, it lived.
Avir almost gasped with relief when she crossed the thresholds into the first chamber again.
The Unifier grinned at her. “Something else, isn’t it? And I’ll tell you what, those lights? They weren’t there when we got here. That didn’t start up until we got Broken Trail down here.”
Avir tried to collect herself, but didn’t feel very successful at the attempt. Her mind was full of light and threads. “Explain what you have done.”
Apparently ready to accept his prisoner status, the Unifier described the hunt for Stone in the Wall’s genetic relatives and how Broken Trail was led to the “control bank” to lay her hand on one of the spheres that still remained in the bank’s sockets. He went on to tell about how the lights had switched on in both the chamber and the cavern, and how the artifact had lain in a stupor since then and he wasn’t sure she was ever going to come out of it.
Avir didn’t realize how chilled her cheeks were until she felt the heat of anger rising in them.
“Do you realize what you have done!” she demanded. “You animal without Lineage!” Her fists clenched. “You played with the work of the Ancestors without even a preliminary test? Without a survey or any kind of analysis! You thought you could just …”
“We were in a hurry,” he said blandly. “We’d had word your lot was coming down like vengeance on this place for no particular reason, except maybe the people.”
Little by little, Avir clamped down on her emotions. This was not just unseemly, it was unacceptable and grossly unproductive. The Unifier had to be questioned thoroughly by experts. The Reclamation Assembly had to be notified of these developments at once. Measures had to be taken to secure the human artifacts, all of them, immediately, from the Imperialist clutches. Teams had to be brought down here as quickly as possible.
All time was gone. It was already too late. The race had started without them and now they could only run to catch up.
I am child of the Lineage. I will not see the work of the Ancestors end at the hands of the Imperialists. I will not.
Now the real work begins.
14—Aboard the U-Kenai, Hour 14:23:45, Ship’s Time
“This is the truth. This is what we learned too late. We should not have made them Human. Even a little bit of Humanity was too much.”
Fragment from “The Beginning of the Flight”, from the Rhudolant Vitae private history Archives
AS IT TURNED OUT, they didn’t even feel the collision. There should have been a long, slow, grinding crash, but there wasn’t. There should have been the sound of straining metals and ceramics, but there wasn’t. One minute the screens were full of filthy ice, the next minute they were black.
Adu felt the smooth surface of the control boards under his hands and for a moment wished Dorias hadn’t decided to house him in the android. It was convenient, but it was isolating. If he had been loaded into the ship itself, then he would have been able to know where the hull stresses were as soon as the ice touched the ship. He could have compensated for them instantly and monitored them where compensation wasn’t needed yet. He would have known everything, without needing to call up the data, or turn his head, or wait while his mind processed what his eyes saw.
Next to him, Eric Born and Arla Stone blinked at the blank screens.