Star Corps(108)

Where was she right now? Garroway stared again into that impossible sky. Hell, where was he right now?

And, more important, why? Finding answers, he was learning, was a lot harder than reaching up into the noumenal data stores.

Chamber of Seeing

Deeps of An-Kur

Seventh Period of Dawn

A seismic quake sent gentle, rumbling shudders through the An-Kur Deeps, but Tu-Kur-La didn’t feel it. He was too lost now in the Zu-Din, the Godmind of the Abzu, to feel anything but exaltation.

More and more Keepers of Memory were entering the Abzu now as they were awakened from the Sleep of Ages and engulfed by the Abzu-il. He could feel their presence, a thronging host of mind and thought and will. As the Zu-Din grew, so too did Tu-Kur-La’s power and the scope and depth of his vision. Before, linked with the Abzu, he’d still been himself, albeit with access to seemingly limitless information. Now, however, as a kind of critical mass was reached by the minds linking in…

This was what it truly meant to be a god, omnipresent and omniscient, a thousand minds working together in parallel as one with a speed and clarity impossible for any purely natural sentience. Tu-Kur-La’s individuality was fading swiftly now; he was no longer Tu-Kur-La of the House of In-Kur-Dru, but the mind and soul of the Abzu itself, the Godmind summoned from the Deeps to once again defend the world of Enduru.

The Race of the Gods would survive.

He watched from a thousand vantage points as the enemy warriors penetrated the Kikig Kur-Urudug, watched as they placed the package beneath a control panel. Sensors within the Abzu-il, which lay like thick jelly on the floors and dripped from the cavern walls, analyzed the device and identified it as a compact thermonuclear device easily large enough to wreck the upper levels of the An-Kur facility.

He could sense too the electromagnetic signals passing between the device and a series of relays set up in the corridors leading to the outside of the mountain. Traps and sensors within the device would probably detonate it if it were tampered with. The problem would require some thought.

The Godmind was both highly intelligent in its own right and supremely fast. The Abzu-il that lay like a gelatinous blanket through much of An-Kur’s underground workings was a biological construct, something created countless cycles ago to connect the various Keepers of Memories. It possessed an artificial intelligence of high order and considerable volition; that AI had been charged with the defense of An-kur, and had responded to the attack a few periods ago on its own initiative. Now, however, that intelligence expanded dramatically as living Ahannu minds linked in.

In the skies over Enduru three large but primitive spacecraft were entering orbit. Through remote sensors scattered about the planet, the Godmind could sense the cloud of smaller ships debarking from the larger. Enduru was being invaded.

Briefly, the Godmind mourned. So much, so very much, had been lost since the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. These invaders, descendants of the Sag-ura of lost Kia, were primitives, their ships not even capable of faster-than-light travel. Unfortunately, the Ahannu’s own assets were badly depleted, their weaponry especially. Enduru’s defenders would rely on weapons more primitive than those of the invaders.

No matter. Numbers—and the superior speed and intellect of the Godmind—would be enough to preserve Enduru. And the Godmind saw now what needed to be done to stop the detonation of the nuclear device in the control center.

With a thought, the Godmind summoned again the defenders of An-Kur….





19





25 JUNE 2148

Combat Information Center

IST Derna, approaching Ishtar orbit

2317 hours ST

Within the link, Ramsey looked down on Ishtar from space, the virtual presences of Dr. Hanson and Gavin Norris hovering by his shoulders. From their noumenal vantage point they seemed to be moving swiftly above the swirl and stippling of a broad swath of clouds, clouds tinged with red and gold from the light of the distant sun. Breaks in the cloud cover revealed glimpses of a tortured landscape, sere desert crisscrossed by vast, yawning fault valleys and rugged mountains; stretches of salty sea filling low-lying rifts like fingers; glaciers clinging to broad, mountain plateaus; savage storms each the size of a subcontinent; and everywhere the black-smudge plumes of active volcanoes.

“Not exactly the sort of neighborhood where you want to raise your kids,” Norris said quietly. “You wouldn’t think anything could live down there.”

“That’s almost certainly why the Ahannu colony survived,” Hanson explained. “The Hunters of the Dawn must have swept through this part of the galaxy, destroying every trace of sentient life and civilization they could find. We know they wiped out every Ahannu colony on Earth and on Earth’s moon.