Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

weeks. By your own admission, you wandered over hundreds of square kilometers. You were a line starship. You must have assessed their production capability.”

Marya put her hand on the Voice’s arm and smiled. “If you don’t know, don’t guess. It’s all right.”

A little reassured, she said, “I only caught glimpses of the vacuum areas. I was pretending to be alive, so I stayed in the main labs most of the time.”

“Yes, yes, we know that. But you must have seen the other facilities, or walked around them, or under them. You must have seen materiel moving back and forth. Robots. Commerce, even. What scale is it on? What are they capable of?”

“Well, I did get a good idea of how much they put into refining the terraforming techniques. And I did see a lot of evidence of other activities.” She paused to calculate. “If they abandoned everything else they were doing? —Which they wouldn’t. But if they did… they could probably produce two thousand copies of my original plan per week. It’s a whole world, after all, if small.”

The admiral nodded. “It’s consistent with what we’re seeing. They’re using all of Diadem then. They’re moving to a war footing.”

Argument broke out among the others. Axel leaned close and pointed to the cloud of dots around the image of Diadem. “See those? Copies of you. Ships. And there’s more arriving by the second.”

The Voice gaped. Ventus’ little moon was englobed by a vast fleet of ships—all copies of herself. All, if the one she had touched was any indication, capable of star travel.

“But how many in total?” asked one of the holograms. “Are they turning Diadem into a giant factory? And are they doing the same to Ventus?”

“Well, that’s the question. Our Ventus expert says they wouldn’t do that.” The admiral gestured at Marya. “Her institute’s AI’s agree.”

“All of Marya’s co-workers were captured by the Winds,” Axel whispered. “They were all taken to Diadem, presumably. So she’s the reigning expert now.”

“This is insane,” said the Voice. “How are we going to—”

“My question for the Desert Voice,” said the admiral, “is, do you recognize any of these structures? Are they like what you saw on Diadem?” He waved his hand, and a new cube appeared overhead. This one showed a telescopic view of the limb of Ventus’ horizon. Square solar mirrors hung in the black sky like fantastic butterflies, and down below, just beyond the terminator on the nightside of Ventus, lay a lozenge of sunlit land.

Diaphanous scarves of glowing light, like solidifying aurora, could be seen spiralling down towards the planet in the vicinity of the sunlit oval.

“It’s the swans!” The Voice vividly remembered them closing on her, and how they had crushed and devoured her body. “Are they attacking something?”

“That’s what we want to know. Are they attacking, or are they building? Did they hang like that over the shipyard you saw on Diadem?”

“No. This is something else.” She concentrated on the daylit side of the terminator, until she could make out the shapes of a continental edge there. “That’s Iapysia they’re over. It’s very near where I set Calandria and Axel set down originally.”

“More to the point,” said a hologram, “it’s roughly where we think Armiger is.”

“Well,” said the admiral. “You heard our experts. They’ve never built ships before.”

“They’ve never been threatened like this before,” the Voice protested. “They’re doing this because we’re here. If we went away they would turn back to running the terraforming system.”

The admiral grimaced. “Well, you came late to the discussion. We’re not sure they’re maintaining the system anymore. That’s the point.”

The Voice turned to Axel. He shrugged. “They think Armiger may have taken the Winds over already. It would certainly explain that.” He pointed to the fleet. “As to what they’re doing on the surface…”

“We think they’re starting to modify it to his standard,” said one of the AIs. “If Diadem can be turned into a giant factory, so much more so with Ventus itself. Worse—it could be turned into a single giant organism.”

“3340.”

“Exactly. Your friends don’t believe it. They’ve been petitioning to go down there and investigate. But based on the numbers you’ve just given us, we don’t have time. If 3340 is back, and it starts converting Ventus itself, there could be geometric growth of these ships.”

Marya shook her head angrily. “They’re just protecting themselves against you! They can see you, sitting out here like vultures.”

“If that were the case, then they wouldn’t be putting themselves in position for a run to escape the system.” The hologram pointed at the specks trailing away from Ventus. “They’re ready to fan out—maybe carry resurrection seeds to every other world in human space. We’d never be able to stop 3340 then.”

“Have you asked the swans what they’re doing?” Marya asked.

“Yes. They don’t answer. We’ve tried sending probes in but that fleet of theirs blows them away before they get close enough to see anything. We have no way to find out what’s going on.”

The admiral sighed. “Since we can’t learn more, I think it’s time to make a decision. I presume the consensus is to cauterize the threat now?”

The others, all save Axel and Marya, nodded.

A slow horror crept over the Voice. “Because of what I said… you’ve decided to kill everyone on that world?”

“It’s not your responsibility,” said the admiral. “Don’t worry about it.”

She could only hang there, stunned. She didn’t even feel Axel put his hand on her shoulder until he pushed her into motion.

In moments they were outside the chamber, and Axel began cursing viciously. She heard Marya gasping, “They can’t! They can’t!” over and over.

“They will,” said Axel quietly. “The people down there mean nothing to them. After all, it’s only a few million; that many people die in the Archipelago every second.”

“If anything’s happening, it’s the Winds fighting Armiger themselves! If we could only prove that. If only one of our ships could get past the swans and see…”

In her mind’s eye the Voice could picture the entire holo display from the conference room; she remembered the position and trajectory of each and every ship, and she knew something she had neglected to tell the admiral. The Voice had been inside the nervous system of one of the Winds’ ships; she knew their tactics, their transmission frequencies—and their recognition codes.

She took a deep breath. It wasn’t fair, she thought bitterly; she had wanted the first real action she took as an individual to be on behalf of her new human side. Nonetheless, for the first time in her existence the Voice felt she was acting by and for herself when she said, “But you do have a ship. Me.”

*

Armiger and Galas stood on a shoulder of land in the foothills of the coastal mountains. They were gazing out at the plains below. It was night—or at least, it was behind them. The plains were in day.

“How can we fight power like that?” murmured Galas. From here, the full extent of the daylit square was visible. They were just outside its western edge, but it was moving, slowly, in their direction. A cluster of vagabond moons shone bright silver high in the vast tapering cube of glowing air.

“There,” said Armiger, pointing. Squinting where he pointed, she made out a low cloud of dust hugging the eastern end of the square.

“What is it?”

“An army, marching. It would seem Parliament still pursues you.”

His voice was neutral—bland, even. He had been like this ever since Megan’s death—withdrawn, but as strong-willed as ever. He had ridden them hard for the past several days. Galas had been afraid that if she showed an instant’s weakness—if she gave him even an inkling that she couldn’t keep up—he would abandon her. It wasn’t that he no longer cared about her, he just seemed so completely focussed on his goal that the present moment had no reality for him.

Recognizing this in him brought a chill to her heart; she had been that way once, and not just for a day or a week. As they rode, Galas spent long hours withdrawn herself, remembering her youth after the death of her mother, for the first time seeing it from the outside, as if hearing about someone else’s tragic past. She did not like what the objectivity revealed.

They rode and rode through grassland dotted with small forests, hour after hour until she lay draped in the saddle, her thighs and lower back a blaze of pain, sure that she would slide off the saddle with the horse’s next step. At some point during that odyssey they had left the plains behind, and now they were scarcely a day’s ride from the Titans’ Peaks.

She spared a glance behind her. Treetops jabbed above the crest of the plateau where they camped, and beyond them mauve cut out shapes she had at first mistaken for storm clouds shone pearly in the reflected light from the plain. The foothills ended in a huge, knotted pair of snow-capped peaks with a deep notch separating them. Lower peaks receded to the south and south, becoming more rounded and lower as they went.

She knew this twin mountain, had spent time there listening to the subterranean roaring of the desals at work. She had never imagined she would see the Titans’ Gates in the light of a Wind-made day.

“We are trapped.” She said it fatalistically.

Armiger waved negligently at the shining plains. “We needn’t fear the humans. They won’t be able to scale the Gates, unless they’re riding in the moons themselves. As to the Winds—well, making day in the night like that is a pretty minor trick.”

“Minor? Can you do it?”

“Not from here. It’s trivial if you’re in orbit.” He shaded his eyes again.

“Armiger.” He didn’t seem to notice her, until she reached out and put a hand on his arm. When he finally turned to face her, she said, “Why have we come here?”

When he didn’t answer immediately she said, “We’ve been riding for days. We’ve barely even spoken. I confess for a time I was content just to be escaping—escaping anything, and everything. But the truth is, I’m sore, stiff and weary beyond belief. If you gave me no good answer as to where we’re going or why, I’d just as soon lie down and wait for those things to find me.”

He smiled slightly and briefly. “I find it hard to talk about it. Not because of any emotional thing… no, it’s because 3340, who gave me the impulse to begin with, made me to be reluctant. Do you understand the concept of conditioning?”

She smiled ironically. “You ask Queen Galas that?”

“All right, then. I’ve been conditioned not to talk about it. But I no longer work for 3340…” He glanced over at her quickly, as if startled by something—or afraid.

Interesting, she thought. “Who do you work for now, Armiger?” she asked quietly.

“One question at a time. You asked why we were here. Look.” With a sweep of his arm he indicated the fang-tooths of the Titans’ Gates. “Even before I met Jordan Mason I thought this place might hold the key. It is the nexus of physical power for the western end of the continent. Here the desals have their power plants and desalination stacks. This is their interface with the Winds of the ocean, who are incredibly strong as well. This is the transfer point for hundreds of underground highways, and there are giant data stores and genetic stockpiles buried deep within the mountains. You probably never got a hint of that when you were here—it’s