There were only two possible basic combinations, but an infinite number of variations. Either you feinted with a dogleg shot to draw your foe’s parrying fire out of line, and then made a straight-line correction, or you feinted with a straight-line shot, then made a dogleg correction to outflank the parrying fire. You either sprayed the chaff in a torus, if you feared the dogleg shot, or you sprayed in a cone, if you feared the straight shot.
One absurd variation which Montrose himself had used once was to point the weapon overhead and shoot the bullet up and then down into the crown of your foe, where the armor was thinnest, hoping he would not shoot his chaff straight up to block the shots. It was a variation quite easy to counter, since a straight shot into the enemy’s armpit with an escort bullet would kill him, and the main shot would practically cut a man in half.
The weather got cooler as Montrose walked on. The leaves were now brightly colored, red and yellow and rich brown. The birds were twittering, preparing to migrate to the nearby lands of summertime, less than a mile away.
A wind was starting. That was odd. No, it was more than odd, it was very bad. Usually there was a constant, unnoticed, mild breeze caused by the turning of the carousel, but the wind only began when the carousel was braking or accelerating. Since the wind was in his face, the carousel was braking. Colored leaves began to leap and swirl in the air, and the gentle, eternally flowing brook was splashing and sloshing in a chaotic fashion, seeming to rush faster.
The path led him into a grape arbor. Vines clustered thickly overhead, and the wind was less, but there were still clouds of colored leaves thrashing and whirling and leaping in his eyesight, blocking his view.
Then he saw the feet of his foe emerging downward from the curved roof of the grape arbor, half-hidden in the leafy cloud. Montrose stopped walking, turned sideways, raised his massive sidearm, a cubit long and six pounds in weight. To shoot now would place his shots in the ground, because of the downward curve imparted by Coriolis forces. If the carousel were changing its rate of spin, however, the degree of correction Montrose would have to calculate would be changing second by second.
“Like fighting a duel in a damn fun house,” growled Montrose to himself. But he released his chaff, hiding himself in a cloud of darkness. Del Azarchel was an indirect man, so Montrose emitted the chaff in a smoke ring. The high wind was causing it to disperse faster than normal: Montrose knew with a sudden light-headed feeling of fear that he had fired his chaff too soon, leaving him with a weak defense. Against a foe with the skill and cool eye of Del Azarchel, that advantage, small as it was, might spell the death of Montrose.
No, that light-headed feeling was not fear. It was lightness. Del Azarchel had done something to the ship, using the duel as cover, using the hour when the ship’s brain would accept no orders, no messages. And if Montrose turned off his countermeasures now to radio a message to Twinklewink, Del Azarchel would put all nine bullets through him.
Because his shot would pull low, Montrose had to wait until Del Azarchel’s helmet was visible. He had to … no, wait. He had to wait for nothing. Montrose raised his weapon a degree or two, pointing at the latticework of grapevines. He pulled the trigger.
The concussion of noise was like a hammer blow. The whole top of the grape arbor was blown upward by the escort bullets, who reacted to the obstacle as if they were enemy counterbullets. There was a gush of fire as the dry wood of the lattices ignited, but a gush of sudden wind lifted up the whole arbor roof screaming and snapping from its thin supports and flung it toppling. The wreckage of wood passed over the head of Montrose and landed behind him. In his earphone, he heard the crackling rush of fire spreading through dry leaves. While directly in front of him, he saw an impossible sight.
For a moment, he could not understand what he was seeing. It was Del Azarchel in his armor, his helmet and his head shattered, blood gushing from every joint. Every bullet of the load had struck the man, killing him instantly. Del Azarchel’s chaff cloud was directly overhead as well and was already tattered and torn by the stormy winds.
It was true. Enough of the front of the head was intact that Montrose could see it was clearly Del Azarchel, not some trick, not some homunculus in his armor. He was dead.
Montrose had won. After long, long last, he had won!
7. Victory
“What the plague?” shouted Montrose aloud.
Nothing he was seeing made sense. Montrose could not focus his eyes, and he was blinking away the sweat droplets he suddenly realized had been stinging his eye sockets for a while now, half blinding him.
Dimly, he could see where Del Azarchel stood, swaying, dead in his armor, blood running, leaking, squirting horribly from six or seven vast wounds in his neck, chest, abdomen, and groin. Both hands were raised, but not in surrender. Del Azarchel held his off hand open, displaying the white fingers and the black palm, the signal that the duelist was ready to fire. But his gun hand was also raised high, pointing at nothing.
Del Azarchel had died standing with his gun hand high overhead, trying for the absurd up-and-down crown shot. Montrose had guessed correctly that Del Azarchel had attempted the indirect shot. But then why had not any of the bullets fallen down around Montrose?
Montrose dropped his gun and struggled to unbolt the heavy helmet. The figure of Del Azarchel swayed as the wind overcame the heaviness of his armor. Del Azarchel tilted, waved his off hand in a cheery salute, and fell with the sound of a Franklin stove being pushed down the cellar stairs. The wind threw dead leaves across his form, half hiding the gore.
With a scream of frustration, Montrose yanked the ungainly helmet free. The echo of the bullet shots was still ringing from the far side of the ship, a mile away. He wiped his eyes. Now he could look upward.
The contrail of the bullet fire from Del Azarchel’s gun ran straight up from his overhead chaff cloud toward the dead center of the ship. The tree that circled the black opal sphere was on fire. In weightlessness, with no gravity to pull them into their characteristic teardrop shape, the flames were blue oblate masses that clung and crawled along the wood like blind worms of pure heat.
The black ceramic sphere itself, somehow, impossibly, was neither punctured nor scratched, but the antennae outside the ship were no longer held in place by their invisible struts, but were slowly, majestically, toppling end over end in an ever-widening spiral.
And the black sphere was no longer in the center of the ship. The black sphere, moving ever faster in what seemed like a spiral, now crashed through the lights and heating elements of the miniature sun, sending broken shards of lamps whirling across the weightless air on meteoric spiral dances of their own, spreading outward, coming toward the strip of garden that formed the carousel of the ship.
“Twinklewink! What is happening?”
The little fairy was by his side, as were an entire swarm. “The vessel has suffered nonrecoverable damage. Please enter hibernation and await rescue. There is no other available course of action.” That was the voice of Twinklewink, but it was slow and halting.
But a little figurine in black said, “I wished I could have waited to see the look on your face as you died, but, alas, fate has not been kind to me.” This was the voice of Del Azarchel.
8. And Defeat
Twinklewink continued to speak: “All main energy supplies have been expended, as have all the fuel cells containing Bondi-Forward negative-mass tritium. The central sphere of the ship was not harmed. The magnetic shrouds struck by Del Azarchel are severed. However, the shrouds on the far side of the sphere from his point of impact were entirely unharmed. I have been able to lock down the remainder. We have lost connection with three-fourths of the sail.”
The figurine in black was speaking. “Novexarchel did actually die to kill you, you know, and so did I. You see, I explained before how I am willing to make sacrifices you are not. I downloaded the last memories of my consciousness into the black sphere using the mental replicator you so thoughtfully put in my charge, and
, since no orders could be given nor rescinded during the hour it took to prepare my mental information for broadcast, I was able to accomplish this with time to spare. I assume your countermeasures block you from seeing the intergalactic-strength broadcast beam leaving the ship for M3. The black sphere is made of ceramic, and my shots have shattered it like glass. All the appliances and mechanisms around it are Rania’s handiwork, human technology, and they will fall, too, and when the sphere passes through the hull—which is only made of an aluminum silicate crystal—the explosive decompression should suffice to end your overly extensive and overly exasperating life. Every last bit of useful energy on the ship, I have used up. Even the induction magnets in the carousel I set to brake the ship, not for any reason, but just so that you will not even have an erg left, not one erg, to maintain your body in hibernation, or in any machine, or as a download, or anywhere. That is assuming you survive the x-ray ignition of the central singularity of the ship’s drive and the smashing of the ship’s hull, which I doubt.”
The first large bits of flaming debris were beginning to hit the carousel ring. Wreckage from the miniature sun fell into the springtime quarter, shattering the fairy tower, igniting trees and ornamental arbors. Deer and rabbits were running pell-mell clockwise and counterclockwise, and some of them jumped too high in the ever-lessening gravity and hung in midair kicking as the air turned dark with smoke.
Twinklewink was speaking at the same time: “The carousel is off center and will collapse. Going into hibernation here will not preserve you.”
Montrose looked up. Most of the wreckage was heading toward the spring and summer quarters. He said, “If I get to the nanosupply pool beneath the skating rink, can you form it into something that will protect me?”
“Yes.”
Montrose leaped into the air. A cluster of fairies, miniatures stronger than they looked, put their tiny shoulders to his feet or under his armpits and flew him face-first through the midair cloud of spinning wood shards and broken lanternworks, deftly eluding the larger bits of flying rubbish. A dead deer floated by.
There was no sensation of weight once he was in the air. Fires were spreading all along the ring.
Montrose watched in awe as the black sphere now made contact with the carousel and made the whole ship ring like a gong, a noise louder than a world being split in two. Instead of smashing through the flimsy-looking surface, the sphere bounced, made contact with the carousel again, and began rolling, flattening trees and crushing wildlife.
Eerily, the flames were losing their yellow and red color and flamelike shape as they turned blue and ghostlike, clinging and crawling as they assumed the aspect of zero-gee flame.
The little black-suited fairy, tucked in the armpit of Montrose and obediently helping his fellow miniatures tow him across the breadth of the disaster, was also reciting the last recording of Del Azarchel: “Now, technically, this might seem like a violation of the terms of the duel, since we are supposed to place all our copies and backups in danger and erase them upon defeat. However, I will point out that this was not an official duel, nor did I actually challenge you to a duel. I was careful with my wording. You see, this was a continuation of the fight where you struck me across the face. All’s fair in a mere brawl, is it not?”
Twinklewink said, “I am also out of main power and have only four hundred seconds of reserves. Do you have any final orders?”
“Yes. Now hear this: when I enter the hibernation pool, download my brain information through the mind replicator into the black sphere; you will delete yourself as I enter to make room. It will kill you. Sorry.”
“I am a machine. Don’t anthropomorphize me,” said Twinklewink primly.
The little black fairy said, “You may have noticed by now that M3 is no longer directly to our fore. That was because while I was captain, I spent about a hundred years trailing the induction cable behind us and using the magnetic fields of the galaxy to turn the ship. I long ago released the cable, so you are left without any means to maneuver. Even if, by pure dumb luck, your specialty, you pass near a star on the way outside the galaxy, your relative velocity will make any rendezvous impossible, as I also piled on every last course and scrap of sail we had to push our velocity to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, with as many nines tacked on after the decimal as you’d like.”
The skating rink was underfoot. The carousel was turning slowly, now, and so the swaying trees were merely clinging by their roots in near weightlessness, as everything not tied down, from the water in the brook to the panicky white rabbits and snapping arctic foxes, toppled madly through midair.
Montrose crashed through the ice into the shockingly cold fluid, losing sensation almost immediately. The fluid, which was not water, thickened and produced wormlike organisms made of ice, which flowed over and into the armor, undoing buckles and latches with quick efficiency.
Montrose used the specialized cells in his brain to send a message. “Why did the black sphere not shatter?”
“The alien core operating system strengthened the interatomic bonds of the ceramic and changed it into an unknown substance, invulnerable to gunfire. The sphere was able to shield one-fourth of the shroud lines, which otherwise would have been severed. The sphere is off center. Shall I enact Rania’s instructions in the event of a shipwreck?”
There was no time to think about the implications of that. “Yes!”
“Stand by. I have given the order to reduce the ship carousel, life support, and decorative elements back into its base state, which Rania called gray goo. The blueprints for the carousel and decorative elements remain within the memory, and the ship can be re-created if another fuel or energy supply is found.”
“Decorative elements?”
“The flora and fauna are not real. They are molecular machines created by the M3 ship functions. This is now being altered to its original design. I am preserving the immediate area around your body in its current state, however.”
The fluid thickened around his head, beginning to form the machinery needed to read and transmit his brain information into the black sphere.
“What the hell? I mean, how are you doing this, if you are entirely out of power?” he asked, because more than the stipulated six minutes of time had passed.
Twinklewink started to melt, saying, “The return to the nonstructural condition is extropic—that is, more chemical energy is gained by the dissolution of the nanomachine infrastructure than is expended. I am attempting to convert this chemical energy into a useful form.”
“He said there would be an x-ray release when the drive core was shattered.”
“There would be, but the drive core has not been shattered. The hull has also changed into a new substance. It is chemically the same as it was, but the bonds of strong and weak nuclear force have increased exponentially, rendering the density beyond what I can measure.”
“That means the opal sphere is just going to bounce around inside the carousel for a while, right?”
“No. The drive sphere has already come to rest, and the carousel material is reconstructing itself into an energy-preserving configuration.”
“What configuration?”
“A sphere. This was the shape of the vessel when she was given to Rania, who endured most of the voyage as mental information in a non-self-aware state, only forming a physical body for herself, and a garden to hold it, and me to tend that garden, as she approached Earth.”
The little black fairy started to melt as, presumably, did all the trees and flowers and rabbits and little woodland animals peopling the wrecked ring. Del Azarchel’s voice rang out, vaunting, “There is no way to stop or slow the ship. Do not be deceived by the appearance of stars before and behind you: your course is in the direction of Canis Majoris, directly normal to the plane of the galaxy, and off into intergalactic nothingness. As I take Rania and clutch her warm and living body in my arms, I will think of your poor corpse drifting, unburied and unmourned, with a foolish expressi
on no doubt frozen on your face forever, in a void where no stars gleam! And how I shall laugh! Farewell, and to hell with you! The empty hell of endless night.”
Del Azarchel’s chilling laugh of triumph seemed to cling to the brain of Montrose, echoing, even after the fairy form uttering it was gone.
9. Ghost ship
Montrose, or Extrose, woke at the same moment the ship’s mind died. The few remaining active figurines, which had resumed what was presumably their original shape as black teardrops, were expelling their small remaining fuel mass to jet around the wreckage and send him views.
The carousel had blackened and shriveled like paper in a fire, shrinking inward, and everything, including what Montrose had thought was air and water, living creatures and hull material, was disassembling itself into a thick black ooze. In a vast wash of spiral mud and muck, the nanomachinery wrapped itself around the black sphere, one layer after another, and formed a featureless gray sphere around the buried black sphere. The only irregularity was the nodule which had once been the ice rink. His original body was still in there, frozen in molecular hibernation, but alive.
This featureless, geometrically perfect sphere was the true shape of the alien vessel.
Twinklewink was gone, erased to make room for Montrose, who could feel the jagged, angular shapes of the alien thought-forms of the operating system, like the bones of a skeleton, somewhere beneath the surface of his consciousness. This, then, was the true ship’s mind.
But he had no fuel and only the tiny cache of useful energy Blackie had not known about, generated when the ship had collapsed back into its primal goo, which Twinklewink had recovered and stored. A small ring of little black teardrops still contained magnetic monopolar lines linking them invisibly to the black sphere. The majority of the sails were no longer attached: they would begin to drift away before too many years had passed, pushed by interstellar light.