Counter-Measures

  Now, he searched for strange new environments for his people to function in.

  This time, he'd outdone himself. They worked outside Gyton's pitted hull, stringing survival line through the irradiated hell cupped within the null singularity fields. Because of their extreme mass, even the light passing through the human eye played tricks, redshifting, lapping back and forth like waves. A misstep could mean death. Especially if a person drifted up, into the space-time distortion warped by the null singularity generation. Once within those fields, tidal effects would make death instantaneous, but they'd never recover the body. The jet of plasma would pop out someplace in Free Space, traveling headlong toward the Forbidden Borders on whatever vector Gyton had been traveling at point of departure.

  Don't think it! Mac insisted, biting his lip as he concentrated on the zizzing vibration of the line as it passed through the zero g clip on his belt. He glanced up, still spooked by the digital clock above the faceplate. The letters had gone blood red, and the seconds, normally just a little slower than his heartbeat, had slowed to a near stop. Worse, photons played funny tricks. The image of the clock seemed to slide around the inside of his helmet, as if his head were oozing and flowing.

  He wore a specially designed suit constructed of layer upon layer of lead foil, ablative material, polarized ceramic, and dense optical-directional fiber to channel radiation away from the body. The exterior of the suit had been polished to a mirror perfect golden sheen. Even the faceplate had been completely opaqued to protect him from the trapped radiation. Everything from heat to X rays crept out from the hull, pent, awaiting the moment when Qyton shifted from null singularity back into the "real" universe. Only then would the law which dictated the conservation of energy be fulfilled and radiation returned to the universe to which it belonged. I A knot slipped by Mac s fingers, and he tightened his cable break to kill his momentum. Arm length by arm length, he pulled himself along until Red's invisible hands grabbed him. They hugged each other, bumping helmets. Red seemed especially reluctant to let go. Mac finally had to pry the man's arms loose.

  Here, beyond the ship,. with energy levels so high, their communications wouldn't work. Broadcast messages, like the light from his helmet chronometer, would bog down, shift and swirl like ripples in cold Ashtan honey.

  So far so good. Mac took a deep breath, forcing himself to concentrate. Even the brain seemed sluggish. The next segment-the most difficult-was up to him.

  He followed the cable down, locating the mooring ring on the hull. As he bent, the light inside his helmet turned oddly blue, then yellow as he turned his head.

  "Pus-licking hell," he whispered to cover his fear.

  You had to be out here, Mac. Next time, just flake out, post the order, and stay safe! Except that he couldn't, not and look his people in the eyes. That mutual respect kept morale alive in his Division.

  Frightened half silly, he had to take the lead. His job would be to string cable along the hull to a ventilation stack, make his way around it, and locate the hatch on the other side. To find it in the total darkness, he had to orient himself along the hull and feel his way the length of a weld seam. His only attachment to Gyton would be via two magnets that he carried.

  "You'll panic out there in the blackness and die!" Rysta had insisted.

  It's all right, Mac. Red didn't panic. The Rotted Gods knew why! But then, Red had nice, safe mooring rings to work his way along. You can make it the rest of the way. His throat felt like he'd swallowed a knotted sock. Just keep your head. Think.

  Forcing himself to breathe easily, he located the magnets on his belt. Feeling with his fingers, he energized them and leaned down. From his belt, he unclipped the coil of cable he carried, hooking one end to the mooring ring, checking, double-checking the fastening to make sure he couldn't drift free.

  Heart battering at his chest, Mac ran gloved fingers over the worn metal, finding the puckered seam of the weld. "Blessed Gods, keep me. " Mac placed his first magnet-and released his hold on the mooring ring. In the event he drifted off the hull, he'd have one chance. If he could reel himself in before he drifted five meters above the hull, he could save his life.

  Handhold by handhold, Mac moved himself across the black face of infinity.

  Time wavered like a mirage. He could feel the temperature rising in his suit.

  With each movement, the normally white light inside his helmet shifted color, or worse, blacked out as photons stopped at the boundary of light speed.

  You're outside of reality, pal.

  "This was a crazy idea. I'm going to get us all killed!" Something had gone wrong. He should have reached the ventilator. The inability to swallow, at first merely an irritant, began to magnify as his insecurity grew.

  He rechecked, feeling the bulge of the weld. It had to be the weld- It had to, What else could be out there?

  Easy. Relax, Mac. Don't panic. Panic will kill you. Each beat of his heart thundered like a drum.

  Did he go back?

  Another ten handholds.

  Nerving himself, he placed his magnet, feeling along the weld.

  * , . Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. I'm going to die. "Another ten, Mac. Then, if you don't find the ventilator, reel yourself in. "

  And he would have failed.

  But you'll be alive. The muscles in his hands began to cramp. Unconsciously, he'd been gripping the magnet handles with all his strength. Sweat clung to his skin in an ever thicker film. He'd started to pant as panic wrapped around him.

  ":. . Five. Six. Seven .

  His helmet smacked the convex surface after his seventh handhold. "Blessed Gods, let it be the ventilator."

  At the base of the unit, he found another mooring ring. He pulled his line tight, fastening it to the ring. Then he worked around the ventilator, following the arc of the convex cover.

  "Forty degrees. Eighty degrees. One-twenty degrees. One-sixty degrees. " If the ship's plans were correct, a hatch should lie within a meter of where he clung to his magnet.

  Mac licked his already wet lips, reaching out. Nothing but featureless deck met his groping fingers.

  "Come on, baby, you gotta be here." He stretched farther. "Just a bit more! "

  The Quantum Gods help him if he'd taken a wrong turn.

  This is crazy! You missed the route. You're going to die out here, Mac!

  He reached out to his fullest, hooking a toe, suffering that sensation of horrible disaster as he slipped loose, rising, thrashing.

  Stop! Think! Sobbing half hysterically, he reached for his hip, collecting the cable, ready to draw himself back down to the mooring ring.

  He screamed when the hand grabbed his foot. The urge to strike out, to fight in panicked insanity flashed through his fevered mind. He struck out, feeling his other foot land against a human body-and aborted his struggle.

  Safe. You're safe!

  The hand dragged him down.

  In hysterical joy, Mac grabbed the suited figure, hugging him in a crushing grip. Arms patted him on the back. Soothing.

  Together, they got the hatch open, Mac could hear the inside of the lock as the system pressurized.

  Mac almost fellas the inner hatch opened and he stumbled over the seal and into the ship. Through the fogged faceplate, he watched the mirror-suited body of his savior bend down, gloved hands working at his helmet release. Other suited forms crowded around: the decontamination team.

  Refreshing air rushed in as the seal cracked. Sweat ran down his face in rivulets as gravity pulled at his soaked flesh.

  "Rotted Gods!" He closed his eyes, shivering.

  When he regained self-possession enough to look around, he blinked, staring into Chrysla's concerned gaze.

  "Mac? Are you all right?"

  He jerked a nod, fiinging sweat everywhere. "Fine. Yeah, fine. Scared is all."

  "But we made it," Andrews noted from somewhere behind him. "Red and the others will be on the way. Attenasio, you'd better get back out there. Judging from the way Mac loo
ks, they might be one click short of overload."

  Chrysla straightened, lifting her helmet.

  "Wait? What are you doing down here?" Mac placed a hand on her reflective suit.

  She bent down, whispering, "I assigned myself to the pickup team. " She gave him a dazzling smile. "Someone had to go out there. You initialed the order yourself. "

  "I initialed . . . when?" But she'd already resecured the helmet, stepping into the lock.

  Mac flopped fiat on his back, gasping lungs full of cool air while Andrews ran the scintillometer over his suit, checking for radiation.

  "What's it like out there?" Andrews studied Mac uneasily. "You look like you've been through hell."

  "If you can handle that, you can tackle anything. Only an idiot would step back out into that insanity."

  Andrews watched the air lock lights change, indicating that the outer hatch was opening, and muttered, "I thought at first she was a puff ball. She's one hell of a woman, Mac. "

  "Yeah, don't I know it." The aftereffects of fear began to fade from his flushed system. And as soon as I get the chance, I'm going to chew her ass for this silly shint.

  And until the day he died, he'd remember the sobbing relief he felt when Chrysla's hand grabbed his leg, pulling him back to safety.

  Nyklos ducked through the hatch and dropped down the ladder. Dealing with Bruen disturbed him. He hadn't intended to ignore the old man, but the fact remained that each time he checked on the ancient Magister, it had a distressing effect.

  " Perhaps it's just you," he told himself. "Nerves, that's all ." But how could a man as strong as Bruen had been break like this? And worse, why did such terror possess the elder at the mere mention of the Mag Comm?

  Nyklos, himself, wouldn't have admitted to being overjoyed with the mission.

  In the first place, he hated Staffa and would be forced to work in close quarters with the man. In the second, he didn't like leaving Kaylla to handle the rest of the Seddi administration by herself. Tension crackled in the very air. Free Space was splitting itself at the seams. One lone nexus of information remained, and Kaylla had become the bearing that kept that wheel running.

  Bruen's liquid blue stare watched him as he stepped off the ladder and walked over to begin his inspection. The medical readouts remained within the normal range.

  "Good day, jailer."

  , ,Hello, Magister. Is there anything you need? Anything I can do for you? Get for you? That is, within the constraints of my mission."

  Bruen made a weak gesture of negation. "No, jailer. Unless you would simply sit and talk. What do you hear from Free Space?"

  - Not much, Magister. We're in null singularity. The last information we had indicated that Maika had suffered riots. Phillipia's citizen committee has declared the planet sovereign-but the Regans there took exception. The chances are that violence will ensue. Staffa has dispatched a warship in their direction. It will be a while before it arrives."

  "It's too late. We're all too late."

  "We have hope. Phillipia won't buck a battleship in orbit. "

  "Oh, you'll save them for now. But next year? The year after that?" Bruen sighed in defeat. "The quanta have destroyed us. What random chance failed to do, the machine will. "

  Nyklos crossed his arms. "Tell me about the machine, Magister. Not the history, I know that, but tell me about how you dealt with it."

  Bruen gave him a measuring glance. "And if I don't, you'll go away? Leave me alone?"

  Nyklos chewed at his lower lip, then shook his head. "No, not if you don't want me to. We can talk about something else. "

  Bruen licked his thin lips. "Very well. If that's your attitude, I'll tell you. I was there, Nyklos. I was in that chamber the day the Mag Comm came alive. I was the young man who ran panting up the stairs, shouting for the Magisters." He shifted, eyes aflame. "Do you understand? It was like watching the statue of a god coming to life!"

  "And everything changed. "

  "Ah, yes, change it did. " Bruen stared absently at the gray girders overhead.

  "The machine ordered us to abandon our teachings, to adopt the mantra of Right Way. You know the teachings."

  "Of course. There is only one truth, that taught by the Mag Comm. Uncertainty doesn't exist. Any action leads to another action. Random events are the creation of a wild and undisciplined human imagination-not the reflection of reality. Truth is service to the machine. "

  "And Staffa would accept'the yoke of such a master? Place it around the neck of humanity?"

  "You didn't accept the yoke."

  "No." Bruen closed his eyes. "But others did. I watched the Magisters enslave themselves. They couldn't guard their thoughts. The machine read their deepest secrets and weeded them out, one by one, until it had total obedience. Only Hyde and I held out. In the end, I assumed the golden helmet-and I alone could hide my true thoughts, my true motives. I had to save us, to return us to the teachings of our fathers. "

  "Why didn't you accept what the machine taught?" Bruen's lips twisted. "Accept it? Pus-dripping quanta,

  only a fool could believe that tripe! I'd as soon have believed that fat Sassan pig was a God! Any intelligent individual would have looked around at the universe and realized what the machine preached was ludicrous. An action didn't always lead to the same reaction. Pour water from a cup. Does the splash pattern always appear exactly the same? Humans act with even less predictability than water! "

  Nyklos lifted a bushy eyebrow. "The idea of ordered development doesn't exactly show an in-depth understanding of human psychology."

  Bruen gave him a sly smile. "The joke on the machine is that the quanta control the human brain. God's fingerprint on our very thoughts. "

  ,'But the machine thinks differently.

  "It's a machine! A digital beast manufactured by something, somewhere, with enough redundancy to produce the same results each time a series of data are entered. It works on a hierarchy of patterns. Each discrete-or so Hyde once believed - "

  "What about the mistakes?" Nyklos asked. "It had to know that it was making mistakes. "

  "Did it? Or did it simply blame them on the humans attempting to implement its program?" Bruen lifted a frail arm and rubbed at his nose. "I don't know. I got the feeling the machine didn't understand us. I remember once, there at the last, everything had gone wrong. Sinklar had eluded our control, Arta had figuratively blown up in our faces. Staffa had defied all the predictions.

  Everything was falling apart. All the elaborate plans had become so much dust.

  , " was under the helmet. The machine was in my mind, upset, unable to understand how things could have gone so wrong. I could feel the confusion.

  Invading my thoughts, it asked if I was responsible for the setbacks. And when I truthfully denied it, the machine left my head so quickly I could barely breathe."

  :'It didn't understand?"

  6Nyklos, despite the machine's constant surveillance of Free Space, it didn't understand that humans cannot be programmed like a machine. As things grew worse, it grew desperate. Asking questions about God. The machine es-poused that a truly rational society could not believe in God.

  "But in doing so, it makes the baseline assumption that God Is existence cannot be proved, not the converse, correct?" "You're a bright study, Nyklos.

  The machine didn't re-

  alize that the existence of God cannot be disproved either. I remember, it once asked for an in-depth report on atheism. Producing the document absorbed manpower we didn't have time to provide, but we did it anyway."

  Bruen paused, seeing those long gone days. "Immediately after that, the machine gave me orders. Silly orders, things we couldn't possibly accomplish."

  "Like what?"

  "Like striking down the Sassan Empire because they made a god out of their fat Emperor. Like ordering Staffa's immediate death. We didn't even know where he was, let alone whether we could kill him! The machine ordered me to destroy Sinklar Fist's Assault Division. And we cursed well
gave that our best effort!" Bruen shook his head, sighing. "And then the machine made the most interesting statement. It told me that it must have predictability from humans. "

  "It must have?" Nyklos grinned. "Must?"

  "Must. And then it told me it couldn't trust me. As if it had any other choice. And finally, it stated this. The words are as vivid as the day they were implanted into my brain. 'Are you and your kind truly irrational as was declared long ago?'

  , ,Who declared?"

  Bruen gave him a sidelong glance. "Who, indeed. I searched the record. The machine had never made a statement like that before. In retrospect, I have come to the conclusion that the machine was so desperate, the effect could be likened to human emotion. It made a mistake. Following that, it threatened us with extinction.

  "Which may not be long in coming."

  "No. But despite my study of the records, I've found no evidence of the machine interfering in our affairs.

  "Would you recognize it?"

  "I think so." Bruen nodded. "The machine has its own special and, I must admit, clumsy signature. "

  Nyklos hesitated, remembering the machine. "Do you . . . do you think it's intelligent? Sentient?"

  For a long time, Bruen stared absently at the gray plates overhead. "I don't know, Nyklos. Either the machine is intelligent, or someone intelligent is constantly programming it.

  "Who? The Sassans?"

  "Don't be silly. Someone- something -but not any persons in Free Space."

  Nyklos skeptically tapped a toe. "The Rotted Gods?" "Don't act like a fool.

  You've seen the machine. It's not human. We didn't make it. Something else did."

  "Then where is the evidence? Archaeologists have scoured Free Space looking for the clues to human origins. If weird creatures, alien beings, built the Mag Comm, where are the other machines they made? Where are the traces of their civilization?"

  "I don't know."

  Nyklos cocked his head. "I don't believe the aliens theory. If anything, I tend to believe we're alone in the universe. The only reason we evolved is because of the Forbidden Borders. They're a gravitic accident, one which protects us from the cosmic radiation beyond. We're the only intelligent beings in a little island of life."