<When you are above these Noughts…> Quath spoke slowly, <sweep the backwash over the ground. The flames will—>
<Maneuver where they can shoot into my underbelly?> A harsh laugh. <You are a grub.>
<Stay, then. We can perhaps ride over them and, and crush—>
<Flee, fool! This is not our task. Clearing of Noughts requires real weapons.> Beq’qdahl’s infrared antennae wobbled and sheared away with a grating noise. <Agh!—what pain! I’m leaving!>
<I…I’m trapped here.>
<I will go ahead, summon aid. You…you boost as far as you can and, and wait.> She finished hurriedly and made ready. Near misses hummed in the air.
Quath felt a stabbing gouge in her third pod. The gray animals—no, Noughts, she corrected herself—were nearer. They were fanning out. Metal glinted in their small feelers.
When Quath glanced skyward again, Beq’qdahl was a yellow dot arcing toward the distant Hive. Quath knew that even if she had boosters, she would lose valuable moments overcoming her own subminds. Their fear of flying was almost unmanageable.
Resigned, she turned to study the Noughts with no weapons to repel them. Small pellets ate—snick! ping!—at her skin. She hoisted her own boosters and locked them into sleeves, shrugging off the small bites as the Noughts’ shots nipped at her. Small, but so many.
As she articulated a telescoping arm, something caught her attention. Her stapler gleamed in the dawnlight.
The humble stapler which drove forked brackets into the Hive rock. No weapon at all…
Quath started to run. And then stopped. The Noughts could follow, after all. If she stood she would retain at least her dignity, if not her life.
Quath turned and faced the enveloping tide of piping Noughts. Something in her wanted this.
She raised the stapler and sighted along it with three eyes. A Nought charged into her center of focus and she fired. The staple split a rock, missing the Nought. She corrected. Fired. Another miss.
Quath felt a strange soothing calm. Shots struck her palps, fracturing one away. Steadily she calibrated and aimed. The stapler jerked. A Nought crumpled and fell into a gully.
The next gray target bobbed and weaved. Quath compensated and caught it on the third shot, splitting the thing in two. Beneath the gray shell it oozed sap.
High, frantic calls piped from the Noughts. Many ducked behind outcroppings. Quath quickly shot three.
Their weapons peppered her, stings nicking at her concentration. She killed five more.
They crowded in now, skipping like mites from one shadowed refuge to the next. Staples plowed through the soft, unarmored Noughts.
Her side dimpled and a hard wave of pain lanced through her. She lurched, gasping. Oil bubbled from two pods. Her remotely actuated hydraulic cylinders did not respond. She was trapped here.
She dashed sideways to elude a wedge of them and a massed volley slammed her into a rock face. Her lenses fogged. Oxygen processors rasped. Fiery fingers pulled at her guts.
Here it is, Quath thought. I have met it. Blackness closed in.
Drifting…
Swimming…
Darkness came…slow…slow.
Yet time ticked on.
In her blurred sensate swamp Quath felt a brush of cool air, like the plasma wind which stirs the banks of dust between suns. Watery images floated in her eyes. She oxidized sugars with nitric acid, splitting open her internal mucus pouches to hasten the mix. She strained—
With a gathering rush her boosters fired, yellow columns singing. A cold fierce joy burst in her.
She landed unsteadily. Noughts swarmed after her. She set herself with a cool certainty and aimed. Fired.
Forked staples cut into the Noughts. Clanking, rumbling, surging, she moved—and boosted again, firing as she flew.
The Noughts in their gray suits exploded when the staples caught them. Guts spilled on crushed rock.
A pleasant fever swept over Quath as they fell under her hail of staples, puny voices screaming, rasping for a last suck of air.
Quath pushed them back across the field. Their firing slowed, ceased. They fled. She swiveled and searched out the few gray dabs remaining. They cowered in their hiding holes, bleating in fear, little better than animals.
Each became a small detail that Quath settled with the quick sharp stutter of the stapling gun. Each ended with a little cry, as if what awaited were a surprise.
When she sliced the last one through, Quath stood alone, gasping, her mind fuzzed. She attached a hook and line to a Nought body which was still in one piece and hauled it up for a better view. In the absolute silence of the battlefield her driving servo scratched, demanding oil. Her joints trembled with strain. The Nought body turned on the hook. Quath plucked at the gray skin. Filmy, it tore away.
The gray suit shucked off, much the way this world would soon become a husk. The Nought slipped free.
At first Quath saw only the gangling appendages with their awkward, splayed ends. Two for walking, two for manipulations. The joints were slight pivots, surely not capable of withstanding much stress.
Yet as Quath studied the creature she saw how the wrinklings and knottings of its skin told how the thing lived. Patches of curdlings at the midjoints of the shorter pods, evidence of wear. A funguslike growth above and below the eyes, to cup warmth about the small brain. Another dark patch, lower, to shelter a tangle of equipment.
Quath traced the fine pattern of fleece that wove about the body, following what she could see were flow lines water would make as the thing swam. A beautiful design. So this Nought was a swimmer, yet it could walk, after a fashion.
She clamped the skull and turned the spinal juncture until a click came. She sent a subsonic hum along the body. With care she lifted the skull. The skeleton came free, sliding up out of the meat.
To Quath this gesture brought into the air a fresh and wonderful vision. The chalky bones were not crude and heavy. They seemed delicately turned, fitting snugly together—thin where waste would slow the beast, strong where torques and forces found their axis.
The center held a finespun cage of calcium rods. Ribs. They blossomed into a brittle and precisely adjusted weave, a song of intricate design and wonderful order that Quath could sense trilling through the webbed intersections.
Yet this Nought-thing was a pest. It crawled on the ground and probably never noticed the stars. It had mastered at best the trifling resources of its pitiful little world. Its crude weapons were barely better than the teeth and hooves of dumb animals.
Quath spun the skeleton, marveling at it. Inside her a chorus swelled over her weak, doubting voices. She swept aside the bleak landscape of small-minded logic, the fears which had ruled her.
Here at last was the truth made manifest. Her faith returned.
Reason resonated here. A universe which spent such care on loathsome, useless Noughts surely could not make the whole drama pointless by discarding it all, by letting blackness swallow everything, by letting Quath’jutt’kkal’thon ever finally fail, fail and die.
A Matter of Momentum
ONE