Spellbound, her audience tried to absorb the news.
“Our finest armor is thickest at the bow,” she reminded them. But before anyone could take comfort in that fact, she said with a brutal confidence, “Our hyperfiber will be sliced apart by the revolving black holes. That much is certain. A white-hot fissure will open up, and before the wounded armor can flow back on itself, the polypond’s blade will cut into the plasma. Its rapid spin will increase the damage. We think the blade carries a profound electric charge, and most of our simulations show a flattened jet of superheated matter carried away from the ship. The loss of mass will be trivial, but of course, that is not the point.”
She paused again.
Breathed, again.
“We’ve dubbed the contraption the Sword of Creation. With each passage, its black holes will continue to acquire mass and destructive capacity. The hyperfiber behind them has been carefully shaped to accomplish this one task. The polypond intends to cut through the heart of our ship. In regions that are rich in rock and air, the damage zone will expand. Blast effects and cave-ins will obliterate everything in a zone as much as twenty kilometers wide. Which is why I have ordered a complete evacuation of the following districts …”
“Why run?” many asked themselves. “There’s no escape, so why prolong the misery?”
And then, as if she had heard their doubts, the Master interrupted her own thorough listing of doomed places. For an instant, something of the old cockiness reemerged. She had evolved into a complicated figurehead. Virtually everyone on board knew her personal history and the endless rumors. Washen was the real queen now, with the other Submasters wearing their own vast roles. But still, the Master was the face of the ship, and she was as much its voice as anyone. When she told everyone, “This is not finished,” they heard and smelled, saw and felt more than just her words. This was the face that every sentient soul could read at a glance, and a single glance provided just enough encouragement. Hundreds of thousands began retreating, even as the same face told everyone else, “Remain ready. At any moment, you may need to flee, too.”
Then with a sigh and another sad shake of the head, the Master reported, “If nothing changes, the Sword of Creation will reach Marrow in a moment less than two hours. And a few minutes later, the swollen black holes will begin to strike whatever sits at the center of that mysterious world. And at the very least, we will have the rare honor of learning what precisely it is that is down there.”
Then with a broad and weary smile, she added, “I have had many honors in my life. But this is one distinction that I would most gladly avoid.”
Forty-five
“The keenest blade is the blade never felt.”
Mere said the words in Tilan, then human, and finally in their original harum-scarum. Then she glanced at the face of an old-fashioned timepiece that Washen had only just given her—a round machine full of humming parts wrapped inside a dull silver case—and she carefully counted the seconds until impact. For a multitude of responsible reasons, she was being held in quarantine. Her new body was being tended to by an intense little autodoc. Stripped of every kind of nexus, she was reduced to watching events as they were projected into the longest wall of her chamber. But at least the feeds were immediate, uncensored and honest. Probes in high orbit above the ship watched the Sword from every angle. Straight on, the great machine was a delicate vertical shimmer—a taut line vibrating under some great pressure—and then the vibration would relax slightly, and the looming threat would suddenly vanish against the black of the nebula. But probes watching from one side or another saw an enormous ribbon of silk, perfectly round and possessing the illusion of stillness. Without features for an eye to follow, the mind couldn’t tell that the Sword was turning. And even with its enormous size, it looked remarkably insubstantial next to the Great Ship—like a child’s throwing hoop about to strike the indifferent face of a great wet stone.
The autodoc told her, “Relax,” and laced her shattered ribs with a healing agent. “And exhale now. Please.”
Mere blew out, wincing with the pain.
“Inhale now. Please.”
The pain diminished noticeably, or she was too distracted to notice.
Beneath the Sword, the newborn sea was churning. Suddenly a narrow band of water developed a crease, fibers and gels and dams of woven hyperfiber forming a double wall that instantly began to pull apart. It was a reflex, she imagined. The polypond was fully prepared to die, yet its own flesh instinctively fought to save itself for another few minutes. Spending vast sums of energy and concentration, the entity dug a deep valley in its own flesh, exposing the original hull of the ship. For an instant, Mere could see the once-flooded telescopes, crushed by currents and the pressure, and the slick gray-white face of the deep, utterly useless armor. Then the Sword plunged into the breach, and for a long amazing instant, it hovered.
Rockets were firing at the hub, tweaking the Sword’s angle one last time. Then they abruptly stopped firing, some point of perfection achieved. Like a woman pulling a dagger into her own chest, the ship’s gravity yanked at the blade, and a scorching white light filled the screen.
A gentle tremor passed through Mere.
Was it the impact, or a personal nervous flinch?
“Do not move,” the autodoc advised. Then with a different voice, it assured her, “You will survive, darling, and so will the rest of us.”
Mere didn’t believe the words, but she couldn’t help but embrace the sentiment. She watched the screen, and the machine watched, too, with its extra eyes, and after a while, one of them said, “Astonishing.”
The word was inadequate, but every word would be. With each second, one hundred tiny black holes swept through the strongest matter known, gouging and cutting and setting the wreckage into churning motion, the quasi fluid rising into the sharp edge of the blade itself, feeling the carefully sculpted charge that grabbed hold of it and flung it outward. The jet formed a single stream, white and intense, and ethereal, and lovely in a horrible fashion. Tens of kilometers of hyperfiber were swiftly sliced away and left useless, and as the Sword cut deeper, it slowed its descent again. Rockets fired and fired harder, and the blade held its pace, and some critical point was achieved. Achieved, and obvious. Suddenly the white stream of plasmas was tainted with traces of yellow and amber, then a vivid burst of deep red. The black holes were burrowing through granite and basalt, and into atmospheres and water, too.
The autodoc had stopped working. Every glass eye was focused on images still thousands of kilometers removed from this place, and the spider-thin hands held delicate instruments up high, and a voice that could never sound anything but utterly confident asked, “What will we do? What will the captains do? How will Washen defeat this thing?”
A distinct, undeniable vibration caused the chamber to shake.
“She’ll destroy the Sword,” Mere offered. “Or knock it free and outrace it. I would guess.”
Neither spoke for a moment.
Then with a vaguely skeptical tone, the machine asked, “Is any of that possible?”
And then it dismissed its own question. “Every illness has its cure,” it declared. “How can I believe anything else?”
FIVE MINUTES MORE.
The tremors grew worse by the moment, insistent, then rough, then the roughest blows were punctuated with hard, sharp rumblings. Great explosions and little collapses sent vibrations traveling through the meat of the ship, many of them skimming along the base of the hull, arriving at Port Gwenth along with a growling groan that was felt more than it was heard.