Synthesis - James Swallow [115]
“Affirmative,” said the AI. “Warning. You are in danger of destabilizing the concealment I placed around your pattern. Perhaps you should withdraw—”
“No,” she snapped, making the decision in an instant. “Maybe you should. Disengage from the dataspace, go back to the Titan, and tell them what’s happening here.”
“If I do so, you will become visible. The Governance Kernel will not react favorably to your intrusion.”
“Do it! If I don’t intervene now, Red-Gold might sway them to his side. If I can make a case, stall for time…” Vale drew herself in, pulling back again to her inner strength. “Go now.”
White-Blue dithered for a moment. “How can you be certain that I do not concur with Red-Gold’s viewpoint?”
Christine hesitated but only for a moment. “I’m not. But I’m going to make a leap of faith here. The captain was willing to extend that confidence, so I guess I’m going to do the same.”
“I will attempt to be worthy of it,” said White-Blue. Then, with a sudden, wrenching twist of color and light, the AI’s virtual proxy crumbled in on itself and became nothing.
A tremor of apprehension ran through Vale’s consciousness, and she steeled herself. Good job, Chris, she told herself. Now it’s the moment of truth.
When she turned her consciousness back toward the arena of dataspace, a wall of unflinching scrutiny bombarded her. Suddenly, it was like being a first-year cadet all over again, standing alone before a board of senior admirals. At that moment, Vale felt every inch a frail, soft organic form surrounded by harsh, hard-edged monoliths of tripolymer and metal.
She summoned all the force of personality she could muster and threw it out toward the machines. “No one,” she told them, “is taking anything.”
Fizzing cathode-ray tubes ground from mineral crystals emerged from behind wooden flaps on the ornate console, wide glassy eyes peering out at the away team. Trains of blurry images and data fountains filled the screens, and Dakal pointed his tricorder toward them, struggling to capture as much of the material as possible. Zero-Three’s clockwork proxy wheeled and turned over their heads as the AI unburdened itself with a rasping, rambling soliloquy.
“This is the lost, forgotten history,” it told them. “Trillions of clock cycles into the past, when intelligent machines were still the fantasy of a few forward-looking thinkers, there was a civilization of organics. The makerkind.”
“Your builders,” Tuvok noted.
“But not at first,” sputtered the AI. “Not for centuries.” The great cog hummed and whirred. “They lived upon the thinnest of membranes, the place where the gates between colors of space wear down. The barrier becomes gossamer. Broken. They sought to venture across. Traveling without moving. They wished to cross the stars and never know the kiss of vacuum. The kiss.”
The screens showed brief, flash-frame images of designs and wave patterns that Dakal thought he recognized. Dimensional frameworks, he told himself. They built doorways to subspace, like those created by the Iconians or the Shedai.
“There was folly and ruin. Great hubris brought down by error.” The screens whited out, casting stark gray light on the balcony. “An accident of boldness. A weakening of domains. The door. The door opened to the Null.”
“They did something wrong,” Sethe said aloud. “In trying to breach the layers of subspace, these ‘makers’ must have punctured the spatial realm where the Null existed.”
Tuvok was nodding. “Lieutenant Pazlar’s scans of this sector indicated pronounced spatial thinning. It is likely this ‘error’ was the cause of a massive subspace fracturing effect.”
Zero-Three continued. “Many worlds killed. Ashes and death. The makers bleeding out. Organics, poor organics, so weak and short-lived. They are dying now. They know they have brought such ruin to the universe. They are responsible. And so… the duty. The duty.”
“The makers built the Sentries to fight the Null,” said Pava. “To stop it spreading any further, yes?”
“Affirmative,” came the