Synthesis - James Swallow [135]
Now, Zero-Three would perish and, like them, never know if the Null would succeed. In the depths of its fractured mind, the AI felt itself coming apart, the great burning heart at its core ripping free of control, eating itself. The Sentry’s drones externalized the machine’s panic for it, hooting and tearing at one another, leaving the mind to die in silence.
As the blazing touch of atmosphere tore into the machine, it tried to cry out, perhaps to find a place to send a fraction of itself, but then Zero-Three remembered it had no voice anymore. Its kindred had taken that.
A catastrophic structural failure rippled through the machine moon and obliterated it, blanketing the sky of the Demon planet in a storm of fragments, but in orbit overhead, the participants in the battle had other focus.
Up there, the darkness was weeping flame. Rents in the structure of space, slashes like cuts from some crack-toothed blade, they grew and disgorged streaks of flaming protoplasmic matter, shapes like whips or great distended boles. It was chaos ranged against order, the clever and regimented minds of the Sentry AIs racked up in globular formations, mathematically computed to provide maximum cover and maximum convergence of firepower.
Rains of coordinated antiproton fire shredded the Null forms, the smaller ones splitting and breaking apart, the larger ones veering away and merging together, apparently propelled by the sheer violence of their velocities.
Shipframes surrounded by the tiny fleets of their space-capable combatant remotes broke from the pack and harried the larger forms, breaking them down, attempting to force them toward decoherence and dissipation, but such mass, and so many of them in close proximity, was a new kind of foe for the machines to take on. Swimming through the soup of scattered exotic radiation, the bits and pieces of the Null did not succumb as easily as it had in other conflicts. New computations and hypotheticals were formulated, considered, and then shared via short-range muon link between the AI ships and the larger machine moons.
It was theorized that there was, at some distant point of hyperincursion, a tipping point. If the mass of the Null could grow to such density in one single locale, then no amount of antiproton bombardment would be enough to stop it; the alien matter would simply be able to reconstitute itself too quickly to be dispelled.
And if that point came… it would be the end.
Black-Silver’s serpentine vessel led a flotilla of eight shipframes, fast models with pulsed-fusion drives for sublight travel. Together with their assembled drones, they were a mailed fist of steel that punched into the line of a Null conglomeration forming in the near-orbit zone. They attacked and disconnected from the larger force of the Sentries, extending away on a broadside pass.
The alien mass, something resembling a bruised egg of diseased flesh, detonated itself into spears of fast-changing metamaterial. Molecular bonds shifted and altered, and in the spilt seconds it took for the fragments to cross the distance to the ships, they had become lances of diamond. Black-Silver was blown apart, the artificial life snuffed out along with five more SecondGen. The others limped away, and the spears became blind snakes slithering across the dark to savage them.
The closest of the FirstGen to the combat zone was Three-Four. A later iteration of the machine moons, like the rest of the Three series, the AI traded computing power for combat prowess. Swiftly, a maw opened on the near side of the sphere to present a glassy lens of mineral crystal within. Grown in the miasma of atmospheric gases and rich hydrocarbons of the superjovian worlds at the edge of the system, the lens gathered and focused the might of an antiproton gun with a barrel big enough to swallow a Galaxy-class