The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [85]
I watched the formations of the attacking entities shift and change, looking more and more like cyborg octopodes built for exotic combat, but I couldn’t tell whether the changes were a result of their maneuvers or a mere matter of altered perspective caused by Child of Fortune’s own evasive action. I wasn’t aware of any momentum effects in my own body, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either, given that the elastic inner surface of the pod was so firmly bonded to my own smartsuit. There was no way to tell how fast the Titanian ship was moving…if it was moving at all.
“Are we shooting back?” I asked the AI.
“No,” said the mechanical voice, obviously not feeling the least need to apologize or explain.
“Can we get away from them?” I asked.
“No,” was the discomfiting reply.
“Will they destroy us?”
I took the consequent silence as an I don’t know, but the image suddenly shifted as if to supply an answer of sorts. I saw that out of the entire alien school, only four of the attackers now seemed to be concentrating all their attentions on us — but the fourth was not like the other three.
If the three I’d already seen were run-of-the-mill calamari, the fourth was a record-breaking giant. In the absence of any benchmarks, and knowing full well that the AI’s external eyes were using all kinds of vision-enhancing tricks even if they were being scrupulously honest, it was difficult to judge exactly how gigantic it might be, but appearances suggested that this was the mother squid, the queen of all the other squids — and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my own dutiful mothership wasn’t pitching and shuddering under the impact of unfriendly fire was that we weren’t actually being shot at at all, in the strictest sense of the term.
We were being pushed.
We were, I suddenly realized, being herded toward the giant — and the giant was already opening her vast tentacles, spreading them like the petals of a world-sized flower to expose an avid maw.
But it had to be fake — didn’t it?
It was all third-rate space opera, as cartoonish as the garden on Excelsior…or the continents and cities of the Gaean restoration.
It’s just a show, I told myself, insistently, as Child of Fortune hurtled helplessly into that awesome pit.It’s all just pretend, to cover up Niamh Horne’s snatch plan, to put one over on poor Adam Zimmerman. But that short-lived conviction had already begun to fade into uncertainty again — and the fear that had always been fear, even while I had insisted on construing it as ire, was working away at the base of my brain.
Some scenarios, I thought, are surely so preposterous that no one would bother to pretend them, even before an audience as ill prepared for contemporary life as Adam Zimmerman. Some lies are so unbelievable that their very absurdity defies scepticism.
While I was trying to weigh that paradox, the Titanian ship was falling into that huge dark mouth. Child of Fortune still urged on by the three spitting babies, which still drifted into the periphery of the visual field on occasion, their whips of virtual light licking out again and again.
The tentacles within the array were moving, groping as if in parody of the microworld’s similarly hungry mouth-parts.
If this is real, I thought, it has nothing to do with Adam Zimmerman. If this is real, it has to be the start of something much bigger and much weirder. Humankind won’t have to wait for the Afterlife; something else is taking over.
There was no way to tell how big that mouth was. For all I knew, it could swallow planets as easily as spaceships. It seemed incredible — but I couldn’t be sure that