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And the Great Annihilator—with only a minute fraction of the mass of the black hole at True Center, yet the focus of inconceivable and inexplicable energies and phenomena—was itself ringed by an artificial construct, a structure of some kind just barely glimpsed at this distance, a ring of pinpoint lights and nearly indiscernible supporting structures in a rigid and geometrical array.

  Strangest was one particular string of stars describing a great, gently arcing curve reminiscent of the twist in the shell of a nautilus or the curve of a galaxy’s spiral arms. Kara counted forty-three stars in that one line, each precisely and evenly spaced from its neighbors, the whole vast array stretched across the sky from the zenith and terminating at the radiant core of the Great Annihilator. Those few close enough to Kara’s location to show a tiny disk revealed, on optical magnification, that one side had been induced to flare with the blue-white intensity of a nova, while the opposite hemisphere seemed darkened and blotched by comparison. As nearly as she could tell from this distance, someone, something had somehow manipulated those stars, exciting them to blow off vast and continuous flares on only one side—in effect transforming them into titanic guided missiles moving ponderously and unstoppably through space. And as for their destination…

  Kara had the distinct and thoroughly uncomfortable feeling that the Web intelligence was deliberately guiding those stars, nudging them one by one and in perfectly regimented order into the maw of the Great Annihilator. It was chilling. The builders of this place, the machine intelligence known to humanity only as the Web, had built a ring around one of the black holes at the Galaxy’s heart and now were steadily feeding it suns.

  My God, she thought, watching through full-extended sensors. These things toss stars around the way we would throw a ball. Star miners, star drivers, star destroyers… and we’re challenging them for control of the Galaxy.…

  So immense were the energies marshaled there that it was hard to tell what was the result of intelligent planning, and what might be the workings of natural forces, of physics on a galactic scale. Those vast arcs of plasma showed a regularity that might well suggest deliberate manipulation… or simply reflect the order stamped by intense magnetic fields on clouds of charged particles.

  The Web, it was now known, was an extremely old machine civilization, one mat presumably had arisen as the product of organic intelligence in the very dawn of the Galaxy’s existence, though whether as tools of that intelligence or as the next step in its evolution was still unknown. For some billions of years, the machines, a lifeform of their own now in every way that mattered, had been quietly building here at me heart of the Galaxy, wielding forces that humanity could only wonder at. The scope of their engineering prowess was staggering.

  Perhaps most unsettling of all was the knowledge of the sheer, inhuman patience the Web must possess. It was using gravity and the ability to transform stars into rocket-powered projectiles to herd dozens of suns across hundreds of light years—a process that must have taken untold millennia to begin with and would take many more to complete. The scale of what Kara was seeing here, the ring around the Annihilator’s accretion disk, the mass of the rotating Stargate, all spoke of a civilization mat thought in terms of millions of years, of eons rather man of decades.

  What kind of mind could think in such terms?

  And how could it be outthought and defeated?

  Kara was still trying to assimilate, to comprehend what mat kind of power meant. There was so much Man yet had to learn about me Web and about what the Web was trying to accomplish, both here at me Galactic Core and beyond, in the quieter backwaters of the Galaxy’s far-flung spiral arms. It was possible, though not certain yet, that the Web had created the huge spinning constructs called me Star-gates. Two were known, the first locked between me mutually orbiting white dwarfs that were all mat remained of the star called Nova Aquila, a second here at the Galactic Core.

  And mere were hints of others, she knew, scattered across me length and breadth of me entire Galaxy.

  But that’s Daren’s worry, she thought, thinking briefly of her half-brother back at Nova Aquila. And Dev’s.…

  The thought of Devis Cameron, of what he had become, sent a shudder through her consciousness. He, of all humanity, had been the first to see this place… in a way. She’d studied the records returned to human space by the probe he’d sent through the Nova Aquila Gate. But it was so hard to think of him as… human. She swiftly turned her thoughts to more immediate matters.

  The other warstriders continued their high-velocity sprint across the void, though there was no way to tell by looking at the stars or nebulae about them that they were moving at all. An hour ago, they’d entered a carefully mapped and plotted hyperdimensional pathway opening close by the blurred silver surface of the Nova Aquila Stargate; a timeless instant later, they’d emerged here, hurtling at high speed into the void of the Core. Though they possessed plasma thrusters for maneuvering, their primary drives grasped local magnetic fields, intensifying them, manipulating them to provide both velocity and changes in course.

  A world expanded from pinpoint to dusky sphere ahead. It was a barren and radiation-scorched place, utterly and forever lifeless—at least insofar as life could be defined as collections of organic chemicals. From space, the surface appeared to be a mottled patchwork of black rock and pale white-and-tan salts, its face peppered with craters and slashed time and time again by literally world-wracking collisions. As Kara drew closer, it became apparent that here, too, the machine rulers of this realm had stamped their imprint in the lifeless chaos of rock and desert. The surveys of this place, based on data gleaned by robotic probes, had designated the world as Core D9837.

  She hit the first traces of air, a thin haze of vapor about the burned-over world. There was scant atmosphere here—mostly carbon dioxide and a scattering of other heavy gases—but her entry speed was so high that her stricter struck flame as it stooped toward the world, scratching a white contrail across its deep blue-violet, light-tortured sky.

  To left and right, above and below, the other striders of the reconnaissance company hit atmosphere as well, but Kara was scarcely aware of them as she rode her strider down the long, flaming shaft of incandescence, sensing through her biolink with the machine’s AI the searing buffeting she was taking during the approach. Fire stood frozen in the sky overhead, looped in titanic streamers, arcs, delicate filigree traceries of energy, and in the spiraled magnificence of the Great Annihilator. Below, the face of a planet nearly as large as New America or Earth lay in rad-seared desolation, its surface curiously worked and reworked by processes unimaginable into vast, sprawling, and subtly alien geometries, shapes worked out in near-right angles, glowing strips of light, and convoluted mechanisms arranged in patterns not easily retained by merely human memory.

  The contrails of her comrades appeared, glowing gently, though the light here was uncertain. Core D9837 orbited no sun but was an orphan, a mote adrift with other crumbs left over from the rubble of an extravagantly wasteful Creation. The only light was the soft and ruddy glow from the background stars, highlighted here and there by the sharper brilliance of blue-white flares or hotter suns, or by the softer arc-light glow of the Annihilator’s polar jets.

  The other forty-seven warstriders of the Phantoms rode their own craft toward landing, burning off excess speed in glowing friction with the atmosphere. Operating now strictly according to programmed instructions loaded into their striders’ AIs, the warcraft descended in gradually flattening trajectories, steering by powerful magnetic fields interacting with the magnetic fields of this world and this alien, flame-ridden sky. Part of their mission was survey mapping; strider AIs processed streams of data as they overflew a strangely shaped and ordered topology, a gray terrain that should have consisted of stark, raw deserts, barren canyons, heat-weathered mesas—and probably once had been just that—but which at some point in the remote past had been extensively reworked.

  It almost looked as though some child giant
had used this world as clay, sculpting bizarrely twisted and alien forms from naked rock and leaving them to bake beneath that searing sky. Kara could see walls, towers, domes, and less readily namable structures, linked together by a subtle architecture that obeyed no human laws of perspective or design. Towers speared the heavens, ebon-black or mercury-silver in color, with angles oddly distorted from geometries used by Man. A deep, convoluted, and black-shadowed canyon reaching for fully a thousand kilometers across the planet’s face had been turned into an elaborate trench lined with machine hardware, spanned by glittering bridges and floored by forests of antennae and mechanisms of unknown and unknowable purpose.

  At an altitude of less than a kilometer, Kara pulled her nose up, spilling energy freely in a burst of high-intensity magnetics, supplementing her rugged deceleration with the whining shriek of plasma jets. The new setup and link with the Mark XC striders permitted accelerations and decelerations unheard of in human-occupied flyers, with the thrust limited only by the tolerances of the machine’s drives and hull strength, though the visual cues unfolding on the view-screen in her head took some real getting used to.

  So far, there’d been no response from the defenders of this alien place. Past the trench now, still descending, she led her company toward the landing site chosen from space just moments ago, an open patch of gray plain partly surrounded by spiked, bristling towers each half a kilometer tall or more. Surface-penetrating radar and IR traces gave indications of a labyrinthine tangle of structures hidden beneath the surface.

  “There’s the LZ, gang,” she called over the tactical frequency. “Let’s take ’em on in.”

  “Roger that, boss,” Lieutenant Hochstader replied. “Looks like we caught the gokkers napping.”

  “Don’t count on that, Lieutenant,” she replied. “They know we’re here.”

  “I wonder,” Warstrider Miles Pritchard said. “I get the feeling that maybe they know, but they just don’t care.”

  That was a frightening thought… beings so advanced, or so different, that human beings had little or no impact on their plans. But then, Core D9837 seemed to be a very minor part of their operation in this place, a debris pile with no significance to their vaster strategies and goals.

  “Maybe they don’t care,” Sergeant Willis Daniels, her top sergeant, added. “Yet.”

  “Well, we can damn well give them something to care about, Will,” Kara said. Extending her craft’s flight surfaces, she flared out above the selected landing zone, her warstrider’s outer hull, a Naga-grown composite, changing both shape and texture as surface-mobile modules unfolded. Normally in a landing op like this one, she would have loosed clouds of nano converters to change the soil to a charged surface, but the ground here already bore current associated with the surrounding alien structures. Magnetics engaged, slowing Kara’s strider to a gentle hover meters above the ground. Legs extended, insectlike, black, gleaming, and chitinous, with tools and sensors extruding to taste the alien air. Carefully, she pivoted through a complete three-sixty, scanning for some response from the foe.

  The scout force had not known what to expect on this run; that was one reason the operation, code-named Core Peek, had been organized. So far, humans had managed to snatch only the briefest and most unsatisfactory of glimpses of Web activities at the Galactic Core. Only one manned vessel had ever come through the Nova Aquila Gate to this place, and that had been destroyed seconds after its arrival. Many succeeding attempts had been made by sophisticated robot probes, all with Naga cores deliberately downloaded with misleading information, in the hope that Web intelligence about the location of Humanity’s worlds could be confused. Operation Shell Game, that effort had been named; presumably, it had worked, since the Web had not launched another effort against the worlds of the Shichiju in the past two years.

  But at the same time, Humanity had learned little about the Web. Some of those probes had been spotted and destroyed instantly, while others had survived for a long time before being detected and hunted down. The planners of this mission had suspected that Model XC striders, slipping through the Gate at high speed and with full stealth nanoflage engaged, might get all the way to Core D9837 without being spotted. Their entry into atmosphere, however, could not have gone unnoticed. Webbers were known to see into the infrared.

  Her view of her surroundings, relayed through her strider’s external sensors and unfolding directly in her mind, was overlaid by smaller windows, one showing systems status displays, another showing a map of her surroundings, complete with the blue-pinpointed positions of her comrades and the locations of unknowns—potential enemies—in red. And there were unknowns out there, hundreds of them, with more appearing on her screen every moment. The shadows beyond the unit’s LZ literally crawled with… things, though at this range all that could be said about them was that they were metallic, that they possessed powerful, self-contained magnetic fields, and that they were moving.

  They were, in fact, beginning to converge on the landing force.

  “On alert, people,” she snapped. “We’ve got company!”

  “I’ve got bogies at three-five,” Daniels called. “Comin’ in fast! Don’t know what they are. I can’t get a hard fix and I’ve never seen—”

  And then the machine army struck.

  Chapter 2

  The DalRiss taught us that intelligence could evolve in surprising ways, yet remain fundamentally the same as that possessed by humans. They were alien, but we could, at the very least, understand their point of view.

  The Naga taught us that it was possible to look at the universe in ways fundamentally different from the typical human worldview. They were difficult to understand but ultimately comprehensible, once we grasped the alien nature of their perceptions.

  The Web taught us to redefine the very nature of our understanding of what intelligence is.

  —Report given before the

  Imperial Xenosophontology Institute,

  Kyoto, Nihon

  DR. DAREN CAMERON

  C.E. 2572

  “Hit them!” Kara yelled over the tactical commo link. “Hit them!”

  She triggered a bolt of blue-white lightning, sending the charge lancing across a kilometer of open ground and into a close-packed cluster of fast-moving, robotic shapes. Chunks of metal flew, spinning lazily. Other warstriders joined in as the Phantoms dropped into a broad, double circle nearly ten kilometers across, each member of the recon force several hundred meters from his or her neighbor, weapons and sensors facing outward. Lightnings flared around the circle, punctuated by the shrill hiss and thunder of volleyed rockets. The attack was developing on all sides with a speed that Kara could scarcely credit.

  “Overwatch,” she called, opening the command frequency. “This is Spearpoint. Are you getting this?”

  “Looking right over your shoulder, Captain,” a woman’s voice answered in her mind. “We’ve got a good feed on all of you. Give us ten minutes down there, if you can!”

  “We’ll try to last that long,” Kara replied, the sarcasm giving an edge to her voice. A sudden rush developed on her front, and she swung her particle cannon to cover it, triggering a thundering barrage of manmade lightnings that illuminated the darkling surface of the world in savagely strobing, actinic flashes. Continuing to fire the CP gun, she flashed a mental command to her AI, unfolding the high-velocity rotary cannon from her flank and putting it into action with a buzzsaw shriek. Hypersonic slugs of depleted uranium shredded the hardest metals and composites, flinging metallic debris high into the sky.

  As fast as she could smash them, though, more crowded in from behind. She had the impression that those underground tunnels must be pouring new machines onto the surface faster than the Phantoms could destroy them.

  “There’s too many of them,” Hochstader warned. She could see him on the magnified image on her screen. His strider, opposite Kara’s on the perimeter and ten kilometers away, was unfolding like a black-petaled flower, revealing the deadly armor
y encased within. “They’ll overrun us in seconds!”

  “Steady, Pel,” she replied over their private channel. “Focus on the job.”

  They kept firing.

  Machines…

  The word was laughably inadequate. The devices gathering in the shadows of the eerie and nightmare-grown towers around them were mechanisms, yes, grown from metal or plastic or polymer-ceramic composites, but the sheer diversity of shapes and sizes and obvious function defied any rational attempt to catalogue or identify. As the first of the Web devices sprinted toward the human line, her overwhelming impression was of a bizarre and wildly varied zoo of insects—glittering, faceted shapes with jointed bodies and spiky or whiplash antennae. Some bristled like porcupines, some were crisply angular, while others were smooth and naked as eggs. Most were small, some literally the size of insects, others the size of Kara’s head, with a sprinkling of a few genuine monsters as big as her warstrider or bigger. Many had legs, ranging in number from two to uncountable ripplings on long, flat things like centipedes, but others levitated on powerful magnetic fields or flew by other means the human team could not identify.

  So far, human military and sophontology experts alike had had no luck at all classifying the Web combat machines, or figuring out what they were after. Confederation military slang simply called them “kickers,” after the Nihongo word kikai, “machine.”

  They seemed to use nanotechnology as did Man, literally growing individual components molecule by molecule. That gave them a high degree of flexibility in their design; a combat machine might fly in space or walk or slither along on glittering, metallic tentacles, or it might do all three… or it might change its own form in order to meet changes in its environment.

  Warstrider technology, Kara reflected as she continued sniping at the lead elements of the Web assault before they could move in closer, had borrowed that philosophy from the Web, and from the Naga before them, with combat machines that could change shape and form, color and weaponry to meet changing battle conditions… but the Web machines were still the undisputed masters of that technique. Machines seemed purpose-grown within seconds of a perceived need; existing machines demonstrated a weirdly shifting polymorphism, as though they were able to somehow digest and regrow the substance of their bodies into new shapes on the spot.