When it reached the other machine, the repeater stepped up onto its back, an armored insect initiating a mating ritual. The device had actually been designed to make such a maneuver impossible; the necessary calculations for complex motion were well beyond the machine's limited internal software. To make the repeater follow its will, Alexander had to swap out the entire contents of its accessible internal memory a thousand times per second. The gargantuan computational power of the compound mind barreled down the bottleneck of the dim machine's mind like an ocean tide forced through a drinking straw. The mind succeeded, however: The insectoid repeater wrapped a leg around the other's power pack, and pulled it fast to the correct position.
Now Alexander was two.
The little machines set off in opposite directions, each looking for more converts. The compound mind's will propagated like rabies, with each victim compelled to spread it further. Gradually, more and more of the field moved into motion.
But Alexander left the software blocks in the civilian network intact, preventing the little machines from receiving any data from the Legis infostructure and passing it on to the entanglement facility.
Let the Imperials be surprised.
The compound mind waited for the process within the wire to complete itself, biding its time and watching the maneuvers in space progress.
Fisherman
Tide and sunset were elegantly matched.
The last red arrows of light struck out from the descending sun, lancing through the waters that tugged gently at Jocim Marx's bare legs. The outflow from the tidal pool grew stronger, widening the sandy channel that connected it to the bay. Jocim felt his motionless feet slowly disappear, subsumed by gradual accumulation, buried by a waterborne drift of sand.
He stood utterly still.
Jocim did not react when the first few glimmers of light slipped past him. Like floating candles, blurred slightly by a few centimeters' depth, they were borne by the quickening current. He waited as a few more drifted by. In the growing dark, he could see a faint luminescence over the large tidal pool, a collective glow from its ample population of torchfish, which had lain all day in the shallow water, storing the sun's energy.
More drifted by. Then he chose one.
The fisherman lofted his spear as the torchfish took its curved path, 155 tugged to one side by the eddies encircling his legs. It moved past Jocim and away, meter by meter, heading for the deeper waters of bay. At ten meters, he threw.
The spear flew from his hand quickly, but slowed as it neared the end of its tether field. It penetrated the water without a splash, barely reaching its glowing target, then began to accelerate back toward Jocim as if attached to him by a long, elastic cord. At the spear's tip a cage of metal fingers held a wriggling form, the fish sparkling in its surprise at being torn from the water.
Jocim caught the returning spear, fluidly reversing the motion with which he had thrown it.
He regarded the fish: bright and evenly lit, edged with blues and gently pink at the dorsal fin. He held the spear-end out to the edge of the tidal channel, where a glass bowl of sea water waited. The spear's terminal claw released the torchfish with a plop, and it fluttered within the bowl, spinning in angry little circles.
The fisherman turned from his catch and raised his arm to throw again. The torchfish were flowing out of the tidal pool in small groups now. It had grown almost completely dark, only a few tendrils of deep red lay upon the horizon. He would have to work quickly to fill his bowl.
Suddenly, the sky cracked.
A long, bright fissure opened, daylight pushing through the broken night sky. The water dried up below Jocim's feet, the white noise of nearby surf sputtering down to a dead-signal hum. The burning blue of the sky turned to a familiar cerulean, the signature color of a blanked interface.
Someone had woken Master Pilot Jocim Marx up, untimely bounced him from a hyperdream. He'd been deep in the rhythms of hypersleep, and his carefully designed arch of mental recuperation had been shattered. His head rang with the chainsaw noise of torn reality, and his body was racked with the heartburn of incompletely digested exhaustion.
"This had better be important," he managed groggily.
"It is," came Hobbes's voice. The executive officer gave him a few more seconds, then restarted his primary vision. Marx blinked his gummy eyes. Hobbes was standing here, physically present in his cabin.
He couldn't remember ever having seen her off the bridge before.
"What is it?"
"An occupation," she answered.
"A what?" :
"On the approach path. There may be another Rix ship."
Executive Officer
Hobbes could see how they had missed it for so long.
No drive signature. No easy graviton emissions. No active sensors of its own. Even now, all they had was an occultation: a milliseconds-long dimming of a few background stars. Whatever it was, the object was invisible to transluminal sensors, and was too far away for the Lynx's active sensors to tell them very much.
But it was big.
"At least fifty kilometers across," Ensign Tyre repeated.
"It's a spare receiver array," Engineer Frick said. "An extra, folded down and trailing the battlecruiser."
"Why so far behind?" Hobbes asked. The object was too distant from the battlecruiser for an easy rendezvous. As it was, the Lynx could easily reach it before the larger Rix ship.
"Perhaps they wanted to keep it invisible," the captain said. "It's running absolutely silent. If it weren't so damn big, we'd have missed it."
And if the captain hadn't been so paranoid, Hobbes thought, they'd have missed it at any size. The last thing anyone else had expected was another Rix vessel coming into the system.
"It's not necessarily running silent, sir," Tyre softly added. "It could simply be inert matter."
"When will we know its mass?" Zai asked.
Tyre looked into the air. "The Master Pilot's drone should be within range to tell us that in fourteen minutes."
Hobbes looked across the table at Marx, and wished again that the captain hadn't insisted on waking the master pilot in mid-sleep sequence. The man looked exhausted, his drowsy absence of mind animated with a bad case of the shakes. All his piloting skill would be meaningless if he couldn't think straight.
The recon drone had been launched almost immediately after the first occultation had been spotted. The drone launch rail was useless, unable to give the drone a magnetic shove, so they'd had to launch it at zero relative. The craft was the Lynx's last surviving fast recon drone, and could sustain six hundred gees for an hour. It had already turned over, and was close to matching velocities with the object.