And yet.
Sandy sighs. Even if it was luck, she might have missed it. It’s been difficult to maintain her focus since Hood died, and that worries her. She has slipped several times, nearly falling out of the innocent savant role she has built for herself. She has dreamed of the bounty hunter more than once, of his heavy footsteps and his solvent scent and his burning eyes. Worst of all, she has been sloppy. When she set up a meeting with the tier four corporate ship from Watertower—she had to do something with the uninvited Human, after all—she miscalculated. The problem is already fixed, but still. If there’s one thing Sandy hates, it’s making a mistake.
[Got a ship comin’ in], says Ol’ Ernie, pulling Sandy back to the present. [Makin’ for Ol’ Ernie’s dock, looks like. Pilot intelligence—family member obviously—says they ain’t much for conversation. Y’all know a Blazing Sunlight?]
A tiny touch of that invincible feeling begins itching inside her. She smiles, with just a few eyes. [Hello, Blazing Sunlight], she sends. She attaches multiple warm and welcoming emotions; when dealing with higher tiers, one can’t be too careful.
The oncoming ship does not respond.
[I apologize that I was not at the meeting place], she continues. [It was beyond my control.]
Still the ship comes. It is just as beautiful as it was at Watertower. It is hundreds of times the mass of her own ship, a graceful silver shape that flows through the darkness like mercury. It changes shape as it comes, as if it were made of liquid. It is gorgeous, it is pure high-tier magic—
And it is the solution to Sandy’s Human problem.
She watches as Blazing Sunlight slows and blossoms into a whirling storm of liquid metal. She feels the massive clang reverberate through the deck as one of those gleaming cords wraps itself around Riptide like the limb of a predator. The metal spreads like liquid, covering half the surface of her ship in a silver skin, and for a moment Sandy is worried that she will be consumed entirely—but that would be ridiculous. They are two ships meeting in the heart of the Network; what danger could there be?
Sandy snaps her mind out of Riptide’s sensors and pads out her door, uneasy at the feeling of her ship’s old bones creaking and popping around her. She descends the ladder, rung by difficult rung, toward the airlock in her cargo bay. It’s growing cold again down here, she notices when she descends into the darkness. The Series 11 is gone, which would be intensely annoying—had Sandy not planned it. The thought brings another smile to her many eyes as she lowers herself one more cold rung. Do you feel safer in the suit, Human? Do you feel clever because you took it without permission? You are never as clever—or as safe—as you think. At least, not when you are dealing with a higher intelligence.
She is startled by a violent report, delivered up the ladder and into her bones like electricity. A dozen rungs below her, the floor of her cargo bay lies under centimeters of dark ice—and one crack, wall to wall. One of her two airlocks is set into the floor, barely visible under the cloudy surface. Sandy watches, fascinated, as something reflective works its way between the two halves of the hatch. And then with another shudder, the ice erupts upward and Blazing Sunlight is in her ship.
Sandy holds on with every paw. If she could hear, she would be deafened. The air itself is vibrating with a continuous drone, and she can feel the same frequency in the ladder she clutches. The silver surges over the floor, flowing like liquid in all directions. She feels her ship shift and creak beneath her as its gravs take this sudden increase in mass into account. Cracks split the ice to the walls as tons of metal pour into her ship.
[The Human is on the Blackstar], Sandy says, attempting to appear dignified as she clings to her rung. [I will lead you to it.]
She has the upper hand in this negotiation—at least, that’s what she keeps telling herself as she holds her rung with every paw. Blazing Sunlight’s target is a private Citizen member, lost on a Blackstar. Even a tier four could not hope to find it…unless, of course, it had the assistance of a certain tier three who took the precaution of encasing the Human in her private property. The Series 11’s location blinks in Sandy’s mind, a dot only a few kilometers away. She will not send the location to Blazing Sunlight—as Hood taught her, that’s how you lose a bounty. But for the price of a significant bit of credit, she would be glad to lead this singing mass of mercury straight to it. Another wrong righted, and another increase in the credit account. A Good Thing, all around.
Hood would be proud.
But the metal does not respond—at least, not via Network. It grows straight up, a column of trembling silver. It rises in parallel to her ladder, half a meter away, until it reaches her rung. In its dark surface, lit only by the dim lights in the corners of the ceiling, a reflection of a tiny bundle of fur stares back at her. And for the first time since she put her plan into action a year ago, Sandy feels the cold talons of doubt under her skin.
She shrieks when it comes for her, feeling her own scream as a dull hum through the bones of her skull. The metal lands on her like a blow, enfolding her limbs with a sensation her nerves can’t identify. Is she freezing? Being burned? Do her limbs exist at all? Is she being eaten? Now her doubt has turned to panic. Did she truly think she could manipulate a tier four, an intelligence with at least a dozen times her capacity? [Blazing Sunlight], she sends, unable to keep her fear out of the message. [Please.]
Every column of ice in the cargo hold shatters when metal impacts floor, Sandy still in its grasp. [That is not My name], says the silver flood in a burst of beautiful meaning.
At any other time, Sandy would spend long fractions of a second appreciating the elegance of a tier four’s Network communication. For now, she can do no more than breathe. Her cargo bay is awash in mercury now, a fifty-ton sloshing silver sea that will surely breach Riptide’s fragile hull any second. [I apologize], she sends desperately. [What do I call You?]
[I am Librarian], says the sea.
The first time Sarya witnessed Eleven’s interior holo system in use, it made her feel powerful. It made her feel like she was Eleven, and that meant she was a giant, a sturdy metal behemoth with arms that could rip through anything—up to and including a Hood-sized adversary.
Here on the Blackstar, it makes her feel like a speck of dust.
Sarya stares straight upward as Eleven threads through a multitude beyond anything she’s ever conceived. She leans back and allows her jaw to fall open in order to add another few degrees of elevation to her gaze. This is the Visitors’ Gallery—and if Ol’ Ernie is to be believed, not even the only Visitors’ Gallery. To call something like this gigantic seems silly if you’ve just parked on a star, but it seems ridiculous for the opposite reason if you’ve ever called another room big. This room is gigantic in the way that orbital stations are gigantic, in the way that terrestrial landforms are gigantic. You could fit all of Watertower into this one room and still have room to park a half dozen Interstellars alongside it. The ceiling is so far up it actually takes on a misty blue cast from the kilometers of atmosphere. Hundreds of bridges cross the space, each one a narrow thread speckled with glittering citizenry. The bridges cross one another in an intricate pattern, a design complex enough to look almost random, but with the suggestion of order that she can’t quite wrap her mind around. But in the center of the space, in the hole avoided by hundreds of bridges, is the true jaw-dropper. A holographic display, easily kilometers on a side, displaying a single instantly recognizable image.