“What species?” rumbles Mer.
Still she doesn’t allow her gaze to drop. “Mine,” she says.
She could go on. She could tell Mer what she’s seen, what it looks like when a solar system is at the mercy of those with no mercy. She wants to describe gas giants turning into nanomachines, ice ships hundreds of kilometers long sliding into planets like blades into flesh, distortions in reality when unstoppable projectiles come hurtling out of unseeable dimensions—
“Then I should kill you,” says Mer.
Sarya swallows. “You could,” she says. “And I know you have the…freedom to do so.” The word hurts, coming out. Freedom. The word she used to justify her actions. Freedom to act without consequence. Freedom to do…to do anything at all. “It might be the right thing to do,” she says. “It might be just—whatever that means. But justice doesn’t help those intelligences up there, out there in those dark systems. It doesn’t make it better. So I was thinking that maybe instead of…instead of doing justice, you could—” She takes a breath. “Maybe you could help me.”
“Oh, this is good,” says Roche. “This is so much better than I expected.”
“Help you what?” rumbles Mer. “Run away?”
“No,” she says instantly. “I’m not going to run away. I’m going to do something about the—about this.” She waves upward at the storm of light in the sky, at the death count in the trillions, at the mind Who sees this as a good start. “And this is my only chance.”
She watches Mer shift his gaze from her face to the clearing beyond the firelight. Observer is everywhere. His bodies lie across each other, under each other, their small faces in their own filth. Some lie halfway out of fires or with meat sticks plunged through them from some drunken game or other, eyes staring at the sky. It may have begun as a feast, but now it looks like a massacre.
And now Roche begins screeching, softly and rhythmically.
“That’s a laugh,” whispers Ace in her ear. “I’m almost sure he’s laughing.”
“We are a handful of twos and a three,” says Roche, somehow laughing and speaking at the same time. “We are lost in a mind the size of several thousand minor planets—drunk though He may be at the moment. If we are here, you can bet your life He wants us to be here. We are no threat to His plans. We have likely fulfilled His will every step of our various journeys here. How far back?” He laughs again. “I don’t know! You don’t know! You can’t know, you arrogant—” He breaks off and shakes his head. “Humans,” he says.
Sarya waits until his screeching has faded to silence. “I don’t think it matters,” she says slowly. “I mean, we could sit around and talk about how everything’s impossible. How the galaxy’s too big for us low-tiers, how we should just let the big minds worry about it. But I think—I think that can’t be true. I’m a two, Roche, and I broke the Network. I changed reality, forever. I killed—” She stops and looks away, eyes blurring. “I learned that the galaxy has to want to work,” she says softly. “If it doesn’t—”
“Then it all falls apart,” says Mer.
Sarya glances up and is startled to see that his massive face is nearly touching hers. He is immobile, on all sixes, but somehow he has advanced almost on top of her and she hasn’t noticed. She stares into his predator eyes, into those symmetrical reflections of a hellish sky, aware that terror would absolutely be a reasonable reaction here. Instead, only one thought is in her mind: Mother would have loved this guy.
“But what are we going to do about it?” he rumbles, his voice vibrating her chest. She feels the hair lift off her forehead, drifting in the hot wash of his breath.
We, he said. What are we going to do about it? Sarya seizes onto that word, that indication that maybe she’s won him over—and therefore, maybe, the others. For the first time since this tiny embryo of an idea settled into her mind, she attempts a smile. It’s a tiny broken thing, the smile, and no one here will even recognize it, but it’s there. It’s there because this is so ridiculous, because it doesn’t have a chance in the universe—and yet, because it’s right. And then she laughs. In the light of a flaming sky, in the center of a drunk supermind, in the combined gaze of five sets of incredulous eyes, she laughs. “We,” she says, savoring the word. “We are going to steal the Humans.”
It’s an impossible plan. It’s a ridiculous plan. But it’s a plan, and that single point in its favor puts it eyes-and-mandibles above any of the other nonsense in her mind. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy.
“This way,” whispers Left.
“Good thing we’ve got a tour guide,” says Right. It looks at Left expectantly, its shiny head reflecting the shifting light of the sky. “Right?”
“Not the time or the place, Right,” says Left, pushing its somber way between two trees.
“Oh, come on. Not even one little pun?”
“No.”
The forest is not dark, but it is not light either. The canopy is thick, and what light survives its trip through its leaves ends up smeared across plant life, fallen branches, windblown surfaces, and the bodies of the six intelligences creeping through the whole mess. Sarya keeps her jaw clenched and her eyes on her feet, but she cannot pretend that this light is something it is not. Each time it shifts, it means that something big has turned its passengers into plasma. Each time it dims, it means that incandescent gases are cooling, and particles that once made up intelligences are now free to journey across the void on their own. Do they appreciate that freedom? Could those atoms ever appreciate what they were once a part of?
She runs a sleeve across her face angrily. It’s an idiotic thought. Typical, from an idiot like her.
“I suggest we move a bit faster,” says Roche. “I’d prefer not to die until I’m back in Network range.”
“Poor you,” says Mer. “Now you have to deal with it like the rest of us.”
“I have spent sixty lifetimes learning how to live. I’m not about to waste all that just because—”
Sarya runs into Mer’s massive self from behind. The other members of the little party take a few steps before they realize Mer has stopped, then freeze as well. Roche crouches in the darkness, every light dimmed. Left and Right stand back to back, Left scanning the treetops frantically while Right acts as if this is the most fun he’s had in years.
“That was a big one,” says Right, nodding toward a gap in the canopy. “Pretty, though.”
“Shut up,” hisses Left. “He’ll hear.”