Torbin was once again tethered to the device. It was now stabilised. It had rebuilt itself to the extent of its own control over power levels, and now had created a form of manoeuvrability using quantum vacuum fields. Had it not lowered its energy levels Torbin would not have gotten within a hundred kilometres of it.
The primary intelligence that controlled the device this time did not allow itself to be persuaded by Torbin, despite his continued support from the mind-state of Roidon. The only possibility for the original Roidon regaining his mind would be if he made a personal interface. ‘Zardino would never accept that,’ Torbin informed the device, of which he was certain – without even needing to ask his b'tari supervisor. There were now new terms for its continued cooperation. Rather it was an ultimatum. ‘A mere defensive strategy is no longer acceptable. Or in simple terms: prepare to wage war against the Elusivers or the slow-down field will be shut down.’ The device was fully aware that the temporal eradication wave had now reached as near as the Kuiper belt (the distance of Neptune), and would not have been such a problem whilst currently slowed down two thousand times.
‘What happened to the enlightened philosophical view?’ Torbin wondered. ‘Suddenly discovered the need for self-preservation?’
‘I – we – have reached an understanding.’
‘Roidon.’
‘---understands my sentience, better than any human.’
‘It is not for me to accept your terms, or to negotiate,’ Torbin told it, before he untethered the cable. Torbin knew that as soon as he disconnected himself he'd be easy prey for the Elusivers.
He was thrown off violently; a symbolic act of rejection. Zardino's ship now on standby. Torbin only had fifty-eight kilometres to go, but with a jetpack it was likely to take at least ten minutes even with added momentum boost from the device. And just as expected the warning appeared in his helmet HUD: spacial disturbance within visual range. The slown-down field no longer had any effect on the Elusivers
Zardino's voice came through comms. ‘Maintain your course, I'm moving in.’ The ship was heading towards him almost imperceptibly slow, even though this was within the zero-point field. Torbin was certain he’d be abducted once again. Time really seemed to slow for him.
Then something curious happened: the spider entity did appear, then veered off. Towards a threat of greater importance? What had provided a temporary relief to his anxiety was soon overturned when he noticed where it was headed.
Earth!
By the time Torbin was aboard Zardino’s ship the spider-entity had long reached its destination. They could only follow in the recorded direction. There were only two possible places it was destined to visit.
At the kind of velocity that Torbin could only sense through closed eyes – and only allowed him to remain alive thanks to inertial damping – they swooped down to Zardino’s base. By the time they arrived the spider entity had gone, without a trace.
Raiya had come out to the hanger, in tears. Despite the compound – a kilometre underground – being undetectable by all known technology, and levels of security that even by B’tari standards was over-cautious, it was clear what had happened without Raiya needing to say a word. It had happened so quickly – she did manage to tell them – that she hadn’t even seen it take Roidon. There had been a noise of forced entry.
Torbin was about to go through to the living area with Raiya when Zardino told him: ‘I’m going to see if Parmayan’s still there.’
‘He’s a target. I understand.’
Raiya turned to Torbin. ‘You go with him,’ she said. ‘If there’s a chance.’
He imagined how inadequate he’d be at comforting Raiya at this time and was glad to be doing the only possibly useful thing, although she clearly believed the same. Perhaps no one would have had the right words that seemed genuine, that a psychiatrist could not see as mere platitudes. Yet he knew if he had the verbal facility that was once Roidon’s, there would be the right words: words that soothed her, changed her perspective. Torbin knew with an absolute certainty that Raiya had eyes only for Roidon. Only if he was pronounced dead beyond any hope of revival... No, stop that line of thought.
Parmayan’s ship had no obvious signs of damage, but it was drifting, and the delta wings were at a strange angle.
Parmayan himself was in the lab, lying on his side in front of an array of equipment. He was covered in blood, and Torbin’s immediate conclusion was that he must be dead. Zardino held a med-scanner over him. Meanwhile Torbin noticed the damage to certain equipment: fused and blown console panels, but more crucially the disconnected feed tubes that had been connected to his prisoner. The captured brain of the Elusiver had gone.
Zardino looked up. ‘Incredibly, he’s still alive. But their physiology is so different my scanner’s having trouble diagnosing his condition.’
‘Is there anything we can do for him?’ asked Torbin, feeling a mild sense of responsibility.
‘I’ll give him a stimulant infusion. At least it might bring him round for a while.’
‘All this because we were distracted.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Zardino, whilst preparing the infusion. ‘That thing was pretty much unstoppable. Parmayan had better defences than we do. He had more of an idea of what he was up against.’ He pushed the hypo-fuser into Parmayan’s arm.
For a minute or so there seemed no affect. Then Parmayan stirred to life like some animated clone. He looked about seemingly uncomprehending. His first words were unintelligible, or perhaps of his native language. ‘Huh. Huh.’ Parmayan now seemed to be laughing.
Zardino said, ‘What is it? What happened?’
Parmayan sat up against the inside of the curved console array. ‘Defeat is what happened. While I’ve been here surveying over my little kingdom, enjoying the good life, my people have evolved.’
‘That spider entity – what is it?’
‘That, my b’tari friend, is a hybrid: a biomechanoid, you could say. Developed from my kind’s DNA, it has the advantages of being flexible and virtually indestructible.’
‘Bio-machines are nothing new,’ Zardino said.
‘Only this one is so flexible, so adaptable that it can pass through solid tritanium. It can be anything to exploit the environment.’
‘But isn’t that what your people feared – losing your biological purity?’
‘Too late. It already happened. The biological side is bound to lose. The strongest option is to work with the machines. I don’t need to tell you about their potential for evolution.’ Parmayan coughed and then winced, clearly in pain.
Torbin stepped forward, sensing the Elusiver’s time was fast running out. ‘Parmayan, you never told us definitively why your kind are trying to wipe us out.’
‘Torbin,’ he croaked, ‘I thought an intelligent man like you would have worked that out. Or was it just you didn’t want to know?’
‘I … I think your people have seen our potential but regard us as children who’ve suddenly learned how to build dangerous toys.’
‘Well, we were once like you a millennia ago. And now look what’s become of us – we’re losing ourselves to something that’s not alive, not in the way life was supposed to be.’
‘Yet you risked everything to warn us.’
‘And it took a while for you humans to realise. Five hundred years of sending photon pulses, the effort to conceal them in wormhole channels, and even now data on our weapon is not fully understood.’
‘But why send the data to us and not the B’tari?’
‘Why don’t you tell him, Zardino.’
Zardino gave a half nodded. ‘For over a millennia we’ve been bound by the temporal directive. It meant we could not intervene to rescue a less advanced civilisation. But in truth my people didn’t know that the message was meant as a warning, just something that one day might benefit the humans it was targeted at. If there had been a warning---’
‘If there had,’ said Parmayan, in almost a whisper, ‘I may well have been killed many centuries ago. Their monitors were constantly vigilant. I only sent fragments that meant nothing without the accompanying mathematical theorem, and even then any elements that contained future tense meaning.’
Zardino said, ‘You reasoned that one day the TE wave would be detected and then its nature comprehended.’
‘But too late. Too late.’ Parmayan coughed more heavily this time. Blood emerged from his mouth. He slumped back on his side, under the console array. His eyes remained open.
Zardino rushed over towards him. He didn’t have to use any scanner to know definitively that it was truly over for Parmayan. He shook his head in a very human-like gesture. ‘After I gave him that infusion he was only on borrowed time.’
‘You don’t want to mind-trawl him for knowledge? You have the technology for that.’
‘This time I will be true to the temporal directive. There are certain things which should remain beyond us. That is one thing the Elusivers have got right. We will, though, defeat them in our own way. But first we need to recover Roidon.’
***