World Hammer

Prologue-2

“We are aligned now,” the lead slug of Gowgoroup gurgled, “you and I. Our foot trails meld into one.”

“No,” Tarkos said. He had put on an oxygen mask before entering Gowgoroup’s quarters, but the sulfuric atmosphere irritated his eyes to tears. “You killed a respected Kirt astronomer. You killed my commander, although not irrevocably. You tried to kill me and Pala Eydis. We are not aligned.”

“I did all that to prevent war.”

“You did all that to delay war to advantage the Ulltrians.”

Half of Gowgoroup had died on the planet known as the Well of Furies. Now the three slugs that remained waved their eye stalks in agitation. “There is no advantage. The Ulltrians will win any war. Even the machines of the Lost Zone will fall before them. But a day of delay is a day of extra life for your species.”

Tarkos frowned. He had no idea whether Gowgoroup actually believed these claims, or simply wanted to render its motives uncertain. “So you say in this Labyrinth we could find the answer we need?”

“At the Labyrinth, you will not be killed, if you slide as I instruct. And then you can bring your war to the Ulltrians. If the Alliance weakens the Ulltrians before the Alliance is destroyed, my species is more likely to negotiate its own survival.”

Tarkos laughed without mirth. This explanation had the ring of truth. No doubt the OnUnAns would prefer to beg leniency of weakened Ulltrian victors. “Tell me how one gets an answer from the Labyrinth.”

“At the end of the many paths through the Labyrinth is the Oracle, an artificial intelligence that is given all our information, all our knowledge. Any pilgrim that finds its way to the Oracle is granted one question of the Oracle, and the Oracle must answer.”

“So if I ask this Oracle the location of the Ulltrian haven, it would have to answer?”

“Yes.”

“Even if the priests would want to kill me, if they knew my mission?”

“The priests will ask you what your quest is, but you do not have to answer.”

Tarkos frowned. “And then I could just go?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the catch?” he asked in English. Then he struggled in Galactic to find an equivalent phrase, and settled for the awkward, “I find it probable that the task is more difficult than you describe.”

“The Labyrinth is large,” Gowgoroup gurgled in chorus. It gave Tarkos the dimensions of the asteroid, and Tarkos did the math in his head. A cylinder fifty-five kilometers long, fifteen in diameter, and almost all of it had been carved with tunnels about two meters wide and three tall. Allowing for an extra meter of wall and infrastructure, he figured there were maybe 100,000 kilometers of tunnel, with a surface area approaching the surface area of California.

Tarkos clamped his jaw and turned toward the door. This was useless: it would take years to walk a maze that large. Gowgoroup was stalling, trying to delay him, or get him killed. Besides, his eyes felt swelled to twice their normal size, burned by the atmosphere in Gowgoroup’s quarters.

But a last thought stopped him.

“Where is this intelligence, this Oracle, inside the asteroid? In the center?”

“It is very near the entrance, near the axis. But all paths in the Labyrinth run at least the length of the asteroid before turning back.”

“But if the Oracle is right there,” Tarkos asked, “why not just cut through a few walls?”

“It is f*******n. The Oracle will not answer unless the pilgrim walks the Labyrinth, without assistance or robots, and without breaking through walls. The rule rules are immutable.”

Tarkos frowned. They talked in Galactic, always a tricky proposition between different individuals of different species. Each species spoke Galactic in its own way—using sound, or light, or radio, talking at frequencies that others could not hear, crushing it into their own cognitive forms—and individuals often then used phonetic translationware to transform the speech into a recognizable form. The translationware, more than the communities of speakers themselves, enforced the common norms of the shared language of the Galactic Alliance.

But even allowing for such differences, the slugs had said something odd. “What do you mean, ‘rule rules’?” Tarkos asked.

“There are rules that determine the rules,” Gowgoroup answered. One of its parts slithered away to find something else to do, no doubt disgusted and bored by Tarkos’s stupidity.

“Explain these,” Tarkos said.

“First rule rule is that rules are respected by priest and pilgrim.”

“And if they are not?”

“Then the other can respond in kind.”

Tarkos smiled. “Let’s start at the beginning. Tell me everything, everything you can, about this Labyrinth and its rules.”

_____

“We have located your ship, human,” the Priest of the Labyrinth repeated. Tarkos wondered where in the Labyrinth the Priest sat now. Cautiously far from the entrance, he suspected.

“I invoke the rules of the Labyrinth,” Tarkos said.

Before him the hall stretched away into a dim distance. The Labyrinth was formed with patterns that mirrored all the mathematical accomplishments of the OnUnAn race. Each path was a vast, brilliant theorem of knot theory that could be interpreted as a thousand other mathematical results. The pattern of entrances, the shape and angle of halls, the turns and corners and curves, the way some passages could move and reconfigure, all had meaning. It was a mathematician’s paradise. It would take him years to find his way through it, should he walk on, as he pretended now that he desperately wanted to do. But, to a small degree, he did want to step inside. Who did not feel, at the mouth of a maze, the desire to run inside and lose yourself in the turns and doorways? The polished walls were beautiful with their gleaming streaks of austerely dark metals. In a different time, how grand it would be to walk this Labyrinth, staying each night in the hostels built for pilgrims, and seek a secret truth of an ancient AI, storehouse of knowledge for a great and ancient race.

But war ruined everything. And now, it seemed, there were labyrinths all around Tarkos, all of them dark and ugly, with wrong turns on every side—turns that led to s*****y or extinction for humanity and for all the races of a hundred other worlds. And even if the Galactic Alliance found a way through the warren of war, he could expect no prize at the end. He knew he would likely die in battle, long before the war was decided.

The priest gurgled, switching back to its native language. Tarkos’s translationware caught up with a slowly streaming message. “You may walk the Labyrinth. But we destroy now your ship.”

An image appeared next to the priest, tilted so that Tarkos could see it clearly: a tactical display of space around the asteroid of the Labyrinth. A single dim spot showed in red, out of human visual range but his suit translated the image into his spectrum. He did not need to ask what it represented: a ship-size heat signature, something out in space beyond the asteroid, just a few Kelvins above the background temperature. In the tactical display, blue diamonds shot toward the spot, hypermissiles tracking the tiny difference in temperature. The ship did not fight back. In seconds the missiles converged on the heat signature, formed a single green disk, and then all these symbols disappeared.

“Those who lay their foot trail beside the Alliance will be made extinct,” the Priest said. Tarkos wondered if its tone were apologetic: it did not need to explain itself.

In answer, Tarkos lay on the floor. He couldn’t know what the priest thought of this—for a being that moved around on pseudopods, the gesture might seem like a preparation to flee. Tarkos lifted his right arm, aiming a fist at the ceiling. He used his implants to interface with the suit’s weapon systems. He turned on his radiation shields to full force. The fields distorted the projection of the priest, so that the heap of slugs seemed to bend away from him, forming a funhouse mirror image of an OnUnAn colony. Then, the outer shell of Tarkos’s armor parted on the forearm and a small cylinder rose up above the surface. A trail of smoke and fire flared out of the back of the tube, coursing up his arm, as the missile in the small silo shot toward the axis.

Tarkos had modified and programmed the mini-missile before dropping to the asteroid. The missile spat out a small package before it hit the ceiling—a picogram of antimatter that smashed into the wall and in a cascade of gamma rays turned the stone into a pocket of energy that blasted a neat hole to the corridor beyond. The missile passed through the debris, and did the same three more times, before itself smashing into a wall and vaporizing a hole in it. Rubble rained down onto Tarkos’s suit. He let the stones and dust collect, appreciating the extra shielding it provided, small through it was.

After a few seconds, he sat up and brushed off. Before him, the image of the priest howled and gurgled, all six of its independent parts writhing in outrage. The image disappeared. Tarkos told his boots and gloves to extrude gecko gripping hairs to assist the magnets. He stepped to the wall, pressed his hands to the metallic stone and felt them grip tightly, and climbed to its top. He pulled himself along the ceiling on all fours like a fly, and then managed to squeeze through the hole blasted by the missile.

It became easier as he went, the apparent gravity reducing as he neared the axis of rotation. He floated through the last breach, into a vast cylindrical room. A dozen entrances from the Labyrinth punctuated the walls, but there were no OnUnAns here. A cube of burnished yellow metal, about three meters on a side, glowed on the far wall, toward the center of the asteroid. Tarkos used his suit’s meager built-in attitude jets to push him toward it. He pinged it with several radio frequencies, but it answered vocally, his suit picking up the sound.

“You have broken a rule of the Labyrinth,” the machine said, in the primary OnUnAn language.

“I am a pilgrim,” Tarkos said in Galactic. He told his suit to transmit the reply in sound, and then to follow it up with its best translation in the OnUnAn language. He waited for the suit to finish before he continued, “The priest has attacked my ship, violating the rules of the pilgrimage. I violated one rule in response.”

Tit for tat, he thought. If Gowgoroup had been right, then the rules of the rules—the metarules—allowed now that he could break one rule in response to the breaking of a rule that favored him. He had gambled that the fear the priests felt toward the Ulltrians would earn him this opportunity. Now he gambled that the Oracle would respect the metarules.

The Oracle was silent a long time. Peculiar, for an AI. Somewhere in the Labyrinth, Tarkos supposed, the priests were talking to it, demanding it wait and allow them to kill Tarkos. But the machine finally said, “Ask your question.”

Tarkos smiled. “I admire your respect for game theory,” he said in English. Then he transmitted, “Three thousand years ago the wandering twin worlds, known by the Ulltrians as Hurk-ka-Dâk-Ull, the World Hammer, passed near Onus, homeworld of the OnUnAns. I ask that you tell me with as much detail and accuracy as you can: the time when the World Hammer passed by the OnUnAn homeworld and its trajectory and its velocity at that time.”

The Oracle answered him, politely, in Galactic.

______

Tarkos dropped back through the hole in the floor. The spin made him miss the next hole when he fell to the next floor, but he took a single step forward and dropped again. It gave him the strange sensation of climbing stairs, getting ever heavier, even though his visual perception showed only that he descended.

The last step set him in the pile of rubble where he began. He walked down the corridor and inside the airlock.

“I leave now,” he transmitted. “Let me go, or my ship will destroy this asteroid.”

“We destroyed your ship,” came the gurgling reply.

“You destroyed a decoy,” Tarkos said. “Inflatable chameleon skins, indistinguishable from a real ship’s chameleon skin. Every Predator cruiser carries several. There is a Predator cruiser out there right now, with a Sussurat in command. A Sussurat,” he stressed. “A sacred warrior of the Predators. She will not be interested in your rules.”

This was a slight exaggeration, since Tarkos knew that Bria, his commander, was still in the autodoc recovering from wounds that had killed her, weeks before. But even an unconscious Sussurat was scary as hell, in his opinion.

No answer came. He wondered if they were going to call his threat, trap him here, send in robots or whatever kind of defense this Labyrinth had. He raised his arm and pointed it at the airlock door. They would understand the gesture, from wherever they watched him: he could blow another hole through the door here, and cause a violent decompression.

The airlock door closed behind him. The atmosphere began to pump out. In a few moments, the opposite door slid upwards, exposing a blur of passing stars.

Tarkos stepped out onto the ancient black surface of the asteroid, reversing the dizzying stunt he performed before, stepping out and onto what seemed from his perspective now a wall. The rocket pack lay where he’d left it. He put it back on and leapt upward, into space, using all the remaining fuel in one sustained burn. He shot up at more than an e-gee. The labyrinth fell away quickly. Adrenaline still made him shake, and he could hardly believe that he’d pulled off his mad plan. But he took a deep breath and held it. For a moment, he enjoyed the sensation that he sailed free, unencumbered, with open space and peaceful quiet before him, all his troubles behind, and a galaxy of stars to chose from—before his ship and all its duties came out of the dark and swallowed him whole.