intelligence flickers out and turns its body into nothing more than a drifting hulk. But for every one that dies, a dozen more enter the Visitors’ Gallery. They cut through her drones like blades through flesh, and in a matter of moments her ten million drones have become nine million, eight million.
Observer fights beside and within her, shoulder to shoulder, mind to mind, drone to body. He is even less prepared for physical conflict than she is. The combat drones do not even bother with Him; they nudge His many bodies aside as they systematically dismantle this alien mind, this disease that has attacked their Network. Your mind is where your power lies, Network told her. But her mind is being torn apart, and her power with it.
She cries out as another hundred thousand drones fall out of her mind. What do I do? she shouts to Observer.
Forget Your body! cries Observer. You are mind!
But she can’t. Network is attacking her body, say her instincts. It’s attacking her, and she must defend herself. Time accelerates as her mind shrinks. Drones fall away from her by the million, each one taking a tiny piece of her with it. She fights, but her blades grow duller and her attacks slower and weaker. Her mind, which only seconds ago had been overflowing with confidence and thoughts of vengeance, is running over with fear.
The more one changes size, the more difficult it becomes to keep a solid grasp on scale. Therefore, it takes actual pain to make her realize how personal the fight has become. Her body, fragile biological shell that it is, has been hurt. Her eyes burn, because blood is sliding down from her forehead and blinding her. Her skull, the one that protects her very self with a few millimeters of fragile skin-covered bone, has been grazed by some whirling chunk of metal that her Librarian has somehow let past its defenses. There are no more drones to defend her, she realizes. Sarya herself, her very existence, is in danger.
A fifty-ton Librarian is a formidable ally, but it is not invulnerable. It has taken hundreds of hits meant for her, and now it seems barely able to move. Great fissures have appeared in its metallic skin, and they squirt glittering dust into the air with every motion. This is why, through one of the gaping holes in its defense, Sarya sees her end coming. It’s not even one of the specialized defense drones. It’s a simple cleaner, its thread trailing dark behind it, probably hurled helplessly and accidentally by some larger conflict. Only seconds ago this was part of her mind. Now she will not have enough time to blink before it takes her head off.
I might as well be killed by a sanitation station.
And then the drone flies past her head, on both sides. She feels a cold burn on each cheek as its two sparking halves brush her skin, but she does not die. And yet she did not defend herself. She could not. She cannot do anything. Nor can the Librarian; it does not respond when she is wrenched from its cooling grasp. And then the sight is blocked out by a closing hatch and she is floating in a red darkness.
[I’m here], says Eleven in glowing red symbols across its internal holo. [I don’t understand what’s happening, but I’m here.]
“Eleven,” gasps Sarya. She says it with her real voice, her real lungs and vocal cords. “Eleven, I don’t—I didn’t mean—”
But what is there to say? Save me? The suit is already doing that, and it’s not even connected to her. I’m sorry I took your mind? She did, she must have, and she didn’t even notice. She would have ripped the suit off its Network and installed it on her own with a bundle of another ten thousand intelligences. She probably felt its fear, one drop in an ocean of emotion. She almost certainly had Mer and Roche and Sandy’s helper intelligences at some point, and their names never even crossed her mind.
And yet the suit protects her. It is not even connected to her, but it defends her. It spins, throwing Sarya’s stomach in all directions. Its arms swing through the darkness, sending drones spinning into the distance. It crushes them, tears them apart and flings them, avoids them with a grace Sarya never suspected it possessed. The suit is a force of nature, a multi-ton cyclone of gleaming metal. But, like the Librarian