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.
The Network.
The detail of the image is astonishing. More threads than Sarya could count in a lifetime swirl and dive and connect in a field of glowing junctions. It’s denser than woven cloth, a solid mass of light and shadow. There are outliers here and there, single gossamer filaments that reach glowing dots almost at the surrounding bridges—Sarya can see a minuscule figure reaching up to touch one, goddess knows how far above Eleven’s trundling figure. And at one edge, a single dot glows a