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Suddenly, the cole of static electricity

Then a rush of air filled the crater, sparking the glowing rocks into open flaainst e H_rd realized that her hearing ed; the noisy craft had sneaked up on her

One of the GEVs opened fire, and the recon flyer responded Its small cannon whined in a pitiful sound, but the Imperial craft pulled back, wary after the Rix blaster&039;s terrific self-destruct

The recon flyer bounced on its air cushion just above h_rd, whipping the air in the crater into a frenzy The co struts, and the flyer soared up and out of the crater In ten seconds they were a hundredfrom the craft with locked e of the wire A swath of destruction cut through it: her neat row of blaster scars extending froe of land eAlexander&039;s attack fro the wire utterly ruptured Only a few, bright lances of antiaircraft tracers survived to dog the flyer as it rose, too far away and firing in short bursts to conserve their waning ammunition

H_rd realized that she would pass out soon, and didn&039;t trust the muscles in her burned hands to stay locked, so she climbed laboriously over the side of the flyer and collapsed into the gunner&039;s webbing

"Take od

And lost consciousness

compound mind

Alexander was ready

Across the planet Legis XV, a sudden pall of electronic failures struck The telephonic system dropped a quarter-billion conversations, aircars tossed their drivers into manual, and inside market-trader headsups the cool icons of co Every rea stuttered, then flew into a rage Airscreens, false views, and overlays were replaced with a riot of color, a turbulent river of passing data in its rawest form

At the operational centers of the planet--the air traffic hub, the private currency exchange, the infoterrorisis&039;s adaped as their soccer-field-sized airscreens tumbled into snow crash For a moment, the frantic operators were blind Then they booted the large, flat hardscreens put in place for soency such as this The backups returned a bizarre sight, oddly similar from all perspectives, whether civilian, coed like a living thing As one, the planet&039;s vast channels of information distended, pushed, were seized by a vast peristaltic le focus

Alexander swept toward the entangleeyser powered by the pressures of an ocean

A few hundred isites stared in surprise at the hard-screens of their wailing phones, and saw interplanetary access codes Worried that pirates had hijacked their accounts, a few million of them stabbed cutoff switches or popped out batteries, but their phones stayed connected, powered by microwave pulses from borrowed traffic transponders Police and re units, usually silent unless their , arose as one to flood their reserved frequencies Every fiber hardline on the planet was lit to capacity

Even medical endoframes--the tiny monitors that watched arrhythmic hearts and trick knees--eency bandwidth to the flow of data toward the pole

Alexander took everything

The planet&039;s trans on a billion channels like so in reverse, and the coe repeaters spread across the tundra, invaded the big dishes devoted to interplanetary transrid itself, but grabbed the transis&039;s other inhabited planets A few , realized that the polar facility had been taken over and was blaring at the sky with fantastic throughput But their software conored, the manual cutoffs useless The specialists tried to explain the situation to the base&039;s coes on the precious few hardlines in the com system

To maintain the interplanetary blackout, they said, drastic action would have to be taken Carpet bomb the repeaters Destroy the dishes Only a few e was fully engaged A battle raged along the wire, an incoe of rockets and drones And apparently, a Rix commando--the Rix commando--was somewhere inside the wire This was a main force assault The existence of the facility was in peril

There was no time to listen to the wild pronouncements of a few hysterical com techs

In the confusion, Alexander was able to shoot into the sky

The compound mind found that space was cold It was chilled by the absence of Legis&039;s an to dihetti-thin stream, like a human pulled into a black hole Behind Alexander was the screa planet, its infostructure ruptured as the co the fevered body of its victim Foras the icy mindlock of pure transmission, a descent into suspended ani for its proh the funnel of the array, leaving a reeling world behind

And for 850 ti

Master Pilot

Master Pilot Marx struggled to concentrate

He&039;d never been yanked out of thethan planetary day-length adaptation, worse than long-terees Marx had been trained to resist the five different syravity cues, to drink air and inject food But he&039;d never been drilled in this particular insult to the body No one at Iht to wake him up from the midst of deep deltas

Only Captain Laurent Zai had proven so perverse

Marx took his hands from the drone&039;s controls and cupped his eyes in his pal a few seconds of blackness to salve his priht But the object was still visible in synesthesia, its bizarre undulations worsening his disorientation He pushed his sensor sub-drones out a bit farther for better parallax, trying to grasp the enor But increased perspective only e staff and all of Data Analysis atching over his shoulder Their hushed voices were filled with awe, so Marx kneasn&039;t completely crazy But he still didn&039;t believe his second sight

The object looked like an ocean An uninterrupted, boloid ocean, without benefit of exposed land mass or iron core

More than a hundred klicks across at its widest point, it spun like a chane dervish Almost everyone in the Navy had atteee, pop a bottle of sparkling wine, catching the unavoidable ejected froth in one hand Use a straw or a pair of eating sticks to prod and coax, to herd the fizzing liquid into a stable, spinning freefall globule Pulsating and twisting like a liquid tornado, each chane dervish had its own personality, its own Rorschach syne was the best, with its slightly stickier surface tension And if cheap stuff wound up splattered across the rooiant thing assaulting Marx&039;s sensibilities wasn&039;t coaton raphs indicated that it was ated across its surface suggested the arcifor desert brushed by ethereal winds But the thing had no atmosphere Data Analysis had told Marx that the dune movement was caused by internal motion Therewas spinning around itself: a quasi-liquid planetoid, a wobbling gyroscope, a chane dervish of dry sand

Master Pilot Marx sent a tiny probe toward the object His drone 169 was configured for leisurely, unarmed recon, and had a considerable number of subprobes Unless the object decided to take a shot at hier

The thing didn&039;t seem to have weapons or a drive Data Analysis said it was coh

But what the hell was it for?

The unidentified object had co at alreater h Some very powerful drive ain Otherwise, its trip here from Rix space would make it very ancient indeed

Marx&039;s probe struck the object softly, sending up a splash, a raindrop in a puddle A few droplets from the impact trailed away from the object, their bond of surface tension broken, and Marx assigned another pilot to maneuver one of his satellite drones in pursuit of the ard sand-stuff Actual spoor from the beast would be helpful

The s fro The probe tumbled helplessly in the interior currents, spun by a thousand reater circle by the Corio-lis force of the object&039;s overall rotation

Sa data came back The object was indeed ranular structure And it was hot inside the whirling desert As the probe was drawn into its center, spiraling inward like a floating speck down a bathtub drain, the te was hard-vacuum cold on the outside, and showed no evidence of internal radiation It wasn&039;t nearly dense enough for gravitational compression, and the friction fros Marx was getting He concluded that so inside

Before it was a quarter of the way to the core, the probe&039;s faint signal ed by heat-noise and the object&039;s inherent density

"Moving in closer," Marx said He brought his subdrones into position surrounding the object

He split his second and tertiary sight ale ile

The exercise addled his brain for aspiderwebs of sensory filaments out froh the Lynx&039;s processors were still daed, the master pilot had priority Without an entire battle to run, the frigate&039;s surviving columns of silicon and phosphorus were still quite formidable Soon, thelike the fran

Now Marx could really see the shape of the object, began to feel the period and flow of the sandy ocean The dunes&039;clouds of sh his ht Marx let hisback into the dream state from which Hobbes had so harshly yanked him He reveled in the patterns of the sand-ocean, and unconsciously guided his various craft about the object, drinking in its for seductive in the fluid

The rasp it

Suddenly, the overlaid ies stuttered, thenof dunes increased in speed, their dance accelerating e of new colors played across the sands, filled the master pilot&039;s three levels of vision with a cascade of lightning that flashed across the spectru onto each other in a way that should have been simply noise But soes of countless faces,vistas, data icons, security ca blared with the chatter of a million conversations, confessions, jokes, draone ht, each discernible as a separate view It felt as if a whole world were being shoved through his mind He reached for the cutoff, but his hand froze, his mind craan rolling across each other, coht and sound collapsed into a single torrent, pulled theain, and finally tattered like a flag driven down the throat of a te into a thousand separate threads

Dimly, Jocie questioning hi sharp and harried coe they spoke It seeed up froether in randouely heard his own name

But by then he was far off in yet another dream, vast and furious

Executive Officer

"What the hell happened to him?"

"Medical doesn&039;t know yet, sir"

"What about the scouts?"

"No response, sir Sending again"

Katherie Hobbes tried to raise the main recon drone once more With one fraction of her mind, she watched the fifty-second delay count tick off With another, she followed the frantic shouting of theMaster Pilot Jocih hallway caee corridor Hobbes had cleared for the techs He hadn&039;t moved since the attack, or transmission, or whatever it had been When the med techs had first arrived, he hadn&039;t even been breathing

In a corner of her vision, Hobbes saw Captain Zai flexing his fingers i she could do to increase the speed of light The object enty-five light-seconds away, and the recon drone&039;s translight capability was definitely out Before collapsing, the scout craft&039;s sensory grid had taken a 200-exabyte input--the equivalent of a planetary array at full power, concentrated into an area a hundred rid had perforated like tissue paper But for those seconds, the drone had tried to pass on the infor bad had happened to Marx

"Do we have an origin for the attack, Executive Officer?"

"DA is trying, sir"

"A rough idea of direction?"

"Trying, sir"

Hobbes shunted another ten percent of processor capacity to Data Analysis, forcing her to beggar the repair crews again The captain&039;s orders were co fast and furious With no determinations yet from any quarter, Zai&039;s questions spun from one issue to the next Lost probes, an unconscious pilot (Was Marx dead! she wondered), a e and fantastic object of unknown purpose

Hobbes thought it unlikely that solid ansere co the source of the radio transmission was particularly tricky The wave had been so focused that the Lynx&039;s sensors hadn&039;t caught a stray photon of it Marx&039;s nuulate Directionality was iraned to find the trans through the frigate&039;s processor capacity like a brushfire Unwieldy algorithms devoured their allotted phosphorus in seconds, and screaned more processors to the problem, but the calculations&039; duty-slope reesse in milliseconds Hobbes queried the expert software&039;s meta-software, which adht be unequal to the task even if they had years to get the answer But it wasn&039;t sure The solution ht come in a few more minutes, or perhaps in the lifetime of a star

Perhaps a little common sense was in order

"Sir? There&039;s only one place in the systenitude"