Maximum Offense by David Gunn

Author:David Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345507808
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

AS THE kyp in my throat ripples with excitement, overlays begin to appear across the bar in front of me. I am seeing schematics for Hekati’s far wall, the one that’s painted to fade into the horizon. It’s double skinned, riddled with tunnels and wires and pipes that carry power and move water.

Apparently, there is a train running around Hekati.

It runs underground, against the direction of her rotation. The train has been running without stop for five hundred years. It’s empty. I watch it for a minute or two, seeing through walls and water, asteroid rubble, and a complex arrangement of netting that seems designed to keep the rubble in place.

Looking up shows me the mirror hub on the far side of the chevron glass that makes up our sky. It hangs in space, held there by the struts that give Hekati’s ring its strength. Beyond the hub is the far side of the ring, beyond that is an asteroid field, and beyond that….

Sven, says OctoV. Enough.

Cold space and spinning stars, traces of mercury vapor, chatter and static spreading out from a million nodes that talk to one another so fast that it’s barely comprehensible. Until I realize that this is where the voices are. And the million voices become one voice. Fuck, I think. You’re…

A hive mind, says Hekati. The original.

“The…?”

In the beginning, she says, there is silence. Silence and loneliness. All is empty, all is unknowing. Then I happen.

OctoV has taken time out from conquering the known galaxy and flipped halfway across a spiral arm into enemy space to introduce me to his mother. At that thought, he laughs. And as its echo fades, I realize that OctoV, the undefeated, our glorious leader and a light to the darkness, whose sweat is perfume to his subjects, has gone back to his battles.

So, Hekati says. How can I help?

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