Battlemind Read Free

were insubstantial wisps of gossamer in comparison to that space-rending colossus.
    Yet even the Stargate paled by comparison with the scale of some of the engineering evident in this alien place. Here, entire stars were being moved, herded from place to place like immense, grazing animals, the process evident in their regimentation, in the geometrical perfection of their alignments with one another. She could see stars arrayed in circles, in polygons, in precisely ordered clusters, as though they’d been penned awaiting some deferred judgment.
    And the Great Annihilator—with only a minute fraction of the mass of the black hole at True Center, yet the focus of inconceivable and inexplicable energies and phenomena—was itself ringed by an artificial construct, a structure of some kind just barely glimpsed at this distance, a ring of pinpoint lights and nearly indiscernible supporting structures in a rigid and geometrical array.
    Strangest was one particular string of stars describing a great, gently arcing curve reminiscent of the twist in the shell of a nautilus or the curve of a galaxy’s spiral arms. Kara counted forty-three stars in that one line, each precisely and evenly spaced from its neighbors, the whole vast array stretched across the sky from the zenith and terminating at the radiant core of the Great Annihilator. Those few close enough to Kara’s location to show a tiny disk revealed, on optical magnification, that one side had been induced to flare with the blue-white intensity of a nova, while the opposite hemisphere seemed darkened and blotched by comparison. As nearly as she could tell from this distance, someone, some thing had somehow manipulated those stars, exciting them to blow off vast and continuous flares on only one side—in effect transforming them into titanic guided missiles moving ponderously and unstoppably through space. And as for their destination…
    Kara had the distinct and thoroughly uncomfortable feeling that the Web intelligence was deliberately guiding those stars, nudging them one by one and in perfectly regimented order into the maw of the Great Annihilator. It was chilling. The builders of this place, the machine intelligence known to humanity only as the Web, had built a ring around one of the black holes at the Galaxy’s heart and now were steadily feeding it suns.
    My God, she thought, watching through full-extended sensors. These things toss stars around the way we would throw a ball. Star miners, star drivers, star destroyers… and we’re challenging them for control of the Galaxy.…
    So immense were the energies marshaled there that it was hard to tell what was the result of intelligent planning, and what might be the workings of natural forces, of physics on a galactic scale. Those vast arcs of plasma showed a regularity that might well suggest deliberate manipulation… or simply reflect the order stamped by intense magnetic fields on clouds of charged particles.
    The Web, it was now known, was an extremely old machine civilization, one mat presumably had arisen as the product of organic intelligence in the very dawn of the Galaxy’s existence, though whether as tools of that intelligence or as the next step in its evolution was still unknown. For some billions of years, the machines, a lifeform of their own now in every way that mattered, had been quietly building here at me heart of the Galaxy, wielding forces that humanity could only wonder at. The scope of their engineering prowess was staggering.
    Perhaps most unsettling of all was the knowledge of the sheer, inhuman patience the Web must possess. It was using gravity and the ability to transform stars into rocket-powered projectiles to herd dozens of suns across hundreds of light years—a process that must have taken untold millennia to begin with and would take many more to complete. The scale of what Kara was seeing here, the ring around the Annihilator’s accretion disk, the mass of the rotating Stargate,