The aliens could certainly move. I had no idea how fast we were going, but I figured that we had to be accelerating at one gee or more. We were already way past the velocity at which we could make sharp turns, no matter how expert our cocoons might be at preventing momentum from crushing us to pulp but the attackers didnt seem to be laboring under that kind of inconvenience. They were hurling themselves all over the sky, like icons in a combat game.
It was all absurd, and plainly so.
It was absurd to suppose that a fleet of alien space fighters was bursting out of some kind of space warp. It was absurd to suppose that they were shooting at us, and hitting us, without actually smashing us into little bits of molten slag. It was absurd to suppose that aliens, or anybody else, would go to such lengths merely to harass or destroy a man whose messianic status was entirely a matter of human estimation. Or me. Or even Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.
But melodrama has its own attractions, its own button-pushing power over those emotions that even the cleverest IT cant muffle.
Its not just us , I thought, as more squiddy things popped into existence, swarming across the whole vast starfield. Its the whole damn system. We just happened to be out here. Theyre invading the whole solar system. Theyre going to annihilate the entire population. Its finally happened. After a thousand years of cultivating a false sense of security, its finally happened, in the very same week that I finally get out of jail .
It was the last and, admittedly, least improbability that derailed the train of thought.
Its an illusion , I told myself. It isnt even a good illusion. Its a practical joke. Someones playing with me, treating me with contempt. Niamh Hornes playing me for a sucker, and shes playing Adam Zimmerman too. But I dont believe it, and neither will he, if hes got any sense .
I thought I owed it to myself not to be taken in. I owed it to myself as a man of the twenty-second century and a designer of virtual experiences not to be a gullible fool. Adam Zimmerman had grown up in the twentieth century, when TV was flat, and came in a box. If all of this had been set up to fool someone, he was the one, and he was the one on whom it might just work but I had higher standards.
Its all fake , I told myself, sternly. That much is definite .
The hope that it was all an illusion, all a third-rate VE space opera, was further encouraged by the fact that I couldnt feel any effects of the shots that were supposedly striking home against the hull of the Titanian ship.
I suspected that I ought not to read too much into that item of negative evidence. I knew that it was always the requirements of melodrama rather than respect for realism that had led the programmers of old to make the bridgeheads of hypothetical spaceships shudder and lurch when the vessels were supposedly hit by exotic ammunition but I allowed myself to be encouraged anyway. I needed every scrap of proof I could find to bolster my conviction that I was not an easy man to take for a ride.
I watched the formations of the attacking entities shift and change, looking more and more like cyborg octopodes built for exotic combat, but I couldnt tell whether the changes were a result of their maneuvers or a mere matter of altered perspective caused by Child of Fortune s own evasive action. I wasnt aware of any momentum effects in my own body, but that didnt necessarily mean anything either, given that the elastic inner surface of the pod was so firmly bonded to my own smartsuit. There was no way to tell how fast the Titanian ship was movingif it was moving at all.
Are we shooting back? I asked the AI.
No, said the mechanical voice, obviously not feeling the least need to apologize or explain.
Can we get away from them? I asked.
No, was the discomfiting reply.
Will they destroy us?
I took the consequent silence as an I dont know , but the image suddenly shifted as if to supply an answer of sorts. I saw that out of the entire alien school, only four of the attackers now seemed to be concentrating all their attentions on us but the fourth was not like the other three.
If the three Id already seen were run-of-the-mill calamari, the fourth was a record-breaking giant. In the absence of any benchmarks, and knowing full well that the AIs external eyes were using all kinds of vision-enhancing tricks even if they were being scrupulously honest, it was difficult to judge exactly how gigantic it might be, but appearances suggested that this was the mother squid, the queen of all the other squids and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my own dutiful mothership wasnt pitching and shuddering under the impact of unfriendly fire was that we werent actually being shot at at all, in the strictest sense of the term.
We were being pushed .
We were, I suddenly realized, being herded toward the giant and the giant was already opening her vast tentacles, spreading them like the petals of a world-sized flower to expose an avid maw.