Read Online Furious Gulf by Gregory Benford - Free Book Online

silent, inky hallways. Teams came streaming out of the Chandelier. Toby got
     into free space just as the relay transmitter they had left in the vault sent:
    *
BEEP
* I AM A BOMB. THIS HAS BEEN A WELCOME CONCLUSION TO MY HISTORIC MISSION. I BID GOOD-BYE TO THOSE WHO CREATED ME AND GAVE
     ME THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE. THANKS ALSO TO THOSE WHO TRIGGERED MY COMPLETING MOMENT. I NOW DETONATE WITH RESOLVE AND ELOQUENCE.
     *
BEEP
*
    Its transmission shut off.
    The Chandelier shook visibly. Spires sheared away. Walls split.
    A helical tower cracked. Then it all came apart in slow motion, buckling and fracturing into shards that spun away, tumbling.
     In the silence of space it was like watching a mountain come apart piece by piece.
    Toby watched the debris as their flyer sped away. It had been a close call, but the Chandelier was fracturing with little
     energy left over.
Argo
was already speeding away. They probably wouldn’t sustain much damage.
    —Whew! We were lucky.—he said.
    —Maybe,——Killeen answered.
    Cermo said,—I don’t think that stuff can really hurt us much.—
    —Me neither,—Killeen answered.—But maybe it wasn’t supposed to.—
    Toby puzzled.—Huh? What else could it have been for?—
    —Wish I knew. But anybody who just wanted to kill us wouldn’t have given any warning.—
    Toby blinked.—And putting it inside an airlock . . . —
    Cermo said,—Mechs wouldn’t be drawn to an atmosphere. They work better without one. We’d be suckered in, though.—
    —So I figure,—Killeen said.—We set off a humans-only alarm.—
    They watched in silence the slow-motion wreck of their ancient ancestral home. Toby’s oldest Aspects murmured, stirred by
     memories he could probably never know. He felt also the unspoken anguish in the scattered comm comments. Even though picked
     clean, there had been a feeling to the place, a taste of what humans had been like many millennia ago. A flavor of antiquity,
     faint and echoing. Tantalizing, sweet—and then snatched away forever.
    —Too bad I didn’t get to that engraving,—Toby said.
    —Yeasay. Team Lambda got a few quick shots, though.—Killeen scowled, lines deepening in his face.
    —I don’t get it. Why destroy such a beautiful thing? They didn’t even catch us.—
    Cermo said,—Dunno. Me, I figure mechs maybe just like busting up anything human. Anything that means something to us.—Killeen
     said darkly,—Let us hope it is only that.—

FIVE
Ancient Flavors
    T oby liked working outside. Grunt work in zero-gravs was more like dancing than real labor, demanding some body-smarts—but
     there were moments that took plenty of muscle, too.
    There was joy in popping out a sweat. He used it to work off his frustrations, which were getting to be many. Even the best
     skinsuit got pretty swampy after a while, though, and it was a lot of trouble to pee, so you didn’t drink anything for hours
     before going out. That meant your throat dried out and you got by on sips of tomato juice.
    This job was tougher. Their passage through the molecular cloud had somehow shorted out some of the ship’s sensors. Cermo
     said it was all those banks of dust. Then the Chandelier explosion had pocked the hull. Most of the debris was small stuff,
     but each gouge had to be patched. Tedious, messy, and essential, just like most jobs on a starship. When there’s only one
     skin between you and high vacuum, you take care of it.
    Toby helped get a crushed antenna back into shape, depending on instructions from a Face he carried. A Face was a trimmed
     down Aspect, really just a catalog of technical lore and tricks. Toby let the Face tell him which tools to use and electrical
     connections to make, which left him free to just puff and sweat for a while. Techno-thinking was intricate and hard and he
     tired of it. But the repair routines went into muscle-memory, so he would be able to do it better next time.
    When a break came he took a stroll over the hull while the rest