Starplex

“Thank you all for coming,” said Boxcar’s voice, over Keith’s implant. It was easy to spot her: hers was the only web flashing. It was eerie, in a way. PHANTOM’s translation was piped into his left acoustic nerve; the other ear heard nothing—even a room this size full of raucous Ibs would be dead silent.

Boxcar was fifteen meters from where Keith and Rissa were standing. In front of the plated space door, PHANTOM was projecting a giant hologram of Boxcar, so that all the Ibs could see her flashing web. Something strange, there: the strands of her web were bright green. Keith had never seen any Ib’s web that color before.

He turned to Rissa, but she must have guessed his question. “It represents a deeply emotional state,” she said. “Boxcar is choked up over the show of support from her people.”

Boxcar’s web flashed again. The translation said, “The whole and the parts—of one, and of them all. The gestalt has resonances on the macro scale and the micro. It binds.”

Obviously, Boxcar was addressing her fellow Ibs. Keith thought he got the gist of what she was saying—something about being part of the Ib community having meant as much to her as being a community of parts herself. Keith prided himself on his acceptance of aliens, his run-ins with Jag notwithstanding. But this was all a little too surreal for him; he knew he was about to watch someone die, but the emotions he should be feeling hadn’t yet come to the surface. Rissa, on the other hand, had that look she got when trying not to cry. She and Boxcar had been closer than he’d known, Keith realized.

“The road is clear,” concluded Boxcar. She rolled several dozen meters away from the others, out into the center of the bay.

“Why’s she doing that?” whispered Keith.

Rissa shrugged her shoulders, but PHANTOM replied into both of their implants: “During discorporation, components—especially wheels—may panic, and seek to bond with any other Ib in the area. It is customary to move far enough away so that if such a thing is attempted, there’s plenty of time to react.”

Keith nodded slightly.

And then it began. In the middle of the bay was a standard Ib comfort mound. Boxcar rolled over it so that the hump supported her frame from underneath. Her web—visible in PHANTOM’s giant hologram—turned an almost electric purple, another color Keith had never seen before. The light points at the web’s countless intersections grew brighter and brighter, a dense constellation map with every star a nova. Then, one by one, the lights winked out. It took perhaps two minutes for them all to go dark.

Boxcar’s frame tipped forward, and her web slid off to the bay floor, landing in a loose pile. Keith had thought the web was already dead, but it arched up sharply, as if a fist were pushing it up from underneath. The strands had now lost all their color; they looked like thick nylon fishing line.

After a moment, though, the web finally did expire, collapsing into a heap. Boxcar was now blind and deaf (she had once had a magnetic sense, too, but that had been neutralized through nanosurgery when she’d left her home-world; it caused severe disorientation aboard spaceships).

Next, Boxcar’s wheels disengaged from the axles on the frame. Wheel disengaging wasn’t unusual in and of itself. The system that allowed nutrients to pass from the axle into each wheel didn’t provide enough food for the wheels, and in their native environment they would periodically separate from the rest of the gestalt for feeding. Thick tendrils, similar to the Ib’s bundle of manipulatory ropes, popped out of the sides of the wheels, preventing them from falling over (or righting them if they did).

Almost immediately after it separated, the left wheel tried to rejoin the frame. Just as PHANTOM said it might, it panicked when it realized that little bumps had risen up all around the axle’s circumference, preventing it from reconnecting. It rolled around the bay, the grabbing projections around its rim extending and retracting at a great rate. The wheel had a few vision sensors of its own, and as soon as it caught sight of the huge collection of Ibs, it made a beeline for the closest. That Ib spun away, avoiding the wheel. One of the others—Butterfly, Keith assumed, the one Ib doctor on board—surged forward, a manipulatory rope extended, a silver-and-black medical stunner held at its tip. The stunner touched the wheel, and it stopped moving. It stood for several seconds, then the rootlike appendages coming out of its sides seemed to go soft, and the wheel toppled onto its side.