Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 571
failing. As radiant fingers touched the inside doorframes, I
flooded the assembler station with energy and ionized gases. I
had a maintenance robot climb into the organized flame, and it
shut the door just as a human-shaped member of the swans
swept into the chamber, its searchlight eyes hunting for signs
of biological life.
At first I thought I might be able to create a hard-shelled
message buoy, or a thousand of them, hoping one or more
might escape my destruction. That hope faded as I felt the
swans eating me thoroughly, from the hull in.
My other maintenance robots fought the swan that had
penetrated to the power core, and meanwhile I remade the
maintenance robot in the assembler station. I gave it a pseudobiological
skin that it could regenerate from an inner reservoir
of fluids, and changed its shape so that it resembled a human. I
chose the best model in memory for this body: my captain.
The body’s skin I designed to exude the pheromones and
other trace proteins that I knew from my identity-scan records
of Calandria May. And behind this skin I made shields and
cloaks to hide the mechanisms that ran it. Finally, as the swans
tore my bird-shape into a million pieces and devoured them, I
uploaded my AI into the new body.
I opened my eyes to see hands--my hands--pressing
against the inside of a cylindrical chamber. I was swimming in
a plasma of hot gases, enmeshed in the fine spiderwebs of the
assembler gantries. An oval window in the chamber’s door
showed only bright light. I moved to it, and beheld the final
disintegration of the Desert Voice take place outside.
The swans opened the door--or to be exact, they ate it.
The glowing fields around me collapsed, leaving me in
darkness lit only by the glow of the swans. They looked at first
like a nest of flaming serpents; the gases escaping around me