Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 683
He didn’t answer.
"But then... the real question is, what do you want to do?"
Armiger didn’t answer for a long time. Finally he said,
"I guess that depends on who I am."
"This god 3340 you’ve spoken of--what did he want you
to do with Ventus?"
"He saw Ventus as a resource waiting to be tapped. But
not an efficient one, as it stands. Most the Winds’ energy is
being put into maintaining the artificial ecology--a complete
waste as far as 3340 was concerned. The first thing it would
have had me do was abandon the terraforming system."
"Abandon...? What would that mean, for us I mean?"
"The air would become poisonous with time... rivers
would dry up, the oceans become toxically metallic. Some
kinds of life, like fungi and bacteria, would run rampant, others
would die. Everything would eventually be choked out, if it
even lasted that long, because 3340 wanted to use the mecha to
make the entire surface of the planet into one giant machine--a
god device."
"For what purpose?"
"Ventus was to have been a staging area for an assault on
the human Archipelago. If 3340 had conquered even a tenth of
the Archipelago, it would have become unstoppable.
Eventually it might have consumed the entire galaxy."
"But 3340 is dead," she said.
"Yes."
"So you won’t do that my world."
He looked her in the eye, expressionless. "I will not," he
said, a bit too vehemently.
"I wish I could believe you."
He looked surprised--the first real emotion he’d shown in
days. He squinted at her through woodsmoke. "Why don’t