The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The smartcore identified them as Hawking M-sinks. Force fields wouldn’t protect Paula from them.

  Another moon exploded. Sequential ripples of exotic energy swept outward, blocking any return to hyperspace. Paula powered the Alexis Denken straight down toward the gas giant, accelerating at fifty gees. Internal gravity compensators could shield her from only about thirty of them. Biononics had to support her body physically as the punishing force tried to crush her into a puddle of flesh across the decking. Even with that enrichment it was tremendously difficult to breathe. She’d gotten her left leg at a slight angle; it made a bad sound as it flattened out.

  One of the small inner moons was below her, a cratered rock two hundred kilometers in diameter, three thousand kilometers farther along its orbital track from her vertical vector and moving sedately away. She fired a quantumbuster at it, modifying the effect field format. When the weapon activated, it converted a quarter of a cubic kilometer of rock right at the moon’s core. The moon shattered instantly. Millions of rocky shrapnel fangs detonated outward from the micronova in a lethal supervelocity cloud. The particles vaporized as they went, blowing off expanding flares of indigo and topaz ions like primeval comets. Space was filled with a dense clutter of energized mass. The Hawking M-sinks flew into it and began to absorb the deluge of lively atoms. Vapor or rock shards, it made no difference; the event horizons sucked everything down. In doing so, their courses wobbled slightly. As the drives attempted to compensate, their efficiency fell off due to the nearly exponential increase in mass they were now propelling.

  The Alexis Denken raced away from the underside of the hellish fireball, hurtling straight for the agitated stormscape below.

  Mellanie’s Redemption flicked back into space one and a quarter million kilometers above the yellow star. She hung there for a couple of seconds while the forward cargo bay opened and the fuselage force field started to fizz with violet stress patterns. The planetary FTL device shot out, and Troblum took the starship straight back into transdimensional suspension.

  “How long?” Aaron demanded.

  “Ten minutes to initiation,” Troblum said. Catriona was back at his side, her beautiful face tragic with concern. “Establishment will take longer. And no, I don’t have a fucking clue how long. Nothing more I can do. We just sit and wait now.”

  Oscar was keeping track of the hysradar return. He winced when one of the gas giant moons broke apart within a bloom of exotic energy. That was one hell of a fight, as bad as Justine and the warrior Raiel. Oh, crap! “Hey!”

  Everyone looked at him. In the packed cabin that was quite intimidating.

  “You didn’t think this ship could survive anything the Cat threw at it,” he said to Troblum. “Why?”

  “Because it couldn’t,” Troblum replied. Catriona was directing an aggressive stare Oscar’s way, which he ignored.

  “But you have the Sol barrier technology. That can withstand any Commonwealth weapon.”

  “Mellanie’s Redemption doesn’t have that kind of protection,” Troblum said.

  “But … your armor does.” So I assumed the ship would as well. Shit!

  “Yes. I just built my armor. But before now I couldn’t ever use the design the Accelerators developed from the Dark Fortress; that would have revealed what we’d got.”

  Oscar wanted to grab the front of Troblum’s toga suit and give the huge man a shake. “But if we haven’t got that kind of force field, how the hell do you think we’ll get past the warrior Raiel?”

  “They’ll let us past. Won’t they?” Troblum said in a puzzled tone that verged on hurt. “When we explain that we’re on a mission to shut down the Void.”

  “Shit,” Tomansio grunted.

  For once even Aaron was startled.

  “Troblum,” Oscar said very firmly. “Give me full access to your TD linkage. Now.”

  “What are you doing?” Inigo asked.

  “Calling the one person who might be able to help.” He grimaced as another one of the gas giant’s moons was blasted into a tsunami of exotic energy. “If she’s still alive.”

  The Alexis Denken hit the upper atmosphere at fifty kilometers a second. Paula ordered an immediate deceleration as they plunged toward the first truculent cloud layer. It didn’t seem to make much difference. Disintegrating gases gouged a five-hundred-kilometer tail of incandescence in their wake, a giant pointer for the Cat’s sensors. The juddering was phenomenal; as an indicator of how much punishment the starship was encountering, it was badly worrying. Acceleration forces were still crushing her down onto the decking.

  Far above, the first flaming debris from the small rock moon was following her down, dazzling points of light churning through the atmosphere, jetting out vast plumes of black smoke. The terrible buffeting broke them apart into hundreds of smaller chunks, which then shattered again and again. A vast plain of electrical fire sank down toward the clouds. The basic energy the impact was spinning off created enormous lightning discharges that flared for thousands of kilometers through the higher atmospheric bands.

  It made sensor coverage difficult. But just before she sank into the second cloud layer, hysradar located the Cat’s ship chasing her down.

  Paula hurriedly changed her direction, angling the regrav units’ propulsive effect sharply to try to flatten out her trajectory but still heading down.

  “I see you,” the Cat called through an interference-saturated link.

  “If you stop now and rendezvous with your force fields down, I will simply place you in suspension with your original self,” Paula replied. “Any other course of action will result in your termination.”

  “Darling Paula, this is what I love about you. That psychoneural profiling is actually the installation of blind stupidity. Come to me. I can remove it for you.”

  The Alexis Denken’s sensors detected another M-sink being fired. Now the entire gas giant was doomed, though its final destruction would be weeks away. Paula suspected the Cat had done that to make sure there would never be any hiding place beneath the gas giant’s furious storms. Paula fired a quantumbuster, then angled the Alexis Denken down through the fourth and final cloud layer. Below that was a zone of perfectly clear hydrogen extending for several hundred kilometers. Huge vertical pillars of lightning snapped on and off within the gap. At their base, a smog of hydrocarbons eddied uneasily atop the pressure boundary where the atmospheric compounds were finally compressed into a liquid. The sight vanished in a blaze of white light as the quantumbuster activated.

  “Naughty, darling,” the Cat taunted. “My turn.”

  The hysradar showed Paula two missiles curving up from the Cat’s ship, arching up through the clouds, where the density was reduced. Of course they could accelerate far faster than the poor Alexis Denken, which was tunneling through the compacted hydrogen.

  They started to plummet again.

  “Oh, fuck,” Paula grunted, and dipped ever closer to the smog band.

  Her smartcore surprised the hell out of her when it announced that Oscar was calling through a TD link.

  “Little busy,” she sent.

  “Appreciate that. But we’re in trouble.”

  “Doesn’t it work?”

  “That almost doesn’t matter. This ship has no protection from the warrior Raiel. Can you ask Qatux to have a word, please.”

  The missiles were quantumbusters. They activated a hundred kilometers ahead. A solid wall of energy hurtled toward the Alexis Denken, only partially slowed and absorbed by the enormous density of the lower atmosphere. Paula dived into the hydrocarbon soup.

  “Do what I can,” she promised. Some remote part of her brain was chuckling over the irony.

  The jolt of impact was enough to cause a momentary blackout. Her tormented flesh was already at its limit. When she recovered, she was still barreling forward, but her speed was sluggish even with the ingrav and regrav units operating at their maximum. The force field was heading toward overload, and she was only five kilometers de
ep. Blood was pouring out of her nose. A small medical icon in her exovision reported she was also bleeding from her ears; there were internal lacerations, too.

  The Cat’s ship sliced cleanly through the hydrogen zone until she was directly above the Alexis Denken. Eight missiles curved elegantly down toward the smog, spreading out in an exemplary spider-leg dispersal pattern. They’d act like old-fashioned depth charges, Paula realized. If they didn’t force her up and out into the open, the pressure pulse would crush the fuselage. Perfect!

  From somewhere deep inside the star, oblivion was surging up through the superdense matter. The planetary FTL device had triggered a terminal mass energy explosion sequence far below the photosphere whose gigantic shock pulse was now slowly flowing down toward the core, creating an unsustainable fusion surge as it went. Energy levels were building fast from the accelerated reactions. Not even the enormous gravity gradient and ultracompressed hydrogen of the star’s interior could contain it.

  But as the runaway energy thrust its languid way upward, other, stranger forces came into play as the device’s exotic matter functions began to blossom, fed by the star’s own amplified output. Like a parasite growing larger as it consumed more of its host, the device exerted an intolerable stress on an infinitesimal point of spacetime, which promptly ruptured. The throat of the wormhole opened. Behind it, the corona began to darken as more and more power was drained away through hyperspace to sustain the new exotic energy manifestation. The wormhole’s terminus began to strain for its designated emergence coordinate over twenty-eight thousand light-years distant. Half of the rapidly expanding photosphere was now falling into darkness as the wormhole usurped more and more of its escalating output.

  Troblum actually smiled at the sensor image as the Mellanie’s Redemption emerged into spacetime. The starship’s curving fins glowed a strong magenta as they threw off the heat that was still seeping through the force fields. Directly ahead, the surface of the violated star was being distorted by the imminent nova eruption. Yet the very pinnacle of the distortion was cascading into night as mass and energy vanished through a dimensional rift. In the middle of that emptiness a tiny indigo star was shining as Cherenkov radiation gleamed out from the exotic matter of the wormhole’s pseudofabric.

  “It’s stabilizing,” he gasped.

  “How long will that hold for?” Inigo asked gently.

  Troblum shook himself. “Not long,” he admitted. For a moment he regretted not using the original configuration, a wormhole wide enough to swallow a gas giant. This was only a kilometer across. But it did extend for twenty-eight thousand light-years.

  It works. I was right. I was right about everything. The Anomine, the Raiel. Everything.

  “I win,” he said softly, then shouted it. “I fucking win! And the universe knows it.”

  “Take us through,” Aaron said.

  Troblum wiped his sleeve across his eyes, getting rid of the moisture. “Right,” he acknowledged. The Mellanie’s Redemption slipped forward, accelerating hard as it passed into the wormhole’s haze.

  ———

  The Cat’s exovision showed her the eight quantumbusters activating fifty kilometers below the surface of the compressed-hydrocarbon ocean. Their titanic pressure waves inflated, merging.

  Hysradar scanned incessantly, trying to discern the Alexis Denken amid the turmoil. But hydrocarbon fluid at that density was strange stuff, and the massive energy deformation didn’t help. If Paula didn’t make a dash for freedom up to the hydrogen layer, she’d be dead. No starship could withstand the kind of force currently cascading through the hydrocarbon.

  Still nothing.

  The smog rippled apart as the hydrocarbon eruption began. It was like seeing a perfectly round volcano erupt. The cone kept rising—five, ten, twenty kilometers high. As it lifted up into the hydrogen zone where the pressure was far lower, it began to boil violently, spewing out great columns of spray like rocket exhausts that just kept thundering upward. Within seconds the hydrogen zone for hundreds of kilometers was clotted by the weird chemical fug. Optical band imagery was reduced to zero as the greasy vapor surged around her starship. Regrav units strained to hold position as the gales rushed past.

  “So fuck you, then,” the Cat told Paula’s cold, gigantic funeral pyre.

  Sensors showed her that the upsurge was still growing, which was surprising but hardly threatening. The crest reached a full hundred kilometers, drawing down a barrage of almighty lightning strikes from the belly of the cloud layer far above.

  Mountainous waves began to gush ponderously down the eruption’s flanks to the ocean below. The Cat still couldn’t see anything, but the starship’s sensors provided her an excellent graphics-profile image. The hydrocarbon was draining away from something solid, something vast that was still impossibly rising upward.

  “What the—” she sputtered. Then the profile began to resolve. Fourteen mushroom shapes were shrugging off their cloak of glutinous liquid and filthy gas to expose the crystalline domes that roofed them. They were attached to the main bulk of the thing, which measured just over sixty kilometers long.

  High Angel cleared the unstable cleft in the hydrocarbon ocean, shedding a tempest of seething smog.

  A communication channel opened without any authorization from the Cat’s u-shadow. “Hello, Catherine Stewart,” Qatux said.

  “Fuck.” She sent her starship into a seventy-gee climb, not even able to scream against the abysmal force crushing her body. Bones snapped; flesh and membranes tore.

  “You don’t remember my wife, do you?” Qatux asked.

  “Your wife? No!”

  “Nor will you ever.”

  Exovision showed the Cat an energy pulse blasting straight up from the High Angel. It struck her starship—

  The shot was powerful enough to warp spacetime in a very specific fashion, so that although the starship was blown apart in milliseconds, time within the explosion stretched on and on and on … To the Cat the utterly excruciating instant of her death lasted for hour after long terrible hour. Though she never realized it, it was exactly the same amount of time it had taken Tiger Pansy to die one thousand one hundred ninety-nine years ago.

  Nine thousand light-years from the boundary of the Void and five light-years from the closest star, a wormhole terminus swirled open, spilling its gentle indigo light out into interstellar space. Thirty seconds later the streamlined shape of the Mellanie’s Redemption flew out.

  “FucktheLady,” Corrie-Lyn exclaimed. “We made it.” She smiled incredulously and kissed Troblum before he could stop her.

  Behind them, the weak light faded away as the wormhole closed, leaving them as isolated and alone as any humans had ever been. Comprehension of their status quickly spread through the cabin, amplified and reinforced by the tiny self-generated gaiafield. It drained away any sense of elation.

  Inigo gave Corrie-Lyn a quick hug in the uncomfortable silence that followed.

  “What do you think happened?” Araminta-two asked.

  “The important thing is that deranged bitch didn’t follow us,” Oscar said.

  “And Paula?”

  Oscar had to grin at that. “Trust me, if anyone in this universe can take care of herself, it’s Paula Myo.”

  “So what do we do now?” Inigo asked.

  “There is no question,” Aaron said. “We go into the Void.”

  “I meant, what do we do about the warrior Raiel?”

  “Two options,” Oscar said. “If Paula survived, we might already have a clear passage confirmed. If not, we really do try what Troblum suggested and ask nicely.”

  “We got this far,” Corrie-Lyn said.

  “That’s the kind of mad optimism I like,” Oscar said. “Troblum, let’s go.”

  “We need to start installing the medical chambers,” Tomansio said.

  Oscar grinned. “Another optimist.”

  “Just being practical.” Tomansio patted one of the capsules stacked up against the bulkhead. He
didn’t have to move his arm far.

  “So next question,” Liatris said. “Who gets to sleep off the next part of the voyage?”

  “Me, happily,” Oscar said. “So long as you bring me out when we go through the boundary. That I have to see.”

  “We’re going FTL,” Troblum announced. “I’ll get the bots to prepare the forward hold.”

  “How long to the Wall stars?” Aaron asked.

  “A hundred and sixty hours.”

  Paula teleported into Qatux’s private chamber, for which she was grateful. She certainly couldn’t have walked. There was a fat warming sheath around her left leg. Twelve semiorganic nodules were stuck over various parts of her torso, their slender filaments weaving through her skin to combine with biononic systems deeper inside her body, helping to repair the damaged cells. She wore a loose robe over all the systems and limped along as if she were an old woman, which was appropriate enough, she acknowledged grimly.

  A human-shaped chair rose silently out of the light blue floor, and she eased herself into it. Directly ahead the silver-gray wall continued its gentle liquid rippling. Tiger Pansy’s face smiled back gleefully at her through the odd twisting motions.

  You can rest easy now, Paula thought. Wherever you are.

  The wall parted, and Qatux walked in. One of his medium-size tentacles stretched out, and its paddle tip touched Paula on the cheek. There was a phantom sensation of warmth that lingered after the touch ended, perhaps a sensation of sympathy and concern, too.

  “Are you badly damaged?” Qatux whispered.

  “Only my pride.”

  “Ahhh,” the Raiel sighed. “The old ones are the best ones.”