They should follow us; now they know I am here, and they want me—an abomination—destroyed.
The Higgins’s reactors thrummed with electrical energy that ran throughout the ship and made everything pulse with a slight vibration; it waxed and waned according to demand cycles of ship’s systems. I am a weapon. Win’s mind spiraled into thought as he squinted at the wormhole, convincing himself that he could see the alien structure—thin, spidery lines that wound around the sphere and, through magic, kept the hole open. This was technology beyond anything he’d seen in the Sommen manuals. Who were those who’d hollowed the asteroid that Fleet had converted into a secret base? Why had they created networks of wormholes throughout the galaxy, only to then disappear?
And how could they foretell the future?
The ashram hatch opened, breaking Win’s trance and, startled, his servo harness shot a jet of gas, spinning him in midair at the same time his spiked legs rose to attack. Zhelnikov pulled himself through and shut the hatch behind him.
“Relax, Win. I’m glad you don’t have a coil gun, or I’d be calling for a medic right now.”
“They haven’t come yet, Zhelnikov. Where are they?”
“I don’t know. The captain thinks the Sommen are toying with us, waiting so that it maximizes our terror. Doubtless their priests have scanned and already sense our presence and location.”
“I have not felt them. Nothing. I hear the thoughts of the crew, but nothing of the Sommen.”
“The crew were all secretly admitted into the Proelian training program; you should not be able to read anything.”
Win grunted. “Terror has a way of breaking the mind, even minds trained in the ways of Proelian trash.”
“Come.” Zhelnikov had taken off his environment suit’s helmet, and now reseated it with a snap. “If the Sommen chase, we will be destroyed. You did good work; we recovered the plans out of your signal buoy and engineers are now working around the clock to construct a weapon for retrofit installation on the Higgins. In the meantime, you and I have something to do.”
“What?”
Zhelnikov opened the hatch and exited into the corridor. “You’ll see when we get there.”
Win followed, by now with an understanding of where the passageways headed, and they moved in the direction of the shuttle hangar. His skin went cold. The thought of being in a lightly armored shuttle when the Sommen popped through the transit made him wonder what Zhelnikov could be thinking.
I am a weapon. Nerves and brain tissue weave themselves into an alien pattern, waking me into Sommen consciousness and turning my fabric into that of a warrior priest. Only I can see. Only I know the way. The sign is the withering of my body, the sign is the growth of my mind.
Zhelnikov waved for Win to continue following him into an old and battered lifeboat—not a shuttle after all—with a pilot and two couches, so small that Win almost couldn’t fit. He strapped himself in and waited. The ship’s engine roared to life, lifting them off the Higgins’s hangar bay floor and then pushing them forward into the blackness of space.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the wormhole.”
Win started to remove his straps. “Are you mad? Turn this ship around!”
“Calm yourself!” Zhelnikov barked. Win felt a wave of anger from the man and he sat back into his couch.
“We aren’t going through the wormhole,” Zhelnikov continued. “We are going to the wormhole. To examine the structure that keeps it open.”
“I see.” But Win struggled to understand; the news generated a sensation that combined fear with excitement, and a feeling that he had foreseen this in a vision he couldn’t recall.
“No, you don’t see. My teams have been there before. There is clearly an entryway to the structure but there’s no mechanism to open it. No keypad of any kind. Nothing.”
“What’s inside?” Win asked.
“That’s what I’m telling you: We’ve never been inside. We’ve never opened the wormhole structure’s entry portal.” Zhelnikov leaned over and grabbed a hose from the bulkhead, snapping its end into a receiver at the side of Win’s servo harness. “You’ll need a full tank of maneuvering gas. The lifeboat’s docking structures aren’t able to make a seal where we’re headed so you and I will be going extravehicular.”
“Into space?”
“There’s nothing to fear. If we get into trouble, the pilot will be there.”
“Zhelnikov.” Win kept his voice even, doing his best to hide the fact that he was terrified. “I’ve had no training in this. What is it you hope to gain, even if we can open the door to an alien structure? This thing is so advanced that it may as well be magic.”
“Not we. You. If there are no control surfaces to lower the barrier, then it must be actuated in another way.”
“Me?”
“You will use your mind. It’s the only thing we haven’t tried. We haven’t been able to try because my group never dared to ask the Proelian theurgists to use their assets for such a mission. But now you are here.”
“You didn’t want the Proelians to get a first look,” said Win. “Because you don’t want them to gain an advantage.”
“They already have the advantage! Use your mind, Win. You should be able to see all of this. The Proelians have the admiral’s attention and the Sommen religious texts. They control Fleet. We are decidedly disadvantaged.”
“The Proelians could examine one of these structures any time they wished, regardless of you or your group’s prodding. Why haven’t they?”
“They are singularly occupied with the Sommen and war. For now, I don’t think it’s even occurred to them that they could—and should—be interested. The abbess and her bishop know of the old race. But it’s a secondary concern to them; something they can ignore, only to be brought up after we defeat the Sommen.”
Win concentrated on Zhelnikov’s words, analyzing them while reaching out to sense the man’s thoughts. A common thread to tie the fabric of space inside a wrapping of time and quantum particles. The tendons of the universe demand conflict and we will provide it. The goal is the end. It is written in stone by our ancestors and the first warriors: only endless battle will bring forth the truth. And there is no greater goal. War is everything. Win opened his eyes, surprised. Zhelnikov believes that he can learn the unlearnable. The man didn’t understand: Unlike the Sommen, whoever built these structures never left any manuals.
“We may lose this war, Zhelnikov; the Proelians may be correct in a singular focus on an enemy. Your drive is split—the Proelians, the Sommen, and the mysteries of whoever built these structures. This is a path to failure. Without a framework of dedication you’ve been blinded to the reality of our situation, despite all your research and efforts to decode Sommen technology.”
Zhelnikov chuckled, the sound echoing in Win’s helmet. “I’m not doing this for my own benefit, boy. And I’ve seen the aftermath of what one Sommen, alone, can do to our forces—at the Charleston spaceport, when your father was the only one able to stop the slaughter.”
Win lifted a spiked arm and placed it against the fabric of Zhelnikov’s suit. Before the sharp tip could penetrate, he stopped, the pressure hard enough that he knew Zhelnikov felt the threat. “Do not speak of my father. I am not his son.”
“If I die, boy, so do you. Recall the poison. And who do you think will protect you once I’m dead? Nobody wants you here but me.”
“I am not for you to tame.”
The pilot interrupted, breaking through on Win’s helmet speakers at the same time the ship decelerated, forcing him against the restraints. “Sirs, we’re there. I’ve maneuvered to within twenty meters of the structure.”
The door slid open and Win pulled his spike away, following Zhelnikov into the airlock. His heart quickened with excitement; it sent a wash of blood around his neural pathways, feeding them with oxygen and nutrients so that clusters of neurons sparked and filled the air with illusions of light. Despite hi
s calculations that this was a waste of time, the excitement of what they were about to do was inescapable: Nobody had ever been inside.
The outer door opened, greeting them with the darkness of space. Win followed Zhelnikov through. His control jets pushed him out, forcing on him the disorientation of space, and Win directed all attention to the structure rising over them. It dwarfed the pair, a single arm of dark material that curved upward. Win lost sight of it in the glittering sphere of Childress transit, its light forcing suit optics to filter with a warning of excessive ultraviolet radiation. Win concentrated on Zhelnikov’s boots. The pair of them drifted forward, and soon the sound of his own rapid breathing hypnotized Win, calming and dampening anticipation.
Zhelnikov stopped, grabbing hold of a portion of the structure, its surface as smooth as glass where Win grabbed hold. They hovered in what looked like a rectangular portal. Its sharp edges had handholds, shaped just inside the portal’s frame.
“The doorway is five meters, side to side and top to bottom,” Zhelnikov radioed.
“We already know these things were tall and wide; but how do we know this wasn’t an entry designed for small ships or shuttles of some kind?”
“We don’t. Switch to ultraviolet.”
Win punched at his forearms, forcing the colors on his screen to shift, the structure glowing in light blue. He squinted. A meter above them, on what he guessed was the enormous hatchway, a series of markings had appeared in pink. Win recognized they were characters; it was as if a series of snake-shaped squiggles and angular gashes had been thrown together and then spread across the hatch’s face.
“What have you learned of this?”
“It’s clearly a language. We’ve had linguists feed the characters into supercomputers—even tried the Sommen translator tech. Nothing. We can’t figure it out.”
“There aren’t any controls. Nothing to mark the surface at all except these handholds.”
“Precisely. And when we bring our ships within fifty meters of the structure itself, it scrambles quantum computing. Fries computations as if this thing swaps particles randomly with our systems.”
“Quantum interference,” said Win. “That’s why you think I can use my mind to open the doorway.”
“I think you and others like you may be the doorway.”
“What do you want me to do, Zhelnikov? Think my way in?”
“If this thing scrambled our quantum computers, even now it’s working on our quantum states. Both my team and the Proelians believe that the key to Sommen interstellar communication is through quantum entanglement. So . . . yes.”
“You want me to talk to a door.”
Zhelnikov sighed. “We’ve tried everything else. Even our most advanced weapons can’t mark this material.”
Win pulled a line from a utility belt on his servo harness suit and clipped into the handhold so he wouldn’t bounce off and away. He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed and his heart rate became a creeping thing, pumping at half speed so that the heating elements inside his suit had to increase power.
Win’s mind tingled, a buzzing which grew so intense it felt as though he needed to crack open his skull to itch the insides, a maddening sensation that—had it lasted any longer—would have driven him crazy. Then it stopped. A new sensation replaced it, this one a regular sequence of what his mind translated into sounds, a pattern repeated over and over.
“Numbers.”
Zhelnikov grabbed a hold of Win’s suit, forcing his eyes to snap open. “What, Win?”
“Numbers. I heard numbers. Whatever controls this thing, it scanned my thoughts and then stopped—I think because it sensed that it was damaging my mind, maybe because I’m not whatever race created the transits. So it went basic: a series of tones, repeated in sequence, over and over. Then I broke contact.”
“Numbers,” said Zhelnikov.
“One through ten. One tone then a pause. Two then a pause. Zhelnikov, I think this structure houses some kind of super-aware, but one that is far more powerful than any we’ve ever created.”
“Why did you break off? We’ll have to return to the shuttle soon for new oxygen generators but let’s see if you can reconnect. You have to learn a new language, which could take a while and there’s no time to waste.”
“It will be rapid,” said Win. “I’m not learning its language. The thing is gathering data from me, starting with basic counting; it’s learning ours.”
“Do it. Now.”
While they’d been speaking, the structure had been reaching for him, sending pulses of energy to attempt flipping subatomic particles in Win’s mind and making his brain matter crawl. Even now it scanned. He concentrated on his thoughts, urging his mind to solidify into an immovable mass that nothing could change but the effort made him grunt with agony when the structure overpowered him, forcing its way in and over any defense he erected. Win gave up. A moment later he heard himself screaming in his helmet and felt Zhelnikov grabbing at his servo harness in an effort to shake him awake and back into control—a useless gesture.
Impure . . . Something spoke to Win, a voice in monotone that came in bursts, only some words intelligible.
Win managed to organize a thought. Who are you?
If the thing heard the question, it gave no indication; instead it continued pawing through his thoughts, ripping them apart in a kind of dissection. All the while, it continued to send information.
This is a dead pathway, an error. There are others on the correct route into ascension and maturity. Its race will be easy to erase.
Without warning, it ended. Win tried to catch his breath and gasped, starting a mantra to distract himself from the lingering agony as if he’d just removed his head from a microwave to find his neural tissue bubbling and cooked. Zhelnikov yelled his name.
“I’m fine,” said Win. “Give me time.”
“Can you get it to open the door?”
“I can’t get it to do anything. By now it knows we want the door open but it completely ignored the request. It only concerned itself with an update.”
“An update on what?”
“On humanity.”
“Jesus!” said Zhelnikov.
“That’s not surprising; if the structure contains a super-aware, one from a race whose proclivities included predicting Sommen and human futures, it makes sense that the thing would want an update.”
“That’s not what I’m surprised by.” Zhelnikov pointed at the doorway. “You succeeded.”
Win had missed it. The smooth panel cracked down the middle and separated into two, sending a puff of dust to patter against his suit and then shoot into empty space. The area beyond blinked from darkness into light; artificial illumination washed an empty room with ultraviolet light at the same time it overwhelmed his UV sensors. The pair jetted inside. After they crossed beyond the outer doors, the two slabs reversed course and shut behind them, soon filling the area with a roar as atmosphere filled the chamber. Win’s chemical sensors flickered to life; they analyzed molecules that now flowed into the space from a vent he couldn’t see, but which soon pressurized the room.
“Some oxygen,” said Zhelnikov. “Mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen.”
“Whoever they were, this is what they breathed. We’ll go hypoxic if we try to inhale this. And they must see in a combination of the visible spectrum and the ultraviolet.”
“The pressure has stabilized. Why isn’t the inner door opening?”
“How should I know?” asked Win. “I never . . .”
A second set of slabs opened, cutting him off and making a long crack in the wall opposite the doorway they’d just entered. It stopped after forming a one-meter gap. The structure’s lights blinked on and off, and Win’s suit pickups sent an audible warbling noise across his helmet speakers.
“Malfunction?” he asked.
Zhelnikov kicked off the closest wall, speeding toward the opening. “We can make it through. Come on.”
“How will we get
out? Even if we make it back here, now that there’s a problem with their airlock mechanism we could be trapped.”
“Then we may as well get a look around our new prison. We only have about twenty minutes left on these oxygen generators. Record everything, Win: sound, video, sensor readings—everything.”
The corridor beyond the airlock dwarfed Win with its dim lighting, illuminating a structure that reminded him of a ribbed cylinder carved from black rock, glistening and wet. The dark throat of a demon, he thought. Where the exterior structure had been smooth and spotless, this was the exact opposite, a textured material alternating in shades of gray and black, with pitted areas that made it look as if it had been sandblasted or drilled to form holes at random. But they weren’t random . . .
“Those are handholds,” said Win. “Or whatever these things used instead of hands. They come in groups of three, suggesting your guess of three digits per hand was correct.”
“How these things had only three digits for manipulation of items and material, and became so advanced . . .”
“What the hell is this place??” Win asked. “Aren’t there any other rooms? Where is the machinery and power plants to support and sustain a fold in space for, what? Centuries? Millennia?”
Zhelnikov didn’t respond. Win sensed the man’s heart rate spike, his pulse so rapid that he wondered if Zhelnikov would have a heart attack, but he understood. His own pulse felt as though it would burst every vein. Win imagined that from a distance they resembled small dots of black, floating like dust amidst a corridor impossibly large, just a bit smaller in diameter than the dimensions Win had taken of the arm’s external features. There was no room left for anything. If each arm of the station making up the wormhole was identical to this, he realized, the web was empty shell—a thin crust of alien rock or ceramic that separated them from the vacuum of deep space.
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