‘That has got to be one giant needle.’
‘It is a thought routine that you should be able to deliver through the “longtalk” telepathy which Querencia’s human citizens use. In a worst-case scenario, your ship could make a physical connection to Makkathran’s network. The conduits would be relatively easy to identify.’
‘Okay, and after it awakes?’
‘If there is a way out, it will use it.’
‘And if not?’
‘The information it has gathered simply by being in there for such a period of time will be invaluable.’
Nigel exhaled a long breath. ‘And we’re still hoping a gaiafield connection will get that information out?’
‘It did for Inigo and Edeard – somehow,’ the original Nigel said. ‘So it ought to allow me to dream you. The gaiafield function was sequenced into you, every neurone has it. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what will.’
‘We made you as best as we could to survive the Void environment,’ Paula said. ‘Your brain is faster and smarter than normal. With luck, that should give you a stronger psychic ability than everyone else. You have weaponized biology in case it’s not.’
‘What about my backups?’ Nigel asked. They had all decided he would need help he could trust implicitly.
‘They’re ready,’ the original Nigel said. ‘Modifying a standard ANAdroid was relatively easy, certainly compared to growing you. We managed to build in every ability I thought of. They’re fully feature-morphic. Mentally, they can operate independently, or you can go multiple with them as soon as you activate them; their neural structure is compatible with your routines, and they have gaiafield access capability, too. We don’t think anyone’s ESP can tell the difference between them and a standard human.’
‘Right.’ Nigel looked at Paula. ‘Anything else? You don’t look happy.’
‘I’m confused by the genistar animals,’ she admitted.
‘What about them?’ Nigel recalled how prevalent they were on Querencia. A native species that humans had learned how to shape into various subspecies to help with simple manual labour. It was Edeard’s Eggshaper Guild that was responsible for them. The genistars had several subspecies, which could be telepathically selected just after egg fertilization by someone particularly skilled in the art.
‘How do you evolve that function naturally?’ Paula asked. ‘Granted, it’s a big strange universe out here, but I don’t believe that could ever happen. They have to be artificial, which is slightly contrary, because that ability to manipulate their final shape can only happen in the Void. As they’re not sentient, that has to be performed by someone else, someone with an excellent telepathic ability. Simply put, they were developed as a slave species. And I’m not sure how you’d do that in a technology-free environment like the Void.’
‘That’s a lot of conjecture you’ve come up with, there,’ Nigel said bluntly. ‘I’m not going to prejudge them.’
‘It’s a logical extrapolation. Edeard’s civilization never encountered the slavers themselves. I’m assuming they were the ones who lived in Makkathran before humans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they all vanished into the Heart. I just want you to be extremely careful around genistars, that’s all.’
‘Got it.’ Nigel looked round the three conspirators, feeling a buzz of excitement he hadn’t known in centuries. ‘So we’re basically ready to go, then?’
‘Indeed,’ his original said.
Nigel regarded Paula slyly. ‘What about my emergency fallback? The fabled plan B?’
She sighed reluctantly. ‘The package is ready. But you have to really need it. If I find out you activated it without any kind of disaster looming . . .’
‘Yeah, I know. And thank you,’ he said sincerely. ‘All right then, I guess I’m ready. Let’s go kick some Void butt.’
‘Oh, I knew it,’ Paula said disapprovingly. ‘Nigel, that’s completely the wrong attitude. This is an information-gathering mission, not a war party.’
‘Hey, you’re getting seriously gloomy; I’m just trying to lighten things up. You know me.’
‘I certainly do. That’s why I came up with plan B.’
‘Have a little faith. This calls for me being smart and sneaky. That I can manage. I won’t call for the intellectual cavalry unless I really need to.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she asked. ‘Really sure?’
Nigel did his best to lower his gaze, but the stare she was giving him seemed to be looking into his mind far more easily than any telepathy. ‘It’s a simple mission,’ he said earnestly. ‘Land as close as I can, try and wake Makkathran. Dream whatever I find back out to you. If the ship still works, try and follow a Skylord to the Heart and dream that back for you as well.’
‘And if it doesn’t work?’ Paula asked.
‘Then I’ll go live a quiet life somewhere in the countryside. Maybe teach them better medicine.’
‘Don’t do anything—’
‘Stupid?’ Nigel asked.
‘I was going to say, dangerous,’ she said. ‘And to that we can add: foolhardy, reckless, irresponsible—’
‘Okay! Hell, I get it, I’ll be good.’
Paula gave him a mournful smile. ‘That would be nice.’
‘Mark has a whole load of instructions for you,’ his original said. ‘Take as long as you want to familiarize yourself with the ship, and after that we’ll leave.’
Paula leaned over and gave him a light kiss. ‘You take care. I mean it. You’ll have me to deal with if you don’t.’
‘I am aware of that.’
She grinned. ‘You have the naming privilege. What are you going to call the ship?’
Nigel grinned back. ‘Skylady, of course. What else?’
July 11th 3326
The Skylady rose silently up into Augusta’s night sky. A fat ellipsoid twenty-five metres long, with rounded delta wings. Her nondescript grey-green fuselage soaked up the starlight, making her very difficult to see.
Umbaratta flew beside her, Nigel Sheldon’s personal starship – a sleek teardrop ultradrive, capable of flying anywhere in the galaxy at fifty-six lightyears an hour. Two thousand kilometres above Augusta, they both rendezvoused with Vallar’s spherical starship, and all three went FTL.
*
Eighteen hours later, a long way outside the Commonwealth, they dropped back into ordinary space. The nearest star was three light-years away.
Sitting in the Umbaratta’s circular cabin, Nigel Sheldon told the smartcore to scan round. The starship’s excellent sensors could detect nothing. He’d been expecting a Raiel starship of some kind to be waiting for them. One of their colossal warships, he’d hoped. They were still over thirty thousand lightyears from the Void, and he was extremely interested in how the Raiel were going to transport them there. The Commonwealth had never managed to produce anything faster than ultradrive.
Vallar opened a link. ‘Stand by,’ she told him.
Nigel opened his gaiamotes, and detected his clone’s thoughts. Like his, they reflected a quiet anticipation.
‘How much faster do you think their ship will be?’ he asked.
‘It won’t be a ship,’ the clone replied.
‘How do you figure?’
His clone’s thoughts turned smug. ‘We only use starships inside the Commonwealth because of politics, and outside because it’s practical. The Raiel are evangelicals devoted to saving the galaxy, and they were more technologically advanced than us a million years ago.’
‘Well argued.’
‘You really do need to get a better brain.’
‘Smartass.’
‘Thankfully, yes.’
They shared a mental smile.
The Umbaratta’s smartcore reported an exotic energy distortion manifesting five hundred kilometres away. Nigel linked in to the external sensors, and his exovision showed him the wormhole opening across the starfield. It was a large one, measuring three hundred metres in diameter.
; ‘This will take you to your destination,’ Vallar told them. ‘The warrior Raiel are waiting for you. Nigel, I would like to thank you for your help.’
‘Anytime,’ Nigel replied airily. He could feel a spike of irony rising in his clone’s thoughts at the polite response.
Umbaratta and Skylady flew into the wormhole, emerging a second later in a very different part of the galaxy. Hundreds of lightyears away, a shimmering band of giant stars formed a magnificent archway across space. The Wall stars, Umbaratta’s smartcore confirmed, a bracelet of intense blue-white light surrounding the galactic core – not that there was much left of it. The Void was slowly expanding into the massive Gulf which the Wall surrounded, the dangerously radioactive zone of broken stars and seething particle storms. Not far away – in galactic terms – was the loop: a dense halo of supercharged atoms that orbited the Void. It burnt a lethal crimson across the Gulf, though that was only the visible aspect of its electromagnetic emissions; its X-ray glare was powerful enough to be detected clear across the galaxy.
Nigel hurriedly reviewed the flight data in his exovision, with particular emphasis on the force fields. They were protecting the hull against the prodigious flood of ultra-hard radiation outside, but it was taking a lot of power to maintain them.
Three massive Raiel warships were holding station behind the wormhole, their shielding only revealing dark spectres, like globes of solidified smoke that were hard for the sensors to focus on. And behind them . . . ‘Sonofabitch,’ Nigel muttered. A Dark Fortress sphere glowed an intense indigo from the swirl of exotic energy it was manipulating. The size of Saturn, the sphere was a lattice of dark struts. Its external shell was wrapped round a series of concentric inner lattice shells, each possessing different physical properties, with a core that was full of extremely odd energy functions.
‘No wonder they can produce a wormhole that reaches halfway across the galaxy,’ the clone Nigel said. ‘The size of the damn thing!’
Humans had first encountered the awesome machines during the Starflyer War. The Raiel had used one to encase an entire solar system in an impenetrable force field, imprisoning the psychotic alien Primes inside. The starship crew who first encountered the sphere that was generating the force field had named it, somewhat quixotically, the Dark Fortress.
It was only later, when the Commonwealth was invited to join the Raiel in observing the Void, that the Navy discovered it was the Raiel who had built the Dark Fortress. At which point the nomenclature was diplomatically shortened to DF sphere. There were a dozen DF spheres in the Centurion Station star system, and many thousands more positioned all the way around the Wall. All the Raiel would say about them was that they were part of their defence against the Void should it start its long-feared catastrophic expansion phase.
A link opened from one of the warships. ‘I am Torux, ships-captain. Please stand by for teleport on board.’
‘Thank yo—’
The Umbaratta was abruptly sitting in an empty, softly lit compartment the size of a CST terminal just as Nigel’s exovision icons were telling him a T-sphere had manifested. The Skylady sat next to it. Nigel had to smile at the guilty thrill his clone was emitting into the gaiafield; it matched his own.
‘We are proceeding to the insertion point,’ Torux told them. ‘Transit time, seven hours fourteen minutes.’
Nigel’s excitement was instantly replaced by a twinge of anxiety, also matched then surpassed by his clone.
‘Welcome aboard, Nigel Sheldon,’ Torux said. ‘You are welcome in my habitation section. Please deactivate your ship’s force fields.’
There was a moment of hesitation, the petulant thought: What if I don’t? Which he knew his clone would also be having. Umbaratta was just about the pinnacle of Commonwealth technology, yet it was nestled here in some obscure corner of this monster warship and he finally knew what the NASA astronauts had felt after they landed on Mars to plant their flag, only to find him waiting there beside a prototype wormhole laughing at them because his technology was oh so superior. No human had ever been on board a Raiel warship. It was a historic moment on many levels.
He switched off the force fields and a T-sphere manifested in the cabin. He was snatched away . . .
. . . to a Raiel’s private chamber similar to those he’d visited in the High Angel. His link to Umbaratta’s smartcore remained; he had courteous hosts, then. The room was circular, fifty metres in diameter, with a ceiling that was lost in the gloom above him, making it seem as if he was standing at the bottom of some giant mine shaft. The walls rippled as though they were a single sheet of water; small coloured jewels glimmered behind the idiosyncratic surface effect casting a wavering sheen of phosphorescence.
A warrior Raiel stood before him. Nigel was expecting it to be larger than the Raiel on High Angel. If you’ve spent a million years breeding for war, everything should be bigger and tougher. But this one was actually smaller than Vallar, although its skin had metamorphosed into an armour of blue-grey segments with tiny lights sparkling below the surface like entombed stars.
‘I am Torux,’ it said in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Welcome aboard our ship, Olokkural.’
‘It is impressive.’
‘I would like to personally thank you for helping us.’
‘The Void affects all of us, ultimately,’ Nigel said. ‘Helping you was the least I could do; your vigil is truly selfless. I will do what I can, though I have to say I am not terribly confident.’
‘Paula Myo considered this to be a worthwhile attempt.’
‘Yes, indeed. Do you know Paula?’
‘We have heard of her from our cousins on High Angel.’
And why does that not surprise me? Nigel could feel his clone laughing.
‘We have a link that will enable you to observe the external environment,’ Torux said.
‘Thank you,’ Nigel replied as his u-shadow reported that a connection to the ship was opening.
*
Seven hours after coming aboard, Nigel watched the Olokkural and its two sister warships drop out of FTL and slow to a relative halt half a million kilometres from the lightless boundary of the Void. Greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and it had taken millennia for humans to bridge that gap, but the scale unveiled before him was severely intimidating to Nigel’s primitive core. This was the eater of stars, of cultures beautiful and terrible, consumer of hope. The one true enemy of all species across the galaxy.
Five more Raiel warships were already waiting for them, along with seven DF spheres. When he saw what else was out there, Nigel gave a smile of complete admiration.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he heard his clone say in the Skylady’s cabin. ‘Win or lose, this is going to make it all worthwhile.’
The DF spheres were using an intricate mesh of gravitational forces to suspend three blue-white supergiant stars, preventing them from the final plunge into the infinite gravity tide of the event horizon which would tear them apart. Even here, half a million kilometres out, surrounded by a cage of inverted gravity fields, their incandescent coronas bulged and writhed, spitting out brutal flares that played across the boundary, dissolving into meta-cascades of radiation as their individual particles were sucked inward and crushed into their sub-atomic components.
‘Please stand by,’ Torux said.
‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ Nigel asked. ‘Even an ordinary event horizon is impossible to break.’
‘This is the method by which we inserted our armada.’
And look what happened to them, Nigel thought.
‘We begin,’ Torux announced.
The DF spheres changed the quantum characteristics of the cage. Nigel could sense the forces alter even though he couldn’t comprehend their nature. The surface of the stars, already impossibly hot, bright and violent, began to burn still brighter as their atoms lost cohesion and transformed into pure energy. For over a quarter of an hour the compression wave grew, travelling inwards, while the coronas mutated to r
elativistic barbs of raw energy stabbing out in every direction through the cage bands. Subjected to the artificial implosion dynamics even their own incredible gravity couldn’t absorb, the three supergiants went nova.
Instead of allowing them to detonate in a radiative blast of energy and superdense hydrogen, the DF spheres did something weird to local spacetime. The power of the novas was converted into negative gravity, and directed in one direction. Straight into the Void’s boundary.
‘Ho-lee crap,’ Nigel grunted, his arms instinctively waving round trying to find something to hold on to as the Olokkural accelerated fast across the horribly short distance to the Void. Skylady was teleported outside, held in place by a gravity node. The warship’s force fields protected it from the cosmic energies wrecking local spacetime.
Ahead of the Olokkural, the Void’s perfectly smooth black boundary began to distort upwards, as if some kind of tumour was growing inside. Up and up it was stretched by the terrible stress of negative gravity, forming a single grotesque mound.
Nigel held his breath. He could feel his clone closing his eyes, hands gripping the cabin’s acceleration couch.
At the peak of the distension, the Void’s boundary tore open. Elegant nebula light shone out into real spacetime. The Olokkural released Skylady, then veered away at two hundred gees, whipping round in a hard parabola and heading back out away from the shrinking rent.
Skylady slipped in through the gap, and thirty seconds later the Void’s wounded boundary closed up behind it.
Nigel gulped down air again.
‘Did he survive?’ Torux asked.
‘Yes.’
BOOK THREE
Revolution for Beginners
1
An hour after the patrol squad broke camp, the morning mist still hadn’t lifted. Grey haze clung to the ground, swirling slowly round the big ecru-shaded tree trunks, keeping the temperature pleasantly low. All across the densely wooded valley, native birds called to each other in their strange oscillating whistle, competing with the incessant rustling sound of bussalore rodents creeping through the undergrowth. Bienvenido’s hot sun was nothing more than a blur-patch above the eastern horizon. Nonetheless, its intensity fluoresced the mist, making it difficult to see more than ten metres.
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