by Ellis, Don
He looked behind them. Four points of light moved against the churning background, apparently all of their pursuers who cared to venture this close to chaos. To the sides and above, the other three Kalirae ships held formation.
“Even odds now, eh?” he asked Harxae.
“Those are Shard,” said the alien.
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Meaning the odds are nowhere near even.”
Raedawn said, “Who are these Shard guys, anyway? You talk about them like they eat bogeymen for lunch.”
“Pharons eat bogeymen for lunch,” Harxae said. “The Shard don’t eat, but if they did, they would eat Pharons for lunch.”
“Oh.”
“Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. They were once energy beings. When their world was drawn into the Maelstrom, the Tkona disrupted their energy matrices, and they were forced to take on physical form. They chose a crystalline structure.” He shook his head. “You are thinking of hard, brittle crystals. No. Think nanites. They can shift their form more easily than you or I. They can flow like water when need be. They can form weapons from their own substance and power them with energy from their very essence. And they hate their imprisonment in physical form even worse than we hate our imprisonment in the Maelstrom.”
“Infinite power in a perpetual bad mood, eh?” Raedawn asked.
“You begin to grasp the problem.”
David said, “How many are there on each of those ships?”
“Each ship carries one being. The Shard intelligence spreads throughout the vessel, so you could think of them as the ship itself, but the vital spark is protected in the core.”
Nano-malleable, powerful, and well shielded. David began to grasp the problem as well.
Navrel was on the other side of the dome, talking with four other Kalirae. Harxae led the humans over to them, and Navrel said, “We have reconfigured some of our weapons to provide magnetic pulses. I gathered the necessary information from your mind as you rested. I hope you are not offended.”
David had sensed nothing. Now he felt more embarrassed than offended, but he supposed he had no reason to feel either. Mind reading was like breathing to these people; they had no concept of privacy.
“Where do you plan to use these pulse bombs?” he asked.
Navrel pointed at the inner edge of the ring system. “See those tendrils of dark matter?”
Even with the dome filtering most of the light, David had to squint into the glare, but he saw what Navrel was talking about. Long, snakelike tentacles of blackness writhed back and forth, lashing out at the leading edge of the ring. Where they hit matter, flares erupted, and huge chunks of rock were ripped loose. They looked very much like the tendrils that had reached for Earth when the dark cloud had first appeared in space around it.
“I don’t think we really want to go in there,” he said. “Have you tried setting off a pulse out here?”
“For what reason? The anomalous space is there.”
“You should have dug a little deeper while you were in my head. One of the things I discovered back on Mars is that you don’t have to be right on top of the anomaly in order to punch through. As long as space is stressed enough, you can make a new hole nearby. By the looks of that, I’d say it’s plenty stressed right where we are.”
Navrel looked out at the burning white hole in space. “We have many pulse bombs. Let us try it.”
He had hardly spoken before missile fire streaked from the front of the ship. It rushed out in front of them until it was just a speck against the huge backdrop of stellar fire, then detonated in a tiny burst of extra light.
The effect was instantaneous. Tendrils from the core lashed out toward the explosion, but another black splotch appeared in space around it, swallowing up the light like an ink stain spreading on paper.
A malevolent, whirling ink stain that spit lightning like a short circuit in a power station. It was far more energetic than the cloud that had brought their shuttle through from the solar system, far more energetic even than the one that had swallowed Earth. And somehow it felt far, far more menacing as well.
“Get ready to blow it open just before we get there,” David said. “This looks like the entrance side rather than the exit, and I don’t think we want to go in there blind.”
“Agreed.”
The ship drew closer, and the dark cloud reached out to meet it, but before it could make contact, another missile streaked out toward it and disappeared into the darkness. A moment later it flashed with light and billowed outward, great bright fissures opening in its surface as the flood of extra energy overwhelmed its ability to hold itself together.
David could see nothing inside it. If there were stars, the intense light from the Tkona and the explosion itself blotted them out.
“Do you see anything?” he asked.
Navrel took a moment to answer, probably polling everyone in the control dome first. “No. But the quality of light is different from the Tkona. Wherever it leads, it is somewhere other than here.”
It wasn’t collapsing again like the others had done. In fact, darkness reappeared at the outer edges as it continued to expand. “Let’s send a probe through first,” said David.
“We don’t have that luxury.” Navrel pointed back toward the Shard ships, which had fired a barrage of missiles at them. At least that’s what they looked like at first, but as they drew closer David realized they were zigzagging back and forth like lightning bolts.
“Plasma conduits,” Navrel said. “We cannot intercept them.” He turned to the anomaly again, and even though he said nothing aloud, all four Kalirae ships accelerated hard into it.
David and Raedawn grabbed one another and braced themselves for impact. The Kalirae apparently trusted their gravity generators; none of them even hung on to a console for support, but they should have. The ship shuddered and groaned as grainy gray darkness enveloped it. David and Raedawn did an impromptu little dance as first one of them lost their balance and nearly fell, then the other. They heard muffled thuds and curses through the fog, then the ship burst out into free space again.
The Tkona was gone. Either that or they were inside it, but wherever they were, it wasn’t a good place to be. The entire sky burned fiercely bright, and the other Kalirae ships looked twisted, as if seen through a fishbowl.
David tapped his watch into calculator mode and called up the value of pi: 0.167.
“Get us out of here!” he ordered. “Go back through, now!”
Just then, a plasma bolt hit the ship to their right. It lurched forward with the impact, lightning crackling up and down its flanks, then the entire ship erupted in a fiery explosion. The Kalirae on their ship all jerked as if they had been hit as well. They probably had, David supposed. At the moment he was glad he wasn’t telepathic. He was ashamed to realize that he also was glad it wasn’t a ship full of humans that had died.
The debris from the explosion flew outward, but instead of traveling in a straight line, it looped around in tight spirals.
“What the hell?” Raedawn asked.
He said, “Space is so curved here that a straight line is the longest distance between two points.” If he needed proof that Lamott was right, this was certainly compelling evidence. The normal universe didn’t have areas where pi was a variable; this must be another part of the Maelstrom.
Their ship and the remaining two whirled around to face the anomaly just as two of the four Shard vessels hove into view. Everyone fired at once, and space filled with swirling missiles and jagged plasma bolts, but there was no way to aim. It was like a fire in a rocket factory; there was nothing to do but duck and hope you didn’t get hit.
“Head into the anomaly!” David said. “We’ve got to blow it open again and get out of here.”
The Kalirae ship edged forward, but the anomaly veered away. The pilots tried to correct, but each time they did, their target dodged again as if it were a living thing trying to avoid them.
“W
hat the hell, try a spiral,” David said.
Two missiles roared past just over the dome. One scored a lucky hit on a Shard ship and blasted a third of it loose, but the rest of it pulled together to fill the gap and continued firing plasma bolts.
A second Kalirae ship took a hit that blew off one of its back fins. Debris roared out into space from the hull breach, and the ship spiraled around, still under thrust, until it plunged into the anomaly and disappeared from sight.
“That’s the hard way,” Raedawn said, “but it looks like it worked.”
The Shard seemed to be having just as much trouble navigating. They swerved this way and that, still firing plasma bolts, but the one that had already been hit once accidentally zapped the other. It crackled with electrical discharge and exploded just like the first Kalirae ship.
David whipped his head back and forth, trying to watch everything at once. The Kalirae all gazed out in different directions, unmoving, and no doubt seeing better than him. They continued to run for the anomaly, which was visible only as a bright turbulent vortex in the general brightness, but suddenly the second Shard vessel loomed directly ahead. The Kalirae immediately fired more missiles, and this time the range was close enough that at least half hit their target. The explosions ripped it into three chunks that spiraled away, still crackling with lightning. One drifted into the anomaly, and the second Kalirae ship followed it in.
That left only the Kalirae flagship. Navrel’s crew guided it closer and closer, slowing down and nudging it this way and that toward the end, until the grainy darkness once more enveloped them.
“Are you still in contact with the other ships?” David asked.
“Barely,” said Navrel.
“Everybody has to fire at once. High explosives at short range. It’s not enough just to open the gateway; you’ve got to bust it apart, or it’ll just close up and drop us back into this part of the Maelstrom again.”
“Understood.”
David felt completely exposed here in the wide expanse of the Kalirae control room. The thought of two other ships out there firing blind into the fog made his skin crawl. He pulled Raedawn close to him and held her tight while he waited for death to rain down out of the void.
There was no countdown. He didn’t even hear the order to fire. The gray fog merely erupted into light too bright for even the opaqued dome to deflect, and a moment later the three Kalirae ships were back at the edge of the Tkona.
Where the other two Shard were waiting for them.
28
They didn’t fire. David wondered why, then he saw the fragment of the Shard ship that had come back through the gateway with them. It was right off the bow of their ship, and it wasn’t dead yet. Apparently the Shard cared enough about their own to hold their fire, or maybe they wanted to find out what it had seen before resuming hostilities that would surely doom it.
The Kalirae didn’t wait to see how long that would last. They poured everything they had at the two intact Shard, plus a few extra shots for the fragment. Then, even as their missiles streaked outward, the ships all split apart and headed for the Tkona.
At least that’s what David thought they were doing, but the one that had already been hit rushed straight toward one of the Shard vessels. It fired such a barrage of missiles that it looked like it had drive flame coming out both ends. The Shard ship tried to intercept all the incoming warheads, but it was completely overwhelmed. It tried to evade the ones that got through, but one scored a direct hit and two more ripped pieces off the edges. That didn’t kill the ship; it had enough life left to fire on the Kalirae ship point-blank, engulfing it in plasma.
It was too late. The Kalirae struck the Shard before it blew, and the explosion took out both ships.
The fragment had become gravel. That left just one intact Shard and two Kalirae, but the Shard surged after them and the Kalirae didn’t seem inclined to turn and fight. They aimed for the center of the vortex instead.
“You’re not going deeper in there?” David said.
Navrel didn’t answer.
“We have little choice,” Harxae said. “There are more Shard on the way.”
David looked behind and saw a dozen or more specks of light moving steadily closer. Harxae pointed off to the side, and then to the other side, where there were even more.
“I think maybe it’s time you called in reinforcements,” Raedawn said.
Harxae looked away. “I didn’t wish to worry you before now, but we have been unable to contact the homeworld since we approached the Tkona.”
“So we’re completely on our own.”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
David eyed the ships approaching from the side. “We’ll never make it to the actual vortex before they intercept us,” he said.
“That is true,” said Harxae. “I’m afraid we’ll have to make another gateway of our own.”
“Not if it leads us back there,” David said.
Harxae held out his arms. “I think I know what happened before. Remember, I can feel the curvature of space. We were in a very tight region at the moment we fired our magnetic pulse bomb. If we choose a flatter area of space this time, perhaps the results will be different.”
“Maybe. It might just drop us right into the middle of that.” David pointed at the Tkona.
“Do we have a choice? Space is entirely too empty here. We have nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run. It is time to leap from the train, off the bridge, and into the river of chance.”
David looked at the oncoming ships again. He counted twenty-three of them. Even jumping off the bridge didn’t seem like much of a strategy, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
“All right,” he said finally. “Let’s do it.”
Harxae backed away and spread his arms wide, then turned slowly around. The two Kalirae ships veered off to the left in tight formation, then banked upward as he directed them toward flatter space. David checked pi on his watch: 3.167. As close to normal as they were likely to get.
Harxae was apparently satisfied with it, too. The Kalirae ships were firing a steady curtain of fire behind them to keep the Shard at bay; now they fired a single missile forward. It drew ahead a few kilometers, then exploded, and another dark cloud blossomed out in its magnetic wake.
Both ships arrowed straight into it. This time everyone braced for the impact, but the effects were much less severe than before. It’s the boundary effect between different curvatures, David thought. Less boundary means less effect.
As soon as they burst out into free space, both ships immediately spun around and braked to a stop just outside the gateway. David watched for the Shard ship to come through, but Raedawn’s gasp of surprise brought his attention to her face, then upward to whatever she was looking at with such an expression of wonder.
They were near a planet. It looked Earth-like, with blue oceans and brown land and streaks of white cloud in its atmosphere. It looked impossibly serene for its location: the Tkona was a bright whorl completely surrounding it. It was inside the swirling chaos, and though lightning bolts and tendrils of dark matter lashed out all around it, none touched it.
“It’s beautiful,” Raedawn said.
“It’s fragile as glass.” David turned to Harxae. “What’s keeping the Tkona at bay?”
Navrel hadn’t spoken since the other Kalirae ships were destroyed. Now he turned to David and said, “I don’t know. We have observed pockets of stability in the Inner Ring, but none so deep as this.”
“Is anyone alive here?” Raedawn asked.
“We detect no sign of it,” Navrel said, “but there is so much interfer—”
The Shard ship burst through the anomaly, already firing its plasma bolts at random. The Kalirae ships immediately fired back, and for a moment all three poured enough energy at one another to rival the sun in brightness. Then the other Kalirae ship took a direct hit, and lightning bolts crackled up and down its length. The crew must have known they were dead,
but they did the one last thing they could do: they fired their engines and rammed the Shard at full acceleration, driving both ships back into the anomaly.
Just before they disappeared, the Kalirae ship exploded. The blast rippled through the white cloud, but didn’t tear it apart. It had happened a few seconds too soon.
“Fire!” David said. “Fire straight into it!”
Navrel looked at him, then back at the anomaly, but no missiles flew from their ship.
“There are two dozen more Shard about to come through that gateway,” David said.
“But nobody on the other side knows what we just learned. No radio or telepathic signal can penetrate the Tkona. We must go back and tell them.”
“We wouldn’t survive thirty seconds on the other side. Maybe we can open another gateway after we close this one, but I’m not convinced that’s the best thing to do anyway. Do we really want this ability to open gateways from place to place to become common knowledge in the Maelstrom?”
Navrel looked over at Harxae. All across the great domed control room, the Kalirae crew froze in deep thought.
Then they slowly began to move again. Navrel looked back to David and said, “You shame us. Once, before we were cast into the Maelstrom, we were capable of such altruism. Pray that your race continues to produce people who can act as you do.”
Missiles flashed away from their ships into the churning white cloud. A few roared on through, trailing streamers of other space behind them, but there was still a Shard ship somewhere inside there, and at least a few missiles hit it. There were half a dozen flashes, then a spectacular fireball that tore the anomaly apart, revealing the naked gateway for just a second before it collapsed.
That second was enough. From their vantage point they could see the outer edge of the Tkona thrashing its angry tentacles out into the chaotic inner ring of debris, and closer at hand the Shard ships bearing down on the gateway, their weapons already firing.
