Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘The dear chap should sport scales as splendid as mine,’ said Skrat, ‘that a human can be quite so slippery . . .’

  Lana snorted. ‘You’ve heard that old human saying, Skrat: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Well, the enemy of my so-called friend is also my enemy, even if we don’t want them to be. Don’t reckon we’ve got much choice on this one.’

  ‘Tracking a multiple missile launch from the drone,’ said Skrat. ‘Rather too small to be nuclear warheads. Probably something to scramble our shields, then the fiend will dive in and rake us clear with kinetic projectiles.’

  ‘Botheration!’ swore Polter. The navigator began chanting a prayer as he busied himself with their hyperspace translation. ‘Lord, admit us to the vaults of heaven, Lord, admit us sinless to the dark flow.’

  Sinless? Lord, if you’re out there, jump us just as we are. Lana hovered in her ship’s cyberspace above the firing solutions being formed by Granny, close-defence guns juddering as they adjusted in their mounts. Her stomach scrunched itself into a dense ball of dread. The icons of the incoming missiles blinked on and off as their likely positions adjusted ever closer; colour-coded impact probabilities flickering as the salvo’s stealth measures battled it out with the ship’s sensors for battlefield supremacy. Come on, drone, Rex is running up behind us, weapons hot and ready for action. He’s the one you want, not us. Pull away, keep your powder dry for the real enemy. Run the threat analysis and target the more dangerous vessel. But the drone kept on coming, as did its wall of missiles. Another screen flicked on. It was Calder in the engine room.

  ‘Skipper, the chief reports our vanes are spinning at maximum. Plot our exit against the current rate of singularity formation. He says it won’t be nearly quick enough.’

  ‘Well, tell me something I don’t know, your highness.’

  ‘I think I have a way to beat the drone . . .’

  ‘Give me a break,’ said Lana. ‘A month ago you were running around the snow in bear skins. A couple of episodes of Hell Fleet doesn’t make you a goddamn carrier commander.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Calder, ‘this is something I learnt back home from a very wise manservant. When you’re hunting a wolf, you must bait the snow with a steak. When the wolf is hunting you, you must bait the snow with two steaks.’

  Lana looked at him for a second, before the sheer genius of what he was suggesting struck her like a diamond blade through the skull. ‘Calder, I could kiss you.’

  ‘Maybe take the bars on your shoulder off first, skipper.’

  ‘Get to it, Prince Charming, and get to it fast.’ Lana killed the feed. She was going to have trouble with that one, she could see that. But only if they lived long enough. ‘Polter, plot the mathematics for a second singularity.’

  ‘But revered skipper,’ said Polter, ‘I cannot possibly keep two wormholes stable simultaneously.’

  ‘I don’t need you to,’ said Lana. ‘Make the second singularity a beast, a real roaring unstable giant. A big, juicy distracting steak. Shrink our first wormhole. Small as you can, with it still able to pass the Gravity Rose. Skrat, launch a countermeasures buoy to orbit the mega-sized singularity, make sure its squawking a hell of a lot more radiation than we are. ’

  Skrat’s bridge chair bobbed to the side of Lana’s. ‘Done! Quite ingenious, although I must say, old girl, it’s normally myself who panders to racial stereotypes by acting quite so recklessly. The drone and its missiles should hone in on the decoy wormhole and our buoy, but only if the wormhole’s structure endures. I don’t believe anyone has ever attempted this before.’

  ‘For good reason,’ protested Polter. ‘The holy of holies preserve us! I will need to integrate the topography of both wormholes, keep each wormhole in phase with the other so the dirty singularity doesn’t destabilise the clean one. Singularity compression on the clean wormhole could prove fatal for us, oh yes… our margin of error on the jump is going to shrivel far beyond all safe thresholds.’

  ‘Shave an inch of steel off our hull if you have to, but jump us just the same,’ ordered Lana. ‘You’re the best in the business, Polter, and damned if you’re able to kill us twice. You can do this!’

  Lana tried not to bite through her tongue. Rex Matobo was quite capable of killing everyone all on his lonesome, it seemed. She felt the second wormhole forming out in the void across her interface, raw and wild, a screaming whirlpool distorting the normal order of space-time, the ship’s sensors protesting at the extra pressure being exerted on them. Off to their starboard, the second singularity shrank, slowly, methodically, the architecture of spin and form that might safely admit them screeching as it was bullied smaller, exotic particles bursting into existence all around the ship. Beyond, their decoy buoy danced around the wild second wormhole opening up. Here I am, it screamed. Here. Here! But the incoming drone and its opening missile salvo had yet to buy into the ruse. Accelerating closer and closer on the Gravity Rose. The drone was going to pass them like a Samurai from some damn historical sim, a brief flash of its blade, and Lana’s precious ship would be decapitated. This is all I have, please, please. She felt the ship’s point defences lighting up the kill area around the vessel. Granny plotting firing solutions, planning where she needed to spread her storm of fire to kill the first volley; the processing speed of the Gravity Rose’s computer systems matched against the deadly intelligence inside the missiles.

  ‘Impact imminent,’ announced Granny. ‘Hardening command armour.’ There was a clash outside the vessel as thick plating enclosed the bridge, cutting off all sight of the stars, a sandwich of self healing materials that could, theoretically, absorb an acre of hell and still soak up deadly residual radiations.

  Lana felt a sudden burst of energy through the sensors as their clean wormhole malformed for a second, before Polter brought it under control. He moaned inside his chair, drumming nervously on his carapace with his two largely superfluous vestigial combat claws. Their navigator only did that when he was praying real hard. Maybe somebody was listening to his devotions. The drone and its missiles suddenly altered their trajectory, vectoring in on their massive singularity and the hyperactive countermeasures buoy orbiting it. Have we done it? Have we really done it?

  ‘Singularity seed is transformed. Event horizon on the clean wormhole is formed and stable,’ announced Polter, the ledge of carapace above his face bobbing in eager anticipation of his joining with God. Lana felt the Gravity Rose manoeuvring into position, responding to the commands from her implant. Lana had never ridden a horse before, but she had a feeling that it would be a lot like this. Gently, that’s it, gently does it. Nothing to indicate we’re here. Nothing to look at. Just a tiny little starship jumping clean. And… damn! Two of the drone’s missile salvo suddenly peeled off, accelerating back towards them. Detected her engine burn? She threw stealth to the wind, and the antimatter reaction drive roared into life at her command. Lana felt the surge in the artificial gravity field around the ship, cancelling the Gees that would otherwise have flattened the crew.

  Polter reported their status calmly, pacified by the act of navigation. Lana was anything but. ‘Vane control is optimal. Dark matter envelope now modelled.’

  Outside the Gravity Rose her near-space envelope was suddenly filled with a thousand slugs of molten metal streaming towards the missiles, the Rose’s guns juddering and spinning all along her hull. While the void was silent, the ship’s passages chattered with the clamour of war: chains of shells jangling; barrel coolant systems squealing. Lana’s sensors flashed mad with alert icons. The twin missile strike had split into a dozen sub-components, independent warheads flowering out and tracking in on them from every direction.

  ‘Tidal eye is targeted and locked. Transit entry and pre-translation dive into dark flow will commence in four, three, two . . .’

  Lana sat bolt upright in her chair, even as the emergency environment seals triggered, her chair transforming and flowing around her, converting into a lightly armoured space pod. And
still the missiles came.

  ***

  The world of Hesperus. Six months later.

  Noak’s wife came back from their small house’s entrance hall looking worried. He didn’t think it was merely because the ice drifts outside had made getting to market on the far side of town difficult. ‘There are two men at the door. They say they have business with you.’

  ‘We haven’t been living in the town long enough to have business with anyone we don’t know,’ said Noak. He had surely travelled far enough East to guarantee that. Any further and they would be across the border. ‘What name did they ask for?’

  ‘None,’ she said. ‘Not our real ones or our new names.’

  ‘Probably just peddlers, my love,’ said Noak, ‘trying it on.’ He glanced towards the crossbow he had sitting near the roaring fireplace, its iron trigger face shiny in the crackling logs’ orange glow. Always good to keep a weapon to hand. ‘Nobody knows us here.’ Most of the people he had served were corpses on the other side of the ocean. Even Noak’s nodding acquaintances were rightfully toasting their feet by fires on the far end of the continent. Certainly not out here, in the high mountains, colder even than the plains and the coast.

  ‘They might be customers,’ ventured his wife, ever hopefully.

  ‘Might be.’ And setting up his shipping concern river-running on a single-sailed sled out in the nub-end of nowhere, Noak couldn’t afford to be shy. Not with the wizard’s seed money mostly spent over the past six months.

  His beloved showed them in. Two large rangy men, both wearing neat bearskin jackets and trimmed beards to match – no swords or crossbows, though. One had a silver fur-lined jacket while the other wore black. This pair certainly didn’t look like trappers needing cargoes sailed back west. Their skin was pale too, almost pallid, didn’t get out much in the sun-glare. Not locals, for all that they wore tricorn hats in the alpine style.

  ‘Welcome gentlemen,’ said Noak. ‘Feel the fire on your bones.’ He indicated the opposite end of the table he was seated at, a couple of stools close by. ‘I am Bertil, the master of the town’s shipping company.’

  The two stood standing and silver-jacket spoke first. ‘We passed your river schooner moored at the bottom of the valley. I am Mister Bligh and this is Mister Thetford.’

  Noak nodded. ‘You boys aren’t peddlers, are you?’

  ‘Travellers,’ said the one named Thetford.

  ‘Seekers,’ clarified his colleague.

  Noak looked at his wife standing by the door to main room. ‘Well then, how about you seek out a couple of cups of warm honey beer for our guests, my love? I handle cargo as a rule, not passengers,’ continued Noak. ‘Mountain salt and pelts, mostly. Not much room for cabins on a narrow-berth river runner. And with names as foreign as yours, I doubt if I’ll be sailing far enough away from the mountain ranges for your tastes.’

  ‘We have our own transportation,’ said Bligh. ‘And what we seek is truth, Noak Barlund.’

  ‘I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ said Bligh. Bizarrely, he produced a frying pan from underneath his bearskin. Noak felt a terrible sinking feeling in his gut. Last time he’d seen that pan, it’d been bouncing off a shield-warrior’s helm on the other side of the country. ‘But we are going to match your DNA to the skin traces on this, just to be certain.’

  ‘Who are Dee and Hay?’

  It was at that moment that his wife re-entered the main room, swinging an axe at the nearest visitor, Thetford. She caught the man on the shoulder, cutting down and sending a severed arm flying over to the other side of the room. A childhood filled with chopping wood for a house’s fireplace could do that for a girl’s back swing. Incredibly, Thetford just stood there, casually glancing at his bloody stump spurting blood as if the wife had done no more than jostle him on a market day.

  ‘That was clever,’ said the wounded visitor. ‘Your request for beer was a coded signal, warning your spouse.’

  Bligh pulled out a pipe-like object from under his jacket. ‘Let’s just take it as red that you are the prince’s manservant.’

  The stranger pointed his pipe at Noak and he barely had time to protest, ‘Ex-manserv—’ before Noak found himself falling to the stone floor, his body paralysed, prisoner in the clutches of a waking nightmare.

  Bligh knelt by Noak’s side. Noak couldn’t see what they had done with his wife from the angle where he’d painfully collapsed, but he noticed there was a strange set of metallic strips tied as a glove around the intruder’s hand.

  ‘So, is this the one?’ asked Bligh.

  Thetford nodded. ‘DNA pairing positive; his ribs have fractures sealed with modern bone replication and there are multiple micro fragments of rail-gun shell casing embedded in his spine. Here’s the shell match. A General Weapons Combine MA1002 flight drone. It’s old school TAMC military surplus.’

  It was spells they were talking about, magic. Matobo the Magnificent, damn his bones. The sorcery that had flown Noak away from certain death at the hands of the baron’s soldiers, the same magic that had healed his broken body. And they can detect it. Have the priests dispatched their own sorcerers to track down Prince Calder? To track me down?

  Bligh came into view again, kicking Noak’s crossbow away. ‘Not quite as old school as one’s trusty crossbow, though, Mister Thetford.’ Bligh smiled, but without an iota of warmth. ‘Hello, Noak Barlund. There’s one thing you should always remember when consorting with wizards. Their magic always leaves traces. Let’s see what you really know, shall we?’

  ‘And with any luck,’ said Thetford, ‘you will be able to help us locate Prince Calder. That’s rather what we’re hoping for, isn’t it Mister Bligh?’

  ‘Quite so, Mister Thetford.’

  Noak couldn’t scream. It was as if his lips had been sewn shut. Bligh stroked Noak’s hair as though the ex-manservant was a hound, little spines on the metal glove’s surface putting pressure on his scalp.

  ‘We’re going to take a copy of your mind, which will, I’m afraid, hurt immensely. Burning your synapses out one at a time is not a procedure you can experience under anaesthetic. You have to be conscious during magnetic resonance capture.’

  Noak tried to struggle, but his body stoically ignored his requests – not even a toe twitching in response to his increasing panic.

  ‘After you’re dead, you will be free. You shall live forever!’

  Who is this maniac? The madman’s first prediction turned out to be true. Noak’s brain burned with all the agony of a tar fire execution in front of the walls of Narvalo. Noak wasn’t actually alive to see how the second prediction worked out. But it was amazing how much he could perceive after he was dead.

  TRANSFERENCE STATION

  Book 2 in the Sliding Void series.

  First published in 2011 by Green Nebula Press

  Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunt

  Typeset and designed by Green Nebula Press

  The right of Stephen Hunt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

  You can follow Stephen on Twitter at http://twitter.com/s_hunt_author

  Or on FaceBook at http://www.facebook.com/SciFi.Fantasy

  For further information on Stephen Hunt’s nov
els, see his web site at http://www.StephenHunt.net

  Also by Stephen Hunt

  The Far-called series

  (Gollancz)

  In Dark Service

  The Jackelian series

  (HarperCollins Voyager in the UK/Macmillan Tor in the USA)

  The Court of the Air

  The Kingdom Beyond the Waves

  Rise of the Iron Moon

  Secrets of the Fire Sea

  Jack Cloudie

  From the Deep of the Dark

  The Sliding Void series

  Sliding Void

  Transference Station

  Red Sun Bleeding

  The Agatha Witchley Mysteries: as Stephen A. Hunt

  In the Company of Ghosts

  The Plato Club

  Secrets of the Moon (coming soon)

  Other works

  Six Against the Stars

  For the Crown and the Dragon

  The Fortress in the Frost

  For links to these books, visit http://www.StephenHunt.net

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 – A starship captain is a very fine thing to be.

  Chapter 2 – Top cats.

  Chapter 3 – Android eyes.

  Chapter 4 – One for each stalk.

  Chapter 5 – Someday a real supernova’s going to come.

  CHAPTER 1

  — A starship captain is a very fine thing to be —

  Lana Fiveworlds wasn’t used to feeling so useless in the face of death. As the skipper and owner of a starship of the size of the Gravity Rose, she was accustomed to barking commands and having them instantly obeyed by her crew. Unfortunately for Lana, the wave of ship killer missiles closing in on her vessel weren’t under her authority. The bridge shuddered again, armoured-up in anticipation of the coming impact, close-defence guns outside throwing a kinetic wall of shells forward of her ship. It won’t work, Lana grimaced to herself. The warheads have fragmented into their sub-ammunition components. Too damn many of them closing too damn fast. Her vessel had to be lucky against every sub-missile arrowing in on her hull. Their mystery assailant out there on the edges of deep space taking pot shots at them only had to be lucky once. The Gravity Rose had a few tricks hidden away under her hull, but at the end of the day, Lana’s vessel was only an independent freighter, not an alliance carrier. How much punishment can we absorb? Not enough, she realized. Not nearly enough. Only seconds away from a hyperspace jump, but which was to come first. Jump or missile impact? The answer squawked in Lana’s direction from her navigator, Polter.