Void All The Way Down: The Sliding Void Omnibus

by Stephen Hunt

  Sebba’s body stepped forward. Her hand reached out and brushed Calder’s cheek in an oddly human gesture. A fizzing gargle came from the skull. ‘This must be preserved.’

  Preserved? The prince didn’t give a damn for this alien world. It was the crew that mattered to him. Lana. ‘You’re still human?’ said Calder, half a question, half a plea.

  ‘No!’ Sebba turned to the survivors and raised the flat of her palm out at them. The cavern air turned into a furnace and Calder stumbled back in agony, his vision clouding, trying to reach for Lana’s blurred outline, doubled up in agony. Even Zeno screamed as he staggered through the torture towards the professor’s corrupted body . . . Momoko clunking to assist him. The ring of machine knights closed in, immune to the punishment, protecting Sebba’s possessed form from Zeno and the robot. Both machines were mere toys compared to the sentinels. Calder collapsed to the floor, half-blacking out, his retina flashing with a light display of pure torment that . . . was suddenly absent. The floor feels different. Hard and metallic. He glanced up. All the survivors lay sprawled across the bridge of the Gravity Rose. No doubt about it. Arched ribs across the ceiling and the illusion of exposed views of deep space between each metal curve: the silver spatter of stars; distant wisps of green nebulae and the angry red ball of a dying star.

  Polter’s chair twisted around, the navigator’s crab-like shell trembling in surprise at the sudden appearance of the ground party and surviving base staff.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mister Polter?’ said Lana, gagging as though she was about to vomit. She picked herself up from the deck. ‘You never saw a millennia-old Heezy matter teleporter in action before?’

  ‘Revered captain!’

  Calder tried to recover his composure as quickly as the skipper. Before I show myself up. It appeared as if Sebba might have had more humanity left in her than she had admitted to. Calder’s body still tingled with an acid burning sensation, as if every molecule of him had been ripped off and then glued back inside again. Maybe it has. As far as transport mechanisms went, entanglement-assisted instantaneous transmission through N dimensional Hilbert space . . . aka teleportation . . . rivalled passing through solid rock for comfort. Frankly, it sucks.

  ‘Sit-rep, Mister Polter,’ demanded Lana, her command chair falling down towards her before she took the seat. ‘Skrat, Zeno, positions. Calder, herd that cargo off my damn bridge, then mount up . . . engineering station.’

  ‘The Rose is currently breaking selenocentric orbit. There’s a pirate fleet inbound at high C.,’ warbled the navigator. ‘Two carrier-class vessels, six frigates and a missile ship. They have already launched fighters towards Abracadabra. The pirates are seeking to swarm us, interdict our jump points. Our clearest exit boost position will carry us close to the sun, which appears to be undergoing a runaway nuclear fusion event. I feared that the creator had turned his eyes away from us . . . that we were to either to die inside a supernova shockwave or at the hands of the Invisible Port’s guns. But your return here! A miracle. Surely we must survive now?’

  ‘If we do, it won’t be because of God,’ said Lana. ‘Not unless you’ve got a temple for seat-of-the-pants piloting.’

  Cargo off the bridge. Calder finally found an order he could obey, ushering the base’s startled survivors into the care of a crowd of drones summoned by Zeno. He watched Momoko stomp away down the passage outside, holding tightly onto Lento. Momoko acted as if being inside a starship was commonplace, while Lento glanced nervously about as though she’d never seen one before. The robot wasn’t the only one bluffing it. He turned back. Bridge position, this is what you’ve being working for, Calder my lad. As far as initiations to the ship’s command centre go, I might have hoped for a gentler introduction.

  He found Zeno sitting in one of the chairs, an array of hologram iconography swimming around him. ‘Missiles down and running hot towards us, forward of their fighter wings. They must be pretty irked about losing the Doubtful Quasar. They’re not even trying to take us intact.’

  ‘The Rose would never make a good prize vessel anyway,’ said Lana. She turned to Calder. ‘Raise the drive room and tell the chief to prep jump vanes for a barycentre jump.’

  Calder gazed across at the skipper as if she had lost her mind. Planning to enter hyperspace this deep inside a system, midway between Abracadabra and its dying sun – otherwise known as the system’s barycentric gravity point? What the hell could go wrong with that? ‘You’re not even attempting to clear the sun’s gravity field?’

  ‘Read that incoming battle group’s telemetry, your highness, and crunch the numbers. We’re going to be chased down long before we get close to any real exit point. We’re either jumping heavy or leaving the system as shot-up hull debris riding a supernova shockwave.’

  ‘Please, revered captain,’ protested Polter, ‘the chances of a stable hyperspace translation in this system’s barycentre point—’

  ‘—are way better than shooting it out with a couple of millions tonnes of fleet-strength military surplus bearing down on us. Lay course for the barycentre and prep for a damn hyperspace transition.’

  ‘Jump or die,’ muttered Zeno.

  Lana nodded. She really is made of steel. Out of the mess on the world below and into one up here with hardly a blink. A woman truly worthy of a prince. But how about an exiled one on his downers? Sadly, not so much, Calder suspected.

  ‘Damn straight, tin man,’ said Lana.

  Calder mounted his seat, its nanotech surface automatically flowing around him. The pressure of additional field protection against high acceleration squeezed his body. Projection stalks flowered in front of his head, almost too much information to process lasered directly onto his retina. Normally the engineering position would be vacant, relying on Chief Paopao and his robots – and more lately, Calder as well – to do what needed doing without additional fine-tuning from the bridge. It was a measure of their situation’s desperation that Calder was being drafted into action up here. This isn’t any promotion, you can’t fool yourself on that score. There was a good reason you didn’t create a wormhole anywhere close to a system’s gravity well. It was hard enough to create a stable singularity to transit to hyperspace at the best of times. Producing a singularity with the added interference of a system’s worth of fluctuating gravitational mass and hoping to slide void through said wormhole would be like trying to ski jump a glacier in the middle of an earthquake while a hostile artillery battery rained shells down on you. It was close to suicide. And by being granted the engineering position, I’m ordered to measure the dose of poison and make sure we only die a little.

  ‘Launching the singularity seed now,’ said Lana. ‘Patching its trajectory through to you, Mister Durk. Let’s kick that can down the road all the way to jump.’

  ‘It’ll be easier if we keep the seeding sphere stationery,’ said Calder. ‘You know, like we normally do.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Lana. ‘I’ll just establish comms with the Pirate King and ask Barcellos if his battle group doesn’t mind giving us a sporting head start. And while we’re about it, maybe you could radio what’s left of the professor back on Abracadabra and get her to postpone re-booting the sun for a couple of days. Or,’ she shot him a withering glance, ‘you can deploy jump vanes and set singularity formation for a moving target with a completely predictable course.’

  Calder fired up the vanes, tracking the little iron sphere launched ahead of them like a torpedo. He began gravity compression; the sphere’s mass exponentially increasing with every second. Calder ignored the torrent of abuse being sent intraship from the drive room at the back of the Rose. Chief Paopao kept a running commentary, stream-of-consciousness style, about how skegged-up attempting an in-system jump was, and their anaemically slim chances of survival from here on in. Calder hardly noticed. The interference from the system mass was making it close to impossible to create a stable singularity . . . like fighting to keep an umbrella upright in the middle of a tornado. He felt th
e buffeting ease slightly as Granny Rose, the ship’s A.I., took up the slack alongside him, working the celestial mechanics of the system mass into the singularity formation in real-time – yet another moving target, thanks to the local star vomiting nuclear mass like a tantrum-prone baby swinging toys out of its cot.

  ‘Sub-munitions are splintering,’ called Skrat. ‘Multiple warheads tracking inbound.’

  The steel deck trembled as the Gravity Rose’s point-defence guns laid down a steel wall of rail-gun pellets in front of the missiles, countermeasure decoys launching and arrowing towards the smart munitions, a slight jump from the display field on Calder’s retina as their ECM grid started broadcasting. He could hear the rattle of hydraulic driven-magazines being emptied at twenty thousand rounds a minute even from the field-swaddled protection of his chair.

  Skrat winked at Calder from his chair. ‘No sense of tradition, eh? Whatever happened to a warning shot across the bows?’

  Calder blinked as the view outside the ship momentarily blacked out, the glare of a prematurely detonating nuclear warhead dwindling as the vast external field of deep space flickered back into life across the bridge ‘I think that was their warning shot.’

  ‘All bogeys down,’ called Zeno. ‘Their own nuke vaporized most of the first broadside.’

  ‘That’s what you get from buying cheap missiles,’ said Lana. ‘They should demand refunds from whatever dirty skeggers are running ordinance to the Invisible Port these days.’

  ‘I reckon that used to be us,’ said Zeno.

  ‘They may not need reimbursement,’ squeaked Polter. ‘By our blessed Lord on High, the sun is now undergoing a full gravitational collapse.’

  ‘Frying tonight,’ mumbled Zeno.

  ‘Mister Durk,’ hissed Lana. ‘Singularity formation any time soon? Dumping that much solar mass into energy has got to help our exit numbers.’

  Calder shook his head. ‘The wormhole has almost formed, but nowhere close to clean. We’re still too near to Abracadabra’s gravity well. Our minimum jump window is twenty minutes away at best.’

  Lana checked her instruments. ‘And we’re going to collide with the supernova’s neutrino jet in seven minutes and cross its main kinetic energy wave a couple of minutes later.’

  ‘Can our shields protect us until we jump?’ asked Calder.

  ‘Your highness, nobody has ever survived a supernova intact enough to report back either way. But frankly, I wouldn’t go making any long-term plans.’

  ‘On the positive side of the ledger, dear fellows,’ announced Skrat. ‘It appears as if the battle group has just found something to occupy itself with a tad more important than their feelings of wounded pride concerning the loss of the Doubtful Quasar. I read every vessel now desperately boosting for an emergency system exit. All we have to deal with are a few spiteful pilots in the fleet’s fighter wing, who appear to have been rather abandoned by the two carriers.’

  ‘I hope they all burn,’ snarled Lana. ‘And I really wish that scumbag Dollar-sign Dillard was in-system to enjoy the payback on his investment. Does that sound vindictive?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Calder. But I forgive you.

  ‘Blessed Creator, shield us in your mercy,’ whistled Polter.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll take some of that.’ Lana swivelled in her chair. ‘Polter, pre-set an automated jump with Granny and leave it counting down, in case the bridge is out of action when we have a stable wormhole.’

  Out of action, that’s an understatement. Calder imagined the ship passing into hyperspace as a half-molten ruin, crew and passengers dead – and that was if their A.I. could handle navigating a jump, which she usually couldn’t. Wasn’t that how the Gravity Rose was found when Lana had inherited her the first time around? Floating dead in space. Maybe history really did repeat itself. Calder just wished history had left a certain exiled prince off this particular merry-go-round. He hadn’t even had a chance to convince Lana Fiveworlds how she should feel about him. This really isn’t fair. On any of them. But most of all, him.

  ‘Incoming transmission from the fighter wing,’ said Zeno. ‘The squadron’s twigged we’re attempting a barycentre jump and are ordering us to park them in the Rose’s shuttle deck or they’ll take us apart.’

  ‘If we’re going to take a supernova suntan, I’m damned if I’ll burn with an armed company of the Invisible Port’s killers on board plotting to seize my ship,’ snarled Lana. ‘Tell them to boost for what’s left of the sun and pray there’s a black hole with a clean jump singularity forming inside it when they arrive.’

  Predictably, it didn’t take long for the abandoned pirate fighters to make good on their threat, swooping in, seeming oblivious to the fact that they were about to try to destroy their last chance of jumping out of the system. Looks like if they can’t hitch a ride, they’re going to make sure nobody else is getting out alive’.

  ‘Those mopes are packing torpedoes!’ called Zeno. ‘I’m detecting nuclear warheads – x-ray laser nukes.’ Calder felt a shiver go down his spine. As if there’s not going to be enough radiation with an exploding star up our aft. There was only one use for such ordinance, overwhelming a ship’s shields and killing her crew in a deadly radiation flash.

  ‘Blasted fools,’ said Skrat. ‘That supernova’s going to detonate their missiles whether they launch them or not.’

  ‘We’re within the warhead’s blast radius,’ warned Zeno. ‘Proto-wave from the supernova is incoming.’

  ‘Keep our vanes turning,’ Lana shouted at the prince, half-ordering, half-pleading. ‘Set us up for a clean dive.’

  Whether we have one or not. Calder tried to keep his eyes fixed on the formation of the artificial black hole they needed to use to rend space-time, slipping the Gravity Rose through the tear. Keep his eyes on that rather than the supernova’s incoming front. The mass fluctuations went off the scale across his instruments, the ship’s A.I struggling vainly to model the dying star’s interactions with his emergent black hole. Something about those numbers really doesn’t make sense, but what is it? His head throbbed as though his skull was being drilled sans anaesthetic, as it always did when he tried to access neural connections that had been made under sim. Even the future’s artificial knowledge comes with a price, it seems.

  Calder’s flagging concentration was shattered by Lana’s yell. ‘Brace for impact!’

  The projection of the stars clouded over as the hull turned opaque, protecting against the fierce detonation of the fighters’ payload. The Gravity Rose’s shields flared up to full strength as she rocked in the early slurry of the dying sun, a mad swaying that only grew worse when the wavefront strengthened. Calder’s seat went into armour mode around him, instruments dying; not that he was able to concentrate on the controls and screaming alarms, his retina flooded with a web of burning scratches, exotic particles treating his skull to its own private firework display. The prince felt as though a giant troll had picked him up and was slamming him from side to side across the bridge, the very air burning. A beating that went on for minutes before suddenly subsiding. If that’s merely the proto-wave, I’d hate to be around when the full surge of the dead star smashes into us. Calder moaned inside his seat. A medical unit appeared from inside the chair, latching onto the skin of his bruised, burning ribs, pumping him full of drugs and miniature nanomechanical healers. Their ship’s sensors were burned out, Calder’s console blank apart from damage report after damage report, the ship’s hull trying to seal herself across multiple impact points. How in the universe did we survive this? Calder had been in Hell Fleet sims – supposedly accurate down to the last rivet – where capital ships with shield generators larger than the Gravity Rose had taken less punishment and still been left dead in space. We’ve lost all incoming sensor information. We’re flying blind. But there was something Calder thought he had seen in the sensor readings before the ferocious detonation off the ship. And he had a hunch about it what it might mean. The professor’s final possessed words inside the mach
ine cavern came back to him. This must be preserved.

  ‘Main surge from the supernova on its way,’ said Zeno. ‘We’ll be riding the solar swell any second.’

  ‘We can dive for hyperspace now,’ coughed Calder.

  ‘We’re still three minutes away from anything other than immediate disintegration if we dive, revered captain!’ said Polter. ‘Please, don’t do it! We’ll be crushed attempting to translate.’

  ‘Do it!’ said Calder through shaking teeth. He was buffeted so fiercely by early plasma from the second shockwave that his seat’s fields could hardly compensate for the violence. What’s that doing to our hull integrity? ‘We’re not going to survive another minute, let alone three.’

  ‘Do you know how many jumps Polter has transited, new boy?’ Lana shouted over the roar of crackling shields. ‘And how many he’s been wrong about? He’s the best damn navigator in the Edge.’