by Brian N Ball
None of this power usable in warp-shift, all of it directed toward containment. To hold back the forces of black night. To keep the station swanning through the edges of the Singularity. And more, thought Buchanan. It had done more. Even within the Singularity, the station was safe. Its shields could divert the stupendous and bizarre vortices of the Singularity. They heaved, struck, and glissaded away. The station slid out of the serpent’s coils.
Buchanan experimented with the strange dimensions.
The station clawed into a furious maelstrom.
Buchanan’s senses reeled as the ship was flung about in the depths. He eased the ship into a calmer region. The robot controls in his palms translated his commands into action. Creaking with monstrous powers, the engines held a strange equilibrium in the weird inner depths. Then Buchanan saw what he sought.
“Dear God!” he whispered as the maelstrom’s fantastic energies fell away and he saw into a corridor of unholy calm. “The ship!”
It was the strange graveyard of ships he had glimpsed before the descent into the Singularity. And there was his lost command!
He sweated as the screened image of the Altair Star was steady for long moments. The ruin held a lonely, frozen space among the other ships of long ago. The scanners ranged closer. He could see details. There were the marks of that ferocious wrecking when the bridge was ripped away. An engine hung clear of the ship, torn away as if by a kraken. But what of the silent crew and passengers? What of the silent company of the dead? Or the undead!
“Readings!” he snapped to the robotic controller. “How near—how soon!”
“Sir?”
“The —Altair Star—there!”
“This automaton installation has records of the Altair Star lost three years ago. You want the details, Commander?”
It knew, of course, of his past. The machines had their own subtle ways of passing on information. The Grade One system that was now at his command knew quite well that he had once been the chief officer on the Altair Star.
“She’s there! You must have readings—I can see it on the screen! The scanners must have assessed the parameters! I’m sure it’s a steady-state!”
“No data, Commander,” the machine said.
Buchanan grew angry. The machines were ranged against him.
“I can see it! You must have readings!”
“Of what, sir?”
“The Altair Star!”
“No readings, Commander.”
Buchanan contained his excitement. He determined on reason rather than rage. You couldn’t hate machines. You could try not to. In fact, you could not manage without them, he told himself. However much you could do on your own, you needed them, every last system of the millions aboard the station. Understand the robot, Buchanan ordered himself. Why was it refusing to admit the Altair Star lay within the deep well of the Singularity?
The sensors in his wet palms fed in continuous streams of information: the ship’s energy levels; the reserves of power available in the three great engines; estimated characteristics of electromagnetic forces emanating from the center of the vast web of the Singularity. Nothing on the eerie tunnel that contained the ships!
“Scan!” ordered Buchanan again. “There!”
The screen changed at his direction. Buchanan ranged closer. The Altair Star’s hulk came nearer. He could make out details of ports and scanner-housings. And something else. All about the ship was a glistening cocoon of black-gold pinpoints of light.
“Still no readings?” asked Buchanan.
“Of what, Commander?”
“The Altair Star.”
“The Altair Star was a total loss, Commander.”
“Even though I can see it now?”
The machine was silent for minutes. Buchanan could imagine the endless circuits far below him, all searching for an answer. At last it spoke, and again the Grade One robot retreated into unknowledge.
“This installation cannot register the impossible, Commander.”
“Impossible,” breathed Buchanan.
The strange graveyard that existed within the rotating fury of the Singularity was impossible. And yet it lay there, in an eerie matrix of forever.
But the robots could not—would not acknowledge it. The strange timeless tunnel did not exist. It was impossible.
So it did not exist.
How could he convince the machines otherwise? If he were to go closer, he needed the massive resources of the station’s robots. He needed the robots and their instant technology. Warning impulses roared through the nerve-endings of his palms. He ignored them, mesmerized by the sight of the Altair Star. He had to get aboard that ill-fated vessel!
“Commander Buchanan!” the robotic controller called. “High field momentum from the Singularity core!
Action necessary!”
Buchanan still watched, and it was only when the frosted, glittering Altair Star began to disappear behind strangely alive coils of imponderable forces that he shook himself free of his ghost-ship’s spell.
“Well?” he asked.
“Commander Buchanan, core emissions indicate maximum danger.” The station juddered as its screens adapted themselves to the huge energies flowing from the bizarre center of the Singularity. Buchanan saw the screen shiver and dissolve. The scanners roved the Singularity.
Then Buchanan lost interest in the Altair Star, for a probing scanner ranged deep into the central core. He saw into the very womb of Singularity, the hole that gave birth to the wild, incomprehensible and deadly monster that dominated the Quadrant.
“The hole,” whispered Buchanan.
Seemingly empty, black, formless, and yet having properties of shape, it was a gap that held neither time nor space.
“Go!” Buchanan called, suddenly more afraid than he had been for three years. “Go!”
“Starquake,” commented the robotic controller. “Commander Buchanan—starquake! The station is in danger, sir!”
Still awed, Buchanan punched orders into the console.
The station’s three storehouses of energy screamed with effort. Roaring, pulsing, blasting, they countered the ferocious unguessable emissions from the black hole. Yet Buchanan still watched that uncanny gap in the cosmos, even as the station began to slide away from the seismic disturbances. He held the scanner locked onto the eerie black hole until the station abruptly bit with great fangs into the serpentine coils that embraced it.
Slowly the station heaved itself away from the furious storms of the inner depths. It clawed out and away from the frightful emissions.
Buchanan could still see that terrible emptiness long after the scanner was unable to range on it. The black hole had imprinted itself on his mind; it was an afterimage on the retina, one that would not leave him.
There was a cosmic mystery here: Buchanan was almost stupefied by the otherness of what he had seen. The black hole belonged to no part of the Galaxy.
It was the ultimate mystery, the ultimate danger. Buchanan felt drained, spent, utterly fatigued. Some hours passed before he could concentrate on his self-imposed task. Buchanan slowly recovered. There was no slackening of his resolve. Starquake had not dismayed him. The eerie black hole had left him shocked but not overwhelmed. The strange graveyard was terrifying, but he could face it. Buchanan looked at the robot’s cone-shaped pedestal.
Somehow he had to convince the machines that what he had seen was possible. That the huge Sargasso Sea and its wrecks were not beyond reach.
There was one source of comfort. The station had proved itself. Even the frightfulness of starquake could not dent its shields. They had held, just as the engineers promised. But God help any ship that came near the Singularity now!
CHAPTER 12
“Enforcement Service cruiser ranging. Course altering. Super-Phase engaged,” reported a scanner. They would have picked up Rosario, thought Liz Deffant. She sat quite still in the comfortable, deep seat as Maran soothed the disturbed high-grade machines. She had expected pai
n and terror, grotesque threats, Maran’s fury. And nothing had happened. Her reaction had been predictable, she recognized: resignation and a state of complete supineness. Not only did she feel that she could no longer interfere in the take-over of the ES 110: if there had been a practicable way of upsetting Maran’s schemes, she could not have brought herself to consider it. She was drained of nervous energy. Shock, her mind said again. You’re in shock. The shock of Maran’s totally unexpected treatment. He was a murderer, yet he had a strange dignity. He was a warped personality, yet he could talk sanely to her about her work with the New Settlements Bureau though three cruisers were ranging on the ES 110.
“You’re with the exploration teams, Miss Deffant,” he had said encouragingly. “I expect you know the planet where it was intended to send me?”
“Not that one. Not personally. I know of it.”
She had been able to answer in the same calm way. And what a conversation it had been. Herself, scared witless and only now able to control the shaking of her limbs; Maran, almost elegantly directing the machines that had once controlled the ES 110. Here she was on the bridge with a huge, black-clad man who regarded her with compassion and admiration. Maran the murderer. Maran whose bizarre machines had ripped out the minds of so many deluded men and women.
“I believe it’s an inhospitable planet,” he was saying, talking as if she were a respected colleague, discussing the planet at the Rim where this batch of expellees would have been ejected.
“It was tolerable,” she said. “A rather severe range of temperatures. But there were excellent indigenous building materials. There was a problem with carnivores—” She stopped. She was replying to him as if he were not the murderer of the guard and poor dead Tup. Maran saw her hesitate.
“Hence the primitive ballistic missile-projectors in the pods,” he prompted. “Resourceful thinking, Miss Deffant.”
“You killed them!” Liz burst out, unable to sustain the role Maran was offering her.
“Regrettably, yes.” Maran turned to the console and fed in commands. He turned back to look at her.
“But for you,” he said slowly, “I could turn this ship toward my own planet. Maran could begin again. Everything is ready.” Liz flinched as she saw the muscle straining in his neck. He was flabby, but the muscle was there. “Now, Maran must run.”
“I’m glad!”
“Naturally, Miss Deffant. But you must agree that you have caused me considerable harm.”
“Message beamed from Enforcement Service cruiser,” interrupted the Grade One robot. “Commander Lientand requests direct visual and sound contact with crew-members. Failing that, sir, he requests similar contact with you.”
“You can’t possibly get away,” Liz said quietly. “Not three cruisers—it just can’t be done. Talk to them. They’ll try to understand.”
It took all the strength she could summon up, this plea to Maran. She was fascinated by his impassive gaze. He was looking past her now, to the big operations screen which showed a shadowy representation of the gray-black form of the cruiser. The blue-pulsing screen was the center of all his thoughts. It seemed that he was willing some new contingency to arise. Liz had the feeling that, if he stared hard enough at the operations screen, some avenue of escape would open in the blank reaches between the arms of the Galaxy.
“Three cruisers now on converging course,” reported another scanner.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Liz said, more softly still.
“We leave a wake like a comet’s tail,” said Maran. His big white hands flickered over the console. Liz saw the cosmos pinwheel on the big blue operations screen.
The entire Quadrant lay before her. Another, sensitive motion of Maran’s hands brought the coruscating wakes of three cruisers into brilliant focus. “The cruisers,” said Maran, and the long black snouts had the look of night creatures. “I wonder if they know you are aboard?”
“Talk to them.”
“No, Miss Deffant.” And now he looked at her directly. “I wonder if they know you are aboard the ship?”
Liz said scornfully: “A hostage! They won’t worry about one Bureau employee—not now they know you’re loose! They’ll do anything to stop you!”
But Maran was not listening to her.
“Another request for reciprocal voice and vision contact, sir,” the Grade One robot said deferentially.
“No,” said Maran. “There is no need to accede to the request.”
“There’s no likelihood you can use me as a hostage,” repeated Liz. “What good can it do to try to escape?”
Maran was intent on the screen. She had ceased to exist for him.
“Time,” he muttered. “Time! It’s possible, but once they know, they can range on the ship!” Liz felt blackness crawling into her head as Maran suddenly jerked the enormous Enforcement Service ship out of its course and plunged it wildly among the storms of hyperspace. Gold-shot sable-edged shards of jangling molecules slipped through her brain-cells, leaving an impression of pure chaos. The robots howled reports. Alarms screeched out across the bridge.
Momentarily, Liz saw the cause of Maran’s lightning action.
The three cruisers had turned in a skilled and predetermined move, each flinging out a vast skein of force-fields to inhibit the ES 110’s drive. Traceries of power flashed toward the ship in a careening, terrifying onrush of pyrotechnics. Maran had seen the maneuver. And he had evaded the cosmic whirlwind.
“Evasive action!” the robotic controller called. “This ship must take evasive action against Enforcement Service cruisers’ apprehend procedures! Why?”
Maran punched commands and it was silent.
Liz was deep in the shelter of a soft couch, whose restraint bands had automatically cocooned her against the violent forces surrounding the ship. Maran’s bulky strength kept him at the console, the command chair enfolded him in its protective cushioning as he faced the whining, flashing bank of controls, his massive jaw jutting out over the sensor-pads, his deep dark eyes half closed in concentration. Liz looked at the screen and saw the three wakes weaving a million-mile-wide pattern against the emptiness of the Quadrant. A great, jagged shard of energy hung momentarily around them.
“Now!” Maran bawled as it began to creep across the intervening reaches toward the ES 110. And again the prison-ship danced madly into sable darkness, always away from the advancing onrush of force-fields. The drives faltered. Liz cried aloud, and Maran grated fresh commands. The ship seemed to hang still as the great cloud of forces neared it. Momentarily, the thrusting drive was inhibited.
“Emergency Phase!” Maran yelled. “Burn the engines out!” The fabric of the vessel creaked.
“There’s nowhere you can go!” Liz cried above the scream of the overworked drive and the complaints of a hundred systems.
Maran ignored Liz. His hands wove a fresh spell. Liz could wonder at his steadfast power. Without a tremor, he was working some fresh legerdemain that would take the ship beyond the reach of the cruisers.
The machine responded.
The ES 110 howled, jangled, screamed!
“Kindly confirm latest instructions regarding expellees,” said a Grade Two System.
“I advise an alteration of course,” the Grade One robot said before Liz could begin to ask herself what the machines meant.
Maran again worked his strange chicanery and the machines were soothed. Nevertheless, the Grade One robot asked nervously:
“I take it, sir, that it is essential for the ES 110 to continue the course indicated?” It waited “If you say so, sir. Scanners report objective in view.”
Liz looked at the operations screen.
There was a great blotch across the cosmos. She had seen it before. “No,” she whispered, staring in disbelief. “Not now—not there!”
The ship gave a series of small, abrupt jerks.
Scanners ranged on the wake of the ship as Maran gave orders.
Dazed by the transition from the strange, spr
eading blotch that had so astounded her, she saw another incomprehensible sight.
In the eddying wake of the ship, scores of tiny objects tumbled end over end in a jerky, unsure jumble. She looked back at Maran. He was watching her.
“I should have sent you, too, Miss Deffant, but I could not.” His hypnotic eyes held her. “Miss Deffant, have you ever met a person for the first time and had the most powerful intuition that you and that person were inextricably bound together?”
Liz knew the terrible irony of his words.
The grim-faced commander of the Enforcement Service cruiser saw the erratic movement of the prison-ship and wondered how long its drive could sustain the colossal pressures exerted on it.
“Anything from Rosario?” he asked.
“No, sir,” said the young lieutenant. “He’s in a coma.”
“And we still don’t know the situation out there.”
“If it’s Maran—”
“It’s Maran.”
“Then he’s keeping us guessing, sir.”
Though he did not allow it to show, the commander was worried. A humane and compassionate man, Commander Lientand had policed the cosmos for thirty years in a Service which he admired. He wished retirement had come earlier. He thought of what he might be called upon to do. Only once had he seen the ghastly, gobbeting power of the cruiser’s main armament. It was a sight to forget. Somewhere within the depths of the cruiser, the golden pellets would be ready.
The ship on the huge screen suddenly leaped into a new framework of dimensions. The field man fought silently to align the force-field which should have snuffed out the ES 110’ s drive like a candle in a gale. Twice now, the prison-ship had eluded the blanketing concentration of energies.
“What’s he trying?” the young lieutenant demanded. “He can’t get away,” he said, echoing Liz Deffant’s words. “There’s nowhere he can go!”
The field man frowned. There was a pattern about the runaway ship’s moves: one that made no sense at all. But a pattern nevertheless.
“Sir—” he began. He was interrupted by an excited report.
“Sighting of survival-cylinders, Commander!” a robot reported.
