by Gary Gibson
Gabrielle screamed, inside her mask, and kicked her way down the airless corridor towards Bash.
Gabrielle came to another pressure field that sealed off the stretch of corridor that had been home to her and Bash since they had left Redstone.
She pushed on through this field, then yanked her mask down: no point in wasting air she might need soon. Making her way back inside the cabin, she quickly strapped the second mask over Bash’s mouth and nose, before beginning to tug him towards the door.
He came to his feet easily, drifting forward to bang into the wall next to the door. Gabrielle grabbed him around the waist and worked hard at pushing and pulling him out into the corridor, cursing silently.
Already she was sweating. There had to be a better way of doing things, she was sure.
Gabrielle was panting heavily from the effort. They had passed back into vacuum, and she wore her mask again, but she was using up its minuscule supply of air much too fast. It wasn’t far from the cabin to the nearest escape-pod bay, but it had taken twice as long to get Bash there as she would have liked.
Gabrielle sent, then she manoeuvred Bash inside.
Menus and animated panels appeared around the escape pod even as she dragged him towards it. Getting it open, she shoved him inside. She was breathing heavily now, and the minutes left on her breather mask’s readout were rapidly ticking closer and closer to zero.
She peered in at Bash, hoping against hope that maybe – just maybe – this might be the time for him to show some hint of his earlier awareness. She wanted, more than anything, to hear him tell her whether she was doing the right thing, or even acting like a stupid idiot. Instead, he just stared mindlessly past her.
‘Goodbye, Bash,’ she said anyway, from inside her breather. ‘And thanks for saving my skin. Twice.’
She sealed the door and set the escape pod to launch. A red light began to strobe as the pod slid into a launching tube, but by then she was already on her way to the engineering section.
Gabrielle worked her way through the ship until she reached the main fabricator bay, which was filled with huge, industrial-scale machinery that could manufacture anything from cutlery to replacement drive-spines for the hull. The engineering section lay on the far side of this, and she made her way down a narrow aisle between the fabricators, ducking beneath feed pipes and thick bundles of cable.
The ship suddenly shook around her with sufficient force to tear one of the fabricators loose from the brackets holding it to a wall. The huge machine floated free, drifting towards her and tearing cables and pipes loose as it came. It looked as if it probably massed at least a couple of tonnes, and she scrambled to get out of its way. But the zero gravity made any movement that much harder, and she was still far from adept at manoeuvring under such conditions.
The huge machine sideswiped her, and sent her spinning. She let out a cry of pain, but at least managed to keep it together enough to avoid getting crushed between the machine and the wall towards which it was drifting.
Something didn’t feel quite right with her arm, and she pulled it close to her chest as she passed into the engineering bay, looking around in the hope of spotting more of the orange emergency boxes. She really, really needed to swap her breather for a fresh one, since she had, at best, only a few minutes of air left.
Then she spotted some mounted on a wall inside the fabricator bay – just a moment before the drifting fabricator crushed them beneath its weight.
Oh, damn.
Trying to reach for a handhold with her injured arm, she nearly screamed from the pain. It felt like being stabbed with a red-hot razor.
She was now left with a stark choice. She could turn around immediately and make her way to the aft launch bay, and the escape pod there. But with the fabricator blocking her way, that would mean a long detour that would cost her precious minutes.
Or she could stay here and set the nova mine to detonate, at the risk of asphyxiating herself before she could get to safety.
She glanced at the readout on her mask, and then wished she hadn’t.
Screw it. She’d known all along that she probably wasn’t coming back from this trip alive.
She searched around until she located the nova mine’s cradle. It consisted of a cylindrical framework covered in warning stickers.
Pulling out the control card Tarrant had given her, she hunted around until she found a slot on the cradle’s underside that looked about the right size. She slid the card in, entered Tarrant’s code in the menu that appeared in response, then confirmed.
Words materialized in the air. MINE DETONATION CONFIRMED. STELLAR CORE COLLAPSE IN THIRTEEN HOURS.
Thirteen hours, she reflected. Would the Wanderer be able to jump out of the system to safety before then? Only, perhaps, if it actually knew the mine had been triggered. It might not.
She thought about what had just happened. The nova mine, which had until this very moment been cruising through the corona surrounding this system’s sun, had just performed a superluminal jump that took it deep inside the star’s core. In the brief moment before it was reduced to a wisp of superheated gas, the exotic singularity at its heart had triggered a stellar core collapse that would consume not only the star itself, but all its planets and moons, as nearly ten billion years’ worth of stored energy was released in one single, titanic instant.
Gabrielle laughed giddily to herself. Stellar core collapse. She had just murdered a star. How many people in history could say that?
She glanced at the readout in the corner of her breather mask, and saw that she had less than sixty seconds of air left. She pushed her way back over to the entrance to the fabricator bay, and saw that the rogue fabricator had now drifted back against the wall to which it had previously been secured. That left a narrow gap that looked as if it might be just wide enough for her to squeeze through.
And if she could manage that, maybe she could still reach the nearest escape pod.
She squeezed her way through, praying that the machine wouldn’t shift again and crush her. She remembered the lessons Megan had given her back at the research outpost on how to use her implants, and she now succeeded in projecting an external array feed on the inside of her breather mask as she struggled. It showed her how the Ingersoll’s hull was now a blur of activity, like a corpse infested by maggots.
She then noticed a dozen or so of the alien machines dragging something out of an enormous wound torn in the Ingersoll’s hull. After a moment, it hit her that this was the ship’s nova drive.
Her air ran out just as she reached the passageway at the far en
d of the fabricator bay. Sucking in her last dregs of oxygen, she wondered how long she had before she lost consciousness. Thirty seconds? Or even as much as a minute?
She pushed off hard. If she could just make it to . . .
She turned the next corner, and found herself confronted by a monster from the very depths of her nightmares. Directly between her and the escape-pod bay, she registered a churning mass of blades and struts, surrounded by blackness.
Her lungs were hurting more than she thought possible. Meanwhile, the machine-monster was busily tearing through the walls and bulkheads all around it, like a buzzsaw through soggy paper.
It suddenly turned and reached out for her. Instinct made her kick her way out of its reach, but this motion carried her up and out through the great rent it had already torn in the hull. She was now outside the Ingersoll, where the icy cold of deep space began infiltrating through her skin and burrowing its way into her bones.
She then caught sight of a corpse drifting close by a drive-spine. It looked as if it might be Kathryn, the woman who had once attended to her.
She tried to call out Megan’s name, in the last moments before her lungs froze solid.
FORTY
Megan
Megan watched helplessly as the Ingersoll was torn to shreds. She also saw the nova drive being dragged out of the hull.
As its components started to drift away from what was left of the Ingersoll, the Wanderer began reverting to its former appearance. There was something hypnotic about the sight, like watching a sponge reform inside a tank of water after it had been segmented in a blender.
For the moment, it seemed to be ignoring her and the Magi ship. It now had what it wanted – what it had always wanted.
When she spotted an escape pod tumbling out of control, she instantly gave chase. It took her half an hour to retrieve it.
The Magi ship formed an airlock bay, and drew the drifting pod inside it. When she activated the pod’s door mechanism, it hissed open to reveal Bash inside. He, of course, betrayed no awareness that Megan was even there.
Perhaps, she speculated, Gabrielle might still be alive, trapped somewhere inside the wreck of the Ingersoll . . .
No, declared the Librarian. We managed to reactivate part of the Ingersoll’s external array, and we sighted her body drifting outside, but still near the ship.
Megan closed her eyes for a moment, resting her forehead against the side of the escape pod.
‘What about the nova mine?’ she asked, lifting her head back up. ‘Do we know if she . . . ?’
We detected an anomalous neutrino burst from this system’s sun within the last few minutes. This indicates that the mine has been triggered, which means we have perhaps half a day before the sun turns nova.
‘And Bellhaven?’
We detected no sign of a tach-net transmission being sent towards the Accord. If there genuinely is a mine around Bellhaven’s star, it has not been activated.
Megan laughed from sheer relief, her hand pounding the door of the pod. Perhaps, she thought, there never had been a mine. It would be just like Tarrant to try and bluff her.
Then she thought of Gabrielle again, and the laughter caught in her throat.
‘What about the Wanderer?’ she asked. ‘Will it be able to jump out of this system before the nova occurs?’
Unlikely, since it does not have the means to ramp up the energy levels necessary for even a short-range jump. It might be able to build new components capable of powering the drive, but not before the star detonates.
‘You did it, Gabrielle,’ she said softly, feeling her eyes well up with tears. She quickly stepped inside the pod before letting emotion overwhelm her completely, and began gently coaxing Bash out of it. They had a long journey home ahead of them.
All the same, they could not afford to leave without witnessing the Wanderer’s destruction; only then could they be sure.
This was not the first time Megan had watched a star die, for she had personally witnessed the destruction of three during that other, previous, life.
Twelve hours after the Wanderer had ripped the nova drive out from the Ingersoll, the Ship of the Covenant detected a second neutrino burst from the star. In the intervening time, they had departed the moon to shelter in the cone of shadow behind the night side of the moon’s parent planet. There the Magi ship could, for a short time, carry out remote observations even while the nova raged.
Bash was now lodged in his own cabin, which had appeared, newly formed, shortly after they exited the airlock bay. She had wordlessly guided him inside, finding there articles of clothing she remembered him wearing years before, and long before he lost his mind to the Wanderer.
The Librarian had recreated it all from her own memories, of course, though she did not like to be reminded of how easily it could reach inside her head.
Before long, the rim of the planet behind which they were sheltering began to burn with incandescent light as the wavefront of the nova detonation struck it. Megan saw valleys filling up with liquid fire, and the sharp-edged silhouettes of mountain peaks melting.
‘Is there any way of seeing the Wanderer?’ she asked. ‘Can we be sure it hasn’t found a way to jump out of range?’
We tapped into a visual feed from the Ingersoll’s sensor arrays just before it was destroyed, replied the Librarian. You may find it interesting viewing.
Screens appeared before Megan, showing a multiplicity of views from the Ingersoll’s perspective. The cameras had survived just long enough to show the star expanding in size, growing to fill the entire sky with terrifying speed.
The perspective shifted to show the Wanderer under extreme magnification, accelerating towards the system’s outer darkness. It had by now fully regained its former shape. Ancillary data informed her that it had engaged in a programme of rapidly re-engineering a number of its components so as to absorb the energy the nova drive required for it to make an interstellar jump.
But too late.
She watched the wavefront of the nova strike the Wanderer. It began to come apart again, unable to maintain its integrity beneath the onslaught of superheated plasma expanding at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. The whole thing had an uncanny, dreamlike quality to it, perhaps partly because what she was seeing there had occurred in millionths of a second, and was slowed down for her benefit.
The cameras flared white, and died.
It was closer to making its escape than you might prefer to know, continued the Librarian. There are still a few Wanderer components surviving in this system’s Oort region, more than a light year out, so it can still rebuild itself, given time.
‘But how long will that take?’ asked Megan.
A thousand years, more or less.
She nodded and let her shoulders sag. ‘It doesn’t have a nova drive any more. We don’t have to worry about it again for a long time yet, if ever. I think that’s good enough for now, don’t you?’
She left her own cabin and made her way through to Bash’s, where she laid her head on his lap and succumbed to racking sobs. She had lost Gabrielle, and now she feared Bash was gone forever alongside the Wanderer, leaving behind only this hollow, helpless shell. She was alone again.
That’s not quite true, the Librarian reminded her.
In that same moment, she felt fingers brushing gently against her hair. It took her a moment to realize that she was not imagining it.
FORTY-ONE
Dakota
Over the next several hours the Magi ship listened out for those few remaining components that the Wanderer had seeded throughout the system’s Oort region, but it soon became clear that they were running silent, waiting for the intruder to depart before beginning their long resurrection. To flush all of them out, and destroy them, would take decades or even centuries, the Librarian explained to Megan. Even then, there could be no guarantee of finding all of them. Besides, the Wanderer had almost certa
inly left components behind in other star systems it had visited, and from those it could eventually reconstitute itself.
But when that day came, the Librarian assured her, it would find other Magi ships ready and waiting for it.
The planet behind which they had sheltered from the nova inevitably began to disintegrate under the onslaught of superheated plasma, so the Magi ship made a short-range jump of half a light year. The craft’s encounter with the Wanderer had seriously depleted its energy resources, and it now needed a few days to prepare for the first in a series of much longer jumps.
Megan – or Dakota, as she had once again come to think of herself – hardly needed to ask where it was taking them next. They were clearly on their way to a confrontation with the Maker Swarm.
After that first brief touch of his fingers, Bash had reverted to his familiar near-vegetative state, and remained that way despite her desperate coaxing and prompting. She returned to her own quarters, and woke later from a long and dreamless sleep only to find that Bash, and even his newly formed quarters, had completely disappeared.
She stared, dumbfounded, at the smooth expanse of wall where his cabin door had been. She then yelled out for the Librarian, demanding its presence instantly.
‘We are merely attempting to repair the damage done to your friend by the Marauder,’ explained the Librarian, from beside her shoulder. As ever it appeared from nowhere, as if it had been hovering just out of sight, unnoticed and unheard until it was required. ‘In your past life, your body was similarly absorbed into the ship’s own flesh in order to carry out necessary changes and repairs.’
‘You don’t do anything for nothing,’ she remarked. ‘And you certainly didn’t ask my damn permission.’
‘We didn’t need to,’ the Librarian replied, ‘as he gave it himself.’
