by Chris Bunch
The Federation forces swept forward, the ships on the ends of the formation following orders, trying to bend the vast C around the Chitet to encircle the fleet. But the center of their pattern was already broken, and the battle center was a swirling catfight.
‘All Federation ships,’ someone - no one ever admitted to the command - ordered, ‘break formation and choose your own targets. I say again, go for their throats!’
The Grayle left N-space for Armageddon. Wolfe gaped at the madness, keyed his com.
‘Nyarlot, Nyarlot, this is the One Who Fights From Shadows. There’s some kind of battle going on here.’
‘Who is fighting?’
Wolfe took a moment to examine his screens, calm himself. ‘It appears to be a Federation fleet . . . I don’t know who they’re against - maybe Chitet? Maybe civil war?’
‘What should we do, One Who Fights From Shadows?’
‘I don’t know,’ Wolfe said.
‘Whose enemy are they?’ Cerigo said. ‘Should we stand aside? Will they leave us alone, let us fight our own battle, fight the battle for them as well? Can we explain in time, and would they believe us? Would they join us? We stand by for your will.’
Joshua took a deep breath, gave an order.
On the bridge of the Andrea Doria, the ship’s executive officer glanced at a master screen and screamed in utter horror, seeing something out of a nightmare vanished long years before.
The Al’ar ships came from nowhere, sweeping forward in a grasping hand formation, a phalanx of corpse-white death.
It seemed to some watchers they came slowly, instead of at their light-second-devouring real speed.
At their head was a monstrous winged shark, scimitar-shaped, beyond any memory of the Al’ar terrors. It was flanked by the robot ships, flying in fours, two abreast, two slightly behind the first pair, as the Al’ar held their grasping organs in combat stance.
Shipskins bulged, split, and birthed slender missiles that trembled once and homed in on their targets. Some Federation or Chitet ships had time for countermissile launches, but too many didn’t see the doom from nowhere.
The Al’ar formation lifted ‘above’ the spinning pandemonium, swept past, reversed course, and came back in a second attack.
A Chitet frigate spat four missiles at the Nyarlot; five countermissiles launched and closed on the missiles. There were three explosions, then a fourth, larger one on one of the Nyarlot’s fighting pods.
Guardians died, and the ships they controlled veered away from the fight, uncontrolled.
Wolfe felt their deaths and flinched. He saw the out-of-control ships and reached for them, as he’d once taken and crushed a missile. The ships were his. Wolfe didn’t notice that the ships broke formation and regrouped - not as the two-two they’d attacked in, but as five fingers, four ships almost parallel, the fifth guarding the rear, human fingers reaching for human throats.
He sent them into the madness, controlling them as they fired their missiles. Federation and Chitet ships were there, past, gone. He came back, dimly aware of the Nyarlot somewhere behind, volleying its own killers toward the human ships.
A ship he knew, a ship he’d been aboard, was close to ‘him,’ but he veered his fighting formation away, away from the Andrea Doria.
Wolfe’s face had a tight, skull-like grin.
‘Whiskey element, engage Chitet vessels at 320-12,’ Hastings ordered. ‘Hotel, please respond to this station. I say again, Hotel, respond if you are still capable. Quebec, regather your elements.’ He was as calm as if he were on a peacetime exercise, or moving models on a map.
Cisco stood beside him, trying to stay out of the way, trying to make sense of the madness that englobed them.
Then there was something else on the bridge. It was an Al’ar, an Al’ar nearly fifteen feet high.
Someone shrieked, and a blaster smashed through the Al’ar and blew a hole in the deck above the apparition. The Al’ar stepped forward, and its grasping organ reached. Cisco shrank back, but the organ came on, came on.
His hand fumbled in a pocket, came out with a gray stone, the Lumina he’d taken from Joshua Wolfe, and brandished it like a talisman. The Al’ar brushed it aside and it smashed to the deck and shattered.
The alien changed, and for an instant Cisco saw Joshua Wolfe reaching for him. Then the grasping organ touched Cisco’s chest, and he screamed, flung back as if smashed by a blaster bolt.
The Al’ar vanished.
Hastings had time enough to manage, ‘What in Mithra’s holy name was . . .’ Then three missiles hit the Andrea Doria, and it broke in half. The rear half exploded, the forward section spun away from the battle, into an orbit without end, vanishing into emptiness.
Then there were fewer ships and fewer still as Chitet ships broke and ran for hyperspace, and Federation ships went after them, or fled on their own. There were no more than a dozen of Man’s ships left in that outer darkness.
‘End contact,’ Cerigo commanded, and Wolfe obeyed, pulling his ‘fingers’ back, away. He sat on the bridge of the Grayle, panting as if he’d fought a tournament.
‘The way is clear,’ Cerigo said.
‘Yes,’ Joshua agreed. ‘Slave all ships to mine. Now we must approach our real enemy.’
The Grayle emerged in the depths of what had been the Al’ar Worlds. Joshua felt redness, death, change, all around him, and his body burned, as if too close to an all-surrounding fire. The stars were dim, the planets indistinct, their shapes blurred, red around them, consuming them, changing them into itself.
The Nyarlot and the robot-ships were there.
Joshua heard hisses of rage from the Guardians aboard the Nyarlot as they sensed their ancient enemy.
No commands were given, none were necessary, and the ships spat heavy missiles at the entity, at what should have been empty space, but Wolfe saw it as red-speckled, pulsing like a diseased organ.
Nuclear fires blossomed, died.
Joshua’s burning pain ebbed, returned more strongly, ebbed once more.
He saw, aboard the Nyarlot, a fighting pod, as Al’ar flesh smoked, curled, and blackened, and Guardians fell, dying, dead.
A small sun was born in nothingness as the Al’ar sunray activated, and fire ravened at the alien.
Joshua felt it shrink, writhe.
The sunray burnt itself out, and the alien gathered its force, its power.
Suddenly the Nyarlot’s drive went to full power, and it drove away from the Grayle.
‘Die well, One Who Fights From Shadows,’ came Cerigo’s last broadcast. ‘Die as we die. Die as an Al’ar.’
The Nyarlot’s engines, fuel, and missiles exploded as one. Flame seared at Wolfe’s eyes, and his screens blanked for a moment. He felt the Guardians, the last of the Al’ar, leave this spacetime.
‘May you be on the Crossing,’ he said without realizing it. The pain was gone momentarily, and he felt the invader recoil. He took the deaths of the Guardians and threw them at the ‘virus’ as he’d once hurled Taen’s death at his murderer to slay him.
The Lumina floating behind him was a flare of solid white, starlike, flaming hot.
Now he saw the invader not as the ‘red virus,’ but, in flashes, as the Al’ar might have, great writhing fanged crawlers, worms, the monstrous worms that had forced the ground creatures who became the Al’ar from their burrows to the surface and then to the stars.
The worms became the serpent of Midgard, gnawing at Yggdrasil for an instant. But Wolfe’s ‘eyes’ went beyond, saw the bits that composed the ‘virus,’ reached below the molecular, the atomic levels, and felt the resonance of its ultimate bits.
He allowed the resonance for an instant, absorbed it, then forbade it.
The alien strings/not-strings hummed down into silence, and there was a vortex of nothingness, absolute nothing, not matter, not energy, not antimatter, at the core of the invader, spreading, eating, a not-cancer.
Far away, Joshua felt the rift in space, then was stand
ing in the huge cavern, hearing the dripping of liquid from its walls, and the monstrous stone door, carved with strange symbols, was in front of him.
The door to the universe the invader had come from yawned open. Behind him, coming toward him, he felt the invader, trying to flee, trying to return to its own place, the universe it had created that became itself.
Wolfe stretched out a hand, and the door boomed shut, and the sound of the booming echoed through creation. He reached up, pulled rock from the ceiling, and it cascaded down with a rumble, burying the passage to the door that his mind had created from a different reality, sealing the rift between universes.
The ‘virus,’ the invader, was around him, and he felt it, had it cupped in his hands. He considered it coldly, then denied it permission to exist.
A soundless scream came, like the tearing of dimensions, and the invader was gone.
Joshua Wolfe hung in space. He was enormous, he was subatomic. He felt the rhythm around him, normal, strange, warm, cold, dark, light.
Stars were above, below, next to him. He studied them for a long time. Some he knew, others were strange. Far in the distance was a familiar yellow star. He approached it, saw its nine worlds. He leaned over one, blue, green, and white, and knew it for his birthplace.
Wolfe stretched out a hand to touch Earth.
His nose tickled.
Joshua Wolfe was on the bridge of the Grayle. Behind him, the Lumina rotated, sending its comfortable, familiar colors around the control room. Wolfe thought of a ceiling, of an artist. His nose still tickled.
He scratched it.
Then he burst into laughter, great, booming waves of total amusement.
TWENTY-TWO
The Grayle orbited a system that had lived and died long before Man, a system without a name, only a number. Its planets had been devoured when the sun went nova, and now there was nothing but the dying star and a tiny starship.
Wolfe relaxed in a chair, gazing at the screen in front of him. He poured the last of the bottle of Hubert Dayton he’d husbanded in the ship’s safe for years, savored its burn, tasted the grapes of Gascony, remembered a winding road, a girl’s laughter, the acrid smell of woodsmoke as the pruned vines burned, a cold wind coming down from the massif, a storm minutes behind, and the welcome flicker of the fire in the tiny cottage ahead.
‘A long time ago,’ he said, lifting the snifter in a toast. ‘Quite a run,’ he said. ‘They gave me quite a run indeed.’
A line from the long-dead poet came:
‘In my end is my beginning.’
He said the words aloud in Terran, then again in Al’ar. Something that might have been a smile came and went on his lips. He drained the snifter.
Wolfe stood. He gave a series of coordinates.
‘Understood,’ the Grayle said. ‘Awaiting your command.’
The flames of the red giant reached for him, welcoming.
‘Go.’ The ship’s drive hummed to life.
He crossed his arms across his chest, brought them slowly out, palm up, as his breathing slowed. The Great Lumina roared life, incandescent as never before. The bits of matter that had been Joshua Wolfe stilled, were motionless.
Joshua Wolfe’s corpse slid to the deck. The slight smile still remained on his lips.
The Grayle, at full drive, plunged into the heart of the dying sun.
BACKBLAST
INTRODUCTION TO ‘BACKBLAST’
‘Backblast’ was written as a hoot - Warren Lapine asked if I was interested in doing a story inspired by art, just as in the old days of SF magazines. I said I’d try.
‘Backblast’ is the result.
When putting together this omnibus, all of us (Lapine, Betancourt, myself) tried to fit the story into the trilogy as seamlessly as possible.
It didn’t work out.
So, for those keeping a chronology, ‘Backblast’ occurs after the end of the Al’ar-Human war, but before the events of the Shadow Warrior books.
BACKBLAST
Lorn Ware checked the bubble, slightly moved the leveling screw, stepped back from the double tripod and bar her recording apparati clung to. She unclipped the remote viewer/shutter release from her belt harness, looked into it. Right screen, foreground was a roseatted circle of stone she named a monument, though why the Al’ar should’ve put one up in the middle of nowhere was a puzzlement.
Just like, she thought, everything, or almost everything about the Al’ar is a mind-shatter.
On the left of her mini-screen was a huge Al’ar transmission tower, the closest of the long line that marched across this sere world from the abandoned, half-finished underground base to the middle of nothing, where the line simply stopped.
It would be a great holograph.
Artistic as all hell, she thought. Just like Herr Uber-Digger-Schwanz Frazier ordered. Perfect for the cover of the semi-annual report, sure to peel more funds for the Univee out of the government.
Until a real analyst happens to take a look at things.
She put that aside. Dad always said Man can’t serve two masters, she thought wryly. But what about Woman?
She shivered as a chill, dead wind whispered past, then checked her timesend, and jolted. How’d it get so late? You’re piddling about with a bare minute-forty before the run . . .
Ware concentrated on her viewer, listened for the barely audible near-subsonic tone of building power, hovering over the release switch, not trusting the automatic shutter.
Picturesque as anybody could want when the violet are fireballs toward me, jumping from tower to tower and past . . .
She caught a flicker from the corner of her eye, started to turn.
The blast of raw energy tore her body apart before she had time to scream.
Scholar Juan Frazier ran a hand over his nearly-bald skull as if anticipating new growth. The small twittering man with the hooded eyes reminded Joshua Wolfe of some species of bird, perhaps a woodpecker; or possibly the reptilian hultsma of Vega VI.
‘Isn’t it a bit irregular to send an investigator all the way from the Federation to inquire about an accident that’s already been fully reported?’ Frazier asked carefully. ‘Not to mention expensive?’
‘Probably,’ Joshua agreed blandly. ‘But I’m a local boy, free-lancing in the Outlaw Worlds, so it wasn’t that many jumps for me. As for irregular, I heard rumors there’s been insurance problems on other university-funded projects.’
‘You don’t have any idea, though, why the Univee . . . damnit, I hate that word . . . isn’t satisfied with the information I provided,’ Frazier persisted.
‘Not really,’ Wolfe said. ‘But I’d guess it might be because your project’s funded through the government. You know how they like to ask questions.’
‘Ah,’ Frazier said. ‘Ah, of course. Of course that’s it.’ He visibly relaxed, but his eyes stayed fixed on Joshua.
His long office was cluttered with terminals, reports, a few models of Al’ar apparatus and, incongruously, an architect’s holograph of an elaborate lakeside home.
There was a port behind him, looking out at the jumble of temporary buildings around the low mounded entrances to the Al’ar base, and, not far distant, Wolfe’s grounded spaceship, the Grayle.
‘As I understand it,’ Wolfe said, ‘your team is currently trying to put the Al’ar power grid back on line, correct?’
‘Not just on line, but also trying to determine what that power was intended for. Another base? An exotic weapons system? Perhaps a launch-base? And all of this is but part and parcel of our complete investigation of all Al’ar remnants on Five.’ Frazier touched a sensor, and a wallscreen lit.
Planet A-6343-5, the fifth planet of the arbitrarily numbered star system, given the A-prefix as a former Al’ar world, hung in space. The perspective closed on the planet.
‘Here is the base we’re at,’ and a dot lit on the map. ‘Transmission towers run out to . . . here.’ A line sketched onscreen.
The screen changed, and sho
wed a single tower.
‘This is the end of the line,’ Frazier said. ‘ Or so we call it.
‘Our first questions are,’ and Wolfe heard in his mind the tapping as earnest students began numbering their lecture notes, ‘what was going to be built here. Or, conceivably, what could be underground here, although none of our resonations have yet discovered anything. Why was this end-point so far from the base? Why are there only a scattering of buildings along the route?’
‘I’ve scanned your reports,’ Wolfe said. ‘Since the base appears unfinished, maybe the Al’ar were just starting to develop this world.’
‘No,’ Frazier said. ‘That’s not good enough. At least, I don’t think that’s the answer. Do you know anything about the Al’ar power source?’
‘Just a little,’ Wolfe lied. He remembered very well the deep hum of the huge tower near the Federation embassy that was his boyhood home; and after that the tower beyond the internment camp his parents had died in.
‘No one quite understands why the Al’ar chose to build these towers so, perhaps monolithic, might be the word,’ Frazier went on, deep into his subject. ‘Especially since their cities are so ethereal. But then, I suppose no one will ever understand the Al’ar, now they’ve vanished.’
Wolfe’s face remained immobile.
A laser pointer touched the tower onscreen. ‘This upper arm carries the main transmission, which is more or less fixed in position at a right angle to the direction of power transmission.
‘On a developed Al’ar world, power would be transferred to the second arm, then diffused downward to receptors below, most generally atop whatever building they powered.
‘Actually the power would be routed to these cylinders, call them holding tanks if you will, below the second arm, then transferred up. Here, just below the lower arm, you’ll note these small columns. We think those were used to fine-tune the power transmission downward.
