The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  Felix nodded. The Yin always disturbed him. They were clones, genetically identical, and religious zealots – everything about them was antithetical to the individualism at the core of the Mentak Coalition. “I do.”

  “I was talking to him at the reception that night, and he claimed he’d been part of a delegation the Yin sent to the Shaleri Passage. They were hoping to found an embassy there, if you can believe it, and open some kind of formal trade relations with the Creuss. The Yin are masters of the biological sciences – what could they possibly offer a species that doesn’t even have bodies?”

  “Forget that,” Felix said. “What could they hope to get in return?”

  “A cure for Greyfire,” Calred said. “They’re always in the market for that. They’ve exposed embryos to every known form of radiation, hoping the consequences would modify the genes in some useful way. Maybe they thought bathing their unborn in the light of an inside-out star in the Passage was worth a try.”

  “Errin didn’t get into all that,” Tib said. “He just told me the Creuss welcomed them and met them on a space station – a replica of a station from Yin space, apparently, probably identical down to the last rivet, but completely new, like it had just been built the day before, specifically for that meeting. Errin said it still smelled of fresh welds and hot polymers. The Yin were disconcerted, understandably, but the Creuss were polite, very formal, spoke their language perfectly, and offered them food that could have been served on any Yin outpost – but Errin did say the food was all exactly the same temperature, just this side of cold, like it had been fabricated or extruded instead of cooked. The Yin tried to talk business, and the Creuss asked questions and made statements, but the stuff the Ghosts said didn’t seem to have any connection to what the Brotherhood said – just random utterances. The ambassador remembered a few of the questions the Creuss asked – they said, ‘Why is a frog?’ and, ‘What is the strategic importance of the color you call blue?’ and ‘Your armor is soft. Should we make soft armor too?’ Pretty baffling, but the Yin attempted to answer as best they could. As far as the ambassador could tell, their answers didn’t make any impression at all – there were never any follow-ups, never any sense of understanding.”

  “Sounds a lot like talking to Thales,” Felix muttered.

  Tib went on. “The ambassador’s theory was that the Creuss weren’t communicating at all – he thought they just had random phrase generators built into their armor, to create the illusion of conversation. After a while, the Creuss all turned and left, right in the middle of their nonsense dialogue. The ambassador and the rest of the delegation sat there for a while, waiting for the Ghosts to come back, but then the station started to disintegrate around them – the artificial gravity failed, rivets started to pop out, plates started to separate on the interior walls. No alarms went off, and there were no warnings, nothing you’d get on a normal station when the infrastructure started to fail. The Brotherhood delegation rushed back to their ship and managed to get on board before the whole station turned into a debris cloud.”

  “The station exploded?” Felix said.

  “No, it just came apart, the ambassador said. Not violently. More like all its joins and welds failed at once. They thought maybe it was a threat, but the Creuss didn’t make any further contact at all, friendly or hostile or otherwise, so the Yin withdrew beyond the Passage. That was the last time the Brotherhood sent a delegation to the Ghosts, as far as Errin knew. He said they counted themselves lucky to get out alive.”

  “We’re drifting away from the current disaster,” Calred said. “Why don’t you tell us Shelma’s ghost story, captain? What did she see?”

  Felix stared at the darkness between the stars. “She didn’t see the Ghost personally. Only Thales did. She got to the lab after the Ghost was gone, but she saw the consequences. Their whole lab was destroyed. Everything, from equipment to furniture, was reduced to fragments so fine they might as well have been sand. She said you couldn’t tell what had been glass and what had been metal without examining the debris with a mass spectrometer. The lab building was totally unscathed, the walls unmarked, the floor not even scuffed, but everything else was just multicolored sand. The data they’d stored offsite drove computers insane when they tried to access it – that’s the word she used, ‘insane.’ Their terminals wouldn’t respond to commands in the expected ways, and after a few minutes the data just overwrote itself with nonsense.”

  “Why is a frog?” Calred said softly.

  “Thales didn’t give her a lot of details about the Creuss he met,” Felix said. “He told Shelma a Ghost appeared in the lab, looked around, and said, ‘You must not fracture the void.’ Before Thales could reply, he blacked out. When he woke up, everything was demolished, and the Ghost was gone. Shelma showed up moments later.”

  “What did they do?” Tib asked.

  “This is Thales we’re talking about,” Felix said. “They had a big fight. Shelma said the visit from the Ghost should be considered a stern cease-and-desist notification from a patent holder concerned about infringement on proprietary technology.”

  “Ha,” Calred said. “I like the way she thinks.”

  “Thales said their lab getting destroyed was just a temporary setback, and that they’d just have to be more careful about security next time. They hadn’t hidden their research, really – they sent updates to the people funding them, occasionally spoke to other experts about thorny problems. They never came out and said ‘we’re building wormholes,’ but someone paying attention might have pieced it together. Thales told Shelma they should just implement new security measures and carry on with their work under assumed names – that’s when he stopped being Caruthers and became Thales.”

  “What work, though?” Tib said. “I thought all their research was turned into sand?”

  “It will shock you to learn Thales is eccentric,” Felix said. “He likes hard copies. He printed things out, because he liked to spread his files around him on the floor or pin the papers on the walls. Having the data arrayed around him in physical space allows him to better comprehend the whole and visualize new connections. That was one of the reasons he left the Universities of Jol-Nar, apparently– it’s hard to sort piles of paper underwater.”

  “What a strange man,” Calred said. “That explains the file boxes we recovered from the human ship. I wondered why he had pounds of dead trees when a couple of data sticks would do.”

  “Thales still had copies of their research, then?” Tib said.

  “Most of it, yeah, tucked away under his bed. Their first model prototype for what Shelma calls the ‘activation engine,’ was reduced to sand, but they still had schematics.”

  “Did Shelma go along with his plan?” Tib asked.

  “She did not,” Felix said. “She told him to go to hell, gave her regrets to their Federation investors, and went back home to run the shipyard. Except when she got to work, her office was just like the lab. Everything was reduced to sand, drifting in the currents. She went to her house, and it was the same. That’s when she got scared. She thought the Creuss were following her, making sure she knew she’d crossed a line. She moved, but things in her life kept glitching. The University would lose her records – she said at one point the system insisted she was deceased, and another time it listed her as a minor in need of state guardianship. She did her best to clear up the errors, but so much of life in an advanced society is mediated by technology.” Felix shook his head. “She went to the Headmaster and told him about everything that happened, and asked for help and protection. The Headmaster refused and told her that, as far as he could tell from looking up her records, she was not a citizen of the Universities of Jol-Nar, and she should remove herself from Hylar space.”

  Tib whistled. “That’s shitty.”

  “Huh,” Calred said. “I ran a search when you gave me the Caruthers name, and still didn’t turn up much beyond
the bare facts of his birth and citizenship. Maybe the Ghosts manipulated his records too.”

  “There were people who knew Shelma personally, though,” Tib pointed out. “She ran the shipyard for years. Does she think the Creuss erased memories or something?”

  “She didn’t go that far,” Felix said. “She thought the Headmaster knew more about the Creuss than she did – that all the higher-ups do – and decided it was better to cut Shelma off than risk annoying the Ghosts.”

  “Maybe the people who run things have a better understanding of how terrified they should be of the Creuss,” Cal said.

  Felix nodded. “Shelma said when she told the Headmaster the Creuss had taken action against her right there, on Nar, the Headmaster basically banished her.”

  “But the Letnev gave her a new home,” Tib said. “They aren’t afraid of Ghosts, are they?”

  “They won’t admit they are, anyway,” Felix said. “The Letnev think they’re better than everyone else, including the Ghosts, who don’t even have bodies. Shelma didn’t particularly want to work for the Barony, but they reached out and offered her a place, and protection, and security.”

  “How did Thales know where to find Shelma, anyway?” Calred said. “He indicated he’d heard about her imprisonment through some kind of scientist whisper network, but now we know nobody talks to him, and if there’s one thing the Barony is good at, it’s secrecy.”

  “That’s where Shelma made a tactical error,” Felix said. “She reached out to Thales through a back channel he’d set up in case she changed her mind about joining him. She told him about the offer of protection she’d gotten from the Barony, to see if he’d join her. He told her he was confident in his ability to protect himself, thanks. But he learned enough from the communication to track her down.”

  “Intelligent and unscrupulous is a terrible combination,” Calred said. “I know they’re founding virtues of the Coalition, but still.”

  “Shelma told me one other thing,” Felix went on “She said she was stringing the Letnev along, pretending to make progress on the activation engine, but secretly ensuring they’d never have a working prototype. She didn’t want to risk another visit from the Creuss.”

  “Do you think we have the Ghosts on our ass?” Calred asked.

  “It’s been more than a year since Shelma joined the Barony,” Felix said. “Longer than that since their lab was destroyed. Maybe the Ghosts lost track of them in the meantime. Maybe they got distracted. Maybe it was only ever one Ghost, with some weird obsession, and they’ve moved on to a different form of entertainment. They’re Ghosts. We don’t understand why they do anything, so how can I predict what they’ll do now?”

  “Felix,” Tib said. “Do you think we have the Ghosts on our ass?”

  Felix sighed. “I’m definitely afraid we do.”

  •••

  “I had an interesting conversation with Shelma today.” Felix perched on the edge of a work table in the rooms Thales had taken over for his lab.

  “That squid does love to hear herself bubble on. Did she tell you all my deep dark secrets?” Thales poked at a tangle of wires with a screwdriver. He hadn’t shaved or showered in some time, and his company was unpleasant even when he wasn’t smelly and disheveled. Felix wondered if Thales was merely oblivious to matters of hygiene, or if he was trying to create a personal forcefield of foulness.

  “More pathetic than deep and dark, really,” Felix said. “She made you sound like a sad outcast who never lived up to his early promise.”

  “I’m still upright and breathing, captain. I have plenty of time to live up to plenty of things. And at least I showed early promise.”

  “She told me about the Creuss, Thales.”

  He stopped poking at the device, slowly lowered the screwdriver, then turned to face Felix, his face blank. “Did she?” His voice was carefully neutral.

  “Is it true? Did you actually see one of the Ghosts, face to face?”

  Thales scowled. “Ghosts! What an idiotic name. The Creuss are energy beings – sapient entities composed of coherent light. They don’t have faces. No biological creature has ever seen a Creuss in its true form. Their bodies aren’t stable outside the twisted physics that exist within the Shaleri Passage anomaly. The Creuss I met was wearing armor, like they always do when they interact with meat-creatures like us. The armor is usually humanoid in shape, but there’s no reason it should be. Maybe they’re mocking us. The one I met had a helmet like a mantis head, decorated with ornamental knotwork. It wasn’t as big or imposing as you might think – it was slim, lithe, and the armor moved as smoothly as flesh. The Creuss have done amazing things with materials science, which is interesting, since as energy beings–”

  “Thales, I’m more interested in the fact that the Ghosts of Creuss destroyed your lab.”

  “Yes!” He balled his hands into fists and shook them in the air. “That’s the proof, captain! I was close! I never told Shelma this, but before the Creuss came, I was beginning to worry – what if their wormhole technology could only be replicated in the Shaleri Passage? There are bizarre space-time anomalies there, the same sort of anomalies that allow stable wormholes to exist, but on both a grander and more intricate scale. In the Shaleri Passage there are dark places, folds, dips, pinpricks, funnels, corners you can see around – corners that can see around you. Places where light misbehaves and entropy spontaneously reverses itself. I visited the Passage in my travels, and came out alive, which makes me part of a small and select group. That’s where the Creuss do their science, under those bizarre conditions, and I thought – perhaps something about that Shaleri Passage allows their tech to work. Maybe you can only open wormholes from there, or with a machine constructed there, or with energies drawn from that place?” He grinned. “But then the Creuss came, threatened me, and destroyed my lab. There’s no reason they’d do that, unless I was on the verge of a breakthrough. Their intervention was proof I was on the right track!”

  “Shelma says the Ghosts might be coming after us, Thales.”

  “Oh, nonsense.” Thales waved his hand like he was shooing away flies. “Shelma just frets. The Creuss think they scared us off. If they were still worried about us, they wouldn’t have stopped at one act of vandalism.”

  “The Creuss did pursue Shelma, Thales. They followed her all the way back home and ruined her life.”

  “Paranoid ravings. If anything happened to her at all, the Barony probably did it, to scare her into joining them. The Creuss never bothered me in Cobbler’s Knob.”

  Maybe that’s because Shelma was the one making the real breakthroughs, Felix thought.

  “If you’re scared of the Creuss,” Thales went on, “I have a simple solution: we just have to build a working prototype. Once we have wormhole technology, the Creuss won’t have any reason to hurt us – it’ll be too late to stop us then. The genie, as they say, will be out of the bottle.”

  “You’re assuming the Ghosts will respond logically–”

  “Go tell your boss you’re afraid of Ghosts, then,” Thales snapped. “Well? No? Then stop this pointless whingeing. I need to talk to Shelma. Surely she’s rested by now?”

  Felix wanted to say a lot of things, but as much as he hated to admit it, Thales was right: there was no point. The Coalition wasn’t going to rescind Felix’s orders because of rumors about the Creuss. The sooner he finished this mission, the sooner he could stop worrying about Ghosts. “I’ll check on her,” Felix said.

  Chapter 13

  Felix didn’t sit when he visited Shelma’s quarters this time. He stood with his back against her closed door, looking up at the ceiling, as if lost in thought. “It occurs to me, and I’m just thinking out loud here, but, if you’re willing to bring your skills to the Coalition… could we do without Thales? My superiors are only interested in him because he claims he can generate wormholes for us. If you can do t
he same thing…”

  Shelma changed color, her body flushing to a deep orange. Felix had picked up that red coloration meant “angry” or at least “annoyed,” but the fine points of Hylar body language were still outside his skillset. “In the realm of engineering, I can do anything Phillip can do, better. I admit he’s brilliant, and I never would have created his conceptual and theoretical framework, but that framework has been built. I know how to implement his theory. At this point, he needs me to continue – I don’t need him.”

  “My only concern is, you’ll do to us what you did to the Barony. String us along without making real progress.”

  “I understand your worry, but don’t see what I could do to assuage it, even if I were motivated to do so. I’ve been honest with you, which is more than Phillip ever was. At this point, I think it’s inevitable that wormhole technology will be developed. Phillip was right – once people know it can be done, they’ll figure out how to do it. At least, this way, I can try to guide the process and protect my people. I’ll need a promise, in writing, from your highest authority, that this technology won’t be used for acts of aggression against Jol-Nar or its allies.”

  The idea that such a document would hold up if the political situation shifted the wrong way was touchingly naive, or maybe she was just trying to make herself feel better and tell herself she’d done her best. “That sort of thing is rather above my pay grade, but I can contact my superiors.”

  “Do that. If you can agree to my terms, then, yes. You can lock Phillip in a cell while I get on with the work. Just don’t set him free. His mind is a weapon, and he holds grudges.”

  “His mind is a sewer I’m sick of swimming around in.” Felix left her quarters and went to call his boss.

  •••

  “Thales is banging on Shelma’s door,” Calred said over the comms.

  Felix swore. He was still bouncing his signal through the numerous layers of encryption and obfuscation necessary to safely contact Jhuri. “Can you send a drone to drag him off?”