The Temporal Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  After the formal hand over for the benefit of the President, senior Senators, and unisphere reporters, the two of them had gone up to the Admiral’s office on the top floor of the thirty-storey Pentagon II tower. Wilson had given Kazimir two pieces of advice as they stood looking across the agreeable parkland of the Babuyan Atoll dome.

  ‘Don’t ever give in to political pressure,’ Wilson had said. ‘I’ve been President myself, so I know the convenience of a military who’ll snap to and say yes to every dark instruction you issue. Resist them. Stick to the fundamentals. We have two roles as ordained by the Senate in more honourable times: protecting the human race in all its forms against alien aggressors, and peaceful scientific exploration of the galaxy. That’s all. Don’t let the Executive wear that down. The general population must have faith in us.’

  ‘I can hold the line,’ Kazimir assured him.

  ‘And second, feel free to change this goddamn office. I always hated it; never got round to redecorating, so now every crappy white molecule qualifies as tradition because this is the way it was when we gained our victory over MorningLightMountain. Every other admiral from Rafael onwards just rolled over and accepted that. I want you to give the conservation fascists a good kicking and bring in your own furniture.’

  Kazimir smiled at the man’s strange passion. They shook hands. ‘I will,’ he promised.

  To date, he’d proudly held that line through some extraordinary difficult political events. The second promise hadn’t been broken, exactly. Like Wilson, he just hadn’t got round to changing things yet.

  Today he looked out of the office to see a circular habitat that also hadn’t changed that much in the last seven centuries. Pentagon II was still the same (which was more than could be said of the original back on Earth that ANA had decided wasn’t significant enough to maintain); several buildings had been reshaped, High Angel adapting their growing-stone material in accordance to each new set of human requirements. It was the living parkland itself which had seen the most alteration, the average level of the tree canopy had risen by over fifty metres since the day Kazimir had assumed command. Under the protective dome of the Raiel arkship, the organic environment was perfect. Every species of tree prospered in a way they could never do on a planet with variable seasons and winds and fires and earthquakes and diseases and parasites and bark-eating creatures. Here there was no real reason for them to die, so they just kept on growing, nurtured by their flawless climate. There were some monster arboreals out there, twenty or so had even reached the same height as Pentagon II, their osmosis now assisted by High Angel, which had reduced the gravity field around them, allowing nutrients to flow unhindered all the way to the topmost branches. It was a forest which could never exist on a planet, and all the more alluring because of it.

  When he glanced up, Kazimir saw Icalanise was a slim tawny crescent overhead. The New Storm seemed to bulge out of the Great Northern cloudband. He’d been watching the moon-sized storm growing for two centuries now, absorbing all the smaller storms it clashed with to become the largest of all the gas giant’s cyclonic swirls. Human starships flittered around the orbital cluster of stations and micro-gee factories like a metallic shoal, mostly Navy craft, with a few commercial freighters and passenger ships. High Angel was still the largest Navy port in the Greater Commonwealth. Its residents took a lot of pride in that, supplying a disproportionate amount of officers.

  Kazimir gathered his thoughts and returned to his big white desk. The office’s ancient tragwood furniture really was aesthetically awful, made worse by the clinical glowing walls and ceiling. But he did concede it was comfortable as he sank back into the cushioning.

  ‘Convene the ExoProtectorate Council,’ he told his u-shadow. The office dissolved from his natural vision, leaving him in the perceptual conference room with its white and orange furniture (not much of an improvement on his own, he reflected sadly) looking out over the tempestuous furore of the Millavian plains.

  Gore and Ilanthe appeared first, sitting next to each other. The Accelerator faction representative had changed her appearance since the last meeting, allowing her dark hair to hang down to her waist in a single tail wrapped with red leather bands; she wore a stylish black dress of horizontal pleats. She nodded politely to Gore, who was in his golden incarnation, dressed in a perfectly tailored tuxedo.

  ‘Any news of Justine?’ Ilanthe asked.

  Gore’s gaze flicked to the chair Justine had occupied last time the Council convened. ‘Nothing. I guess we’ll have to wait to see if the Second Dreamer deigns to reveal anything to us.’

  Crispin Goldreich arrived. The ancient Senator gave Justine’s chair a look. ‘Gore. Kazimir,’ he said formally. ‘My sympathies to both of you.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Gore said.

  ‘I prefer to consider her successfully positioned to assist us further,’ Kazimir said. ‘She has achieved something remarkable, after all.’

  ‘Yes,’ Crispin said sheepishly.

  Creewan materialized in his chair, to the left of Kazimir. The Custodian faction member gave the Admiral a formal bow. He hadn’t completed the motion when the Darwinist faction representative, John Thelwell, arrived in a seat on the opposite side of the table. The two of them always seemed to appear at the same time. Kazimir wondered idly if there was some kind of alliance involved, though how such diverse factions could find any common ground was a mystery.

  ‘Aren’t you going to activate Justine’s ANA personality?’ John Thelwell asked in some surprise.

  ‘Why?’ Gore asked. ‘Her actual is still alive. Duplication is still our biggest anathema, isn’t it? Or have you converted to that pervert multiple philosophy.’

  Thelwell threw up his hands. ‘Fine. If that’s how you want to play it.’

  ‘If you’re ready,’ Kazimir said. ‘I have the secure link to the Yenisey available.’

  ‘All right,’ Gore said. ‘Let’s take a look and see what the Ocisens have come up with.’

  Captain Lucian was proud of his small crew. For nine days the Yenisey had flown in pursuit of the greatest fleet of warships the Ocisens had ever assembled. If intelligence summaries about the Starslayer-class ships was correct, then not even MorningLightMountain had enjoyed this level of firepower to deploy against the Commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, then, tension on board had been building as they closed on the fleet. Yet he considered they’d coped remarkably well. This mission wasn’t anything they’d expected or trained for; however, as one they had risen to the challenge. Toi, the systems officer, actually relished the chance to confront the Ocisens.

  ‘They’ve learned nothing in five hundred years,’ she said. ‘They genuinely believe we’re just a bunch of decadent animals who got lucky on the technology front. We are the classical immovable object in their way, and all they do is crack what passes for a head against us. They don’t try to learn or adapt.’

  ‘This fleet is proof they have tried to think round the problem,’ Kylee, the first tactical officer argued. ‘They saw what they needed to overcome us, and they set out to obtain it. That’s adaptive.’

  ‘They set out to steal it,’ Toi said.

  ‘Negotiating an allegiance is hardly stealing.’

  ‘I don’t believe they could do that. They found the leftovers of a post-physical, and bootstrapped themselves up a whole weapons-level.’

  ‘Even that’s pretty adaptive.’

  The argument had been just about continuous. The four of them had completely different positions, not that it interfered with their tasks. Although Lucian was slightly concerned about Gieovan, the second tactical officer, whose solution to the whole Ocisen problem was unpleasantly crude. He would be allying himself directly to the Accelerators at download, Lucian decided, if not the Isolationists or possibly the more radical Darwinists. For a moment, he did worry about confronting the fleet with Gieovan’s hand on the trigger of their formidable arsenal. But none of them ever allowed their personal views to affect their professionalism. H
e was confident they’d deliver the result Admiral Kazimir had tasked them with.

  For eighteen hours they’d flown beside the Ocisen fleet in stealth mode, and monitored the alien warships. To Lucian’s huge relief, they were all Ocisen.

  ‘Unless they’ve got stealth,’ Kylee pointed out after the first hour.

  ‘You can’t stealth a continuous wormhole drive,’ Gieovan countered. ‘In any case, you can only minimalize the hyperdrive emission and damp down its distortion effect. You’re never truly stealthed to a top-level sensor array. Detection and concealment technology are a constant race for superiority.’

  ‘But we’re not registering anything?’ Lucian asked.

  ‘No, captain,’ Gieovan. ‘We could use more active scanning, of course, but that would give us away.’

  ‘Let’s not make this any more difficult. Continue monitoring their communications. We need to identify the command ship.’

  The Ocisen fleet hierarchy was of course a replica of their imperial structure, with the Emperor’s nest having ultimate authority. Individual captains had very little leeway. Consequently the communication traffic reflected that, with one ship issuing orders to everyone else. There was no cross-ship chatter.

  Once they’d identified the command ship beyond any doubt, Lucian called Admiral Kazimir and received authorization for the interception.

  ‘Knock them out of ftl,’ Kazimir said, ‘and deliver our warning. They are to turn around or every ship will be disabled.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure we can achieve that,’ Lucian said. ‘The Yenisey packs a hell of a punch, but there’s over two and a half thousand ships out there, including nine hundred Starslayers. If even twenty of them combine, they can get through our shields.’

  ‘Lucian, I could never countenance disabling the fleet in deep space, not when they’re already so far past the Empire’s boundary. They simply don’t have the ships nor resources to mount a viable rescue operation. The crews would perish. That is not something I wish to have on my conscience, nor that of any of my officers. No, today is simply a reminder of our technological superiority. I suspect it will have to be repeated several times until they realize they cannot physically achieve their goal.’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ Lucian said with some relief.

  The four of them settled on their couches in the main cabin, and merged with the smartcore. It gave them a perceptual viewpoint from the front of the fuselage. Yenisey curved away beneath them, the main hull was a fat cylinder eighty metres long, with a conical nose section. Midships sprouted three radial fins supporting bulbous weapons nacelles, each of which curved down to a sharp point. A uniform luminous blue representation of hyperspace flowed around them, as though they were some yacht sailing an ocean.

  Lucian was fed senses that revealed flaws in the blueness, a constellation of dark splinters surrounded by a green haze of exotic energy: the Ocisen warships. He directed the Yenisey until it was holding station a kilometre away from the command ship.

  ‘Are we ready?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Kylee replied.

  ‘Excellent. Gieovan, you have fire authority as of now. Keep scanning for any anomalous activity – just in case. Toi, I want total systems availability, high-status.’ He scanned the Ocisen ship. It was two hundred and fifty metres long, a fat ovoid shape, with thin edges like curving wings. The hull was rough, strewn with irregular lumps, as if it had somehow become encrusted with barnacles during its flight. Although the scan couldn’t perceive its colour, he knew it would be a dull metallic shade, dappled by furry green patches. All Ocisen starships were like that after they developed their semi-organic extrusion technology.

  ‘Pull it out,’ he told Kylee.

  The Yenisey’s energy manipulators produced wildly fluctuating waveforms that intersected the exotic energy cascading fluidly around the Starslayer. Instabilities immediately started to skitter along its wormhole. Kylee analysed the modifier effects which the warship’s drive exerted in an attempt to regain control, and simply overwhelmed them with the raw power available to the Yenisey’s systems. The rest of the fleet shot away from them as the wormhole’s pseudofabric broke down. Within a second they had vanished into the blueness.

  Spacetime reasserted itself, swamping the blueness with infinite black. Stars shone with unwavering intensity. Eight hundred metres away, the massive Ocisen warship started a laborious tumble. Its protective force fields flickered dangerously as uncontained energy pulses swept out from the ruined drive.

  ‘Attention Ocisen ship,’ Lucian broadcast. ‘This is the Greater Commonwealth Navy ship Yenisey. You are hereby ordered to turn your fleet around and return to—’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Gieovan gulped.

  A smooth spherical starship appeared from nowhere a kilometre ahead of the Starslayer. Its force fields were impenetrable. The Yenisey couldn’t even get an accurate quantum signature scan to determine what kind of drive it used.

  ‘Admiral,’ Lucian called urgently. ‘We can’t—’

  The unknown ship fired.

  ‘What the fuck was that!’ Gore yelled as the secure link abruptly vanished.

  Kazimir took a second to review the TD link data, he was so surprised. His tactical staff had produced a number of scenarios, mostly incorporating the Ocisens utilizing weapons technology they’d procured from a more advanced species. This hadn’t been a remote consideration.

  ‘I don’t recognize that design at all,’ Ilanthe said. ‘Do we have any spherical ship on the Navy’s intelligence registry?’

  ‘There are some species that utilize a sphere,’ Kazimir said slowly as his u-shadow supplied their most highly classified data. ‘But we don’t list anything that can disable the River-class starships quite that quickly.’

  ‘Disable?’ Gore snapped. ‘What is that, the new politically correct term for blowing it to shit?’

  ‘All we know so far is that the Yenisey’s TD link has failed—’ Kazimir began.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘I’m afraid I agree with Gore,’ Ilanthe said. ‘That was not a warning shot. Yenisey is a warship, one of the best we’ve got, and designed to operate at long distances. The last thing that fails is the communication. After all, we kept in touch with Justine until the Void swallowed her. ’

  ‘My staff will run a full analysis,’ Kazimir said. ‘It should help define the nature of the attack.’

  ‘The weapon, you mean,’ Crispin said. ‘I’m with Gore on this, Admiral, you can’t start hiding behind language. All of us here today are long past that.’

  ‘You are correct,’ Kazimir said, knowing that they were right, the Yenisey was lost with all hands. It was hard, he hadn’t lost a starship in combat in six hundred years, not since the last Ocisen expansion wave. The crew would be re-lifed, of course, but still he had to endure the fact that he’d sent them out there into a hostile environment, while they were woefully under-equipped. It was a classic command failure, deploying your people on the basis of bad information under political pressure. The wonder of hindsight.

  ‘In the light of this catastrophe, I propose we send our deterrent fleet to intercept the Ocisen Empire ships,’ Ilanthe said. ‘I don’t believe we have any choice. Following the loss of the Yenisey, we are seeing a very real and credible threat to the entire Commonwealth. Who knows what that unknown ship is capable of.’

  ‘They are still a long way off,’ Kazimir said. ‘We can use that interval to discover what their full potential is.’

  ‘You’re playing God with our future,’ Creewan said. ‘I for one won’t tolerate that.’

  Kazimir gave him a withering look. ‘I hardly think one unknown warship constitutes an end to our civilization.’

  ‘You don’t know it’s just one,’ Ilanthe said. ‘You don’t know if that was their best weapon, or their equivalent of a bow and arrow. Kazimir, what is wrong with you? You are charged with defending our entire species. Will you please act as if you care?’

  ‘I care
very much indeed. I continue to maintain we need intelligence on the ally which the Ocisens have found themselves. I would like to propose that we send at least one more scout mission to determine what we can of the threat level. We do have time, and I am reluctant to formulate a final response without greater intelligence.’

  Ilanthe glanced round the table. ‘I will support that on the condition you at least mobilize the deterrent fleet. If the next interception is destroyed, then the deterrent fleet must be deployed against the Ocisens.’

  ‘I second that,’ Gore said.

  The other three gave their assent.

  ‘I will dispatch four Capital-class ships,’ Kazimir said. ‘They should be there within five days.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with Capital-class ships,’ John Thelwell said. ‘Are they part of the deterrent fleet?’

  ‘No. They are a grade below that. But I am confident they will be able to hold their own, at least until we know more about the Ocisen’s allies.’

  Gore and Kazimir remained in the perceptual reality after the others left. Outside the window, the ice meteorites fell in silent splendour, triggering vast electron webs across the dark sky.

  ‘You know, in all my time, and for all my clout with ANA, I’ve never managed to get a single hint out of it concerning the deterrent fleet,’ Gore said.

  ‘I would hope not,’ Kazimir told him. ‘It is our ultimate defence. Its nature should not be available for scrutiny and discussion, however well intentioned. It is enough that we have it.’

  ‘Now there’s the thing, see. Down at my most basic level, I’m an old-fashioned boy, rooted in the physical and distrusting of politicians. I’d hate to think our entire survival prospects are based on a cosmic-sized poker bluff.’ His golden face looked straight at Kazimir. ‘Do we actually have a deterrence fleet, son? Is it real?’

  ‘It is real, Grandfather. And if the Ocisen allies prove stronger than our Capital-class, I will personally lead it into battle against the Empire’s fleet.’