by David Mack
At the top of the dome, the eight-person team perched at the edge of the fifty-meter-wide aperture to the crystalline shaft that linked the dome to the enormous circular platform two hundred meters below. “Moment of truth,” Foyle said as he stared down into the glittering empty space and the constantly moving mass of dark machines at its nadir.
All six MACOs doffed their packs, opened them, and began extracting coils of high-tensile microfiber rope and carabiners that they snapped into reinforced loops on their standard-issue tactical vests. Their hands worked faster than Thayer could follow, threading ropes through the steel loops, tying knots, and securing pockets and packs.
Graylock carried a tube of cyanoacrylate from his emergency repair kit and moved down the line, stopping behind each person to affix a carabiner on the surface of the dome with a thick wad of the polymer superadhesive. Thayer eyed the fat dollop of glue with suspicion. “Will that hold?”
“Ja, but not long. Six, maybe seven decades.” As Graylock moved on, Thayer reflected on the truism that there had never been any great German comedians.
Yacavino tapped her on the shoulder. “Lift your arms, signorina,” he said. “I need to tie you a harness.” She did as he asked and watched as he worked careful loops in a cross over her torso and then secured them with a strong simple knot through the carabiner at her feet. Then he threaded her descent rope through a carabiner on her makeshift harness. “You know how to use this, sì?”
“I think I remember, yes,” she lied.
A few meters away, Steinhauer finished strapping Graylock into his own jury-rigged harness. The MACOs secured their rifles and gear, slung their packs back into place, and looked to Foyle for orders. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”
Yacavino whispered to Thayer, “Do as we do.”
He turned his back to the aperture and took hold of the rope between himself and his glued-on anchor. Thayer mimicked his actions but lacked the Italian man’s ease or confidence as they began backing up in small steps toward the edge behind them. Watching and copying his every movement, she set her heels precisely over the edge, pulled her rope taut, and leaned back until she was almost horizontal, with only her grip keeping her from free fall. On either side of her, the others hovered over the shining abyss. Then Foyle said, “Now.”
Reflex kept her in motion with the MACOs. She bent her knees just enough to coil up some energy, then she pushed away from the wall and let the slack rope fly through the carabiner. Then her old combat training came back to her, and she was right beside Yacavino and the others, plummeting and bouncing and feeling the exhilaration of acceleration, the rush of falling without losing control, all her focus on the present moment, the angle of her body, the placement of her hands, the tension in the rope, the rebound in her feet.
In less than a minute, they were standing on the narrow perimeter rim at the bottom of the shaft and unhooking their carabiners from their rappelling lines. Speed was paramount now. They had to act before the Caeliar had time to respond.
They slipped through a close grouping of meter-wide slits in the columns and sprinted across the giant, deserted circular platform, toward one of the entrances to the facility hidden within. Beyond the luminous halo of the platform, Thayer saw nothing but shadows and heard only the vital pulsing of great machines and the endless echoes of the yawning silo.
A portal irised open on the blockhouse as Foyle and Pembleton approached it, weapons held steady and level. Thayer was stunned by the lack of security. Guess the Caeliar figured we’d never get this far, so why lock the door?
Beyond the portal was a long, spiral-shaped ramp that led down and doubled back beneath Thayer’s position. Foyle motioned Pembleton to take point, and the sergeant stalked forward in a low crouch until he was almost out of the team’s sight. With a low wave, he ushered the rest of the team forward.
Mazzetti and Crichlow were the next to proceed. Then Foyle gestured for Thayer and Graylock to advance, placing them in the protected middle of the formation. Next, the major and Private Steinhauer followed the two flight officers, while Yacavino lingered a few meters back as the squad’s rear guard.
Near the bottom of the ramp, the team halted while Foyle and Pembleton surveyed the situation. Thayer peeked over the low half wall that bordered the ramp and stared agape at the Caeliar laboratory. Beside her, Graylock was stealing a peek of his own.
Machines of crystal, light, and fluid ringed the nearly hundred-meter-wide open space, and a dancing sphere of light several meters in diameter hovered in the chamber’s center. The ceiling was dozens of meters overhead, lending a cavernous aspect to the facility’s total enclosure. But its real wonder were the Caeliar themselves.
There were only thirteen of them overseeing the entire works. Some stood and interfaced with the apparatus by contact, while others hovered in midair and manipulated two-dimensional screens that seemed to be made of silver liquid that rippled at their touch. A slow, oscillating song emanated from the machines, eerie and almost hypnotic in quality.
Pembleton looked back at Foyle, who nodded. It was time.
The team charged into the open, the MACOs brandishing their rifles, as Pembleton shouted, “Stop what you’re doing!” His voice echoed back to him twice as the rest of the MACOs spread out around him. The Caeliar, if they were surprised or alarmed, gave no appearance of it. They regarded the invaders with the same curious annoyance that a human might have at discovering a troublesome pet in a forbidden room of the house.
Foyle stepped out in front of the group and addressed the Caeliar in a calm, even manner. “We are here because we desire your cooperation. And before you start vanishing in puffs of smoke or floating away, I should warn you that if you don’t cooperate, there will be grave consequences.”
The nearest Caeliar scientist said, with almost pitying boredom, “Your weapons pose little threat to us, Stephen Foyle.”
“Yes, I’m aware of that.” Foyle looked at Pembleton. “Sergeant, if you would.”
Pembleton turned, fired, and shot Thayer’s left foot.
She collapsed to the floor, screaming and bleeding.
Her ragged cries of horror and agony resounded in the vast enclosure, bringing her pain and shock back to her threefold. The initial needlelike blast of pain in her now-crisped foot became an unbearable burning that spread from her ankle into her entire leg. “Putain de merde!” she raged at Pembleton. To Foyle she added, “Con de crisse!” Blood flowed from the stump of her leg, forming an irregularly shaped puddle on the floor.
No one had told her this would be part of the plan.
Graylock tried to come to her, but Yacavino held him back.
The Caeliar crowded forward as if attracted to her pain. Foyle waited until they had circled around the squad and said, “Any closer and my sergeant will kill her.”
“And if we drain the power from your weapons?” inquired another Caeliar.
Steinhauer pressed a combat knife against Thayer’s throat.
“Then he cuts her from ear to ear,” said Foyle.
Thayer fought to blink through her kaleidoscope of tears. She saw Graylock struggle against the MACO lieutenant’s hold. “You’re all verrückt!” shouted the furious Austrian.
“Be quiet, Mister Graylock,” Foyle said. “We’ve come here to do a job, and I will see it done, by any means necessary.” Returning his focus to the Caeliar, Foyle continued, “My chief engineer is going to ask you to make some adjustments to your apparatus. First, however, I want you to weaken the scattering field in a narrow radius around this facility, with a clear line of transmission to our ship in orbit. Do you understand?”
The Caeliar watched Thayer as she squirmed in agony on the floor and flailed desperately in a pool of her own blood. A few seconds passed before the first Caeliar who had spoken to Foyle replied, “We understand.”
That was when Thayer understood Foyle’s logic. Unable to overpower the Caeliar, he had exploited their only weaknesses: their c
ompassion and pacifism. Several times over the past six months they had reminded the Columbia team of their aversion to violence and their cultural prohibition against taking sentient life, through “action or omission of action.”
It was a noble philosophy, in Thayer’s opinion, and it was therefore completely unsuitable for dealing with such a ruthless political actor as Foyle, who had just put it to the test and found it wanting. He snapped at Graylock, “Stop staring at her and get to work on the time tunnel home.” While Graylock stepped away and conferred with three of the Caeliar scientists about the modifications he wanted to make in their apparatus, Foyle looked to his MACOs. “Yacavino, hail the Columbia. Pembleton, if he can’t break through the scattering field and raise the ship in the next fifteen seconds, shoot Thayer’s other foot.”
His order brought back all her pain, and the fear of an encore made it worse. She wanted to crawl away and hide, but the cold edge of Steinhauer’s knife was firm against her throat. Her leg felt as if it was on fire, and her mouth was parched. A sick feeling swelled in her stomach, and adrenaline overload was shaking her with the force of a seizure while she watched her lifeblood seep away.
Yacavino held up his communicator and called to Foyle, “I have the Columbia, sir.”
“Tell them to fire up the transporter,” Foyle said. “Fast.”
One of the Caeliar made cautious gestures to Foyle and then drew near. “Your engineer’s time-travel formulae are crude,” the scientist said. “We’ve made such adjustments as are necessary for your safe passage. However, I should warn you that the linked nature of the apparatus will make it obvious to the other loci in the network when we shift our focus to Earth. Also, the various stations all operate from a central command system, so your time-travel formulae will infect the system as a whole. These details will not go unnoticed. The Quorum will block your escape from orbit once your actions are noted by the gestalt.”
“They’ll try,” Foyle replied. He pulled back one sleeve of his camouflage uniform and checked his watch. He tapped its face and smiled. “Which is why, when we set our timers, I chose this as the perfect moment for a distraction.”
* * *
On the sunlit side of Erigol, in the city of Kintana, Auceo, poet-laureate and chief archivist of the Caeliar, worked with his colleagues in the core of the city’s apparatus, awaiting the response to the hail they had projected across the universe, toward a civilization from the dawn of time.
“The aperture is steady,” said Eilo, his research partner. She dragged the tip of one tendril across the liquid display that shimmered before her.
Attuning his will to the gestalt, Auceo rearranged the monads that infused the air around him. The same nigh-invisible cloud of raw matter surrounded all the Caeliar’s cities and was free for the taking by all who could perceive its existence.
Subatomic particles coalesced at his behest and formed a curving liquid-silver sheet that he molded until its vista of images, all as sharp as reality, filled his peripheral vision. Streams of data flooded his senses, some of it numeric, some of it visual. “Subspatial harmonics are stable,” he said. “Data stream integrity is—”
Errors and failures cascaded from every system, and Auceo and the others in the Kintana locus abandoned their previous tasks to attend the emergent crisis.
“The Mantilis node is misaligned,” reported Noreth, the interlink engineer.
Auceo observed the feed from Mantilis. It fell farther out of synchronization with the other loci the longer he watched.
Then a hue of alarm resonated in the gestalt, and Auceo caught only the most fleeting sense of its warning—the humans had interfered in the Great Work somehow. Before he could learn more, a discordant wail of pain and terror engulfed the gestalt and drowned out all the other voices. At the same time, a surge of chaotic signals and unchecked power spikes blasted through the apparatus network, disrupting its global frequency.
For the first time that Auceo had ever known, the gestalt was silenced by its shared pain and horror.
Far beyond the horizon from Kintana, halfway between it and Axion, the city of Feiran had just vanished in a flash of fire.
* * *
“Massive detonation on the planet’s surface,” reported Ensign Claudia Siguenza, the Columbia’s gamma-shift weapons officer. “One of the alien cities just exploded.”
“Hexter, report,” said Lieutenant Commander el-Rashad.
Lieutenant Russell Hexter, the alpha-shift officer of the watch who had been serving for the past few months as el-Rashad’s XO, punched up a new screen of data on the science station’s monitor. “The scattering fields on the surface just collapsed.”
“Do we have a transporter lock yet?”
“Almost,” replied the lanky, rudder-nosed, red-haired American. “The explosion kicked up a lot of interference.”
From the communications station, Ensign Remy Oliveira called out, “I have a lock on Major Foyle’s communicator. Relaying coordinates to the transporter room now.”
El-Rashad thumbed a switch on the arm of the command chair and opened an intraship comm to the engineering deck. “Pierce! Power up the transporter, and stand by for full impulse!”
“Aye, sir,” said the acting chief engineer. “We’re patching in the coordinates now. Energizing in sixty seconds.”
“Acknowledged, bridge out.” El-Rashad closed the comm channel and said to the entire bridge crew, “Look sharp, everyone. I get the feeling this one’s going to be close.”
* * *
At first, Erika Hernandez thought she and the other captive officers were being visited by a swarm of fireflies. Then the gently buzzing cloud of glowing motes fused together and formed an incandescent sphere, which swiftly reshaped itself into Inyx.
The looming Caeliar scientist took a moment to assess Hernandez’s predicament. Then he extended his hand, conjured a small cluster of radiant particles that descended on her and the others, and sent the glowing specks into a dizzying spin. Seconds later the tiny lights faded away to nothing, and the ropes that had held her were gone. She plucked the sock from her mouth and looked for any trace of the ropes behind her, but there wasn’t so much as a loose thread or a stray fiber.
Hernandez turned to Inyx and massaged her rope-burned wrists. “Foyle and his men are planning an attack.”
“Their scheme is already set in motion,” Inyx said. “They have destroyed one of our cities by sabotaging a node of the apparatus, and they have seized another.”
Fletcher, Valerian, and Metzger gathered at Hernandez’s sides. “Can’t you stop them?” Fletcher asked Inyx.
“They are threatening one of their own to keep us at bay,” Inyx said. “For her sake, we are exercising caution.”
Hernandez fumed to think of Foyle and his men using Thayer as a pawn. Although Thayer had betrayed her by siding with the MACOs, she was still one of Hernandez’s officers. “Is she okay?”
“No,” Inyx said. “She’s badly wounded. She may die.”
Dr. Metzger said, “Take me to her, please, I can—”
“Unacceptable,” Inyx said. “Allowing you to regroup with the others is forbidden by order of the Quorum. I am here only because the gestalt saw that you four were not with the others, and we feared for your well-being.”
The doctor looked ready to argue with him, but Hernandez silenced her CMO with a raised hand. “Inyx, take us to the Quorum, as fast as you can. We’ll help you stop Foyle and his men before this gets any worse.” She saw him bristle at the notion. “Please, Inyx. I’m begging you. Let us try to help. Bring us to the Quorum.”
Inyx pondered her request for a few seconds. He turned away and bowed his head ever so slightly, then he extended his arm toward the terrace outside the penthouse and summoned a pool of quicksilver from the dark marble tiles.
Valerian stared at the shifting metallic liquid and muttered, “Talk about taking blood from a stone.”
Thousands of drops of shining fluid floated upward and conglomerat
ed a few centimeters above the terrace into a mirror-perfect, razor-thin transportation disk. Inyx walked forward, stepped onto the disk, and looked back at Hernandez.
“Events are accelerating,” he said. “We should go.”
* * *
Major Foyle’s vision pierced the white haze of the transporter effect as he rematerialized on D Deck inside the Columbia.
To his left was Lieutenant Yacavino, and in front of them, with their rifles in his back, was a Caeliar scientist. As soon as the rematerialization sequence finished, Foyle prodded the lanky, bulbous-headed alien forward. “Move.”
The two MACO officers and the Caeliar stepped off the small transporter pad and were met by Corporal Hossad Mottaki and Private Ndufe Otumbo. Mottaki nodded at the Caeliar and asked Foyle, “Who’s your friend, sir?”
“He’s not a friend, he’s a prisoner,” Foyle said. “Put him in the brig and keep an eye on him at all times. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Mottaki said, and he aimed his rifle at the Caeliar. “Follow Private Otumbo.” The corporal nodded to the private, who led them out of the transporter bay.
Standing behind the transporter control console was Ensign Katrin Gunnarsdóttir, from the ship’s engineering division. The wide-eyed Icelander asked, “Are you all right, sirs? I’ve never had to run a transport sequence that fast before.”
“We’re fine,” Foyle said. “Thank you, Ensign. I’m just glad you were ready when we needed you. Start scanning for the next round of transports, we don’t have much time.” He signaled Yacavino with a nod toward the door. “Let’s get to the bridge.”
As the two men headed for the exit, Gunnarsdóttir called after them, “Sirs? I’m only reading six communicator signals at the transport site. I can’t get a lock on the captain, the XO, the doctor, or Ensign Valerian. Where are they?”
Foyle ignored his lieutenant’s accusing stare and replied calmly, “They didn’t make it. Let’s get the rest of our people home as soon as we can, Ensign.”