by A. A. Ripley
‘He’s got it… but not all,’ said Ure, looking at her. The lag in his voice became noticeably longer. ‘The fool… the fanatical fool.’
With great effort, he moved his still intact hand and reached deep into the deteriorating expanse of his stomach. With great effort, he pulled an object from the silver mass that was already turning dirt-grey. It was a small data-storage device, like the ones used to carry astro-navigational coordinates.
‘Is this…’
‘A copy… yes,’ he said. His face was rippling like a pool of boiling mercury now, the damaged circuitry no longer able to hold his shape.
Inan took the storage device. Her fingers closed around Ure’s ever-shifting digits. She could feel the prickling of the little metallic spiders, trapped in their mechanical agony.
‘I was… never big on… politics, but he… owes me money. Nobody gets to… cheat me of… my share.’
With a faint whisper of protest he unravelled, leaving nothing but dust and the robotic spiders that once constructed the new body of Ure Ambrus.
She sat there, looking at the mound of dead mechanical spiders, their legs still and twisted, and she thought that she should feel relief or satisfaction. The person who left them stranded on an alien world was no more, his extended lease on life – cancelled.
*
The trek back to the city was long and thirsty. The sky was unclouded and the sun bore down on their heads. The open spaces of Confidence were mostly grey and sharp, with spiky rocks emerging from the soil. On occasion, they would pass an ecru-coloured shrub with thin limbs gathered like an upturned satellite dish with a colony of insects residing among them. Sometimes they would pass fields of sand chives, where their entangled flagella would writhe in surging motion, making a sound like rubbing dry fingers together. Confidence seemed to Inan like a place where no time ever passes, the grim events of the day entombed under the endless droning of insects and stale smells.
When they finally reached the spaceport, the Yi-yik-ke was gone. The landing pad was still cooling from the engine blast; a curtain of hot air was levitating above it. The pirates must have taken it, or some unknown agent of Cochrane did that for them. The only starship left was their crippled freighter.
The mood on board was a foul one. None of them spoke for some time. Alan ran seemingly nonsensical flight simulations and mumbled under his breath each time the console showed an error. Hijinks walked about buried in her thoughts, absentmindedly tightening fastening clips on access panels. Inan reached out to her.
‘We can’t make it before them, can we, Hijinks?’ she asked, knowing the answer already. Hijinks didn’t say anything. From the nooks of her clothes she fished out a cigarette. The grey haze covered her face as she smoked, making her look as if she was sitting inside a darkening storm-cloud.
‘I think I see how we can still make it,’ said Alan, flipping through the star-charts.
‘This thing here,’ he brought up a speck from the corner of a chart and blew it up to fill the whole display. Inan looked at it, without really realising what she was looking at. The whole display seemed to be distorted, the light of the stars smudged in concentrating half-moons around a sphere blacker than dark matter. Then she realised that what she was seeing was a gravitational lens. The immense attraction of the object inside was refracting the starlight, painting a crescent shape around it. For a moment she thought she was looking into the heart of a black hole itself. But then she saw the object designation written underneath.
‘It’s a wormhole!’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘It has a note attached to it. Apparently, there was a probe sent by a scientific expedition that determined the other end is just a few light hours away from the coordinates.’
‘But it wasn’t carrying anyone on board, was it?’ asked Inan.
‘No, but I still think that it’s the best idea right now.’
‘Good idea,’ agreed Hijinks. ‘For dying fast. Like Jumbob.’
‘Who?’
‘Jumbob the Very Very Insane,’ said Hijinks. ‘He was a scientist. He would put his head into a chowgrunter’s mouth to count teeth. Stay up late to measure rays in gamma radiation. Dare supernovas to explode. Went up Einstein–Rosen bridge. This one.’
Inan looked at the display, the open mouth of the wormhole. The light of the nearby stars was distorted by the gravity lens and the edges of the hole seemed to move. It was just a clip playing on a monitor; the hole itself was far away, but Inan felt as though it was staring at her, a dark blind eye.
‘What happened to him over there?’ said Inan, but deep inside her she knew the answer already.
‘Never came back to tell.’
Alan nodded.
‘If any of you have a better idea than this, now it would be good to say so.’ Inan fell silent. She felt as though her mind had turned into a calculating machine, a computer built for one task only – to find a better, saner solution to this situation. There must be something better they could do! Commandeer Confidence’s only hyperlink and call someone? They could reach the Core Forces or Human Alliance, and explain. But even if they believed them, how long before anyone could reach them? In the meantime, Cochrane would reach the Actuality Regulator, and the world they knew would be no more.
She looked at her companions, trying to guess the thoughts behind their alien faces. Hijinks’ face looked calm, but she too looked intensively into the maw of the wormhole. When their gaze met, Inan felt that Hijinks had come to the same conclusion. Alan wasn’t looking at the display, but through the window into the monotonous landscape of Confidence. His eyes were following the small vehicle of the landing-pad crew, slowly going about their business. His face was shadowed by his shaggy head-fur and Inan could not read it. Was he hesitating?
A couple of seconds passed. It was Alan who broke the extended silence.
‘I’ll program the course,’ he said.
*
The three of them stood looking at the forward display. Inan opened her mouth, feeling as if she was voicing the thought that was running through all their heads.
‘We are going in there?’
The wormhole looked the same as in the recording they had pulled from the database earlier. The same dark hole, crowned with a halo of light that was slowly sinking inside it, never to be seen again. The edges seemed to be vibrating slightly, like the mouth of a monster that breathes heavily. Inan wanted to avert her eyes, but the abyss captured her gaze, making her stare into the impenetrable darkness and try to see if she could peer to the other side.
‘Listen to it?’ asked Hijinks and, almost despite herself, Inan approved. Hijinks touched the console and the outside sensors picked up the electromagnetic waves that spilled from the wormhole, passing them to the on-board computer, which scaled them down to a spectrum that was audible to their ears. Hijinks switched on the internal speakers. The black hole was howling, the sound a raging hurricane that crushed the air in the cabin. It was like a storm over screams, high-pitched and mashed together as if the universe itself was wailing in agony. Inan pressed her hands to her ears, trying to shut out the dreadful noise, and shouted to Hijinks to cut off the speakers. After the longest second, a dead silence filled the cabin.
They strapped themselves into their seats. Inan checked the pre-tensioners on them three times, knowing that there was precious little she could do in the event of any equipment failure. There was nothing to do but plunge the ship into the gravitational well of the wormhole and hope that it was sturdy enough to navigate the immense forces that dwelled within it.
Hijinks sat there with her hands on the controls, waiting for them to be ready. Over her head, the wormhole took the whole display, looming over Hijinks like a bottomless shaft or a chimney piercing a starless sky.
Inan closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
‘Do it,’ she said.
‘Do it!’ echoed Alan.
Hijinks fired-up the engines and they were away. Inan had learned beforehand what graph on the console was their relative speed, and now she watched it rise. Hijinks cut off the engines, but they were still accelerating, already surrendering to the gravity field of the wormhole. Hijinks muttered something in her language.
‘Fools,’ thought Inan. ‘She is calling us all fools.’
They began their final approach. The proximity sensors issued a collision warning before switching off as if they disbelieved the data that was fed to them. The ship continued to pursue the open maw of the wormhole without any more complaints from its equipment. The ship was silent.
Soon, the tension started to rise as the machines had to start compensating for the extreme conditions. The silence gave way to the whine of overworked equipment.
Inan was lying strapped to the seat, half-unconscious from terror, listening to the pained screeches of the anti-gravity generators. She could feel the strain going through the ship, the vibrations on the deck, and the barely audible groans of the bulkheads and the stressed metal of the hull. Her heart almost stopped at the sound of rent metal. For a second she dared to hope it was just some of the outer plating being stripped by the immense gravity. But then she saw an explosion of alarm lights on all the consoles. Briefly, Inan caught a terrifying sight – one of the module clamps had torn loose and was now spiralling into the darkness of the wormhole! Inan curled up as far as the belts allowed her, shut her eyes tight and waited for the imminent sound of the ribs breaking and folding under the stress of the disintegrating hull. Silence invaded suddenly. Inan opened one eye cautiously and was greeted with the most beautiful sight – a display full of stars. They were through.
Inan disentangled herself from the restraints and, on still unsure legs, joined Alan and Hijinks at the consoles. She still couldn’t believe they had actually done it. Alan was comparing their position with the estimated course, while Hijinks confirmed that, apart from the broken clamp, the damage was minimal.
‘Are… are we in the right place?’ said Inan, peering over Alan’s shoulder.
Alan was bent over the console, trying to convince the panicked computer that there were no errors in the calculation of the positioning, that they had really crossed the incredible amount of space in the time it takes to complete a docking manoeuvre.
‘Look,’ said Hijinks, adjusting the outside cameras.
A flaming star sat in the middle of the display. It was fiery-orange and covered in darker blemishes like an overripe fruit. Long ribbons of flares erupted from its surface like blazing fingers reaching into darkness. Inan looked at the star and then at the readings of the sensors. She was expecting to see a planet or a space station, something that would hold the Actuality Regulator. But there was nothing. The star had no satellites, no planets, not even asteroid belts or proto-planetary dust clouds. There was nothing there but the flaming eye hung on the backdrop of the void.
‘Approaching,’ said Hijinks, as if reading Inan’s mind. ‘There must be something here.’
And there was, but it was like nothing Inan had seen in the old books or the interplanetary databases. It was a set of objects encircling the star, like thousands of cupped hands. Those structures were flat, and curved towards the star’s corona. They looked small in comparison to the face of the sun, but they must have been larger than the biggest planets, even bigger than gas giants. As Inan watched, something strange happened. The star ejected a powerful flare. It unfurled itself, carrying flaming gas thousands of miles upwards over the surface of the star. But instead of peaking and falling down, it curled itself towards one of the flat objects, swirled and disappeared without trace, as though it was sucked inside the object. Hijinks tuned up the magnification and now they could see one of the objects up close. It was flat and curved, like the dish of an enormous antenna, but it was not smooth. Large funnelled openings littered its surface, like inverted wells. Behind and over it, a black shining tail trailed into the darkness, like cable with reinforced insulation. Thick and massive it stretched like a landmass-sized bridge suspended in the void.
‘Is that it?’ said Inan. ‘Is that installation the Actuality Regulator?’
‘Not quite,’ said Alan. ‘The coordinates don’t match exactly. They are off by a few light years but there is nothing else out there, not according to any charts.’
‘It’s charging,’ said Hijinks as another flare erupted from the sun, just to be consumed by the strange receptor.
Inan thought it was only logical that a machine capable of dismantling and putting back together the very filaments of the universe would require unimaginable amounts of energy. And what better source of energy than an enormous ball of burning gases? Somewhere, beyond their sight, an ancient god-machine was biding its time, until it was ready to put an end to the universe they knew. But where was it?
‘It’s not only not quite here, but there is another star nearby. This star here and the other one are a binary system.’
Inan looked at the console. A simulation of the two stars encircling themselves gracefully was playing in a loop. A thought flashed through her mind like a stray comet.
‘The machine, it’s… it’s in the barycentre, isn’t it?’ asked Inan, suddenly realising the scope of the installation, the scale of the engineering involved.
Her companions looked at her quizzically.
‘It’s the point that both of those stars are orbiting. The Actuality Regulator must be exactly between them! I think that if we follow those strands we will find something in between those two stars.’
They followed the strands. Each of them was segmented and ridged, snaking away from the antenna-shaped receptors and towards the barycentre. They went on and on, curving and joining each other, until there was just one left. One cable – black, iridescent and wider than the rings of many gas planets – passed under their ship like a high-speed road for alien vehicles.
*
Inan had thought that Middlelink was an enormous station, but this one dwarfed Middlelink. It was shaped much like a model of an atom. The centre was a bulging, uneven sphere suspended in a net of overlapping ellipsoidal rings. The rings themselves were the same colour as the cables, rising and dipping sharply, curving around the sphere-like bowed ribs. The cable they were following was attached to the sphere with talon-like contraptions, digging deep under the iridescent skin of the station. Inan looked closely, but couldn’t see any lights that would illuminate this strange construction. Instead, the whole surface gave out a steady, reddish glow that put the station in sharp contrast with the blackness of space.
Hijinks was operating the controls and leading the ship steadily alongside the sphere, looking for anything that looked like a dock, or a bay or even a hatch that could enable them to get inside. But there was nothing but a rippled, segmented surface, like skin on a furless beast. The material was folding over itself; full of crevices and regular, tight gaps in the glistening shell. It seemed as though there was no way to enter the station.
Inan watched as the station passed next to them and wished she knew how to get in.
‘Maybe we should land?’ said Alan, peering over Inan’s shoulder.
‘Hijinks, can we land?’ called Inan.
From the corner of her eye, Inan saw Hijinks skimming over readouts.
‘Enough gravity,’ she called back. ‘We can land.’
Inan watched Hijinks choosing the right spot, relatively smooth, without cracks or folds. The reddish surface seemed slippery, or maybe it was just an illusion made by their lights reflected in the metallic substance? Hijinks engaged the manoeuvring thrusters and gently steered the ship towards the surface. The descent was slow. The gravity here was very weak and the braking engines sat them down with little effort. The landing gear touched the station with a thud. The clunking sound of the clamps engaging sent vibrations through the deck.
They had landed.
Inan relaxed. She had tensed her whole body during the manoeuvre, as though she had expected trouble. But nothing happened and now they had landed on the outer shell of an alien space station.
‘I think we should go out,’ said Inan. ‘Maybe we can find an entrance on foot.’ They went digging in the storage compartments. Inan was worried there might be only one type of spacesuit, suited to races with flat faces – similar to the ones she had found on Yi-yik-ke. But the lockers seemed to be well-stocked, the doors marked adequately to the body types of many sentient species. It was, after all, a spaceship that used to belong to a multispecies expedition.
Inan was trying to figure out which one of the space suits would accommodate both her tail and the shape of her head, when she felt a shudder as if the ship was trembling in a cold wind.
‘Did you feel that?’ she called to Alan and Hijinks, who were busy pulling out spacesuits from the lockers.
‘Feel what?’ asked Hijinks.
‘I don’t know,’ said Inan. ‘It felt almost like…’
She didn’t finish because the deck slipped from under her feet. With her face on the floor, she felt her body growing suddenly lighter. They were falling! The whole ship was plunging with terrifying speed.
Inan screamed. In her mind, she already saw their bodies shattered and broken among the twisted metal at the end of this sudden fall. She braced for the impact that would come any second now. But it didn’t.
Instead, the fall slowed down. It no longer felt like a plunge, more like a soft descent. Inan was even able to stand.
‘Are we… in a lift?’ said Inan. As if in response the descent ended with a barely-audible thunk.
They raced back to the control room. Inan looked out and shuddered. The darkness beyond the ship was thick and more oppressive than any blackness between the stars. Then specks of light appeared out of nowhere, illuminating the place, and the darkness withdrew. The ship was laid in a berth, supported by large, softly-curved struts and surrounded by a walkway made from a softly-glowing material. The berth itself was in a hall so high that Inan couldn’t see the ceiling.