The Heisenberg Corollary

by C H Duryea

  Chuck—what’s your situation? There was no response. Chuck?

  Forget it, Zeke, Narissa said. Chuck’s gone dark. He said we couldn’t go with him—even in his head.

  You guys keep an eye out for that cruiser, Zeke said. It’s heading your way.

  Roger that, Augie answered. Rendezvousing with Narissa now and we’re heading to the base of the lens structure. We’ll keep these iron idiots too busy to think about you!

  Zeke toggled his autobreather, threw the hatch open, and jumped out onto the wide deck that formed the inner surface of the Tozzk lens array. Looking up, he saw the deck stretching out and gradually sweeping up as it shrank in the distance overhead, bristling with alien technology. And beyond—Zeke looked into the space above and stopped in a cold moment of dread.

  The hyperstack filled the sky. From here he could see the individual nodes, each spewing forth vivid ropes of force of all manner of wavelength from all manner of universes. Some glowed more threateningly than others, but he was suddenly dead sure he wanted nothing to do with any of them. And there was no way he was going to let Vibeke get catapulted into one either. He craned his neck up, and he spotted the platform, hovering directly overhead. From this vantage, he could only see the underside, but he caught a glimpse of the transport beam above and it appeared to still be delivering cargo to the topside. He toggled the heads-up display inside his helmet and checked the chronometer.

  “Qaant Yke!” he yelled. “Let’s move, old pal!”

  He turned and saw that the chelipedic alien had already unpacked the Bug’s small cargo hold and stood next to a neatly staged pile of weapons and gear.

  “My homeworld has a longer orbit than yours,” he said. “Relative age, therefore, defies such simplistic calibration.”

  “We’ve got twelve minutes. Are you gonna help me blow stuff up or not?”

  “If fate is determined to hold me to account, either way, I might as well participate.”

  “We need to find the repulsors.” Zeke brought up Harbinger’s schematic of the ring on his heads-up. The display flashed the locations of the repulsion generators holding the platform in place. There were eight, situated at regular intervals around the inner ring. “According to Augie’s analysis, we need to take out three to disable the whole system.”

  “And cause a structural failure that could kill us all.”

  “I told you, I got that covered.” Zeke mapped the display against the surroundings and the locations of the nearest projectors flashed on his heads-up. He pointed to an outcrop of heavy instruments about a hundred meters distant. “There. Let’s go.”

  They grabbed several energy weapons of varying wavelengths, and Qaant Yke hefted a large crate holding a small arsenal of explosives.

  The instrument array was anchored by a squat enclosure about six meters square. A collection of projectors thrust upward from its roof. Although nothing showed up on the visible spectrum, Zeke’s heads-up display showed the entire structure absolutely thrumming with energy. They stopped at about fifty meters.

  “It’s surrounded by an electron force field,” Zeke said after scrolling through the readouts on his display. “Too strong to penetrate with explosives.”

  Qaant Yke produced a long-barreled positron accelerator. “Will this do?”

  “It will, but we’re going to get slammed with gamma rays in the process. But I have an idea.”

  He pulled an object about the size of a shoebox from the crate and ran towards the array. He maglocked the box on a small mechanical outcrop about halfway between them and the structure. He toggled the power switch and returned.

  “Portable magnetic dipole generator,” he explained. “It should shield us from the worst of the radiation.”

  “Now whose confidence is unflagging?”

  “Just aim for mid-structure and maintain a steady positron stream, will ya?”

  Zeke opened the crate as Qaant Yke secured a tripod mount for the projector. He quickly unfolded a shoulder launcher and armed an ultra-thermite rocket. He signaled the alien with a nod and Qaant Yke opened fire with the proton gun.

  The force field went white where the proton beam intercepted, and on the heads-up, Zeke saw the dipole generator scattering the gamma rays safely around them. He armed the rocket, took aim, and fired into the white spot.

  The thermite device penetrated and impacted. The device wasn’t an explosive. Instead, it burned its way into its target with the heat of a small star. The base structure glowed and buckled, and the force field went down.

  Qaant Yke killed the proton beam.

  “Shall we deliver an explosive for redundancy?” the alien asked.

  And then the array exploded. Zeke and Qaant Yke hit the deck as shrapnel, fire and plasma scattered into the thin atmosphere. The thermite reaction continued to burn its way into the metal decking, and Zeke felt a deep trembling from somewhere inside the structure.

  When the debris settled, they stood and Zeke looked up at the platform. It was wobbling but holding its position.

  “One down,” Zeke said. “Now that we got a system, two more should be easy.”

  Then laser fire peppered the air all around them, sending them diving for cover again. Zeke peered over a power conduit and saw a squad of Tozzk soldiers charging out of a freight elevator a few hundred meters away. Each carried a heavy-duty laser projector, and they weren’t asking questions.

  Zeke, Augie called. Sorry, pal, a few of ‘em got past me! That heavy cruiser just put down on a pad connecting to the structure. You might have more coming your way.

  Augie, you guys get back to the ship! You’ve done enough down there. He turned to Qaant Yke. “You’re generally better than I am at taking these guys down,” he said. “If I draw their fire, do you think—”

  The alien was way ahead of him.

  “Waste of perfectly good free iron!” He pulled his flying death-ball from his bag and launched himself at them.

  Zeke scrambled over to the weapons case and grabbed a hundred-watt plasma rifle, hoping that Augie had been right in guessing plasma would be effective. But out of an abundance of caution, he scooped up a portable gauss cannon in the other hand and stood up to face the attackers.

  Qaant Yke had already bounded to the side and flanked the squad, sending the metal ball against the rearmost soldier and shattering its skull. The others seemed not to notice, or care, and they charged forward spraying a hail of laser fire around Zeke.

  The streaks of the lasers strayed to either side of him, overhead, or scorched the decking in front of him—but they missed him by a significant margin. He put this off to the seeming enthusiasm with which they charged, but he knew it was only a momentary stroke of luck.

  His mind flashed on something Harbinger once mentioned. Cinematic presence. He wondered if this was what he meant. He decided to test it and returned fire with the plasma gun. He shot at the closest warrior and the superheated beam sent it flying back, hitting the deck with a splash of lumpy, half-molten metal.

  “Ha ha!” Zeke felt a flush of exhilaration. As Qaant Yke took down two more from the rear, Zeke raised the gauss cannon at the remaining three. “Let’s see if these bad boys will pierce those hides of yours!”

  He pulled the trigger and loosed a barrage of high-velocity mag bolts, designed to make Swiss cheese out of anything.

  They bounced right off with a string of violent pings. The warriors weren’t even slowed, and they were getting closer now—twenty meters. As Zeke dropped the gauss gun, an errant lucky hit from the Tozzk lasers ripped the plasma projector from his other hand. Qaant Yke dispatched one more of the charging behemoths, but this time the target got a claw into one of his shell plates and brought him crashing to the deck with him.

  The last two were nearly on him.

  So much for cinematic presence, Zeke thought. Another of Harbinger’s favorite phrases now came to mind: double fumble.

  Qaant Yke sprang up behind the two leaving a wake of Tozzk parts, leapt on one and
removed its skull ridge. But the last one was still coming. It leveled its weapon right at Zeke and fired.

  Zeke reflexively stuck his left hand out—and the upturned palm of his conduction gauntlet caught every bolt and sent a surge of power through the suit, and into him. It didn’t faze the Tozzk, however. It tossed the weapon and lunged the final five meters, leading with its teeth and claws.

  He fell back and the creature landed astride him, its feet denting the deck as they struck. It stopped and stared down at Zeke, its eyes glowing like hungry coals, its breath, noxious but somehow familiar, blasting down on him like a pressurized exhaust vent. It reached down and sank its claws into his outer armor layer and jerked him upright—and within biting range.

  Zeke wasn’t about to get bitten in two—not after all this. But as he flailed in mid-air like a fish, he didn’t have anything left but his fists. So he swung and connected against the side of the Tozzk’s neck. And as he struck, the laser fire he had absorbed channeled through his fist as pure kinetic energy.

  Zeke flew back, the Tozzk claws ripping away and shredding parts of his suit. He landed hard against an instrument housing, but when he looked up, he saw the Tozzk flying end over end into the open space between the lens and the hyperstack.

  He stood and kept watching as Qaant Yke extracted himself from his final kill, clutching his side where one of his shell plates had a nasty crack.

  “Are you all right?” Zeke asked.

  “Nothing a hearty meal of polysaccharides will not rectify.”

  “Come on! Eight minutes and two more projectors!”

  They made quick business of it. Now that they knew what would work, they grabbed the three necessary components and left the rest.

  The next projector was a few hundred meters from the last one, just before the massive door for some kind of loading ramp.

  “Save this one for last,” Zeke said. “Make sure we’re right underneath when the repulsion ring fails.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” Qaant Yke said, “for someone seeking to get pulverized.”

  They kept going, past the huge cargo door, to the next projector. Zeke could feel the slight incline as they moved farther away from the low point on the ring. Zeke planted the dipole generator, and they repeated the combination of the proton beam and the thermite rocket. Just like the first, the bunker melted, then exploded. Overhead, the platform wobbled again, seemingly less stable than before.

  “One more,” Zeke called and turned to retrieve the dipole. He heard a loud clang and hiss and stopped. He looked up and the loading ramp doors were sliding open.

  In the shadows within, Zeke could only make out a monstrous shape—one he had seen before.

  “Oh, no,” he said, getting ready to run.

  It was too late. A sudden wall of force knocked them both flying backward and stumbling along the deck the way they had come. Zeke scrambled for purchase and grabbed onto a set of pipes to stop himself.

  Qaant Yke wasn’t so lucky. He kept tumbling along the current of force until he reached the hole left by the second explosion, where the thermite still burned into the structure—and he fell into the white fire underneath.

  “Qaant Yke!” he shouted, but it was no use. The alien was gone, and Zeke was alone.

  Well, not quite. He heard a deep rhythmic thumping that rattled the deck under him. He tried to convince himself that those deep, foreboding sounds were not footsteps, but he couldn’t, and as he turned, the cause came slowly into the light.

  Thirty

  Zeke reached around wildly for a weapon before remembering that Qaant Yke had been carrying the case when he fell. All he had left was the old haptic blaster strapped to his now bare forearm. He flicked the release and the gun slipped into his palm.

  For all the good it would do against the massive form approaching him, its footfalls sending impact vibrations through the structure underneath.

  It was at least eight meters tall, with multiple appendages. Two sets of rusty, sinewy claws were busy etching glowing sigils into the air. The other two sets flexed and fluttered in seeming anticipation of the slashing and rending it was about to dish out. Glowing eyes stared down with open malice at Zeke.

  The uber-Tozzk.

  Zeke pointed the blaster up at it. The massive alien growled, a grating, metallic sound. Then a crackling electronic voice said, “How droll.”

  One of the sigil-wielding claws swept out and Zeke was sent careening backward again, this time slamming into a vent bulkhead. The blaster broke apart and scattered on the deck, charge cartridges rolling in every direction.

  What’s happening up there? Narissa called. Zeke, we have five minutes before the lens comes into alignment!

  Zeke was too rattled by the impact to answer.

  The uber-Tozzk stomped over and closed in. Its huge, toothy muzzle hovering above him. It growled again and washed Zeke in its hot, noxious breath.

  “You insects,” the electronic voice said, “have a vexing talent for complicating our plans.”

  Zeke realized that it was speaking through a translator unit, strapped to its side.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience,” Zeke shot back. “And not for nothing, but the insect comparison doesn’t really seem fair given your excess of appendages.”

  “Worm, then.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “You have interfered with our master stratagem for the last time, worm.”

  “Who’s interfering with who? Seems it was you who came after us in the first place, trying to blast us to bits and steal my drive.”

  The uber-Tozzk erupted in an ear-splitting, spasmodic screech that apparently passed as the Tozzk version of laughter.

  “You comprehend nothing!”

  “What’s not to comprehend?” Zeke challenged. “You’ve been using the hyperstack out there to surf universes. Which is pretty impressive I’ll grant you. But it’s a chronospatial minefield at best. I’m amazed you don’t lose half your fleets each time you go through.”

  “That is no concern of yours,” the uber-Tozzk snapped.

  “So you are losing ships. Then the Frogger must seem like a very tempting prize. And your invasion of Inverketh? Those attacks on the Inverkethi plains? Just a diversion, right? To go after the Dodecahedron?”

  The uber-Tozzk made its laugh screech again, blasting Zeke with its acrid, suffocating breath. It practically knocked him out, but something about the smell lodged in his mind.

  “The Inverkethi artifact was a mere training exercise,” the creature explained. “I had to give my forces something to do until you arrived. No, worm—our objective was the female.”

  Zeke shook himself back to alertness. “Vibeke,” he said. “Why?”

  “Her unique neural architecture has been perfected to our needs by the two machines she harnessed on your ship.”

  “The Frogger—and the NeuralNav?”

  “At last, the worm begins to comprehend.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Zeke said. “You attacked before we escaped on the Friendly Card. How could you have known we’d all end up on the same ship?”

  “One of my best targetmasters commuted a death sentence by striking your station at the exact juncture to leave you only one option for escape.”

  Shock filtered through Zeke. His gaze fell to his outstretched legs before him as he tried to make this new information fit. His eyes absently followed the loose cartridges from the shattered haptic blaster. Harbinger’s experimental rounds.

  “You used us!”

  “And now we will master the Great Convergence and the Multiverse will be ours to conquer!”

  “You mean the six-pack out there? Is that what you call it?” He reached out and picked up one of the blaster cartridges. Looking at it, Zeke began to chuckle.

  “You dare laugh,” the uber-Tozzk growled.

  “If my friend Chuck were here,” Zeke said, “he’d crack some joke about the villain speechifying about his diabolical plan.”

&nbs
p; “Do you want to hear this or not, worm?”

  “Will it make any difference?”

  “No.”

  “So you were never after my drive at all?”

  “You, worm, were a means to an end. Your little trinket will be a valuable asset, to be sure, but it was not what they were after.”

  “Wait,” Zeke said. “They? Who’s they?”

  The uber-Tozzk roared at Zeke, hitting him with that noxious smell again.

  “No—I mean we,” the creature said, and it struck the mechanism at its side. “Wretched translator!”

  Zeke’s mind and his nose finally connected. He remembered where he had encountered that awful stench before. He closed his fist around the experimental cartridge.

  He looked up and stared the uber-Tozzk in its glowing eyes.

  “But how could you have possibly pulled that off?” he asked.

  “We knew your actions before you did. We guided you to the necessary peaks of extremity—to board the female’s vessel. To compel your combined use of both machines.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Zeke said. “You don’t strike me as smart enough for such a sophisticated program of manipulation. So, if you’re going to speechify about your diabolical plans, tell me this. Who are you working for?”

  The uber-Tozzk roared again and brought its jagged, rusty teeth within a meter of Zeke.

  “Do you want to be eaten, worm?” it snarled.

  “No,” Zeke answered as he thumbed a small release valve on the cartridge. “I just wanted to get you close enough make sure that this goes straight down your throat.”

  He tossed the venting cartridge into the uber-Tozzk’s shadowy maw, and it struck the back of its throat. Zeke jumped up and vaulted to the other side of the bulkhead for cover.

  The uber-Tozzk jerked up in surprise and shook its head violently, stumbling spasmodically, its eyes wide as a brilliant flash of light erupted from his mouth. An irreversible and inevitable reaction took hold in the creature’s innards. It shrieked in rage and agony as a blinding white flame devoured the uber-Tozzk from within. The fire burst from its mouth, like one of the Inverkethi dragons, then broke through its tough, rusty hide, first at the joints and then expanding outward until the entire creature was a huge, thrashing ball of angry fire.