"Shortwave?" Jophiel asked. "You mean high-frequency?"
"No, Sir," Klik'rr said. "Shortwave. As in eleven meters."
A tingle rippled through Jophiel's feathers. She lowered her voice, even though they were still inside her ship.
"From what direction?"
Klik'rr tapped his command console and displayed the star charts they'd documented so far on one of flatscreens which lined the bridge.
"It appears to be coming from just on the other side of this red giant, Sir," Klik'rr said.
A sun…
Solar activity…
Could be used to as a natural amplifier for eleven meter frequencies, and nobody, not even a civilian ship, would be looking for a broadcast that low in the frequency bands because nobody used such primitive broadcast technology anymore…
"All stop," Jophiel said.
"All stop," Klik'rr called down into the engine room.
The bones of the ship gave a low, moaning shudder at the sudden cessation of their subspace engines. Stopping a command carrier was no easy matter, and it continued to hurtle towards the red giant which was their only cover even though the Eternal Light no longer ran under power.
"Order the crew to cease all radio communications within the ship," Jophiel said. "I don’t care if it's a personal music player. Tell them to turn it off and use the analog system."
"Yes, Sir," Klik'rr said.
Jophiel watched the flatscreen for hints of what was broadcasting that signal. It was unlikely a casual enemy scan would pick up the weak signal they used within the ship, but with so little radio wave distortion caused by the stars which would have surrounded them had they been inside the galaxy proper, it was not worth the risk. The same factors which had enabled them to pick an eleven meter signal out of the solar noise meant their internal signals might be picked up as well.
"What's on the other side of this red giant?" Jophiel asked.
"We sent out a probe," Klik'rr said. "There is a small black hole in the Magellenic cloud between this red giant and the next star."
"Any planets?"
"None," Klik'rr said. "Not even an asteroid."
"How close did the probe get?"
"Not very close," Klik'rr said. "With little prospect of resupply, I did not wish to sacrifice a probe."
"Send it again," Jophiel said. " Have it make a closer loop to the black hole, and then return for manual download. -If- it doesn't get caught up in the event horizon."
"Right away, Sir," Klik'rr said.
They waited while the probe was launched, and then twiddled their thumbs, ate lunch, and did all the usual things sentient creatures did to pass the time when pulling duty on a boring deep space mission. At last the analog wall-speaker informed her the deep space probe had returned. She went up to the war room to brief Klik'rr and her other officers who had remained loyal to her after she had fled the Eternal Palace.
She pointed to a peculiar object the probe had photographed orbiting just outside of the event horizon.
"What is that?" Jophiel asked. The image was grainy, but the cluster of objects which ringed the event horizon like a string of beads was most definitely manmade … and massive.
"We ran it through a database of all known technologies," Klik'rr said. He tapped his hard armored green finger on the tabletop. "Sir? What this is couldn't possibly exist."
"What do you believe it to be?" Jophiel said.
"I … er…" Klik'rr stammered. "I took the liberty of summoning one of our stellar engineers. He dabbles in theoretical physics as a hobby."
Her second-in-command pressed the call button. A moment later, in hop-walked a small, thin Delphinium man wearing the bars of a master-sergeant. There was no doubt in her mind the man worked in the engine room as his coveralls were crumpled and streaked with grease, but he had the air about him of a scientist, despite his un-scientific pursuits..
"Sir," he saluted. "Master-Sergeant Kaku'el reporting for duty, sir."
Jophiel saluted him back. "At ease, Master-Sergeant. Major Klik'rr tells me you have a theory about what this thing is?"
The Delphinium's frog-like face lit up with a cheerful grin. "It's a wormhole bridge!"
"A wormhole bridge?" Jophiel stared at the blurry image on the screen, wracking her brains to dig out tidbits of science she'd never given a second thought since the day she'd graduated from the youth training academy. "I thought M-Theory was discredited?"
"Discredited?" Kaku'el said. "No. Not discredited. For some reason, right after the Emperor disappeared, all funding for M-Theory research was cut off and the scientists reassigned to other projects. My grandfather was one of those scientists, which is why I'm so familiar with it."
Jophiel pointed at the screen. "So tell me what this is?"
Master-Sergeant Kaku'el pulled up an image onto the small holographic projector in the center of the conference table. It contained a model of two funnels with a bridge between them.
"This is the event horizon in this universe," Kaku'el said. "We know there are more than four dimension, though how many, exactly, is still the subject of much debate. We also know there are alternate universes, but according to the Emperor, we are cut off from those universes because it is the will of She-who-is. If, even for a moment, a black hole here can be induced to make contact with a black hole in an alternate universe, the sub-atomic particles which touch will form super-strings which remain attached. Those strings can be spun to make a natural tunnel between the two which, if it can be stabilized, can be used as a bridge to pass objects back and forth between the two universes."
Jophiel tapped her finger on her lip.
"Kind of like what the Emperor does when he fades out in one place and reappears in another?"
"Only the Emperor does that on what we hypothesize is the tenth dimension of this universe," Kaku'el said. "But this bridge. It is likely connected someplace else entirely."
"Why make contact with an alternate universe?" Jophiel asked.
"Why not?" Master-Sergeant Kaku'el asked. "It would be little different than traveling from planet to planet, only in an alternate universe, who knows what structures have arisen?"
"Theorizing it was possible to build such a bridge," Jophiel asked. "How much would you say it would cost to fund such a project?"
"Based on how much we were spending just before Lucifer cut off funding," Kaku'el said. "More than the budgets of all four branches of the military combined. That was the excuse Lucifer used when he asked us to direct our scientific curiosity elsewhere."
A trill of knowing rippled through Jophiel's feathers.
"And how would such a bridge be opened?" Jophiel asked.
"In layperson's terms?" Kaku'el said.
"In layperson's terms," Jophiel said.
"Well," Kaku'el said. "Picture that all sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of tiny strings which correspond to musical notes. The universe is essentially nothing but a symphony of vibrating strings. As a string moves in time, it can warp the fabric of space around it to produce black holes, wormholes, and other exotic phenomenon which we only peripherally understand."
Jophiel remembered the small, black book the Emperor had given her; the one she had tucked into Uriel's needle when she'd sent him away.
"A song?"
Kaku'el's broad mouth curved up into a grin.
"Yes, Sir," Kaku'el said. "That is how we visualize it. Order is brought to chaos by the singing of a song."
Song of Ki. The Song of Creation. According to Uriel's black book, it claimed the mother-goddess of She-who-is had sung He-who's-not into creation, and that She-who-is had then used that primordial soup to shape the universe.
"And what if you wanted to uncreate something?" Jophiel asked.
Kaku'el frowned.
"I've never really considered such a theory," Kaku'el said. The frog-man's brow furrowed in thought, as if he was running mathematical calculations in his head. "But yes, if one set of strings vibrating i
n the right order can cause stellar bodies to coalesce, then yes, if that song was sung disharmoniously, I do believe the same principles would govern it. You could rattle the strings apart rather than encourage them to join."
Jophiel gave him a polite nod, and then ordered him to wait outside. She turned to Klik'rr.
"We have to get in closer to that object."
"We can't put you at risk, Sir," Klik'rr said. "You are the Supreme Commander-General."
Jophiel gave him a coy smirk.
"I am the lowest ranking person on this ship," Jophiel said. "E-fuzzy, not even a Private Second Class. It will be me who goes on this mission, a pilot, and that clever young flight engineer."
"I insist we send two men to guard you," Klik'rr said.
"From who?" Jophiel said. "There isn't anyone out here."
A half hour later, their shuttle was off, sling-shotting around the red giant so they could use its gravitational field to burn a minimal amount of fuel, lessening the chances they'd be detected. Someone was there, or otherwise they wouldn't have picked up a radio signal despite the black hole which, as far as black holes went, was small and well-behaved.
They coasted in amongst the Magellan cloud which floated along the edge of the event horizon feeding it, a baby as far as black holes were concerned, merely twenty kilometers wide. At last they came to the first of the objects, a large, pyramidal apparatus which glowed with a putrid green light.
"How does it work?" Jophiel asked.
"It would take a massive power source to stabilize a black hole," Kaku'el said. "Even a small one such as this." He pointed to what appeared to be the antimatter induction port of an FTL drive. "That appears to be some sort of feedback loop. Once you start this thing, the black hole will organize the stellar dust it feeds upon to progress it inward in a more orderly fashion, enabling this pyramid to capture some of that matter and use it to fuel the stabilization field, which in turn keeps stabilizing the black hole so even more matter will continue to feed it."
"So it's some kind of self-perpetuating machine?" Jophiel asked.
"Apparently," Kaku'el said. "But I'd love to see it in action."
They fired off their inertial dampeners to push the shuttle towards the next object in the line rather than risk firing the engine and being detected by the bridge-builder's instruments. The next object was the same, as the next one, as the next one, and the next several objects after that. They had explored the twelfth one when the pilot alerted them they were not alone.
"Sir," the pilot said. "You're not going to believe this."
"Company?"
"Lots of company, Sir," the pilot said. He pointed to a cluster of dots sitting just outside the event horizon, perhaps eight or nine pyramids beyond where they were now. "Look at them all! I've never seen so many Sata'anic ships in a single place. It's an armada!"
"How many?"
"At least a hundred, Sir," the pilot said. "Some of them are battle cruisers, but most of them are merchant vessels, the kind Shay'tan uses to ferry tribute back into the Hades cluster."
"We had intelligence about missing ships," Jophiel said. "We suspected Shay'tan had sent an annexation fleet to wherever Earth is, but what is it doing all the way out here? This is far beyond where Mikhail's signal could have been broadcast from."
"If Shay'tan wanted to avoid detection, he might have ordered the fleet to come the long way around," the pilot suggested.
Jophiel scrutinized the grainy image of the ships. They were too far away to get a clear image without using their long-range scanners, something this armada would likely detect.
"We need to move in closer," Jophiel said. "How are we doing on power for the impulse thrusters?"
"We can get perhaps two pyramids closer," the pilot said, "but after that, it would force us to use our hyperdrives to break away from the event horizon."
"Get in as close as you safely can," Jophiel ordered.
They had moved past the first of the additional pyramids when the greenish glow of the wormhole bridge began to grow greener and shoot bolts of lightning between each pyramid in the bridge. The pilot adjusted their flight path so they would not fly into the unknown energy source. The shuttle trembled as a sensation Jophiel could only equate to how it had felt to experience uterine contractions during labor squeezed the shuttle and made it feel as though time and space distorted.
Jophiel gripped the control panel of the shuttle in terror.
Master-Sergeant Kaku'el thrummed nervously in his throat-pouch.
The pilot sent up a prayer, not to the Eternal Emperor, but to an ancient native god who most Mantoids still worshipped alongside their Emperor.
Green lightning shot out of the center of the black hole, and then it disappeared. Where, only moments before, there had been nothing but the faint stellar jets of a black hole consuming matter, now sat two ships unlike anything she had ever seen. In the middle was a third ship which was most definitely familiar.
"Well I'll be damned…" the pilot whistled.
Damnation was the least of their worries as Jophiel stared at the unmistakable shape of the Prince of Tyre.
"Lucifer's alive," Jophiel whispered.
An odd sense of relief was her first sensation, followed by a desire to kill the man all over again. 'What the hell are you up to, you sneaky bastard?'
The six ships moved to rendezvous with the Sata'anic armada.
"Look, Sir," Master-Sergeant Kaku'el said. "In the middle of the Sata'anic ships. Aren't those Tokoloshe dreadnoughts?"
All three of them visibly blanched, herself included, and she was not ashamed to admit it.
"What is Shay'tan doing consorting with the Tokoloshe?" Jophiel asked. There were not many things in the universe which Hashem and the old dragon agreed on, but containing Tokoloshe expansion was one of them.
They floated, not daring to maneuver closer or fire their engines to return to their ship, until at last the entire armada began to move away. They waited until the fleet had disappeared beyond the next red giant in the Monoceros Ring before using their impulse engines to get as far away from the event horizon as they could. The moment they got within line-of-sight with the Eternal Light, Jophiel dared use a high-frequency radio channel to send a data burst to Major Klik'rr ordering him to analyze the data on the fleet they had seen, including the two unknown ships.
Klik'rr met her in the launch bay, his hard outer wings flared as his inner gossamer wings hummed with nervous energy.
"What were they?" Jophiel asked.
"You're not going to believe this, Sir!" Klik'rr said.
"What were they?"
Klik'rr shoved his portable flatscreen under her nose. Jophiel stared at a historical registry of ancient ships and species. The ships weren't identical, for the ones they'd see were far more advanced in technology, but the organically-inspired architecture was unmistakable.
"Nephilim," Jophiel said.
"I thought they were extinct?" Master-Sergeant Kaku'el said.
Jophiel snorted.
"Sata'anic propaganda," Jophiel said. "Shay'tan exterminated them right around the time of the destruction of Nibiru, but most of their planets evacuated and disappeared. We've found no sign of them before today, but there have been stories out in the uncharted territories about explorers having run-ins with what they called 'transdimensional aliens.' Shay'tan swears he ran them out of the galaxy, but with so many unexplored planets, Hashem was always skeptical that some might remain."
"Maybe it wasn't where they disappeared to," Master-Sergeant Kaku'el said, "but what universe? If they figured out how to move between the dimensions, even Shay'tan would have a hard time detecting them."
Jophiel nodded. In light of the wormhole bridge, this theory made sense, but she was out of her scientific league. It was time to notify the one man in the universe who was capable of figuring it all out.
"Ready my needle," Jophiel said. "Download everything we've got onto a database, along with our exact position. It's ti
me to inform the Emperor."
Major Klikrrr's incessant wing-hum grew even louder.
"We can't, Sir."
"Why?"
"About the time that wormhole bridge opened," Klik'rr said. "Your needle became agitated, and then it disappeared. The needle-handler tried to command it to stop, but it circumvented the control collar and hasn't answered a signal since."
"Where did it go?" Jophiel asked.
"It leaped between dimensions," Klik'rr said. He tilted his heart-shaped green head. "Sir. This far from all known bases and signal amplifiers, we have no way to reach the Eternal Emperor."
Jophiel cursed, something she never did.
"What do we do now, Sir?" Klik'rr said.
Jophiel pulled up a map of the Monoceros Ring and pointed to the next red giant on the chain.
"We follow that armada," Jophiel said.
"But they'll see us!" Klik'rr said.
Jophiel laughed.
"Not if we stay one solar system back from them at all times and hide in the cover of each sun," Jophiel said. "I learned a thing or two about stalking prey from Colonel Mannuki'ili. It's time to go hunting, boys!"
She turned to the pilot. "You. As soon as you can refuel that thing, you're going back out. You'll be point man. Creep up behind that armada and see what you can find out."
She turned to Klik'rr.
"Set up a line of shuttles behind him. As long as we use direct-beamed transmissions relayed line-of-sight from shuttle-to-shuttle, they shouldn't pick up we're here. Small ships as point-men will lessen the chance of the lizards looking in the rear-view mirror and noticing they've got an Alliance command carrier tailing them, and it will give us time to bug out of here if they do spot us."
"Yes, Sir," the pilot and Klik'rr said.
She went back to her war room and analyzed the data until, several days later, they got a relayed transmission from the pilot who was the front-man.
"Sir?" the pilot said.
"What?"
"Lucifer's ship and the two Nephilim vessels disappeared."
"You mean they broke off from the Sata'anic armada?" Jophiel asked.
"No, Sir," the pilot said. "I relayed the actual video footage. Look for yourself."
Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 87