by Chris Bunch
“Correct This is the Grayle, clear.”
• • •
The contact alarm gonged as Federation ships came out of N-space. Michele Strozzi heard someone swear, ignored it. “We were betrayed,” he said calmly to his admiral, Ignatieff.
“Yes, sir. Should we attempt to withdraw?”
“No,” Strozzi decided. “They’ll pursue us, and we do not need to have an enemy at our back. Eventually we’ll have to confront the Federation, to make them realize we’re right in what we’re doing. How many of them are there?”
Ignatieff asked an electronics officer and relayed the answer: “About 160, sir.”
“They outnumber us,” Strozzi said. “But the Federation’s ships are mostly manned with recruits, and ours with veterans. They’ve been subject to peacetime economics; we’ve kept our men fully trained. Admiral Ignatieff, destroy this Federation fleet. Perhaps this is our beginning, even though it was not in my projection of coming events.”
“Yes, sir.”
• • •
The Federation ships came out of N-space in battle order, a huge crescent, sweeping toward the Chitet fleet.
“As I promised you, Admiral,” Cisco said. “The Chitet. Do you wish the honors?”
Hastings took the mike his aide held out. “This is the Federation battleship Andrea Doria,“ he said. “I order all vessels not under Federation command to immediately signal blue-white-blue as a signal of surrender. You have five minutes to comply, or you will be attacked.”
“Captain,” a weapons officer reported, “one of the ships has launched missiles. I’ve activated countermeasures.”
“There’s your answer,” Cisco said.
“Very well,” Hastings said, switching to another frequency. “All ships. This is the Andrea Doria. Authentication Witnal. Attack!”
• • •
Missiles spat from the Chitet ships at the oncoming Federation fleet, and countermissiles flashed back. Explosions dotted space and quickly vanished. Other, greater blasts came as the Federation took hits, and ships pinwheeled out of formation or drove “down” or “up” in senseless directions.
The Chitet launched a second wave of missiles as they closed on the Federation.
• • •
Too many Federation weapons crews were inexperienced, but there were still veterans of the Al’ar War among them.
Aboard one Federation ship a warrant officer in his sixties pushed a lieutenant out of his way and crouched over a launch station, cursing as his prosthetic leg creaked.
“Target acquired,” he said, his voice level. “Launching — One launched — Two launched … Now, goddammit, lieutenant, watch how I’m trying to spoof ‘em. The first one goes for the incoming missile … closing … Got the son of a bitch! The second goes right on through the debris, uses the crap to mask itself against their countermeasures — don’t go to autopilot but keep the controls and you ride it right on into the …”
• • •
The Federation missile smashed into the bow of the Udayana, into its electronics bays, and explosions tore at the battlecruiser, ripping the bridge decking three floors above like an ancient tin can.
Michele Strozzi was sent spinning into a control panel, blood spattering the screens beside him. He sprawled motionless for an instant, then stumbled to his feet. He saw Admiral Ignatieff’s head lying next to him, looked for his body, saw nothing.
An aide was beside him, arm around his shoulders. “Sir, lie down,” she shouted.
He looked at her, opened his mouth to say something reassuring, inspiring. Blood poured out, drenching her tunic, and his eyes went dull and he went down limply.
The aide knelt, keening in loss, and another missile smashed directly into the bridge. The Udayana exploded in a long sheet of flame.
• • •
The Federation forces swept forward, the ships on the ends of the formation following orders, trying to bend the vast C around the Chitet to encircle the fleet. But the center of their pattern was already broken, and the battle center was a swirling catfight.
“All Federation ships,” someone — no one ever admitted to the command — ordered, “break formation and choose your own targets. I say again, go for their throats!”
• • •
The Grayle left N-space for Armageddon. Wolfe gaped at the madness, keyed his com.
“Nyarlot, Nyarlot, this is the One Who Fights From Shadows. There’s some kind of battle going on here.”
“Who is fighting?”
Wolfe took a moment to examine his screens, calm himself. “It appears to be a Federation fleet … I don’t know who they’re against — maybe Chitet? Maybe civil war?”
“What should we do, One Who Fights From Shadows?”
“I don’t know,” Wolfe said.
“Whose enemy are they?” Cerigo said. “Should we stand aside? Will they leave us alone, let us fight our own battle, fight the battle for them as well? Can we explain in time, and would they believe us? Would they join us? We stand by for your will.”
Joshua took a deep breath, gave an order.
• • •
On the bridge of the Andrea Doria, the ship’s executive officer glanced at a master screen and screamed in utter horror, seeing something out of a nightmare vanished long years before.
• • •
The Al’ar ships came from nowhere, sweeping forward in a grasping hand formation, a phalanx of corpse-white death.
It seemed to some watchers they came slowly, instead of at their light-second-devouring real speed.
At their head was a monstrous winged shark, scimitar-shaped, beyond any memory of the Al’ar terrors. It was flanked by the robot ships, flying in fours, two abreast, two slightly behind the first pair, as the Al’ar held their grasping organs in combat stance.
Shipskins bulged, split, and birthed slender missiles that trembled once and homed in on their targets. Some Federation or Chitet ships had time for countermissile launches, but too many didn’t see the doom from nowhere.
The Al’ar formation lifted “above” the spinning pandemonium, swept past, reversed course, and came back in a second attack.
A Chitet frigate spat four missiles at the Nyarlot; five countermissiles launched and closed on the missiles.
There were three explosions, then a fourth, larger one on one of the Nyarlot’s fighting pods.
Guardians died, and the ships they controlled veered away from the fight, uncontrolled.
Wolfe felt their deaths and flinched. He saw the out-of-control ships and reached for them, as he’d once taken and crushed a missile. The ships were his. Wolfe didn’t notice that the ships broke formation and regrouped — not as the two-two they’d attacked in, but as five fingers, four ships almost parallel, the fifth guarding the rear, human fingers reaching for human throats.
He sent them into the madness, controlling them as they fired their missiles. Federation and Chitet ships were there, past, gone. He came back, dimly aware of the Nyarlot somewhere behind, volleying its own killers toward the human ships.
A ship he knew, a ship he’d been aboard, was close to “him,” but he veered his fighting formation away, away from the Andrea Doria.
Wolfe’s face had a tight, skull-like grin.
• • •
“Whiskey element, engage Chitet vessels at 320-12,” Hastings ordered. “Hotel, please respond to this station. I say again, Hotel, respond if you are still capable. Quebec, regather your elements.” He was as calm as if he were on a peacetime exercise, or moving models on a map.
Cisco stood beside him, trying to stay out of the way, trying to make sense of the madness that englobed them.
Then there was something else on the bridge. It was an Al’ar, an Al’ar nearly fifteen feet high.
Someone shrieked, and a blaster smashed through the Al’ar and blew a hole in the deck above the apparition. The Al’ar stepped forward, and its grasping organ reached. Cisco shrank back, but the organ came on, c
ame on.
His hand fumbled in a pocket, came out with a gray stone, the Lumina he’d taken from Joshua Wolfe, and brandished it like a talisman. The Al’ar brushed it aside, and it smashed to the deck and shattered.
The alien changed, and for an instant Cisco saw Joshua Wolfe reaching for him. Then the grasping organ touched Cisco’s chest, and he screamed, flung back as if smashed by a blaster bolt.
The Al’ar vanished.
Hastings had time enough to manage, “What in Mithra’s holy name was …” Then three missiles hit the Andrea Doria, and it broke in half. The rear half exploded, the forward section spun away from the battle, into an orbit without end, vanishing into emptiness.
• • •
Then there were fewer ships and fewer still as Chitet ships broke and ran for hyperspace, and Federation ships went after them, or fled on their own. There were no more than a dozen of Man’s ships left in that outer darkness.
“End contact,” Cerigo commanded, and Wolfe obeyed, pulling his “fingers” back, away. He sat on the bridge of the Grayle, panting as if he’d fought a tournament.
“The way is clear,” Cerigo said.
“Yes,” Joshua agreed. “Slave all ships to mine. Now we must approach our real enemy.”
• • •
The Grayle emerged in the depths of what had been the Al’ar Worlds. Joshua felt redness, death, change, all around him, and his body burned, as if too close to an all-surrounding fire. The stars were dim, the planets indistinct, their shapes blurred, red around them, consuming them, changing them into itself.
The Nyarlot and the robot-ships were there.
Joshua heard hisses of rage from the Guardians aboard the Nyarlot as they sensed their ancient enemy.
No commands were given, none were necessary, and the ships spat heavy missiles at the entity, at what should have been empty space, but Wolfe saw it as red-speckled, pulsing like a diseased organ.
Nuclear fires blossomed, died.
Joshua’s burning pain ebbed, returned more strongly, ebbed once more.
He saw, aboard the Nyarlot, a fighting pod, as Al’ar flesh smoked, curled, and blackened, and Guardians fell, dying, dead.
A small sun was born in nothingness as the Al’ar sun-ray activated, and fire ravened at the alien. Joshua felt it shrink, writhe.
The sunray burnt itself out, and the alien gathered its force, its power.
Suddenly the Nyarlot’s drive went to full power, and it drove away from the Grayle.
“Die well, One Who Fights From Shadows,” came Cerigo’s last broadcast. “Die as we die. Die as an Al’ar.”
The Nyarlot’s engines, fuel, and missiles exploded as one. Flame seared at Wolfe’s eyes, and his screens blanked for a moment. He felt the Guardians, the last of the Al’ar, leave this spacetime.
“May you be on The Crossing,” he said without realizing it. The pain was gone momentarily, and he felt the invader recoil. He took the deaths of the Guardians and threw them at the “virus” as he’d once hurled Taen’s death at his murderer to slay him.
The Lumina floating behind him was a flare of solid white, starlike, flaming hot.
Now he saw the invader not as the “red virus,” but, in flashes, as the Al’ar might have, great writhing fanged crawlers, worms, the monstrous worms that had forced the ground creatures who became the Al’ar from their burrows to the surface and then to the stars.
The worms became the serpent of Midgard, gnawing at Yggdrasil for an instant. But Wolfe’s “eyes” went beyond, saw the bits that composed the “virus,” reached below the molecular, the atomic levels, and felt the resonance of its ultimate bits.
He allowed the resonance for an instant, absorbed it, then forbade it.
The alien strings/not-strings hummed down into silence, and there was a vortex of nothingness, absolute nothing, not matter, not energy, not antimatter, at the core of the invader, spreading, eating, a not-cancer.
Far away, Joshua felt the rift in space, then was standing in the huge cavern, hearing the dripping of liquid from its walls, and the monstrous stone door, carved with strange symbols, was in front of him.
The door to the universe the invader had come from yawned open. Behind him, coming toward him, he felt the invader, trying to flee, trying to return to its own place, the universe it had created that became itself.
Wolfe stretched out a hand, and the door boomed shut, and the sound of the booming echoed through creation. He reached up, pulled rock from the ceiling, and it cascaded down with a rumble, burying the passage to the door that his mind had created from a different reality, sealing the rift between universes.
The “virus,” the invader, was around him, and he felt it, had it cupped in his hands. He considered it coldly, then denied it permission to exist.
A soundless scream came, like the tearing of dimensions, and the invader was gone.
Joshua Wolfe hung in space. He was enormous, he was subatomic. He felt the rhythm around him, normal, strange, warm, cold, dark, light.
Stars were above, below, next to him. He studied them for a long time. Some he knew, others were strange. Far in the distance was a familiar yellow star. He approached it, saw its nine worlds. He leaned over one, blue, green, and white, and knew it for his birthplace.
Wolfe stretched out a hand to touch Earth.
His nose tickled.
Joshua Wolfe was on the bridge of the Grayle. Behind him, the Lumina rotated, sending its comfortable, familiar colors around the control room. Wolfe thought of a ceiling, of an artist. His nose still tickled.
He scratched it.
Then he burst into laughter, great, booming waves of total amusement.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Grayle orbited a system that had lived and died long before Man, a system without a name, only a number. Its planets had been devoured when the sun went nova, and now there was nothing but the dying star and a tiny starship.
Wolfe relaxed in a chair, gazing at the screen in front of him. He poured the last of the bottle of Hubert Dayton he’d husbanded in the ship’s safe for years, savored its burn, tasted the grapes of Gascony, remembered a winding road, a girl’s laughter, the acrid smell of woodsmoke as the pruned vines burned, a cold wind coming down from the massif, a storm minutes behind, and the welcome flicker of the fire in the tiny cottage ahead.
“A long time ago,” he said, lifting the snifter in a toast. “Quite a run,” he said. “They gave me quite a run indeed.”
A Une from the long-dead poet came:
“In my end is my beginning.”
He said the words aloud in Terran, then again in Al’ar. Something that might have been a smile came and went on his lips. He drained the snifter.
Wolfe stood. He gave a series of coordinates.
“Understood,” the Grayle said. “Awaiting your command.”
The flames of the red giant reached for him, welcoming. “Go.” The ship’s drive hummed to life.
He crossed his arms across his chest, brought them slowly out, palm up, as his breathing slowed. The Great Lumina roared life, incandescent as never before. The bits of matter that had been Joshua Wolfe stilled, were motionless.
Joshua Wolfe’s corpse slid to the deck. The slight smile still remained on his lips.
The Grayle, at full drive, plunged into the heart of the dying sun.
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Text Copyright © 1997 by Chris Bunch
All rights reserved.
Published in association with Athans & Associates Creative Consulting
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-5350-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-5350-9