Then the warring fleets astern vanished, and the stars themselves were crawling slowly across the sky, their wavelengths wildly redshifted by the GEF’s fall until they, too, vanished in Night Absolute. For long moments, there was only the Gate, looming huge now, just ahead, a wall that filled half of the heavens. Then, the silvery shape blurred. Light bouncing from its sides and reflected toward the fleet was being distorted.
Distortion became blackness, an impenetrable night.
In the last instant, Dev had the impression that they were falling into a long and utterly death-black tunnel.
Linked into Gauss’s main navigation system, Kara watched as the line of three DalRiss cityships—starfish-shapes each the size of a mountain, their tapering arms curled protectively around the frail, human-built vessels tucked away in their ventral grooves—moved in perfect line-ahead formation, following the path that would take them across eighteen hundred light years in space and nearly a thousand years forward in time. The DalRiss had never developed the fine navigational control that humans employed routinely on their vessels. For that reason, human navigators, jacked into the DalRiss computers through their Naga Companions, were steering the huge cityships, following computer graphic simulations that kept them on the correct approach path. In Kara’s mind, the ordinarily invisible path had been painted as a blue-walled tunnel, with the seething flux of blue light to left and right, above and below representing the tortured space that existed within a few hundred meters of the continent-sized spinning cylinder.
Kara, like Dev, felt a heaviness unlike any she’d known before. It always hurt when comrades were killed or wounded, but Ran Ferris haunted her. Though she’d never let herself closely examine her feelings for him—company COs, she was convinced, didn’t have time for romantic liaisons—she knew now that she loved him, and his loss… no, the uncertainty, the not knowing whether she’d lost him forever or not… was tearing her apart.
Damn the war. Her thoughts were a hard, staccato litany. Damn the military. Damn what we’ve done to ourselves. Burning first and foremost in her mind now was what striderjacks called the JonahSim, the wicked bit of self-torture common to most military personnel who’d survived when those around them, comrades and subordinates and friends, had died. She’d already been terribly conscious of the deaths of Vasily Lechenko at Kasei and of Phil Dolan at Nova Aquila, the brain death of Miles Pritchard and the reduction of Willis Daniels to a ghost at Core D9837. And now, Ran was a ghost too. She still couldn’t get the image of his Falcon exploding in front of her out of her mind.
Something bad happens to everyone who gets close to me, she thought. The ancient, biting cliché would have made her laugh, except that right now that was precisely the way she felt. She recognized the tired, grating tone of self-pity, but she was no longer able to keep it safely stowed and locked down.
They’d offered her the chance to con the cityship Shralghal, and she’d turned it down. Turned it down. That was an honor that most striderjacks would have been fighting for, the chance to teleoperate a living mountain through the eye of a needle… and call it flying.
She’d agreed instead to serve as backup pilot, which was why she was jacked into the navigational system now, monitoring the Shralghal’s passage of the Stargate path. If Senior Captain Carol Latimer, who was teleconning from the Gauss’s bridge, dropped the ball, Kara would be able to recover and keep them going. Latimer was good, though, and there was little for Kara to do but sit and think. In fact, she was finding that she had entirely too much time for thought. It might have been better if she’d accepted the assignment. Guiding a mountain through a tunnel just barely wide enough to enclose it would have given her something constructive to do.
Then the tunnel opened ahead, a blackness swallowing the blue as Gauss plunged through the interface between the more or less sane universe and something, someplace very other.
Down the rabbit hole, Kara thought… an expression she’d heard somewhere when she was a child but couldn’t remember where. She knew she associated the phrase, though, with a place of magical wonder. Wonderland? Yes, that was it. Alice in Wonderland.…
What would she find at the bottom of this rabbit hole?
A purely spacelike translation, like the one the Phantoms had employed on their raid to the Galactic Core, was over almost at once, for the approach path involved traveling almost directly toward the vast, silvery wall of the rotating cylinder. A timelike path, however, ran almost parallel to the cylinder, and the passage seemed to take much longer. Once the space-time tunnel opened, however, passage was quick… the blink of an eye, a wrenching in the gut… and then the three DalRiss city ships were rising out from the Stargate, still traveling in perfect line-ahead formation.
No… not the Stargate; a stargate. The star-clouded skies encircling this cylinder were quite different from those around Nova Aquila, or New America, for that matter. And there were other… differences.
And similarities as well. The star system they’d emerged in seemed to be the twin of Nova Aquila, a close-set pair of fiercely burning white dwarfs, rotating about one another with a period of several days. At the system’s gravitational center, the stargate whirled silently, as streams of starstuff spiraled around and around, curving inward from the suns to nearly touch the two ends of the gate, and vanish.
But beyond the gate and the circling, shrunken stars…
“What are we seeing?” Vic said over the net, his voice tight.
“I can’t really see,” Carol Latimer said. “It’s like… like I can’t get my eyes to focus on it. They just slide right off.”
Kara was having the same difficulty. There was something out there, something encircling both stars, but the structure was so inconceivably vast and so strangely twisted, she was having trouble making it out. Much of what humans see, she realized, is based on what they know. When faced with things beyond their experience, it can take time to learn how to see them.
“I think,” she said carefully, “we’re seeing something like a Dyson sphere, but I think it’s not a solid. It looks from here like some kind of plasma trapped inside a deliberately shaped magnetic Held.”
As they continued scanning the surrounding volume of space, it became clear that the double star of the Gr’tak had been completely enclosed by a shell nearly four light minutes across—a sphere with a diameter of just under half an astronomical unit. Some billions of objects, most just a few tens of kilometers across, served as nodes for the incredibly complex crisscrossing of tubes of pale light.
In a way, it looked like an interlocking set of girders, interlocked at odd angles and made not of steel, but of a planet’s polar aurorae. In places, the light looked solid; in others, it was a tenuous haze. A magnified view of any of those “girders” showed that they were composed of countless motes, specks of reflected light moving in carefully channeled seas of energy. The nodes might once have been planetoids, but they’d been completely remade by nanotechnology or something more magical still, their surfaces gleaming like pure silver, sculpted into bizarre arrays of towers, spines, and convoluted shapes that defied architectural definition.
The beams of plasma or energy that connected the nodes created the impression of a gossamer-fine webwork, a spiderweb, perhaps, built of purest light. The motes traveling within those beams appeared to be solid, however; they might have been myriad ships. More likely, they were habitats of some sort, a few scores or hundreds of meters across. Perhaps they were Web kickers, the inhabitants of this place.
“Labyrinthulids,” Daren said over the comnet. His mental voice cracked. “God… labyrinthulids!”
“What are you talking about?” Kara asked her brother.
“It’s a form of simple life,” Taki explained. “Kingdom Protoctista on Earth, but there are analogous kingdoms and phyla on other worlds too.” Taki uploaded a file, which Kara picked up and downloaded, quickly skimming through the information, which appeared to be part of a report of xenobiological studies made on
Dante. The file included microscopic images and sims of Terran labyrinthulids, as well as scans from a teleoperated nanoprobe of a portion of the network embedded in a Dantean commune’s brain.
Kara could see at a glance the similarities between the microscopic net amoeba and the far vaster network of plasma conduits connecting the myriad points of light surrounding the double star. She assumed that similarity to be a coincidence of form and function, but the mimicry was astonishing, though the larger, artificially constructed network was by far more rigid and geometrically crafted than the organic one.
She also realized that she was seeing Web engineering here, not human. The overall appearance, of a titanic spiderweb, was also coincidence, but the wholesale conversion of an entire solar system into some kind of complex mechanism looked more like the mark of a machine intelligence than of humans.
“Does this… does this mean the Web won?” Kara asked, feeling bleak. “After a thousand years… damn! I’d have thought humanity would have spread out this far by now. If they didn’t—”
“Enough of that,” Dev said sharply. “Even if the Web dominates the entire Galaxy now, remember that this is only one possible future. That’s why we’re here, to learn what we need to do to change things.”
“Heads up, everybody,” Karyu’s weapons officer announced over the general tactical net. “I’ve got multiple incoming. Kuso! They’re moving in gokking damned fast!”
Through her link, Kara saw the dazzling gleam of a million lasers shining from the inside surface of the shell surrounding star and stargate, with more winking on every second. Gauss’s sensor AI put the laser spectra analysis onto a pulldown window and graphed out the absorption and emission lines and their meaning.
The incoming were tiny things, massing no more than a few grams apiece, but driven by that barrage of laser light, they were accelerating at nearly five hundred Gs. They had begun accelerating within seconds of the GEF’s emergence from the gate. It would have taken a couple of minutes for the light announcing their arrival to reach that encircling shell, and two minutes more for the laser light of the Web’s response to return. Kara checked her inner time sense. Somehow, knowing the Web, she was not surprised to see that they didn’t deliberate on their course of action for more than a very few seconds.
Some of the lasers were playing across the surfaces of the three DalRiss cityships, carrying joules enough to damage their tough hides. “Change course!” Dev cried over the link. “Change course, fast!”
Kara saw what he was getting at. With a four-minute time lag from the stargate to the shell and back, the Web gunners would be firing at images seen a full two minutes earlier, aiming at where the cityships were going to be by the time the laser fire made the two-minute-long trek back to the Gate. If the GEF changed course several times each minute, the distant gunners would not be able to accurately predict where their targets were going to be.
The order had scarcely been given, however, when a sudden white flash erupted from the dark, knobbled flank of the Gharesthghal, the cityship carrying the cruiser Independence. Within the next five seconds, dozens of gouts of white light flared from Shrenghal, Gharesthghal, and Shralghal as the laser-wisps smashed home.
Driven to near-light velocity, the laser-launched gossamers were smashing into the DalRiss vessels’ thick hides, causing terrible damage with each strike. Even as the city-ships changed course and began speeding up, the gossamers continued to streak home with deadly accuracy. Obviously, the gossamers themselves, though they massed only a few grams, had sensors and intelligence enough to correct their course en route, probably by tacking on the intense magnetic fields surrounding both stars and stargate.
In the near distance, visible as sinister silhouettes against the light-fog backdrop of the system, a half dozen bodies, roughly spherical, as massive as fair-sized moons, were moving now toward the intruders.
There could be no doubt at all that these were some sort of sentry squadron, posted to deal with unwanted or unidentified visitors arriving through the gate.
“Head back for the stargate!” Vic called. “If we stay here, they’re going to take us apart!”
“What course?” Rear Admiral Barnes replied from Karyu. “We’re not set for the next jump!”
The next jump was supposed to be into the future… but how far was to have been determined by what they found at Doval-Tovan. A fallback set of coordinates had been uploaded to the DalRiss that would—theoretically at least—have returned them to Nova Aquila at about the time they’d left… but that would bring them out in the middle of the battle between the Imperial squadron and the remnants of the Unified Fleet.
“We’ve got to go back,” Vic called. “We either go back and face the Imperials, or we stay here and get fried.”
“It’s either that,” Gauss’s skipper added, “or we make a blind jump.”
“That’s no good,” Dev said. “We’d be stranded. You’re right, Vic. We have to return. Initiate the fallback path coordinates.”
Ponderously, the three cityships, guided by their tiny human charges, swung about onto a new course, both spacelike and timelike, descending back into the rippling blue folds of twisted space and time in which the stargate nested. Their maneuvers had eluded incoming laser beams entirely, but the living gossamers continued to pursue them, flickering in from astern to detonate on the living DalRiss ships with grim and terrible effect.
Last in the line-of-three was Gharesthghal, and she was taking the heaviest volume of fire.
“I can’t hold her!” Captain Hernandez, skipper of the Independence, called out on the tactical net. “I can’t hold her!” Kara wondered what he meant… then decided he was referring to the cumbersome cityship Gharesthghal, which he was trying to con from the cruiser’s bridge. The vessel was hard hit, rolling under the multiple impacts of the laser-gossamers. “I’m going to cut loose with the Indie and see if I can distract them!”
“Negative!” Vic ordered. “Jorge, stay in line!”
But the two-kilometer-wide mountain that was Gharesthghal was drifting off high and to starboard now, a huge and savagely wounded beast, falling out of control, bleeding gold and silver sparks from a dozen rips in its side. As Kara watched with mounting horror, the ship’s arms unfolded from the long and wedge-pointed shape they carried. In the next moment, the cruiser Independence was drifting free of the larger carrier, swinging her prow around to stay clear of the intensifying fields of warped space near the gate and firing her main drives in a shaft of dazzling, blue-white light.
“Admiral Barnes!” Dev called. “Vic! Link up! We can’t let ourselves be separated!”
Kara was aware now of a dull, far-off roar, like ocean surf, and could feel the trembling vibration as Shralghal plowed into… what? It was as though they were smashing through thickening clouds of dust and gas, but the likeliest explanation she could imagine was that space itself was growing thick, somehow, here a few hundred meters from the whirling stargate cylinder. Something was terribly wrong. They’d slipped clear of the safe channel leading on their programmed course.
Kara didn’t know if it was even possible to get back on course once they’d slipped off. No one did. No one had ever tried this before.
Despite the worsening vibration, Shralghal nudged up close behind the Shrenghal. Long, silvery filaments extruded themselves from Shralghal’s forward-center mound, penetrating the arms of the cityship ahead. It looked comically like the extrusion of a Companion’s filaments from the head of a human seeking a direct interface… and in point of fact that was almost literally what was happening. DalRiss city-ships were grown about massive cores taken from domesticated planetary Nagas; the Naga cores served as enormous, organic computers, as well as portable nanomanufactories that could pattern and grow nearly anything imaginable, given sufficient raw materials.
The filaments took hold, tightened up, grew shorter, welding the two mountains together. Wherever, whenever they went, they would go together.
�
�We’re off course completely,” Vic said… needlessly now, for everyone could sense the roar and shudder of the passage through unmapped and uncalculated warped space-time. She glanced aft, seeking the Independence… and caught a final glimpse of a tiny, intense star-flare of light already red-shifting and moving quickly across the sky. The cruiser appeared to be accelerating at thousands of Gs—though it was actually Shralghal, Kara realized, that was accelerating forward in time. Suddenly, something that might have been a final, nova-hot eruption of energy where the Independence was fighting strobed in ruby-brilliance and winked out… but she couldn’t be sure.
Then, they were down the rabbit hole, plunging through night…
Chapter 22
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
—Clarke’s Third Law
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
science and techfantasy writer
late twentieth century C.E.
… and emerging once more, this time into unspeakable glory.
For long seconds, no one aboard either Gauss or Karyu spoke. Wonder caught hold of brain and voice—even the mental voice of Companion links—and enforced an awe-stricken silence.
They floated several tens of thousands of light years above and beyond the plane of the Galaxy, of a galaxy, rather, for there was no way to be certain that this blue and dusty whirlpool of light was the familiar Milky Way of Earth’s sun, not from this vantage point. Shralghal and Shrenghal hung suspended well above the great spiral’s plane, looking down on a vast and infinitely detailed swirl of dust and gas and stars. Looming huge opposite that stellar whirlpool was a second spiral, larger and more tightly wound, cocked at a different angle from the first and very nearly touching it. She could see the distortions in the outer spiral arms of both galaxies, where mutual gravitation had begun distorting the perfection of their respective shapes. With a jolt, Kara realized that there was nothing like that second galaxy in the skies she knew, nor were the two tiny attendants of the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, in evidence; they must have covered an incredible distance in space, some hundreds of millions of light years, at least.
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