by Rupert Segar
There were five routes from the Empire to the planet Marylebone, where the Royal Fleet was attempting to defeat the guardian world of Fair Isles. Each space lane, going from portal to portal, was bustling with traffic, most of it one way. Troop carriers, supply ships, munition barges and newly launched warships headed towards the conflict. The longest route involved passing through nineteen gateways. At each transit the passing ship would be met by one or more imperial warship. Having burst out of the guardians’ blockade, the Empire’s admirals wanted to make sure they kept control of the portals in space.
The tenth gateway on the longest route, from Crandos to Marylebone, hung in orbit above a non-descript desert world called Oman. An imperial cruiser stood guard. The control room of the ship was deserted. Most functions were automated or else controlled by a dull metal box bolted on top of the control desk. The warship was commanded by three small spiders in a box of green jelly.
Although Oman was just another world full of bare rocks and sand dunes, the gateway in near geosynchronous orbit was special. It was a four-way portal. Oman was where two space lanes crossed. One route stretched from Crandos the capital world of the Empire to Marylebone and beyond. The other space lane went from the fringe of the galaxy to its core. This was why the spider controlled cruiser stood guard. The portal was a four-way node making it vulnerable to attack.
The gateway began emitting a stream of tachyons and flux ions. The spiders reacted instantly. The upgraded ion cannon at both the front and the rear began to charge. All the missile bays were opened. The spiders were ready to greet whatever came out of the portal.
The old explorer ship that emerged from the gateway barely looked like a threat at all, except possibly for the silver threads of a force field spinning around the crafts hull.
“Identify yourself,” was the command transmitted from the Imperial cruiser, which was more than three times the length of the explorer ship.
“Hi, this is the guardian vessel Ajax,” came the reply. “We demand your surrender.”
At these words, the spiders unleashed a torrent of missiles and fired both their forward facing super charged ion cannon at the former explorer ship. The screen of silver threads surrounding the small craft span faster and faster until the explorer ship was hidden behind a mirror like coating. The ion beams just bounced of the tiny ship causing the portal behind it to flare out with huge bolts of electricity. At the front of the explorer vessel the silver force field started to mould itself. The spiders detected the change just too late. Both ion cannon blew up as they were powering down. The force field mirrors had reflected back enough of the beams to destroy the big guns. There were two blackened holes in the prow of the cruiser. Integrity fields had prevented the explosion causing any more damage to the spiders’ ship. They had suffered a bloody nose but it was not a fatal body blow.
Four seconds later the first wave of missiles and inertia ingots converged on the explorer ship. The flowing mirror like force field expanded until it was ten times the size of the small craft. As the missiles hit the boundary they exploded. The inertia ingots were stopped dead. The entire field wobbled like a giant jelly. A bluish beam reached out and gathered the ingots into one spot.
“Now, would you like to surrender?” said the guardian captain over a comms link.
“Never,” came the reply from the spiders who began turning their ship around so they could use their rear facing cannon.
“OK. Bad choice. First, you can have these back.”
The blue ray holding the ingots was extinguished and all the ten kilogram blocks of metal shot backward towards the cruiser at an impossibly high velocity. Seconds later the Imperial vessel was hit amidships. The blocks were travelling at one hundredth of the speed of light and punctured the cruisers force field as if it didn’t exist. The kinetic energy of each block was comparable to that of an atom bomb. A large section of the cruiser disappeared.
“Last chance for anyone on board to surrender.”
The spiders began sending a transmission back to the Brood King using the portal as a beacon.
“Naughty, naughty,” said the captain of the explorer. “We can’t have you telling tales. Transmission blocked.”
The Imperial cruiser used it two remaining gravity engines to set a course directly for the explorer ship. 100 metres off the tiny vessel, the large warship exploded violently. The spiders had set an auto destruct device.
Once more the explorer ship was surrounded by a wobbling jelly, absorbing and re-channelled all the excessive energies.
On board the explorer ship, the captain and his crew waited for the dust and debris to clear.
“Now, that wasn’t very nice,” said Captain Martin Clarke. “Not the sort of people we like.”
“Martin, there was something strange about that vessel, said the science officer.
“What? You mean besides their death wish.”
“‘They’ didn’t have a death wish; I don’t think there was anyone on board.”
“Hey?” said Captain Clarke. “Then who tried to phone home?”
“When I scanned the vessel, there were no life signs. There was no air pressure. The cabins and control room were in partial vacuum.”
“Do you think the Empire is letting AIs run their ships?”
“We need to pass this up the line, captain. Tell the Ship.”
Chapter 23: Sun Buster
Peter rocked on his haunches as he listened to the spider talking to the Sentinel. He wrapped his arms about his knees as he tried to supress the hate and rage he felt towards the arachnid.
“You have the formulation for the signal?” asked the guttural voice.
“The good you do today will be forgotten,” said the softly spoken Sentinel.
The arachnid snapped a contact shut on the top of the coffin sized casket and there was a sound of a short circuit.
“The evil you do will live on,” said the Sentinel.
The spider reached for another contact. Peter started humming to himself
“Yes, I have processed the formulation,” said the Sentinel before the spider could punish it further. “It is an antibaryon sequence.”
“Then we can send the timed sequence to any portal and it would become a neutrino emitter,” said the head hanging below the spider’s abdomen.”
Peter did a backwards somersault rolling away from the Brood King.
“It works because a spinning black hole connects every portal pair,” said the Sentinel in a sing song voice. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. Data is amplified because in effect entropy travels backwards inside the portal. I do not think they will sing to me.”
“What about the mini-black hole my father used to send me here?”
“Any black hole that has the effect of joining two regions of space can be used to amplify the signal,” said the Sentinel.
“Yes, yes, yes,” shouted the spider’s mouthpiece, coughing up a blue liquid. “Revenge is mine. Peter, go and find another transmitter. I need to have a conversation with my father.”
Peter jumped down off the Sentinel and ambled away with a lolling gait. He spent a long time in the technical store trying to work out what the Brood King was going to do. Peter realised that the spider was now the most dangerous creature in the galaxy. Peter might have to stop the arachnid, but how? For the moment, he decided to assist the spider in its next task. Peter suspected it would be good for humanity.
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“Peter, hook up the virteron cables as well as the antibaryon sequencer. Run both now.”
The new aerial was pointed out of the open loading bay doors towards the nearby portal. Brood technology used mini-black holes to connect with any portal anywhere in the cosmos. Essentially, the Brood were parasites, leaching off the technology of other species. This was one reason why the Brood King had been angry with the Emperor when he suggested that his father had used the portals to send him to Chimera Three. Certainly the spider’s mini black hole had created th
e intergalactic link. However, it only worked because of the huge energies provided by the spinning black holes that made up the portal network.
With the Sentinel’s help both signals were fed into the portal. The Brood King was using the network like a giant radio transmitter. The virterons and sequenced antibaryons raced from portal to portal until they found the gateway on Chimera Three. The link to the Whirlpool galaxy was re-activated. The virterons allowed almost instance communication across a 23 million light year gap. The antibaryon sequence, much amplified by the portal network caused a cascade of neutrons to be emitted by the mini black hole contained in a magnetic bottle on the rain sodden world of the Brood King’s father.
The older arachnid appeared in holoform.
“Why are you bothering me? You are outcast.”
“Father I have found a new weapon that will make the Brood invincible.”
“Until you have complete control of your galaxy, we will not consider your appeal.”
“I thought you might try to ignore me, father. I will send a recording of this conversation to the other Brood Kings.”
“My child, you are being pathetic. They will not listen to a failure like you.”
“Being a failure in your eyes is better than being dead.”
“What?” said the older arachnid, suddenly less certain, began pulling some screens and monitors towards him so they appeared in the holographic view.
“What have you done, my child?”
“For the past 5 minutes, before even you deigned to speak to me, neutrinos have been flooding out of your captive black hole. They passed through the magnetic confinement and straight through the core of your planet, directly towards your sun.
What?” shouted the Old Spider.
“These particles will cause a runaway cascade of nuclear fission. Your sun will go supernova. It may have already happened but the shock wave hasn’t reached you yet.”
“You have broken every tenant of the Brood code,” screamed the older arachnid. “You are not just outcast, you are an abomination. The other Brood Kings will not deal with you.”
“I think they will, father, when I give them a simple choice. Obey me as Brood leader … or die. How many do you think will chose to perish the way you are going to die, father? You will be blasted off the surface of the planet by the flames of a supernova. Goodbye.”
“You vile, ungrateful child. You …”
The transmission ended abruptly.
“Sentinel, show me the view from the black hole.”
An image appeared and it took Peter 30 seconds to realise that the image was turning round and round. The view was from a spinning black hole, floating free in space.
“Stabilise the picture,” ordered the Brood King.
The imaged stop moving as it was replaced pixel by pixel in sections. In every direction there was a yellow and red wall of fire. It was the expanding shell of the shock wave that had destroyed his father’s planet. There were mountain sized bits of rock. There were streams of rubble flowing like rivers. On the left hand side of the picture a much smaller sun was burning intensely bright.
“Farewell, father,” said the arachnid without emotion.
Chapter 24: Raising Hope
The blonde haired couple beached their small sailing boat on the shores of the Isle of Hope. They were young, in love and reckless. Most of all they were sceptical about the stories which said Hope was haunted. Whenever, the Isle of Hope came up in conversation, most people spoke in hushed voices. Some said the island was holy ground, which was odd as the people of Fair Isles had no history of practicing religion. Others claimed that daemons roamed the rocky island. A few sailors claimed to have seen the creatures from afar while passing near Hope. They were described as goblins or gargoyles. No-one had any appetite to visit the island, no-one except the young couple.
While on Crete, the world’s biggest island, they had scoffed at what they called superstitious hokum. The callow youths had told each other that they could prove everyone wrong. They had felt brave making a pledge to each other to visit Hope. Now, they were on Hope, they did not feel so confident.
“Marcus, are you sure about this?” said the teenage girl, zipping up her jacket against the wind.
“We’ll be fine, Lara. Just keep your eyes peeled for the bogey man.”
Marcus was putting on a brave face for his girlfriend. Secretly he was nervous with all his senses alert. A small bird flew up from behind some rocks in front of the couple and both of them jumped in fright.
“Come on,” said Marcus. “Let’s get to the top and we can say we did it.”
“Let’s not and just say we did,” said Lara, holding her boyfriend by the shoulders and looking up at him with her two blue eyes wide open. “Please!”
“Come on. Lara. We can do this.”
The couple trudged up the grassy boulder strewn slopes that led towards the crater that dominated the island. Fair Isles was a water world with just one chain of islands which were all former volcanoes. Long extinct, the volcanic crater was four hundred metres above sea level. There was, by repute a passable path running all around the rim which afforded panoramic views of the island and the sea beyond. They had told all their friends that they would do one circuit at the top to prove the island was not haunted.
Marcus was beginning to sweat when they stopped and consulted the tablet map that he had downloaded. The scale was small and the details scant. There were no working satellites orbiting Fair Isles, not since, nine centuries before, when the Great Plague arrived and destroyed every AI computer. The inertial calculator on the map had limited efficiency. At the moment, according to the tablet screen, the young couple were 3 km out to sea. Marcus moved the green cross to a position correlating to roughly where they were.
“Just over the rise up ahead is a nice flat plateau that will take us to the bottom of the cinder cone,” said Marcus.
The pair walked on up the grassy slope which was decorated with the occasional small boulder. The final rise before the plateau was marked by a small cliff of granite. Directly ahead there was a pass, a crevice in the cliff face. As the couple neared the passageway through the rock face, Lara reached out and grabbed Marcus’ arm.
“I can hear children’s voices,” she said in a whisper
Marcus stopped and listened hard. He tapped his left ear and wagged a finger. Marcus had always been slightly hard of hearing.
“It must be a bird or something.”
Laura shook her head and held her hand to his lips. She listened intently.
“It’s definitely kids. I can hear them shouting at one another and laughing.”
“Let’s see,” said Marcus, creeping forwards towards the sound.
The couple entered the crevice and were walking in a ravine packed with a group of rock tors. The stone fingers were about two metres high, the same height as the two sides of the ravine. The gaps between the tors were never more than a metre and a half wide. In many places Marcus found the way too narrow for him to pass.
The children’s voices were much louder now. Even Marcus could hear the shouts and the laughter. Something flew overhead causing the couple to start. They looked up and saw a figure jump from one tor to the next. Perhaps it was a problem with their perspective but the child, if it was a child, seemed to have impossibly long arms and legs. A whoop and a shout came from just ahead. Marcus and Lara edged round the side of a tor to find a clearing among the stone fingers. There on the far side were three beings. Marcus saw them as goblins, faerie folk straight out of the children’s vid books he’s grown up with. The faeries, a boy and two girls had long hair and wore jerkins and oversized slippers. They were cavorting, laughing and pointing at one another. In Lara’s eyes they looked just like gargoyles. They had overstretched limbs and impossibly long noses. Their most alien feature was the size of their eyes.
Lara tugged at Marcus’ sleeve. She began to tiptoe back up the passageway between the tors. She beckoned him to go with her.
Marcus took one last look at the trio of sprites and followed reluctantly. At first they moved slowly and quietly but, as the distance from the three creatures increased so did their speed. Marcus and Laura were running as they approached the end of the ravine. They were just metres from the exit when a man over 2 metres tall stepped out in front of them.
“Please don’t run away,” said the alien with two large eyes widely spaced either side of a long straight nose. “We have so few visitors.”
Lara let out a stifled scream and collapsed. Marcus raised his fist and moved towards the giant man. An equally tall woman stepped out from behind a boulder and fired a stun gun at him. The last thing Marcus remembered was that she was pretty, for an alien, and she had three breasts.
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Marcus woke feeling slightly groggy. Through half closed eyes he could see he was sat on what felt like a camping chair, except it was too wide and too deep to be comfortable.
“Please, sit still, you will feel better in a moment,” said a woman’s voice in Standard Terran.
“Lara, where’s Lara?”
“She is playing with the children,” said the woman.
Marcus could hear children laughing. He looked up and saw Lara about 15 metres away chasing the three goblins among the boulder strewn field.
“It’s not fair,” Lara shouted. “Your legs are much longer than mine.”
“Then we will hop,” replied one of the sprites.
The three goblins started hopping and Lara ran into them. They all tumbled to the ground laughing.
“Seeing someone new is such a treat,” said the woman.
Marcus, looked sideways and saw a smiling alien face. He glanced down at her low cut dress and saw three breasts.
“I am sorry I had to stun you but I did not want you to hurt my father. He is not a fighter.”
“I am too am sorry,” said Marcus. “But who are you and what are you doing here?”
“It is a long story, let me tell you in my own way.”
The alien woman reached forwards with her hands. Marcus flinched but then succumbed as her long fingers caressed his cheeks. He stared into her wide eyes and heard her voice inside his head.