Part of the refinement of this harvest was in just this state, Instigator thought. Bliss, while tumbling mouthlong into the abyss. The Cascade.
For they were shooting down the coiling rapids. At their backs pressed the Upstream, heavy and eternal, cool and certain. Here came the interstellar plasma and gas, the charged and uncharged wedded by their long association, all coasting along at their minor velocities between the stars. Until the Hot came plowing along its great path, the arc that would take it all the way around the Hub in due time, circling the entire galaxy. In the frame of the Beings, carried along by the Hot’s slow sway, the Upstream was the eternal storm that fed them. Manna.
All along the parabola of the Hot’s province, vast turbulence negotiated the collision of Hot and Stream. Squalls larger than worlds perpetually broke there, in energies comparable to the pale Hotlight that shed upon this.
Curling out of the churn, they all caught the low-frequency wave front.
Recorder said slowly.
Hotclouds were the occasional nuggets that came forth when the Hot raged. Furious and doomed, Hotclouds came from storms that burst into froth. As they rose, they ebbed, died. The Hotclouds’ bounty was gained at the expense of a framework that might have made a Being. But it would be a rebuke not to feast upon the vagrant energies remaining in the Hotcloud, after all. The cloud was thick plasma, cooling and clasping its fields poorly. It was child’s play—and if a child were nearby, it would be encouraged to be the first—to rip this poor bag and eat its momentary wealth.
Ring began,
It smelled wrong, scorched and bristling. Too…alive. Hotclouds had settled into decay and were easily torn. This torch cut upward through the waves, not minding the curl of them, boring, cutting outward.
Forceful spoke for the first time.
Too late. The Hotpoint punched through the strong field blanket Chill had raised to protect itself. Fields flared and died as the onrushing lance of plasma punched through Chill. Long, agonizing peals came from Chill. Shells of opposite currents peeled away. Dusk, Chill’s linkmate, fell away in a panic. The very tones of Chill’s outcry shifted as layers swamped and filled with virulent plasma, stifling chords.
A sudden searing wail froze them. Chill was being stripped by the warm, fast electrons. Flowing faster than field knots could impede them, they made new conducting paths within the vast body. Charges long held apart suddenly united. Frenzy. Memories and structural parts of Chill popped and moaned in pitiful low tones…and fell silent.
Chill splintered now. They all rushed to capture parts of Chill as he shredded. Shards of plasma caught in magnetic traps fumed free, lost. Colossal flares burst along the body as fields, newly connected by the ravening plasma, canceled each other out. This liberated raw energy blew apart more parts of the rupturing body.
Instigator said.
Instigator said,
Mirk sent mournfully,
Instigator was grim.
Mirk sent, <…that is all there is now.>
Instigator cried in triumph.
9.
RAM PRESSURE
“DRIVE FAIL!” VIKTOR SHOUTED. “Right in middle.”
“Burn failing in the core?” Veronique asked. “I’ll—”
“No—getting back pressure.” Viktor’s hands flew in the command gloves, but the complex, luminous display hanging before him did not change. “Plasma coming back into the magnetic nozzle. Damn!”
“How can it?” Veronique called Hiroshi for backup while the picture before them both worsened. The plume they saw from two aft cameras was hunching up, as if rippling around some unseen obstacle. The logjam thickened as they watched. Vibrations came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.
“Getting a lot of jitter,” Veronique reported. “Building up.”
“Ram pressure is inverting profile,” Viktor said crisply. “Never happens, this. Not even in simulations.”
“I can feel it,” Veronique said. “This much vibration, this far away, the whole config must be—”
“Too much plasma jamming back into the throat.” Viktor gestured to where the side profile of the engine showed the blue magnetic hourglass-shaped throat. No matter could survive the fused plasma that flowed along that pinch-and-release flaring geometry. Made of fields, it could adjust at the speed of light to changes in the furious ions that rushed down it, fresh from their fusion burn. But it could only take so much variation before snarling, choking—and blowing a hole.
“I must shut down,” Viktor said with icy calm.
“But we’ll—”
“Go to reserve power.”
“That won’t last long,” Veronique said as she did it.
Hiroshi worked sending data, his voice grim. “Proserpina’s behind us; seems okay, though. We’re getting lots of plasma pressure. Must be the bow shock.”
Julia burst in, face flushed. The sphere of electrosensors registered her presence and decided to ignore her. Viktor’s hands moved in the air, capturing and changing ship controls. “What’s—,” she began, and seeing Viktor’s face, stopped in midsentence.
A long, low note rang through the ship. No one had heard that sound since training. The drive had not been off since then. Muted, yes—as they maneuvered near Pluto—but never gutted and silent.
Over audio came a buzzing. “What’s that?” Julia asked.
“Not from the engine,” Veronique said, “that’s for sure.”
“Can you localize?” Viktor asked, eyes not moving from the control space before him.
“Yeah, it’s—hell, all around us.” Veronique looked puzzled. “Low-frequency stuff.”
“Listen,” Julia said softly, “it’s almost like a song.”
10.
SORE DIMINISHED
Dusk echoed all their joy.
Instigator sent.
Instigator sounded firm and sure, but with an undertone of apprehension it could not disguise.
Forceful said.
Instigator said.
In defense Instigator had made a hollow column of itself. Actinic violence flared there. Instigator screamed. A white-hot lance gouged in its bowels. The cutting sword shot out of the cold thing, roaring in mad rage. Instigator unwrapped, coiling away from the flaring plume. She tried to veer away from exploding radiance but left shreds of herself behind.
Panic. A chorus of screams pealed into the distance as Beings sensed the eruption.
Instigator sent.
Forceful called.
Recorder sent,
Forceful said angrily,
In a rush, pressures gathered from all those Beings within range. Magnetic fields can thicken and flex as quickly as light, bringing vector forces to bear.
They heaved and worked, all Beings nearby sliding sections of themselves together into a thin disk. This sliced against the tubular throat at the base of the small cold thing. The arc shuddered and fought along its length as the throat that formed it worked feverishly to adjust to sudden sideways thrusts. The system could not cope with the canny way the magnetic disk cut, moved and tilted, cut again.
11.
DRAGONS IN THE NIGHT
“DAMN! HAVE TO SHUT DOWN again,” Viktor said grimly.
They were all rotating slowly, hanging sideways in their couches. The entire ship moved as it had never been meant to. Creaks and groans ran along it, big booms and warning clangs echoing down the softly lit passageways.
“The throat’s going?” Julia asked.
“Malfing.” Viktor spoke clearly through clenched teeth. “Big error signals. Does not explain itself.”
“Yeah, systems analysis says it doesn’t know why,” Veronique added. “No simulation—”
“Shutting down now,” Viktor said. The rumbling aft faded. Eerie popping noises came through the support beams around their cabin. Creakings. A sour stench of something scorched. The display space before Viktor and Veronique seemed calm.
“That buzzing again,” Julia said.
“I got better directionals this time,” Veronique said firmly. “I rotated some aft antennas, the sideband controllers, too.”
“Where’s it from?” Viktor asked. “Around us, yes?”
Veronique frowned. “Intensity plot—well, look at this. Max on the sides. I thought it’d be in the rear someplace. Something to do with the nozzle shutdown.”
Julia watched the shape form up, a filmy blue image on the screen before them all. “Damn,” she said. “A wedge of magnetic fields and plasma. It’s running alongside us. Keeping up. Even though we’re tumbling.”
“The emission region, look. Big, yes—we have found the source of the low waves,” Viktor said. “Nasty, too, they are. Trying to kill us.”
“What’ll we do?” Julia asked. We went looking for dragons, and now we found them. “We can’t tumble like this forever. The plasma antenna grid—it’s out of commission, like this.”
“These things won’t go away, I bet,” Veronique said. “What are they?”
“Dragons,” Julia said. “Dragons in the night.”
Viktor grimaced. “So we punch back. I’ll fire a small side jet, rotate on the other axis, take our aft around on them.”
Julia saw what he meant as his hands traced a command system into being in the space before him. A faint rumbling began. The ship began to slide sideways, or that’s how it felt to her. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been her strong point in training, and that had been decades ago. Her head spun, her stomach lurched. Yet she felt awe at the presence of these immense…things.
Viktor glanced at her, frowned in concern. “Is okay?”
Julia said softly, “I’m glad somebody knows what to do.”
“I try, is all.” He winked.
The sliding feeling got worse, and something strummed deeply, amid more popping noises.
“Ready power up?” Viktor called to Veronique. “We be fast now.”
“Roger.”
The surge made Julia’s gorge rise. Whirling, wrenching—she held on.
“High Flyer, coming in on port approach,” came Shanna’s clear voice. “We’re out at 1,237 klicks, closing slow. Gather you have trouble.”
“Something we can’t see with eyes, yes,” Viktor called back. “But on-screen…”
“Dragons,” Julia said. “Stay well clear of the plasma emission zone, Shanna.”
Viktor brought up a picture with Proserpina’s bright flare at its center. Wisps of ivory luminescence crawled across the image, blurred as if out of focus. “To port. Acquiring your close-upped image. Your burn looks stable.”
“Right, but between us there’re some vague shapes,” Shanna said. “Like worms, coiling around each other.”
“Plasma discharges, I’ll bet,” Veronique said. “I saw some, back in the days when I did lab work at Caltech. They’re diffuse, like a neon light, but they’re long threads. Means there must be pretty powerful magnetic fields around them.”
“Ummmm,” Viktor murmured, staring at the traceries that moved like kelp in the slow wash of tides. “Magnetic pressure we can counter with plasma pressure, right?”
“Good idea,” Shanna said sharply. “Bringing our tail around.”
“Da.”
Proserpina’s image began rotating. The bright flare of its drive glared as it came around to point in their direction. Julia could see filigrees of exhaust licking out across the great distance, moving at tens of kilometers per second, to judge by the scale. Where the wash of it struck, the threads of ivory plasma shredded, blown apart. Their soft glow dissolved.
“Got them!” Shanna called.
“Copy that. Pour it on,” Viktor called happily. “I’m bringing ours around, too.”
More lurching. A nasty rumble in the deck. Julia hung on.
12.
HARD PLASMA
Mirk called,
Forceful reported calmly.
They were all withdrawing, trailing some fields they would lose in their haste. The example of Chill had bro
ught caution to them all.
Mirk sent,
Their pursuit had carried them safely upstream of the roaring Cascade, but they still felt vibrations and shocks from it reverberate through their bodies.
A long silence hung between them. Each mended its skin and currents, rebuilding where hard plasma had torn raw gouts in filmy magnetic structures. In the quiet, upstream from the thunder and boom of the Cascade, a faint whispering came to them. Jittery spikes came from the two tiny cold things.
Sunless sent a slick burst of layered nuances, piling language into stacks.
Recorder sent a long, thoughtful roll of waves, whose import was,
Mirth greeted this.
Dusk dismissed the idea.
The Sunborn Page 25