“They were here,” Lanoe said. “Not long ago, they were here.”
His eyes burned with excitement.
It wasn’t much farther to the center of the city. From the air Valk had been able to see how all the roads formed a series of concentric rings—they looked like a sort of cobweb, really—around a clearing at the city’s heart. If they were going to find anything here, that had to be the place. Lanoe rushed ahead, outpacing the marines as they covered the last few blocks before the center.
Valk hurried to catch up with him—then came up short when he saw what awaited them.
A circular plaza, big enough to land the cruiser in. Ringed all around by tier after tier of low stone benches. A theater in the round, capable of seating maybe a hundred thousand people.
Perhaps it was a sporting arena, Valk thought. Except that the central space in the middle of all those seats wasn’t big enough for any sport he could think of. The seats ran down into a sort of pit no more then twenty meters across, and most of that space was filled by what looked like a ring of abstract sculptures. Twelve of them, each six meters high, made of dark, featureless basalt.
“Like Stonehenge,” one of the marines said, perhaps forgetting that he wasn’t supposed to speak without permission of his superiors. Lanoe didn’t even look at the man. He was too busy running up to lay a hand on one of the sculptures.
“No, Stonehenge is those big arches, right?” the female marine, the one who’d seen the roads, said. “This looks more like, I don’t know. Dancers, or something stupid like that.”
Each sculpture was identical in shape, though Valk didn’t think they’d been mass-produced. He could see tiny differences between them, slight asymmetries. Each of them started at ground level as a gently tapering cone, then flared out near the top. A cylinder of carefully hewn rock sat atop each of them, slowly rotating. No, the cylinders floated atop them—they weren’t connected to, or supported by, the larger cones at all.
“Chess pieces,” Lanoe suggested, patting the sculpture with a gentle hand.
Valk scanned them in every wavelength he could think of. Whatever energy was being expended to keep those spheres aloft didn’t register with any of his many, many senses. It might as well be magic.
He didn’t like that. He didn’t like it at all.
“Lanoe,” he said, carefully. “Maybe take a step back from that thing? I’m not sure it’s safe.”
“How did you not notice this when you scanned the place from orbit?”
“What would I have noticed?” Valk said. “There’s only a trickle of power here, not enough to detect from any distance. I’m guessing that’s intentional.”
“Oh?” Lanoe asked.
“Whoever put these here, they didn’t want machines to be able to find them. They wanted them invisible to the kind of scans I would think of doing. It took a human brain to notice the pattern of the roads, how it made a kind of bull’s-eye.”
Lanoe nodded sagely.
Valk took a step closer to one of the statues. Held up one hand, stopping short of actually touching the thing. “Do you feel them, I don’t know, humming?”
Lanoe had noticed that. On a subconscious level, perhaps. The statues were vibrating—but only a little. Just enough to give off an almost inaudible tone.
“These have to be important, right?” Lanoe asked. “The only thing on the planet still powered …”
Lanoe spun around to look at the marines. They had their helmets up and their rifles in their arms. They’d backed away from the sculptures. Sensibly. Naval officers tended not to rate the intelligence of marines very high, but Lanoe had been around enough of them to know they had a finely tuned sense of self-preservation.
“Any ideas?” he asked them. Because he was fresh out of them.
Sadly, the marines—even the one who’d seen the roads, who knew about Stonehenge—could only shrug.
Lanoe reached up and rubbed at his nose with one gloved hand. He suddenly felt incredibly, impossibly tired.
The long journey to get here. The incredible peril. The empty planet. It didn’t add up. He should be able to see the answer here. It should be obvious. Had he really forced Valk to go on living, had he put Candless and her students in danger, had he gone so far as to take help from Auster Maggs, just to be defeated here, because he couldn’t think? Because he couldn’t understand?
The mysterious message had promised help. WE CAN HELP. It hadn’t been very specific in what kind of help. But it had told him what he needed to know, how to get to this place. COME AND FIND US.
And so he had. He’d followed the map, found the X at its center.
An X on a dead planet.
There had to be a way forward, a way to—
“Lanoe.”
He stiffened, unsure if he’d really heard that. Before, always, when Zhang spoke to him, he’d been right on the edge of sleep, in the liminal space between conscious and unconscious thought.
She’d never come to him when he was wide awake before.
Yet, now—he could almost feel her standing behind him. Sense the shape of her, the warmth. He felt like she was reaching out to put a hand on his shoulder.
“Lanoe. You’re so far away,” she said.
She was so close.
He didn’t dare turn around. He knew if he looked for her she wouldn’t be there. He squeezed his eyes shut. Spoke her name, silently, in his head.
“You’re not where you need to be,” she said.
He opened his eyes. She was gone. Just a voice on the wind, and the wind had blown away. Yet something remained. She had jogged something in his memory, loosened some gear in his mind that had gotten stuck. He understood, suddenly, what he had to do.
HERE IS THE KEY.
Before, he’d always thought that they meant that like the key of a map, the legend. The annotations on the map of wormspace …
But they’d given him a hint, hadn’t they? The roads. The roads they’d cleared around this city. Roads—and wormholes were a kind of road, weren’t they?
“Valk,” he said. He was trembling. Could this really be it? “Valk—the map. You have the map stored in your, your databases, right?”
“The map?” Valk asked. “Which—oh. Yeah, of course I do. The map of wormspace. The one that brought us here.”
“Show me,” Lanoe said.
Valk lifted his arm and his wrist display showed the map, a twisted convolution of knots rotating slowly between them. All the wormholes and their throats, the navigational hazards, the positions of the Blue-Blue-White fleets. All that priceless information. The marines weren’t cleared to see that map. Lanoe didn’t give a damn.
“Show it to them,” Lanoe said, and he pointed at the sculptures behind him.
Slowly, carefully, Valk raised his arm. His wrist display projected the map across the stone of the nearest statue.
The sculptures began to sing.
“Hellfire,” Valk said. “Lanoe—everyone—get back. Get back!”
How had he not noticed before, that each of the sculptures was humming at a slightly different pitch? Each one resonating to a single frequency on a twelve-note scale. The sound waves, the vibrations, oscillating in perfect harmony.
The humming rose in volume. The notes were crystal clear, a unison of sound.
The marines almost fell over each other as they stumbled up the rows of benches, pushing back away from the sculptures. Lanoe hadn’t moved at all. He stood there transfixed, staring up at them.
Valk’s whole suit shook with the tones, with the waves rolling off the stone. He felt like he would shake to pieces if he didn’t get away. If he didn’t get clear.
He shouted Lanoe’s name, but it was lost in the sound. In that perfect, roaring, singing sound. He put his hands on either side of his helmet as if he could cover his ears, as if he had ears, as if he had hands—
Lanoe! he shouted again. Lanoe!
He pushed forward, against the rolling waves of sound. Against the vibratio
n that threatened to knock him off his feet, against that tone that threatened to shatter him into pieces. He felt like he was trying to walk into a hurricane.
Lanoe lifted his hands toward the sculptures. If he touched them, if he discharged the energy flowing through them—
Lanoe, Valk howled.
Lanoe.
The sound rose and rose in volume, with no distortion whatsoever. It was so perfectly clear and sweet, and any moment now it would rupture Lanoe’s eardrums, it would break open all the blood vessels in his head, and still, he wouldn’t move, it was like he was hypnotized, entranced by the sound, and—
Automatically, Lanoe’s helmet swam up out of his collar ring. Valk could see the sound waves rippling through the flowglas as it fought to cover Lanoe’s head, to block out that perfect, beautiful, obliviating sound. Somehow the helmet coalesced, coming together over the crown of his head, sealing Lanoe off from the tones.
It broke the spell. Lanoe turned around, a look of utter confusion on his face. His eyes went wide when he saw Valk staggering toward him.
Valk grabbed him around the waist and picked him up. It was easy—the servomotors in his suit were much stronger than human muscles. He picked Lanoe up and hauled him away from the statues, bounding up the terraced benches two at a time, three at a time. Just in time.
In perfect synchrony, the stone cylinders atop the sculptures spun around one hundred and eighty degrees, and then dropped down into the fluted upper portions of the cones. And then all hell broke loose.
Whatever energy the sculptures had kept hidden, all that titanic force came out of them at once, shooting straight up into the air. Valk’s electronic eyes could see it, see torrents of superlow-frequency energy pour into the sky. He threw Lanoe down on one of the benches and shielded his body with his own as side-lobe radiation washed over him, a pure and crystalline and perfect and deafening and lethal and thrilling pulse of sound.
Valk could see behind him. He could see what was happening up in the air. He was still surprised when the note, the perfect note, was joined by a new sound, one that failed altogether to harmonize. A crack, a peal, a rumble of thunder that made the whole open-air theater, the city center, shake.
And then—
Up there, in the air. Kilometers up, but not that many kilometers. The air itself seemed to change, to turn to glass. A lens, a sphere of glass appeared up there, out of literally thin air. Vapor swirled around it, twisting into a cyclone of hurrying cloud. Static electric charges leapt from it, tiny bolts of lightning. For a few brief seconds rain and then hail pelted down all around Valk, bouncing off his suit, rebounding off his helmet like gunshots—but then it was gone, and the clouds settled down, and the sky started to behave again.
Except now it had a new hole in it. A hole in the sky.
“Valk,” Lanoe said. “Valk, that—that’s a—”
A wormhole throat. Hanging in the middle of the air, just above the ring of sculptures.
A hole in the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Bullam strapped herself into her seat on the bridge of the carrier. Summoned one of her drones to bring up a simple communications panel. She nodded and it established a link to the scout ships. The faces of the pilots appeared before her, all in a row.
“I want you to know that Centrocor salutes your bravery,” she told them. “We’re all in this together.”
“If we can get on with it?” Shulkin asked.
She studied the way he sat in his command seat, leaning forward, hands on his knees. Looking perfectly composed despite the absence of gravity. The man was a machine purpose-built for this kind of work. His eyes were like the diamond tips of industrial drills.
“All right,” she said. “Good luck, pilots.” Then she cut the connection.
On the big display above the navigator’s position, three blue dots moved steadily forward, fanning out in three directions. Ahead of them lay three hazardous paths. The detour to Avernus meant Lanoe had a week’s head start on them. It was possible he hadn’t taken any of these wormholes, and that exploring the hazardous tunnels was a waste of time and fuel. Bullam had studied the map a dozen times, though, and she had to believe that Lanoe hadn’t doubled back just to throw them off the scent.
The problem was they had no idea which of the three tunnels was the right one. It was Shulkin who had pointed out they had a simple solution to this dilemma. The carrier had dozens of scout craft in its big vehicle bay, tiny, fast ships perfect for this role. Three pilots had been chosen at random to try the tunnels.
The first tunnel looked perfectly safe and normal as far as their sensors could reach. All three of them did. Radio communication was impossible in a wormhole, but as long as two ships were within line of sight of each other, they could stay in touch by communications laser. The three wormholes, as hazardous as they might be, ran unusually straight ahead. They expected to be able to receive regular updates from the scouts for at least the first few million kilometers of the mission.
The pilot in charge of exploring the first tunnel sounded relaxed as he streaked onward, reading off data as he went. “Temperature normal, geometry normal. The ghostlight in here is a little strange—it looks like something might have stirred it up.”
Bullam looked over at the information officer. “Could Lanoe have done that?” she asked.
The IO looked like he wanted to shrug but he fought down the urge. “Unclear, ma’am. If a large amount of mass hit the tunnel wall all at once … maybe.”
“You don’t think Lanoe crashed his ship,” Bullam said, turning to Shulkin. “Do you?”
“He’s no fool,” Shulkin replied. He twitched one shoulder. “Accidents happen. But no, I don’t believe he died here.”
“One point five million kilometers in. Temperature’s rising a little,” the scout pilot said. “Are you seeing this? Looks like … like …”
“IO?” Shulkin barked.
“Imagery is … inconclusive. I’ll bring it up.”
The navigational display showed a forward view from the scout, the same thing the pilot saw. The wormhole tunnel ran straight as an arrow away from him, ghostlight spearing out from the walls in long, spiky plumes. Without warning one of the spikes thickened and then lurched across the tunnel, twisting around itself like a tornado of light.
The view rolled sickeningly as the pilot maneuvered hard to avoid that plume of energy. For a moment they had a good view of the tunnel wall and Bullam saw the ghostlight roiling and spitting, far more energetic than the quiet, smoky radiance she would have expected.
“Evading,” the pilot said, his voice rising in pitch. “I see three more of those flares. Requesting permission to return to vehicle.”
Everyone looked to Shulkin. He might have been made of stone, his eyes fixed on the display. He didn’t say a word.
“Activity is increasing, repeat, activity is increasing, reaching dangerous levels,” the pilot called, almost shouting now.
On the display a prominence of ghostlight smashed across the tunnel, an arch of quivering light that entirely blocked the way forward. Spears of bright ghostlight jumped out of the walls from every direction. None of the activity looked coordinated, it wasn’t actively targeting the scout, but it was just a matter of time before one of them struck his tiny ship.
“Captain Shulkin,” Bullam said. “Recall the scout.”
Shulkin didn’t even look like he was breathing.
“Captain! That man is going to die! We don’t gain any data from letting him get burned alive. Recall the—”
Shulkin spoke over her. “Pilot, I want you to pick a spot on the wall, well ahead of you, and fire a one-second burst of PBW into it.”
Bullam wanted to jump out of her seat and throttle Shulkin. “You’re running experiments now? You’re using this man as a guinea pig?”
The scout pilot did as he was told. PBW fire lanced out from the single cannon mounted in the nose of his ship, drawing a line of radiance along the wall of t
he tunnel. Its light was lost in the storm of ghostlight that followed, the wall exploding with fury every time one of the particles struck home.
The light was bright enough to make Bullam’s eyes hurt. The tunnel ahead of the scout filled completely with raging, spectral fire.
But perhaps there was a limit to how much activity one tunnel could produce. The flares and prominences around the scout receded, pulling back toward the walls.
“Now you may return,” Shulkin told the man.
The pilot wasted no time twisting around and burning toward home. In a few seconds he was free of the tunnel and calling for clearance to dock in the vehicle bay.
“You knew that would work?” Bullam asked.
Shulkin did not look at her, nor did he answer her.
“Tell the second scout to proceed with his mission,” he said.
The second wormhole didn’t run quite as straight as the first. Communications would be impossible after the first million kilometers. Anything could be hiding in there. A naked singularity. A dozen branching paths, each of them more deadly than the last. Some kind of wormhole-native cyclopean monster that subsisted on human spacecraft.
Well, that last was unlikely. Bullam’s stomach knotted with dread, though, as she watched the second scout race ahead down the wormhole’s length.
“Conditions normal,” the pilot called. “Temperature and geometry as expected. The ghostlight in here doesn’t seem particularly active.”
“Understood,” Shulkin said. He inclined his head forward to drink some water from a straw hidden inside his collar ring. Any of the carrier’s crew would have been happy to fetch him a squeeze tube if he wanted it, but instead he chose to sip at his own recycled fluids. Bullam, whose suit did not include a reclamation system, turned away and watched the screen.
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