Ilanthe felt the perception of the Skylords concentrate on the inversion core, seeking understanding of what she was. Her thoughts established a perfect shield around the shell of the inversion core, blocking their probes.
“Greetings,” she told the closest Skylord neutrally, and began to accelerate toward it. Her own perception ability listened to Araminta and several others from the Pilgrimage fleet frantically warning the Skylords to be careful, claiming she was dangerous. Their responses were interesting, revealing their complete lack of rational intellect. They almost evaded the topic; certainly, they didn’t seem to comprehend the meaning behind the concepts. It wasn’t part of their world; therefore, their mental vocabulary didn’t accommodate it. Either they were artificial constructs designated by the nucleus with the specific task of gathering up mature minds, or they had once been fully sentient spaceborne entities who had de-evolved throughout the countless millennia since their imprisonment. With nothing new to experience inside the Void, no challenges to struggle with, their minds had atrophied down to instinct-based responses.
“I am fulfilled,” Ilanthe told the Skylord as she approached it. “Please take me to the Heart.”
“I do not know if you are fulfilled,” the Skylord responded. “You are closed to me. Open yourself.”
The tentative wisps of the colorful vacuum wings flowed around the inversion core as it glided in toward the Skylord’s glimmering crystalline body. Ilanthe could perceive the texture of its oddly distorted geometry, a kind of honeycomb of ordinary matter and something similar to an exotic force; the two were in constant flux, which bestowed that distinctive surface instability. The composition was intriguing. But despite its subtle complexity, the thoughts that animated it lacked potency. Her own determination, amplified by the neural pathways available within the inversion core, was a lot stronger. “I would be grateful if you would open yourself to me,” she told it.
“I withhold nothing.”
“Oh, but you do.” And she reached for the Skylord, inserting her hardened, purposeful thoughts amid its clean and simple routines. Lovingly entwining them. Taking hold.
“What are you doing?” the Skylord asked.
She suppressed the rising incomprehension, stilling its deep instincts to facilitate applications that would take it far from this place.
“Your intrusion is preventing me from functioning. Parts of me are failing. Withdraw yourself.”
“I am helping you to become so much more. Together we are synergistic,” she promised. “I will guide you to the pinnacle of fulfillment.” Then the feast began.
“I am ending,” the Skylord declared.
“Stop!” Araminta cried. “You’re killing it.”
“Have you learned nothing about the Void?” Ilanthe retorted.
Dark specters began to slither through the cheerful sparkles of the Skylord’s vacuum wings, proliferating and expanding. The tenuous cloud of molecules that formed the physical aspect of the wings burst apart, dark frosty motes dissipating through space like a black snowstorm. Now the dark flames were shivering across the intricate optical quivering of the Skylord’s surface, biting inward.
Everything it was poured across the gap to the inversion core, an extirpation that allowed the abilities and knowledge of its kind to flow into Ilanthe.
At that point she almost regretted no longer having a human face. How she would be smiling now. Engorged and enriched by the Skylord’s essence, her mastery of this strange continuum was rising toward absolute. Function manipulation began to integrate with her personality at an instinctive level. She heard the call of the nebulae, the transdimensional sink points of rationality twisting out through the Void’s quantum fields, keening for intelligence with the promise of escalation to something greater, as yet unglimpsed. They must lead to the paramount consciousness, she knew. The Heart itself. From that nucleus everything could be controlled.
Local space was awash with despair and revulsion at the Skylord’s demise. “You will thank me soon enough,” she informed the insignificant human minds. One was different from the rest. A small part of her acknowledged the Dreamer Araminta, whose thoughts stretched away somehow, a method that didn’t utilize the Void fabric. It wasn’t relevant.
Once more Ilanthe’s thoughts flowed into the pattern to manipulate the Void’s temporal and gravatonic functions, this time correctly. A wide area around the inversion core began to sparkle as the surrounding dust was caught up in the effect, drifting into chiaroscuro spirals. Ilanthe accelerated hard, simultaneously negating the temporal flow around the inversion core’s shell. The Pilgrimage fleet dwindled away to nothing in seconds as it achieved point nine lightspeed. Far ahead, the siren melody from the nebula that Querencia humans had named Odin’s Sea grew perceptibly stronger.
Araminta hadn’t moved throughout the atrocity. It had happened not ten kilometers directly ahead of the Lady’s Light, and there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. She’d seen the Skylord’s vacuum wings dim to a frail gray travesty of their former grandeur, and then even that feeble light had been smothered. All the while her mind echoed with the Skylord’s pitiable incomprehension.
It was too much. Tears leaked out from behind her sunglasses. “I did this, I’m responsible, I brought that monster here.”
“No,” Aaron assured her. “You were manipulated by Ilanthe, as were all of us. You have no guilt.”
“But I do,” Araminta whispered.
“Dreamer,” Darraklan said earnestly. “This is not your fault. Ethan was the one who fell to that thing’s sweet promises. It subverted him. You are blameless. You simply fulfilled your destiny.”
Out beyond the observation deck, the remaining Skylords were slowly circling around the cold husk of their dead kindred. She could feel their mournful thoughts as they scoured space for its soul. But of course Ilanthe had absorbed every aspect, leaving nothing.
“I’m so sorry,” she told the distraught Skylords.
“It is gone,” came the chorus of grief. “Our kindred is gone. It did not go to the Heart. The other ended it. Why?”
“The other is unfulfilled and evil,” Araminta told them. “This is what we bring wherever we go.”
The Skylords recoiled.
“We need them,” Rincenso said in alarm. “Dreamer, please. The fleet needs guidance more than ever now.”
“It’s over,” she said brokenly. “Ethan was right: I don’t believe. Besides, it doesn’t matter anymore. Inigo will end this as he began it. At least I think that’s right.”
When Araminta-two looked at Aaron for confirmation, he shook his head angrily.
“What?” Araminta-two protested. “That’s the great and wonderful plan, isn’t it?”
“The fleet is not part of the plan,” Aaron said.
“I got it safely through the barrier. That’s it. That’s all I ever said I’d do.”
“Get the Skylords to help,” Aaron ordered. “Come on, don’t wilt on us now.”
“Help do what?” Araminta-two asked. “We’re almost at Querencia. Nothing else matters. You don’t need me now, and I never needed the fleet.”
“You talked about responsibility,” Aaron said. “Those millions of dumb Living Dream followers placed their lives in your hands.”
“Waiting in space isn’t going to hurt them. It won’t be long. After all, this is about to end.”
“And if it doesn’t end in our favor?”
From the other side of the cramped cabin of the Mellanie’s Redemption, Araminta-two gave him a curious glance. “You? You have doubts?”
“I’ve always known what I have to do even though I don’t know why. It’s comfortable that way.” His face twisted in anguish. “I’ve remembered too much of her now, and it’s eating me alive. Memories of night and desolation are breaking loose. She thrives on them. I have to unknow again. I have to be free; I have to be clean. That or death. I would welcome death at this point. You, Corrie-Lyn, Inigo, the others, you all claimed that
I needed to find myself, to be true to me. I don’t. I cannot be. I need to be what I was granted in return for my new life. That is me. And none of you accept that.”
“But-”
“Things go wrong!” Aaron almost shouted.
It was the thing Araminta had feared ever since Corrie-Lyn had told her about Aaron’s nearly total collapse in mindspace. He was the one who’d brought them all together, who’d relentlessly pushed them into the Void because of some plan his masters had conceived. He knew what to do. Even though his faith in that task was totally artificial, it had swept them all along. And now here they were, almost within reach of whatever goal they had to attain, and he was falling apart because of his past and the doubts it was inflicting.
“I’ll talk to the Skylords,” Araminta-two said earnestly. “I’ll fix this. The pilgrimage fleet will land on Querencia. They’ll be safe.”
He nodded, grimacing. “Thank you.”
Darraklan was giving Araminta a curious look as agitation built amid his thoughts. She realized that some suggestion of Aaron might have escaped from her shield.
“Dreamer?” It was almost a plea. Like all of them, he’d invested everything he had in her.
“It’s all right,” Araminta said, and held out her hand for him to touch. “I will talk to the Skylords. I will get us to Makkathran.” She faced the front of the observation deck again, focusing on the bereaved Skylords. “We seek fulfillment,” she told them calmly. “We seek guidance.”
Everything was calm. That wasn’t good.
The Delivery Man wanted some kind of evidence of the unimaginable nuclear hell that raged barely twenty meters from where he was sitting in the Last Throw’s cabin.
“This is really disturbing you, isn’t it?” Gore said over the TD channel. “Your emotions are hyping up the gaiafield. Why don’t you play some soothing music.”
“FUCK OFF.”
And still the Last Throw remained perfectly still. The Delivery Man desperately needed proof that he was actually descending through the photosphere of a midrange star, not that size truly mattered given the circumstances. Some shaking would be nice. Maybe the odd creak of the stress structure. And heat. There really, really ought to be an unpleasant amount of heat in the cabin.
There wasn’t a chance of that. The super-reinforced force fields cocooning the starship would work or they wouldn’t. There was no little margin for error that he could get through by gritting his teeth and heroically enduring some hardship. For all the difference it would make, he could quite easily be taking a comforting spore shower or maybe a little snooze in his sleep compartment. Oh, yes, that’s really going to happen.
The Last Throw was navigating by hysradar alone. None of its other sensors would be of the slightest use. They couldn’t even protrude through the ultrasilver one-hundred-percent-reflective surface of the outermost force field. Nothing material could survive the photosphere plasma.
So … hysradar it was. The exovision display showed the macrohurricanes of the photosphere rampaging around him, particle gales so large and fearsome that their size actually made their surges and twists predictable. The smartcore could track and predict the impact vectors of the magnetosphere squalls and granulation eruptions braking around them, allowing the ingrav and regrav units to compensate, keeping them on course.
They were driving down vertically, forcing through the barrage of escaping plasma toward the siphon-now three thousand kilometers below Last Throw, submerged within the convection zone, where the temperature spiked up past two million degrees Celsius, with a density just over ten percent that of water. And life was going to get extremely dangerous, because as Gore had gleefully remarked, the photosphere was just the warm-up. The Delivery Man still didn’t know what to make of that sense of humor.
His one talisman was the Stardiver program, which had notched up some success over the centuries. Not that Stardiver probes were the most regular missions launched by the Greater Commonwealth Astronomical Agency. The hyperspace-spliced shielding perfected for them over eight hundred years hardly guaranteed success once the convection zone was entered.
The Delivery Man would have liked a few test flights first, each one dipping a little deeper, scientifically analyzing the results, seeing how the modified and expanded force field generators performed. Power consumption. Energy tolerance. Pressure resistance. Hyperspace shunts. But no …
“It either works or it doesn’t,” Gore had said. “There’s no halfway here.”
That didn’t mean one couldn’t be prudent. It wasn’t an argument the Delivery Man even bothered with. Besides, even he acknowledged that it wouldn’t do to pique the curiosity of the ship that had followed them. No Accelerator agent would ever permit any endeavor that might halt Ilanthe’s attempt to Fuse with the Void.
Two and a half thousand kilometers.
The Delivery Man had launched five hours after Justine’s last dream, and he hadn’t worked out what was so incredibly funny about the Lady’s statue. Gore-naturally!-had smirked and gone: “Well, who’d have guessed?” So they both knew who she was, some figure from ancient history, no doubt.
“How’s your infiltration going?” the Delivery Man asked.
“Everything’s in position,” Gore replied. “I won’t be starting the actual physical process until you’ve established command over the siphon.”
“What does Tyzak make of it all?”
“It’s just another sensor system to him.”
“We could maybe tell him the truth.”
“Sonny, we’re doing what we have to so we can protect our species-and his. He does what he has to do to guarantee his way of life. This is not a diplomatic negotiation so that we can find common ground. Both of us are genetically wired to be what we are. And right now there is no common purpose. That’s a fucking great shame, but it’s the way it is.”
“I know. I suppose I was hoping that meeting Justine might make him change his mind. If he could just understand what it is we’re all facing.”
“That’s the thing; he does understand. But that doesn’t mean he can change, not to the degree we need and certainly not in the time frame we have.”
“I know. Are you really not going to tell me who the Lady is?”
“It’s a complete irrelevance to this situation; besides, it keeps you distracted.”
“Yeah, right.” The Last Throw was now three hundred kilometers above the surface of the convection zone. Energy usage was growing as the drives fought to keep the ship stable against the monstrous tides of plasma streaking along the quivering flux lines. There was also the problem of the star’s own gravity. Five additional ingrav units had been included in the modification whose sole purpose was to negate that awesome crushing force. They were operating right at their maximum loading. If one of them glitched for even a second, he’d be squashed into a molecule-thick puddle of blood and flesh across the decking.
“Here it comes.” The Delivery Man braced himself as Last Throw approached the convection zone. There was no clean defining edge between the two. The photosphere simply grew hotter, with a corresponding shift in density.
The Last Throw’s ultradrive came on as the temperature rose from the relative cool of the photosphere shunting excess energy from the force fields away into hyperspace, a flow rate that was increasing at a nearly exponential rate. The Stardiver project engineers had soon learned that combining the force field energy dissipation function with an exotic component was the only way to deal with such extraordinary temperature loading.
“It’s holding,” the Delivery Man said in surprise as the starship began to descend through the convection zone. Now the biggest danger lay with the bubblelike granulations that bloomed thousands of kilometers across almost without warning and raced for the photosphere. One of the primary mission objectives for Stardiver probes was to study the factors that contributed to their gestation. Even now, with centuries of research and observation, that prediction was a very inexact science.
> “Good man,” Gore replied levelly. “Keep it coming.”
“Right.” The Delivery Man was shaking now. He wiped a hand across his forehead, dismayed to find out how much sweat was forming there, then ordered his biononics to initiate an adrenaline suppressor. He had to keep a clear head, and fear was degrading his ability to think straight. Yeah, as if staying sober and alert is going to help. One flaw in a system, one dodgy component, a single poorly written line of code, and it would be over in microseconds. At least I’ll never know. Until I get re-lifed. Except I won’t get re-lifed because according to Gore, this is the galaxy’s last chance. Oh, shit. I miss the kids.
This time the moisture staining his cheeks wasn’t coming from his brow.
“So when do you think Inigo is going to get to Makkathran?” he asked to distract himself from death, which was surely going to hit at any moment. He was still amazed at Paula Myo calling to tell Gore that Inigo, a weird duo-multiple Araminta, and a team of her agents had somehow raced Troblum’s starship ahead of the Pilgrimage fleet.
“It really shouldn’t be long, son. You’ll be out of there and back with your girls before you know it.”
“Yeah, sure.” His one remaining satisfaction was knowing that he was doing something to help Lizzie and the girls. By contrast, it would have been awful to be stuck inside the Sol barrier with them, not knowing what was happening outside, whether there was any hope. Not much, but enough, he promised his family. Given the not so small miracle Gore had worked in getting Inigo to help, he’d convinced himself there was a chance. A very small one, but it was real. All he had to do now was rendezvous with the siphon.
It took another fifty minutes to maneuver through the macrosurges of the convection zone’s deathly environment before the fifty-kilometer circle of the siphon force field was directly underneath Last Throw. Hysradar showed the torrent of two-million-degree hydrogen streaming in through the rim. The Delivery Man guided the starship across the curving upper surface of the giant lens shape and then slowly down until it was nose-on to the edge.
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