“We know.” The twins gave a small shiver. “But we will continue to protect our friends for every second that we can. Who knows? It may be the difference between life and death.”
“Let us hope so.” The canths left them alone to deal with the situation, but the two twins still had the lingering impression that the canths thought their mission to be impossible.
“Collision estimated in one minute,” said the tinny metallic voice. Then it repeated the same message twice more. The trimorphs lost all colour. That didn’t give anybody long to find a solution. They held their places loyally, determined to give their friends one last chance at survival.
DOWN ON THE planet, deep inside the floating Island of the Forthgoing, the situation was not improving.
Six saw, to his horror, that one of the membranes had enfolded Diva’s arm again. He gave a sharp cry of warning – too late – and launched himself towards her. But as he did, he felt the dry, crawling sensation which told him that he himself had been caught up by the fronds of one of the specimens. He was helpless to escape; he tried to hack off the nearest membrane with his sword, but it was impossible to get an angle which would be effective. All he was able to do was to prick at it, some distance above the membrane, and that was proving totally ineffectual.
He looked up. The largest of the Dessites, the one which had captured Tallen, only to have him transport away to safety, was moving out of the area as fast as its membranes would take it. Six frowned. He had the impression that the large creature was somehow in charge of all these others, and it surprised him to see it withdrawing from the zone of combat.
Then his eyes saw Diva. She was struggling with all her might against the rippling membranes which prevented her from moving, her eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle. His eyes softened for a moment. She was showing no fear whatsoever, simply concentrating on doing her best to disable the enemy. He gave the slightest of slight shakes of his head in admiration. She was inimitable, and he loved her for it with all his heart. She would never give up, he knew. It simply wasn’t in her being.
He forced himself to look away. He must do the same. It did them no good for him to be thinking of Diva all the time. There were other priorities. She would not be allowing feelings to distract her right now. He renewed his efforts to force the Dessite into dropping him, bringing all of his will to bear on the way to break free.
Diva snatched a quick look in Six’s direction and found herself almost smiling. The Kwaidian was slashing away at the creature holding him, his face filled with determination, his jaw set. There was no way he was simply about to sit back and let fate take its course. He would fight, kicking and screaming to the bitter end. And she loved him for it. Her heart gave a sudden flip and jumped. She ignored it sternly, turning her attention back to the alien holding her. Now was not the time for these meanderings. There were other priorities. Six would not be allowing feelings to distract him right now. She twisted around in the grasp of the Dessite and redoubled her attempts to make it relax its grip.
The others were already surrounded, and as Diva squirmed in the grasp of her Dessite, they found themselves being lifted off the ground by the membranes too.
Ledin stared across at Grace, his face a picture of dismay. Her face fell, too. They both felt another moment of conviction that they wouldn’t see Temar again, that he would grow up without knowing his parents. Their eyes met across the chamber, and they stared at each other, unwilling to break the only connection they had left. The moment seemed like an hour; it was as if the whole universe had stopped. There was no need to say anything; their feelings were in their eyes. It was something closer even than a kiss; it was an entire conversation without words. Ledin’s lop-sided smile appeared fleetingly on his face, matched by a slight upturn of Grace’s lips as they said goodbye to each other.
Bennel and Tallen were both in the process of being dismembered by their respective captors. The membranes were slowly rippling in different directions, so that each limb was stretched apart. The pain was excruciating; they had no will left over to think of anything but the agony which was centred on their arms and legs. All thought was numbed by the waves of anguish which flooded their bodies. Tallen’s eyes were open, though, and he thought he could see a shaft of blue light illuminating the whole scene. It was warm, welcoming. Eager to take refuge from the torture inside its soothing light, he twisted towards it.
SOME DISTANCE AWAY, Arcan was struggling with the new-found knowledge that the namura stone in some way broke the carbon nanographite trap. He could dimly see that this would enable them to escape, but he couldn’t quite see how to do it.
At the back of his mind he was aware of everything that was happening to the others; part of him could see their plight. He knew that he had only seconds left to make decisions, to put this right or to detonate the explosives.
As part of him regarded the others, now being slowly pulled apart by the Dessites, he realized that it was time to put the thing to the test. If he didn’t act now, his friends would be dead. They had mere seconds of life left.
With a sort of grim determination, he transported the namura stone to the edge of his being, holding it up in front of him as if it were some sort of beacon lighting the way. Then he thrust firmly against the sides of the chamber, through them; against the walls of the installation; through them, against the rocks which formed the island; through them.
Where the aura of the blue stone touched the barrier formed by the carbon nanographite, it created a tiny thinning of the effect all around its circumference; a thinning that Arcan could use to tunnel out of the trap he was in. But it would be very difficult; the thinning was microscopic in comparison to his size, and he still needed huge energy to initiate quantum tunnelling.
There was a long pause, as gradually tiny parts of him began to push through the weakened barrier, through to the other side.
It was something which should have taken minutes, should have been measured carefully, judged to the last fraction of a waveform. It should have been calculated, careful, slow and steady.
UNFORTUNATELY, AT THAT same moment the first suicide traveler slammed into the New Independence, up in orbit around the Dessite moon. The two ships shrieked in dying spasms as they gouged into each other, and then, as the other two traveler ships added their momentum to the mix, exploded in a flare of burning debris which could be seen with the naked eye from the surface of the sea on Dessia.
The twins had waited until the very last moment to transport themselves back to Pictoria. In fact, they almost left it too late; as they arrived in the familiar caverns, they were forced to dive into the ortholiquid there to cool themselves down. They had taken on too much energy from the explosion.
They let the ortholiquid lake remove all the excess heat, before looking sadly around at the amorphs which clustered close to them. Then they stared at each other, wondering what was happening on the planet they had left behind, now fully defended again by the Dessite wall of minds. Both twins clouded over; they felt they had not done their duty well.
Arcan became suddenly aware of the death of the New Independence. The small part of him which had so far tunnelled out of the island trap had reached out to the twins automatically. He felt them leave and knew exactly why. He sensed the canths withdraw their light support, unable to carry on by themselves. As soon as their protection disappeared, he became aware of the force of the wall on him; it bore down on his mind inexorably, and he realized at once that it had the power to stop him.
He reacted instantly. There was only time to throw himself without thought at the weakness in the barrier, only time to accelerate towards it with all his might, only time to risk all on this one chance. As he fell towards it, he reached out to pluck his friends away from their Dessite captors.
Tallen was the first, and the cry of relief reached the others.
“Arcan!” he shouted. “Arc
an has found a way out!”
They twisted as best they could to see where the cry had come from. But Tallen had gone.
They all knew what that meant. There was a chance. At last, there was a chance! Ledin smiled at Grace, this time with hope, and Bennel allowed himself to think that he might live to see his wife again. Six gave Diva his nonchalant grin; she smiled and stretched a hand towards him, trying to reach out to him across the metres separating them. He gave half a wave back. They waited for Arcan to pluck them out of their captive’s clutches. At last they all stopped struggling, confident that Arcan would save them now.
Arcan picked up Grace and Bennel, and then Ledin, without too much trouble. Then he brought his powerful mind to thinking them across the weak part of the barrier, around the imperfection of the namura stone.
It should have been easy, but it wasn’t.
None of them knew it, but a shock wave was forming inside the orthogel itself. As Arcan accelerated onto the weakness to force the tunneling phenomenon, the high speed he was reaching was helping to form a bottleneck at the barrier, and this bottleneck was splicing the incident orthogel in two. He was literally being rendered into separate halves: one inside, one outside the trap.
Trains of self-reinforcing waves sped away from the annular ring around the namura stone, visible inside Arcan as trails of light.
Arcan belatedly became aware of what was happening, but he was powerless to stop it. The shock wave tore back inside him with a devastating effect; everything in its path began to oscillate, everything fell into vortices which began to form inside the orthogel.
Arcan pushed at the tiny life-forms suspended within him, pushed with all his might to get them to the other side of the barrier. He was already calculating his next move.
And the calculations were quite clear. He must arm the explosives. Whatever part of him was left inside the trap must be destroyed while he was still able to activate the fuses.
In a second it was done.
Now everything depended on how much of him would be able to tunnel out before the explosion took place. He threw his friends, and all his remaining brain cells, at the barrier, at the namura stone.
SIX WAS INSIDE the orthogel. He relaxed, feeling inordinate relief.
“You see, Diva,” he said over his shoulder. “I told you Arcan would find a way out of this.”
Silence greeted him.
He looked around, struggling to right himself in the small orthogel bubble which held him.
“Diva? Diva?”
Then he saw her. She was struggling to stand, in another bubble, some way behind his. She caught his eye and smiled back, giving him an excited wave.
He waved back, but then fell against the walls. The bubble was becoming caught up in some sort of whirlpool effect, and he found he could no longer stand easily.
Sinking back against the orthogel, he swiveled around to find Diva again. She, too, was being caught up in this turmoil of motion, and he was pleased to see that the bubble she was in was rapidly catching up with his.
They waved again, and Six pressed against the walls of his bubble as she swept up towards him. For a moment their bubbles almost met; their hands could almost have been giving the traditional binary system salute.
Then there was a flash of fire, and small bursts of light erupted in the orthogel directly between the two bubbles.
Six frowned. He looked up, to see Diva was puzzled too.
The bursts of light became bigger and bigger, spitting sparks which grew larger and larger until they coalesced into a jagged line, which looked like a fork of lightning propagating horizontally. The sound as space was actually rent in two was deafening. For a moment the new fracture hung stationary, then the self-reinforcing waves began to pry its edges open, forcing them further and further apart. The selwaves themselves were ominous shapes of colours which blistered into existence in the gap and, once there, mushroomed out, twisting and mutating into other shapes, other colours. They would have been beautiful if they hadn’t been so deadly. Behind the selwaves, light was blazing through the fracture. As the rift became larger and larger it started to consume its own surroundings, and everything in its path was suctioned towards it by forces which were beginning to increase exponentially.
Six had to shade his eyes against the light. The bubble he was in was trembling, shaking with the force of all the pressure around it as it struggled to escape the fault line, to move forwards. He had lost Diva, and he twisted to find her.
She was behind him again. He scrambled to his feet and stared over the disrupted space between them. Her bubble was being carried away, sideways and backwards.
It was the wrong direction.
She was being carried back into the rift. Her bubble was silhouetted against the brilliant white light which shone out of the rupture. She had been caught up by the shockwave. The selwaves of energy were receding with her, framing Diva – and everything which could not escape – in a bright filament of furious energy. The rift had become a giant crevice of boiling flame which was cauterizing the open wound in the quantum trap and closing it forever.
She was not going to get through the tunnel. She was being slowly carried away from him, away from safety. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, but it was inevitable; they were like flies trapped in amber.
He shouted, and pounded at the walls of the bubble. “NO! —ARCAN!”
There was no response. He hammered again at the wall, feeling helpless. “YOU HAVE TO STOP THIS!”
But there was still no reply. Now his hands scrabbled desperately at the sides of the bubble. “ARCAN! LET ME OUT!”
He could still see Diva’s face. She was looking sad, but staring at him as he was carried away from her, towards the daylight, and she was carried back, towards the dark.
He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the bubble behind him. It was already far away, but he could see her figure, slender, brave, still facing towards him. Her hands were held against the bubble, he saw.
Maybe she could sign to him!
Hastily he pushed his own hands against the bubble, his fingers racing to press out words. “Diva? Are you there?”
But there was silence. It was as if the bubble he was inside was merely inorganic; there was no sensation of Arcan’s presence. The bubble was silent, the walls inelastic, mute.
Six could do nothing but watch as the girl he had always loved with all his heart was swept further and further away. The rift was receding too, he saw. The fracture in reality was moving rapidly back into the darkness, the bubble containing Diva becoming smaller and smaller until he could no longer distinguish it, or her. He screwed up his eyes. She must be there, somewhere. But he couldn’t see her bubble; it had vanished behind the streams of seething selwaves, and was no longer visible. All that was left was the flaming line of intense light which marked the rift itself, and this was gradually becoming thinner and thinner as it raced backwards into the darkness, further and further away.
Still he peered behind him, even though he couldn’t see her anymore.
He stared at the boundary, at the disappearing line of turbulence. He didn’t dare to blink; he didn’t want to miss seeing Diva reappear. She had to reappear. He forgot to breathe.
Then the thin line that she had vanished into flared with an explosion of intense light, a light so white that it seemed to burn its memory into his retina. By the time the incandescence had faded and he was able to see again, all the selwaves had vanished; he was now only surrounded by darkness.
Six’s throat worked. He felt dizzy, still unable to take a breath. Because, even though he didn’t want to believe it, deep down he knew what that last, devastating blaze of light had been. Arcan had activated the Reventex. That part of the orthogel which was not on this side of the barrier had been subjected to a detonation big
enough to destroy an entire skyrise.
Six stared dumbly at the last place he had seen her bubble; his face a numb mask, his eyes unfocused.
Diva had been on the other side of the barrier.
His mind was stricken. It was trying to inform him of a disaster, but a sponge-like sense of preservation was intercepting that information, blotting it out and refusing to let it register.
Small sparks of logic stuttered to get their message through, but were blocked by a wall of rejection.
He could hear nothing except the black pounding of his own blood in his ears, and then that, too, seemed to come to a halt as everything around him imploded and then froze.
He wouldn’t believe it; his brain wouldn’t allow it to be true. It would simply delete the possibility. His eyes closed and he let the blackness take over. An emptiness gradually erased every thought from his brain, every feeling. As if a giant hand had pushed the stop button on his life, everything inside his mind ground to a halt. He stopped working. His body refused to continue with its involuntary tasks.
The blood drained from his face; he swayed for a moment, and then keeled over, collapsing to the floor of the bubble, unconsciousness temporarily insulating him from any more contact with past, present or the immediate future.
DIVA LOOKED AROUND. She was alone. There was quite a lot of orthogel surrounding her, but she could see nobody else.
She was glad. She hoped Arcan had managed to get the others all out.
“Well done, Arcan,” she muttered to herself, surprised at the strength of her voice, but rather disappointed to find that she was beginning to shake. “Well done.”
“Thank you, Diva.”
Diva stood up, her jaw strong if trembling slightly, and her shoulders straight. She swallowed, determined to overcome the momentary weakness of her body, before going on: “Did you set the fuses?”
The Namura Stone Page 19