The Abyss Beyond Dreams (21 page)

‘How much faster do you think their ship will be?’ he asked.

‘It won’t be a ship,’ the clone replied.

‘How do you figure?’

His clone’s thoughts turned smug. ‘We only use starships inside the Commonwealth because of politics, and outside because it’s practical. The Raiel are evangelicals devoted to
saving the galaxy, and they were more technologically advanced than us a million years ago.’

‘Well argued.’

‘You really do need to get a better brain.’

‘Smartass.’

‘Thankfully, yes.’

They shared a mental smile.

The
Umbaratta
’s smartcore reported an exotic energy distortion manifesting five hundred kilometres away. Nigel linked in to the external sensors, and his exovision showed him the
wormhole opening across the starfield. It was a large one, measuring three hundred metres in diameter.

‘This will take you to your destination,’ Vallar told them. ‘The warrior Raiel are waiting for you. Nigel, I would like to thank you for your help.’

‘Anytime,’ Nigel replied airily. He could feel a spike of irony rising in his clone’s thoughts at the polite response.

Umbaratta
and
Skylady
flew into the wormhole, emerging a second later in a very different part of the galaxy. Hundreds of lightyears away, a shimmering band of giant stars
formed a magnificent archway across space. The Wall stars,
Umbaratta
’s smartcore confirmed, a bracelet of intense blue-white light surrounding the galactic core – not that
there was much left of it. The Void was slowly expanding into the massive Gulf which the Wall surrounded, the dangerously radioactive zone of broken stars and seething particle storms. Not far away
– in galactic terms – was the loop: a dense halo of supercharged atoms that orbited the Void. It burnt a lethal crimson across the Gulf, though that was only the visible aspect of its
electromagnetic emissions; its X-ray glare was powerful enough to be detected clear across the galaxy.

Nigel hurriedly reviewed the flight data in his exovision, with particular emphasis on the force fields. They were protecting the hull against the prodigious flood of ultra-hard radiation
outside, but it was taking a lot of power to maintain them.

Three massive Raiel warships were holding station behind the wormhole, their shielding only revealing dark spectres, like globes of solidified smoke that were hard for the sensors to focus on.
And behind them . . . ‘Sonofabitch,’ Nigel muttered. A Dark Fortress sphere glowed an intense indigo from the swirl of exotic energy it was manipulating. The size of Saturn, the sphere
was a lattice of dark struts. Its external shell was wrapped round a series of concentric inner lattice shells, each possessing different physical properties, with a core that was full of extremely
odd energy functions.

‘No wonder they can produce a wormhole that reaches halfway across the galaxy,’ the clone Nigel said. ‘The size of the damn thing!’

Humans had first encountered the awesome machines during the Starflyer War. The Raiel had used one to encase an entire solar system in an impenetrable force field, imprisoning the psychotic
alien Primes inside. The starship crew who first encountered the sphere that was generating the force field had named it, somewhat quixotically, the Dark Fortress.

It was only later, when the Commonwealth was invited to join the Raiel in observing the Void, that the Navy discovered it was the Raiel who had built the Dark Fortress. At which point the
nomenclature was diplomatically shortened to DF sphere. There were a dozen DF spheres in the Centurion Station star system, and many thousands more positioned all the way around the Wall. All the
Raiel would say about them was that they were part of their defence against the Void should it start its long-feared catastrophic expansion phase.

A link opened from one of the warships. ‘I am Torux, ships-captain. Please stand by for teleport on board.’

‘Thank yo—’

The
Umbaratta
was abruptly sitting in an empty, softly lit compartment the size of a CST terminal just as Nigel’s exovision icons were telling him a T-sphere had manifested. The
Skylady
sat next to it. Nigel had to smile at the guilty thrill his clone was emitting into the gaiafield; it matched his own.

‘We are proceeding to the insertion point,’ Torux told them. ‘Transit time, seven hours fourteen minutes.’

Nigel’s excitement was instantly replaced by a twinge of anxiety, also matched then surpassed by his clone.

‘Welcome aboard, Nigel Sheldon,’ Torux said. ‘You are welcome in my habitation section. Please deactivate your ship’s force fields.’

There was a moment of hesitation, the petulant thought:
What if I don’t?
Which he knew his clone would also be having.
Umbaratta
was just about the pinnacle of
Commonwealth technology, yet it was nestled here in some obscure corner of this monster warship and he finally knew what the NASA astronauts had felt after they landed on Mars to plant their flag,
only to find him waiting there beside a prototype wormhole laughing at them because his technology was oh so superior. No human had ever been on board a Raiel warship. It was a historic moment on
many levels.

He switched off the force fields and a T-sphere manifested in the cabin. He was snatched away . . .

. . . to a Raiel’s private chamber similar to those he’d visited in the
High Angel
. His link to
Umbaratta
’s smartcore remained; he had courteous hosts, then.
The room was circular, fifty metres in diameter, with a ceiling that was lost in the gloom above him, making it seem as if he was standing at the bottom of some giant mine shaft. The walls rippled
as though they were a single sheet of water; small coloured jewels glimmered behind the idiosyncratic surface effect casting a wavering sheen of phosphorescence.

A warrior Raiel stood before him. Nigel was expecting it to be larger than the Raiel on
High Angel
.
If you’ve spent a million years breeding for war, everything should be
bigger and tougher
. But this one was actually smaller than Vallar, although its skin had metamorphosed into an armour of blue-grey segments with tiny lights sparkling below the surface like
entombed stars.

‘I am Torux,’ it said in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Welcome aboard our ship,
Olokkural
.’

‘It is impressive.’

‘I would like to personally thank you for helping us.’

‘The Void affects all of us, ultimately,’ Nigel said. ‘Helping you was the least I could do; your vigil is truly selfless. I will do what I can, though I have to say I am not
terribly confident.’

‘Paula Myo considered this to be a worthwhile attempt.’

‘Yes, indeed. Do you know Paula?’

‘We have heard of her from our cousins on
High Angel
.’

And why does that not surprise me?
Nigel could feel his clone laughing.

‘We have a link that will enable you to observe the external environment,’ Torux said.

‘Thank you,’ Nigel replied as his u-shadow reported that a connection to the ship was opening.

*

Seven hours after coming aboard, Nigel watched the
Olokkural
and its two sister warships drop out of FTL and slow to a relative halt half a million kilometres from the
lightless boundary of the Void. Greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and it had taken millennia for humans to bridge that gap, but the scale unveiled before him was severely
intimidating to Nigel’s primitive core. This was the eater of stars, of cultures beautiful and terrible, consumer of hope. The one true enemy of all species across the galaxy.

Five more Raiel warships were already waiting for them, along with seven DF spheres. When he saw what else was out there, Nigel gave a smile of complete admiration.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he heard his clone say in the
Skylady
’s cabin. ‘Win or lose, this is going to make it all worthwhile.’

The DF spheres were using an intricate mesh of gravitational forces to suspend three blue-white supergiant stars, preventing them from the final plunge into the infinite gravity tide of the
event horizon which would tear them apart. Even here, half a million kilometres out, surrounded by a cage of inverted gravity fields, their incandescent coronas bulged and writhed, spitting out
brutal flares that played across the boundary, dissolving into meta-cascades of radiation as their individual particles were sucked inward and crushed into their sub-atomic components.

‘Please stand by,’ Torux said.

‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ Nigel asked. ‘Even an ordinary event horizon is impossible to break.’

‘This is the method by which we inserted our armada.’

And look what happened to them
, Nigel thought.

‘We begin,’ Torux announced.

The DF spheres changed the quantum characteristics of the cage. Nigel could sense the forces alter even though he couldn’t comprehend their nature. The surface of the stars, already
impossibly hot, bright and violent, began to burn still brighter as their atoms lost cohesion and transformed into pure energy. For over a quarter of an hour the compression wave grew, travelling
inwards, while the coronas mutated to relativistic barbs of raw energy stabbing out in every direction through the cage bands. Subjected to the artificial implosion dynamics even their own
incredible gravity couldn’t absorb, the three supergiants went nova.

Instead of allowing them to detonate in a radiative blast of energy and superdense hydrogen, the DF spheres did something weird to local spacetime. The power of the novas was converted into
negative gravity, and directed in one direction. Straight into the Void’s boundary.

‘Ho-lee crap,’ Nigel grunted, his arms instinctively waving round trying to find something to hold on to as the
Olokkural
accelerated fast across the horribly short distance
to the Void.
Skylady
was teleported outside, held in place by a gravity node. The warship’s force fields protected it from the cosmic energies wrecking local spacetime.

Ahead of the
Olokkural
, the Void’s perfectly smooth black boundary began to distort upwards, as if some kind of tumour was growing inside. Up and up it was stretched by the
terrible stress of negative gravity, forming a single grotesque mound.

Nigel held his breath. He could feel his clone closing his eyes, hands gripping the cabin’s acceleration couch.

At the peak of the distension, the Void’s boundary tore open. Elegant nebula light shone out into real spacetime. The
Olokkural
released
Skylady
, then veered away at two
hundred gees, whipping round in a hard parabola and heading back out away from the shrinking rent.

Skylady
slipped in through the gap, and thirty seconds later the Void’s wounded boundary closed up behind it.

Nigel gulped down air again.

‘Did he survive?’ Torux asked.

‘Yes.’

An hour after the patrol squad broke camp, the morning mist still hadn’t lifted. Grey haze clung to the ground, swirling slowly round the big ecru-shaded tree trunks,
keeping the temperature pleasantly low. All across the densely wooded valley, native birds called to each other in their strange oscillating whistle, competing with the incessant rustling sound of
bussalore rodents creeping through the undergrowth. Bienvenido’s hot sun was nothing more than a blur-patch above the eastern horizon. Nonetheless, its intensity fluoresced the mist, making
it difficult to see more than ten metres.

Slvasta dragged his boots through the feathery lingrass that grew lavishly between the trunks of the quasso trees, ripping the twiny blades apart. It was easier than picking his feet up; the
lingrass came halfway up his shins. Dew slicked his stiff regiment-issue canvas garters; he knew that by midday that damp would be soaking his socks and rubbing his feet raw. An hour into the
sweep, and he was bored and irked already.

‘Crud, Slvasta, why not just ring a bell to tell the Fallers we’re here?’ Corporal Jamenk chided.

‘This stuff is everywhere,’ Slvasta complained, as he carried on tearing the wispy strands apart. ‘I can’t help it.’

Jamenk drew an annoyed breath, but decided not to push it. Slvasta gave Ingmar a desperate look, but his friend wasn’t about to take his side in any dispute with the corporal.

Slvasta was peeved by the betrayal. The two of them had signed on with the regiment in Cham three months ago. Slvasta could have done it earlier, but he’d agreed to wait for Ingmar’s
seventeenth birthday so they could do it together. Signing on was all he’d wanted to do since he was nine, and his father and uncle had vanished after a Fall. The regiment had never found the
bodies, not in all the sweeps they made of the county during the following month. Even at school, everyone knew what
that
meant.

Two years later his mother had married Vikor; he was a decent man, and Slvasta now had two little half-brothers. But the loss of his father – the way he was taken – was a fire which
burnt his very soul. He knew he would never be fulfilled, never be guided by the Skylords to the Giu nebula where the Heart of the Void waited, not until he had exorcized his demons. And that would
only happen when he had his vengeance on the diabolical Fallers, smashing up every one of their eggs that plagued the world.

Joining the regiment was the first step in achieving that. Slvasta had dreams of rising up through the ranks until he was Bienvenido’s lord general, commanding troops across the globe. He
would show the Fallers no mercy until the Forest which birthed them eventually realized it could never defeat him, and retreated from Bienvenido forever. Now that would be true fulfilment.

However, the reality of regimental life was altogether more mundane that he’d been expecting. Uniform to be painstakingly maintained. Horses to muck out. Food you wouldn’t even use
as pigswill back home on the farm. Drill – endless drill, marching round the headquarters’ yard. Flamethrower practice against mannequins representing Fallers – now that was
exciting, the two times he’d got to do it. Search exercises that were basically little more than camping trips out in the wilds beyond the county’s farmland.