The Temporal Void (16 page)

Justine felt her body shiver again. It was hard to comprehend the scale of the forces outside. She was feeling very small and alone.

‘Dad?’

‘Still here, darling. The relay is holding. Big Bronx cheer for the old Navy techs who put it together.’

‘We left the last known sensor systems behind five minutes ago. The link might not last much longer.’

‘Course it will, angel. This was meant to be.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘I’m looking at the access figures for the unisphere. You’ve got over half of humanity looking over your shoulder right now.’

‘Hi there, half of humanity,’ she said brittley.

‘You’re doing fine. And I’m in deep shit with ANA for publically admitting there’s such a thing as ultradrive.’

‘Ha! You’re always in trouble.’

‘True. Without me, lawyers would just wither away and die. They think of me as their messiah. Remember when we got caught planting the Florida estate with alien vines?’

‘Hell, yes. The UFN Environmental Commissioners went apeshit with us.’

‘There are banks we own on the External worlds still paying off that fine.’

Justine barked a laugh. Drew down a juddering breath. She desperately wanted out of her ancient body with all its silly biochemical-derived fright. Anyone would think her personality was genuinely scared. ‘Any sign the Second Dreamer accessed your appeal?’

‘Not yet. I expect he’ll be talking to the Skylord quite soon now. After all, he’ll have to face me if he doesn’t start getting his ass in gear. Isn’t that right, Second Dreamer?’

‘Now, Dad,’ she chided.

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I think I’m going to skim round the loop. That radiation is strong enough to slice through the
Silverbird
’s force fields as if they were tissue paper. Can you believe the figures I’m getting.’

‘You’ll be quite safe in hyperspace.’

‘I know, but . . .’

‘Whatever makes you comfortable, angel.’

Justine instructed the smartcore to fly to galactic south of the loop. ‘That’s odd.’ The sensors were picking up an artificial signature over forty lightyears behind her. She focused on the origin, which the smartcore displayed as two amber circles. ‘Uh, Dad, are you getting this?’

Gore took a moment to answer. ‘Yes.’

‘Whatever they are, they’re travelling ftl.’

‘See that.’

‘I didn’t know there was anyone else flying round this part of the galaxy.’ Tabulated data flowed up into her exovision. ‘Christ, they’re massive.’ A wild thought surfaced. ‘Do you think they’re Skylords?’ she asked eagerly.

‘No, darling, I don’t. They’re bigger than that. And that’s an interception course.’

‘Oh.’ Her mood dropped fast. ‘The Raiel. And they’re fast, too. Faster than
Silverbird
. Just.’ It would be touch and go if she reached the boundary ahead of them. ‘I don’t suppose they’re here to escort me in safely.’

‘I’m calling Qatux right now. He’ll sort this out.’

‘Okay, Dad.’

The external sensor visualization flashed white for a microsecond, as if a lightning bolt had zipped through it. Once it cleared, there was an ominous translucent lavender shell emerging where the Raiel ships were, expanding rapidly. Secondary data streams showed her the anomaly was centred on a mass point the size of Earth’s moon that had been curving in towards the Void on a ten-million-year journey to its death.
Had been
. It had vanished, converted directly to exotic energy which was now flowing through hyperspace.

‘Oh FUCK,’ Justine yelled.
Silverbird
strengthened every defensive system it had.

The hyperspace shockwave struck the little ultradrive ship with the force of a wayward dinosaur. Justine screamed as she was flung out of the couch, crashing into the forward bulkhead. Alarms shrieked back at her. A multitude of exovision schematics turned amber and red.

The crowd of anti-invasion protestors down in the park gasped in unison as the
Silverbird
juddered, then let out a long ‘Ohooo,’ of wonder and relief. Araminta couldn’t help but join in, thankful Justine had survived the third shockwave propagated by the pursuing Raiel warships and was now picking herself up off the cabin floor again. It was a sound which was replicated right across Colwyn City and beyond. A long way beyond.

She slipped in through the apartment block’s underground garage entrance. The door was still open a couple of metres, not wide enough to admit a capsule, but sufficient for her to take her trike out. She’d deactivated the mechanism as she left, opening up the little control box and physically disconnecting the wiring. Now she plugged the coloured cables back into their blocks. The door slid shut behind her, and she hurried through the near-deserted concrete cave to the lifts.

‘You okay?’ Gore asked.

‘Bastards!’ Justine replied shakily. ‘What, this isn’t hard enough already?’

Araminta sank back against the cool metal wall of the lift, feeling the way Justine looked. She’d driven round for an hour on the trike before parking it in a public bay at the Tala mall. Now there was nothing to prove she was at the apartment block – it was the best cover she could think of. The walk back to the Bodant district had taken forty minutes, during which the Raiel warships had started blowing up small moons to try and stop Justine.
Everyone
accessed that. It made her kind of conspicuous; she was just about the only person moving on Colwyn’s streets.

‘You’re doing fine,’ Gore assured his daughter. ‘Just fine.’

Araminta used her old override code to unlock the door to Danal’s apartment. Neither he nor Mareble were in. Presumably they were out partying with the occupying army, she thought resentfully. The bare structure of the place had just been finished when Araminta handed it over. Since then, Mareble had moved in a few basic furnishings. Araminta gave the cooker a critical glare, the big metal thing looked ridiculously primitive. It had taken Mr Bovey a long time to find it for her, and installing it had been a nightmare.

In Araminta’s exovision, Justine was climbing back into her chair, which folded protectively around her. ‘Main systems are functional. Drive units have reduced capacity. These energy bursts are stressing a lot of components. I guess they’re trying to wear me down.’

Araminta crept over to the balcony windows, and peered out across the park. There were several Ellezelin capsules hanging above the encircling road. They were all stationary; like everyone else their occupants were captivated by the chase thirty thousand lightyears away. Below them, the crowd stared up into the heavens whose stars were smeared by the weather dome. She nodded in satisfaction.

‘They’re firing again,’ Justine yelped. ‘Oh Christ.’

The
Silverbird
shuddered violently. Araminta gritted her teeth, feeling the huge tremor of anticipation in the gaiafield. More sections of the ship reported overloads. The speed fell off as the drive reconfigured its energy manipulation functions around degraded components. Justine changed course, streaking into the loop, the shortest distance to the barrier. Both Raiel warships followed unerringly. Closing the gap.

Araminta pulled a big sky-blue cushion out of a nest pile and into the middle of the living room. She was annoyed to see the ebony-wood parquet had been stripped back to the bare wood. Didn’t Mareble understand how difficult it was to get the varnish application correct? The work that had gone into cleaning the little wooden blocks!

She sat down on the cushion and crossed her legs, banishing such negative thoughts.

‘Good strategy, darling,’ Gore said. ‘There aren’t many planets inside the loop.’

Araminta retrieved Likan’s program from her storage lacuna, feeling her mind finally settle. It was a risk using this apartment, but she wasn’t sure how good Living Dream was at tracking people through the gaiafield. The day Danal had moved in he’d confided to her that he was helping with the search for the Second Dreamer, and how the confluence nests were being altered somehow to facilitate that. So she certainly didn’t want to be in her own place when she did this, just in case they were accurate enough to fix the exact location. And they might just think Danal’s apartment was some kind of false reading. She didn’t know anywhere else she could go. Other than to Mr Bovey’s house, but that would expose him to the paramilitaries, which she could never do.

The shadowy spectres of sensation that lurked within her subconscious expanded outwards. She let her attention swim across the myriad thoughts it contained. Drifting. Content in a way the program alone could never kindle.

Most of the thoughts she could ignore. Some were intriguing. One had a mental signature she knew, associated with a dark tone that almost made her shy away. Instead, she concentrated.

‘My Lord,’ Ethan was pleading. ‘Hear us please.’

He was calling with all his mental strength, amplified by countless confluence nests, directing his appeal outwards into the infinite.
Wrong
, she mused from her lofty Olympian distance.
The Skylord is not beyond us, it is within.

She drifted further, devoid of urgency.

‘If you don’t call them off I will personally rip your fucking arkship apart molecule by molecule with all of you in it,’ Gore was yelling. ‘You think the Void is a Bad Thing? Do you, huh? You believe that? Because let me tell you: it is your mommy with her titty out for you to suck on compared to me.’

Araminta couldn’t help grinning.
Now that’s the kind of father I would have liked
. Out in the park, people were cheering. A cry taken up across hundreds of planets. The gaiafield filled with determination and support, the raw emotion of billions, swelling the sense of unification to near ecstasy. Go Gore, humanity whooped. Araminta added her blessing, a whisper lost in the multitude.

‘I can do nothing,’ Qatux protested. ‘They are warrior Raiel. Not our kind, not any longer.’

‘Find a fucking way!’

Araminta lifted herself away from the turmoil, drifting towards a strand of familiar quiet thought. Opening herself in greeting. The nebulas of the Void emerged from darkness to glimmer spectacularly around her. Half of space was a gauzy splash of aquamarine with a few distant stars shining through. She recognized it as Odin’s Sea where a Skylord coasted between two of the scarlet promontories, spikes of whorled gases light-years long, swelling to buds big enough to contain a globular cluster. And here, the thoughts of what once was mingled with more purposeful notions. An awareness wove through this space, not conscious, but knowing purpose.

Silverbird
burst out of the loop and streaked towards the final implacable barrier. All around it, broken stars sleeted inwards, shedding the glowing husks of the planets they had once birthed as if they were an encumbrance during the final tumultuous plunge to extinction.

‘Oh, God, here we go again,’ Justine whimpered. Ten light-years behind her a gas-giant imploded. Hyperluminal quantum distortions burst out from its vanishing point.

The
Silverbird
dropped out of hyperspace, flying free in spacetime that no human would recognize. It was a dark universe inside the Wall stars. Thick braids of dust and gas shielded the light of the galactic core behind the starship. Ahead, few photons escaped the macrogravity cloak of the Void as suns sank through the event horizon. A lurid vermilion band shimmered across space, the swirl of ion clouds enraged by the loop’s fatal discharge, illuminating the fuselage like the devil’s own gaze. Radiation alarms howled in fright as the force field started to collapse. The fuselage blistered.

‘One of us comes,’ Araminta said. ‘See?’

The distortion shockwave was almost unnoticeable in real space as it flashed past. Dead streamers of atoms were stirred briefly by the unquiet force leaking back out of the quantum interstices.
Silverbird
powered back into hyperspace, smouldering from radiation burns.

‘You,’ Ethan exclaimed.

The Skylord resonated with interest. ‘I still search for you. The nucleus aches with longing.’

‘I know. You must stop that. Please welcome our emissary. She approaches you.’

‘Where? I sense you are so far away.’

‘I am. She is close to you now. Feel for her. She bleeds emotion as do we all. Guide her as you should. Open your boundary.’

‘The Heart will welcome you.’

The two Raiel warships were closing on the
Silverbird
. Justine’s sensor display showed her another gas giant-sized mass barely five lightyears away. If they targeted that it would be the end. The
Silverbird
’s ultradrive was struggling to maintain acceleration now.

‘Hurry. Please,’ Araminta implored.

The Skylord radiated satisfaction as it receded.

‘I thank you,’ Gore said. ‘Whoever you are.’

Justine sank back into the couch, her mind fully open to the gaiafield, letting every emotion pour fourth. Hopes. Fears. Everything she was.

Ahead of the
Silverbird
, the Void boundary changed. A vast circular wave rippled out, creating a crater ten lightyears across. From its centre a smooth cone of pure blackness rose up towards the starship.

Justine regarded the exovision images in surprise. She was gripping the couch arms tight, her skin slick with sweat. ‘I’m not so sure—’

Behind her, the Raiel warships slowed, allowing the
Silverbird
to race onwards.

‘ – this is such – ’

At fifteen lightyears high the cone stopped expanding.

‘ – a good – ’

Its apex opened like a flower, petals of infinite night pealing back. Exquisite nebula-light shone out into the Gulf.

‘ – idea – ’

Silverbird
passed across the threshold, into the Void.

‘ – after all.’

The cone closed up. It sank back into the now quiescent boundary.
Silverbird
’s communication link to the Navy relay ended. Both Raiel warships executed tight curves and headed back towards the Wall.

‘Please, talk to us,’ Ethan appealed. ‘The Skylord has anointed you as our Second Dreamer. We await you. We need you.’