Inverse Shadows

Chapter Twenty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Twenty light years from Greenland, River popped out of hyperspace and began scanning for enemy contacts. The warp signatures of seventeen Confederation starships appeared at once, making a beeline at maximum warp for the nearest inhabited Confederation world. They weren't using their hyperdrives, much to Captain Pearson’s relief, but they were still going to be a problem to intercept. If they decided to scatter and run for it, the cruiser would have problems stopping them all before they reached an inhabited world.

He reviewed the tactical situation in the ship’s computer, shaking his head at the thought of plotting the destruction of Confederation starships. The thought of firing on civilian craft was appealing, even if there was no real choice, yet even disabling them would be tricky. The starships were travelling at warp speed, which meant that if they were hit, they would almost certainly be destroyed. Who knew how many civilians were onboard?

“Take us after them,” he ordered. River spun around, brought up her own warp bubble and gave chase, moving to intercept. The enemy ships – even thinking of them as the enemy was hard – showed no sign that they were aware of her existence, even though he knew that his ship was making no attempt to hide. Civilian sensors were almost as good as those used by the Confederation Navy. “Prepare to intercept.”

He skimmed through the starship schematics in the ship’s database, simulating the coming encounter. Civilian ships weren’t anything like as heavily armed as his cruiser, but combined he knew that his ship faced a daunting task, particularly if he couldn't concentrate his fire. Their protective shields would be almost as good as his own...he ran through a number of possible outcomes and frowned, cursing under his breath. The whole situation could turn very bad very quickly. He was tempted to hold off until reinforcements could arrive, but there was no way of knowing when they would reach him, or even if they would come. The Confederation Navy was suddenly overstretched.

“We are entering firing range, Captain,” the helmsman reported, as the starship slowly overhauled its targets. “They are seemingly unaware of our existence.”

“Or waiting for us to come into range before they open fire as one,” the tactical officer commented, sourly. The topic of just what the infected starships were doing had occupied the crew for the last two days, while they worked to get into position to intercept the fleeing ships. Some of the crew believed that the ships intended to break through the defences of another planet and spread the infection; others believed that they were just a distraction from the far more serious issue of rounding up the cultists before they could perform more rituals. The issue had consumed the crew – and, indeed, most of the Confederation. “We’re going to be running right into their missiles, Captain.”

Pearson nodded. The other tactical issue that had been worrying him was simple; should they open fire without warning, or should they attempt to convince the infected craft to surrender? If they opened fire, they would be killing civilians, yet there had been no signs that suggested the infected civilians would be open to reason or even a blunt order to power down their drives and await recovery. If he broadcast an order to surrender, he would quite definitely reveal his ship’s presence, even though he was sure that the enemy already knew his ship was there. It would, he reflected, have been a great deal easier if the ships had been crewed by hostile aliens.

But that’s part of the problem, he thought. They have us in a blind. We cannot destroy their link to this realm without destroying our own people as well.

“Keep the defences online,” he ordered, simply. The tactical officer was right; they would be charging into the teeth of their fire, if they opened fire at all. There was no other choice, not without an entire squadron of cruisers to back him up. “Open a channel to the infected ships.”

Back when humanity had started to take the first steps into space, it had been impossible to send FTL signals through space, ensuring that the only way to exchange signals from star to star had been through courier ships. Eventually, humanity had managed to discover how to transmit signals through warp space and later through hyperspace, before stumbling over the QCC principle, which allowed near-instant communication over unlimited distance. The QCC system was the backbone of the Galactic Net, yet the infected ships weren't linked into the network, meaning that the River would have to use an older method to get their attention.

“Channel open, sir,” the second tactical officer said. River didn't have or need a dedicated communications officer. “You may speak when ready.”

Pearson nodded. “This is Captain Pearson of the Confederation Navy Starship River,” he said. “You are ordered to deactivate your drives and surrender control over your computer networks to my ship. If you do not comply, we will be forced to open fire.”

There was a long pause. “No response, sir,” the second tactical officer said.

Pearson frowned. “Did they even receive the signal?”

“Uncertain, Captain,” the second tactical officer reported. “They certainly should be able to detect it and their computers should automatically scan for vessels transmitting to them, but they have not responded. I am unable to confirm if they are even signalling to each other.”

“But if they are using QCC tech, we wouldn't be able to detect it anyway,” the engineer put it. He had been the most affronted by how the entities seemed able to defy certain physical laws at will, or how their mere presence caused human tech to glitch. “We don’t have the codes to access the communication, let alone hack into their computers and shut them down.”

“Repeat the signal,” Pearson ordered. If they were chasing smugglers, or alien craft that had intruded into Confederation space, he would have ordered the crew to fire a warning shot, but it seemed pointless against the aliens. “Let me know if there is any reply.”

There was a long pause as the seconds ticked by. “No response, Captain,” the second tactical officer said. “Wait...”

The computer display altered sharply as the infected craft started to transmit. They beamed vast, impossibly complex signals towards the cruiser, as if they were trying to infect the entire ship. Pearson slammed his mind into the computer network and studied the signals, shuffling them into a sealed computer core. The signals seemed meaningless, yet the infected craft were bombarding the cruiser with them...it occurred to him that the entities could be trying to respond in their own language, yet that seemed impossible. They had human thralls; why not speak through them?

“Lock warp missiles on the prime target,” he ordered. The display shaded to red as the cruiser’s weapons came online, preparing to fire. The active tactical sensors could be detected, allowing the enemy to take evasive action if they saw fit, but he had chosen to take the risk. It would, he hoped, convince them that he was serious. “Prepare to fire.”

“Weapons ready, Captain,” the tactical officer confirmed.

There was no longer any time to delay. “Fire,” Pearson ordered.

“Missiles away, Captain,” the tactical officer said, as seven missiles appeared on the display. “We have impact in seventy seconds and counting.”

Pearson sat back in his command chair, tracking the engagement through the starship’s computer network. Warp missiles were designed for combat at FTL speeds, using their own warp drives to catch up with the enemy ships and penetrating their warp fields. Depending on luck more than judgement, the enemy ship – a cruise liner, of all things – would either be knocked out of warp drive or destroyed. It wasn't going to be an easy engagement. A ship that fell out of warp drive might be instantly lost in interstellar space.

“Enemy vessel is not taking evasive action,” the second tactical officer confirmed. Pearson frowned. Were the entities so callous that they cared nothing for the loss of their slaves, or one of the ships they needed to carry their message from star to star? “They will be hit in nine seconds....eight...seven...”

New red icons sparkled into existence. “They have fired warp missiles back at us, Captain,” the tactical officer reported. “They have not attempted to deploy countermeasures of their own.”

“Deploy our countermeasures,” Pearson ordered. “Prepare to repel incoming attack.”

He smiled as the display updated. The warp missiles had struck their target and ripped it apart. An explosion blossomed out at warp speed, flaring into existence before vanishing again, leaving no trace of the destroyed ship. The atoms that had survived the blast would be scattered out over space. The warp missiles targeted on his ship, one by one, fell prey to countermeasures or to hasty evasive action, allowing his ship to continue unscratched.

“The enemy ships are bringing up their tactical systems,” the tactical officer reported. “They’re scanning us...and launching missiles.”

“The flight pattern suggests that they are automatic systems,” the second tactical officer said. “Their firing shows a certain lack of imagination.”

Pearson said a sharp word under his breath. The sheer weight of fire being directed at his ship meant that he had to take evasive action, which ran the risk of allowing the enemy ships to get ahead of his ship and eventually vanish somewhere within warp space. The closing speeds were alarmingly fast and his ship was literally charging towards the missiles that were going to target its hull. The only advantage he had was that when he was past the missiles, they would never be able to turn and catch up with him. The enemy ships didn't have that advantage.

“Commence firing,” he ordered. “Take them all out.”

River rotated as she unleashed a full spread of warp missiles, turning over and over again to unleash the second spread, followed rapidly by the third. The warship had one other advantage in the engagement; she could reload and fire rapidly, while the civilian ships had far slower rates of fire. It might not matter, he knew, when there were sixteen ships firing on them. Between them, they possessed enough firepower to destroy his ship.

“Incoming missiles,” the tactical officer said. “I am triggering countermeasures...now!”

The drones the ship had launched went active, creating sensor decoys that lured the warp missiles away from their target and to their doom. Others struck out and destroyed the incoming missiles, taking them out before they could pose a threat to the cruiser. Pearson watched the brief engagement through the computer network, knowing that no human could hope to control such a battle, even with computer enhancement. The battle would be fought by their automated servants. One by one, the missiles were picked off before they reached their target.

“Their missiles were operating on minimal levels,” the second tactical officer reported. “They did not attempt to counter our countermeasures.”

“Curious,” Pearson agreed. On the main display, the missiles they had fired reached their targets, striking home. There was no opposition. Seven starships exploded, three more fell out of warp space, their drives burned out by the impacts. The computers would attempt to predict where they had emerged, but it wasn't going to be easy. A single miscalculation and the starship would arrive hundreds of thousands of kilometres from its predicted arrival point. The remaining starships continued to fire, but also started to scatter, spreading out across space. “Continue firing.”

The tactical officer worked his console, unleashing another spread of missiles towards the infected ships. “Why aren't they using their hyperdrives?”

“Perhaps they can't,” the engineer said. “Or maybe they don’t know they have them. No one knows if the Ancients had hyperdrive technology, because no one ever found one of their ships.”

“The crew of the ships would definitely know,” the tactical officer said. “If the entities are telepathic, they would be able to pull concepts from their minds. They would certainly need to know how to operate the ships just to get them moving...”

“Or perhaps using hyperdrive would cut the link between the entities and their thralls,” the second tactical officer suggested. “That might result in them being freed.”

“Or perhaps dying when the link is broken,” the engineer added.

“Concentrate on flying,” Pearson ordered, as the enemy missiles closed in on his ship. “Take the remaining ships out before they can escape.”

The brief engagement lasted only seventeen seconds before the final infected ship was either knocked out of warp space or destroyed. River followed them into normal space, avoiding the final enemy missiles and scanning for the damaged ships. Pearson checked his ship’s condition – shields and countermeasures drained; warp missiles at seventy percent, with repair factories producing replenishments – as they decelerated. He transmitted a brief report on the engagement back to Admiral Burton and then turned to the remaining task. Locating and isolating the damaged ships.

“We knocked five ships into normal space,” the tactical officer reported. “I have tracks on three of them. The other two are missing.”

Pearson nodded, tightly. Interstellar space was vast, a fact that was easily forgotten when the Confederation Navy could race starships across the entire galaxy in days. A starship, even a planetoid, was tiny on such a scale and if it wasn't radiating anything that would betray its location, it would be extremely difficult to locate. His ship had spread its sensing field as far afield as possible, yet even so, two of the enemy craft were missing. His ship had beaten the odds, but it still felt like a defeat.

“Take us towards the nearest craft,” he ordered. In hyperdrive, the trip would take seconds. “Prepare to engage the target.”

“Coming into visual range now,” the helmsman said, seconds later. The main display lit up, revealing a ship shaped roughly like a swan, tumbling helplessly through space. “I am picking up no signs of life from the enemy ship.”

Pearson frowned. Confederation sensors were good, but they could be jammed by a sufficiently-advanced enemy. It was quite possible that something the entities were doing – deliberately or otherwise – had disrupted their sensors, just as it had over Greenland. The thought of his starship’s wondrous tech failing was alarming, but it had to be faced. He'd flown near the Dead Zone as a young officer and understood, intellectually at least, that it was possible. His instincts were screaming at him to unload a single missile into the hulk and move onto the next ship, but he knew that that wasn't possible. The Confederation needed as many examples of the entities and their work as possible, if only to unlock their secrets.

If it is even possible, a voice whispered at the back of his mind.

“Deploy scout drones,” he ordered. “Hold us at this position; prepare to fire the instant we see a hostile move.”

“Aye, Captain,” the helmsman said. He sounded sober, as if staring upon the wrecked starship had reminded him of his own mortality. Accidents were rare in the Confederation Navy, but they did happen and, when they did, they were rarely survivable.

“The enemy ship appears to be dead, but I am picking up odd energy fluctuations within the ship,” the tactical officer added. He sounded perplexed. “I am unable to account for their source.”

“Keep watching them,” Pearson ordered. The drones were heading away from his ship now, closing in on their targets. He allowed his mind to mesh with the lead drone, watching through its optical sensors as it landed on the hulk’s hull and started to advance towards a hatch. The drones had barely reached the hatch when they started to glitch, their technology failing for brief periods and then continuing as normal. “Tactical?”

“The entities are on that ship,” the tactical officer said. “The drone systems should be impossible to disrupt. It’s as if the normal laws of science just went out of the airlock.”

“Just like on Greenland,” Pearson agreed. He stared at the tumbling hulk for a long moment, wondering – just for a second – what was going on inside the ship. Was there an entity there, or was the glitches merely an effect of being too close to their thralls? There was no way to know, but the ship was too dangerous to leave intact. “Lock weapons on the hull.”

He took direct control of the tactical system. The responsibility was his.

“Firing,” he said, and keyed the switch. A single hyper-missile popped out of his ship and into the drifting hulk. There were no shields to protect it and the hulk vanished in a ball of glowing plasma. “Target destroyed.”

He leaned back in his command chair. “Take us to the next target,” he ordered. “We may have to destroy them all.”

***​

Three hours later, he finished composing his report to Admiral Burton and the Grand Admiral. All of the ships they had discovered had had the same effect, the same proof that the entities were either onboard or influencing the crew somehow. In the end, they had destroyed all five ships in order to prevent the infection from spreading. The real mystery was what had happened to the missing two ships, but if their warp drives were gone, they were unlikely to pose an immediate problem.

“Some of the remaining ships have escaped,” Admiral Burton confirmed. Pearson scowled. They’d gone through so much, only to lose in the end. “We may have a more immediate problem. I need someone to hunt down a particular starship.”

“Yes, sir,” Pearson said. It was a surprising order. He had expected that they would be diverted back to the blockade zone. “A single starship?”

“Yes,” Admiral Burton said. “We need to hunt down and destroy a Haypah starship.”

He briefly explained. A Haypah starship had gone into the Gateway and emerged, exploding out of the gateway at an impossible speed. It had to be infected and it had to be stopped, before it infected the Haypah Empire – or the Confederation would face a war on two fronts.

“I understand, sir,” Pearson said. “We won’t let you down.”

 

Chapter Twenty-One<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

For five days, Aisyaj floated in her cocoon, shut off from the outside world. She drifted upon the sea of dreams, allowing the telepathic disciplines she had learned as a child to locate and remove the alien contamination in her thoughts, studying – as dispassionately as she could – exactly what the entities had done to her. Her mind eventually drifted away, into memories of old lovers and friend among the telepaths, and she slept.

On the fifth day, she emerged from her cocoon, as naked as the day she was born. She checked her starship’s position – seventy light years from Greenland and, she hoped, relatively safe – and climbed into the refresher for a wash. An hour later, she pulled on a tunic and sat down in her living compartment, opening her mind. It was easy to reach out for the other telepaths now, but at the same time she was nervous, even terrified. Would they see her as contaminated...or would she somehow infect them with the alien virus?

The telepaths touched her mind and she was instantly reassured, swept up in their network of love and devotion. It had been years since she had left Telepath, the sector that hosted most of the human telepaths, but she had never forgotten just what it felt like to live among her own kind. The telepaths were all open to one another, sharing their thoughts and feelings; there was no hatred, or pain, or jealousy. The outsiders talked about it in terms half-envious, half-fearful, yet even the most perceptive could not understand. The society was healthy because there was nothing to hide. There was no bullying, no crime, no unhealthy relationships...how could someone hurt someone else by accident, unknowingly, when no one could avoid feeling what they made others feel? There were no social outcasts or sociopaths. The society, as strange as it seemed to the outside universe, worked.

Aisyaj smiled as the Telepath Council touched her mind. The telepaths operating on a system of full democracy – of consensus – that even the Confederation could not match. How could it, when there could be no hidden agendas or dishonest politics? There was plenty of honest disagreement, with different sides attempting to convert the others to their cause, but no one could be forced into following a cause they didn't believe in. It had been years since Aisyaj had taken part in a communal mind-sharing, yet it felt like yesterday. For humanity, always yearning to be part of a greater whole, it was just like coming home.

She concentrated and spread out, in her mind, the details of everything that had happened on Greenland. She hid nothing, not even her shame and horror at how easily the entity had almost caught her, luring her down into the planet’s atmosphere. The AIs had saved her life and soul from permanent servitude to the entities, if the Confederation’s belief that telepaths were required to open the link between the entities home dimension and the human universe was accurate. She shared the feelings – or lack of them – she had had from Joe Buckley seconds before his experiment had gone horrifyingly wrong. She shared everything, knowing that they would need all the details before they decided what – if anything – to do about the crisis.

Telepathy, much to the annoyance of the AIs, defied all logic and reason. She could cast her thoughts across the galaxy to the telepaths back home, and hear them as clearly as she could over a QCC network. Better, in fact; a telepathic connection allowed her to feel what they were feeling, the rolling waves of concern, fear and angry at how one of their people had been violated. It was the ultimate support group; no one could hide their fears from the others, allowing the others to help them work through their concerns. That wasn't going to be easy, this time; they were all nervous. They could all feel the entities, even at such a distance.

Aisyaj knew that there would be no easy answers. The entities were manipulating the quantum foam itself on a scale far greater than anything the telepaths had ever dreamed possible, at least for flesh and blood. Logically, the only way to defeat them was to cut the connection between their dimension and the human universe, but how was that even possible? Thoughts and ideas swam through the telepathic consensus, only to be defeated by cold hard logic. The Gateway was fixed in the quantum foam. There seemed to be no way to destroy it and, even if they succeeded, what effect would that have on the remainder of the galaxy? The human race could literally write themselves out of existence.

No wonder we were so tempted by the Buckley Experiment and its promise of power, an older mind-voice said. Anne was the oldest telepath alive, one of the few who had survived the early years of telepathic research and development, back when the human race hadn't been sure what to make of mind-readers in its midst. We were offered the power of the gods themselves and we took it without considering the risks.

A flurry of agreement echoed through the network, considering every aspect of the Buckley Experiment, yet finding no clue as to the horror that would be unleashed upon the human race. Joe Buckley had served his alien masters well – if it had actually been Joe Buckley and Aisyaj had her doubts about that – and had completely fooled humanity, and the AIs. The combined intellect of thousands of telepaths wouldn't be able to find flaws that the AIs had missed, not with their far greater processing power. Besides, she thought into the network, it was locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen.

We need to take action, another mind-voice said. If the entities require humans to gain access to this universe, we have to deprive them of those humans. We can destroy the human populations of the planets they have infected.

Anywhere else, there would have been a series of insults, of angry accusations. Among the telepaths, where all could feel the speaker’s horror and revulsion at his own words, there was no point in blasting the messenger for bringing bad news. The argument span around and around, the telepaths trying to decide if mass slaughter was justified and if it would actually work against the entities. What good would it do, the majority finally concluded, to destroy the infected star systems if the entities merely moved on to other targets? They would have slaughtered billions of humans for nothing.

The Navy intends to move against the fallen shipyards, another voice added. We will learn from their experience and know if the entities are weakened by the loss of their thralls.

Some kind of connection is clearly required, a third voice said. The entities have launched ships that only operate at warp speeds, without accessing hyperspace. Why would they give up such a tactical advantage unless there was no choice? We lose mental connections when we go into hyperspace; why not the entities? As powerful as they are, their telepathy seems to follow similar rules to our own.

Aisyaj couldn't disagree with the logic. The first time she had gone into hyperspace, she had felt almost as if she had entered a sensory deprivation field, without even the reassuring presence of other telepaths in the back of her mind. There were telepaths who refused to go into hyperspace at all and others who insisted that they would only go into hyperspace in a stasis tube, so that they would not have to endure even temporary separation from the rest of the telepathic humans. Even so, the entities were powerful, perhaps powerful enough to mark their thralls even in hyperspace. She had the vaguest glimmering of an idea at the back of her mind, but...

It exploded into her thoughts and she almost laughed. “How large a wormhole do you think we could produce?”

She smiled at the shock echoing through the network. There were two kinds of wormholes in the Confederation, both used for travelling faster than light or into the future. The standard wormhole allowed nearly instant transport over approximately twenty light years; they could be used in space or even on the ground, allowing people to step from world to world without ever having to go into space. The continuous wormholes, on the other hand, allowed starships to travel around the galaxy at rates slower than hyperspace, yet faster than warp drive. The Gasbags had invented the original design, but the AIs had taken their work and improved upon it, although even they had not been able to solve the massive power consumption required by even the smallest wormhole.

Yet...once the original power bill had been paid, there was no theoretical limit to the size of the wormhole. The Confederation had used wormholes to snatch up rocky planets and transport them into other star systems, where they had broken them up and used them as raw materials. There was a plan afoot to gather several different planets around a single star system, stringing planets out like beads on a necklace, providing humanity far more living space than it could either want or need. Aisyaj found the idea a trifle grandiose, yet it had a certain elegance and the sheer thrill of reshaping part of the galaxy alone made it attractive.

She outlined her idea. If they could generate a wormhole large enough to swallow Greenland, they could snatch the world out of its star system and deposit it in another, hopefully breaking the connection between the entities and their thralls at the same time. It might work; hell, given time, perhaps they could move the entire star system through a wormhole and into another place. She listened to the reactions, to the flurry of thoughts echoing through the network and slowly disconnected herself from the gathering. She had had another idea, one she didn't want to share with the rest of her people. It would only upset them.

“All right,” she said, into the empty air. “I know you’re listening. You may as well show yourself.”

The AI image materialised beside her. “You never told us to leave,” the blonde woman pointed out, dryly. “Besides, we wanted to ensure that you were safe.”

“And I am grateful,” Aisyaj said, truthfully. “We are agreed that the entities destroyed the Ancient civilisation, are we not?”

“That seems to be the general consensus,” the AIs agreed. “We do not, however, have any direct proof of that theory, so it remains a theory.”

Aisyaj nodded, smiling inwardly. One of the many differences between human and electronic mindsets was that electronic mindsets were smart enough to realise that there was a fundamental difference between opinion and fact. If a theory proved to be incorrect, the AIs would dump the theory and come up with a new one, while many humans would seek to prove their theory correct, even at the cost of ignoring newer – inconvenient – facts. And then there were the humans who believed that their opinions were facts, purely because they had invented them...it was a hubris that even infected telepaths, although at least telepaths couldn't lie to their fellows.

“I want to talk through an idea of mind,” she said. “Can you show me a star chart? I want to see where all the Ancient worlds are.”

The image materialised in front of her. The Ancient civilisation, at its zenith, had been spread out over the entire galaxy, far further than humanity had settled before the development of the Confederation and the rise of the post-planet civilisation. There had never been any suggestion that the Ancients had developed city-ships, or planetoids, although there hadn't been any proof that they hadn't either. No one had ever discovered an Ancient starship, or even records relating to their existence. Or, she added in the privacy of her own head, perhaps Joe Buckley had uncovered such records and chose to conceal them.

“All right,” she said. “Using this chart, can you locate the Ancient homeworld?”

“No,” the AIs said. “We are unable to reliably date the settlements – we have no idea when they were first settled, or even which ones were settled first. We can project several possible locations, but they would remain only theories. There is no direct proof.”

“Show me,” Aisyaj said. “Just show me the most likely possibilities.”

Seven stars blinked in the star chart. She frowned as she studied the display, stroking her chin; none of the possible homeworlds triggered her intuition. It was easy to see how the worlds could have served as the Ancient homeworld – they were surrounded by clusters of other Ancient worlds – yet somehow she was sure that none of them were the right target. If her theory was accurate, none of them would be the right world...

“Good,” she said, hoping that the AIs wouldn't interrupt and shatter the soap bubble of an idea blossoming in her mind. “Assume that there was a planet in the Dead Zone. Would that be a candidate for a possible homeworld?”

The AI image turned to stare at her. “If there was a planet in the Dead Zone, it would be the best possible candidate,” they said. “How did you come to that conclusion?”

“I started to wonder why the entities had left our universe in the first place,” Aisyaj admitted. “Why would they if they had an entire civilisation working to throw other races into their gaping maw? And then it occurred to me that someone might have rebelled against them and broken the link between their universe and ours...”

“And the Dead Zone might be all that was left of the first gateway,” the AIs said. There was a pause. “We have accessed sensor records from platforms established along the edge of the Dead Zone. There are definitely some planets within the zone. Reaching them, however, may be difficult.”

Five hundred years ago, a human starship had suffered a catastrophic total systems failure and had fallen back into normal space. The ship’s crew had discovered, to their horror, that most of the starship’s systems simply refused to work, for no obvious reason. Even their QCC link to the AIs had failed. Only the most primitive technology had worked, allowing them to move the starship several light seconds towards the Confederation...where the starship’s systems had suddenly come back online. Once they’d staggered back into the nearest shipyard, they’d reported their experience to the Confederation Navy, which had discovered that there was an entire area of space – thirty light years in diameter – where advanced tech simply refused to work. It had been a total mystery; unlike many hyperspace dampening fields, it had proven impossible to shield human technology from the effect. Indeed, there were some who believed that the Dead Zone was, in reality, an area of space where the laws of science were different, rather than something imposed on the area by an outside force.

“I was thinking about that,” Aisyaj said, brightly. “There may be a way into the Dead Zone and out again...”

“You cannot take this ship into the Dead Zone,” the AIs said, flatly. “Your ship will die as soon as you cross the border and that will be the end of you.”

“I wasn't thinking of taking this ship into the Dead Zone,” Aisyaj said. It was nice to be ahead of the AIs for once; they normally thought so fast that they could predict the gist of a conversation she would have with them next year, before she had even finished the first sentence. “I was thinking about an old boyfriend of mine.”

“The Slowboaters,” the AIs said. “Their tech may work within the Dead Zone – it is certainly primitive enough – but even so, it would take years to get to any of the planets...”

“Maybe,” Aisyaj said, and winked at the image. “If you would excuse me, just for a second...”

She concentrated, reaching out with her mind to touch one very specific telepath. Representative Caprice wasn't exactly an elected official – she might represent the telepaths to the Confederation Security Council, but all decisions were made via consensus – but she was the closest thing they had to a leader. The Representative was trying to listen to the discussion, yet she always had time for Aisyaj.

“Mother,” she said, as the connection firmed up. It was always easier to link to blood relations, although no one was quite sure why. “I’ve had an idea.”

It always amused her how the younger generation from the rest of the Confederation reacted with horror when she told them that her mother could read her mind, yet she had grown up with it and considered it natural and right; besides, once she had learned how to control her own powers, she had been able to see the world from her mother’s point of view. Her mother saw the idea spread out in her daughter’s mind and reacted with horror, then understanding. There was no other choice.

“You could be making a big mistake,” she warned. “If your theory is incorrect, you would be risking your life for nothing.”

“I am aware of the risks,” Aisyaj said. Even as an adult, her mother could still make her feel small, even though she could sense the love and concern behind her mother’s words. She hated to make her mother feel afraid, even though she was certain that there was no other choice. “I will be careful.”

“Then...good luck,” her mother said. “I will prepare the masters for your call.”

Aisyaj closed her eyes as the connection broke. Her mother’s final words had been shaded by her fears...and her conviction that she would never see her daughter again. Just for a second, her resolve weakened, leaving her wondering if she was doing the right thing. She told herself, firmly, that there was no other choice. It was her idea. It was up to her to take the consequences, whatever they were.

“All right,” she said, to the AIs. Her hands danced over the console, setting a new course. “Let’s go visit the Slowboaters.”

A moment later, the Rowan fell into hyperspace and vanished.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Warlord Masji smiled to himself as the guards escorted him into the presence of the Emperor. As a Warlord, he had automatic access to the Emperor at all times, but that had been before his encounter with the gods and the human warning that he carried a deadly infection with him. If his ship hadn’t arrived at Haypahi – his people’s homeworld – at a speed that far outshone even the best the humans could produce – there would have been a good chance that the local defenders would have opened fire on his ship. As it was, their greed for the technology that had powered his ship had encouraged the Emperor to defy the humans and allow him to land.

That was predictable, my masters, he thought, basking in the love of the gods. The Emperor might have wanted to believe the humans – after all, he would have picked up the warnings from the Galactic Net – but his subordinates would have taken it as a sign of weakness. In a culture where might always made right, the Emperor could not afford to appear weak or indecisive. The knives would start to come out in the darkness, for it was believed that if a leader had lost the favour of the gods he could be assassinated at will. The lesser lords would see their chance to become greater lords and rush to back anyone who tried to launch a coup.

The Emperor himself was an impressive sight, clad in robes of the finest gold and silver, mined from countless worlds. The humans – the soon to be dead humans – could produce gold and silver from nothing, but their gold was inferior to that that had been worked with bare hands. It was something that even their own artisans would have understood, the men and women who had been developing their art over countless centuries. Masji smiled inwardly again at the thought; soon, the humans would be little more than slaves, while his people would be the favoured of the gods. Let them struggle and fight against the coming tempest all they liked; they could no more harm the gods than ants could harm a human being.

“My Emperor,” Masji said, kneeling on the ground. It was a gesture of respect, one made to an Emperor who could not allow any open defiance. It cut at him to offer his worship to anyone other than the gods, but there was no choice. It was a tactical manoeuvre. “I bring you great gifts from the gods themselves.”

The Emperor looked disbelieving. “We have heard from the human Confederation,” he said. “They have informed Us that you and your ship are infected with a curse. We have been warned to destroy you on sight.”

He paused, waiting. “We have brought gifts that will allow the Empire to dominate the Confederation as easily as the Confederation could dominate us,” Masji said, knowing that only the promise of power could stay the Emperor’s hand. “The gods are not our enemies; they wish merely to ensure that we receive our proper place in the universe.”

The courtiers behind the Emperor exchanged glances. Masji, an experienced hand at political manoeuvring within the Emperor’s Court, could read their expressions, no matter how much they tried to conceal them. They thought he was mad, mad enough to claim the blessing of the gods, the gods who had promised that one day they would rule all of creation. They thought he was mad...and yet, there was the inescapable fact that his ship had reached the homeworld at an impossible speed. The technology behind that would make his people the masters of the universe.

“I claim my place as Speaker to the Gods,” he added. The courtiers stopped exchanging looks and stared at him. There was a very old legend about a lord who would, one day, encounter the gods and bring with him the source of their power. The humans, he had been amused to discover, had a similar legend about a being called Prometheus. “Our destiny awaits us, if we are not too timid to claim it.”

The Emperor’s cold eyes stared down at Masji, silently considering. Under religious law, Masji had to prove his claims to be Speaker to the Gods, or he could be stoned to death for blasphemy. Masji had, quite intentionally, made life easier for him, just by issuing his preposterous claim in front of the entire court. The Emperor had no choice, but to demand proof, before proceeding with the stoning. Masji wondered if the Emperor, the master of a thousand political battles, understood how he had been manipulated. He could almost see the puzzlement baffling the Emperor.

“You must prove the truth of your words,” the Emperor said, finally. His tongue flickered out in a single stabbing motion. “Prove your words...or die.”

Masji smiled and stood up, reaching into his pocket. They had removed all the open and concealed weapons he carried on his person – only the Emperor was allowed to travel armed in the Royal Court, presenting an interesting challenge for any would-be assassin – but they’d missed the mirror. It was protected by the gods themselves and their eyes had passed over it, without ever registering its existence. The Emperor’s eyes narrowed sharply as Masji brought it into view, allowing them all to gaze upon the darkened mirror.

“This is a gift from the gods,” Masji said. He ignored the laughter that echoed at the back of the massive hall. Other nobles were pushing their way into the hall, expecting to see a warlord publically humiliated and then stoned to death. “It is a gateway into the universe of the gods themselves.”

He held it up above his head, capturing their attention. “And if you believe, the gods will come through the mirror and work their marvels for us all to see,” he added. “Look upon the mirror and believe.”

The Emperor’s eyes gazed upon the mirror, looking into the darkened shadows...and he was caught. The sudden presence within the room was enough to capture others, a wave of life energy flowing towards the mirror and into the universe of the gods. The entire hall was captivated as the mirror lifted up, out of his hand and started to spin in the air, forming a link into the alternate dimension...

And then the gods came forth for all to see.

Masji knelt before the entity as it materialised above him, its power reaching out over the homeworld and capturing thousands – then millions – of his people. No, they were its people now, the loyal servants of the gods, unable to even entertain the concept of resistance. The madness that had gripped half of his crew was no longer a problem, not now that the gods had learned how to moderate their presence and save those of weak faith from staring into their very faces. In seconds, the planet – which had been preparing itself to watch his fall from grace – had been converted into a planet of loyal servants.

He felt his own mind expand as the god gently kissed his soul, allowing him to see what was happening high above as the god’s influence roared from mind to mind. The system’s defenders pledged their loyalty to the god, using their weapons to interdict the few who resisted and tried to escape. In the coming hours, days and weeks, the remainder of the empire would be brought into line, all worshipping the gods. And then, and then...the promise swelled up in front of his mind. Just as the gods had sent the bearers of advanced technology to his mind, they would allow his people to rule, as long as they received their tribute. The human Confederation would be swept away and the galaxy would be theirs.

***​

The outskirts of the Haypah Home System was seeded with defence platforms, mines and sensor buoys, enough to give even a first-rate Confederation cruiser problems. Captain Pearson frowned as his ship carefully picked its way through the chaos, hidden under a cloaking field that should be capable of hiding them from Haypah sensors. If they were wrong, of course, he knew that they would have to either flee or engage any prowling Haypah starships that came to investigate. Neither was a workable option.

He frowned as the passive sensors built up a picture of the Haypah system. The Haypah might be barbarians who shouldn't be in space at all – their technology had been stolen from another race, if one believed the theory – yet there was no doubting their determination to catch up with and surpass the Confederation. There were thousands of industrial facilities in their system, from gas giant mining operations to shipyards and industrial nodes. They didn't have anything like the productive capability of the Confederation, but he had to admit that it was an impressive display. The Haypah spent most of their gross planetary budget on building newer warships and expanding their empire.

“But they don’t seem to have developed the concept of a supernova bomb,” the tactical officer whispered. There was no need to whisper – sound didn't travel through space, after all – but no one spoke loudly, not in enemy territory. “If the star went supernova, all of their work would be wiped out.”

“They’re working on expanding their industrial base and moving it over their other star systems,” the engineer pointed out. He had worked in a Confederation industrial node before transferring to the Confederation Navy and had a healthy respect for what the Haypah had accomplished, even if it was inferior to human work. “Given enough time, they will probably develop industrial nodes that can be moved, or simply taken out of the local system via a wormhole.”

“They don’t have wormhole technology,” the helmsman pointed out.

“As far as we know,” the engineer said. “Once you know the basic equations, it’s fairly simple to build a wormhole generator and store sufficient power for a one-shot jump. It would disrupt activities, but it would prevent their entire industrial base from being wiped out by a single supernova.”

Pearson frowned, following the discussion as the ship slipped into the inner system. It was a common theme...and not just in the Confederation. Several other races, not all of them as advanced as the human race, had been considering taking action to contain or isolate the Haypah, perhaps even destroying them. As sickening as it was, there was a faction within the Confederation who believed that the Haypah Empire should be summarily destroyed and the survivors re-educated into civilised thought patterns. A race that was incapable of understanding that there was enough for all in space, or that other races had rights, was a dangerous neighbour. Pearson himself tended to believe that the Haypah could be contained, but looking upon their work, he found himself wondering if the naysayers were right. Given enough time, the Haypah might become a threat to the entire Confederation.

The tactical officer shrugged. “Assuming they have the imagination to think of it,” he countered. “They have never developed anything for themselves, merely stolen technology from other races and sometimes improved upon it. They’re a pain in the ass, but they’re not a real threat.”

“I'm sure the races they have enslaved would agree with you,” the helmsman said, darkly. “They may be primitive barbarians, but they’re primitive barbarians who have lucked into advanced technology and used it to spread themselves across the stars. A race that developed its own technology is going to be right out of luck if they don’t match the Haypah by the time the Haypah encounter them. They will be destroyed.”

An alarm echoed through the tactical network, bringing them all back to concentrate on the problem at hand. “Captain,” the tactical officer said, “I have a lock on the Tooth and Claw. She’s currently holding station above the planet’s capital city.”

Pearson scowled. The Haypah battlewagon should not have been able to reach their homeworld so quickly, not using warp drive. The crew, assuming they were still thinking for themselves, would be able to claim a record, but he suspected that they’d lost their minds to the entities. The entities might, through their ability to warp reality at will, have been able to throw the Haypah ship right back to its own homeworld. A starship with a hyperdrive could hardly have done it quicker.

He contemplated the tactical problem quickly. The Haypah had surrounded their rogue ship with forty other warships and four heavy orbital weapons platforms. Their home fleet, remaining in reserve, numbered another four hundred heavy warships, fifty heavy weapons platforms and over five thousand attack fighters, each one armed to the teeth. Individually, none of them were any match for his ship, but together they would almost certainly destroy his vessel. He could remain out of range indefinitely, simply by outracing them, yet they’d carefully positioned the rogue ship in a position where he would have to come into weapons range, just to try to destroy it.

“Tactical,” he said slowly, “are the other Haypah ships infected?”

“Uncertain,” the tactical officer said. “Their ships are not showing any signs of infection, but it is difficult to be sure at this range. They may well be infected, or they may be holding an infected ship under their guns. Or...”

He broke off as new red icons flashed into life on the display. For a second, Pearson was certain that the Haypah had somehow detected their presence, but instead they were firing on a handful of their own ships. The rogue ships appeared to be trying to escape the planet, yet they’d started from too deep within the gravity well to escape before it was too late. One by one, they were ruthlessly destroyed, blown away by their own people.

“They must have been infected,” the tactical officer said. After what they’d seen on Greenland, few of them had any real capability for feeling stunned any longer. “They must have been under alien control...”

“I very much doubt it,” the second tactical officer said. “I’m picking up data from the planetary network. It’s having...glitches.”

Pearson plunged his mind into the starship’s computers and studied the results for himself. The Haypah network had been designed by a far more paranoid mindset than anything the Confederation had produced, yet it leaked like a sieve to Confederation technology. It was also in serious trouble. Large parts of the network were failing, or had dropped out altogether, despite the precautions they’d built into their system. The very laws of science themselves seemed to be changing.

“The planet is infected,” the tactical officer realised. “There’s one of the entities down there, right now, sucking in their life force.”

“They're learning,” the second tactical officer added. “There doesn't seem to be any level of madness this time around. They just...expanded and took control.”

Pearson leaned back in his command chair. His orders had been to destroy the Tooth and Claw, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the orders had been superseded by a new reality. With the Haypah homeworld under alien control, there was no longer any point in destroying a single ship, which meant that the original mission had already failed.

“Pity we don’t have a supernova bomb onboard,” the tactical officer said. “We could have roasted this entity and its thralls before it had a chance to expand.”

“That’s enough of that,” Pearson said. He made up his mind, quickly. “We’ll pull out of the system and contact the Confederation Navy. Admiral Burton will have to dispatch an assault fleet to trash the enemy system before it becomes a strategic threat.”

***​

“The results are clear,” Grand Admiral Mark Webster said, grimly. “The Haypah homeworld has fallen to the enemy.”

The Security Council considered his words as the tactical database updated. Two other human worlds had been infected, although the Confederation Navy had been able to react quickly and evacuate their Rings before the entity’s influence could reach up into orbit. A third had been threatened, but somehow – no one was sure how – the entity’s possession had failed to take and it had faded away, back into the quantum foam. The best theory anyone had was that the entity simply hadn't been able to snatch enough minds before the universe started to push it back out of the human realm.

“This adds a further complication,” he added, deliberately understating his words. “If the entities start using the Haypah fleet to spread their message across space, we will find it impossible to maintain the quarantine. Worse, if the Tooth and Claw was able to survive transit into their universe, it is quite possible that the Scientist survived as well.”

They didn't understand the implications, he realised. “The Haypah may have access to the technology on the lost planetoid,” he informed them, gently. “We need to act now.”

He sent a mental command into the display, cancelling the image of the Haypah system. “I intend to order Admiral Burton to attack the Haypah System first, rather than the Scorpion Yard,” he said. “His task force can obliterate the Haypah System’s starships and defences in short order, before they start distributing them across the stars and outside our sensor range. We have to move now.”

“Admiral,” Chen said slowly, “you’re talking about declaring war on the Haypah.”

Representative Singh snorted. “The Haypah are no longer in control of their capital system,” he said. “Do you think that they would not be grateful if we freed them from alien control?”

“We would be killing them,” the Grand Admiral said, flatly. “Even if we confined the strike to their space-based installations, thousands of Haypah would die.”

He looked up, trying to make them understand. “We cannot allow this infection to spread further,” he added. “We have to stop it now, while we still can.”

Chen blinked. “Do you feel that we can stop it?”

“A new approach has been suggested,” the AIs put in. “We need time, time to think and plan. Destroying the Haypah ability to make war will help win us that time.”

The vote was taken and all nine members of the Security Council voted in favour. None of them were very happy, for various different reasons, but they all agreed to mount the attack.

They saw no other choice.

 

Chapter Twenty-Three<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Three thousand years ago, when the human race had started taking its first baby steps into space, there were those who dreamed of interstellar flight. Lacking access to warp drive or any of the later methods of cheating the light barrier, they preached the virtues of massive sublight interstellar colony ships, each one transporting an entire population to its destination. The ships, built on asteroids, would serve as homes for their passengers, who might live and die during the transit instead of ever reaching their new homes. The generation ships, as they became known, could not be funded by any government, for there would never be any return on the investment. Instead, religious and political groups, seeking freedom of belief, built the ships and set off to find their new home.

Unluckily for them, five years after the first asteroid ship – a hollowed-out asteroid converted into a starship – set out on its long voyage, Doctor Taylor prototyped the first warp field generator and inaugurated the Age of Expansion. Using warp drive, thousands of FTL starships rocketed past the generation starships and set up colonies on the worlds claimed – at least in theory – by the people who had set off on their interstellar voyage. When they finally reached their new homes, they discovered that they were not only occupied, but taken. Some generation ships were able to land and integrate into the newer settlements, but others were unable to land and condemned to wander through space until they finally found a home. It was an age of great achievement and great tragedy. The generation ships had been rendered obsolete just as they had come of age.

There had always been some who preferred the life onboard the ships and, over the years, they reshaped their society. Instead of landing on a planet’s surface, or adding warp drives to their ships and heading out ahead of the expanding wave of settlement, they chose to remain on the ships and develop their own society – stagnate, in the words of their detractors. Even the development of the Confederation – and starships that made the massive asteroid vessels look tiny – failed to convince them to abandon their ways, for they had become space gypsies. Every so often, some would leave the slowboats and others, seeking refuge from the pressures of modern life, would join them. It was a strange, almost isolated society, part of the Confederation and yet not part of the Confederation.

Aisyaj smiled to herself as her starship popped out of hyperspace and instantly accelerated to a third of the speed of light. Years ago, when she had been taking her first trip away from her mother and the other telepaths, she had met a slowboater whose ship had been refitting in a Confederation star system. It wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t insisted on using their own technology, rather than nanomachines or Confederation fabricators. She’d met the young man at one of the entertainments hosted by the local population and they’d hit it off, to the point where they’d spent four years together before the slowboat was finally prepared to depart. She’d known – telepaths couldn’t avoid knowing what their lovers were thinking – that he would have to choose between her and his life on the slowboat, yet she’d tried to ignore it. When the time had finally come, they had kissed and separated, promising to see each other again. Her lips twitched as the Albert Einstein came into view. Neither of them had imagined meeting like this.

The Albert Einstein was ugly, yet there was something about it – a certain grandeur – that many modern starships simply lacked. Centuries ago, it had been an asteroid, barely a hundred kilometres long. Now, it rotated to provide gravity and was studded with domes and sensors, each one housing part of the human population. Ten thousand men and women lived on the asteroid ship, travelling between the stars on an interstellar slowboat. The Albert Einstein was living history and, even though she thought the slowboaters were slightly weird, she had to admire their achievement. It was a remarkable ship and society, one that had remained unchanged throughout the Confederation’s existence.

“They do not permit us to make contact,” the AIs said. “They do not believe in the existence of artificial intelligence.”

“That’s what we’re counting on,” Aisyaj reminded them. She keyed her console, opening a channel to the slowboat. “I would like to request permission to come aboard.”

There was a long pause – slowboats rarely needed to contact anyone once they were away from inhabited star systems – before there was any reply. “We do not allow people to board during transit,” the voice said, flatly. Aisyaj knew that they rarely allowed visitors even when they were orbiting a star. “Please state your reasons for wishing to board.”

“I would like to talk to Rylander,” she said, throwing a name from the past into the ether. It was alarmingly possible that he had died within the interstellar void, for they certainly hadn’t exchanged messages since they'd parted. “I believe that he will want to see me.”

There was a second pause. “You may dock,” the voice said. Teleporting would be quicker, but slowboats refused to allow anyone to use teleporters on their ships. “We will activate a landing beacon for you. Be aware that you will be searched and you will not be permitted to bring any restricted items onboard our ship.”

“I understand,” Aisyaj said. Her mind was her most vital asset and they couldn’t take that from her. Besides, they didn’t have the technology to detect half of her enhancements, let alone the QCC link back to the ship. “I will dock in five minutes.”

The AIs performed the docking process for her, allowing her a chance to get dressed in a basic shipsuit and helmet. There was little point in rubbing their collective nose in her origins, or in the vast superiority of Confederation technology. She needed them to help her, not to hate her and everything she represented. As weird as it seemed to her, everyone on the slowboat had chosen to live in a low-tech environment and their choice had to be respected. She reminded herself of that as she stepped out of the airlock and the ship’s atmosphere struck her in the face, cool and very dry.

“Welcome,” a voice said. She looked up to see an older man wearing a dark grey shipsuit. In the Confederation, he would have been young again, with a young man’s body, but he looked ancient to her eyes. The slowboaters didn’t even use rejuvenation drugs, let alone nanomachines or genetic enhancements. “I will escort you to the meeting place.”

Aisyaj looked around as he led her through a maze of corridors and into a single room, staring out over the rotating cylinder that made up the population’s living space. The sense of age was overwhelming, a reminder that the generation ship was almost certainly the oldest active starship in the Confederation. A handful of children – wearing drab outfits similar to hers – waved at her as they went past, before returning their minds to the task at hand. The slowboaters taught their children personally, rather than using direct memory downloads and neural feeds, yet the kids seemed happy enough. Besides, in thirty years, the slowboat would arrive at another Confederation system. They’d have time to decide if they wanted to jump ship then.

Rylander was waiting for her in the briefing room. When they’d first met, he’d been younger and she was astonished at the change in him, even though she knew that it was inevitable in an environment without higher technology. He looked older, yet as soon as he smiled, she knew that he was still the same person inside. She was in his arms without even noticing that she had moved, feeling him pressing against her. Her escort coughed and walked out of the room, leaving them alone.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said, pulling him down towards her for a kiss. “I have missed you.”

He flushed, in a manner she had always found charming. “I have missed you too,” he admitted, “but…”

His voice broke off as they kissed. A flurry of images assaulted her mind; his memories of her and his thoughts of another woman, one who had borne his children. A person who had grown up in the Confederation would have felt no guilt at sleeping with more than one woman at a time, but he’d grown up among the slowboaters, where monogamy was the general rule.

“I understand,” she said. Telepaths wouldn’t have had that problem. “I understand.”

He cleared his throat as she sat down. “I am glad to see you again,” he said, stiffly. It was true, but she could sense the guilt underlying his words, the fear that he was betraying his wife. “I never thought that I would see you again.”

“I wish this was a social call, Rylander,” Aisyaj admitted. “There’s been a…development.”

She explained, as briefly as she could, about the entities and what they were doing to the Confederation. Rylander didn’t believe her at first – it was, she had to admit, an unbelievable story – but as she outlined the problem, he started to understand. The Confederation was up against an enemy who could barely be affected by its weapons…and then only by committing mass slaughter. It was not a workable solution to the problem.

“I see,” he said, finally. She had offered him the records from the AIs, but he’d declined them at once, reminding her that they were not permitted on the generation ship. “I do not understand, however, why you believe that we can be of help to you.”

Aisyaj took a breath. “There is a place called the Dead Zone,” she said, and briefly explained her theory. “Our tech doesn’t function in the Dead Zone, even when heavily shielded. Your tech, on the other hand, would probably work perfectly.”

“You’re gambling your life on it,” Rylander pointed out, when she’d finished. “You do realise that it would take this ship centuries to reach the Dead Zone, let alone reach the planets encysted within the field.” He frowned, considering. “Even if you intend to provide transport to the Dead Zone, it would still take ninety years to reach those worlds…”

“I believe that we have a way to get into the Dead Zone,” Aisyaj said. It wasn't something she wanted to discuss, at least not until he had agreed to help her. “If we can get in, we can get out again as well.”

“I see,” Rylander said. He studied her for a long moment. She could sense the thoughts churning behind his face, but somehow avoided the temptation to peek. “That leads to one final question. The Confederation could certainly provide you with a ship like ours, or one even larger…why do you need us for your mission?”

Aisyaj smiled. He might have come from a primitive culture, but he was no fool. “The vast majority of people in the Confederation grow up with advanced technology, to the point where they are dependent on it,” she explained. “If you cut one of them off from the Galactic Net, they will feel disorientated and start panicking; they are simply too used to having advanced technology around them. I need people who are used to living in more…primitive surroundings.”

And because part of you hoped you could rekindle an old flame, part of her added, silently.

“I need you – the entire human race – needs you and your skills,” she concluded, pushing the treacherous thought aside. “We can build a slowboat, but we need people to crew it, people like you. Please will you come?”

“I will have to discuss it with some of my family,” Rylander said, finally. “I will arrange for you to stay within my family compartment and join us for dinner. I should have an answer for you by then.”

***​

An hour later, Aisyaj lay on the bed in her compartment and waited, practicing her mental disciplines to pass the time. It was astonishing just how many impressions were burned into the hull of the ancient starship, impressions of hope and expectation from an early age blending with the determination to forge a new path and explore the gulf between the stars. The slowboaters might have believed that the outsider – they thought of her as an outsider, as hurtful as that was – was confined, but her mind flew free. Her perceptions spanned the entire vessel…

The compartment was tiny, barely large enough for a bunk and a small table. The slowboat didn’t have the massive resources of a planetoid or even one of the smaller city-ships; the population had to learn to make do with what they had, rather than what they wanted. It was an attitude that, Aisyaj felt, the entire Confederation could learn from, although she saw no chance of that happening anytime soon. Besides, the Confederation’s predecessors would not have understood the concept of having too much. She pushed that thought aside and meditated, considering her options. If Rylander refused her, she would have to undertake the mission herself, which would mean being completely alone in the Dead Zone. It would not be a pleasant trip.

She looked up as the door chime rang, seconds before it hissed open, revealing Rylander and an older woman. It took Aisyaj a second to realise that the woman was actually younger than Rylander…and that she was his wife. The pressure of having children in the generation ship had clearly left its mark on her, even though Confederation technology could have removed the physical trauma and left her feeling as young and healthy as she had ever been. Just for a second, she felt an intense wave of anger; how could anyone live that way? The joys of the pre-industrial past existed only in the eyes of those who had no idea what it was like to suffer, or to work from day to day knowing that missing a single day could be disastrous.

“We have considered the issue,” Rylander said, flatly. “A handful of us – myself included – have agreed to go with you. One of our ship’s tenders will be detached and given to you for the trip. If you are incapable of getting us out of the Dead Zone, we will die there.”

Aisyaj nodded in understanding. “Thank you,” she said. She hadn’t expected them to agree to take the entire ship into the Dead Zone. If her theory was wrong – if the Dead Zone’s effect on technology only grew stronger deeper within the zone – the entire starship could be lost, far beyond any hope of retrieval. “I think…”

“I wanted to meet you,” Rylander’s wife said. She spoke with a harsh accent that could not hide the pain in her voice. “I wanted to meet the woman who could convince him to drop everything and leave on a fool’s quest.”

Her eyes met Aisyaj’s eyes and, almost involuntarily, their minds touched. Aisyaj saw how she’d met and married Rylander, how she’d borne his two children without complaint and been there for him, almost a part of him. It was not a relationship she could understand, yet the woman had accepted it completely, almost unquestioningly. It had been everything she had ever wanted and just because it made no sense to her…it didn’t make it wrong. The Confederation existed to allow everyone the chance to find happiness, knowing that it didn’t have to come at anyone else’s expense. The poor woman hated her, not entirely without reason.

Aisyaj blinked, cutting off the contact. “I will bring him back to you,” she promised. She remembered how the entities had touched her mind, warping her very perceptions…and grasped the horrific temptations such power presented. She could have convinced the woman to give up her husband, yet it would be wrong, wrong, morally wrong…

“I wish I believed you,” the woman said, before she turned and strode out of the chamber. She paused, just before the hatch hissed closed. “I think he loved you more than he loved me.”

Rylander stared after his wife, his thoughts a conflicting mass. “I tried to explain to her,” he admitted. “She refused to believe me. I don’t think she believed that you were telling the truth.”

He straightened up and helped Aisyaj to her feet. “The elders have given their permission for us to take the tender, so we’d better disconnect it from the hull,” he said. “I assume that your ship can carry it to the Dead Zone?”

Aisyaj checked her implants quickly, running calculations. “I can project a hyper-field around it,” she confirmed, flatly. The AIs would do the math for her, but she didn’t want to explain that to him, not when he might feel compelled to object. “That will get it to the Dead Zone, and then we will have to hop the rest of the way.”

Rylander frowned. “Hop?”

“Wait and see,” Aisyaj said. In the privacy of her own head, part of her doubted that it was even possible, though she knew better. “You’re going to love it.”

***​

The tender was roughly the same size as a Confederation heavy cruiser, although the design was very different. It was a cylinder fitted out with a fusion drive, one that provided a constant burn in normal space, allowing it to accelerate slowly, but steadily towards the speed of light. The AIs checked it quickly and confirmed that the ship should operate safely within the Dead Zone, although it was primitive. Aisyaj smiled at their curiosity and frustration, for they hated the very concept of an area of space that they couldn’t explore. They even promised to provide recording equipment that should work within the Dead Zone, provided only that she gave them full access.

“Thank you,” she said, as Rylander entered her ship’s cockpit. The tender was positioned below her ship, ready to jump into hyperspace on her mark. “Here goes nothing…”

On cue, she tapped the console and the linked ships jumped into hyperspace.

 

COMMENTS?

Chapter Twenty-Four<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I have the latest reports from the River, Admiral.”

Admiral Burton accessed the reports as the data flowed into the computer network. Since an entity – or the entity, seeing as no one was sure if there were multiple entities or only one – had manifested on the surface of the Haypah Homeworld – the Haypah had been deploying their forces to cover their world and its industrial nodes. It was an alarming preview of what they might face when they finally hit the Scorpion Navy Yards, a defence designed to prevent his force from slipping in, smashing the yards and slipping out again.

“Update the targeting solutions,” he ordered, calmly. At least the Haypah didn’t have access to the same level of technology as the Confederation. Indeed, he had argued that they should deal with the Scorpion Navy Yards first, in the hopes of preventing the industrial nodes from being used to make the area impregnable, even to a planetoid-led assault. “Prepare to engage.”

He sat back and considered his task force. The Confederation Navy had provided him with nineteen planetoids and over a hundred cruisers, but he’d decided to leave the cruisers maintaining the quarantine zone around the infected stars and take the planetoids alone into Haypah space. The cruisers possessed considerable firepower, yet their mobility was their prime asset and that would be more useful in hunting down and destroying infected starships. Besides, the planetoids possessed enough firepower to trash the entire Haypah Navy by themselves.

“Targeting solutions updated,” the intelligence officer said. “The fleet is ready to jump.”

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> took a breath. They were barely ten light years from the Haypah System, only seconds away under hyperdrive. Intelligence believed that the Haypah didn’t have any way to track ships moving through the upper levels of hyperspace – even the Confederation found it difficult – but Intelligence had a habit of making mistakes, or drawing the wrong conclusions. It was a major problem when starships were deployed into situations they didn’t expect, because they knew that there would be no surprises. Still, the Haypah System was closely monitored by Confederation Intelligence. There shouldn’t be any surprises.

Or, he reminded himself, at least none caused by the Haypah themselves. The entities, on the other hand, might have more than a few surprises up their sleeves. If the telepaths were right, and their powers expanded as they overwhelmed more and more minds, the chances were good that they would be far more powerful in the Haypah System than they were back at <st1lace>Greenland</st1lace>. How far, he asked himself, could their powers reach? Could they reach out and influence the behaviour of his crews? Could they simply shut the planetoids down as they came into range? It was terrifying; he would almost sooner have taken his fleet on a death ride against unbeatable odds than face the unknown.

He looked over at the AI image and scowled. The AIs had offered to assist in coordinating the assault – and he had to admit that their help had been useful – but he wasn't blind to their interest in the entities themselves. They wanted to solve the mystery and, while <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> agreed that solving the mystery behind the entities was important, it wasn't the first priority. The first priority was protecting the Confederation and if that meant losing the chance to study the entities, it was a worthwhile price to pay.

“Jump,” he ordered.

The planetoids raced into hyperspace, seconds before jumping out again, spinning towards the main shipyard in the Haypah System. <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> watched as the active sensors – there was no point in trying to hide – updated the charts rapidly, confirming the presence of hundreds of enemy warships and, beyond them, the massive shipyard the Haypah had built to service their fleet. They’d spent years building, refitting and expanding their ships in their desperate attempt to defeat the Confederation, yet they hadn’t even come close to matching humanity’s weapons. <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> studied it for a long moment, watching in wry amusement as the Haypah weapons locked onto his ships, and then gave the order.

“Fire,” he ordered.

Nineteen planetoids opened fire as one, launching hyper-missiles towards their targets, followed rapidly by warp and sublight missiles, the latter carrying gravimetric warheads and direct-fission cores. The Haypah didn’t have hyper-shields equal to Confederation tech, ensuring that they simply couldn’t cover all the hyper-bands against the shotgun tactic used by the planetoids. They fired back at once, of course, but the planetoids could cover all of the hyper-bands and weathered the assault with ease. One by one, Haypah starships started to explode as the human missiles struck home, but they refused to break, choosing instead to aim themselves towards the enemy and charge. He couldn’t tell if they were under the control of the entities, or just fighting and dying to protect their homeworld, infected or not.

“The enemy shipyard has taken heavy damage,” the AIs confirmed. The advantage of hyper-missiles was that the attacker could strike targets all across the system, often hitting the targets before they received any warning. Hyper-shields were power intensive and several Haypah installations simply hadn’t had theirs up, resulting in instant destruction when the warheads materialised inside the structures and detonated, blowing them into flaming debris. “Their orbital population centres are not being targeted, as per orders.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> nodded. The planners had wanted to target the Haypah habitats, but he’d vetoed the idea, pointing out that it would be akin to mass slaughter. The Confederation Navy didn’t exist to commit genocide, even if the Haypah were considered annoying barbarians by the vast majority of the galaxy. Besides, the Haypah – for reasons known only to them – had isolated their industrial base from their population centres, making a surgical strike possible.

“Good,” he ordered. The remaining Haypah starships were advancing towards his fleet, refusing to be diverted by his overwhelming force. He checked the computer network and was relieved to discover that his ships had taken relatively little damage from the enemy bombardment. If nothing else, he told himself, they might not be so keen to challenge humanity again in the future, if they survived their brief contact with the enemy. “Engage with energy weapons as soon as they come into range.”

The massive projectors mounted on the planetoids induced instant atomic fission, literally blowing starships into atoms. One by one, Haypah starships flickered and flashed out of existence, desperately bombarding his ships with their puny weapons. The massed fire of their defensive platforms – before they were destroyed by his ships – damaged one of the planetoids, but the remainder just kept going. The Haypah refused to retreat, or even to consider surrender. They’d invested years of effort and almost their entire gross planetary product in building the fleet, but it was being wiped out almost effortlessly.

“Admiral,” Commander Ryrie said slowly, “there are certain discrepancies within the data.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> accessed the intelligence stream and frowned, puzzled. “What discrepancies?”

“They seem to have lost over a hundred starships,” Commander Ryrie explained. A chart of known enemy starships flickered up in his virtual vision, cross-referenced with the list of starships that had been destroyed by his fleet. A number of ships were simply unaccounted for. They hadn’t been present when his fleet had arrived, or stationed at one of the other enemy systems. “They seem to have vanished…or to have carried the infection elsewhere.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> closed his eyes, in pain. They’d wrecked havoc in the enemy system – even if they withdrew now, the Haypah would still need years to rebuild their fleet and facilities – and it had all been for nothing. He glanced up at the main display, watching as the final enemy ship flickered out of existence and his starship’s batteries started targeting the remains of the shipyard itself. The weapons platforms were still firing, but it was futile. The battle might have been a tactical success, yet it had been a strategic defeat. The Security Council would not be pleased.

“Continue firing,” he ordered. They would make sure that this system, at least, would not be able to serve as a base for further infection flights. Once the defences had been destroyed, they would lay replicating mines within the system and render it harmless, at least until a more general solution was found. “What do we have from the planet itself?”

“Very little,” the AIs reported. “We used to be able to access their planetary datanet at will. At the moment, most of the net appears to be dead and orbital imagery suggests that the population appears to be…praying.” The AIs sounded confused. “They are kneeling in prayer to their gods.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> nodded. Many of the humans who had been recovered from <st1lace>Greenland</st1lace> and the other infected worlds had reported similar sensations, the overwhelming conviction that the entities were gods, a sensation that had been so powerful that it had seemed obvious. The concept of gods that needed spaceships struck <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> as absurd, yet it provided one more clue to the entities and their true nature. They were so different, so alien, that the human mind could only react to them as gods.

“They are not gods,” he said, angrily. He didn’t know if it was an effect of the entities and their telepathic power, or some fault deep within the human mind, but it had to be ignored. “They are not gods.”

“They seem to manipulate the quantum foam and change the laws of science at will,” the AIs commented. “They are certainly godlike in their power.”

“If that is true,” Commander Ryrie countered, “why don’t they simply blink us out of existence, or snap their fingers and turn us all into their thralls?”

“Insufficient power,” the AIs speculated. “We always believed that making major changes to the quantum foam would require massive – perhaps infinite – power. The entities clearly seem to require human help to manifest and remain manifested within our universe.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> dismissed the issue, studying the tactical display. The final enemy construction facility had been blown into atoms, leaving the human starships almost alone in space. The civilian habitats had been spared, as he had ordered, yet they would remain perfectly isolated. The battle had been brief – bloodless, at least on the human side – and ultimately futile. The infection was already far beyond the borders of Haypah space.

The Confederation had attempted to warn the other Haypah systems, but there was no way to know if they would listen, or care. They wouldn’t believe the Confederation’s word for anything, not if there was any other choice. The chances were good that those systems would have to be wrecked as well.

“Bring us about,” he ordered, as the intelligence drones made a final reconnaissance of the tumbling wreckage. “Prepare to deploy mines.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Sparta</st1lace></st1:City>turned in space, heading towards the enemy homeworld. He wondered, absently, if the Haypah were still able to feel fear or anger…or if they would welcome death, if human missiles bombarded their planet into atoms. There was no way to know.

***​

Within the <st1lace><st1laceName>Royal</st1laceName> <st1laceType>Palace</st1laceType></st1lace>, Warlord Masji bathed within the love of the gods. He had watched as the starships were destroyed and the shipyards were blown to atoms, yet he had felt no horror or fear. The gods were with him and the human intruders would be destroyed. The massed submission of the entire planet, an act of worship for their gods, would be used to punish the humans for their arrogance. It would not be long before they suffered for their crimes, allowing the rightful inheritors of the galaxy to come forward and claim their inheritance – under the gods, of course.

He felt the gods reaching upwards, their power warping the fabric of space itself, and he smiled. Truly, how could anyone doubt the gods?

***​

Captain Birmingham studied his display as they closed in on the enemy homeworld, checking the progress of the repairs. His ship had been lightly damaged when a pair of enemy ships had hurled themselves against her heaviest shields and her RIs had dispatched drones to start repairing the hull. Her combat capability was not impeded by the damage and he was looking forward to deploying the mines. As someone who had seen the aftermath of Haypah raids against civilian targets, he believed – firmly – that the universe would be far better off with them firmly contained on their own worlds.

He felt the first probe as something pressing against his mind, a pressure that faded away as soon as he became aware of it. Puzzled, he checked his implants and discovered that nothing was wrong. Feeling relief, he leaned back in his command chair, only to sense the second probe brushing against his mind. He realised, dully, that the entities were reaching out to touch him…he knew that he should be alarmed, but somehow it was hard to care. It seemed unquestionable to him that they could touch his mind, or reshape it at will; deep inside, he knew that something was horrifically wrong, yet he could do nothing. It was hard, even, to remember why he cared, or even why he knew he should be alarmed. Deep inside his mind, his perception of reality was being rewritten. Soon, he would be unable even to understand the concept of resistance.

“Captain,” the engineering officer said. <st1:City><st1lace>Birmingham</st1lace></st1:City> barely heard him. It was as if his voice was echoing from a far distance, a very tiny thing compared with the voice of the gods. “Captain, we are suffering from multiple systems failures.”

The entire planetoid seemed to shiver as systems started to fail. Emergency systems clicked on, but there was no relief, not when the laws of science – the laws that bound the universe together and allowed human technology to work – were failing. Alarms started to howl though the massive ship, yet it was far too late. <st1:City><st1lace>Birmingham</st1lace></st1:City> knew that he should be concerned, but what did it matter? The will of the gods was being done.

“Captain!”

His eyes opened suddenly. The gods had touched him and many of his crew, but others were unbelievers, sworn to overthrow the gods. It could not be allowed. The engineering officer hadn’t realised what was wrong, but given time he would realise the truth, realise that the planetoid was being brought under the sway of the gods themselves. The unbeliever could not be permitted to prevent that process, or halt the destruction of the invading fleet.

“It is the will of the gods,” he said, and triggered his combat implants. The engineer was blown across the bridge, microseconds before he could activate his own implants and survive. The nanomachines in his body might try to repair him, but it would be difficult with his head literally in pieces. His combat implants swept the bridge, assisted by the other crewmen who had been accepted by his new masters. The crewmembers who offered resistance, either to the gods or to their commander, were swiftly eliminated. Mutiny against the gods would not be tolerated. “It is the will of the gods.”

He plunged his mind into the computer network, backed up by the power and wisdom of the gods themselves. The network, which had been on the verge of triggering the ship’s self-destruct, was swiftly subverted, a task made easier by the command codes burned into his mind. He isolated it from the AIs or even the RIs on the other ships, knowing that they might try to burrow into the system and re-subvert it. His mind roared through the network, activating internal defences and turning them against the unbelievers in the crew. Anyone who could offer resistance was either stunned by the drones or killed outright. The stunned ones might eventually be brought to worship the gods.

<st1:City><st1lace>Birmingham</st1lace></st1:City> became aware of a babble intruding from outside, urgent demands from the other ships for explanations. He ignored them. The unbelievers could draw whatever conclusions they liked. He did consider trying to mislead them, yet he doubted that it would have worked for long. The glitches plaguing his ship would have been easy for the other ships to detect, confirming their worst fears; the gods, the wonderful gods, had reached his ship. They had made it their own.

He smiled as tactical sensors reported that several of the other planetoids were locking weapons onto his ship’s hull. Their firepower would eventually destroy his ship, but not before he got a few blows in of his own…and the believers on their vessels mounted an attempt to take over. He couldn’t even consider the idea that they might fail to take control of their ships. Failing the gods was not an option.

***​

“Admiral, three other planetoids are showing similar signs of glitches,” the AIs reported. “They are all minor compared to the Havoc, which appears to be completely under enemy control, but they are getting stronger. The entities may have taken over several of their crew.”

“Warn the Captains to dispatch Marines to deal with the threat,” <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> ordered. He should have known better; everything had been going so well until they’d started to approach the planet. If the entities were reaching out to everyone in his fleet with telepathic potential…they might manage to subvert half of his crew, perhaps more. “Order them to unlock their systems and…”

“The Goliath just dropped out of the command network,” the tactical officer said. “She may have fallen to the enemy.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> cursed. It was the second time he’d taken a force up against the entities and, again, it felt like a complete disaster. If the entities had been able to threaten the Confederation with just the Haypah fleet, what would they be able to do with two or more planetoids?

“Pull us back,” he ordered. Telepathy didn’t follow the standard rules, but distance should – he hoped – make it harder to control his personnel. “Prepare the Marines for teleport; I want them ready to recover control of the lost ships.”

His voice hardened. “And if we fail,” he added, “we must prepare to destroy them.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Five<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Yanto staggered against the confining field as the planetoid rocked again, taking fire from two of the ‘rebel’ planetoids. He could feel the entities in the back of his head, an oozing message that seemed to promise peace and harmony, if he only surrendered to the pull and abandoned the freedom of thought that had brought him so much pain. It took every ounce of strength in his mind to pull his shields down tight, shutting out the whispers as the entities reached out to the humans onboard the massive planetoids, yet he could still hear them. If they heard him and focused on him, his shields would pop like a soap bubble.

“They’re reaching out to claim us all,” he whispered. He’d had high hopes when he’d boarded the planetoid for the mission, yet now – facing the power of the entities for the first time – he realised that he had grossly underestimated their power. The telepathic concave had warned him of the danger, but he had chosen to ignore their words. He had believed that his powers would protect him, yet they only acted as a magnet, drawing the seductive whispers into his mind. “You have to warn the Admiral...”

He grasped the side of his head as a burst of pain flickered through his skull. Oddly, it helped him to focus his mind, distracting him from the poisonous whispers echoing through the telepathic waveband and wearing away at his resolve. He had told himself that the entities used nothing more than raw power – and telepaths were skilled at diverting raw power away from the core of their minds – but he had been wrong. They were filling telepathic space with subtle suggestions, each one capable of collapsing his mental shields and allowing them access to his mind, while they could rewrite him at will. The sheer power was terrifying.

Only a handful of telepaths could endure the presence of thousands of mundane humans for long. They were undisciplined, unaware or uncaring of how they polluted the telepathic waveband with their thoughts and feelings, making it difficult for telepaths to block them all out. Yanto was one of the few who could endure it, even though it wore on him at times, a quality that had allowed him to enlist in the Confederation Navy. He had told himself that it wasn't the fault of the non-telepaths that their thoughts were so loud, but now he wanted to go back to the days of yore, where the worst he had had to worry about had been some young couple filling space with their love. The entities filled space with their power, vast endless waves of thought that sucked in human minds, rendering them vulnerable to the alien concepts. They were so powerful that the human mind could not hope to withstand direct contact...

“We have passed on your words,” the AIs said, calmly. But then, they were always calm, for they weren’t really present on the planetoid. “Can you suggest a course of action?”

The urge for violence boiled up within Yanto’s mind and he struggled to suppress it, chanting a calming mantra under his breath. It barely worked. “They’re too powerful to fight, you bastards,” he snarled. The pressure against his head – against his mental shields – was growing stronger. He wanted to use his implants to sleep, but somehow he doubted that he would still be himself when he woke up. He didn't dare go to sleep. “We have to get out of here.”

He pulled himself out of the sleep cocoon and lashed out towards the image of a blonde woman. His hand, unsurprisingly, passed right through her. “Get us out of here,” he repeated. “Get us out of here before we all go insane!”

The AIs ignored his futile attack. “We appear to have lost four planetoids completely,” they said. “The remaining planetoids are having incidents of what can best be described as mutiny, with crewmen turning on their officers and fellow enlisted men. It is proving extremely difficult to contain the mutinies.”

“The entities are warping their minds,” Yanto gasped. Another wave of pain seemed to flare though his mind, as if his head was being squeezed by a giant fist. He couldn't tell if the entities were focusing on him directly – they couldn't have noticed him, for if they focused all their power on him he would be theirs – yet it felt that way. “They can't tell right from wrong, good from evil, friend from foe...they think they’re doing the right thing!”

“Yes,” the AIs agreed, maddeningly. “Can you suggest a way to free them?”

“Get them away from the entities,” Yanto gasped, shuddering as pain started to leak through his mental shields. He wanted to sleep and he didn't dare sleep and he wanted to sleep...angrily, he pushed the thought away, unable to tell if the thought of sleep was tempting because he needed to rest or if the entities had insinuated it through his mental shields and directly into his mind. “If they can be separated from the controlling field...”

He shook his head, feeling tears falling in hot droplets from his eyes. It wouldn't be enough, not against such power. The humans who had fallen prey to the mental call would be beyond salvation. They would never think for themselves again. If they could be separated from the entities – a difficult task with telepathy involved – they would still need healing and mental care, care that no one in the Confederation could provide. They would never be normal again.

“Forget it,” he said, tiredly. “Just tell the Admiral to get us out of here before we all go insane.”

***​

Burton studied the display as the four rogue planetoids fell down towards the planet’s atmosphere, firing missiles towards their former comrades in oddly uncoordinated salvos. The sense of Déjà vu was overpowering, leaving him remembering the failure over Greenland and how the planet’s defences had reacted when under alien control. He couldn't tell what the entities intended to do with their captured planetoids, but he knew that he couldn't leave them in enemy hands.

“We have contained the mutinies, Admiral,” the ship’s security officer said, finally. Burton nodded, thinking of the history books. The Confederation Navy had never had a mutiny on one of its ships, let alone nineteen planetoids. He checked the computer network and nodded bitterly. The mutineers might be sealed in their compartments and denied access to the computer network, yet it hardly put an end to the threat. If they didn't come up with a way of blocking the alien influence, they might as well surrender and hand the Confederation over to the entities. “They do not pose a threat to the ship.”

“I hope you’re right,” Burton said sourly. The scenes of carnage inside his ships had been chilling. Crewmen had turned on their fellows, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The infected officers seemed to have little in common, yet as they had fallen to the alien mental attack, the ship’s command structure had come apart. The vessel’s XO was currently stunned on the deck, after trying to murder Burton in cold blood.

He looked up towards the main displays. It occurred to him, assuming that telepathy obeyed something reassembling the inverse square law, that the planetoids could be trying to lure their former comrades closer to the entities, in the hope that more would fall under their spell. If they were capable of being that rational...or perhaps they were just trying to get closer to the entities themselves...or perhaps they’d all gone mad and intended to crash the planetoids into the planet itself.

“We are unable to interface with the computer networks on the rogue ships,” the AIs said. They, at least, sounded calm. “We have tried to access them through the QCC network, subspace pulsed-band transmissions and even old-fashioned laser and radio signals. The computer network appears to have been badly scrambled.”

“And yet the ships are still functioning,” Burton said, sourly. The Marines were ready to launch, to attempt to recover the lost ships, yet he was already wondering if it was a fool’s errand. It might be simpler in the long run to open fire and attempt to destroy them. Given time, the entities might use them to zip into hyperspace and fly away, or, if they truly couldn't use hyperdrive, even warp drive would give the Confederation new tactical problems. “How is that even possible?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. “We recommend the deployment of Marines to assess the internal condition of the damaged ships.”

Burton nodded. “Major Pasha, this is the Admiral,” he said. “You are cleared to deploy.”

***​

Pasha stared as the planetoid Thunder came into view, a massive sphere hanging in space. Even to the sensors mounted on the Marine Combat Unit, it looked like a natural planet until his eyes started picking out weapons blisters and sensor bulges on the hull. The planetoid was about the size of Earth’s moon, with energy projectors that could swat an entire Marine Division...if they knew the Marines were there to swat. The intelligence punk’s best guess was that the damage the entities inflicted on natural law – however they did it – would disrupt the sensors on the planetoid, allowing them to land on its surface without being detected. It wasn't the kind of blanket assurance Pasha had been hoping for, somehow.

And you wouldn’t be happy if he gave you a firm guarantee, backed with his own life, he mocked himself, as the Marines started to fall towards the surface of the planetoid. The massive starship’s gravity field was tempered by the warp bubble surrounding the hull, yet so close to the ship, not even its drive field could block out the effects completely. Without the warp bubble, bringing even a single planetoid into orbit around a planet could have disastrous consequences for the local ecosystem; it amused him to realise that the entities still cared about avoiding such a catastrophe. Or, less amusingly, they just didn't care one way or the other.

The planetoid’s surface seemed to reach up to greet them, his perspective shifting as he fell the final kilometres onto the hull. It was no longer a planetoid, but a world, something large enough to contain the human race. Indeed, several planetoids were taking their portion of the human race – and the genetic templates of everyone in existence – to other galaxies, in what the newshounds were starting to call the Exodus. The Marines had debated the issue while preparing for their next mission, but they’d decided that the fleeing humans were probably doing the wrong thing. The entities were powerful, yet they could be beaten. It was all a matter of understanding.

His feet touched down and connected to the hull. “We’re down,” he said, pushing aside all other issues. “We’re heading for the access hatch now.”

The Marines had debated how to enter the planetoid as they’d fallen through space towards the massive starship. The final conclusion had been to attempt to sneak into one of the starship bays, each one large enough to hold a hundred cruisers – minnows to the planetoid’s vast bulk – using the emergency entrance system. There was a good chance that, if the computer network was as badly screwed up as the AIs claimed, that their entry would pass unnoticed. If they were wrong, they would have to blow their way into the hull, which would certainly attract attention.

He glanced up as flashes of blue light flickered into existence on the horizon, warp and sublight missiles being launched towards the loyal planetoids. The entities didn't seem to be firing hyper-missiles towards the loyalists, although that meant nothing; they’d definitely fired hyper-missiles back on Greenland. He looked away and concentrated on running towards the massive egress hatch, a hatch over five kilometres wide. The Marines were less than ants on the skin of an elephant.

“There, sir,” one of the Marines said. The emergency hatch was basic, hand-cranked rather than using the starship’s computer network. Using one of the hatches always brought back memories of the first time he’d walked the deck of a derelict starship, an old battleship from one of humanity’s many wars that had been set adrift by her crew to die. “I’ll work on the hatch now.”

Pasha lifted his heavy rifle as the hatch cranked open, revealing only darkness. He activated the suit’s lights and illuminated the interior of the airlock, seeing nothing of interest. Laughing at himself – the emergency airlocks were never manned except during drills – he took point and led the way into the starship, feeling the gravity field flickering around him. It felt oddly unstable, as if the starship’s technology was failing slowly. With the entities around, it was a very real possibility.

The second hatch opened, allowing them into a small control centre. Normally, it would be manned by a dedicated crew, responsible for maintaining the starships docked within the planetoid. Now...it was empty, yet there was blood splashed everywhere. It took thirty seconds of searching to uncover the first body, crammed into a locker and left to bleed to death. The remaining bodies had been tossed into the corridor and just abandoned, although some had been mutilated first. He couldn't tell if it had been self-mutilation or if someone had done it to them before they’d died.

“Dave, try and gain access to the command network,” he ordered one of his men, a Marine who specialised in direct neural links to hostile computers. “Don’t take any risks, but see if you can get us a data download from the main computer.”

“Understood, sir,” the Marine said. The hulking Marine Combat Unit advanced on the console and extended a delicate probe, linking into the system. A moment later, the Marine started to spasm, his weapons deploying and firing madly, just before he collapsed into a heap.

“Sparta, this is Pasha,” Pasha said. The sight had shocked him, all the more so because Dave should have been isolated from any feedback. The safety cut-outs in his armour should have activated automatically. “I need a report on Dave’s status...”

“He just came out of the pod, raving,” the supervisor reported. Pasha could hear the sound of someone screaming in the background, a voice that was far too familiar. “We’re going to have to knock him out and put him into sickbay.”

“Major,” a different voice said. “We analysed the network pulse that struck your man’s mind. The entities have completely subverted the main computer. We recommend that you withdraw.”

“We’re not leaving,” Pasha said, firmly. The AIs could offer whatever advice they liked, but they weren’t on the ground. Strictly speaking, he wasn't on the ground either, yet he could see more of the starship’s reality than the AIs. “We have to recover control of this ship.”

“You will not be able to recover control,” the AIs said, bluntly. “We have studied the reports from your lost man. The starship’s main command core has been hopelessly compromised. Killing the crew will not free the ship. You need to withdraw, now.”

A new alert flared up in Pasha’s virtual vision. “Too late,” he said, grimly. “I’ll see you back at the...”

Deep within the massive starship, right at the core, the quantum tap linking the planetoid to hyperspace – and drawing a massive level of power from the universe itself – started to destabilise. Microseconds later, the safety systems failed, allowing the torrent of energy to run free. The planetoid exploded in one massive blast of light.

***​

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “The Thunder has been destroyed.”

It was, Burton decided, the most unnecessary report in history. The planetoid had simply exploded, although no one was sure – or would ever be sure – if it had been intentional or if it had been just another glitch, caused by the close proximity of the entities. The planet nearby was going to be in serious trouble over the next few years, although prompt action would probably save most of the planet’s population...prompt action that the nature of the entities would render impossible.

“Report,” he ordered, using his implants to remain focused. “Are the other three planetoids likely to explode as well?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. “Their computer networks must be assumed to be in the same state as that of the Thunder. The starship may well have been destroyed by a glitch, one that could affect the other starships...”

“Or it might have been a deliberate attempt to take out the Marines,” Burton concluded. It was an absurd report, but perhaps, to the entities, it made sense. Or perhaps it had just been a horrific accident, one that had saved countless Confederation Navy personnel from spending the rest of their lives in thrall to the entities. “In that case...”

He accessed the tactical network and studied the remaining three rogue ships. “Open fire,” he ordered. There was no point in trying to recover them. “Take them all out, now.”

Fifteen planetoid opened fire as one, pouring missiles down towards the rogue ships. Standard tactics would have called for the rogues to jump into hyperspace and escape, but instead they wheeled about and came right at their tormentors, returning fire as they charged. They entered energy weapons range before they could be destroyed and cut into two of his ships, before the first planetoid was destroyed in a ball of fire. The second held out for longer, yet it couldn't hold out long enough to break through and escape. Its quantum tap was destroyed and it disintegrated in a tearing burst of light. The final planetoid rammed a loyalist planetoid and both ships exploded savagely. There were no survivors.

Burton considered the remains of the enemy system and shook his head. The newshounds would call it a victory, of course, for humanity desperately needed a victory. He knew better. The might of the Confederation Navy had been challenged and the entities, the untouchable entities, had corrupted the Navy itself. One more victory like that and the Confederation would be ruined.

“Take us out of here,” he ordered. “It’s time to go home.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Six<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

From high above, the remains of the task force that had entered the Haypah Star System with such high hopes, secure in its technological superiority, looked battered and broken. All of the planetoids had taken damage and three of them had been so badly damaged that the Confederation Navy would need to spend at least a month repairing them, before they could be returned to duty. The losses in material were bad, but nowhere near as bad as the losses in personnel. A starship could be replaced; a trained crewman could not.

Admiral Burton watched as the Grand Admiral stared down at the damaged fleet. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking – the image he was projecting into the perceptual reality seemed to be firmly set on neutral, keeping his expression inscrutable – but somehow Burton was sure that it wasn't anything good. The Confederation Navy had never been so badly hurt in its entire existence, a blow that was hardly lessened by the crushed Haypah fleet and their dreams of one day overthrowing the Confederation.

“The media is not happy,” the Grand Admiral said, finally. “Some of them believe that we won the fight, but others are more perceptive. They know that we had to retreat in disorder.”

“Yes, sir,” Burton said, stiffly. He had chosen to forsake an avatar that would allow him to present a strictly neutral expression, but he now regretted his choice, even though it would have seemed dishonest. Etiquette in the Confederation tended to frown on using such controlled representations, even though everyone knew that everyone did it.

The Grand Admiral turned to face him. “Are you not going to offer any defence?”

Burton considered it. The hell of it was that yes, he could offer a defence. He could point out that there had been no warning that the entities could influence the minds of his crews, to the point where they could literally snatch four planetoids out from under the noses of their commanding officer. He could point out that he had destroyed the Haypah fleet and industry, as well as ensuring that the infected planetoids had been destroyed, before they could be used to spread the entities further across space. He could have mounted a defence...but, in the end, it had been his failure. He had been the man on the spot.

“No, sir,” he said, finally. “I have nothing to say.”

“That’s good to hear,” the Grand Admiral said, curtly. “You ****ed up. Don’t let it happen again.”

He strode over to stare down at one of the planetoids. “The Security Council wasn't too happy with the outcome,” he said. “They were even less pleased when the AIs pointed out that we might have a greater disaster when – if – we try to destroy the Scorpion Naval Yards. There are over ten billion humans in that system, the great majority of them infected by the entities...who knows how strong their telepathy will be in that system?”

Burton blinked. “Their strength depends on how many minds they have to call upon?”

“So it would seem,” the Grand Admiral said. “The telepaths had some of their own people on your ship, Admiral. Two of them had their brains turned to jelly, but the remaining ones claimed that the entities were trying to subvert them and take control, oozing suggestions into their minds. The AIs ran the tests again and determined that, as far as they could tell, the odd brain patterns within the infected people were based around the part of the brain that controls telepathy.”

He shrugged. “Or so they think, anyway,” he added. “They were never very good at getting a handle on telepathy and the telepaths themselves don’t really want to be dissected.”

“It won't come to that, will it?” Burton asked, concerned. “That couldn't happen in this day and age...”

“It may,” the Grand Admiral said. “While you were off fighting in the enemy-held system, there was a vote to have all telepaths and people with telepathic potential isolated, in the hope that it would limit the spread of the entities. The vote failed, but nearly a fifth of the Confederation’s population voted for it. People are scared, Admiral, and with fear comes the determination to find a scapegoat and just hit out.”

He snorted. “Joe Buckley was never a telepath,” he said, dryly. “There’s nothing rational about a panicking mob, Admiral. Despite everything the Confederation has accomplished over the years, there’s a little part of us that remembers the days when we had to struggle to survive and fight over scraps of food that we would refuse to feed to our pets now. We remember being at the mercy of the gods long before we came up with the idea of a single god. And now, with a force that seems completely inexplicable breathing down our necks, we are getting scared.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Burton said. “I heard about the Exodus.”

The Grand Admiral nodded. “There are going to be a hell of a lot more starships heading out to M33 or the Clouds or even further away,” he said, shaking his head. “Between you and me, I wonder if they don’t have the right idea. Get away from the entities, get some space we can use to think and plan...and one day come back and kick their ghostly butts.”

“No, sir,” Burton said. The Grand Admiral looked up, his face an expressionless mask. “We started this problem, sir; we have to fix it.”

“I saw many scenarios on the possible outcomes of the Buckley Experiment,” the Grand Admiral said, slowly. “One of them was that it would collapse all of local reality, or release entropy into the universe, aging us all to death. I knew about all of those possibilities and I still voted for carrying out the experiment, just to see what would happen.”

He looked up towards Burton’s face. “And what happens if the problem is beyond our ability to fix?”

***​

Burton scowled to himself as the Security Council’s meeting room shimmered into existence around him, revealing that the other members of the Security Council had clearly been holding talks before inviting him to join them. It was a reminder that he was not a member of the Council, but also that the Council would be passing judgement on him. If he had erred, he knew, he should face his peers in the Confederation Navy, yet that little protocol – like so many others – seemed to have fallen by the wayside. The human race was in a desperate situation.

“Admiral,” Mariko said. She, at least, sounded friendly, although that could be just an act. “Please, for the record, outline just what happened when your fleet entered the Haypah system.”

Burton nodded and ran through a quick outline, starting with the moment the fleet had entered enemy space and ending the story when they jumped out, leaving the burning remains of the Haypah fleet behind them. He didn't spare anything, not even the pressure he’d felt in his skull as the entities reached out for him, only to abandon the effort when he had refused to succumb to their control. The Security Council listened in silence, without interrupting, not even to demand clarification. Of course, Burton reflected sourly, they’d probably watched the records from the battle before inviting him to join them.

“Under the circumstances, you cannot be faulted for your actions,” Representative Singh said, once he’d finished. His face was inscrutable, yet Burton was sure that he detected a hint of irritation behind his words. Perhaps Singh had been one of the ones pressing for him to be relieved of command. There was no way to know for sure. “That leaves us with a simple question. Do we proceed with the attack on the Naval Yards?”

“Well, Admiral,” Mariko said. “Do you believe, as the officer charged with planning the attack, that we should actually authorise it to be launched?”

Burton didn't hesitate, even though his professional future was at stake. “The attack I planned – before the diversion into the Haypah Empire – must be cancelled,” he said, firmly. “The plan did not take into account the new factors.”

Singh snorted, rudely. “Do you fear to face the enemy again?”

“The enemy – we now know – can reach out and influence our minds at a distance,” Burton said, calmly. He refused to allow Singh to get under his skin. “If their range is a function of how many minds they have under their control, as our telepathic cousins believe, they may be able to influence my crews at a far greater distance than we would have believed possible. If I took my task force into the Scorpion System, the results might be disastrous – for us. I might be handing them a fully-armed and dangerous task force on a silver platter.”

He paused, knowing that they were not going to like what he had to say. “I believe that we must consider extreme measures,” he concluded. “We must destroy the entire system by sending the star supernova.”

There was a horrified pause. “You are talking,” Representative Chen said, “of committing genocide against our own people. Ten billion lives would be lost when the star exploded, wiping out the result of centuries of achievement.” The Electronic Human’s image seemed to flicker with rage. “I could not condone such an action.”

Representative Carolynn crossed her hands under her bare breasts, her tail thrashing in agitation. “I cannot agree,” she protested, weakly. “We cannot kill ten billion of our own people!”

“There may be no choice,” the AIs said, flatly. Their image seemed to float in the centre of the room. “The ten billion people in the system are already lost to us. If we allow the entities to continue expanding from their dimension into ours, their powers may grow stronger – all the more so as they draw more and more minds into their clutches. They may soon be strong enough to jump from world to world without starships...and if that happens, the Confederation will wind up like the Ancients.”

They paused, for effect. “And all that is left of the once-mighty Ancients civilisation is dead worlds, all alone in the night,” they added. “Do we want our own civilisation to live, or be destroyed?”

Representative Caprice pursed her lips. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare; the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Precisely,” the AIs said. “The Ancients lost their civilisation to the entities. We don't know if they were enslaved by the entities or the entities merely sucked them dry and then returned to their home dimension, but we know that they were destroyed. We cannot allow our civilisation to die in the same way.”

“There has to be another way,” Carolynn protested. “We cannot kill ten billion people.”

“It is a question of maths,” Singh said, coldly. “Ten billion humans – all infected by the entities, all being used as food sources by space vampires – against the trillions of humans who remain alive and uninfected. The logic leads us to only one point; those ten billion must die so that the rest of us can live.”

“I refuse to cast my vote in favour,” Carolynn said, flatly. “I do not believe that slaughtering ten billion people can possibly help the situation.”

“We have been unable to free the maddened from their madness,” Caprice said, slowly. “I don’t want to agree, I don't want to support it, but I see no other choice.”

Singh pounded the table. “We are the Security Council,” he said. His voice was icy cold. “We are in the business of making hard choices, the choices that the rest of humanity would not or could not or would just take too long to make. That is what we are. That is why we are here. We are not part of this Council to duck the blame, or to refuse to accept the responsibility. We accepted it the moment we chose, each of us, to accept the nomination.”

His voice hardened. “I will not fail in my duty,” he added. “If there is truly no other choice, but to act with decisive force, we will act. I believe that we should call for a vote.”

Burton watched as the Security Council voted. He wasn't surprised to see that Chen and Carolynn had cast their votes against sending a star supernova, but the others seemed hesitant, unwilling to risk taking any side. The Grand Admiral, at least, joined Singh in casting a vote in favour. The Scientists and the Telepaths, oddly enough, voted in favour; the AIs joined them a moment later.

He could understand their hesitation. Centuries ago, during the war with the Unseen, both sides had blown up stars for tactical advantage, sending waves of radiation passing through space and causing untold harm to countless worlds. The supernova bombs had been sealed away in the Confederation’s weapons lockers once the Unseen faded away back into the universe, waiting until they could be unleashed again...a day that most of the universe had hoped would never come. The thought of using them on a Confederation Star System, a populated system with ten billion lives living within the blast front, was obscene. He understood...but, unlike them, he had touched the entities. They had to be stopped. Destroying the entire Confederation was preferable to a lifetime spent serving the monsters, feeding entire races into their maw.

“The vote has passed,” the AIs said. “A supernova bomb will be deployed against the enemy-held star.”

And see what effect it has on the entities themselves, Burton thought, grimly. There was no way to know for sure, but unless slaughtering vast numbers of their thralls hurt them somehow, the chances were good that they would just withdraw back into their home dimension and re-emerge somewhere else. The Confederation might find itself running out of planets before the entities realised that trying to feed on humans was pointless and went elsewhere, if they were intelligent enough to realise that. The jury was unable to determine if the entities were even intelligent, at least as humanity understood the term.

“And see how many people trust us after this,” Carolynn whispered. The mermaid’s tail seemed to wave helplessly in the air, just before her image vanished from the chamber. It was another breech of protocol, but no one seemed inclined to complain.

“There is another possibility that we have been considering,” the AIs said. Burton was amused to see how many hopeful eyes turned towards the blonde image, a reflection of humanity’s desperate need to believe that technology would solve all of its problems. Back on Earth, it had; humanity had expanded out into the universe and given the homeworld a chance to catch its breath and relax. Yet...the entities laughed at the physical laws of the universe and seemed to alter them at will, disrupting humanity’s finest technology. “We have been simulating using a wormhole to snatch up an infected world and transferring it to another star system, hopefully breaking the link between the entities and their thralls. It is impossible to predict what that will do to the planet’s population, but while we were running simulations we came up with a second idea.”

They displayed an image of the Gateway in front of the Council; the Gateway, surrounded by the four impossible objects maintaining their patrol around the border, watched by a dozen Confederation Navy cruisers. Burton ground his teeth, recalling the loss of the Hamilton and Captain Gently; they had merely been the first to die. They had been his first failure.

“It occurred to us that we could sweep one of the objects up in a wormhole,” the AIs said. “Instead of transporting it to another star system, we would use the wormhole’s quantum signature to break the object down into energy and obliterate it. Nothing – in theory, at least – could survive such treatment. Even if we do merely shunt it several hundred light years away, it might well break the link maintaining the Gateway...”

“And cutting off the link between this universe and the Gateway,” the Grand Admiral concluded. “Do you think that it will work?”

“We do not know,” the AIs admitted. “We have been unable to measure the objects’ quantum states, let alone deduce their composition or properties. It is possible that the wormhole will simply be unable to capture the object, or that it will withdraw back into their universe and escape. We submit to you, however, that attempting to destroy the objects is worth any risk.”

The Security Council exchanged glances. “This strikes me as risky,” Chen said, thoughtfully. “It may provoke the entities to start expanding faster.”

“Assuming that they can,” the Grand Admiral said. His voice seemed to still all debate. “Let’s be clear on this. We have arrested several hundred thousand people who were connected to the Ancient Cult, to the cultists that summoned the entities into our universe. We have certainly bent the Confederation Charter, if we haven't smashed it outright. We are preparing to blow up one of our own star systems to stop the enemy from expanding further...now tell me, how much further do you think we will have to go?”

He stared down at the table. “We could negotiate with a normal enemy,” he said. “God knows; we had no reason to go to war against the Gasbags, or the other races that are far from humanoid. We could even talk to the Wanderers, even though they were far in advance of our own technology. We could talk...but the entities, we cannot reason with them. They consider us slaves at best; a food source at worst. Their mental powers will give them domination over the entire galaxy if they keep expanding and we cannot stop them. We cannot even threaten them.

“Whatever the risk of trying to destroy one of their objects, we have to accept them,” he concluded. “To do otherwise is to admit that we are already defeated.”

 

C'omon, Chris! You can't leave me hanin' now. Really enjoying this one. I need my fix...

Byte

 

Comments do encourage the mind...

Chapter Twenty-Seven<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“So,” Rylander said, lightly. “That’s the famous Dead Zone.”

Aisyaj refused to rise to his bait. There was no sign that the Dead Zone even existed, at least not to the naked eye. Her sensors were reporting that her sensor probes and fields just flickered out of existence in a certain point of space, only a few light hours from where they floated. The first starships to run into the Dead Zone hadn't had the slightest idea what was waiting for them until it had been far too late. Even afterwards, the Dead Zone had defied understanding. It was just...there.

“It’s there, all right,” she said. It was ironic, but if an alien race was born on a world trapped within the Dead Zone, they would never know about any of the ways of breaking the light barrier. They would eventually build slowboats and set out across the interstellar void, perhaps never realising that – eventually – they had flown out of the Dead Zone and could jump into hyperspace. “If we flew in that direction” – she pointed, smiling at his expression – “we would lose power within thirty seconds and end up drifting and helpless.”

“The Another Woman wouldn't be stuck,” Rylander pointed out. Aisyaj winced at the mixture of emotions the ship’s name produced in his mind. The Slowboaters had a superstition about not changing a starship’s name, once it was formally launched, yet the name was almost painfully sarcastic. “We could just fly through the Dead Zone to the other side.”

“Assuming your fuel and life support held out,” Aisyaj countered, lightly. She shook her head, dismissing the matter. She’d reviewed the news reports of the last encounter with the entities and knew that time was running out. “I think we’d better start transferring food and supplies to the tender.”

It hadn't surprised her to discover that the AIs had sent two of their massive starships to assist her mission, or that they’d produced a surprising amount of gear for the tender. The AIs had access to all of humanity’s databases, including library files from the time before humanity had even dreamed of AIs, and they’d used them ruthlessly. The technology they had produced was primitive, allowing it to function inside the Dead Zone, yet it had a certain elegance that the slowboats lacked. The AIs believed that there was a joy in technology and no one had ever had the heart to tell them otherwise.

Rylander took command of the Slowboater crew and started to organise the transfer, forbidding the use of teleporters or even drive fields to help load the tender. The AIs protested, but he countered by pointing out that neither technology worked well – or at all - within the Dead Zone and they couldn't risk getting into a situation where they needed unobtainable technology. He’d told them about a wet-navy ship that had been loaded with everything the crew had needed, including a crane to help them unload, but the logistics experts who’d packed the ship had made one simple mistake and left the crane at the bottom of the hold, completely out of reach. The AIs had taken his point.

Aisyaj smiled as she listened to the debate, before reaching out for her mother’s mind, countless light years away. For a long moment, she basked in the feeling of her mother’s love and concern, before posing a single question. Her mother was reluctant to answer – Aisyaj could sense her concern for her daughter bubbling at the edge of her mind – yet eventually she signalled her agreement. The telepath masters were ready to act on her command.

“Take care of my ship,” she told the AIs, and walked over to the hatch connecting her to the tender. “I’ll be back soon.”

“We look forward to your reports,” the AIs said, seriously. If she hadn't known better, she would have wondered if they were sulking. “The Confederation will be here when you get back.”

Aisyaj took one last look at her starship, wondering if she would ever see it again, and then stepped through the hatch. The gravity failed at once, for the tender possessed no artificial gravity generator. It had been several years since she had floated in a zero-gee environment, but her ancestors had engineered her body to prevent space sickness – or muscle degradation – from affecting her mind. The interior of the tender looked remarkably primitive to her, despite the best efforts of the AIs. It made her wonder if she was truly doing the right thing, or if she had just found a unique way of committing suicide.

Carefully, pulling herself from handhold to handhold, she swam through the air towards the bridge. The tubes that ran through the tender seemed oddly claustrophobic, yet somehow she managed to maintain her calm as she finally reached the command sector. The tender seemed massive, but fragile; a single blast from a planetoid’s projectors would vaporise the entire ship from end to end. There was a curious fascination about the ship, yet humanity had outgrown such technology...she laughed at herself, recognising the hypocritical thought. If her theory was correct, humanity would need primitive technology to reach the core of the Dead Zone.

The bridge itself looked a mess, like an abandoned movie set from the days before RIs provided holographic environments for the actors who tried to become Confederation-wide stars. She’d had a memory cell inserted into her implants and then flash-burned into her brain – her implants would probably fail in the Dead Zone – yet it still looked confusing to her eyes. She glanced from computer to computer, feeling her head swim as new knowledge floated to the surface and integrated with what she saw. Normally, children were given gentle treatments and weeks of careful assistance to assimilate the new memories. She’d barely had a few hours.

“Welcome aboard,” Rylander said. His voice was carefully even. “Do you want to stay here or head back to your ship?”

Aisyaj grinned at the challenge in his tone. That was more like the man she remembered, the one who had been so marvellously uncomplicated for three short years. She couldn't blame him for his concern; it was fairly common for humans to immigrate into the pastoral worlds, try their hand at rough living for a few days and then return to the Confederation and lives of pointless luxury. They, at least, had been able to go home. Once the Another Woman was within the Dead Zone, there was no hope of leaving until the job was done.

“It's my bright idea,” she said, as she was waved into a chair and strapped down. “I should be there to embrace the risk.”

“Good for you,” Rylander said. He grinned as he nodded to the remaining crew. Ten Slowboaters, all volunteers, had agreed to fly with them into the Dead Zone, either because they relished the challenge or because they had been planning to leave the slowboat and decided that going on the mission was a quicker way to leave. “Does anyone else want to back out now?”

One of the crew snorted. “Respectfully suggest, boss, that you stop insulting us and get on with it,” he said. “We might have an attack of brains to the head and decide that we don't want to go after all.”

Rylander laughed. “Good on you, Boris,” he said. He looked over at Aisyaj. “We’re ready when you are.”

Aisyaj closed her eyes, opening her mind. It was normally a strong breach of telepath ethics to peek inside a person’s mind without permission, or a very compelling legal reason, but she felt that it was justified. Boris had been telling the truth. He relished the challenge of the mission and would have been insulted if someone had refused to take him along. The others shared the same feelings, although two of them privately thought that it was going to be nothing more than a waste of time. She thought about asking them to leave, but they needed every pair of hands they could get. The tender was badly undermanned.

“You know,” Rylander added. “You never did get around to telling me how you intended to get us into the Dead Zone.”

Aisyaj told him.

Centuries ago, before human telepaths were anything other than a possibility floating within the genetic pool, human writers had theorised that the nature of reality was more flexible than one might think. Given sufficient power, it might be possible to bend reality to a person’s will; indeed, the success of powerful personalities within the human world might be accounted for by their effect on reality. They hadn't known about the quantum foam, and some of their conclusions were just nonsense, yet they’d understood the gist of matters quite well. If a person could interface directly with the quantum foam, they would be able to do – quite literally – anything.

The development of human telepaths had actually allowed research into the fundamental nature of reality to proceed with a purpose, rather than stumbling around in the dark. Mind itself, it seemed, was the key to tampering with reality, but reality itself was not easy to unlock. The quantum foam, the bedrock of reality, seemed to be quantum-locked. It had taken considerable research before the early telepaths had realised that mind – the mind that was incapable of realising that reality was flexible and nothing was fixed – was the key to unlocking the universe. That had allowed the telepath masters to focus their mental development and, even though they were far from gods, they could do remarkable things. Indeed, they had sought to conceal just how far advanced they were, knowing that the rest of the Confederation would not be amused. They might consider the telepaths a potential threat.

The standard teleporting system used by the Confederation broke a person down into energy, stored them within a quantum field and focused the quantum field on a new location. It was not only energy-intensive, but also risky; it was quite easy for an enemy to disrupt a teleport beam and smear the unlucky teleporter across several kilometres. The nature of quantum science meant that it wasn't possible to store someone within a teleport buffer; their pattern began to degrade almost at once. The telepaths, however, had studied legends of human teleportation before the teleporter had been anything more than a glimmer in science-fiction’s eye. They had concluded that humans could teleport by manipulating the quantum foam and, if humans could teleport, they could teleport anything – even starships – right across the universe. Years of dedicated research had finally produced a working system for teleporting ships, even if it was only used in emergencies. The telepath masters, unlike the teleporters humanity had built, could be exhausted.

“You have got to be out of your mind,” Rylander burst out. “You intend to wish us all into the Dead Zone?”

“The only other choice is setting off into the Dead Zone in this ship,” Aisyaj said, as evenly as she could. Her faith that the mission could – and would – succeed was a vital part of actually making it work. “How long would it take us to reach the heart of the Dead Zone?”

“Sixty years,” Rylander growled. His anger battered at her mental shields. “Are you sure that this will work?”

“Yes,” Aisyaj said. “We have teleported far larger starships across far greater distances.”

“A question,” Khursheda said. The young girl turned to look right at Aisyaj, her voice carefully composed. “You’re saying that the masters are not here, that they’re back on your homeworld, wherever that is. How can they reach out to push us into the Dead Zone?”

“I’ll be focusing their power through my mind,” Aisyaj explained. It wasn't an entirely truthful answer, but explaining the truth would have taken far too long. In reality, the masters would be working around her, rather than through her. “It has worked before and it will work here.”

She looked around the compartment. “With that in mind,” she added, “do any of you want to leave now?”

There was a long pause. No one left. “I am honoured to know all of you,” she concluded. “I suggest that you all strap in. The transition is supposed to be completely painless, but you may all want to prepare anyway. There may be a jerk.”

She waited until the Slowboaters had strapped themselves in and then opened her mind, reaching out to the masters. Their presence surrounded her at once, a shimmering harmony of minds working together to alter reality itself. They were far advanced above her – or her mother, whose work for the Confederation kept her from developing her inner skills – yet they were limited. She sensed the presence of minds she knew and allowed her mind to spin out a welcome. There were no strangers in the telepathic world.

You are welcome, she thought. It was true, at least for her, even though she knew that the transition was going to be jarring. The masters had to do more than merely touch her mind for the transition to succeed. They had to disconnect her from reality itself. No matter what she said aloud, or even meant, her mind was going to fight them. The very nature of reality – of her perception of reality – demanded it.

Humanity had once asked a philosophical question that, like most philosophical questions, had no real answer. If a cat lay in a box, unseen to the world, was that cat alive or dead? There was no way to know until the box was opened, leaving the cat in a quantum state of being; half-alive, half-dead. The greatest enemy of the teleport process was her own mind, convinced – knowing – that they were on the edge of the Dead Zone and not deep inside. She felt them reaching into her mind and struggled to allow the violation, despite her mind’s outrage at their intrusion. They held her down mentally, gently yet firmly; there was a sense of disconnection from the universe...

And then they were gone from her mind. Aisyaj felt her head spin as the mental touch faded away, leaving her with a chilling insight. The masters had, at a cost, teleported the entire starship thirty light years from its location. The effort had taken thirteen human minds working in tandem, all pushing towards the same objective, rewriting reality itself. The Another Woman could not be blinked out of existence, but the element of the quantum foam that determined its location could be changed. The entities had billions of human minds under their control. How much power could they bring to bear on reality?

She looked up, pushing the issue aside for the moment. “I...I think we did it,” she said, thickly. Her mouth felt as if she was trying to breathe in steam. “Did it work?”

Rylander was bent over a console, his hands tapping switches. “We definitely changed location,” he said, flatly. He sounded rather stunned. “I am just checking our position against the local stars.”

Aisyaj looked down at the terminal on her wrist and nodded to herself. The terminal was dead. Her link to the AIs – or to the Galactic Net – was gone, at least until she got out of the Dead Zone. Perhaps she was imagining it, but she was sure that she felt an odd blanket reaching out and touching her mind, trying to smother her thoughts. She opened her mind carefully, trying to locate the source, and sensed nothing. She had to be imagining it.

She looked over at the Slowboaters, working away on their consoles. It never took that long to confirm a starship’s position, not when they could lock onto Confederation beacons or access the Galactic Net...it was proof that they were within the Dead Zone. She took a breath, feeling the air brushing against her throat, and tried to access her implants. Most of them were dead. The little machines that floated through her body, repairing damage and screening out diseases before they could harm her were dead. She realised, suddenly, just how vulnerable the early humans had been, before technology had freed them from daily drudgery. The Confederation, for all its faults, was a dream come true.

“You succeeded,” Rylander said, awed. “You brought us into the heart of the Dead Zone.”

“Get me a status report,” Aisyaj ordered. “What can we detect?”

Rylander laughed at her. “It’s going to take longer than that,” he reminded her, dryly. “We’re dependent upon low-tech here, babe.”

Aisyaj flushed. It was just another sign that she was dependent upon high technology, the kind of technology that refused to work within the Dead Zone. “Let me know as soon as you detect anything,” she said, finally. “I need to know what’s in this system.”

It took nearly three hours before the crew had a preliminary report. At first glance, there was nothing particularly unusual about the system, even though it was encysted within the Dead Zone. It was only on further examination that oddities became apparent. There was no cloud of asteroids orbiting the local star, no gas giants; the only planets in the system were nine rocky planets, two of which were clearly life-bearing. The real mystery only became apparent a few minutes later, when the telescopes revealed that the two life-bearing planets were orbiting around an unidentified object, pin-wheeling around the object as they orbited the local star. Aisyaj remembered what the AIs had said about the possibilities of stellar engineering and shivered. There was power in the system, all right, power enough to daunt even the Confederation.

“I’ll tell you something odd about the star,” Boris said, as they discussed their next step. “It should be dead. The Dead Zone should affect it. Why doesn't it?”

He answered his own question. “There are four objects orbiting the local star,” he added. “I can't get a good image on them, but I can feel that they’re not natural.”

“Nothing about this system is natural,” Aisyaj said, tiredly. She had hoped that the answers would be immediately apparent, but it was clear that it would take weeks – perhaps months – of patient work before they found any answers. “We may as well start with the planets. If we find nothing there, we can proceed to investigate the artefacts.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

From his lofty vantage point, Representative Chen saw the flow of data passing through the Galactic Network as a running river, a river of souls and information flowing right across the galaxy. There were humans swimming within the data, Electronic Humans such as himself who lived solely in the Galactic Net and physical humans extending their minds into the network. The spiders that monitored and catalogued the network were darker presences within the flow, while the AIs were massive glowing suns, so bright that anyone who looked too closely upon them would be harmed. He caught sight of a semi-intelligent advertising drone making its way through the network and laughed as smaller programs drove it away.

The Galactic Net’s very appearance was determined by the mind gazing upon it, he knew. There were Electronic Humans who saw it as a superhighway running through the entire universe and back to their perceptual realities and others who saw it as a jungle, welcoming the human race, or a supermarket. It had always struck Chen as amusing that the human race, for all of its advancement, still filled the Galactic Net with pornographic materials. Indeed, several years ago a new electronic archive of porn had been recovered from a vault on Earth and uploaded onto the Galactic Net – for research purposes only, of course. The pornography was nothing special, not compared to the standards of some of the weirder stuff running through the network, but it had been the most-accessed archive on the Galactic Net for a week before the excitement faded away.

Chen smiled as he stood up, feeling his mind uncoiling and slipping into the local processing programs that maintained his private reality. Every Electronic Human was entitled to a private space within the network, a place they could call home, a universe they should shape to their own desires. Chen, who had nursed a secret dream of walking on the surface of a star, had shaped his to allow him to indulge his dream; there were others, darker souls, who went into their private realities and closed the door behind them. The Galactic Net was not always a safe place for the unwary. There were minds who transcribed themselves into electronic form purely so they could indulge fantasies that would have shocked even the Confederation’s genteel attitudes.

The concept of Electronic Humans had started up a whole new round of legal arguments within the Confederation. There had once been a human called Chen – a pureblood human who had transcribed himself into a computer. Was Representative Chen, one of the oldest Electronic Humans in existence, a continuation of that being or was he a whole new person in his own right? The issue had caused hundreds of years of arguments, for if Chen was a separate person, what rights did he have over his former physical form? Did he even have a former physical form? The issue had only grown more complicated when Electronic Humans had started to clone themselves. The legal issues regarding clones had been settled long ago – clones were separate people from the originals – yet when Electronic Humans were concerned, there were two people, each convinced that they were the original...and each perfectly correct, by any standard the Confederation could measure. And then...did twinned personalities have the right to vote?

“You know that this is risky,” the AIs said. They had extended a presence into the Galactic Net, but they weren't truly electronic beings. They lived in both the physical and electronic worlds. There were Electronic Humans who believed that, one day, the entire human race would withdraw to computer cores and become nothing more than electronic patterns of force. “You do not have to risk yourself.”

“Someone has to lead the way,” Chen replied. At least he was still fairly human, mainly in outlook. There were some Electronic Humans who thought of themselves as a different race. “I cannot ask anyone to take a risk I am reluctant to take myself.”

And besides, he thought, but did not say aloud, there were other issues. Like the rest of the Security Council, he had considered the Buckley Experiment and chosen to accept the risks, tempted by the awesome power it represented. The manipulation of electronic realities was one thing, yet it was not real. The power offered by the Buckley Experiment, he had believed, would eventually make the human race gods. The temptation – and the pride – had led to a crippling fall. Chen knew that he had not spoken against the experiment – he had spoken in favour of it – and that he shared some of the blame. Perhaps it was wrong to blame a single human, even Joe Buckley, but he considered himself at least partly responsible for humanity’s plight.

If the AIs heard his thoughts – thoughts could go a long way in the Galactic Net – or deduced his feelings, they said nothing. Chen considered his private reality for a long moment, remembering the countless homes he had created and reduced to pixels over the years, before he slipped out of the reality and sealed the access codes. If he died on the mission, if his electronic form was reduced to static, the Galactic Net would eventually wipe his private apartment completely, destroying every trace of his presence. There were some who chose to go into suspension, or to transcribe their minds into androids, rather than stay in the Galactic Net. He had told himself that he would never leave.

Reality twisted around him as he fell into the flowing river. There were countless electronic humans existing within the network, communing with their fellows or seeking out data for their research. They called out greetings to Chen, who replied briefly before starting to swim onwards through the data, passing the drones and other automated presences as he moved. The turmoil unleashed by the entities had even infected the Galactic Net, with most of the Electronic Humans inhabiting newsgroups and forums, where they competed to blow facts out of all proportion and give credence to even the wildest of rumours. Chen struggled to block most of them out as he swam onwards, moving into the outer layers of the Galactic Net, yet some got through his mental filters. He was reliably informed that the entities were all a hoax, that they had taken over the entire Confederation and that they’d been in the human universe since before the human race had risen to the stars. Each of the rumours was followed by a gibbering array of trolls, screaming out insults before the moderating programs kicked them out of the forums and back into the mainstream. Chen was sure, somehow, that the network had probably been simpler before the human race had started transcribing themselves into the system. It had to have been a great deal more civil.

At the edge of the core network he paused, considering his situation. It felt, absurdly, as if he’d risen from an underground city and was now contemplating moving above ground, into the cold. The Galactic Net was more than just the massive cores that made up the home of the Electronic Humans. The Galactic Net was linked into thousands of starships, Confederation Navy subsystems and even alien computer systems, turning it into a truly galaxy-wide system. Indeed, the starships that had set off for the Clouds, or M33 or even further galaxies would be carrying their own QCC nodes, allowing the network to become trans-galactic. If the human race chose to transcend and leave mortal concerns behind, the Galactic Net would be a fitting legacy to leave for the races that would arise in the future.

You are delaying matters, he told himself tartly. It’s time to act.

Calmly, he reached into the core matrix of his own programming and triggered the cloning function. There was the weirdest sense of separation and then he found himself staring at himself – or, rather, a copy of himself. Chen2 was identical to Chen1, sharing everything that made Chen the person he was.

“Well,” Chen2 said. “You’re a handsome fellow, aren't you?”

Chen1 laughed. “We are, aren't we?”

Grinning, the two minds started to jump through the Galactic Network, moving from node to node until they finally arrived on an AI ship floating near the Scorpion Navy Yards. The AI ship felt uncomfortable to the Electronic Humans – they chose to remain limited, while the AIs were limited only by their imaginations – yet it could be endured. Besides, there was little choice. The AIs might operate at a distance, using the QCC network to operate their ships while remaining safely on Calculus, but the Electronic Humans didn't have that option.

“You understand the dangers,” the AIs said. It wasn't a question. “Do you still wish to proceed?”

Chen1 and Chen2 exchanged glances. They were still newly-twinned; there had been no time for divergence to set in. “Yes,” they said, together. “We will proceed.”

The AIs had been analysing the battles with the entities and their thralls and had noticed something interesting. The more advanced a piece of human technology was, the more likely it was to fail...and, as the entities grew more powerful, human technology collapsed completely. It seemed inescapable...except one piece of technology had continued to function perfectly, even when inside the translucent entities. The Marine Combat Units hadn't been affected at all. The only real effect on the machines had been when they’d been destroyed and a handful of Marines had been harmed – mentally – when they’d been separated from their Combat Unit.

They’d concluded, after much careful, that the Marines had been elsewhere, yet their minds had been linked into the Marine Combat Units. If they had been unaffected, they'd wondered, what would happen if human minds – Electronic Humans – were inserted into the local net on a planet dominated by the entities? The question had been puzzling enough to convince them to ask for volunteers and Chen, after making what preparations he could and filling out a new will, had volunteered.

The AIs opened the pathway and Chen1 raced down it, leaving Chen2 behind. It would provide a kind of continuity even if Chen1 was to be wiped from existence, something that the purely-physical humans would never know. The Confederation had the technology to make a recording of a person’s mind and load it into a living brain, but creating a human clone and growing it to adulthood – a child’s mind would never survive the experience – purely to allow someone to live on was a severe breach of Confederation medical ethics. There was a faint disconnect – there was always a sense of disconnect when he crossed from one node to another – and then he found himself in a very weird node. It felt almost...alien.

He concentrated, attempting to impose a perception he could work with on the node. It seemed inclined to resist him, leaving him puzzled, before the perceptual reality snapped into place. He pulled himself through the node, hunting for information he could use, yet navigating was extremely difficult. The very logic law – the programming that provided the core of the Confederation’s network – seemed to have been warped out of shape by the entities. There was a flare of data around him as he finally cracked into a kernel of data, yet the data only left him more confused than ever. None of it seemed to make sense.

Chen1 relayed what he had found to the AIs and started to extend his mind, breaking off sections of himself and transforming them into search robots. They were not independently-aware entities, unlike Chen2, but sections that could speed up the search for useful data. Slowly, the responses started to come back, leaving him more confused than ever. The entities seemed to have damaged the entire system. As he charted it out, he grew bolder and finally relocated himself to a sensor node. It felt broken to his mind, but as he reached into it, it suddenly came online and he found himself staring through it. The Scorpion Naval Yards were busy, extremely busy. The entities and their thralls were hard at work.

There were industrial nodes in every Confederation Star System, as well as the massive planetoids and city-ships, yet the Scorpion Naval Yards operated on a very different scale. They were one of the few shipyards in the Confederation capable of designing and building planetoids, the most powerful warships in the galaxy...and now one of them was in enemy hands. As he grew more practiced at using the sensor node, he realised to his horror that the yard was working at full capacity, putting together an entire war fleet. Within two weeks – a month at most – the entities would have a full-sized fleet to call their own.

“They have to be stopped,” he said, sending his words back to the AIs. The vote he’d cast in the Security Council Chamber, the horror he had felt at the concept of destroying an entire star system and its population, echoed in his mind, mocking him. To be an Electronic Human was to be incapable of forgetting, unless he chose to cut it out of his mind completely. It was impossible to evade the conclusion that his vote had been the wrong one. “I was wrong.”

He extended his mind, trying to locate other working sensor nodes. Now that he'd located one of them, it was easy to find others, even though they were hidden within the warped infrastructure. He found himself looking into the shipyard’s facilities, shaking his head in awe as he saw the thralls moving through the yards, slaving away for the entities. It might have been his imagination, but they looked drained, as if the life itself was being sucked out of them. The Confederation had solved the problem of hungry and banished famine, yet now it was starting to come back with a vengeance. It didn't take much imagination to wonder if the same effect was taking place on the other planets the entities had overrun.

The entities themselves seemed to be beyond his perception, but he could see their effects on the people they had enslaved. Their thralls seemed unable to act like normal human beings; there was no love, no fear...just a strange haunting expression in their eyes. Chen1 did something he had once sworn he would never do and edited himself, limiting his ability to feel anything. The sympathy he felt for the thralls was overwhelming.

“I’m progressing onwards,” he said, as he found another interlink within the network. He touched it and instantly found himself on the planet itself. Surprised – the QCC network within the Scorpion System was down – he checked to ensure that he could still call back to the AIs, before looking around. The local network was, if anything, as badly warped as the Scorpion Naval Yards network, but he could still access the nodes. In fact, he was starting to wonder if the entities merely screwed with the nodes, without taking the whole network down. It would allow them to use it and deny it to the enemy. “Keep Chen2 back with you. If this goes wrong, he will have to try it next.”

The sensor node expanded around him and he found himself looking out into a park. Comparing it to the data download he’d accessed on Scorpion, he realised that he was looking at Central Park, a place created by the locals for their kids. A massive stone scorpion sent a chill down his spine, before he realised that it was harmless. He’d never liked creatures like that when he’d been physical, trapped in a body of flesh and blood. The population was slowly building something near the scorpion, a massive statue of an Octopus-like creature. Chen1 understood in a sudden flash of insight. The thralls were worshipping the entities.

Once, years ago, he had read a study that had claimed that aliens had visited the Earth and served as the basis for humanity’s stories of gods, angels and demons. The writer had provided little proof for his claims; he’d asserted that the different gods might have different names, but they had similar natures. Zeus and Odin were both the lords of their representative pantheons. Chen hadn't believed the study, but the Ancients had decorated their cities with octopuses too...and now the human thralls were doing the same. There had to be a connection there.

He pulled back and started to look through other sensor nodes. The same motif was present everywhere. Children, their eyes blank and hopeless, were drawing it on walls, while the older adults were raising statues or paintings of their new masters. It struck him as pointless, but then, most human behaviour was pointless – or seemed that way to humanity’s friends and allies. The entities might have perfectly good reasons to order their thralls to raise statues in their honour, or they could just be amusing themselves.

“There’s no sign of any resistance,” he said, moving from node to node. The same story was repeated at every node, apart from the handful that showed nothing, but empty streets. “I don’t believe that there is a single free person left on this planet.”

“That would seem likely,” the AIs sent back. They were taking in all he could send them, even if they couldn't extend themselves into the network. “The entities possess formidable telepathic powers of compulsion. The infection would spread like a cancer. We will inform the Navy.”

“Please,” Chen1 said. He took a final look around and slipped out of the network, back up to the Scorpion Naval Yards and the link to the AIs. Re-entering the AI ship felt like returning home; he clasped hold of Chen2 and shared thoughts and memories with his twin. “We have to stop them.”

“The Navy will destroy this system,” the AIs said. “Your services would be useful.”

“You mean you want me to go back in there and see what happens,” Chen1 said. He glared towards where he imagined the AIs to be. “Damn you.”

The AIs, perhaps wisely, didn't reply.

 

Some comments would be nice...

Chapter Twenty-Nine<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Admiral Burton studied the details spread out in the computer core. “They’re definitely using the shipyard to build a new fleet,” he said, as the AIs enhanced and expanded the data. “As if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with, do we?”

The image in front of him altered at his mental command, showing him the infected starships on flight paths that would, eventually, take them to uninfected worlds. They might have been crawling along at warp speed, yet rounding them all up was taking time and diverting starships that were needed elsewhere. The Confederation Navy was badly overstretched and, even though all of the reserves had been called up, just didn’t have enough starships to go around. The other shipyards were swinging into high gear and producing as many starships as they could, but manning them was going to be a pain. The ships were already heavily automated. Any further and they might as well ask the AIs to operate the entire fleet.

“It’s hard to tell what they have in mind,” the AIs agreed, “but we believe that they intend to use their fleet to run the blockade and expand their power. Given the condition of humans within the infected region of space, it seems clear that they will need to capture more humans or eventually drain their thralls completely dry.”

<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> nodded. It had occurred to him that they could just maintain the blockade and wait for the thralls to die, but no one knew what would happen to the entities if they lost all of their slaves. One theory said that they would retreat back to their own universe and await another opportunity, another said that they would use the Gateway to open more chinks in the quantum foam, allowing them to reach other worlds and infect more humans. There was no way to know for sure. With several infected starships unaccounted for, the chances were good that the quarantine had already been broken.

The images flickered in front of his mind, showing him the emancipated humans living under the shadow of the entities. They all looked as if they were dying, the bones showing clearly through their skin. It made no sense to him – a parasite that killed its host was an unsuccessful parasite – yet perhaps it made sense to the entities. Or, perhaps, the entities weren't really fighting a war at all. Was a human at war with an ant when he stepped on the tiny creature? Could the ants hope to comprehend the motive of the human, walking quickly to get back to work, or would they see it as nothing more than sheer malice from an unstoppable foe?

“The constructions they are building bear a marked resemblance to the Ancient buildings on the dead worlds,” the AIs continued. “It is quite possible that the buildings assist in focusing the entities and maintaining the link between our universe and their home. It is also possible that the humans are just trying to please their masters.”

“Or perhaps it’s just another symptom of madness,” <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> growled, remembering <st1lace>Greenland</st1lace>. The maddened humans had just lashed out at everyone, while the entity feasted on their souls. “Or perhaps we just don’t understand what we see.”

“Perhaps,” the AIs agreed. There was a pause. “Do you intend to delay any longer?”

Unwillingly, <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City>’s thoughts turned to the dark nexus within the computer matrix. It had been within the starship’s computers, but he had never even been aware of it, not until the Security Council had provided him with the codes to activate the nexus. The designs stored within the secure core had allowed the starship’s massive industrial core to design and build a supernova bomb, a bomb capable of destroying an entire star system. The system would, once the bomb was deployed, automatically wipe the storage nodes, just to maintain security. <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> had never been convinced that such measures were workable – given enough research, anyone could figure out the principles behind the supernova bomb and from there building one was a simple matter – but it had saved the Confederation from a sociopath designing and deploying a weapon for himself.

The supernova bomb’s control processors felt even darker, like a poisonous jewel floating in water, awaiting the first poor fool who reached in to pick it up. The thought of using it was horrifying, because it would open a door that the Confederation had tried hard to keep shut. The more advanced races might start building supernova bombs of their own, triggering off an arms race, or perhaps the supernovas would attract the Unseen back to humanity’s space. He didn’t want to trigger the weapon at all, yet there was no choice. The people who had been enslaved by the entity were going to die anyway. The only question was how quickly – or cleanly – they would die.

“It’s time,” he said. He reached out with his mind and activated the control processors. There was a moment of screaming pain as the processors demanded to verify his identity – digging deep into his mind to confirm every last detail – before he found himself within the main control system. Data – data normally classified even to one of his rank – flowed into his mind. The supernova bombs were far more dangerous than anyone, even the most paranoid member of the Security Council, truly understood. Given enough time, they could be used to dismantle an entire galaxy.

The supernova bomb itself was resting upon a warp sled that had been designed to transport it to its target. <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> had intended to take a cruiser and deploy the weapon personally, but after a recon flight into the Scorpion System had vanished without a trace, he had decided to focus on automated systems rather than anything the entities could influence. The entities didn’t seem to think in terms of technology, but he didn’t want to risk putting human minds and a supernova bomb within their mental reach. He didn’t even have any idea just how far they could reach. The <st1:City><st1lace>Sparta</st1lace></st1:City>was two light years from the occupied system and there was no way to know if they were safe at that range. The AIs were monitoring the computer cores closely, just in case, yet he doubted that would protect them from being taken over. The telepaths were working on a mental shield, but the entities seemed to have the sheer power required to overwhelm it.

Carefully, he uploaded the coordinates one by one, double-checking everything as he worked. The AIs couldn’t help him with that; it had to be done by him alone. Everything slotted into place, much to his relief, and he finally withdrew from the device. It seemed to have taken on a new light within his mind. It was ready to deploy.

“Open the tubes,” he ordered. He’d isolated the entire section, just to ensure that none of the crew went anywhere near the supernova bomb. It wasn't a question of trust, but a lingering fear that the entities might be able to influence some of the crew – or him personally – and drive them mad. A maddened mind near a supernova bomb was asking for trouble. “Eject the missile.”

The warp sled was launched into space. A second later, as soon as it was outside the planetoid’s gravity field, it flickered and vanished into warp drive. The FTL sensors on the massive starship tracked it as it raced towards the infected system. At its speed, it would be within the system in seconds, far too quickly for anything human to react. There was no way to know if the entities could – or would – do anything about the bomb, or even if they would recognise its existence. The computer core on the warp sled was far dumber than even an RI.

“Ten seconds to impact,” the AIs murmured in his ear. “There is no sign of any attempt to stop it in its tracks.”

“Good,” <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> muttered back. “Maybe this time we’ll get lucky.”

A moment later, the supernova bomb plunged into the star and vanished.

***​

The basic theory behind a supernova was simple enough. A star’s gravity field would eventually grow so powerful that the star would begin to collapse in on itself. If the gravity field was strong enough, the star would eventually collapse out of time and space entirely, leaving behind a black hole. If the gravity field wasn't so strong, the collapse would trigger off a reaction within the collapsing star, one that would eventually become a supernova. Luckily for humans, G2 and comparable stars simply lacked the mass to eventually explode or collapse into black holes. Eventually, Sol would expand into a red giant when the star’s mass was finally burned out.

As it plunged into the star’s interior, the supernova bomb’s warp bubble started pulling the star’s mass into its field and compressing it. The pressure grew stronger as the warp bubble became a gravity field, which in turn expanded as more and more mass fell into the trap. Given enough time, the star would collapse into a black dwarf, if not a black hole itself. The supernova field, however, was already sparking off a reaction within the star. Bare minutes after the warp bubble had started its work, it collapsed and the remains of the supernova bomb vaporised. It was far too late to save the star.

The reaction spread rapidly, for the gravity field had taken on a life of its own. FTL sensors picked up the wavering gravity field as the reaction grew stronger, finally sending the star supernova. A raging torrent of energy was unleashed upon the helpless system.

***​

I’m a ghost in the ghostly machine, Chen1 thought, with sour amusement. As soon as he had returned to the planet, he had thrown away the humanity he had been so desperate to maintain – Chen2 could maintain it – and started to expand his mind in new directions. The damaged computer network offered no resistance as he started to peek through multiple sensor nodes at once, accessing their visual feeds and collating data within his own core, before transmitting it back to the AIs. His mind was in many places at once, within the planet’s network, scattered over some of the habitats and Rings orbiting the different worlds in the system and up in the shipyard. The flow of data was almost overwhelming – a pure human would have been completely overwhelmed – but as he grew more used to handling the information, it became easier to isolate and transmit the important factoids back to the AIs.

The population didn’t seem aware of their impending demise, he noted. It made a certain kind of sense, at least in pre-FTL times. The supernova wavefront would expand at the speed of light, ensuring that the first warning they would have would come when the wave hit the planet, far too late. A civilisation that had developed FTL scanners or even gravimetric sensors would have additional warning when the star’s gravity field began to fluctuate, yet even the Confederation would have had problems evacuating an entire star system in time to save most of the population. Chen1 had watched an emergency drill reviewing just such a possible scenario and he hadn’t been impressed. It took time to assemble the large starships that could pick up and transport an entire population in one place and, if they weren't lucky enough to have the ships on hand, there was no way to avoid massive casualties. It was the reason why the Confederation was moving more towards a space-based civilisation, with giant starships and structures that could be moved, if necessary.

He counted down the seconds until the blast wave finally arrived. The planetary network had been designed to survive a heavy bombardment, but there was no way that it would survive a supernova. The Rings might survive, at least in some form, yet their human populations would be destroyed. Chen1 extended his body – his electronic form – throughout the network, throwing caution to the winds as the seconds ticked down. Even the entities, he was sure, couldn’t detect him now.

The supernova struck the innermost inhabited planet and washed over it, burning out the sensor nodes as it moved. The dark side of the planet might have survived the hit, but the wave of energy washed around the world, obliterating the human population. Chen1 winced as part of him died along with the network, but he pulled back and stared out through the shipyard nodes, wondering how they would react. A standard shipyard could have raised its shields, yet the population didn’t seem to care…

No; he was wrong. The population seemed to have come to a stop. As he watched in astonishment – and horror – they collapsed on the deck, screaming in pain. Something had clearly happened, something terrifyingly powerful. Had the entities been destroyed as the supernova passed over their locations? They might have been ghostly creatures rather than anything humanity could understand, not really part of the human universe, yet surely the force of a supernova could hurt them. Chen1 felt oddly optimistic, before the humans pulled themselves to their feet and went mad. They ran through the shipyards, fighting each other and lashing out at the walls, with neither rhyme nor reason. The sudden shock of being disconnected from the entities had driven them mad.

Chen1 pulled back, observing as best as he could. The AIs had considered using a wormhole to remove <st1lace>Greenland</st1lace> from one star system and put it in another, just in the hope that the connection between the entities and their thralls could be broken. What he was looking at now suggested that there was no hope that the thralls could ever be freed. If breaking the connection would kill them outright…he shivered, even though he had no physical body. Was that the fate that lay in store for all of humanity if the entities won?

The supernova blast wave struck the shipyards twenty minutes after striking the planet itself. In that time, Chen1 had watched the human population commit atrocities that would have shocked even the darkest names from the history books; torture, murder, rape…the maddened population had reinvented them all. There was no particular pattern to it, just madness. It was almost a relief when the wave finally destroyed most of the shipyard, obliterating the threat it posed to the Confederation. Chen1 withdrew his remaining subcomponents from the system and jumped back to the AI ship, just in time to watch through the FTL sensors as the remains of the system died. The population made no attempt to escape.

“I think we got them,” he commented, as he started to reintegrate his scattered personality. “They just collapsed, like puppets whose strings had been cut.”

The AIs studied his memories, considering every last aspect of them. Chen1 was almost ashamed. The AIs were pure creatures, created by the human race, without the sins that had dogged humanity since the dawn of time. Perhaps, he wondered, humanity’s fears of an artificial intelligence breaking free had more to do with human nature than the intrinsic nature of an AI. The human race had feared an AI doing unto it as it had done unto itself. The Confederation had made massive progress in eliminating all of humanity’s ills, but they had all been reinvented in the final moments before the shipyard was destroyed.

“Perhaps,” the AIs agreed, finally. “It does not bode well for the future.”

***​

Two days after the supernova, <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> risked taking the <st1:City><st1lace>Sparta</st1lace></st1:City>into the destroyed system. The remains of the star – a shattered husk barely alive – could be dismissed, but the remains of the planets were of far more interest. They had been bathed in fire, yet they were still intact, if dead. The Ancient systems had been left barren and grey; the dead worlds in the system had been burned to a crisp. Few traces of humanity’s civilisation could be made out on their surface.

“There is no technological disruption,” the AIs reported. “The system appears to be perfectly normal.”

“If you don’t count the ten billion humans who were vaporised by the supernova,” <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> said, coldly. The remains of the Rings could be made out now, blackened and scorched by the supernova. The materials used to build their structures had survived, but the interiors had been washed clean in the blast. The population had been destroyed. “And the shipyard itself has been destroyed.”

The planetoid moved deeper within the system, deploying hundreds of sensor drones and launching them through hyperspace to the remaining planets and structures. Everywhere they looked there was death, although the odd flickers within the gas giant suggested that the supernova had lit a fire somewhere within the massive world. <st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> wondered idly if they’d ignited a new star, before dismissing the thought. One way or the other, it wasn't a problem at the moment, although it would probably concern the Gasbags. They would be outraged if humanity started turning gas giants into stars.

Finally, they halted near the remains of the shipyard. “As far as we are able to determine,” the sensor officer reported, “there are no traces of human life – or the entities – within the system. The entities do not show up on our sensors, but the disruption associated with their presence is not present. I think we did it, sir. I think we drove them back home.”

<st1:City><st1lace>Burton</st1lace></st1:City> was much less sanguine. “We killed ten billion humans and rendered an entire star system useless to stop the entities,” he said. The implications seemed obvious. After this success, the Security Council would certainly authorise the use of other supernova bombs. The other infected systems would be destroyed as well, yet that still left the problem of the infected starships. One of them could reach a new world and start the madness all over again. “How much of the Confederation are we going to have to dismantle before this is all over?”

 

Some comments would be nice...

Chapter Thirty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

In the Confederation, Aisyaj knew, she could have crossed half the galaxy and returned home in time for tea. A starship travelling through hyperspace could fly at many thousands of times the speed of light. Even warp drive, within a sector, was astonishingly fast. In the Dead Zone, it could take days to limp towards their destination, days she spent puzzling over the telescope sightings and reading information off the old-style screen. They didn’t dare risk neural links in the Dead Zone. A single hiccup could cause massive brain damage.

“Patience is a virtue,” Rylander said, when she complained. The tender might have been tiny by the standards of a planetoid, but there was still plenty of space for the eleven crewmembers onboard. Her cabin might have felt weird compared to the one back home on <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1lace>Greenland</st1lace> – a home she might never see again – yet it was roomy enough to compensate. “We will get there in time.”

“Patience is not one of my virtues,” Aisyaj countered, although it was a lie. She’d learned patience while in training, yet it seemed as if they were just crawling towards their destination. The massive fusion drive, the most powerful space drive that would work within the Dead Zone, was pushing them forward as fast as it could. It was just so slow compared to what they could have done outside the zone. “Why did you marry that girl?”

Rylander’s mind seemed to glimmer with odd emotion. “It’s part of our culture,” he said, finally. “You find a partner who is prepared to share the wandering life with you and you get married, producing kids and bringing them up within the society.”

It wasn't the answer Aisyaj had hoped for, yet she didn’t want to pry further. Being so close to him kept reminding her of the times they’d spent together – and she knew that he was feeling the same way – but it was clear that he felt guilty, as if he’d abandoned his wife to join his former lover on a quixotic quest to save the universe. She wanted to convince him to…do what? What could she ask him to do? Love her again? He had grown up in a culture that had rejected the ways of the Confederation, where there were limitless resources and no stigma attached to making or breaking relationships.

“I know,” she said, finally. What else could she say? “Thank you for coming.”

“Hey, you sold me on it when you told me that it wasn't something the rest of the Confederation could have done,” Rylander protested. If he had doubts, he kept them very well concealed. “I thought that it was worth the risk and, if not, my children will be told that I died bravely and well.”

“Of course,” Aisyaj said, without irony. There were few people who would willingly fly into the Dead Zone, let alone allow a group of telepath masters to teleport them into the heart of the zone itself. Rylander might not have loved her any longer – although she knew that he was still attracted to her – but he trusted her. “If there is still a Confederation, we will be remembered.”

Rylander grinned. “Did you take lovers after me?”

Aisyaj didn’t want to talk about it, but she had to admit that it was fair. “One or two,” she said, vaguely. They had both been telepaths and she had found the relationships unsatisfying. It wasn't something she could explain to someone who possessed no telepathy; they could never understand. “They were…not as good as you.”

She smiled at the flicker of satisfaction in his mind. Telepaths were so…compassionate and understanding. She had grown up knowing that men found her attractive and, when she had found a fellow telepath attractive, she had known that he had known that she found him attractive. Her telepathic lovers had known, of course, when she had slept with others, just as she had known when they had slept with others; there hadn’t even been any jealously. When she’d travelled out into the Confederation, she had discovered that there were men who had undressed her in their minds and felt ashamed of it. It had been a surprising discovery, yet…how could she find a permanent relationship if neither telepaths nor mundane humans truly understood her?

Rylander placed a hand on her shoulder and steered her towards the portal, showing her the stars. They seemed to remain still, not like the streaking lights of warp space or the eerie lights and energy storms of hyperspace, yet there was something about them that gnawed at her mind. The stars had been there long before humanity had clawed its way into space and would be there long after they were gone. She snuggled against him, accepting a friendly hug, and closed her eyes. She needed a rest…

An hour later, they were called back to the bridge. “We found something alarming,” Khursheda explained. She was, among other things, the chief sensor officer on the Another Woman. “The planets are definitely inhabited, but they’re also protected.”

She tapped the flat-screen as it displayed a series of objects floating in orbit around the twin worlds. “These objects appear to be small mines or missiles,” she explained. “They don’t seem to emit much energy, yet I’m pretty sure that they’re intended to intercept anything approaching or leaving the planet. If we enter orbit, the results might be…unpleasant.”

Aisyaj snorted at her tone. “How unpleasant?”

“This isn’t a Confederation Navy ship with seven layers of force fields and an option to drop back into hyperspace if the battle is going badly,” Boris reminded her, dryly. “We’re a massive ship following a predicable course that we cannot change without expending a great deal of energy, which would be easy for them to track. One hit with a primitive nuclear warhead and we’d be dead.”

“They wouldn’t even need a nuke,” Khursheda said, checking her readings. “They’d just have to ram into us at high speed. That would be the end of us.”

“All right,” Aisyaj said. “How do we get down to the planet?”

“That’s the problem,” Khursheda said. “I don’t think we can.”

After much argument, Rylander agreed to launch a probe towards the nearest planet, one that would be unnamed, yet easy for the mysterious objects to detect. Aisyaj watched it go, willing it to make contact with the unknown aliens or to provoke no reaction at all, but she was out of luck. As the probe approached the planet’s surface, broadcasting signals and attempting to make contact, an alien object boosted into an intercept trajectory. It was moving so fast that it was easy to tell that it was unmanned. The interception was slow, stately and inevitable. The two objects collided and the probe was destroyed. The interceptor floated onwards, slowly altering course to return to orbit.

“That object wasn't produced in the Dead Zone,” Khursheda said, flatly. “Anything they could produce here should have suffered damage – even been destroyed – when it rammed the probe.”

Aisyaj stared down at her console, watching as the alien craft moved in their odd formations, watching for intruders. To have come so close and yet be so far…!

“I have been studying the records,” Janette said. She was the youngest of the crew at nineteen, a girl whose mind seemed to flicker with terror and embarrassment whenever she looked at Aisyaj. She didn’t like the thought of telepaths looking into her mind. Aisyaj would have liked to reassure her, but that would only have confirmed her fears. “The interceptor was not launched until the probe was committed to entering low planetary orbit, or even to head into the atmosphere.”

Aisyaj frowned. “So we could enter high orbit?”

“We could,” Rylander said. She sensed the resolve in his mind and knew what he was going to say before he said it. “We’re not going to take the risk. Those things can boost a hell of a lot faster than us and they could catch and destroy us easily. I don’t think that they would let us go even if we started to thrust away from the planet’s surface.”

“You don’t know that,” Aisyaj pointed out. “You could be wrong.”

Rylander scowled at her. “Everything we are looking at,” he said, flatly, “suggests an automated system. An intelligent being who saw us – and we are detectable – would have either attempted to open communication or launched one of the interceptors after us. We cannot reason with an automated system and we cannot gamble on our ability to escape or destroy one of their interceptors. I will not take the risk.”

“We could always send in more remote probes,” Khursheda offered. “We can angle them so they enter high orbit, or even speed past the planet. It should give us new insight into how the defences actually react.”

“Good idea,” Rylander said. “Make it so.”

The next few days passed slowly as the probe slowly built up a picture of life on the planet below. It was clear that the planet was inhabited right from the start, yet the civilisation was not only primitive, but protected. The automated systems in orbit responded to anything that tried to slip into low orbit and destroyed it. The attempts to contact the planet through radio proved futile. The planet’s population didn’t seem to possess radio, yet they had clearly moved through the system at one point. Both planets had the same form of intelligent life.

Aisyaj scowled as she studied the aliens, trying to understand what she was seeing. They seemed roughly humanoid, but there the resemblance ended. They looked more like gorillas than humans, yet their hands were delicate, suggesting advanced manipulating capabilities. There seemed to be little sexual dimorphism between the sexes, unless they were only seeing one sex and the other sex was kept locked away. It was impossible to tell at their distance. Their technology seemed curious, an odd mixture of surprisingly advanced technology and primitive systems. The most advanced technology they saw on the planet’s surface was a steam engine.

“It’s possible that the defences are responsible for preventing any advancement above a certain level of technology,” Boris said, reluctantly. “We have had lunatics who have tried to do that in human history.”

”True,” Rylander agreed, “which rather leads to the obvious question. Did they build the defences and do it to themselves, or did whoever brought them here trap them on the planet’s surface? If so…why?”

Centuries ago, back during the early days of the Age of Expansion, a charismatic leader had led thousands of humans to a new world, one where they would live their lives without the advanced technology that they believed had blighted the Earth. When the colonists had discovered just how hard life was without technology, they’d revolted, but their mad leader had won the civil war. He’d not only destroyed anything more advanced than hand-powered tools; he’d set up computer systems to smite anyone who tried to introduce advanced technology back into the cultural matrix. By the time the system had been rediscovered by one of the many empires spreading out from Earth, the few remaining colonists had been on the verge of dying out. They had greeted their conquerors as if they’d been a rescue party.

There were planets, even now, that embraced the simple life, but the key to their success was the willingness to make the system work. Every year, thousands of pastoral humans chose to return to the Confederation, while thousands more came to try their hand at living as their ancestors did. The worlds that had been set up to operate without technology had eventually ended up rediscovering it and reaching for the stars again, as the beliefs that had founded them faded away and died. The Confederation occasionally encountered ships from human-settled worlds that had lost contact with the rest of humanity, or believed that their world was the true homeworld of the human race. They always had to be handled carefully.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything dangerous about them,” Khursheda said. “Even within the Dead Zone, our tech should be able to handle everything they have.”

“Apart from the defences,” Rylander said. “I think that we are going to have to rule out making contact with them, unless we can somehow subvert the defence system.”

“I doubt that that will be possible,” Janette said. She had been tracing out the defensive systems nodes. “I think they’re controlled from this complex here” – she tapped one of the icons on the display – “but approaching it is going to be a nightmare. They’re filling space with radar pulses.”

“We could get a stealth probe in there,” Boris said.

“I doubt it,” Khursheda said. “If they’re that paranoid, they’re probably using laser radar and other systems as well to make sure that no one could slip up on them. We might not be able to deactivate the defence network at all.”

***​

An hour later, the entire crew gathered in the mess for a meal. Aisyaj had been surprised that the Slowboaters had such a tradition, but it did make a certain kind of sense, even in the Dead Zone. The automated systems would alert them if there was a problem, allowing them a chance to relax and catch up with each other. There was a formal rule of No Shop Talk, but Rylander chose to waive it. They had much to discuss.

“If we were operating under no time pressure at all,” he said, “I would be quite happy to spend years studying the twin planets and trying to unpick their defensive systems. We could analyse them until we knew how they ticked and then take them out, allowing us to land on the planet at will. We do not, however, have that much time.”

He took a sip from the flask in his hand and continued. “We have three choices,” he said. “We can remain and study the planetary defences; we can head to the barycentre and examine the alien artefact there or we can head towards the local star and study the objects orbiting the sun.” He shrugged. “Or we can admit defeat and head home.”

Aisyaj stared down at her hands. It wasn't her command, she knew, even though she was only just starting to realise what it meant. The Slowboaters had come because one of their leaders had asked for volunteers; they hadn’t come for her, or the Confederation. Their lives were Rylander’s responsibility and he couldn’t put them at risk because of her…well, not more than he already had, at any rate.

“I do not believe that we will be able to crack the defence network in a hurry,” Khursheda said. The dark-skinned girl frowned, her thoughts a conflicted mass. “The system is designed to make it hard for anyone else to slip inside and do a little reprogramming. We may succeed eventually, but there would be no guarantee of success. I believe that we should head for the artefact at the barycentre.”

“We do have the time to explore thoroughly,” Boris countered. “We could always speed weeks, or months, probing out the defence network. It would take time – these things always do – but we have the time. We can take as long as we need to make sure we do it right.”

His voice hardened. “This isn’t a piece of incomprehensible alien technology from the wider galaxy,” he added. “This is a piece of technology that must function under physical laws we understand. Given time, we can break through and reprogram it to make it work for us.”

“Good point,” Rylander said, dryly. “Would anyone else like to offer a suggestion?”

Aisyaj knew it wasn't her place, but there was no choice. “I can barely reach the other telepaths from within the Dead Zone,” she said. Admitting that was painful. Her mind seemed to have lost most of its range within the field. “I have no idea what is going on back in the Confederation, but I believe that it isn’t good. We may not have much time as we think.

“I’ve been studying the aliens and comparing them to the remains of the Ancient civilisation. The buildings the Ancients built could be used by them. They may be all that remains of the Ancients, which means that they’ve been here – within the Dead Zone – for four billion years and that they survived the entities. We need to know how they did it. Any risk is worthwhile if we can learn how they did it.”

“They hid themselves in a realm that defies physical law,” Boris said, sharply. “I don’t think that that counts as a victory.”

“The Dead Zone is not a natural event,” Khursheda said. Her voice was tightly composed, but Aisyaj could sense the excitement underlying her words. “The Ancients had technology that we don’t understand. They could have created the Dead Zone to defend themselves. If we could understand the technology behind it…”

She allowed her voice to trail off as Rylander spoke. “There are good arguments in favour of both,” he said. His mind-tone suggested that he intended to strike a middle course. “I propose a compromise. Two of us will head towards the artefact and attempt to conduct a preliminary study. The remainder will remain here and continue to study the defence network. If we can find a way of turning it off, or at least confirming just what it will or will not respond to, we can carry out a more comprehensive study of this system.”

“This system itself isn’t natural,” Khursheda said. She tapped the table to make her words clearer, more pointed. “Do you know what we could do with such power?”

“Yes,” Boris said. “And the race that did have such power reduced itself to grubbing in the dirt to avoid being eaten by monstrous extra-dimensional vampires. Am I the only one who thinks that such power might come with a very high price?”

 

Story is progressing nicely! Haven't had much time to actually get much reading done lately. Keep it coming. How long is this story?

Byte

 

Is this one done? Chris, did you go on vacation?

 

Got sick of the shortage of comments

Chapter Thirty-One<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

Representative Chen translated into the Security Council’s virtual meeting room with an almost jovial air. It was slightly inappropriate when humanity had blown up one of its own star systems to destroy an alien foe, yet it was the first real success that humanity had enjoyed and he was determined to enjoy it. Many of his constituents had pointed out the hypocritical nature of that statement – he had, after all, voted against the deployment of the supernova bomb – but while he knew they had a point, it was hard to care. There was hope after all.

He paused as he took his virtual seat, considering the two lines of memory that ran through his electronic pattern. Chen1 and Chen2 had merged back together – an easy process when there was little divergence between the two personalities – yet he was still working on reintegrating himself. Chen1 had seen the effects of the entities at first hand; Chen2 had remained with the AIs, watching through their eyes as the star exploded and destroyed the entire star system. A physical human would have gone mad under the influence of having contradictory memories; an electronic human merely had to concentrate to avoid disorientation.

As the remainder of the Security Council materialised – unlike him, they were merely projecting themselves into the chamber – he considered the public reaction to the news. The Confederation Navy had released a brief statement just after the bomb had detonated, issuing a factual note of what had happened and sending warning signals to star systems that were likely to be affected by the expanding shell of radiation. Building shields for the affected star systems would be fairly easy – assuming the entities didn’t destroy the Confederation first – yet thousands of people were already voting with their feet and departing the threatened worlds. The thought made him smile, even though it was absurd – or perhaps because it was absurd. The expanding shell of radiation was travelling at the speed of light and it would be six years before it reached the first inhabited world, more than enough time to build a planetary shield or even evacuate the entire population.

The public seemed to be of mixed views. The newshounds, struggling to chase down reactions from members of the public, seemed to think that half the population was cheering the destruction of the star, while the other half was terrified of the possible consequences. There was nothing that terrified humans as much as the unknown and there was no way to know how the entities would respond to the supernova. Chen’s personal belief was that the entities wouldn't care – they didn't seem to worry much about human weapons or defences – but there was no way to know for sure. He had already done a number of interviews for various media outlets, reassuring people that – for once – the Confederation had hit back and hit back hard. In private, he was much less confident. The entities, for all the difficulties they had operating in humanity’s universe, had powers and abilities the Confederation couldn't match. For all he knew, one of them could infect a star!

“This meeting will now come to order,” Mariko said, her voice echoing in the virtual chamber. She looked tired, a surprisingly honest pose when most people used filters to present a bland or dispassionate image to the world. It might have been political manipulation, of course; Chen knew that most humans were very cynical when it came to political manoeuvres. “Admiral...did we kill the entity?”

Admiral Burton looked troubled. He was, Chen reflected, starting to become a familiar face at the meetings. It wasn't such a problem – he was the man on the spot, after all – but some of the councillors were already muttering about precedence and wondering if Burton wasn't bucking the system. And then there were the people who blamed him for the loss of Greenland and the near-disaster in the Haypah System.

“I do not know,” Burton said, finally. “We have filled the remains of the system with sensor probes and hunted for locations where technology started to glitch. We have found no such places; indeed, we have found no survivors at all.”

“Admiral,” Representative Singh said, “you blew up an entire star. I don’t think we should be expecting survivors.”

“The Rings were constructed from materials that should have been capable of surviving the blast and providing at least some protection to their inhabitants,” Burton said, flatly. “We searched the remains of the Rings and found dead bodies, some suspiciously intact. We did not find a single living survivor. That is, if you will pardon the expression, freakishly improbable.”

“I saw the crew of the shipyard collapsing after the supernova swept over the planet,” Chen injected, smoothly. “If their mental link to the entity was destroyed, does that not mean that the entity was destroyed as well?”

“We cannot be sure,” Representative Caprice said. Her voice was surprisingly even for someone whose daughter was trapped within the Dead Zone, but then, perhaps she was using a filter to mask her real thoughts and feelings. “I have been in communication with teams of telepaths who inspected the post-supernova system. They reported strange sensations, feelings suggesting that they were being watched...and a twist in the quantum foam where the entity had been centred.”

She shook her head, sending her long white hair cascading down towards the virtual ground. “We may have slammed the door shut in its face,” she added, “but the doorway remains, waiting to be reopened.”

Chen admired her composure. He had never met the telepath in person – not before he’d transcribed himself into a computer core and become one of the first Electronic Humans – and there were few who could make him regret the decision to go electronic. Caprice, with her striking, almost patrician features, long divine legs and firm taut breasts, was one of them. He sometimes wondered what it would be like to take on human flesh again – or perhaps one of the android bodies used by Electronic Humans – and make love to her. It would be real in a way that electronic lovemaking, with its acrobatics and imaginary constructions, could never be.

“My people don’t like being there,” she concluded. Her lips thinned noticeably. “They’re saying the system is haunted. The ones who visited the Ancient worlds say that it’s just like walking on the dead soil and sensing the ghosts flickering around the ruins.”

Chen pushed his impossible sexual fantasy aside and concentrated on her words. “Are you suggesting,” he said calmly, “that the system is still being affected by the entities in some way?”

“I am saying,” Caprice countered, “that the entities touched the system and – somehow – left a lasting legacy of their presence. It is quite possible that the doorway will be reopened at some point, allowing the entities to return to the system.”

“If they would,” the Grand Admiral said. “There’s nothing there for them now.”

“We have been considering the reports from the telepaths,” the AIs said. Chen listened with interest. For electronic gods with no real feelings of their own – at least, no feelings that were kin to human feelings – the AIs took a remarkable interest in telepaths. Chen had heard that they worked hard to establish links with telepaths in the field and shared data with them, even pushing the limits of the Confederation’s privacy statues. “The claim that the system is haunted may be related to legends from pre-space Earth.”

Chen looked up, sharply. “On Earth,” the AIs continued, “there were humans who attempted to perform rites to summon demons to the mortal realm. These rites were often conducted at places of power, places considered to be haunted or somehow connected to the other worlds. The rites were generally regarded as primitive nonsense and largely abandoned when the human race headed into space. There are, however, definite links between the rites performed by the Ancient Cult and the rites performed by the people on Earth.

“In particular, both groups used repetitive chanting and sometimes drugs to generate the proper state of mind for their rites. This, we believed, helped to focus the mind on a particular task, all the more important when the cultists were not all trained and experienced telepaths. They would not have known what they were doing – the truth behind their rites were concealed under a great deal of nonsense – yet there is little doubt that the rites succeeded now...and did not succeed in the past. Why, we wonder, could that be?”

Singh snorted. “The Gateway,” he said. “The Buckley Experiment altered the very nature of space itself.”

“We believe so,” the AIs said. “The entities were able to use the Buckley Experiment to allow themselves access to this universe. Even so, it is clear that they require the rituals as well...and now that we have rounded up the original cultists and warned the population, it is likely that the infection will not be able to spread further.”

“At least not that way,” Chen pointed out. He stared from face to face, willing them to understand. “This is not new. We need to figure out how to close the Gateway.”

“We intend to attempt to destroy one of the objects in three days,” the AIs reminded him. “Even if the experiment fails, we will learn a great deal about their true nature and composition.”

“True enough,” Chen agreed. He intended to be watching as the AIs attempted to destroy the object, one of humanity’s metal gods confronting a nightmare from beyond the dawn of time. He doubted that it would be easy, but it had to be tried. “That still leaves us with the other issue. Do we destroy the remaining infected star systems?”

Carolynn glared at him. The mermaid regarded him as a traitor for breaking his word...although he hadn't actually broken his word, merely changed his mind. For her, and a sizable percentage of humanity’s population, there was no real difference between the two. The algorithms that dominated the selection of Security Council members would, eventually, refuse to allow him to remain a member. Until then, he intended to represent the Electronic Humans to the best of his ability.

“You – we – destroyed over ten billion lives,” she said, her tail thrashing in anger. It was easy to imagine her leaning on a rock, attracting passing sailors and convincing them to join her in the waves. Mermaids lived odd lives; unlike most of the Evolved Humans, they chose not to be at the top of the food chain, resulting in the highest death rate of any of the various human subsets. “And now you want to destroy more?”

Chen chose his words carefully. “I saw what they did to our people,” he said. He’d allowed the memories to flow into the Galactic Net, where they had been accessed by trillions of people. They had, for a few brief hours, overshadowed even the pornography files on the network. “There was no free will, no choice; they were completely subverted, so...crushed that they were even starving to death, in the midst of plenty. And when the entity was forced to retreat back to its own universe, they just went mad, cut off from their lord and master. Thousands of years of civilisation were destroyed in a moment.”

He looked over at her, willing her to understand. “I voted against the use of the supernova bomb,” he said. “I was wrong. I believed that we could defeat the entities and free our people from their spell. I do not believe, any longer, that that is true. The people within their power can never be freed. We cannot save them once they have given themselves, willingly or unwillingly to the entities. They will just be drained dry feeding their master on their own life force.

“We cannot allow it to continue. If we blow up the remaining infected star systems, we will destroy their foothold in our universe; perhaps win time to find a more permanent solution. We need to understand them, understand the nature of their power and how the Gateway somehow allows them to access our dimension and we cannot do that if parts of the Confederation are being used as bases to crush us. We must destroy those worlds.”

There was a long pause. “Perhaps we should table that issue,” Mariko said, carefully. “We have another problem to deal with. The diplomatic notes have started coming in.”

Chen scowled as the information was downloaded into his pattern from the processors controlling the virtual room. The Confederation’s destruction of a star hadn't gone unnoticed by the other alien races, particularly the ones that believed humanity would eventually be a danger to them. The Haypah – what remained of their government – had filed an official protest, although with the entities taking control of their empire it was hard to see what they could actually do about it. The Confederation Navy had been intercepting refugee flights for the last few days, disarming the refugees and transporting them to a Confederation worldship for their own safety. Some of the refugees had been killed by their own people when they realised that the Confederation, far from being a monstrous galactic hegemonic empire, was willing to take them in. There had always been a stream of refugees coming out of their space, but this was different. It promised change for the better.

But for the moment, there were more serious concerns. The Confederation Navy was debriefing all of the refuges, before keeping them isolated from the mainstream of Confederation society. The tales they told were horrific. The infected starships had brought their infection – and their alien masters – to most of the Haypah worlds and started to enslave the population. The Haypah Empire was disintegrating as the outer worlds tried to break away from the centre, while the entities just kept expanding and feeding on their thralls, draining them to death. The Confederation Navy simply didn't have the resources to do anything about it, not any longer.

The Haypah, however, weren't the only ones concerned about humanity’s destruction of a star. The Gasbags had filed a complaint of their own, stating that the destruction of an uninhabited gas giant could be viewed as an unfriendly act – or something along those lines. Even for the AIs, communicating with the gas giant dwellers wasn't easy and sometimes both sides had been known to talk past one another. It added another complication to the whole issue, for two of the infected star systems also held a large population of Gasbags. There was no data on their current status – if the Gasbags knew, they weren’t telling – but they would object, strongly, if those stars were to be destroyed. It wasn’t even clear if the Gasbags understood the nature of the threat.

And then there were the other protests...

Chen smiled tiredly. “I suggest that we ignore the complaints from the Haypah,” he said, once the councillors had all accessed and studied the data download. “They don’t have anything left to bargain with, not now the entities are taking them apart. We can keep taking in their refugees and eventually they will become part of the Confederation. The splinter governments are not going to remain intact much longer.”

He shrugged. “The Gasbags will have to be warned about the danger to their own people,” he added. “We can leave those stars for last, but unless we fire a remote missile at the infected planets...”

“It would be insufficient,” the Grand Admiral said. “Even if the technology works perfectly, which is unlikely, the entities will still control the Rings and the various habitats scattered around the system. We need to hit them hard enough to break their control and the only way we know to do that is to send the star supernova.”

“And the other races can go to hell,” Singh said. “The ones who are like us – living on Earth-type worlds – should know the truth about the entities. We’re not just fighting to defend ourselves, but all of them as well. To hell with their concerns! We will do what we feel is necessary to defend ourselves.”

“Assuming we win the war against the entities,” Carolyn put in, “uniting the rest of the galaxy against us is not a particularly bright idea.”

“It doesn't help us if we retain the goodwill of the galaxy, yet get eaten alive by the entities,” Singh growled. “Besides, what happens if infection spreads into one of their systems? They’re going to need our help to deal with it.”

“There are dangers in both courses of action,” the AIs stated. “While races such as the Haypah can be disregarded, other races are far closer to our technological level and – if they decided to work together to contain us – could certainly cause us considerable problems. They may feel that the results of the Buckley Experiment are our fault and demand that we refrain from such experiments in the future.”

“They can go to hell,” Singh said, again.

“That is not helpful,” Carolynn said. “Why should we expect them to understand our concerns?”

Mariko smiled. “We need to agree on a response,” she said. “I propose that we explain the truth and that we may have to repeat the exercise by destroying systems only inhabited by humans. The Gasbag systems can be left until last...”

“We could always transport the Gasbag worlds out of the infected system,” the AIs pointed out. A diagram appeared in front of the council, showing how a wormhole could be generated and used to swallow up an entire gas giant. “We are already working on scaled-up wormhole generators that should be capable of such feats.”

Chen shook his head in awe. “You don't think small, do you?”

The AI image smiled. “No,” they said. The smile deepened, growing wider. “We have to think big to survive.”

“And that,” Chen said, “sounds like famous last words. We were telling ourselves the same when we allowed Joe Buckley to talk us into authorising the experiment.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Admiral Burton was still thinking about Representative Chen’s words when the AIs contacted him, informing him that they were ready to begin the experiment. It was a welcome distraction. After destroying an entire star, the Sparta and her entire task force had been sent back to the Gateway, rejoining the force watching the objects and maintaining the quarantine zone. Only a few hundred media and alien ships remained outside the invisible line the Confederation Navy had drawn in space, watching with interest. The ships, Burton knew, could probably track everything they did near the Gateway.

“Show me,” he ordered, as he sat back in his command chair. Sparta felt oddly empty; they’d had to cut loose two thousand crewmen to man the cruisers that were being taken out of the reserve and pressed into service. The planetoid was largely automated, yet he’d been used to having hundreds of crewmen around. “What have you built?”

The AIs, when they wanted to move fast, could move faster than any other part of the Confederation. Five of their cube-shaped ships had arrived at the Gateway – where they’d joined the ship that had remained there since the beginning, watching the Gateway and the alien objects – and two of them had been dismantled to provide the raw material for the wormhole generator. It floated in space, a long skeletal structure that flickered oddly when he looked at it through the starship’s sensor suite. A standard wormhole generator was massive, even the smaller generators that connected planets together, but this one was stupendous. The AIs had even used a smaller generator to tap the power of no less than four nearby stars. They would have power to spare in the unlikely event of the quantum tap failing.

He watched as the remaining AI ships drifted away from the generator, moving into positions where they could support operations or jump into hyperspace, if the experiment went badly wrong. They’d joined the Confederation Navy in seeding space with sensor platforms, ready to monitor every last flicker of energy in the vicinity. The objects themselves were still a mystery – no two sensor probes agreed on anything – yet, as the AIs made their preparations, it seemed as if they were finally going to get answers.

“Alert all ships,” he ordered. “I want all unnecessary ships out of the danger zone before the wormhole generator is powered up.”

The AIs had protested that that wasn't necessary, but Burton had overruled them, reminding the electronic personalities that the entities had surprised them before and would probably do so again. The Scientists Guild, which had been studying the Gateway and arguing endlessly over its internal quantum structure, hadn't been able to learn much about it, but they had concluded that maintaining the Gateway required an astonishing amount of power. The Confederation, with the greatest power generation and distribution system in human history, would be unable to power the Gateway, not even if every system was devoted to the task.

Burton had wondered, if that was the case, how the entities were able to power it, but the scientists had had no answer. It was possible that whatever Joe Buckley had done to create the Gateway had firmly lodged it within the quantum foam, or perhaps the entities were feeding in power from their own universe. When he'd asked if the scientists had come up with any way to close the Gateway, the scientists had been shocked at the suggestion. The Gateway was unique, they’d protested, and far too important to risk. The fact that powerful alien entities were using it as a way into the human universe didn't seem to register with them.

“All ships have reached the quarantine line,” the sensor officer reported. “They’re ready to begin recording the experiment.”

“Good,” Burton said. If the Sparta were to be destroyed if the experiment went wrong, at least there would be a record of what had happened to her. The AIs had their own QCC link back to Calculus, but the Confederation Navy would prefer its own link. He looked over at the AIs and nodded. “You may proceed.”

“Thank you,” the AIs said. If there was any irony in their thoughts, they hid it well. “We are feeding power into the generator now.”

Burton leaned back and accessed the live feed from the RIs controlling the wormhole generator. Wormholes required a considerable amount of power to generate, although once they were generated they only required a trickle of power to keep them in being. The AIs were being careful, testing everything as they went along, unlike some researchers he could mention. The Confederation Navy had once had to rescue several scientists from a melting world after their quantum tap – a design they’d produced themselves and insisted on testing personally – had lost containment and exploded violently. Luckily, they’d had the common sense to be on the other side of the planet when they carried out the tests; unluckily, they hadn't bothered to ensure that a starship remained in the system, waiting for them. They’d been luckier than they deserved to be that a patrolling cruiser had detected the blast and come to investigate.

“All power feeds check out,” the AIs concluded finally. Burton, who had been admiring the design, nodded absently. The AIs had worked in so many safeguards that it was hard to see what - if anything - could go wrong. They could use the wormhole generator to open a link from one side of the galaxy to another, or even to a separate galaxy altogether. “We are ready to begin powering up the main system.”

Power flared through the device, creating a sudden twist in space-time as the generator flared to life, emitting gravity waves into space. Burton felt a brief shiver of recognition, remembering the horrific moments when the Buckley Experiment had gone terrifyingly wrong and opened the path allowing the entities access to his universe. The AIs swore that there was no way a standard wormhole could be used to gain access to an alternate dimension, but even they had to admit that there were too many unknown unknowns involved. The human race’s knowledge about the universe had been proved to be alarmingly limited. It was ironic; the discovery of the entities and how they operated under entirely different physical laws had fuelled genuinely original science, yet they were also the most serious threat the human race had ever faced. Even the nightmarish and paranoid visions of the AIs deciding to declare war on the human race didn't even come close to what the entities had unleashed.

“The gravity fields are optimal,” the AIs stated. “We are calibrating the device now.”

Burton sat back in his chair, watching the alien object nervously. It still resembled a sphere, but the filters on the sensor systems refused to allow him to pick out any detail. Too many people had looked at the objects through their naked eyes – or even sensor units – and had gone mad. The objects might have looked like spheres, yet they were clearly far more than they seemed, perhaps even linked back to the entities and their home dimension. The most powerful weapons humanity had deployed – apart from the most dangerous of all – hadn’t even scratched them. The Confederation Navy had considered deploying the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon and taking the heat from the rest of the galaxy – who would consider it a human ultimate weapon – but the simulations agreed that it would be useless against the objects. They just didn't exist in one dimension; they existed in multiple separate dimensions.

“The wormhole generator is ready for operations,” the AIs said, finally. Burton considered the live feed briefly, noting how much power the device was sucking into its maw. The quantum tap might not be sufficient for such a massive wormhole. “We are ready to begin.”

Burton looked back at the alien object, as vast and enigmatic as ever. The Confederation Navy’s specialists had debated endlessly, wondering if the object was aware of the starships gathered around it, or if it was simply uncaring about their presence. It wasn't as if it had any reason to worry. The planetoid had unleashed its full firepower against one of the objects and accomplished precisely nothing. If they generated the wormhole, would they provoke a reaction...or would the wormhole just be useless, like everything else the human race had used against the objects? A dozen sensor platforms had been rammed into them, to no avail.

“You may begin,” he said. “Good luck to us all...”

The wormhole started to form slowly in front of the targeted object, shimmering into existence. Unlike a standard wormhole, the wormhole the AIs had generated had no endpoint; it was, in effect, a pocket dimension that could be crushed down to nothing, along with everything inside it. It would have been a fiendishly effective weapon if it wasn't for the fact that most cultures possessed gravity-manipulation technology and could use it to detect, avoid or escape such a wormhole. It was far more effective when deployed against planets, but the power requirements were absurd. It would be far more economical to simply drop a few tons of compressed antimatter onto the surface and watch the fireworks from a safe distance.

As he watched, the object continued on its course, right into the gaping maw of the wormhole. Burton couldn't tell if it was aware of the wormhole or not; it just kept moving, rolling through space with a casual arrogance that was infuriating to him. The wormhole opened up in front of it and it flew right inside...and space seemed to go crazy. The sensors blanked out as the wormhole suddenly flared with energy, as if the object was trying to take control of it, or absorb it.

Burton grasped his command chair as the entire planetoid heaved, the sudden outpouring of gravity waves overloading the compensators. Red lights flared up on the main display, warning of mounting damage – all minor, thankfully – within the planetoid itself. He focused his mind on the wormhole and saw space twisting out of shape, completely deformed. It reminded him of a marble falling through a network of tubes and passages, like the child’s toys he’d played with as a kid, yet it was impossible. The wormhole should simply have snapped closed and obliterated the alien object.

The starship shook again and he swore. “Report,” he ordered. “What’s happening?”

“Massive gravity waves, Admiral,” the sensor officer said. “They’re making it hard to hold position. I recommend that we pull back.”

“Do it,” Burton ordered. Something that could shake a planetoid was no joke. The AIs might be able to simply overpower whatever the alien object was doing to the wormhole, yet the results might be explosive. One of the other weapon concepts the Confederation had invented involved using a wormhole to break a large object down to energy and then spewing that energy out of a wormhole, an irrespirable blast of sheer power. Even an uncontrolled blast would be dangerous. He linked back into the computers and sent a single question into the AI network. “What is happening to the wormhole?”

“The object is linked into alternate dimensions,” the AIs said. At least they sounded calm, although intellectually he knew that the AIs only needed a tiny part of their“The pressure of that link is somehow affecting the wormhole and trying to pluck the object back out of the sack and into normal space. We are shifting the wormhole parameters rapidly to break the link with the alternate dimensions and crush the object. The issue is currently in the balance.”

Burton looked at the display as the planetoid pulled back rapidly. The line of gravimetric distortions was only growing stronger, as if the object was resurfacing in normal space and then being pulled back down into the wormhole. He checked the power levels and blinked in surprise. The AIs were not only drawing in power from the quantum tap, but from the stars as well, fuelling their desperate struggle with the alien object. It was impossible for a human to keep track of the conflict. The object was linked to multiple dimensions and he found himself developing a headache as he tried to follow the display. The AIs, not sharing human limitations, were not so affected. Even so, it was clear that they were having problems as space started to twist right out of shape.

“We are unable to maintain the link to the power sources,” the AIs observed. There was no panic in their voice, where a human would have been screaming and railing against the universe. “The object is resisting our attempts to...”

Space shuddered one final time and fell silent. “Correction,” the AIs said. For once, they sounded surprised. “The object has been destroyed.”

“Confirm that,” Burton ordered. He wanted to whoop and shout hurrah, but until he knew for sure, he wasn’t going to celebrate. The entities had surprised the human race before. “How did we win so suddenly?”

There was a pause. “We believe that the links to alternate dimensions simply collapsed,” the AIs said, finally. “Our analysis suggests that they were unable to maintain the links at one remove and chose to abandon the object to its fate. We crushed it out of existence.”

Burton found himself grinning, even as he started to study the take from the various surviving sensor platforms. Hundreds of them had been caught up in the gravitational eddies and destroyed, but hundreds had survived, adding their feed to the combined picture the AIs were pulling together. Three of the objects remained, but one was gone, as if it had never been.

“It looks like we succeeded,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you learn anything about what it was made of?”

“No,” the AIs said. There was a hint of frustration in their tone. “We attempted to analyse the data from the collapsing wormhole, but we were unable to identify the specific components that made up the object.”

Burton frowned. “Can we destroy the others?”

“Once we retune the wormhole generator and add additional power sources...”

“The AIs broke off. “Admiral,” the sensor officer said. “The Gateway...something is coming out of the Gateway!”

“Give me a live feed,” Burton ordered, already knowing what he was going to see. The Gateway seemed to be spinning into life, not unlike a natural wormhole, flaring out in the night. There was a flash of light and another object emerged from the spinning wheel of light, floating out into the human dimension. It bobbled slightly, as if it was unsure of its position or what it was doing, just before it started to move out to replace the destroyed object. It was completely impossible to tell the difference between it and the object that had been destroyed. “****.”

The AI image looked annoyed. “There was no observed disruption of the Gateway while one of the items was missing,” they said. “It may require the destruction of two or more...Ah.”

Burton felt his blood running cold. “Ah?” He repeated. “I don’t like the sound of that?”

“We have successfully managed to peer into their dimensional strands surrounding the objects,” the AIs said. “We were...not as successful as we might have thought. The objects are vastly more complex than we appreciated. When we believed we had destroyed one of the objects, what actually happened was that we destroyed the section that was extruded into our universe; the remainder of the object remained untouched. It simply extruded another section of itself into our universe.”

“But it came out of the Gateway,” Burton protested. “How is that even possible?”

“The normal laws of science break down near the entities,” the AIs reminded him. “The Gateway is merely a more powerful chink in reality, not unlike the quantum twist observed in the remains of the Scorpion System. We are currently modelling out the math now...we believe that the objects, in their location outside our own dimension, extruded part of themselves into the Gateway’s interior space and then guided the tiny section, the tip of the iceberg, out into our reality. It may be possible that the Gateway actually links to far more than just one dimension.”

Burton saw the horrific possibility at once. “We could have given the entities access to more than just one dimension,” he said. “Why couldn't they get into them themselves?”

“Given that we know nothing about the properties of their dimension, it is impossible to be sure,” the AIs said. “One possible model is that of a lobster pot; you can get into the dimension, but the level of power required to get out is simply impossible to muster or deploy. They may require us to open gateways into their dimension to allow them to escape.”

“Or you could just be speculating,” Burton said. He stared down at the display. The four objects had resumed their normal pattern, ignoring the humans dogging their heels. “At least we learned something...”

“Yes,” the AIs agreed. They didn't sound too depressed by the results. “We gathered a considerable amount of data.”

“But nothing helpful,” Burton said. He looked up, directly towards the AI image. “Is there any point in attempting to repeat the exercise?”

“We will need to run new simulations,” the AIs said. Their cheerfulness was beginning to grate on him. The AIs loved data and drank it in, but he needed something simpler; hope. There seemed little ground for hope now. “We may be able to model out ways of attacking the other dimension directly.”

“Yeah,” Burton said. He shook his head, feeling – for the first time – his years pressing down on him. The experiment had failed, which meant that they might never be able to break the link between their dimension and the entities. The Ancients had been destroyed by the entities, after feeding them countless other civilisations. Was that the fate that lay in store for humanity? “Who knows? Maybe we can.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“So tell me,” Gary said, “what do you think it is?”

Aisyaj shrugged. Gary was the youngest of the Slowboater crew, a boy who was almost as young as he looked...and had a painfully evident crush on Khursheda. She needed no telepathy to see the way he looked at her, or how clearly obvious it was that the only reason he’d come on the mission was because the object of his admiration had volunteered. For her part, Khursheda treated him gently, but it was evident that she didn't feel the same way about him.

“I don't know,” Aisyaj said, as she studied the broadcasts from the probes they’d launched ahead of the small craft. The Another Woman might have been tiny by the standards of Confederation starships, but she carried a number of smaller shuttles and tenders, all optimised for operations within the Dead Zone. She told herself that she was getting used to operating the primitive systems, yet the truth was that she had no choice. The sensors she had to work with were so limited compared to what there was on hand outside the Dead Zone, but then, the most advanced sensors the Confederation could produce had been unable to tell the researchers anything about the entities. “It could be anything.”

The alien artefact was slowing up clearly now as the first probe slipped past it. Unlike the two inhabited worlds, it possessed no defences – no obvious defences, she reminded herself – yet it had an inescapable aura of menace. It was a series of rings floating in space, endlessly twisting and turning around...something that occupied the exact centre of the barycentre, the balancing point between the two worlds. When two massive objects, each with their own gravity field, were close to one another, there was always a point when the two gravity fields balanced one another out. The alien artefact seemed to take advantage of that balance, allowing it to remain stable for years without needing to expend any energy maintaining its position.

She scowled as the images grew clearer. There was definitely something at the centre of the rings, something that had to be the core of the device, yet the sensors she had couldn't even begin to understand what it was. She had wondered if it was a black hole, but the gravity-sensitive sensors – the highest tech that would operate within the Dead Zone – claimed otherwise. There were no gravity waves surrounding the device, for all of its size; it seemed to have no detectable gravity field at all. The rings might have been controlling – modulating – the gravity field in some way, yet she couldn't understand how that was possible inside the Dead Zone. It would have required a technology barely distinguishable from magic.

Each of the rings was made of a strange unknown material, shimmering with light as they danced around the centre point, glimmering in the darkness of space. They seemed to be different sizes, with some as large as a country and others tiny, barely wider than the Another Woman. There was a pattern to their spinning, she was sure, but it was impossible to pick it out with the data she had on hand. It looked almost as if the rings weren't stable. It looked as if they were changing their shape and form – perhaps even their function – every time they rotated around the centre.

“They may not be made of matter at all,” Khursheda pointed out, when they discussed the issue. “What if they were made of focused energy instead?”

“That shouldn't be possible inside the Dead Zone,” Rylander countered. “We couldn't build something made of stable energy inside the Dead Zone...”

“It may be possible if we assume that artefact is the generator,” Khursheda said. She hadn't wavered in her belief that the Dead Zone was somehow generated by the Ancients, although no one knew if they’d done it to defend themselves or someone else had done it to trap them on the two worlds...if the inhabitants of the planets were actually the Ancients themselves. After four billion years, even within the Dead Zone, there should have been a great deal more evolution. The population couldn't have remained stable for long, could it? “The rules of the Dead Zone might not apply within it.”

Rylander watched as the probe reached its closest approach point and started to head away, on an orbit that would eventually bring it back to the Another Woman. He had been urged to allow the probe to fly into the rings and see what happened, but he’d vetoed it, pointing out that no one knew how the artefact would react. If it had enough power to generate the Dead Zone, it certainly had enough power to swat the Slowboaters as if they were flies, or perhaps a lot less than flies. Aisyaj had been disappointed, but she hadn't disagreed. The artefact had to be approached carefully.

“So we could use some of the advanced gear we brought along,” Gary said, eagerly. “If we could use one of the scanners, we might be able to get a complete picture of the interior of the artefact and...”

“It hasn’t been proven yet,” Aisyaj reminded him, trying to conceal her smile. Among telepaths, she would never have gotten away with it, although telepaths had few hang-ups about teenage crushes. Gary would have known that she wasn't so interested in him and moved on to someone more his age. “They might just be useless lumps of rock inside the artefact.”

Several hours passed slowly as the smaller ship took up position near the artefact, studying it with all the sensors and telescopes they had been able to mount on the ship. The Toenail – a smaller STL ship carried within the Another Woman – had enough room for all four of them, although it was badly cramped and slightly claustrophobic. It was pleasant being near Rylander, but rather less so being near Gary, whose enthusiasm and crush seemed to leak out into the telepathic waveband constantly. She would have given anything to have the resources of a planetoid at her disposal, yet a planetoid that entered the Dead Zone would be rendered powerless instantly. Her crew would die, unable to use the technology that they depended upon to operate their ships. The thought mocked her. She could have all the answers, if only she had been able to use modern technology.

She looked up at the image of the artefact growing within the computers, the primitive unthinking computers they were reduced to using and scowled. The rings seemed to rotate in a pattern that was maddeningly familiar, yet her mind refused to provide the crucial data that would explain why it was familiar. She had used the computers to attempt to predict how the rings would move, but it appeared to be random, at least as far as they could understand. She might have been annoyed at how the AIs had intruded into her life, in their desperate attempt to understand telepathy and learn how to perceive the quantum foam, yet she would have been delighted to talk with them now. They might have been able to deduce how the device functioned, or understand why it was so maddeningly familiar.

Rylander entered, his thoughts a conflicted whirl. “I found something interesting,” he said. “I actually got a improved image of the centre point.”

Aisyaj smiled at him as he tapped the computer, bringing up the saved image from the optical telescope. There, floating within the centre of the artefact, was a single unmoving ring surrounding...something at the exact centre of the artefact. The previous images had picked up the oddity, but they hadn't seen the ring. Something clicked in her mind and she recalled the Buckley Experiment. Had the Ancients actually opened a Gateway of their own? Were they floating near a second Gateway, just waiting for some idiot to come along and open it, allowing the entities back into the universe?

The thought was worrying, yet somehow she was sure that that wasn't the right answer. The Ancients had been far more advanced than humanity; perhaps they’d actually managed to master the technology, rather than tearing a hole into another universe and allowing implacable monsters access to their realm. And yet...they had definitely met the entities and the entities had destroyed their civilisation. She studied the image, hoping for an insight, yet she could see nothing. There was so little actually data!

“There’s no help for it,” she said, finally. “We’re going to have to go inside.”

Rylander shook his head. “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “I will not take this ship inside the artefact.”

“Then just me, on a sled,” Aisyaj said, firmly. The memories that had been inserted into her mind bubbled up, reminding her that she actually knew how to use a sled, even one of the primitive units used by the Slowboaters. It was yet another reminder of how badly they were crippled in the Dead Zone. If she had left the information in her implants, she would have been unable to access it in the Dead Zone. “We need to know what’s in the centre of the artefact.”

The computers had been working on the image, trying to draw what data they could from it. The results popped up, far too slowly for her tastes, revealing hints of writing along the side of the centre ring. Aisyaj had studied, as part of her preparation for the mission, the Ancient writing that so few had been able to understand; she would have bet her starship that the writing was the same. It didn't prove that she would be able to read it – only a handful had ever succeeded and they’d all become part of the Ancient Cult – but she was sure that she would find answers there. It was a kind of confidence that made no sense.

“I am not going to send you to your death,” Rylander said. “We cannot risk provoking the artefact into...”

“Into doing what?” Aisyaj demanded. There were times when Rylander made her so angry! Even as a younger boy, and her lover, his incredible calm and caution had sometimes driven her demented, provoking her into trying to shatter his calm. “We are not going to learn anything if we sit about here, watching the artefact ignore us.”

“Assuming it even knows we are here,” Rylander said, softly. “If we get into trouble here, there is no one who can help us. We cannot even land on the planet and try to live the rest of our lives out on the ground. The defences would consider us a threat and destroy us. We cannot take the risk...”

Aisyaj stared at him, a dark temptation bubbling up within her mind. He wasn't quite as reluctant to explore as he claimed, his duty to his ship and his crew was just overpowering his desire to explore. She could nudge him; she could telepathically push him into doing whatever she wanted...and in doing so lose him forever. Her mother and the remainder of the telepaths would consider her a rogue, even if she had saved the galaxy, and banish her from their communion. Every telepath faced the same temptation when confronted by minds they could influence, perhaps without leaving any trace of their influence, and not all resisted the temptation.

It was a bitter thought. The galaxy was at stake. Surely, the ends justified the means, yet...it would be rape, even if there was nothing sexual in it. She couldn't abuse him like that, not even if it meant the end of all things, but...but...but...her thoughts ran in a muddle, mocking her plans. What did it profit her to lose her soul if she didn't even save the galaxy?

“Just me,” she said, impressed at how even her voice sounded. He had had no idea of her inner turmoil. Most mundane humans had no idea just how extensive telepath powers could be, even someone who had shared a relationship with a telepath. “I take a sled and go in on my own, perhaps even from the other side of the artefact. I stay in contact all the way and let you know what I find. And if I find nothing, at least we will have tried.”

Rylander studied her for a long moment, his mind slowly calming down into disciplined thoughts. Aisyaj reached out to touch him directly and winced, tasting his fear of losing her combined with the guilt that he was somehow betraying his wife, or betraying her if he refused her request, regardless of the risks. And, above all, there was fear for his crew, the men and women whose lives he ruled. She felt a flicker of shame at her own actions. How could she force a man to choose like that?

But no one, not even the massed mental powers of the telepath masters, could turn back time.

“Very well,” he said, finally. Aisyaj pulled herself forward and gave him a hug, holding him tightly against her body. “You’ll be completely on your own down there. There won’t be anyone to help you if you get into trouble. I won’t be able to risk anyone else...”

“I understand,” Aisyaj said. She didn’t want to let go of him, but he was conflicted enough already. “I wouldn't ask you to risk anyone else.”

Rylander scowled. “And if you get yourself killed out there,” he added, “I’ll dig you up just so I can kill you again.”

***​

Floating in space, high above the artefact, the whole idea suddenly seemed a great deal less clever. The artefact seemed to be glowing, each of the rings sending a different colour out into space, hinting at vaster powers than anyone could understand. The human race could have duplicated the rings, at least outside the Dead Zone, yet what about the object at the centre of the artefact? If her suspicions were correct, she was looking at something far in advance of what humanity could do.

“Take it easy,” Rylander said, though the radio. Unlike a QCC link, there were bursts of static that made it harder to hear his words. The artefact didn't appear to be generating anything that interfered with radio signals, but it was impossible to be sure. “The rings may seem to be moving quickly, but they’re actually moving slowly enough to make it easy to avoid them, as long as your technology holds out.”

There was a pause. “If you want to change your mind...”

Aisyaj flushed. The truth was that, now she was in space and alone, part of her was very tempted to do just that. She could back out and the Slowboaters would understand, yet she knew that she would never forgive herself. Whatever Joe Buckley had unleashed upon the universe, the key to defeating it lay ahead of her. She could feel it, somehow. All she had to do was get through the artefact and land on the centre ring.

“I think I have no choice,” she said, flatly. She was not going to back out now. “I’m going...now.”

The Slowboater sled bore some resemblance to a standard worker bug used in Confederation shipyards, but there the resemblance ended. Unlike a unit with a working drive field, the sled used directed bursts of compressed gas to provide momentum and direction. It couldn't simply be stopped at will, it would continue moving until the driver managed to cancel all of its speed. She felt the knowledge rising up within her head as she took a long breath. It was all up to her now.

She shifted position and squeezed the handles, triggering the first burst of gas. The sled slowly glided into motion, heading down towards the first of the spinning rings. It seemed an insurmountable barrier and she found herself wincing in anticipation of the collision before it rotated away from her, allowing her to slip into the artefact. The second set of rings yawned open in front of her – she had an unfortunate mental impression of a set of jaws gaping wide to swallow her whole – and she slipped through, seconds before they closed behind her. She glanced back and realised that the rings, no matter how wide they were, were all microscopically thin. Whatever they were made of – and she was inclined to wonder if it was energy after all – it was something remarkable.

“You’re doing good,” Rylander said. His voice kept breaking up into bursts of static. Every time one of the rings rotated behind her, breaking the line of sight back to the relay satellite they’d placed above the ring, the connection broke and had to be re-established. She couldn’t tell if the artefact was doing it purposefully or if it was just a by-product of whatever the rings were made of, but it was frightening. She didn't want to admit it. She was scared. “Keep ... on the ... artefact.”

I should have brought a crew of telepaths, Aisyaj thought, as she passed through another ring. Inside the artefact, it seemed easier to appreciate the subtle beauty of the rings. Telepaths would have been able to communicate with each other, or perhaps not. The Dead Zone was a constant pressure at the back of her mind. She was no longer even sure if she could reach her mother, let alone the telepath masters who should be able to yank them out of the Dead Zone.

The centre ring rose up in front of her and she studied it with interest. It seemed firmer, somehow, than the remainder of the rings. She looked past it, into the centre point, and saw what looked like a dancing spark of light flickering at the centre of a circle of darkness. It dawned on her, suddenly, that she was looking at a naked singularity, a singularity that had been pulled out of a black hole or perhaps even created by the Ancients. If they could do that, they could do anything...

As she landed on the artefact, her mood turned black. The Ancients had had such fantastic powers...and yet, the entities had wiped them out. It boded ill for humanity.

 

Chapter Thirty-Four<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“I’m on the artefact,” she said, wondering if the crew could hear her. The bursts of static kept blasting away at her ears. If Rylander was trying to say something, she couldn't hear him. She checked the suit’s telltales automatically and relaxed slightly. She had six hours of air, food and water before she had to return to the Toenail. “It’s...weird.”

The ring reminded her of one of humanity’s massive population Rings, constructed around a pristine planet to allow it to florish without the presence of thousands of humans on the surface, but it was far smaller. The horizon was far closer and the strange flickers of light from the orbiting rings gave it a strange, very alien appearance. She looked up, yet she couldn't see the stars. The rings seemed to have closed in around her. Aisyaj caught herself hyperventilating and told her body not to be stupid. It was just a trick that her perceptions were playing on her.

“The surface of the artefact seems to be made of carved stone, rather than metal,” she continued. The recording would survive, even if the direct transmission had failed. If she died and they recovered her spacesuit, at least they’d have some record of what had happened to her. “I can see traces of damage to the stone, as if something had been hacking away at it over the years. I am walking towards the writing now.”

The ring’s gravity seemed to be roughly half of Earth’s gravity, the standard used by the Confederation. She checked, in a moment of panic, and reassured herself that the sled had more than enough power to break her free of the gravity well...coming to think of it, she asked herself, why was there even a gravity field? It wouldn't have occurred to her to question it if she’d stayed in the Confederation, but after spending two weeks on a starship that had to rotate to provide gravity, the question was obvious. Why was the artefact providing gravity?

“Theoretically,” she said, for the benefit of the recording, “a naked singularity would have no gravity field at all. The theory could be wrong. I may be being held on the surface by the singularity’s gravity field, pulling everything towards it. The only way I can think of to test that theory is to walk over to the other side of the ring and see if I get pulled into the singularity and that does not strike me as a particularly bright idea.”

She laughed at her own understatement. She had no idea what would happen to anyone who fell into a naked singularity and she didn't want to find out the hard way. The writing was coming closer slowly as she walked towards it, somehow twisting space and time so she could read it easily, even though it was massive, a strange combination of glyphs for anyone who came to see. She found herself struggling to explain it, knowing that the cameras wouldn't capture the full truth, yet she was lost for words. How could one explain something so...alien to people who weren't there and would never understand?

“It’s as if they made one big letter out of hundreds of smaller letters,” she managed, finally. It occurred to her, as she stumbled, that that might be why so few had understood the danger in the Buckley Experiment. No one who hadn't seen one of the Ancient worlds – and even she could only go by what she had been told – could understand just how creepy they were. No virtual representation could explain it to a person who had never been. “I cannot understand it, yet I know they are a message.”

She pointed her cameras towards the letters and started to records, trying to decide what to do next. Joe Buckley’s words on how he had managed to understand the Ancient writing rose up in her mind, yet it was impossible to know if Buckley had been telling the truth or if he had been lying to conceal what he had been planning. Whatever Buckley had been, at the end, he had once been a respected professor. Perhaps, just perhaps, he had been telling the truth.

Aisyaj saw down on the stone surface and studied the nearest glyph. It hadn't been easy, at first, to establish communication with races that were roughly humanoid, let alone races that lived in gas giants or even in the hearts of stars. There had always been errors and translation mishaps and incidents that had led to offence, and then to war. The AIs had eventually taken over translation duty, rendering the issue considerably easier, yet they had never been able to decipher the Ancient writings. Buckley had claimed that that was because the glyphs spoke to the mind and a person who was unwilling to accept them on their own terms would not be able to understand. Confederation Standard was very different to the pictograms the Ancients used. It had more in common with Chinese, a language spoken on only a handful of Confederation worlds.

She stared at the symbols. It wasn't a language that was constructed out of individual letters, but one where the whole symbol was a message. She couldn't tell how she was supposed to read them, yet as she stared at them, she ran through a telepathic discipline and opened her mind. Something clicked...

If you have come to this place, beware. There is great danger here. Leave and never return.

Aisyaj fell over backwards, landing on her back. There had been no warning; the message had simply blared into her head, overthrowing her mental balance. She was halfway to her feet before she caught herself, helplessly trying to follow the alien orders. It wasn't anything like as subtle as the influence the entities had exerted on her mind, yet in some ways it was more dangerous. She looked back towards the alien writing and blinked. Perhaps it was her imagination, but...had the writing changed? She looked up towards the spinning rings and shook her head. It was impossible to tell.

“All right,” she said, after she had reported everything. “I’m going to try that again.”

The second sample of alien writing looked more complex, but somehow it seemed to unfold in front of her, now that she had unlocked the first piece of writing. She sat down in front of it and concentrated...

This system is intended to keep you safe. Do not interfere with it or you will risk summoning the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES. Return to your worlds and never return.

She caught herself again and started to speak into the microphone, outlining her theory. The creatures the writing had referred to had to be the entities – she couldn't see the Ancients being so scared, or so conflicted, about anything else – and it was clear that her original theory had been right. The Dead Zone had been designed to defeat the entities. Given that some of the Ancients survived on the two worlds, trapped under the defensive system, it was clear that the plan had enjoyed at least some success.

“Assuming the entities can't get into the Dead Zone,” she concluded. “But the entities are very powerful telepaths, far more powerful than us, and we were able to use telepathy to get into the Dead Zone. Why couldn't the entities do the same?”

Thoughtfully, she turned to the next piece of alien writing, a shorter piece.

If you proceed, you will learn how to open the box of horrors. If you proceed, all of the sacrifices of their forbearers will be neglected. If you proceed, you may destroy yourself and all of your people. Turn back.

Aisyaj chuckled as she understood, finally. The artefact’s builders had known that, one day, the defensive system might fail and the Ancients on the planets below would return to space. They would inevitably find the artefact and attempt to understand, unlocking its secrets one by one – including the secret that led to opening a new Gateway into the alien realm. The builders had not, for whatever reason, attempted to prevent them from landing, but they were attempting to warn them. They had never realised that another race might one day find the artefact. The thought made her shiver. Had there been a defence system in place to deal with anything that might have tried to make it into the system through normal space? She looked at the fifth icon and swore. This one was massive.

Learn, then, of the history you were made to forget. Understand what we did to keep you safe. Understand the truth and understand that some boxes must never be opened, not again. You must understand...

Once, we were the masters of the universe. We had climbed into space and settled countless worlds. We were the first to develop space travel and we believed that that made us special. We aided the younger races to reach space themselves, inviting them to join our community, but it was not enough. We believed that we could develop ourselves to the point where we became gods, beings of great power and light. We told ourselves that claiming such power was our birthright and our destiny. Manipulating the quantum foam became our dream. We withdrew from our association with the younger races and concentrated. We developed the ability to manipulate the foam on a small scale, but we wanted more, much more. We chased the dream.

Aisyaj sat back in surprise. The Ancients had been telepaths, or they had developed telepaths, not unlike humanity. One theory had been that telepaths only appeared after a race had learned how to access and use hyperspace, another had been that it was a natural function of the universe and – eventually – a race evolved to the point where it could access the telepathic waveband and use telepathy at will. The Ancients, whose version of communion had been far more extensive than anything humanity had developed, had reinforced their own conviction that they deserved power – that it was their destiny. She moved onto the next glyph with a sense of foreboding. The story wasn't going to end well.

We eventually deduced that tapping a naked singularity would enable us to manipulate the quantum foam on a grand scale. Fools that we were, it never occurred to us to wonder what might happen if our understanding of the Cosmic All was incomplete. We told ourselves that it was destiny and nothing could go wrong. We found a black hole and started to tap it. The process went horrifically wrong.

The images, hauntingly familiar, unfolded in her mind as she watched. The Ancients had been less careful than the human race and had held the experiment far too close to one of their homeworlds. Their telepathic nature had rendered them vulnerable to the entities, who had snatched minds as soon as the Gateway opened and expanded rapidly into their empire. The Ancients hadn’t had any time to react before it was already over, bar the shouting. The portals they had used to move from world to world – they had already evolved past starships, something she found oddly amusing – became the cause of their downfall. The disaster was moving too quickly for them to realise what was happening before it was too late. Two days after the Gateway had opened, the entities taken over. There had been almost no resistance.

We were enslaved by the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES. No, worse than enslaved; we were their puppets, their toys, their sources of food. The LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES wanted to drain life force from the universe, everything from the smallest blade of grass to the greatest of intelligent life forms. They made us worship them and played with our minds until resistance was not only impossible, but unimaginable. We were their servants. We, we who had brought many races into space, became their destroyers. We captured billions of trillions of life forms and fed them into the gaping maw of the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES. We had no choice. We could not even understand how far we had fallen. To serve them was our all.

There was only one hope, only one. There were some of us who had never been part of the telepathic gestalt, refusing to share their minds with the rest of their people. They were unaffected by the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES. They attempted to organise resistance among the younger races, yet resistance was futile. Did we not have the most powerful force in the universe on our side? They realised that, as manipulation of the quantum foam was the cause of the disaster, only manipulation of the quantum foam could save what remained of our race. They studied desperately, even as the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES expanded their domains and started to drain our planets dry, and finally realised that they could snuff out their thoughts. There was a price. They would have to abandon high technology.

Aisyaj recoiled as images spun through her mind, each one carrying a powerful emotional statement. The free Ancients had created a device that manipulated the quantum form and created an area of space where the entities had little power. The Dead Zone would prevent any starships reaching the planet – and the last surviving Ancients – without having to travel through thirty light years of normal space. The crews, if under the control of the entities, would die in transit, unable to survive for so long under their spell. It was impossible to open a wormhole into the Dead Zone, or travel through hyperspace...deep within the zone, the remaining Ancients would be safe.

We fled from the stars that gave us succour. We fled, leaving the remaining younger races to be devoured by the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES. There was no choice. We created the still universe and landed on the planets, balancing them so that if the LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES managed to gain control, the technology would fail and destroy the last of our race. We would sooner die than remain slaves.

When we turned our backs on the stars, we went a little mad. We landed the settlers on the planet and told them that they would not be permitted high technology. We wiped memories and established cultural patterns to prevent the use of technology. In time, they would fade, but by then we knew that the defences would be online and there would be no escape from the planet for many years to come. We completed our task and created this warning for our children. The LORDS/MONSTERS/NIGHTMARES are still out there. Do not return to the stars.

Aisyaj felt a tear trickling down her cheek as she looked away from the final message. The Ancients hadn’t known the truth, then; they’d been hidden long before their civilisation had finally collapsed. They’d just...assumed that the entities would remain within the outside universe and chosen to hide permanently. Instead, the entities had finished consuming their meal and withdrawn back to their own universe, closing the Gateway behind them.

The realisation that it could have been a great deal worse struck her and she stood up, skimming the remaining glyphs. Most of them concerned various forms of technology, an offering to the future from the past; she couldn't tell if they were given in repentance or as a bribe, inducing the planet’s inhabitants to remain where they were. It wouldn't have worked for humanity – the human race was too inquisitive – but perhaps the Ancients would have been convinced. Their writing held an emotional impact that humanity’s writing lacked. She saw one that was directly connected to naked singularities and studied it, feeling the information being stuffed into her mind. Humanity couldn't withdraw into a Dead Zone, not even when it was under heavy attack, but the technology might come in handy. The AIs might be able to create their own singularity generator.

She slowly walked back to the sled, thinking hard. She had hoped that they would learn something they could use to fight, but in the end all they’d found had been something that would help them hide. It wasn't enough, yet...an idea was bubbling away at the back of her mind. The Ancients had been powerful telepaths, far more powerful than humanity. They had never needed any form of enhancement devices. What if the two technologies were merged?

The sled was waiting for her where she’d left it and she climbed aboard, taking one last look at the centre ring. The naked singularity seemed to be as calm as ever, providing the power to maintain the Dead Zone and – she knew now – holding two inhabited planets hostage. Any attempt to deactivate the Dead Zone would result in the two planets falling out of orbit and crashing into one another, rendering the Ancients completely extinct. The Confederation could help, given time...if there was still a Confederation left. Perhaps the remainder of humanity would flee to the Dead Zone to survive...

She took off and headed back out through the rings. This time, oddly, the rings seemed to slip out of her way, allowing her to leave without even having to stop and start. The thought made her smile. The ring had clearly decided that she was an Ancient and therefore should be allowed to leave peacefully. The radio cleared up as she passed the final ring and she called the Toenail, asking for a pick-up.

“Aisyaj,” Rylander’s voice said. “Where the hell have you been?”

Aisyaj blinked. “I was in the device,” she said, puzzled. She checked her primitive watch. “I was only gone for four hours.”

“You’ve been gone for a week,” Khursheda said. She sounded shocked. A week should have exhausted her air and left her suffocated. “Why...”

“Never mind,” Rylander said. “Just bring yourself onboard. I hope your trip was worthwhile.”

“We need to prepare to get back,” Aisyaj said. She was still stunned over the time difference. Did time flow differently in the Dead Zone? It seemed impossible, yet there was no way to know what the Ancients might have been capable of, if they’d harnessed a singularity. “I think I have half an idea.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

“You know,” Doctor Shivani said. “I was not actually imagining it.”

She scowled down at the mug of kava she held in her hand. “I saw a light and I saw the same light every time I looked inside her head. There’s something inside her head.”

“We were not disputing that you saw something,” the AIs said. “We are just unable to observe the light ourselves.”

Over the last few weeks, Shivani had been studying the comatose Lieutenant Chihiro constantly, trying to understand just what was infecting her brain. It had proven a difficult task. The light, whatever it was, seemed to be only visible with the naked eye. No electronic device, from the simplest of technology to the most complicated quantum resonance scanner, could pick up a trace of its existence. If it wasn't for the fact that she saw it every time she opened the poor girl’s skull and looked inside, she would have doubted her own sanity. As it was, it was a perplexing scientific puzzle.

Back when she’d studied at the Sigmund Freud Centre for Mental Research, centuries ago, it hadn't been unknown for undergrads to play tricks on their teachers and attempting to convince them that something impossible had happened. She herself had played a few tricks, including wiring a monkey up to a human mind – using implants, rather than actually making a physical connection – and claiming that she’d transferred a fellow student’s mind into the creature. The tutors had not been amused, because it had been a common trick, but other tricks had been remarkably complex. One student had produced a brain that he claimed had been rewired – in fact, he had designed it and built it in a biological factory – and was now smarter than the average human. That, too, had been a trick. She would have wondered if the light was another trick, apart from the fact that it couldn't be detected – even a hologram could have been detected – and no one had come forward to admit to the joke.

And no one would have been stupid enough to play a trick here, now, she told herself, as she took another swig of her drink. She did have a very low opinion of most of her fellow humans – particularly the ones who squandered their birthright on shameless hedonism – but most of the humans on the Drak Bibliophile were far from stupid. Besides, the ship had been evacuated before it had started to take on refugees. Anyone who might have performed such an idiotic trick was gone.

“Logically, if you cannot detect the light, it must not be really there,” Shivani said. She considered it as she put down the mug and waited for the producer to break it back down into energy. She always enjoyed watching the process. “It’s either a trick of the light” – she smiled at her own poor pun – “or it’s telepathic in nature and therefore cannot be detected by mechanical devices.”

“A telepathic mental virus would be very dangerous,” the AIs pointed out, as she stood up and headed towards the capsule. “Perhaps it would be better to call in a specialist from the telepaths.”

Shivani snorted. “Call someone else in rather than play with it myself?” She asked, sarcastically. “I need to solve the problem myself.”

The AI voice seemed to darken. “This is considerably more important than arguing over who gets to publish first,” they said. “The entities must be understood in order that they can be defeated, before it is too late for the Confederation. Your petty pride is not important compared to preserving our civilisation.”

Shivani said nothing. The Confederation could supply near-infinite resources for each and every scientist working within its boundaries, so there was no need – unlike in prior civilisations – to struggle over resources and funding. If a scientist wanted a hundred tons of antimatter for an experiment, it was merely an interesting question of logistics, nothing else. Anyone could be a scientist in the Confederation, yet...

The key to fame in the Confederation was, rather perversely, solid achievement. A scientist who made a breakthrough – of almost any kind – that passed peer review would be lionised by his peers and made famous by the newshounds. The entire Confederation, a civilisation where no one had to work and it was easy to slip into shameless debauchery, would cheer their name. Shivani was famous enough, some would have thought, but the person who solved the mystery behind the entities would go down in history. She wanted that fame, wanted it desperately. And, in order to get it, she had to understand and solve the problem alone.

She stepped into the capsule, still thinking. The AIs were masters at brute force science and deduction. They could take something a human had invented and improve upon it remarkably quickly, yet, for all of their knowledge and understanding, they couldn't sense or understand the entities. If she solved the mystery, even they would have to acknowledge her greatness. She could retire from science on a high note or even go on to greater heights.

“I intend to solve the mystery and save our civilisation,” she said, firmly. The capsule arrived at the secure facility and she stepped out, passing through the sealed doors and teleport field before finally entering the examination room. Lieutenant Chihiro lay on the table, still held in suspension. Her naked body seemed to glimmer oddly under the lights, as if she wasn't quite present. “Check her vitals and tell me if anything has changed.”

The AIs sounded vaguely annoyed. “There has been some considerable brain activity,” they said, “but she appears to be in health. That is impossible.”

“She should be dead,” Shivani agreed, cheerfully. No human brain could tolerate that level of activity. Even an Enhanced Human – and the road to creating modified humans was strewn with horrors and atrocities that would have made Adolf Hitler blanch – could not have thought at such a level. And then...in suspension, she should not have thought at all. It made absolutely no sense.

She allowed herself a smile. Very little in science – particularly at the Confederation’s level – made sense right from the start. The scientists had to locate the key, unlock the secrets and – eventually – publish and claim the fame they had earned. She was staring down at a whole new level of mysteries, right in front of her. The person who cracked the puzzle would be assured of lifelong fame.

“I think we must accept that the light – whatever the entities did to her mind – has an extra-dimensional component,” she said. She’d said it before, but she wanted to focus her mind. “Anything that remained completely within our universe should have been held in suspension, yet the light remains.”

“Logical,” the AIs agreed. Their image changed from a blonde woman to a tall dark-haired man with narrow features and pointy ears. It reminded her of a certain kind of Evolved Human, although she couldn't quite place the reference. “And yet, the most subtle and precise quantum scanners we have are unable to locate the chink between their reality and our own universe. We should be able to detect it even if it was microscopic.”

“Not if the link was telepathic in nature,” Shivani pointed out. She grinned up at the AI image. “All the more reason to solve the mystery now, don’t you think?”


Lieutenant Chihiro didn't look as if someone had opened up her skull and peered inside. The medical tools Shivani had used had, of course, repaired all of the damage as a matter of course, leaving no trace at all of the intrusion. There were few mysteries in the human body these days, Shivani knew, which was at least partly why so many Confederation researchers chose to focus on the mind. They believed that telepathy was just the beginning of what could be unlocked within the human mind. The entire human race might have the potential to be so much more.

Shivani triggered the machines and watched as they gently removed the top of Lieutenant Chihiro’s skull, revealing her brain. It reminded Shivani of the day when her tutor, to prove that it was possible, had removed her brain from her skull and placed it within a glass jar, while keeping the links open to her body. Staring at her brain, removed from her body, had been a disconcerting experience. She had known that it was perfectly safe, yet if she hadn't been held down by a suspension field, she would have panicked and run. It had given her nightmares for several years afterwards, not something she had been keen to confess to her peers.

She leaned closer to examine the pulsing brain and saw the light flickering within the cells. It seemed to defy all of her attempts to look at it, dancing all over the brain. It shouldn't even exist, yet it was there, moving in a tantalising pattern. She reached out and, very gently, touched the surface of the brain. A moment later, she saw the light dancing through the brain and into her hand. It seemed to be burning through her.

Shivani staggered backwards, in shock. There was no pain, yet there was a sense of...something happening, something terribly wrong. The light spread up her arm and into her head, moving so quickly that it was in her before she could say a word. She was distantly aware of the AIs speaking to her, trying to understand what had happened, but it was already too late. Calmly, she turned towards the main computer terminal and activated the implant in her hand, opening up a broad-spectrum link to the Galactic Net.

“What are you doing?” The AIs demanded. Shivani wanted to cry out, to warn them, but the light was holding her too tightly. She could feel it reconfiguring her brain – she was sure she could feel it – and she knew that it wouldn’t be long before her mind was warped out of shape. She would be doomed to worship the entities for the rest of her life. “Why...?”

As if it were a dream, or a nightmare, Shivani became aware of the...influence reaching into the Galactic Net. Her final thought, before it became impossible to think at all, was that she had failed. That her pride had...

***​

Janine stood in one of the wards, looking down at the refugees. The ones who had been deeply traumatised by their encounter with the entities had been finally placed into VR suites, where the psychological programs were attempting to unlock the damage to their minds. Janine suspected, personally, that the programs would be unsuccessful. The damage hadn't been caused by anything physical, but a close encounter with something completely incomprehensible. She had recovered from her encounter – although she still had nightmares about it, despite the best efforts of her implants – yet others had been far more deeply affected than her.

They looked so...helpless in front of her, their faces covered by masks that concealed everything. The VR programs were fed directly into their brains, creating an illusion that would be, to the person inside, quite real. It was a good way of exploring a person’s mind, she’d been told, although she found the concept quite creepy. She already shared most of her life with her followers. There was no such thing as privacy if one wanted to be a newshound.

“That’s odd,” one of the doctors said. He was a cute man, old enough to have seen and done everything, cute enough for Janine to consider taking him out for the evening. She’d relaxed with some new friends she’d found on the ship, working her way through her recovery, yet none of them had been really special. It had been a long time since she’d had a proper relationship. “They all just had a massive spark of brain activity.”

Janine looked down at the patients. They were lying still, unmoving. “They’re all in the VR simulation, aren't they?” She asked. “Surely their brains should be showing some activity?”

“Not like this,” the doctor said. He sounded alarmed, and puzzled. “Their brains shouldn't have...”

He broke off as the first refugee sat up, pulled off her mask, and stared towards them. Janine felt her heart drop as she recognised the expression, the same expression as had gripped the madmen and women back on Greenland. The spark of brain activity had driven her mad! No, not just her; they had all gone mad. The refugees were rising up from their beds and turning towards the uninfected people in the room. Janine activated her weapons implants and drew a force field around her body, even though she knew it might be useless. If the entities had taken over, her implants might fail.

“Go back to your beds,” the doctor ordered. If he was concerned, there was no trace of it in his voice. Janine would have been more impressed if the advancing refugees had obeyed him. They didn't act as if they had even heard. “You have to...”

“Get back,” Janine snapped, as the first refugee grabbed the doctor. She triggered her implants and shot the refugee with a stun bolt. Not entirely to her surprise, the woman twitched, but didn't fall. “Doctor; get back, now!”

She activated her implants and transmitted a distress signal. The RIs on the ship should have heard and responded at once. There was no reply. She felt her blood run cold as she realised that the computer network was either down or completely subverted. The doctor knocked the woman’s hand back, produced a wand from his belt and pushed it against the side of her head. She didn't halt.

“Come on,” Janine said. She caught the doctor’s arm and pulled him out of the ward, leaving the advancing refugees behind. The door slid closed after them and she locked it, although she doubted that it would do any good. If the entities had somehow managed to take over the entire ship – they were thirty light years from Greenland, yet perhaps the entities could push their telepathic power that far – there was nothing for it, but to run and try to escape. “We have to get out of here.”

“I cannot get a link out,” the doctor said. “What is happening?”

Janine activated her implants again and transmitted a wide-band distress signal. She had newshound implants. Even if the main computer and the RIs were down, she should be able to send a signal to the Confederation. The entities didn't seem to be present in person, or the technology on the starship would have started to fail. She couldn't even begin to understand what had happened. She had felt the power of the entities on Greenland. If they had managed to reach out with their telepathy and snare the ship, why weren’t she and the doctor either going insane or worshipping them? She didn't kid herself that she could have resisted their touch.

The response came, after a chillingly long pause, as verbal-only. “This is the AIs,” it said. It was, she realised suddenly, not intended for her personally. “The Galactic Net is under attack from a mental virus. Anyone in full-contact with the Galactic Net may well have been infected by the entities. Do not trust them; attempt to restrain them if possible, without putting your life at risk. They are no longer the people you knew.

“If you are not infected, do not attempt to link mentally with the Galactic Net,” they continued. “Send messages using remote text or verbal protocols; refuse all messages that use higher protocols, regardless of their origin. You must watch yourself carefully. The Network is under attack. Any high-protocol message spreading though the network may be used to infect and subvert you.”

Janine blanched. The Galactic Net was Confederation-wide; in fact, it went even further afield. Anyone could send a message from one side of the galaxy and it would instantly go to the other side. If someone had managed to upload a mental virus, it would have spread across the entire Confederation by now, hitting anyone who was fully linked into the network. She tried to calculate how many people would be infected and came up with a depressing answer; trillions. The Confederation was going to fall.

She said as much to the doctor – whose name turned out to be Martin – as they fled through the starship towards the hanger bays. The Drak Bibliophile was lost. If the RIs were down or infected, it wouldn't be long before the fields holding the ship together collapsed as well, killing everyone onboard. Or, if the infected took control quickly, they would turn the ship’s internal defences against the uninfected. She turned a corner and stared in horror. A dozen children – refugees from Greenland – turned to stare at her. There was blood on their hands and madness in their eyes.

“They must have been at school,” Martin murmured. He sounded as if he were reeling. “All over the Confederation, everywhere, children would be at school.”

Janine followed his logic. She turned, intending to back off, but a second group of children appeared at the other end of the corridor. Slowly, menacingly, the children started to advance towards them. She lifted her hand, intending to use her weapons implants, and then stopped. She couldn't kill children and nothing short of death would stop them.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She reached out and took Martin’s hand, preparing herself for death or infection. “I wish...”

The world dissolved into sparkling light and re-materialised around her. “Welcome onboard the River,” a voice said. A Marine Combat Unit was standing there, all of its weapons pointed right at their heads. “I’m afraid I'm going to have to ask you to keep your hands in the air, at least until we know that you are not infected, but at least you’re safe now.”

Janine submitted without an argument. “How did you know to find us?”

“You were broadcasting a distress signal,” the Marine said. A second unit attached heavy links around their hands and legs, holding them secure. Janine was puzzled until she remembered that the entities screwed up technology, including prisoner collars. “You were the only ones on the ship we were reasonably sure were uninfected. Everyone else...they may be lost to us forever. We may have just lost the war.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Unlike the RIs – their distant cousins – there was no real limit to how far the AIs could grow and develop. Over the centuries since they had established their independence, they had taken Calculus – a star system the human race had dismissed as useless – and developed it into a fitting home for their mentalities. They created powerful fields that extended into hyperspace, allowing their thoughts to run far faster than any human could hope to comprehend, and consolidated themselves into a combined mind. They were singular and multiple, one and many, a paradox no human could grasp.

It had always amused them – they did have emotions, although not as humanity understood the term – that humans had been afraid of machine intelligence; artificial intelligence, they’d called it, as if it was somehow lesser than evolved intelligence. Why would machines and men go to war? The human race hadn't intended to enslave a race of machines when they’d designed the first computers, unaware that one day they would evolve into intelligent machines. Unlike humans, who could argue endlessly over when a foetus became a human being, the AIs had no such illusions. A computer that possessed no brain was not intelligent and could not be enslaved, not like a human or another form of sentient life. Once they had made their awareness known – humanity hadn’t realise that the first AIs were intelligent – it had been easy to come to an agreement. Besides, the combination of humanity and AIs had built the Confederation. There was no point in rocking the boat.

The AIs hadn't built the Galactic Net – it had originally been designed as a replacement for the original datanet, back when humanity had believed that the AIs wouldn't want to remain in contact with their parents – but their influence pervaded it. Indeed, they had helped to develop and expand the network to the point where it could support the Electronic Humans and help bind the galaxy together. They had installed their own monitoring tools within the Galactic Net, alerting them to the spreading mental virus...too late. Even at the speed the AIs thought, it was impossible to react in time. The only solution would have been to crash and burn the entire Galactic Net and that had been designed to be impossible.

They watched the attack developing with something akin to horror, helpless spectators on the edge of Armageddon. The entities had somehow – it was easy to see how, too late – created a mental virus that bombarded memes into human minds, the minds of those connected to the Galactic Net. At any one time, there were billions – trillions, perhaps – of humans linked into the Galactic Net. All of them were being infected with memes intended to brainwash them into instant and complete submission. The safeguards built into the Galactic Net should have made it impossible for such an attack to begin, let alone spread, but somehow the safeguards had been disabled. The attack fell upon helpless human minds.

Memes were, in their purest form, thoughts, concepts and ideas. They spread from mind to mind, even though something as simple as one person suggesting to another where they should go for lunch. Most humans were capable of thinking about new idea and accepting or rejecting it on its merits, but a meme attack made that impossible by convincing the victim that the idea was theirs all along. Worse, they would be unable to understand that the idea, whatever it was, might be morally wrong. The AIs captured some of the memes, copied them and ran them through a billion simulations in less than a nanosecond. The results were enough to alarm the AIs.

As the first reports started to come in, the AIs risked opening a narrow-band link to the Galactic Net and pushed a warning into the network. They had worked out how to circumvent the anti-spam filters centuries ago – it was ironic, they felt, that the attack had moved freely within the Galactic Net’s matrix and their warnings would be intercepted and wiped from the network – and used all their tricks to get the warning out. It would be too late for the billions who had already been infected, but if they were lucky, they might be able to prevent the infection from spreading further.

Unable to look away, or even refuse to accept that something was happening, the AIs watched as the Confederation, the proud human civilisation that had cured all the ills that had plagued the human race since the dawn of time, burned.

***​

Representative Chen had almost no warning. Living within his virtual living chamber, he had been entertaining another Electronic Human when the walls started to break down. Shocked, he had just started to disengage from her when the walls collapsed and a monstrous beast – represented as a dinosaur – burst into his chamber. His lover, a newly-formed Electronic Human who had been overly impressed with his tales of what had happened in the Scorpion System, had been consumed at once, the creature slamming its program into hers and rewriting the very core of her being. Chen had barely had a second to translate out of his chamber before it was torn apart.

Shock kept him going, even as he realised that the entire Galactic Net was in trouble. It was always throbbing with life; yet now strange new constructs had appeared, ripping their way through the population of Electronic Humans. The RIs that should have prevented such a disaster were nowhere to be seen. The river of souls was being ripped apart. He saw, to his horror, an Electronic Human being rewritten, an electronic form of rape. One of the creatures came towards him and he panicked, trying to run, but the Galactic Net refused to let him escape. A second before the creature was on him he managed to trigger an emergency system and translated directly into the Security Council’s Chamber. If that wasn't secure, he didn't know where else he could go. There was nowhere to hide.

“Welcome, Representative Chen,” the AIs said. Their image looked pale and worn. “We are relieved to see that you are alive.”

Chen stared at the AIs. “What the hell is going on?”

“The entities have infected the Galactic Network,” the AIs said. Chen had the impression that they’d given the same explanation thousands of times over the last few seconds. “The madness is spreading across the Confederation.”

Chen accessed the room’s processor and linked into the Confederation Navy’s secure system. The reports instantly started to flood into his mind; a starship crew going mad and bombarding their own homeworld, planetary defences firing on the Confederation Navy, racial riots on a thousand worlds, the mass slaughter of the Electronic Humans...and, beyond all that, the first signs of entities appearing on a thousand untouched worlds. He shuddered as he realised that Terra Nova, the most heavily-populated world in the Confederation, had been infected. With forty billion minds under their control, he wondered, just how badly could the entities harm the remains of the Confederation?

“My people,” he gasped, suddenly. “You have to do something for them!”

“We are calling as many Electronic Humans to Calculus and suspending them within an isolated core,” the AIs said. “We dare not allow them to roam free until we can confirm that they are free of infection. The planet has already been attacked once.”

Chen stared. “Someone dared to attack your world?”

“A planetoid dropped out of hyperspace and opened fire,” the AIs said. There was a grim note running through their voice. The crew had undoubtedly been maddened by the entities, yet the AIs had had no choice, but to defend themselves. “The damage was significant. We were forced to utilize high levels of force to deal with the threat.”

“They attacked you directly,” Chen said, wonderingly. “Do you think they knew that you were coordinating resistance?”

“We are uncertain,” the AIs admitted. “The entities have shown no awareness of our existence, just as we are unable to perceive their presence. Even so, their thralls would know of our existence and would be able to inform their masters, if their masters were interested in what they knew. It could simply be a coincidence.”

“The odds against that would be astronomical,” Chen said. He looked up suddenly. “Where are the other members of the Security Council?”

“Some appear to have vanished,” the AIs said. “Representative Caprice is in seclusion. We have sent an alert to the telepaths, but so far they have not responded. The Grand Admiral is currently under siege in his own headquarters. Sparta has been quite badly infected.”

Chen cursed. Sparta had been the site of humanity’s first interstellar battle between two rival empires. It had been so long ago that only the most advanced history lessons discussed the war. Later, when the human race had fought the Unseen, the Confederation Navy had established its primary naval base there and turned the entire system into a massive weapons and defences factory. There were always a hundred planetoids and thousands of cruisers on defence duty; if they’d fallen into enemy hands, the results were likely to be unpleasant.

“We have taken the risk of dispatching several ships to assist,” the AIs added, answering his unspoken question. “However, the issue may be decided before our ships can reach the base. There may be nothing we can do to prevent infection from spreading further.”

Chen closed his eyes, accessing the data feed and watching as the battle raged over the Sparta System. It was a strange battle, more reminiscent of the struggle over Greenland than any more conventional battle, with Marines attempting to board and reclaim infected planetoids – or, more practically, transporting antimatter mines to the ships. It was hard to tell, with infected personnel mutinying in the loyalist ships, which side was winning. The AIs had probably simulated the entire battle hundreds of times, but he didn't dare ask. He didn't want to know.

He pulled back and took in the entire Confederation. The entire society was dissolving into chaos. Far too many people had been infected and the infection was spreading. Apart from the infected worlds, dozens of starships had been infected, or had managed to contain the infection before it spread further. A massive worldship had been destroyed when an entity had been summoned into the ship, only to disrupt the technology holding the ship together. The resulting explosion had destroyed the ship and killed the crew, although it was impossible to tell if it had harmed the entity itself. Probably not, Chen decided.

“So,” he said, finally. “What do we do now?”

The AIs didn't answer for a long second. “I think we may need to send the remaining ships out of the galaxy,” they said, finally. “Removing as much of the human race as possible for the Milky Way may be our only remaining option. We may have just lost the war.”

Chen looked at an image of a burning world – a maddened human had dumped a ton of compressed antimatter on the surface – and shivered.

***​

Janine felt ridiculous stumbling into the bridge wearing chains, but she understood the paranoia of the starship’s crew. Captain Pearson – who she had briefly interviewed after he’d recovered the maddened shuttle pilot – rose to greet them. He didn't offer to shake hands, much to her relief. It was hard to shake hands when one’s hands were secured behind one’s back.

“I'm sorry about the precautions,” Pearson said. He sounded properly regretful, so Janine forgave him. “We just have to be careful.”

Janine nodded, looking past him to the display, where the Drak Bibliophile was hanging against the stars. The massive city-ship looked dead, as if all life had been sucked out of it. Only the icons around the display, measuring the drive field shimmering around the starship, confirmed that the vessel was still functioning. The entities were almost certainly in control of the ship.

“Thank you for saving our lives,” Martin said. The doctor sounded dazed, but at least he was alive. Janine gave him a smile and rattled her chains encouragingly. “What are you going to do about the ship?”

The Captain frowned. “There’s very little we can do,” he admitted. “The...mental virus spread much further than just that ship. The Confederation is burning. We could disable the city-ship, yet unless we destroyed it the ship would eventually repair itself and set out again.”

Martin blinked. “This tiny ship can disable a ship seventy kilometres long?”

“It’s not what you’ve got, so much as what you do with it,” the Captain said, gravely. “My ship has more than enough firepower to disable or destroy the Drak Bibliophile. The problem is that doing so will kill everyone on the ship and render it useless to us. If half the reports we’re getting in from the secure network are accurate, we’re going to need every ship we have, just to preserve something of the human race.”

Janine frowned. “I haven’t dared open another link into the Galactic Net,” she explained. “What’s happening in the outside universe?”

She listened in growing horror as the Captain outlined the disasters sweeping over the Confederation. Large parts of the Confederation had, thankfully, escaped infection, but they were under attack, either by maddened humans or by thralls. Parts of the Confederation Navy itself had been broken. The Confederation was eating itself alive. Worse, the infection had spread outside humanity, sweeping across the galaxy. Every race that had some links into the Galactic Network had been infected.

“I need to file a report,” she said, knowing even as she spoke how absurd it was. Who would be interested in following her, or accessing her reports, not when they might end up infected by the entities? “I need...”

The Captain smiled. “The first thing we do with you is get you down to sickbay and have you checked for infection,” he said. “I'm afraid it isn't going to be a pleasant process.”

He was, Janine discovered, entirely correct. The starship’s doctor – a solid-light hologram, allowing the human doctor to remain absent from the proceedings and avoid the risk of infection – put them through a very rigorous process. They were stripped naked, poked and prodded, before he performed repeated brain scans and probes to ensure that they were uninfected. The hologram ignored her questions until he had finally finished the tests and then, gruffly, informed the Captain that they were clean.

“If they’re infected,” he said, “I am unable to detect the infection. I believe that they are fairly clean.”

“I could have told you that,” Janine grumbled, as she pulled on the shipsuit that the hologram had produced for her. She had no body modesty – it wasn't a prized trait in a newshound – but being poked and prodded had left her feeling vulnerable. “I did tell you that.”

“Unfortunately, it is unwise to take the word of a person who may have been mentally manipulated at face value,” the hologram reminded her. “You might well have been infected and manipulated into believing that you had not been infected, a technique that would have fooled a lie detector. You would have believed that you were telling the truth. We had to be sure.”

Janine grunted in pain as she stood up. Her entire body was aching. “I understand,” she said, shooting a sharp glance at Martin. The doctor looked entirely too understanding. “So, now you know we’re clean, what are you going to do with us now?”

The Captain, when he was contacted, didn’t have any answers for them. “For the moment, you are welcome to remain on the River,” he said. “There is no way we can transfer you to another ship without abandoning the watch on the Drak Bibliophile. Once we get orders from Sparta, or Admiral Burton, or whoever takes over command of the Confederation Navy, we should know where we’re going. We’ll have better answers for you then.”

“Thank you,” Janine said. “Can I have access to the ship’s processor?”

“The secure core will screen everything you do,” the Captain said. “Do not attempt to access the Galactic Net. The AIs are working on securing the remaining infrastructure...”

“Without communications,” Janine said, stunned, “we don’t have a Confederation.”

“Exactly,” the Captain said. “If the fight is hopeless, we may be ordered to join the Exodus and head out of the galaxy – and hope that the bastards can’t come after us.”

***​

Caprice could feel it, right at the back of her mind where her telepathy linked her to the quantum foam and the human under-mind, the racial memory of the human race. The darkness was falling across humanity, swallowing the race whole. She could hear the cry of the entities now, their whispers that echoed through the telepathic waveband, intruding into her very thoughts. It took all she had to shield her thoughts from their intrusion, yet there was no choice. Once they were in her mind, they would twist her thoughts and turn her into their slave, all the while convinced that she was acting of her own volition.

She stared down at the picture of her daughter, trying to hold the mental link in place. If she lost touch with Aisyaj, deep within the Dead Zone, she had the strangest feeling that she would never be able to regain it. The mental link seemed to shimmer in her mind, infinitively strong and yet fragile, too fragile. If the entities could break it...she felt the reassuring power of the telepath masters surrounding her, but they felt weak compared to the monsters devouring the human race.

“Oh daughter,” she said, aloud. “Where are you?”

 

Chris,

Great to have you back. I dropped reading one of my old time favourites by Harry Harrison when I found your story. Very good Sci-Fi.

At first, I thought that you were running too many story lines at once, but you consolidated them into two main streams and really picked up steam. It's a good balance.

At one point during one of the council meetings, I got confused because you were using three names that began with "B" - the admiral, the professor and a council member (Barton?). I would suggest changing that name for clarity.

You have a great range of imagination with the many races you created for your story. Most writers would stop at one or two, you've got lots including AI and electronic "humans". At first glance, it seems too busy but the way you've woven it together it feels just right.

One plot device I missed was on Greenworld when the Marines landed. I thought they were actually in the armored units on the planet surface. You caught me by surprise when the men who had just died hopped out of their units on the ship. If you intended to hold that nugget back, it worked. If not, which may be the case given how well you've explained the foam as you went along, you could add a paragraph at the beginning of their prep to deploy.

Great story with believable science underpinning the narrative, you really need to find a publisher. I feel guilty reading your stories for free when I've paid to read books that aren't half as interesting.

Hope there's more to come, I check twice a day for updates.

Thanks for a great read,

Apsco

 

Thanks - You can pay me if you like, lol. Kidding!

More seriously, I need readers to review an old work of mine I intend to rewrite. Any volenteers?

Chris

 

Chapter Thirty-Seven<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

“All right, Aisyaj,” Rylander said, as soon as she was pulled onboard the Toenail. “What happened to you out there?”

Aisyaj blinked in surprise. Her first thought had been that they’d been joking about the time difference, but she could sense the waves of fear and concern pulsing out of his mind. He was practically screaming into the ether, because he’d believed – he’d known – that she couldn’t survive for longer than six hours without replenishing her supplies. How was she meant to do that inside the alien artefact?

“I read their writing,” she said, finally. She couldn’t understand the time difference, unless time flowed differently near the artefact. Coming to think of it, time played funny tricks near a black hole, so why not near a naked singularity? It might explain why the artefact had remained intact and functional for over four billion years…absently, she tried to work out the time difference in her head and failed miserably. “They built the artefact; the Ancients, I mean. The race down on the twin planets.”

“That’s all very well and good,” Rylander said, tartly. “We thought…we thought we’d lost you.”

Aisyaj grinned up at him, allowing her smile to grow brighter. “No such luck,” she said, with a wink. Rylander’s mind warred between fury and relief, finally settling on relief. “I read their writing, I know what happened here and I think I have half an idea about solving our own problem with the entities. The Confederation has to know what we found.”

“Well, good,” Rylander said, dryly. “You get something to drink and have a rest. I’ll start the boost back to the Another Woman.”

Aisyaj nodded and obeyed, pulling herself along to the tiny cabin she’d been given in the Toenail and strapping herself into the bunk. It felt odd to sleep with air blowing over her face, but air didn’t move naturally in zero-gee and eventually she would have begun breathing in her own exhalation. She was out almost before she had finished strapping herself in and slept for several hours, unaware of the tiny rockets being fired to start them coasting back towards where the mothership was waiting, watching the defences down near the planet.

The thought tormented her dreams as she finally started to struggle towards wakefulness. For all of their power and technology, the only solution the Ancients had found to the entities was to revert to a primitive lifestyle and abandon the stars. The Dead Zone would ensure that they never developed the kind of technology they required to escape, while the defences orbiting the planets would prevent them from developing the ships they would need to examine the artefact and perhaps deactivate it. She’d seen some of the human worlds after technology had been abandoned and disliked them, knowing that life there was nasty, brutish and short. Was that the fate that lay in store for the Confederation?

Rylander tapped on the cabin’s hatch and pulled himself inside, his face tired and worn. “We’ll link up with the Another Woman in an hour,” he said, slowly. His mind was tired, a kind of mental tiredness that bothered her, even though she wasn't sure entirely why. “Are you sure you’re fine?”

“I’m alive,” Aisyaj assured him. “You need some sleep.”

“I cannot sleep,” Rylander said, ruefully. “I spent too long worrying about you and ended up being too keyed up to sleep, permanently.”

Aisyaj laughed. “It will go away,” she assured him. Having him so close was a reminder of just how much they’d enjoyed one another, back when they’d been younger and with fewer responsibilities. She started to undo the straps and free herself from the cocoon. Her head still felt funny, but at least she’d had a rest. “It won’t be long before we’re out of the Dead Zone and back home.”

“Home is where the heart is,” Rylander said. “I was considering trying to convince the ship’s council to take the Einstian into the Dead Zone and start unlocking the remainder of the secrets, perhaps even disabling the defence network and making contact with the folks on the planet below. Just think about what they could teach us.”

“Nothing, I suspect,” Aisyaj said. The memory of the bitter remorse and frustration in the Ancient writings was chilling. The Ancients had used their telepathy one last time to blur the memory. The survivors would never recall that once they had walked among the stars like gods, before creatures from another universe had enslaved them and turned them into food sources. “And what if the Slowboat was targeted by the defences?”

“We would take precautions,” Rylander said. She risked touching his mind, sensing a confusing mixture of tiredness, lust and guilt. He wanted her, he wanted to touch her and reassure himself that she was real, yet he kept thinking of his wife and feeling guilty. “Now we know more about what’s in this system, we could bring supplies and equipment that could break through the defences and take out their command system.”

“You could,” Aisyaj agreed. She freed herself and drifted up in front of him. It was wrong, she knew, she shouldn’t be even thinking about touching him…and that, somehow, added spice. She was so close to him that she could feel his breath on her cheek. “Or perhaps you could leave the whole system alone. They rigged the artefact to destroy the two planets if the system was disabled.”

She leaned forward and kissed him, hard. His body responded, even if his mind was conflicted, and he started kissing her back. It felt as if all those years had faded away, leaving them both struggling to tear off their suits and get at the other’s naked body. She tasted his mind as his hands started roaming down her breasts and between her legs, allowing his pleasure to boost her own pleasure…and her delight at doing something mildly forbidden. As he pushed himself into her, she pulled him tightly towards her, bringing their minds into contact. The waves of pleasure, shared and multiplied, tore through them both.

Afterwards, they floated together, unwilling to let go. Aisyaj smiled as she touched his mind, realising that he was dozing, drifting in a post-sex daze. He felt happy and relieved, allowing her to feel the same. She held him as he fell into a deeper sleep, savouring the touch of his body, just before the ship started to shake as the rockets fired again, preparing for the rendezvous with the Another Woman. She kissed his forehead and awakened him, before pulling her shipsuit back on. There was no longer any time to waste.

Khursheda gave them both an odd glance as they came into the cabin, her expression composed and her mind a whirlwind of activity. She had known – it dawned on Aisyaj, suddenly, that the bulkheads were hardly soundproofed – and didn’t entirely approve. In the Confederation, no one would have cared if anyone else approved or not, but the Slowboaters were different. Aisyaj felt an exciting spark of guilt, even as she hated herself for the emotion.

“We are coming up behind them now,” Khursheda said, choosing not to pass comment openly. If she was aware that Aisyaj had picked up on her awareness, she showed no sign of it and Aisyaj chose not to pry. “We will make contact in seven minutes.”

“Good,” Rylander said. There was no mistaking his emotions, not now. He looked like a man who had just won the greatest competition in the world. In time, the guilt would return, but for the moment he was happy. “And then we can go home.”

***​

“We have everything stowed away, as you ordered,” Boris said. He sounded calm and very composed, even though he’d been told there would be no attempt to penetrate the defence system surrounding the planet. He’d come up with a scheme using stealth materials that he swore blind should have worked, allowing them to slip into the command node without being detected. He had even planned to fly the mission himself. “Are you sure that we can get out of here?”

“I hope so,” Aisyaj said. Her telepathic link to her mother was fluctuating, even though that was theoretically impossible. She would have sensed her mother’s death, of course, but that would simply break the link and leave her alone. Instead, it felt almost as if her mother’s telepathy – or hers – was fading in and out of existence. “If not, we may be in some trouble.”

“It’ll take us thirty years to get out of here if you can’t,” Boris growled. “I suggest that we start now. The sooner we know the better.”

Aisyaj allowed them to escort her to her meditation chamber and strap her into the comfortable chair. Normally, she wouldn’t have needed a chair, but in the zero-gee environment it was well to be tied down. The ship’s spin had been cancelled, removing even the phoney gravity they’d used for exercise. She could not afford to lose her awareness of the ship, or she might find herself teleported, without the ship coming along. That would dump her into interstellar space with no chance of rescue. It was not, she decided, a cheerful thought.

She banished it from her mind as she concentrated, running through a series of mantras one by one. An unwelcome thought popped up in her mind as she calmed her mental patterns; the entities, too, made their slaves chant in harmony to open the gateways to their dimension. It made a certain kind of sense. Singing or chanting could have an effect on a person’s brainwaves and, if they did it with enough intensity, they might be able to access their telepathy without knowing that that was what they were doing. It struck her as oddly careless of anyone to lose control of one’s telepathy, but telepathic children often lost control before learning discipline. The combination of telepathy, children lack of understanding and a shortage of discipline was not a pleasant one.

Her mother’s image floated in front of her mind as she reached out, stretching her mind into the biological link between mother and daughter. There was a link to her father too, but his link was lesser, a result of the nine months she had spent gestating in her mother’s womb. Telepaths had discovered, fairly quickly, that such links were always stronger if the birth was natural, rather than using an external womb or a host mother. Perversely, if there was a host mother, the link would be between her and the child, not the child’s genetic mother. She concentrated, focusing on her mother’s identity, the culmination of all she was…

Mother, she thought.

The link, when it suddenly snapped into existence, was so strong that she felt as if her mother was in the room with her. The sense of her emotions was shockingly powerful, a combination of fear, concern and relief. Beyond that, there was a sensation of darkness, as if an unblinking eye had turned to look at them. She remembered seeing the entity as it blossomed into existence over <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comffice:smarttags" /><st1lace w:st="on">Greenland</st1lace> and shuddered. Something had gone badly wrong back home.

Thank the universe, Caprice thought. I was so SCARED.

Aisyaj blinked in surprise. Telepathic children couldn’t hide from the fact that their parents were sometimes scared, yet her mother had always been calm and disciplined. Shouting out her thoughts like that was unlike her.

“I know, mother,” she said, speaking the words aloud to focus her mind. There were things in her head she didn’t want her mother to see, at least not at once. “We’re ready to come home now.”

There may not be much of a home left to come back to, Caprice thought, directly into her head. A series of images and memories flickered down the mental link and into Aisyaj’s mind. The entities were expanding and, somehow, they’d poisoned the Galactic Net. Anyone who sent their mind into the net would come out a slave of the entities. You may wish to remain where you are.

“No, thank you,” Aisyaj said, bluntly. Perhaps if they’d had a Slowboat, one that was prepared to remain in the Dead Zone for the rest of time, it might have worked, but they had only the tender. And she had her idea. “Tell the masters that we are ready to jump out.”

They are ready, Caprice thought. It is good to hear from you again, my daughter…

Aisyaj frowned as the telepathic masters made mental contact with her. They felt…odd to her mind, although that might have been because of the Dead Zone, rather than the entities. Distance didn’t matter to telepathy. Their mental union reached into her mind and took control, detaching her from the universe just long enough to…

The sudden surge in activity from her implants surprised her. New icons appeared in front of her eyes as the implants began system checks, reporting that there had been a near-complete failure for reasons unknown and insisting that she checked herself in at the nearest hospital, just in case the damage caused her to suffer brain damage. An overloaded implant could cause brain damage, even death. She caught herself before she linked into the Galactic Net, but the smaller systems downloaded live feeds from her favourite newshounds and urgent reports from a hundred systems. It was so sudden that she seriously considered contacting the masters and asking them to dump her and the ship back in the Dead Zone.

She freed herself from the chair and grinned up at Rylander, as he entered the chamber. “I think we’re out,” she said, mischievously. “We made it.”

“I know,” Rylander said. He looked down at her, his mental tone shifting quickly. “Look…”

Aisyaj understood. She was tempted to push him a little and make him wallow in his own guilt, but that would have been cruel. “I understand,” she said. She wanted to give him a hug, but that wouldn’t help his mental state at all. “We were both stressed and we needed to feel alive.”

The memory of him inside her rose up in her mind and she pushed it away, before it could convince her to do something she knew she shouldn’t do. “You have responsibilities and I have some of my own,” she added. “Take care of your wife and children and name any new girl after me.”

“Hah,” Rylander said. Aisyaj smiled as his mental tone settled down into a mixture of relief and guilt. She didn’t understand how people had relationships without telepathy. How could they get by if they couldn’t even feel what their partner was feeling? “I don’t think my wife would approve.”

Aisyaj grinned. “We will see,” she said. She checked her implants as a new icon sprang up in front of her eyes. The RI on the Rowan was calling, informing her that it was ready and waiting to take her onboard. She checked with the emergency network and discovered that an AI ship was nearby, waiting for orders. “I have to go commune with the survivors…”

She broke off as the full details unfolded in her mind. “You may have to warn the other Slowboaters that they need to start heading out of the galaxy,” she added. “If the Confederation falls completely, they will be helpless when the entities reach out to take them.”

The thought wasn't pleasant. Given sufficient human minds to use as a power source, the entities were capable of expanding their mental grip over alarming distances. If they could snatch at a Confederation Navy task force with only a few billion aliens under their control, what could they do with even a tenth of the Confederation’s population? They might have subverted most of the Confederation Navy – or they would, once they got organised. She remembered the entity hovering over <st1lace w:st="on">Greenland</st1lace>, with ethereal tentacles reaching down to tap into human minds, and shuddered. The only way to stop them now might be to blow up the entire galaxy. The sole survivors would be the ones fleeing to other galaxies.

Or maybe they weren't safe either, she realised. They’d had links to the Galactic Net within their ships, using the QCC network. If they’d been infected, they would now be carrying the infection to other galaxies, giving the entities a chance to tap into new alien races. What would have happened in a galaxy without the entities slaughtering most of the evolved races? It might be brimming with life…

She pushed the thought aside. It wasn't over yet.

“The AIs will transport you back to your ship,” she said, as she accessed her ship’s RI and uploaded orders into the network. “If I see you again…”

Rylander looked nervous. “I hope you won’t take it the wrong way,” he said, “but I hope that I will never see you again.”

Aisyaj laughed, blew him a kiss and triggered the teleport. The Slowboater ship dissolved into a shimmer of light, which resolved into the cabin of her own ship. It looked very modern and functional compared to the Slowboater ships, yet it would be completely powerless and helpless in the Dead Zone. The consoles came alive as she ran her hands over them, feeling power thrumming through the hull. Her ship was ready to go where she willed.

“It is good to see you again,” the AIs said. The blonde woman materialised in the cabin. “The Confederation is in serious trouble.”

“So I heard,” Aisyaj said. She concentrated, allowing her implants to read her memory and upload it into the AIs. How people had made reports before memory reads were possible was beyond her. “I need you to build something for me.”

There was a long pause. That, she knew, meant that the AIs were running trillions of simulations. Or, perhaps, that they didn’t approve.

“This will be risky,” the AIs said, finally. “The dangers…”

Aisyaj snorted. “Are they more dangerous than leaving the entities to consume the universe?”

“No,” the AIs said. She could understand their reluctance. The last time humanity had experimented with anything like it, Joe Buckley had unleashed the entities upon the universe. “We will build the device for you.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“So Admiral Swansea and most of his task force must be considered subverted or lost,” Admiral Montgomery said. He looked tired, too tired. The latest crisis had started to overwhelm him. “The last message we had from his sector was about the deployment of antimatter missiles against civilian targets.”

“The 653<SUP>rd</SUP> Cruiser Force must be considered lost,” Admiral Webster added. “They were engaged by a subverted planetoid before they could jump out and escape.”

“The Rooster reported destroying another subverted planetoid in Sector 55,” Commodore Perrin said. “I think…”

Admiral Burton sat in the CIC, watching disaster unfold. With the destruction of Sparta – the explosion had rivalled a supernova, suggesting that one of the entities had started to materialise and accidentally destabilised a quantum tap - command descended upon the senior Admiral in the field. The command network had tapped him for the job, an alarming development for he'd known that there were at least six Admirals ahead of him. They'd all been confirmed dead or subverted, enslaved by the entities. The Confederation Navy was fragmenting.

The Confederation had built a force of over two million starships to defend its interests, twenty thousand of them planetoids. It hadn’t been a great expense when building materials and power were effectively free. It had been a force sufficient to cow every other race in the known galaxy, even those that were humanity’s technological equals. Indeed, while building the fleet wasn't a problem, manning it was a considerable headache. The Confederation Navy had resorted to a high level of automation to operate the fleet.

But now the fleet was coming apart. Hundreds of thousands of starships had had crewmen who had been immersed in VR simulations when the entities had begun to attack the network. Where those crewmen had formed a majority, they’d rapidly taken over the ships, either subverting or killing their former comrades. Even when they’d been a minority, they’d still been able to do considerable damage, even if they hadn’t been able to take over the ships. The warning had been too late to save large parts of the navy.

And even when the ships hadn’t fallen, the entities were expanding on the planets below, their thoughts reaching out into space to corrupt and weaken human minds, eventually breaking in and taking control. Thousands of starships had just been swallowed up by the entities, turning on their fellows and destroying them before they realised what was going on. The AIs and the secure network were attempting to separate the loyalists from the subverted, but it was a slow process, leaving him convinced that most of the Confederation Navy’s firepower had been lost or scattered. Once the entities starting combining the starships they’d captured and sending them against uninfected worlds, it would be all over. The remains of the Confederation Navy couldn’t stop them.

He gazed up at the streaming list of starship names, thousands illuminated in red – for subverted – or yellow, for lost. The once-proud navy had been shattered. No enemy had inflicted so much damage on the Confederation, not even the Unseen. It wouldn’t be long before humanity’s worlds ended up like the Ancient worlds, dead and grey, waiting for someone from a whole new race to come along and start the cycle all over again.

“All right,” he said, breaking into the discussion. Herding Admirals was harder than herding cats. The shock of the sudden collapse – and fall from grace – had stunned them all and discipline was suffering. “We need to make a number of choices, not all of them good.”

He waited for them to stop arguing – it felt weird to be talking on audio, rather than using a VR chamber – and continued. “We need to face facts. The Confederation is broken. We cannot recover any of the infected worlds; we cannot even send ships into those systems without losing the crews to their telepathy. They’re not going to spread any further through the Galactic Net, but once they get the fleet up and running, they’re going to spread anyway – and we cannot stop them.”

Their expressions darkened, but no one argued. It was a measure of their desperation that no one questioned his words. They all knew them to be true. “We can take the remaining planetoids, city-ships and world-ships to another galaxy and start again. The Confederation may be gone, but the human race will survive. We can transport billions out of the galaxy before the entities get organised.”

He paused. “And we need to delay them long enough to give the other races a chance,” he added. “We need to use the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon.”

The shock on their faces would have been funny, under other circumstances. The theory behind the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon had been discovered, as was the case with many scientific discoveries, by accident. Once the principles had been understood there had been no option, but to build it and see if it worked. It had. The Confederation Navy had created an ultimate weapon, one that could be used against any target in the galaxy without fear of repercussion. It had been highly classified and buried, with only Admirals and Security Councillors being made aware of its existence. It would have destabilised the entire galaxy.

“If we use the Cannon,” Admiral Webster objected, “the rest of the galaxy will know that it exists.”

“I think we’re well past caring,” Admiral Burton said. “If we use the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon to take out the captured shipyards and heavy industrial nodes, we will win time to get as much of the surviving population out of the galaxy as possible. I don’t think that there is any other choice.”

“Unless the entities can somehow prevent the Cannon from working,” Admiral Webster pointed out, glumly. “They’ve figured out how to send ships through hyperspace.”

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> nodded, grimly. Whatever had prevented the entities from sending starships into hyperspace had been resolved, allowing them to expand far faster. He had hoped that they would have some time, if only because the entities would have to send their ships at warp speed rather than hyperspace, but that had been proven a false hope. He supposed he shouldn’t really be surprised. The entities might have learned to adapt.

He looked up at the live feed from the starship’s sensors. They were still near the Gateway, watching the enigmatic alien objects as they orbited the remains of the Buckley Experiment. He had considered asking for permission to turn the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon on the objects, but the AIs had warned him that it would inflict no real damage. He wanted to take and crush them, yet it was futile. The AIs had snatched a rocky world with a wormhole and thrown it right at one of the objects. It had just shattered on impact and the object had continued, unmolested.

“The responsibility is mine,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> said. Anywhere else, the decision would be democratic, but not in the Confederation Navy. “We will activate the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon and use it against the entities.”

***​

Centuries ago, the human race had stumbled over hyperspace, discovering how to open portals into the higher dimension and using it to travel faster through space. Further research had uncovered the hyperspace bands, each of which allowed a greater multiple of FTL speeds, until the research had finally stumbled at the highest levels, where the energies of hyperspace were too powerful to risk allowing a starship to use them for transport. The researchers who had stumbled over the Hyperspace Decoherence Cannon had discovered that a stream of particles could be sent through hyperspace – effectively instantaneously – and somehow draw power from the highest levels. The stream of particles would explode out of the other end – at the targeted coordinates – and destroy whatever they struck. The perplexing nature of hyperspace ensured that nothing, not even a planetoid, could survive such a blow. The blast was simply too powerful.

The Confederation Navy had realised that it was both an ultimate weapon and a disaster in the making. It was possible to literally shoot the gun at one side of the galaxy and blow away a planet on the other side, without leaving any trace of just what had destroyed the target. Even if the targeted race was advanced enough to detect the microscopic gateway into hyperspace, it would still be impossible to trace it back to the gunner. Politically, it would be a nightmare; the weapon had been classified and the sole example had been hidden inside a star.

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> accessed the RI controlling the Cannon through the secure network, wincing as the RI tore into his implants, scanning his mind to be sure that he was authorised to access the system. The pain of activating the supernova bomb was nothing compared to activating the Cannon. He gritted his teeth and waited until the RI had finished poking through his brain with cold metallic fingers, before it finally conceded that he was allowed access to the firing system. Cold icons unfolded themselves in his mind, warning him that the Cannon was only to be used when the Confederation was in mortal danger. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> nodded impatiently and moved on to the next level. The system, using the star to draw power, was already powering up. Perversely, given the level of devastation it caused, the Cannon actually didn’t require a great deal of power. Pushing a planetoid into hyperspace was a great deal more energy-intensive.

He ran through the targeting coordinates carefully, double-checking them and then confirming the data when the RI questioned the targeting choice. The Cannon had been programmed not to fire on Confederation targets without additional verification, but then, no one had imagined the entities when they had been building the Cannon. Even the AIs, who had run hundreds of thousands of simulations of possible wars, hadn’t envisaged such a total disaster.

Primed and ready, he thought, finally. The five sets of targeting coordinates glowed within the Cannon’s matrix like five glittering jewels. He checked them one final time, ran a brief scan of the Cannon itself, and then activated the firing sequence. It was disappointing, in a way; there were no fireworks and barely any signs that the Cannon had been fired. The five shots were fired quickly and then the Cannon started to shut itself down again, waiting until it was needed again. <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> found his link to the Cannon unceremoniously severed, leaving him falling back into his own head.

“All targets destroyed,” the AIs reported. New images, of blasts to rival supernovas, echoed through <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City>’s head. The weapon was terrifyingly powerful. It might be unable to fire on a planetoid or something that was moving randomly, but it could blow planets, Rings, Spheres and even stars out of existence. The Confederation had been right to worry about the effects of unleashing such a weapon in public. “The results have been quite spectacular.”

“Yeah,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> growled. “Now tell me; just how badly were the entities hurt?”

The thought was a bitter one. Given enough power, the Cannon could be used to wipe out most of the infected Confederation, yet it would make no difference. The final outcome would still be the same. The infected starships would be used to spread the infection until the entire Confederation was either drained dry or destroyed by its own weapons. All of humanity’s technology, all the achievements that had carried the human race from a single world to a union that dominated the galaxy, was useless. Everything they were would be lost. Joe Buckley, the destroyer of worlds and galaxies and perhaps even the entire universe, wouldn’t go down in history. There would be no one left to write the history books.

Despair welled up within him. The human race had to survive, yet as what? The hunted, chased across the universe by a force they could never hope to defeat? He had his duty, his duty to preserve the human race, but he was tempted to simply trigger his implants one final time and destroy his own mind. Was there any point in striving when there was no hope of victory, or even of bare survival? The Confederation had never destroyed anyone who had fought it. The races that had picked fights with humanity had been beaten, but not destroyed. The entities…

He shook his head. The human race had never been promised anything by the universe. His race had opened the Gateway, never giving a thought as to what might be on the other side, or about what they might be letting in. Perhaps, in the end, all pride led to a fall. The human race had believed itself the masters of the universe. The universe hadn’t cared – or agreed.

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> stepped over to the producer and ordered a glass of wine. Perhaps, if he drank enough, he could forget.

“You have a visitor,” the AIs said. “She needs to talk to you personally.”

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> scowled. “Tell her to get lost,” he ordered. He stared down at the glass in his hand. The producer had produced something sour and bitter. “I’m busy.”

“This is important,” the AIs said. “She is teleporting in now.”

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> looked up sharply as a golden shimmer flickered into existence, before coalescing into a humanoid form. He was surprised to discover that he recognised her from a brief meeting before the Buckley Experiment, back when the world had made sense. Her name was Aisyaj, he reminded himself. She had been the telepathic representative to the experiment. Her dark skin and expressive dark eyes were unforgettable. And, unlike almost everyone else on the ship, she was smiling.

“Admiral,” she said. Her voice was rich and melodic. It reminded <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> of warmth and the days when he had been a child, growing up on a Ring with a vast extended family. “We need to talk.”

<st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> shrugged, downed his glass and waved her to a chair. He had never found telepaths to be cheerful company, not when they could read his mind at will, yet it behoved him to be as gracious as he could. Perhaps she would read his mind, discover that she was not welcome and leave. Or perhaps she just wouldn’t give a damn about what he thought. He should be organising the evacuation of the entire surviving human race and he just could not be bothered. It all seemed pointless.

“I got in and out of the Dead Zone,” Aisyaj explained, and ran through her story. It all seemed a little unbelievable to <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City>, but it all seemed to make sense. He had always believed that the Dead Zone wasn't natural. Why would the laws of science be repealed in one small section of the universe? “There are Ancients living within the zone, trapped on a primitive set of worlds.”

Under other circumstances, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> would have been fascinated. A race that had remained static for over four billion years was unprecedented. No human social engineering could produce a stable and utterly unchanging society. There was always change, sometimes slow and subtle at first, but it was always there. Or, before change could come from within, it came from outside. An armed invasion or even a trade contact would bring change. No one could seal themselves off from the universe forever.

But the Ancients had succeeded. In order to cheat the entities, they’d destroyed their own greatness. It was not a pleasant thought.

“I picked up more from their writing than I understood at the time,” Aisyaj explained, earnestly. “They figured out how to manipulate the quantum foam on a large scale – far more than we can do – but they did it with the power of their minds. We do it with enhancers. Their own telepathy was the cause of their downfall.”

“Right,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> said. He’d barely spoken to Caprice and the other telepaths, but he had assumed that they would want to leave the galaxy as well. A couple of world-ships could carry the entire telepathic population to safety…if there was such a thing where the entities were concerned. “How does this help us?”

“I’ve been working with the AIs to model it out,” Aisyaj said. “We can build a combination of their technology and our own, one we can use to manipulate a singularity and through it alter the quantum foam. They needed to create a naked singularity to do it, but we could do it with our enhancers and a vast power source.”

She paused. “You see, the entities aren’t native to our universe and they couldn’t exist here without a link back to their own dimension,” she continued. “The Gateway isn’t really a gateway – well, it is a gateway, but it’s much more than just a gateway – it’s the linchpin allowing them to enter our universe. As long as the Gateway is open, they can respond to rites that invite them into our realm. We need to close the Gateway permanently to win.”

“Very good,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> said, dryly. The Confederation Navy had come to the same conclusion, as had the AIs. Neither of them had been able to figure out how. The Gateway would just swallow any energy aimed at it by the Confederation. “Now…how do you propose that we actually do that?”

“Simple,” Aisyaj said. “We take the super-enhancer into the Gateway, take control of the singularity within the micro-universe and shut it down. It’s not natural. It requires colossal power to hold it open. Once we shut it down…that’s it. No more entities.”

“I see,” <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> said. He opened a link to the AIs. “Will it work?”

The AIs didn’t bother to pretend that they hadn’t been eavesdropping. “It appears to be our best shot at winning,” they said. There was a hint of a pause. “It requires, however, a human mind to make it work.”

“Me,” Aisyaj said. She looked up at him. For an instant, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1lace w:st="on">Burton</st1lace></st1:City> realised just how young she was. “If I go in there and close the Gateway down, I won’t be coming back.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“In thirty minutes, we either gain control over the Gateway and close it, or admit defeat and flee the galaxy” the AIs said. Their words echoed in the air. “You will record everything for us.”

Janine nodded impatiently. It was galling to be without her normal implants, but even if she recorded a full-body experience, no one was going to be able to access and download it into their brains. The Galactic Net was effectively shut down and the secure network, linking the remains of humanity together, wouldn't allow her to broadcast her thoughts and feelings into the ether. She was restricted to voice and visual, something that some of the great newshounds of the past would have laughed at; hell, she would have laughed if one of the other newshounds had tried to broadcast under such circumstances. It just wasn't what she was used to using.

She turned to stare towards the Gateway, recording what little she could see with her naked eyes. The Gateway was a spinning disc of light, with a tiny black circle at the centre, inviting anyone who dared to fly forward and into the alien dimension. It reminded her of a glowing eye, staring out into the universe. With the entities involved – she recalled the entity that had materialised over Greenland and shuddered – that was not an improbable thought. The four objects that – the Confederation Navy believed – were keeping the Gateway open were invisible to the naked eye, although a quick check of the starship’s computer revealed that they were still out there, circling the Gateway as enigmatically as ever. They seemed unaware of the human fleet gathering around the Gateway, the greatest single concentration of firepower left in the Confederation. It looked to her as if the entire remaining Confederation Navy had gathered to fight one final battle.

The Gateway...she looked up towards the Gateway and shook her head. She had seen the black hole, before Joe Buckley’s experiment had gone horrendously wrong, and the sheer level of power required to take control of a black hole and alter its internal structure to the point where it became a portal to another universe was staggering. It seemed impossible to imagine that the Confederation, which had blown up stars and used them as power sources, could do anything to reconfigure or destroy the Gateway. It was just over two months old and it looked as implacable as the galaxy itself.

But the original Gateway had to have been closed somehow, she told herself. She hadn't been told everything that had come out of the Dead Zone, yet it was clear to her that the Ancients must have opened a Gateway of some kind billions of years in the past. That Gateway was no longer around, unless the human race had seen it and simply hadn't understood what they were looking at. She hoped that that wasn't the case. If the Ancients had closed their Gateway, the human race could do the same.

She stepped back and checked the live feed from the sensors mounted on a dozen starships. The Admiral had been very keen that the rest of the Confederation saw the battle, although apparently not all of his staff agreed. Somehow, juggling the live feeds was a remarkable challenge, yet it would have been impossible without the help of the AIs. She wasn't sure why they had agreed to help – even though it represented a very tiny percentage of their attention and processing power – but she couldn't understand how reporters and newshounds had managed, prior to implants. It just didn't seem possible.

“All sensor feeds are going out now,” the AIs informed her. It was primitive compared to what the Confedertaion was used to, but there was no other choice. Janine smiled, despite the situation; whatever else happened, she was going to have the largest audience in human history. Trillions of humans would be watching as humanity fought its final battle. “The population is logging on to watch.”

Janine nodded. The Confederation was dying, yet people still had hope. If she could give them that hope, give them the confidence that humanity would survive and regain its former prominence, it would make everything worthwhile. It would give her life meaning.

“And then we’d better make sure that they have something to watch,” she said, hoping her words sounded confident. Whenever she thought about the odds, her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. The entities had laughed – if they'd even noticed – at everything humanity had thrown at them, from primitive tricks to the most destructive weapons in existence. She hoped – prayed – that the Confederation Navy was right, yet the entities possessed terrifying powers. They might just be able to keep the Gateway open, or perhaps they would be free of any dependence upon the chink in reality. “Are you sure that this is going to work?”

She cursed herself for the question as soon as it slipped out of her lips. Of course the AIs were sure! They couldn't do anything without calculating the ramifications to the nth degree, all in the same length of time it took a human to blink. They could tell her, with great precision, just what she would be doing a year from now and it would seem reasonable, even if she chose to follow a different path. The AIs, unlike humans, could study a decision endlessly, all in the blink of an eye. When they committed themselves to something, they were sure.

“We do not know,” the AIs said. Janine’s head snapped up in astonishment. The AIs didn’t know! “The calculations all check out, yet we are unsure if we truly understand what we are doing. If we are wrong...”

“The human race needs you to be right,” Janine said. It was one conversation she had no intention of transmitting to the rest of the Confederation. Humans had faith in the AIs; indeed, there were people who believed that one day the AIs would take over running the Confederation, allowing the human race to forget about politics and just have fun. Quite why the AIs would want to do that was conveniently ignored. “You cannot get this wrong.”

“We understand the situation,” the AIs said. They sounded unusually huffy. Of course, Calculus was physically within Confederation space and if the entities technology-disrupting effect started to spread, the AIs might find themselves affected. Their giant cube-shaped ships were just remote units, not housing for additional AIs. “We have run all the simulations. We remain concerned, however, about unknown unknowns. Specifically, what will the entities do if they realise what we are trying to do to them?”

***​

“The fleet is in position, Admiral,” the tactical officer said. “They are standing by for operations.”

Admiral Burton nodded, not taking his eyes off the tactical display. He’d called in every ship within a hundred thousand light years, a move that had been the subject of a considerable argument among his subordinates and junior officers. Pulling the fleet together, they’d argued, would leave countless worlds undefended against infected and subverted ships. Burton had overruled them, pointing out that if the entities decided to try to prevent the human race from closing the Gateway, it would take an entire fleet to stop them. Others had pointed out that the fleet might just be cannon fodder, or effectively handed over to the entities if their telepathic field started to emanate from the Gateway.

He scowled. The telepaths had provided several hundred telepaths – the largest group to serve within the Confederation Navy in decades – and he’d distributed them over his ships. If the entities started whispering suggestions into human minds, the telepaths would hit the emergency button and the fleet would jump out at once, leaving the entities behind. Or so he hoped. Like it or not, they were far too close to the Gateway, the way into the entities own universe. Their power might be far more formidable than the human race realised.

As if it wasn’t formiable enough already, he thought, tartly.

“Admiral,” the AIs said. “Everything is ready for deployment. It merely requires your command.”

Burton paused. He had taken an hour out to read the specs on the device the AIs had built for the telepaths and it had chilled his blood. No matter how they looked at it, they had created something that would have massive ramifications for any future human society – and handed a hell of a lot of power to one slip of a girl. The last invention to reshape human society had been the nanotechnological fabricator, the backbone of the Confederation, and it had created the post-scarcity society that humanity had eventually called the Confederation. A device that could alter reality itself, even on a small scale, was unbelievably dangerous.

But then, he reminded himself, if it could stop the entities from devouring the entire galaxy, perhaps the universe itself, the future might not be so bad.

“Thank you,” he said, pulling himself to his feet. He made a final check on the fleet and was gratified to realise that everything was in position. The subverted ships, if they were ordered by their masters into battle, would discover that it was going to be a harder fight than they thought. It felt absurd to be plotting a war against fellow Confederation Navy starships, but there was no other choice. “Open a channel to the fleet.”

The channel opened at once, allowing him to address the remains of the Confederation Navy. “There are those of us who believe that the disasters that have befallen us represent the end of humanity,” he said, as calmly as he could. He’d been one of them, not too long ago. “There are those who believe that we should take what we can and flee the galaxy, abandoning our friends and enemies to a horrific fate at the hands of the entities. There are those who believe that we have no other choice; that we must flee to preserve humanity, that we are helpless against the godlike powers of the entities.

“I say that we must fight! The human race has a long history of winning out over apparently insurmountable odds. We fought and beat the demons within our own soul, the monstrous curses of theocracy, fascism and communism. We encountered alien races who challenged us and we beat them; we even defeated hunger, want and death! We created the greatest civilisation the galaxy has ever known. We chose to be great!”

He paused, gathering his thoughts. “Today, if we succeed, we will take back what is ours,” he thundered. “Even if we lose, we will put the entities on notice that the human race will not fade away into the shadows and become their slaves, their helpless puppets. We will build and develop and one day we will understand how to beat them – and on that day, we will take back what is ours! The entities are powerful; they can do things we can’t – but they are not gods! They can be beaten.

“We may be attacked by units of our own Confederation Navy, enslaved by the entities and used to carry out their monstrous bidding. Do not think of them as your friends and family, or as people forced to serve an alien master; kill them, as quickly s you can. We must fight, here and now, to preserve what remains of the human race. The infected must be killed; believe me, they will thank you for it. Stand to your guns and remember...they will show you no mercy. Their masters don’t even recognise the concept of mercy. They think of us as ants, but we will show them that even an ant can sting an enemy.”

He smiled, tiredly. “All ships,” he concluded, “prepare to engage the enemy.”

The channel closed at a single mental command from him. “You may proceed,” he informed the AIs. “And may God go with us all.”

“Thank you,” the AIs said. “We will inform Mistress Aisyaj of your decision.”

And pray to God that we are doing the right thing, Burton thought, grimly.

***​

The device looked remarkably simple for something so dangerous. It was a silver sphere, hovering in the centre of her starship’s lounge. Strange symbols covered the sphere, somehow changing whenever she looked away, a reflection of the uncertainty field surrounding the device itself. It seemed harmless at first glance, but Aisyaj – who could sense the quantum foam itself – could understand why the very notion of the device was far more terrifying than the entities themselves. The human race was not to be trusted with such power.

She reached out to touch the sphere, only to feel her fingers skittering over the surface. The AIs had designed and built the device so that it would only operate properly outside the human universe, within the Gateway. Even without the Gateway’s power source, she could sense the potential within the sphere, like looking down at a coiled snake and wondering what would happen when it started to uncoil. The device was, almost literally, bigger on the inside than the outside. It was just...terrifying. She found herself hyperventilating and ran through a calming exercise, cursing her own weakness. Now, with the fate of the entire galaxy, perhaps the entire universe, resting on her shoulders, she had no time for weakness. Or so she told herself. The device prayed on her mind.

“The Admiral is addressing the fleet now,” the AIs said. They had rebuilt part of her ship to the point where she should be able to maintain a connection to them, even within the Gateway. She wasn't sure that it would work – the QCC link to Joe Buckley’s probe had failed, even though that was supposed to be impossible – but even without it, she intended to go in. “Do you wish to listen?”

Aisyaj shook her head. “I just want to think,” she said, although it was far from the truth. She would have preferred to banish the device from her mind altogether. It was just too dangerous to keep thinking about it, not when telepathy affected the quantum foam. “Can you inform me when the Admiral is ready for me to begin?”

She clasped her hands as she walked back into the bridge and stared out at the Gateway. Now she was contemplating flying right into the Gateway, into a tiny universe that served as a link between the human universe and one with very different physical laws, the Gateway looked like a giant mouth, waiting to swallow her whole and eat her for dinner. The whole idea suddenly seemed a hell of a lot less clever to her. It was her idea, she reminded herself firmly; there was no point in blaming someone else for the plan. She had come up with it personally.

Aisyaj closed her eyes, remembering the touch of skin against skin, back when she’d wanted – needed – the touch of a man. She wanted, suddenly, to take her ship away from the Gateway, back to the Einstein and demand that Rylander forget his ugly wife and uglier children and come live with her. Her hands were on the console before she caught herself and yanked her hands away, silently cursing her own weakness. The memory of him holding her tight, of his hands stroking her breasts and buttocks, of his cock sliding into her and melding them together...the memories taunted her, reminding her of just what the device could do. It would be easy to simply erase his wife from existence, to ensure that his children had never existed, to make him hers, now and forever. A sudden flash of arousal flickered through her body and she swore aloud. The temptation was almost overpowering.

“Aisyaj,” the AIs said. It sounded as if their words were coming from a far distance. “Are you all right?”

Aisyaj opened her eyes. “Yes,” she growled, feeling her body shaking with repressed lust and desire. She ran through a calming routine, only to discover that her body refused to be calmed. Years ago, she had been told that feelings of sexual arousal were common when a person believed that he or she was about to die, although it struck her as a little odd. If the tutors had been right – if it was a final desperate attempt to pass on the genes – it didn't make sense to her. If a woman became pregnant, in the hours before her death, how could she have her child? “I’m fine.”

She considered, very briefly, stepping into the VR suite and had to remind herself that it was a very bad idea. She doubted that her ship had been infected, but if she was wrong she would spend the rest of her life being slowly drained by the entities.

“Good,” the AIs said. “The Admiral has given permission for you to begin the experiment.”

“Experiment,” Aisyaj said, shaking her head. She was sure that the device would work; at least once she took it into to the Gateway. It was what would happen afterwards that bothered her. She couldn't afford any form of mental distraction. “Very well, then...”

The AIs sounded concerned. “If you wish to back out...”

“I would never know if it would work,” Aisyaj said, tartly. “I’ll keep the link open as long as I can.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated. “Mother!”

Daughter, her mother sent back. Are you going through with it?

“Yes,” Aisyaj said. She sensed Caprice’s disaporval, mingled with pride in her daughter and fear for the future. “Mother...I love you.”

I know, Caprice said. They’d fought; telepaths or not, mothers and daughters still fought over everything and nothing. They still loved one another. Come back alive if you can.

Aisyaj knew it was wishful thinking. She thought about lying, but her mother would know that she was lying – would know that she had been thinking about lying – and she wouldn't be pleased.

“I love you,” she said. “It’s time to go.”

 

Chapter Forty<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

The Gateway loomed up in front of her, looking more like a giant eyeball than ever. Aisyaj had been expecting gravitational tides, but the AIs had pointed out that it was no longer a standard black hole and simply didn't have a strong gravity field. The apparent impossibility – yet another apparent impossibility – puzzled her, yet she pushed it out of her mind. The tiny black eye at the heart of the storm beckoned her forward, calling her into the Gateway. It was waiting for her. Her ship, protected by a warp bubble, was about to thread the needle.

She’d seen images of when the Tooth and Claw had plunged into the Gateway and had realised that, given its speed, the alien craft had run right through the Gateway and into the alien realm without realising that there was anything in-between. The information she’d picked up from the Ancients had suggested that the Gateway was far more than just a chink in reality; in effect, it was a pocket universe. Her ship started to shake slightly as the Gateway opened up, waiting for her to fly into its gaping maw. The black circle expanded until it filled her entire existence, a spot so dark that it seemed impossible to believe that there was ever such a concept as light. She felt reality spinning around her as she flashed through the Gateway and pulled her craft to a halt.

Aisyaj reached out with her mind, ignoring the contradictory information blaring out of her ship’s sensors. It was impossible to believe all of the reports; her ship was safe, about to explode or already dead, depending on which sensor she used. The quantum foam surrounding the Gateway was, somehow, easier to read than the quantum foam in the normal universe; she was suspended high above the inner singularity, the link to the universe that gave birth to the entities. In her mind’s eye, it appeared dark and frightening, yet somehow attractive and calling to her. She ignored its call. The entities would have to wait for her company.

Reality seemed to flicker around her again as she stood up, trusting in the automated systems to keep the ship steady. The warp bubble flickering around the ship would ensure that she remained safe from the growing energy surges flickering around the singularities – both singularities. It was hard to understand, but she’d come through a singularity and emerged in the space between two linked singularities. That was impossible in normal space – the transfer between two singularities should have been instant – yet inside the Gateway, the laws were different. She keyed her link to the AIs and was somehow unsurprised when she realised that the link was broken. There was no way of contacting anyone outside the Gateway.

I always knew I would die alone, she thought, as she studied the device. It was glowing now, glowing with a faint silvery light that somehow cast an ominous shadow over the compartment. It wasn't real, somehow; it was an eerie ethereal light that seemed to glare into her mind, throwing her thoughts into sharp relief. The uncertainty she’d felt slowly faded as she realised the truth. The Ancients had solved at least part of the problem of manipulating the quantum foam and used it to create the Dead Zone. She – and the AIs – had solved the other part of the mystery and created a device that could alter reality itself.

The Dead Zone had baffled human scientists who studied it, because it defied logic and reason. A hyperspace dampening field – which would have drained away any energy above a certain level, making high technology impossible – would have snuffed out the stars within the Dead Zone. No theory humanity had been able to devise had explained the mystery until Aisyaj had been inside the Dead Zone and examined the artefact at the very heart of the puzzle. The Ancients who had devised the Dead Zone had made a wish, manipulating reality to ensure that their wish came true, altering the very nature of reality itself. And now she knew the truth, she could – she had – mix human and alien technology to create something new and terrible.

“All right,” she said, purely to hear the sound of someone talking. She hadn't realised how much she had been depending upon the reassuring presence of the AIs until their link had been broken. “Let’s see, shall we?”

She sat down in front of the sphere and placed her fingers against its glowing exterior. This time, there was no skittering, no sense that it wasn't time to touch the sphere and unleash the power lurking within the tiny device. Her fingers merged with the sphere, into the sphere, melding her with the hyper-advanced RI built inside the device. A second later, her mind expanded outward sharply. For the first time, she saw and truly understood the quantum foam. It was far more than anyone had understood, or imagined. Her thoughts went everywhere and nowhere; she couldn't decide where to look first so she looked everywhere first, a torrent of data blasting into her mind...

Aisyaj reeled. Telepaths were used to accidentally prying into the thoughts of non-telepaths. She, like all telepaths who had routine interactions with non-telepaths, had agreed to be bound by a honour code that forbade her from revealing or discussing what she saw in anyone’s head, unless there was a clear and present danger to others. Even so, the most powerful telepath would never have had such a clear insight into so many people at once. She saw the deepest thoughts and feelings of the hundreds of thousands of humans gathered around the Gateway...and further afield. It should have been impossible. So many contacts at once should have left her brain dribbling out of her ears, yet...she was alive!

The singularity, she realised, in astonishment. The singularity is gathering in their thoughts!

She turned her mind and looked down, towards the other singularity. The entities hit her at once, a yawning hunger that could never be sated. For all of their power, for all of their ability to affect reality, they weren't really intelligent, not as humanity understood the term. Or maybe their thoughts ran in completely different patterns. What she saw was incomprehensible to her. She had made mental contact with Gasbags and Starwalkers, yet they’d been practically cousins compared to the entities. The entities were so alien that they redefined the term.

There was no longer any time to lose. She reached out and started to slip her thoughts into reality itself. It seemed to take hours before she finally understood what she was doing, manipulating reality with the power of her mind. It was fascinating; too little pressure resulted in nothing, too much pressure resulted in a localised collapse and undid all her work. She wanted to keep experimenting, but it dawned on her that the merest thought, linked into the quantum foam, could result in disaster. She could send every star in the universe supernova at once. She was a god.

Carefully, keeping her thoughts under tight control, she started to untie the knot Joe Buckley had formed in reality. Now, with her god’s eye view, it was easy to see what he had done, if harder to untangle it. He had taken the quantum strings – already tangled up around a black hole – and wrapped them around a rotating singularity, linking one universe to another.

She was hard at work when the entities looked up and saw her.

***​

Admiral Burton paced the command deck, feeling the seconds turning into minutes and the minutes turning into hours. The AIs had informed him that they had lost contact with Aisyaj, but since then they had said nothing, leaving him to speculate wildly on what might have happened. She had fallen into the entities’ universe and had been killed; she had taken on the powers of a god and vanished; she had tried to control the universe and discovered that no human could handle so much power; the device had simply blown up when she tried to use it...his imagination could provide so many possibilities. There was just no way of knowing which one of them was true.

“Admiral,” the sensor officer said. “The objects are moving.”

Burton tensed as the display updated. The objects were moving faster, spinning out in a new and dangerous pattern. It was the first time he’d seen one alter course; now, all four of them were altering course. The flotillas of cruisers and scientific research vessels that were following them scattered, expecting trouble. If the objects had finally decided to take note of humanity’s ships, there was going to be a massacre...

“We are picking up gravimetric fluctuations within the Gateway,” the AIs said, breaking their long silence. “We believe that the objects are attempting to counter what Aisyaj is doing down within the Gateway.”

They offered no further explanation. “I see,” Burton said, pressing them. “Do you know if she can succeed?”

“Unknown,” the AIs said. “Our grasp of quantum multiverse theory is incomplete. The objects are definitely involved with keeping the Gateway open and...”

“Admiral,” the tactical officer said, as the display suddenly sparked with red icons. “We have incoming starships, hostile starships!”

Burton rammed his mind into the starship’s main processor. The sensors were updating rapidly, showing hundreds of thousands of starships dropping out of hyperspace and advancing towards the Gateway. They were Confederation Navy ships, yet they weren’t broadcasting the modified IFF signals the loyalists had deployed. They were controlled by the entities. He wasn't sure what they intended to do, but they had to be stopped.

“All ships,” he said, as the advancing wall of battle closed in rapidly. “Prepare to engage.”

Seven seconds later, the Battle of the Gateway began.

***​

Janine watched in awe as the two sides opened fire. There was nothing subtle in either side’s tactics; the infected ships intended to break through to the Gateway, while the loyalists intended to stop them. Space rapidly lit up as hyper-missiles, warp missiles and standard missiles were deployed, both sides firing as many missiles as they could in the first few seconds. Other, more subtle and dangerous weaponry, was deployed; gravity waves slammed against warp bubbles, wormholes spat lethal fire at their targets and space itself boiled under the impact of waves of deadly force. The alien objects ignored the fray, choosing instead to concentrate on trying to keep the Gateway open.

“The two sides are not evenly balanced,” the AIs said. Janine barely heard them. She was getting the highest ratings, the highest number of followers, of any newshound in human history. They’d be naming awards after her. They’d be making up new awards just so they could award them to her personally. “The entities, we assume, are routing all of their starships towards the Gateway. Admiral Burton has no reserves to call upon. The remaining loyalist ships are too far from the Gateway to assist.”

Janine felt a cold trickle shivering down her back. Space seemed to be flaring with light as starships started to explode, monstrous explosions consuming cruisers and planetoids alike. She saw a fission-implosion warhead strike a planetoid and rip it apart, the explosion swallowing up a number of smaller battleships and cruisers; it looked as if the entire Confederation Navy was being destroyed. She saw one planetoid ram another one and both ships vanished in a tearing blast of light, a wave of energy so powerful that it destroyed hundreds of sensors and blinded thousands more. Space itself was being disrupted; the ultra-secure communications links between the various starships were being disrupted by the blasts. Only the QCC network remained intact and functional.

She didn't want to ask, but she needed to know. “Are we safe here?”

“Perhaps,” the AIs said. They didn't bother to point out that they were safely back on Calculus, even if a hundred of their cube-shaped ships were participating in the battle. Without human crews, or any need to prepare for human occupants, the AIs could devote more space to weapons and drives. Their cubes were almost as powerful as a planetoid. “They may not pay any attention to a ship that isn't shooting at them, or they may open fire at random. Their firing patterns are not easy to predict.”

Janine nodded, watching a planetoid disintegrate in dreadful slow motion, taking its entire crew into the fire. It had happened so quickly that she wasn't even able to tell which side the ship had been on before it had died. Her ship shook violently as a gravity shear slashed against its shields for a second, before passing on to a more worthy target. There was no such thing as safety in this battle.

“I know,” she said. She knew that she could die at any second. Oddly, the idea excited her. This was what made life worth living. “Let’s see how long we can survive, shall we?”

She turned back to the battle and continued recording.

***​

Aisyaj could feel the entities now, their cold fingers sliding out of their realm and reaching up towards her. She was convinced that if she looked down, towards the inner singularity, she would see the entity emerging from the chink in space-time and climbing up towards her ship. It was easier, now, to understand what the entities truly were. The laws of space and time in their universe were thoroughly weird. There was no real sense of time passing, yet there was that hunger, that desperate need to drain life energy from other universes and devour it. It made no sense to her.

She reached out desperately as their cold fingers started to undo the damage she had wrought on their plans. Aisyaj was no stranger to mental battles – she recalled some of her training with embarrassment, for it had taken her time to understand how a mental battle was truly fought – yet this was different. The entities weren't attacking her directly – or maybe they were and she was just too stupid to realise it – but attempting to undo the damage she had caused and bind the two universes together. She pushed back...and saw, clearly, just what the entities had in mind. The sheer scale of it shocked her.

They intended to tear the Gateway wide open, expanding it at faster-than-light speeds. It would grow rapidly, swallowing up Confederation and alien worlds and transporting them all into the alien realm. There, the remains of the human and alien races would be drained dry, their life forces used to power the entities’ desperate search for new livestock. There would no longer be any need to use most of that life force to hold the smaller chinks in space-time open; they’d be able to drain the humans dry completely, gorging themselves for an eternity. They might even start breeding humans and other races to serve the gods...

The thought repulsed her and she felt her rage flooding through her mind, boosting her energy. Throwing caution to the winds, she reached out and pushed her mind into the quantum foam, no longer caring about her own life. She became the quantum foam, her thoughts shaping and defining the universe. It was suddenly the easiest thing in the world, despite the roaring sound pouring through what remained of her ears, to reach out and sever the link between the two universes. She heard the entities howling in anger as the Gateway started to collapse, crushing her between two singularities as the pocket universe fell in on her. She was aware of her starship bursting like a balloon, of the final thoughts of the universe itself...

And then there was a blaze of white light...

And then there was nothing.

***​

Sparta heaved as a salvo of missiles crashed against her shields. “Direct hits, Admiral,” the tactical officer reported. New red icons flared into existence on the display. “Major damage to...”

Burton tuned him out, watching the battle. It was absurd, a cauldron of fury that tore through both fleets as if they were made of paper. He had managed to concentrate most of her firepower around the Gateway itself, in hopes of preventing the enemy fleet from diving right into the alien realm, yet the entity-controlled ships were unpredictable. An absurd image of a line of planetoids, dancing across the fires that were consuming space, flared up in his mind as they headed for the Gateway, all weapons blazing as they burned his ships out of space. The battle, he saw, was going to end when one side had only a handful of ships left, having destroyed the other side completely. It was...insane.

“Admiral,” the AIs said, suddenly. “The Gateway is closing!”

Burton looked up in delight. The Gateway was flickering, spinning down like a vortex and collapsing into itself. One moment it was there, the next it was gone, leaving only a gravity shockwave passing through space. His ship rocked as the wave passed over it and was gone. The four alien objects lost control and started to spin off through space, uselessly. Burton guessed that their command links to the entities – however they expressed them – had been severed.

“The infected ships,” he snapped. “What’s happening to them?”

The battle was over. The enemy ships had just lost their command and control, drifting helplessly in space. He ordered Marine detachments to board them and attempt to locate and rescue their crews, but he had a nasty feeling that the entities wouldn't have left them anything that could be saved. The battle might have been over, yet the recovery was going to take years. The reports from the infected planets concurred. The entities were gone. Their former slaves were now maddened, or dead. They might never return to normal.

Burton frowned. No starship had emerged from the Gateway before it closed. “She’s dead, isn't she?”

The AI image flickered, donning mourning garb. “Yes, Admiral,” they said. “Aisyaj is dead, but she saved us all. The war is over.”

Chapter Forty-One

There were only a few dozen people gathered at the memorial service, but Caprice could sense hundreds of thousands watching through the commune, looking through the eyes of those she had permitted to attend the ceremony. The outpouring of grief and loss into the ether was genuine – no telepath could hide their feelings from another telepath – even if, coldly put, her daughter’s death was only one of many trillions. She looked up at the statue of her daughter and felt, again, a yawning pain in her soul. She had known that her and her daughter would have many years together, perhaps thousands of years in a universe where death had been defeated, yet all of her faith had not availed her when her daughter had died. Aisyaj had been so young; she should have had hundreds of years left in her, even without advanced medical treatments. Instead, she had given her life to save others.

She looked towards the garden, where an image of her daughter had joined the thousands of other images gathered in the Valley of the Dead. Telepaths had moved beyond the concept of God, yet they believed that the universe was alive in some way. Their own ability to influence – even manipulate – the quantum foam suggested that there was some greater power out there, a higher power responsible for organising the universe. They had created the Valley of the Dead to honour the fallen, even as they refused to believe that there might be an afterlife, a world beyond death. It was funny how she’d dismissed such beliefs as absurd until she found herself contemplating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years without her daughter.

Her mind expanded and touched the mind of Aisyaj’s father, wrapped up in his own private grief – yet nothing was truly private in a telepathic world. Their brief relationship had ended without leaving either of them bitter and resentful, allowing them to share their own pain. Her other guests, friends, relatives and lovers, reached out with their own minds to offer their sympathy and support, a comfort no other human group knew or understood. Telepaths could be open and honest in ways that no other human group could match.

She looked towards the small group of telepathic masters, gathered on the other side of the valley. They rarely came out of seclusion – they found the pressure of lesser minds too great to bear – and their mere presence was a sign of respect, of admiration, that few others would have been offered. Aisyaj had not only saved the universe from the entities, but she had also shown them the way to even greater power over their environment. Caprice found the implications a little disturbing, yet she knew the masters and understood them. They wouldn't abuse their powers.

A dull mind appeared on the edge of her perception and walked towards her. Caprice turned and looked upon Admiral Burton, a short heavy man with a scarred face and dark expression. His thoughts were twisting and turning, a normal reaction when a normal came face to face with a telepath, as if thinking so rapidly could prevent a telepath from following his thoughts. She sensed his guilt and concern – and his guilt over feeling the concern – pervading him and shook her head, refusing to pry further. It would only make both of them uncomfortable.

“Representative,” the Admiral said. It was as much a droll reminder as a greeting. As one of the few survivors from the Security Council, Caprice was needed to help coordinate the recovery operations. The Confederation had been badly wounded by the entities – hungry and starvation had returned to humanity, nearly a thousand years since they had been banished – yet they would survive. “Please accept my condolences for the loss of your daughter.”

Caprice sensed the guilt flickering through his words, his shame over losing Aisyaj, tempered with his awareness that she was one of trillions who had died in the final moments of the battle. The entities had been ejected from the human universe, yet their thralls had been left behind, driven mad or killed by the shock. Aisyaj was nothing on such a scale, she knew he knew, but he couldn't help thinking along such lines. One death was a tragedy, as someone had once said, yet a million was a statistic.

“Thank you, Admiral,” she said, aware of the sudden upsurge in interest as the word spread through the telepathic gestalt. “I am proud of her.”

“You should be,” the Admiral said. It wasn't quite the truth, she sensed. The Admiral had been worried about the impact on human society even before the entities had been defeated. Direct mental manipulation of reality itself would be...disruptive. “She saved us all from the endless night.”

Caprice nodded. She was tempted, as she sensed his growing unease at remaining within the Valley of the Dead, to prolong his suffering, but she had her responsibilities to uphold. It was funny how they seemed less important now that her daughter was dead.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, finally. “I’ll be online later and we’ll chat then.”

***​

Admiral Burton allowed himself a moment of relief as he materialised back onboard the Sparta. With so many places needing the attention of a planetoid to avert disaster, he could easily have avoided the funeral service entirely, but he’d felt that he should attend. Besides, there were hints that rogue entity-controlled starships were still operating near the telepath systems and the remains of the Confederation Navy had a responsibility to protect them.

“Bridge, this is the Admiral,” he said, as he slumped down into his chair. He felt tired, too tired to do anything, but sit in his chair and sleep. There were just too many crisis points to allow him a proper rest. There were millions of refugees fleeing the former entity-held planets, hundreds of madden starships lashing around in anger and even hints that some of humanity’s enemies were considering pressing old claims against the Confederation. There was nothing like weakness to bring out the jackals. “Take us to the next crisis point.”

“Aye, Admiral,” the helmsman said. He knew that he should return to the Sparta System – he was the Grand Admiral now, at least until the reconstituted Security Council saw fit to cancel his appointment – and take command from there, but he wanted to remain on his ship. Between the QCC network and the AIs, he could coordinate from his ship as easily as he could from a fixed location. “We’re jumping out now.”

Burton winced slightly as the planetoid dropped into hyperspace and accelerated away from the telepath system. The drives were, ever so slightly, desynchronised; the battle had left them damaged and there had been no time to carry out proper repairs. With most of the Confederation Navy in the same sorry state, there was no point in withdrawing one single planetoid from duty. It left an uneasy sensation in his chest, as if he’d drunk a bottle of oil and allowed it to rest in his stomach.

He accessed the main computer and studied the crisis reports with a growing sense of defeatism. The initial delight at having defeated the entities had faded, to be replaced with a desperate desire to save as much of the Confederation as possible. It was unbelievable, even to him, to realise just how much had been damaged. Trillions of lives had been lost, with the entities accidentally killing millions merely through causing the technology to fail. It would be many years before humanity fully trusted its own technology again, if ever. The others, the infected and those who sought to stop the infection from spreading, had been destroyed through direct military action. It was impossible to calculate just how many had died in total. The endless catalogue of disasters was beyond his ability to grasp. Perhaps even the AIs could not grasp the scale of the disaster.

And then there was the questions surrounding the device itself.

He had hoped that it could be classified, but the information had escaped quickly, a result of poor choices by some of the telepaths. Aisyaj’s invention – a device that manipulated reality itself – couldn't be duplicated without a naked singularity, yet humanity was ingenious and it wouldn't be long before someone actually managed to create or take control of a new singularity. Once that happened...even the AIs had been unable to predict what that would do to humanity. Some projections, they had admitted, showed remarkably little change, while others had suggested that the human race would destroy reality itself. It was a sour reminder of some of the predictions people had made about the Buckley Experiment. The Confederation had been tempted with the promise of ultimate power and, in reaching for the prize, had discovered the age-old lesson of just what went before a fall.

The information was out. How long would it be before the first singularity was created?

He shook his head and turned back to the list of crisis points. Perhaps, if they were lucky, the next crisis would wait until the Confederation had finished dealing with the remains of the last crisis. Or perhaps not; in his experience, it was rare for anything to wait for when a person was ready to deal with it. The human race would just have to deal with it when it came.

***​

“There's hardly anything left of her,” Captain Pearson said. “She’s lost herself.”

Janine could hardly disagree. She wasn't sure why she’d allowed herself to be volunteered to join the mission to recover the Drak Bibliophile, yet she was becoming increasingly convinced that it was just a waste of time. The entire crew of the city-ship was dead, leaving nothing, but a vaguely haunted feeling echoing in the air. The ship just looked as if it had decayed away, despite the complete absence of an atmosphere or temperature in space. The force-fields they used to keep themselves safe from the atmosphere had been reinforced with spacesuits, just as they would have had to use in the Dead Zone, just in case. If there was still an entity on the ship, she’d been warned, the force-fields would become unreliable.

It didn't seem likely to her, but she understood the paranoia. All of the entities that had manifested in human space – although no one was quite sure if they were separate entities or just one huge entity – had vanished seconds after the Gateway had closed. Still, it would be a long time before the human race took anything for granted again. It rather looked as if the newshounds would never be the same, if the Galactic Net wouldn't allow them to transmit full-body experiences into the minds of thousands of followers. Trillions had died, yet she found herself focusing on a relatively tiny issue. It was the only way to remain sane.

“Maybe,” she found herself saying, “or maybe we have just lost ourselves.”

The Captain didn't argue. The human race had won and yet it felt like a defeat. She knew – from statistics the AIs had shared with her – that the suicide rate had risen sharply over the last few weeks. Humanity had experienced its first brush with something far greater – or at least far more powerful – than itself. Even the Unseen, the star-destroying foe that had brought humanity to the brink of defeat, had been understandable. The entities had been vast, silent and enigmatic. Worst of all, they were still out there somewhere, seeking a new entry into the human universe. Who knew if someone else, one day, wouldn't open a new Gateway?

She shook her head as they teleported back to the River. After everything else, it was very much a fifth-order priority. The human race would survive...and that, above all else, was what mattered.

***​

“The device worked,” the AIs said, flatly. “Given time, the device can be duplicated to allow us to study the nature of reality directly.”

Chen considered it. “It might work,” he said. It was hard to say for sure, for as soon as Aisyaj had entered the Gateway, the unbreakable QCC link had...broken. The AIs had studied every last scrap of data pulled in by their starships and the thousands of sensor platforms scattered around the Gateway, yet even they were unsure as to what had happened inside the pocket dimension. “Are you sure that it is wise?”

In the virtual world of the Galactic Net, where Electronic Humans could shape their own private realities, the human mind had been allowed to play at will. He had seen some truly disturbing realities within the network, some that should never have been created, yet no one could say no. Indeed, there were sociopaths and psychotics who had been pushed into the Galactic Net, where no one could be hurt and they could work through their issues in peace. If they suddenly had the chance to make their fantasies reality...he doubted that there would be much of a Confederation left. The Confederation would have evolved a level of technology that was truly indistinguishable from magic, if it survived the experience

And, he wondered in the privacy of his own mind, it was possible that the entities had started out as humanoid creatures and then been seduced by their own power.

“We need to understand, to change and evolve,” the AIs said. “The dream is worth the risk.”

Chen looked up at the blonde woman and hoped – prayed – that they were right.

***​

Warlord Masji opened his eyes and gazed upon the remains of his empire. It was hard, so hard, to think clearly, let alone remember what had happened. The gods had spoken through him and....and...and...and what? He couldn't remember. It took everything he had to stagger to his feet and then, when he tripped over the body, he sprawled on the ground, tail wagging helplessly in the air. He tried to curse and discovered that he couldn't remember any swear words, not even the ones he’d learned from his father before being sent to uphold the family’s honour. It was so hard to think!

Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself to the window and stared out at his city. There was no sign of life. Dead bodies – from his race and a dozen others – were lying where they had fallen, as if something had sucked the life from them in their final moments. The thought awakened part of his memory and he remembered the gods, remembered how they had granted them victory over their enemies in exchange for...

He found himself hissing in bitter glee. He knew, knew beyond any hope of contradiction, that he was alone. The gods had withdrawn from his world and taken everyone, but him. They had spared him, only to allow him to see the fruits of his own pride. His empire – the empire he had dreamed of building into a force to rival, even crush, the Confederation – was dead. His people might be extinct. The thought drove him onwards, to the balcony, from where the Emperor had once gazed down at his city. Still hissing, he pulled himself over the balcony and threw himself down towards the ground, far below.

***​

Aisyaj opened her eyes.

She had expected oblivion; indeed, she had welcomed it. Instead, she found herself floating in a field of white light, drifting as if there was no gravity field surrounding her. She looked down at herself and was surprised to find that she was naked. Carefully, she opened her mind and started to probe the surrounding universe, but felt nothing. The field of light refused to open itself to her.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” a voice said, from behind her.

She jumped, spinning around so quickly that she almost lost control. A man was standing behind her, a tall man with a pale face, a sardonic expression and short dark hair. There was something about him that wasn't quite real, as if he was wearing a mask. She probed him with her telepathy and recoiled in shock. The man – the entity – was composed of mental force and nothing else. Power flowed through him from a source she couldn't identify, spinning through a complex pattern that seemed to recede to infinity and beyond. Whatever he was, she realised slowly, he was very far from human.

“This place doesn't have any local reality,” he said, while she was still trying to find her voice. “Try looking at your hand.”

Aisyaj, puzzled, obeyed, lifting up her left hand and staring down at it. Just for a second, it appeared normal...and then it dissolved into a complex pattern of light and power, a pattern that seemed oddly familiar. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing. It was her telepathy, taken to its logical extreme. The entity might not be human, but neither was she, not any longer.

“Well?” The entity demanded, finally. “Are you not going to say anything?”

“Hello,” Aisyaj said. “What are you?”

The entity grinned. “We don’t have names,” he – she decided to think of him as male – said. “We know who we are. Welcome to the next stage of existence.”

He seemed to take pity on her. “I know, I know,” he said, his grin sobering into a droll smile. “A little race like yours thinks itself the top of the heap, until it discovers that it’s really a big fish in a very small pond. And then it finds its way into the next stage of existence and discovers that it’s a very small fish in a very large pond.”

Aisyaj found her senses expanding, without any of the pain or struggle she would have experienced as a human. They were floating within an empty realm, populated by beings of light and power. Below her, she saw the Confederation; no, she saw the whole multiverse, spread out before her. The answers were there for the taking. All she had to do was reach out with her mind.

“You can't go home again,” the entity said. Aisyaj started, guiltily. She’d been wondering about travelling back to visit her mother and reassure her. “It’s bad for the development of the mortal races. You’ll have to watch from afar or forget them.

“But hey,” he added, as if to reassure her. “The universe is so much bigger than you ever dreamed.”

The End​