Context (120 page)

I didn‘t think he‘d send his
entire army.

And accompany them. Tom glanced
towards the tac-display, where Corduven looked like a living skeleton himself,
taut-skinned and surviving on his nerves.

They must have interpreted the
information in the same way as Tom. If the Blight was a local seed of an
Anomalous form of life, restricted to Nulapeiron, and it was about to join with
the Fulgor Anomaly and whatever counterparts existed on other worlds ...

If the Blight was not already a
dark god, then soon it would be.

‘It was Elva’s idea.’ Tom could
not take the credit for the notion: she knew transmitter design better than he,
for all his use of mu-space tech.

Avernon shook his head, not
knowing who Elva might be. Then he asked a question, but Tom could not
understand.

‘We need to do the same again,’
he said, or hoped he said, to Avernon. ‘The most powerful signal you can
imagine.’

Tom reached inside his tunic,
made a control gesture in front of his stallion talisman, and caught the small
ovoid capsule as it slipped out of the metal when it split apart.

I did it before.

Spreading his hands, Avernon said
something. An excuse, a reason it could not be done. Still, he accepted the
capsule when Tom held it out, and split it open with one thumb to reveal the
crystal inside.

If it doesn‘t work, we‘re all
lost.

Avernon shook his head.

But Thylara moved before Tom
could think of a reply, and dragged Avernon up the dell’s slope—Tom followed—until
they stood at the top with the battle zone a distant conflagration. She
pointed, demonstrating why they had no choice.

We‘re lost, along with all
humanity.

Beyond the battlefield, a white
light blazed greater than the sun.

They
flew, and they prepared to die, and it was magnificent. And Tom wept when he
realized what was occurring.

It was a final, desperate move.

His idea. If he was wrong, brave
young men and women were throwing their lives away for nothing.

Either way, for twenty flight
crews, this spelled their deaths.

No…

Tom had not thought it possible,
but the white light was growing, spreading ...

Standing at the slope’s apex, he
suddenly fell to one knee, buffeted by a great wind which had sprung up from
nowhere. All around, men and women were pitching over.

In the distance, thousands were
engaged in hand-to-hand combat amid the blood and the mud, the churned ground a
silent backdrop to desperate conflict where graser fire cut down distant
combatants while others struggled close enough to inhale each other’s stinking
breaths, feel the opponent’s heart beating beneath their ribs, using any
weapons which came to hand: here, teeth upon the jugular, biting till bright
hot blood spurted; there, the use of thumbs to wetly hook out eyes, then
mercifully snapping the neck while the dying man screamed.

But all the time, that nova-glow
was growing.

Tom knew—he had seen the
confirmation in Avernon’s eyes, and Avernon was a logosophical genius whose
like had not been seen in Nulapeiron for a century or more—that the blazing
white light indicated more than the burning of the atmosphere, the incandescence
of a vast explosion to come.

Worse, much worse: those energies
would rip through spacetime, twist apart its smallest structures, dive through
the tiny extra hyperdimensions of the realspace continuum, tearing a pathway
through the Calabi-Yau layers beneath reality, ripping open a channel which
would stretch all the way to Fulgor, in a perverse exploitation of natural law
which could breach the light-years between this world and the original Anomaly
as though the universe’s vastness were a mere bagatelle, a trick designed to
separate lesser beings from their dreamed-of destinations.

We’re going to die, all of us.

But worse, much worse, was the
Fate of those who might physically survive, their souls lost forever as part of
the expanded Blight: components of the Dark Fire, subsumed within a being so
great its powers and purposes could never be comprehended by single biological
beings, as far below awareness as bacteria within multicellular bodies.

Elva. Do I get to see you again
before we die?

But he did not know where she
was, whether Thylara’s fellow TauRiders had managed to whisk Elva to safety
along the deserted tunnels within the old Collegium.

The sky brightened.

Flickering in his vision—thinking
for a moment that his retinae were damaged—black flames whose dimensions were
impossible to guess danced across that whiteness, as the Dark Fire claimed
Nulapeiron’s skies for itself.

We expect to fight that?

Whirlwinds tore across the
ground, spitting soil and people upwards into the air. Across the battleground,
troops of both sides hunkered down, dug with their fingers into clay and mud,
holding on for survival. Torn corpses and screaming soldiers—Tom could see
their mouths distended wide, though the world remained silent and warm liquid
ran from his ears—were whipped up into the maelstrom, were gone.

It was the Day of Judgement.

In the whiteness, there remained
for now a core of greater energy, the blazing heart of the Blight’s burgeoning
connection which would soon explode in a crescendo of climactic joining as two
Anomalies became one, merged their energies, pulsed together into a fusion
whose urgent drives and godlike powers were beyond Tom’s power to imagine.

There...

He could see them now: twenty
tiny triangles, flying through the air, almost lost amid the glow.

Dead, for sure.

But
Avernon was a genius, and he had networked the flyers together in a way which
would heterodyne the signal that Tom had configured. On board, one flyer
carried his mu-space crystal, which this time surely could not survive.

It was the Zajinets from Ro’s
Story who had given Tom the idea, with their ability to warp Calabi-Yau space
in the near vicinity—the nature of the aliens’ teleportation abilities had been
clear to him, if not to the people involved in those historical events—as well
as travel through mu-space using technology similar to the Pilots’ own.

With his hearing gone and time
running out, he had told Avernon only the barest bones of his theory; but
Avernon had understood before Tom had half begun, and waved him away to get
some peace, working on his calculations while Corduven had the task of deciding
which flyer squadron he would send to their deaths.

And now the action was under way.

Raging storms tore the landscape,
ripped vegetation and bodies apart, while energies lit the skies as the clouds
became incandescent and the white-upon-white glow grew ever brighter overhead,
and the entire atmosphere began to shiver.

It was indeed the Day of
Judgement.

Do you remember, Dart?

But if Tom was right, it could
become Ragnarok: it could be Armageddon.

Can you recall what it means to
be human?

And if that entity, part of the
mu-space universe itself, ever deigned to have such considerations, could It be
moved to care? Would It worry about the species It formerly belonged to, any
more than humans thought about the microbes from which they had once evolved?

For there was a difference:
between the Last Judgement delivered by an omnipotent deity, and the Final
Battle in which two such forces opposed each other...

Whiteness, as the atmosphere was
ripped apart.

It was the moment space split
open.

No...

Pressure waves slammed people to
the ground, but Tom clung on, fingers entwined in grace, squinting against the
wind to see.

The sky ripped apart, as a wide
black ribbon tore through it from horizon to horizon, arching overhead.

Anomaly?

The world ended.

A foetus on the ground, a wet
helpless embryo about to be squashed from existence, Tom wept, for the
millions, the billions of people who would die, for Elva whom he would never
see again.

He felt the dark, uncaring
presence fill the void. He knew its malevolent drives, as though its hungers
could resonate inside a human soul. Rising desire, the vast concentration of
growing energies which were about to burst across space-time, to explode in an
orgy of merging with its distant Anomalous counterpart—

But there existed another power
as far beyond humankind as it was possible to imagine, which existed in another
universe, but whose origins were as human as those of the Anomaly itself.

And this was the moment for It to
manifest Itself.