Sunborn (50 page)

    Li-Jared turned to look, hearts suddenly burning in his chest. “Oh no.”

    “Oh yes.”

*

   
Deeaab was captivated and sobered by what was happening between Ik and the star. Thanks to the quarx-echo bridging the gulf to Ik’s organic consciousness, Deeaab was able to follow some of the communication. The star’s thoughts Deeaab could fathom more easily, as it bore greater resemblance to Deeaab’s own consciousness. This star’s pain was harder to bear than
*
Brightburn
*
’s, perhaps because
*
Thunder
*
was young and not near the end of its natural life, as
*
Brightburn
*
had been. The long cords of strange matter running through it and joining it to the more distant star would lead to mounting pain for this star, and violent death for the other. And
*
N-n-ck-k-k-k
*
’s death would cause a cascade of violent death for
*
Thunder
*
 and many other stars.

    Deeaab was all too familiar with death. In another time and universe, Deeaab had witnessed great violence, multiple cascades of death. Indeed, only by slipping from that universe to this had Deeaab—and, separately, Daarooaack—escaped that death themselves, a death of the universe itself, a winding down of all energy and life. Slipping through a rare, fleeting connection between universes, they’d found their way to a place where life still lived, where death, while everywhere, could be held back for a time. Deeaab greatly preferred life to death. And he did not want to be alone again.

    Now, as the small, quick life did their work, Deeaab thought hard about how this particular pain, this impending death, might be stopped.

    It would not be easy...

    Even as Deeaab thought this, another hypergrav shock wave passed through, coming from the direction of
*
N-n-ck-k-k-k
*
. Were those waves coming more frequently? He feared so. He feared they were a sign of something nearing completion.

*

   
As they floated back along the ridge overlooking the dark-matter river, Bandicut began to feel as if he were on a long quest in some phantasmagorical land, searching for a magical
something.
He didn’t know what. He had the feeling that if he slipped on a rock and fell into the glowing river to his left, the waters of the river would dissolve his body and separate his soul from it within moments. Which probably wasn’t far from the truth. He felt an acute sense of vulnerability; so easy to lose control and slip...

   
/// What’s really bothering you? ///

   
Bandicut grunted. /For one thing, the fact that we’re getting farther and farther from the place where we came in. I’m not sure I could find my way out, if anything happened to Nappy./

   
/// Good reason to keep a sharp eye out

   
for Napoleon’s safety. ///

   
/Yah./

   
/// John, maybe you need to slow down

   
and take a few deep breaths.

   
You’re very tense. ///

   
/You think?/

    At that moment, his surroundings began to vibrate violently. “Cap’n, hypergrav shock waves,” Napoleon warned.

    Bandicut felt his own body shake. Reaching out to grab the nearest support, he missed, took a bad bounce off a melted-looking piece of machinery, and caromed unexpectedly to the left. Before he could catch himself, he was floating out from the ridge toward the river of dark matter. “Shit!” he yelled. “Help—Napoleon!” He flailed his arms. There was nothing to grab on to. “
Napoleon,
 can you—?”

    Something grabbed his ankle and jerked him to a stop. He gasped with relief. Now he was being pulled back. Twisting around, he saw that Napoleon was anchoring himself with two or three grippers, and reeling in a rope that was coiled around Bandicut’s ankle. “What the—is that Ik’s rope?” he asked as Napoleon brought him alongside and released the rope with a final tug.

    “It is a copy,” the robot said, retracting the line. “The ship made it for me. That was a pretty strong shock wave we just felt. Likely it is a sign of growing instability.”

    Bandicut grimaced as they continued on. The hardware landscape began to open out, as though they were emerging from a valley into a plain. They passed over a low rise, and the view before them took Bandicut’s breath away. The dark-matter river, on their left, emerged from the valley and took a sharp turn so that it looped to the right to cut a glowing swath in the landscape before them. It divided into numerous branches, until it looked like a great meandering estuary system. But the branch-streams, instead of draining into an ocean, rose up from the landscape and climbed like spider-web tendrils into the darkness of a starry sky.

   
The movement of the ghostly stream was clearly visible—coming
down
from the sky in the many individual streams, and joining to become the great river that flowed past Bandicut and Napoleon, and continued behind them to the n-space tunnel and on into the heart of a star.

    Bandicut remained poised, scarcely breathing. Finally he murmured, “This is it, then? This is where it’s brought in from all over space and funneled together? Into
*
Thunder
*
and then
*
Nick
*
?”

   
Napoleon ticked slowly. “It would seem so, Cap’n. This is what will kill
*
Nick
*
, if we don’t stop it.”

    “And do you see any way to do that?”

    “I can only hope that somewhere down there is something that controls all this.”

    Bandicut nodded. “Any information from the probe you sent this way?”

    “Nothing useful so far.”

    Bandicut sighed. “Shall we go have a look, then?”

*

   
“Copernicus, what
is
 that thing that’s moving toward us?” Li-Jared rubbed the control panel nervously with two fingers. He was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

    “Appears to be another Mindaru object, doesn’t it?” said Copernicus.

    “I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

    “Not this time, no. It appears,” said Copernicus, “that we have drawn the attention of the local Mindaru bouncers.”

   
Bwang.
 “What?”

    “Local guardians. Sentinels. Trouble. There’s a good chance we’re going to want to move quickly. I recommend you consider recalling John Bandicut and Napoleon.”

    Li-Jared made a gravelly sound. “I don’t know if you noticed, but they’re in there trying to stop a
star
 from exploding.”

    “I know that,” said Copernicus. “But it’s no good having us all dead, is it?”

    “No, but—” Li-Jared dropped the hand he’d raised in protest and keyed the comm. “Bandie, what is your status?”

    There was a long pause before he heard anything, and then, distant with static, Bandicut’s voice:
“We’re trying to find the control point to alter the stream of dark matter. What’s the ship’s status?”

   
Bong.
 “Not much happening here. Except Copernicus has detected what he describes as a Mindaru ‘bouncer’ approaching. He suggests you might want to come back to the ship. We may have to move quickly.”

    Bandicut’s voice sounded even more strained.
“We need every minute you can buy us. It could be critical.”

    Li-Jared drummed his fingers on his chest. “Do you have a time estimate?”

   
“No, I—wait, Napoleon is communicating with Copernicus—”

   
Li-Jared turned and looked at the robot, half-embedded in the wall. “Well?”

    After a moment’s delay, Copernicus said, “Napoleon suggests, if necessary, we may have to leave them temporarily behind—if we’re forced to move to evade the Mindaru sentinel.”

    “We will do no such thing,” Li-Jared growled. “We will hold our position. Right here. Is that understood?”

    Copernicus seemed to hesitate before answering. “Understood.”

*

   
Bandicut followed Napoleon into a narrow cleft, which cut off the view of the river of light. He felt as if they were surrounded by living rock as they passed between the walls of the cleft. There was an electricity in the air, and quick flashes of light along the walls, like firing synapses. Napoleon pushed on ahead without hesitation, and as Bandicut followed, he felt an odd
crinkling
 sensation.

    “N-space transition,” Napoleon reported. “We’ve gone a dimension or two deeper. And...we’ve lost contact with the probe.”

   
Damn.
“All right, that means we’re now
where?
” Bandicut looked around uneasily. Everything had changed, or at least shifted around. He rolled slightly, and was shocked to see the ghostly glowing river flowing over his head. He suddenly realized he was looking up as if through the bottom of an overhead aquarium, with the dark-matter streams moving
above
 him. It was an extremely disorienting sensation.

    Napoleon was examining the surface of the wall, where there had been glimmers of light a moment ago. “I am attempting to find a control interface. There are surface points here for the local intelligence system, but I cannot seem to find a linguistic common ground. I am at a loss.”

    Bandicut scowled, thinking. He mentally paced in circles. They didn’t necessarily need to understand the whole control system, if they could just make a small change, in the right direction. It was a problem in plumbing, really. Hydraulics, maybe—or fluidics. It was a problem on a cosmic scale, but the same principles might apply. “Nappy? Is it possible we could influence it in some
very small way
?”

    An idea was beginning to form, and he hesitated before mentioning it to Napoleon. “Napoleon, what if...” and he hesitated, and looked within to Charli and the stones for confirmation. /Can we do this?/

   
*We are ready to try.*

   
“Suppose
I
 tried to make contact with the control. I mean the stones, not me, but I would have to make the contact. Maybe they can translate where you—”

    “Where I could not. Because they learned some language from that mech. It is a promising idea, but a risky one, Cap’n.” The robot turned and eyed him with pale-glowing sensors.

    “Yes, it is. But if we don’t succeed, that star’s going to blow up and take us with it, anyway.” Bandicut surveyed their immediate surroundings; they were still in what felt like a rock passage. He floated into position and hooked his feet on something to steady himself, and reached out to touch the spot Napoleon had just been probing. /Are you ready for contact?/

   
*Proceed.*

   
Taking a deep breath, he pressed the silver-coated palm of his hand to the wall. At first he felt just a tingle, and then a sputter. He resisted the urge to pull away, quelled the fear of electrocution...

    And then a flash of purplish blue light passed over him. And a second flash, at a different angle. And with a rush, he felt himself buzzing with dancing electricity, and voices, and rapidly thrumming strings. For about ten heartbeats, he was completely out of his body, and unable to control so much as a thought.
Something
 was happening between the stones and the interface. Then all the sensations vanished as abruptly as they’d come, except for a burning in both of his wrists. And that, too, faded and he came back to his senses, peering at Napoleon. “I—I just—oh, my God, I don’t know what I—”

   
/// That was...very strange.

   
John, the stones took a jolt.

   
I don’t know what they learned,

   
or did...///

   
The stones were silent. It was impossible to tell if they had accomplished anything. Napoleon was asking, for the third time, if he was okay. He didn’t know. But there was something else—a deep, thrumming reverberation that shook him like the pulse of some gigantic creature.
“What the hell is that sound?”

    “Cap’n, I’m not picking up any unusual sound,” Napoleon said.

    Bandicut cocked his head, puzzled. He began to experience a strange kind of flickering, as though a strobe were nearby. Images began pulsing in his thoughts—dreamlike, but broken and stuttering, as though someone or something were rifling his memories. “Napoleon, I—” he began, and then, /Charli—/

   
/// I’m...trying...///

   
There was a sudden
snap
and Bandicut felt another change within himself. A slippage. A shifting of internal gears. A blurring...

   
/// John, are you—? ///

   
Silence-fugue. Oh God.

    His mental space ballooned outward, and along with the terror, he felt a sudden airless clarity.
Yes.
Now he saw things that before had been hidden from him, as though by obscuring layers of dust. This was the way to view reality, the saner way; he could
see
the razor-sharp focus of the other intelligence around him, like an enormous network of flickering tendrils. And he could see other things as well: Napoleon’s thoughts in the midst of a small cyclone, as threads of the other tried to probe Napoleon’s mind-space...and now a looming presence that was at once alien and familiar, emerging from a deeper dimension.

   
/// Hold tight, John.