The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (272 page)

The hyperglider sank swiftly down toward the fissured surface of the summit. Too steep for comfort.
Nothing I can do, this is all gravity now.
Already the rest of the planet had vanished below the false horizon of Aphrodite’s Seat where the lava ended in sheer cliffs over eight kilometers high. Wilson was alone in space above a rugged circle of lava that was a lot more craggy than the images had hinted at. Shards of clinker littered the ground. He checked his helmet seals again, then made sure the suit’s environmental system was switched on. The wings were drawn back to a ten-meter span, their tips curled down in case they were needed for stability should the wheels be damaged on impact.

Fifty meters altitude, and only eight hundred meters from the edge of the cliff. The parabola hadn’t been quite so perfect after all. Wilson fired all the upper surface gas thrusters at once, trying to speed the descent. The quiet crept up on him, unexpectedly unnerving. Even in a glider he expected some sound from air rushing over the wings as it came in to land. Here there was nothing, only the ghost of Schiaparelli crater. He lowered the landing struts. And the speed was still way too fast.

The hyperglider hit and immediately bounced. He saw stone fragments spinning off on either side where the wheels had kicked them. Seven hundred meters from the cliff. The wheels touched again. He heard something then, the sound of impacts on the little tires. Then the cockpit was juddering frenziedly. Dust flared up from the wheels, shooting out streamers thinner than water vapor. The nose landing strut snapped, and the real noise began as the fuselage started skidding across the ground.

Wilson knew it was going to flip. He could feel the motion building.
Nothing I can do. It’s all gravity.
The tailplane lifted up as the main body rolled to starboard, jabbing the wingtip into a small crevice. In low gravity the somersault was almost graceful. The hyperglider turned lazily and thudded down on its upper fuselage. An inverted horizon skidded toward Wilson as cracks multiplied across the cockpit canopy. The tough glass finally shattered in a burst of gas. Raw pocked lava rushed past, centimeters from his helmet. Through the swirling white haze of the cockpit’s evacuating atmosphere Wilson saw a big spur of rock straight ahead. The hyperglider crashed into it, flooding Wilson’s universe with a searing red pain.

“Man! This is one seriously cruddy radar,” Ozzie complained as the
Charybdis
approached the edge of the Dyson Alpha star system. He’d pulled the TD detector visualization out of his grid to find a translucent gray cube filling his virtual vision. It was grainy inside, with minuscule photonic flaws flowing past him like some kind of smog. Clusters of them veered into warped blemishes, knots in the structural fabric that represented the stars back in the real universe. Now they were only twenty minutes out from Dyson Alpha he changed the scan resolution to focus on the star system ahead. There was a silent inrush of the streaming particles as they foregathered as the star. Smaller congregations swept around it in concentric orbits, three solid planets and two gas giants. Ozzie searched for the location of the Dark Fortress but there was nothing available on this scale.
Strange, that mother’s the size of a planet.
He pulled astronomical data out of the grid, and overlaid it. A tangerine reticulation sprang up to mimic the planetary system layout and size-adjusted until it synchronized with the sensor imagery. A simple purple decussation highlighted the coordinates of the Dark Fortress. Ozzie shifted the focus to center it, then expanded to the sensor’s absolute limit. The little gray motes underwent some kind of jitter as they slipped through the volume of space where the Dark Fortress should be.

“Well, something’s still there,” Mark said without much conviction.

“Let’s go take a look,” Ozzie said. He altered their course vector to take them in a mild curve around to the Dark Fortress coordinates. “Can this thing pick out ships?”

“I’ve no idea,” Mark said. “It doesn’t have very good resolution. I suppose if you get close enough it can pick up smaller objects.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I haven’t got a clue about the physics behind any of this, that’s if you can even call it physics anymore. I just do the assembly, remember?”

“Okay. Let’s get ready to drop out of hyperspace five thousand kilometers above the outer lattice sphere. Get our force fields activated. I’ll scan around with ordinary sensors. And, Mark, if there are any ships out there, they’re going to be hostile. They’re going to think we’re here to turn their star nova.”

“I know! I was on Elan when they invaded.”

“So,” Ozzie prompted.

Mark gave him an irritated frown. “So?”

“You’ve encrypted the weapons. You’re going to have to shoot them.”

“Oh. Right. I’ll enable the tactical systems.”

“Good idea, man.”

Ozzie gradually reduced their speed as they drew closer until they were stationary relative to the Dark Fortress. There were sixteen ships or satellites orbiting around the structure. The TD detector couldn’t provide reliable size estimations.

“Got to be big to show up on this piece of junk,” Ozzie decided.

“The smallest mass to create a gravitonic fold in space-time which can be detected from hyperspace is approximately one thousand tons,” the SIsubroutine said.

“They’re ships, then.”

“That is a high probability.”

Ozzie touched the icon that activated his couch’s plyplastic webbing. He turned his head to look at Mark. “You ready for this?”

Mark gave him a calculating look. “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

Ozzie dropped the
Charybdis
back into real space. Tiny segments of the stealth hull peeled back like eyelids, allowing sensors to peer out. Five thousand kilometers in front of the sleek ultra-black ellipse of the frigate the Dark Fortress writhed in electromagnetic agony. Beneath the outer lattice sphere a dense typhoon of radiant amethyst plasma was beset with eruptions and upsurges of copper and azure gyres. The unstable surface spun out tumescent fountains. As they lashed against the outer lattice sphere they triggered snapping discharges deep within the struts causing them to glow with ethereal radiance.

“Wow,” Mark hissed. “Looks like it’s on fire down there.”

“Uh huh.” Ozzie was watching the data from the nonvisual sensors. The energy environment around the gigantic orb was diabolical, with electrical, magnetic, and gravitonic emissions pulsing up from the rutilant interior to create a maelstrom of particles and radiation above the outer lattice sphere. “I guess something this big doesn’t have a quick death no matter what you hit it with,” he mused.

“What about the flare bomb’s quantum signature?”

“It’s still there all right.” Ozzie grinned in relish.
I was right; so screw you, Nigel.
“Unchanged from when they first detected it right after the barrier collapsed.”

“Can you find the origin point?”

“No way, man. There’s a hell of a lot of interference from this plasma storm and God knows what else that’s going on in the depths. We’ll have to use the active sensors, and go in to take a look.”

“They’ll see us.”

Ozzie reviewed the infrared image. The objects that the TD detector had found were Prime ships, glowing cerise against the dark. They were also emitting just about every sensor radiation that the
Charybdis
’s passive scanners could detect, sending great fans of it to wash across the outer shell. Their constant radio emission matched the chaotic analogue signals that MorningLightMountain used to mesh its multitude of motiles and immotile groups into a unified whole. “There’s a wormhole open about ten thousand kilometers away,” he said. “And I’m also picking up some strong radio signals from inside the lattice spheres. It’s got ships in there.”

“They’re waiting for us.”

“No they’re not. Don’t panic. These ships are just part of a science mission to examine this thing. Man, it’s impressive. You don’t realize that until you get up close and personal. Even for a species that went through their singularity event this had to take some doing. And I thought the gas halo was formidable. This could well peak it.”

“Gas halo?”

“Long story. We need to get inside. Do you think our onboard systems are up to it?”

“Why shouldn’t they be?”

“The first lattice has a composition that produces electro-repulsive properties. It’s in the files. Get too close to it, and your power goes dead, that and other generally bad things.”

“How close?”

“Under ten kilometers, I think. The
Second Chance
couldn’t get any probes nearer than that.”

“Ozzie, some of these gaps are over a thousand kilometers wide. The Primes have got their ships through and they’re five times the size of the
Charybdis.
We’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but we’re going to have to switch on our active sensors. There’s no way we can do this on visual alone.”

Mark’s fingers drummed nervously on the acceleration couch cushioning. “All right.”

“Is that quantumbuster ready to go?”

“Yeah yeah.”

“Force fields?”

“Get on with it.”

Ozzie enabled the active sensors. The data return quadrupled, amplifying and clarifying the image. “The environment inside is a lot worse than it was before,” he said tightly. “But I’ve got a more accurate fix on the quantum signature, it’s definitely inside the fourth lattice sphere. The Starflyer agent planted it in the ring structure somewhere.”

“Can we just get this
over with.
Please.”

“No problem, man.” Ozzie fed power into the secondary drive units. The
Charybdis
accelerated at a smooth one gee toward the outer lattice sphere. He was aiming for a pentagonal interstice that measured six hundred kilometers in diameter. Radar return was fuzzed by the struts, denying them any close resolution; but their bulk was easy enough to track.

The infrared sensors reported long slender jets of superheated plasma appearing in space around them. They were being swept by laser, maser, and standard radar pulses, which the stealth hull was deflecting. “Uh, bad news, man. They’ve seen us, sort of; they’re locking on to our sensor emissions. Ships are accelerating this way. Jeez! Nine gees. Is that big Mountain dude paranoid, or what?”

“Let’s speed things up here.” Mark’s voice had risen in pitch.

“Okay, here we go, five gees.” It built quickly, crushing Ozzie back into the cushioning. The outer lattice sphere was expanding fast in the sensor image. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Mark barked.

“It’s not waiting for its ships to catch us. Eight wormholes opening. Five hundred kilometers away. Another four; damn, they’re popping up all over the place. Hang on.” Ozzie bumped the acceleration up to ten gees. He could feel his flesh sagging backward. It was getting very hard to breathe.
Not a day to be wearing tight pants.

Big ships began to fly out of the wormholes, already accelerating. Missiles leaped away from them, plasma exhausts turning space above the planetsized artifact to a noonday brilliance. Nuclear explosions erupted, stabbing vast tracts of coherent radiation toward the tiny emission point betraying the
Charybdis
’s existence. Force field warning icons glared red. Ozzie increased their acceleration to twelve gees. His own anguished whimper joined Mark’s.

MorningLightMountain had never given the alien mega-structure much consideration. Not that it ignored the strange artifact. It had noticed the structure almost as soon as the barrier withdrew. Ships sent to investigate found a planet-size machine with incomprehensible mass properties. Given its scale, MorningLightMountain concluded it had to be associated with the barrier; in all probability it was the generator or a part of it. According to the Bose memories, that was what the humans considered it to be. It did not understand why they called it the Dark Fortress. Something to do with combining
fiction
and
humor.

The investigation that followed was as methodical as MorningLightMountain could be. Its primary attention was of course directed first toward eliminating its rival immotiles, then the conquest of the Commonwealth. Even so, it kept worrying away at the enigma. New sensors were fabricated and sent out. Ships ventured through the giant webbed carapace and began to map the properties, energy patterns, and geometry of the interior. Over the months this became more difficult as the internal energy secretions grew in strength while becoming more frenzied. Eventually the artifact resembled a caged star.