The Evolutionary Void (79 page)

“Naughty, darling,” the Cat taunted. “My turn.”

The hysradar showed Paula two missiles curving up from the Cat’s ship,
arching up through the clouds, where the density was reduced. Of course they
could accelerate far faster than the poor
Alexis Denken
,
which was tunneling through the compacted hydrogen.

They started to plummet again.

“Oh, fuck,” Paula grunted, and dipped ever closer to the smog band.

Her smartcore surprised the hell out of her when it announced that Oscar
was calling through a TD link.

“Little busy,” she sent.

“Appreciate that. But we’re in trouble.”

“Doesn’t it work?”

“That almost doesn’t matter. This ship has no protection from the warrior
Raiel. Can you ask Qatux to have a word, please.”

The missiles were quantumbusters. They activated a hundred kilometers
ahead. A solid wall of energy hurtled toward the
Alexis
Denken
, only partially slowed and absorbed by the enormous density of
the lower atmosphere. Paula dived into the hydrocarbon soup.

“Do what I can,” she promised. Some remote part of her brain was
chuckling over the irony.

The jolt of impact was enough to cause a momentary blackout. Her
tormented flesh was already at its limit. When she recovered, she was still
barreling forward, but her speed was sluggish even with the ingrav and regrav
units operating at their maximum. The force field was heading toward overload,
and she was only five kilometers deep. Blood was pouring out of her nose. A
small medical icon in her exovision reported she was also bleeding from her
ears; there were internal lacerations, too.

The Cat’s ship sliced cleanly through the hydrogen zone until she was
directly above the
Alexis Denken
. Eight missiles
curved elegantly down toward the smog, spreading out in an exemplary spider-leg
dispersal pattern. They’d act like old-fashioned depth charges, Paula realized.
If they didn’t force her up and out into the open, the pressure pulse would
crush the fuselage.
Perfect!

From somewhere deep inside the star, oblivion was surging up through the
superdense matter. The planetary FTL device had triggered a terminal mass
energy explosion sequence far below the photosphere whose gigantic shock pulse
was now slowly flowing down toward the core, creating an unsustainable fusion
surge as it went. Energy levels were building fast from the accelerated
reactions. Not even the enormous gravity gradient and ultracompressed hydrogen
of the star’s interior could contain it.

But as the runaway energy thrust its languid way upward, other, stranger
forces came into play as the device’s exotic matter functions began to blossom,
fed by the star’s own amplified output. Like a parasite growing larger as it
consumed more of its host, the device exerted an intolerable stress on an
infinitesimal point of spacetime, which promptly ruptured. The throat of the
wormhole opened. Behind it, the corona began to darken as more and more power
was drained away through hyperspace to sustain the new exotic energy
manifestation. The wormhole’s terminus began to strain for its designated
emergence coordinate over twenty-eight thousand light-years distant. Half of
the rapidly expanding photosphere was now falling into darkness as the wormhole
usurped more and more of its escalating output.

Troblum actually smiled at the sensor image as the
Mellanie’s
Redemption
emerged into spacetime. The starship’s curving fins glowed a
strong magenta as they threw off the heat that was still seeping through the
force fields. Directly ahead, the surface of the violated star was being
distorted by the imminent nova eruption. Yet the very pinnacle of the
distortion was cascading into night as mass and energy vanished through a dimensional
rift. In the middle of that emptiness a tiny indigo star was shining as
Cherenkov radiation gleamed out from the exotic matter of the wormhole’s
pseudofabric.

“It’s stabilizing,” he gasped.

“How long will that hold for?” Inigo asked gently.

Troblum shook himself. “Not long,” he admitted. For a moment he regretted
not using the original configuration, a wormhole wide enough to swallow a gas
giant. This was only a kilometer across. But it did extend for twenty-eight
thousand light-years.

It works. I was right. I was right about everything.
The Anomine, the Raiel. Everything
.

“I win,” he said softly, then shouted it. “I fucking win! And the
universe knows it.”

“Take us through,” Aaron said.

Troblum wiped his sleeve across his eyes, getting rid of the moisture.
“Right,” he acknowledged. The
Mellanie’s Redemption
slipped forward, accelerating hard as it passed into the wormhole’s haze.

———

The Cat’s exovision showed her the eight quantumbusters activating fifty
kilometers below the surface of the compressed-hydrocarbon ocean. Their titanic
pressure waves inflated, merging.

Hysradar scanned incessantly, trying to discern the
Alexis
Denken
amid the turmoil. But hydrocarbon fluid at that density was
strange stuff, and the massive energy deformation didn’t help. If Paula didn’t
make a dash for freedom up to the hydrogen layer, she’d be dead. No starship
could withstand the kind of force currently cascading through the hydrocarbon.

Still nothing.

The smog rippled apart as the hydrocarbon eruption began. It was like
seeing a perfectly round volcano erupt. The cone kept rising—five, ten, twenty
kilometers high. As it lifted up into the hydrogen zone where the pressure was
far lower, it began to boil violently, spewing out great columns of spray like
rocket exhausts that just kept thundering upward. Within seconds the hydrogen
zone for hundreds of kilometers was clotted by the weird chemical fug. Optical
band imagery was reduced to zero as the greasy vapor surged around her
starship. Regrav units strained to hold position as the gales rushed past.

“So fuck you, then,” the Cat told Paula’s cold, gigantic funeral pyre.

Sensors showed her that the upsurge was still growing, which was
surprising but hardly threatening. The crest reached a full hundred kilometers,
drawing down a barrage of almighty lightning strikes from the belly of the
cloud layer far above.

Mountainous waves began to gush ponderously down the eruption’s flanks to
the ocean below. The Cat still couldn’t see anything, but the starship’s
sensors provided her an excellent graphics-profile image. The hydrocarbon was
draining away from something solid, something vast that was still impossibly
rising upward.

“What the—” she sputtered. Then the profile began to resolve. Fourteen
mushroom shapes were shrugging off their cloak of glutinous liquid and filthy
gas to expose the crystalline domes that roofed them. They were attached to the
main bulk of the thing, which measured just over sixty kilometers long.

High Angel
cleared the unstable cleft in the
hydrocarbon ocean, shedding a tempest of seething smog.

A communication channel opened without any authorization from the Cat’s
u-shadow. “Hello, Catherine Stewart,” Qatux said.

“Fuck.” She sent her starship into a seventy-gee climb, not even able to
scream against the abysmal force crushing her body. Bones snapped; flesh and
membranes tore.

“You don’t remember my wife, do you?” Qatux asked.

“Your
wife
? No!”

“Nor will you ever.”

Exovision showed the Cat an energy pulse blasting straight up from the
High Angel
. It struck her starship—

The shot was powerful enough to warp spacetime in a very specific
fashion, so that although the starship was blown apart in milliseconds, time
within the explosion stretched on and on and on … To the Cat the utterly
excruciating instant of her death lasted for hour after long terrible hour.
Though she never realized it, it was exactly the same amount of time it had
taken Tiger Pansy to die one thousand one hundred ninety-nine years ago.

Nine thousand light-years from the boundary of the Void and five
light-years from the closest star, a wormhole terminus swirled open, spilling
its gentle indigo light out into interstellar space. Thirty seconds later the
streamlined shape of the
Mellanie’s Redemption
flew
out.

“FucktheLady,” Corrie-Lyn exclaimed. “We made it.” She smiled
incredulously and kissed Troblum before he could stop her.

Behind them, the weak light faded away as the wormhole closed, leaving
them as isolated and alone as any humans had ever been. Comprehension of their
status quickly spread through the cabin, amplified and reinforced by the tiny
self-generated gaiafield. It drained away any sense of elation.

Inigo gave Corrie-Lyn a quick hug in the uncomfortable silence that
followed.

“What do you think happened?” Araminta-two asked.

“The important thing is that deranged bitch didn’t follow us,” Oscar
said.

“And Paula?”

Oscar had to grin at that. “Trust me, if anyone in this universe can take
care of herself, it’s Paula Myo.”

“So what do we do now?” Inigo asked.

“There is no question,” Aaron said. “We go into the Void.”

“I meant, what do we do about the warrior Raiel?”

“Two options,” Oscar said. “If Paula survived, we might already have a
clear passage confirmed. If not, we really do try what Troblum suggested and
ask nicely.”

“We got this far,” Corrie-Lyn said.

“That’s the kind of mad optimism I like,” Oscar said. “Troblum, let’s
go.”

“We need to start installing the medical chambers,” Tomansio said.

Oscar grinned. “Another optimist.”

“Just being practical.” Tomansio patted one of the capsules stacked up
against the bulkhead. He didn’t have to move his arm far.

“So next question,” Liatris said. “Who gets to sleep off the next part of
the voyage?”

“Me, happily,” Oscar said. “So long as you bring me out when we go
through the boundary. That I have to see.”

“We’re going FTL,” Troblum announced. “I’ll get the bots to prepare the
forward hold.”

“How long to the Wall stars?” Aaron asked.

“A hundred and sixty hours.”

Paula teleported into Qatux’s private chamber, for which she was
grateful. She certainly couldn’t have walked. There was a fat warming sheath
around her left leg. Twelve semiorganic nodules were stuck over various parts
of her torso, their slender filaments weaving through her skin to combine with
biononic systems deeper inside her body, helping to repair the damaged cells.
She wore a loose robe over all the systems and limped along as if she were an
old woman, which was appropriate enough, she acknowledged grimly.

A human-shaped chair rose silently out of the light blue floor, and she
eased herself into it. Directly ahead the silver-gray wall continued its gentle
liquid rippling. Tiger Pansy’s face smiled back gleefully at her through the
odd twisting motions.

You can rest easy now
, Paula thought.
Wherever you are
.

The wall parted, and Qatux walked in. One of his medium-size tentacles
stretched out, and its paddle tip touched Paula on the cheek. There was a
phantom sensation of warmth that lingered after the touch ended, perhaps a
sensation of sympathy and concern, too.

“Are you badly damaged?” Qatux whispered.

“Only my pride.”

“Ahhh,” the Raiel sighed. “The old ones are the best ones.”

“Thank you for your help.”

“And yet her real self lies dormant in Paris.”

“Where it should be. Not resurrected to act as some human political
movement’s agitator. Not that she ever did as she was told in whatever
incarnation.”

A couple of tentacles waved about in what could have been agitation. “As
you said, the universe needs to be rid of her.”

“I was sure if anything could make her termination definite, it would be
High Angel
. Navy ships have the firepower, but she’d
detect them.”

“Not quite what my race intended this arkship should be used for, but we
live in extraordinary times.”

“I hope I haven’t gotten you into trouble, Qatux.”

“No. We Raiel do not lack for empathy. However, I believe some of the
humans in residence are slightly shocked by events. Not to mention the Naozun.”

Paula couldn’t remember any race called the Naozun. “Good. It’s about
time we stirred things up.”

“We have grown, you and I, Paula.”

“I should certainly hope so. We’ve had long enough.”

Air whistled softly out of Qatux’s mouth. “Indeed.”

“Did the wormhole open as Troblum predicted?”

“Yes.”

“Finally! Something went right for us. Whatever the hell that something
is. I just hope Aaron’s controller knows what they’re doing. On which note, I
have yet another favor to ask.”

“Yes.”

“The
Mellanie’s Redemption
needs to get into
the Void. Can you get the warrior Raiel to let it through the Gulf unharmed? I
genuinely believe it might be our only chance to prevent a catastrophic
expansion phase.”