‘It’s in,’ said one of the interface techs needlessly, for the first screen briefly displayed a giant feeding mouth flung out from an incursion in the abutment chamber of Sauros, before that particular sensor in the wormhole was knocked spinning through the air. All in the room now glimpsed the heaving roll of beast, its probing tentacles and glistening red caves, and one brief glimpse of a defence raft, with its back end sheered off, falling and burning, spilling screaming Heliothane into a tree on which every leaf was a mouth.
‘Anything yet from Goron?’ Maxell asked, walking over to stand behind the sensor operator’s chair and peering up at the view on his first screen.
‘Nothing,’ said Carloon, as he too gazed up at the chaotic image and tried to get his first sensor back under control. Abruptly the first screen blanked and the man swore, pushing his chair back from his console, then turning to Maxell.
‘The attack hit them too quickly, so maybe he didn’t get out,’ he said. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’
On the second screen a tiny speck grew into a distant darkness, at the centre of the triangular tunnel.
Already?
Maxell made a rough calculation: ten thousand million kilometres, and no sign of closure from Sauros. Of course, inside the wormhole, the distance the torbeast extended itself through and its speed were a function of the energy it could expend, nevertheless…
‘Any mass readings yet?’
The interface tech who had first spoken said, ‘Nothing yet, we can’t get that until it’s all entirely in the wormhole, where we can calculate then subtract its energy level.’
‘Mother of fuck,’ said Carloon.
Now, in the second screen, the image had grown and was becoming clear. Maxell considered this view similar to what the prey of a piranha shoal might see in its last moments. The wormhole was filled with a great triangular plug of flesh that consisted almost entirely of mouths. This was the sharp end of the torbeast—that which was the essence of its ferocity and voracity. There was something wolfish about this mass, but with everything else but teeth and jaws stripped away. There could be no doubt, seeing this, that the torbeast’s intentions were not benign.
‘It’s pressed right up against the walls. I’ll not be able to get my sensor out of the way of that,’ said Carloon.
‘Can you take it out of phase?’
‘I can, but how will I know when to bring it back in?’
‘When I tell you.’
As the torbeast completely filled the screen, Carloon put that particular sensor a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase, folding the picture into black, speckled with the flashes of potential photons generated by the beast’s energy front.
Maxell considered her options. If they left bringing the sensor back into phase until the last moment, and then saw that the beast was entirely inside the wormhole, this would indicate that Goron had failed. If it revealed, however briefly, that the beast was still pouring in, they could drop the structural energy feed and thus extend the tunnel by perhaps another third of a lightyear. After that, without closure at Sauros, they must act. It meant catastrophic feedback to Sauros and the certain deaths of any survivors there, along with most of the life existing on that past Earth. It was still a matter for conjecture whether this might shove the Heliothane Dominion down the probability slope just as firmly as anything Cowl might achieve.
On the third screen the beast came into view, eventually filled the screen, then folded away as Carloon put that sensor out of phase too. Maxell felt her body growing damp with perspiration.
Damnation! Twenty thousand million kilometres?
At fifty thousand million kilometres the sweat was actually trickling from her armpits.
‘How big is that damned thing?’ asked Carloon.
Maxell didn’t try to formulate a reply. There was a contention amongst Heliothane chronophysicists that the creature was potentially infinite—and it was a contention she didn’t want to think about.
‘I’ll bring the third sensor back into phase,’ said Carloon. ‘It doesn’t matter if we lose that one.’
The sensor operated for less than a second. Carloon froze the view, displaying a blurred image as of a torch shone through someone’s cheek from inside.
‘Coming up on number seven,’ said Carloon.
Maxell noticed how the man’s hand was shaking as he poised a finger over the virtual icon that would put this next sensor out of phase. Three more sensors went the same way and when Carloon got the same view from number four as he had from number three, she knew there was no point in saving any more of them for a hoped-for rear view of the beast.
‘Cut the structural feed to minimum sustainable,’ she instructed the interface techs.
The immediate energy surge caused the floor to vibrate, and she knew the Heliothane population would be feeling this all across the city’s disc. Now microwave projectors and terajoule lasers were pumping the energy excess out into space, but this was an emission the city could not sustain. Eventually something would burn out, and then systems would begin to break down. If that happened the wormhole extension would have to be cut, else the microwave beam transmitted from the sun tap would create a molten sea in the centre of their fine city.
‘Coming up on eleven,’ said Carloon. ‘It’s taking longer.’
‘When it hits twelve, we do it,’ said Maxell. She looked around, seeing that most of the superfluous control-room staff were now standing in a semi-circle behind her. ‘And then we see if we survive.’
Theldon gazed back for a second to where the survivors of Sauros were setting up camp on the mountainside, then turned and negotiated his way down what was once the course of a stream between stands of charred vegetation. He needed a deep pool to take the emergency manifold and there was none around here, the water having been evaporated literally in the heat of battle.
Even though the differences between heliothant and umbrathant were a few minor genetic ones, but mostly a question of loyalties, Theldon had found it difficult to infiltrate the upper echelons of the Heliothane Dominion. It had in fact taken him fifty of his one hundred and twenty-five years of life, and just when he was in a position to strike a blow that would obliterate New London, and the threat that it posed, Goron had shut down his console. He would have liked to have acted even earlier, but only during the chaos of the attack could his own penetration of abutment control have gone unnoticed. He damned himself for not sticking entirely to his job, and warning them of that first incursion because that error had certainly been what had roused Goron’s suspicions. Now fifty years of sycophancy were wasted and ten years of being subordinate to Cowl’s previously unknown primary agent.
Palleque.
They’d brought him back wounded for an interrogation. Theldon was unworried that his own presence might be revealed by Palleque, for the identities of Umbrathane agents or Cowl’s agents were never revealed to each other, precisely for this reason. What had worried him then was just how long it was taking for that interrogation to start. And now… now Palleque was Goron’s great friend and a hero to the Heliothane. Palleque had always been a double agent and this was something Cowl needed to know because that, and the fatalistic way Goron had reacted to the torbeast’s attack, made Theldon feel this whole situation stank.
At last, out of sight of the vast flow of the torbeast pouring into the wormhole, Theldon saw the glimmer of water between some rocks. Heading down, he scanned desperately for a deep pool, but none was yet in evidence. Then, thankfully, it appeared before him: a deep pool right by a seared pile of vegetation that must have been washed down here in an earlier flood. He hurried towards it, having no doubt that Goron’s people would be hunting for him even now. Perhaps Cowl could somehow divert an outgrowth of the torbeast into depositing one of its active scales—or maybe Cowl possessed some other method of retrieving his loyal agents.