“Dudley? This is Commander Kime. How… Are you all right? Jesus, Dudley, we never hoped for so much.”
The voice was distorted by what the Bose memories identified as emotions of incredulity and hope.
“I made it, Captain. I’m okay. And I’ve got a whole load of new friends with me just waiting to meet you. Should be able to rendezvous with you in a little while.”
“Dudley, are you on the ship that’s sending your signal?”
“Sure am. How about that for coincidence? I’ve been out here for months helping the Primes with their wormhole.”
“Dudley, that ship’s under ten-gee acceleration.”
The voice had changed. MorningLightMountain’s Bose memories identified it as puzzled.
“Yeah, God don’t I know it. It’s hell on my spine.”
“You can slow down,” Wilson Kime said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“Right, sure. I’ll tell the captain.”
MorningLightMountain reduced the acceleration on its interdiction squadron to three gees. It didn’t want to scare the humans off—another new concept. So many since the barrier had fallen.
“Where’s Emmanuelle, Dudley? Is she there with you?”
“No, she’s back on the homeworld DEAD RUN YOU DUMB FUCK RUN THEY KILLED US THEY’LL KILL ALL OF US IT’S INHUMAN RUN YOU MOTHERFU—”
MorningLightMountain wanted to scream in pure fury as the betraying corruption burned through its consciousness. Its mind crushed the Bose memories as they blossomed out of the immotile brain where they had been stored, pummeling them back under control. Crushing them. Eradicating them from existence.
Demented, defiant human laughter echoed around inside the giant building that housed the central immotile grouping of MorningLightMountain, the core of its existence. The memory of laughter. Mocking as it faded.
Wilson stared, aghast, at the speaker that just a minute earlier had delivered a joy that had brought him close to tears. The shout lingered in the deadly silence that filled the bridge.
He’d known, deep deep down inside, from the moment the Dudley voice claimed to be on a ship doing ten gees, and speaking as calmly as if they were sitting at a bar with a couple of drinks. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
“The alien ships have started accelerating again,” Anna called. “Eight gees. Nine.”
“Tu Lee, take us out of here now,” Wilson ordered. Déjà vu plucked at him, almost comforting in its horrifying familiarity. “Oscar, Antonia, scatter pattern one. You heard the man: run for it.”
The screens showing visual spectrum images of space outside began to glow blue, as if they’d glided into a patch of planetary sky. Tu Lee sent the Conway streaking out of the Dyson system at half a light-year an hour.
“Goddamnit, what happened?” Anna said. “What was that talking to us?”
“Whatever was left of Dudley Bose,” Wilson said grimly. Damn, and I always thought bad of him. “Any sign of pursuit?”
“Nothing chasing us in hyperspace, Captain,” Tunde said. “The StAsaph and Langharne are ahead of us, and spreading out.”
Wilson studied the displays around his couch, breathing deeply to try to calm his racing heart. He watched the other two scoutships diving wide into the depths of interstellar space, making it difficult for any potential enemy to chase all of them. A pitiful maneuver, really. If the aliens had built FTL starships they could send a thousand after each of us.
“We were out of hyperspace for six and a quarter minutes,” Anna said as the bridge crew started to relax. “Our mission time out here just keeps getting shorter, and we still have no idea what they look like.”
Wilson gave his e-butler some instructions, and it folded back one of the display screens around his couch. He turned to look at Tunde Sutton. “What did our sensors collect?”
“Almost nothing, Captain,” the physicist said glumly. “We weren’t there long enough to obtain any decent imagery.”
“What about that giant wormhole?”
“Ah, yes.” Tunde seemed curiously reticent to say anything. “You know, we’ve never attempted to build anything on such a scale. And the amount of quantum activity we did manage to detect indicated a considerable number of wormholes have been opened within the Dyson system. All of them were significantly smaller than the one above the outer gas giant. It confirms our previous conclusions about their industrial capabilities. A year and a half ago they didn’t have one wormhole generator.”
“Just how big was that one above the gas giant?”
Tunde began to call up hysradar records, concentrating on the outermost gas giant with its three large moons, and superimposing what little visual imagery they’d snatched. He focused the image on the third moon, orbiting seven hundred ninety thousand kilometers above the turbulent equatorial storm clouds. It was a rocky planetoid with half of its fractured surface covered in ice sheets averaging five kilometers thick. Hundreds of force field domes had encased nearly a quarter of the total surface area. Fusion drive ships clouded space around it, forming a bright ring two hundred fifty kilometers above the equator. From that a sparkling river of blue-white plasma stretched across to the moon’s outermost Lagrange point, fifteen thousand kilometers away. The aliens had stationed the wormhole at the center of the gravitational null-point, where it kept its position with a minimum of thruster usage. There was no visual data, the generator structure itself was very dark, although it showed as a gleaming crimson spark in infrared. Hysradar revealed a toroid with a central aperture measuring two and a half kilometers across. Ships were flying into the center at the rate of one every five or six minutes, large ships.
“Son of a bitch,” Wilson murmured. “Is there any way of telling where that leads?”
“No, sir,” Tunde said. “But judging by the strength of its quantum distortion, I’d say several hundred light-years. Where they get that much power from I don’t know, there’s no corresponding neutrino emissions which would indicate fusion sources.”
“Have they reached inside the Commonwealth?” Wilson asked sharply.
“It won’t extend that far. Four hundred light-years, possibly, maybe five.”
Wilson wanted to feel relief. It should have been there, knowing the aliens hadn’t reached home behind him. But the sensation eluded him completely. What they’d seen was too worrying. Even for a civilization this size, the giant wormhole was too obviously a crash project: an act of desperation. He was sure he knew where it would take them eventually. The why of it, though, he couldn’t understand. What could they possibly want with the Commonwealth?
…
It was an astonishing landscape. Nothing you couldn’t find on any H-congruous world, but scaled up twenty percent. Higher mountains. Deeper valleys. Wider rivers. Broader plains. Even the sky seemed bigger, though that might have been due to the absence of clouds during the (long) daytime.
All of which made Ozzie worry about what kind of animals they might encounter. Rats the size of dogs? Dogs the size of horses? What might the elephants be like, or the dinosaurs?
They’d been here for eight days now, though, and hadn’t seen so much as a gnat so far. The plants didn’t quite match up to the scenery; they were all bland. Grass that was like a sheet of moss. Bushes that were globes with slender little leaves that were woven together so tightly that from a distance they looked like a single membrane. Trees that had a simple conical symmetry with dark green finger-sized leaves. Botany at least wasn’t adventurous here. In fact, he hadn’t seen a single flower since they arrived. Maybe evolution had bypassed the whole concept of pollination. Or maybe there were no insects to pollinate.
That made Tochee the most colorful thing on the planet. The big alien had recovered quickly from its frostbite as they wandered along the paths after escaping the Ice Citadel planet. Its rubbery locomotion ridges had almost completely healed up now after weeks of sliding along through temperate grassland and loamy forest floors. Of the three planets they’d progressed through, one of the paths had been in a tropical zone. Tochee had really liked that. The little shriveled fronds sprouting from wrinkles in its brown hide had sprouted into colorful life. They now resembled feathery ferns whose vivid pigmentation acted like a silky flowing cloak; ripples of scarlet, tangerine, turquoise, and emerald swayed along its body with every motion and gust of wind.