Useless; all of it useless. The Melancholia’s defences were simply too small-scale, too short-range, to have any chance against the pursuing megatonnage of the lighthugger. Hardly surprising; some of the Infinity’s guns were larger than the shuttle, and those were probably the ones that it had not yet bothered deploying.
Cerberus was a grey immensity, filling a third of the sky from the shuttle’s perspective. By now they should be decelerating, yet they were busy wasting precious seconds being fried. Even if they fought off the attack, they would be moving uncomfortably fast…
More of the hull vaporised.
She let her fingers do the talking, typing in a programmed evasive pattern that would undoubtedly get them out of the immediate focus of the graser onslaught. The only trouble was, it depended on sustaining thrust at ten gees.
She executed the routine, and almost immediately blacked out.
The chamber was hollow, but not empty.
Three hundred kilometres wide, Sylveste guessed it to be, though that was sheer guesswork, because his suit radar stubbornly refused to come up with a consistent distance for the diameter of the chamber, no matter how many readings he asked it to make. No doubt what was in the middle of the chamber was causing his suit difficulty. He could understand that. The thing was causing him difficulty as well, though in perhaps not quite the same way. It was giving him a headache.
In fact, there were two of them, and he wasn’t sure which was the stranger. They were moving, or rather one of them was, locked in orbit around the other. The one that moved was like a gem, but it was a gem so complicated, and so constantly in flux, that it was impossible to describe its shape, or even its colour and lustre from moment to moment. All he knew was that it was large—tens of kilometres wide, it seemed—but again, when he asked the suit to confirm this, it was unable to give him a coherent reply. He might as well have asked the suit to comment on the subtext of a piece of free-form haiku, for all the sense it gave him.
He tried to enlarge it with his eyes’ zoom faculty, but it seemed to defy enlargement, if anything growing smaller when he examined it under magnification. Something seriously strange had happened to spacetime in the vicinity of that jewel.
Next, he tried to record a snapshot of it using his eyes’ image capture facility, but that failed as well, and what the image showed was something paradoxically more blurred than what he appeared to see in realtime, as if the object were changing more rapidly on small timescales—more thoroughly—than on timescales of seconds or longer. He tried to hold this concept in his head and for a moment thought he might have succeeded, but the illusion of understanding was only fleeting.
And the other thing…
The other thing, the stationary thing… if anything, this was worse.
It was like a gash in reality, a gaping hole from which erupted white light from the mouth of infinity. The light was intense, more intense and pure than any he had known or dreamt of—like the light which the near-dead spoke of, beckoning them to the afterlife. He too felt the light was beckoning. It was so bright he should have been blinded. But the more he looked into its fulgent depths, the less it seemed to glare; the more it became only a tranquil, fathomless whiteness.
The light refracted through the orbiting gem, casting varicoloured, constantly shifting slabs of illumination on the chamber walls. It was beautiful; intense and ever-shifting, beguiling.
“At this point,” Calvin said, “I think a little humility may be in order. You’re impressed, aren’t you?”
“Of course.” If he spoke, he did not hear his own words. But Calvin seemed to understand.
“And this is enough, isn’t it? I mean, now you know what it was they had to conceal from us. Something so strange… God only knows what it is…”
“Perhaps that’s just what it is. God.”
“Staring into that light, I almost believe you.”
“You feel it too, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not sure what I feel. I’m not sure I like it, either.”
Sylveste said, “Do you think they made this, or was it something they happened to find?”
“This is a first—you asking my opinion.” Calvin seemed to deliberate, but his answer was hardly surprising when it came. “They never made this, Dan. They were clever—maybe even cleverer than us. But the Amarantin were never gods.”
“Someone else, then.”
“Someone I hope we never meet.”
“Then hold your breath, because for all I know, we’re about to.”
Weightless, he jetted the suit into the chamber, towards the dancing jewel and the source of searingly beautiful light.
When Volyova came around, it was to the sound of the radar warning siren, which meant that the Infinity was preparing to re-aim its grasers. It would not take it more than a few seconds to do so, even allowing for her random-walk evasive manoeuvre. She glanced at the hull health indicator and saw that they were down to only a few remaining millimetres of sacrificial metal, that the chaff throwers were depleted, and that—realistically—they could withstand no more than one or two additional bursts of graser-strike.
“Are we still here?” Khouri asked, seemingly astonished that she was even capable of framing the question.
One more strike and the hull would start outgassing in a dozen places, if it did not spontaneously vaporise. It was hot now; noticeably. The heat of the first few sweeps had been efficiently dissipated, but the last one had not been so easily parried, and its lethal warming energies had seeped inwards.
“Get to the spider-room,” Volyova shouted, momentarily throttling down the thrust to permit locomotion around the ship. “The insulation will enable you to survive another few strikes.”
“No!” Khouri was shouting now. “We can’t! At least here we’ve got a chance!”
“She’s right,” Pascale said.
“You’ll still have one in the spider-room,” Volyova said. “Better, in fact. It’s a smaller target, for one. I’m guessing the ship will direct its weapons against the shuttle in preference, or it may not even realise that the spider-room is anything but wreckage.”
“But what about you?”
She was angry now. “Do you think I’m the type to indulge in heroics, Khouri? I’m coming too; with or without you. But I have to program a flight pattern into the shuttle first—unless you think you can do it.”
Khouri hesitated, as if the idea was not totally absurd. Then she unbuckled from her couch, jabbed a thumb towards Pascale and began moving, as if her life depended on it.
Which, rationally, it probably did.
Volyova did what she had promised she would do, inputting the most hair-raising evasive pattern she could imagine, one that she was not even sure she or her companions would be capable of surviving, with peak bursts exceeding fifteen gees for whole seconds. But did it really matter now? Somehow, the idea of dying while already unconscious, in the warm, muggy torpor of gee-induced blackout, was preferable to being burned alive, in vacuum, in the invisible heat of gamma-rays.
Grabbing the helmet she had worn when she boarded the shuttle, she prepared to join the others, mentally counting down until the initiation of the evasive pattern.