The skills of some long-departed pilot had settled calmly into Oscar’s mind now, allowing him to manipulate the joystick in kinesic synergy with the hyperglider, bestowing a flawless control over the aerodynamics at some animal-instinct level. Amid the darkening sky and belligerent uproar of the storm he watched the express train from StLincoln leave the tracks in a cloying oily fireball, saw the carriages jackknife and crumple, caught sight of the broken charred bodies sprawled along the side of the tracks. He knew them all now, every night for forty years their faces had filled his one and only dream.
His virtual hand manipulated the wing configuration again, molding it into a wider, longer planform among the red warning symbols thrown up by the onboard array. His speed increased, and he lowered the nose, hurtling down toward the torrent of white foam that soared through the air two kilometers above the canyon floor.
“Wilson?” he called above the cacophony.
Savage rivulets churned around the hyperglider fuselage to be sliced apart by the rapier blade wings. High above, the sun rose over the summit of Mount Herculaneum.
“I hear you.”
The sunlight broke apart on the water, scattering into a seething cloud of ephemeral rainbows. Oscar smiled in delight at the beauty of this world’s bizarre nature. Directly in front and below a dazzling white cruciform shape surfed along the top of the coruscating foam.
“My name is Gene Yaohui.” As he said it, he plunged into the glorious vortex of light and water, crashing straight into Anna’s hyperglider.
It had happened before, many times, back when he was flying with the Wild Fox squadron. It was such a tight institution that they willingly lived each other’s lives in the air and on the ground; they trained together, they partied together, went to the big game together, flew missions together, served overseas together. On base he knew the wives and kids of every other pilot, their money troubles, their fights, their grocery orders; while in the air he knew the performance and limit of each man flying. They were as close as brothers.
When they flew combat missions some didn’t come back. The radar showed them die, its neat little neon-green symbology on the HUD printing up CONTACT LOST codes where their plane had burst apart from a missile strike to fall like a meteor in flaming ruin. Each time, a part of himself had been wrenched away into the crash leaving a void that would never be filled in quite the same way again. But you carried on because that was what the guys wanted, you knew them well enough to be certain. It was that knowledge that gave you the strength to carry on.
And now, three and a half centuries after he thought he’d lost his last squadron buddy, Wilson Kime watched the radar symbols of his wife and best friend tumble out of the sky to smash apart on the implacable rock far below his hyperglider.
“Good-bye, Gene Yaohui,” he whispered.
Two kilometers ahead of him, the river that streaked through the air performed its magnificently paradoxical curve and charged up parallel to the immense cliff face. Orange positioning vectors printed themselves around his virtual vision, and he moved the joystick calmly, lining the craft up on the correct approach path. He withdrew the wings back into a short swept-back planform as the canyon walls rushed in on either side. The waterfall was directly ahead, a sheet of silver ripples ascending at over three hundred kilometers an hour. He held his breath for a long heartbeat.
The hyperglider was abruptly torn upward with a force that thrust him down into the seat. He grappled with the joystick, wrangling the wing surfaces to keep the craft perfectly level as it stood on its tail and blasted straight up for the pristine sapphire sky. Wilson breathed again, then he was suddenly laughing, only it sounded more like a defiant snarl that the Starflyer would hear and know.
Peaking out at five kilometers, the vertical waterfall began to break apart as the immense pressure that created it lessened, escaping from Stakeout Canyon’s brutal constriction. The water parted into two cataracts of looser spume, gushing away north and south onto the huge volcano’s lower slopes. Wilson rode the residual blast of air from the escaping storm, letting it carry him still higher, maintaining velocity. As he soared above the grasslands of the higher, temperate slopes, he watched the massive cloud bands below him tumbling away around the volcano where they would engender the planet’s revenge on the other side.
The radar started to pick out the twisters up ahead as they birthed out of the clear turbulence that marked the upper fringes of the storm. He watched them whipping around, translucent columns skating erratically across the ground that would suddenly be plunged full of dust and stone as they sucked up an exposed patch of soil. The onboard array started tracking them, winding in his options.
Three were in the right area, all of them large enough. One he dismissed, its oscillations too unstable. Out of the remaining two, he simply went for the nearest.
He eased the joystick forward, aiming the nose at the whirling base of the twister, matching the semirhythmic way it skewed from side to side as it snaked its way upslope. The hyperglider’s wings and tailplane were pulled in to simple shark-fin steering flaps as he dived in toward the target. Holding steady, intuitively aiming for where he knew it would go. If Gene Yaohui can aim straight, then I sure as hell can. Our purpose will go on, will succeed.
Wilson tugged the joystick back, pulling the hyperglider into a steep climb as it slid into the twister. The canopy was instantly bombarded with sand and gravel; larger chunks of stone made him cringe as they impacted. Fuselage stress levels peaked. Motors whined directly behind his seat, spinning the forward section of the hyperglider in counter to the twister rotation, adding stability to the climb. The wings had morphed again, becoming propeller blades to tap the tempestuous power of the twister.
Seconds later the hyperglider burst out of the top of the twister. Wilson began an urgent review of the flight vector. He’d gained enough velocity to fly the complete arc over the summit. Good, but not what he wanted. The wings altered their camber, pitching the nose up in a modest aerobrake maneuver. There wasn’t much time, the gases were thinning out rapidly as he left the stratosphere behind. He extended the wings farther still, and angled them to increase their drag on the tenuous gusts of molecules that were slipping past the fuselage. In his virtual vision, the projected parabola slowly sank back down into the one he’d plotted, giving him an impact point a kilometer and a half behind Aphrodite’s Seat.
The hyperglider sailed up out of the atmosphere. Space reverted to familiar welcome black outside, the stars as bright as he’d ever seen them. He watched beads of moisture smeared across the fuselage turn to ice. Beneath his starboard wing, Mount Titan’s crater bubbled with gloomy red light as the lava churned and effervesced, spitting out smoky gobbets of stone that chased parabolas of their own down into the atmosphere where they burst apart in crimson shock waves. In front of the nose, Mount Herculaneum’s flat summit tipped into view as the hyperglider reached the apex of its trajectory, presenting a dismal umber plain of cold lava dimpled by the twin caldera.
Wilson saw it but that was all; there was no interest, no marveling at the vista. He’d honored those taken from him, he’d flown the perfect flight for them. That alone was victory. There was nothing else left for him to do, no adjustments to make. Tiny cold gas reaction thrusters kept the hyperglider level up here in the vacuum. Gravity would bring him down where they’d chosen. That was his last memory of the three of them: gathered around the projected map back in the hangar, squabbling excitedly over the best patch of ground, ignoring the sullen armed Guardians as they glowered at the inappropriate jollity. Oscar and Anna, the two people he would have vouched for above anyone else. People who’d never really existed to begin with.
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 a
bove 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 comp
osition 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.