There was none. This was different. The human wormholes were somehow merging with its own, their energy input helping to maintain the fissure through spacetime. For a moment, MorningLightMountain didn’t understand at all. Then it realized it was now unable to close the wormhole. The humans were injecting so much energy into it they were stabilizing the fabric; they were also locking the exit in place within the Wessex system. There was a hole open directly into its staging post that it didn’t control.
MorningLightMountain tried to introduce instabilities, inducing resonances, modifying power frequency. The humans countered it all with ease. Sensors located a relativistic missile racing for the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain strengthened the force field that covered the exit, and started pulling back the ships that had just gone through, clustering them in a defensive formation. Force fields inside the staging post area were strengthened. It had prepared for a relativistic explosion like last time in case the humans managed to engineer a strike. The damage should be minimal.
A starship materialized inside the force field covering the wormhole exit. It was difficult to detect: the hull was completely black, absorbing all electromagnetic radiation. MorningLightMountain knew it was there only because it partially eclipsed the drive contrails of its own ships outside. There had been no warning of its existence, no detectable superluminal quantum distortion waves that were the signature of human ships and missiles. They had built something new.
The ship moved swiftly into the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain switched every available power source it had into the generator in one last frantic attempt to destabilize the wormhole. Nothing happened; the wormhole fabric remained perfectly constant as the humans countered every power surge. MorningLightMountain gathered its own ships around the generator, ready to fire. Sensors were also aligned in an attempt to learn something about the nature of the new drive.
The human ship emerged from the wormhole. MorningLightMountain’s ships fired every beam weapon they had at the intruder. It vanished.
“Second batch of flare bombs coming through,” Anna reported.
“Oh, Jesus,” Wilson exclaimed. The display showed him over thirty new devices had emerged, accelerating at a hundred gees toward their target stars. “Natasha?”
“If you can’t intercept the devices with Douvoir missiles, hit them with quantumbusters.”
“Son of a bitch.” Wilson nodded at Anna. “All right, authorize that; divert every Douvoir we have in proximity. Some of them must be able to hit a flare bomb.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One of us will run out of superweapons before the other,” Dimitri said. “That will decide who wins today.”
“That decides who wins, period,” Rafael said.
“Yes, Admiral.”
Nigel’s image flickered back into life. “I’ve done what I can,” he said. “We should see a result in the next quarter of an hour.”
Wilson quickly checked the Wessex section of the tactical display. One of the Prime wormholes had vanished. One? “What did you do?”
“Sent a ship through to Hell’s Gateway.”
Wilson looked at Anna and then Rafael, both of whom looked equally perplexed.
“What sort of ship?” a fascinated Dimitri asked.
“Warship,” Nigel said. “Heavily armed.”
“With what?” Natasha asked.
“Advanced quantumbuster.”
“Advanced?”
“You’ll see.” He paused. “If it works.”
***
MorningLightMountain could not detect the human ship anywhere within the staging post system. Most of its sensors had recorded nothing as it emerged from the wormhole. The visual images were strongest, and most informative, showing a black ovoid sucking in light. There was no quantum signature, nothing on the mass detector. Most puzzling and alarming, there was no detectable wormhole. Whatever the human scientist class had come up with, it was radically different from anything they employed before.
Now MorningLightMountain was left wondering what the ship would do. Some kind of attack was surely imminent. It couldn’t understand why the humans hadn’t simply set off a superbomb as soon as the ship was through. What could be more damaging than that? Certainly a large proportion of the equipment and ships at the staging post would have been destroyed. Even the interstellar wormhole would have been threatened.
Why did it never truly understand humans?
Sensors on several of the star-orbiting missile platforms spotted a strong magnetic source emerging from nowhere a hundred thousand kilometers above the corona. MorningLightMountain had placed four thousand such platforms around the star to protect its magflux extractors. Without them, it couldn’t power the wormhole generators into the Commonwealth. But this missile wasn’t fired at any of the magflux extractors, it was heading straight down into the star, and its position had already put it beyond any feasible interception. Given its location and course, there were only two possibilities: either humans had developed corona-rupture devices, or it was one of their superbombs. There was no way to tell until the impact.
MorningLightMountain calculated what damage a flare would inflict on the magflux extractors as they passed above it. With adequate warning, it should be able to use the attitude thrusters to alter their orbital inclination, and steer them clear of the radiation stream. Surely humans would know that. A superbomb would do a lot more damage, though even an explosion of that magnitude could only destroy a small percentage of its magflux extractors. Perhaps the ship was going to launch a series of superbombs. That would seriously degrade its immediate ability to continue expanding into Commonwealth space. Considering this from a tactical angle, MorningLightMountain launched another batch of its own corona-rupture devices at the forty-eight systems it was invading. It also began reviewing the location of the remaining Commonwealth stars. A gradual, measured absorption of human planets was preferable, weakening them and utilizing their discarded industrial infrastructure, but they were now forcing its responses.
The tens of thousands of group clusters managing the staging post wormhole generators began to compute new exit coordinates. Towers loaded with corona-rupture devices were prepared; immotile group clusters analyzed and prepared guidance electronics on all the remaining devices. MorningLightMountain didn’t have as many as it would like. They were extremely difficult to build, even with its technological ability and resources.
Sensors in the star-orbiting missile platforms closest to the human missile caught a sudden burst of quantum field activity just as it reached the chromosphere. Then their communications links ended. Power from all the magflux extractors around the impact zone failed simultaneously, forcing MorningLightMountain to switch to emergency power reserves to maintain over a hundred fifty wormholes into the Commonwealth. Platforms farther away showed the distinctive blast crater of a superbomb starting to form within the corona. Then something else happened. Quantum signature detectors recorded activity leaping off their scale. The star’s magnetic field multiplied in strength by orders of magnitude, producing a pulse effect strong enough to shove a fifth of MorningLightMountain’s magflux extractors and missile platforms out of their orbital track. As they tumbled away with every electronic system burnt out, MorningLightMountain switched to platforms still farther away from the missile impact point to try to understand what was happening. Around the crater zone, a solid plane of brightness was swelling up and out across the chromosphere. Ultra-hard radiation poured away from it, a wavefront powerful enough to slice through the strongest force field.
More missile platforms and magflux extractors failed. MorningLightMountain didn’t have anything left that could scan the impact zone directly; its only remaining platforms were on the other side of the star. Sensors at the staging post still showed the star as it was six minutes ago, passively normal. Power reserves were now insufficient to provide an alternative supply for all the magflux extractors it had lost. It concentrated on maintaining two wormhol
es to each of its captured Commonwealth planets.
The first flotilla of missile platforms to slide out of the initial blast umbra showed what looked like the crescent of a blue-white giant appearing behind the staging post star. And MorningLightMountain finally realized what the humans had done.
The star was going nova.
***
Ozzie woke up as slim beams of bright sunlight slid across his face. He lay motionless for a while, eyes shut, a smile playing across his face. Let’s see. He opened his eyes and brought his hand around in front of his face. His antique wristwatch told him he’d spent nine hours asleep. “Oh, yeah?” His voice was a contented challenge to the universe.
He unzipped the sleeping bag and stretched. The cool air gusted over him, and he reached for his cord pants. Once he’d fastened the belt around his waist, he picked up his checked shirt and grinned knowingly. Very carefully, he slipped his arms into the sleeves. There was no ripping sound from any of the stitches. “Man, some progress!” Both of his large toes stuck up through holes in his socks as he shoved his feet into his boots. “Ah well, then again, maybe not.” They definitely still needed darning. He patted the pocket on his old dark gray fleece where his small needle and thread packet was stashed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
He was pressing down on a giggle as he pushed the curtain aside and stepped out of the crude shelter. “Morning,” he called out cheerfully to Orion, who was sitting beside the fire he’d just rekindled. Their metal mugs were standing on a shard of polyp above the flames, wisps of steam rising from the water inside.
“Five teacubes left,” Orion said. “Two chocolate. Which do you want?”
“Variety is the spice of life, man, so let’s go for tea today, shall we?”
“Okay.” Orion gave the little gold cubes of chocolate a wistful look.
“Fine, thanks,” Ozzie said. He sat down on one of the ebony and maroon polyp protrusions, wincing as he straightened his leg.
“Excuse me?” Orion said.
“The knee, thank you, it’s a lot better, but I’m gonna have to keep up with the exercises to loosen it up. It’s still plenty stiff after yesterday.” He gave the perplexed boy a happy look. “You remember yesterday, right? The walk down to the end spire.”
“Yes.” Orion was becoming petulant. He couldn’t figure what the joke was.
Tochee emerged from the jungle, its manipulator flesh coiled around various containers it had filled with water.
“Good morning to you, friend Ozzie,” it said through the handheld array.
“Morning.” Ozzie took the mug that Orion proffered, ignoring the boy’s scowl. “Did you find anything interesting?” he asked the big alien.
“I have detected no electrical power circuit activity with my equipment.” Tochee held up a couple of sensors. “The machinery must be very deep inside the reef.”
“Yeah, if there is any.”
“I thought you said there was,” Orion protested.
“Something generates gravity. My guess is, it’s too sophisticated to be anything like a machine. Specific quark lattice, folded quantum fields, gravitonic-molecular intersection assembled at a subatomic level, something like that. Who knows, who cares. It’s not why we’re here.”
“What are we here for, then?” Orion asked in exasperation.
“The Silfen community.”
“Well, they’re not here, are they.” The boy waved his arm around in a broad half circle to illustrate the absence of the humanoid aliens. Tea sloshed out of his mug.
“Not yet.” Ozzie picked up one of the bluish gray fruits they’d gathered and started peeling it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay, think on this. Nobody here believes we crashed here on Island Two by accident, right? I mean, what are the odds, man? The gas halo is big in anyone’s language. And the old Pathfinder, face it, we’re not talking Titanic here.”
“A natural collision was unlikely,” Tochee said.
“So we’re not here by accident. And what did we find yesterday? What’s at the end of the reef?”
“Spires,” Orion said doubtfully.
“Which we all decided would make excellent landing areas for flying Silfen.” Ozzie bit into the coarse fruit, grinning at his companions.
“They’ll come to us!” Orion smiled brightly.
“That is an excellent deduction, friend Ozzie.”
“Many thanks.” Ozzie wiped some of the juice from his beard. “It’s worth a try, anyway. I can’t think of any other reason for today.”
The tiniest of frowns flickered over Orion’s face, but he let the comment go. Ozzie couldn’t quite work out if the boy and Tochee were real or not. Temporal reset was not something he believed in. There were many ways of manipulating spacetime within a wormhole so that time appeared to flow faster around the observer, but traveling back in time was a fundamental impossibility. So if this day on the reef was an artificially generated reality, it was a perfect one, which logically meant his companions would replicate their real selves down to the last nuance. Then again, they might be sharing the dream—in which case why didn’t they remember the yesterdays? Of course, maybe there was some kind of closed temporal loop subsect operating inside the gas halo, a microcontinuum operating in parallel to the universe but with different time flow laws. He wasn’t sure if such a thing was possible. Intriguing idea to try to analyze, though it was a very long time since he’d attempted math that complicated. And today, he decided, wasn’t the day to begin again.
After breakfast he made sure Orion and Tochee gathered their belongings to carry with them on the trek through the reef’s forest. Without understanding if what was happening was real or not, he couldn’t risk them losing the few essential items they still possessed if they did find a path and move on to somewhere else. So the tent and water filter pump, the few tools remaining, all came with them.
“Should we be picking fruit?” Orion asked as they wound through a section of trees that were nearly all laden with grapelike clusters of scarlet berries. “We normally pick fruit.”
“If you want to,” Ozzie said. He was concentrating on keeping his head clear of the ceiling formed by the lowest branches as he bounce-walked his way forward. The trees were large and old, producing a wide interlocking lacework of branches and twigs. Sunlight around the trunks was a gentle twilight glimmer, complemented by dry air smelling faintly of spice.
Orion gave a victorious whoop, and immediately shinned up the closest trunk. Ozzie could see him walking along the branches overhead as twigs snapped, and the occasional leaf fluttered down.
“Are you not using your sensors, friend Ozzie?” Tochee asked.
“I’ve got a few running,” Ozzie said defensively. He didn’t fancy trying to explain to Tochee that right now they might both be nothing other than figments in the Silfen Community’s dream. If they weren’t, he’d be facing a serious credibility crisis. “We’ll save the complex ones for something interesting.”
“I understand. I will continue to record the general background, it may help us determine—”
“Hey!” Orion yelped.
Ozzie couldn’t quite tell if the boy was in pain or just startled. There was a flurry of motion in the forest’s lower ceiling five meters away from him. Broken twigs and a small crowd of leaves plummeted down. Orion’s legs appeared in the rent. They swung from side to side a couple of times, and he let go, falling slowly to the thin layer of sandy soil covering the polyp. Several clusters of the red berries fell with him. He looked directly back up, a flustered expression on his face.
“What’s the matter?” Ozzie went toward the boy with an easy bounding motion. Tochee speeded up to match him, its locomotion ridges spreading out for better traction.
Orion was scrabbling backward, his eyes fixed on the tear he’d created. Stronger slivers of sunlight shone straight down through it. “There’s something up there,” the panicked boy gasped. “Something big, I swear it.”
&
nbsp; The front of Tochee’s body lifted off the ground as the alien aligned its pyramid eye on the gap. “I see nothing, friend Orion.”
“Not right up there, more off this way.” Orion pointed.
“What sort of size are you talking about?” Ozzie asked nervously. The boy’s behavior was making him jittery. Was that intentional? Or were they out of the illusion now? If so…His hand slipped down toward the sheath where his knife hung.
“I don’t know.” Orion clambered to his feet. “It was this shape moving, that’s all. A dark shape. My size, maybe bigger.”
Tochee had begun sliding in the direction Orion indicated, winding slightly from side to side in short economic movements. Its colorful fronds were standing proud from its hide, waving slightly in sympathy with its body motion. Something about the alien’s intent and confidence reminded Ozzie of native American hunters. When he looked up again at the ragged ceiling of branches and leaves there was nothing to see, just the occasional flutter of the leaves, the chiaroscuro dapple in perpetual random motion.
“What’s—” Orion began.
Ozzie closed a hand about the curious boy’s pointing hand, lowering it. “Why don’t we just keep on going to the spire?” he said, trying to be casual as he put a finger to his lips. Orion’s eyes bugged.
Tochee reared up, an impressive action even in the reef’s low gravity. The front edges of its locomotion ridges curled into hooks that fastened around a branch, holding it vertical. The manipulator flesh on its flanks lunged out, flattening into two tentacles that shot up into the forest’s vegetation. For a moment nothing happened. Then Tochee let go of the branches, and tugged with its tentacles. Its heavy body fell smoothly. A humanoid form came crashing down through the forest’s low ceiling.
Ozzie was already leaping forward. He landed right on top of the figure struggling on the ground next to Tochee. The pair of them rolled over and over as Ozzie tried to get his opponent in a wrestling lock. Whoever he was holding writhed like an electrocuted octopus. Every time Ozzie grabbed a limb, it was torn from his grasp with above-human strength. Something like a thick leather cloak kept batting against his face. They wound up rolling into the bottom of a tree, with Ozzie on top. The tough dark fabric was slapping into his face again. So he just lashed out with both feet. He was no street-fighter, never had been, so the toes of his boots just connected with the polyp; the follow-up bounce meant his knees landed hard.