Exiting his interface sphere, he took a route through the space station he hadn’t taken for a while. As expected, when he had taken just a few paces along a particular access tube, Owl contacted him.
“You’ve thought of some new addition?” Owl enquired, tone utterly neutral.
“No.”
“Perhaps you are considering replacing some of the shielding with one of the new gravity-forged meta-materials?”
“No.”
“Maybe some radical redesign of the recording core?”
Crowther sighed and replied, “Of course not—it’s as good as it’s ever going to be.”
Owl’s tone might have been neutral but its sarcasm laced every word. It knew him far too well and was aware that he had started to get a little stir-crazy. It also knew that he always paid a visit down here when mulling over what to do about that.
Reaching a double sliding door, he sent an instruction and it opened ahead of him, revealing itself to be a yard’s thickness of laminated armour, superconducting meshes and other materials. In the long cylindrical room ahead, braced by shatter-clamps, rested a long missile of gleaming blue metal. As he gazed at the thing, Crowther tossed up a schematic of it in his mind. The well-hopper contained crystal storage, internally braced with meta-material shear planes and micro-hardfields. Its engine was a single solid-burn fuser with thrust that would leave a prador kamikaze standing, complemented by a Laumer drive—expensive and difficult to manufacture. And its structure, enclosing these, along with solid-state fuser-reactors and hardfield projectors, was also solid through and through: layered meta-materials forged on the surface of a brown dwarf. The thing was practically indestructible, which was what it had to be to escape a close encounter with the event horizon of a black hole.
The Well Head, being such a valuable asset, possessed every safety precaution possible. It still had the U-space drive that had brought it here to this system, though it was considered unlikely ever to be used again because, besides the strange data issuing from the black hole, the studies and experiments to be conducted here had already backed up a thousand years into the future. However, the drive was maintained as one of those safety precautions. The Well Head had all those other engines capable of taking it away from the black hole, and it had all its protections but, if something went seriously wrong here and all of those became unusable, the Well Head could still jump away. In the end, however, the Well Head itself was disposable, and Crowther and Owl did not consider themselves to be.
If everything began to go badly wrong here and even the U-space drive became unusable, which was always a distinct possibility when sitting close to one of the most destructive forces in the universe, Crowther and Owl could at least escape by runcible. That was the theory. In reality, if everything else was falling apart, it was highly likely that the runcible would go down as well. The well-hopper had started as a project to improve the durability of the probes they occasionally shot close to the black hole and had grown from there. It had then turned into a way of gathering data while skimming the event horizon, but that idea had soon been abandoned when it became evident that though the crystal storage might survive such a close encounter, the hopper’s sensors would not. It had been Owl’s idea, shortly after the EMR blast front resulting from the hole’s digesting of a red dwarf had knocked out more systems than was supposed to be possible: make it their escape of last resort.
The theory was that if everything went completely wrong and the Well Head was being sucked into the black hole, both Owl and Crowther could download to the crystal storage aboard the hopper. Crowther wasn’t entirely in love with the idea because the transference would have to be fast and would require the destructive conversion of everything he was into quantum data. Still, it was survival of a sort. There protected from the titanic forces in play about the black hole, the fuser in combination with the Laumer engine just might be able to fling them both out intact.
“No, I can think of nothing to add,” said Crowther.
“Nothing worth disassembling,” Owl said. “At present rates of technological advance I calculate another solstan year until the next upgrade.”
Schematic and statistical analyses faded from Crowther’s mind, and boredom returned. As was usual when he came here, Crowther found it easier to get some perspective. The research here at Layden’s Sink was lined up for centuries, his own life had a span that could only be measured when it ended and that only seemed likely to happen by mischance—the kind of mischance he and Owl had built the well-hopper to avoid. Great vistas of possibility opened for him and the boredom fled as he initiated other levels of his mind and called up other interests.
“History,” he said.
“Ah,” said Owl. “When are you going?”
“Very soon, I think.”
“Earth?”
Yes, it was time to go to Earth and clarify some of his research into the histories of the worlds falling into Layden’s Sink, there to be torn apart and erased forever.
7
Lelic
The air was full of smoke, the smells of cooking flesh, screams and crashes. Lying amidst tangled wreckage, Lelic gazed at where sharp metal had sliced through above his tail fluke right to the vertebrae, and was just too terrified to feel any pain. He smothered a dry cough then peered at the blood on his hand. He tried to convince himself that perhaps this was a result of the fall but, as he struggled to free himself, suspected it had more to do with that black dust he had breathed in.
The collapse of the stand had lured the prador out of its squat and now, having consumed all but one foot of the spectator he had grabbed and with such an excess of meat available, Sfolk had decided it was time to play. While the prador made selective amputations to stop his victims running away, then concentrated on disembowelling Dorrel, Lelic hauled himself out of the wreckage of the pulpit and attached walkway and, using his auxiliary tentacles, dragged himself towards the armoured door through which the apparently empty space suit had walked. The prador hadn’t noticed him, but he knew that if it did his death would likely be more protracted than that of the screaming Dorrel. Sfolk was an intelligent creature and knew very well who had been running the show here.
Reaching the door, Lelic auged into the station system, and there found chaos. The station’s computer was both fighting some sort of incursion and trying to relay power to critical life-support, because something had also tapped into the reactors and was sucking power from them at an ever-increasing rate. However, access to the arena controls remained available, probably because whatever had attacked them had knocked out every weapon and did not need to do any more. Lelic accessed the door and opened it, crawled through, but when he tried to close it the system just crashed. He turned and snapped out a tentacle to tug on the door, simultaneously using his other tentacle to hit a manual control. Even as he did this he saw Sfolk spin round, discarding the great mass of purple intestines he had drawn out of Dorrel, and start charging across.
With the door clicking home, Lelic flopped away as fast as he could, flesh hanging open by his tail fluke. He glanced up and saw an octopus partially extruded but then, thankfully, it retracted again. He concentrated on going just as fast as he could, aware that if the prador got through he was finished. A crash resounded behind him and he couldn’t help but glance back. The door had closed but the ceramic was crazed with cracks. It had definitely been some sort of nano-attack that had penetrated surrounding materials and turned them brittle. It would not take Sfolk long to get through that door. Another fit of dry coughing hit him and he spat more blood. His chest felt tight and painful and his breathing wasn’t so good. Perhaps he was right: perhaps he had broken a rib and punctured his lung. He crawled to the door from this chamber and palmed the control beside that, and felt weak with relief as it swung open.
The tunnel outside was grav free so now he could travel faster, finally propelling himself out into the d
ocking sphere. Other extremadapts had obviously managed to escape and were flapping, crawling and hopping to their ships. Lelic just concentrated on getting to his own ship, first palming the second door control once he was through, and then satisfied to see it closing. Ahead of him he could see the bulky and bloody shape of someone down on his knees, coughing, and he deliberately moved to give the man a wide berth.
“Lelic . . . do you hear it?” It was Henderson, the limpet muscles on his face horribly pale as he tried and failed to unstick himself from the floor. “It’s whispering—” he coughed and blood bubbled from his mouth—“to me.”
“What is?” Lelic asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“It’s . . . here,” Henderson rasped.
From behind came another crash, and Lelic glanced back at the second door. It appeared undamaged. He hoped the nano-attack hadn’t reached it yet.
“We need to get to the ship and out of here,” he said, and kept moving. With any luck Henderson, who was in a terrible state, wouldn’t be able to follow him. Lelic did not want the man bringing whatever ailed him aboard.
“Oh,” said Henderson. Lelic halted and turned. The man had rolled face-down, then after a moment levered himself up onto his hands and knees, his bulbous body still touching the deck, his face pointing down and bloody drool trailing from his mouth. Then his body shuddered, limpet muscles clenching, his squat head came up and he emitted a gurgling scream. Black spikes stabbed out of his back, his chest and up beside his thick neck. It was as if the head of a big glassy morning star had sprouted inside his chest. His scream died, as did he, while the spikes continued growing, blood running down them. They stabbed into the floor, held him still in the same position, one of them exiting his mouth, then began to lift him up, leaving him like some bug at the intersection of numerous pins.
As Lelic towed himself backwards in utter horror, the whole construct shrugged itself and, in tough muscular chunks, Henderson fell out of it. Resting on the deck now was a star, a thing like a plant, but formed of black crystal. As he watched, it exuded a silvery tentacle from its core. Lelic half expected this thing to start sucking up Henderson’s remains but, from where it touched the deck, silvery veins began spreading out in the ceramal and construction coral.
As Lelic turned towards his ship he paused, seeing more of these things scattered all around the dock sphere, some seemingly crouching over bloody remains, others floating amidst slowly falling clouds of the same. He finished his turn and, using his tentacles like legs and flapping his tail fluke hard, no matter how much it hurt, drove himself to the airlock door of his tug and palmed it open. Inside, sobbing for breath, he coughed and spattered blood on the inner wall. It was a rib. It was a broken rib. It had to be a broken rib.
Once he had closed the inner door of the airlock he auged into his ship’s system and commanded an emergency launch. The ship was already on the move, turning through the wall of the sphere, by the time he reached his small bridge. Gazing through the screen, he could see more of those star things scattered about the dock sphere, but none of his people. Then he saw a ceramic door swing open and Sfolk come hurrying out, skidding on blood all across the deck, throwing himself into a long bound in the low gravity. Too late now.
The sphere hatch closed behind as, on thrusters, Lelic took his ship down the throat of a long tunnel towards the first set of space doors. He wondered how many of the others had escaped, but knew he wouldn’t know until he was outside. He sent a signal to the space doors, half expecting that he would need to use the grab arm to tear them open, but they obediently slid apart. As the doors closed behind and his ship entered what was effectively a massive airlock, Lelic rubbed at his aching chest. He needed to get his emergency autodoc out and working on him, but first he had to get away from the station. After an interminable delay, the massive airlock evacuated most of its air, then the outer doors opened. Cautiously, Lelic guided his ship out.
Five miles out, Lelic turned the ship so he could watch the station through his chain-glass screen. As ever it looked like the case of a giant caddis fly. Scanning near space he soon found that the objects drifting away from the axial spin of his erstwhile home were debris. The thing was coming apart and, even as he watched, some big chunk blew away under internal pressure and spewed atmosphere out into vacuum. Then he saw that one other had escaped, a large egg-shaped craft with three U-nacelles extending from its equator. Somehow Lelic wasn’t surprised to see Mr Pace’s ship steadily moving away. But at least that fucking Sfolk would die in there. However, even as he thought that, the whispers denied it.
“What?” He looked around inside his ship, sure someone had just been speaking to him, then rubbed at his chest, which felt as if it was full of broken glass.
The station continued to disintegrate and hurl chunks of itself out into vacuum. An algae storage tank near one end exploded, spilling a green fog, then something else blew up at the centre of the station and cut it in half. Next, out of one of those halves bloomed a black crystalline flower, other smaller fragments of blackness zooming in towards it and sticking, the thing growing larger and somehow more solid than everything around it. Lelic gaped. Nano-attack? This thing was like nothing he knew about or had researched. As he watched, he suddenly realized his chest didn’t hurt any more. It was because he was keeping still. It was a broken rib . . .
Then suddenly he couldn’t breathe as hot agony expanded from a point deep inside him, just before a black spine stabbed out beside his keel bone and kept growing. He managed one convulsion and tried to reach for that spine as if he might pluck it out. Other spines shot out of his body, one of them impaling his arm through his wrist.
He died to the sound of whispers.
Trent
The younger boy, Ieran, all energy and excitement, had dodged through the scattering of shell people to the dropshaft and back again. He then grabbed hold of his mother’s hand. When the boy, Robert, stepped over beside him and grasped his hand, Trent didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t any image he had ever had in his mind of the ruthless gangland enforcer Trent Sobel. But at least Robert wasn’t as active as Ieran, just walked along beside him, gazing with curiosity at the shell people.
“So,” said Reece, “we’re aboard an out-Polity space station now . . .”
“We are,” Trent agreed, fiddling with his shirt. Before bringing her out of hibernation he had felt the need to shed his space suit and clean himself and his clothes. He still felt vulnerable without the suit, though, remembering how this hospital had been so quickly torn apart before.
Reece pursed her lips. “Hardly what I was hoping for when I went into hibernation.”
Trent shrugged. Since she’d woken up he’d detailed events, as he understood them, to date. He was shocked when halfway through his story she whipped back the heat sheet and climbed naked out of bed to check on her children. She’d been delighted and tearful to hear Robert’s voice, apparently for the first time in months. Then, slyly noting Trent’s discomfort, she had enquired about some clothing. Now, like her two children, she wore trousers, shirt and slippers from a hospital fabricator.
“But the situation is much better than it could have been.” She smiled.
They reached the dropshaft, the wash of the irised gravity field tugging at them as the shell people ahead stepped into it. Trent moved to step in next but was halted by a tug on his hand. He glanced down at Robert and saw the doubt there.
“It’s okay,” Trent said as Reece and Ieran moved past them into the shaft and descended. “See?”
Robert nodded solemnly and allowed Trent to tug him into the shaft. They descended easily and stepped out into the high-ceilinged corridor leading into the barracks.
“This way.” He led them off, stepping round shell people who were peering at slips of memory paper they had been given in the hospital and studying the directions signs. Branching from this main corridor were othe
rs at regular intervals, doors all the way along them leading into spartan suites of rooms that had been restored by Sverl’s robots so they at least had beds and washing facilities. Food and drinks beyond just water could be obtained in a communal area, while other fabricating machines were being moved in too, in maybe a few days, to provide a bit more beyond bare necessities. However, Trent had felt he owed these three more than that.
“Here,” he told them, finally arriving before the door he had been looking for.
Family apartments in the barracks were a rarity since soldiers during the war hadn’t fought in family units, but there were these few along this corridor. Reaching into his pocket, Trent took out a key stick and pointed it at the door, which opened. Before they stepped into the room beyond he gestured to a palm lock. “That’s not been set yet so you can set it up to respond only to you. Do you know how to do that?”
“Do I look like an idiot?” Reece responded.
“I guess not.” Trent stepped back and waved them in. “There’s a console inside with com—I’ve input my radio code so you can get in contact with me at any time.” He pointed to the com button on the shoulder of his long ersatz leather coat. “I’ve left you some food and some other items you might need—things will be better later on.” He turned away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
He turned back. “I was just going to leave you to settle in.”
“No, you’re not,” she said, stepping into the apartment. Trent followed.
The main middle room contained a kitchenette, with a table and chairs fabricated by robot from bubble-metal. It had been the best Trent could do, thus far. On the table lay packages of printed bread and thermal beakers of soup—all from the hospital fabricators.
“The boys’ room is there.” He pointed to a door then walked over and opened it. As Reece came to stand at his shoulder he gestured to the bunk beds he’d rigged up, along with a console, screen and a couple of VR visors and body sensors he had managed to scavenge. The two boys looked inside then stepped back. They both looked tired now, Robert because his body was still recovering—Trent had seen this with the shell people—and Ieran because his short-charge batteries had just run out. Trent next showed them the washroom with its shower, toilet and other items he’d managed to find: hundred-year-old sonic toothbrushes, a biotronic soap dispenser and towels of cellulose fibre. Then Reece’s bedroom, with a bubble-metal dressing table scattered with items he’d found in a locker here: an intellifibre hairbrush, a bottle of some ancient perfume, a powerfab make-up kit.