“After ten thousand years, you’re worried about a few minutes?”
“Yes, now that the pyramid defenses are alerted.”
“You’re in no shape to move.”
“I’m winded, that’s all. I think I can . . .” His voice dissolved into coughs, but even while it was happening, Sora watched him push himself upright. When he spoke again, his voice was hardly a wheeze. “I’m gambling there was only one of whatever it was. Otherwise we should never have made it as far as we did.”
“I hope you’re right, Merlin.”
“There’s – um – something else. Ship’s just given me a piece of not entirely welcome news. A few neutrino sources that weren’t there when we first got here.”
“Oh, great.” Sora didn’t need to be told what that meant: a Husker swarm, one that had presumably been waiting around the gas giant all along, chilled down below detection thresholds. “Bastards must have been sleeping, waiting for something to happen here.”
“Sounds like a perfectly sensible strategy,” the familiar said, before projecting a map onto Sora’s faceplate, confirming the arrival of the enemy ships. “One of the moons has a liquid ocean. My guess is that the Huskers were parked below the ice.”
Sora asked Merlin: “How long before they get here?”
“No more than two or three hours.”
“Right. Then we’d better make damn sure we’ve got that gun by then, right?”
She carried him most of the way, his heels scuffing the ground in a halfhearted attempt at locomotion. But he remained lucid, and Sora began to hope that the wound really had been cauterized by the beam-weapon.
“You knew the Husker would be human, didn’t you?” she said, to keep him talking.
“Told you: rumors. The alien cyborg story was just that – a fiction our own side invented. I told you it wouldn’t be xenocide.”
“Not good enough, Merlin.” She was about to tell him about the symbiote in her head, then drew back, fearful that it would destroy what trust he had in her. “I know you’ve been lying. I hacked your ship’s log.”
They had reached the shadow of the pyramid, descending the last hillock toward the access ports spaced around the rim.
“Thought you trusted me.”
“I had to know if there was a reason not to. And I think I was right.”
She told him what she had learnt; that he’d been traveling for longer than he had told her – whole decades longer, by shiptime – and that he had grown old in that journey, and perhaps a little insane. And then how he had seemed to find the Brittlestar. “Problem is, Merlin, we – I – don’t know what happened to you in that thing, except that it had something to do with finding the gun, and you came out of it younger than when you went in!”
“You really want to know?”
“Take a guess.”
He started telling her some of it, while she dragged him toward their destination.
The pyramid was surrounded by tens of meters of self-repairing armor, white as bone. If the designers had not allowed deliberate entrances around its rim, Sora doubted that she and Merlin would ever have found a way to get inside.
“Should have been sentries here, once,” said the man leaning against her shoulder. “It’s lucky for us that everything falls apart, eventually.”
“Except your fabled gun.” They were moving down a sloping corridor, the walls and ceiling unblemished, the floor strewn with icy debris from the moon’s surface. “Anyway, stop changing the subject.”
Merlin coughed and resumed his narrative. “I was getting very old and very disillusioned. I hadn’t found the gun and I was about ready to give up. That or go insane. Then I found the Brittlestar. Came out of the Waynet and there it was, sitting there pulsing gravity waves at me.”
“It would take a pair of neutron stars,” the familiar said. “Orbiting around each other, to generate that kind of signature.”
“What happened next?” Sora asked.
“Don’t really remember. Not properly. I went – or was taken – inside it – and there I met . . .” He paused, and for a moment she thought it was because he needed to catch his breath. But that wasn’t the reason. “I met entities, I suppose you’d call them. I quickly realized that they were just highly advanced projections of a maintenance program left behind by the Waymakers.”
“They made you young, didn’t they.”
“I don’t think it was stretching their capabilities overmuch, put it like that.”
The corridor flattened out, branching in several different directions. Merlin leant toward one of the routes.
“Why?”
“So I could finish the job. Find the gun.”
The corridor opened out into a chamber, a bowl-ceilinged control room, unpressurized and lit only by the wavering light of their helmets. Seats and consoles were arrayed around a single spherical projection device, cradled in ash-colored gimbals. Corpses slumped over some of the consoles, but nothing remained except skeletons draped in colorless rags. Presumably they had rotted away for centuries before the chamber was finally opened to vacuum, and even that would have been more than twenty thousand years ago.
“They must have been attacked by a bioweapon,” Merlin said, easing himself into one of the seats, which – after exhaling a cloud of dust – seemed able to take his weight. “Something that left the machines intact.”
Sora walked around, examining the consoles, all of which betrayed a technology higher than anything the Cohort had known for millennia. Some of the symbols on them were recognizable antecedents of those used in Main, but there was nothing she could actually read.
Merlin made a noise that might have been a grunt of suppressed pain, and when Sora looked at him, she saw that he was spooling the optical cable from his suit sleeve, just as he had when they had first met on the cometary shard. He lifted an access panel back on the top of the console, exposing an intestinal mass of silvery circuits. He seemed to know exactly where to place the end of the spool, allowing its microscopic cilia to tap into the ancient system.
The projection chamber was warming to life now: amber light swelling from its heart, solidifying into abstract shapes, neutral test representations. For a moment, the chamber showed a schematic of the ringed giant and its moons, with the locations of the approaching Husker ships marked with complex ideograms. The familiar was right: their place of sanctuary must have been the moon with the liquid ocean. Then the shapes flowed liquidly, zooming in on the gas giant.
“You wanted to know where the gun was,” Merlin said. “Well, I’m about to show you.”
The view enlarged on a cyclonic storm near the planet’s equator, a great swirling red eye in the atmosphere.
“It’s a metastable storm,” Sora said. “Common feature of gas giants. You’re not telling me—”
Merlin’s gauntleted fingers were at work now, flying across an array of keys marked with symbols of unguessable meaning. “The storm’s natural, of course, or at least it was, before these people hid the gun inside it, exploiting the pressure differentials to hold the gun at a fixed point in the atmosphere, for safekeeping. There’s just one small problem.”
“Go ahead . . .”
“The gun isn’t a gun. It functions as weapon, but that’s mostly accidental. It certainly wasn’t the intention of the Waymakers.”
“You’re losing me, Merlin.”
“Maybe I should tell you about the ring.”
Something was happening to the surface of the gas giant now. The cyclone was not behaving in the manner of other metastable storms Sora had seen. It was spinning perceptibly, throwing off eddies from its curlicued edge like the tails of seahorses. It was growing a bloodier red by the second.
“Yes,” Sora said. “Tell me about the ring.”
“The Waymakers gave it to me, when they made me young. It’s a reminder of what I have to do. You see, if I fail, it will be very bad for every thinking creature in this part of the galaxy. What did you see when you looked
at the ring, Sora?”
“A red gem, with two lights orbiting inside it.”
“Would you be surprised if I told you that the lights represent two neutron stars; two of the densest objects in the universe? And that they’re in orbit about each other, spinning around their mutual center of gravity?”
“Inside the Brittlestar.”
She caught his glance, directed quizzically toward her. “Yes,” Merlin said slowly. “A pair of neutron stars, born in supernovae, bound together by gravity, slowly spiraling closer and closer to each other.”
The cyclonic storm was whirling insanely now, sparks of subatmospheric lightning flickering around its boundary. Sora had the feeling that titanic – and quite inhuman – energies were being unleashed, as if something very close to magic was being deployed beneath the clouds. It was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen.
“I hope you know how to fire this when the time comes, Merlin.”
“All the knowledge I need is carried by the ring. It taps into my bloodstream and builds structures in my head that tell me exactly what I need to know, on a level so deep that I hardly know it myself.”
“Husker swarm will be within range in ninety minutes,” the familiar said, “assuming attack profiles for the usual swarm boser and charm-torp weapon configurations. Of course, if they have any refinements, they might be in attack range a little sooner than that . . .”
“Merlin: tell me about the neutron stars, will you? I need something to keep my mind occupied.”
“The troublesome part is what happens when they stop spiraling around each other and collide. Mercifully, it’s a fairly rare event even by Galactic standards – it doesn’t happen more than once in a million years, and when it does it’s usually far enough away not to be a problem.”
“But if it isn’t far away – how troublesome would it be?”
“Imagine the release of more energy in a second than a typical star emits in ten billion years: one vast photo-leptonic fireball. An unimaginably bright pulse of gamma-rays. Instant sterilization for thousands of light-years in any direction.”
The cyclone had grown a central bulge now, a perfectly circular bruise rising above the surface of the planet. As it rose, towering thousands of kilometers above the cloud layer, it elongated like a waterspout. Soon, Sora could see it backdropped against space. And there was something rising within it.
“The Waymakers tried to stop it, didn’t they.”
Merlin nodded. “They found the neutron star binary when they extended the Waynet deeper into the galaxy. They realized that the two stars were only a few thousand years from colliding together – and that there was almost nothing they could do about it.”
She could see what she thought was the weapon, now, encased in the waterspout like a seed. It was huge – larger perhaps than this moon. It looked fragile, nonetheless, like an impossibly ornate candelabra, or a species of deep sea medusa, glowing with its own bioluminescence. Sloughing atmosphere, the thing came to a watchful halt, and the waterspout slowly retracted back toward the cyclone, which was now slowing, like a monstrous fly wheel grinding down.
“Nothing?”
“Well – almost nothing.”
“They built the Brittlestar around it,” Sora said. “A kind of shield, right? So that, when the stars collided, the flash would be contained?”
“Not even Waymaker science could contain that much energy.” Merlin looked to the projection, seeming to pay attention to the weapon for the first time. If he felt any elation on seeing his gun for the first time, none of it was visible on his face. He looked, instead, ashen – as if the years had suddenly reclaimed what the Waymakers had given him. “All they could do was keep the stars in check, keep them from spiraling any closer. So they built the Brittlestar, a vast machine with only one function: to constantly nudge the orbits of the neutron stars at its heart. For every angstrom that the stars fell toward each other, the Brittlestar pushed them an angstrom apart. And it was designed to keep doing that for a million years, until the Waymakers found a way to shift the entire binary beyond the Galaxy. You want to know how they kept pushing them apart?”
Sora nodded, though she thought she half-knew the answer already.
“Tiny black holes,” Merlin said. “Accelerated close to the speed of light, each black hole interacting gravitationally with the binary before evaporating in a puff of pair-production radiation.”
“Just the same way the gun functions. That’s no coincidence, is it?”
“The gun – what we call the gun – was just a component in the Brittlestar; the source of relativistic black holes needed to keep the neutron stars from colliding.”
Sora looked around the room. “And these people stole it?”
“Like I said, they were closer to the Waymakers than us. They knew enough about them to dismantle part of the Brittlestar, to override its defenses and remove the mechanism they needed to win their war.”
“But the Brittlestar . . .”
“Hasn’t been working properly ever since. Its capability to regenerate itself was harmed when the subsystem was stolen, and the remaining black-hole generating mechanisms can’t do all the work required. The neutron stars have continued to spiral closer together – slowly but surely.”
“But you said they were only a few thousand years from collision . . .”
Merlin had not stopped working the controls in all this time. The gun had come closer, seemingly oblivious to the ordinary laws of celestial mechanics. Down below, the planetary surface had returned to normality, except for a ruddier hue to the storm.
“Maybe now,” Merlin said, “you’re beginning to understand why I want the gun so badly.”
“You want to return it, don’t you. You never really wanted to find a weapon.”
“I did, once.” Merlin seemed to tap some final reserve of energy, his voice growing momentarily stronger. “But now I’m older and wiser. In less than four thousand years the stars meet, and it suddenly won’t matter who wins this war. We’re like ignorant armies fighting over a patch of land beneath a rumbling volcano!”
Four thousand years, Sora thought. More time had passed since she had been born.
“If we don’t have the gun,” she said, “we die anyway – wiped out by the Huskers. Not much of a choice, is it?”
“At least something would survive. Something that might even still think of itself as human.”
“You’re saying that we should capitulate? That we get our hands on the ultimate weapon, and then not use it?”
“I never said it was going to be easy, Sora.” Merlin pitched forward, slowly enough that she was able to reach him before he slumped into the exposed circuitry of the console. His coughs were loud in her helmet. “Actually, I think I’m more than winded,” he said, when he was able to speak at all.
“We’ll get you back to the ship; the proctors can help . . .”
“It’s too late, Sora.”
“What about the gun?”
“I’m . . . doing something rather rash, in the circumstances. Trusting it to you. Does that sound utterly insane?”
“I’ll betray you. I’ll give the gun to the Cohort. You know that, don’t you?”
Merlin’s voice was soft. “I don’t think you will. I think you’ll do the right thing and return it to the Brittlestar.”
“Don’t make me betray you!”
He shook his head. “I’ve just issued a command that reassigns control of my ship to you. The proctors are now under your command – they’ll show you everything you need.”
“Merlin, I’m begging you . . .”
His voice was weak now, hard to distinguish from the scratchy irregularity of his breathing. She leant down to him and touched helmets, hoping the old trick would make him easier to hear. “No good, Sora. Much too late. I’ve signed it all over.”
“No!” She shook him, almost in anger. Then she began to cry, loud enough so that she was in no doubt he would hear it. “I don’t ev
en know what you want me to do with it!”
“Take the ring, then the rest will be abundantly clear.”
“What?” She could hardly understand herself now.
“Put the ring on. Do it now, Sora. Before I die. So that I at least know it’s done.”
“When I take your glove off, I’ll kill you, Merlin. You know that, don’t you? And I won’t be able to put the ring on until I’m back in the ship.”
“I . . . just want to see you take it. That’s enough, Sora. And you’d better be quick . . .”
“I love you, you bastard!”
“Then do this.”
She placed her hands around the cuff seal of his gauntlet, feeling the alloy locking mechanism, knowing that it would only take a careful depression of the sealing latches, and then a quick twisting movement, and the glove would slide free, releasing the air in his suit. She wondered how long he would last before consciousness left him – no more than tens of seconds, she thought, unless he drew breath first. And by the state of his breathing, that would not be easy for him.
She removed the gauntlet, and took his ring.
Tyrant lifted from the moon.
“Husker forces grouping in attack configuration,” the familiar said, tapping directly into the ship’s avionics. “Hull sensors read sweeps by targeting lidar . . . an attack is imminent, Sora.”
Tyrant’s light armor would not save them, Sora knew. The attack would be blinding and brief, and she would probably never know it had happened. But that didn’t mean that she was going to let it happen.
She felt the gun move to her will.
It would not always be like this, she knew: the gun was only hers until she returned it to the Waymakers. But for now it felt like an inseparable part of her, like a twin she had never known, but whose every move was familiar to her fractionally in advance of it being made. She felt the gun energize itself, reaching deep into the bedrock of spacetime, plundering mass-energy from quantum foam, forging singularities in its heart.
She felt readiness.
“First element of swarm has deployed charm-torps,” the familiar reported, an odd slurred quality entering her voice. “Activating Tyrant’s countermeasures . . .”