Not for the first time, MorningLightMountain considered simply erasing the Bose memories. It often considered the alien thoughts to be a form of insanity. Despite them being securely caged within a single immotile unit, there was notice-able leakage. Strange ideas and concepts often occurred these days – a different way of looking at things. After all, there was, it had to concede, a certain illogicality about releasing so much pollution across its homeworld, allowing so many motiles – parts of itself – to die in sickening fashion from disease and poison. It was killing itself for the now, not planning properly for tomorrow. It wasn’t sure how the notion of sickening had crept into its thoughts.
Such innovative thoughts might lead it into becoming alienPrime, contaminated from within. Though it knew its Prime rationality was still dominant, after all it was a misapplication of resources to let so many motiles waste away. So for now it tolerated the Bose memories, knowing that soon it would no longer require them.
The three human starships slowed their approach, then flew forward again. One came to a halt just beyond where the barrier used to be, remaining within the wormhole it was generating. The other two headed in for the second gas-giant, where MorningLightMountain had built the interstellar worm-hole. It began to prepare nearby ships for interception.
One of the human ships emerged from its wormhole amid a burst of blue radiation. It was five million kilometres from the interstellar wormhole. Electromagnetic beams swept out, probing space around it, while its wormhole generator emitted pulses of distortion, which the Bose memories identified as hysradar. High-cohesion force fields enveloped the human ship, deflecting most of MorningLightMountain’s sensor scans. They would be tough to break, it acknowledged. But not impossible.
Sixteen ships were dispatched at high acceleration to interdict the enemy. Within seconds of their fusion drives coming on, the human ship directed microwave and laser beams towards them. This time MorningLightMountain understood the binary pulses, the simple mathematical constants, pixel matrices with basic images and symbols, periodic tables. It directed a communication maser back at the human ship.
The Bose memories were marshalled to initiate contact, appropriate ‘speech’ sequences selected.
‘Hi guys, it’s Dudley Bose calling home. You took your sweet time getting back here, didn’t you? But by God I am sure glad to see you.’
The human lasers switched off. A single microwave beam remained focused on the ship which had sent the message.
‘Dudley? This is Commander Kime. How . . . Are you all right? Jesus, Dudley, we never hoped for so much.’
The voice was distorted by what the Bose memories identified as emotions of incredulity and hope.
‘I made it, Captain. I’m okay. And I’ve got a whole load of new friends with me just waiting to meet you. Should be able to rendezvous with you in a little while.’
‘Dudley, are you on the ship that’s sending your signal?’
‘Sure am. How about that for coincidence? I’ve been out here for months helping the Primes with their wormhole.’
‘Dudley, that ship’s under ten-gee acceleration.’
The voice had changed. MorningLightMountain’s Bose memories identified it as puzzled.
‘Yeah, God don’t I know it. It’s hell on my spine.’
‘You can slow down,’ Wilson Kime said. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
‘Right, sure. I’ll tell the captain.’
MorningLightMountain reduced the acceleration on its interdiction squadron to three gees. It didn’t want to scare the humans off – another new concept. So many since the barrier had fallen.
‘Where’s Emmanuelle, Dudley? Is she there with you?’
‘No she’s back on the homeworld DEAD RUN YOU DUMB FUCK RUN THEY KILLED US THEY’LL KILL ALL OF US IT’S INHUMAN RUN YOU MOTHERFU—’
MorningLightMountain wanted to scream in pure fury as the betraying corruption burned through its consciousness. Its mind crushed the Bose memories as they blossomed out of the immotile brain where they had been stored, pummelling them back under control. Crushing them. Eradicating them from existence.
Demented, defiant human laughter echoed around inside the giant building which housed the central immotile grouping of MorningLightMountain, the core of its existence. The memory of laughter. Mocking as it faded.
*
Wilson stared, aghast, at the speaker which just a minute earlier had delivered a joy which had brought him close to tears. The shout lingered in the deadly silence which filled the bridge.
He’d known, deep deep down inside, from the moment the Dudley voice claimed to be on a ship doing ten gees, and speaking as calmly as if they were sitting at a bar with a couple of drinks. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
‘The alien ships have started accelerating again,’ Anna called. ‘Eight gees. Nine.’
‘Tu Lee, take us out of here now,’ Wilson ordered. D éjà vu plucked at him, almost comforting in its horrifying familiarity. ‘Oscar, Antonia, scatter pattern one. You heard the man: run for it.’
The screens showing visual spectrum images of space outside began to glow blue, as if they’d glided into a patch of planetary sky. Tu Lee sent the Conway streaking out of the Dyson system at half a light-year an hour.
‘Goddamnit, what happened?’ Anna said. ‘What was that talking to us?’
‘Whatever was left of Dudley Bose,’ Wilson said grimly. Damn, and I always thought bad of him. ‘Any sign of pursuit?’
‘Nothing chasing us in hyperspace, Captain,’ Tunde said. ‘The StAsaph and Langharne are ahead of us, and spreading out.’
Wilson studied the displays around his couch, breathing deep to try and calm his racing heart. He watched the other two scoutships diving wide into the depths of interstellar space, making it difficult for any potential enemy to chase all of them. A pitiful manoeuvre, really, if the aliens had built ftl starships they could send a thousand after each of us.
‘We were out of hyperspace for six and a quarter minutes,’ Anna said as the bridge crew started to relax. ‘Our mission time out here just keeps getting shorter, and we still have no idea what they look like.’
Wilson gave his e-butler some instructions, and it folded back one of the display screens around his couch. He turned to look at Tunde Sutton. ‘What did our sensors collect?’
‘Almost nothing, Captain,’ the physicist said glumly. ‘We weren’t there long enough to obtain any decent imagery.’
‘What about that giant wormhole?’
‘Ah, yes.’ Tunde seemed curiously reticent to say anything. ‘You know, we’ve never attempted to build anything on such a scale. And the amount of quantum activity we did manage to detect indicated a considerable number of wormholes have been opened within the Dyson system. All of them were significantly smaller than the one above the outer gas-giant. It confirms our previous conclusions about their industrial capabilities. A year and a half ago they didn’t have one wormhole generator.’
‘Just how big was that one above the gas-giant?’
Tunde began to call up hysradar records, concentrating on the outermost gas-giant with its three large moons, and superimposing what little visual imagery they’d snatched. He focused the image on the third moon, orbiting seven hundred and ninety thousand kilometres above the turbulent equatorial storm clouds. It was a rocky planetoid with half of its fractured surface covered in ice sheets averaging five kilometres thick. Hundreds of force field domes had encased nearly a quarter of the total surface area. Fusion drive ships clouded space around it, forming a bright ring two hundred and fifty kilometres above the equator. From that a sparkling river of blue-white plasma stretched across to the moon’s outermost Lagrange point, fifteen thousand kilometres away. The aliens had stationed the wormhole at the centre of the gravitational null-point, where it kept its position with a minimum of thruster usage. There was no visual data, the generator structure itself was very dark, although it showed as a gleaming crimson spark in infrared
. Hysradar revealed a toroid with a central aperture measuring two and a half kilometres across. Ships were flying into the centre at the rate of one every five or six every minute, large ships.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Wilson murmured. ‘Is there any way of telling where that leads?’
‘No, sir,’ Tunde said. ‘But judging by the strength of its quantum distortion, I’d say several hundred light-years. Where they get that much power from I don’t know, there’s no corresponding neutrino emissions which would indicate fusion sources.’
‘Have they reached inside the Commonwealth?’ Wilson asked sharply.
‘It won’t extend that far. Four hundred light-years, possibly, maybe five.’
Wilson wanted to feel relief. It should have been there, knowing the aliens hadn’t reached home behind him. But the sensation eluded him completely. What they’d seen was too worrying. Even for a civilization this size, the giant wormhole was too obviously a crash project; an act of desperation. He was sure he knew where it would take them eventually. The why of it, though, he couldn’t understand. What could they possibly want with the Commonwealth?
*
It was an astonishing landscape. Nothing you couldn’t find on any H-congruous world, but scaled up twenty per cent. Higher mountains. Deeper valleys. Wider rivers. Broader plains. Even the sky seemed bigger, though that might have been due to the absence of clouds during the (long) daytime.
All of which made Ozzie worry about what kind of animals they might encounter. Rats the size of dogs? Dogs the size of horses? What might the elephants be like, or the dinosaurs?
Although they’d been here for eight days now, and hadn’t seen so much as a gnat so far. The plants didn’t quite match up to the scenery. They were all bland, with grass that was like a sheet of moss, and bushes that were globes with slender little leaves which were woven together so tightly that, from a distance, they looked like a single membrane. Trees had a simple conical symmetry with dark green finger-sized leaves. Botany at least wasn’t adventurous here. In fact, he hadn’t seen a single flower since they arrived. Maybe evolution had bypassed the whole concept of pollination. Or maybe there were no insects to pollinate.
That made Tochee the most colourful thing on the planet. The big alien had recovered quickly from its frostbite as they wandered along the paths after escaping the Ice Citadel planet. Its rubbery locomotion ridges had almost completely healed up now after weeks of sliding along through temperate grass-land and loamy forest floors. Of the three planets they’d progressed through, one of the paths had been in a tropical zone. Tochee had really liked that. The little shrivelled fronds sprouting from wrinkles in its brown hide had sprouted into colourful life. They now resembled feathery ferns whose vivid pigmentation acted like a silky flowing cloak; ripples of scarlet, tangerine, turquoise and emerald swayed along its body with every motion and gust of wind.
‘It looks like a furry rainbow,’ Orion had said when the fronds began to grow again.
The boy was a great deal happier now as well. A lot of his former chirpy confidence had returned, strengthening with every additional step they put between themselves and the Ice Citadel.
Ozzie was half-expecting him to start asking, ‘Are we there, yet?’ Which, given their circumstances, was just about impossible to answer. The Silfen paths had been reasonably obvious on the worlds they’d visited so far, and the little friendship pendant had helped a couple of times when Ozzie was uncertain. But to date they’d found themselves in areas where the forests were close together, with just a couple of valleys or hills separating their boundaries.
This big world was different. They’d emerged from a tree line to see a vast undulating plain stretching away ahead of them. The forest behind filled a V-shaped valley; there was only the one path through it, leading straight out alongside the swift stream which gushed down the valley floor. So they simply carried on walking, keeping close to the stream. It was one of many tributaries feeding the river which cut across the plain.
In five days’ continuous hiking they’d found plenty of similar woods hugging steep valleys. Not one of which had a Silfen path leading out. The trees did have edible fruit, globes the size of melons, with a fibrous pap that tasted similar to bland apples. That seemed to be a constant on the worlds linked by Silfen paths, nothing eatable had a strong taste.
Orion would knock the fruit down with a big stick, some-times with Tochee holding him aloft in its tentacles so he could reach the ones dangling on higher branches. Every time Ozzie watched the laughing boy flailing away at the fruit, he would think of curries and chilli burgers.
The river was leading them towards a range of snow-capped mountains which marked the end of the plain. As they neared the foothills, the pervasive mat of grass thinned out, leaving stretches of thin sandy soil exposed to the air. Soon, only the broad ravine through which the river flowed had any greenery left. They picked their way along the boulder-strewn sides, testing carefully for boggy ground. Ozzie and Orion were both carrying heavy rucksacks, while Tochee had a pair of big old panniers slung over its back. As the ravine started to slope down so the river flow quickened, foaming around stones sticking up from its bed.
‘Still wish we’d made a boat?’ Orion asked cheerfully as they passed one set of boulders that were sending out great spumes.
It was something Ozzie had suggested earlier, at around the third forest they’d examined for paths. While it made sense, his diamond-tipped blade wasn’t the ideal tool for cutting and trimming that many trees. In any case, they hadn’t got any rope to lash even a crude raft together. At the time he’d just wanted to get off the plain. Days spent under the silent expanse of sky were bad enough. But at night, he hurried into the tent, unnerved by the emptiness around them. Some deep-buried intuition was wary of the planet.
‘I’ve been down worse rapids than these,’ Ozzie told him defensively.
After half a day trailing along the side of the ravine, it turned sharply and opened out into a massive canyon. The river surged forward and fell away down a series of steep steps, each taller than the last, ending with a waterfall that thundered over a cliff three hundred metres high. After so many days immersed in the deep silence which blanketed the empty plain, the roar from the cascading water was shocking.
‘So now what?’ Orion asked. He was facing the giant canyon which carried the water away beyond the falls. It seemed to slice clean through the mountain range.
‘There’s no way off this world behind us,’ Ozzie said, thinking out loud. ‘We either keep following the river, or look for some other way round the mountains.’ He brought out a very tatty sheet of parchment. His last charcoal stump was down to a small nub so, finding the sharpest edge, he wrote: I think we should go on. This seems to be the path.
I agree, Tochee’s forward eye segment flashed.
All throughout the long afternoon they picked their way down the side of the falls. With the rocks slick from all the spray, they moved slowly and carefully. If there were to be any kind of accident here, the chances of help were effectively zero. Travelling alone had instilled a sense of caution into them, even Orion didn’t make any complaint about how long the descent was taking. Tochee took the lead; with his locomotion ridges he was easily the most agile of the three of them on the precarious gradient.
The sun had long vanished behind the canyon walls when they reached the floor. According to Ozzie’s virtual vision timer they still had another two hours of full daylight left. He took his sunglasses off to squint at the bright naked rocks all around. Somewhat inevitably, the sun here was bright enough to make them wear the protective glasses all day long. The mist thrown out by the waterfall had fooled him for a moment, producing a pocket of cool humid air around the base of the falls. But even out of the direct sunlight, he was better off with the glasses on.
They walked past the deep rock pool formed by the churning impact of the waterfall, and carried on to where the river resumed its calm flow, gurgling across the sandy pebble
s which made up its broad bed. He stood on the bank to take in the view. The near-vertical walls of iron-red rock on both sides were over a kilometre high and, as the canyon curved gently around to the east in front of him, it looked as though they were growing progressively taller. At the widest, the canyon floor stretched about eight kilometres wide. Nothing grew within the canyon, no grass or scrub. The floor was shingle and sand, all the same sandstone red as the walls. He could see huge great conic mounds of jagged rock piled up all along the base of each cliff, where giant sections had broken off far above to crash down into pulverized scree.
One of Tochee’s manipulator flesh arms poked up, a very human gesture it’d developed to attract their attention. When Ozzie turned to check the alien, mauve patterns were flickering in its forward eye segment. Something at the first curve. Possibly a tree.
Ozzie ordered his retinal implants to zoom in. The air was shimmering from the heat of the rocks and the air, but some dark smudge was visible beside the river just as it turned out of sight. Could be, he wrote.
They started off along the canyon, and almost immediately came across the ancient fire. It was a simple circle of stones, their inner sides blackened. The ash had blown away long ago, leaving just darkened sand inside.
‘Look!’ Orion cried and ran off. He stopped a few yards past the fire circle and picked something out of the sand. His smile was victorious as he held up his trophy.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Ozzie grunted. The boy had found a coke can. Its colouring had bleached badly over the years, but the familiar logo was easily visible.
‘Are we on Earth?’ the boy asked excitedly.
‘Sorry, man, no way.’
‘This must be somewhere in the Commonwealth, though. We even had coke on Silvergalde.’
Ozzie scratched at his large fuzzy beard. ‘I think it’s just litter. You know what people are like, the biggest hooligans in the universe. But hey! It proves we’re on the right path.’ He didn’t want to crush the boy’s fragile hope.