Read The Reality Dysfunction Page 13

  The event horizon had evaporated from the Dymasio’s hull, depositing the starship five light-days out from Honeck’s sun. Its sensor clusters and thermo-dump panels emerged from the hull with the timidity of a hibernating creature venturing out into a spring day. As with all Adamist starships, it took time to check its location, and scan local space for stray comets or rock fragments. That crucial time lapse allowed the tremendous spacial flaws accompanying the opening of the voidhawks’ terminuses to remain undetected.

  Ignorant of his invisible followers, the Dymasio’s captain activated the starship’s main fusion drive, heading towards the next jump coordinate.

  “It’s moving again,” Syrinx said. “Preparing to go insystem. Do you want to interdict?” The thought of antimatter being carried into an inhabited system disturbed her.

  “What’s the new destination?” Eileen Carouch asked.

  Syrinx consulted the system’s almanac stored in Oenone’s memory cells.

  “It looks like Kirchol, the outer gas giant.”

  “Any settlements in orbit?” She hadn’t quite grasped how to pull information from Oenone the way she could from hardware memory cores.

  “None listed.”

  “It has to be heading for a rendezvous, then. Don’t interdict it, follow it in.”

  “Let it into an inhabited system?”

  “Sure. Look, if it was just the antimatter we wanted, we could have boarded any time in the last three months. That’s how long we’ve known the stuff was on board. Dymasio has visited seven inhabited star systems since we started monitoring it, without threatening any of them. Now my agent confirms the captain has found a buyer with these separatist hotheads, and I want them. This way we can wrap up both supplier and destination. We could even come out of it with the location of the antimatter-production station. Commendations all round, so just be patient.”

  “OK.” <> Syrinx asked Thetis.

  <>

  <> She broadcast a complex emotional harmonic of eagerness and frustration.

  <> Mental laughter. Thetis always knew how to tweak her. Graeae had been born before Oenone, but there was a marked comparison in size; with a hull diameter of a hundred and fifteen metres Oenone was the largest of all Iasius’s children. And it wasn’t until puberty’s growth hormones came into effect that Thetis outmatched her in physical tussles. But they had always been the closest, always competing against each other.

  <> Ruben chided.

  <>

  She laughed out loud, quickly turning it into a cough for Eileen’s benefit. Even though she was used to the degree of honesty which affinity fostered, Ruben always astounded her with his intimate knowledge of her emotional composition. <> she shot back, complete with a very graphic image.

  <>

  <>

  The prospect almost made the tense waiting worthwhile.

  Because of the need for a more precise trajectory when jumping towards a planet than for an interstellar jump, Dymasio spent a good fifty minutes re-aligning its course with considerable accuracy. Once its new orbital vector intersected Kirchol, the starship reconfigured itself for a jump.

  <> Syrinx demanded when the light from Dymasio’s dive flame began to fade.

  <> Chi replied.

  <>

  She caught an indistinct mental grumble: <> From the tiredness of the tone she guessed it was Oxley, who was actually older than Ruben, a hundred and fifty. Sinon had recommended him when she was assembling her first crew. He had stayed on mostly out of loyalty to her when she signed on with the navy. More cause for guilt.

  Dymasio jumped.

  Kirchol was a muddy brown globe three hundred and seventy thousand kilometres below Oenone’s hull, attendant moons glimmering dimly in the exhausted sunlight. The gas giant had nothing like the majesty of Saturn, it was too drab, too listless. Even the stormbands lacked ferocity.

  Dymasio and the two voidhawks had emerged above the south pole; insignificant on such a scale, one dull speck, and two coal-black motes, falling with imperceptible slowness as the gravity field tugged at them.

  Syrinx opened her mind to Chi, combining Oenone’s perceptual awareness with the weapons officer’s knowledge of their combat wasps’ performance capabilities. Her nerves stretching over a huge volume of space, making a far-off body tremble in reaction.

  The Dymasio started to transmit a simple radio code, beaming it down towards the gas giant. Given their position, there would be no overspill falling on the populated inner system, Syrinx realized, no chance of being detected even in a few hours when the radio waves finally bridged the gulf.

  An answering pulse flashed out from something in orbit around Kirchol, well outside Oenone’s mass-detection range. The source point began to move, vaulting out of its orbit at five gees. Oenone couldn’t detect any infrared trace, and there was no reaction-drive exhaust. The radio signal cut out.

  <> The thought leapt between the Edenists on both voidhawks, a shared frisson of glee.

  <> Syrinx told Thetis on singular-engagement mode. She hadn’t forgotten how the last blackhawk had given them the slip. It rankled still.

  <> he protested.

  <> she repeated coolly. <>

  <>

  <> she cooed.

  Thetis retreated, his subconscious grousing away. But he knew better than try and argue with his sister when she was in that mood.

  <> Oenone demanded.

  <> she reassured it.

  <>

  <>

  Oenone didn’t answer, but she could sense the resentment in its mind. She had almost been tempted to try the larger than usual swallow, but fear of injuring the voidhawk held her back. That and the prospect of stranding the rest of the crew in deep space.

  <> Oenone said gently.

  <>

  <>

  The blackhawk rose up out of the ecliptic plane in a long, graceful curve. Even when it slowed to rendezvous with the Dymasio the two waiting voidhawks couldn’t discern its shape or size. They were thirty thousand kilometres away, too far for optical resolution, and the slightest use of the distortion effect to probe it would have given them away.

  Both target craft used their radios when they were five thousand kilometres apart, a steady stream of encrypted data. It made tracking absurdly easy, Oenone’s passive electronic sensor array triangulating them to half a metre. Syrinx waited until they were only two thousand kilometres apart, then issued the order to interdict.

  <> Oenone bellowed across the affinity band. It detected a mental flinch from the blackhawk. <>

  Gravity surged back into the crew toroid, building with un
comfortable speed. Oenone and Graeae streaked in towards their prey at eight gees.

  Oenone was capable of generating a counter-acceleration force of three gees around the crew toroid, which still left Syrinx subject to a harsh five gees. Her toughened internal membranes could just about take the strain, but she worried that the blackhawk would try to run. Their crews nearly always used nanonic supplements, enabling them to withstand much higher acceleration. If it developed into a straight chase, Oenone’s crew were going to suffer, especially Ruben and Oxley.

  She needn’t have worried. After Oenone’s affinity shout, the blackhawk folded in its distortion field. But she was keenly aware of the sullen anger coloring its thoughts, presumably echoing those of its captain.

  There was a name, too, or rather an insistence of identity: Vermuden.

  Graeae was broadcasting a radio message at the Dymasio, the same demand to maintain position. In the Adamist starship’s case, enforcement was a more practical option. The voidhawk reached out with its distortion field, disrupting the quantum state of space around the Dymasio’s hull; if it tried to jump away now, the interference would produce instabilities in its patterning nodes, with spectacularly lethal results as the desynchronized energy loci imploded.

  Oenone and Graeae drew apart as they closed on their respective targets.

  The Vermuden was a sharp profile in Syrinx’s mind now, a flattish onion shape one hundred and five metres in diameter, its central spire tapering to a needle-sharp point sixty metres above the hull rim. There was no crew toroid, instead three silvery mechanical capsules were fixed equidistantly around the upper hull; one was a life-support cabin large enough for about five or six people, another was a hangar for a small spaceplane, the third was its cargo hold. Energy currents simmered below its hull, spectral iridescent whirls that suggested extreme agitation.

  “Captain Kouritz, you and your squad to the airlock, please,” Syrinx said when they began to slow for rendezvous. “Be advised, the blackhawk’s cabin space is approximately four hundred cubic metres.”

  Vermuden hung in space three hundred kilometres away, a dusky crescent, slightly ginger in colour. She could feel Chi locking the proximity defence lasers onto the blackhawk, a mix of electronic and bitek senses providing the focus.

  “I’ll go with them,” Eileen Carouch said. She tapped her restraint-strap release catch.

  “Make sure the Vermuden’s captain is brought straight back here,” Syrinx said. “I’ll send one of my people with you to fly Vermuden back to Fleet headquarters.” Without its captain, the blackhawk would have to obey an Edenist.

  Oenone flipped over as it approached Vermuden, inverting itself so that it seemed to be descending vertically towards the blackhawk’s upper hull.

  An airlock tube extended out from the crew toroid. The marine squad waited in the chamber behind it, fully armoured, weapons powered up.

  Gravity throughout the toroid had returned to a welcome Earth standard.

  Syrinx ordered the Vermuden’s captain to extend the blackhawk’s airlock.

  The Dymasio exploded.

  Its captain, faced with the total certainty of a personality debrief followed by a Confederation Navy firing squad, decided his crew and ship were a worthwhile price to pay for taking Graeae with him. He waited until the voidhawk was a scant kilometre away, beginning its docking manoeuvres, then turned off the antimatter-confinement chambers.

  Five hundred grams of antimatter rushed to embrace an equal mass of ordinary matter.

  From Oenone’s position, two thousand kilometres away, the elemental energy wavefront split the universe in two. On one side the stars burnt with their usual untroubled tranquillity; opposite that infinity vanished, replaced by a solid flat plane of raging photons.

  Syrinx felt the light searing into Oenone, scorching opticalreceptor cells into crisps. Affinity acted like a conductor for purple-white light, allowing it to shine straight into her own mind, a torrent of photons that threatened to engulf her sanity. In amongst the glare were fissures of darkness, fluttering around like tiny birds caught by a gale.

  They called out to her as they passed, mental cries, sometimes words, sometimes visions of people and places, sometimes smells—phantasm tastes, a touch, the laughter, music, heat, chill, wetness. Minds transferring into Oenone’s neural cells. But broken, incomplete. Flawed.

  <> Syrinx cried.

  She couldn’t find him, not amid such turmoil. And the light had become a pervasive pain. She howled in anguish and hatred.

  Vermuden’s distortion field distended, strengthened, applying stress against the perpetual structure of reality. An interstice yawned wide.

  Chi fired the gamma lasers. But the beams raked emptiness. The interstice was already closing.

  Less than two seconds after the Dymasio exploded, a blast wave of particles arrived to assault Oenone’s hull, supplementing the corrosive electromagnetic radiation already striking against the foam. The voidhawk looked past the immediate chaos, observing Vermuden’s wormhole forming, a tunnel through empty dimensions. Size and determinant length defined by the blackhawk’s energy input. Oenone knew the terminus coordinate exactly, twenty-one lightyears away, the blackhawk’s utter limit.

  <> Oenone thought tempestuously. Energy blazed through its own patterning cells.

  <> Syrinx shouted, shocked out of her grief.

  <>

  She waited helplessly as the interstice engulfed them, some treacherous aspect of her subconscious granting the voidhawk permission, urging them on towards retribution. Worry faded when she saw the wormhole was only thirteen light-years long. As its terminus began to open, she felt the patterning cells activate again. Realization was instantaneous, and she laughed with vengeful fury.

  <> Oenone said smugly.

  The desperate twenty-one light-year swallow had stretched Vermuden’s energy loading capacity virtually to breaking point. It could sense its captain prone on his acceleration couch, muscles locked solid, back arched, the exertion twinned. The wormhole’s pseudofabric slithered round the hull, not a physical pressure, but tangible none the less. Finally, up ahead, the terminus manifested. Starlight traced strange shapes as it filtered through.

  Vermuden popped out into the clean vacuum of normal space, mind radiating vivid relief.

  <> its captain said. Vermuden felt arm and chest muscles slacken, an indrawn breath.

  Powerful laserlight illuminated its hull, washing out its optical receptor cells in a pink dazzle. A lens-shaped mass a hundred and fifteen metres in diameter hung eighty metres off its central spire in the direction of Betelgeuse’s demonic red gleam.

  “What the fuck ... How?” the captain yelped.

  <> Oenone said. <>

  “I didn’t know voidhawks could do that,” Eileen Carouch said a couple of hours later. Vermuden’s captain, Henry Siclari, and the blackhawk’s other two crewmen, were in Oenone’s brig; and the navy prize crew, headed by Cacus, were familiarizing themselves with the blackhawk’s systems. Cacus reckoned they would be able to take the ship back to Oshanko in a day.

  “Sequential swallows?” Syrinx said. “Nothing to stop them, you just need a voidhawk with an acute spacial sense.” <>

  <> Oenone replied, unabashed by the alternate praise and admonitions the Edenists had been bombarding it with since the manoeuvre.

  <> she said. But the humour wasn’t there.

  Thetis. His broad, smiling face covered in boyish freckles, the uncombed sandy hair, the lanky, slightly awkward body. All the hours together spent roving around Romulus.

  He was a part of her identity in the same way as Oenone. Soulsibling, so much had been shared. A
nd now he was gone. Torn away from her, torn out of her, the voyages together, frustrations and achievements.

  <> Oenone whispered into her mind, its thoughts drenched with regret.

  <>

  <>

  <> she said, because it was true enough. But there was still that fraction of her mind which remained vacant, the vanished smile.

  Athene knew something was shockingly wrong as soon as Oenone emerged above Saturn. She was in the garden lounge, feeding two-month-old Clymene from a bitek mammary orb when the cold premonition closed about her. It made her clutch at her second great-great-grandchild for fear of the future and what it held. The infant wailed in protest at the loss of the nipple and the tightness of her grip. She hurriedly handed Clymene back to her great-grandson, who tried to calm the baby girl with mental coos of reassurance. Then Syrinx’s alarmingly dulled mind touched Athene, and the awful knowledge was revealed in full.

  <> she asked softly.

  <> Syrinx said. <>

  <>

  As Oenone neared Romulus it gave up the thought fragments it had stored to the habitat personality. A precious intangible residue of life, the sole legacy of Thetis and his crew.

  Athene’s past friends, lovers, and husbands emerged from the multiplicity of Romulus’s personality to offer support and encouragement, cushioning the blow as best they could. <> they assured her. She could feel the tremulous remnants of her son being slowly woven into a more cohesive whole, and drew a brief measure of comfort from that.

  Although no stranger to death, Athene found this bereavement particularly difficult. Always at the back of her mind was the belief that the voidhawks and their captains were somehow immortal, or at least immune to such wasteful calamity. A foolish, almost childish belief, because they were the children she prized the most. Her last link with Iasius, their offspring.