Century Rain

THIRTY-NINE

It was a little-travelled arm of the hyperweb, one that had seen only sporadic traffic since the Slashers had begun to map the network’s further fringes. Five portals lay close together in a loose, drifting quincunx, separated by no more than a light-second of interstellar space. There were no suns here, no worlds, no rogue moons—not even the rocky fragments of them, unborn or shattered. Only the spired husks of five large comets, dry and dead for billions of years, each of which formed an anchor for a single unmanned portal.

But there was something else. Sensors groped for it in the darkness. It was unthinkably dark, illuminated only by starlight. It was also unthinkably huge: as wide across as the sun itself, with room to spare.

“Are we too late?” Auger said as Tunguska assembled a composite picture of the ALS on one of the walls.

“I don’t know. If my timing’s correct, Niagara should only have achieved portal egress… ninety minutes ago.”

“Then why don’t we see him?”

“There’s a faint thrust trail,” Tunguska said. “It suggests that Niagara’s already passed around the limb of the ALS. Again—assuming that the usual margins were ignored—he would have had just enough time to do that.”

“So follow him.”

“We are. Unfortunately, the bleed-drive needs further attention. This is the maximum acceleration we can sustain.”

The composite image of the ALS gained detail by the second, as Tunguska’s sensors teased more structure out of the darkness. Complex statistical methods squeezed the maximum information from meagre data. Auger recalled the briefing she had been given aboard the Twentieth Century Limited. Peter’s schematic representation had been tinted a dull blue-grey, but there was not enough light here to trigger the eye’s colour receptors. Tunguska’s schematic ignored the faint ambient illumination and painted the entire structure a flat grey, with no shadowing except that necessary to suggest the platelike surface texturing. In Peter’s overview, that platelike structure had made her think of something viral or crystalline, but now the hide of the ALS reminded her of some magnified view of human or animal skin, with a rough hint of irregularity and—here and there—signs where healing processes had not quite erased the evidence of former injuries. It was as if the ALS had been grown, rather than constructed.

Perhaps it had. No one had the slightest idea where the raw materials had come from. Maybe there had once been an entire solar system in this pocket of space, which had then been efficiently strip-mined to create the hard, thin shell of the sphere. Or perhaps the necessary mass-energy had been conjured out of nothing, in some vastly more sophisticated version of the principle that underpinned the bleed-drive.

Auger looked at Floyd, wondering how he was taking all of this. “Not many people get to see this,” she said. “If that’s any consolation.”

“I could have lived without it,” he said. “Somehow I rather liked the idea that I could trust the night sky, or that the Sun was real.”

“Your world is real, Floyd, and so are you. Nothing else matters.”

“I’m picking something up,” Tunguska said with quiet urgency. “It could be Niagara.”

“An echo from his ship?” Auger asked.

“Not close enough for that,” he said, “but there’s a moving patch of enhanced brightness on the skin of the ALS. It’s probably the reflection from his drive. He’s doing his best to hide it, but there’s only so much he can do if he still wants to steer.”

“Remind me: do we have any more missiles in this thing?” Auger asked.

“None. I’ve instructed the factories to make more, but I can’t afford to divert too much repair capacity away from the bleed-drive. I think we’ll have to rely on beams, at least until later.”

“Are we in firing range?”

“Not yet. We’ll have to close quite a bit of distance for that.”

“Can we get close enough?” Auger asked.

“Not if Niagara maintains his latest heading. But that reflection signature suggests that he’s slowing down, relative to the ALS.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Floyd.

“Probably because he’s ready to deploy the Molotov device,” Tunguska said.

“You have to hit him before he has a chance.”

“Are you sure you want that, Floyd? If that antimatter bomb doesn’t blow a hole in the ALS, you won’t be going home.”

“Just do it,” Floyd said. “Worry about my return ticket later. A few hours ago I wasn’t even expecting to live this long.”

“I don’t think any of us were,” Tunguska replied. His forehead creased, revealing some glint of interest in the storm of numbers flooding his head. “Ah. Now this may be significant.” He looked around at their expectant faces. “I have some refined data on that reflection pattern. It looks as if there are two sources of light, rather than one.”

Auger wondered if she understood him. “Two thrust beams?”

“Yes—but far enough apart that they can’t be associated with the same craft. It looks as if Niagara’s deployed a smaller ship from the larger one. We should have a hard echo any moment now…” He pressed a thick finger against one side of his temple.

“That makes sense,” Auger said. “His main ship is just large enough to carry the Molotov device, right?”

“So it would seem.”

“He’s probably going to plough it into the ALS like a battering ram. Too much trouble to extract the antimatter core, when he already has a ready-made delivery system.” She pushed forward in her seat, ignoring the tension in her back. “The other ship must be a shuttle, something with enough range to make it to E2.”

“That would be the ship carrying Silver Rain,” Tunguska said.

“And Niagara,” Auger added.

Tunguska shut his eyes, blanking out the extraneous distraction of the real world. “I see the shuttle, and the mother ship,” he said. “The shuttle is on a high-gee burn trajectory away from the Molotov section.”

“Looks like it’s trying to put as much distance between itself and the blast point as possible,” Auger speculated.

Tunguska nodded, his eyes still closed.

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” Floyd commented.

“Any chance of a beam strike any time soon?” she asked.

“Not yet. Believe me, my trigger finger is itching.”

There was nothing to do but wait for the distance to be closed. Tunguska’s long-range view gradually sharpened, confirming that the two ships had indeed separated, and that the heavier of the two—the main craft, the one that they had been following from Earth—was racing on an accelerating trajectory towards the surface of the ALS, gunning its bleed-drive to the wall. The excess radiation from the tortured drive made it an easy object to track, even across such a distance. An hour earlier it had been moving parallel to the surface of the sphere, but now it was daggering down on a course that would intersect the surface at a right angle.

“We can’t stop this, can we?” Auger said, exasperated. “That damned thing is going to hit the ALS no matter what we do.”

“But admit it,” Tunguska said, with more playfulness than she cared for. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious to see what will happen?”

“I could stand not knowing,” she said.

Tunguska opened his eyes. “Report from the bleed-drive: we’re ready to increase our thrust to five gees. Can’t risk anything higher than that, for now at least. We won’t need the acceleration caskets, although the ship will still have to immobilise us.”

“Whatever it takes,” Auger said.

The room quivered and swallowed them.

In the soft grip of the ship’s protective systems, time surged and dragged in unpredictable, dreamlike waves. She wondered how it was for Floyd, whose head was free of twinkling machines. What was he thinking now that he was so close to home, and simultaneously so close to seeing everything he knew destroyed?

“By my estimation,” Tunguska said, “the Molotov impact will happen in fifty seconds. I’m deploying expendable sensors, but closing off all our usual channels. No one’s ever seen a big matter-antimatter explosion up close, and there’s no telling what kind of reaction the blast will provoke from the ALS itself.”

“How close is that shuttle to the impact point?” Auger asked.

“About half our present distance,” Tunguska replied. “His shielding had better be good if he wants to be alive at the end of this. Thirty seconds—”

“I can do without the countdown, Tunguska,” Auger said, bracing herself. “Just tell us if we’re still alive at the end of it.”

She felt, when it happened, some ghostly report of the blast, even though Tunguska assured her that no signals could possibly reach her through the barricades he had put in place. It was long and drawn out, like a distant peel of thunder.

“The Molotov device has detonated,” Tunguska said. “And we, self-evidently, are still alive.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I wasn’t. It’s always good to confirm these things.”

When the expendable sensors deemed it safe, Tunguska unshuttered the ship’s more delicate eyes and turned them on the scene of the crime. It took a little while for them to make sense of the data, for the view was obstructed by a slowly expanding debris plume, spreading away from the impact point like a cherry-red fountain. Auger grappled with the scale, but she still couldn’t adjust to the mind-numbing size of the ALS object. The plume was huge—hundreds of thousands of kilometres across and still growing—but it was just a tiny detail on the surface of the sphere.

“Debris is clearing near the epicentre,” Tunguska said. “The view is foreshortened, so it isn’t easy to see exactly what damage has been done.”

“Just show us what you’ve got,” Auger said.

They had to wait twenty minutes until the plume had dissipated sufficiently, and their angle of observation improved enough, to allow a clearer view. By then, Tunguska’s ship was following the same arcing trajectory as Niagara’s, curving around for a hard interception with the ALS. They were still sustaining five gees, cocooned against harm.

“They’ve broken through,” Tunguska said.

He pushed an image into Auger’s head. The Molotov device had punched a surprisingly neat little entry wound into the skin of the ALS. The hole was a hundred kilometres across and nearly circular. The kilometre-thick skin glowed painfully brightly around the edge of the hole, shading down through blue and yellow and charred red out to a distance of perhaps two or three hundred kilometres from the epicentre. There were hints of wild, lashing structures in the exposed cross section, flailing like severed nerve endings.

“Dear Christ,” Auger said. “They did it. The damned thing didn’t put up any kind of fight at all.”

“Did you expect it to?” Floyd asked.

“I expected something.”

“What about the other ship?”

“Still tracking it,” Tunguska said. “She’s under thrust and maintaining the course she was following before the blast. It will take her through the wound in under ten minutes.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have been so concerned about the state of Niagara’s shielding, she thought. “I take it we’re still not within beam range?”

“No.” Tunguska sounded genuinely embarrassed. “We’ll have to follow her in for that.”

“Through the wound?”

“Yes,” Tunguska said. “Into the ALS. I’m afraid it’s the only course available to us.”