Erebus (32 page)

Fortunately—or, more accurately, suspiciously—the operating systems all looked in order, and activating the gateway didn’t seem especially complicated. Frampton was looking at a symbol on one of the whiteboards, head cocked to one side. It was two circles, one much larger than the other and a dotted line between them drawn in marker pen. I could see some scribbled equations covering it that may as well have been hieroglyphics to me.

“Dexter,” I said sharply to cut through his daze of concentration, “just show me what to do, then clear out. We can’t afford to delay any longer.”

“Okay.” Frampton gave a little shake of his head. “The operating system looks like it’s pretty simple. I’ll set it to the point just prior to power-up, and then you can take over.”

***

Christ, I hoped that I was right that the bomb wasn’t set to go off the moment someone switched on this contraption. My instincts said not. After all,
Erebus
had used it when she went through, and that hadn’t blown Iwa into a cloud of rubble.

A small shuttlepod from
Gagarin
waited at the lock nearest me. It was preprogrammed with a fast-burn solution to get me off this rock quickly and back to
Gagarin
. In theory, I needed only to press a couple of buttons in the base, run—or the Iwa equivalent of running—to the pod, press a couple more buttons, and then enjoy the ride.

I had my feet hooked under some convenient hoops on the floor in front of a console looking out of the bay window of the viewing gallery. Frampton had set it to power up the pagoda. Again, the thought that this was suspiciously easy plagued the back of my mind. It was as if someone wanted us to do it. But if this were a trap, at least it would only take me out…and forever imprison Frain and Drayton on the other side of the alien gate—a small consolation, at least.

I looked at the artifact looming from floor to ceiling in the dark belly of the cavern with my hand resting on the console, waiting for
Gagarin
to call. If I’d felt isolated and far from home before, it was nothing to being alone in that room waiting to punch in a sequence that I hoped wouldn’t blow me up. The artifact, ancient and alien, made me feel small, insignificant. It was a cold feeling gnawing in the center of my gut. For all we knew, the artifact could have been floating around out here during the time of the dinosaurs, before mankind ever drew breath. I shook my head and took a deep breath. I needed to get a good solid grip.

As far as Frampton could tell, the artifact had two modes—some kind of personal transport, where someone could simply walk into it, and a mode for transporting ships in orbit of Iwa. That was the mode Frampton thought he had figured out.

“
Gagarin
is in position,” Captain Vasily called over the laser link. “Layton, you are a go at your discretion.”

I looked at the large view screen in front of me, a graphic of the artifact on display. I tapped the touch screen. It flickered back on for me to input the targeting coordinates into a waiting field.

“Okay, give me your coordinates.”

Captain Vasily fed me a long string of numbers, telling me when to swap from azimuth to altitude. I entered them, prodding the touch screen with my suited index finger.

“Target locked,” I said once I had input all the numbers. “Beginning power-up.”

This was the nerve-racking bit. Was that bomb set to explode as soon as any juice went through it? Sergeant Jamal didn’t think so. He said it was likely wired to a simple remote control. I just hoped that no suicidal zealot was around in some secret chamber that the troops had missed to activate it.

I touched the screen and a bar graph appeared, showing bars creeping upward.

Fusion tokomak active. Capacitor charge time: twenty minutes. Commit?
blinked onto the screen.

“Guys, one more button to press. Are we good to go?” I said, my hand trembling. If it was going to pop, this was what would do it.

“Go,” Vasily said without hesitation.

Without another thought, I pressed the screen.

Committed.
I read the blinking word off the display. “Right, I’m hauling arse.”

I unhooked my feet from the loops and turned to the door. Another screen caught my eye as I did. It showed a graphic of Akarga with pulsating red light in the center that hadn’t been up a moment before, but I didn’t have time to ponder it. I moved as fast as I could, that mix of dragging and loping that seemed to be the quickest way of getting around on this rock. I was thankful I’d had a lot of practice back on Concorde.

I jumped down the ladder well, pushing myself down on the rungs to speed my slow drop, and hauled myself to the lock. Two minutes had gone by according to the chronograph in my HUD.

The inner door of the airlock had been left open for me. I slid in, slapped the
close
button, and it rumbled shut. I lifted the safety guard on the emergency decompress and hit the button. The door opened slowly at first to equalize the pressure inside. If it didn’t, I would shoot out with the air and find myself in close orbit around Iwa, unable to get back to the surface until I either hit a mountain or Iwa’s insignificant gravity clawed me back into a dusty heap after a few days. By then,
Gagarin
would be gone, and I would die of asphyxiation or, if I could manage to get back to the base, have a long wait for rescue. The pressure in the chamber reached zero, and the door slammed open.

One of the troops had laid a guide rope leading from the lock to the shuttlepod, and I pulled myself along it as fast as I could in my bulky suit. I got to the small spacecraft with fifteen minutes left on the clock. The pod was little more than a pressurized bubble and an engine. I climbed in and sealed the hatch. I strapped myself into the seat of the single-man pod and hit the button labeled
execute
. It was a poor choice of word, indeed.

The engine was already primed to go, and within seconds, I felt myself being crushed back into the seat as the craft climbed hard on a column of fire. Above, I could see the
Gagarin
, tiny but growing fast.

“Layton, we have you off the surface. Ten minutes on the clock. ETA four minutes.”

I could only grunt in reply. I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest under the horrendous acceleration the pod had been programmed to perform.

The autopilot spun nose to tail, and Iwa rolled dizzyingly into view. Squinting through the pain, I could see the dome receding. At first, so gradually that I wasn’t sure if I were imagining it, I could see a light start to grow in the center where the tip of the pagoda breached the dome.

“Ac...” I coughed, struggling to get the word out through the brutal acceleration I was being subjected to. “Activity. Dome.”

“We’ve got it, Layton,” Vasily said. “Don’t worry about it; just enjoy the ride.”

The pod was decelerating hard, matching speed with
Gagarin
for docking, and before long, the motion slowed and eased as it maneuvered into dock.

With a loud thump, the boat latched onto
Gagarin.
Before I was on my feet, the hatch sprang open, and Phillips hauled me bodily out of the seat.

“Come on, Layton. No time to be a layabout,” she said. She was unbelievably strong, manipulating me with ease. “I’m going to get you to the habitat ring. If there’s any nasty radiation from that thing, you’re going to be best off in there.”

I nodded in reply, and she hauled me deftly into the spinal corridor cart elevator. Gripping the rail, she set it off toward the more protected ring section.

Two minutes went by before we got to the habitat ring. I shambled after Phillips toward the mess section, still adjusting to my centrifuge-induced weight. The mess was a quarter of the way around the ring from our position, and we made it in good time despite my now feeble legs.

“Database dump has been completed. The blockade over at the gate will have all data up to this point,” I heard Frampton say as we entered the mess and I buckled my aching body into my seat. “I’ll keep piping through sensor readings as we get them.” That would at least mean that the lander and assault shuttle would have a record of everything we had found.

“Thirty seconds,” Vasily called.

“Layton, well done,” Vance said distractedly, watching the image of the Iwa dome. The tip was unmistakably bright now. It looked like it was barely containing the energy within.

“Thanks. At least it hasn’t sparked off the antimatter,” I said.

“Ten seconds.”

“Whose bright idea was it to follow Frain through an alien stargate, anyway?” Vance muttered.

The tip of the pagoda flared and everything in the room brightened. Other than that, it felt nothing like a human gate. It was far, far more painful.

Every fiber in my body erupted with a burning agony. My muscles cramped, and my throat opened to scream—but it died there. Just as quickly as it started, the pain was gone, like a switch had been thrown. No gentle gradient, it just stopped. One after another, the external images on the walls blinked back into existence.

Outside, I could see a golden whirlpool in space, a swirling load of burning matter being drawn into the dark center, and out of that center, a piercing beam of light lanced toward the stars. Even with my sketchy knowledge of astrophysics, I knew what it was. We had found ourselves next one of the most voracious eaters of matter in the galaxy—a black hole.

The people in the room were not easily shocked. Many were over a hundred years old, yet violence was still new to many of them. But that wasn’t what had given them pause.

“
Another
FTL gate?” Patrice breathed. “And it is functional?”

“We’ll get to that,” the host said grimly.

“This technology…” Patrice breathed, “…would change everything.”

“That it would,” the host agreed. “But there is a problem.”

“A problem?”

“Perhaps we should continue…”

“Yes, yes,” Patrice said. “We must see more.”

“We think it’s a black hole called V4641 Sagittarius, also known as Sagi,” Captain Vasily said. “From what we can see of the local stars through all the dust that is swirling about out here, that is. That would put us over one thousand six hundred light-years out from Sol. To say we are a long way from home is an understatement.”

More detail was resolving on the screens and holotank. The source of the golden light was a star orbiting close to the hole, being ripped to shreds. The blazing debris that had been wrenched from its surface had created something the captain had called an
accretion disk
. In a way, it was beautiful to see, a star being stripped of matter, the gasses swirling into a flat golden whirlpool.

Gagarin had found itself orbiting a grey, meteorite-punished moon that circled a vast gas giant, the biggest we’d yet encountered. It was shrouded in streaks of red and golden clouds, dimly illuminated by the tortured star and silent maelstrom of the black hole.

The moon we were above looked the twin of Earth’s, yet that was not the most interesting thing about this rock. The telescopes revealed the ragged remains of a city on the surface embedded in one of the craters. It reminded me of Arcas City on Calisto, only much bigger and containing oddly shaped structures. The buildings had strange, twisted lines in some places and bulbous protrusions. Just from looking at it, it was obvious they weren’t designed by a human mind. Still, what was similar was that building a city in a crater made sense. Why build walls when half of the work was already done for you?

“Any sign of
Erebus
?” I asked.

“Yes.” Vasily nodded his head. On the screen, an image of a bright blue-hot flare appeared. “We have an antimatter plume. Eighteen million kilometers out and accelerating at one-g.”

“Christ, he’s not giving up, is he?” I muttered.

“
Nyet
, he is not.” Vasily’s tone was low and dangerous. The friendly man I met when we embarked had long since disappeared beneath a cold hatred for what Frain had done to his crew and ship. “He’s heading straight toward the black hole or, more accurately, this.”

The screen flashed and showed another dark world barreling through the cloud of the accretion disk. It left a wake that filled with golden matter.

“That’s pretty damn close to the event horizon of the hole,” Frampton said, his attention glued to one of the wall screens that scrolled a bunch of incomprehensible numbers. “Why the hell would he want to go there?”

“That we don’t know yet,” Vasily said, his blue eyes reflecting the multicolored vista of space he stared at.

“What do we know about it?” I asked. To me, it just looked like a black sphere back-dropped by the accretion disk.

“It’s a dwarf planet, barely a thousand kilometers in diameter.” Vasily shrugged helplessly. “It’s skimming the event horizon of Sagi. It’s balanced somewhat precariously. I must say, unless we’ve had the extraordinary luck to happen upon a world about to be devoured, I am somewhat suspicious of it being there.”

“Everything he’s done has led to this place,” I said. “Whatever he wants, it’s on that rock.”

“Then, if for no other reason than for Dana,” Vasily growled, “I want to stop him from getting there. I don’t intend to fuck around. We will drop out of A-drive right on top of them. The cascade as the bubble collapses will atomize them.”

“Captain,” Sihota said calmly, “we have to consider the possibility that we may find ourselves in a first contact situation out here. We know the remains of a city are below us on that moon. If there is any kind of extant intelligence here, it won’t reflect well on humanity if the first thing they see is us slaughtering our kindred.”

Vasily stood up from his seat, the anger sparking in his eyes. His mouth opened and closed a few times.

“There’s another point,” I said, trying to match Sihota’s soothing tone. “We’ve seen no sign of him off-loading
Erebus’s
crew, not to mention that he might have people from Iwa onboard. Trust me, you don’t want their deaths on your conscience, even if you can live with killing Frain and Drayton.”

“Goddamn it!” He slammed his fist down on the console in front of him, then turned to face us again. “I’m a scientist, an explorer, not a soldier. We were supposed to leave all this shit behind.”