The Abyss Beyond Dreams (88 page)

‘Three minutes to the centre of the Forest,’ the smartcore said.

‘Great. Synth some beer and pizza for me.’

‘Are you regressing?’

‘I think I’m allowed some comfort food at this point.’

The food processor pinged. Nigel went over and smiled fondly at the brown glass bottle and the flat, square cardboard box. ‘Thanks. Damn, I haven’t seen that label in a thousand
years.’ The smell triggered memories of long ago. Of student halls and all-night sessions on the physics department hypercube, hour after hour arguing excitedly with Ozzie as they begged,
borrowed and stole equipment to build the gateway. His first footprint on Mars.

Nigel took a good long swig from the bottle. ‘That is just how I remember it tasting. Cheap, weak and gassy. Perfect.’

‘We are at the centre of the Forest. Would you like a countdown?’

‘Hell, no. Just do it.’ He bit into the hot pizza slice –

*

Demitri had caught up with them on the afternoon of the day after the launch, riding his horse up the first of the Algory foothills where they’d made camp.

‘Where’s Valeri?’ Kysandra asked.

Demitri dismounted. ‘In Dios, keeping an eye on things.’

‘Nothing on this planet matters any more?’

‘Let’s hope not, eh?’

They built a small fire of logs. Not worried about the blaze being seen. The ge-eagles were still flying high circles around them, alert for any pursuit. There wasn’t another human within
twenty miles.

Kysandra insisted on sitting up for most of the night, waiting.

‘How long?’ she asked as the flames sent sparks high into the night. Overhead, the beautiful nebulas glimmered for what she knew was their last time; Giu and Uracus sat on opposite
sides of the sky, facing each other as always. It didn’t matter; soon she would know a night sky filled with stars.

‘It should have taken
Skylady
approximately twenty-two hours to reach the Forest,’ Fergus said. ‘But don’t forget he had to locate Shuttle Fourteen.’

Kysandra hugged her knees and rocked about. ‘Oh, come on, Nigel!

Marek shook her shoulder, waking her. She looked about in puzzlement. Someone had put a blanket over her. The fire had burnt down to embers. Dawn was lightening the eastern
sky, allowing the nebulas to fade away behind the rising azure stain. Poised just above the horizon, the Forest shimmered a pale silver.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Why hasn’t it detonated?’

‘Not much longer,’ Marek assured her. ‘We thought you’d better be awake for this.’

‘Thanks.’ She nodded in gratitude.

Demitri handed her a mug of tea. She sat up, stretching. Her shell tightened. She didn’t want the ANAdroids to know how alarmed she was growing. She’d been expecting the
quantumbuster to detonate a long time ago.

She sipped at the reassuringly hot tea, glancing resentfully up at the vile fuzzy patch that was starting to blend into the emergent rays of the sun.

‘Best you don’t look directly at the Forest now,’ Fergus said.

‘Why?’

‘The
Skylady
masses about three hundred tonnes. When the quantumbuster goes off, it’ll convert that directly to energy to power the effect. Even if ninety per cent is
successfully modified into a quantum distortion wave, ten per cent is still a hell of a lot of radiation overspill.’

‘The flash will be brighter than the sun,’ Marek said. ‘And we’ll have no warning.’

She frowned thoughtfully. ‘What about gamma rays? Won’t they be harmful?’

‘The atmosphere should shield us.’

‘Should?’

‘It depends on—’

Marek lied. The quantumbuster detonation wasn’t simply brighter than the sun. It was so intense, so overwhelming, the flare dissolved the whole world into a uniform sheet of silver
whiteness. Kysandra yelled in shock as everything vanished into the outpouring of impossible light. She instinctively slapped her hand over her already closed eyes. The whiteness dimmed to bright
scarlet.
Blood colour.

Her heart was racing exactly as it had while
Skylady
powered into space. She wanted to risk opening her eyes, but she was too scared.

‘It’s okay,’ Fergus was assuring her. ‘It’s over.’

Now she was simply creeped out by the silence of the devastating light. Something that powerful should surely sound like the planet splitting open. Carefully, she opened one eye. Her vision
seemed to be all purple and yellow after-image blotches. She blinked for a long while, trying to clear the contamination away. Secondary routines helped filter her retinas.

The three ANAdroids were standing together, holding hands, their heads tipped back so they could watch the early morning sky.

Kysandra turned to look at the Forest. She drew in a sharp breath, and her lips twitched in the start of a smile. The Forest was still there, but now it was crowned with a halo of vivid emerald
light. As she watched, strands of the light chased across space like stellar lightning bolts. One hurtled towards Bienvenido, passing close above the atmosphere, and that entire half of the sky
abruptly seethed turquoise. ‘Oh, great Giu,’ she groaned. Space itself was splitting open.

‘Cherenkov radiation,’ Fergus said. ‘It’s working. The Void is breaking up.’

Kysandra laughed in delight as the perfect green ruptures multiplied. ‘He did it. Oh, Giu, he did it!’ The nebulas vanished, their dainty light obliterated by the raw energy of the
fissures. Her laughter weakened. Except Uracus. Uracus was still there. The malevolent tangle of fluorescent scarlet and yellow fronds was at the centre of a violent radiation storm. Jade cataracts
writhed in torment, rebuffed by Uracus.

The tainted red light of the ominous nebula was growing stronger.

‘It’s growing,’ she moaned. ‘Uracus is growing.’

The cancerous presence, which alongside sweet Giu had dominated the night above Bienvenido her whole life, was flexing energetically, like a spectral serpent wriggling through space. Visibly
expanding as it came.

‘That’s impossible,’ Marek said. ‘Nothing that big can move that fast. It’s lightyears across. And lightyears away.’

‘So . . . it started doing this years ago?’ Kysandra asked uncertainly.

‘I don’t think so,’ Fergus said.

Kysandra took a small step backwards. Uracus now took up a quarter of the sky. The thrashing aquamarine clefts of the quantum distortion were in retreat before it. ‘Uh . . .’ she
breathed. ‘Is it coming towards us?’

‘Oh, dear,’ Demitri murmured.

‘The Void knows,’ Marek said. ‘It can sense the internal damage the quantumbuster is inflicting. This could be its response mechanism.’

‘But Uracus is where the bad souls are sent,’ Kysandra groaned. ‘It’s what the Commonwealth legends call hell. Nigel told me.’

‘We’re not going to hell, Kysandra.’ Fergus said quickly.

Kysandra didn’t believe him.

Uracus filled the entire sky now, its tangled web of topaz and scarlet plasma strands flexing ominously as it rushed towards Bienvenido. Golden sparks emerged around the central gash, to slither
around and between the individual strands as if they were flocks of frenzied shooting stars.

‘It’s going to hit us!’ Kysandra cried. ‘It’s going to smash into Bienvenido!’

Uracus engulfed them. The sun vanished behind its tattered swirls of phosphorescence – an eclipse that dropped the planet back into night. Faint, cold moiré light was all that
illuminated the landscape now. A fissure of utter blackness split apart down the centre of the nebula. Long tenuous strands of pulsing cerise and saffron stardust curved back in great cataracts, a
million effervescent waterfalls falling out of the universe. Deeper and deeper they plunged down the infinite lightless abyss as it opened still wider.

Then Bienvenido was falling beside the phenomenal cascades. Uracus closed behind it.

*

Nigel Sheldon woke up with a start, the ANAdroids’ dream of the terrible abyss still chilling his mind. He opened his eyes.

Torux was watching him from the other side of the private chamber on board
Olokkural
.

‘What just happened?’ Nigel demanded. ‘I can’t dream them any more. Where the hell did they go?’

Kysandra heard the planes of the Air Defence Force droning overhead as she walked across the gardens at the back of the manor house. She wasn’t surprised; there had been a
Fall alert on the radio that afternoon. The big radars of the Space Vigilance Office had picked up a batch of eggs on their way down to Bienvenido from the Ring. They estimated the Fall zone to be
west of Port Chana, close to the Sansone mountains; impact would be five o’clock in the morning.

Without her retinas switched to infra-red, she couldn’t see the planes against the jet-black night sky. But everybody knew and cheered that distinctive sound now; it was the twin engine
IA-505s above her. They were stationed down at the aerodrome of the county’s fledgling squadron, just outside the city. Five IA-505s had been delivered to Port Chana so far, with another
three expected before the end of the year. They were a veritable miracle of manufacture for Bienvenido’s primitive industrial base, the first planes able to lift the heavy-calibre Gatling
guns that could penetrate the shell of a Faller egg. The radio was always full of praise for the valiant workers on the big new factory lines, transforming Laura Brandt’s designs into solid
metal.

Kysandra had to admire Laura for that. She was dealing with engineers who had grown up with steam engines. Supercharged V12 engines were something they just about comprehended.
Bienvenido’s foundries didn’t require too much modernization to fabricate the components. Production was starting to increase. The skies would be safer.

The large observatory building was a simple circular stone wall with a dome roof, whose wooden petals could be cranked apart to give the telescope access to the sky. There wasn’t another
building like it in the region, which sooner or later was going to cause problems. Kysandra still hadn’t decided if they should dismantle the structures they’d built to contain and
operate all the systems Nigel had removed from
Skylady
before his final flight. Or if she and the ANAdroids should simply move. A life spent constantly on the run didn’t really
appeal. But now the medical module had finished enriching her body with biononics, she didn’t actually need it any more. The semiorganic synthesizers, though – they were a different
matter. She didn’t want to abandon them. They could produce a great many useful Commonwealth items.

For six months they’d been busy extruding sophisticated components for Demitri’s telescope. With its array of flawless mirrors and electronic focal sensors, it could scour the empty
skies like nothing else on Bienvenido. Demitri spent every night in the observatory, looking for . . . well, anything.

Bienvenido was slowly turning Port Chana towards dawn, a motion which had brought Aqueous above the horizon, a strong point of blue light, shining by itself in the absolute night. Seventeen
million kilometres distant along the same orbit, their neighbouring water world was too far away to show as a crescent to the naked eye. Unlike Valatare, the gas giant that orbited their new star
only ten million kilometres further out. Its pink disc dominated the sky when they were in conjunction, creating tides that plagued the coastal cities and producing a season of storms to lash the
lands.

The heavy throbbing noise of the V12 engines had faded into the west when she opened the observatory’s door and went inside. Demitri was sitting on a stool, wearing a thick sweater against
the cool night air. The shelf bench beside him held a couple of processor modules that controlled the telescope, with an old-style hologram portal on top of one. The big multi-mirror telescope
itself filled most of the observatory. Tonight it was angled to point into the south-west.

He looked round as she came in. ‘How did the trial go?’

‘Oh.’ She waved a hand airily, feigning a lack of interest. It was still odd not having an ex-sight, or teekay for that matter. Even now, five years on from the Great Transition, she
frequently tried to perceive the emotional content of minds of everyone she encountered – not that she’d ever been able to read the ANAdroids back in the Void. ‘What we
expected.’ The short-wave radio signal from the capital had drifted in and out annoyingly all night, but the result of the show trial was never going to be in doubt. ‘Bethaneve was
found guilty of sedition. Apparently she was plotting against Democratic Unity with other anti-revolutionary forces.’

‘Oh, dear. It’s always tough being married to a paranoid dictator. I did warn her.’

‘She got sentenced to twenty years in the Pidrui mines. Apparently our great and glorious Prime Minister Slvasta asked the court to show no leniency. He wanted to make it clear that
we’re all equal now. No exceptions.’

‘If it gets any worse, we’ll have to assassinate him.’

‘We can’t afford a social upheaval. Not right now. There are too many Falls from the Ring. Bienvenido has to have some kind of cohesive response force, or we’ll be
overwhelmed.’

‘I bet that’s what Captain Cornelius used to say.’

‘Probably,’ she admitted. ‘What did you want to show me?’

He tugged another stool out from under the bench. Kysandra sat on it, and the hologram portal came on. A small circular smudge of light hung in its centre, like a glittery hurricane swirl.

‘This,’ he said cheerfully.

She regarded it with interest. It wasn’t one of the nine other planets they shared the lonely sun with in this strange dark universe Uracus had thrown them into. Nor a tree from the Ring
that circled fifty-three thousand kilometres above Bienvenido; wrong shape.

‘A Skylord?’ she asked cautiously.

‘No,’ Demitri said. ‘It’s a galaxy.’

‘Crud!’

‘Quite.’

‘How far away?’

‘Optically, it’s extremely faint. My preliminary estimate is about three and a half million lightyears.’

‘How did it get there?’