Sunborn (55 page)

   
“It is too little. It cannot save the star. And there’s a new threat!”

   
Deeaab’s voice echoed across the gulf.
“Can you remove the threat?”

     “The new one and the quick-ones are very close. Uncertain I can intercede without harm.”

     “Can you not place yourself between them?”

   
Daarooaack hesitated. She felt so wary of making matters worse; she was far younger than Deeaab, and wished that the older one could do it.

    A sigh rippled through Deeaab. Daarooaack knew Deeaab’s attention was on the time-fusion between
*
Thunder
*
 and the small ones. Daarooaack really should do it; she was in a better position, and had the stronger command of energy. But Daarooaack was afraid of endangering the ephemerals while trying to save them.

     “You must try to pull the attacker away. And I must end the time-fusion.”

   
Daarooaack spoke reluctantly.
“I will try.”

*

   
Ik’s head was so full of images from the star, they were hard to keep straight. It took time to realize that
*
Thunder
*
was experiencing a new distress. The flow of dark matter had changed, and it was building up a knot of indigestion in
*
Thunder
*
’s own belly. What was happening? Was this John Bandicut’s work? He must ask
*
Thunder
*
. That’s what he was here for, was to gain understanding, to learn how to help. /If you can hear...what is happening? We are trying to help you and the other star./

       
Stop

           
it must stop

       
Can you not help ?

   
Ik struggled to understand. He could not. Then Antares, nearby, nudged him to look at something. /What?/ Finally he picked a detail out of the images: a complex network of threads converging on a star. But this wasn’t the streams of dark matter going into
*
Thunder
*
, a lot of little streams joining to make one large stream. No, this was a network going into
*Nick*
—a lot of
large
streams from
*
Thunder
*
and
many other stars,
joining to become the flood that would kill
*
Nick
*
. Was that what Antares wanted him to see? Was there more?

    /Uhhhl...
look
./

    The nearby stream from
*
Thunder
*
was attenuated, because of the blockage.
Ed?
And something was trying to free it. The stream was twitching like a high-pressure hose. There was a node of some kind, a center down close to
*
Nick
*
, maybe even inside
*
Nick
*
—and that was where the efforts were coming from. He could see it the way
*
Thunder
*
 saw it, little pulses of light, persistently trying to get the flow restarted, like someone turning the water on and off in a hose, trying to clear a kink.

   
/Is that—?
*
Thunder
*
, is that what’s controlling it all? Is
that
the control center? Over there inside
*
Nick
*
?/

       
Source

           
source of the pain

               
there

       
Must stop...

           
can you not stop ?

   
Ik was stunned into silence. The stream from
*
Thunder
*
was just one in a
myriad
of dark-matter streams pouring into
*
Nick
*
. Their efforts here were futile. Moon and stars! He focused on the control node.
That
was what they needed to get to. He felt a moment of dizziness as he tried to fix it clearly in his mind. /I think...I see...we will.../ And then he stopped again. He had a sudden feeling that his thoughts were no longer reaching the ailing star. The images were flattening out, losing clarity, dissipating. He could no longer hear the star’s thoughts. He felt Antares begin to pull away.

    It was ending. /
*
Thunder
*
.../ But it was too late. Whatever Deep had done to enable the contact had disappeared.

    Ik opened his eyes. He was almost shocked to find himself still on the bridge of
The Long View.
 How long had he been in the joining? His limbs ached. He slowly stretched his arms, moved his legs, and blinked his eyes back into focus. Beside him, Antares was doing the same. He saw Li-Jared a dozen strides away, pacing, talking to Bandicut.

    Bandicut was the first to notice Ik, and he rushed to help Ik and Antares to their feet. He was full of questions, but Ik waved the questions off for the moment; he was too overwhelmed with thoughts and images. “What has been happening here?” he asked in a rasp.

    Bandicut looked just as overwhelmed. He gestured at the viewspace. “We’re just trying to get away from our new
friend
out there.” Ik looked again and drew back. A menacing-looking object—
not
 the satellite where they had been docked—was silhouetted against the star.

    “Hrrr! Are we fleeing?”

    “Yes we are,” Li-Jared growled, sounding preoccupied. Then he wheeled around, apparently registering Ik’s voice.
Bong-g-g.
 “Ik! You’re out!”

    “Yes.”

    “What happened in there? No wait—Bandie was about to tell me what happened inside that Mindaru vessel, and why he had to leave Napoleon behind.”

    “Vessel? Left Napoleon?” Antares had just staggered to her feet, and was leaning on Bandicut’s arm for support. “John, do I remember...did you tell us you were going
off the ship
?”

    Bandicut turned to glance anxiously at the pursuing Mindaru. “I’ll have to say this fast, because we’re dealing with a lot. Napoleon and I tried to reach the central control, but we couldn’t. We think it’s in orbit around
*
Nick
*
.”

    “Hrah! Yes!
Inside
*
Nick
*
!” Ik exclaimed. “We saw it.”

    Bandicut started visibly. “You
saw
it? Napoleon’s
over
there in
*
Nick
*
’s atmosphere now—”

    “
Uhhll?
 How?”

    “Hrrl—?”

    “N-space connector—Napoleon’s there now, waiting to see if we can find some other way to shut off the dark matter. If we can’t, he’s going to try to blow up the star before it reaches the critical mass for a hypernova.”

    Antares’s eyes opened wide. She looked at Ik, who looked at Li-Jared, who said to Bandicut, “I thought you said you’d stopped it.”

    “We thought we had, or Ed had, but—”

    “But, rrrr, you didn’t,” Ik interrupted. “There are
many
stars pouring dark matter onto
*
Nick
*
, not just
*
Thunder
*
.”

    “Exactly,” Bandicut said, explaining what he and Napoleon and Ed had done.

    The part about Bandicut and Napoleon jumping across to the hypernova star, while the rest of them were inside
*
Thunder
*
, left Ik speechless. How could that be?

    His thought was interrupted by the voice of Copernicus. “Folks, I’m pleased to have you all back, but while you’ve been talking, we’ve just completed a slingshot maneuver close to the sun. And I’m afraid we’ve got a problem.”

*

   
Daarooaack made her move as the quicklife began their plunge around the body of the star. It seemed clear they were attempting to outrun the pursuer. They were widening the gap, possibly enough for Daarooaack to slip across and make contact with the enemy—perhaps enough even to
grab
it and pull it away. She wasn’t sure how to destroy it, the way she knew Deeaab had once destroyed one of these objects, but if she could just give the quicklife some room to flee...

    Darting, she caught up with the enemy and engulfed it. She tried to pull it onto a new course, but it felt like...she wasn’t sure what. It felt like nothing she had ever known, a solid un-life, but an un-life that behaved and reacted like life. It squirmed; it was hard to hold, too compact, too dense. It was trying to follow the quicklife in a tight loop around the sun. Daarooaack tried widening the object’s arc; but somehow it slipped out of her grasp and steered even tighter to the sun.

    Daarooaack dove after it. The currents of space and time were tricky here. She seized it again, caught it in her downward swoop, and tried this time to carry it straight down into the core of the sun, where surely it could not survive. Deeper and faster she took it. But again it spun in an unexpected direction and slipped from her grasp. This time, however, she had given it speed in the wrong direction. It was now cutting an even tighter arc through the sun, and it was gaining fast; it was now nearly upon the ephemerals’ ship.

    And it was now too close for her to intervene without risking her friends. Daarooaack veered away in fury and frustration.

*

   
“I think Dark just tried to help us,” Copernicus said.

    Ik and the others turned to look. “Oh, mokin’ A,” Bandicut said. A black cloud, presumably Dark, was flying up and away from them. The Mindaru was now emerging from the glowing mist of fire, and was a lot closer than before, and growing fast.

    “I believe Dark just tried to drag the sentinel into the sun,” Copernicus said. “Unfortunately, it failed.”

    “Worse, the Mindaru has managed an even tighter loop than ours,” Jeaves reported. “It’s gaining fast. I can only suggest to fly evasively if you can.”

    Ik could see that Copernicus was trying, but the Mindaru sentry was closing rapidly. It now loomed over the viewspace balcony like a great crablike thing, all angles and extensions. Parts of it seemed darker than night; other parts blazed brighter than the star behind it. Long, jointed appendages erupted from it and arched forward, as though to pluck them each right off the bridge. Ik stepped back involuntarily, and grabbed in the air for support as Copernicus attempted a last, desperate course change. “Hrachh!” he cried. “Copern—”

    But before he could finish calling the name, a crashing jolt passed through the ship, sending Ik slamming into Bandicut, and all of them sliding across the deck. As Ik struggled back to his feet, he looked up to see a flashing array of shadow-and-light, great jointed claws of metal or energy, encircle and snap closed around their ship.

Chapter 34

Captive

    The Mindaru entity known locally as Starburster was wrestling with an unexpected challenge. Instreaming data told of multiple invasive activities nearby—all threatening the mission of creating a massive overload of exotic matter in the star at the heart of the nebula. The Starburster Mindbody strove to weave together an understanding of the situation. Organic life-structures were attempting to disrupt the matter-gathering enterprise. Default response called for parasitic lifeforms to be caught and examined. One set had just in fact been captured, possibly the same lifeforms that had recently eluded one of the outer sentries.
    Their presence had caused minimal harm, but not trivial. One thread of the Starburster mass-gathering project had been compromised. It was a small percentage, but worrisome because it was unexpected. They could not be allowed to survive, but it was essential to learn more about them, especially their places of origin.

    The inner sentinel would arrive soon with the captives. Two other, quite different, entities were approaching, however—cloudlike spatial discontinuities that displayed certain lifelike characteristics. Their nature and purpose were unknown. One had briefly interfered with the sentinel, but the interference had turned to the sentinel’s advantage. For now, the Starburster Mindbody would simply monitor the strange beings; it had no means of acting against them.

    Behind all of this lay the mission of the Survivors. The Survivors were relentless in pursuit of their goals, and so therefore were the Mindaru, their servants. The Starburster Mindbody would stay here until the work of the Survivors had been done. Eons of work had already been completed; but eons more remained, before the transformation of the galaxy would be complete.

*

   
Daarooaack watched in dismay as the hostile entity closed its long pincers and physically seized the quicklife ship. The entity began at once to drag the ship onto a new course.

    Daarooaack called to Deeaab:
“I could not stop it. I cannot separate them. What can we do?”

    Deeaab drew in from the other side, and they flanked the hostile one as it pulled the quicklife vessel onto a course toward the imperiled star, the one the ephemeral Bandicut, through Charli-echo, had identified as
*
Nick
*
.

    As they shadowed the joined spaceships in flight through the layers of otherspace, Deeaab gently probed and tested the surrounding fabric of spacetime.