Sunborn (62 page)

    The question remained whether he could get the grenades down to the core of the star and have them survive long enough to work. It was a big if. He’d had time to think about it, and the thought had finally occurred to him that they wouldn’t have built this ledge just as a pretty place to stand. If it wasn’t connected to the control center, surely it was connected to the reservoir down in the core. Maybe for maintenance. Napoleon couldn’t imagine what sort of maintenance the Mindaru could do on the reservoir from here, but what else could it be for? Perhaps there was a provision for sending special mechs down to do who knew what? With that thought in mind, he had undertaken an extremely careful search for a thread, a hint of an n-space connector between the ledge where he stood and the core.

    Six hours ago, he had found it. It was literally a thread, more like an anchor line, or a placeholder for a real n-space passage. But there it was. And he was pretty sure that even with the very limited n-space abilities he had from his upgrades, he could pry it open just a little—just enough to pop three grenades into it and send them on a long slide down to the core. The n-space layer should protect them, and the pressure of the sun might even squeeze them downward faster.

    One by one, he set the slender grenades to detonate when they encountered an n-space field of a certain strength; the exact setting was a guess. When that was done, he spun up the tiny n-space generator in his third hand, and with great care, dilated the opening of the n-space thread. With one last hesitation, he popped the grenades down the tube. Then he pinched the end of the tube closed.

    With a thought that was very much like a prayer, he waited. And figuratively put his head between his knees, as Bandicut might have told him to do.

*

   
The Mindaru were taking the bait. Deeaab heard from Daarooaack that a change was occurring in the boundary layer deep in the star. The inflowing streams dropped away. An instant later that shell of spacetime, the boundary layer that had been holding all the strange matter in, was gone.

    The dense strange matter was abruptly part of normal-space at the heart of the star. Gravity spiked instantaneously. The surrounding plasma, already fusing furiously, began at once to fall into the steep gravity well.

    The star began to collapse.

    Deeaab whirled to bring time once more to a near-standstill in a tight cloak around the enemy. He would have slowed time at the core of the star, too, if he could have. But that was more than he could do at once. He was just going to have to work fast.

    The ship of the ephemerals had done all it could. Deeaab murmured to the quarx-echo,
“Tell them to flee. Flee for their lives!”

*

   
It seemed to Bandicut that the probing of the Mindaru AI suddenly slowed, as if it had stepped into molasses. The Mindaru’s rats appeared frozen, out at the periphery of his vision. They had turned pale, ghostly transparent.

    He didn’t understand why. And then he did. Remember what Deep is good at, Charli had said. Time-fusion. Was Deep slowing time for the Mindaru?
To let us get away!

    The last of the link with the Mindaru was dissolving. Bandicut blinked back to awareness where he sat, in the middle of the bridge. In front of him was the fire of the star. They were free and diving headlong into the sun.
A diversion. To convince the Mindaru we were serious.
 He turned and was stunned to see Li-Jared wrestling on the deck with Ik, both of them shouting. Antares was getting to her feet, shouting, “Ik, this isn’t you, it’s the Mindaru! Don’t let them control you!”

    Bandicut remembered with a jolt. The Mindaru infection had erupted in Ik’s stones. “My God!” he croaked, and lurched out of his seat.

    Antares flew to his side. “John, what have you done? I felt you telling the enemy to destroy the star!” She grabbed his arm in a viselike grip and shook him violently. “Ik’s gone mad—have you, too?”

    Bandicut struggled to keep his balance. “Deep and Dark—we have to work together with them! You’ve got to trust us, no, we’re not working with the Mindaru!”

    “HRAHH!” Ik bellowed, throwing Li-Jared off. He staggered to his feet, glaring at Bandicut.
“You are—not—Mindaru?”
 He whirled at Li-Jared, who was picking himself up—then whirled again and strode toward Bandicut. His hands were half curled into fists, as if undecided whether to punch or strangle the human.

    “No, Ik!” Bandicut edged to one side, crouching defensively. He hated to think what Ik might be capable of, under enemy control.

    “Captains, things are happening very quickly,” Copernicus called. “Dark is—
look!
” Copernicus refocused the image in the viewspace. Dark had shot past, a black shadow streaking into the blazing body of the sun. She left a faintly coruscating tunnel in her wake.

    At the same moment, Bandicut heard Charli say,

   
/// Deep says we’ve done our part.

   
We should flee! Fast! ///

   
“Coppy!”
Bandicut shouted.
“Deep says get us the hell out of here! Get out of the—!”

    “NO-O-O!” Ik bellowed, crashing into Bandicut and grabbing him in a powerful bear hug. “Do—not—
leave!
That is the—
enemy talking!
”

    “Ik-k-k!” Bandicut gasped. “You’re—chok-k-k-ing—m—”

    There was a jolt through the ship as Copernicus savagely changed course. Though he could barely see past Ik’s head, Bandicut caught sight of Deep wrapping his shadow around the Mindaru control station and swirling downward into the heart of the sun. Then he was blinded by pain as Ik’s hands clamped around his neck.

*

   
It was tougher than Deeaab expected to carry the enemy down into the collapsing sun. Not at first, because he’d slowed the enemy’s time and it couldn’t fight back—but Deeaab had never before tried to keep a time-bubble stable in the midst of such energetic chaos, and it wasn’t long before he felt his grip on that tiny, contained pocket of time begin to slip.

    Daarooaack was flying before him, widening the channel down into the sun—whirling first through the outer layers, where magnetic lines whipped through the turbulence of plasma storms. The entire system boiled on the verge of eruption. Light and chaos and convection cells of streaming particles were ordinary life here, part of what made this star a living being. Deeaab arrowed down through it all. Below those layers, everything was radiation and fury. Was there
thought
 here? Particles and photons were flying, hammering, heating. They dove through all of that, through the sea of radiant energy, toward the glaring abyss of the core. Toward the fusion furnace at the heart, where the inferno began.

    And through it all, Deeaab struggled to keep a grip on his Mindaru captive, and the increasingly hard-to-maintain pocket of frozen time.

    As they approached the center, they crossed at last into the hell of the just-released strange matter.
Strange dark matter.
It was the closest thing to insanity Deeaab had ever touched; it was all of the strangeness that he had felt tenuously spread among the stars, now gathered tightly in this one place. Freed from its n-space imprisonment, it was warping the star’s time, space, and gravity in a horrific knot that was squeezing the center of the star into oblivion.

    Through it all, Daarooaack led the way, and Deeaab with his captive followed. And in the very center,
there was the opening.
 Just a pinprick, but an opening into the next universe, created by the spike of gravity that was crushing the star. And Daarooaack, whirling down, exerted her own mastery over space and energy to widen the opening.

    Now it looked like a small doorway of darkness in the heart of blinding fury.

    It yammered with energy, and glowered with the darkness of the dying universe beyond. Deeaab recognized that glower; it was the same universe he had escaped from, so long ago.

    The portal would not stay open, not without help. That was Daarooaack’s job. And getting this enemy, the Mindaru, through the opening was Deeaab’s job. Already the strange matter was gushing through, into the other universe. But everything had to happen before the collapse brought on the explosion that would light up
*
Nick
*
 brighter than the rest of the galaxy combined.

*

   
The Mindbody was stunned, incapable of understanding what was happening. It tried to reconstruct the immediate past, but there were baffling discontinuities. Memory loss, then; but the crucial thing was it had gotten separated from its captive, and then had become a captive of something it couldn’t fathom. Around it, the star was dying, crushing inward. The Mindaru would fight for its independence. But if the star was dying, in the end it wouldn’t matter; its mission was already accomplished.

*

   
The strain of freezing time was too much. Deeaab couldn’t hold on to that
and
the physical enemy. When he let go of the pocket of time, the enemy suddenly came to life and fought madly, trying to fly this way and that through n-space. Deeaab fought, spinning, and nearly lost his grip. He tried to shape space to force the thing toward the dark doorway, but shaping space was Daarooaack’s strength, not his, and it was all Deeaab could do simply to hold on.

    Daarooaack couldn’t help without letting go of her hold on the portal opening, and that was unthinkable. But Daarooaack cried:
“The star is collapsing! Shall I widen the opening?”

     “Yes! Yes!”

   
Daarooaack whirled, expanding the opening, the portal, the gateway—until it became a funnel of darkness spinning in the middle of the star’s core. As the strange matter swirled through it, the portal began to grow bright with the torrent of matter pouring into the next universe. Even as the star’s core was crushing inward, the source of the gravity was shooting out through the portal. If the gravity eased quickly enough, the collapse would stop. But would it happen in time?

   
Deeaab felt the crush of the star around him as he struggled to hold the enemy. He no longer thought he could hurl it through. If he released it, would it escape through its n-space fields? What else could he do?
Carry it through?

*

   
Antares, still disoriented from the shouting and the jolting course change, reeled as the star’s protest swept over her. She felt the shock, then the crippling knot in its heart, and finally a kind of numbness. The end was inevitable; it could only collapse inward, and die. /No, don’t surrender to it!/ she tried to cry, though she didn’t think it could hear.

   
But as that wave subsided, she came to her senses and realized that Ik was strangling John Bandicut.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
She leaped to grab Ik from behind, and Li-Jared was already pummeling Ik from the side, but the Hraachee’an’s strength was enormous. She tried to connect her stones to Ik’s, but Ik was moving too violently.
“STOP!”
she shouted, darting around to where she could see his face.
“Ik, think! You’re killing your friend!”
 She grabbed his sculpted head and tried to force him to look at her.

    For an instant, Ik seemed to recognize her. He shook off her hand, but not before she felt the struggle for control inside his mind. The stones in his temples were pulsing like embers. His eyes were wild, tortured in their deep sockets. His hard-lipped mouth opened, letting out a groan.

    Antares dug her fingers into his shoulder. /
Stones, you have to stop this!
/ She felt the connection like a jolt of electricity, her own stones searing in her throat. Ik stiffened.

    What happened next she could barely follow. Her stones locked in battle with Ik’s—with the Mindaru that had taken control. No gentle healing this time. It was a fight for life. The Mindaru were deadly and swift—and for a heart-stopping moment, they seemed to be coming after
her,
like glowing demons. But they were cut off, their attack caught and turned by the fury of her own stones, flashing like swords. The Mindaru retreated, and turned instead on
Ik.
The Hraachee’an, releasing Bandicut, fell back, choking. Antares followed, keeping her grip on his shoulder. She knew what needed to be done, and she shouted to the stones, /Cast them out!
Cast them out!
/

    In the terrifying whirlwind, she felt the moment in which her stones gained control—surrounded and reinforced now by Li-Jared’s stones and Bandicut’s stones—

    —and the swords flashed one more time—

    —and Ik’s stones flew out of his temples.

   
“Hrahhhhh!”
 Ik bellowed, and fell to the floor in anguish as two points of fire flew into the air and circled like angry bees over the viewspace balcony.

   
*We cannot save them. They must be destroyed!*
 her stones said sharply.

    “Copernicus!” Antares shouted. “Can you get those things off the ship?”

    “Are you certain?”

   
“Yes! Now!”

   
“Fall back, everyone! To the back of the bridge!” Jeaves commanded. They scrambled to obey. “
Now,
 Copernicus!”

    A shimmering force-field sprang up across the bridge, with the evicted stones on the far side. There was a thunderclap, the viewspace went dark, flashed bright, then dark again. After a moment, it slowly returned to normal. The force-field ebbed away. Ik’s stones were gone.

*

   
It all came together for Deeaab with a strange solemnity, as though he had slowed time around himself while he thought matters through. He hadn’t, but the understanding that filled him felt so deliberate and clear that the effect was the same. The truth crystallized like a thing of terrible beauty: