Outlanders closing the c.., p.19
Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 19
Only not falling, but smacking the planet at terminal velocity. It's always the landing that kills you, the aviator in him reminded himself, not too smugly, as he followed his friends aft.
IT WAS TOO BAD he turned at just that moment. Because no sooner had he looked away from the huge display screens curving across the front of the semicircular bridge than all hell broke loose across them.
Chapter 24
Brigid opened her eyes. Briefly she saw, not her present surroundings, but the terrible scene that had filled her mind only an instant ago, by her perception.
"Anam-chara," she breathed.
She felt a pressure on her right hand. She turned her eyes blindly that way. In a moment the image of Marina's concerned young face resolved out of blur.
The background, the bulkheads of a compartment aboard the coalition blockade meant, stayed dingy yellow. Now she was back to herself, all cool archivist again, and her first thoughts were of duty: "Did he get the information? The boy—" Her words wandered, mirroring her mind, and she chastised herself for weakness. Focus! What's happened to your discipline?
"Take it easy, Ms. Brigid," Marina said. "That had to be hard on you."
"And to answer your question," came another voice, likewise feminine but brassy and self-assured, "yes. Even though it was, as your cohort Major Michael pithily put it, a 'psychic Rube Goldberg device.' "
With an assurance beyond her years the Atshuara girl helped Brigid sit up. Before she could force another word out through throat and lips she realized suddenly were parched, and a mouth that seemed packed with cotton, she felt a cool bulb being pressed into her hands. Marina guided Brigid's hands upward to her mouth. On proximity the bulb extruded a drinking nipple, and Brigid gratefully sucked down cool water.
"An appropriate characterization," she said, and managed to get close to her customary professional crispness. In fact she only just barely recognized the reference, by dint of expertise gained in literally years of study and analysis of twentieth-century culture and technology as a Historical Division archivist in the barony of Cobaltville. "It hardly seems possible, though—such abstruse data, transmitted through so tenuous a link, in so short an period of time." "Your psychic bond with Kane is extremely powerful," Bug Mama said. She still more the anti-detection robe the coalition resistance had worn planet-side, with hood thrown back to reveal her outsized head and huge gleaming eyes. "Far more powerful, actually, than either of you is consciously aware of. Or admits to yourself, maybe. I can't pretend any direct knowledge myself. I have the psi capability of a basalt slab, and not even our Groks, with some of the highest psi potential and skill indices of any races known to our history, can make much sense of human thoughts anyway. Probably one of the reasons we keep you around. Anyway, we did get the coordinates, Svarri did get the coordinates—loud and clear. He's a wonder, that kid, and no mistake. But the truth is, he hardly needed to."
"The Devil's Eye," Pine's voice said.
Brigid turned her head the other way to see the young woman standing on the other side of the couch with her hand on the shoulder of her brother who stood beside her. He was a slight lad with sandy blond hair and a freckled face. Despite having just been rescued, against all probabilities, from alien slavery, and knowing as well as everybody else aboard the Forlorn Hope that they were about to run the gauntlet of a potential concentration of firepower approximating the output-over-time of a supernova, he looked, well, normal. Or what some instinct or atavism buried deeply in Brigid's skull, told her normal was like: a friendly, open innocence, curiosity, acceptance. So unlike the pinched tension never absent from the faces and frames of children in a baronial Enclave, or the fear and want always mirrored by outlander youngsters, the wariness they always showed even at their most apparently abandoned play. He was an extraordinary child, she realized as he grinned shyly at her. And not just because of his psychic gifts. "Who would have expected it?" the young non-terrestrial human woman said. "It seems almost too...obvious for a cosmic secret."
"The Devil's Asshole," Bug Mama said. Brigid sensed her grin. "Pine's polite. I'm not. Although 'Eye' may be more appropriate in one way, it's not so much, in another. It's a naked-eye object from Sidra, a black hole binary not thirty light-years away."
"What's that mean?" asked Domi, who had been uncharacteristically quiet these last few minutes. "In plain English. Or, well, bug."
Pine looked distressed. Bug Mama's laugh was translated duly by her device, a rich contralto bubble of amusement, with a hint of gravel-road rasp, just like the usual speaking voice it gave her. "Plain bug it is, then. You know black holes, child'?"
Domi shrugged. "Sorta."
Bug Mama chuckled again. "That's all anybody understands black holes, even after a million years of studying them. They're like God—nobody can really know anything about them, theorize as we might. And you're wrong." The last she said turning her huge eyes with their weird black darting eye-spots to Brigid, who indeed had been about to interject "You may think your scientists have a good theoretical model of what black holes are really like. No doubt your draggle-tail Annunaki, who think they're so important bullying a backward, backwater planet think they have one too. But you're wrong. Every theoretical model we've concocted, some observed fact has come along in a thousand years or a hundred thousand and knocked on its kiester." At that word Brigid cocked an eyebrow. She didn't know what surprised her more: that Bug Mama would use an word analogous to that slang term, or that the translator software knew it. Had it come from Bates? From one of Team Phoenix, more likely, she thought; the software was high-order hermeneutic and learned quickly from experience. "Anyway," Bug Mama went on, "a few million years ago, long before even the cycle of Arm civilization the War of the Eye knocked to bits got started, a couple of blue super-giants formed a fairly close binary system, each rotating around each other. They were so evenly matched in size that they sucked matter out of each other, causing big blazing trails of cooler yellow gas to swirl around 'em. And, yeah, you Earthers might have some kind of cockamamie theory why that can't happen, either. Wrongo. We actually have artifact records—videos—of the whole thing. The ancients thought it was pretty noteworthy, too.
Especially when one of the big bastards blew up, as super-giants will. It naturally caused the other one to go off right away. The resulting radiation wave wiped all life in nearby systems. It scoured Sidra of everything but deep- ocean life-forms—Sidra had deeper oceans then, before UV from its sun had cracked so much water into its component hydrogen and oxygen. Life came back on Sidra, of course. Fortunately or not, your call.
"So the remnants of the twin supernovae were, naturally, two black holes. Likewise orbiting each other, and really sucking down mass. Not just the double-lobed nebula they ejected from themselves—scarfed that long ago--but they've pulled in at least two neighboring stars and are even now in the process of ripping another one apart with their monstrous tidal effects like a couple big carnivores fighting over prey. Hell of a sight, between that and the accretion disk proper. Even from a long way off. If you spent a little more time on Sidra, you'd have seen it yourselves— big weird blue glow. Scary even if you don't know what it is. Scarier if you do."
She shook her head. "And real scary now that we know what that rascal's been hiding all these aeons."
"Didn't have a lot of time for stargazing," Marina said, sweeping her heavy blue-black hair hack from her face. Brigid saw a sheen of perspiration on her dark face in the sourceless yellow light that half illuminated the compartment.
Bug Mama checked a small display inset in the chitin of her skinny right wrist that served among other things as a chron. "We better get to the bridge. One of the biggest light shows since the big twin blues blew is due to break loose in about forty seconds. It'll be the show of a lifetime, kids. And since the odds aren't half bad it'll be the last thing we ever see, we better get our money's worth."
And now not even duty or intellectual curiosity could bottle up the question in Brigid's heart any longer. "And Kane?" she asked, her attempt to keep desperation from her voice not altogether successful. "He is—?"
"Well, his condition's stable, just as we knew it was going to be." The insectile alien raised arms from her sides in a shrug.
"After all, you can't get more stable than 'dead."
THE SELF-CONTRADICTORILY named Coalition of Nonaligned Races was weak. By Far Arm standards, by the standards of the gigantic Triangle and Circle factions. Even by the standards of the major races who dominated them, the Zuri and Pan and their stronger ally and vassal races, they were few.
But trillions of sophonts gave allegiance to the resistance. And they were what their opponents were not: infinitely resourceful, infinitely flexible. They studied and practiced the arcane principles of asymmetric warfare with a master's touch.
And like vast centralized empires over a million years of thoroughly documented Far Arm history, and for mega-years known through fragmentary records before that, neither the Council nor its perpetually warring main parties was institutionally able to adjust to it.
One of the greatest tools the weak had versus the strong was the ability to manipulate that very strength to their own advantage.
The Circle and the Triangle had their counterintelligence officers and dedicated mole-hunters, of course. Millions of sophonts suffered and died at their palps, tentacles and claws each year. Of these many were plain unlucky innocents, arrested by mistake. Many were operators from rival Grand Council factions. And a very great many indeed were in fact loyal servitors of the very power that tortured them to death for imagined treason, set up by authentic enemy infiltrators.
Some were even coalition agents. But, like the coalition itself, relatively few.
Like any vast, centralized organization, the Council and its prime components were a great deal better at being big than smart.
So it was that, by a seemingly random twist of the fortunes of battle and the intrigue that swirled around all like unseen nebular gases, a million combatant warships suddenly broke off their twisting internecine dogfight and formed a huge wedge that drove like an arrow straight toward the nameless battle planetoid. Renegades from Circle and Triangle and even Paa and Zuri had made secret common cause to seize for themselves the cosmic treasure held inextricably in the brain of Gilgamesh Bates. Or vaporize that brain and deny its vast and horrid secret to all.
It was an effort doomed to fail. As the coalition moles and provocateurs who had carefully engineered it knew from the inception. As they knew that the odds were vanishingly small that any of them, as individuals, would survive. But it would succeed smashingly as a diversion for the breakaway from Sidra and its solar system of the tiny rag-tag rebel fleet bearing the very treasure such an unimaginable amount of sapient life had been and would continue to be squandered over: the true location of the Cosmic Eye. As space exploded into an outpouring of energies across far more spectra than the electromagnetic alone, and a populous planet's worth of combatants died in its first minute, the coalition ships lined out in the opposite direction, bound for the relative safety of hyperspace.
Of course, for a single, small, battered freighter dubbed by its passengers the Rolling Stone, the odds of survival— here at the interstellar hell storm's very eye—were slight. But the occupants all knew the job was risky when they took it. And though men of two drastically different eras and worldviews, all had this in common: none ever expected to get out of this life alive.
Chapter 25
"Caspar van Dien," Sean Reichert was saying when the man came onto the bridge behind him. "Was he ever in anything that didn't blow?"
"No," Larry Robison said. "Because the lights went out all over the world not that long after we went beddy-bye. Poor boy didn't get much chance."
"How are you doing?" Grant asked from the helm without turning. Only the sweat glittering along the line of his short crinkled hair showed the tension he was experiencing as he tried to guide the little, virtually unprotected ship through the bowels of the Hell being created outside its flimsy hull.
Ignoring the way Weaver came just a step behind him to steady him if he swayed, Kane took a sip of the warm broth in the bulb he carried in his right hand. It tasted like a swampie's armpit smelled. He reckoned that meant it was all full of those hydrolytes and nutrients his body craved. "Like death warmed over," he said. "What else?" "'Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse,' " Reichert quoted without taking his eyes from the fireworks display filling the wide screens."Unlike most of us, though, you get another chance to make good on that last one. Which, whoa, respect, you need."
Kane knew he looked the way he felt. He had checked himself in the mirror of the Stone's sickbay as soon as he was steady enough to rise from the examination table. On the third attempt. Even for a man burdened with as little vanity as Kane was, he was conscious of looking like what Joe Weaver once termed "hammered dog shit."
"Look, can we just skip the rest of the living-dead humor?" he said. "I know you guys got a million jokes." "The poor man's heard most of them by now, anyway," Joe Weaver said.
He stopped then and stared at the surging, blazing light swirls on the displays. His blue-green eyes got as big and round as the rimless lenses before them.
"Holy shit," he said.
"You said a mouthful," Reichert said brightly. "Jesus," Grant said in disgust.
"I can truthfully say I was better off dead," Kane said. "Why'd you wake me up, anyway? You coulda kept me in the stasis locker till we hooked up with the rest of our little fleet."
"Ever the optimist, are you, Kane?" Hays asked, cocking an eye at him.
"Not so you'd notice, usually. Call it post-postmortem giddiness."
"What's all that?" Kane asked, gesturing at the displays. "Some kind of screen saver?"
"Oh, you know," Major Mike said. "Just a space battle. Biggest one in the Milky Way Galaxy in a million years or so."
"Like I always say, Kane," said Grant, "you got a unique talent for pissing people off."
"I did this? Fill in my memory. Turns out you miss stuff when you're dead."
"You guys're into all this SciFi crap," Grant said, eyes forward again. "You explain it to him. I got a ship to fly." "The story to here," Reichert said, after a quick glance around showed none of his buddies wanted to do the honors. "Our hero, the brave, self-sacrificing but maybe not so bright warrior-hero-jock named Kane agreed to let himself get captured by bad aliens on the pesthole planet of Sidra. Sundry spear-carriers bravely lost their lives to prop up the deception—so sad, the lot of indigenous forces. In other words, same-old same-old."
"More succinctly," Kane said in a warning growl, propping his rump against the back of an unoccupied chair. Reichert pouted and folded his antis across his chest. "Okay, my tam," Robison said. "You got taken to the big ball of malice out there, where everybody's favorite megalomaniac multibillionaire is getting himself proclaimed Lord of All Creation. He, being the thorough-going megalomaniac nut bag that he is, immediately had you escorted into his presence so he could gloat.”
"Just the way we knew he would," Reichert said smugly. "This is 'succinct'?" Grant demanded. "What do you call 'verbose'?"
"Pray you don't find out," Joe Weaver said, deadpan. Kane waved a hand. "No worse than Lakesh. Not much, anyway. And shitloads better than that dickless wonder Philboyd. Go on."
"So you, hero that you unquestionably are, Kane," Robison went on, with only traces of dismay in his tone, "contrived to lay hands on Bates' blessed person."
A slow smile spread across Kane's bearded, still somewhat gray features. "Got both hands around the bastard's throat," he said with satisfaction. "I remember."
"And then a whole lot of things went down, psychically speaking," Hays said, taking up the narrative thread. "Augmented by the remarkable and unplumbed powers of young Svarri, Brigid Baptiste's mind was en rapport with yours. There's a remarkable connection between you two you're generally aware of, so that gifted young man tells us. Through that channel between you two, Svarri was able somehow to draw forth from Bates' big brain the coordinates for the Cosmic Eye that's the occasion for all these fireworks. Which our friends tell us have reached such a level that, in a couple years, people in neighboring star systems will be able to see with the naked eye...."
"You guys formed a real, live Psychic Friends Network," Reichert said cheerily.
"They don't get the gag, kid," Hays said.
"I'll save it for Brigid. She will."
"Like we'll live so long."
Kane thought about it for a moment. "That," he said, "is undoubtedly the biggest crock of shit I've heard in my entire life."
"Worked, though," Hays said smugly.
"And then," Reichert said to Kane, "you died."
"Svarri set up some kind of psi compulsion in your deep subconscious," Hays said. "Like a post-hypnotic suggestion on steroids."
"With a thermonuclear payload," Robison said. "Okay, mixed-metaphor mode off."
Kane frowned. His memory wasn't clear on everything that happened after the fierce hot joy of grabbing Bates by the throat. He did remember the rush of exultation, and then a strange sort of serial explosion in his mind, like a string of firecrackers going off, but in weird pulsations instead of bangs.
Then...nothing. The big nothing.
"But it was, like, some kind of coma. Narcolepsy, whatever they call it?" he asked hopefully.
