Judgement Day

(Ark Royal, Book XX)

Christopher G. Nuttall

Book One: Ark Royal

Book Two: The Nelson Touch

Book Three: The Trafalgar Gambit

Book Four: Warspite

Book Five: A Savage War of Peace

Book Six: A Small Colonial War

Book Seven: Vanguard

Book Eight: Fear God And Dread Naught

Book Nine: We Lead

Book Ten: The Longest Day

Book Eleven: The Cruel Stars

Book Twelve: Invincible

Book Thirteen: Para Bellum

Book Fourteen: The Right of the Line

Book Fifteen: The Lion and the Unicorn

Book Sixteen: Fighting For The Crown

Book Seventeen: Drake’s Drum

Book Eighteen: Endeavour

Book Nineteen: The Lone World

Book Twenty: Judgement Day

––––––––

http://www.chrishanger.net

http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

Cover by Justin Adams

http://www.variastudios.com/

All Comments Welcome!

Cover Blurb

For uncounted millennia, the twin Dyson Spheres – one intact, and host to a population unaware of their origins or even the nature of the world around them; one seemingly little more than debris orbiting a dying star – have remained a mystery, their seemingly all-powerful builders as enigmatic as the supertechnology used to construct and maintain the humungous megastructures. But now, in the wake of HMS Endeavour’s discovery of the spheres and the arrival of a multinational fleet to explore – and exploit – the alien tech, everything has changed.

The Builders have returned.

And for all of humanity, and every other known race, it is nothing less than Judgement Day.

Prologue I

From: The Journal of Professor Harrison, Xenoarchaeologist. Baen Publishing House, 2305.

If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it.

The concept of a Dyson Sphere – a shell enclosing an entire star, allowing its builders to make use of every last scrap of solar energy – was first devised in 1960, decades before the first offworld settlements and the discovery of the tramlines allowing FTL travel between star systems. The basic theory was sound, but the practicalities were sorely lacking. It was deemed impossible to gather enough raw material to enclose a star, let alone craft it into a sphere and terraform the interior into something habitable. Smaller concepts – Ringworlds and Orbitals – weren’t much more practical, as far as we could tell. The tech and materials science to make the concept work simply didn’t exist.

And then, on a deep-space exploration mission, HMS Endeavour discovered not one, but two, Dyson Spheres.

It is impossible, even now, to describe the sheer size of the megastructures.  One (Dyson One) shattered long ago, leaving behind a debris field straight out of bad science-fantasy; the other (Dyson Two) remained intact, enclosing an entire star.  When the crew of Endeavour jumped into the sphere, following the tramline, they rapidly discovered the sphere was very far from dead. The interior space was patrolled by ‘fists’ – spheres made of an unknown and seemingly indestructible material, termed ‘unobtainium,’ and propelled around the interior by focused gravity beams – and the surface was inhabited by humans, taken from Earth untold centuries ago and settled on the Dyson Sphere. It rapidly became clear the settlers were trapped in the Stone Age, lacking the metals they needed to make transit to the Iron Age and eventually the Space Age. The local history appeared to be fluid, but from a long-term point of view it was astonishingly repetitive. They simply could not break out of the trap. Indeed, Endeavour herself was almost trapped within the sphere – when the fists took notice of her presence – and she was very lucky to escape.

The news shocked Earth, when Endeavour returned. The human race had long grown used to the concept of technologically-advanced aliens – the Tadpoles had been two or three decades ahead of humanity, when the First Interstellar War broke out – but the Dyson Spheres were several orders of magnitude more advanced than anything humanity had ever encountered. The sheer scale of the megastructures – and the suspiciously-empty star systems surrounding the Dyson System – was incredibly difficult to grasp, suggesting the existence of supertechnology that made humanity’s best look like sticks and stones. The human population on the sphere, worse, was clear proof the Builders had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped a breeding population. The spheres were awe-inspiring, wondrous and terrifying. They promised technology beyond the dreams of human scientists and threatened contact with a race so advanced it might see humanity – and the other known alien intelligences – as nothing more than ants. The shock was great enough to cause no end of turmoil on the homeworld, with some groups worshipping the Builders (and tying them into reputed alien abductions and ancient astronauts), and others insisting the spheres should be left completely alone, for fear of attracting attention from a super-race.

It was unlikely in the extreme that such demands would be honoured. The Dyson System held too much promise with regards to everything from technological development and sociological research for the system to be left in quarantine. The first ships were already heading back to the system within a week of Endeavour’s report; asteroid miners and independent spacers hoping to find something they could claim and exploit so they could turn a profit. It would not be long, everyone knew even if they were unwilling to admit it, before the governments got involved. Indeed, the negotiations for assembling and dispatching a multinational fleet back to the sphere – with orders to arrest independent scavengers and ensure that all discoveries were shared – were concluded surprisingly quickly, with the fleet itself dispatched shortly afterwards. In hindsight, it is perhaps unsurprising that certain governments were plotting to claim the entire system for themselves. The prize was worth almost any risk.

The fleet returned and started to assess the sphere, discovering a handful of installations near the North Mountain (a hatch in the sphere, surrounded by solid walls to keep the atmosphere from leaking out when the hatch was opened) and then a lone planetoid orbiting inside the sphere, apparently a command centre for the entire system. Further research revealed a series of intelligence tests for users, culminating in a device that apparently turned off the tramline linking Dyson to the nearest star. The MNF was, apparently, trapped. It took weeks of additional research, while the military crews were forced to plan an evacuation of the ships to the sphere, before the researchers figured out how to open the North Hatch and discovered, to their horror, that the Dyson System was now completely isolated. The tramlines were gone. The fleet was stranded hundreds of light years from home.

At that moment, treachery struck. The Chinese Government had planned how to take control of the system, and given its representative – the second-in-command of the fleet – orders to strike if it seemed likely the system could be annexed and exploited before the rest of the human governments could react. The attack almost worked – and would have been completely successful, if Endeavour hadn’t managed to hide within the sphere and use the alien technology to destroy two Chinese starships, forcing the remainder to surrender. But this still left the fleet cut off from Earth ...

... And, as the fleet came to grips with the prospect of being stranded for the rest of their lives, Dyson One’s star went out ...

Prologue II

“What do you mean, the tramline’s gone?”

Admiral Lady Susan Onarina regretted her tone as soon as she spoke. The midshipwoman was so young Susan was tempted to check her birth certificate to make sure the girl hadn’t lied about her age, when she’d joined the Royal Navy, although she wouldn’t have been seconded to the Admiralty if she wasn’t very good at her job. She looked as though she was barely in her teens, hardly old enough to be trusted with ... Susan shook her head, cutting off that line of thought before it went any further. She’d been a young midshipwoman too, years ago, and it hadn’t been easy to convince her superiors – and enlisted crewmen – to take her seriously ...

And yet, she couldn’t help wondering if some arsehole hadn’t sent the young woman on a snipe hunt. It wasn’t impossible. Senior Midshipmen and Crew Chiefs were fond of knocking newly minted officers and crew down a peg or two, by sending them to find something that simply didn’t exist or couldn’t be found ... it was unlikely someone had pranked her by telling her to make an absurd report to the First Space Lady herself, but it couldn’t be ruled out. Not completely. The young officer might be too ignorant to realise she was making an impossible report.

Midshipwoman Harrington swallowed, hard. “Convoy OCP-Nine-Seven was due to make the hop to Dyson four days ago,” she said. Her voice was shaky, suggesting she knew how absurd the report sounded. “They passed through the tramline to ES-17 and discovered the tramline to Dyson simply wasn’t there. The automated relay station reported losing contact, that it had lost contact with the MNF, two weeks prior to the convoy’s arrival in ES-17. The convoy confirmed the tramline itself was gone.”

Susan keyed her terminal. If it was a joke, she’d have the perpetrator ... she sucked in her breath as the report popped up in front of her, confirming the absurd story. The tramline had simply vanished, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned it off. It couldn’t be a joke and yet ... it was hard, almost impossible, to believe. She had wondered why the Admiralty – and its foreign counterparts – had had so much trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of alien invaders, back when the First Interstellar War had begun, but she thought she understood now. There hadn’t been any real hint of alien civilisations, not until the Tadpoles had arrived and started shooting. It had been one hell of a shock.

Her heart pounded as the implications dawned on her. The tramlines linked Earth to hundreds of settled systems, from heavily developed worlds like Britannia to isolated settlements like Wensleydale or multiracial colonies like Unity. If the tramlines vanished ... interstellar civilisation would vanish with them. The fastest starship the navy had ever designed and put into mass production would take a decade to reach the nearest star, if she were forced to make the trip in realspace. The colonies would be isolated so completely they’d have to live or die on their own. And ...

“Go back to your station,” she said, quietly. “And tell Admiral Mason I need to speak with him immediately.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Susan leaned back in her chair as the young midshipwoman retreated, no doubt relieved to be out of her superior’s office. Her career had only just begun, and a single misstep could put it right into the crapper. Susan herself had had problems ... she sighed inwardly as she reread the report, wishing it was nothing more than a practical joke. The idea of losing the tramlines was utterly terrifying, a disaster so vast it would make the Navy’s contingency plans look like nothing. She keyed her console, sending a query into the system. They’d have to quietly check the remaining tramlines, just in case. But it might be weeks before they heard back from distant colonies ...

The flicker network can be checked, at least, she told herself. It can’t function without the tramlines.

The hatch hissed open. Admiral Paul Mason stepped into the office.

“The tramline to Dyson has vanished,” Susan said flatly, swinging the terminal around so he could read the report. “What do you make of it?”

“We always knew there was something odd about that tramline,” Mason said, running his eyes down the report. It was surprisingly short, for something so urgent. Susan suspected the convoy commander had been too stunned to engage in the usual arse-covering that normally attended any absurd report. Tramlines did not change, yet this one had. “It was extended far beyond the limits of any other known tramline.”

Susan nodded, curtly. The lines of gravimetric force linking stars together were rarely longer than ten light years, and the longest tramline prior to the Dyson Tramline was fifteen light years. The researchers speculated there were longer tramlines, but they were too weak to detect, let alone ride. The Builders had either found a weak tramline and boosted it or ... they’d created one from scratch. If that was true ... she knew her own government, much less every other government, would do whatever it took to get their hands on the technology and put it into mass production. It would change the universe forever.

“And it went off,” Susan said. “What happened?”

“The MNF was supposed to be exploring the sphere,” Mason reminded her. “Perhaps they pushed the off switch.”

Susan snorted, although it wasn’t funny. She found it hard to believe someone would leave the off switch for a tramline simply lying around, although it stood to reason that if you could make tramlines at will you didn’t have to worry about someone turning it off and stranding you hundreds of light years from home. For all she knew, the tramline could be rebooted by simply turning the system off and then on again. And yet ... the last report from Dyson Two had made it clear that it would be decades, perhaps centuries, before the researchers unravelled the secrets of alien technology. The MNF might be stuck there for a very long time.

Or they might have sentenced themselves to death, she thought. The planners had done what they could to make the fleet as self-sufficient as possible, and the crew could always trade with the locals for food and drink, but there were limits. They might not survive long enough to figure it out.

She met his eyes. “What do we do about it?”

“It depends how much our political masters are prepared to commit to the mission,” Mason pointed out. “We could set up a catapult somewhere near the system and launch a relief convoy to Dyson, with the supplies they’d need to set up a relief catapult. The cost would be staggering, but it could be done.”

“It would be difficult to convince the government to pay for the catapult,” Susan said, reluctantly. Catapults were expensive. The Royal Navy could purchase an entire squadron of battleships, or fleet carriers, for the cost of a single catapult. Even with other governments chipping in, it would still be immensely costly. “And some of them, I suspect, will be relieved we lost contact with Dyson.”

She grimaced. The first reports from Dyson had unleashed political chaos. The prospect of alien supertechnology entering the market had changed everything, as had the discovery aliens had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped hundreds – perhaps thousands – of humans and transhipped them to their new home. Even if the Builders had abandoned the spheres long ago, and no one had seen any evidence the Builders were still around, the discovery was still incredibly disquieting. She could easily imagine the government trying to wash its hands of the whole matter. It wouldn’t work, she was sure, but ...

It wouldn’t be the first time the government tried to cover its collective eyes and pretend something didn’t exist, she thought, grimly. And if they think they can get away with it ...

“I need to speak to the PM,” she said, tiredly. The one advantage of being based in London, rather than Nelson Base, was that she could see the PM at very short notice. It was just a matter of time before the news got out – someone would leak, sooner rather than later – but she should have a chance to shape the political reaction before the media and the opposition had their say. “You go back to the office and get your people looking through every last scrap of data, see if they can figure out what happened and why. And if there is anything we can do from this end.”

Mason frowned. “We can try, but I doubt we’ll find anything.”

Susan nodded. It hadn’t been easy to unlock the secrets of Tadpole tech ... and Builder tech was several orders of magnitude more advanced. They could no more understand it at first glance than a medieval peasant could understand a starship or even a simple shuttlecraft. The peasant wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he was so ignorant he couldn’t even begin to grasp just how much he didn’t know. Mason and his team would do their best, she was sure, yet they didn’t know what they didn’t know either.

“There’s another danger,” Mason said, quietly. “There’s a theory that none of the tramlines are natural, that the Builders might have set up a network of gravity beams to allow FTL travel between star systems. If that’s true, they might turn them all off.”

Susan shuddered, recalling her earlier thoughts. “Thanks for that thought,” she said, sardonically. “If you have any more like it, feel free to keep them to yourself.”

Mason nodded. “Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter One: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System (Interior)

Endeavour shook, violently.

Captain Staci Templeton gritted her teeth as the gravity wave crashed against the hull, sending shockwaves through the entire ship. It felt as if the starship was a wet-navy vessel, trying to make her way through rough seas, something she would have sworn impossible before the first gravity wave struck her ship. Red lights flared on the display, Endeavour’s drive field flickering and flaring before quietening down again; she grimaced as she realised the drive nodes were taking one hell of a beating. She had never felt anything like it, even in battle. The damage was starting to mount rapidly.

“We’ve lost two drive nodes,” Lieutenant-Commander David Atkinson reported, grimly. “I’m adjusting to compensate ...”

“Get the damage control teams out there,” Staci snapped. In theory, the ship could lose half her drive nodes without losing her drive fields, but she didn’t want to put theory to the test. “We need those nodes repaired or replaced.”

“Aye, Captain,” Commander Mike Jenner said.  “I ...”

The ship shook again. Staci cursed under her breath as new reports flowed into the display. Two of her crew were injured, one fatally ... she’d ordered all non-essential personnel to tie themselves down, in hopes of avoiding serious injury, but she suspected the civilians were going to be beaten and battered by the time the crisis came to an end. If it ever did ... an entire star had vanished, somehow. She had never seen or even heard of anything like it. For all she knew, the gravity waves were going to keep hammering Endeavour until she fell apart at the seams. She didn’t want to think about what might be happening to the remainder of the fleet, or on the sphere’s surface. The sphere might be having the first earthquakes in its long history.

“Captain, we are nearing the hatch,” Atkinson reported. “Do we risk passing through?”

“We have to get into open space,” Staci said. The gravity waves appeared to be random, with no discernible pattern. If Endeavour was caught inside the North Mountain ... the entire ship might be dashed against the walls and smashed to atoms, something else that should have been impossible. “Take us through.”

She sucked in her breath as the display updated, her head swimming as she tried – again and again – to come to terms with the sheer size of the sphere.  The North Mountain made Earth’s orbital towers seem tiny, the hatch below bigger than an entire planet ... her perspective twisted violently, leaving her half-convinced she plummeting to certain death. It felt as if she’d ordered her starship to ram a planet ... the world seemed to shift around her, the gravity field pulsing in a manner that felt weird, as the starship plunged through the hatch and into open space. The drive field twitched – a dull shiver running through the hull – as Endeavour glided through a cloud of dust. The shockwaves had shaken the sphere so badly the layers of exterior surface dust had been blasted into interstellar space ...

“Captain, the remainder of the fleet is heading into open space,” Lieutenant Helen Yang reported. “They’re trying to avoid the debris swarms.”

“Communications, raise them,” Staci ordered. The Chinese had surrendered - Admiral He had ordered his crews to hand themselves over to the nearest MNF authorities – but God alone knew what was really going on. No one had expected the alien tech to come into play, let alone an entire star winking out. “Find out who’s in command.”

The display updated, again. Red lights flowed towards Endeavour, icons flickering from red to yellow and back again as the tactical processors attempted to determine what was happening. Staci told herself she shouldn’t have been surprised. Dyson One had shattered centuries ago, leaving behind a shell of debris orbiting the star ... and now, pieces of debris were being picked up and shoved into interstellar space by gravitational shockwaves. She hoped Dyson Two could handle the impact, when the inevitable happened and an immense piece of debris struck the sphere, but she feared the worst. The sphere’s shell might be pretty close to indestructible – the researchers hadn’t found a way to so much as scratch it – yet a piece of debris bigger than Britain or Australia might be enough. Even if it didn’t break the shell, the shockwaves would do immense damage. They might even knock the entire sphere into the star.

Unless the Builders intervene, she thought. But they did nothing to save Dyson One.

“Signal from the fleet, Captain,” Lieutenant Andy MacPhee said.  The communications officer didn’t take his eyes off his screen. “Commodore Lafarge has assumed command and is requesting an update from the Admiral.”

“Forward the request to the sphere,” Staci ordered. They’d left Admiral Dismukes on another ship, just in case Endeavour couldn’t make it through the hatch. “And request a full data dump.”

“Captain, the interstellar tramline is still absent,” Helen reported. “I can’t even pick up a hint of its presence.”

Staci grimaced. She’d expected as much, after the tramline had vanished, but she’d hoped ...

“Helm, set course for Dyson One,” she ordered. “Best possible speed.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Her terminal updated, again. She glanced at the reports, running her eye down the headings in grim disbelief. The damage wasn’t fatal, thankfully, but it was terrifyingly extensive, the sort of damage she’d expect in a training sim, not real life. There was no rhyme or reason, no pattern ... there were damaged sections that were isolated from other sections, internal damage that resembled sabotage or malfunction rather than direct attack. She’d served in combat before – she’d been on ships struck by nuclear warheads or hammered by bomb-pumped lasers – and the damage had been understandable, often predictable.  This ... she shook her head, trusting her XO and the damage control teams to fix as much as possible before they reached Dyson One. Or where Dyson One had been ...

A wave of unreality washed over her as the ship evaded a wave of debris right out of science-fantasy. The idea of hiding in an asteroid cloud was fantastical anywhere else, but here ... she sucked in her breath, bracing herself as pieces of space junk, some so large they had fragments of atmosphere, rocketed past. The display kept updating, projecting trajectories ... most of the debris would miss Dyson Two, but some would strike the sphere. She hoped – prayed – the Builders would intervene. The MNF was nowhere near big enough to destroy or divert all the debris before it was too late.

We could assemble the entire navy, every navy, and still not have enough ships, she thought numbly. The whole scene was a nightmare. She was tempted to pinch herself just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She felt like an ant caught in the midst of human machinery, unsure what was actually going on but all too aware of the dangers. And if one impact knocks the sphere off its axis ...

“Deploy four sensor drones,” she ordered, as they glided past another piece of debris. It was tumbling through space languidly, slow and stately compared to a starship, but it would be instantly fatal if it struck the hull. Or the distant sphere. “Try to track the debris.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Helen looked up. “Captain, Dyson One’s gravity field is still present. I think the star was crushed into a black hole.”

Staci glanced at her. It was insane, but ... what wasn’t?

“A black hole,” she repeated. “How?”

“In theory, one can create a gravity field that compresses a star into a black hole,” Helen said, slowly. “There were some ... ah, theories that suggested it might be possible to use a gravity well to trigger a fusion reaction within Jupiter and turn the planet into a star. If you can compress a star, you can just keep going until you end up with a black hole ...”

“And then what?” Staci could understand someone trying to ignite a gas giant, although she doubted anyone would take the risk in a populated system, but creating a black hole? What was the point? It would make one hell of a weapon, she supposed, yet using it here seemed pointless. Worse than pointless. There was a very real risk the process would damage or destroy the second sphere, exterminating uncounted millions of humans – and perhaps other races – who lacked the ability to understand what was happening. “Why?”

Helen hesitated. “In theory, again, if you have a black hole at your disposal you could bend space and time into a pretzel. You could create a tramline, or a catapult effect, or ...”

“Shit,” Staci said, quietly. She’d seen catapults in action. It was quite possible, at least in theory, to catapult an entire fleet hundreds of light years in a split second, without using the tramlines. Human tech had sent fleets dozens of light years behind enemy lines ... she wondered, suddenly, just how far the Builders could send a fleet. A race that thought nothing of dismantling entire star systems might be able to cross the entire galaxy in a single moment. “Are they coming here?”

“It’s possible,” Helen said. “Given enough gravity to play with, they might be able to open a wormhole large enough to swallow an entire planet – or a star.”

“This is all just theory,” Atkinson said, from his console. “For all we know, something went badly wrong ...”

Staci doubted it. The MNF had been exploring the sphere for the last few months, pushing buttons without ever knowing what they did ... to the point, she reflected sourly, they’d accidentally turned off the interstellar tramline and trapped themselves. And then ... they’d worked out how to open the hatch, take control of the fists, and even use them as weapons against their fellow humans. Sure, it was possible the star becoming a black hole was just a huge coincidence, but the odds against it were literally incalculable. A chill ran down her spine as she realised what it might mean. The Builders were coming home.

If Helen’s right, she thought, numbly. Or they may be testing us further.

The thought irked her. The command centres in the sphere – on the surface, in the lone planetoid – were little more than intelligence tests. The researchers had speculated they were designed to unlock themselves, when the local humans – or whoever – reached a point where they could solve the tests and gain access to the centres. Staci wasn’t sure if she liked that idea or not. On one hand, without gaining access the locals would never be able to design and build anything more advanced than a horse and cart, let alone get into orbit; on the other, it suggested a condescending and calculating attitude towards primitive races that chilled her to the bone. If one regarded oneself as superior, so superior there was no way one’s inferiors could close the gap, it was a very short jump indeed to thinking one had to take care of one’s inferiors or use them as one pleased. She was all too aware it had been hard, if not impossible, to keep humans from treating the Vesy as noble savages, rather than intelligent beings in their own right, and the gap between the two races was far smaller than the gap between humanity and the Builders.

Contact with us nearly destroyed the Vesy, and much of their culture was lost in the waves of change washing over their world, she thought, grimly. If the Russian deserters hadn’t made contact with the Vesy, it might have been possible to isolate their world and let them develop in peace, but ... there’d been no putting the genie back in the bottle. How badly will we be hurt if we make open contact with the Builders?

She tried not to think about it as Endeavour neared the black hole. The gravitational field was little stronger than the star’s gravity field, the slight increase barely noticeable. She suspected hundreds of pieces of debris had been pulled towards the black hole, when the gravity shockwaves had knocked some of the junk out of stable orbits. The sphere had shattered so long ago the debris that hadn’t fallen into stable orbits had fallen into the sun or been blasted into interstellar space, but now ... she shook her head as the display updated, revealing a handful of scavenger craft fleeing the dangerously unpredictable system. They’d have to join the MNF, sooner or later, unless they wanted to try to make an impossible crossing to the nearest star. Hell, even if they did, there’d be no guarantee of finding a way home. It was quite possible they’d fly out of the frying pan and find themselves in the fire.

“Communications, shoot them a copy of the general amnesty,” she ordered, quietly. “If they want to come in out of the cold, they’re welcome.”

She sighed inwardly.  Technically, the MNF was supposed to arrest the intruders; practically, there was no point when there was no way to ship the scavengers back home for trial. If the fleet was permanently stranded in the alien system, they’d need every last pair of hands they could muster ... she wondered, suddenly, just what they’d do with the Chinese. They might have staked everything on seizing the system – and she didn’t believe Admiral He’s assertion he’d acted alone, out of a desire to set himself up as an all-powerful warlord – but the MNF could hardly afford to dispose of them. They were trained and experienced personnel, people who couldn’t be discarded ... not if there was any other choice.

And they might find a way to rebel again, if we treat them badly, she thought, tiredly. What do we do with them?

It felt like hours before Endeavour finally slipped into the original debris field. The MNF had barely made a start on charting the pieces of space junk, fragments of the shattered sphere, before all hell had broken loose ... and now, the charts they’d painstakingly put together were worse than useless. Staci felt uncomfortably cramped as the ship inched through the field, cramped and confined in a manner she’d thought unthinkable. She was all too aware they were passing within bare kilometres of asteroid-like debris, close enough – almost – to reach out and touch. The ship was practically crawling through the field and yet ... she shivered, again, as they made it through the shattered shell. Pieces of debris were spinning out of control, some cracking against other pieces like billiard balls; others plummeting down an invisible funnel and spinning straight into the black hole. She’d read a story, once, about a spacecraft that accidentally crossed an event horizon, time slowing down as it plummeted into the black hole ...

“Hold position,” she ordered, sharply. They didn’t dare go too close. It was easy to predict the ebb and flow of the gravity field, at least in theory, but no one had ever seen a real black hole. The field might grow stronger with every piece of debris that plunged into the invisible maw, or something else might happen when – if – the Builders arrived. “Deploy additional sensor platforms, then relay our live feed to the MNF.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci’s terminal bleeped.  “Captain, we have completed preliminary repairs,” Jenner reported. “We’re currently working on secondary repairs.”

“We can fly and fight,” Staci said, although she doubted Endeavour could outrun or outfight a race capable of turning a star into a black hole. They’d seen the fists smash entire starships to atoms and they were tiny, compared to the pieces of debris flying towards Dyson Two. “Injuries?”

Jenner lowered his voice. “Nine dead, seventeen injured,” he said. “Seven were thrown into bulkheads and fatally injured, two have no apparent cause of death. The doctor will carry out an autopsy, once the injured are stable.”

Staci nodded, grimly. Her crew was as healthy as any other naval crew – perhaps more so, given the long durations of their voyage – but the civilian complement veered between young and fit and old and decidedly unfit. They’d boarded too many researchers for her peace of mind ... she wished, suddenly, they’d brought a pair of passenger liners for the civilians. They wouldn’t have been caught up in the battle to control the system if they’d been based on a civilian ship, with very limited military potential.  But the gravitational shockwaves might have done immense damage to the civilian-grade drive nodes, perhaps even destroyed them and their ships ...

“See to it,” she ordered. She felt unusually tired. She hadn’t felt so rough since she’d taken a sailing ship from Britain to Iceland, a passage so draining it had left her with a new respect for the early explorers who’d sailed the seven seas. “And make sure you get some rest. We don’t know when everything will change, again.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci closed the link and stared at the display. The black hole was tiny, impossibly tiny, and yet its gravity field dominated the system. Her sensor crews were having problems trying to track the gravity waves, practically tides, shifting around the gravity nexus. It seemed as though the normal laws of physics were breaking down, tiny flickers of tramline-link patterns coming and going so quickly the sensors could barely keep track. It was awesome and terrifying and left her feeling numb. And yet ...

We are ants before them, her mind whispered. She knew she was brave – she had gone into battle more times than she could count – but the scene before her was daunting. How did one fight a race so advanced they could build Dyson Spheres and compress a star into a black hole? And even if they mean well, they may hurt us just by existing ...

Chapter Two: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

Admiral Dismukes, Ambassador Lady Charlotte Hammond thought coldly, is either very brave or very stupid.

She stood in Fujian’s CIC and watched, grimly, as the Chinese crew struggled to cope with the unfolding disaster. Admiral Dismukes had decided to move his flag to the Chinese supercarrier, along with enough Marines to ensure the Chinese couldn’t capture him and resume the conflict, but Charlotte wasn’t sure it was a good idea. The Chinese ship was configured for large-scale fleet command and control, and she was better in that role than any other ship in the MNF, yet it still struck Charlotte as incredibly risky. There was no way in hell the Chinese could be trusted completely.

And yet, we have very little choice, she reflected. The tramlines were still gone. The MNF was still cut off from the rest of the human race. It was possible, sure, that the tramlines could be reopened – the researchers were still studying the alien tech, trying to determine how it actually worked – but they couldn’t give any sort of time estimate. We are going to need them if we are going to survive, if we can’t get home.

She gritted her teeth, feeling useless as the military personnel flowed around her, barking out incomprehensible commands as the carrier rocked like a boat caught in a thunderstorm. The entire sphere was quivering under the impact of gravity waves straight out of science-fantasy, blows no one had expected to see outside training simulations designed to test naval cadets rather than consider ways to escape a deadly trap. Charlotte’s husband – her ex-husband – had told her, once, that the Royal Navy had a supernova training scenario, although it was unlikely in the extreme anyone could survive save through sheer dumb luck. The exploding wavefront, travelling at the speed of light, would hit its target well before any warning could arrive, let alone be acted upon. She wasn’t sure there was anything a starship crew could do even if they had warning. If they couldn’t reach the tramline in time to jump out, or perhaps take shelter behind a rocky planet, they were doomed.

Red lights flickered and flashed on the display, centred on the mountaintop base and the settlement at the bottom of the impossible mountain. The Chinese had overwhelmed the original colony and started to put together a military base before they’d been forced to surrender and there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of allied personnel on the surface. Charlotte hoped they were coping, although she had no way to know. The sphere’s defences would fire, automatically, on any radio transmissions from the surface, while the landlines had been cut by the earthquakes. It would take time to get in touch, if anyone survived on the surface. She wondered, numbly, what the locals made of the earthquakes. The sphere had been as geologically stable as any space habitat, despite its far greater size. The natives were experiencing earth-shaking tremors for the first time in their history.

She tried not to think about the unfolding disaster, but her mind morbidly returned time and time again. She’d been a young girl during the Bombardment, too young to remember much of anything, yet she’d seen the videos of tidal waves smashing their way inland, crushing everything in their path, or chunks of debris falling from the sky and inflicting immense damage. It had to be just as bad on the sphere, if not worse. She couldn’t help imagining rivers and seas breaking their banks, tidal waves smashing into local settlements and destroying them beyond all hope of repair. There were entire settlements on the waters, she recalled. Their populations would be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Her heart sank. The locals had been caught in a cultural and technological stasis when Endeavour had discovered the sphere and made contact with the surface dwellers. There had been little hope of them ever climbing outside their atmosphere, let alone finding a way to get out of the sphere. Charlotte had seen their homes, on the surface, and realised their lives were dull and predictable and yet ... she wondered if the intruders had caused the storms battering the sphere, shattering the local society beyond repair. It was a disaster on a scale beyond all hope of comprehension. No one was sure how many humans – and other races – lived on the sphere, but even if the population estimates were low ...

Billions could have died in the last hour, she thought. She recalled the first village they’d encountered, when her team had accidentally crashed on the surface, and shuddered, remembering names and faces of people who had greeted them as allies, then turned against the offworlders when they realised how dangerous and disruptive they could be. The society had been very traditional – dominated by older women who groomed the younger girls to take their place – and restrictive, but it didn’t deserve to be destroyed. How many of the folk we knew are dead?

The question haunted her as another quiver ran through the carrier’s hull. The display seemed to wobble – for a horrified moment, she thought she saw the star come apart like a broken egg yolk – before she blinked and the image steadied. It was difficult to believe anything the size of the sphere could be damaged, knocked off its axis, or even destroyed, but the remnants of Dyson One were a grim reminder the spheres weren’t completely indestructible. Charlotte had no idea what could damage their shells – human nukes wouldn’t so much as scratch the surface – but ... she shook her head, tiredly, as the display updated again. The fists were starting to move, heading straight for the mountaintop.

“Pull us back to a safe distance,” Admiral Dismukes ordered, in Chinese. Charlotte silently blessed her tutors for insisting she mastered the language, even though English was the lingua franca of space travellers and French was more common amongst the British aristocracy. “Deploy two stealth drones to monitor their approach.”

Charlotte stepped back, trying to stay out of the way as the remainder of the fleet backed further into the sphere. She had no idea if the admiral was making the right call, but she’d seen the fists smash entire starships as if they were made of paper; the carrier would be effortlessly destroyed if the alien devices caught her trying to pass through the hatch. It was difficult, if not impossible, to tell what the fists were doing, and it was probably wise to keep their distance ... she hoped, desperately, that the fists weren’t intent on wiping out the intruding starships, or merely keeping them confined within the sphere. There was no other way out, unless the tramline somehow booted back up again ...

“Check the laser link with the lone planet outpost,” the admiral added. “If they’ve lost control of the fists ...”

They never really had it, Charlotte thought. She’d barely had the time to scan the report, before Dyson One’s star had simply winked out, but it was clear the researchers hadn’t had complete control over the fists, or gravity-manipulation technology light years ahead of anything humanity had ever devised. If the fists are operating under alien orders, their actions will be dangerously unpredictable.

She forced herself to wait, watching the timer tick down. The sheer size of the sphere was staggering. They were exchanging laser signals at the speed of light, but it still took hours for a message to pass from Fujian to the outpost and back again. It was possible, she supposed, the researchers might figure out how to use the alien tech to reply instantly, but she dared not count on it. She’d seen the alien gravity technology at work. It was quite possible that sending a message would be incredibly destructive, like firing up a modern communications array next to a primitive system wholly incapable of handling the discharge ... it was ironic, she reflected, given how much primitive tech had been brought to the sphere, in hopes of avoiding attention from alien weapons platforms. The landlines on the surface were so primitive ...

“Admiral, the gravity beams are growing in power,” a sensor officer reported. His voice was tightly controlled, but Charlotte could hear fear underlining his words. “The inner shell is vibrating rapidly. I think the orbital shell is actually speeding up.”

Charlotte shivered. Earth rotated on its axis, ensuring a day-night rhythm, but there was no such thing on the sphere. The Builders had compensated by crafting an inner shell of heavy plates, orbiting the star to give the sphere a day-night rhythm of its own ... a concept that was easy to understand, compared to many others they’d seen on the sphere, yet still a sign of just how big the Builders thought. The plates were huge, each one larger than an entire planet, and rotating at terrifying speed ... if they were speeding up, what did it mean? And why?

The locals will see day turn to night and back again faster than they would have thought possible, Charlotte realised. She’d heard stories of eclipses shocking primitive societies, although most of the stories – including brave Western explorers using the eclipse to prove the gods favoured them – were massively exaggerated or made up of whole cloth. The primitives might not have understood quite how eclipses worked, but they’d been perfectly capable of understanding the pattern and predicting them. Here ...

She swallowed, suddenly feeling as dull and stupid as a caveman who’d stumbled through a space-time portal and found himself in modern London. She’d thought the locals would be scared shitless by the sudden changes in their local environment, but ... she was scared too. A star had gone out. A star! It was impossible, and yet it had happened. Endeavour was making her way towards Dyson One, in hopes of determining just what had happened, but somehow Charlotte doubted the explorer ship would be able to figure it out. They were ants, crawling across a machine so vast they couldn’t even begin to grasp the sheer immensity of the device, let alone its purpose. She’d read a story, once, about a hamster who’d made a home inside a grand piano. She knew, now, how that poor beast must have felt.

Admiral Dismukes joined her, his face grim. “The gravity fields are speeding up,” he said, quietly. “It looks as if the sphere is trying to steady itself.”

Charlotte frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The star is at the centre of the sphere, but it isn’t actually attached to the sphere,” the admiral explained. “If the sphere’s shell is pushed away from Dyson One, it will eventually brush against the star and the entire surface will be incinerated.”

“Shit.” Charlotte felt numb. It was – would be – a disaster on an unimaginable scale. The sphere was so huge it was hard to believe anything could so much as shake it, let alone push the shell out of orbit, but ... she’d studied plans to blow up Mercury for raw materials, concepts that had never – thankfully – seen the light of day. “If that happens, can we get out?”

“Perhaps.” Admiral Dismukes nodded to the display. “The fists are guarding the exit and God alone knows what’s happening outside.”

Charlotte nodded. The communications links had broken down. Hell, there were ships that had fled into the sphere, when the Chinese had staged their coup, and remained out of contact, unwilling to risk radio transmissions for fear of attracting the fists. Charlotte had no idea what, if anything, the admiral intended to do about those ships. It would be easy to use a drone to send a radio signal – the drones were expendable – but difficult to convince the ships to come in from the cold. They might assume, even with disaster sweeping over the sphere’s interior, that the Chinese remained in control. In theory, the admiral’s command and verification codes should have been wiped if he’d been forced to surrender. In practice, who knew? One didn’t have to be paranoid beyond reason to think the Chinese might have captured the codes and put them to use ...

And half the fleet is composed of civilian ships, not military vessels, she reminded herself, grimly. Their crews weren’t primed to destroy their computer cores if there was a risk of their ships being captured.

She glanced at the admiral. He’d always been handsome, but he seemed to have aged ten years in the last few hours. Her lips twitched. She probably didn’t look much better. She was tired and worn and she hadn’t so much as had a shower, let alone a few hours of sleep ... the Chinese had given her a cabin, to be fair, but she hadn’t been able to sleep even before all hell had broken loose. And ... she hadn’t been able to do much of anything, except watch, when the star had winked out and the storm had begun. She was nothing more than a helpless spectator ...

So is he, she reflected. Admiral Dismukes knew how to handle himself in battle, and he’d done well when the Chinese had launched their coup, but what could he and his fleet do against a disaster big enough to threaten the entire sphere? Charlotte suspected there was nothing they could do, nothing that might save even a handful of the locals ... perhaps not even that. The MNF was in deep shit, caught in a trap it might never be able to escape. And if they couldn’t save themselves ...  We might never see home again.

Another quiver ran through the hull. She forced herself to take a long breath, wishing she had somewhere to sit. Perhaps it would be wiser to go to her cabin and close her eyes, and pretend it wasn’t happening, but she couldn’t force herself to leave. She hadn’t felt so helpless since ... since ever. Even when they’d been trapped on the surface, they’d had options ... shitty options, to be fair, but options nonetheless.  Here ... nothing they could do could save themselves, or the local population, if the sphere died. Or if the alien weapons platforms and fists came after them ...

Mitch would have loved this, she thought, suddenly. He would have thrived on uncertainty.

“We may be able to gain control of the fists, or at least get them out of the way,” the admiral continued. “But we know so little ...”

“We also need to help the locals,” Charlotte said. The live feed from a stealth platform near the surface was updating rapidly, showing a hurricane forming below. The storm was so impossibly vast Charlotte couldn’t help wondering if the sensors were having flights of fancy ... or if they were being disrupted by the gravity waves flowing through the sphere. She’d heard of some big storms in the past, but one big enough to sweep over an entire planet ...? “Is there anything we can do?”

“We can try,” the admiral said. “But right now, we can barely help ourselves.”

He nodded to the display. “We don’t even dare try to fiddle with the command centres, not as long as the gravity waves are crashing into the sphere,” he added. “Right now, if we push the wrong button, we could make the disaster incomparably worse.”

“You’d think the Builders would expect the locals to eventually get into the command centres,” Charlotte muttered. The locals hadn’t been able to get near the centres, from what she’d heard, but she could think of a few ways around that. “Or did they think the locals would figure out how the system works before they started pushing buttons?”

She shook her head, tiredly. The Chinese had designed their ships to be very compatible with foreign vessels – a precaution dating all the way back to the First Interstellar War – and yet she couldn’t even begin to fly the ship. She had almost no naval experience worthy of the name. A British naval crew might be able to steer the carrier, even take her into battle, but she’d have a few surprises for the foreigners, even if they thought they knew what they were doing. The technology might be practically identical, but the layout was very different. She could easily imagine a crewman trying to power up the drive and accidentally opening fire instead. Builder tech was so different it was impossible to predict what would happen until it was far too late ...

And so advanced it can generate tramlines at the drop of a hat, she reflected, sourly. How can we even begin to guess at what else it can do?

“All we can do is wait, and hope for the best,” Admiral Dismukes said. “When the fists settle down, we’ll try and get back to the hatch – and down to the surface. We’ll do what we can for the folks down there.”

Charlotte tried not to wince. The military tended to be more practical than government officials who couldn’t understand that disaster relief, no matter how well-funded and equipped, couldn’t hope to save everyone. The Bombardment had been as well-handled as any disaster-relief planners could have hoped, and yet millions of humans had died in the days and weeks after the rocks had fallen from the sky, despite the best efforts of tens of thousands of soldiers, doctors, and countless civilians. Here ... they couldn’t even scratch the surface. And yet, they had to try. Their mere presence had shattered the local society beyond repair.

Perhaps it needed to be changed, she thought. She had no truck with people who insisted oppressive or stagnant societies should be left alone, even if it meant condemning the locals to suffering, but still ... she couldn’t help shuddering. It was one thing to introduce new technology and medicine, to help the locals get out of a trap, and another to shatter their society without doing anything to put the pieces back together. The locals had been friendly, at least at first. And their world ...  But not changed like this.

But she knew, deep inside, there was no way to put the pieces back together.

Chapter Three: Shuttlecraft, Dyson Two (Exterior)

“Jesus!”

Shuttle Pilot Richard Tobias Gurnard bit himself, none too gently, as the shuttle flew through the sphere’s hatch and out into interplanetary space. The sphere appeared to be shaking the dust from its shell, clouds of it spreading through space as if the sphere was caught in a sandstorm, and pieces of debris were flying towards the surface. Tobias had played countless computer games where local space was filled with dust and asteroids and other hazards that simply didn’t exist in the real world ... it felt like a nightmare, rather than anything real. Even after everything he’d seen ...

He bit himself again as the shuttle glided away from the sphere, pushing its way through a dust cloud that really shouldn’t have existed. The surface was caked in powder, layer upon layer of interstellar dust that had accumulated over uncounted millions of years, but now it looked as though windstorms were sweeping over the sphere, tearing the powder from the surface and tossing it into vortexes that reached into interplanetary space. It was so impossible he couldn’t help wondering if the sphere had suddenly developed a surface atmosphere, though the shell lacked the gravity to keep an atmosphere for more than a few seconds. Or ... perhaps there had been an atmosphere, at one point in time. He’d seen the Builders twist gravity fields in ways he’d thought impossible before he’d seen them shape gravity into a twisted morass or use it to throw fists across the system at near-superluminal speeds. Who knew? Perhaps the sphere had once been inhabited on both sides.

A dull thump echoed through the shuttle. Tobias felt a flash of panic, convinced they’d hit something, before he realised the gravity wave had crashed into their drive field and raged on, striking the sphere itself. He glanced at the display, half-expecting to see the sphere shatter into a cloud of debris ... it wasn’t impossible. He’d flown through the wreckage of Dyson One and he knew there was no reason Dyson Two couldn’t go the same way, although no one knew for sure what had happened to Dyson One. Tobias privately suspected the gravity field had unbalanced slightly, putting a little stress on the megastructure ... too small to be noticed, at least at first, but enough to steadily damage the structure over millions of years until it had finally shattered. It was funny, he’d been taught in school, how a tiny imperfection could lead to disaster. Even something as simple as a bike could be ruined if ...

He gritted his teeth as another gravity wave slammed into the craft, leaving him fighting to control his sudden terror. He knew how to fly the shuttle into danger – he had flown into danger – and yet he had never felt so helpless in his entire life, not since joining the Royal Navy and learning how to fly gunboats. He was in control – he was hardly a passenger – and yet he couldn’t help feeling as though the shuttle was spiralling out of control. He’d flown through storms as well as enemy fire, but storms had been predictable and he’d known how to handle them. Here ... the shuttle shuddered again, hard enough to destabilise the gravity field. For a moment, it was so intense he was afraid the crew were going to be crushed by their own gravity generator.

“We lost a drive node,” Marigold reported. Her voice was high, suggesting she was on the verge of panic too. “Two more are going to break, unless we shut them down.”

“Do it,” Tobias ordered, curtly. The shuttle had seven drive nodes. In theory, she could lose half of them without losing anything else; in practice, he wasn’t so sure. They’d be completely safe, if they were in interplanetary space, but the gravity field surrounding Dyson Two was dangerously unpredictable. It reminded him of training sims where wannabe pilots had to thread their way through gravity wells, only with real consequences if you misjudged your flight. “And try to make contact with the ship.”

“Aye, sir,” Marigold said. “The MNF is heading into interstellar space.”

“I can’t blame them,” Tobias muttered. The starships could probably handle the gravity waves better than the shuttle, but it was quite reasonable for their commanding officers to want some distance between themselves and the sphere. “See if you can get a link to whoever’s in charge over there too.”

He grimaced as the shuttle cleared the last of the dust cloud and headed further into interplanetary space. The sphere was just too big, a solid wall so vast it was impossible to make out the curve with his naked eye. He’d read comics where the universe was enclosed with a vast wall, keeping the chaos outside from destroying all of creation, and he couldn’t help thinking the sphere wasn’t that different even if it was tiny compared to a universal wall. He had no idea what it was made of, but it blocked everything from radio transmissions to nuclear missiles. They’d lost their link to the mountaintop base, and the remainder of the fleet, the moment they passed through the hatch.

His console sounded the alarm. Tobias cursed under his breath as a piece of debris shot towards them, so close he couldn’t help wondering if it had been aimed deliberately at the tiny shuttle. It wasn’t alone either ... he swore out loud as he saw an impossible debris storm hurtling towards the shuttle and the sphere beyond. The shell itself might not have much of a gravity field, he reflected, but the star inside sat at the bottom of a gravity well, pulling pieces of debris towards the sphere ... he yanked the shuttle to one side, gritting his teeth as another piece of space junk rocketed past. Whatever had happened to Dyson One’s star – and he refused to even think about it – had knocked countless pieces of debris out of their relatively stable orbits and thrown them in all directions. He shuddered to think what would happen if one struck the shuttle. They’d be atomised and no one would even notice.

“I have a solid link to the fleet,” Marigold reported. She sounded steadier now ... Tobias envied her. “They’re holding position well clear of the debris storm.”

“Try and get a link to Endeavour,” Tobias said. The mothership had passed through the hatch hours ago and headed straight for Dyson One. No matter what, it was unlikely they’d get a reply for several hours ... if they were lucky. He tried not to consider the possibility the explorer ship had been hit by flying debris. Endeavour was the largest ship he’d ever served on, but she’d be destroyed if something struck her at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light. “The captain may have orders for us.”

The words sounded silly, even as he spoke. They were a long way from the remainder of the fleet, either the ships inside the sphere or the ones holding position light-minutes from the debris field. They were effectively alone, unless they turned and flew back through the hatch and he didn’t think that was a good idea. The dust storm was intense enough to interfere with laser signals, something else he’d previously thought impossible, and radio signals would draw hostile attention. They were so far from everyone else, there was no point in asking for specific orders. By the time any arrived, events would have moved on.

“Crap,” he said, as a piece of debris – merely the size of Belgium – slammed into the sphere. Giant waves washed over the surface and exploded into interplanetary space, waves so intense he thought for an insane moment the sphere was covered in water before he realised the towering waves were actually dust. It didn’t look as though the impact had damaged the shell itself – it really was unbelievably strong – but it was impossible to be sure. “If the sphere is punctured ...”

He looked at her and saw her staring back, horror clearly visible on her face. The sphere was an entire world, only turned inside-out. If the shell was damaged, if something hit the surface hard enough to break through ... he had a sudden mental image of a punctured balloon starting to deflate, the air flowing out until it was gone ... the sphere had more atmosphere than a hundred planets, he thought, but once it started flowing out it would keep going until the entire population suffocated. He’d endured emergency drills in which they’d had to patch up the hull, with everything from purpose-built patches to duct tape, yet ... how did one patch up a hole the size of Belgium? Or something bigger? Some of the debris chunks were big enough to pass for planets!

“We can’t even begin to deflect them,” Marigold said, grimly. “We don’t have the power ...”

The shuttle rocked again. Tobias cursed as a hundred pieces of debris altered their courses, as if they were litter caught up in an ocean wave. It wasn’t a bad analogy, part of his mind whispered. He’d only been to the beach once, as a young boy, but he’d seen the waves pick up litter and carry it out to sea or toss it back onto the shore. Here ... he evaded a piece of debris that came right at them and plunged onwards into interstellar space, fortunately heading nowhere near the fleet. Another piece spun out of control and glanced off the sphere, spinning back into interplanetary space. He shuddered helplessly as more dust storms marched across the surface, seemingly small from their vantage point, but in reality they were so immense they would’ve swallowed up an entire country back on Earth. It was like the Bombardment all over again, but worse. Far worse.

He tried to think of options, as more pieces of debris hit the sphere, but there were none. The shuttle wasn’t designed to push an incoming asteroid onto a trajectory that wouldn’t hit a planet, nor did it have the weapons to shatter the asteroid into chunks too small to pose any real threat. The entire fleet wasn’t big enough to make a difference, even if it had been in position to intercept the incoming rocks; the fists might make a difference, he supposed, but they’d never seen the alien structures operating outside the sphere. There was no way, he thought, to focus the gravity beams into interstellar space.

Or if there is we don’t know about it, he thought. It stood to reason it could be done – the Builders had dismantled entire planets to build the spheres, and they clearly hadn’t needed the spheres to do it – but he had no idea how. There were no command-and-control structures outside the sphere, as far as they knew. Perhaps they were buried under the dust.

The thought mocked him. The Dyson System was a binary system ... or had been, before one of the stars had winked out. Any star system was immense and a binary star system was larger than most, and searching it would take thousands upon thousands of years. An entire fleet could go dark within a star system and effectively vanish ... for all he knew, the command-and-control system was only a few hundred kilometres from his current position, yet it was so dark and silent he wouldn’t have the slightest idea it was there unless he stumbled across it. The sheer size of the system was daunting. Hell, for all he knew, the original command structure had already been picked up by the gravity waves and thrown into the sphere.

“The dust is going to pose a major hazard,” Marigold said, in a tone that suggested she was fighting hard to remain calm. “I don’t know what’ll happen if it gets into the sphere itself.”

Tobias had no idea either. The Builders had shaped the gravity field so perfectly that there was no gravity within the mountain. Flying through the hatch was more like flying through an oversized launch tube than trying to thread an impossibly huge needle. In theory, there was no reason the dust would fall into the mountain passageway and contaminate the interior; in practice, he had no idea what to expect. A massive influx of dust would do immense ecological damage ... the Bombardment had thrown tons of dust and water vapour into Earth’s atmosphere, and that had been relatively minor. A full-fledged nuclear war might have rendered the planet uninhabitable or worse ...

“We can’t do anything,” he said. The realisation hurt. He hadn’t enjoyed his brief time on the surface, and it had been no surprise to him that the locals had tried to kill him and the offworlders, but the locals didn’t deserve to die. The impacts might not punch through the shell, as incredible as it seemed, yet ... they had to be shaking the surface violently enough to do real damage. “I think ...”

He watched another piece of debris strike the surface and shivered. The dust cloud was expanding rapidly, rippling oddly as gravity waves passed through the system and vanished into interstellar space. It made him wonder what, if anything, the distant colonies would pick up, when the gravity waves washed through their systems. The nearest colony world was forty light years away, in realspace ... the gravity waves would hit them in forty years, unless they faded before they got there. Would they blame the whole affair on alien supertechnology, he asked himself, or would they assume a distant star had gone supernova or ... or what? Perhaps they’d deduce the truth, or something close to it. They’d certainly notice an entire star going out.

A chill ran down his spine. Anyone standing on the colony world and looking towards the Dyson System would see Dyson One, glowing as brightly as always. It would be forty years before the colonists saw the star go out, even though it had happened only a few short hours ago. Forty years ... it would be interesting, he reflected, to see what could be picked up if the fleet travelled far enough to witness the event from light-weeks away, but that was impossible without the tramline. He grimaced, wondering what would happen if the entire system came apart. The fleet was supposed to be equipped for long-term deployment, with enough supplies to set up a self-sustaining settlement if they lost contact with Earth, but they’d always assumed they’d be able to trade with the locals for food and drink. What if they couldn’t? Would they be able to survive? Or would they find themselves slowly dying out?

We’ll last longer than the locals, if the sphere shatters, he thought, numbly. It was difficult to imagine the scale of the potential disaster, impossible to grasp how many innocents would die without ever knowing what had happened ... lacking even the knowledge to understand they lived inside a Dyson sphere. But we won’t last forever.

He glanced at Marigold, her head bent over her console, and felt a pang of guilt. It would have been easy to resign, in the wake of the war, and find employment in the asteroid belt or even purchase a small starship for themselves. They’d planned to do just that ... and they would have, if they hadn’t been convinced to join the first voyage beyond the rim of explored space.  Now ... he didn’t regret seeing the spheres, but they were trapped light years from Earth and the colonies. They might never get home ... he could do the maths, as easily as everyone else. The nearest colony was forty light years away, which meant it would take at least a century to reach it if they travelled in realspace ...

And if we could keep the drives online indefinitely, which we can’t, he thought, bitterly. He was no starship engineer, but he understood the dangers of keeping the drive nodes operational for far too long without repair or replacement. The wear and tear on the system would be enough to degrade the units and ruin their performance, if they didn’t destroy themselves completely. If we can’t reactivate the tramlines, we’re fucked.

“I think that’s the last of the first wave,” Marigold said. “But other pieces of debris were pushed into orbits that might intersect the sphere.”

Tobias made a face. In theory, it would be easy to track the debris and predict which pieces would hit the sphere. In practice, if there were more gravity waves, it would prove impossible to be sure of anything. The debris might pick up speed or be tossed away from the sphere or ... who knew? He hoped the researchers were looking for ways to steer the fists outside the sphere or ... could a gravity wave push through the sphere? Was it possible? He had no idea, and it struck him as incredibly dangerous, but ... he made a mental note to forward the suggestion to the research team. If they could push a gravity beam through the shell without damaging the sphere itself, it might give them a way to deflect the next wave of debris. Might.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” he said. The laser link to the Chinese carrier was gone. Naval protocol was to re-establish the link as quickly as possible, but he had no idea if that was even possible. “Forward our sensor records to the exterior fleet. We’re going to need pick-up sooner or later.”

Marigold wrinkled her nose. “It’ll have to be sooner,” she said. “Our systems took one hell of a beating. The damage pattern is bizarre.”

“Yeah,” Tobias agreed. A laser burning through the hull, damaging everything in its path, would have made sense. The pattern in front of him was erratic, seemingly random. “It makes no sense at all.”

Chapter Four: North Mountain Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

“Don’t say a word,” the pilot said. “One cough and we’re dead.”

Captain Colin Lancaster, Royal Marines, swallowed several nasty responses – he was in no mood for pilot humour - as the shuttle glided towards the mountaintop base. The fists were orbiting directly above the shuttle – his sense of perspective kept shifting as the craft moved over the mountain shaft leading down to the open hatch – and there’d be no time to react if they sensed the shuttle and attacked. He’d seen alien objects smash shuttles to atoms, and alien weapons slice through others effortlessly, and he knew the dangers ... even though he also knew sound didn’t travel in a vacuum and the fists wouldn’t hear anything they said, no matter how loud. It was good discipline though, he reflected. He’d been in dangerous environments before, where the slightest radio signal could bring death and destruction down on their heads, but the sphere was easily the most dangerous. The Builders didn’t seem to have any qualms about collateral damage when they fired on radio sources.

The shuttle rocked faintly, the gravity wave rippling over the hull and on into the sphere, as they neared the mountaintop base. It should have been anchored to the base material, but it had proved impossible to drill into the mountain to properly secure the collection of modular structures that made up the station. The engineers had practically had to clamp the structure to the mountaintop – he couldn’t help thinking of something perched on the edge of a volcano – and it hadn’t been enough, anything like enough, to keep the earthquakes from doing immense damage. His heart sank as he surveyed the live feed from the shuttle’s optical sensors. Half the base was missing – he hoped the modules had been thrown into orbit, rather than down to the surface – and the remainder looked badly damaged, as if the base had been caught in a storm. It should have been impossible – they were well above the sphere’s atmosphere – but what was impossible these days? An entire star had just ... gone out.

“The outer airlock appears to be defunct,” the pilot reported. “There’s no way I can dock. You want to try to open it from the outside?”

Colin shook his head. “We’ll go through the gash in the hull,” he said, curtly. It was hard to be sure, but the gash looked big enough to take an armoured man. The interior was no longer pressurised ... he hoped, prayed, that some of the modules had remained intact, but he feared the worst. “Hold position near the base. I’ll take the first team.”

“Aye, sir.”

He nodded to Sergeant Ben Burris and Corporal Rowntree, of the Royal Engineers, then led the way to the airlock. The pilot kept up a running commentary as the marines prepped for the jump, cautioning them to remain tethered to the shuttle at all times. Colin found it hard to believe there was a dust storm below, blocking visual access to the outside universe, but ... he told himself to take the report seriously. An entire star had gone out and the sphere, a megastructure so vast it made Earth look tiny, was shaking. He couldn’t imagine anything powerful enough to do that, let alone shatter Dyson One. If Dyson Two went the same way ...

The hatch hissed open as soon as they checked each other’s suits, revealing the mountaintop station dead ahead. Colin couldn’t help thinking that the station looked like a child’s toy, one battered repeatedly by the child’s older sibling ... the damage so extensive, even to the naked eye, that all hope of finding survivors was lost. The Chinese might have done the MNF a favour, he reflected sourly, by capturing the base and taking the crew down to the surface. They might still be alive, as long as the locals stayed well away from the surface outpost. Whoever they’d left in position on the mountaintop was almost certainly dead.

He triggered his gas jets and flew out of the hatch, straight towards the gash in the base’s hull. Up close, the gash was larger than he’d thought, opening directly into the crew’s sleeping compartments. They’d had slightly more room than the Royal Marines, he noted absently, but they’d probably had to hotbunk if they weren’t making their way down to the surface. He paused at the gash and peered inside, carefully activating his suit’s spotlights. The interior was as dark and silent as the grave. A shiver ran down his spine as he glided inwards, his eyes flickering from bunk to bunk. They were all empty, stripped of bodies and blankets alike when the air flowed out of the station. A handful of eReaders floated in the air, left tethered to the bunks by their owners. Colin hoped they were safe – it was possible the compartment had been empty, when it was opened to vacuum – but there was no way to be sure. The clean-up crews would have a lot of work to do, figuring out who’d owned what. He didn’t envy them.

And if someone was sleeping when the hull was breached, their odds of getting out before it was too late would be precisely zero, he thought, grimly. He’d done extensive survival training throughout his career, with endless drills for donning life support gear in the middle of an emergency, but his instructors had made it clear survival depended on having the right gear within reach. There should have been survival gear in the module – the base was in a dangerous environment – yet he couldn’t see any. The crew had been caught by surprise. They wouldn’t even have time to kiss their ass goodbye.

The sense of unreality grew stronger as they forced open the hatch to the next compartment and glided inside. The station had been designed to seal off any breached compartments before the entire structure could depressurise, but the damage was too great to allow any part of the station to be isolated and saved. The bulkhead looked so battered and holed he couldn’t help wondering if someone had opened fire inside the compartment, although the damage didn’t look like bullet holes. It looked more like someone – or something – had bent the structure as if it were made of taffy. He gritted his teeth as he made his way into the command compartment and cursed under his breath. Two bodies hung in the air, faces frozen in a rictus of agony. One male, one female, both Chinese.

Rowntree glided past him and started to work on the console. Colin left him to it and made his way to the upper funicular station. It should have been secure – God knew the funicular was the only way to get up and down without a purpose-built vehicle, one of which had suffered a terrible accident on the way down the mountainside – but much of the station was simply gone. Colin guessed the earthquakes had shaken it free and sent it tumbling down the mountain, into the sphere’s gravity field. He could see nothing below, save for the upper atmosphere’s haze. The sphere was as daunting as ever. He forced himself to look away before vertigo overwhelmed him.

And I thought the Beacons were bad, he thought, as they inched back into the station. The mountaintop didn’t look that bad, but there was something about it that wore him down in a way the forced march through the Brecon Beacons had not. There’s no way anyone could get used to this environment.

He checked the line tethering him to the shuttle, then keyed the communicator. “We’re going to need the car. Team One can get the car out and meet us by the funicular; Team Two can start patching holes up here.”

The pilot put on a mock maternal tone. “See that you bring her back without a scratch.”

Colin had to smile as he went back to the command centre, although it wasn’t funny. He’d totalled his mother’s car a few years ago and he’d been damned lucky he hadn’t been sent to jail, given how careless he’d been. He could easily have killed himself and the girl he’d been trying to impress ... he couldn’t even remember her name. She hadn’t put out for him either, he recalled. His old self had been outraged she hadn’t given herself to him; his newer, more mature, self argued she’d probably had a point. What sort of idiot would date a guy who’d nearly gotten her killed?

“The main system is completely fucked, sir,” Rowntree reported. “All the local datanodes are gone, and most of the sensors and datalinks are either lost or operating at very low capacity. I might be able to extract some of the smaller datacores, but ... I’ve never seen internal damage like this. The fusion core and batteries are ruined beyond repair.”

Colin was too numb to be surprised. The Royal Navy was a firm believer in building as much redundancy into its ships and stations as possible. He’d seen battleships and carriers soak up a hell of a lot of damage and keep going, even when they’d been streaming atmosphere and plasma from gashes in their hulls. The station should have survived the earthquakes ... and even if the modules had been pulled apart, the datanodes should have survived long enough to be recovered and scanned. But then, no one had expected gravity waves so powerful they shook something the size of a Dyson Sphere. It made him wonder if the ships outside the sphere were gone. The gravity waves could have smashed them as easily as a tidal wave shattered a wooden sailing ship.

That’s someone else’s problem, he told himself, sharply. Worry about your own problems.

“Team Two is on the way,” he said. “When they arrive, do what you can to help them patch up the station.”

“We’d be better off building a whole new station, sir,” Rowntree pointed out. “The hull is fucked too.”

Colin could hardly disagree. The station was completely exposed to vacuum. The team would have to find and seal all the holes before they could repressurise the station and that wouldn’t be easy, not when some of the holes would be tiny. Rowntree was right, but Colin didn’t think the MNF had anymore modules on hand. They might have to put them together in the fleet’s machine shops, or adapt a starship to serve as a base of operations, and either way it would take time ... time they didn’t have. Besides, he had no idea if there would be more gravity waves. It was quite possible the admiral would refuse to take the risk of throwing good equipment after bad.

“Do what you can,” he ordered, quietly. “Good luck.”

He turned and hurried back to the funicular station. The car – a strange combination of rollercoaster carriage, spider-walker and IFV – was already waiting, the crew carefully attaching one end of the cable to the mountaintop station to ensure they could communicate with the shuttle crew as they made their way to the surface. The mountain had been wired, a few short hours ago, but the cables had been snapped or simply torn from their mountings by the earthquake. He gritted his teeth as he clambered into the cab and buckled in, bracing himself for the coming fall. The old sweats had talked about disaster relief efforts, back during the First Interstellar War, but they’d had it easy. They’d been able to use radios and drones and hundreds of other pieces of military technology, none of which could be used on the sphere. He tried not to think about the orbiting weapons platform high overhead, ready to fire without warning ... if it decided to strike the car, they were dead. There was no armour known to mankind that could stand up to the alien weapons for even a second.

“Go,” he ordered.

The car lurched into motion and plunged down the mountainside. Colin had always loved rollercoaster rides as a kid – being helpless was part of the thrill – but the rides had always been relatively safe. The riders might be upside down, or thrown around at terrifying speed, yet ... there was little real danger. It was no worse than flying on a modern aircraft. The odds of something going wrong were very low. But here ...

He gritted his teeth, closing his eyes as the vehicle picked up speed. In theory, they could lose their grip and tumble all the way to the ground ... and survive. In theory. In practice, he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen men survive dreadful accidents – he’d watched helplessly as a tank ran into a canal and got stuck under the water, where the crew had had to wait until they could be rescued – but they’d been in controlled environments. Here ... he found it hard to believe they could survive if they rolled all the way to the ground.

His heart sank. They needed to rebuild the funicular as quickly as possible.

The shaking grew worse, his stomach twisting ... he couldn’t help thinking he’d left it behind, hundreds of miles away. The vehicle lurched back and forth, the ground heaving underneath them, then slipped further down the mountainside ... the wheels almost losing their grip before catching themselves, an instant before they lost control. Colin mentally kicked himself for volunteering for the mission, half-wishing he’d thought to apply for a transfer instead. If he’d been reassigned to the units patrolling the Security Zone ...

Right now, charging stark naked into a terrorist base sounds pretty damn good, he thought, as he heard someone behind him throwing up. It would be better than this.

The vehicle bottomed out and skidded to a halt. Colin opened his eyes and peered towards the base camp. It had grown since the last time he’d visited – the researchers had brought more tents and prefabricated buildings, the Chinese had landed everything they needed to set up a garrison – but half the buildings looked badly damaged, as if they’d been caught in a mighty thunderstorm. He couldn’t help wondering if that was what had happened. They’d tracked hurricanes from orbit, giant storms large enough to swallow entire planets. If there had been human or alien settlements under the storm, they’d likely been destroyed. Even a modern settlement would have been battered beyond repair.

He opened the hatch and stepped outside, glancing up the mountainside. The cable was still intact, thankfully. The crew were already establishing a secure link to the shuttle, and through the shuttle’s laser communicators to the remainder of the fleet. Colin had always liked being far enough from his superiors that he was able to run the show without referring every decision to someone sitting in an air-conditioned office, as detached from the reality of life on the edge as it was possible to be, but it was good to know he wasn’t alone. The first time they’d set foot on the sphere, there had been a very real risk they’d spend the rest of their lives there.

“Look sharp,” he muttered, as the remainder of the platoon formed up around him. The Chinese had surrendered, but there was no way to know how the troops on the surface would react. Would they refuse to honour Admiral He’s surrender? It was never easy to tell how anyone would act, if they thought they were being sent into a POW camp ... or worse. He’d heard the Chinese government had murdered POWs, and even committed genocide, and he knew he would keep fighting if he thought surrender meant death. “If they’re hostile ...”

He braced himself, counting down the seconds. The Chinese had had enough time to ship thousands of troops to the surface, along with enough weapons to make digging them out a very difficult task. Normally, a military base could be smashed from orbit if it refused to surrender, but no one knew how the alien tech would react to that. He wouldn’t live to see it. If the Chinese decided to make a fight of it, his platoon would be wiped out so quickly they might not even get a shot off before it was too late ...

Someone moved, dead ahead. Colin allowed himself a moment of relief as he spotted a Chinese officer and a researcher in a makeshift uniform, designed to provide protection against poison darts and arrows. The locals were hardly harmless, but modern technology and medical science could neutralise most of their weapons. That might have changed, he reminded himself. The Chinese had given their local allies enough semi-modern weapons to make them masters of the local area, at least until the ammunition ran out.

“Sir,” the Chinese officer said, stiffly. “As per my orders, I am surrendering this base to you.”

Colin wondered, suddenly, if the man knew what had happened. The communication links had gone down so quickly that they might not know anything had happened, save for the earthquakes. They might have seen the wreckage tumbling down the mountain, but ... would they realise the earthquakes weren’t natural? Could they even imagine a star going out?

“Understood,” Colin said. “Please have your men assist with recovery work ...”

“We need help,” the researcher said, quickly. “The entire region has been devastated. The natives need our help too.”

Colin nodded, trying not to think about how little they could do, compared to what was needed. Calling it a drop in the bucket would be a gross exaggeration. More like a drop in the ocean ...

“We’ll do what we can,” he promised. The camp looked ruined, although the Chinese were already repairing what they could. He hoped the garrison walls were still in place. If the locals decided to blame the offworlders for the crisis and attacked ... they might wipe out the landing parties before they could be beaten off. “But all hell has broken loose.”

Chapter Five: Shuttlecraft/Cousteau, Dyson Two (Exterior)

“This could go very badly wrong,” Marigold said. There was an edge to her voice that suggested she was terrified, despite having flown shuttles and gunboats for as long as he had. “Don’t fuck up.”

“Yes, Mother,” Tobias said. There was no humour in his tone. There was nothing to joke about. “I won’t.”

He gritted his teeth. They’d made contact with the remainder of the MNF as the starships started to return to the sphere – leaving a number of civilian vessels watching from a safe distance, or what everyone hoped was a safe distance – and received new orders to do what they could to deflect incoming pieces of debris. Tobias wasn’t sure if the small fleet of shuttles and gunboats, armed with pressers and nuclear warheads, could make any real difference, but it had to be tried. The sphere wasn’t indestructible – the ruins of Dyson One were clear proof the spheres could be destroyed – and it was quite possible the constant hammering, as chunks of debris struck the shell, would eventually do real damage. Tobias didn’t need to see the simulations to know what would happen if something punched a hole in the shell. He’d seen it in his nightmares.

“Get ready to deploy the presser,” he ordered. He didn’t blame her for being nervous. They’d barely had an hour of sleep between them and they’d drunk far too much coffee and eaten too many energy bars for his peace of mind. He felt edgy, all too aware his tiredness could lead to a deadly mistake that could get him and his lover killed. Back home, such wanton dismissal of safety regulations would have landed them both in hot water, perhaps even led to a dishonourable discharge. Here ... there was no time to follow the rules. “We won’t be holding position for long.”

Marigold sounded waspish. “You do your bit and I’ll do mine.”

Tobias fought down the urge to snap at her as they neared their target, a piece of debris large enough to pass for the Isle of Man. It was hard to keep his temper under control, a grim reminder he really was tired. Normally, they didn’t snap and snarl at each other ... he gritted his teeth and angled the shuttle towards the nearest debris chunk, altering their position to match its course and speed. He couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a giant baseball bat – or, more likely, a caveman’s club – heading right towards someone’s head. He hadn’t played baseball very often – it had never been a thing in his school – but he’d loathed it as much as every other sport. He bit his lip, all too aware his mind was wandering. It would be dangerous enough under any circumstances, when he was flying a shuttle, but here ... if another gravity wave struck the shuttle, it could toss them into the debris chunk or send it tumbling away from them. There was no way to predict when and where the next gravity wave would strike.

“Moving in now,” he said. The range was closing with terrifying speed. His reactions were good, normally, but they were dulled right now. “Deploy as soon as possible.”

“Got it.” Marigold worked her console. “Ready to deploy ...”

Tobias looked up and out of the cockpit and wished he hadn’t. Space was dark, inky dark; the debris chunk darker, somehow, than space itself, twisting and tumbling as it plummeted towards the sphere. He keyed a switch, bringing the main lights online as the shuttle neared its destination, revealing more detail than he’d wanted to know. It was normally easy to calculate ballistic trajectories, and work out how best to approach a target, but here ... he tried not to think about it. A single shift in movement might get them both killed – or worse.

“Deploying ... now,” Marigold said. A dull clump echoed through the shuttle as the presser was released. “Contact made. I say again, contact made.”

Tobias breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled the shuttle away from the debris chunk. “Time to activation?”

“Two minutes,” Marigold said. “It’ll be launched away from us.”

“And straight into interstellar space,” Tobias finished. His imagination pointed out that the debris chunk would keep flying until it hit something, although cold logic insisted the odds of hitting a star, let alone something smaller, were very low indeed. Normally, no one would take the risk, but here ... “Make sure it isn’t pointed at us when it fires.”

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” Marigold teased. “I know what I’m doing.”

Tobias had no doubt of it, as the timer ticked down to zero, but the system was dangerously unpredictable. A faint flicker of ... something ... ran through the shuttle, so faint he couldn’t help wondering if he’d imagined it, as the presser triggered, creating a gravity nexus that tossed the debris chunk away from the sphere. He frowned as he studied the trajectory – either the projections had been wrong or they’d missed something – then relaxed slightly as he realised the debris chunk would still miss the sphere by a comfortable margin. His lips twitched into a tired smile as he realised just how absurd that would be, almost anywhere else. The sphere was just too large. It made all the normal safety margins look meaningless.

“The trajectory is wrong,” Marigold said. “I don’t know why.”

“It was already moving at speed,” Tobias pointed out. The last time they’d used pressers to move asteroids across a star system, the asteroids had been in stable – and predictable – orbits. “Or the gravity field might have been twisted in some way.”

He rubbed his forehead. Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin were personal heroes, for him and nearly every other spacer in the known universe, but neither man would have understood modern technology. They’d be stunned if they saw starships larger than wet-navy battleships, awed if they watched the ships jumping light-years in a single bound ... there was no way they could understand what they were seeing, let alone predict what effect it had on the universe around them. He felt the same way too, as the presser disengaged from the debris chunk and started signalling for pickup. There was no way to even begin to predict what the Builders could do.

For all we know, they might knock the asteroid back towards the sphere, he thought. He couldn’t imagine any reason to do it, unless the Builders really did want to commit genocide, but they were so alien it was impossible to predict what they might do. He’d read theories that suggested the Builders had actually evolved on gas giants, or developed themselves to the point they were beings of pure energy, rather than matter. Or they might do something so impossible we can’t even begin to imagine it.

He yawned, helplessly. “We need a break.”

Marigold yawned, too. “You tell the admiral that.”

Tobias laughed, humourlessly, as he steered the shuttle towards the presser. They’d have a chance to repeat the trick, to deflect another chunk of debris, unless they did manage to convince the admiral to let them take a break. He doubted it, somehow. There were thousands of pieces of debris moving through the system, hundreds either going to strike the sphere or pass close enough to kiss the surface. The latter shouldn’t be a problem, normally, but the gravity surges were dangerously unpredictable. It would only take a moment of bad luck for a passing debris chunk to be slammed into the sphere ...

“And even if we did get a rest, could we sleep?” Marigold’s voice was tired and drained. “How much coffee did you drink?”

“Too much,” Tobias said. “It’s all going to catch up with us, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Marigold agreed. “It will.”

***

Commodore Gillett Lafarge had thought himself used to the idea of an ever-changing universe. He was old enough to have served in the Second Interstellar War as a young officer, when the human race had encountered its second major alien enemy, and fought beside old enemies against the all-devouring threat of the Virus, before being assigned to the MNF as one of its senior officers. He’d been fifth in command, before the Chinese had staged a coup that had killed the third and forth in command, and he’d barely had a chance to get used to being second in command before his squadron had lost contact with Admiral Dismukes ...

... No, he thought. Before a star turned into a black hole.

He stared at the main display, feeling more than a little out of his depth. Cousteau was a deep space explorer, very similar to Endeavour, and her crew was supposed to expect the unexpected, but none of them had expected to see a star crushed into a black hole. They knew the Builders were advanced, yet ... creating a black hole was technology so advanced it might as well be magic. Gillett would have been less surprised, he thought, if it turned out the technological world had a magic counterpart existing at right angles to itself, a world that had suddenly been merged into his. Humans with magic would have been easier to accept, he told himself, than aliens with godlike powers. All the stories of strange encounters on the edge of explored space, encounters that somehow were never recorded or relayed by reliable observers, suddenly seemed more than a little creditable. And yet ...

The display updated, again, as the sensor drones picked up more asteroids – debris chunks – heading towards the sphere. He’d never seen anything like it, not in his worst nightmares. Meteor storms weren’t uncommon on Earth – the planet’s gravity well drew tiny meteorites into the atmosphere with astonishing regularity – but it was rare for a starship to be caught in a meteor storm ... at least outside bad fiction. Normally, a lone asteroid could be avoided with ease. Here ...

“Commodore, we’re deploying additional shuttles now,” Lieutenant Archambault reported, grimly. She looked as tired as everyone else, her uniform so untidy she’d fail an inspection. “But we’re running short of pushers.”

And we can barely hope to deflect even a fraction of the incoming rocks, Gillett thought. The fleet could use nukes, but nukes were one-shot weapons ... and, in truth, they didn’t have enough to make a difference. His lips twisted sourly. Clearly, not setting up a nuclear weapons production plant, the day they’d entered the binary system, had been a grave mistake. We don’t even have a clear idea of which chunks of debris should be prioritised.

“Tell the shuttles to concentrate on the larger pieces of debris,” he ordered, tiredly. Whatever the Builders had used to construct the sphere’s shell, it had survived impacts that would have vaporised the largest structure the human race had ever built. The dust storms looked impressive, but they didn’t seem to be anything more than purely cosmetic. There was no hint the entire sphere was coming apart, let alone exploding into a cloud of debris like Dyson One. “We’ll do what we can to protect the sphere.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Archambault said. She sounded as though she wanted to argue, to point out that even the smaller pieces of debris could do real damage if they hit the sphere. Small was relative, particularly here. There were small pieces of debris that were orders of magnitude bigger than a battleship. “We ... ah ... we need the rest of the fleet.”

“Attend to your orders,” Gillett said, curtly. Survey crews were often less formal than regular military, but there were limits. “Do the best you can.”

He sank back into his chair, never taking his eyes off the display. The system was crazy, utterly unprecedented. The MNF had barely catalogued even a tiny fraction of the system before the gravity waves had picked up pieces of debris and tossed them in all directions ... worse, the burst of energy from Dyson One as it became a black hole had fried nearly every sensor platform within ten light-minutes of the former star. They’d practically had to start rebuilding their charts from scratch, a task made much harder by gravity waves warping debris trajectories, seemingly at random. Gillett knew he’d been lucky – if the squadron had been nearer the star, it might have been disabled or destroyed – but the crisis unfolding in front of him was immense, so vast they couldn’t so much as hope to scratch the surface. They could stop dozens of debris chunks from striking the sphere, but dozens more would make it through and then ...

You’d think the Builders would do something about the threat of asteroid impacts, he thought, as another set of icons blinked up on the display. Thankfully, they appeared to be heading well away from the sphere. The sphere is a bigger target than just about everything else ... and the star inside is sitting at the bottom of a gravity well, pulling asteroids into trajectories that will intersect with the shell.

He rubbed his eyes, cursing the Chinese under his breath. He’d spent the last few hours helping to pick up the pieces, taking Chinese officers into custody while keeping their enlisted men under supervision, a task he simply didn’t have the manpower to do properly ... not without alienating the Chinese to the point that resistance and rebellion would become inevitable. Gillett had been told Admiral He had decided to become a warlord – that was the admiral’s story and he was sticking to it – but Gillett rather suspected the Chinese officer was lying through his teeth. The Chinese government wasn’t known for trusting its officials and there was a very good chance they’d had a secret agent positioned close to Admiral He, ready to put a knife in him if he turned traitor. The fact Admiral He had survived long enough to surrender suggested his government quietly approved of his actions, both in trying to seize the system and in taking the blame on himself when the coup failed. It had probably been planned that way, he told himself. The Chinese Government could blame everything on a rogue warlord and avoid the wrath of the other human governments. Gillett had no idea if they could get away with it, but they clearly thought they could.

And we were so worn out by the first crisis that we were unprepared for the second, he thought, tiredly. What else is going to go wrong?

He glowered at the fleet communications console. Half the fleet was missing, trapped inside the sphere. A dust storm shouldn’t pose any threat to a modern starship inching its way through the hatch, but ... who knew what was happening on the far side? Admiral Dismukes might be alive and well, and in command, or ... Gillett shook his head. He could hope for the best, and he did, but he had to plan for the worst. He’d have to send a shuttle through the dust storm soon, once they’d deflected as much of the debris as they were able, and hope they could make contact. Losing the laser link was not encouraging.

“Commodore, long-range passive sensors are picking up more high-energy bursts from Dyson One,” Commander Desjardins reported. “They ... sir, they defy analysis.”

“What doesn’t, these days?” Gillett eyed the display warily, reminding himself to be aware of the time delay. It took nearly twenty hours for a signal to travel from Dyson One to their current location. Whatever was happening ... it had already happened. “Make sure you record everything, and back it up to secure locations. The researchers back home will ...”

He felt his mood turn black. They were stranded, trapped for the rest of their lives. The civilians might talk about flying to the nearest system, in realspace, as if it was just a cruise from Earth to Jupiter, but Gillett had been a naval officer too long to have any illusions. They were stuck, cut off completely ... unless they worked out how to turn the tramlines back on. If they didn’t ... in theory, they could set up a stable community and keep themselves alive indefinitely; in practice, he wasn’t so sure.  They’d certainly have real problems putting a colony on a steady footing, particularly if they couldn’t rely on trade with the sphere’s inhabitants. There would be no way to prevent a technological regression, no matter what they did. It would take decades, at best, before they could start building shuttles and starships for themselves.

“Never mind,” he said. The MNF had hundreds of researchers, experts in everything from gravity theory to social studies. He doubted they were true experts, not compared to the Builders, but they were amongst the best and brightest of humanity. Who knew? Maybe they’d work out how to reopen the tramlines or ... who knew? “Make sure you spread the data as widely as possible.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Gillett nodded, curtly, as the hours wore on. He would have killed for a space battle, for an enemy he could engage and destroy, rather than a natural disaster ... a very unnatural natural disaster. It felt as if they were facing an invincible foe, one who had no malice and yet no care either ... he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to turn a star into a black hole. Did the Builders know Dyson One had shattered centuries ago? He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the sphere had remained intact. The entire sphere would have been destroyed, along with the population. Had they chosen the shattered sphere to avoid damaging the intact sphere? Or were they indifferent to the carnage they were inflicting on the system? They didn’t seem to be doing anything to save the intact sphere from the debris storm ...

“Commodore, we just picked up a laser signal from a shuttlecraft,” Lieutenant Archambault reported. “Admiral Dismukes is trying to make contact.”

“Send him a full status report,” Gillett ordered. It would be an hour, at least, before the admiral knew what was going on, but at least they were getting back in touch. The situation was too dire for him to resent the reappearance of a superior officer. “And inform him we’re doing our best to protect the sphere.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chapter Six: North Mountain Lower Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

Colin had seen some nightmarish scenes in his time, but this ...

He shuddered, recalling a deployment to the Security Zone. That had been bad. A desolate wasteland, dotted with refugee camps half-heartedly protected from roving terrorists, religious fanatics and outright bandits, made incomparably worse by the virus spreading through people utterly unprepared for it ... it had been a grim reminder that, for all the hardships of his early years, Britain was a far safer place for a young man to grow into adulthood.  Here ... the camp, half-ruined by the earthquakes, was already groaning under the weight of refugees – locals and offworlders alike – and he was sure more were on the way. The original landing parties had tried to keep their distance from the locals. The Chinese had bought allies by giving them modern weapons, medicine and even some communications tech. Greed had overcome fear of the newcomers.

His nose wrinkled as the wind shifted, blowing the stench of countless unwashed bodies into his nostrils. The sphere’s weather had been dull and predictable, a few short hours ago, but now even the most advanced weather-tracking and monitoring systems couldn’t even begin to assess what was coming next. They were lucky none of the really big hurricanes were anywhere near the North Mountain, yet ... the rainstorms that came and went with astonishing speed were quite bad enough. Colin had heard all the jokes about Britain melting under the weight of near-constant rainfall – a gross libel; British weather wasn’t that bad – but he was starting to think the nearby settlements were screwed. They were designed for light rainfall, not the heavy showers sweeping the lands as water vapour condensed into droplets and fell back to the ground. The rapid shifts between day and night were probably making it worse. Colin couldn’t remember much of what he’d been taught about weather, in school, but he was fairly sure the sun had some effect. Probably.

“Get the bioreactors up and running,” he ordered, as he surveyed the mess. The Chinese had done what they could, he supposed, but it wasn’t going to be enough. “Get everyone organised to dig latrines and everything else.”

He glanced up at the sky, wondering just what was happening in orbital space. The fleet had to send more troops and supplies, and quickly, or evacuate the camp ... if it could be evacuated. The engineers had found the remains of the original funicular and determined it couldn’t be repaired, not without a proper machine shop and plenty of raw materials. Colin was tempted to write an official complaint – the device had been designed for rough environments – but there were probably limits. Rolling down the largest mountain in known space, a mountain high enough to poke all the way into low orbit – or what passed for it, on the sphere – was a little outside the scope of the device’s warranty. His lips quirked at the thought as the rain started again, water splashing down amongst the camp. The ground was already waterlogged, the tents starting to sink in the mud. He hoped the prefabricated installations survived long enough for the weather to calm down, although he feared the worst. They hadn’t been designed for such an environment either.

“We’re shoving all we can into the bioreactor,” a young civilian said. Colin tried not to notice the way the rain made her shirt cling to her breasts, water running though her hair and down to pool in her boots. She was being practical, which was more than could be said of most of the researchers. Half were still in shock and most of the rest were demanding an immediate return to orbit, even though it was impossible. “But the ration bars won’t be very tasty.”

“As long as they keep people alive,” Colin said. Bioreactor food was bland and boring and served only as a last resort, not least because too many people knew what went into the food, but it would have to do. He remembered eating some of the bars as a young boy, when his family hadn’t had the money to buy real food, and slathering them in sauce in the hopes of tasting something – anything – other than cardboard. “Shame we don’t have any condiments.”

“The locals probably do,” she said. “But ...”

She broke off. Colin nodded in grim agreement. The locals had served fantastic food, when they'd made contact for the first time, but their food stockpiles and fields were already waterlogged, if the earthquakes and high winds hadn’t destroyed them first. It was unlikely they had much of a reserve left, not least because they didn’t have many ways to preserve the food. No, the locals would be starving soon, if they weren’t already. Bioreactor food would be all that stood between them and population collapse.

A nice polite euphemism for mass death on a scale unseen since the Troubles, Colin thought, although he knew it was – if anything – an understatement. The crimes of Hitler and Stalin and Mao would pale, in comparison to the waves of death sweeping across the sphere. And how much of this is our fault?

“Keep churning out the crap,” he ordered, curtly. “And have it ready.”

The hours wore on, day shifting to night and back to day again and again. Colin patrolled the edge of the camp, directing troops into position to watch all the approaches. The landscape provided far too much cover for possible visitors, friendly or hostile, and he dared not risk deploying any modern technology to cover the gap. It was galling to think he had drones that could fly so high they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, with sensors so sharp they could track an individual ant across the ground, yet there was no way to use them without radio or datalinks, both of which would draw fire from the alien defences. There might be ways to deploy them without radiating any betraying emissions, but no one was sure what else would draw alien fire. Would they ignore the drones, on the grounds they were too tiny to pose a real threat to the surface, or would they mindlessly blow them away anyway? No one knew.

His heart clenched as more local refugees stumbled into the camp. They’d been welcoming and friendly, at least at first, when his team had been forced to make contact with them; they’d been confident and striking and ... the refugees in front of him looked like drowned rats, too scared of their own shadow to speak openly. Colin caught sight of a young woman’s bare breasts and felt a pang of guilt, recalling the bare-breasted women he’d seen in the local settlement. They’d been ... they’d been at home, seeing nothing wrong with their near-nakedness, but now ... they looked hopeless and vulnerable and scared. He made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on the men under his command, to keep them from taking advantage of the locals. It had always been a dirty little secret of the refugee camps back home that the refugees were exploited, no matter how many officers and politicians promised harsh punishment for anyone who crossed the line. Colin suspected the truth was that no one really cared, certainly not enough to do anything after the media outrage died down. The days in which advanced countries tried to help the less fortunate had ended long ago.

“We need to push them away from the camp,” Major Yu said. The Chinese officer’s position was a little odd. On one hand, he outranked Colin and should have been in overall command of the camp, as per the international treaties that had laid the groundwork for the MNF; on the other, he was technically Colin’s prisoner, and – equally technically – his troops should have been moved to a POW camp rather than being put to work. There was so much irregular about the arrangement, legally speaking, that the international lawyers charged with sorting the whole mess out wouldn’t even know where to begin. “They’re far too close.”

“We don’t have the manpower to make any sort of arrangements for them,” Colin disagreed, although he saw Yu’s point. The refugees looked harmless – now – but they could do a great deal of damage if they charged the camp’s defenders. Some had had the presence of mind to bring poison darts with them, tied to their wristbands; others might be unarmed, but that hardly made them harmless. “We’re going to need to put them to work when the weather calms down.”

“If it ever does,” Yu said. The darkness was sweeping across the land, moving with astonishing speed. Colin didn’t want to imagine how fast the inner shell had to be moving, to cast such a shadow on the sphere. “We’re already running short of shelter.”

Colin scowled. There was no point in trying to disagree. The tents were increasingly waterlogged and the prefabs were already crammed with people, mostly unhappy researchers and support staff. There were supposed to be more prefabs in orbit, waiting to be shipped to the surface and assembled, but Colin had no idea what had happened to them. The freighters might have been ordered to high-tail it out of the sphere or they might have gone dark, hiding somewhere within the interior. He’d sent a request for resupply – and reinforcements – up the chain to the mountaintop base, but he wasn’t expecting either in a hurry. The mountaintop base would have to be repaired first, before more than a trickle of supplies could be sent down to the surface.

“We’re going to have to get them chopping down trees and turning them into makeshift houses,” he said, finally. The base had plenty of unpowered saws and axes, thankfully. Some bright spark back home had worked out they’d made ideal trade goods, to people whose environment had barely any metal. Stone axes weren’t completely useless, but they didn’t compare to metal tools. “It’ll have to be enough.”

He stared into the distance, wondering what was happening only a few short miles away. The locals had never taken much interest in the mountain, from what he’d heard, but that had changed when the offworlders had arrived. Would they blame them for the earthquakes, for devastation and death on a scale beyond their imagination? The locals had fought wars, of course, but they’d been surprisingly ritualised, to the point they’d been shocked when the offworlders had helped them. The sheer brutality of offworld warfare ...

The hours wore on. More and more refugees arrived, some clearly too stunned to be dangerous and others angry, simmering with quiet rage. The soldiers patrolled the makeshift camp as best as they could, breaking up fights between different tribes with as much force as necessary; the translators tried to coax the newcomers to join work parties, doing what they could to make the camp more liveable. Colin had the nasty feeling the situation was turning sour, conflicts between locals growing sharper as they were forced to work together. The locals had had a surprisingly elaborate culture, almost matriarchal, but how could it survive under the impact of so many disasters? Colin had been sure, during his first visit, that there’d been resentments bubbling under the surface, resentments fuelled by young men who felt deprived and degraded by their elders. And now ...

They’re going to be eating bioreactor crap, he thought, sourly. That’ll put them in a bad mood ...

Someone shouted. Others shouted too, their voices blurring together into a cacophonous howl. Colin turned, just in time to see a fist fight breaking out in the middle of the camp, an outburst of violence that sucked in more and more young men like a whirlpool. He couldn’t see who had started it, but it hardly mattered. Blows were struck, others were struck in retaliation ... there was little hope of calming the crisis before it was far too late. An older woman stepped into the morass, saying something – Colin couldn’t hear her over the racket – only to be knocked down a second later, blood streaming from her nose. There was a pause – it could only have been a few seconds, but it felt like hours – and then the fighting resumed, worse than ever ...

Colin blew his whistle, cursing – once again – the lack of radio communications. There was no way to isolate the fight, let alone keep word from spreading ... the fleeing women and children alone would be enough to trigger fights in other parts of the camp. He wished his superiors had thought to equip his men for riot control, although it was hardly something they’d had any reason to expect. They’d assumed they’d be attacked and they’d have to kill or be killed, not put down a riot without seriously hurting – or killing – the rioters. Colin had heard horror stories of urban unrest, during the Troubles, but that had been a long time before his birth. He wondered, sometimes, how the troops had coped. Knocking heads together on the streets could not have been pleasant, even when the gloves had been taken off.

His mind raced as the troops formed up around him. Their body armour was good, and they’d been immunised against local poison darts, but if they charged the rioters there was a good chance they’d be beaten to death by sheer weight of numbers. They weren’t equipped for non-lethal takedowns, certainly not of hundreds of young men used to fighting with their fists. He cursed his superiors under his breath for not considering the possibility. They could have armed the men with capture gear, the kind of gear they’d use to snatch a terrorist from the middle of a camp and get him out before his friends could react. There weren’t many other options. The machine guns would make mincemeat out of the rioters, but ... it would be mass slaughter. There was no way in hell he could kill hundreds of men unless there was no other choice.

He signalled a runner. “Get the IFVs up here, quickly!”

The fight kept spreading, the rioters heading towards the assembled troops. Colin snapped his mask into place, barking orders. They didn’t have clubs and shields, let alone stunners or knockout gas or anything else that could be used to stop the crowd. He hoped whoever had taken command, back in the prefabs, had had the sense to shut and lock the doors – they were solid enough to resist fists and hand-powered weapons – but there was no way to know without a combat datalink or even a simple battlefield radio. He’d wondered, years ago, how officers had coped when their men were out of sight, when they’d had no way to know what was happening a few short miles away; he knew, now, how isolated they’d felt, how much they’d needed to depend on their juniors to handle matters without their supervision. They were lucky, he supposed, that they’d known they couldn’t rely on their communications net. It would have been a great deal harder to cope if they hadn’t already planned for it.

He gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to cause a slaughter, but he had to protect his men and the researchers behind them. “If they try to snatch weapons, open fire.”

A rustle ran down the line. Colin hoped they’d follow orders. He’d be happier if the entire unit was composed of Royal Marines, or at least British soldiers, but there were men from a dozen different nations brought together in a makeshift battle group. The command arrangements had been a nightmarish hodgepodge before the Chinese had fucked up half the system and the earthquakes had fucked up the rest. He didn’t know half his men; he didn’t know if they’d follow orders or panic when the shit hit the fan. There hadn’t even been time for any combat drills!

Something glinted off his mask. He cursed, an instant before the crowd charged his men. He couldn’t tell if it were planned or not, but it hardly mattered. There were too many of them ... he brought up his rifle, switching to automatic fire as the rioters closed, too late. They crashed into him, bowling him over by sheer weight of numbers. The body armour provided a great deal of protection – someone pounded his mask hard enough to break his skull, if it had been unprotected – but there were limits. He’d fucked up and his men were going to die ...

A dull chattering echoed through the air. The rioters seemed to hesitate, a moment before they broke and ran. Colin forced himself to stagger to his feet, his body aching even though his armour had taken most of the blows. The three IFVs were nosing forward, their engines surprisingly loud ... someone, he realised dully, had had the presence of mind to deactivate the sound baffles, ensuring the IFVs sounded about as loud and dangerous as a dragon and just as supernatural. The machine guns had been terrifyingly intimidating, when fired over their heads ... Colin looked around, breathing a sigh of relief as it became clear none of his men were dead. Two were injured, and were being supported by their comrades, but the remainder were alive and well.

“Good thinking,” he said, as the hatch popped open. “Keep nosing forward, keep them running.”

He sighed, inwardly, as they started to pick up the pieces. Many of the rioters had fled, but they’d be back. They weren’t stupid. The IFVs might look magical, but they were hardly invincible. Colin could envisage several ways to take them down and he dared not assume the fleeing rioters couldn’t, once they calmed down. God alone knew how many of the remaining refugees could be trusted. There were still so many of them ...

“Tighten up the lines,” he ordered. Force protection came first, now more than ever. They’d have to draw a line and be ready to shoot any local who tried to cross. “And get some of the refugees to start working on earthworks. We need to strengthen our defences.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter Seven: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

Staci had never considered, not in her wildest imaginations, what it might be like to gaze upon a black hole.

It hadn’t seemed like something she’d ever do. The nearest black hole was over a thousand light years away, far – far – beyond the reach of any human starship. It would be centuries, perhaps decades, before exploratory starships made their way to the nearest black hole, assuming – of course – there were tramlines that led there. The researchers had been unsure if there would be a direct connection, and the latest computer models suggested the gravity field near a black hole would be too warped to allow it to exist, but there’d been no way to be certain. The tramlines themselves were mysteries, despite the best efforts of hundreds of researchers. Staci had never wasted time worrying about it.

And yet, standing in the observation blister and staring into the darkness, she felt ... unsettled.

She’d expected a glowing whirlpool of light spinning into utter darkness, even though she knew it was unlikely. A black hole’s gravity field was so massive it even sucked in light itself. It should have been darker than the inky blackness of space and yet ... it was dark, to the naked eye, but there were flashes of light, twinkles of energy, that flickered and flared into reality and then vanished again so quickly it was easy to believe she’d imagined their mere existence. The researchers were going mad, trying to understand what they were seeing – the word ‘impossible’ had been tossed around a lot – and some of their theories were just absurd. The idea the black hole might be a gateway to the other side of the known universe, or a higher dimension, or ...

Staci shook her head. She’d managed to snatch a few hours of sleep, in between reassuring her crew and keeping tabs on the repairs, but it hadn’t been anything like enough. Endeavour was badly damaged, yet there was still no rhyme or reason to the pattern ... and no way to be sure it wouldn’t happen again. One of the researchers had suggested the gravity waves had interacted with the ship’s drive nodes, and gravity generator, and created localised nexuses of gravity distortion that had caused the otherwise inexplicable damage, but he hadn’t been able to propose any way to counter it, save for shutting down both systems and hoping for the best. Staci hadn’t known if she wanted to laugh or cry. It might work, if they were desperate, but it would render the ship effectively defenceless, if all hell broke loose. She wouldn’t care to take the risk if she were flying in convoy, let alone so far from the rest of the fleet. If something went wrong, it would be days – at least – before someone could arrive to help.

She sighed, inwardly. She’d had to order her crew to rest too, but it hadn’t been easy even though the gravity shockwaves seemed to have subsided. Morale was in the crapper and who could blame them, when they’d witnessed an entire star get crushed and compressed into a black hole ... and then spent hours trying to fix damage that should have been flatly impossible. Her crew had barely gotten used to the spheres when all hell had broken loose – again – and now ... she let her eyes linger on the darkness, cursing under her breath. She’d read reports that stated the Aztecs had literally been unable to see the Spanish ships because they were so alien to their experience, although her tutors had pooh-poohed the concept as absurd. She wondered, now, if there hadn’t been some truth to the idea. The Dyson Spheres were so big it was hard to wrap their heads around their sheer size, and that had been before witnessing impossible feats. She was a grown woman and an experienced naval officer and yet part of her wanted to turn and run for her life, as if the devil himself was after her. It was just a matter of time, she thought, before someone started running through the corridors with his underpants on his head. Why not? It wasn’t as if they were facing a normal foe.

We don’t know we’re facing anything hostile, she reminded herself, sharply. But the Builders are so powerful they might destroy us unintentionally, without ever knowing what they’ve done.

The thought was daunting. She suspected a handful of scavenger ships had been sucked into the black hole and crushed, although no one would ever know for sure. Endeavour herself was maintaining position at what should be a safe distance, yet – again – it was impossible to be certain of anything. The last set of gravity waves had swept across the binary system, battered Dyson Two, and raged into interstellar space. For all she knew, they’d be causing havoc on the nearest colony in forty years. Or worse. She wondered, numbly, just how many ants she’d stepped on, over the years; how many insects and worms and whatever had died because of her ... she didn’t know. She couldn’t even begin to guess. A race capable of building the spheres was so advanced it might not notice humanity’s mere existence ...

But we know they took humans to the sphere, she reminded herself. Why?

A dull quiver ran through the ship. Her wristcom bleeped a second later. “Captain, we’re picking up gravity surges, coming from the black hole.”

“I’m on my way.” Staci looked up at the black hole – it was unchanged – and then headed for the hatch. “Sound yellow alert, beat to quarters.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci heard the drumbeat echoing through the hull as she made her way to the bridge, trying to hurry without looking as though she was. They’d had a few hours to put together contingency plans for further gravity waves, including ordering all unnecessary crewmen to tie themselves down, but it was impossible to guess at what might happen, if the situation changed yet again. They were supposed to be at a safe distance from the black hole, yet ... they didn’t know what truly was safe. Her father had been an army sniper and he’d told her he’d picked off terrorist leaders, during his time in the field, because they’d been so convinced they were safe they’d stepped out in the open. They hadn’t realised a skilled sniper could pick off a man from over five kilometres away ...

“Report,” she snapped.

“Captain, the black hole’s gravimetric pattern is twisting,” Helen reported. The sensor officer looked nervous, and completely out of her depth. She wasn’t a trained scientist, no matter how skilled she was at teasing data out of her sensor arrays, and the black hole was utterly unprecedented. “It’s producing newer gravity waves, shaking the entire system.”

Staci took her seat. “Helm, prepare to alter our position, or to evade incoming debris,” she ordered. Local space was relatively clear, but that could change. “Tactical, prepare to deflect or destroy anything that might strike us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lieutenant-Commander Philip McDougall said.

Staci could hear the concern in the tactical officer’s voice. She understood all too well. Endeavour’s weapons were incredibly destructive, compared to starships from the First Interstellar war, but they weren’t destructive enough to shatter an asteroid the size of a small country. If a tidal wave picked up a chunk of debris and threw it at the ship, they’d have to evade the rock or risk destruction. There’d be no time to do anything more complex ... she scowled, inwardly, as she stared at the display. They needed to stay close, to collect as much data as they could, but there was a certain danger in going too close. The survey service had quite a few horror stories about researchers taking their ships too close to particularly interesting stars and being unable to escape before it was too late ... hell, half the reason the navy provided the commanders and most of the crews was to keep eggheads from risking the entire ship. And yet ... she glanced at the live feed from the sensor platforms, inching as close as they could get to the black hole without being sucked into its gaping maw. The data they were collecting would fuel genuine, original, science ...

Another shudder ran through the ship. The internal sensors didn’t report any damage – Staci hoped to hell that didn’t mean the internal sensors themselves had been damaged – but physical damage wasn’t the only problem. Her crew would have felt the impact, and not all of them had duties to take their minds off the growing threat. An unpleasant feeling washed over her, a kind of dizziness and queasiness that came and went so quickly there was no time to react. She doubted anyone would be able to sleep, not if they were being jerked around by an unseen force ... she wished, against her common sense, for an encounter with an understandable foe. She would sooner have taken her old frigate up against an infected battleship, than face a threat so powerful it was beyond her comprehension.

“The gravity waves are falling into a pattern,” Helen reported. “And ... they’re spinning.”

Staci glanced at her back. “Spinning?”

“I’m ... I’m not sure how to describe it,” Helen said. The frustration in her voice was all too evident. Staci knew officers who would have reprimanded her for it or made puerile jokes about Underlings Inability Descriptive Syndrome. “The gravity waves are spreading out of the black hole, but ... they’re folding back too. It’s impossible. Half the data doesn’t make sense! It looks as if the distance between us, the black hole, and the sensor platform on the far side is growing wider, as if something is expanding the local region of space-time ...”

The ship rocked, once again. Staci kept her voice calm. “Does it pose any threat?”

“Impossible to say,” Helen said. “The data is just ... inconclusive.”

“Helm, hold position,” Staci ordered. “Communications, channel everything – and I mean everything – to the remainder of the fleet.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The console lit up, again. Staci felt a moment of hope as tramlines – a dozen tramlines – flickered into existence, then vanished again so quickly there’d been no hope of jumping through them even if they’d had advance notice of their creation. It confirmed some of the theories about them, part of her mind noted, but ... why hadn’t they appeared the moment the star had been crushed into a black hole? Or ... were the Builders actually creating new tramlines? Or ... or what? She keyed her console, trying to determine if there was an alien command centre nearby, an entity directing the storm, but there was nothing, not as far as her sensors could tell. She suspected it was meaningless. Modern flicker transmissions would have been undetectable, a few decades ago. Their mere existence would have been regarded as fantastical. For all she knew, the Builders used telepathy to communicate ...

Her lips twisted. Like all officers on the command track, she’d had to study alien contacts – historical and potential – in hopes of preventing a repeat of the First Interstellar War. Some of the class modules had discussed the possibility of telepathic aliens, capable of reading human thoughts effortlessly ... she’d thought the concept nonsensical, and the role-play beyond absurd, but she had to admit it was a possibility. There’d been no verified incidents of telepathy amongst humans, yet ... there was no way to be sure an alien race wasn’t telepathic. And besides, the module had helped them think about outside context problems. It was just a shame their imaginations hadn’t encompassed the spheres themselves.

Endeavour rang like a bell. Staci felt as if she’d been slapped, as if someone had drawn back his hand and slapped her face ... for a moment, she honestly thought someone on her bridge was launching a mutiny. There hadn’t been a naval mutiny in modern history, save for infected crewmen trying to seize control of their ships before they were sniffed out, but ... the gravity field twisted wildly, her head spinning as she fought to steady herself. Someone threw up behind her, someone else coughing so violently Staci feared he was going to be sick too. The internal status display was covered in red lights, a handful winking off as the internal sensors updated ... the remainder burned brightly in front of her. The external display had blanked completely ...

“We lost half the hull sensors,” Helen reported, between gasps. Her tunic was stained with vomit. Normally, Staci would have called Helen’s relief and dispatched the sensor officer to sickbay, but right now she had no idea if Helen’s relief was still alive. The officer should have been strapped down, yet ... “I’m deploying additional sensor platforms.”

Staci nodded, feeling cold. Endeavour was blind without her sensors. It was bad enough in interstellar space, where the odds of a collision were minimal, but here ... for all she knew, a chunk of debris was rocketing towards them and there would be no warning before it slammed into the hull. She kicked herself, mentally, for not pulling back before it was too late. The Board of Inquiry was going to have a field day, when – if – they got home. If they didn’t ... Admiral Dismukes would certainly have a few things to say about it. It was going to be one hell of a mess ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I’ve deployed the sensor platforms and ...”

She broke off. Staci glanced at her, then up at the sensor display as it came back online. It was ... her mind froze, unwilling to accept the sight in front of her. The bridge fell silent as all eyes turned to the display. There was a ... a ship ... holding position near the black hole, far too close for comfort. For a horrible moment, she thought the vessel was going to be sucked into the maw and destroyed, before realising the alien ship seemed unaffected by the gravity field. It was hard to be sure of anything, but ... it looked as if it had popped out of the black hole. Staci didn’t want to believe it.

“I ...” Helen swallowed and started again. “Captain, the energy readings are off the scale.”

So go get a bigger scale, Staci thought, waspishly. The alien ship was just too big. And alien. Tadpole starships looked oddly melted, and Fox starships were crude and brutal, but they were understandable. The alien ship was very different. If that thing is hostile ...

She leaned forward, her heart pounding like a drum. The alien ship – the Builder ship – was wrapped in a field of light, a haze so bright it was hard to determine the shape of the hull underneath. If there was a hull ... for all she knew, part of her mind pointed out, the entire ship was composed of energy, or the ship might be a living intelligence in its own right. It wasn’t impossible. Researchers had been experimenting with linking a human brain into a starship for decades and, if they succeeded ... hell, the alien ship might be controlled by an artificial intelligence. No human AI was up to the task, but the Builders were so far advanced ... who knew what they could do?

Her eyes itched as she studied the alien ship. Were those wings in the haze? Or was her imagination hinting at form or meaning when there was none? The display updated, trying to categorise what the sensors were picking up and turn it into something comprehensible. Staci suspected they were wasting their time. The ship was just so different. She’d read the reports from the First Interstellar War, when humanity’s spacers had come face to face with advanced alien technology ... but at least it had been understandable. They’d been able to determine how the technology worked, and how to predict what it could do, even if it couldn’t be duplicated in a hurry. The ship in front of her, holding position over a black hole as if it wasn’t there at all ...

Staci cleared her throat. If it was a Builder ship, and she didn’t want to imagine two hyper-advanced alien races, the humans were trespassing in their system. If the Builders took offense ... she had no idea what weapons that ship carried, or even if it did carry weapons, but a race capable of twisting gravity fields into pretzels would have no difficulty turning them into weapons. The humans had used Builder tech to crush a Chinese battleship ... she had no doubt the Builders themselves could do the same thing, or worse. They had to make contact before it was too late.

Her voice was steady. Somehow. “Communications, transmit the first contact package.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said. There was a long, chilling pause. “No response.”

Staci hesitated. The energy levels surrounding the alien ship were so intense it was quite possible the signal had been lost or disrupted. It was also possible, she supposed, that the Builders simply didn’t understand. The protocols were meant to be universal, but ... there was no guarantee they were. Aliens were alien, and the Builders more so than most. For all she knew, they were sending up the equivalent of smoke signals, something so primitive modern humans might not even recognise them for what they were ...

“Transmit a full update to the admiral,” she ordered, finally. The admiral wouldn’t know everything had changed, not yet. She wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to see from the other sphere. “And tell him we will be holding position as long as possible.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Commander Jenner frowned at her. “Captain, what’ll we do if they don’t make contact?”

Staci shook her head. What could they do? Leaving the system wasn’t an option, nor was hanging around indefinitely while waiting for something to happen. She felt unsure of herself in a way she hadn’t felt since joining the navy, years ago. The entire universe had just changed. She knew it, even if the rest of the human race didn’t. A recorded encounter with a super-race, even if the race didn’t try to communicate, would change everything. God alone knew where the pieces would fall.

She kept her voice low. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Chapter Eight: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

“Just how big is that ... thing?”

Charlotte sucked in her breath as the Chinese sensor officer tried to answer. The alien ship was immense, a sensor blur so big it was impossible to make out any real details. She couldn’t tell if the craft really was hundreds of miles from bow to stern, or if the field surrounding it concealed something far smaller. The wings – she couldn’t help thinking of the shimmering formations as wings – rippled steadily, as if the giant starship was standing firm against an invisible current. It might well be, part of her mind gibbered. The angel-like starship was far too close to the black hole for anyone’s peace of mind.

The Chinese woman sounded unnerved. “It’s impossible to tell. Admiral,” she managed. Charlotte felt a flicker of sympathy. She’d heard that female Chinese naval officers had to be at least twice as good as their male counterparts if they wanted to rise in the ranks, something the Royal Navy had left behind years ago. “The alien craft’s drive field – if it is a drive field – is immense, but we cannot detect the starship underneath ...”

“If there is a starship,” someone muttered. “The alien ship could be composed of nothing but raw energy, steered by a guiding mind.”

Charlotte felt oddly detached from the near-panic dancing around the CIC. She was no naval officer, although she’d picked up a great deal from her ex-husband, much less Mitch, and her first cruise on Endeavour, but somehow her lack of experience made it easier to take the alien ship in stride. She’d seen engineers caught up in their own disbelief, when they’d laid eyes on the spheres for the first time, and she assumed the starship crews felt the same way when they saw the alien ship. The largest starship humanity had ever built was a colonist-carrier, ten kilometres from bow to stern, and the angel made that ship look tiny. It’s mere arrival, if the reports were accurate, had come close to destroying Endeavour. She dreaded to think what would happen when – if – the ship glided away from the shattered sphere and made its way towards the intact sphere. Who knew what it would do?

The display updated. Charlotte felt a flicker of panic, before reminding herself the long-range sensor feed was hours out of date. Whatever they were seeing, either with their own sensors or relayed from Endeavour, had happened hours ago. Captain Templeton and her crew might already be dead, or worse, and no one on Fujian would know until much later. She sucked in her breath as red-yellow icons popped up on the display, more pieces of debris displaced from stable orbits and tossed randomly across the system. The Chinese systems computed trajectories, then forwarded alerts to the shuttles and starships trying to shield the sphere from debris impacts. Charlotte hoped the crews weren’t too bust gawking at the angel-ship to protect the sphere. It drew the eye and, at the same time, repelled. She wanted to believe it didn’t exist, that Captain Templeton was playing a joke, that the ship’s long-range sensors were having flights of fancy. It was just too ... big.

If Captain Smith and his crew encountered Fujian, they’d understand her even though she was far more advanced than Ark Royal, she thought, numbly. She’d read a book in which HMS Theodore Smith, the Royal Navy’s most modern fleet carrier, had been tossed back in time to meet HMS Ark Royal and the greatest naval hero of the modern age. The tactical alterations had bored her, and the sex scenes were possible only by a contortionist, but Ark Royal’s crew not being particularly wowed by Theodore Smith made a degree of sense. The modern carrier was merely a logical extrapolation of past starship designs. But this ship ...

She wondered, suddenly, how a Roman vessel would have reacted if it had come face-to-face with an aircraft carrier from the wet-navy era, or a cruise liner – a ship built for luxury – that was still light-years beyond anything they could imagine. The gap between sailing ships and steam powered ironclads wasn’t that large, historically speaking, but to the locals ... they might as well be demons from the lowest pits of hell. By the time they worked out how to duplicate the ships, to build the tools to build the tools to match them, it would be already too late.

Admiral Dismukes cleared his throat. “Lady Charlotte, Admiral He, Professor Ratingen ... my office. Now.”

It isn’t your office, Charlotte thought wryly, as she made her way through the hatch. The office had belonged to Admiral He, before it had been formally surrendered along with the Chinese task force. She wondered, idly, if Admiral Dismukes was making a point ... or if he just wanted to remind the Chinese they’d surrendered. Or ...

Charlotte couldn’t help wondering if it even mattered. The alien ship changed everything. She shivered, helplessly, as she considered the implications. Whatever happens next is out of our hands.

She looked around the office with interest as she took a seat on the sofa. Admiral He – or his superiors – didn’t believe in luxury or decoration. There were no pictures of the admiral’s loved ones – she had no idea if he was married or had children, although his British counterparts would be expected to have both by the time they reached flag rank – nor were there any certificates, military honours, or even commemorative plaques. The only decoration was a Chinese flag, draped across the rear bulkhead. She couldn’t help wondering if it was a sick joke, a clear sign the admiral hadn’t forsaken his country after all or ... simple proof no one had had the time to take it down. God knew, the admiral had had too many other things to worry about ...

Admiral Dismukes waited for the Chinese orderly to pour four cups of coffee and withdraw, then leaned forward. “Professor, what’s the word from the research teams?”

Professor Ratingen looked as if his world had turned upside down. Charlotte rather understood how he was feeling. He was an expert in exotic drive systems and other technologies, his field more theoretical than practical, but ... she had the nasty feeling the term expert might have been grossly misused. It was one thing to project possible uses of alien super-technology, or outline what might be possible as human technology advanced; quite another, she reflected, to come face to face with an alien starship that effortlessly outmatched the entire squadron. Professor Ratingen had expected to spend years dissecting the spheres, the seemingly abandoned spheres; he hadn’t expected, not really, to encounter the Builders themselves ...

“Admiral, we know very little,” Professor Ratingen said, finally. The research teams had been scattered by the Chinese, some taken into custody and others hiding inside the sphere, and the communications network allowing the different teams to work together had barely been re-established before all hell broke loose. Again. “What little we know comes from long-range sensors and hasty analysis, none of which may be accurate ...”

“We do understand,” Admiral Dismukes reassured him. “What can you tell us?”

“Very little,” Professor Ratingen said. He sipped his coffee gingerly. Charlotte couldn’t help suspecting he was stalling for time. “The alien drive field is so powerful we cannot determine anything about the ship within, if there is a ship. We’re unsure, even, how it works! One theory is that it is comparable to one of our drive fields, just on a far greater scale; another is that it is literally reshaping the fabric of space-time around it, pulling it onwards ... if that is the case, and we don’t know for sure, the power requirements must be off the scale.”

Charlotte kept her voice calm. “And in layman’s terms?”

Professor Ratingen didn’t sound reassured by her tone. “A standard drive field creates a ... ah, think of it as a wave for the starship to surf. It’s a little more complex than that” – Admiral Dismukes snorted – “but that’s the basic idea. This would represent something an order of magnitude more powerful than our own gravity-manipulating tech, yet ... that would fit in with the rest of their observed technology. They manipulate gravity in ways we cannot even begin to match. But if the other theory is true, the ship might be dragging itself along the fabric of space-time and ...”

His voice trailed off. Charlotte did her best to pretend she understood, although – in truth – she didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant. She kicked herself, mentally, for not studying the concept at school, rather than estate management and everything else she’d needed to be a young aristocratic wife who’d stay at home while her husband went off to war ... but then, why had she ever thought she might need it? If her life had followed the expected trajectory, she would never have left the estate. Her husband would have stepped sideways into politics, with her at his side; her daughters would be married to good men and having children of their own.  And ...

She bit her lip. What was done was done. She had to live with it.

Admiral He had a different question. “If that ship is hostile, professor, what could it do to us?”

Professor Ratingen said nothing for a long moment. “Where does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit down? Anywhere it wants!”

“Professor?”

The professor looked as if he was on the verge of hysteria; his face flushed, his eyes too bright. “They can project gravity waves that will damage, even destroy, our drive nodes and gravity technology,” he said. “They can pick up pieces of debris and propel them around the systems at impossible speeds, so fast there will be little warning before they hit us; they can generate gravity nexuses that can crush our ships effortlessly, or at least injure or kill the entire crew. And that’s just based on what we’ve seen so far, when we first started to survey the spheres. They might be capable of feats well beyond our imagination, let alone our comprehension.”

He chuckled, humourlessly. “The sheer power of that ship is daunting, Admiral. I’m certain that all our weapons, even nukes, won’t make so much as a scratch on her hull. We never managed to deploy a working force shield, something capable of protecting a ship from incoming fire, but their drive field is powerful enough to protect their hull. If they have a hull. And if their hull is composed of the same material they used to build the spheres, it might be indestructible even without the drive field.”

Charlotte reached forward and touched his hand, gently. “Professor, can you tell us anything else about the ship?”

Professor Ratingen shook his head. “We don’t have anything like enough data,” he said, quietly. “It will take years, at least, to unravel the science behind it, years we don’t have.”

He paused. “Admiral, that ship arrived without a tramline,” he added. “It’s quite possible it can leave again the same way.”

“Crap,” Admiral Dismukes said.

Charlotte nodded in understanding. Human starships needed a tramline to jump from star to star. It was the fundamental reality of interstellar travel, one barely challenged by the development of catapult technology. The task force was stranded in the Dyson System because the tramlines had vanished, or been turned off, and ... she gritted her teeth. If the angel-ship was capable of jumping light years without a tramline, it could leave at any moment or ...

Admiral Dismukes cleared his throat. “Professor, go back to your cabin and get some rest,” he ordered. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

He waited for the professor to leave before continuing.  “Lady Charlotte, I assume there are contingency plans for actually encountering the Builders themselves?”

“Yes, Admiral,” Charlotte said. “But the plans are quite vague.”

Her heart sank. She wasn’t sure if the admiral had been briefed on the plans or not, although – given how vague they were – it was possible the details had slipped his mind. Insofar as there were details ... the Royal Navy’s planners hadn’t been able to come up with any halfway plausible scenarios and the Foreign Office hadn’t done any better. The United States’ State Department knew how to deal with alien races on the same level as humanity, or close enough, but a hyper-advanced race? It was impossible to predict their mindset or ... or what they might think of humanity.

They might have their own version of the Prime Directive, she thought, recalling the non-interference edict that was supposed to govern humanity’s interactions with primitive non-human races. No contact, under any circumstances, until the primitive race had reached a point it would survive contact with a far more advanced race. And yet, the one time we did meet a primitive alien race, the edict was discarded faster than a social norm, when society is genuinely threatened.

She sighed, inwardly. Humanity’s first contact with the Vesy was a textbook case of what not to do. The Russian deserters had made contact with the aliens in hopes of turning them into humanity’s allies, then other countries had gotten involved ... some devising nonsense about ‘the civilised race’s burden,’ others not even bothering to come up with justifications for their actions. The original Vesy culture had been shattered and ... the hell of it was that it had been easy to justify. It had been barbaric, by human standards, and deserved to be destroyed. She could see their logic. But ... would the Builders feel the same way about human culture?

“The general concept is to establish friendly contact as quickly as possible,” she said, trying to put her fears aside. “This is their territory. We might have a claim on it, in our legal framework, but they might feel differently and they have the big guns to back it up. We have to make contact before they decide we’re intruders and kill us. Or decide our mere presence is an act of war, deserving of a full-scale genocidal war.”

Admiral He chuckled, darkly. “They are strong and we are weak, at least in comparison, and that means their interpretation of the law is all that counts.”

Charlotte nodded, curtly. The idea of an international legal framework for settling disputes was a good one, on paper, but such ideals hadn’t survived contact with reality. The strong did as they wished and the weak suffered, as they must, unless they managed to band together to put restraints on the strong ... human history suggested the weak eventually became the strong and bullied the weak in the same way they’d been bullied, learning nothing from their experience of being weak. China’s history could be divided into sections when she had been bullied and when she’d done the bullying, and the same could be said for nearly every other major player in global politics. There was no reason to think interstellar power politics would ever be anything better. Power talked, ideals walked.

“Yes,” she said. “We need to find a way to make contact.”

“They ignored Endeavour’s attempts to signal them,” Admiral Dismukes said. “What else can we try?”

“There are other ways to send signals,” Admiral He pointed out. “For all we know, they’re waiting for us to send a shuttle.”

“Our ships have standing orders to fire on any shuttlecraft that crosses the line without permission,” Admiral Dismukes countered. Starships were heavily armoured, but a single shuttle crammed with nuclear warheads could do immense damage if it latched itself to the hull and detonated before anyone could react. “They might have similar orders.”

“They’re incredibly advanced,” Charlotte said. “What do they have to fear from us?”

“Primitive weapons can be no less deadly,” Admiral Dismukes said. “A soldier with modern weapons and all the support we take for granted can still be killed if someone hits him over the head with a rock. The local settlements down there” – he jerked a finger at the bulkhead – “use poison darts, which were lethal before we immunised our people, and spears that are still lethal if they hit an unprotected human. The Builders are powerful, true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have reason to fear us.”

Charlotte swallowed, hard. “If they fear us, will they attack?”

“It might be their safest course of action,” Admiral He said. “How different would the history of America have been, perhaps, if the Native Americans had attacked every European ship they saw on sight?”

Admiral Dismukes didn’t rise to the bait. “They are so far advanced they may feel they have little to fear, even if they know we could prove dangerous,” he said. “And we don’t intend to harm them.”

“But we must make contact,” Charlotte said. She was the leader of the diplomatic contingent, although half her staff were still on Endeavour. “I need to go there.”

“And we need a way to talk to them,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Gravity waves? If we use their own systems to make contact ...”

“We also need ways to counter their technology,” Admiral He pointed out. “They might harm us quite by accident.”

Charlotte couldn’t disagree. “Should we evacuate the sphere? If they take offense at our presence ...?”

“Getting our own people off will take days, even if the fists don’t interfere,” Admiral Dismukes said. “And that means abandoning all attempts to help the locals.”

He stared down at his hands for a long moment, then looked up. “Lady Charlotte, you can go to Endeavour and try to make contact, if possible,” he said. “The remainder of the fleet will keep a safe distance from the alien ship.”

“If there is such a thing as a safe distance,” Admiral He said, pessimistically. “If we could leave the system, I’d suggest it.”

“Yeah,” Admiral Dismukes said. He sounded older, as if he’d aged a decade overnight. “Me too.”

Chapter Nine: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System (Interior/Exterior)

“I feel like Stellar Star,” Tobias muttered.

Marigold giggled. “In the sense you want to go to bed with her,” she teased, “or in the sense you want to be her?”

Tobias flushed. Stellar Star wasn’t real. The actress who played her wasn’t real either, the product of computer-generated imagery mated to perverse sexual desire. There were no girls in the real world, even with advances in cosmetic surgery, who looked anything like her ... he bit down on that thought quickly, before it could show on his face. The days when he’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no girl would ever look at him once, let alone twice, were long gone. And that meant ...

“I meant the scene where she guides her starship into a nebula,” he said, quickly. “This is almost as bad.”

Marigold nodded, thoughtfully. Stellar Star’s body wasn’t the only impossible thing in the series. She flew her starship through asteroid fields that didn’t exist in real life, ducking and dodging and darting through gaps that were barely large enough to take a small starship, hiding within nebulas and dancing over black holes ... all of which, he thought wryly, existed within the Dyson System even if they didn’t exist anywhere else. The dust cloud covering the hatch was as thick as any fictional nebula, the storm so intense he couldn’t help feeling they were utterly blind. He trusted his craft’s computers, but ...

The shuttle shuddered, slightly, as she nosed her way into the storm. Tobias kept a wary eye on the hull monitors, unsure what would happen if the shuttle was caked in dust or caught in a storm ... a storm that really shouldn’t exist. Shockwaves marched across the sphere’s surface every time a piece of debris crashed into the shell, but ... none of the computer models could explain why the dust hadn’t cleared by now, either drifting back to the surface or out into interplanetary space. The best theory anyone had been able to come up with was that the sphere’s gravity field was somehow attracting the dust, although the outer shell had almost no gravity field of its own. It was just another impossible thing that couldn’t occur anywhere else. The sphere was just ... alien.

“We should be dead centre,” Marigold said. “But passive sensors are useless.”

Tobias nodded, sweat prickling down his spine as the eerie dust storm washed over the cockpit. Stellar Star had nearly crashed into an alien starship that had been making its way through the same nebula, something else that was impossible in the real world, but here ... the communications links to the ships inside the sphere were dangerously unreliable, to the point they failed completely at random intervals and needed to be patched back together manually.  The paranoid part of his mind wondered if the Builders were screwing with the datalinks deliberately, although they hardly needed to bother. If there was a shuttle coming the other way ... the hatch was vast, so big a thousand shuttles could pass simultaneously without any real risk, but ... it was hard, so hard, to convince himself to believe it. Cold logic was meaningless, when everything he’d thought solid and settled had been shattered beyond all hope of repair. What did his tiny craft matter, when the gods had arrived?

Not gods, he told himself. Just immensely powerful beings.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought. He’d spent his entire life being pushed around by people stronger than him, even if they weren’t smarter. What did brains and knowledge matter in the face of raw strength and stamina and naked charisma? Power was all that mattered and the Builders had it all, enough to do as they pleased and never have to worry about consequences. Who could hold them to account ...?

The dust storm cleared. He breathed a sigh of relief as he nosed the shuttle through the funnel, his perspective shifting rapidly. They might be flying up the mountain, as if they were climbing out of a volcano, but the gravity field suggested otherwise. It was yet another grim reminder of just how much the aliens could do with gravity fields. They’d given the sphere’s surface a regular gravity field, yet somehow ensured the interior of the North Mountain had had about as much gravity as interstellar space. Some researchers suspected there were gravity beams ready to pull starships into the sphere or shove them out, but they were nowhere in evidence. Tobias suspected the Builders had never needed to bother.

Marigold sucked in a breath. “The fists are waiting.”

“We’ll keep our distance,” Tobias said. He’d never grown used to passing near the alien projectiles, perfect spheres made of something so indestructible they’d smashed entire starships without so much as taking a scratch. He had no illusions about what would happen if they noticed the shuttle, after so many close encounters since they’d first entered the sphere. They might have to bail out, if the decoys failed to distract the fists. “Prepare to launch decoys ...”

The range closed slowly, the shuttle practically inching towards the mountaintop. Tobias spotted the base, a handful of men and automated drones moving around the structure, and made sure to keep his distance from that too. It would be bad enough for his shuttle to be targeted, but losing the supply base would be even worse. He knew people who’d gone down to the surface and ... his breath caught in his throat as they crossed the lip and climbed into interplanetary space. Or interior space ... his lips twisted in droll amusement. They needed to come up with a common terminology for flying inside a Dyson sphere. Was it still interplanetary space if it was enclosed by a shell large enough to surround an entire star?

“They didn’t notice us,” Marigold said, relieved. “What are they doing?”

“They might be watching for pieces of debris,” Tobias speculated. The hatch was immense by human standards, and tiny compared to the sheer size of the sphere’s shell, but it would only take one piece of bad luck to send a chunk of debris flying through the hatch and into the sphere. He dreaded to think what might happen if it struck the inner shell or flew past the star and hit the shell itself. It might exterminate all life on the surface. “They have to know what’s happening outside, don’t they?”

Marigold shrugged. She didn’t know. Tobias could hardly disagree. It was impossible to imagine a human settlement sealing itself off so completely it could no longer monitor what was going on outside the shell, but ... if there was an intelligence governing the system it had never bothered to make itself known to the human explorers. There was something about the way the sphere reacted to intruders that suggested it was an automatic system, rather than a genuine AI or a biological intelligence. It attacked anyone foolish enough to send a radio transmission, or anything that might crash into the sphere, but ignored everything else. Tobias couldn’t help wondering if the Builders had assumed they were the only race capable of mastering spaceflight. God knew, humanity had thought it was alone in the universe until the Tadpoles had taught them otherwise.

He relaxed, slightly, as they left the mountain hatch far behind and flew further into the sphere, heading straight for the human task force. The interior was so vast there should be plenty of warning, at least in theory, if the sphere’s automated defences decided it was time to destroy the human intruders. In theory, he reminded himself. The sphere could launch a projectile at immense speeds, so close to the speed of light they’d strike their targets mere seconds behind any warning, or ... for all he knew, the Builders had weapons that moved faster than light, something capable of picking off a starship from the other side of the system or even entire light years away. Hell, their weapons might be so advanced they wouldn’t even be recognised as weapons before it was far too late. A race capable of dismantling entire planets and crushing stars into black holes might be capable of doing things he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

What do we do, he asked himself, in a war against the gods?

He leaned back in his chair. “You may as well get some rest,” he said, tiredly. “I’ll keep an eye on things here.”

“Thanks,” Marigold said. “Wake me in a couple of hours.”

She unbuckled herself and stood, the flight suit drawing his eye to the shape of her breasts and hips. Tobias had a sudden mad urge to join her in the rear compartment, to leave the automatics in command while they made love, an urge he ruthlessly suppressed. The automatics couldn’t handle everything, no matter what the boffins insisted, and if they were caught they’d be lucky if they were merely dishonourably discharged. He wondered what that even meant, if the squadron remained trapped in the system. Would they be stranded on the sphere, tossed out an airlock or simply flogged? It was legal, technically, but he didn’t think it had ever been carried out. The rule dated back to the days starships and wet-navy vessels had been out of contact for months, if not years ...

And we may never see Earth again, he told himself. They can’t afford to discard crewmen with irreplaceable skills, can they?

He sat back in his chair and allowed his mind to wander. The sphere’s interior was so immense it would take hours to reach the squadron, even at full speed ... and charging around the interior like a bat out of hell was asking for trouble. The interior didn’t seem to have changed that much, despite the gravity waves and the alien starship; the gravity beams, nexuses of high-energy transmissions and weird objects, some defying any form of analysis, were still flickering and flaring, dancing to a very alien tune. And yet ... he put the thought aside as he contemplated every science-fantasy encounter with advanced races he’d watched, quietly mining them for ideas. What did one do, when dealing with a hyper-advanced species intent on putting the entire human race on trial?

His blood ran cold. One book had featured a godlike alien with a sense of honour, of sorts, but another had seen testing primitive races as nothing more than a blood sport, and he’d had no intention of letting his victims win. Bullies were bad enough under any circumstances, but a bully who could literally do anything? How did one fight something like that? He was almost reassured to contemplate the tricksters, races who were little more than con artists, races that could be beaten if one figured out how the trick was done and countered it. He remembered the report from Dyson One and shuddered, again. If the angel-ship was hostile, somehow he didn’t think a stirring speech from a starship captain would be enough to change its mind.

It was almost a relief when the Chinese supercarrier came into view. Marigold joined him as the shuttle exchanged IFF signals with the ship, then came in to dock. Up close, the Chinese ship was very different from its British counterpart, with six launch bays positioned around the hull rather than just two. He wondered, idly, how well it worked; the supercarrier might be able to soak up more damage and keep going, at least on paper, but there might well be downsides that weren’t immediately apparent. A British carrier would be able to put out more point defence, he thought. The Chinese launch tubes would mount their own point defence, unless her designers were insanely optimistic or absurdly incompetent, but he doubted the tubes were armoured heavily enough to keep the enemy from shutting them down with a relative handful of hits. It would be interesting to match two supercarriers and see who won ... he pushed the thought out of his head as they docked, tested atmospheres, and opened the hatch. Lady Charlotte and a pair of staffers stepped into the shuttlecraft, looking surprisingly out of place.

“Taxi, please,” one of the staffers said.

I must be tired, Tobias thought. That actually sounded funny.

He smiled. “Ten bob to your destination, me lord, and twenty bob if you want me to be quiet while I’m driving.”

“Twenty bob?” The staffer pretended to have a heart attack. “You must be joking!”

Lady Charlotte cleared her throat. “Do you need to fetch anything from Fujian before you set course for Endeavour?”

“No, My Lady.” Tobias hadn’t thought highly of Lady Charlotte until he’d met her. She’d coped well, better than he’d expected, when they’d crashed on the sphere ... back when they’d thought the Builders were dead and gone. He briefly considered trying to pick up some food and drink, but Chinese naval rations were no better than their British counterparts. “Just so you know, we’ll be in transit for thirty-seven hours. If there’s anything you need, fetch it now.”

“We should have everything we need,” Lady Charlotte assured him. Tobias hoped she was right. The shuttle might be much larger than the average human being, but it was cramped and confining and hours on the craft would get to anyone, sooner or later. She was lucky there were only five people on the shuttle. Tobias had flown shuttles so cramped they’d been lucky no one had had to go to the washroom. “If you can get us there quicker, please do.”

“I can’t,” Tobias said. The shuttle didn’t have a pusher drive. Even if it had, the drive would have been worse than useless. Lady Charlotte probably hadn’t quite realised, not really, that there was no way to hop from Dyson Two to Dyson One in a split-second. She’d have to make the transit in realspace. “You can be sedated, if you wish ...”

“No, thank you,” Lady Charlotte said. “Just get us there as quickly as possible.”

Tobias nodded and returned to his console, running down the list of pre-flight checks. It was annoying to set out again so quickly, but they could get some proper rest once they were out of the sphere and heading through interplanetary space. There might be more debris flying through space, but their active sensors should pick them up once they risked bringing them online. He hoped Lady Charlotte and her team had brought their own eReaders or other entertainments. The onboard archive was crammed with the crew’s choices – he’d picked half, Marigold had picked the other half – but he had no idea if Lady Charlotte would like their selections. Not, he supposed, that it mattered. The shuttle was still the quickest way to travel from Dyson Two to Dyson One.

He disengaged from the supercarrier and set course back towards the hatch. The Chinese had offered to deploy a handful of drones to distract the fists, as they passed the mountain top, but Tobias had declined. If the fists started swarming, they might attack everything in range, from the shuttle itself to the mountaintop base. It was better, he thought, to sneak past ... if nothing else, the fists had never been observed passing through the hatch themselves. They could sneak past and be relatively safe, even as they made their way through the dust cloud.

Lady Charlotte joined them as the shuttle powered onwards. “Is there any update from Endeavour?”

Tobias shook his head. “No, My Lady,” he said, deciding not to point out she would probably have received any update before a relatively junior shuttle crew. Any signal from Endeavour would have been relayed to Fujian through the laser datalink and repeated time and time again, to ensure the Chinese flagship received an intact message. “Everything we know is hours out of date.”

“So they could have made contact already,” Lady Charlotte mused, “or simply been destroyed. And we wouldn’t know.”

“No, My Lady,” Tobias said. He’d heard stories about entitled aristocrats demanding the impossible, but Lady Charlotte hadn’t thrown a tantrum when they’d been stranded on the sphere. She had had no real naval training, from what he’d heard, yet she should have picked up the cold fact some laws of nature were simply immutable ... or had been, a couple of days ago. “Anything we get will be out of date, at least until we reach the edge of the debris field.”

“Or what’s left of it,” Lady Charlotte said. “It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?”

“Yes, My Lady,” Tobias said. He’d flown a gunboat into the teeth of enemy fire, but this was worse. Much worse. “I pinched myself twice, but for some strange reason I refused to wake up.”

Lady Charlotte chuckled. “Perhaps I’m having the nightmare and I’m just dreaming you’re with me,” she said. “Or maybe it’s real ... nah, couldn’t be.”

Tobias had to smile, even though part of him was tempted to wonder if he was trapped in a VR fantasy. He’d never had the money for an hour or two in the machine, and even if he had he would have known it was fake, but ... perhaps thinking he didn’t have the money was part of the scenario, a trick to make him think it was real. And yet ... he dismissed the thought with a flicker of irritation. It was about as bad as the belief the universe was nothing more than a simulation in alien computers, a concept that made absolutely no sense. And it didn’t matter. Real or not, it sure as hell felt real.

“We’ll see the alien ship with our naked eyes soon enough,” he said. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The sensor records had been bad enough. “Until then, all we can do is wait.”

“And see,” Lady Charlotte said. “I’ll get some sleep. Wake me if anything happens.”

Chapter Ten: North Mountain Lower Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

“There’s an alien starship at Dyson One,” the American officer said. “Or where Dyson One used to be ...”

Colin cut him off. “Do you have more supply pallets for us?”

“Just the ones we’re rolling down the mountainside,” the American said. Colin hadn’t caught his name. “The teams up there” – he jerked his thumb towards the mountain, going up and up until it vanished into the heavy clouds – “are having problems getting the monorail back online.”

“Shit.” Colin shook his head in frustration. It was typical of the military that they’d dispatched a pair of higher-ranking officers to take command of the camp, after the first riot had been quelled and relief efforts organised, but not prioritised the repair of the funicular so they could bring more than a handful of supplies down to the surface. He understood the problem – the spacers had to slip supplies past indestructible alien platforms – yet it was still a major pain in the arse. “We’d better go fetch them, and quickly.”

“We might be pulling out completely,” the American cautioned him. “Word from above says the gods have arrived.”

Colin snorted, then put the matter out of his mind as he went to organise a platoon and a pair of IFVs. The rumours had been flying thick and fast, growing and growing to the point it was literally impossible to believe a single word. Colin had spent enough time in the military to know rumours couldn’t be trusted, even if there was a kernel of truth hidden under all the bullshit. Besides, it wasn’t his problem. Right now, his task was to defend the refugee camp and wait for further orders.

God help us if we have to evacuate, he thought. There were over a thousand outsiders on the sphere’s surface and, in the camp alone, nearly ten thousand locals who’d fled the remains of their towns and villages. Some were helping the offworlders to cope with the crisis, others were utterly broken ... some, he was sure, were plotting trouble. Who knew how they’d react, if they thought they were being abandoned? Even with the funicular, getting everyone back into space will be an utter nightmare.

His mood lightened, slightly, as he walked past a pair of makeshift barracks. The locals might not be used to metal tools, but they’d taken to them with a will and they already knew how to turn wood and stone into surprisingly decent accommodations. Their huts were crude and primitive, and the offworlders had had to encourage them to dig ditches to keep the water flowing away from their homes, but they should suffice long enough for the weather to calm down. Or so Colin hoped. The Chinese had shipped a small fabber down to the surface, to churn out anything their military required, yet ... demand so far exceeded supply the lone fabber was overworked, to the point of coming apart. Colin had put in a request for more, but so far there’d been no reply. He suspected Admiral Dismukes had privately decided the refugee camp was untenable.

He might be right, Colin thought. The local towns and villages had been surprisingly clean, a far cry from the shit-stained hovels of medieval fantasy flicks, but their sanitation system had been shattered. It was just a matter of time before the refugees caught something nasty or started trying to slip back to the remains of their villages, where dead bodies remained unburied. One outbreak of the galloping shits and this place is going to turn into hell.

Sergeant Ben Burris greeted him as he reached the IFVs. “Fire team reporting for duty, sir.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Colin said. He would have preferred a tank, or an APC, but the closest tank was hundreds of light years away and the APCs were tied up covering the research base. “Any sign of trouble?”

“None,” Burris said. “But that could be meaningless.”

Colin nodded, coldly. The locals were incredibly good at slipping through the foliage without being seen, perhaps even more capable than the SAS. They lacked the protective gear Special Forces troopers took for granted, but they hardly needed it when their opponents dared not deploy advanced sensor technology. The Chinese had scattered passive sensors around the camp, and Colin had secured control of them as soon as he took the camp, yet ... either the Chinese gear was unreliable or the earthquakes had knocked them off-kilter. Or something else was going on. Half the refugee groups hadn’t been spotted until they’d been seen with the naked eye.

He motioned for the troops to mount up and scrambled up himself, his eyes sweeping the distant jungle. It was surprisingly warm, so much water vapour hanging in the air that visibility was shot to hell beyond a dozen metres or so. The trees and foliage were a discordant mess, some uprooted by the earthquakes; some standing tall and proud, providing perfect vantage points for watching locals. Hell, he reflected, the fallen tree trunks were even worse. A small band of tribal fighters could get very close without his men having the slightest idea they were there. He looked up into the dark sky, cursing under his breath. He’d wondered, once, why the troops who’d fought the early campaigns of the Age of Unrest had had such a hard time beating their enemies. He knew now. The weather and alien weapons platforms had stripped his men of their technological edge. If the tribes intended to attack, the odds would be too close to even for his peace of mind.

And half of us haven’t even exercised together, he thought. The Royal Marines were trained to form hodgepodge battlegroups out of whatever units were available, rather than rely on their own resources, but they were pushing their training to the limit. Half his original unit had been redeployed, their speciality skills needed elsewhere. Colin understood the logic, didn’t begrudge it, but it would be a major headache if they ran into trouble. We barely even share the same vocabulary.

“Keep your eyes peeled, and weapons at the ready, but fire only if fired upon,” he ordered quietly. “Move out.”

The IFV rattled into life and rumbled down the makeshift path. Colin glanced back at the camp, noting the sentries holding position along the earthen ramparts, and then looked forward again. The landscape was incredibly waterlogged, tiny rivers of water flowing around the tracks and turning the plains into muddy ditches. Colin wondered, suddenly, if he’d made a terrible mistake. The IFVs were rated for muddy fields, and he’d seen them driven through seas of mud on Salisbury Plain, but there were limits. The geologists insisted the water was already flowing into the rivers, which flowed back into the seas, yet ... they weren’t on a normal planet. It was hard to escape the impression the water would flow to the bottom of the sphere and pool there.

And someone standing on the south pole will fall into interplanetary space, he thought, sarcastically. It was easy to understand why some people thought the Earth was flat, even though humanity had been a spacefaring race for nearly three centuries. I have to keep thinking of this as a world with a regular gravity field ...

He shoved the thought out of his mind as the landscape closed in relentlessly. They were passing far too close to the foliage for his peace of mind, the jungle so shrouded in water vapour that his uniform felt damp, almost drenched, as if they were caught in a rainstorm. The temperature kept shifting rapidly, rising to tropical heat and then plummeting so quickly he was sure they’d driven right into the cold ocean. He had a nasty feeling the locals would be catching colds, although he knew the common cold was viral rather than caused by cold weather. It made him wonder if the locals would catch something from the offworlders too ... the medics had sworn blind it couldn’t happen, that they’d made sure the landing parties weren’t carrying anything dangerous, but ... what if they were wrong? The Chinese might not have been as careful about vetting their troops, before they landed, or ...

“It’s quiet,” a young soldier said. “Too quiet.”

Colin opened his mouth to snap at him, then caught himself. It was alarmingly quiet. The sphere wasn’t just inhabited by humans, but everything from dinosaurs to creatures so alien it was clear they’d been scooped up from a very different world. He hoped to hell the weirder creatures were just non-sentient animals, rather than intelligent beings in their own right. The locals hunted and ate the animals here, and he dreaded to think what would happen if it turned out they’d been hunting members of an intelligent race, particularly one with spacefaring cousins of its own. Wars had started over less. He shook his head and listened, carefully. There should have been swarms of invisible insects buzzing through the trees, making a noise so loud it was almost mechanical, insects that disdainfully ignored interlopers ... instead, it was silent. The only noise came from the IFVs ...

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he repeated. “We’ll tell the boffins when they get back.”

A memory flashed through his mind. He hadn’t paid much attention in biology class – he’d been more interested in trying to peek up his teacher’s skirt, something that had seemed hilarious as a teenager and now made him violently cringe – but he vaguely recalled being told that insects were important, that they were vital to a planet’s ecosystem. The terraforming teams struggling valiantly to turn Mars and Venus into habitable planets were introducing insects, if he recalled correctly, as well as everything else. If the insects were gone ...

They might be hiding, he told himself. The combination of earthquakes and heavy rainfall couldn’t have been good for the insects. But if they’re all dead...

He made a mental note to pass his observations on to the researchers – there was nothing else he could do – as the first pallets came into view. They’d gone crashing down the mountain, aimed well away from the camp ... he hoped, prayed, that the pallets hadn’t hit any locals when they hit the ground and bounced. The debris was everywhere; trees shattered into sawdust and splinters, a long gouge in the ground leading directly to the pallets. If there had been someone in their way, that person was dead. A few days ago, the risk had been minimal. Now ...

“Hook up the pallets,” he ordered, sharply. Dragging them back to the camp was inefficient, to say the least, but they didn’t have time to unload the pallets and get their contents back any other way. They didn’t have supply trucks and organising porter teams would be another nightmare. The locals had porters, he knew, but could they be trusted? He was mildly surprised someone hadn’t beaten them to the pallets. The IFVs were fast, on good roads, but the terrain surrounding the North Mountain wasn’t good. “And then we’ll get them home.”

He frowned as he surveyed the landing site. The pallets had come down hard. The simulations suggested their contents should have survived, and the mountaintop teams would have packed them carefully, but it was hard to believe. It was quite possible the contents could have been broken, or smashed, although ... not all of the contents were breakable. The IFV rumbled as it turned about, the driver muttering under his breath as his vehicle was hooked up to the pallet. Colin pretended not to hear. He understood, all too well. The IFV was already a sitting duck, but dragging a pallet would make it difficult, if not impossible, to escape an enemy attack. The driver couldn’t even dump the pallet and run without discarding the entire mechanism. And when he got home, someone would tear a strip off him for leaving the supplies behind.

A shot rang out. Colin ducked, instinctively, as more shots followed. Single shots, part of his mind noted. Whoever was firing on them knew what he was doing, rather than spraying and praying like so many insurgent groups in the Security Zone. Chinese stragglers? He saw a man grunt and fold over, hitting the muddy ground hard, only to stagger to his feet moments later. Modern body armour was good, but not that good. The Chinese had insisted they’d given weakened weapons to the locals, deadly against unarmoured targets but far less lethal against body armour. The man would be fine, after he’d had a chance to sit down and recover. Body armour or no, the impact would still feel like the victim had been punched in the gut.

His men scrambled into ragged defence formation, using the IFVs for cover. Colin lifted his rifle and joined them, crouching low as his eyes swept the foliage for targets. The Chinese hadn’t thought to fiddle with the ammunition in other ways, he noted sourly. It would have been easy to rig the bullets to make a big flash, like something out of a flick with bad special effects, but he could see almost nothing. The mist was growing thicker too, cutting down visibility sharply. He felt a flicker of admiration for his unseen enemies, even though they’d have been slaughtered effortlessly if their opponents could deploy modern sensors and weapons. Plasma cannons would have torn through the jungle like fire through paper, but the orbiting weapons platforms would blast them the moment they opened fire. The locals had carried out a textbook-perfect ambush, trapping his men in a killing zone. His only real advantage was body armour and IFVs and neither were as advantageous as they should have been.

We don’t dare charge either, he thought. It might have worked elsewhere – it had – but the locals were clearly experienced fighters, even if their weapons were new. If he charged their positions, his men were likely to be gunned down or hit with poison darts ... the impact likely to do real damage even if the poison was useless. And no one is coming to our aid.

“Bring up the machine guns,” he ordered, sharply. “Hose the foliage!”

“Aye, sir!”

Colin braced himself as the machine guns traversed into position, then opened fire. The irony mocked him – he’d always been taught to scorn spraying and praying and now he was relying on the technique to save his arse – as the bullets tore through the foliage, the machine guns traversing until they’d swept all around the clearing. He had no idea how many locals had attacked them, and how many had survived the machine guns, but the incoming fire slacked off rapidly. Colin breathed a sigh of relief – they’d been lucky the Chinese hadn’t given the locals mortars, or instructions on how to make basic explosives – then snapped orders. His men hopped aboard as the IFVs rumbled into life, driving back the way they’d come as fast as possible. It wasn’t fast enough. The shooting grew louder, bullets pinging off the rear armour, as they dragged the pallets back to the camp. He’d hoped the locals would be intimidated. He was starting to suspect they weren’t.

And if they blame us for the disasters that swept over their world, they might put revenge before reason, Colin thought. He’d seen that pattern before, even felt it as a young man before his instructors had straightened him out. We might be their only hope of surviving the next few years, if they can no longer hunt or grow crops, but that survival comes at a price they might not be willing to pay.

The shooting died away, slowly, as the IFVs picked up speed, lurching back and forth as they dragged the pallets. Colin suspected the enemy fighters were smart enough to keep their distance, after watching machine guns tear through trees like paper, although he supposed it fitted in with local customs. There were few really big battles, in their society; most encounters, he’d learnt, were more ritualised than violent. He supposed it made a certain kind of sense. The locals really didn’t have the technology or resources for large-scale industrialised warfare. Sure, one city-state could beat a few others into submission, but keeping them in submission indefinitely was impossible.

“We’re going to need to clear fields of fire,” he muttered, as they reached the earthworks. The local loggers were doing what they could, but they’d barely made a dent in the foliage. “If they can get close enough to attack the walls and trenches, they might get into the camp.”

“Particularly if they have help on the inside,” Burris offered. “There isn’t much we can do about it.”

Colin nodded, curtly. The locals looked ... he wasn’t sure how to put it into words. A few days ago, they’d been the effective masters of the known world. They might have heard stories about offworld super-technology, but they might not have believed it. Now ... they were refugees, dependent on offworld charity and forced to work for their daily rations ... tasteless rations. Colin was a big believer in ‘no work, no eat’ but even he had to admit it was one hell of a fall for proud hunter-gatherers. It would lead to trouble, eventually. And all hell would break loose.

“We’re going to need a larger deployment to recover the next pallet,” he said, when Colonel Scalzi joined him. “They’ll learn from their mistakes.”

“If there is a next pallet,” Scalzi said. “They were lucky to get both so close to the base.”

Colin nodded, curtly. The North Mountain was large enough to make Ben Nevis – or Mount Everest – look tiny. Launching a pallet down the mountainside seemed a good idea, on paper, but it could easily end with the pallet coming to rest hundreds of miles away. And if that happened ...

“There’s going to be trouble, sir,” he said, and outlined his earlier thoughts. “We have to be ready.”

Chapter Eleven: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

“The images just didn’t do her justice,” Lady Charlotte said. “That’s ...”

Her voice trailed off. Staci nodded. She’d always thought Lady Charlotte had one hell of an ego, an opinion that hadn’t changed even though she’d come to like the older woman, and it was oddly amusing to discover there was something Lady Charlotte found daunting. But then, the angel-ship really was. It was immense, incredibly advanced, and almost completely inexplicable. Her sensors could tell her almost nothing about the alien vessel, certainly almost nothing reliable. Half the sensor readings were contradictory, to the point it was hard to tell if the alien ship was really over two hundred kilometres from bow to stern, and the boffins were having problems coming to grips with what they saw. Their reports were so hedged with qualifiers, and question marks, that Staci had been tempted to ask if they should be replaced by fortune cookies. But then, she could hardly blame them. One set of sensor records insisted the alien ship was far bigger on the inside; another, just as likely to be accurate, stated the real ship was tiny, just wrapped in a drive field that made Endeavour’s look puny.

“I need a stiff drink,” Lady Charlotte said. She looked tired – long shuttle flights were never restful, even though passengers were encouraged to sleep – and her shipsuit looked rumpled enough to suggest she’d never had a chance to shower and change since being taken prisoner by the Chinese. “Do you have anything?”

“I’m afraid not,” Staci said. Every naval captain knew to turn a blind eye to enlisted men producing their own alcohol, as long as they didn’t let it interfere with their duties, but she’d ordered the unofficial stills shut down before they’d jumped into the Dyson System for the second time. She’d had quite enough problems with drunkenness during their first visit, when the crew had been overwhelmed by the sheer size of the alien megastructure, and she had no intention of repeating that experience. “Just tea and coffee, I’m afraid.”

Lady Charlotte didn’t argue, somewhat to Staci’s surprise. The diplomats probably had their own stash of alcohol in their cabins, brought along to help diplomatic dinners go smoothly, but ... Staci hoped they had the sense to keep the alcohol well away from the crew. It was a great deal easier to reconcile the lower rankers to being deprived of alcohol if the senior crew and starship passengers were also going dry. The last thing she needed was some lower deck enlisted crewman setting up a completely secret still, concealed from the senior chiefs, and distributing rotgut to his mates. It was quite possible he’d accidentally poison them.

“Coffee would be fine, please,” Lady Charlotte said. “Milk, no sugar.”

Staci keyed her terminal, ordering coffee and tea from her steward. She would have advised Lady Charlotte to stay away from coffee, at least until she’d had a proper rest, but she doubted the older woman would listen. She hadn’t been watching the alien ship for several days, waiting for it to do something ... anything. Staci didn’t pretend to understand what the Builders were thinking, as their ship held station over a black hole. It struck her as deliberately unsafe, like driving a car along the edge of a cliff, or perhaps a sign of arrogance born of technological superiority. She might not approve of tankers who drove through foreign towns, allowing enemy bullets and RPGs to bounce off their armour, but she could understand their thinking. If they convinced potential enemies the tanks were invincible, it would keep conflict from breaking out. If.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” Lady Charlotte said. “What is that thing?”

“We think she’s an alien starship,” Staci said, dryly. She could understand the diplomat’s confusion. It would be easy for Neil Armstrong to comprehend Endeavour, even if she was literally three hundred years ahead of Apollo Eleven, but the alien ship was just too alien. A pair of scientists were arguing the angel-ship was a Builder, rather than merely one of their starships. “Beyond that, it is anyone’s guess.”

Lady Charlotte nodded. “And they’ve made no attempt to contact you? Do they even know you’re here?”

“We tried to signal them,” Staci reminded her. Endeavour wasn’t trying to hide, but it was just possible she’d been taken for yet another piece of debris, all that remained of the shattered sphere. The radio signals should have been clear proof she was nothing of the sort. “If they picked up the message, they made no attempt to reply.”

“If they heard you at all,” Lady Charlotte pointed out. “Did they hear you?”

“There’s no way to tell,” Staci said. “Their drive field might be powerful enough to blot out our signals. Their communications gear might be too advanced to pick up something as primitive as radio signals. Or they might be ignoring us. It’s pretty clear we can’t pose any threat to them.”

The hatch opened, the steward pushing a trolley laden with tea, coffee, biscuits and sandwiches into the compartment. Staci sighed inwardly, wondering why someone deemed it appropriate for the gallery crew to keep tabs on what their commanding officer was eating. She hadn’t ordered sandwiches, but someone had prepared them anyway ... a grim reminder she really needed to eat, before something happened that threw the entire ship into chaos. Her stomach growled as the steward saluted, then withdraw as silently as he’d come. His face had seemed haunted, as if he was trying not to think of the alien starship sitting far too close for comfort. Staci suspected he’d been relieved to have a nice little menial task to do. She rather wished she could say the same.

“We have to make contact,” Lady Charlotte said. She took a sandwich – chicken, cucumber and mayonnaise – and nibbled thoughtfully. “Is there anything we haven’t tried?”

Staci took a sandwich herself and smiled, inwardly. She’d grown up in a place where the idea of cucumber sandwiches seemed ridiculous, the sort of delicacy that might appeal to effeminate rich kids who didn’t have to work for a living, but she had to admit she’d developed a taste for them. The gallery staff hadn’t failed to notice. They were smart enough, unlike her teachers, to acknowledge that the secret to getting their charges to eat was to feed them meals they actually wanted to eat. But then, students had very little power and their complaints went unheeded. She could have the gallery staff flogged.

Not that I would, she thought. Her hometown had also been the kind of place where you ate what you were given, often all your family could afford, or went hungry. It was good practice for a military career. I’m eating better than nearly everyone else, right now.

“We have teams working on gravity-wave communications,” Staci said. “They think they can generate a very light gravity wave, not enough to damage anything – we hope – but enough to draw their attention. We’re still not sure if it’s a good idea.”

“We need to let them know we’re here,” Lady Charlotte said. “Do you read the more nightmarish projections, the ones the Foreign Office put together?”

She took a breath and went on before Staci could answer. “Imagine a race of alien super-engineers who arrive in our home system and start dismantling the planets to produce a new Dyson Sphere. They’re so advanced our presence doesn’t even register, our starships and space habitats dismissed as asteroids ... maybe they’re so intelligent that they see us as little more than beavers, building quite remarkable structures by instinct rather than actual intelligence. They destroy our civilisation so completely there’s nothing left to repair ...”

Staci winced, inwardly. She’d read, years ago, a story in which a super-advanced race moved in and evicted humanity from every world it had colonised, so effortlessly the combined military power of the human race hadn’t stood a chance. Anyone who tried to remain behind was hopelessly lost, while the remainder of humanity’s starships were forced to flee, and flee again, until they ran out of space. The writer hadn’t known about real aliens – the novel dated back to the days when humanity had thought itself alone in the universe – and his grasp of technology and naval realities had been pitiful, but it had still been a chilling read.

“They have to know starships are the products of intelligence,” she said, trying not to think of the hundreds of humans she’d met who’d acted as though they were creatures of mindless instinct. She’d had an uncle who’d picked fights with everyone he’d met; she’d known a boy who’d sexually harassed every girl he’d met, until he’d ended up in jail. “Don’t they?”

“Human history is full of entire local ecosystems being destroyed, and animals being forced to flee or simply rendered extinct, for raw materials and profit,” Lady Charlotte pointed out. “There are vast tracts of Russian or Chinese or even Indian lands poisoned beyond all hope of repair, all in the name of industrial development. If we are so heedless of the smaller creatures around us, why should they take any more care of us?”

“I don’t choose to think about it,” Staci said. She was all too aware of what had happened to the Vesy, largely by accident. “But you’re right. We do need to make contact.”

“They ignored the first contact package,” Lady Charlotte said. “Have you tried anything else?”

“Radio and laser signals, both useless,” Staci said. “We don’t know if they’d understand the package. Building up a whole new middle-language from scratch is going to be difficult – they may not understand what we have in mind, when we try, or they may not be inclined to talk down to us.”

She shook her head. “Right now, we’re flying blind. And mesmerized.”

Lady Charlotte made a face. “If it does turn out to be hostile, what can it do to us?”

Staci fought down an absurd urge to giggle. “From what we’ve already seen? It could throw objects at us like a giant mass driver, propelling them in our direction so close to light-speed we’d have no time to dodge. It could create a gravity nexus, like we did to the Chinese battleship, and crush us effortlessly. It could overpower and burn out our drive nodes, leaving us helplessly drifting in space, or simply hurl us into the black hole.”

She met Lady Charlotte’s eyes. “It is my duty, as a military officer, to warn you that we do not have the power to fight that ship, if it turns out to be hostile. I suggest you do nothing to provoke it.”

Her heart twisted. She had never liked being helpless, and she’d spent half of her life learning martial arts to ensure she never would be. Growing up in a very rough town had left her all too aware she could be overpowered at any moment, unless she knew how to take care of herself. She’d fought in naval battles, gone up against enemy starships that outmatched her ship so heavily the odds had been completely against her, and yet this ... just looking at the alien ship left her feeling helpless, or worse. It wasn’t as if she’d been drugged, or tied up, or otherwise immobilised ... it was as if she’d been left completely unrestrained, because the attacker had no fear of anything she might do to him.

We don’t know they’re hostile, she told herself, sharply.

Sure, her thoughts answered. The French are our allies. We have no reason to think they’re going to come storming across the English Channel tomorrow. But we’d still be concerned if they moved troops and air support and landing craft into position for an invasion, even if we didn’t think they were suddenly hostile.

“I agree,” Lady Charlotte said. “What are they doing?”

Staci shrugged. The analysts had come up with a dozen different answers, some more reassuring than others ... none of which, of course, could be proved. The Builders might be recovering from their passage through a black hole, or they might be scanning the system to determine what had happened to the shattered sphere, or they might be marking down every intruding starship to make sure they wiped them out in a single attack, or ... who knew?

The intercom bleeped. “Captain,” Jenner said, “the techs have gotten the gravity-wave projector up and running. They say they’re ready to attempt to signal the angel-ship.”

“I’m on my way,” Staci said. “Dump our sensor records to the remainder of the fleet, then bring the stealthed platforms online. I want to make sure we have decent records of everything that happens.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Lady Charlotte cleared her throat. “You don’t have good sensor records?”

“No,” Staci said. “We lost most of our shipboard sensors when the angel-ship appeared, along with the deployed drones. They were blinded, or simply burnt out ... something I would have sworn impossible, before it actually happened. We don’t have accurate readings of just what happened when the alien ship appeared, or how its drive field interacted with the black hole. What little we do have is FUBAR.”

She stood, brushing down her uniform as she headed for the hatch. Lady Charlotte followed, her footsteps betraying a slight hesitancy as she stepped onto the bridge. Staci wondered, not for the first time, just what the older woman made of the compartment. There had been two men in her life, her ex-husband and the man she’d dumped him for, and they’d both been starship commanders, men so wedded to the naval life that death was the only thing that would get them out of the command chair. It was hard not to feel a flicker of the old distaste for a woman who cheated on her husband, while he was on deployment ... it would have been social death, or worse, in her hometown. And yet, Lady Charlotte was more than just a one-dimensional character from a bad romance flick. She was a person in her own right.

“Captain,” Jenner said. “All stations report ready. Laser links are in place, relay networks set up to ensure the messages are forwarded out of the danger zone as quickly as possible.”

Staci nodded as she took her chair, although they had no idea just how big the ‘danger zone’ actually was. If the alien ship had been human ... they were well out of firing range, far enough to risk taunting the crew from a safe distance. Her old commanding officer had once mooned his opponents, during an exercise; Staci hadn’t been able to keep from pointing out their rivals had probably been disgusted, rather than enraged. This ship ... she had no idea if they were at a safe distance, or at point blank range, or so close they were actually safe from the alien weapons. She hoped for the latter, but she doubted it. No commanding officer worthy of the title would let anyone so close unless they were entirely sure of the newcomer’s bona fides.

Unless their hull is as unbreakable as Dyson Two, she thought, coldly. The sphere was hit by at least fifty pieces of debris, some the size of an entire country, and it remains intact.

“Take the spare console,” she ordered Lady Charlotte. “Don’t touch anything.”

The older woman nodded, unable to take her eyes off the display. The angel-craft waxed and waned as power flickered through its folded wings. Gravity twisted around the vessel’s hull, bending light around it as well ... Staci wondered, not for the first time, if their radio signals had simply never reached the alien sensors. No human designer would have accepted such a risk, unless they had sensors and communicators that could reach through the haze. Perhaps the Builders honestly thought they were the only spacefaring race that was, and ever would be. It wasn’t entirely impossible. The human race had come very close to stagnating, time and time again, before successfully climbing out of the gravity well and into interstellar space. The Tadpoles had taken a great deal longer. If they’d advanced at the same speed as humanity, they’d have swept through the Sol System while the dinosaurs ruled the world and humanity would never have existed at all.

An alert flickered briefly on her terminal, informing her that the general console had been locked out. A wise precaution, even though Lady Charlotte was smart enough not to push random buttons. There was no point in taking additional chances. They were about to take the biggest one of all.

If the admiral was here ...

She smiled at herself, rather ruefully. Admiral Dismukes was on the other side of a binary star system, his fleet trying to protect the sphere while keeping its distance from the angel-ship. She had no time to ask for orders, and she knew what they’d be if she had. The admiral knew the importance of making contact as well as herself ... and besides, she’d wanted command. She’d wanted to sit in the command chair, she’d wanted to be responsible for an entire starship ... the whole affair was larger than anything she’d imagined, and the stakes were incredibly high, but it was what she’d wanted. She couldn’t stand down now.

“Communications,” she ordered. Her throat was suddenly dry. She was very tempted to order a pause, long enough for a nap ... no, she knew that she would be just putting off the inevitable. And probably get herself put in front of a court-martial as well. “Communications, are the gravity-wave pulsars ready to go?”

“Yes, Captain,” Lieutenant Andy MacPhee said.  The communications officer looked nervous. “I've programmed in a very basic version of the standard package, working towards a true/false dynamic to build up a ...”

“Understood,” Staci said, cutting him off. “You may begin transmitting at will.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Chapter Twelve: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

Charlotte wondered, again, if she was dreaming, or drunk, or simply out of her mind on one of the pleasure drugs she’d experimented with, briefly, at school. The first sensor records had been almost impossible to believe and their successors had been even worse, displaying a starship so advanced it was completely beyond her comprehension. The angel-ship was easily the largest starship known to mankind, and one of the largest megastructures. The spheres were far larger, of course, but they were just shells enclosing entire stars. The only thing that came close was the lone planetoid and no one was quite sure if it was a real megastructure or just a moon-sized object that had been hollowed out and turned into a command centre for the entire sphere. The starship on the main display was just too ... big.

She forced herself to sit calmly as the naval staff bustled around her. She’d learnt to read the room at a very young age and it was clear the spacers were a little unnerved by the alien ship, in the way people always were by the unknown. They’d have been happier, she thought, if the alien ship hadn’t been quite so advanced, clear proof that the gulf between humanity and the Builders was immense. Or if they’d understood the ship, even if they couldn’t duplicate it. A pilot from the First World War would recognise and understand a jet fighter, although he couldn’t have begun to figure out how it worked; a soldier who’d marched with Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar wouldn’t have the slightest idea what a jet fighter actually was, to the point he might assume the aircraft had been created by the gods. What other explanation was possible, to a man of his limited worldview? Charlotte suspected it had to be worse for the naval officers, certainly worse than it was for her. They knew the realities of naval technology so completely that the giant alien ship was an outside context problem. Charlotte, by contrast, didn’t know what was impossible.

Or what was impossible, she reflected. She had resented her ex-husband’s naval career and she’d never bothered to learn much about it. It had been easier to be mad at him for not writing to her, than acknowledging her husband’s career would take him away from home for weeks, months, or years. Even if that ship vanishes, instead of talking to us, the sensor logs will shake the universe.

The communications officer, a fresh-faced young man who looked as if he was surviving on caffeine and sheer determination, spoke into the silence. “The first gravity pulses are going ... now.”

Charlotte gritted her teeth. Let’s hope they understand the pattern, and don’t think it’s an invitation to do battle.

She watched, unsure if she should hope for something to change – or fear it. She’d read all the reports, time and time again, all the speculations about what would happen if humanity genuinely came face to face with an unquestionably superior species. Some of the speculation had drawn on ideals from science-fantasy, from Kryptonians to Time Lords; the remainder had been a little more restrained, although few of the predictions had been particularly good or optimistic. And here ...

We should be able to establish a common language, if they think like us, she thought. Maths was supposed to be something all intelligent races had in common, and it could be used as the building blocks of something greater, but what if they were wrong? We have trouble understanding the Tadpoles. Will the Builders have trouble understanding us?

Her mind raced, as time itself seemed to slow down. It was easy for someone rich and powerful to lose touch with the realities of life, particularly realities faced by those who were not rich and powerful. Or living in other countries ... Mitch, may he rest in peace, had been a poor boy from a poor family, but his country had still been wealthy and developed enough to give him free healthcare, free education, and every chance of making something of himself. A young man born in the Security Zone had none of those things; his choices were inexplicable, from Charlotte’s point of view, but made perfect sense from his. The Builders might be so advanced they had a genuine post-scarcity society, or a democratic network that bypassed politicians and ensured everyone had a voice, or ... they might have forgotten what it was like to be poor. God knew, there were plenty of humans who’d forgotten the grim truth that the universe was red in tooth and claw, ready to maul you if you made a single mistake. The Troubles wouldn’t have been so bad if the government hadn’t lost track of reality ...

“Captain, there is no apparent response,” the communications officer said. “If they can hear us, they’re not replying.”

Captain Templeton looked at him. “Can they hear us?”

“Uncertain,” the communications officer said, reluctantly. “The gravity waves should be capable of passing through their haze, and brushing against their gravimetric sensors, but we know nothing of the limits of their technology. The gravity pulses might be getting absorbed by their drive field too.”

“Check with the drones on the other side of the alien ship, then angle the next pulses to be sure they intersect with the drones,” Commander Jenner suggested. “If they do, we know the pulses are passing through their hull.”

Do we? Charlotte wasn’t so sure. The alien drive field was huge, true, but the alien hull might be a great deal smaller. They might be missing the alien hull completely, without ever being aware of it. They might not hear us because we’re not aiming at their ears.

“Aye, Commander,” the communications officer said. “If they are warping the gravity pulse trajectories ...”

“I can adjust our sensors to compensate,” the sensor officer put in. She looked young, to Charlotte’s jaded eye, but if she was on the bridge at such a crucial moment she must have more than proven herself to her superiors. “We can alter the gravity pulses too, make them more detectable.”

“Like depth charges,” Commander Jenner said. “Captain, they may take that for a hostile act.”

Captain Templeton said nothing for a long moment. Charlotte was surprised. Mitch had been Captain Templeton’s mentor and his approach had always been to charge, to take the initiative and run with it as fast as possible. But ... Unicorn had always been expendable – the Royal Navy could replace a frigate and her crew easily – and Mitch had never had an entire civilisation at stake. It was one thing to put himself at risk, along with an all-volunteer crew, but quite another to risk everything on one bad throw of the die. Charlotte didn’t blame the younger woman for hesitating. The stakes were literally immeasurable.

“Do it, as gently as possible,” Captain Templeton ordered, finally. “The touch is not to damage their ship.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Charlotte wondered, grimly, just how the young officer intended to guarantee it. Endeavour had survived gravity waves that had threatened to smash the starship to atoms, and it stood to reason the angel-ship would be capable of surviving too, but how could anyone be sure? On one hand, the Builders were aware of the threat – they had to be – and they would logically have taken precautions; on the other, they might assume they were the only races capable of generating gravity waves and therefore decline to waste money on protecting themselves. If money was a thing for them, of course. But then, they weren’t just jumping into abandoned systems ... were they? It stood to reason they might jump into populated systems – their systems – and gravity waves would pose a threat ... her mind ran in circles. She knew so little ... she was aware of her own ignorance, but she ...

I don’t know what I don’t know and I can’t even guess at what I don’t know, she thought, wryly. Centuries ago, someone had once predicted there would only ever be a handful of computers in the modern world. He’d known so little of how computer tech would develop that he couldn’t hope to realise how many computers would be needed, or what they’d be needed for, in a mere decade or two. We are blind to things the Builders must take for granted.

“Captain,” the communications officer said. “The pulsar is ready to signal.”

Captain Templeton sounded calm, somehow. “You may proceed when ready.”

Charlotte tensed. It wasn’t always easy – and with aliens it was practically impossible – to predict what would be counted as a hostile act. Some people would laugh off minor jokes, others would be triggered and start throwing insults and punches ... her ancestors had forgotten, too, that not everyone thought the same as themselves. The Tadpoles were humanity’s closest allies, and yet there’d been incidents ... the dreams of aliens serving on human ships, and vice versa, were just impractical. It had been tried once and the results had been mixed ...

“No response,” the communications officer said. “No ... wait!”

Endeavour quivered, just slightly. Charlotte barely noticed. The alien ship was coming to life, unfolding its wings ... she sucked in her breath, staring at the live feed from the drones near the black hole. The alien wings – she knew they were waves of energy, but they looked like wings – were spreading out, rippling across miles upon miles of interplanetary space. The scale was daunting, beyond belief. She was torn between awe and horror.

Commander Jenner cleared his throat. “Did we do that?”

“The wings started to unfurl two minutes after the gravity wave passed through the haze,” the sensor officer said. “We may have triggered it ...”

May, Charlotte thought. It was hard to believe the aliens had missed the gravity wave completely. Anything humans could do, they could do too ... and probably better. They’re reacting to us.

She swallowed, hard. The alien starship was altering its configuration and that meant ... what? The wings were unfolding slowly, from her vantage point, but ... she knew enough to realise they were moving at incredible speed. It was beautiful, and awesome, and terrifying. There was nothing in humanity’s toolkit that could produce such an effect. She’d read some of the more speculative reports, written by researchers still in shock after laying eyes on the angel-craft, and most of them had sounded insane. But now ... she wasn’t so sure.

We wanted their attention, she thought. She’d done stupid things, as a child, a teenager, and finally as a young woman, to attract attention. In hindsight, some of those things had been counterproductive ... and not always, she admitted sourly, quickly enough for her to reverse course. And now we seem to have it, we don’t know if we really wanted it all along.

***

“Hold position,” Staci ordered. The alien ship was spreading her wings. Tiny flickers of gravity were darting across the system, waves powerful enough to rock Endeavour without doing any actual damage. The sensor network, even the drones lurking near the alien ship, appeared to be intact. She couldn’t tell if that was consideration or simple coincidence. The alien ship wasn’t actually moving, just ... “Sensors?”

“I think she’s bringing her drives online,” Helen said. “The gravity waves are oddly constrained, as if ... as if they’re part of a drive field, but one held together by another drive field.”

Staci nodded, slowly. She knew how much power it took to move a battleship – and the angel-ship was over ten times bigger than the largest battleship humanity had ever put into space. It stood to reason its drive field would be larger too, although ... she’d never seen anything like it, not even in theoretical studies of advanced drive systems. The techs had speculated the alien craft surfed on folded space ... were they actually correct? She wondered, numbly, if humanity would ever make the jump from theoretical concept to practical technology? The gap was incredibly wide.

But at least we know it can be done, she told herself. It isn’t just theory any longer.

She kept her eyes on the display. “Can we get a look inside the haze, now they’re spreading their wings?”

“The haze does seem to have lost power slightly,” Helen reported, “but our sensor readings are still a little distorted. The gravity imaging is producing impossible results and ... I don’t know if they’re reliable, or if they’re being screwed with deliberately. They can’t all be true.”

“Or we may be misinterpreting the data,” Jenner put in. “If we don’t understand what we’re seeing ...”

Staci nodded, curtly. Masking field technology was designed to mess with enemy sensors, rather than cloak a ship completely. It wasn’t always reliable – and an enemy who knew they were being spoofed could adjust their systems to compensate – but it did have its uses. Here ... for all she knew, the alien haze was too powerful for her sensors to penetrate properly particularly when they were reliant on passive information gathering rather than active probes. The latter would definitely attract attention, and the attention might not be good.

She held up a hand. There was no point in worrying about it now. The live feed was already being fed to the analysts and transmitted across the system, ensuring that every researcher assigned to the task force had a chance to study the data. It would be parsed out, bit by bit, and every last scrap of real information would be extracted ... eventually. Helen and her team would do their best, she knew, but she wasn’t expecting miracles. How could she? They weren’t studying human-level tech, but something far more advanced.

“Do your best,” she said. “Helm, hold us here for the moment.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci frowned inwardly. Was the alien ship preparing to depart? She thought so and yet ... it was impossible to be sure. The wings might be a weapon of some kind, or a demonstration of power, or ... for all she knew, it was the alien counterpart to discarding waste heat after a long period in stealth mode. They dared not assume anything, anything at all, but ... she shook her head. The alien tech was advanced, true, yet it wasn’t magic. They would come to understand it, sooner or later, and then duplicate it ...

Lady Charlotte cleared her throat. “Does the admiral have any comment?”

“No,” Staci said, flatly. It would be hours before Admiral Dismukes received their report and hours more before any reply could reach them. The long-range sensor records were a little vague on just how quickly the MNF had realised the angel-ship had arrived – some records hinted they’d detected the ship well before they should have spotted it – but radio and laser transmissions moved no faster than light. “By the time we hear from him, events will have moved on.”

The live feed updated. Staci stared, almost hypnotised by the alien ship. Endeavour was beautiful, in her eyes at least, but she shared the blocky and crude design of most military starships, where function was far more important than form. Civilian ships, even cruise liners, were little better, the cold realities of starship design defeating any attempt to make them look works of art. The grand designs of science-fantasy had never taken shape in the real world, but the Builders ... their tech was so advanced they could let their dreams take flight. She felt tears at the corner of her eye and blinked them away, almost angrily. It made a certain kind of sense. If one could generate actual force shields to protect one’s hull, one didn’t have to make a starship that could take a pounding and keep going. In fact ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I think ... I think there’s a gap in the field.”

“Show me,” Staci ordered. She leaned forward as the display changed, showing the alien starship from close range. Helen was right. There was a faint, a very faint, gap in the field ... tiny on the display, from what she could see, but easily large enough to take a shuttlecraft or two. Was it an invitation? Or were they mistaken? For all they knew, the gap would be gone within seconds. “Can you see the hull beyond?”

“I can see something,” Helen said. “It appears solid, but ...”

She broke off. “Captain, there’s a gravity pulse – a set of pulses – emanating from the gap in the field. They match ours. They’re playing our signal back to us.”

“Won’t you come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,” Jenner muttered. “Is this an invitation – or a trap?”

“They don’t need to trap us,” Lady Charlotte said, bluntly. “They can swat us like flies.”

Staci was tempted to agree. The Great Powers had no qualms about bombarding entire regions of the Security Zone if they caused trouble. The days in which governments worried about enemy casualties had died with the post-Cold War consensus. They tended to be a little more careful when dealing with peer powers, or minor powers strong enough to cause real trouble, preferring subtle contests rather than outright trials of strength. The Builders were so powerful they could crush the entire human race almost effortlessly. Why would they risk fucking around when they could just move in for the kill?

“It would be rude to ignore the invitation,” she said, slowly. She was tempted to lead the mission herself, but her place was on the bridge. “Commander Jenner, prepare a shuttle and crew. Lady Charlotte, collect two of your diplomatic aides and meet Commander Jenner at the shuttle. And be careful.”

Lady Charlotte nodded, her face pale. Staci wondered if she should advise the older woman to remain on the ship, then dismissed the thought before she could put it into words. Lady Charlotte was the diplomatic team leader, and besides she was a little more expendable than the rest of her team. And she had a working brain.

“Good luck,” she said. “Dismissed.”

Chapter Thirteen: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

Tobias jerked awake as the alarm rang, loudly.

They’d gone straight back to their cabin, when they’d docked, and made love before falling asleep in each other’s arms. Tobias hadn’t seen any point in worrying about the alien starship only a few million kilometres away, unlike the crewmen who wandered the decks with haunted expressions; he’d seen enough alien super-technology to be fairly confident that, if the Builders wanted Endeavour dead, she would already be dead. He’d wondered, as he drifted off to sleep, if the Builders would react badly to their sphere being turned into a battleground, but the fighting had largely come to an end by the time their giant ship arrived. It was quite possible they might not realise something had happened, at least until they checked their automatic recording systems. If they had recording systems. The Builder mindset struck him as a strange combination of practicality – they didn’t need to bother with energy weapons when kinetic projectiles did the job well enough – and thoughtlessness.

Perhaps they’re so confident in their own security they neglect the fundamentals, he’d thought, and made a note of it to be forwarded into the ship’s discussion forums.  He’d played an online contest, once, against a player so arrogant he hadn’t bothered to secure his rear area, allowing Tobias a chance to send his tanks to wreak havoc. It was the sort of thing that couldn’t be done in the real world, he thought, but gaming logic was different. If you think you can’t possibly lose, you don’t always worry to keep an eye on the defences that make your position invulnerable.

The alarm sent him rolling out of his bunk, one hand grabbing for the terminal. It felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, as if he’d barely had a moment to close his eyes ... he reached for the stimulant tab, then caught himself as he keyed the terminal and brought up the message. They were ordered to report to the briefing room in twenty minutes, barely enough time for a shower and a ration bar. He sighed inwardly, wondering why they’d been called. They weren’t the only shuttle pilots on the ship, and – at a pinch – there were quite a few crewmen rated to fly shuttles, even if they didn’t have the flying hours required under normal circumstances. But then, there was nothing normal about these circumstances ...

Marigold poked her head out from under the sheets. “What’s up?”

Tobias bit down on the obvious joke. “We’ve been summoned to the briefing room in twenty,” he said, heading for the washroom. “We barely have time for a ration bar.”

“Oh dear,” Marigold said, a deadpan look on her face. “What the hell do they think we’ve done?”

Tobias snorted – ration bars met all their needs, but they tasted like stale cardboard – and stepped into the washroom, silently relieved he’d slept naked. He answered the call of nature, washed and dried himself in the shower and headed back outside to dress as quickly as possible, careful not to look at Marigold as she collected a box of ration bars from the shelf and dropped it on the folding table. They’d been lovers for years, but she was still quite self-conscious about being naked. Tobias didn’t blame her. Sharing a changing room with a bunch of teenagers who’d developed faster than he had had left him self-conscious too.

He checked the terminal as he ate, frowning inwardly as he noted the gravity wave reports. They hadn’t felt anything while they were sleeping ... clearly, the earth hadn’t moved at all. His lips twitched at the weak joke, his thoughts running in circles. They’d been summoned to the briefing room ... why? Normally, there was a reason, but now ... he couldn’t find anything on the shipboard net that even hinted at a reason. It was either classified so highly he didn’t have access – hardly impossible – or nothing had been written down at all. The latter struck him as unlikely. They hadn’t done anything, as far as he knew, that deserved an off-the-record bollocking from the XO, let alone the captain herself.

“Anything?” Marigold stepped out of the shower. He carefully didn’t turn his head as he heard her start to dress. He’d always been told women took hours to get ready, although Marigold only took a few moments. It helped, he supposed, that flight tunics were designed to be donned quickly, and there was no point in putting on makeup or styling one’s hair. “Are we going back to the sphere?”

“I don’t know,” Tobias said. He passed her a ration bar, feeling vaguely guilty. There were no shortage of tales about boys being dumped because they took girls to cheap diners that sold flavoured ration bars or muck, although he rather suspected any boy who took a girl there was asking for it. There were cheap dates and then there were really cheap dates. “There’s nothing in the files.”

Marigold nodded curtly, grimacing slightly as she nibbled the ration bar. Tobias poured two glasses of water and passed one to her, sipping the other himself. Ration bars weren’t disgusting, certainly not when compared to school dinners, but they were just so tasteless the stomach rebelled anyway. He made a mental note to see if there were any dipping sauces left in the stores, although it wasn’t too likely. There was no hope of resupply unless they found a way to get back home. They might be eating ration bars for the rest of their lives.

He checked his appearance quickly, then led the way through the door. Commander Jenner was a reasonable type, and standards weren’t so strict on survey ships, but there was no point in taking chances. Discipline had taken a hit the first time they’d visited the sphere and it had to be worse now, with the tramline gone. How long would it be, he asked himself sourly, before junior officers, crew and passengers started wondering why they had to take orders from fleet command? Not long, if he was any judge. He’d watched Planet of the Flies as a teenager and the only thing that had surprised him about the ghastly scenario was that law and order had lasted a week. He had expected it to break down at once.

But then, anyone on a colony ship would know the basics of survival on an alien world, he reminded himself. He’d been given the basics, when he’d joined the navy, and real colonists were taught a great deal more. They might understand the importance of working together and not fighting each other for supremacy and ...

The hatch hissed open, revealing the briefing room. Tobias relaxed, slightly, as he spotted Lady Charlotte, flanked by a pair of young staffers in unmarked shipsuits. Commander Jenner stood at the end of the table, his face so tightly controlled Tobias knew he was deeply worried. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. On one hand, they weren’t going to be lectured in front of the civilians; on the other, if they weren’t in trouble, what was really happening? Who knew?

“Be seated,” Commander Jenner ordered.

Tobias sat, his mind churning. Marigold sat next to him. His eyes flickered around the compartment, spotting no one else. Had the XO and Lady Charlotte been waiting on them? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps they’d just been closer to the briefing room. The XO’s quarters were at the far end of the ship – they had to be well away from the Captain’s, in case Endeavour took heavy damage – but he’d probably been on the bridge, while the diplomats could have made their way to the compartment earlier. It wasn’t as if they’d been late, he told himself firmly. They’d reached the briefing room in plenty of time.

Commander Jenner tapped the control pad in front of him. An image of the angel-ship appeared in front of him, the wings rippling the fabric of space-time in a manner Tobias would have thought flatly impossible. He leaned forward, his eyes narrowing as they spotted the scale next to the image, insisting the wings extended hundreds of kilometres into open space. Tobias was almost tempted to believe someone had hacked the sensors and reprogrammed them to display obvious nonsense. It should have been impossible, but ... so were the spheres, and the crushed star, and the black hole, and ...

“As most of you know, the alien ship is surrounded by a drive field of unprecedented power,” Commander Jenner said. “The field is powerful enough to distort all our sensors, active and passive alike, and we have very little hard data concerning the ship underneath. It may be hundreds of kilometres long, as the drive field suggests, or it may be a great deal smaller. The fact that the wings, for want of a better term, are truly immense may suggest the starship itself is considerably smaller than it appears.”

May, Tobias thought.

“We have detected a gap in the field,” Commander Jenner continued. “The aliens are radiating a set of gravity pulses that match the ones we used in an attempt to communicate with them, aiming our own message back at us. We believe it is an invitation.”

Tobias frowned, inwardly. He’d watched an old movie where the aliens had recorded one of humanity’s first television transmissions and relayed it back to Earth without understanding the context ... and given humanity a fright because the broadcast had been made by Adolf Hitler. It was possible, of course, that the commander was right, but ... he didn’t know what to make of it. Just because someone opened a door didn’t mean he wanted you to step through. Why not step outside and issue a formal invitation? Or even start replying to the first contact package in a manner that allowed both sides to develop a common vocabulary?

But has that ever actually happened in the real world? He doubted it. Humanity’s real first contacts had never been under controlled conditions, and the package had never really been tested. For all we know, opening a door is perfectly normal for them.

“We intend to accept the invitation,” Commander Jenner said. “I will lead the mission. Lady Charlotte, as the senior diplomat, will head up the diplomatic party. Pilots Gurnard and Harkness will fly us to the alien ship, carefully. Very carefully.”

Tobias nodded, trying to keep his face under control. Why us?

“You two have more experience of flying shuttles in alien environments than anyone else, certainly anyone available to us,” Jenner continued. Tobias thought, for a horrible moment, he’d asked the question out loud. “You flew the first shuttle to land on the sphere, and the first shuttle to land on the lone world, as well as exploring the other alien artefacts on Virus Prime. Your record in such matters is unmatched.”

We crashed on the sphere, Tobias thought, darkly. They’d been damned lucky the alien defences hadn’t killed them ... and, in truth, he wasn’t sure why they’d been spared. It was possible the Builders were confident their weapons vaporised whatever they hit, and they weren’t entirely wrong, but it should have been obvious they’d failed when the shuttle kept plummeting out of the sky. The Chinese had been much less lucky. Their shuttle had been atomised before their pilot knew they were under attack. We survived more through luck than judgement.

He sighed, inwardly, and forced himself to concentrate as Jenner ran through the rest of the mission details. There was another good reason for selecting Marigold and himself, he thought, and that was that neither of them were navy careerists. They could think outside the box in a manner most careerists could not, and dispute orders in a way that would be career suicide for anyone else. Although ... the sneaky part of his mind wondered if they had career security, now the MNF was cut off from the rest of the human race. They could hardly be sent home and discharged when there was no way home.

“We don’t know what we’ll encounter,” Jenner finished. “But I am sure we can handle whatever we find.”

And I hope that is just you trying to put us at ease, and not mindless bravado, Tobias thought, sourly. The latter could easily get us killed.

He stood, his mind churning. He’d met too many people who had thought, for better or worse, that they could handle anything. There was no way to know what they’d encounter, if they managed to dock with the angel-ship; there was no way to know how they’d react to aliens who might be physical gods, beings of pure energy, artificial intelligences, or something so different that they were literally unimaginable, or so weird that gazing upon them would drive a human mad. He wished, now, that he hadn’t spent so much time devouring early science-fantasy and horror stories as a youngster. Cthulhu was a much cooler entity when there wasn’t a prospect, no matter how vague, of coming face to face with him.

Commander Jenner caught his eye. “The maintenance crew have been over the shuttle already, but make sure you check everything yourselves,” he ordered.  “We leave in an hour.”

“Aye, sir,” Tobias said, careful not to point out that fixing any problems might take a great deal longer, particularly if the maintenance crews had missed something that might turn deadly. Unlikely, but possible ... perhaps not here. They weren’t at war. There’d been plenty of time to go over the shuttle with a fine-toothed comb, then deal with any issues before they turned lethal. “We’ll be ready.”

He kept the rest of his thoughts to himself as they made their way down to the shuttlebay. The maintenance crew had done more than just check the operating systems, he noted; they’d cleaned the interior, wiped the cockpit and even installed comfier flight chairs for the diplomats. Tobias snorted – Lady Charlotte hadn’t complained about the accommodation, at least not to him – but he supposed it made a certain kind of sense. No one knew if the Builders cared, if the humans arrived in a fresh shuttle or a craft that was showing its age, yet it did help put the humans in the right mindset for alien contact. Sort of.

Marigold looked up from her console. “No obvious problems with the interior systems,” she said. They’d double-check each other’s work, just to be sure nothing was missed. “You found anything?”

“Nothing,” Tobias said.  He hadn’t expected to. The maintenance crews knew their job. They’d installed newer and better sensor nodes as well as replacing a number of components that were within six months of their expiry date. Tobias wasn’t sure if that was a wise precaution or if they were wasting resources that would be hard, if not impossible, to replace in a hurry. “I think we’re as good as we ever were.”

“Better than taking a shuttle right out of the fabrication node,” Marigold agreed. A new shuttle would be absolutely perfect, at least on paper, but it was impossible to be certain until a pilot took her out for a spin. Her eyes narrowed. “We may have one problem.”

Tobias blinked. “What?”

“The sensor nodes on Endeavour took a beating when the alien ship appeared,” Marigold said. She’d spent the flight from the sphere studying the reports. “Some were blinded. Some burnt out. And some exploded.”

“Fuck,” Tobias said. If Endeavour’s sensor nodes exploded, all of them, the damage would be minimal. The real danger would come from the ship being blind, not relatively small explosions that wouldn’t do any damage to the vessel’s interior. But if the same happened onboard a shuttle ... he didn’t need to run it through the simulations to know the entire ship would be destroyed. “We need to mention it to the commander.”

“We can try,” Marigold said, pessimistically. “But I doubt he’ll agree to pull out the sensors.”

Tobias made a face. She was probably right, although ... he wasn’t sure the Builders would be very pleased if they discovered the shuttle was crammed with modern sensors. Modern sensors could pick up a lot, even if they relied purely on passive detection. Up close ... the alien ship was putting out so much power that it was quite possible the sensors would burn out accidentally, or worse. And if they did decide to object to active sensors ...

I wouldn’t be pleased if someone parked a sensor van next to my house, he thought darkly, and neither would anyone else.

He sighed inwardly. Modern-day sensor vans had been deployed to track zombies – humans infected with the virus, humans no longer in control of themselves – and they’d been fairly successful, but they’d also been a privacy nightmare. The scandals had started at once – operators had peeked into homes and through clothes, sometimes angling their sensors to make sure they got a good look – and the lawsuits had started to follow as soon as the state of emergency was lifted. Tobias wondered what sort of idiot had ever envisaged that such technology would never be misused. If there was one thing humans were bad at, it was resisting temptation.

“We’ll mention it to him,” he said, finally. Passive sensors were a lot less revealing, but they were also a lot less provocative. “And then hope for the best.”

Marigold smiled, tartly. “Did you update your will?”

“I didn’t see the point,” Tobias said. He’d written his will when he’d joined the navy – it was standard procedure – and updated it after the war, but now ... what little he had with him would be shared amongst the crew, if he didn’t come back one day. Everything he owned back home was out of reach and would remain so, unless they managed to get back to Earth. “You know, if we remain out of contact for years, we could be declared dead?”

“That would be bad,” Marigold said. “Less for us, perhaps, but for everyone else ...?”

Tobias nodded – if someone was declared legally dead, their property could be passed on and their partners allowed to remarry - then frowned as the XO entered the shuttlebay. “It’s nearly time to go,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“No,” Marigold said. “But we’ll have to go soon anyway.”

Chapter Fourteen: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System

The good news, Charlotte noted as she was helped into the shuttle, was that someone had torn out the uncomfortable military-grade seating and replaced it with something a little more comfortable; the bad news, unfortunately, was that they were expected to wear heavy-duty spacesuits. She’d worn shipsuits for most of the voyage, and she’d grown used to checking her mask and oxygen supply was firmly in place for emergencies, but spacesuits were a whole other story. They felt like suits of armour, so heavy that all the servomotors in the world couldn’t keep her from staggering every time she tried to walk. She understood the logic – if the hull was breached, the spacesuit might keep her alive long enough to escape – but she couldn’t help thinking it was a little pointless. The Builders could vaporise the entire shuttle, if they wished, before the crew even knew they were under attack.

“We have to take every reasonable precaution,” Commander Jenner had said, as they’d gone through the medical screening prior to donning the suits and boarding the shuttle. “We don’t know what’ll happen, out there.”

Charlotte hadn’t bothered to argue further. There were some advantages to wearing the suits – for one thing, they had access to the shuttle’s sensors – and the XO had a point. He was also in charge of her personal safety, as well as the rest of the first contact team, and ignoring advice from such people was never wise. Her grandfather had died, from what she’d been told, because he’d had a habit of ditching his security team and going out for nights on the town, although Charlotte had a private suspicion there was more to the story. But then, she knew plenty of people who’d been caught in compromising positions with their trousers down or their skirts raised. It was easy, sometimes, to know why so many commoners hated the aristocracy. For every noble-born man who served his country well, like her ex-husband, there was an entitled prat intent on dragging his family name through the mud. The media being what it was, it was the prat who had his bare arse put on the front cover for the world to see.

She took a long breath as she was strapped in, then watched the shuttle crew making the final pre-flight checks. They’d had a long discussion with Commander Jenner about something, when he’d stepped up front, but they’d kept their voices too low for Charlotte to make out their words. She wondered, rather darkly, why the flight crew weren’t in heavy spacesuits, too ... she shrugged. It was fairly obvious the crew couldn’t fly the ship in spacesuits. The gloves alone rendered it impossible.

A low hum echoed through the shuttlecraft as the drives came online, the hatch closed, locked, and checked – twice. Charlotte forced herself to wait, as calmly as possible, as the shuttle rose from the deck and headed straight for open space. She almost wished she couldn’t see the cockpit, and interplanetary space beyond, even though she was pretty sure that something she couldn’t see could easily kill her. Science-fantasy flicks might showcase starships fighting at point-blank range, but most engagements took place between starships well out of each other’s visual range. Even starfighter pilots didn’t see their targets with the naked eye, not very often. It was quite possible an enemy shooter was already taking aim at her and ...

Not here, she told herself. And not now.

The thought nagged at her mind as the shuttle altered course and headed towards the black hole – and the angel-ship. Charlotte had expected to see the hole itself, something blacker than black, but instead ... the hole was tiny, she reminded herself, despite its immense gravity field. She thought she saw something – a faint distortion, a faint trick of the light – yet she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it. The gravity field was so massive it was swallowing up light itself, or ...

There’s no way to fight such a race, she thought. A chill ran down her spine. We keep assuming they have to be benevolent, because we pride ourselves on being benevolent, but ... we look like ants to them.

She shivered, helplessly. There had been ants, unwelcome ants, on the estate, when her daughters had been little girls. She’d ordered them exterminated ... and why not? They were just ants. But if the Builders saw humans as ants, and no more important than ants, was there anything wrong in exterminating them? Humanity wasn’t good at living up to its own benevolence. Why should the Builders be any different?

The thought haunted her as she linked into the shuttle’s sensors and watched the angel-ship slowly coming into view. Red icons flared up in front of her, indicating a funnel of gravimetric force ... a whirlpool leading down to the alien vessel. She couldn’t help being reminded of the North Mountain Hatch, a place where gravity was banished to allow ships to move in and out of the sphere, but here ... it was a technological feat without peer. She’d wondered why the aliens would choose to hold station so close to the black hole, yet ... if they could manipulate gravity so precisely, they didn’t need to keep their distance. They could fly right into a black hole if they wished.

And then get crushed, she thought. Unless some of the really far-out speculations are correct and the black hole really has punched a hole in the universe.

She shook her head and watched as the alien ship grew larger. It really did look like an angel, a classical eldritch horror rather than the human-with-wings statues that dominated her church, but there was something about the alien form that was hard to grasp. The live feed from the optical sensors was weirdly hazy, as if the sensors couldn’t quite focus on the alien vessel, while the other sensors kept blatantly contradicting themselves over the slightest details.  One moment, the alien ship’s wingspan stretched thousands of kilometres from the hull; the next, the wingspan was only a few hundred kilometres. She wasn’t sure if the sensors were having problems tracking the wings, being spoofed by alien counter-surveillance technology, or were simply being distorted by the black hole. They were supposed to be safe, but who knew for sure?

If the gravity field collapses, we’re going to plunge right into the black hole, she thought, numbly. Were they already too close to escape? Or could they reverse course and get out before it was too late? One of the boffins had said something about a starship being lulled into a false sense of security, for reasons Charlotte hadn’t been able to follow, and crossing the point of no return well before they realised they were in trouble. This could easily turn into a suicide mission.

Light flared through the porthole. She looked up to see the angel-ship dominating the night sky ... no, interplanetary space. Her naked eyes should not have been able to see the ship, certainly not in so much detail ... she swallowed, hard, at the sudden reminder of just how big and bright the alien ship truly was. White-gold light rippled over the wings, as elegant and powerful as a swan flapping its wings in the water ... she wondered, suddenly, if they should have thought of the alien ship as a swan, rather than an angel. The latter had too many religious connotations, even though the former could be vicious.

A dull tremor ran through the shuttle. “We’re nearing the gap now,” the pilot said. “We’ll be entering in five minutes.”

Charlotte felt her heart start to race as the light grew brighter. Was there a gap there? She couldn’t see anything in the golden light, not even giant feathers composed of raw light and gravity. They were so close and yet so far ... she heard one of her staffers moan in fear and winced inwardly, feeling a twinge of pity. Everything in the shuttle would be recorded for later analysis, from cold and precise commentary to moans, groans and screams. The poor girl would go down in history, and not in a good way. There was no way to erase the recording either. It was already being forwarded to Endeavour.

“There’s no gap,” her other staffer said. “Pull back!”

“The gap is there,” the pilot assured her. “It’s just too small to see with the naked eye.”

Charlotte leaned forward as golden light poured into the cabin. The gap should be dead ahead of them, but ... it was hard to be sure. The sensors couldn’t tell much of anything about the vessel inside the haze, save for glints of detail that were utterly inhuman. It was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture was supposed to look like, or even if you had a complete set. The light grew brighter and brighter ... was that a gap, so tiny to her eye, or was she just imagining it? She couldn’t tell ...

“Prepare for entry,” the pilot said. There was still no gap. The light was everywhere. “Entering ...”

Charlotte cried out as the light stabbed through her eyes and into her brain. The shuttle twisted, as if it was suddenly flying down a roller coaster, the gravity field pulling her out of her chair one moment and shoving her back down the next. She heard someone screaming behind her, the words so garbled she couldn’t make them out, but she couldn’t force her body to move, let alone unbuckle herself and go to their aid. The light was pouring through her body, shimmering through her soul ...

... She found herself looking up at her governess, being scolded for finding the old lady’s purse and dumping the entire contents onto the floor. The woman had never been allowed to lay a finger on her, but her lectures were almost as bad as being slapped. Charlotte had cried as she’d been reprimanded, wondering – again and again – why her mother had left her with the older woman. The old lady had been kind enough, in her way, but she hadn’t been her mother ...

... She found herself playing in the garden with a young boy – a stranger, but no older than she was – who had snuck into the estate on a dare. She had liked playing with him, and getting muddy, yet when the governess had found out the young man had been marched out of the gate and Charlotte had never seen him again. And she’d been scolded for getting her dress dirty, and for playing with a stranger, and ...

... She found herself standing in front of Hanover Towers, trying to pluck up the nerve to pick up her trunk and carry it into the boarding school. Her mother had told her, in no uncertain terms, that all the best people went to Hanover Towers, where they met their peers – and the handful of commoners who’d earned a place amongst them – and built friendships and networks of clients who would be with them for the rest of their lives ... she knew it was true, she really did, but she was only twelve years old and very alone ...

... She found herself getting lectured by a prefect, the older girl waving a slipper threateningly as she berated Charlotte for something minor, something that wouldn’t have mattered at all if the wretched bully hadn’t been looking for an excuse to beat her ...

... She found herself lecturing a younger girl herself, even though she knew what it was like to be under a prefect’s eye ...

... She found herself being lectured by the headmistress, after a dinner and dance party had gone spectacularly wrong, and swallowing her anger and humiliation at the sheer unfairness as the headmistress outlined just how badly she could have screwed up her life ...

...She found herself standing coyly in her father’s study, being introduced to Thomas Hammond ... a young man a few years older than her, but soon to be heir to his father’s title, lands, and fortune. The match had been arranged, of course, and she knew better than to say no ... besides, he was a naval officer who had duties elsewhere, leaving her in charge of the estate and ...

... She found herself lifting her lips for a kiss, during the wedding, and thinking it was so dull ...

... She found herself looking at the files, a few years after she had done her duty and borne Thomas two young daughters, and asking herself if this was all her life would be, if she would spend the rest of her life managing the estate, shepherding her daughters through their early lives and eventually becoming as bitter and twisted as the older women who dominated society and looked down on girls who dared to step outside society’s bounds ... a fate worse than death, for someone like her ...

... She found herself arguing with her husband about his time spent away from home, then seducing a guest in a blind rage, the awareness of just how easily she could be fucked – in all senses of the word – giving the act a thrill that was far beyond anything Thomas had given her ...

... She found herself looking at Mitch, hard-charging Mitch, and thinking she could make something of him, even as she seduced him and ...

... She found herself looking at herself, when she’d been kicked out of the hall, when she’d heard about Mitch’s death, when ...

Charlotte threw back her head and screamed. The memories were all jumbled together ... no, they were being torn out of her mind and scanned and ... for a horrified moment, she thought she was in two places at once. She was in the shuttle, and yet she was also somewhere else ... a memory flickered through her, of being revolted when a distant uncle showed her his collection of butterflies, each one pinned to a card. She’d been sick and started screaming and her governess had had to take her home ... she felt as if she were pinned down, a needle rammed through her chest to hold her firmly in place. Her mind flickered back and forth, torn between the two realities ... she couldn’t tell which one was real, or even if one was more real than the other. She was dimly aware she wasn’t the only one screaming, but ...

... She blacked out.

***

A babble zone, Tobias thought, numbly. He’d experienced one before, on the lone planetoid, and it had nearly killed him. They presented nightmares, images torn from one’s mind and distorted to make it difficult, if not impossible, to get through. We could be dead ...

It was hard, so hard, to think clearly. His life had flashed before his eyes, from his earliest memories to more recent memories, so clear and intense he’d wondered, just for a second, if they were caught in a time loop, fated to repeat the same moments in time again and again. He’d seen everything, from the humiliations his peers had heaped on him to the very first time he’d slept with Marigold, the events rushing through his mind in a manner that brought back all the feelings, as well as the memories. It was like everything had happened again, and again, and again ...

His thoughts veered in circles. He was in the shuttle. He knew it. But he was also somewhere else ... reality itself appeared to be breaking down, as if someone had hacked the piloting simulation and reprogrammed the processor to present an impossible scenario. Or worse ... like he’d entered a VR simulation and then discovered the sim was corrupt, threatening the user with madness or death. He’d heard all sorts of horror stories ... none had made him want to try the sims himself. They were just too dangerous, if the user became addicted.

Marigold screamed. She had always been screaming, part of his mind realised, but he hadn’t been aware of it ... somehow. Panic shot through him. He couldn’t think clearly and neither could she and they were flying straight into the light, into an alien starship that was unlikely to be pleased if he rammed the shuttle into its hull. His fingers twitched helplessly as he tried to reach for the console, to activate the autopilot ... the automatic sensors should have realised the crew were in deep trouble, shouldn’t it? His panic grew worse as he realised what the automatics would do if they realised the crew were suffering. They’d cut the drive and hold position, right in the babble zone! If it was a babble zone ...

His hand felt dead, as if it was no longer his. There was no time for anything fancy – and no way to program it either. He hit the panel hard, throwing the shuttle into reverse long enough – he hoped – to clear the babble zone. It was a risk – there was a very good chance their course had been altered, to the point they might reverse right into the black hole – but what else could he do? If they stayed where they were, they’d go mad.

The shuttle lurched and spun, the gravity field pressing down hard enough to hurt. Alarms went off, screaming ... perhaps the crew were screaming. Still screaming. The shuttle should have been angled away from the alien ship by now, away from the light, but it was burning through the hull and tearing into his brain, memories flickering through his skull as they were ruthlessly scanned. Some of them weren’t his. He lay on his back, looking up at a naked man he vaguely recognised as the man prepared to go inside him ... inside her. It wasn’t him and yet the memory was so intense ...

Mercifully, Tobias blacked out.

Chapter Fifteen: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

Staci hadn’t been sure what to expect when the shuttle entered the gap in the alien drive field.

No one had any idea what to expect, not the away team nor the boffins who’d come up with dozens of scenarios, from the familiar and reassuring to the alien and downright insane. She had dismissed most of the latter, pointing out they had very little raw data to put into their simulations, and forced herself to wait as the shuttle was launched towards the alien ship. It shouldn’t be long, she told herself, before they knew one way or the other. The entire system was watching from a safe distance.

Or what we devoutly hope is a safe distance, she thought, coldly. She had taken part in dozens of simulations and war games – some on computer, some in real life – but they’d all been based on known technologies, save for the ones based on extrapolations of technical development. We know so little ...

The thought haunted her as the live feed updated time and time again, showing a whirlpool of gravitational force surrounding the alien ship. The analysts were insisting it was a welcoming sign – it certainly made it easier to get a shuttle near the black hole without risking disaster – but Staci didn’t like it. Why not open communications and talk? It was possible, she supposed, that the Builders had abandoned radio long ago, as some of the boffins argued, but surely they’d at least know of the possibility. Without radio, was it even possible to develop spacefaring technology? She didn’t know, but she doubted it.

And their fists homed in on radio transmissions, she reminded herself. They must know what to look for ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I’m getting some odd distortions on the datalink.”

Staci felt a tingle of alarm. The shuttle was nearing the gap, showing no sign of slowing down. “What kind of distortions? Jamming?”

“No.” Helen stared down at her console, clearly worried. “It’s like the signal is being ... stretched in some manner. It’s easy to compensate for the distortion, but ... I don’t understand why it’s happening.”

“There’s a black hole down there,” Staci reminded her. If one shot a beam of light into a black hole, it would vanish; if one shot a beam of light so it would pass near a black hole, its course would be slightly altered even if it wasn’t swallowed by the gravity well itself. It stood to reason the laser datalink would be slightly distorted by the gravity well. “If that is affecting the datalink ...”

She frowned as the shuttle vanished into the gap, then seemed to freeze. The live freeze blurred, as if the shuttle was jerking madly in a manner no eye could follow. Staci sucked in her breath, her instincts telling her something had gone wrong, as the shuttle vanished completely, only to come charging out of the golden light a second later, heading straight for the edge of the funnel and the gravity well beyond. Her heart stopped in her throat – the time delay meant that whatever was going to happen had already happened – a second before the shuttle adjusted course so quickly she thought it had been teleported, flying out of the gravity well as if the devil himself was in hot pursuit. The drives cut out as soon as the shuttle was clear, leaving the craft tumbling helplessly through space. Staci had no idea what had happened, but one thing was clear. If the shuttle’s compensators had failed, the entire crew would have been smashed to paste before they knew they were doomed.

“Get an override link into the shuttle’s flight computer,” she snapped, cursing the decision to leave most of the Royal Marines on Dyson Two. They were the experts at Search and Rescue missions. “And assemble a recovery party.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said. There was a long pause. “I can’t access the shuttle’s datacores.”

Staci stood and paced over to his console. “They’re down?”

“They might be,” MacPhee said. “I should be able to set up a link, even if the onboard security firewalls refuse to accept my codes as valid and let me take remote control of the shuttle. But there’s no response at all.”

“I’ve got a shuttle and recovery team on standby, ready to go,” Lieutenant Commander Philip McDougall put in. “Captain?”

“Order them to launch,” Staci said. The team might be walking straight into a tomb. If the compensators had failed ... the shock shouldn’t have smashed the datacores as well as the human crew, but compensator failure was so rare it was impossible to be sure. Whatever had happened down there, it had clearly been disastrous. “And caution them to be careful.”

She returned to her command chair and forced herself to wait, her mind racing frantically. What had happened? The shuttle had entered the gap and then ... what? She brought up the records and replayed them, cursing the distortion under her breath. If the records were taken at face value, the shuttle had literally vanished for at least five seconds, then adjusted course so sharply a starfighter pilot would have quailed. In fact, the latter manoeuvre had been so quick she wondered if the shuttle had been teleported ... impossible, of course. Or was it?

If you eliminate the impossible, then whatever remains – however unlikely – must be the answer, she reminded herself. Sherlock Holmes would have enjoyed exploring the mysteries of alien technology. But how do you know what’s actually impossible?

She wished, suddenly, that she could confer with the admiral. But he was too far away for a proper discussion, or anything. And that meant ...

“Captain, the recovery team is attempting to slow the shuttle’s tumble now,” McDougall reported. “If they can bring her to a relative halt, they can board without problems.”

Staci nodded, impatiently. It wasn’t the first time someone had boarded a derelict ship – she’d done it herself – but few would dare to risk landing on a shuttle that was spinning helplessly out of control, even if there was no reason to think the drive would come back online or the gas jets fire at a bad moment. Normally, she wouldn’t take the risk unless there was a pressing reason ... there was here, wasn’t there? They had to secure the shuttle’s datacores and hope to hell they hadn’t been burned out ...

“Captain, they just got through the hatch,” McDougall said. “The team is alive!”

“Thank God!” Staci had expected the recovery team to find nothing but blood painted over the bulkheads. She’d barely even started to come to terms with the fact her XO, two of her crewmen and three diplomats were almost certainly dead ... they were alive? How? “Get them back to the ship, then through the bio-security screenings as quickly as possible.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci forced herself to wait, again. There was nothing else she could do. She wanted to hurry down to sickbay and watch as the doctor ran the away team through every check in the book, then demand answers from the team, but ... she knew better. She couldn’t speed things up, no matter how much she nagged; all she’d do was slow things down. She watched grimly as the recovery team towed the shuttle back to the ship, engineers already waiting to download the sensor records and check the craft from top to bottom. What had happened? And how the hell had the shuttle survived?

Her terminal bleeped. “All six members of the away team are alive, but unconscious,” Doctor Jim Carnell reported. “They’re unharmed, as far as I can tell, yet ...”

He broke off. “There’s something odd about their brainwaves. Their activity is oddly high.”

Staci frowned. “Are they ... have they been replaced in some way?”

She felt silly even asking the question. The idea of humans being replaced by lookalike aliens was just absurd, although she supposed the virus had been able to turn humans into puppets that had passed for normal long enough to do real damage, before blood-screenings became commonplace. The whole concept struck her as silly, something out of science-fantasy. But she’d thought the same about Dyson Spheres.

“Their DNA checks out, right down the line,” Doctor Carnell said. “I ran every ID test in the book, Captain, and if someone can fake human bodies well enough to pass that level of scrutiny ... well, we’re fucked anyway. No trace of the virus or anything similar, no hint of mental conditioning ... just elevated brain activity. If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea they’d been on a shuttle. There’s no trace of bruising, let alone anything worse. They wet themselves and that was about it.”

Staci frowned. “Can you wake them?”

“I’d prefer to wait for them to wake naturally,” Doctor Carnell told her. “It could be dangerous to hurry them.”

“Then wait,” Staci said. She could order the doctor to try, but ... she’d just have to wait herself. “Keep them under close observation, and completely isolated from the rest of the ship.”

“Aye, Captain,” Doctor Carnell said. “I’ll keep you informed.”

He signed off. Staci gritted her teeth and looked up at the angel-ship, hanging in the distance and waiting ... waiting for what? A surge of sudden hatred ran through her, a surge she didn’t care to look at too closely. What were the aliens doing? Why invite visitors and then ... and then what? What had they done to her crew?

We may never know, she thought. Right now, all we can do is wait.

***

Tobias screamed as golden light burned through him, then jerked awake.

The real world crashed down so hard he almost blacked out again. He was lying on a table, an examination table ... he tried to sit up and discovered it was impossible, that he’d been secured to the table in a manner that made it very hard to move freely. Panic shot through him as he saw figures in the light, humanoid shapes that loomed over him threateningly ... he screamed, again, and struggled against his bonds. They refused to break, leaving him at their mercy ...

“It’s alright, Richard,” a calm voice said. “You’re safe now.”

Tobias felt his head split into two, as if he were in two places at once. The voice was oddly familiar ... Doctor Carnell, he recalled. Endeavour’s chief medical officer. Not much of a bedside manner, Tobias had noted during his last physical, but so much better than the school doctor that there was no real comparison. The light dimmed slightly, letting him see the doctor as he bent over Tobias’s body. Tobias felt a twinge of fear, and embarrassment, even though the doctor’s examination was clinical, completely dispassionate. It felt so wrong ...

“Tobias,” he said. There were times when he cursed his mother for calling him Richard. Richard was shortened to Dick and a dick was ... oh, he’d been lucky very few had ever figured it out. “I’m Tobias.”

The doctor looked pleased. “I’m glad you remembered,” he said. “You’re the first one to recover.”

Tobias felt his heart sink. “Marigold?”

“Still asleep, but otherwise fine,” the doctor assured him. “How much else do you remember?”

“There was a babble zone,” Tobias managed. “Or something like it. I ... I saw my life flashing in front of my eyes, all of it. Every memory, good or bad, and ...”

He swallowed, hard. “I saw other memories too.”

Doctor Carnell eyed him thoughtfully. “Elaborate?”

Tobias flushed. “They weren’t my memories,” he said. “I was a girl ... ah, a young woman, and ... I was about to have sex.”

“Interesting,” the doctor said. “Was it comparable to the other babble zone, the one on the planetoid?”

“I don’t know,” Tobias said. “That one shot nightmares at us. This one read our minds.”

He hesitated. “I think it actually did read our minds. The light was everywhere and ... it came through the bulkhead.”

The doctor studied his terminal. “Interesting,” he said. Tobias couldn’t tell if Doctor Carnell believed him or not. “What did you do?”

“I thought we’d die if we stayed in the zone,” Tobias said. “It was all I could do to get the shuttle out and then ...”

He swallowed. “I was awake and asleep, and ... I felt as if I’d been torn in two. And then ... the next thing I remember is you waking me up.”

“We’ll keep you under observation, for the moment,” Doctor Carnell said, finally. “Can you relax for me?”

“You’ve got me tied to the bed,” Tobias pointed out. “It’s not precisely relaxing. Can you let me go?”

“Not yet,” the doctor said. He kept talking before Tobias could object, “We don’t know what happened to you, and we don’t know what they left behind ... if anything. Right now, we’re keeping you under observation, at least until we are sure it’s safe to let you free.  Sorry.”

Tobias scowled. “Can you at least put me in the same room as Marigold?”

“Not until she wakes, and she agrees to share a room,” the doctor said. “You were screaming when you woke, young man, and there’s no reason to assume she’ll wake up quietly. Just wait, please. We’ll pipe in some music for you if you wish.”

“Thanks,” Tobias said, sourly. “Can I get a movie too, or will I be forced to one-star you on travel websites?”

The doctor laughed, then left the compartment.

Tobias lay back, trying to relax. His head felt fragile, his body hurt ... it didn’t feel quite real. The bulkheads were solid metal, the strongest material known to mankind until they’d encountered the spheres, but he had the strangest sense they were almost translucent, as if something was seeping through the metal and into the real world. His head spun and, for a moment, he felt as though he was somewhere else, yet ... the feeling refused to sharpen and simply faded away until it was gone for good. He tested his bonds, half-convinced they were as insubstantial as a thought, but they refused to break. Of course ... he sighed and forced himself to lie still. The doctor was right. Keeping him and the rest of the team in quarantine was the right thing to do, at least until they were sure there was no threat. And yet ...

Marigold will be fine, he told himself. Won’t she?

Somehow, the thought wasn’t reassuring.

***

Staci had never really liked Endeavour’s sickbay, not least because it was more like a prison than a genuine hospital ward. She had joined the navy when the enemy had been a sentient virus, although the jury was still unsure if the virus had genuinely been sentient, and her ship was designed to boldly travel beyond the rim of explored space ... but it still felt wrong to lock up her people in sealed compartments. She felt vaguely guilty as she walked through the outside corridors, peeking through one-way windows that made it impossible for the occupants to tell they were being watched. There was no privacy ... the naval crewmen, at least, would be used to it, but the civilians would be horrified. Her lips twisted in distaste as she walked into the doctor’s office. The doctor was studying the live feed from the private compartments.

“There’s a lot of interesting little points,” the doctor said, without preamble. “For one thing, they all claim their lives flashed in front of their eyes ... and that they saw images from someone else’s lives. I suspect they saw each other’s memories, although we can’t be sure unless we encourage them to talk about it to each other – and that’s pretty much the last thing they want to do right now. Some of the memories are pretty embarrassing – and private. Another point is that they all report the same sensation, of being in two places at once. Their brain activity actually diminishes, in some ways, when they report the sensation.”

Staci took her seat and leaned forward. “Did the Builders scan their minds?”

“Theoretically, it is possible to read someone’s memories,” Doctor Carnell said. “In practice, it can’t be done. Not yet. We can monitor someone’s brain activity to determine if they’re telling the truth, or at least think so, but beyond that ... no, not so easy. We have tried to link human brains to technology, yet ... it’s never been reliable, and frankly there are some pretty major ethical boundaries we’d have to cross. The Russians went furthest, with their cyborg troops, but their effectiveness in battle was always questionable.”

“This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the builders meddle with minds,” Staci reminded him.

“The babble zone on the planetoid appears to drag up painful memories, not scan them,” Doctor Carnell said. “I have drugs that would force you to relive some of your worst experiences. But I wouldn’t know what they are, unless you told me.”

He shook his head. “As far as I can tell, there’s no threat. They’re not under alien control. But ... there are too many question marks. And ... there’s another issue.”

“Go on,” Staci said.

“The diplomats were given a full, and I mean a full, medical work-up before they boarded the shuttle,” Doctor Carnell said. “There wasn’t time to do the same for the naval personnel, but ... the three diplomats are several hours older than they should be.”

Staci blinked. “What? How can you be sure?”

“They ate before they were given the work-up,” Doctor Carnell told her. “The food should not have passed through their stomach and intestines as quickly as it did. There’s a lot of other minor points, and of course we have no baseline on the naval personnel, but from what I’m seeing I’d say time actually slowed down for them. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“No,” Staci said. “It’s worrying. And what do we do about it?”

“They’re unhurt, as far as we can tell,” Doctor Carnell said. “But in truth ... I don’t know what really happened to them. And I don’t think we ever will.”

Chapter Sixteen: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

“I feel like a boxer who’s been knocked down five times,” Admiral Newton Wayne Dismukes said, “and is now questioning the wisdom of getting up again.”

“There’s no point in giving up when your opponent might still lose,” Admiral He pointed out, as they stood together in the CIC. “Or even concede defeat.”

“There may be case to be made for an immediate retreat from the system,” Commodore Lafarge said. His holographic image flickered as he spoke, his voice stuttering slightly despite the system being designed to compensate for degraded or disrupted signals. Newton wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. The system was supposed to clean up the signal as much as possible, not substitute a garbled transmission with its best guess at the correct words, but he feared the system wasn’t quite up to the task. “Can we?”

Newton snorted. There was no retreat, unless they wanted to blast into interstellar space and hope the drives lasted long enough for them to reach the nearest star. The engineers thought they could keep the core starships online – they had plenty of spare parts, and they could cannibalise some of the starships to keep the others going – but he didn’t want to put their theories to the test. A drive failure in an inhabited system would be bad enough; a failure in interstellar space would be utterly catastrophic. No, they were stuck ... and far too close to the angel-ship. He felt like a mouse, forced to share a cage with a cat. If the beast decided to kill him, there was nowhere to run.

“There’s no way out,” Admiral He said. “Unless we do manage to take control of the sphere ...”

“We could close the hatch,” Commodore Lafarge agreed. “But what’s to stop them opening it again?”

“There’s no control centre on the exterior surface,” Admiral He said. “We might be able to close the hatch and hide inside the sphere, at least long enough to try to take control of the interior systems.”

Newton shook his head. They hadn’t found an exterior control centre, true, but they’d barely surveyed even a tiny fraction of the exterior surface. There could be a hundred control centres buried under the dust, completely hidden from prying eyes. It was possible, he supposed, that the sphere’s hatch had never been designed to open from the outside, but it struck him as unlikely. Starship airlocks were designed to be opened from the outside, even if the intruder would be held – in theory – inside the lock until their credentials could be checked out. No one wanted to leave someone suffocating in space, if their life support failed suddenly, when they could dart into the nearest airlock. The Builders might have the same idea.

If that ship really does belong to the Builders, he thought. For all we know, it belongs to their great enemy.

He sighed, inwardly. The optimists insisted advanced races would outgrow war ... and all the factors that led to conflict. Newton, a pessimist by training and inclination, suspected otherwise. Humanity might have advanced far beyond the technology available to Alexander the Great, but wars had only grown more destructive, held in check only by international agreements and the threat of mutual destruction. The Builders might have enemies ... a race as powerful as themselves, only hostile. They still didn’t know what had shattered Dyson One. It was quite possible the system had been attacked, the attackers beaten off before they could shatter Dyson Two ...

“You’ve all read the report from Endeavour,” he said, quietly. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Commodore Lafarge said. “What it describes is impossible.”

“A word we really should retire,” Admiral He said. He scowled at the display. “If the report is accurate, the Builders scanned the away team’s minds.”

“If,” Newton said. “It could have been just another babble zone, stronger than the last.”

“The report indicated the away team shared each other’s memories,” Admiral He reminded him. “That isn’t something out of a babble zone.”

Newton conceded the point. The babble zones were terrifying, true, but they were also surprisingly understandable. It was quite possible to use subsonics – and a handful of other techniques – to drag up bad memories, even render someone a blubbering mess, unable to continue. The exact technology the Builders used remained a mystery – subsonics shouldn’t have affected men in encounter suits, as well as being easily detectable – but the theory behind it was simple enough. There was no way, as far as he knew, that one victim could see what another was seeing. The nightmares came out of the target’s own mind.

“Furthermore, if the report is accurate, their minds were cloned in some way,” Admiral He added. “They kept insisting they were in two places at once.”

“This is absurd,” Commodore Lafarge said. “Cloning a person is easy, but duplicating their memories ...?”

“We can’t do it,” Newton agreed. A clone of himself, sharing the same DNA, would not be the same person. That had been legally established long ago. How could the clone be him, when they shared nothing beyond genetic code? “But can the Builders?”

Admiral He leaned forward. “There’s no point in arguing over how they did it, or even if they did it,” he said. “We must assume they did, and face up to the implications.”

Commodore Lafarge looked displeased. Newton didn’t blame him. The command and control structure was a mess. Under normal circumstances, Admiral He and his entire crew – every last Chinese spacer and soldier – would be in POW camps now, waiting to be traded or repatriated when the diplomats started sorting out the issues and putting together a treaty everyone could live with. Instead ... there was no way to run the Chinese ships without the Chinese spacers – he simply didn’t have the manpower – and they needed the Chinese troops on the ground to protect the research base. Admiral He might have no power, in theory, but he was inching his way back to being the de facto second-in-command. Newton suspected he’d be in a world of trouble, when they made contact again. The American Government wouldn’t understand the cold realities of his position. He doubted the rest of the MNF’s backers would be any better.

Handling a military emergency looks mighty easy when you’re thousands of light years from the battlefield, he thought. Eisenhower had been the last President of the pre-Crazy Years era to have any substantial military experience, which had given him a sense of practicalities that most of his successors had lacked. He’d been talking about farming, but the principle was much the same. No doubt some armchair admiral will come up with a perfect way to handle the crisis ...all with the advantage of hindsight and far too late to be of any real use.

Admiral He pressed on. “We must assume that everything the away team knew is now also known to the aliens,” he continued. “Lady Charlotte is a diplomat, and an important member of the British Government. The naval officer is a career military officer. The rest ... they may not be important, by our standards, but who knows what they might have picked up along the way?”

“Too many secrets aren’t as secret as we might wish,” Newton agreed. He’d been a flag officer long enough to know junior officers often learnt more than they should, even though most had the sense to keep their mouths firmly closed. Some didn’t, leading to all sorts of problems for their superiors. “And if they know something they shouldn’t ...”

He scowled. He didn’t pretend to understand Lady Charlotte’s relationship with her own government. The briefing notes the State Department had sent him had an odour of CYA, as if whoever had put the notes together had drawn his information from open-source media, not intelligence assets. Lady Charlotte was important, but at the same time her government had sent her hundreds of light years from home. It struck him as oddly contradictory, yet ... she had been a part of the aristocracy, something akin to a Washington socialite. God knew they often heard things they shouldn’t, and sometimes shared them too. Lady Charlotte might know quite a few things her government didn’t want shared.

And a starship XO would know a great deal too, he thought. Captain Templeton would have discussed the MNF’s contingency plans with her XO, as a matter of course. He’d be intimately familiar with the ship itself, as well as the Royal Navy. God alone knows what the juniors picked up, over the years, that have now been plucked out of their brains.

“We have to assume the worst,” Admiral He said, making the point again. “Everything they know is known to the aliens.”

Newton nodded. Everyone talked, eventually. Officers with high security clearances were rarely permitted to travel anywhere they might be captured, no matter how loudly they insisted they wouldn’t be made to talk. A strong-minded man could be ground down through psychological manipulation, drugs, brain stimulation and outright torture, until they couldn’t hide a single detail from their captors. Newton had gone through training to prepare him for interrogation, but his instructors had made it clear there was little hope of hiding anything permanently. Newton feared they were right. The training had been tame, compared to a real interrogation, but it had taken one hell of a toll on his mind.

“It does raise the question of how much is actually useful to them,” Commodore Lafarge added. “They have no reason to fear us, no reason to treat us as equals ...”

“Lady Charlotte crash-landed on the sphere,” Admiral He pointed out. “She was intimately involved with our explorations of the interior, including the lone planetoid and the hatch command centre. The others might have been involved too. Even if they weren’t, they’ll have certainly heard rumours.”

“Right.” Commodore Lafarge’s image flickered, again. “Assuming all of this is true, and I don’t really believe they could clone a living mind in such a manner, what do we do about it?”

Newton hesitated. “I want Lady Charlotte back here, along with her staffers, for a full examination. Endeavour’s crews are trained to handle the unknown, but we have most of the xenospecialists and more ... far out researchers with us. The rest of the crew can be kept under close observation. There’s no reason to think they’ve been conditioned, or replaced, but we should be careful. We have a great deal to lose.”

He paused. “Second” – he nodded at the holographic display, showing the angel-ship holding position over the black hole – “how the hell do we fight that thing?”

Commodore Lafarge’s image flickered again. Newton felt cold. It was impossible, even with modern computer technology, to create a simulation so perfect it could pass for the original person. The fears of a soft coup, with computer-generated voices and images used to hack into and take charge of the nation’s command network, had never been truly realised. An AI image would lack the knowledge, let alone personality, of the person it was trying to impersonate and could be easily exposed by asking the right questions, but ... he couldn’t help wondering. Junior officers rarely asked their seniors intimate questions and they’d be brought up on charges if they did, meaning it might be hard to expose a faked broadcast claiming to be from a senior officer. His wife might smell a rat, or his best friend, if someone tried to impersonate him, but someone who saw him only as a superior officer – a vastly superior officer – wouldn’t notice. Paranoia yammered at the back of his mind. Was he really speaking to Lafarge, or a computer-generated impersonation? What was really going on?

“Our conventional weapons are unlikely to affect the alien ship,” Lafarge said. It was a reasonable point for him to make, but ... an alien impersonation would make the same point too. “We need unconventional weapons.”

Newton’s mind raced. They depended on their sensors to tell them what was happening outside their hulls. It was bad enough when the enemy spoofed them, or simply cloaked their ships, but if they could feed false information into the datanet ... an alien starship could be bringing its guns to bear at point-blank range and they’d never know about it, if the sensors were being manipulated. Or simply turned off ... it was impossible, in theory, for a sensor to go offline without sounding an alert, but who knew if that was true? Given enough computing power, and the ability to scan human minds, the aliens could have the entire fleet dancing to their tune. They might even be able to trigger the self-destruct systems ...

You are panicking over nothing, he told himself, severely. They are not gods. Their technology is not magic.

A tank is not magic, his thoughts answered. But it wouldn’t make it any less unstoppable if it charged the Continental Army.

“We need gravity weapons,” Admiral He said. “And we need to take control of the sphere.”

“The sphere’s gravity beams do not extend outside the sphere,” Commodore Lafarge pointed out, coldly. “The fists have never been observed dropping into the mountain funnel, yet alone flying outside.”

“No,” Admiral He agreed. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t.”

Newton frowned. “There’s another possibility,” he said. “The lone planetoid controls the sphere, as far as we can tell. Logically, there should be a second planetoid orbiting Dyson One.”

“Unless it was destroyed centuries ago, or sucked into the black hole,” Commodore Lafarge said, grimly. “We barely had a chance to begin surveying the debris before all hell broke loose.”

Newton snorted. Anywhere else, a planetoid the size of Earth’s moon would stick out like a sore thumb. Here ... it was just one piece of debris amongst many, a needle in a haystack the size of a star system. And Lafarge was right. They might be looking for something that had been destroyed before humanity had ever mastered fire, or even just a few days ago. It might already be too late.

“We have to try,” he said. “We can also dispatch teams to the command centres – all of them, as well as assisting the locals as much as we can. If we can take control, we might have a chance if they do prove hostile.”

He took a breath. “Commodore Lafarge, take your task force to Dyson One and commence the search for the second planetoid. Keep your distance from the angel-ship, as much as possible, and make sure you leave a couple of pickets watching everything from a safe distance. If the aliens react to your presence, use your own best judgement.”

“Aye, sir,” Lafarge said. “Why did they invite us in, only to toss us out again?”

“A trap,” Admiral He said. “Or they thought we could pass through the danger zone without ill effect.”

“The Tadpoles might not realise a human couldn’t breathe underwater until that human drowned,” Newton said. If they had thought so, they’d learnt better very quickly. Their POW camps had been almost maddeningly simple, yet devastatingly effective. No one could get out without rebreathers, meaning no human could get out at all. There wasn’t even an opportunity to steal enemy rebreathers. The Tadpoles didn’t bother to bring them because they didn’t need them. “Perhaps the Builders thought the same.”

“We could force our way through a babble zone, once we understood what it was,” Admiral He agreed. “But what they did to the shuttle crew was something else.”

“We will figure it out,” Newton said.

He looked from one to the other, feeling the weight of the world crashing down on his shoulders. Being isolated from the rest of the Human Sphere was bad enough, but the angel-ship made it worse. The contingency plans hadn’t covered anything like it. They’d never thought the Builders would simply ignore the human ships, then lure a shuttle crew into a trap ... if it really had been a trap. He was all too aware that alien motivations and reasoning could be unpredictable, but ... he shook his head. They would figure it out.

“Dismissed,” he said. “We’ll speak soon.”

He sat back in his chair as the holographic image flickered and vanished, the brief distortion doing nothing to calm his fears. Admiral He left a moment later, leaving Newton alone with his thoughts. He’d thought some of the early scenarios, drawn up when the human race had encountered aliens for the first time, had been uncomfortably paranoid, but he was starting to think they hadn’t been paranoid enough. A human starship would be careful to make contact with an alien ship, even a primitive vessel, that noticed her presence ... just in case. The non-interference edict was strict, but it did allow for friendly communication if the aliens were already spacefaring. The Builders, on the other hand, were screwing around. What were they doing? If they hoped to keep anyone from noticing their presence, they’d fucked it up spectacularly.

They crushed an entire star, he thought. Did they really think we wouldn’t miss it?

His lips twisted. Perhaps the Builders were indecisive. He’d met a few officers – he had no idea how they’d gotten promoted – who’d been unable to decide what to do, when the shit was hitting the fan. They should have acted to save their ships and crews and yet they'd come very close to losing them ... who knew? Perhaps the Builders couldn’t make up their minds. Or perhaps they were just following their own timetable, rather than his. If they were immortal, effectively speaking, they might think it perfectly reasonable to wait a hundred years before opening communications. Newton couldn’t wait so long.

And anything we do to open contact could easily lead to disaster, he reminded himself. It was hard not to be intimidated by a race that had crushed an entire star. But doing nothing could easily lead to disaster too.

Chapter Seventeen: North Mountain Lower Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

Colin had hoped for a little more organisation, but it seemed he was to be disappointed.

Admiral Dismukes, or whoever had taken command of the fleet, didn’t seem to consider the base camp a priority. Colin supposed it made sense – the rumours of an alien starship’s arrival had been confirmed – but it was still frustrating. The refugees were mutinous, the logging teams were being harassed, and he was uneasily aware the chain of command was a mangled ruin, particularly when troops were dispatched out of visual range. He had liked the idea of being isolated, without orders from above, before he’d had to lead his men into battle without radios, datanet access, and fire support from aircraft, drones and orbital weapons platforms. On one hand, he wasn’t being bombarded by impossible or contradictory orders; on the other, he couldn’t call down supporting fire or beg for reinforcements. His team wasn’t even carrying radios. The risk of accidentally attracting enemy fire was too great.

His eyes swept the team of researchers, wondering if they could be trusted to react calmly to incoming fire. The APC was immune to any local-produced weapons – the worst the locals could do was trap the vehicle in a pit, until it could be dragged out again – but the Chinese had given their allies mortars as well as automatic rifles and ammunition. It wouldn’t be that hard for the locals to devise a trap that could cripple or destroy the APC, let alone the open-topped IFVs escorting it. If that happened, the research team would be fucked.

“When we’re on the move, you do as I say,” Colin ordered. Some researchers had worked under military escort before, others hadn’t had that chance until they’d reached the sphere. He suspected they rather looked down on the military, thinking anyone who volunteered to join the army was a caveman by any other name. It was certainly true, he reflected, that one did one’s National Service in the infantry if you didn’t qualify for anything else, but that didn’t make one stupid. “Stay in the vehicle until I tell you to leave, keep your heads down and make damn sure every last piece of gear you’re carrying has the transmission function disabled. If you send a signal, they’ll blow us up from orbit.”

He reminded himself to make sure everything was checked before they drove out of the camp. There was always some idiot who thought the rules didn’t apply to him or was too ignorant to understand the danger. Colin had spent enough time in the field to know that everything short of a laser beam could be intercepted and tracked ... and, in all honesty, he wasn’t sure the Builders couldn’t track laser beams either. They were normally impossible to detect, unless someone flew right through the beam, but the weather was so wild it was just possible watching eyes would be able to deduce the beam’s existence. Sure, they’d been safe enough during his first visit to the sphere, yet ... who knew?

We need to test it, he thought, as the researchers were ushered into the APC. One young woman loudly insisted it was a tank, somewhat to his amusement. A modern tank could crush the APC into a pancake without even noticing or blow an entire army of APCs away with its secondary armament. But not here and not now.

Sergeant Burris joined him. “The lads are ready, sir,” he said. “They’re looking forward to it.”

Colin’s lips twitched. There’d been no rest for the weary, not since they’d gotten the pallets back to the camp. They had barely had any sleep, in-between patrolling the earthworks and helping the researchers and support staff carry supplies from one end of the camp to the other. It wasn’t clear if the admiral had decided to evacuate the camp or not – they certainly didn’t seem to be making an effort to get the funicular up and running – but they had to assume they were on the surface to stay. If that changed ... he gritted his teeth. The refugees couldn’t take care of themselves, and they certainly couldn’t use the offworld tech to feed themselves. Leaving them behind would mean condemning them to certain death.

“Good,” he said. “Any reports from the field?”

“Nothing new, sir,” Burris said. “Meaningless, of course.”

“Of course,” Colin echoed. It was the sergeant’s job to remind him, to make sure he remembered ... not that he’d forget. The foliage was impassable, until it wasn’t. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled.”

“And the researchers in their vehicle,” Burris said. “They should be safe enough as long as the hatches stay battened down.”

And if the enemy do manage to put together an improvised IED, that APC will turn into a death trap, Colin thought. He’d seen men roasted to death, and it was one of the worst ways to go. We could get there quicker if we walked, but the researchers would be hellishly exposed.

He nodded, curtly, as Midshipwoman Wallace hurried up to him. “The research gear is all isolated from the net,” she reported, “and I’ve disabled the transmitter functions on all pieces of kit. A couple of researchers complained loudly, sir, but I ignored them.”

They probably have porn on their terminals, Colin thought. It wasn’t technically illegal, but it was against naval regulations – if they were enforced on the civilians – and also distasteful. One of Colin’s better tutors had caught the gang browsing porn and, instead of sending them to the headmaster, pointed out just how much damage it could do to their reputations if their tastes became known. Sure, you might be watching step-sibling porn because you knew the actors weren’t actually related, but no one would see it that way. Right now, it isn’t a problem as long as they’re not sharing it with anyone.

He ground his teeth as he made his way to the lead IFV and scrambled into the cab, his men taking up firing positions to the rear. There were plenty of jammers that could prevent a radio signal from getting out, but most would draw fire from the alien defences themselves. They couldn’t rely on passive systems either, not when they made it impossible to move the gear without risking detection. If one idiot had concealed his transmitter from the inspection ... he wouldn’t live long enough to be arrested and charged. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Colin thought, if he wouldn’t take the rest of the convoy with him.

“Let’s move,” he ordered.

The IFV roared into life, grumbling past the earthworks and into the open fields. The loggers were working with terrifying speed, cutting down trees and turning them into log cabins and barracks, but they’d barely made a dent. The original landing parties had created a small road leading straight to the alien command centre, much to the alarm of the locals, but that road was now a sea of mud. Colin suspected they should have brought hovercraft, if not actual boats. A ship that wouldn’t have impressed his distant ancestors, who’d fought Adolf Hitler, would have awed the locals without risking detection. Modern hovercraft were too dangerous – they might have drawn fire from orbit - but a primitive design ...

He cursed under his breath as they kept moving. The infantry vehicles were supposed to be all-terrain, up to and including converting into small boats for crossing rivers, but there were limits. He would have sold his soul for a modern speedboat, or the fast river boats they’d used to land assault forces behind enemy lines, or even a working helicopter. That was completely out of the question, of course. The alien defences ignored ground-based vehicles, perhaps on the assumption they could have been designed and built by the locals, but aircraft were doomed unless they stayed dangerously low. It wasn’t worth the risk.

The landscape changed as the vehicle rocked again. He couldn’t help thinking of the rice paddies of the Far East, patches of green land surrounded by pools of dark water ... some so shallow the rice could be harvested easily, some dangerously deceptive, seeming as shallow as the others until you stepped into them and found yourself plunging into dark water, swimming desperately to save your life. The patches of ground weren’t much better, he recalled from war games and exercises; they impeded modern soldiers, with all their equipment, while giving easy passage to enemy fighters who carried nothing but their guns. The only good thing about the ruined landscape was that it would be difficult – if not impossible – to place an IED in their path. There were just too many possible routes for them to follow.

“Jesus,” the driver muttered.

Colin followed his eyes. There were bodies floating in the water, slowly coming apart as hundreds of tiny fish stripped the meat from their bones. He’d seen some sickening sights in his day, but this ... he swallowed hard, trying not to look too closely at a body that had been savaged so badly it was impossible to tell if it had been male or female. A hunting party, caught in the storms, or refugees slaughtered by their peers and left to rot? There was no way to deny the fact the sphere’s civilisation had been changed, ruthlessly altered by the weather ... and, he had to admit, contact with offworlders. God alone knew how far word had already spread. It was hard to believe anyone living on the other side knew about the offworlders, but how could they be sure?

We made contact last year, he reminded himself. Assuming word travelled at the speed of sound, how far could it have travelled by now?

He dismissed the thought as the landscape rose slightly, rivers of water draining into the pools and hopefully down to the seas. Fragments of earth travelled within the water, further damaging the biosphere ... he wished, suddenly, that he’d paid more attention in class. If the earth was washed into the seas, what did it mean for the biosphere? There’d been a whole panic about Britain melting into the Atlantic, a century or so ago, but it struck him as absurd beyond words. Britain was a big country. The idea of it just dissolving into the sea ...

“We need some defoliant,” the driver said, as they pushed their way onwards. Fallen trees littered the ground, some so deeply entrenched it wasn’t easy to force them to one side. The survivors looked tough, too tough to be shifted by a team of modern loggers. “Or a flamethrower.”

“We don’t know how the defences will react to that,” Colin reminded him. The locals had fire, and he assumed the sphere had had its fair share of natural firestorms, but flamethrowers were well beyond them. “It could be the last thing we ever did.”

He broke off as they pushed their way into the clearing, the rain stopping dead ... he looked up and stared in absolute disbelief. The rain was splattering off an invisible barrier, running down above him ... his sense of perspective, always tested on the sphere, shifted again as he struggled to accept what he was seeing. It was almost as if they were underwater, staring up at the surface ... he’d known the Builders were advanced, of course, but a working force field? It was the Holy Grail of starship engineers!

“Park us near the centre,” he said. The alien structure was as enigmatic as ever. His eyes had trouble making out the exact details, as always. They’d tried to take images with optical sensors and primitive cameras, but none of the photographs had captured the true majesty of the building. They looked like tawdry fakes, a child’s impression of paintings produced by the greatest artist of the age. “And watch for trouble.”

He jumped outside, rifle at the ready. The ground was dry, surprisingly so. The air felt weirdly warm. He looked around as the rest of the team disembarked, spreading out as they’d planned. There was no opposition, no locals watching from a safe distance. Colin wasn’t surprised - the locals normally gave the alien centres a wide berth, although no two locals agreed as to why– but he’d been careful not to take that for granted. The taboo, whatever hid behind it, might not hold if all hell was breaking loose. Colin could hardly blame anyone for finding shelter wherever they could.

“No sign of any intruders,” Burris reported. “The gear left behind when we abandoned the base is still in place.”

Colin nodded. The Chinese had ordered the original research teams back to the base camp, and left behind their supplies, but there’d been no reason to think it would be stolen or lost beneath the mud. The earthquakes, on the other hand, might have caused very real damage to fragile pieces of technology. He looked up at the alien structure and shook his head. It was hard to tell how big it actually was, and their portable sensors couldn’t agree on a figure, but it was larger than anything the human settlers had built. And yet, it had survived earthquakes that had knocked down human villages like ninepins. Colin was ruefully impressed – and worried. If the Builders had prepared for earthquakes, did that mean they’d considered the possibility of something striking the sphere ...and accepted it?

It wasn’t a reassuring thought. Humanity had known of the threat of asteroid impacts for decades and yet ... it had taken surprisingly long to put together any sort of asteroid defence system. The concept had seemed remote, despite the scars left behind by previous impacts ... including one that might have wiped out the dinosaurs. Or at least contributed to their extinction. Colin vaguely recalled hearing it hadn’t been as cut and dried as ‘rocks fell, everyone died’ – but he hadn’t paid much attention to those lessons either. If an asteroid had approached Earth in the modern world, the Royal Navy would’ve used it for target practice.

Or someone else would, he thought. The arguments over who got to shoot it would last longer than the asteroid itself.

He put the thought out of his head as he rapped on the APC hatch to tell the crew to open up. There was a pause – if the crew knew their jobs, they’d be making damn sure he wasn’t an enemy fighter – and then the hatch opened, a ladder falling to the ground to allow the passengers to disembark. Colin hid his amusement as they stumbled into the light, looking rather seasick. It couldn’t have been a pleasant journey for them, not inside the armoured vehicle. The seats were uncomfortable, the compensators non-functional and the view non-existent. They would have rattled back and forth for hours, unsure what was happening outside the armoured walls ... he wondered, wryly, if they’d thought the APC had turned itself into a boat. They wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.

“Stay under the umbrella, at least until we get the tents set up,” he said. “And don’t wander away from the centre.”

The researchers barely heard him. They were too busy staring up at the forcefield. Colin knew it was impossible, at least with human technology, but the researchers knew just how impossible it was ... they could probably appreciate the power the aliens casually displayed far more than himself. He hoped they weren’t too intimidated. Tanks had been intimidating as hell, when they’d first appeared on the battlefield, but it hadn’t taken too long for the defenders to come up with antitank weapons. There had been times, throughout the Age of Unrest, where the tank had seemed to be an outdated weapon, only to prove its usefulness again and again. They’d even fought the Tadpoles in the war’s handful of ground engagements ...

“That’s pretty impressive,” an older woman said. Colin couldn’t recall her name. “Can we get a drone up there?”

“No,” Colin said, flatly. A balloon might work, but he’d want to test it somewhere several hundred miles away ... just to be sure. It would be perfectly safe if it was the drive field that attracted attention, and death, but what if it wasn’t? “If they see us, we’re dead.”

“Why?” The woman sounded peevish, her tone accusing even though it could not possibly be his fault. “Why would they fire on us?”

“They don’t want the locals developing the tech to get into orbit,” Colin said. It felt a little like overkill to him – the locals didn’t have the metals they needed to forge swords and shields, let alone railway engines, aircraft, and starships – but there was no way to pretend it wasn't true. “They fire on anything that looks like modern technology.”

The woman looked unconvinced. “Even firing on their own command centre?”

Colin shrugged. The Americans had been tricked, once, into bombing their own troops. The post-engagement inquest had been scathing, pointing out that the drone operators had been overconfident and hadn’t bothered to verify what they were being told before it was too late. An automatic system might make the same mistake, which was why there were no human systems designed to open fire without a human being in the loop ... the Builders, on the other hand, had complete faith in their systems. They might assume the weapons platforms could be trusted not to fire on the command centre, or they might think the centre would survive whatever the platforms threw at it.

“We’re not going to test it,” he said, firmly. “If you have a problem with that, direct your complaints to the admiral.”

The researcher nodded and stomped off. Colin hoped she wouldn’t do anything stupid. All it would take was one idiot making a dreadful mistake ...

We told them time and time again about the dangers, he reminded himself. He knew young officers who’d been told about snipers but hadn’t believed they could be killed by a gunner lurking over two kilometres away until they’d been shot ... thankfully, with training lasers rather than real bullets. But if they don’t believe us, what can we do?

Chapter Eighteen: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

“And you’re sure you’re fit to return to duty?”

Staci studied Commander Jenner thoughtfully. He was a good officer, and they’d made a good team after a rather shaky start, but it was impossible to tell if he really was fit to return to duty. If an officer had been held prisoner by an alien race, he would have been benched until he’d passed a number of checks intended to determine if he was mentally stable and there had been no attempt to turn him into a spy or assassin. Here ... she was torn between accepting his word along with the doctor’s admission he couldn’t find any red flags, and her fear that the aliens might have something up their sleeves. She would almost have been happier if he’d been held prisoner by a human group. She would have had a rough idea, if nothing else, of what they could have done.

“Yes, Captain,” Jenner said. “I can’t stay in sickbay doing nothing.”

“It can be maddening,” Staci agreed. Sickbay was hardly a prison – patients had books, games and flicks – but Jenner was the ship’s XO. He could hardly abide doing nothing when the MNF was trying to survive in a hostile universe, not when there was nothing obviously wrong with him. Staci knew officers who’d tried to report for duty with broken legs ... they, at least, had been easy to refuse. “I read your report very carefully, including the embarrassing details.”

Jenner flushed. He’d been a naval brat himself, like Staci, and privacy was a foreign concept to anyone who’d been a junior middy sharing a wardroom, but there were limits. The interior of his head should have been his own private kingdom, not ... not have the contents extracted by alien tech, and some of his memories shown to the rest of the away team. Staci had cringed with second-hand embarrassment when she’d read the report, torn between relief and guilt she hadn’t led the mission herself. Jenner had made no bones about it. Poor Pilot Gurnard had seen far too much of his superior officer, in a very intimate way.

I’d court-martial any officer who exposed himself to a junior in such a way, Staci thought, coldly. The asshole would never serve on a ship again, if she had anything to say about it. But Mike can hardly be blamed for having his memory extracted and shown to his subordinate.

“I can’t swear they didn’t do anything else to me,” Jenner said. “I’d say that if they did. But ... I believe myself to be fit for duty.”

Staci winced, inwardly. “The admiral has ordered me to dispatch Lady Charlotte and her staffers to Dyson Two. I’m intending to send them with our two pilots – I don’t think we’ll need them here, we have others – and technically I should probably send you too. But ... you can stay, as long as the doctor keeps you under observation at all times.”

“I understand,” Jenner said. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Thank me afterwards,” Staci said. Jenner swore blind he hadn’t been conditioned, but everyone who had ever been conditioned, since the technique had been worked out and perfected, had said exactly the same thing. They’d believed it too, of course. There was no point in rewiring someone’s brain to turn them into a menace to civilisation if they couldn’t pass a basic lie detector test. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.”

She cursed under her breath. If they’d been in contact with Earth, the decision would have been easy. Jenner and the rest of the team would have been sent for evaluation, while she could have promoted the next in line or waited for the Admiralty to assign her a replacement XO. Probably the latter, she suspected. A temporary replacement could be relieved, if Jenner was cleared to return, something that could be politically harder if she’d promoted someone else. Here, there were no replacements and her tactical officer wasn’t ready for the job. She’d scanned the fleet lists, in hopes of finding someone who could take the position without too much retraining, but there wasn’t anyone up to the task who could be spared.

And if they did something to him, letting him walk free might give us an insight into what they did, she thought. The risk is worth the danger.

“Don’t do anything to alarm us,” she said. “Go say goodbye to the away team, then report for your shift.”

She watched him go, then ran her eye down the reports from sickbay. No apparent physical injuries. Some elevated brain activity, now normal ... if there hadn’t been a slight disparity between the shuttle crew and the personnel who’d remained behind, suggesting the flight had been longer for the shuttle than the watching starship, she wouldn’t have known anything had changed. The whole thing was just ... strange. What could make time slow down? Or ... what had the aliens hoped to achieve? She just didn’t know.

The admiral’s message glowed in front of her. The exterior fleet was coming to help search for the second planetoid, if it existed. Staci could follow the admiral’s logic, but she doubted the search would succeed in a hurry. The planetoid was just too small, a statement that would have been thoroughly absurd anywhere else, and dark enough to pass unnoticed unless they got very lucky. And they’d never be able to be sure if the planetoid was truly gone.  One couldn’t prove a negative.

And the angel-ship is just sitting there, Staci thought. What is it doing?

She frowned. She’d read a book, a very old book, in which the alien visitors had ignored the human race until the human race, tired of being ignored, had opened fire ... at which point the aliens had simply turned off the power. To them, it had been nothing more than a spanking; to the humans, it had been utterly disastrous. Modern society – or what had passed for it, back then – could not survive without power. Starvation and anarchy had swept the globe, claiming the lives of millions and leaving the rest in helpless poverty. And then the aliens had just up and left, leaving a stunned and broken world behind ...

We can’t afford to leave it alone and we can’t afford to offend it either, she told herself. What do we do?

Her intercom bleeped. “Captain, the shuttle is ready to depart.”

Staci scowled. It felt wrong to send two of her crew – and three diplomats – away from her ship, even though she understood the admiral’s logic. Endeavour’s sickbay was designed for unprecedented alien threats – there was no way to know what they might encounter beyond the rim - but she didn’t have any xeno-doc or specialist medical personnel. It was quite possible the doctors had missed something, no matter how carefully they’d examined the team. The reports were extensive, but ...

“Inform them they are clear to depart,” she ordered. Sending them to the admiral was another calculated risk, but ... it was worth it. She hoped. “I’m on my way.”

She closed the terminal, finished her coffee, and made her way onto the bridge. The shuttle was already on its way, heading back into interplanetary space; the tactical sensors were tracking the craft, ready to bring weapons online at the slightest hint the shuttle intended to reverse course and ram the mothership. Staci didn’t think it would happen, but it was better to be sure. If they had been conditioned ...

Her eyes drifted to the angel-ship, its wings spread wide. Anyone who can build a ship like that doesn’t need to fuck around. They could rip us to shreds in an instant.

“Captain,” Helen said. “They’re repeating the gravity pulses.”

Staci shook her head. Another invitation? Another trap? She didn’t know. She couldn’t send anyone into the lion’s den, not after what had happened the first time. Perhaps they could send someone alone ... the researchers thought the shuttle might have been trapped in a babble zone and could have escaped by driving forwards, but no one knew for sure. Staci had a nasty feeling they were wrong. There was no way in hell a babble zone, or something like it, could serve as a welcome mat. It would be like inviting someone into your home and shooting them the moment they stepped onto the garden path.

“Hold position,” she said. She’d noted there were quite a few volunteers for a second away team, somewhat to her surprise, but she had no intention of risking anyone. “We’ll wait.”

The angel-ship’s wings spread wider, beating the air ... beating the fabric of space itself. Staci could almost believe there was air – the wings rippled as if they were passing through an atmosphere, rather than a vacuum – although she knew better. Someone had devised a plan for a habitat that was nothing more than a bubble of air, but there was no way it could become reality ... not unless technology advanced a great deal further. The Builders could shape gravity fields at will – Dyson Two did not have a natural gravity field – and perhaps they could get it to work, if they had faith their tech wouldn’t fail. They did seem to be very confident, she reflected. Their tech was still working after untold thousands of years.

And yet one of the spheres shattered, she reminded herself. They’re not gods.

A dull rumble echoed through the ship. “Report!”

“A gravity wave, coming from the angel,” Helen snapped. The ship rocked again, the gravity field quivering oddly. “They’re powering up their drives and ...”

A third shiver ran through the ship. “Red alert,” Staci ordered, sharply. The crew had battened down the hatches as much as possible, an expression that had once seemed absurd on a spacefaring starship, and secured everything else. They knew to strap themselves down if the ship started shaking again. “Helm, bring up the main drives.”

“Aye, Captain,” Atkinson said. “We might be able to match our drive field to surf their waves ...”

Staci nodded, curtly. “See to it,” she ordered. Common sense told her to put some distance between herself and the alien ship, but was that even possible? The last set of gravity waves had swept right across the system. “Communications, signal Commodore Lafarge. Inform him of our situation, and advise him to stay well clear until the gravity waves settle down.”

If they ever do, her thoughts added. The first gravity wave would strike the commodore’s ships well before they received his message. He’d know something was changing. But what can he do, other than reverse course and run?

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said.

“The gravity waves are intensifying,” Helen said. “They’re actually moving in tune with the wings ... I think we can predict them ...”

The ship shuddered, again. Staci gritted her teeth. There was no real damage, not yet, but the battering would take one hell of a toll on her crew. “What are they doing?”

“I don’t know,” Helen said. “My close-range sensor readings are going nuts!”

Staci keyed her console. Helen was right. One sensor was insisting there were several light minutes between Endeavour’s position and the drones on the other side of the black hole, another insisted it was actually several light hours and a third was claiming the drones had vanished, if in fact they’d ever existed at all. The gravimetric sensors were having real problems trying to get a read on what was happening, as gravity waves spun around the angel-ship and the black hole. Staci wondered, suddenly, if the black hole was actually part of the alien ship. There was a theoretical drive system that involved generating an artificial black hole, positioning it at the prow of the alien ship and using it to pull the starship along, like a donkey chasing a carrot held just in front of the poor beast’s nose. Were the Builders doing something like that, perhaps using a black hole to punch through the very fabric of space itself, or ... or what?

Endeavour shook again, harder. “Damage reports, decks twelve and thirteen,” Jenner snapped. “We lost two drive nodes.”

Staci cursed. Damage control teams were already on their way, but replacing drive nodes was a difficult task even when the ship wasn’t being hammered by the fists of angry gods. The gravity waves would make it worse, much worse ...

“Helm, pull us back,” she ordered. If they could get clear of the alien ship, the gravity waves might slacken ... might. The debris field was already shaking, chunks of dead sphere falling out of orbit, trajectories wobbling back and forth as if they were being randomly tugged in all directions. She wondered, suddenly, if they were. The shattered sphere might be reflecting gravity waves ... “Get us clear ...”

The ship rocked, violently. Again. “Captain, our drive field is destabilising,” Atkinson snapped, as alarms howled. “We’re losing it!”

“Three more drive nodes gone, two badly damaged,” Jenner added. The gravity field rippled, growing stronger and then weaker before returning to normal. “The gravity generator is being disrupted too.”

The ship shifted again, the deck suddenly unsteady under Staci’s feet. Her mind raced. They were far too close to the alien ship, and a black hole, and if they were on the verge of losing their drive field completely ... she cursed under her breath, unsure what to do. If she lost the rest of her drive nodes, they’d be reduced to a helpless wreck; if she powered them down, there was a very good chance she’d be thrown into a piece of debris or sucked into a black hole. There was no way to determine what would happen, but ...

“Divert all non-essential power to drive nodes,” she ordered, grimly. They’d lost five nodes ... but they should be able to maintain a stable drive field with the remaining nodes. The survey ship was over-engineered even by military standards. The designers had insisted she could handle anything. Staci was starting to suspect their imaginations were more limited than she’d thought. “Helm, angle the fields to send us ballistic if we lose the drive.”

“Aye, Captain,” Atkinson said. A low whine echoed through the hull, the internal display flickering with red icons. Some would be false positives, but others would be all too real. “The field ...”

Endeavour’s hull rang like a bell. Staci thought, for a horrible moment, that she’d actually hit a piece of debris, before she realised any impact would have been instantly fatal. The gravity field flickered and died; she silently blessed the designers who’d installed seat belts, as absurd as they’d seemed the day she’d first sat at a bridge console. The last thing she needed, right now, was her crew floating into the air. The damage control efforts were going to be slowed, if not stopped completely ... her crew knew how to handle themselves in zero-gravity, but it wouldn’t be easy to get to the nodes and swap them for replacements. She cursed under her breath. If they had to abandon ship, it was going to be impossible to get everyone out before they ran out of time ...

“Captain,” Atkinson said. “The drive field is gone and ...”

He broke off. Staci stared at the display. They were falling towards the angel-ship, plummeting into a gravity well ... or the ship was heading towards them. It was impossible to be sure. The sensors were completely compromised ... she thought, numbly, that the sensors being too damaged to produce useful data would be preferable to the data being accurate. Strange ripples ran through the air, the gravity field twisting oddly; a shiver ran down her spine, as if someone had touched her without permission, only to vanish again before she could react. She feared the gravity generator had been knocked out of kilter, and the gravity field was no longer pulling them down, but ... no, that couldn’t be true. Or ...

“Captain, I can’t alter course,” Atkinson said.

“Impact in seventeen seconds,” Helen added. “Captain ...”

“Dump our sensor records to the admiral,” Staci ordered. There was no way to escape disaster, nor could they keep the Builders from considering the impending collision a hostile act. Ships didn’t ram each other by accident. No spacer, no matter how inept, could do that. They were going to collide ... she thought, briefly, about opening fire, but it wouldn’t be enough to clear the way even if the alien ship had been no more advanced than her own.  The black hole was behind it, under it ... Endeavour was doomed. There wasn’t even time to abandon ship! The gravity well had them firmly in its clutches. She eyed the giant glowing wings and felt a twinge of guilt, mingled with regret, that she’d never meet the minds behind such a wonderful ship, even if they’d put her vessel in fatal peril. The golden light grew brighter ...

... Everything stopped.

Staci blinked. The fall had just ... stopped. They were close to the alien ship, too close, but ... they were holding position in a patch of gravity-free space. It was impossible and yet it had happened ... golden light inched towards them, tendrils of energy that managed to seem both welcoming and threatening. She couldn’t speak. Time itself seemed to be slowing down ...

“Captain,” Helen said. Her voice was dead and cold, as if she’d gone well beyond panic and into a state of pure numbness.  They’d known they were dead ... were the aliens playing with their food? Or was something else happening? “I’m picking up a gravity surge ...”

The world twisted. Staci felt as if someone had kicked her in the head, the pain so great she was sure her head was about to shatter like Dyson One ...

... And then the world went away in a haze of pain and darkness.

Chapter Nineteen: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System

“I think we’ve got a problem,” Marigold stated, “and ...”

Tobias took one look at the sensors and swore. “Brace for impact!  All hands ...”

The shuttle shuddered violently. The hull screamed in protest. Tobias swore again as the display lit up with red icons, so many the entire shuttle appeared to be breaking apart at the seams. He’d heard stories from the war in which engineers had joked it would be easier to list all the sections that weren’t damaged, or the components that hadn’t been disabled or destroyed, but he’d never thought they were serious. Now ... for a horrified moment, he was sure they were going to be ejected into space. The entire shuttle was spinning. The drive field was gone.

“Hold on,” he shouted, trying to reboot the system. They had been clearing the debris field when all hell broke loose, but there’d been enough chunks of debris floating near them that it was quite possible they’d collide with one ... or one would be picked up by the gravity wave and hurled right at them. The stars outside the canopy were spinning madly, so rapidly they were starting to blur into starlines right out of a science-fantasy flick. “Get your masks ...”

The shuttle rocked a second time. Tobias cursed once again, torn between ordering an emergency bail-out and remaining where he was. Normally, bailing out would be perfectly safe – and perhaps safer than staying in a shuttle spinning out of control – but now it would be like orbital jumping right into the middle of a hurricane. There were easier ways to commit suicide, if he felt so inclined. The display blanked and rebooted, half the red icons blinking out a second later. Tobias glanced once, then mentally shook his head. The remainder of the damage was quite bad enough. Normally, Marigold would be trying to fix the damaged sections, if it was possible, but she couldn’t leave her seat when the gravity field was flickering like mad. If the compensators failed, they were dead.

His head spun. For a moment, he was in two places at once ... again. He was in the shuttle, fighting for control, and he was also looking down at himself from a safe distance ... a distance that was both near and far. He was suddenly very aware of the shuttle, and of the pieces of debris nearby ... some moving out of orbit, after being hammered by the gravity waves. They didn’t seem threatening ... the second self vanished, his mentality falling back into his own body so hard he almost fainted. It felt as if he’d woken up from a nightmare, only to discover the real world was worse. The gravity field grew stronger, then weaker, then failed altogether. He heard someone throw up a second later and grimaced. Vomit was bad enough when the gravity was online, but in zero-gravity the liquid was going to get everywhere. On paper, the shuttle’s systems shouldn’t be badly affected, even if the cabin and passenger compartments stank; in practice, the shuttle was so heavily damaged already he couldn’t swear to it. He wasn’t about to ask Marigold to grab a vacuum and deal with it either. If the shuttle was hit again, without warning, she’d be smashed right into the bulkheads.

Another shudder ran through the shuttle. Tobias threw caution to the winds and flash-woke the drive nodes, even though he was unsure if they were in any condition to come back online. The shuttle’s gas jets were still online – the tech was very basic, older than space travel – but they were only intended for minor course alterations, not propelling the shuttle from one binary star to the other. If the drive field didn’t come back online, they were fucked. The gravity shimmered, compensators whining in protest, as a handful of nodes came to life. The red warnings were terrifying. Under normal circumstances, the shuttle would probably be scrapped. It would be cheaper, and perhaps more efficient, to build a new shuttle from scratch. Here ...

“Get me a lock on Endeavour,” he snapped. There was no hope of reaching any other ship in a hurry, not without half the drive nodes. He had no idea how long the life support would hold out. The system was designed to be very tough, but none of the designers had ever envisaged gravity waves powerful enough to knock planets out of orbit. He wasn’t sure if the ship would be any safer, yet ... she had enough redundancy built into her hull to have a better chance at survival. “Get me ...”

Marigold gasped. “I ... fuck!”

Tobias blinked – Marigold rarely swore – and stared at the display. Endeavour was falling, tumbling helplessly as she plunged towards the angel-ship ... for a moment, his mind flatly refused to accept what he was seeing. Starships didn’t fall like that, not even if someone deliberately flew them into planets. Horror washed through him a second later ... it might be an image on a display, but the image represented something real. Captain Templeton and her crew were falling to their deaths, caught in a gravity well they clearly couldn’t escape. He hadn’t spent that much time with the crew, but he knew and liked many of his fellow spacers and now ... and now they were going to die. He was going to watch them die, unable to do anything to help. Even if the shuttle hadn’t been damaged, there was no way he could fly her into the gravity maelstrom without being torn to bits.

“Shit,” he breathed. The starship was falling faster ... part of his mind calculated just how strong the gravity pull had to be, another part wondered if the crew were already dead. The compensators weren’t designed to protect the crew against something so powerful ... if they’d survived the gravity waves. He wanted to look away, to avoid bearing witness to their deaths, and yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the display. “I ...”

Endeavour stopped, bare metres from the glowing alien wings. Tobias stared in disbelief. It couldn’t be real. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could just stop a falling ship. Destroy it, easily, but stop it as if someone had hit the brakes ...? It wasn’t possible ... he wondered if the gravity well was strong enough to slow time, or to give the impression Endeavour was still intact long after she’d been smashed to atoms, then sucked in his breath as golden light enveloped the ship. He couldn’t help thinking of a fisherman hauling in his catch ... he shuddered. He’d never liked the idea of fishing, even when fishermen caught fish .... They were animals, he reflected, but the Builders might see humans as animals. Or ...

“Did they save the ship out of concern for the crew, or even to protect themselves,” Marigold breathed, “or ...”

The display went white, then blanked. The gravity wave hit the shuttle a second later, the entire hull vibrating for a long chilling feeling before the sensation stopped so abruptly he couldn’t help wondering if someone had hit a switch. The display rebooted frantically, displaying the black hole and ...

Nothing. The angel-ship was gone.

“Endeavour!” Marigold sounded shocked. She’d admired Captain Templeton ... and she’d always had more friends on the vessel than he had. “What happened?”

Tobias stared at the display, unable to put his feelings into words. Local space looked normal. There were no more warped and twisted gravity fields, no sense they might be hit with another gravity wave at any moment ... and no Endeavour.  His sensors blinked alerts – a lot of debris had been knocked out of orbit, some spiralling into the black hole and others flying into interstellar space – but there was still no sign of the mothership. He took a breath, then brought all the active sensors online, sweeping space in a manner that could easily get them killed if a hostile starship was watching and waiting for them to show themselves. The display updated rapidly, more and more chunks of debris appearing in front of them, but ... there was no sign of Endeavour. She was gone.

The air shifted. The stench of vomit wafted towards them.

“I need to get as much of our systems back online as possible,” he said. “Can you deal with ... that?”

“I hate you,” Marigold said, without heat. “Just you wait until I’m prime pilot.”

Tobias snorted. He would almost have preferred to clear up the mess himself, even though it was disgusting. It would have been a nicely menial task, something to keep him from thinking ... he’d read stories of the first lunar settlements, when a stranded crew had drunk themselves senseless ... there’d been a medical rationale, from what he recalled, yet he rather suspected it had been more to keep their minds off their situation than anything else. He didn’t drink, but still ... he shook his head as he tried to get a datalink to the approaching ships, then plough through the sensor records. The ships hadn’t been that close, had they? The shuttle had been a great deal closer and she’d survived, if barely. But what if they were wrong ...?

He didn’t look around to see who’d been sick, or the condition of the rest of their passengers, as he bent his head over the console. Most of the drive nodes were effectively useless, although they should be able to get out of the debris field with what they had left ... unless the internal sensors were worse off than he’d thought, to the point they were insisting the nodes were in working order when they were actually burnt-out pieces of scrap. He told himself the sensors would either work or not, that if they were damaged beyond repair there wouldn’t be any readings at all, but it was hard to be sure. He felt like a doctor staring at someone who’d been shot in the heart, trying to figure out why there were no entry or exit wounds. It just made no sense. He ran a pair of repair cycles, uneasily aware they wouldn’t be able to fix more than very minor problems. The shuttle really needed a full overhaul if she wasn’t going to be scrapped.

“Let me know when you’re done,” he said, “and I’ll try to get the gravity field back up and running.”

His stomach clenched at the thought. He’d done zero-gravity exercises – all spacers had to know the basics and prove they didn’t suffer space-sickness – but it had been a long time since he’d been in zero-gee. The last time had been in a zero-gee hotel ... it was funny, part of his mind noted, how the concept of zero-gee sex had seemed more reasonable before he’d tried it. The rest of his mind tried to focus on the sensor records. They were so badly distorted that he feared they’d never get anything from them, no matter what enhancement programs the analysts ran. There came a point, from what he’d heard, when enhancement became little more than random guesswork, with some answers that might be completely accurate and others so far wrong they were worse than useless. His eyes narrowed as he brought up the optical records. They were blurry, but ...

He cursed under his breath. One moment, the angel-ship – and Endeavour – had been intact, Endeavour held firmly within the golden light. The next, the image had started to distort, as if space itself was being warped ... which might, he noted, have been exactly what had happened. There were several moments of pure golden light – it looked as if it had lasted for hours, although the time log indicated it had only been seconds – and then the inky darkness of space snapped back into focus, the black hole invisible to the naked eye. He keyed the gravimetric log and shook his head in disbelief. For a second, it had registered something that might – might – have been a localised tramline.

Marigold pulled herself back to him. “I got most of the crap,” she said, stowing the vacuum under the chair. “Let me sit down, then you can bring the gravity back online.”

“I think the alien ship jumped out of the system – and she took Endeavour with her,” Tobias said. He hoped to God that was the answer. If the aliens had decided to commit suicide, for whatever reasons made sense to alien minds, they wouldn’t bother catching and securing Endeavour first. Probably. He was no xenospecialist, trained to think as the aliens thought ... although, from what he’d heard, quite a few xenospecialists tended to be wrong with confidence when discussing alien mentalities. “Why?”

Marigold glanced at him. “Dissection?”

Tobias shuddered. If the aliens had wanted to talk, they could have done it without abducting an entire starship and her crew. There was something to be said for exchanging signals while keeping a safe distance, just in case you accidentally said something incredibly offensive, but it wasn’t as if the Builders had anything to fear from human tech. No matter how he looked at it, the only way Endeavour’s weapons could reach the angel-ship’s hull was if the aliens chose to let them. If they wanted to avoid causing any social chaos, or outright disasters ... they’d already isolated the MNF from the rest of the Human Sphere. No, there was no benevolent reason for the aliens to kidnap Endeavour. And that meant ...

His heart sank as he keyed the gravity generator, bracing himself. The unit might be damaged in a manner they couldn’t detect, or the control programs could have been warped or ruined ... he breathed a sigh of relief as the gravity field came to life, pulling them back downwards. Something hit the deck behind him ... thankfully, it sounded solid. He had no idea what had gotten loose, or why – the civilians probably hadn’t realised everything needed to be stowed away – but it didn’t matter. Right now, there were too many other problems.

“Send an update to Commodore Lafarge,” he ordered. He had no idea if the commodore would want to get any closer to the debris field, or the black hole, but ... ideally, he wouldn’t have to risk flying the shuttle any further than strictly necessary. The hull was designed to fly into rough skies – there were quite a few worlds where the local weather made landings difficult – yet he had no way to be sure it had endured the gravity waves without damage. A tiny fragment of damage, so minor it would pass unnoticed, could easily get them killed if they were unlucky. “And tell him we’ll hold position long enough to wait for orders.”

“If the life support holds out that long,” Marigold said. “Half the internal monitors are gone.”

Tobias nodded, curtly. The life support seemed to be working, and the shuttle was over-engineered, but it was hard to be certain. If it stopped working ... how long would it be, he asked himself, before they suffocated? The shuttle wasn’t exactly small, but with five people breathing in air and exhaling poison ...

Don’t think about it, he told himself. Panic would only speed up their inevitable doom, if the life support truly failed. They had to remain calm and breathe normally. Just wait and pray.

He stared at the display as more and more pieces of debris appeared in front of him. Dozens of chunks were heading towards Dyson Two, on trajectories that would intersect with the outer shell. He hoped – prayed – there were enough shuttles left near the sphere to protect it from the incoming debris, although he was uneasily aware that some pieces were likely to get through no matter what the humans did. What did it say about the Builders, he asked himself, that they had no qualms about putting their own sphere, and a helpless population, in terrible danger? They couldn’t have that much faith in their own tech, could they?

Of course not, he told himself, darkly. Their ship appeared in the middle of the wreckage left by a shattered fucking sphere!

Lady Charlotte sounded shaken, as she called from the rear. “What do we do now?”

“We wait,” Tobias said. The admiral should be able to get a destroyer or frigate to pick up the shuttle, even if he declined to send his larger ships anywhere near the debris field. Or even another shuttle ... the hatches looked intact, allowing one shuttle to dock with them, and even if they couldn’t, they should be able to spacewalk from one craft to the other. “There’s nothing else we can do.”

He heard a choked sob from behind him. The diplomats would have friends on Endeavour too. He had no idea how much they’d bonded with the crew, if at all, but there were other diplomats ... he wanted to tell them he was sure the ship was still intact, and her crew alive, yet he didn’t quite dare. He could easily be wrong. For all he knew, Marigold was right and the Builders intended to dissect the entire ship. Or poke sensors somewhere the sun didn’t shine. There had been all kinds of puerile jokes about anal probes, when humans had become alien prisoners for the first time. They didn’t seem so funny now. But then, they’d never really been funny at all.

The console bleeped. He frowned, leaning forward. There was something there, something big, in the midst of a debris cloud. It should have been instantly noticeable, and would have been anywhere else, but ... he sucked in his breath. It was a perfect sphere, large enough to pass for a planetoid, drifting through space on a trajectory that would eventually send it straight into the black hole. And ... there were faint, very faint, gravity waves surrounding it.

His mouth was suddenly dry. He knew what it was. He knew what it had to be. “Signal the admiral,” he ordered. “Tell him we’ve found the second lone planetoid.”

Chapter Twenty: HMS Endeavour, ES-17

“Captain? Captain?”

Staci hurt.

She hadn’t felt so bad since ... since ever. She’d been an unarmed combat student from childhood, she’d grown up in a rough part of town, and she’d been a naval officer who’d gone into combat more times than she could count, but she’d never felt so badly battered in her entire life. Her body felt as if it had been worked over by experts, inflicting incredible levels of pain without doing any real damage, then waiting for her to start to recover before doing it again and again. She was uneasily aware she was lying on the deck, in a terribly undignified position, and yet it was hard to focus enough to so much as open her eyes. And someone was kneeling beside her ...

She forced her eyes to open, somehow. The compartment was dark, illuminated only by emergency lighting. The gravity field was back online, somehow, but it was so light she feared the slightest push might send her flying into the air. Helen was beside her, a nasty bruise marring her face ... Staci felt a hot flash of rage, half-convinced that someone had slapped the younger woman, then realised Helen had probably hit the deck too. She had been strapped down, hadn’t she? Staci wasn’t sure how any of them had been thrown from their chairs.

It was hard to speak – her mouth was dry – but she managed. “Report!”

Helen’s voice was grim. “Main power is offline, Captain. Secondary power is at very low levels only, battery power is indeterminate. Sensors are degraded to the point of uselessness; drives and weapons are both offline. Internal comlinks appear to be down; we haven’t been able to raise anyone outside the bridge. I’m not sure why we even have gravity.”

Staci gritted her teeth and stood. Somehow. The bridge looked battered, a pair of consoles dead and useless ... she stared at them in shock, wondering just what had happened to them. Explosive consoles looked good, on science-fantasy shows, but had their designers never heard of circuit breakers? Consoles only exploded if the entire ship exploded ... or, she supposed, deliberate sabotage. The crew didn’t look any better. Jenner was lying on the deck, blood pooling around his head; the remainder looked as if they’d been in the wars. Staci pointed a crewman at the XO, then gritted her teeth, trying to remember what had happened before she’d blacked out. The alien ship had grabbed them and ... and what? Where were they?

“Switch wristcoms to independent transmitting, then get the shafts open,” she ordered. There was no point in trying to maintain silent running, not now. They had to get the command network up and running before something – anything – happened. If the signals would attract attention ... they’d just have to take the risk. “We need get a party down to engineering and find out what’s happening.”

She keyed her console, only to draw a blank. The internal datanet was offline. That meant ... she swore under her breath. She’d never heard of a datanet failing completely, unless a starship had been battered into an air-streaming hulk. There was normally so much redundancy built into the system that the only way to take out the datanet was to take out the ship itself. Her mind raced as she considered the possibilities, and the dangers. There was enough air in the ship to keep them alive for quite some time, even if the life support was offline too, but the emergency systems should have sealed and isolated the compartments from each other. Some compartments would have plenty of air, hopefully giving them time to get the life support back online; others would already be running short. She gritted her teeth as the hatches were opened, allowing the crew into the Jeffries Tubes. They might already be running out of time.

“Move as quickly as you can, but stay safe,” she ordered, as Helen led the way into the tubes. “Don’t get distracted as you get down to engineering.”

She took the helm console and checked it quickly, confirming – again – that the datanet was offline. The console was still working, thankfully, but it wasn’t connected to anything. There were emergency procedures to get the ship up and running without the datanet, she’d been assured, yet she also knew that such procedures were designed only for emergencies ... and had never, not ever, been tested. She had a nasty feeling she was about to discover that those procedures were fatally flawed, intended to keep the crew from despair more than actually getting the ship back home. Normally, any stricken starship would have help nearby.

Commodore Lafarge is on his way, she told herself, as she tended to her XO. The wound was bad, but he would survive if he got proper medical care. How long had she been out? It couldn’t have been that long or Jenner would have bled to death. He could send us help ...

Her heart sank as a nasty thought occurred to her. Where were they? What had the angel-ship done to them? Was this hell? Or something like it? Or ... her eyes narrowed. Why did they have gravity? The generators had been failing, one by one, before she’d been knocked out ... why had they survived, when so much else had failed? And if they were working normally, why was the gravity field so light?

The wristcom bleeped. “Captain,” Helen said. “We’re in engineering. The crew are trying to bring the fusion cores back online.”

Chief Engineer Daniel Barnett took the wristcom. He sounded headachy, and grouchy, but at least he was alive. “Captain, Fusion One, Fusion Three and Fusion Four are defunct. Fusion Two appears to be intact, but it’s hard to be certain. Battery power is online, yet ... I think we’ve lost at least two of the energy sinks. With your permission, I’d like to power up Fusion Two and see if she’s still in working order.”

Staci gritted her teeth. Endeavour had been designed to make replacing the fusion cores easy, at least when compared to a fleet carrier or battleship, but without a mobile shipyard and replacement cores it was pointless. They could run the ship on a single core, she thought, yet if that core failed ... they’d be doomed. The batteries wouldn’t last long enough to get the ship home. If the commodore was heading towards them, they’d be fine, but she had an awful suspicion ...

“Do it,” she ordered. “Carefully.”

“Aye, Captain,” Barnett said. “I may have to reboot the entire datanet and then check the internal datanodes, one by one. The drive nodes were already damaged before the final impact.”

“Do it,” Staci repeated.

She braced herself as she stepped back to the console, feeling useless. She didn’t have the manpower to organise runners to put the different compartments back in touch with each other, let alone set up an independent communications network. There was no way to know what was happening outside the bridge or engineering, no way to discover which compartments needed help or to organise it. Standard procedure was for all crew to remain where they were and wait for orders, unless they were part of the damage control teams, but with the datanet offline it was quite possible that half the crew were already heading for the lifeboats. There was no point in waiting for orders if the datanet was down and those orders were never going to come.

A low hum echoed though the hull, slightly off-kilter. The power distribution net had to be badly damaged, if not degraded to the point of complete uselessness ... no, that was impossible. If the net was gone completely, there’d be no point in trying to power the ship back up. The internal display came back to life, a third of the ship covered in red icons and half of the remainder grey, a grim reminder that the internal monitors were as badly damaged as the rest of the ship. Sickbay was online, fortunately, and most of the emergency hatches could be opened to allow emergency crews to go where they were needed. She cursed under her breath as emergency signals, some automatic, started to appear on the display. Some crewmen were too badly hurt to signal for themselves, their wristcoms sounding the alert instead ...

“Fusion Two appears to be working, but at half-power,” Barnett reported. “I’m reluctant to risk pushing the core any harder, at least until we have checked out the others.”

“Understood,” Staci said. The bridge hatch opened, allowing the medics to evacuate the wounded and relief crew to take their stations. She felt a twinge of relief, even though she didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening outside the hull. “Do as you see fit.”

Helen returned, looking tired. “Captain, a third of the engineering crew has been sent to sickbay,” she said. “We didn’t have a chance to assess the rest of the ship, but ...”

“We’ll cope,” Staci said. She hoped sickbay could cope. If a third of the crew were wounded, or dead, it would be a nightmare. All spacers had basic medical training, and minor wounds could be bandaged or the victim told to wait until all the life-threatening injuries had been treated, but they might easily run out of supplies. The medical staff were good, yet ... they could only be in one place at one time. “See if you can get our sensors back online.”

“Captain, the communications array is online, but it isn’t picking up anything,” MacPhee said. “The spectrum is completely blank.”

Staci frowned, glancing at the timer. Commodore Lafarge had been hours away, but ... how long had they been out? She keyed the records, trying to figure it out. The fact they didn’t know immediately was proof, she feared, that the ship’s datanet was a mess and their sensors – and everything else – might be completely unreliable. And yet ... it couldn’t have been so long, her thoughts reminded her, or Jenner would be dead. She might be dead. If she’d remained unconscious for hours ...

“Captain,” Helen said. Her tone suggested she was numb, too numb to feel much of anything. “Captain, I think you should see this.”

Staci felt a shiver run down her spine as she made her way to the sensor console. Helen’s hands were resting on the console, as if she were reluctant to risk touching the systems she’d once played like musical instruments. The display was blurry, as if the sensors were either badly damaged or unable to resolve whatever they were seeing, but ... there was something there, something very close to them. Staci stared, feeling her heart sink. They were within bare kilometres of something very big ...

“That’s the angel,” Helen said, so quietly Staci could barely hear her. “We’re caught within her wings.”

“Fuck,” Staci said. Up close, it was easier to make out details. She almost wished otherwise. The angel’s hull was nearly two hundred kilometres long, wrapped in a gravity field that bent light – and everything else – into a pretzel. She didn’t know how many of Endeavour’s drive nodes could be repaired, if any, but even at full power she didn’t think they could pull free. The aliens had them trapped. “Can you see anything outside the field?”

“Yeah.” Helen glanced at Staci, her dark eyes fearful. “Captain, we’re no longer in the Dyson System.”

Staci sucked in her breath. She’d assumed the angel-ship could jump from system to system without a tramline – God knew, the ship had arrived without a tramline – but part of her hadn’t really believed it. There hadn’t been any catapults, as far as they’d been able to tell; the ship had jumped on its own, without any help ... her heart twisted as she realised why they’d heard nothing from the commodore. His fleet must have been left behind ... she hoped so. None of the alternatives were any better. The gravity waves had been strong enough to smash entire ships ...

She composed herself with an effort. “Where are we?”

There was a long pause. Staci waited, telling herself they couldn’t have jumped that far. The human race had spotted, logged, and named millions upon millions of stars, most so far from the Human Sphere it would be centuries before any human starship reached them. Each star was unique ... it would be easy, she told herself, to determine their position even if they’d jumped to the far side of the galaxy. The long-range optical sensors would note stars on either side of the Galactic Core and then ...

Helen looked up from her console. “ES-17, Captain.”

At first. Staci was relieved. ES-17 was – had been – the nearest star system to Dyson. Endeavour had passed through the system, charting the weirdly empty space around the primary star, on her way to the spheres ... and the MNF, later, had confirmed the star was completely alone in space. Her second reaction was fear. The angel-ship was jumping towards inhabited space, towards what remained of infected space and the human worlds beyond. She refused to believe it was a coincidence. The angel could have jumped to any one of a hundred stars – more, if its range was greater than thirty light years. If it had jumped to ES-17, where would it go next?

“Captain,” Atkinson said. “I’m picking up the tramline leading to ES-16.”

Staci felt a conflicted whorl of emotions. She’d feared, in the privacy of her own mind, that all the tramlines might be gone. The thought had tormented her late at night, when she’d been lying in her bunk ... if they were all gone, human civilisation would go with them. It was a relief to know they were still in existence, but they represented a trail of breadcrumbs that led the way back to human space ... the flicker stations, holding position along the tramlines, would be even worse. They were supposed to be hard to detect, but somehow she was sure the aliens would have no trouble finding them. And if they reached Earth ...

“See if you can get a message to the flicker station,” she ordered. They needed to get a full report to Earth, a report covering everything from the first tramlines vanishing to the coup and now the angel-ship. She was tempted to leave out some of the details – the last thing the human race needed was an international kerfuffle in the middle of an interstellar crisis – but there was no time to censor the data. Endeavour had backed-up copies of records from every starship ... she couldn’t even begin to edit it. “If you can ... dump everything into the network.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci forced herself to step back and return to her chair. The internal display was updating rapidly – seventeen crewmen were dead, nearly a hundred badly injured – and telling her things she didn’t want to know about her ship’s status. If they were back home, she’d be taking Endeavour into a shipyard and doing her best to ignore the yard techs glowering at her like an overbearing father who’d just discovered his teenager had taken his car for a spin and totalled it. Here ... half the drive nodes could be repaired, the engineers thought, but it would take time. She had no idea if they had the time.

The flicker messages will get home in a few days, she told herself. They were stationed as close to the stars as possible, to cut down the time it took to get a message from one station to the next, but it would still take quite some time to get a signal to Earth. And then ... what?

She looked at Helen’s back. “Are there any other ships in the system?”

“Not as far as I can tell, Captain,” Helen said. “But our sensors are quite degraded.”

Staci nodded, slowly. If the navy had kept the planned schedules, at least three convoys should have passed through ES-17 since the tramline had vanished. Those convoys hadn’t arrived in the Dyson System – a quick glance at the display confirmed the ES-17-Dyson tramline was gone – and that meant Earth should know the tramline had vanished, unless the convoys – for some unaccountable reason – hadn’t sent a warning back down the line. But even if they knew, what could they do? Their only real option was to try to catapult a ship to Dyson and they’d be reluctant to try, simply because they had no idea what they’d find at the far end. They might be catapulting the ship to certain death.

Her terminal bleeped. “Captain, I've been assessing the sensor records and the damage to the drive nodes,” Barnett said. “It may be possible to ... ah, avoid taking so much damage when the angel jumps again. If we reconfigure the drive field, we might be able to steer the waves around us ...”

“Do it,” Staci ordered. The first jump had nearly destroyed her ship. A second would finish the job. “Can you get us free?”

“Unknown,” Barnett said. “Right now, we’re held in a gravitational eddy ... a safe space, as long as we stay put. Trying to get out would mean having to pass through the angel’s drive field, which would be rough.”

“Very rough,” Staci agreed. “Do it, and hurry. I don’t know how long we have before she decides to jump again.”

“Aye, Captain,” Barnett said. His voice turned thoughtful. “Of course, there’s another possibility. We might be able to get onto the alien ship.”

“Might,” Staci agreed. They could see the alien hull now, but ... it was daunting. She didn’t have the slightest idea where to land a second away team. “We may have no choice but to try.”

She shook her head, although he couldn’t see her. “Concentrate on the drive nodes first,” she ordered. “We’ll worry about the rest later.”

Chapter Twenty-One: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System

“It looks safer than the last planetoid,” Marigold said. “Where are the fists?”

Tobias nodded, keeping his eye on the display. Commodore Lafarge was keeping most of his fleet well clear of the debris field, and the black hole where the star had once been, but he’d aimed dozens of drones on trajectories that had taken them right past the lone planetoid. The first one had been surrounded by fists, ready to kill anything that threatened to land on the surface; this one was orbited by clouds of debris, none looking intentionally dangerous. A collision would be fatal, of course, but it didn’t seem the debris was going to accelerate at an impossible rate and smash the shuttle to atoms before they could react. He hoped to hell it was true. The commodore had made it clear that getting into the planetoid, and taking control, was a priority. They needed the alien tech.

Assuming millions of years in cold soak hasn’t broken something, Tobias thought. No two researchers agreed on just how old the spheres were, but they were clearly much older than recorded civilisation. The first planetoid was inside a sphere. This one was tossed into open space when the sphere shattered ... and we don’t even know what shattered it!

“It’s as quiet as a graveyard,” he said, and wished he hadn’t. The debris hadn’t reacted to the drones, even the ones that had been bombarding the planetoid with every active sensor emission known to mankind ... something that would have gotten the drones killed on Dyson Two. If the system was completely defunct, there was no danger in using active sensors, but ... there was also little chance of finding usable technology. The planetoid was huge. It might be impossible to repair systems they barely understood – hell, they’d have to find them first – in time to save the MNF. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” Marigold said. “You are clear to land.”

Tobias sighed, inwardly. Their debriefing with Commodore Lafarge, after they’d offloaded their passengers, had been brief, formal, and edgy. He’d had the feeling the Frenchman would have tried to have them committed, if his analysts hadn’t been able to get a surprising amount of useful data out of the shuttle’s sensors. The only good news was that Endeavour appeared to have been dragged along with the angel-ship, as he’d thought, rather than being destroyed. There was still no clue about where she had been taken, or why, but at least there was a chance that the survey ship was intact. And the techs thought the sensor records might provide a clue to unlocking more alien secrets ...

“They effectively created a catapult-field,” the tech had explained, as they’d studied the records. “They folded space around their ship and jumped. We could do the same, if we had the power and the tech ...”

He pushed the thought aside as the lone planetoid came into view. It looked darker than the first, although he suspected that was largely a figment of his imagination. Or perhaps not ... the original planetoid had been very close to a star, while this one was orbiting a black hole. He checked his timer quickly, although they had months before the planetoid entered the danger zone. It was hard not to feel uneasy so close to a black hole. It might be nothing more than a supermassive gravity well, something more understandable than most of the binary system, but there was something about it that felt deeply unnatural. The more he looked into the darkness, the more he felt something was looking back.

“They may tap into the black hole’s gravity field to warp space around their ships,” the tech had said. “That might be why they created the black hole in the first place. If they needed to jump for thousands of light years ...”

Tobias shivered – he really didn’t like the implications – and then forced himself to concentrate as the planetoid shifted from a piece of space junk to an object the size of the moon. It was as unnatural as the rest of the system, although – unlike its peer – the exterior looked pitted, almost as if it were a real moon. Tobias watched carefully, slowly dropping the shuttle lower and lower – his perspective shifting as they flew – until they were hovering just above the surface. Dust hung in the air, brushing against the drive field. Tobias eyed it in surprise, then remembered the planetoid had probably been hit by debris too, just like the sphere. The odds of it being hit at least once were very high.

“We have arrived,” he announced, as he stood and made his way into the passenger compartment. He was tempted to indulge in a little pilot humour, but none of the researchers seemed the type to appreciate it. “Please check your spacesuits, then wait for the call to leave the shuttle.”

He stepped into the airlock, pulled his own spacesuit into place, cycled the lock and opened the exterior hatch. The planetoid looked more like the moon than anything else, rather than the smooth metal he recalled from the first planetoid. The surface was stained with dust, shimmering around his feet as he walked around the shuttle to check the landing struts. The gravity field was light, almost non-existent ... he wasn’t sure if that was a good sign. He finished his circuit and looked towards the entrance, an entrance that had been carefully concealed on the other planetoid. Here, it gaped open, waiting. He rested his hand against the outer sensors, inviting the team to join him, and then forced himself to wait. Marigold had lost the coin toss and would be remaining with the shuttle ... he wondered, numbly, which of them had won. He almost wished Colin had left the intact sphere in time to join them, despite everything, or that some of the original research team had made their way to the second planetoid. They were still on the first, trying to unlock its secrets. Tobias silently wished them luck.

The research team joined him, moving uneasily in their suits. Tobias checked their tethers – the gravity was so light a jump could send them flying into space – and then hooked up the communications links. He’d been tempted to use radios and databurst transmitters, but the commodore had overridden him. There was no point in taking chances, he’d said, and Tobias had to admit he was right. The exterior might be dark and cold. The interior might be alive and ready to kill them, if they put a single foot wrong. He muttered a reminder that anything they said would be picked up by the mikes and relayed to everyone else, then led the way to the entrance. It gaped open invitingly, the darkness surprisingly reassuring after staring into a black hole. Tobias launched a handful of drones into the darkness, then jumped into the entrance. The gravity field grew stronger, very slightly. He frowned, inwardly, as they slipped further into the planetoid. It was odd, as if they were being pulled at an angle. Was it a natural gravity field? Or was it something else?

He did his best to ignore the excited chatter from the researchers as they looked around, their headlights driving back the darkness for long moments before it snapped back again. The alien corridors were huge, easily large enough to take an entire shuttle, but they were almost completely barren. The walls seemed unmarked by centuries in vacuum, as far as he could tell, yet there was a sense of age hanging in the air that surprised him. There was no sign of any maintenance machines, nothing to keep up repairs.  But then, they hadn’t seen any on the other planetoid. He wondered, rather tiredly, if it was just another sign of how confident the Builders were in their technology.

The gravity field continued to slant oddly as they made their way deeper into the planetoid. The researchers kept chattering amongst themselves, even though they hadn’t so much as scratched the surface. The planetoid was huge and humans were small ... more drones were deployed, flying deeper and deeper into the corridors and relaying the results to their human masters, but it would be a long – long – time before they had a complete map. London was the biggest city in England and yet London was tiny, compared to the planetoid. No one would ever know every last detail of the alien structure.

A memory struck him, an instant too late, as they walked through a large chamber. It was the babble zone ... no, where the babble zone had been on the other planetoid, the working planetoid. He froze, unwilling to keep moving, then forced himself onwards. The low gravity was a help, not a hindrance. If his nightmares rose to strike him, he could force himself to jump up and out of the zone before it was too late, dragging the rest of the team with him. Nothing happened, save for the beating of his heart. The babble zone was gone. He was relieved, even though he knew it wasn't good news. If the defences weren’t working, what else wasn’t?

“I think there’s a gravity well at the planetoid’s core,” a researcher said. Tobias had to struggle to remember her name. Kate Evans, if he recalled correctly. She was a few years older than he was, and so far ahead of him in intellect that he couldn’t help feeling a little jealous.  He hadn’t cared – much – about being beaten on the sports field, but he had been one of the brightest kids at his school and being outshone so effectively hurt. “The gravity field feels more natural than the intact sphere, yet ... it should be stronger.”

Tobias thought he understood. The Builders had no trouble generating shaped gravity fields on an unimaginable scale. Dyson Two didn’t have the mass to generate an internal gravity field, nor did either of the planetoids. If there was an artificial field, it should be pulling them down ... straight down. But if it was slanted ... it was almost as if they were walking down an underground shaft, one dug straight into the planet ... he frowned, trying to wrap his head around it. It was just too big.

“Their technology does seem to depend on immense gravity sources,” another researcher said. He was old enough to be Tobias’s father, although they had barely exchanged words since the team had been assembled. “Logically, there could be a black hole – or something – at the heart of the planetoid.”

“We never got all the way to the first planetoid’s core,” a third researcher put in. “If there is a tiny black hole ...”

Tobias didn’t like the sound of it. A tiny black hole, a very tiny black hole, would only be able to eat atoms, but it would grow with each atom until it was big enough to swallow the entire planetoid. Or something ... he suddenly felt slow and stupid, an odd moment of kinship with the thugs and bullies he’d known at school. It was deeply frustrating to be unable to grasp something, all the while watching helplessly as others jumped ahead in leaps and bounds. He’d never had that problem in class, thankfully, but would he if he’d gone to a better school? God knew, his national exams hadn’t been good enough to spare him military service. Had he been unaware of his own ignorance? He hadn’t been able to force himself to check the exam sheets, after watching his hopes and dreams explode ...

... The thought nagged at him, tearing at his mind as the chatter died away. Was he a fool who thought himself a wise man? Or was he just a common boy from a common family, too common to be noticed, too common to be special ...? Or ... the self-doubt was crushing, playing on each of his insecurities. Marigold might be humouring him, when she said he was smart. She might be letting him win when they played their games, treating him as someone it would be wise to let win ... cold logic told him that was stupid, that she was hardly the sort of person to let anyone win, but it was hard to convince himself. She would dump him the moment someone better came along, someone smarter than him or someone stronger ...

... And yet, she hadn’t glommed on to Colin when they’d been trapped on the sphere ...

The thought brought a moment of relief, just enough for him to realise what was happening. They were inside a babble zone, a low-power zone ... or one designed to pose a very different threat, dragging up insecurities rather than nightmares. Marigold hadn’t ditched him when she’d had the chance and she wouldn’t let him win and ... he forced himself to run forward, dragging the rest of them behind him. The communications network exploded with whimpers and sobs ... it took him a second to realise the noises had been there all along, but he’d been so lost in his own thoughts that he hadn’t heard a thing. The sensation tore at his mind for a moment longer, then vanished as he reached the end of the compartment. The control centre lay beyond.

“It gets into your head,” he said. He had no idea what the scientists had seen, but nothing could have prepared them for it. He’d told them about the babble zone, and whatever he’d experienced near the angel-ship, yet ... his words had been inadequate. There were no words that could convey the sensation, certainly in a manner they might comprehend; nothing he could say or do that would’ve prepared them for the nightmare. “Whatever you felt, it wasn’t real.”

They paused long enough to collect themselves, then made their way into the next chamber. It was dark, pieces of metal lying on the floor at odd angles ... it didn’t look anything like the chamber he’d seen in the first planetoid. The drones swept past him, cataloguing everything within view, leaving the team alone. Tobias felt despair as he surveyed the wreckage. It looked more like building blocks than something technical, much less anything that could be repaired. It had been tricky to integrate Tadpole tech into human starships, but at least their tech hadn’t been that advanced. The principles had been easy to work out, even if it had taken longer to actually duplicate the tech and put it into mass production. Here ...

Imagine a World War Two engineer trying to understand modern technology, he thought, numbly. He wouldn’t even know how to begin.

He leaned against the wall and forced himself to wait as the researchers got to work. The reinforcements would already be on their way, he hoped, but it would be a few hours before they arrived. They’d set up tents within the planetoid, giving the research crew a place to rest between shifts ... he wondered, sourly, if they’d get anywhere. He’d hoped the working babble zone was proof the planetoid wasn’t all dead, but the control centre was a wreck and the system he’d used to manipulate the fists inside the sphere was nowhere in evidence. They might find a way to bring it back online, or ...

A thought crossed his mind. If the tech really was like building bricks ...

“If we put everything back in place,” he asked, “what do you think will happen?”

“Good question,” Kate Evans said. “We’ve been tracking gravity eddies – so tiny only the most sensitive gear can detect them – running through the planetoid. The drones note the gravity field actually gets stronger, the further they go towards the core. I think the planetoid actually channels gravity energy through the control system and out into space ...”

“And the components themselves might be the alien counterpart to starship components,” another researcher said. “If ...”

Tobias wasn’t sure what to make of that as the discussion raged on and on. Starship computers were a mixed bag; some could be repaired, with the right equipment, but some were so delicately put together that if they were damaged they had to be pulled out and scrapped. There were elements that could be built in a starship’s machine shop, others that could only be constructed in a specialised industrial node. The bricks in front of him might have simply been dislodged, or they might have been destroyed completely. There was no way to know.

“Help me get them into place,” Kate Evans said. “Hurry.”

The team got to work, trying to fit the bricks back where they belonged. Tobias had feared it would be impossible to tell what went where, but up close they were all slightly different shapes and sizes. There was a strange ... feeling ... whenever a brick was slotted into the right place, a faint glimmer of something that nagged at his mind. He’d had the impression the Builders weren’t humanoid, when he’d experimented with their control system, and it was possible they had senses the human race lacked. The virus hadn’t been remotely humanoid and it had seen the universe very differently ... hell, for all he knew, the Builders had been telepaths and designed their machines to interface with their minds.

“That’s the last,” Kate Evans said. “I ...”

The chamber lit up, so brightly Tobias had to close his eyes. The ground shivered beneath his feel, the gravity suddenly shifting to pull him to the ground ... he gritted his teeth as the light grew brighter, then faded enough to let him risk opening his eyes. The chamber was glowing with light, strange alien sigils flickering in and out of existence as the system came back to life. He hoped to hell they hadn’t accidentally triggered a self-destruct. They might not even realise what they’d done until it was too late.

“Now, we’re talking,” Kate Evans said. “Shall we see what we can do now?”

Chapter Twenty-Two: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

“They got control of the alien system?”

Charlotte wasn’t quite sure she understood what she’d heard. She was no expert on alien technology, or technology in general, but she’d been given to understand that unlocking the secrets of Builder supertechnology could – would – take years, if not centuries. The gulf between humanity’s gravity-manipulation tech and theirs was so vast that, even if the theory was worked out, it would still take a long time to develop technology to make use of it. And yet, she had hoped ...

“They’re still working on the alien control system,” Professor Rossi said. “However, they are starting to unlock its secrets and understand how it actually works.”

He paused. “We discovered that there’s a small black hole, a very small black hole, at the heart of the second planetoid. It should have evaporated centuries ago” – he shrugged, expressively – “but it is very definitely there. The pseudogravity ripple that swept across the system after the planetoid came back online exposed other black holes, including one at the core of the first planetoid. We believe those black holes are the key to projecting pseudogravity waves, which in turn can be blended together to create gravitational eddies that push the fists across the system.”

“Which we already knew,” Admiral Dismukes pointed out.

“We didn’t know the half of it,” Rossi corrected. “The black holes are linked together, allowing for effectively instantaneous communications across the system. We believed they had their own version of the flicker transmitter, despite the presence of only two tramlines within the system, but instead it seems their black holes were linked together in a manner that allowed for instant transmission. It’s quite possible that, as we explore the tech further, we will find a way to step between the black holes, effectively teleporting light-minutes in a split second. This may explain why they trapped the locals on the surface. If the locals got control of the command centre, they would be able to use it to teleport to the lone planetoid – the first lone planetoid – and explore the rest of the system.”

Charlotte stared at the display. “Are you saying the system was just waiting for someone to come along and unlock it?”

“Their system is designed to test anyone trying to enter, at least for the first time,” Rossi said. “The babble zones force intruders to confront their fears. The further tests assess their ability to understand and manipulate the world around them, perhaps even determine if they are capable of thinking outside the box. I don’t think any of the locals could even get through the babble zones, let alone pass the further tests. They demand a level of comprehension the locals are unlikely ever to reach.”

“They’re not stupid,” Charlotte snapped.

“No, but they are trapped in a world – an environment – they don’t understand, and lack the tools to make it comprehensible,” Rossi said. “The odds of them developing theories to account for their existence, let alone the world around them, are very low. They are trapped in an evolutionary and technological cul-de-sac, with no way out. They might have as much raw intelligence and potential as you or I or anyone born on Earth, yet without the education and training they need to develop themselves ... they’re stuck.”

Admiral Dismukes lifted a hand. “This is an interesting discussion,” he said, “but right now there is a more important issue. Can we use the alien technology to get us home?”

Rossi hesitated. “In theory, it should be possible,” he said. “The pseudogravity can be used to create a catapult effect, tossing a starship hundreds of light years in the blink of an eye. In practice, it may take us some time to work out how to do it safely. We can manipulate the fists, for example, but the push is so intense it would overpower compensators – if the fists had compensators – and kill the crew.”

“If they had a crew,” Commodore Lafarge muttered.

“Quite,” Rossi agreed. “We’re working on it, but don’t ask me for a timetable. It could be tomorrow or it could be ten years from now.”

“I see,” Admiral Dismukes said. Charlotte couldn’t help but think that the Admiral looked tired. “Keep us informed.”

Rossi cleared his throat. “I will, Admiral,” he said. “But there is another matter I want to bring to your attention. The troops on the surface are mistreating the locals.”

Charlotte felt a hot flash of alarm. British troops were highly disciplined, but she’d been cautioned that discipline could start to break down if the troops felt they’d been sent into a no-win situation. God alone knew how many of the Royal Marines had friends and families back home, people they would never see again unless someone managed to reactivate the tramline or find another way to jump hundreds of light years; God alone knew how many others were in the same boat. She’d tried not to think about her daughters, who would spend the rest of their lives without her, but every night she looked at their photographs and promised herself she’d see them again, whatever it took. If discipline was breaking down ...

Admiral Dismukes sounded very calm. “Elaborate.”

“They told the refugees that they had to crap in the latrines,” Rossi said. “And when some didn’t listen, they were ordered out of the camp and told not to return.”

“I see,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Out of idle curiosity, what do you think would happen if they were allowed to shit wherever they pleased?”

Charlotte winced, inwardly. She’d made the same mistake herself, back when she’d been the director of a charity charged with supporting refugee camps in the security zone. Too many refugees hadn’t understood the concept of basic sanitation, or were too broken to care; too many refugees had been killed in the epidemics that had followed, epidemics that could have been avoided if the refugees had done as they were told. It hadn’t felt good to make it clear that anyone who ignored the sanitation guidelines would be evicted from the camp, no matter how pitiful their situation or the impossibility of sending them home, but there’d been no choice. Their behaviour put everyone at risk.

You’d think the locals would be less prideful, she thought, although she wasn’t sure that was true. The less people had, the more they clung to what they had. Their world will never be the same again.

“Admiral, there’s no call for not treating the locals with respect,” Rossi said. “They wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for us.”

“That may be true,” Admiral Dismukes said. Charlotte vaguely recalled the admiral having been involved in disaster relief and colony evacuation efforts, back during the war. “However, a person who shits wherever he pleases is going to get everyone else infected with the galloping shits ... if they’re lucky. I understand your concerns, but the blunt truth is that we don’t have time for the niceties. If they don’t follow the rules, they have to be kicked out for the good of everyone else.”

Rossi looked displeased. “I will raise these concerns with the government, back home.”

“Please do,” Admiral Dismukes said. He didn’t point out the professor would have to solve the problem of getting home first, if he wanted to make official complaints. Charlotte was mildly impressed at his self-restraint. “Until then, please keep us informed of your progress.”

And stay in your lane, Charlotte added, as the professor’s image vanished. We don’t have time to handle your complaints.

She leaned back in her chair and surveyed the holoconference. It was weirdly disconcerting to be aware that there were only three flesh-and-blood individuals in the conference room, the remainder nothing more than holographic images relayed through the communications network ... the time delay, she noted sourly, making it hard to have a proper conversation no matter how much processing power was devoted to trying to smooth out the kinks. One officer would start talking, another would interrupt ... quite by accident. It was inconvenient, but there was no other choice. The admiral was reluctant to order his commanders to attend the meeting in person, or even to bring their ships close enough to reduce the time delay to something unnoticeable. Who knew what would happen next?

Admiral Dismukes spoke with quiet urgency. “The alien ship vanished, taking Endeavour with it,” he said, as if the assembled officers didn’t already know. Charlotte couldn’t tell if he was stating the fact to make sure everyone was on the same page, or merely assembling his own thoughts into a coherent order. “There is no way to tell if Endeavour is still intact or if she was crushed to atoms in the gravity distortion. Our probes have not picked up any debris, but if she was atomised there might be no debris ... or the debris might have been taken with the alien ship and discarded when she reached her destination. We simply don’t know.”

There was a long, chilling pause. “We also don’t know when, or if, the alien ship will return. We don’t know where she went, or why, or anything ... we don’t even know why she came here. We don’t even understand their behaviour. They may be so alien that our interpretations of their actions are completely inaccurate. Logic, here, may be nothing more than a way to be wrong with confidence.”

Charlotte couldn’t disagree. Humans were the same the world over, governed by self-interest and tribal dictates ... no matter how insane such dictates sounded to others. It was easy to misunderstand someone, if you didn’t understand the realities of their lives, or to think their choices were flatly insane. It was quite possible to correct such issues, if one were dealing with humans, but much harder when aliens were involved. They were alien. Their thought processes were often beyond comprehension. Human comprehension. She had no doubt humanity’s alien allies thought the same of humanity.

“In short, we have a dilemma,” Admiral Dismukes continued. “We may, as the good professor pointed out, succeed in unlocking enough of the alien tech to get home. We may also discover that it takes years, if not decades, to succeed ... if we succeed at all. If we fail to compensate for the gravity waves, or fail to solve any one of a hundred other problems, we will be unable to risk sending a ship home. What do we do?”

“The original mission concept was to construct habitats within the system,” Lafarge said, after a brief pause. Charlotte couldn’t tell if he’d spoken ahead of everyone else or if the processors had decided the commodore, the second-ranking officer in the MNF, had the right to speak first. There was a reason such conventions rarely had the force of law. Given enough computing power, they could be manipulated to give one side an unfair advantage. “On one hand, we need those habitats to support the fleet ... all the more now, as the sphere is no longer even remotely safe. On the other, our first habitats were severely damaged by the gravity waves. Rebuilding them may just lead to them being smashed again.”

Charlotte felt a pang of guilt. She had heard about the damaged habitats, but in the wake of all the other disasters she’d barely noticed. Even during wartime, the loss of so many trained men and their equipment would have been a major catastrophe ...

“We do have a way, now, to shield our ships and stations from gravity waves,” Admiral He pointed out. “And frankly, we do need those habitats.”

A rustle ran through the assembled officers. Not all were happy with Admiral He maintaining any authority, even if it was purely nominal, in the wake of the coup. They were smart enough to realise there was little choice, but ... it didn’t sit well. Charlotte understood, better than she cared to admit. There was just no choice.

“What other options do we have?” Captain Aster looked worried. “We could try assembling the habitats quite some distance from the sphere, or even behind Dyson Two.”

“The gravity waves went through the sphere,” Commodore Lafarge said. “It didn’t provide any protection to the ships and drones on the far side ...”

“The deep-space drones were also affected by the gravity waves,” another captain – Charlotte didn’t know him – pointed out. “We’d have to build the habitats a long way from Dyson One.”

“Assuming the alien ship returns to Dyson One,” Admiral He said. “It might easily return to Dyson Two.”

“We need a way to fight it,” Captain Aster said.

“We don’t know they’re hostile,” Captain Yuri countered. The Russian’s lips twitched into a bitter smile. “If they are ... we’re fucked anyway.”

“A man who stamps on an ant may not intend to be hostile either,” Captain Aster snapped. “But the ant won’t know the difference.”

Charlotte gritted her teeth. The human race had devised hundreds of first contact scenarios, from a picture-perfect meeting in which everything went perfectly and a common language was put together with no room for misunderstandings, to nightmarish encounters where one side did something that looked hostile and the other reacted with lethal force. The risk of accidentally declaring war on a technologically advanced species had been clear well before the space age, as had the dangers of assuming too much about the other side too quickly. She didn’t want to think the Builders might be hostile and yet ... her head itched, a grim reminder of how they’d swept into her mind and memories. They might not mean to be hostile, but Captain Aster was right. There often came a point when it was impossible to tell the difference between carelessness and deliberate malice.

“We are working on ways to use their technology against them, if push comes to shove,” Admiral Dismukes said. “But right now ... we have to hope for the best.”

“We need to set up those habitats,” Lafarge said. “And we have to hope we can protect them if there are more gravity waves.”

“We could always focus on the sphere,” another captain said. “There’s enough land surface to meet our needs a million times over.”

“We cannot assume the sphere will remain inviolate,” Admiral Dismukes said. “And the weather has yet to settle down.”

We don’t even know for sure it will, Charlotte thought. The sphere’s interior was large enough to house a hundred different environments, enough land surface to make Earth look small, but it was still an artificial environment. She’d heard horror stories of space habitats losing their interior environments, to the point the entire population had to be evacuated before it was too late, yet ... the sphere was just too big. Is there anything controlling the weather, and trying to calm the storms, or are they just waiting for the environment to calm down naturally? Or ...

She shuddered. It defied belief that something the size of the sphere didn’t have an intelligence watching over it, but what if ...?

“There are few other options,” Lafarge said. “I move we start work on the habitats now.”

Charlotte saw a shadow flash across the admiral’s face. Normally, a council of war would only be called under very specific circumstances. Her ex had once noted that few admirals would ever call a council unless they wanted to make a decision that was the right thing to do, under the circumstances, but would likely get them in trouble when they returned home. The whole exercise was little more than a CYA gambit ... here, it was something else. The fleet was under the admiral’s command, at least on paper, but if the glue binding it together started to weaken ...

“It might be a waste of resources,” another officer said. “We cannot risk losing them again.”

Admiral Dismukes tapped the table. “Do you have any better suggestions?”

He went on before anyone could reply. “We cannot flee the system, unless you want to spend years in interstellar space. We cannot settle the sphere, nor can we rely on the locals for food and drink. We cannot wait for the professor and his research teams to produce results, because we have no idea when they’ll crack the secret, wave a magic wand, and turn our ships into super-ships. We must plan on the assumption we are permanently stranded in this system, for the foreseeable future, and that our children will be the ones to figure out how to use the alien technology to get home. We have no other option.”

“We have to hang together, or we will all hang separately,” Charlotte added. “Like it or not, we are in the same boat.”

“The Titanic,” someone muttered.

“We will proceed,” Admiral Dismukes said. “We have no choice. Dismissed.”

He tapped his terminal. The holographic images vanished, one by one, until the room was suddenly empty. Charlotte felt her head spin, just a little, as her perspective shifted. Admiral He nodded politely, then left the room. It was hard, sometimes, to wrap her head around holoconferences. She much preferred meeting in the flesh.

“You didn’t call for a vote,” she said. “Why ...?”

“Too many opportunities for someone to cause trouble,” Admiral Dismukes said. “If there was a better option, it would be harder to deny a vote ...”

He shook his head. “What other choice do we have?”

“None,” Charlotte said. She was surprised he’d answered so frankly. “You’ll keep helping the locals?”

“If we can,” Admiral Dismukes said. “The refugee camp is getting bigger with every passing hour. It won’t be long before we have an epidemic anyway, no matter what we do. Or before something else happens.”

Charlotte couldn’t disagree. “I don’t understand the Builders,” she said. “What are they doing?”

“I wish I knew,” Admiral Dismukes said. “But really, would our actions make sense to an ant? Or a dog? Or even a monkey?”

“They’re not sentient,” Charlotte said. “We are.”

“Yeah,” the admiral said. “But will the Builders understand that?”

Chapter Twenty-Three: Virus Prime

There was something about Virus Prime, Admiral Cochrane had always thought, that made his skin crawl. It was a relatively normal system, lacking some of the weirder aspects of systems that had been catalogued over the last two centuries, yet its planets had been irredeemably scarred by the virus. There was no way to be sure the system had given birth to the virus, or that it hadn’t once belonged to a spacefaring race that had accidentally brought the virus back to their homeworld and doomed themselves to a fate worse than death, but it hardly mattered. The rocky planets had been bombarded so heavily the planetary crust had cracked, the gas giants had been targeted by asteroids and comets to make certain no viral structures floated within the upper atmospheres, and every last orbiting structure had been mercilessly destroyed, yet it still made his skin crawl. It felt as if he was surrounded by insects or walking in sewage or something – anything – else that might kill or infect him, if he made the slightest mistake.

It wasn’t something he could put into words, but it was ever-present. The small detachment monitoring the system, watching for any signs of viral activity, was one of the least-popular stations in the Royal Navy. If it hadn’t been for the team examining the alien artefact discovered in the asteroid belt, a sphere-like artefact light-years ahead of anything the virus had created or stolen for itself, it would have been the least popular duty station in the entire Human Sphere. Cochrane was uneasily aware half his subordinates were trying to get transferred and the other half were spending their free time drinking rotgut, exploring VR sims, or otherwise engaging in activities that – anywhere else – would have landed them in hot water. A year ago, he conceded sourly, he would have been the first to call for harsh punishment for a crewman who lost himself in a VR sim, but now ...

He stood in the centre of the monitoring system and scowled at the handful of icons traversing the system. Virus Prime was supposed to be under quarantine, with only authorised starships allowed to enter, but too many scavengers were popping in and out to see if they could find something they could sell to make themselves instantly rich. His detachment did what they could to drive them out again, yet he had no illusions about their inability to patrol an entire star system ... to say nothing of the rest of infected space. The discovery of a pair of Dyson Spheres, one shattered beyond all hope of repair, had brought some relief, but ... he sighed inwardly. He hoped to hell the scavengers listened to the warnings about infection. There’d been two outbreaks since the formal end of the war and he was sure they’d flowed from a scavenger being goddamned careless with something filched from the system. Some people were just too dumb to live.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d killed themselves and themselves alone, he thought, crossly. But they took hundreds of innocents with them too.

The display pinged. “Sir, we’re picking up an emergency alert from the xenospecialists,” the operator said. There were times when Cochrane wondered what she’d done to be exiled to Virus Prime. She’d either pissed someone off – not impossible – or she’d barely scraped a pass at the academy. “They’re saying the alien artefact is coming to life.”

Cochrane blinked. The alien artefact was a mystery. No one knew what it was, or how it worked, or why it had avoided detection for so long. The virus had been dangerously unpredictable, and it had often ignored threats humans would never have risked leaving to fester, but surely it should have noted the artefact and done something about it. Sure, the ground-based artefacts had repelled the virus, yet ... the sphere had been floating in interplanetary space. The virus should have found it years ago.

“Tell them to evacuate,” he ordered, curtly. The artefact was too inexplicable for the researchers to take risks. No one had figured out how it messed with the sensors, or even why it had shown a handful of researchers a map leading to the Dyson Sphere. Was it really bigger on the inside, as some suspected, or was it simply reconfiguring its interior to mess with the explorers? “They can ...”

Alarms howled. Cochrane jumped. The duty station might be tedious, and that very tedium might be dangerous, but it was relatively uneventful. He caught himself and stared at the display, his mind unable to keep track of the icons flickering into existence, far too near the planet for comfort. The entire station rocked like a boat caught in a storm; a moment later; he hit the alert switch a bit too late, cursing his own lassitude as red icons flashed up in front of him. A handful of compartments were already decompressing ... he hoped to hell no one was in them, as they were sealed off from the rest of the station. They would be dead soon ...

Should have kept running proper drills, his thoughts slammed him. He’d always been uneasily aware he was letting things slide, that if he’d done the same on a starship he’d be in deep shit if the Admiralty inspected his command, but there’d been something about the system that had made it hard to be a martinet. Do your crew even know how to protect themselves?

“Admiral,” the operator said. “There’s ... there’s a ship appearing out of nowhere.”

Cochrane stared in utter disbelief. A catapulted ship would have been understandable, if unexpected. But this ship ... he thought his sensors were being spoofed. The alien ship was nearly two hundred kilometres long, riding on glowing golden wings that stretched out hundreds of miles ... it was impossible to wrap his head around what he was seeing. The ship was just too big. He snapped orders, telling the crew to check the sensors ... if this was someone’s idea of a joke, heads were going to roll. Or a test of his readiness ... it wasn't impossible, he supposed, that someone might have hacked the displays and fed them images of a nightmarish starship ... no, no command inspection would go so far. The risk of the victim doing something insane was just too high.

The station shook again. “What is it?”

“Power readings are off the scale,” the operator said. The alien ship was angling towards the planet. “There’s so much disruption I can’t get a solid read on anything!”

“Bring up the first contact package and send it,” Cochrane snapped. He’d assumed whoever had built the alien artefact within the system was dead and gone, that they’d passed on millions of years ago ... he’d checked the contact protocols when he’d taken command, out of habit, but he’d never thought he’d actually have to use them. “And send a flash-alert down the chain to Earth!”

“Aye, Sir.”

Cochrane barely heard the response. The alien starship was gliding towards the planet, her wings opening wide in a manner he couldn’t help finding ominous. It moved with a speed and grace he would have thought impossible for a ship her size ... battleships were much – much – smaller, yet they moved like wallowing cows. They were tough because they couldn’t hope to dodge incoming projectiles ... and yet, the alien starship was almost absurdly nimble. He poked his forearm and then pinched it, half-expecting to wake up in his bunk, but nothing happened. It was real ...

Jesus, he thought. He was too stunned to feel much of anything, from awe to panic or both. What is that thing?

***

“We made it,” Atkinson reported. “No major damage, just minor bumps and bruises.”

Staci gave him a sharp look. Sure, Endeavour had survived her second jump, but ... she was effectively a prisoner, trapped within the alien gravity fields. They might have managed to compensate for the gravity waves, ensuring a relatively safe transition, yet ... she shook her head as she keyed her console, checking the reports from the departmental heads. The jump had been uncomfortable, but at least they’d survived. It made her hope they could figure out a way to break free.

She kept her voice carefully even. “Where are we?”

There was a pause. Staci gritted her teeth. Normally, it was difficult – if not impossible – to get so lost you didn’t know what star system you were in. The only time it had been difficult to predict precisely where the tramline was going, ironically enough, had been during the first jump to the Dyson System, when the tramline had been extended – or created – by alien technology. Now ... the angel-ship had jumped over thirty light years, the first time she’d taken Endeavour with her, and who knew how far she’d gone now? Staci was all too aware the jump could end with them on the far side of the galaxy, or perhaps even further ...

“Virus Prime,” Helen said. “Captain, we are nearing Virus Prime.”

The display booted up a second later. The results were hazy – the alien drive field made it difficult to see anything that didn’t have a gravity field of its own – but there was no mistaking the surrounding starfield. Or the planet that had – that might have – given birth to the deadliest threat humanity had ever encountered. Staci had passed through the system a year ago and noted just how badly the worlds had been hammered, all the while fearing the virus – a remarkably tenacious life form – had survived. It was hard to believe, but if anything could ...

“Try to raise the observation squadron,” she ordered. It was unlikely they could get a message out, unless they managed to get an accurate lock that would allow for laser communication, but they had to try. “Tell them to keep their distance and watch.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said.

Staci glanced at her console as the angel-ship kept gliding towards the planet. It was moving impossibly quickly, yet it was barely testing the compensators. She suspected – and the analysis deck confirmed it – that they were wrapped in the alien compensator field, or at least something that had the same basic function. She wondered, suddenly, if the aliens needed a compensator field. A race that had transcribed itself into computer cores, or evolved on a gas giant, or become something composed of pure energy ... would it even need a compensator? The thought mocked her as the range closed at incredible speed. If she was right ...

It’s all just theory, she told herself. We know so very little for sure.

Her mind raced. Her warning from ES-17 probably wouldn’t have reached Virus Prime, let alone Earth, by now. Was the alien ship heading straight towards Earth? She didn’t know ... she didn’t even know if the aliens knew where Earth was ... no, that was stupid. They’d kidnapped humans centuries ago, taken them from their homeworld ...of course they knew where to find more! And even if they didn’t ... they’d scanned the minds of humans who’d flown too close to their ships. Their targets might not know where Earth was, but their shuttle’s flight computer sure as hell did. The aliens knew exactly where to find Earth ...

And they might reach the homeworld well before any warning of their arrival, she thought, numbly. It would take weeks, at best, for a fast courier to travel from Virus Prime to Earth. Assuming the jump from ES-17 to Virus Prime was at the limit of alien FTL technology, it would only take a few days for the ship to reach Earth ... perhaps less, perhaps much less, if she was wrong. What the hell is it doing?

“Captain,” MacPhee said. “I have established a laser link with the observation station.”

“Transmit copies of everything to them,” Staci ordered, “and tell them to distribute the information as far as possible.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said. “Transmitting ...”

“Energy surge,” Helen snapped. “Captain, they’re running energy through the gravity folds and ...”

Staci sucked in her breath. The display fuzzed as lightning seemed to dart from one end of the alien ship to the other, each streak of energy larger than Endeavour herself. It made her think of shipkiller missiles, so big they made starfighters and shuttles seem small, even though she didn’t want to think they might be weapons. The lightning folded back and forth on itself, running through the gravity folds like water running through transparent pipes, growing more and more powerful with each iteration. It was awesome and terrifying. There was enough power flowing around the starship to vaporise Endeavour ... she hoped, prayed, that whatever reason the aliens had snatched up her ship didn’t include turning her into kindling. They didn’t want to destroy her ship, did they? If they did, they would have done it by now ...

The lightning flared from the tip of the angel-ship and darted through interplanetary space, striking the planet itself. The display blanked, alarms howling as sensors struggled to cope with the sudden energy surge, then started to clear. Staci stared in disbelief. The entire planet was gone, reduced to atoms ... it was impossible. There had been plans to blow up Mercury, she knew, but they’d proven impractical. And yet the aliens had vaporised an entire planet.

“Shit,” someone breathed.

Staci couldn’t find it in her heart to rebuke them. The display was picking up asteroids now – the planet hadn’t been entirely vaporised – but ... if there had been anyone on the surface, any infected bodies hiding in underground compartments, they were gone now. The energy surge had sterilised the wreckage, obliterating every last trace of the virus along with the rest of the world. She swallowed hard, trying to grasp the impossible sight before her ... and the terrifying implications. If the aliens did that to a settled world ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I believe the ship is preparing to jump again.”

“Alert the crew,” Staci said, automatically. She had had no qualms about bombarding Virus Prime from a safe distance. The virus had been a lethal threat, one so alien there could be no communication, no compromise. If there really had been a planet-cracker bomb, she would have dropped it on Virus Prime without hesitation. And yet, why had the angel-ship destroyed the planet?  Were they trying to help, in a terrifyingly destructive manner, or were they just testing their superweapon on the nearest target? “Communications, did you get everything off?”

“The signal may have been garbled,” MacPhee reported. “I’m repeating the transmission now.”

“Too late,” Helen said. “We’re jumping ...”

Staci braced herself, too late. The world blurred ...

****

This has to be a nightmare, Cochrane thought. It has to be ...

He was too badly shaken to think clearly as he looked at the display. The alien ship had been bad enough, but its casual destruction of an entire planet had been ... it was hard, so hard, to even form a clear picture of what had happened. The sensor web they’d put up around the planet was gone, some sensor platforms obliterated in the blast and others blinded so completely they were worse than useless. His own sensors had been badly damaged too, despite being at a safe distance ... what they’d thought was a safe distance. The gravity waves had battered his station so badly he’d lost touch with half his decks and he had no real clue how many of his crew were injured or dead. The internal monitors, which should have kept track of such details, were so badly degraded it was impossible to determine how best to repair them.

The station shook again. “The ship is gone,” the operator reported. Her voice was weak, shaken. Cochrane wondered, darkly, if she’d shown a tendency to panic when confronted with the unknown, although he had to admit he hadn’t done much better. His training hadn’t included planet-killing alien super-ships appearing out of nowhere and he was fairly sure hers hadn’t either. “She took Endeavour with it.”

Cochrane swallowed. He’d watched Endeavour pass through the system a year ago, on her unknowing way to the Dyson Spheres. She’d gone back there and now ... he wondered, numbly, what had happened to her? Clearly, the spheres hadn’t been as dead as they’d thought. What was the alien ship? And why had it destroyed Virus Prime?

A brief report flashed up on his display. It was impossible to be sure – every sensor that had been watching the planet was either fried or damaged to the point of near-uselessness – but some of the boffins thought a chunk of the planet’s matter had been converted into energy, setting off a chain reaction that had taken out the entire world. Cochrane hadn’t felt any guilt over bombarding Virus Prime – and, to be fair, he hadn’t been anywhere near the system until long afterwards – but why had the alien ship attacked the almost-dead world? He couldn’t come up with any reassuring answers. If they were showing off their power ...

“Admiral, I’m picking up a flash message from Troubadour,” the operator said. “She ... she reports the alien artefact has vanished.”

“What?”

“The alien artefact vanished from her screens shortly before the alien ship left,” the operator said. She didn’t show any sign of nervousness at making an impossible report, although it was clear the word ‘impossible’ needed some revising. “There was a gravity surge and then she was gone.”

“Forward everything to Earth,” Cochrane ordered. The alien ship and Endeavour were gone. There was no way to know if it would return. It was certainly out of his hands. “And then get the damage control teams to work. There’s nothing else we can do here.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter Twenty-Four: HMS Endeavour, Pi System

“Where the hell are we now?”

Staci didn’t mean to snap, but ... she was running on adrenaline and coffee. Endeavour had ridden out the third jump, as easily as the second, yet the ship had too many injured crew while too many of the remainder were strapped to their bunks or couches, unable to relieve her command crew. The ship was slowly being repaired, despite the jumps and the often inexplicable damage to the hull, but she was uneasily aware some of the repairs would fail if the ship was shaken so badly again. The longer they stayed bound to the alien hull, the greater the chance of something going catastrophically wrong.

As if it hasn’t already, she thought, numbly. She knew, now, how the Aztecs must have felt when they’d laid eyes on the Spanish Conquistadors. Or the Zulus who had fought and died at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. They just killed an entire planet.

“We’re in the Pi System, Captain,” Atkinson reported. “The ship is currently holding position twelve light minutes from Pi itself.”

Staci keyed her terminal, bringing up the planetary record. Pi had never been considered a suitable site for a proper colony, which was why the settlement rights had been sold to a religious group keen to abandon technology and go back to live in the way nature intended ... a life, she was pretty sure, that would be nasty, brutish and short for pretty much everyone. It might have been hell, or a paradise, but it no longer mattered. The virus had descended on Pi and infected the colony before it even knew it was under attack. If there was anyone left on the surface, they’d either died of starvation or died when the planet was BioBombed during the closing days of the war.

“Communications, see if you can locate a flicker station,” she ordered. She wasn’t sure if the network had been extended so far from the core worlds – Pi wasn’t particularly important in the grand scheme of things – but it was worth checking. “Sensors, maintain a watch for other starships. Warn them off if you see them.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci rubbed her forehead. She was tired, drained in a manner she hadn’t felt since a star had been crushed into a black hole. The ship was a helpless prisoner and ... she had no idea what to do. It had been easy during the war, when it had been kill or be killed, but now ... the situation was too complex, with so many unknowns, for her to decide on a plan. Could they break free of the alien ship? Or would they be better advised to get closer and see if they could disable the ship? Or destroy it?

She keyed her terminal again. “The beta crews are to replace the alphas where possible,” she ordered. The crew roster was a mess, just like everything else. “Put the delta crewers in place if the betas are unavailable.”

Or dead, her thoughts added, darkly. Or even too badly injured to do their jobs.

Her mind felt dull, but she forced herself to think. Her XO was still in sickbay ... the doctor had healed the wound, from the last report, yet it would be quite some time before he was fit for duty once again. Atkinson or McDougall were technically third and fourth in the chain of command, but both of them had been at their stations longer than Staci herself; the Chief Engineer and his deputy, fifth and sixth in the chain, were both needed elsewhere. She would be quite happy to let a junior have the conn, if they were in interstellar space; here, she wanted an experienced officer in the chair. The hell of it was that she didn’t have one.

Fuck, she thought, numbly. If Admiral Dismukes had remained onboard, I could have press-ganged him into the chair.

Sure, her thoughts replied. And you’d have been court-martialed when you got home.

She keyed her console. “Lieutenant Drake, report to the bridge,” she ordered. He was technically ninth in the chain of command, but he was a mustang and had more experience than officers who outranked him. It wasn't the kind of solution that would please her instructors, or a board of inquiry manned by officers who hadn’t stood on a command deck for decades, yet ... she couldn’t think of a better choice. “Immediately.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci didn’t relax as she surveyed the alien ship, wrapped in its glowing haze. What was it doing? Waiting to recharge its weapons? Or contemplating what it had done? Or ... or what? She wished she knew and yet she feared she never would. The alien behaviour just made no sense, as far as she could tell. But then, perhaps it never would.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Drake said, as he stepped onto the bridge. “Reporting as ordered.”

“You have the conn,” Staci told him. He raised his eyebrows very slightly, but otherwise showed no visible reaction. “I’ll be in my ready room, then inspecting the ship. If anything changes, anything at all, raise me at once.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci nodded curtly, then stepped into her ready room and sagged as the hatch hissed closed behind her. There’d probably be complaints later about her putting Lieutenant Drake in command, from higher-ranking officers who wanted more time in the command chair so they’d be considered for promotion earlier, but they could wait. The officers were dog-tired too, if she was any judge ... she hoped, prayed, nothing would happen while the alpha crew rested. On paper, the other crews were just as good; in practice, the alphas tended to have the edge. In hindsight, that was something she’d have to address when she had a moment. Right now, she was too tired.

She collapsed onto the sofa and closed her eyes. Sleep came slowly and, when it did, she felt nightmarish shadows pressing against her mind, glimpses of things so alien – and so horrific – that she honestly wasn’t sure if she was dreaming. There had been problems the first time they’d jumped into the sphere, but this ... was far worse. They’d been kidnapped by an alien starship, then forced to watch helplessly as the ship had destroyed an entire world. She wanted to believe it was a nightmare, the product of too much school cheese on toast, but she’d pinched herself quite enough. It was real and ...

Her eyes opened, seconds later. It felt as if she hadn’t slept at all, but the chronometer insisted she’d been asleep for hours. She sat upright and checked the status display, breathing a sigh of relief when it became clear the alien ship hadn’t moved. Perhaps it was recharging its drives, she told herself. Catapults were incredibly energy intensive and she had no doubt that whatever the aliens used was just as demanding, particularly as the craft had jumped three times in less than a day. No human ship could even come close to matching such performance. She gritted her teeth as she stood, stumbled into the washroom and undressed before clambering into the shower. The water jerked her awake, just a little. She wished she had more time to luxuriate before returning to duty, but ...

I could have brought a partner with me, she thought. It would have been nice to have someone in her bed – male or female; she wasn’t fussy – and survey ship officers had a great deal of latitude in such matters. But I didn’t have anyone who might be interested.

She keyed the kettle to produce coffee, wondering when she’d gotten so spoiled as to think her steward should make it for her, then found a ration bar and forced herself to eat it. The steward was elsewhere, probably helping in sickbay; she told herself, sharply, not to worry about it. The ship was in a dire situation and all hands were needed to take care of the crew ... hell, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t make her own coffee. It hadn’t been that long since she’d served on a frigate. No one, not even the captain, had someone to make his coffee. If he didn’t like the drink the vending machines provided, he could damn well make his own.

The thought made her smile as she drank her coffee – dark and strong – and changed into a fresh uniform. It didn’t make her feel much better, although she hoped the impression of herself as a commanding officer firmly in command of her ship would stick. She checked the display again, just to be sure nothing had changed, then stood and made her way down to sickbay. Doctor Carnell was sitting at his desk, looking exhausted. Staci hoped he’d found some time to have a nap, between shifts. It was dangerous for anyone to use stims, but for a doctor ...

“The majority of the injured should be fit to return to duty shortly, if they’re not already cleared,” Carnell said, without preamble. His voice sounded as tired as he looked. “The remainder will have to remain in sickbay for now. Most require more intensive treatment than I can offer, even with this sickbay. I don’t suppose there’s a chance to offload them on this magical mystery tour?”

“I doubt it,” Staci said. “If we can’t get the ship free, I doubt we can get a shuttle out too.”

“Thought not.” Carnell stared down at his desk, his eyes seeing nothing. “There’s forty-two dead now, mostly through impact damage of one kind or another. Two died on the operating table ... one ... I’m not sure why he died. The other had brain bleeding and our attempts to cut it off before it was too late were unsuccessful. A few of the wounded could have been saved if we’d gotten to them in time. But ...”

He looked up at her. “Captain, what is this? What are they doing?”

“I wish I knew,” Staci said. She would have understood losing crewmen in combat, but this ... it was rare, almost unknown, for a wounded man to die on the operating table. Modern medical science was incredibly advanced, compared to even a century ago, yet it wasn’t perfect. “You’ve stored the bodies?”

“Put them on ice,” Carnell confirmed. “Under the circumstances, I thought there was nothing to be gained by carrying out the biohazard protocols. I checked carefully, of course, and there’s no hazard.”

Staci nodded, curtly. Tradition demanded the navy do everything in its power to bring the bodies home, if the dead man hadn’t specifically requested burial amidst the stars. The virus had ruined that tradition, as it had ruined so many other things; bodies were to be cremated, without exception, at least until the end of the war. She wasn’t sure if she should reprimand the doctor or agree with him, although ... she sighed, inwardly. The bodies would have to be dealt with, sooner or later. There would have to be a service, for the comfort of the living rather than the dead. And then ...

We can’t risk launching the bodies into space now, she told herself. For all we know, it might be treated as a hostile act.

“Keep them on ice, for the moment,” she said. “And you, Doctor, need to get some sleep.”

Carnell shook his head. “Half my staff are currently resting,” he said. “I’ll sleep when they’re back on duty.”

Staci met his eyes. “And what happens when you try to perform surgery in this condition?”

“I don’t,” Carnell said. “The autodocs can handle most injuries. The ones they can’t ... I’ll have to wake the other doctors.”

“When they get back, go sleep at once,” Staci ordered. “No arguments.”

Carnell laughed, rather humourlessly. “Under normal circumstances, I’d be relieving myself of duty,” he said. “But now I can’t afford to take myself out of sickbay.”

“There’s an awful lot of that going around,” Staci said. “Where did you put Commander Jenner?”

“Room Five,” Carnell said. “He’s doing fine, surprisingly so. The delay in treatment could easily have proven fatal.”

Staci nodded, keeping her face under tight control as she made her way to Room Five. The post-mission debriefing was going to be a bitch, when – if – they made it back to Earth. Her crew had had no reason to expect they’d be swept up by an alien starship, let alone jump from system to system in a manner they’d thought flatly impossible ... she wondered, idly, if she’d be praised for doing the best she could or condemned for not having realised what was about to happen until it was far too late. There wasn’t much point in worrying about it, she told herself firmly. She would happily accept a court-martial if it was the price of getting her crew home.

“Captain,” Jenner said. He was sitting in bed, reading a datapad. “Are the reports true?”

“Virus Prime is gone,” Staci said. Jenner hadn’t been anywhere near the system in its prime, unlike her, but he’d seen the records. “The entire planet has been shattered.”

“Just like Dyson One,” Jenner said. “Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

“Impossible to say.” Staci met his eyes. “What do you make of the rest of the reports?”

“Apart from wondering if someone is messing with me ...?” Jenner held up the datapad. “We are starting to understand how the alien tech works, even if we are very far from duplicating it.”

“We probably should have brought more specialists with us,” Staci said. She’d thought the MNF had too many boffins. She was starting to think they’d had too few. Offloading most of the researchers before everything had gone to hell had been, in hindsight, a mistake. “We need to find a way to get out before it is too late.”

“We are compensating for their gravity waves,” Jenner said. He eyed the datapad thoughtfully. “I’m starting to think they ... they don’t have compensators, as we understand the term. They may not need them. Like jumping up and down in a train, where you don’t get tossed down the aisle the moment your feet leave the ground. Perhaps ... they travel in a bubble of space-time, rather than a drive field. Or something.”

“Or something,” Staci agreed. It was hard to imagine a starship without compensators, although if the ship’s drives worked on very different principles ... “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

Jenner frowned. “They destroyed Virus Prime,” he said. “No, they passed through ES-17, destroyed Virus Prime and then jumped to Pi. Two of those systems we know they’ve touched – they swept ES-17 clear of raw matter so they could use it to build the spheres; they left a device on Virus Prime to monitor the system – and it’s not impossible there’s another alien artefact somewhere on Pi. Did they come here to inspect it?”

Staci shook her head. “We may never know.”

She took the datapad and brought up the file on the nearby planet. The survey hadn’t been very extensive. The first team had noted how difficult it would be to colonise the planet, then performed only the basics – confirming the absence of any indigenous intelligent life, noting a handful of potential locations for settlements – before pulling out and selling the settlement rights for a nominal sum. It was quite possible they’d missed an artefact lying somewhere under an alien sun; God knew, she reflected, that such artefacts were quite hard to find unless one stumbled over them. The virus had been deflected, from what she’d heard; in hindsight, it sounded a lot like the tricks used to keep the sphere-dwellers from making their way into the command centre and accidentally triggering the defences ...

“It’s possible ...”

Staci stopped, dead, as her blood ran cold. A handful of alien artefacts, discovered during Operation Lightning Strike, had been taken back to Earth for study. The researchers had found nothing, as far as she knew, but ... she’d been there when they’d been shipped home. There was no reason to think the aliens knew what had happened to them, yet ... what if they did? What if they thought the artefacts had been stolen? Or what if they were mindlessly following them ...? The angel-ship’s strange behaviour could easily be explained by a semi-intelligent AI being in command, rather than an actual intelligent being. Was it trying to follow orders from long-dead masters?

“We need to warn Earth,” she said. The communications officers would have sent a warning, if one could be sent. “And we need to find a way to stop this ship ...”

Her blood seemed to freeze. Virus Prime was – had been – off-limits. No one who set foot on the surface would be allowed to step off again. The risk was just too high. The world had also been empty, at least of humanoid life. The zombies were all gone, wiped out by the asteroid bombardment and the BioBombs and ... there had been no danger of the angel-ship destroying innocent victims. But if the ship reached Earth ...

They could wipe out billions of humans in a single moment, she thought, numbly. Did the Builders care? Did they intend to destroy an inhabited world? Or would the humans just be collateral damage? If the ship was an AI, would it even notice? What are they doing?

“We need to communicate with them,” Jenner said. “If they don’t know we’re intelligent, why would they give us any consideration?”

Staci had no answer. “Why indeed?”

Her wristcom bleeped. “Captain,” Drake said. “We’re detecting fluctuations in the alien energy field. We think she’s preparing to jump again.”

“Understood,” Staci said. What now? The only good news, she supposed, was that the ship hadn’t taken the time to destroy Pi before leaving. “I’m on my way.”

“Good luck, Captain,” Jenner said. “I’ll be back up there as soon as the doc lets me go.”

Chapter Twenty-Five: Alien Command Centre, Dyson System (Interior)

“The good news is that part of the system seems to have unlocked itself,” Professor Cargill said. “The bad news is that we’re still figuring out what we can do with it.”

Colin nodded, impatiently, as his eyes swept the surrounding foliage. It had been two days since they’d moved back to the command centre and set up camp – again – and a handful of convoys had been harassed, even though they were heavily escorted and heading straight to a place the locals regarded as taboo. So far, the locals hadn’t risked attacking the camp itself, but he feared it was just a matter of time. The taboo had already been broken by the offworlders. He doubted it would take long for the locals to nerve themselves up to cross the line too.

“If the gravimetric readings are correct, there are dozens of microscopic black holes positioned within the shell,” Cargill continued. “There could be one beneath our feet.”

“I see,” Colin said, recalling the old sweats offering food to the raw recruits ... and then telling the youngsters, after they’d eaten, precisely what they’d eaten. Colin had numbed his palate on school dinners, and yet he’d had to struggle not to throw up when he’d been told the ghastly truth. Silly, given that he’d been eating the stuff quite happily before he’d been told, but ... ironically, it hadn’t been the worst thing he’d eaten in years of military service. “And are we in any immediate danger?”

“No.” Cargill seemed mildly disappointed Colin hadn’t panicked. “But we have learnt a great deal more about the shell, and how it’s put together, and how they shape the gravity field that keeps our feet on the ground.”

“That’s always useful,” Colin said, dryly. The researchers often seemed to want to say the obvious. He wasn’t sure if they wanted to say their theories out loud, if only to see if they made sense outside the privacy of their own heads, or if they were just trying to be friendly the only way they knew how. “Make sure you don’t accidentally close the hatch.”

“We are doing our best,” Cargill said. “But a great deal of the system is still closed to us.”

Colin nodded, shifting his attention back to the foliage. It was hard to escape the sense they were being watched, although patrols of the outer defence line – such as it was – had turned up nothing. He wondered, not for the first time, just how many guns – and pallets of ammunition – had been handed over to the locals, before the Chinese coup had been defeated. The Chinese hadn’t kept very good records ... or, more likely, the officers on the ground had messed with them before surrendering. Colin liked to think it was possible to count the bullets and mortar shells, when they were fired at him, but that only worked in bad action movies. The Chinese hadn’t been foolish enough to give the locals anything that couldn’t be countered.

And if they had, the orbital defences would have dropped a hammer on anyone who tried to fire it, he reminded himself. They had the same limitations as us.

He sighed, inwardly. The boffins had yet to find a way to turn off the orbital weapons platforms. It was deeply frustrating, if only because the reports from the second planetoid made it clear that modern active sensors could – and would – reveal many of the command centre’s secrets. Colin had had to fend off demands from the boffins that they take the risk, gambling the orbital defences wouldn’t fire on their own command centre, or direct the fists to take out the bombardment platforms. Colin had flatly vetoed both ideas, at least until the admiral could be consulted. He’d never seen anything to suggest there was an actual intelligence governing them, and if they really were nothing more than automated they might fire on the command centre without bothering to think about it. Hell, given their power level, they could cause a great deal of damage by bombarding the surface around the command centre. Colin had never wanted a safe life, but there were limits.

A low rumble split the air as the next convoy glided into view, the guards relaxing – slightly – as they passed through the earthworks. Colin nodded to the new CO, then turned and headed into the alien building. The boffins were largely a sensible lot – and he’d made sure to confiscate anything that could transmit a signal, if the signal function hadn’t been physically disabled – but he felt the urge to keep an eye on them. It was all too easy to imagine them finding a big red button, pushing it ... and accidentally blowing up the whole sphere. Or switching off the gravity field. Or ... the hell of it, he reflected, was that it was impossible to estimate the risks. Back home, he could point out the danger of picking up an unexploded shell in the midst of Salisbury Plain, or walking into the middle of the range during a live-fire exercise. Here ... for all he knew, something that looked dangerous might be completely safe and something very dangerous might look harmless, at least until he touched it.

He felt the gravity field flicker, slightly, as he passed through a set of alien corridors. It was hard to imagine what the Builders might have looked like, given the sheer size of their corridors, although he’d thought – the first time he’d seen the building – that the corridors were really their loading bays. He’d driven armoured cars and tanks through passageways large enough for a dozen men to march abreast, and they were the smaller passageways. The builders might be no bigger than the average human, but their vehicles might be much larger. The spheres were proof they thought big ...

And yet, the more he looked at the corridor, the more he thought there was something odd about it. It was a perfect square, not ... he’d been in corridors that were taller than they were wider, or vice versa, but he couldn’t recall anything so perfectly balanced anywhere on Earth. Or onboard ship ... even the internal tubes weren’t perfectly symmetrical. But here ... he wondered if it said something about the Builders, if they were more used to living and working in zero-gee environments, or if they’d assigned the job of building the command centre to someone who didn’t think about such things. It wasn’t impossible. He’d had a mate, back home, who’d grown up on a housing estate designed by a council bureaucrat who’d never thought the inhabitants might need shops, playgrounds, or anything else that might make life on the estate reasonably tolerable.

He put the thought aside as he stepped into one of the control rooms and looked around. An oddly translucent hologram hung in the air in the exact centre of the chamber, a strange mix of a perfectly spherical structure combined with hexagons that rotated oddly, twisting and turning in a pattern that seemed random, yet ... he thought there was a pattern, and that it would come to him if he stared long enough. He forced himself to tear his eyes away and look around the rest of the chamber, the boffins and their equipment scattered around the compartment in a manner that made them look like unwelcome intruders. Their passive sensors watched everything, recording everything they could and transmitting it back to the ships for detailed analysis ... he hoped, despite himself, that there would be no more intelligence tests. It had been hard enough to pass the tests back when he’d volunteered for the military, on the assumption that volunteering would give him a chance to choose where he’d go, but here ... who knew if alien logic was anything like human logic? They might be operating from completely different ideas of how the universe worked ...

“We think that sphere represents the shell itself,” Cargill said. He’d been standing beside a passive sensor when Colin entered, checking the notes against his datapad. “The hexagons represent the gravity fields controlling the black holes, and the haze is the sphere’s own gravity field.”

Colin frowned. “How can you be sure?”

“We can’t,” Cargill said, “but if the hexagons were material we’d see more evidence of their existence. They’re really too large, to the point they should be bursting out of the ground everywhere ... except they’re not. The sphere isn’t quite flat, but the North Mountain is the only really large mountain.”

“That we’ve logged,” Colin reminded him. He’d expected a second mountain, and hatch, on the other side of the sphere, but long-range sensors and probes had revealed nothing. The sheer size of the megastructure made it hard to believe they’d charted the entire surface, particularly as using active sensors within the sphere was a death sentence, but a large mountain should have been visible from orbit. “There could be more natural structures than we’ve found ...”

“Nothing about this thing is natural,” Cargill reminded him, quietly. “The environment is even less natural than Mars, or any space habitat.”

A shiver ran down Colin’s spine. Mars had been a dead world when humans had first landed on the red planet, and even after two hundred years of terraforming the planet was still nowhere near as warm and comfortable as the homeworld. Rumours of alien artefacts on the surface had given way to the cold hard fact that, if life had ever existed on Mars, it was long gone. There were no tiny little aliens plotting to blow up the Earth, no shape-shifting superheroes, no giant tripods flashing heat-rays and crewed by eldritch horrors bent on conquest. And yet ... at least Mars had a natural gravity field. It couldn’t be turned off by boffins with more curiosity than common sense. The sphere was so big it was easy to forget it was an artificial environment.

“The shell itself is actually very thin,” Cargill continued. “Thin is relative, when we discuss something the size of a Dyson sphere, but ... it really is quite thin. If it were made of the toughest material known to humanity, it would have been shattered from the bombardment by now. Whatever it is actually made of, it is incredibly tough ...”

He paused. “I think the gravity field actually absorbed a great deal of the kinetic energy when the debris hit the sphere.”

Colin eyed the hologram for a long moment. “And what does that mean?”

“It means the sphere may not be as tough as we thought,” Cargill said. “The fists, too, may be wrapped in gravitational force, rather than being solid objects ...”

“I’ll leave that to you to think about,” Colin said. “Have you figured out how to control the system?”

“Some parts of it,” Cargill said. “The black holes do seem to allow for a degree of FTL communications, as well as targeting beams of pseudogravity. We didn’t understand how that worked at first – gravity is restricted to the speed of light, while pseudogravity seemed to be considerably faster – but we’re unlocking it now. I’m pretty sure the various stations are supposed to interact in concert, which makes sense if they have a method of FTL communication that doesn’t require a tramline. Back when we were experimenting with the lone planetoid, there were limits to what we could get the fists to do. Here ... I think we can make them sit up and dance.”

“Be very careful,” Colin warned. The fists might be nothing more than big dumb objects, but ... how could they be sure? At what point would the automatics decide they needed intelligent supervision and send an alert up the chain? Had they already done it? Was that why the alien starship had arrived? “If you push the wrong thing, you might blow up the entire system.”

“I doubt it,” Cargill said. “But we do have a handful of experiments we wish to try.”

He grinned as he turned away, leading Colin deeper into the structure. “Do you know it’s possible to use a laser beam to launch a spacecraft into orbit?”

Colin frowned. It didn’t seem very plausible. He vaguely recalled reading something about a laser-powered probe being dispatched to the nearest star, over a hundred years ago, but the program had come to an abrupt end when the tramlines had been discovered. Why bother spending years on propelling a tiny probe across the void for years when you could hop from star to star in the blink of an eye? It just struck him as wasteful.

“It was never actually tried, not to get a spacecraft off the planet’s surface,” Cargill explained. “By the time we developed the technology to make it practical, we had SSTOs and later drive fields ... there was no need, we felt, to build the infrastructure when drive field-powered shuttles were much more flexible. Laser-powered lightsails worked better in open space, but again ... no matter how much effort we put into the designs, drive fields were far superior.”

He paused. “The Builders thought differently. Their pseudogravity beams have the same effect, only on a much greater scale. Here ... I think it’s possible to use a pseudogravity beam to lift a makeshift starship into orbit ... and I’d bet good money the orbiting defence platforms will ignore it.”

Colin shot him an odd look. He’d had to do a module in unconventional technology, as part of the preparations for the mission, but his instructors had admitted that half the technology was effectively theoretical and the other half incredibly inefficient. Maybe it was possible to build a surprisingly advanced tech base out of sticks, stones and wind-powered devices, yet ... no one had ever actually tried, not even the morons who thought they could live without modern technology. Colin had been convinced of the value of modern tech from the moment he’d done his first survival exercise, and he was entirely sure the luddites had changed their minds when they’d tried to live without it; he had no intention of spending his life trying to develop a new way to live, when the old way was so much better. The idea that anyone could build a starship out of wood ... one might as well try to put one together out of spit and baling wire. It was just absurd.

Perhaps not, part of his mind whispered. There’d been a handful of asteroid colonies cut off from the Human Sphere during the war, left to survive on their own until contact had been re-established after the fighting had finally come to an end. They didn’t have the tech to build their own starships, or get out of the gravity well, but they didn’t need to do either. They just needed to survive.

“It might be worth trying,” he said, carefully. The fists hadn’t been attacked by the weapons platforms, as far as they knew, although the fists hadn’t tried to land on the surface. He’d always assumed the shuttle had been shot down, the first time they’d visited the sphere, because it had been slipping into the atmosphere, but ... had it been because it was radiating a drive field instead of pseudogravity? “But how would you control your flight?”

“Once we get into orbit, we’d be relatively safe,” Cargill said, leading the way into another chamber. “We think the pseudogravity beams could be controlled from the surface.”

“H.G. Wells would be proud,” Colin said. He couldn’t help thinking Tobias would love the concept of a steampunk starship. “But ...”

He shook his head as he looked around the chamber. It reminded him, weirdly enough, of a nursery for young children, with building blocks they could put together, take apart, and then put back together in a different shape. He’d spent quite a few months himself in such a place, when his mother had to go back to work. It was difficult to believe the bricks were alien machinery, although he’d seen enough evidence to convince him. The locals hadn’t recognised the first away team’s guns as deadly weapons until they’d seen them in action.

A soldier from the Napoleonic Wars would recognise a modern weapon, he thought, but a soldier from the days before gunpowder might think it nothing more than a poorly designed spear.

“We’ve been figuring out what bricks do what,” Cargill said, indicating the pile. “The system looks absurd, to our eyes, but it’s really nothing more than a circuit board. Well, something along the same lines ... at least. The locals would need months to work out the basics, we think, and in doing so their minds would develop in the right directions, but we’ve been able to crack them through a combination of computer analysis and ... well, actually having a concept or two the locals lack. I suspect it would take them quite some time to work out what the bricks are, let alone put them together. We may be cheating.”

“May,” Colin repeated. The other pieces of alien machinery were just ... weird. He stared at them ... and felt as dull and stupid as a primitive tribesman, coming face to face with starships so advanced they were practically magic. “What do you think the Builders will think of that?”

His heart sank as he studied a piece of technology that looked ... strange. It was so alien it was hard to get an impression of what it really looked like, as if it shifted slightly every time he blinked. He wanted to believe it was broken – parts certainly looked melted – but it was too well put together for him to convince himself, let alone anyone else. What was it? There was a strange sense around it, as if it was reaching out to him ...

Cargill said something. Colin didn’t hear.

The world lurched, then went dark.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Second Planetoid, Dyson System

“We’re good to go,” Kate Evans said. “Are we ready?”

Tobias gritted his teeth. The first time he’d meddled with the alien command and control system, he’d likened it to a computer game. He’d had no idea how it actually functioned, or just where the power came from, but he hadn’t needed to know the details to make the system work. Once he’d worked out the basics of gravity and pseudogravity manipulation, it had been relatively simple to work out what the system could and couldn’t do. It had been counter-intuitive, at first, and it had heightened his suspicion the Builders were used to a zero-gee environment, but they’d learnt to use it. This time, they were fiddling with the base code itself.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought. He’d often tried to hack his favourite games, as a teenager, and the results had been decidedly mixed. It was one thing to have infinite lives, or invincible characters, but quite another to accidentally crash the game because of errors in the base code rendering the game unplayable. Or being kicked out of a challenge match for cheating ... he’d never had that happen, but then his hacking skills had never been up to the challenge of hacking a game server and rewriting the code to rig events in his favour. The gaming companies were locked in an endless battle with hackers who outshone him effortlessly, many who’d embarrassed their targets as well as undermining them. Here, the consequences could be a great deal worse. If they pushed the wrong button, they might turn off an entire star.

Or create a second black hole, he thought. The gravity waves had knocked nearly a third of the debris out of orbit. He didn’t want to think what they’d do to an intact sphere. Smash everything flat, kill every last inhabitant ... perhaps even shatter the sphere. There were boffins who argued that was what had killed Dyson One, insisting the Builders had turned the star into a black hole and then back again ... very few took those theories seriously, for obvious reasons, but right now they seemed disturbingly plausible. We don’t really know the limits of their technology.

The alien display in front of him was relatively simply, although – again – the way it was set up suggested the Builders had been used to viewing it from any angle, or even using the display to manipulate the objects it showed. There were no colours, none of the red or green icons humans used to indicate hostile or friendly objects, nor were there any vector lines showing possible targets or impact sites, but it was easy enough to pick them out. Some holographic icons were harder than others, as if they were real rather than translucent ghosts; he suspected, after his first experience, that the solid-light projections signified items that could be manipulated. It gave him a strange feeling of God-like omnipotence, mingled with awe and terror. He felt as if he could reach out and shove one or more of the human ships straight into the sphere, or crush it with his bare hands. It made him wonder just how the Builders must have felt, as they gazed upon their work. They had to have felt like gods.

“Gaze upon my works, you mighty, and despair,” he muttered. It had been a long – long – time since he’d read the poem, since he’d been taught the dangers of a society failing to rejuvenate itself and eventually falling to stronger competitors ... something he’d suspected, as he grew older and more cynical, to be a droll reminder of just how close his civilisation had come to disaster. “But what is left of the Builders themselves?”

Kate Evans glanced at him. “I beg your pardon?”

Tobias shook his head. It wasn’t important. The Builders were gone ... no matter how he studied the system-wide display, showing the binary system in realtime, he didn’t see any trace of the Builders, much less a watching intelligence. It defied belief that any society would be so careless, particularly when it had brought millions of primitives to a wholly artificial environment, but he’d seen enough evidence of his own society’s carelessness to find it hard to judge the Builders too harshly. His tutors had insisted – he was sure it was government propaganda – that Britain had saved itself from total defeat, during the Troubles, yet the price had been high. Freedom had taken a blow, as had democracy. Britain might not be a nakedly fascistic state, not compared to China or Russia, but she wasn’t wholly free either. He’d read quite a few history books on the dark web that suggested an alternate take on the last two hundred years.

“Never mind,” he said. He checked the live feed again, silently envying the Builders their FTL communications system. Their prime target was nearly ten light hours from the second planetoid, heading away from Dyson One and directly towards Dyson Two; there was no way they could monitor the target, let alone compensate for any misfortunes, if they were wholly reliant on human tech. “I’m ready.”

Sure, his thoughts mocked. Ready to do what?

The thought galled him. He wasn’t sure why the admiral, or whoever had made the call, had insisted on leaving him on the planetoid. He’d flown a bunch of researchers to the planetoid and then gone back for more, as well as a handful of technicians to set up life support tents for the boffins, but otherwise he’d been of little real use. The whole experience was a grim reminder of just how little he knew, compared to a regular naval crewman. He’d put together a long list of things he needed to learn, if he had time, yet ... right now, all he could really do to help consisted of fetching and carrying. Even putting together the tents had been tricky, not least because his mind kept insisting they were being silly. It felt like putting together a tent inside a home, although it wasn’t as silly as it looked. There were plans to repressurise the planetoid, and as far as anyone could tell the outer hull was intact, but the sheer volume of air they’d require was daunting. Tobias had no idea how the Builders had managed to pressurise the planetoid in the first place.

Perhaps they didn’t bother, he thought. Or they simply wore masks.

Or ...  There were concepts for genetically engineered humans who could live in space, feeding on solar radiation and little else. They all struck him as absurd, if not impractical, but who knew? The Builders might be able to solve the problems effortlessly, or they might even have evolved in open space. Unlikely, yet ... no one had thought an underwater civilisation could develop technology, let alone become spacefarers, until the Tadpoles had done it.

“Here we go,” Kate said. “Brace yourselves ...”

She glided forward, carefully steering herself through the holograms until she was hovering in front of their target. It was semi-solid, according to the sensors, suggesting it could be manipulated by the control system. Tobias felt cold just looking at it. A chunk of debris larger than an entire continent ... it was hard, incredibly hard, not to fear it would pop the sphere like a balloon when it struck the shell. It was far too big to be deflected or destroyed by merely human technology, not even the biggest bomb humanity had ever managed to build and deploy. His lips quirked as Kate reached forward, touching the object so gently it was difficult to believe the system was even registering the touch. No one knew for sure how sensitive the alien tech actually was, or what level of pressure was required to activate the command-and-control system. Better to be safe than sorry, but they knew so little it was hard to tell what was safe.

“Pretend it’s your lover’s genitals,” someone muttered.

“So hit them as hard as possible?” Kate sounded more distracted than amused or irritated. “It feels very solid and ...”

The object shifted, moving so rapidly that Kate almost spun out of control. She caught herself quickly, before her flailing arms and legs could intersect with something else, and glided back as the object moved away from the sphere. It appeared to be moving slowly, but the sheer volume of space covered by the display was clear proof it had been shoved with incredible force. Right now ... he did a silent calculation in his head, then checked the results on the datapad. The object was flying out of the system at nearly a third of the speed of light. He breathed a silent prayer it wouldn’t fly straight into another star system and strike an inhabited world. At that speed, the locals would barely have any warning before it was too late.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to shove it into the black hole instead, he told himself. No one really knew what would happen if they kept feeding debris into the gravity well – he’d heard all sorts of crazy theories, from nothing much happening to the gravity field expanding to the point it started to devour the entire galaxy – but it had to be safer than tossing immense pieces of debris into interstellar space. We might have signed a race’s death warrant without ever knowing what we’d done.

“We need to wait now,” Professor Russ said. “We can’t do anything else until we get independent confirmation.”

Kate Evans nodded as she floated back to the webbing surrounding the display and attached herself to the hooks. The planetoid’s gravity field was oddly variable, shaped in ways that defied human technology; Tobias liked to think the Builders had taken precautions against having their tech activated by accident, particularly pseudogravity beams that could knock a whole planet out of orbit, but it was well to be careful. The Builders might be adults who’d never thought they’d have to take care of children, or simply underestimated how ingenious some children could be. A child might see a tabletop as a challenge and climb up, without being aware of what would happen if they fell off ...

And in this case, we might blow up the sphere, or the star, or ...

“There’s a faint sense of ... well, a border at the edge of the display,” Kate said. “I think that’s the edge of their range.”

Tobias heard a scientist snort. He rolled his eyes, although he understood the man’s point. If they were reading the scale correctly, the display covered nearly two light-days, a range over four times the distance between Sol and Pluto. At some point, and he feared they were nearing it, the sheer scale of the alien technology – and the power it gave its masters – became just too big to be comprehended. He glanced at the timer, wishing – again – that they had their own FTL communicator. The display insisted the debris had been knocked away from the sphere, but how could they be sure? It could be just a simulation ...

You used the tech to aim fists at targets, he reminded himself. That wasn’t a simulation, was it?

He put the thought aside as he started to walk through the surrounding compartments, looking for anything that might have changed in the last few hours. The scientists had already noted and logged dozens of changes, filing them away in hopes of deciphering the meaning behind them or understanding just why the interior sometimes seemed to change when humans looked away. Tobias suspected it had something to do with the black hole, although he had to admit that some of the wilder theories would make for a pretty interesting science-fantasy flick. The idea of the planetoid existing in multiple dimensions and timelines at once was quite amusing, although he found the theory hard to grasp. It was quite possible one might walk down the wrong corridor and find oneself in the wrong timeline ...

And you might not notice at first, until you came face to face with something different, he told himself. It would make a pretty cool horror story. Was his alternate self still dating Marigold? Was his mother or sister dead in the alternate timeline? Or ... the possibilities were endless, and so were the risks. If that happens to be true, would you even realise until it was far too late to get home? Would you even know how?

He shook his head as he walked past a pile of alien machinery, surrounded by human sensors. There was no clear idea of what the tech was designed to do, although it was clearly doing something. Tobias hadn’t been able to figure it out and neither had any of the boffins ... which hadn’t stopped them from speculating, of course.  Some of their theories sounded crazy, at least at first, but Tobias wondered ... if you could create a solid-light hologram, and the Builders could, why couldn’t you create holographic machinery that was more than just a simple illusion? Perhaps the reason the alien tech seemed to change every time he looked at it wasn’t something to do with multiple dimensions, or sheer alienness, but a hologram reconfiguring itself as easily as a shuttlecraft might adjust its drive fields in flight. Perhaps ...

Something flickered through the air. His hair tried to stand on end as a gust of wind brushed against him. It shouldn’t have been there ... there was no air in the planetoid, nothing that could carry a breeze. Alarm washed through him, one hand dropping to his wristcom to sound the alert as the alien machinery came to life, throwing up flashes of light that might be alien writing or nothing at all ... he stumbled backwards as the darkness twisted in front of him – for a moment, he was sure he was falling into the black hole – and then a human figure was suddenly there, gasping for air. Tobias froze, panic yammering at the back of his mind. Colin! It was Colin ... Colin appearing out of nowhere was one of his nightmares, one that had never quite gone away ... Colin was dying, hand grabbing for a mask that was nowhere to be seen.

It’s a babble zone, Tobias thought. It had to be. The alien tech dragged up their worst fears and threw them into the light, forcing them to confront themselves or back off. And yet it feels real ...

He hesitated, then grabbed the spare mask from his belt and stumbled forward, pressing it against Colin’s face. The mask melded to his skin, pushing air into his lungs ... enough air, if the briefing notes were accurate, to keep someone alive long enough to get to a shuttle or tent or somewhere – anywhere – else. Tobias’s mind caught up a second later, a shiver of fear running through him as he realised he was actually touching Colin. He’d thought it a nightmare, perhaps induced by alien technology, but it was real. He’d saved Colin’s life.  Again. He wondered, once again, if he’d live long enough to regret it.

Colin stared at him, shocked. Tobias stared back. Colin had been on the sphere, the last he’d heard ... it wasn’t as if they’d stayed in touch over the last few days. He shouldn’t have been here, not on the planetoid ... how the hell had he even gotten here? Tobias had to admit Colin was good at his job, but there was no need for him on the planetoid. There were no locals who might prove a threat ...

Tobias beckoned. Colin followed, stumbling after him. His uniform should have provided some protection, from the sudden drop into vacuum, but he’d clearly been too stunned to reach for his mask, if he’d had one. Failing to carry a spare was a serious breach of regulations, when operating on the planetoid, yet ... Tobias wondered, in a flicker of alarm, if the person he’d saved wasn’t the real Colin, just something put together from his memories and given human form. He had no idea how to test it. If the aliens had scanned his memories, they knew everything Colin and Tobias had shared. The nasty part of his mind whispered they’d take one look and condemn the human race to death. The hell of it was that there was a part of him that wouldn’t blame them.

Colin sagged in relief as he was shown into a tent. “Fuck,” he managed, as he tore away the mask. His voice was raspy, his throat damaged by the vacuum. “I thought I was dead.”

“I thought you were on the sphere,” Tobias said. “What happened?”

“I was!” Colin stared at him, his face red. “Where are we?”

“The planetoid,” Tobias said, carefully. He was torn between believing Colin and absolute disbelief.  “The second planetoid.”

“There was an alien device,” Colin managed. “It did something and ... I was here.”

“You were lucky,” Tobias said, keying his handheld sensor. It wasn’t set up for medical exams, but Colin certainly looked human ... and real. If he was an alien copy, it was a very good copy. “Do you remember what happened at the Christmas Play, when we were in our fifth year?”

“Judy lost her knickers,” Colin said. “Why ...?”

Tobias nodded, thoughtfully. Judy had been singing her solo when her panties had fallen down, a moment before some teacher had had the presence of mind to turn off the lights. No one had seen anything, certainly nothing explicit, but it had been the talk of the school for months afterwards. The poor girl had never quite lived it down. If Colin remembered that ...

“I need to get you back to the ship,” he said. The medics would scan Colin from top to bottom, confirming he wasn’t a duplicate ... or someone from an alternate timeline. They’d also check to make sure Colin had vanished from the sphere. “And then ... I guess there’s a record you could claim.”

Colin grinned. “Right on!”

Chapter Twenty-Seven: HMS Endeavour, Wensleydale System

“Captain,” Helen said. “I’ve got a direct link from the analysis deck. The researchers think we’re going to jump to Wensleydale.”

Staci frowned, inwardly. The first contact with the virus had been at Wensleydale, although no one had realised it at the time. They’d spotted an STL generation ship fleeing an alien threat and hadn’t worked out, until it had been far too late, that the refugees had brought the virus with them. There’d been little hope of saving them, not when their bodies had been so comprehensively riddled with the virus. The researchers had done what they could, but in the end the poor bastards had been just another race wiped out so completely little survived. They didn’t even know, not really, if the aliens had been native to their supposed homeworld, or if they’d just been brought there from somewhere else.

She looked up. “How can you be sure?”

“The sensor readings suggest the angel-ship is focusing its gravity field on Wensleydale’s primary,” Helen said. “It’s forming a long-range tramline ... rather, a semi-tramline, one yanking it towards its target star.”

It could slam us right into the star, Staci thought. The angel might have nothing to fear from a dive into a star, but Endeavour would be vaporised if she went too close. There’d been a handful of probes dropped into stars, over the years, yet they’d all been heavily armoured and none had lasted long. What is that ship doing?

“It does make sense,” Helen added. “There’s a direct line between Dyson and ES-17, then ES-17 and Virus Prime, and then ...”

Staci nodded, curtly. The researchers had often speculated there were hundreds upon hundreds of tramlines that were so faint they couldn’t be detected, let alone used to cross light-years in the blink of an eye. It was possible the angel could make use of them, or simply create a brief tramline for itself ... she eyed the display as it updated rapidly, wondering if the black hole had served as a target for a starship jumping hundreds of light years in a single bound. It shouldn’t have been visible – she didn’t have to check the optical sensors to know Dyson One appeared unchanged, not from dozens of light years away – but who knew? The Builders might even have created the black hole to draw their ship from its homeworld to the binary system.

The ship quivered, slightly, as the angel-ship prepared to jump. Staci sucked in her breath as the gravity waves grew stronger, brushing against Endeavour’s hull despite the adapted drive fields. The data in front of her would fuel genuinely original science, she knew, but it was hard not to feel helpless and trapped. She’d studied martial arts from a very early age and she knew she was a good fighter, yet the one time she’d fought a boy much older than herself had been a painful and humiliating defeat. She’d known more than her opponent, she thought, but he’d been so strong her knowledge and skill had been completely irrelevant. They were learning more about the alien technology with every passing moment, unlocking its secrets one by one, and yet ...

Another quiver ran through the hull. Staci felt sick, as if the world itself was suddenly untethered from reality, and caught herself a moment before she threw up. Her stomach felt oily, full to bursting of something she could neither digest nor expel, as the display blanked. For a moment, the universe itself seemed to pause like a man on the verge of a sneeze, before clearing. Her vision darkened and then cleared so quickly she wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. The display lit up again, sensors working desperately to pick out something – anything – outside the angel’s haze. The star was easy to find. Everything else ...

“Location confirmed,” Atkinson said. “We have arrived at Wensleydale.”

“And we set a new record,” Helen put in. “The fastest recorded trip between the two stars is three weeks, and we did it in ten seconds.”

“It may not count if we’re not the ones in control,” Staci said. “We didn’t choose to come here.”

She sucked in her breath. “Communications, try to raise the colony. Warn them they may be attacked.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The display filled slowly, piece by piece. The angel-ship was spreading her wings wide, picking up speed in a manner that would challenge a courier boat. They had the fastest acceleration curves in the fleet, certainly for interstellar starships, but the angel’s acceleration curve threatened to leave them in the dust. Staci recalled some of the old reports from the First Interstellar War and scowled inwardly, finally understanding why Admiral Smith had chosen his tactics to force the enemy to come to him, rather than closing with the enemy as fast as possible. Ark Royal had been heavily armoured, but she’d handled like a wallowing pig. If the Tadpoles had wanted to avoid engagement, they could have done so easily.

“Captain, I’m picking up the generation ship and two destroyers orbiting the colony,” Helen said. “They’re bringing their drives online now.”

“Communications, signal the destroyers,” Staci ordered. “Caution them to keep their distance.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said. “The interference may make it impossible to get a signal to them at this range ...”

“Work on it,” Staci snapped. She had no idea what the destroyer captains were thinking, but she feared the worst. Did they know what had happened to Virus Prime? Wensleydale had been a colony on the edge of explored space, well beyond the early flicker network, when the war had started and ... she had no idea if the network had been expanded this far in the last year or so. It had been on the list of tasks the navy intended to do, but the international aspect meant it was quite possible nothing had been done. “If they engage the angel, all hell will break loose.”

Her mind raced. Wensleydale had never been a particularly big colony. The sheer distance from Earth had limited its appeal, ensuring the first settlers were hardy independent types rather than farmers, industrialists and everyone else more interested in moving to one of closer worlds. The virus had infected a chunk of the population, but – for whatever reason – it hadn’t managed to infect the entire world. Some of the survivors had managed to last long enough to be rescued, then took the lead on rebuilding their world. She keyed the terminal and brought up the records. The census was imprecise – Wensleydale and a number of other outer colonies had a habit of understating their populations – but there were at least seven thousand people on the surface. It might be a great deal more.

“Captain, I can’t punch a radio beam through to the destroyers,” MacPhee reported. “Laser links are unreliable at this distance!”

Staci scowled. “Can you get a drone through the haze?”

“I doubt it,” MacPhee said. “A drone wouldn’t have the power to compensate and surf its way free.”

“Keep trying to raise them,” Staci ordered.

Her heart sank. She knew what the destroyer captains must be feeling. One moment, everything had been calm; the next, an alien super-ship had appeared out of nowhere on a direct course for Wensleydale. They would have sent a raid warning down to the surface, of course, but there wouldn’t be enough time for the population to take shelter if the intruder was hostile. Staci suspected it wouldn’t matter if the population was under cover, with all betraying technology silenced, or not. The angel had blown up an entire world, and she had no doubt it could do it again. The outer colonies had procedures to cope with sudden threats coming out of the void, and the colonists tended to take them seriously, but she had a nasty feeling their procedures weren’t anything like enough. Wensleydale didn’t have a modern planetary defence net and even if it had, the angel-ship wouldn’t have a problem blasting through it.

“Captain,” Helen said, quietly. “The two destroyers are on approach vector. I think they’re trying to warn the angel off.”

Staci glanced at her. “You think?”

“I’m picking up scattered radio transmissions, all heavily garbled,” Helen said. “They may be trying to raise the angel, but the haze is making it impossible to read their signals.”

“And we already knew it pays no attention to the first contact package,” Staci finished, grimly. “Can they detect us, trapped within the haze?”

“Unknown,” Helen said. “But I doubt it. The haze is too intense to get a solid read on anything from the outside.”

Staci swore under her breath. The destroyer captains were watching the worst first contact scenarios unfold right in front of them. The alien ship was clearly from a far more advanced race, yet it was bearing down on a human world and ignoring the human ships ... should they back off and hope for the best, or risk opening fire on a starship that was ignoring everything else? If the former, they’d be leaving Wensleydale at the angel’s mercy; if the latter, they risked starting a war with a far more advanced race, a war humanity could and would lose. Interstellar law – human law – stated that it would be perfectly legal to fire on a ship posing an obvious threat, human or alien, but the aliens might disagree and if they had the bigger guns it was their interpretation that would count. Human history was full of events decided by force, or the threat of force, rather than legality; the Great Powers had never hesitated to stamp on the Lesser Powers if they thought their interests were at risk, although they often came up with justifications that didn’t make them look like the bad guys. And the only reason those justifications were believed, or people pretended to believe them, was the threat of force ...

Back off, you fools, she thought. The destroyers couldn’t save Wensleydale, if the angel intended to destroy it. There was nothing they could do, but die heroically. Back off ...

She felt a stab of sympathy. A clear threat could be handled, perhaps. But a situation involving an unknown starship with unknown intentions ... it would breed uncertainty and hesitation, the kind of feeling that the board of inquiry would condemn after the fact, if anyone remained alive to do it. She wouldn’t have wanted to back off, if she’d found herself the only thing standing between an unknown ship and a populated world, but ... what choice did they have? They couldn’t hope to stop the angel if it wanted to take out the entire planet.

Her eyes lingered on the display. The range was closing rapidly ... no, that was a joke where the angel was concerned. The destroyers carried nuclear-tipped missiles and laser warheads and neither, she was sure, would make the angel-ship so much as blink. Their energy weapons weren’t capable of doing more than scorching a battleship’s hull ... somehow, she didn’t think they could get through the haze, let alone hurt the angel. She thought frantically, trying to come up with a plan, but there was nothing. They might be inside the angel’s defence field, at least, yet that didn’t mean they could damage the hull ...

“Captain, one of the destroyers is breaking off,” Helen reported. The display updated, showing a destroyer turning to head straight towards the tramline. Her captain must have ordered maximum power, she noted, although it was nowhere near enough to get out of range if the angel decided to kill him. “The other is holding position.”

Staci grimaced. She had no idea who was in command – the distortion was intense enough to keep them from picking up IFF codes – but she couldn’t fault their call. The first destroyer was standing her ground, watching and waiting; the second would take the warning up the chain, alerting Earth that they had a new and terrible enemy. She swallowed hard, reminding herself the angel might reach Earth before any word of its existence. She checked the starchart, cursing under her breath. The last update suggested the nearest flicker station was two jumps away. Assuming the destroyer kept going at max power, she’d still need at least three days to get there and then ...

The naval base nearby will get the message first, she told herself. But what the hell are they going to do about it?

She forced herself to watch as the range closed rapidly. Local space appeared to be empty, but she was certain the destroyers would have launched probes and deployed sensor platforms. She hoped – prayed – they’d pick up something ... she cursed the designers under her breath for doing too good a job, when it came to making the platforms incredibly difficult to spot. They might have been able to get a laser signal through, if they’d known where to point the beam. The platforms weren’t actively cloaked, and somehow she was sure the stealth coating wasn’t enough to hide them from detection, but the haze made it impossible for her to find them. The range closed so rapidly she was sure the angel was going to ram, or capture, the destroyer, an instant before the destroyer darted out of the way. She sucked in her breath. The ship’s commander had nerve, to be sure, but ...

He had no choice, she told herself, sharply. The sheer power surrounding the alien starship was unreal. The destroyer would have been torn into atoms if she’d brushed against the wings, unless the aliens chose to pull her to them. But now ... what now?

Her gaze sharpened. Wensleydale’s orbitals were nearly empty, save for the alien generation starship and a handful of orbiting satellites. The generation starship hadn’t been that interesting, from a technical point of view, but that hadn’t kept dozens of scientists crawling over the ship to determine just how well the original plans held up against a real generation starship. Staci vaguely recalled reading an abstract of a report that suggested the starship had been built by a far more advanced society than they’d thought, at least at first, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Technological advancement didn’t move in a straight line ... and besides, the virus had had a tendency to take over host societies rather than build its own starships, resulting in its fleets being dangerously unpredictable. There’d never been any way to know what weapons the ships had been carrying, at least until they opened fire. And yet ...

There’s no longer any virus here, she thought, numbly. You don’t need to destroy the entire world ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I’m picking up an energy surge!”

Staci tapped her console. “All hands, brace for impact! I say again, brace for impact!”

She couldn’t keep her eyes off the display as the lightning crawled through the alien drive field. It moved incredibly quickly, yet to her eyes it moved slowly and haltingly and yet inevitably into space, towards its target. It twisted through the darkness and almost gently touched Wensleydale, the planet seeming to shiver an instant before a chunk of its mass was converted to raw energy. The planet exploded violently, thousands of lives wiped out in a split second ... Staci found it hard to wrap her head around it. She’d never been to Wensleydale, she’d never quite realised the planet was real ... she never would, now the world was nothing more than pieces of debris spinning through space. The blast had been powerful enough to throw them out of what little remained of the planet’s gravity field ...

We have to check if any of the crew have relatives down there ... had relatives, she thought, numbly. It was hardly the most important consideration, with her ship a de facto prisoner and her entire race at risk, but her mind refused to focus properly. No one had died on Virus Prime, apart from what remained of the virus itself, yet blowing up Wensleydale showed a frightening lack of concern for human lives. What the hell is it doing?

“Captain, she’s preparing to jump,” Helen warned. “I can’t parse out her destination yet.”

“Keep working on it,” Staci ordered, sharply. The haze had protected Endeavour from the worst of the blast ... she shuddered to think how much damage the destroyer had taken, just from being too close. Her captain had had no idea he was in the danger zone. She might have gotten lucky and only lost every last sensor ... Staci didn’t know and had no way to find out. “And tell the analysis deck we need a counter to that weapon!”

Careful, her thoughts cautioned. Your frustration is showing.

She calmed herself, with an effort. There was nothing, as far as she knew, that could stand up to an alien weapon that converted its target into energy. The blast would outrun the weapon’s effect, she judged, but it hardly mattered. It would already have done enough damage to ensure its target was wiped from existence. There was no point in noting that some of the planet had survived when it was painfully clear no life remained.

Her eyes found the second destroyer, still running. She hoped to hell the destroyer would get to the fleet base first and then ... and then what? She didn’t know. Perhaps they could evacuate ... no, that was wishful thinking. The space navies were overstretched, coping with problems from one side of explored space to the other ... there was no way to assemble the ships to evacuate even a small colony, let alone a fully-developed world. If the angel attacked one of them, there was nothing the locals could do ...

... And she would have to watch, helplessly, as millions of lives were lost.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Admiralty House, Earth

Admiral Lady Susan Onarina had sometimes wondered what it must have been like, years ago, for the Admiralty to hear about the very first alien contact – and war – in human history. The admirals of that time had been far from stupid, but most had never expected to run into aliens and the few that had believed alien contact to be inevitable had assumed the aliens would at least try to talk to humanity first. They had to have thought the first reports were jokes; false reports, like so many others filed by lone spacers or half-mad asteroid miners all alone in the dark. How hard must it have been for them to wrap their heads around the sudden paradigm shift, when the first sensor records got home? One moment, the only real threat was an ongoing diplomatic dispute between Russia and China; the next, the human race was under attack by hostile aliens. They’d been lucky in so many ways. If the Tadpoles had pressed the offensive right at the start, they might have won the war before the human race even knew it was under attack.

She knew, now, how the earlier Admirals must have felt. The records she’d seen made her feel ... she wasn’t sure how to put it into words. She felt nervous and afraid ... she hadn’t felt so bad since her schooldays, when she’d been sent to the headmistress and forced to wait for punishment, but at least she’d known what to expect when the snooty woman got tired of making her squirm and summoned her to take her medicine. Here ... she was older and wiser and yet she was afraid, afraid of the power the alien ship had displayed and afraid, too, of what else it might be able to do. It was hard, so hard, not to shake as she watched the recording a second time. Years ago, she’d mocked a girl who was mortally afraid of spiders. She wished she could go back in time and kick herself in the backside. She knew, now, how that girl must have felt.

Her eye wandered down the preliminary report, individual words and sentences jumping out at her. The power readings had been off the scale, so much that nearly the entire network of sensors covering Virus Prime had been blinded or destroyed. HMS Pinafore, one of two destroyers attached to Wensleydale as a quick reaction force, had been crippled, even though she hadn’t been targeted specifically. There might be other, more encouraging, reports in the pipeline, as researchers studied what little they’d logged and tried to make sense of the readings, but she dared not count on it. The data might be corrupted ... she would have thought so, hoped so, if two separate attacks hadn’t been reported at almost the same time. And if they’d been carried out by the same ship ...

It was hard, very hard, to look at the optical images and believe what she saw. The Royal Navy’s starships prized function over form, as did nearly every other military force known to mankind. The virus had been the only real exception, and that was only because it had a tendency to use ships from a dozen different infected races with a flair few others could match. Civilian ships looked a lot prettier – naval battleships and fleet carriers would never win any design awards – but they still followed a certain pattern. The ship in front of her, however, was absurd by any realistic standards. A hull over two hundred kilometres long, glowing bird-like wings that flowed out ... if someone had come to her, and proposed the design for a naval warship, she would have laughed. But the aliens had made it work.

We don’t know it’s a warship, she told herself. But the tech disparity is too great for it to matter.

She closed her eyes for a long moment, all too aware of the flurry of activity running through the building as more and more departments were manned, personnel rushing to deal with the new threat. She’d sent out the emergency recall the moment she’d realised what was happening, although she suspected she’d get into trouble for that later. The media would notice the recall and draw certain conclusions, some of which would be alarmingly close to accurate. The first war had been so unprecedented the media, even the tabloids, hadn’t believed the truth until the Prime Minister had stood up in the House of Commons to address the nation, telling them that they were at war with an alien race. It had always struck her as funny that newspapers that regularly ran stories about aliens mating with humans hadn’t believed the truth, but then no one had really believed the pre-contact tabloids and there’d always been an air of unreality about the more far-out stories. Now ...

They’ll believe the story now, when it leaks, she thought. And it will.

She sighed inwardly, The PM’s staff were already waking him. Right now, other world leaders would be being woken and briefed too, aides already arranging holoconferences to agree on a joint human response to the threat. Thankfully, there were procedures to ensure the conferences went smoothly these days. The pre-contact admirals had noted, in their memoirs, that just getting everyone around the same time – real or holographic – had been pretty difficult, almost impossible. The old rivalries had made it hard to coordinate anything until the Battle of New Russia had shown the human race it was in deep shit. This time ... her eyes rested on the alien ship, wings spread over the remnants of a dead world. The tech gap might be too wide to be closed in a hurry ...

Two questions echoed through her mind. Where the hell does it come from? And what the hell does it want?

Her thoughts ran in circles. A tramline had simply vanished. And now an alien starship had appeared ... two, perhaps. The analysts might be able to tell if it had been the same ship that had attacked both Virus Prime and Wensleydale ... in truth, she wasn’t sure which was preferable. Either way, it spoke of technology humanity couldn’t hope to match. She keyed the terminal, bringing up the starchart. The attacks had been close to the Dyson System, but close was relative on an interstellar scale. There were nearly eighty light years between Dyson and Virus Prime. Once, that would have been such an insurmountable gap that the thought of events in those two systems being connected would have seemed insane.

The terminal bleeped. “Admiral, the Prime Minister’s office is ready to speak with you.”

Susan’s lips twitched. Her people had spoken to the PM’s people and organised a call ... a lot of trouble, she’d thought once, just to ensure their principals could speak to each other. She was the First Space Lord and she had automatic access to the PM, the right to request a meeting at a moment’s notice ... but the PM was a very busy man, as were his peers. It wasn’t easy to ensure the PM and the American President could talk without warning, even on the hotline. Getting the staff to arrange it ensured one world leader wasn’t hanging on the line, waiting to speak to the other. That wouldn’t go down well under any circumstances.

“Put him through,” she ordered. “Please.”

The terminal blanked, then cleared. Prime Minister Arthur Harrison looked as if he hadn’t slept at all, something that wasn’t entirely impossible. Susan had done a stint as the previous Prime Minister’s naval advisor and she knew how much the PM had to do. She had no idea how John Major or Lance Martin had managed to have affairs while they’d been in office. The latter had been known to have had at least five mistresses and a few casual hook-ups ... in hindsight, she supposed the lack of attention to his duties might explain why he’d nearly led the country to ruin. No PM who had the slightest bit of care for his nation, and his own legacy, had the time to have an affair, let alone two.

“Admiral,” Harrison said. He sounded like a man who’d just been woken too. “Is the report true?”

“It appears so, Prime Minister,” Susan said. Harrison was far from stupid, but he was considerably more diplomatic than she was. If he was asking a direct question ... he was either tired or shocked. Susan hoped it was the latter. “Virus Prime and Wensleydale have both been attacked by alien forces, and both planets have been literally destroyed.”

Harrison looked off-camera, at a staffer or his wife or someone in the room ... Susan told herself, firmly, that the security team would not have allowed someone to join the discussion unless they were properly cleared. She had heard rumours about staffers, and even partners, who hadn’t been so cleared ... a nightmare for anyone who took security seriously, as they would have to explain to the PM that they couldn’t share certain details with their wives, husbands, or close friends. It took a great deal of maturity to tolerate being excluded in such a manner and Susan knew few people, certainly in government, who could handle it. But right now, it wasn’t her problem.

“Destroyed.” The Prime Minister returned his attention to her. “Literally destroyed.”

“The two worlds have both been shattered into asteroid clusters,” Susan said, flatly. The first reports had suggested the analysts were still in deep denial, although hopefully they’d get over that by the time she finished the call. “There were no direct attacks on other assets within the system, but a number of sensor platforms and a destroyer were disabled or destroyed and the alien artefact at Virus Prime vanished, apparently without trace.”

The PM said nothing for a long moment, then ...  “How many dead?”

“Roughly seven thousand on Wensleydale,” Susan said. They might never have a precise count. The colony had recruited quite a few colonists who’d been off the books. “No one was reported dead on Virus Prime – no one human, at least – but there were a number of wounded on the observation station. We’re still waiting on further reports.”

“I see,” the PM said. “What do we know?”

“Very little,” Susan said. The basics were clear. “An alien ship of unknown design and incredible power appeared in the Virus Prime system and destroyed the planet, then left again. Nearly a day afterwards, the ship – or another of similar design – appeared in the Wensleydale system and destroyed the planet, then left again. In both attacks, the alien ship displayed an ability to travel at FTL speeds without using the tramlines and demonstrated a destructive capability at least an order of magnitude ahead of any human technology, shattering entire planets. Beyond that, Prime Minister, we know very little.”

The PM looked at his hands. “I’m due to meet with the other world leaders at 0300,” he said, curtly. Susan looked at the timer. It was 0223. “What do you propose?”

Susan hesitated. There were procedures and protocols – now – for contact with spacefaring alien races. It didn’t matter, at least on paper, if the alien race was hostile. A fleet had to be assembled, just in case first contact went sour, and databases purged to make sure the newcomers didn’t learn anything about humanity until it was clear they were friendly. She’d already given the orders to start mobilising the QRF, once the first reports had arrived. But the standard protocols might be worse than useless. There was no point in assembling a fleet at the nearest chokepoint if the enemy could simply go around it.

“The plans, drawn up before we discovered the Dyson Spheres, were to assemble a fleet at Falkirk, the American Naval Base,” she said. “The Americans have maintained a handful of squadrons there since the war, and we can redirect a handful of our own vessels there as well as calling on the other Great Powers. However, our new enemy doesn’t seem to need the tramlines. I believe we would be better off holding back much of the fleet to cover our rear.”

She gritted her teeth in frustration. Yesterday, she’d known her rear area was relatively safe. The only way to bypass the tramlines was through catapults and they could be detected – and countermeasures devised – before they could be put into service. The sudden appearance of this new threat was a tactical nightmare, all the more so given their undisputed technological superiority. Susan had no idea how to deploy her fleets for best advantage, or even if she should. Ideally, she wanted to avoid contact as long as possible, at least until the boffins came up with counters to alien tech, but she doubted it could be done. The new enemy would set the battlefield tempo, and God help everyone else.

“We need to make contact with them,” the PM said. “And ask why ...?”

He yawned. Susan had to bite her lip to keep from yawning too. She wanted to believe they could make contact, that they could convince the newcomers to back off, but she feared the worst. Human history was full of encounters between advanced groups and primitive groups and they tended to end badly for the latter, even if the advanced group didn’t intend to be hostile. Her dark skin was a grim reminder of her family’s long history, of an ancestor who’d been taken from Africa and shipped to Jamaica to work in the fields ... an ancestor she didn’t even know. He’d been sold into slavery by his relatives and then ... she winced, wondering how long it would take for one human nation to try to sell out the others. Not long, if she was any judge. If the war seemed hopeless, why not try to get onto the winning side?

“We will try,” Susan agreed. She wondered just how many of her peers were having the same discussion with their political leaders. Most of them, probably. The first reports had been scattered across the system. “Prime Minister, this is a very delicate situation. These newcomers ... the gap between us is very wide. We could lose the war very quickly.”

The PM stared at her for a long moment. “Do you believe we should surrender?”

“No,” Susan said. “But we need to be very careful. This is not an enemy who can be stomped into submission, but one who might stomp us if we do the wrong thing. We may need to avoid contact” – if possible, her thoughts added – “until we have counters to their weapons.”

“Understood,” the PM said. “Brief me properly once the analysts have done their jobs.”

Susan nodded and closed the connection. The PM was a good man, but she couldn’t blame him for being a little overwhelmed. The first reports were always bad and the first panic had to be overcome before the navy could work out how best to respond, although – in this case – she doubted the second reports would be any better. It would take one hell of a spin doctor to put a positive spin on two planets being blown to atoms. Rendering a world uninhabitable was relatively straightforward, but the planet itself would survive ...

Her terminal bleeped. Admiral Mason was calling her.

“I take it you saw the report,” Susan said, without preamble. She hadn’t had enough sleep and she couldn’t go back to bed, even though there was nothing she could do. She’d set everything in motion and now all she could do was wait. It was clear, now, why so many admirals were micromanagers. They were responsible for so much, but they could do so little. “It doesn’t look good.”

“I also saw the second report,” Mason said. “The alien ship had Endeavour within its fields.”

Susan blinked. “What?”

“We’re still parsing the data, but it seems the alien ship came directly from the Dyson System,” Mason told her. “Endeavour was apparently dragged along in her wake and, when they reached Virus Prime, they were able to dump their records into the sensor network and forward them to the station. A lot of the files got degraded when the planet was destroyed, but we managed to salvage most of them. The real problem is that not all of them are believable.”

“Right now, I’d believe almost anything,” Susan said. “If that alien ship belongs to the Builders, what does it want?”

“They don’t know,” Mason said. “Unless there’s a gap in the files, which is alarmingly plausible right now, they were never able to make contact with the Builders. Or whoever’s flying the ship, if it isn’t them. It arrived, after a star was turned into a black hole, and ...”

“It might be wise not to share that little detail with the public,” Susan said, dryly. It was a shame it couldn’t be hidden from the politicians too. If she was any judge, her political lords and masters were either panicking or in deep denial. She could hardly blame the latter group, for once. The facts were hard to believe. “Did they find a way to hurt the alien ship? Or to stop it?”

Mason shook his head. “We’re still looking, but ...”

“Yeah,” Susan said. “If we can’t find a solution ... we’re fucked.”

She met his eyes. “Find a way to stop that thing, before it attacks again,” she said, knowing even as she spoke that it might be impossible. She knew how to calculate how long it would take the average starship to move from point to point, but the angel-ship was so advanced the regular calculations were worse than useless. “Go through every last shred of data and find something, whatever it takes. Or it might be the end.”

“Understood, Admiral,” Mason said. “I won’t let you down.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

If she hadn’t seen it, Charlotte wouldn’t have believed it.

“You are telling me,” she said carefully, “that a man was teleported twenty light-hours in the blink of an eye?”

“The report has been confirmed,” Admiral Dismukes said. If he’d been younger, Charlotte would have expected him to show all the signs of a young officer making a report he knew his superior wouldn’t believe. God knew she’d seen it before, when she’d been running charities to give herself a socially approved diversion from her duties as wife and mother. “We compared the time clocks on both sides of the system, and noted the jump took around five seconds at most. It might have been a great deal shorter. We didn’t have the system set up to monitor the interior, before the teleporter was triggered by accident.”

“The teleporter,” Charlotte repeated. It sounded like a dream – or a nightmare. The boffins had long insisted matter transference was possible, but none of their theories had ever resulted in a practical technology. Charlotte had no idea if anyone was even researching the concept, although she’d be surprised if no one was at least trying. It would be a low-risk, high-reward scenario for the nation or corporation who made it work. “Are we sure ...?”

“We ran Captain Lancaster through hundreds of tests, including a handful we made up on the spot,” Admiral Dismukes said, scanning the report. “DNA? Check. Memories? Check. A number of other tells ... a perfect match, right down to the submolecular level. And, of course, there’s no copy of him running around the alien control centre on the surface. As far as any test we can devise can tell us, Colin Lancaster was on the surface one moment and in the second planetoid, gasping for breath, the second.”

Charlotte winced. She’d grown up in a reasonably safe environment, as long as you didn’t do something stupid like ride an unbroken horse or pissing off the headmistress, and the concept of suddenly finding herself in vacuum was unthinkable. She couldn’t help likening it to the covered ditches on the estate, traps devised for intruders in less civilised times, but ... what sort of lunatic set up a teleporter without safeties, then left it alone for someone to accidentally send themselves to their doom? If the second planetoid hadn’t been discovered, Colin Lancaster would have suffocated or frozen and no one would ever have known what had happened. His body might’ve never been found.

She shivered. She hadn’t realised, as a young mother, just how easy it was for a child to get into trouble until it was too late. She’d thought her own mother’s stories were exaggerated, but ... she’d hired nannies and governesses and done everything she could, splashing out money like water, to make the estate safe, only to watch in horror as her girls came very close to hurting themselves time and time again. And they had had a whole team of adults watching out for them. The explorers probing through the alien ruins had no one. They didn’t know which buttons were safe to push, and which ones were clearly marked – to those who knew how to read the alien tongue – DO NOT PUSH.

“I see,” she said, finally. Her memories mocked her, cautioned her they might not understand what had really happened. Had Colin Lancaster been copied and replaced? A week ago, she would have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested as much. There was no way any clone could be a perfect match for the original, even if they shared the same DNA. But now, after having her memories scanned, she feared otherwise. “If this is true ...?”

She felt a sudden stab of something. If someone cloned her, cloned her so perfectly the cloned body carried all the scars of the original, every little change in her body created by a lifetime of being her – and gave the new body all her memories – how would anyone tell the difference? How could they? Would there be two people convinced they were her, both correct by every measure humanity could devise? Or ... she swallowed, hard. The laws around clones and cloning were a little vague, not least because there was no point in writing laws to forbid the impossible, but ... who knew? She scowled, inwardly. If she cloned herself, and insisted her clone was her ...

“It appears to be true,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Right now, I think we have to assume it is true.”

“And that means they’ll be trying again,” Charlotte said. It was impossible to repressurise the entire planetoid, from what she’d heard, but ensuring that the teleporter section had air and warmth wouldn’t be difficult. The teams were already doing it, while the researchers on the sphere looked for volunteers to make the jump themselves. Hell, for all she knew, there was a way to jump back. Logically, there had to be. “Right?”

“Yeah,” the admiral confirmed. “They want to see if they can do it twice.”

Charlotte nodded. She didn’t envy the volunteers. Colin Lancaster had been incredibly lucky, to say the least, and there was no guarantee that anyone who tried the teleporter after him would end up in the same place. The boffins were still going on about quantum entanglement, and other pieces of technobabble Charlotte couldn’t even pretend to understand, but it was clear they weren’t sure how to target the teleporter. The only upside, if they were right, was that there had to be an active teleporter at both ends. If ... she prayed that they were. The thought of someone being teleported into interstellar space was chilling ...

“The good news is that we have far better control over the alien gravimetric technology,” Admiral Dismukes said. “And we might be able to use it.”

He tapped his terminal. “First, we think we understand – now – how their communications system works,” he continued. “Their black holes – for want of a better term – resonate together, allowing messages to be sent from place to place effectively instantaneously. We’re a long way from being able to create such gravity waves for ourselves, but we should be able to retune their black holes to serve us ... and also, perhaps, to communicate with the angel-ship when it returns.”

If, Charlotte thought. The datanet had been full of theories about where the alien ship had taken Endeavour, from the dubious to the horrific, but no one knew anything for sure. The survey ship could have been swept up by accident, carried along so the aliens could have a private chat a long way from anywhere else, or earmarked for dissection the moment the angel-ship was relatively safe. They could have jumped halfway across the galaxy – or further.

She shivered. There were vague suggestions that distant parts of the known universe were home to super-advanced aliens, but none of those suggestions had ever been proven. Quasars had long-since been proven to be natural, rather than alien navigational beacons, and for all she knew the other stellar phenomena were natural too. If they weren’t ... if the angel-ship came from one of them, it had still travelled thousands of light years in a very short space of time. Perhaps. She just didn’t know and feared she never would. For all they knew, they’d never see the alien ship again.

“The more interesting discovery is that we may be able to open a tramline, if briefly,” Admiral Dismukes continued. Charlotte dragged her attention back to him. She’d mastered the art of pretending to be interested a long time ago – half of the aristocratic matrons she’d endured could have bored for England, and tuning them out was the only way to avoid yawning in front of them – but the admiral deserved better. “If our theories are correct, we can open a tramline – a long tramline – and send a ship home.”

Charlotte sucked in her breath. “Are you sure?”

“The theory is solid,” Admiral Dismukes said. “It’s more like a catapult, to be honest, than a tramline, but the gravimetric displacement should be sufficient to jump a ship from one point to another. The real problem is the gravity surge. If it overpowers the starship’s compensators, it will kill the entire crew.”

“We’d better be careful how we test it,” Charlotte said, dryly. There’d be no shortage of volunteers, she was sure, but there was a difference between dispatching crews on a dangerous mission and sending them to certain death. “Can we try a drone first?”

“If we can find a place to send it,” Admiral Dismukes said. “We may be able to set up a proper tramline, given time, but ... I suspect the black hole has disrupted the system’s gravity field, even though its total mass isn’t that much greater than the star it replaced.”

Charlotte blinked. “Did it replace the star? I had the impression the star was crushed into a black hole.”

“So do we,” Admiral Dismukes said. “It also sucked in a great deal of debris, accounting for the extra mass. Or so we think ...”

“There are worse possibilities,” Charlotte agreed. If you could generate wormholes at the drop of a hat and had the power to make them any size you wished, you could sweep up a planet or star and move it wherever you wanted. “If we can make it work ...”

She paused as a thought struck her. “If we can fiddle with their black hole communicators, can we use them to speak to the alien ship?”

“It’s a possibility,” Admiral Dismukes agreed. “We have teams exploring the issue now. But we won’t know for sure until we try.”

He turned away as his wristcom blinked. Charlotte sighed inwardly. It was quite possible a race as advanced as the Builders would have given up on radio and laser communications centuries ago, if they’d discovered something more useful, but why would they assume other races would have given up radio too? Surely, they had to understand that radio was universal amongst spacefaring races ... even though, she conceded, the number of humans who knew how to use smoke signals or heliographs in the modern era was pretty darn low. But then, humans who set out on first contact missions – or missions that might run the risk of encountering aliens – were carefully briefed on all known methods of communication, including some believed to be purely theoretical. Surely, the Builders would be the same ...

Right?

“It’s a test,” she muttered.

Admiral Dismukes looked at her. “Pardon?”

“Their whole system is designed to test its users,” Charlotte pointed out. “You can’t get to the surface unless you figure out how to do it” – or crash by accident, her thoughts added – “and you can’t get into the command centres unless you work out the key. Getting into the lone planetoid isn’t easy, unless you work out how to use the teleporter ... we might have figured it out earlier, if the Chinese hadn’t launched their coup. We may have triggered an alert by doing things the locals couldn’t, calling the angel-ship to determine what happened and ...”

She scowled. “Maybe they only talk to people who prove they can talk to them.”

“You might be right,” Admiral Dismukes agreed. “And if you are ...”

“We work out how to talk to them, using their own tech,” Charlotte said. “And quickly.”

“We also work out how to use their tech to defend ourselves, if necessary,” the admiral added. “This might not be a test. This might be a blood sport.”

***

Colin had never been truly surprised in his life.

Not really. His childhood had been dull and predictable; his teenage years a blur of sports, dating, and the eventual – inevitable – military service, a requirement for all young men who weren’t extremely smart or crippled. There had been surprises during his career, as a young recruit, a trained bootneck and a troop leader, but none had been particularly shocking or completely unexpected. He’d been ambushed a few times, yet always in places where he’d been primed for ambushes even though he had no idea where they’d be ...

He sat in the shuttle, disoriented beyond words. He’d been on the surface, in the alien command centre, one moment ... and the next he’d been gasping for air. He had known, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was going to die. His mask was gone – he hadn’t carried it on the surface; he hadn’t thought it necessary – and the cold was seeping into his bones, leaving him unsure if he’d freeze to death or suffocate first. In hindsight, even if he’d had the mask, it might have done him no good. The idea he could find himself being teleported was just ...

His hands shook, uncontrollably, as he tried to calm himself. The medics had done what they could, in-between poking and prodding him so thoroughly he’d asked if they were going to buy him dinner afterwards, but he still felt cold. Vacuum damage was nothing to laugh at and now ... he was fit and well, according to the medics, and yet the cold was ever-present. It would fade in time, he hoped, but ... it was funny, he reflected, yet he hadn’t felt so unpleasant the first time he’d been under enemy fire. He’d trained for that, but this ...

“If you find yourself in vacuum, get the life support gear on as soon as possible,” his instructor had said. He hadn’t made any bones about needing the gear. “This course is based on the assumption you will have survival gear within reach ... because, to be honest, if you don’t you’re better off spending your last few seconds bending over and kissing your arse goodbye.”

The shuttle altered course slightly as she flew through the hatch, heading straight for Fujian. Colin tried not to think about how long it had taken to travel from the planetoid to the Chinese carrier, not when he’d made the first trip in a split-second ... perhaps less. The boffins who’d taken his wristcom and terminal and scanned them both had noted the trip seemed to take around a microsecond, although it was impossible to be sure. There were some questions marks over the whole affair, they’d noted, and gone into a detailed explanation of time delays and temporal resynchronisation that had left Colin feeling more confused than enlightened. It hadn’t made any sense to him. All he knew was that he’d been on the sphere one moment, the second planetoid the next ... and if he’d been slightly less lucky, he’d be dead.

Tobias saved your life, his thoughts pointed out. You owe him.

Colin shoved that thought aside and forced himself to consider what he’d say to his superiors. He hoped to hell the locals hadn’t attacked the command centre while the researchers were still trying to work out what had happened to him, leaving the defenders confused about who was in command. The Royal Marines were trained for such circumstances, and Colin wouldn’t have any concerns if the defenders had been Bootnecks alone, but a multinational defence force would find it harder to sort out the chain of command if the official commanding officers had vanished. His lips twisted. He’d taken part in an exercise, once, when the CO had just walked off ... all part of the test, of course, but it had still led to disaster. They’d been lucky that all they got was a stern lecture from the exercise coordinators. If that had happened in the field ...

A dull thump echoed through the shuttle. The pilot’s hatch opened a moment later. “Sir, we have docked with Fujian,” she said. She was a few years younger than himself, her flight suit showing off her curves ... Colin reminded himself, sharply, that it was no time to be thinking with his smaller head. “Your escort is waiting outside.”

“Got it.” Colin reached for his duffel automatically, remembered he didn’t have one, and followed her to the hatch. “Thank you for the flight.”

The pilot nodded and opened the hatch, motioning for him to step through. A pair of Chinese officers greeted him, their eyes flickering over him in a manner that suggested they were security troops. Leaving them wandering free didn’t sit well with him, although he was uneasily aware there was no choice. They needed the Chinese manpower, particularly if they never made it home again. And yet ... he put the thought aside as he followed the officers through a maze of corridors, noting how Fujian shaped up compared to her British counterparts. There were fewer personnel in the corridors ... perhaps it was late at night, by ship’s time. He’d quite lost track of which time zone he was actually in.

Jetlagged, he thought, as he was shown into a briefing room. Or sphere-lagged.

“Major,” Admiral Dismukes said. It wasn’t a promotion. There was only one captain on the ship and it wasn’t a groundpounder. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you, sir,” Colin said. “The surface?”

“Safe and secure, for the moment,” the admiral said. “They’re very relieved you’re alive.”

“That’s good to know,” Colin said. The team would probably be glad to have an explanation for his absence. The mystery would worry them more than a dead body. “It was an interesting experience.”

“I read your report,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Do you have anything to add?”

Colin felt a twinge of irritation, which he forced back into the corner of his mind. “No, sir,” he said. There hadn’t been any sense of transit, no awareness he was going somewhere. One moment, he’d been in the command centre; the next, he’d been on the planetoid. “Everything is in my report.”

“Glad to hear it,” Admiral Dismukes said. “We need, of course, to keep experimenting. If you could be teleported so far, where else can a person go?”

Chapter Thirty: Falkirk System

“It’s good to have you back, Mr. Jenner,” Staci said, as her XO stepped onto the bridge. “You’re just in time.”

“It’s good to be back, Captain,” Jenner said. “I trust my chair was kept nicely warm?”

Staci smiled, then turned back to the display. The last few hours had managed to be both terrifying and uneventful, after the angel-ship had jumped into an uninhabited system that was not, as far as they could tell, linked to any other system. She’d feared the aliens intended to abandon Endeavour in the uncharted system, decades from any other system ... a fate worse, she suspected, than being trapped within the Dyson System itself. Instead, the alien ship had paid no heed to Endeavour as it held position, watching and waiting for ... something. The analysts had suggested the ship was recharging and Staci hoped they were right. It would be good to know the alien tech had some limits.

We’re learning more with every passing second, she told herself. They knew how to ride out the gravity waves ... they even had a theory about how best to escape the alien haze without being crushed or atomised. Given time, we’ll unlock all the secrets.

A low tremor ran though the ship as the angel-ship pulled in its wings, preparing to jump. The display changed, showing a starchart and prospective – possible – vectors for the alien vessel. The options were narrowing all the time ... she reminded herself, again, that their estimates were little better than guesses. She couldn’t help recalling playing chess with her grandmaster of a teacher, and being told to figure out his handicap. If you got it right, you could turn it against him, but if you got it wrong ...

We don’t think they can pass through a star, or near a star, she thought. The angel-ship didn’t seem to draw straight lines between its start point and its destination. But if we’re wrong about their limits, we may be wrong about where they’re going.

“Captain,” Atkinson said. “If we’re reading the gravity field correctly, they’re jumping to Falkirk.”

Staci cursed under her breath. Falkirk had been discovered by a British survey ship, hence the name, but settlement rights had been sold to the Americans ... there’d been a lot of arguments about the deal at the time, from what she recalled, but in hindsight they’d been incredibly lucky. If the Americans had realised they were going to take possession of a system on the direct route to infected space, one they’d have to fortify heavily before the virus arrived in force and kicked them out, they might have thought twice. They’d reclaimed the system after the war had come to an end, and Falkirk herself had largely survived the war, but from what little she recalled the defences were still not up to their pre-war state. And the angel-ship was far tougher than anything the virus had thrown at the system ...

They have to know what’s coming, she thought, numbly. Word should have reached Falkirk from Wensleydale, if not Virus Prime. Her most pessimistic calculations suggested Falkirk should know what was coming, unless the destroyer had bypassed the system ... unlikely, given the sheer scale of the crisis. The Americans could be trusted to relay the warning and prepare their system ... in fact, if Earth knew what had happened, there was a good chance the human fleet would muster at Falkirk. And then ... They’re not ready for it.

“Captain, the gravitational nexus is spinning into place,” Helen reported. “She’s about to jump.”

Staci keyed her terminal. “All hands, brace for transit,” she ordered. They’d developed newer and better procedures, now they knew more about the alien tech, but she had no intention of taking risks. Better to have all non-essential personnel strapped down, in their beds, than risk more injuries or deaths. “I say again, brace for transit.”

“All decks report ready,” Jenner said. “Captain?”

“We wait.” Staci felt another flicker of helplessness. She was the unquestioned mistress of her ship, with broad authority to do as she saw fit, and yet she wasn’t the one who’d determine when the conjoined ships were going to jump. The alien CO, if there was one, would make that call. Her authority was so limited, now, that it was little more than purely nominal. “Brace yourselves.”

Her heart pounded. She knew what it was like to jump through an unexplored tramline into the unknown, unaware of what might be on the far side, but that was a controlled risk. She knew when and where they were going to cross the tramline, when they were going to jump into the new system ... here, she didn’t know anything for sure. The projections might be wrong, completely wrong. Even if they got the destination right, the timing was unpredictable ...

The world darkened, as if the entire universe was going to sneeze. She gripped her chair, feeling vaguely silly as her seatbelt tightened around her chest. She hadn’t needed it before now, even when going into combat, but ... she shook her head. The seatbelt might be all that stood between her and a very painful death, or ... the display blanked, the bridge lights flickering briefly, then started to clear. The haze still made it difficult to see the outside universe, but ... they had no trouble picking out the nearest star.

“Falkirk, Captain.” Helen’s tone was bleak, helpless. “We have arrived at Falkirk.”

***

Admiral Leyland Cooper had not expected his latest posting – and perhaps his last – to be particularly exciting. Falkirk had been briefly important as a naval base, and then as the linchpin of humanity’s defence against the virus, but the combination of the enemy forcing their way closer to Earth and the devastation inflicted on infected space had reduced Falkirk’s importance so sharply the USN had found it hard to get the funding to rebuild the colony and repair what was left of the base. They’d been lucky the colony had survived without infection, although the planet’s lack of atmosphere and general disagreeableness probably explained it. The colony’s domes might be as welcoming as anyone could expect, but the planet outside was about as habitable as Pluto. They had intended to terraform the world, eventually, yet getting the funding for that ...

He shook his head in disbelief as he contemplated the international fleet gathering around his base. The Americans and the Russians were the only Great Powers with any major fleet elements in the area, leaving their ships to do the heavy lifting while the British, French and Chinese units provided covering fire. The plans, such as they were, had called for reinforcements to be dispatched at the first hint of trouble, but even if everything went according to plan – and Leyland was too experienced an officer to expect it – they’d be waiting weeks, if not months, for support. The latest from Earth suggested the reinforcements would not be forthcoming, not after the analysts had studied the reports from Virus Prime and Wensleydale. The concept of forcing the enemy to pass through a bottleneck might look good on paper – the real universe was rarely so obliging – but completely meaningless when the enemy didn’t have to do anything of the sort. Leyland didn’t claim to be a tactical or strategic genius – he’d been given the posting because he was a good organiser and diplomat, which was precisely what the base needed – yet even he could tell they were in trouble. It was quite possible their new enemy would simply ignore the base and fleet.

And all the normal advantages of operating in the enemy’s rear are meaningless here too, he thought, studying the starchart. The analysts thought the alien ship came from the Dyson System – quite how they’d come to that conclusion he didn’t know – but there was no way he could use it against the new enemy. The tramline between ES-17 and Dyson was gone. They can bypass us with ease if they wish ...

He felt his mood darken as he studied the display. He’d moved his flag to USS North Carolina, a Texas-class battleship, and grouped the remainder of his heavy hitters around the flag, keeping the carriers in reserve for long-range strike operations. It represented enough firepower to fight and win the First Interstellar War, without having its hulls so much as scratched, but he was uneasily aware that a weapon capable of shattering a planet would have no trouble destroying his ships. The sensor records were far from perfect – they’d been badly distorted by energy waves the aliens had unleashed – yet he didn’t need precise data to tell the planets had been destroyed. He wanted to think the weapon wasn’t perfect, and that there was no such thing as an unbeatable edge, but it was powerful enough to make the new enemy incredibly formidable. His combat sims were not encouraging.

They just blew away two worlds, without even trying to communicate, he thought, numbly. He could understand destroying Virus Prime – the world had been a nightmare, even after the surface had been repeatedly hammered from orbit – but Wensleydale had been innocent. What do they want?

The thought nagged at his mind as he paced the CIC, snapping out orders to his fleet and trying to work out a proper coordination system. They’d avoided most of the problems his ancestors had had, when they’d been fighting in the first interstellar war, but there were still dozens of questions, everything from command rankings to supply priorities, that required all of his diplomatic skill to answer. It would have been so much easier, he reflected, if the plan to merge all the space navies into one had worked, but ... the end of the war had brought the end of those plans. He supposed it would have been hypocritical of him to complain. The United States had been no more eager to give up power and control to an international organisation than any other spacefaring nation. The League of Nations and its successor the United Nations had failed, spectacularly so. Why would anyone want to repeat that experience?

An alarm pinged. “Admiral,” Lieutenant Bergh said. “We’re picking up a gravity surge, two light-minutes from Falkirk.”

“And very far from the tramline,” Leyland noted. “Bring the fleet to battle readiness, and direct the first set of drones towards the distortion.”

“Aye, Admiral,” Bergh said.

Leyland forced himself to sit as the gravity surge slowly revealed a giant alien starship, already unfolding its wings. The drones were heading right towards the starship, but the time delay meant everything they sent would be two minutes out of date ... not a problem under normal circumstances, and one every spacer knew how to handle, but here it might easily prove fatal. He glowered at the display, wondering just how the alien ship moved so rapidly without tramlines. If the human race learnt how to do it, the universe would be changed forever.

The display updated, reporting the remainder of the fleet coming to battle stations and linking their weapons and defences into the fleet datanet. Behind them, a handful of freighters were blasting clear of the planet and running for their lives, heading straight for the nearest tramline. Leyland doubted they’d make it, if the alien ship decided it wanted them dead. He had no idea how a starship that large could pull an acceleration curve that made a starfighter look slow, but the sensor records were clear. The alien ship could give the starfighter a start and still outrun it. It was incredible, impossible, and ... the records didn’t lie.

No, he told himself, cynically. If they were lying, they’d have tried to come up with a more believable lie.

He leaned forward. “Transmit an alert down the chain,” he ordered. “Inform Earth what is happening, and caution all ships heading here to keep their distance. They are not to enter this system until the crisis is over.”

“Aye, Admiral,” Bergh said.

Leyland nodded, curtly. “And bring up the modified first contact package,” he added, after a moment. “Transmit at will.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

If they’ll listen, Leyland thought. The aliens had simply ignored all attempts to get in touch with them. The analysts insisted the aliens were so advanced they simply didn’t know what radio was any longer, but Leyland suspected that was wishful thinking. Aliens were very odd, yet he found it hard to believe they couldn’t monitor radio signals even if they no longer relied on them. Perversely, he almost wished he thought the analysts were right. If they’re choosing to ignore us, it isn’t a good sign.

“Detach two couriers and deploy them to Point Custer,” he added. He should have done it earlier, but his plans had barely been drawn before they’d been mugged by reality. “They are to maintain laser links to the sensor web as long as possible, so Earth will know what happens here.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Leyland watched and waited. The alien starship was holding position, seemingly unconcerned about the fleet standing between it and the planet. The uncertainty tore at his brain, undermining his confidence. He had orders to avoid doing anything hostile or provocative, but he also had orders to defend the planet ... at what point, he asked himself, would he have to make the decision to fire on the alien ship? On one hand, cold logic told him the aliens weren’t friendly and hesitation might prove fatal; on the other, if there was a hope of sorting out a diplomatic solution, opening fire might ruin it. He cursed under his breath as he recalled his orders, so vague and unhelpful he suspected they’d been written by a number of very scared men, or a committee. He couldn’t blame the former – any race that could build a ship like the one in front of him was clearly formidable – but it was still unhelpful.

And a committee would be even worse, he thought, snidely. The only known form of life with nine assholes and no brains.

He forced himself to keep his eyes on the display. The time delay didn’t make him feel any better ... he couldn’t decide if the aliens were scanning the system, perhaps with some super-tech he’d never even considered possible, or if they were trying to intimidate the defenders. The thought should have made him feel a little better – there was no point in wasting time trying to intimidate someone unless you thought they needed to be scared – but it didn’t. The alien ship just hung there, flapping its giant glowing wings ...

“Admiral, Governor Clinton just signalled,” Bergh said. “The population is in their shelters.”

“Noted,” Leyland said. The governor was doing the only thing she could, but ... it was pointless. The shelters had been designed to protect the population from a kinetic bombardment, not a planet-cracking superweapon. “Tell her I’ll speak to her later.”

If there is a later, his mind added, pessimistically. He was tempted, very tempted, to simply order the fleet to fall back, abandoning the planet to its fate. It went against everything he’d been taught, when he’d joined the navy, and his family would disown him, but it might be the best of a bad set of options. No one would thank him for his service, not after he’d turned and ran, yet ... he could make it clear the orders had been his and his alone, leaving the rest of his crew in the clear. If ...

The display seemed to jump. The alien ship was suddenly closer ... for an absurd moment, he thought the ship had jumped at FTL speeds before realising it had simply glided forward at an impossible speed. The sensors were insisting the ship was in two places at once ... a brief moment of confusion that would have been fatal in battle, if the aliens had been inclined to take advantage of it. Leyland figured they hadn’t known for sure it would work ... tech development wasn’t a straight line from a computer simulation and it was quite possible human sensors wouldn’t be fooled. Or ... he felt his heart sink as the range closed rapidly. They were already on the verge of entering firing range ... what they thought was the ship’s firing range. If they were wrong, they might be dead before they knew they were even under attack.

His mind raced. They’d run dozens of simulations, and they’d all run aground on sheer lack of knowledge. What could the aliens do? What other weapons did they have? What the hell did they want? He’d planned a standard engagement, then adjusted his plans and yet ... he didn’t know if any of his plans would survive contact with the enemy. They were just too powerful – and unpredictable.

“Signal the fleet,” he ordered, quietly. “Begin Evasive Pattern One.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Leyland kept his eyes on the display. Evasive Pattern One would have been a joke under other circumstances. Starfighters, destroyers and frigates could turn on the head of a pin, dodging anything powerful enough to hurt them, but battleships could no more evade incoming missiles than they could jump to full speed in the blink of an eye. Their evasive patterns looked absurd and the thought of them actually saving the ships was worse, yet they might make the difference between survival and certain death. Might. Leyland had no idea how the aliens armed their ships, but ...

“Admiral,” Bergh said. “She’s nearing the line.”

Leyland nodded, gritting his teeth. They couldn’t let the ship into planet-killing range and that meant they had to try to stop it, despite its incredible power. The communications arrays were still humming, transmitting signals on all known frequencies, but there was no response. He keyed a switch, bringing the targeting sensors online ... a warning no human ship would have missed, a way of saying Stop or I Shoot. But the aliens ignored it too ...

“Signal Bunker Hill,” he ordered. “She is to open fire at will.”

Bergh’s voice shook. “Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter Thirty-One: Falkirk System

“Captain, I have been unable to get a signal out,” MacPhee reported. “They don’t seem to be receiving any of our messages.”

Staci gritted her teeth. The alien ship’s haze was still messing with her sensors, but they’d managed to locate the star, the planet, a handful of moons ... and a small fleet of human starships, standing between the angel-ship and Falkirk. There didn’t seem to be any smaller ships – she hoped their sensors simply couldn’t see the flanking units most capital ships had as a matter of course – but under normal circumstances she would have bet on the human fleet. Here ... seven battleships, five carriers and a missile-heavy battlecruiser were unlikely to do more than slow the angel-ship for a few seconds.

Jenner caught her eye. “We could try to break free ...”

“We don’t even know we can,” Staci said. Her instructors had shown her a number of ways to restrain someone, from gently holding the victim’s upper arm to trapping their hands and preventing them from moving at all. If someone was cooperative, you didn’t need to hold them tightly, but if that changed ... “They might react badly to us trying to escape.”

Her mind raced. The range was closing sharply. The angel-ship was heading right towards the planet, the human fleet blocking its way ... she wanted to shout at whoever was in command, to tell them to get out before it was too late, but she was nothing more than a helpless spectator. Gravity waves flickered through the system, washing back and forth like a demented radar sensor ... she wondered, suddenly, if the gravity waves really were the alien radar. It wasn't impossible. Everything had a gravity field, even if the field was so tiny it could barely be said to exist at all, and if the aliens had a sensor capable of spotting the field they could locate anything ... even a cloaked starship. She eyed the display warily, wondering if the aliens had already detected the entire fleet. It was a standard procedure to have at least one or two cloaked ships watching from a safe distance, if there was such a thing, but here it might be worse than useless ...

“Missile separation,” Helen snapped. “I count forty-seven missiles, impact in five minutes!”

Staci swore under her breath. Endeavour wasn’t the target – she had no idea if the defenders had any idea she was even there – but it wouldn’t matter if, by some dark miracle, they actually managed to destroy the alien ship. Normally, one exploding starship didn’t normally set off a chain reaction of starships, exploding one after the other, yet here ... her ship was far too close to the alien hull for her peace of mind. She would have ordered a breakout, despite the risk, if she hadn’t been certain the missiles would never reach the alien hull. They’d be either nukes or laser warheads, unless some completely new weapons system had been invented and deployed in the last few months, and neither would be enough to do any real damage. Or any damage ...

“All hands, brace for impact,” Jenner ordered. “Damage control teams, prepare for emergency deployment.”

Staci leaned forward, watching as the range steadily closed. The Americans didn’t seem to have a spotter calling their shots, and providing realtime targeting data to their missiles, but the angel-ship was so big it would be more surprising if they missed. Her mind assessed the possibilities, calculating what kind of firing solutions might have been programmed into the missiles. Nukes or lasers? The former could be called off at the last moment, if the aliens backed down, but the latter were more damaging ... she reminded herself that the human race had witnessed the destruction of two planets in quick succession. There was no reason for them to assume the alien-ship was anything other than nakedly hostile.

“Captain, the gravity sensor waves are intensifying,” Helen reported. “They should have solid locks on the missiles.”

“They should have had them already,” Jenner commented. “The Yanks aren’t even trying to hide their missile tracks.”

Staci nodded. She could understand the commander’s reasoning – a blunt threat might cause the aliens to back off – but every tactical instinct she had told her it was a mistake. The missiles were coming in fat and happy, their trajectories easily calculated by anyone with modern targeting computers ... no point defence officer, even one fresh out of the academy, could possibly fail to target them all, then take them out in one fell swoop. And yet the range was closing and closing and ...

“They’re detonating,” Helen said. The haze seemed to brighten for a second, as bomb-pumped laser beams lashed into the angel’s fields, then dimmed. “No apparent damage.”

Staci heard someone swear behind her. Bomb-pumped lasers were amongst the deadliest weapons humanity had ever intended, certainly for ship-to-ship combat. A capital ship might be able to take the blow, sealing off compartments and rerouting around the damage to ensure the ship remained operational, but a smaller ship would be crippled beyond repair, if not destroyed outright. She’d seen battleships stagger under laser hits ... the angel-ship seemed completely unaffected. It didn’t look as if the beams had even reached the hull.

“The fields broke up the laser beams and absorbed them,” Helen confirmed. “Captain, energy weapons are unlikely to be effective.”

Fuck, Staci thought. What now?

***

Leyland stared in disbelief.

He’d hoped the alien ship would back off. He’d expected they’d deploy point defence weapons. He’d feared their weapons, whatever they were, would take out the missiles long before they could detonate their laser warheads and send beams of irresistible force burning into the alien hull. Instead, the laser beams had struck the alien fields and ... dissipated? He barely heard the tactical officers babbling through the network, offering their advice, as he tried to think. What else could he do?

“Signal the fleet,” he ordered. “Deploy shipkillers, and launch torpedo starfighters.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

The battleship shuddered as she launched her first salvo of nuclear-tipped shipkiller missiles. They were less destructive than laser warheads, at least when they hit starship hulls, but they might pass through the alien forcefield. Or whatever it was ... he’d watched a comedy from yesteryear in which old-style jets had battled an alien ship with a forcefield and noted how it had ended badly, at least until the defence shield had gone down. He had the nasty feeling he was going to face the same problem, at least unless he found a way through the enemy defences. If they could slip a solid projectile through the fields ...

The range closed rapidly, again. The alien ship kept coming, seemingly unconcerned about the tidal wave of missiles rushing towards her. Leyland felt his heart sink. No human fleet, not even one composed of every battleship in commission, could hope to survive if they just let missiles hit them. It wasn’t as if the humans were throwing spitballs or laser pulses that were more commonly used in tactical exercises, rather than real engagements. One might as well engage a target with a water pistol! But the aliens were doing nothing ...

He braced himself, ice trickling down his spine as the missiles hit the enemy field and stopped. Dead. It was incredible, impossible. The missiles had touched the field and bounced ... for an instant, he refused to believe what he saw. The missiles were acting like kiddie drones, programmed to follow orders and keep going even if their orders took them straight into a wall. They hit, they recoiled, they hit again ... the datanet chatter stopped abruptly, the analysts as stunned as himself. Leyland would have smiled, if the situation hadn’t been so dangerous. It felt like a nightmare.

The display blurred, very briefly. “Captain, there was a high-energy discharge,” Bergh reported. “The missiles are gone.”

Leyland stared at him. “They detonated?”

“No, Admiral,” Bergh said. “The energy discharge was considerably higher than it should have been.”

The display shifted. The starfighters were flying into attack formation, ducking and dodging in a manner that would make them hard to target and destroy deliberately, although most modern ships could put out enough point defence to ensure one or two starfighters would be taken out in each attack run. He felt a wave of pride in his pilots, even though he feared the attack would be pointless. The alien ship was just too powerful to be taken out ... he considered, briefly, ramming his battleship into the alien vessel, but he had no idea if it would even work. The ship was immense. It was ...

“Admiral, the analysts believe a handful of our missiles were hit with an energy conversion weapon,” Bergh reported. “They turned our own weapons against us!”

“Noted.” Leyland was running out of options. There were smaller ships he could point at the alien hull, or mass drivers ... he feared neither would work, not as long as the aliens had a force shield. If that was what it was ... the live feed from the sensor platforms near the alien ship wasn't very informative. The aliens were either spoofing the signals directly, quite possible given how advanced they were, or the combination of their forcefield and energy discharges were corrupting the sensors. “Contact the fleet base. I want ...”

“Admiral!” Bergh’s voice rose in alarm. “The starfighters ...”

Leyland swore. The starfighters had been launching their torpedoes from extreme range – they should have gone closer, but that would have meant flying right into the alien force field – and now they were spinning out of control, their drive fields flickering and flaring into nothingness as the starfighters rolled away from the alien ship. He stared, feeling his orders dying in his throat; he keyed his terminal for a replay, unsure what had happened. The starfighters had just ... they’d been swept away, as if they were bugs brushed away by a lone human. Their IFF beacons were gone too and that meant ... he shivered. If they’d been slapped hard enough to overpower their compensators, their pilots might be nothing more than blood and gore ...

“Admiral, I’m picking up energy pulses on the alien ship,” Bergh reported. “She’s doing something ...”

The display blanked. Leyland swore as alarms howled, trying to reboot the system. It came back online a moment later, revealing six battleships ... six? Hadn’t there been seven? He was sure he’d had seven ... another update blinked up, informing him that Kirov was gone ... just gone. A battleship fully as powerful as his own, armoured so heavily she could take a dozen direct hits and keep fighting, was gone. There wasn’t even any wreckage.

“Admiral, she was hit with the same weapon,” Bergh managed. “The energy discharge was so intense it blinded every sensor within ...”

The display flared again. A carrier died. Leyland froze, panic yammering at the back of his mind. The ship had nearly five thousand crewmen, all dead. There hadn’t even been any time to sound the alert, let alone abandon ship. He hadn’t trained for something like this, no one had. The alien ship wasn’t mounting a serious offense. It was just picking targets at random and blowing them away ... he watched as it fired again, the streak of light darting into the distance to strike one of the cloaked pickets. They should have been safe, even if the rest of the fleet ran into something it couldn’t handle, but this ...

“All ships, engage with missiles,” he snapped. It wasn’t much, but there was no other option. “All ships are also to fall back, keeping the range open as much as possible.”

“Aye, Captain,” Bergh said. “I ...”

The alien fired again. This time, the streak of light passed dangerously close to a destroyer, but not close enough to do any real damage. The display flashed up warning icons anyway, puzzling Leyland until he realised the energy weapon – whatever it was – damaged delicate sensors even if it didn’t destroy them outright. The entire battle was dissolving into utter chaos, fleet discipline coming apart at the seams. He snapped orders, commanding the fleet to fall back again even though he knew the planet was coming into range, but what else could he do? He ordered the fleet station – evacuated the moment the alien ship arrived – to be steered right into the alien vessel, to no avail. The fleet station was destroyed effortlessly and the aliens kept coming. It was all going to hell ...

***

Staci watched in horror as the battle formation came apart. She hadn’t expected the human fleet to be able to do anything more than slow the angel, perhaps long enough to buy time to get a handful of colonists off the planet, but it hadn’t even been able to do that. The missiles had been useless, the starfighters had been worse ... it was hard to be sure, looking from inside the alien haze, but it seemed as if the starfighters had been completely depowered before being sent tumbling helplessly through space. If they’d lost all power, they were helpless, the pilots sentenced to death ...

They can see each and every one of our ships, she thought. The angel had fired twice at seemingly empty space, each time striking a cloaked ship. Or something. Given the nature of their weapons, they had to have hit something solid. That fleet is doomed.

She tried to think of a plan, but nothing came to mind. She hadn’t seen such a one-sided battle since one of her classmates at the academy had reprogrammed the simulator computers so blatantly each and every one of his shots had been perfect hits, while every shot aimed at him had missed so completely he’d never been in any real danger. Back then, the instructors had caught him – it had been so obvious there’d never been any doubt what had happened – and made sure he regretted it. Here ... there were no instructors trying to enforce fair play and make sure no one cheated. The fleet wasn’t even going to put a scratch on its enemy ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “I believe I have an option.”

Staci glanced at her in desperate hope. “You do?”

“They’re using gravity pulses to locate their targets,” Helen said. “I can transmit gravity pulses and give them false targets, causing them to waste their shots ...”

“Do it,” Staci ordered. The Battle of Falkirk was shaping up to be the most one-sided conflict since New Russia, and that hadn’t been quite so hopeless. There were no other options ... she couldn’t find a way to get a shot into the alien hull, and even if they did she doubted it would do any real damage. “And hurry!”

And hope it doesn’t get them to target us, her thoughts added. Endeavour was at point-blank range ... closer than that, really, by their standards. If they realise what we’re doing ...

The angel fired again, the shot vanishing harmlessly into interplanetary space. Staci hoped, suddenly, that the shot wouldn’t keep going until it hit something ... plasma pulses came apart very quickly, relatively speaking, but she had no idea what the aliens used to tear through battleships like paper. It wasn’t a light-speed weapon, the analysts insisted, yet it moved too quickly for anything larger than a starfighter to evade. If they were firing seemingly at random ... Staci hoped, desperately, that whoever was in command on the other side had enough sense to withdraw. There was no saving Falkirk now. They’d just have to hope they could find a solution, before the angel targeted another world.

Jenner leaned forward. “How long can you keep this up?”

“I don’t know,” Helen said. “They’re bound to notice they’re not hitting anything eventually ...”

She broke off as alarms howled. “Gravity surge,” she snapped. “We’re jumping!”

“Brace for impact,” Staci snapped. “I say again, all hands brace for ...”

The angel jumped.

***

One moment, the alien ship was tearing through the fleet as if it was nothing more than a minor nuisance; the second, it was firing in random directions; the third ...

“Admiral, she just jumped out,” Bergh reported. He sounded as if he didn’t believe his own words. Leyland had heard some howlers from junior officers over the years – the poor ensign who’d been sent to search for a set of Fallopian tubes came to mind – but this ... if he hadn’t seen the display update, he wouldn’t have believed it. “She just ... left.”

“Deploy SAR shuttles,” Leyland ordered, automatically. He’d wanted to launch them the moment he’d seen the starfighters depowered, but he’d had no idea if the aliens would shoot at the shuttles or not. It was considered a war crime, amongst humans, yet ... who knew what the aliens considered war crimes? “And get the damage control parties on their way.”

“Aye, sir,” Bergh said. He looked up, his face pale. “Did we just ... win?”

Leyland had no idea. The enemy had ... left. The analysts would go through every last scrap of sensor data, trying to work out what had happened, but ... unless he was very wrong, the alien ship had taken everything they could throw at it and just carried on. If it had so much as had its paint scratched, he couldn’t see it. And there was no point in pretending otherwise.

If they were losing, retreat would have made sense, he thought. The aliens couldn’t be that alien, could they? It defied all reason, and yet they had abandoned the fight and jumped out. They were winning.

“I don’t know,” he said, quietly. Was it a trick of some kind? Why would they bother? “As God is my witness, I just don’t know.”

He cleared his throat. “Get me a secure link to the flicker station. I need to report to Earth.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter Thirty-Two: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System

“This could change everything,” Marigold said. “You do realise ...?”

Tobias grinned. He would probably never make a proper starship officer – he was still mildly surprised he’d been allowed to stay as a shuttlecraft pilot, rather than being demobilised with the remainder of the conscripts after the war had come to an end – but he’d played enough space combat simulations, as real as the Royal Navy could make them, to understand the basics. There were problems, of course, in translating any simulation to reality – and there’d been a vast number of tactical gambits that had worked perfectly in the simulation, without ever getting off the ground in the real world – yet he understood most of the limits of modern combat. The fog of war, the persistent time delay, the outflanking pincer movements that ran the risk of each pincer being met and defeated individually ... they'd always been part of the simulated matrix. And yet if this worked ...

“It won’t be our names in the history books,” he said. He’d suggested naming the drone something funny, to make future generations of schoolchildren smile as they read about an event that had been exciting and significant, before academic writers had gotten their hands on it, but Commodore Lafarge had shot the idea down. “We’ll be a footnote at best.”

“That depends on who writes the books,” Marigold teased. “I could write The Terribly True Adventures of Marigold and her Boyfriend ...”

Tobias stuck out his tongue. “It sounds like one of those romantic novels that give boys terrible ideas about girls.”

“You mean you actually read them?” Marigold pretended to be shocked, overacting so dramatically she made him giggle. “I was told, time and time again, that boys would sooner have their nether parts cut off than read a romance novel.”

“They don’t want romance, they want sex,” Tobias said. He’d never liked romance novels, not least because they bore no resemblance to the real world. In his experience, girls didn’t like forward young men, let alone stalkers, gropers, and assholes whose behaviour was so close to rape he didn’t think there was much of a difference. Perhaps it was erotic on the page, when there simply wasn’t any danger, but the real world was very different. A real boy who tried that crap would be lucky if he was only expelled. “Reading fifty chapters of a budding romance is like watching paint dry, only more boring.”

“Only for those without eyes to see and brains to understand,” Marigold teased. “The thrill of the developing relationship ...”

“... depends entirely on the characters having a writer who genuinely wants their relationship to succeed,” Tobias said. He’d once been forced to read a great work of art – or so his teacher had insisted – in which a lower-class boy won the heart of an upper-class girl, despite her equally upper-class fiancé. The rich asshole hadn’t been entirely wrong to complain about her conduct, he supposed, and in the real world the girl would never have stayed with the poor boy anyway. “Their chat-up lines only work if the writer makes the girl accept them.”

Marigold snorted. “We could still write our memoirs, then spice them up a little.”

“Hah.” Tobias liked the idea – he’d seen memoirs written by people from all walks of life, who’d served as everything from senior flag officers to kitchen staff – but he had a suspicion the market would be flooded by the time they got home. If they ever did. “Who was in the control room, on the ground, when Neil Armstrong was launched towards the moon? Who was the guy who remained in orbit, when Armstrong landed?”

Marigold opened her mouth to respond, then paused as the console bleeped. “The datalink is up and running,” she said, instantly professional. “Handshaking ... now.”

Tobias sucked in his breath. He’d thought the concept utter madness when he’d been briefed and he still found it hard to believe it had worked, at least long enough for them to fly well clear of the debris field. They’d loaded a literal black hole onto his ship ... it seemed incredible that they could even carry it from the planetoid into open space, let alone use it for communications. He knew, intellectually, the black hole’s mass was relatively small – just compressed so intensely it had fallen out of time and space – and yet it was difficult to wrap his head around it. The idea the shuttle could actually carry a black hole ...

She’s right, he thought numbly, as the datastream tightened. This really is going to change everything.

“The datalink is up and running,” Marigold said. “Realtime communications are online.”

Tobias muttered a word under his breath. It took hours to get a signal from the second planetoid to the first ... and, somehow, Colin had travelled the same distance effectively instantly. Now ... he could request orders from the commodore and get them so quickly he might as well have been standing right next to him, well within speaking range. He wondered, absently, just how many of the more absurd tactics he’d seen during simulations would actually work, now it was possible to coordinate fleets light-hours apart. Many of the ideas had failed because the units couldn’t be coordinated properly ...

“Check the link,” he said, although he suspected it was pointless. There was no middle ground. The system either worked or it didn’t. “Do the codes match?”

“Yes,” Marigold said. “We have a realtime link to both the second planetoid and the sphere.”

And they’re looking over our shoulders, Tobias thought. He understood, intellectually, that everything that happened onboard the shuttle was recorded, and the files would be unsealed if their commanding officer deemed it necessary, but it wasn’t as if they were being watched in real time. That was no longer true. The live feed from the shuttle, fed though the black hole, included nearly everything, from their conversation to toilet breaks. This won’t be fun.

He put the thought out of his head and leaned forward. “Deploy the drone,” he ordered, “and then bring the second black hole online.”

Marigold giggled – perhaps, like him, she was having problems coming to terms with what they were doing – and keyed her console. The drone, slung under the shuttle, dropped free, holding position in the darkness of interstellar space. Tobias clicked on the floodlights and ran them over the drone, performing a final visual check. The drone looked like the missile it was, the warhead stripped out and replaced by a handful of sensors and the black hole containment field generator, ensuring the black hole remained intact instead of evaporating into nothingness. Tobias frowned, inwardly, as he pulled the shuttle back, eying the drone thoughtfully. It looked surprisingly mundane for something carrying a black hole ...

A chill ran down his spine. Once, years ago, he’d read a story in which a small boy – not too unlike him – had owned a portable star. Small, but very real. He’d ignored orders and kept feeding the star until it turned into a black hole, which had killed him and then gone on to destroy the entire universe. That wasn’t too realistic, Tobias had been assured by the boffins, but they were still messing with something they didn’t quite understand. It reminded him of reading about the first atomic bombs, when there’d been fears the bomb would ignite the atmosphere and kill everyone on the planet. They’d gone ahead and tested the bomb anyway.

“The datalink is up and running,” Marigold said. “We’re cleared to move to a safe distance.”

Swell, Tobias thought. And just what is a safe distance these days?

He kept the thought to himself as he pulled back, the drone vanishing into the darkness until it was completely invisible. His sensors had no trouble picking it up – the improved gravimetric sensors insisted, rightly, that the drone had more mass than a battleship – but the naked eye couldn’t find it. The stars behind the drone looked tiny, even though they were far larger than any gas giant. He’d half-expected to see more.

“We’re clear,” he said, although he wasn’t sure if they truly were at a safe distance. “I’m bringing the gravity baffles online now.”

“Gravity surfers,” Marigold corrected. “We’re going to surf the waves.”

“If there are any,” Tobias said. They’d tried surfing on the moon, in one of the resorts, but neither of them had been very good at it. “We simply don’t know.”

“No,” Marigold agreed. “The countdown begins ... now.”

Tobias felt a flicker of something he didn’t want to look at too closely. A few weeks ago, they would have set the countdown timer themselves. There would have been no point in waiting for orders from the Commodore, or the Admiral, because by the time the orders arrived the situation would have moved on. Now ... orders would arrive mere seconds after they were issued, well before they became outdated. He wondered what that would mean, for the future. Quite a few history books claimed the Admiralty, back in the wet navy days, had screwed up naval operations by issuing contradictory orders.

He ran his eye down the sensor checklist as the countdown ticked to zero. They’d deployed a dozen sensor platforms – some very close to the drone, some far enough that they would almost certainly survive whatever happened – but it was hard to be sure they’d deployed enough. His stomach felt heavy, as if he was nervous ... in truth, he was nervous. He might have joked about their names never being recorded in the history books – it would be people like Admiral Dismukes or Captain Templeton instead – but they really were doing something significant. If the test was screwed up, they’d be remembered as screw-ups even if it wasn’t their fault. In his experience, higher-ups always needed someone to blame ...

“Ten seconds,” Marigold said, quietly. “Gravity pulses are online, ready to go.”

Tobias braced himself, unsure of what to expect. The boffins themselves hadn’t been sure. The shuttle should be safe, but ... the nasty part of his mind noted the boffins hadn’t volunteered to join the shuttle crew. They wouldn’t have been permitted, he suspected, yet ... he would have been more reassured if they’d tried. The last few seconds were ticking down ...

He lifted his eyes, just in time to see the starlight distort ... right in front of him. There was a flash of bright light, so bright he feared they’d blown up the drone ... it should have been impossible, like so much else, but the word had lost all meaning. The shuttle vibrated a second later, the gravity waves slamming into the gravity buffers ... he had the vague impression of the shuttle being picked up by giant waves and then put down again, although it was nothing like that ... not really. The gravity sensors went off the scale for a split second, the gravity generators rebooted ... and then everything returned to normal, so abruptly he was sure something had gone spectacularly wrong.

His throat was dry. “Damage report?”

“Some minor power fluctuations in the gravity generators and drive field nodes,” Marigold reported, her voice as shaken as his. “No major damage. A starship could probably ride the waves without suffering any damage at all.”

“Probably,” Tobias agreed. Endeavour had so much more raw power than a shuttle that there was no point in comparing the two. “The drone?”

He was almost afraid to look at the sensors, but ... he forced himself to study the live feed. The drone was gone. Two of the sensor platforms were gone too, either damaged so badly their beacons were gone – something else that had been considered impossible, once upon a time – or simply atomised. The remaining platforms had taken some damage, but their communications systems were still online, their readings forwarded to their mothership. It looked as if the drone had vanished in the gravity surge ...

Marigold cleared her throat. “I have a direct link to the drone.”

Tobias swallowed. “Location?”

“ES-17,” Marigold said. “It worked!”

Tobias felt weak at the knees. The simulations hadn’t been quite sure what would happen when the drone was ... displaced. Some boffins had argued they shouldn’t risk fitting a black hole into the drone, pointing out the risks of two gravity wells interacting in unpredictable ways; they’d been overruled by the naval staff, who’d argued they needed the black hole for FTL communication, or otherwise they’d be waiting thirty years to receive a signal from the drone, if they ever did. The signal might be lost in the interstellar void ...

We just launched a drone thirty light years in a split second, he thought, numbly. The boffins had insisted it wasn’t precisely instantaneous, but the time period was too small to measure effectively. And if we can get a ship there too...

“They’ll be delighted,” he said, studying the live feed. The boffins were already querying the drone, downloading its datacores through the FTL link to determine just how rough the transit had been. If they could get a starship out of the system ... the naval staff, more aware of the realities of their situation than the boffins, were already using the drone to signal the flicker station. Earth would know what had happened to them ... “I wonder ...”

He stared down at the display, unable to fully grasp what they’d done. They’d combined alien technology, gravity-manipulation on an incredible scale, and coordinated it across an entire binary star system, using it to transport a drone thirty light years ... it was astonishing, unprecedented, and it would change everything. There was no suggestion they’d burnt out any of the alien tech ... it could be used, again and again, to get the MNF home.

If we can get a starship to ES-17, he corrected himself. The drone had been relatively solid-state. It would survive a gravity flux that would overwhelm a compensator field and kill a human crew so quickly they wouldn’t know what had hit them. The drone can tell us a great deal, but we’ll have to send a starship to determine if it’s truly safe.

Marigold glanced at him. “They’ll probably launch a shuttlecraft into the void,” she said. “Do you want to volunteer?”

“Um ...”

Tobias had no idea. That it was her asking ...he scowled, remembering the wretched women who handed out white feathers to men who didn’t sign up for the military when they turned eighteen. They’d been so determined everyone should go to fight, without ever putting themselves at risk ... he’d hated them, back when he’d been a teenager, because why should he risk his life for a country that had done nothing for him? He’d grown up a little since then – and he knew his country had done a lot for him – but it still stung to be called a coward by someone who had nothing, and probably no one, at risk. In truth, there was a bit of him that really was a coward ...

His mind churned. It was very tempting, although his imagination suggested hundreds of ways it could go wrong. The gravity generators might explode, or the drive nodes might fail, or the compensators could be overwhelmed, killing them instantly. Or ... the shuttle was hardly a full-fledged starship. They might run into something that could kill them effortlessly, or suffer a catastrophic failure that would leave them stranded hundreds of light years from home, or ... he wanted to say no, and yet the thought of being the first person to use the alien FTL system was tempting. He’d definitely get his name – and hers – in the history books. And when his old headmaster asked him to come speak to the students, he could enjoy saying no.

“If it can be done, we can,” he said. It might be nothing more than a pleasant fantasy. There was no way to know what the senior officers would decide, now they knew the alien tech could get a ship out of the system. God only knew what it would do to the uneasy truce after the coup, or ... he hoped the admiral had ensured the Chinese couldn’t try again. Or someone else ... for all he knew, every nation had planned trouble and the Chinese were merely the ones who’d struck first. “But we should make sure it is reasonably safe first.”

“If we can,” Marigold said. “But you know what this means? We can go home.”

“We all can, perhaps,” Tobias said. Home wasn’t Earth, as far as he was concerned. He had no intention of returning for good. Perhaps a brief visit to his family and nothing more ... perhaps. “You do realise there may be no way back to the sphere?”

Marigold shrugged. “That’s someone else’s problem.”

Tobias couldn’t disagree. He’d seen enough of the sphere – and alien supertechnology – to last him a lifetime. An asteroid colony might be even more artificial, and the life support much more fragile, but at least it was understandable. Colin had been damned lucky to survive, when he’d found the teleporter; who knew what would happen when someone touched another teleporter, or something worse? He’d leave the sphere to the boffins who wanted to spend centuries crawling over it, if he had a choice. He wanted to go somewhere the universe made sense.

Half the boffins would want to stay here anyway, he thought. Did they even notice the attempted coup?

“We’ll see,” he said. He eyed the live feed thoughtfully. The drone was thirty light years away and yet it was streaming data as if it was only a few kilometres from the shuttle. Or the carrier and planetoid. It was remarkable and world-changing and threatening and ... he took a breath. “But it might be quite some time before they decide to take the plunge.”

Chapter Thirty-Three: HMS Endeavour, Lopez System/Dyson System

Staci braced for something – anything – as the alien starship completed its jump.

She found it hard to believe the angel-ship hadn’t realised its sensors were being spoofed. The Royal Navy was all too aware how easy it could be to trick a starship’s sensors and constantly updated its countermeasures, testing them repeatedly and making sure there was a human in the loop when the time came to make life or death decisions. She’d been put through hundreds of tests herself, to make sure she wouldn’t take anything for granted or blindly follow orders that would lead to the assassination of the Prime Minister or something equally unsavoury. If the alien ship realised what had happened, they might assume Endeavour was better destroyed before she did something else ...

“Jump completed, Captain,” Atkinson reported, as if they’d made the jump under their own power. “Location confirmed; we’re in the Lopez System.”

“Twenty-seven thousand colonists before the war, none now,” Jenner put in, checking his terminal. “The system was infected in the early days of the war, then bio-bombed during the final offensive and left to rot.”

Staci grimaced. Lopez had been one of many ethnic-streamed worlds, home to a culture that could no longer flourish on Earth, not after all the unrest and wars. She had no idea how much of the settler culture had been authentic, in any sense of the word, but it hardly mattered. The colony had been destroyed by the virus, the population trapped in a lingering living death until the ecosystem had been poisoned, the remnants of the colony left as a living reminder of one atrocity amongst many. The hell of it, she reflected sourly, was that coming to Lopez was almost a good thing. There were no humans left for the angel to kill ...

Except us, she thought. She wanted to think they were held under the enemy’s guns, that they were too close to the hull to be destroyed, but she doubted it. Why hasn’t it killed us?

“Captain,” Helen said. “The analysts have run their simulations. They think we can break free, if we move the moment the ship jumps.”

“If,” Staci said. She was still numb. The Battle of Falkirk had been a total disaster. Word would already be on its way to Earth and then ... what then? “We can’t even determine when and where the ship will jump.”

Helen hesitated, noticeably. “Captain, they think we can also redirect the ship’s jump.”

Staci stared at the display. “How?”

“They generate a gravity field to twist time and space, yanking them towards their target,” Helen said. “If I understand the theory correctly, we may be able to insert our own gravity wave into the matrix and change the destination coordinates. It might even be rough enough to disable or destroy the angel ...”

“Might,” Staci repeated. “How sure are they?”

“They think it can be done,” Helen said. She was a good all-arounder, where science was concerned, but she was very much a jack of all trades and mistress of none. “It’s like redirecting a rocket, very slightly. If we give it a little push, at the right time, we can adjust the trajectory in a manner that could easily prove fatal.”

“And the angel has already proven fatal,” Jenner put in, quietly.

Staci nodded, curtly. The angel had killed – murdered – thousands of humans, blowing up two worlds along with a handful of starships. She had no idea what the defenders had thought, when the angel had jumped away, but they’d know the alien ship had broken contact of its own accord. They had to. Unless their sensors had been completely disrupted, to the point of uselessness, they’d be all too aware their foe hadn’t been damaged. They hadn’t even scratched the paint! She didn’t want to imagine the kind of panic that would hit Earth, when the news reached the homeworld. The Battle of New Russia had been bad. This would be worse.

She studied the display. She’d taken an oath ... and part of that oath was to put her body between Britain and her enemies, to risk her life fighting to defend British civilians from all who’d do them harm. She took the oath seriously, even if there were times when she thought the government was foolish and the civilians ungrateful. And the angel was a clear and present threat to the entire human race, a threat so great it had to be stopped no matter the cost. If she could take the angel out, her entire ship was a small price to pay.

“Prepare the gravity projectors,” she ordered, quietly. “Can you guarantee the angel’s destruction?”

“No,” Helen said. “Even if we try to point her at the black hole, there’s no guarantee she’ll be destroyed or crippled to the point she drifts into the gravity well and gets swallowed. We know too little to make any definite projections.”

“Point her at the black hole,” Staci ordered. It offered the best chance of destroying the angel outright, although she doubted that would be the end of the matter. If there was one starship, there would be a fleet of starships ... and, sooner or later, whoever had dispatched the angel would notice it had never returned. The first ship might not have realised humanity could be dangerous. The second would be much more careful. “And prepare to break us free as soon as she jumps.”

“Aye, Captain,” Helen said.

Staci felt tired, bone-weariness dragging her down even as she sat in the command chair. She knew she needed to rest – again – and yet she’d also be needed on the bridge, if something happened. They were messing with powers and technologies they barely understood ... the Builders might laugh, as an adult might smile at a child playing with building bricks, or they might confiscate the toys for the child’s own safety. Or everyone else’s ... Staci had once seen a male classmate get into trouble for bringing his father’s tools to show and tell, even though no one had gotten hurt. It had seemed dreadfully unfair at the time, but now ... her adult self recognised the dangers. Someone could have been injured or killed, quite by accident.

Jenner caught her eye. “Captain, you should go rest,” he said, pitching his voice low enough to ensure no one overheard. “You’ve been on the bridge for hours.”

Staci knew he was right, although he’d been on the bridge for hours himself. He had his duties, as XO and secondary tactical officer, to keep him busy, but her ... her stomach growled, a reminder the last thing she’d eaten had been ... she honestly couldn’t remember. Probably a ration bar or two. She’d ordered the galley closed after the first jump, even though it would play merry hell with crew morale. The last thing she needed was the kitchen staff injured or killed, if the angel jumped again and took Endeavour with her. She shook her head and forced herself to stand, even though her legs felt as tired as the rest of her. He was right; she needed rest.

“You have the bridge,” she said. “Alert me if anything changes.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci wasn’t reassured as she made her way to the ready room. Jenner was a good man, and his close encounter with the aliens didn’t seem to have left any damage behind, but he might not have time to alert her if something happened. Helen was still working on the plan to hack the gravitational matrix, when it came online, yet ... when it happened, it would happen very suddenly. Unless the angel wanted to stay at Lopez forever, or was calling for reinforcements, or ...

Her display blinked as she sat down in front of the desk and dug a handful of ration bars out of her drawer. She could order food, she supposed, but it would be unfair when the rest of the crew was eating ration bars. She’d always admired Captain Campbell for making a point of eating whatever his crew ate, although she supposed Unicorn had been too small for him to do anything else. There had only been one galley and mess hall on the frigate, with part-time cooks ... she put the memory aside as she ate quickly, washing the crumbs down with canned coffee. It was strong, but preferable to the ration bars.

She keyed the console, scanning a dozen reports that would only be important if her ship ever made it back to Earth. The temptation to ignore them wasn’t so strong now, after they’d been dragged out of the Dyson System, but she still felt as though she should leave them until she was reasonably certain she’d make it home. The Admiralty wasn’t going to complain about her paperwork if they never saw Endeavour again. She wondered, not for the first time, if they’d even gotten the messages she’d transmitted at Virus Prime. It was far too easy to believe they’d been garbled so completely no one, not even the most advanced analysis programs in existence, had been able to make anything of them.

They’ll have seen the angel, she told herself. Even if they didn’t get reports from the first two encounters, they’ll have seen the alien craft at Falkirk. They’ll know we’re under attack.

Her mind raced. How did they stop a race capable of direct matter-energy conversion ... weaponised matter-energy conversion? How did they stop a starship that could bend gravity into a pretzel, absorb or deflect everything aimed at her, or ... what else could it do? She felt like the British soldiers who’d confronted the Martian tripods, men so utterly outmatched even their handful of victories were little more than luck. They would have lost the war – they had lost – if the Martians hadn’t fallen to disease. How different would it have been, she asked herself, if the Martians hadn’t been vulnerable? They would have won the war.

Funny, she thought. We used to use it as an example of a no-win scenario, yet it was always disappointing because it never answered the obvious question ...

A wave of tiredness overcame her. She turned off the terminal and leaned over the desk, resting her head on her arms. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but she was too tired to make it to the sofa. The ship seemed to darken as she gathered herself, feeling a pang of guilt as she closed her eyes. Jenner hadn’t been on the bridge as long as her, but he’d need a rest too ... perhaps if she only slept for an hour or so, everything would be fine. Perhaps ...

She jerked awake as her wristcom bleeped. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. Her arms and legs were aching ... she hit the wristcom hard enough to make her fingers sting, gritting her teeth against a sudden burst of pain. How long had she been asleep? It felt as if she hadn’t slept at all ... the chronometer, blinking on the terminal, insisted it had been only two hours. She was sure it was lying.

“Captain,” Jenner said. “The angel appears to be preparing to jump.”

Staci stood. “I’m on my way,” she said. “Inform Helen she is cleared to proceed as planned.”

She glanced into her drawer – there was a stimulant injector there, one she knew better than to use unless events were truly dire – then closed it and hurried back to the bridge. The angel was already folding its wings, without obliterating the planet or doing anything to the starship trapped within its fields. Staci wondered, suddenly, if there were any other watching eyes in the system, hoping and praying the intruder wouldn’t notice them. Lopez hadn’t been considered a major colony, and much of the system development work had been focused on the planet rather than the asteroids, but it was possible there was at least someone else in the system. They might have gone dark the moment the virus arrived, then remained so buried they didn’t even know the system was gone ...

“The gravity matrix is coming online now, Captain,” Helen said. “I’m inserting the altered pulses now.”

Staci took her seat, ice prickling down her spine. No human starship could travel from system to system without the tramlines, and there was no need for precision when jumping ... the drive either worked or it didn’t. She couldn’t see any point in trying to redirect a human ship, but here ... did the Builders know what they were doing? Would they counter the manipulations or overpower them or ... or what? She wished, again, for a war with a race she understood, with technology she could match. The Builders were just ... alien. Hell, they didn’t even know the angel was a Builder ship. For all she knew, it could be from a completely different species ...

Jenner yawned behind her, loudly enough for her to hear. She tried not to smile, although she’d known some captains who would have been annoyed if someone had yawned on their bridge. But then, they’d had nice normal disasters to deal with, nothing they didn’t know how to handle. She felt as if she were bluffing her way through crisis after crisis, facing an enemy who might know she was bluffing, but was waiting for her to expose herself completely before calling her bluff. She would almost sooner have played Russian Roulette with a loaded gun. At least she could have calculated the odds accurately.

“The gravity surge is building now,” Helen added. “I can’t tell if we succeeded ...”

Staci tapped her terminal. “All hands, brace for impact,” she ordered. The crew should already be strapped down, if they’d followed orders, but they needed the warning to go limp. “I say again, all hands ...”

She felt something slam into her and tasted blood in her mouth. Someone had hit her, smacked her right in the face ... she thought, just for a second, someone had bashed her entire body with a cricket bat. Alarms howled a moment later ... no, someone was screaming in pain. The gravity field tightened – it struck her that, if the plan had worked, they might now be far too close to a black hole for comfort – and then faded altogether. She felt something trickling down her neck and shuddered. Was she bleeding? Her vision was blurring in and out ...

The ship shuddered again, a low rumbling sensation that made the hull creak and crack. She heard something explode behind her ... something that shouldn’t have exploded unless the entire ship had been destroyed. The main lights died, the emergency lighting coming online only to start fading an instant later. She thought she saw the hull tear open, threatening to hurl them all into space ... she blinked and the image was gone, the bridge almost unharmed save for a handful of disabled consoles. Her body still hurt ... if there had been anyone near her, part of her mind noted, she would have thought they’d hit her. She hadn’t felt so badly beaten since ... since ever.

“Report,” she managed. Her mouth was full of blood. She spat it out as her vision cleared. “What hit us?”

“We’re clear,” Atkinson managed. She couldn’t see his face, but he sounded as if he were choking on his own blood. “We were thrown clear of the angel and ...”

The display cleared. Staci forced herself to watch as more and more icons popped into view. The angel was between them and the black hole ... she couldn’t tell if she should be relieved they’d jumped all the way back to Dyson or cursing because they might have trapped themselves again. The angel looked ... weaker somehow, the wings nowhere near as focused – and glorious – as they’d seemed when it had first appeared. Staci hoped, with a flash of vindictive glee, that that meant the angel was heavily damaged. It was hard to be sure. They were already too far from the alien ship to get a good look at her hull.

Fall into the black hole, she thought, desperately. Fall into the black hole ...

“Damage reports, all decks,” Jenner said. His face looked as if someone had hit him with a frying pan. He had bruises all over his skin. “Captain, it would be easier to say which systems aren’t damaged.”

“Helm, if we have drive power, put as much distance as we can between us and the angel,” Staci ordered. Did they have drives? The internal datanet was down ... again. They’d done what they could to harden it against gravity waves, but it hadn’t been enough. “Sensors, report?”

“We returned to the Dyson System,” Helen said. “I’m reading major power fluctuations surrounding the angel ...”

Fall into the black hole, Staci thought, again. The angel was beating its wings desperately, like a bird trying to escape a wind turbine. She wanted to think it was too badly damaged to escape the gravity pull.  Fall into the black hole ...

“Captain, she’s pulling free,” Helen said. The display updated rapidly. It would take time for the angel to pull itself free, but ... it was doing it. “Slowly, but surely.”

Staci cursed. Was there anything they could do? Nothing came to mind. Ramming the angel simply wasn’t going to work, unless the alien ship was already crippled. She didn’t have any other weapon that might do any damage, let alone finish the job. And that meant ...

“Raise the commodore,” she ordered. Admiral Dismukes was still inside Dyson Two, unless that had changed, but Commodore Lafarge should have stayed close. She needed to update him and then ... she didn’t know. Perhaps they could hit the alien ship with the fists and hope for the best. “And make sure he gets copies of all our sensor records.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Chapter Thirty-Four: Dyson System

Charlotte had been asleep when the alarm sounded, yanking her out of her nightmares.

It hadn’t been a pleasant dream, yet ... the details slipped her mind. Something had been wrong, so very wrong, but she couldn’t remember anything, beyond a mind-numbing sense of dread and fear. It was funny, part of her reflected, that they might be on the verge of getting out of the real-life nightmare, even as her mind plunged her into darkness. Something had been looming over her, something all the more terrible for only existing at the corner of her eye, something ...

The intercom bleeped. “Lady Charlotte to the CIC, please.”

Charlotte sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bunk, heading for the washroom as quickly as possible. The Chinese weren’t great believers in luxury for their senior officers, she’d noted, and the stateroom wouldn’t have impressed any of her former peers amongst the aristocracy. She might not have been impressed either, if she hadn’t gone down in the world and then risen, only to go down again. She also knew it was far superior to the wardrooms assigned to junior officers or enlisted men, something that puzzled her. But it wasn’t any of her business.

She washed and changed into a fresh tunic, then made her way up to the CIC. The situation had changed, the moment the drone had been successfully displaced to ES-17, and everyone knew it. She had no idea what sort of agreements Admiral Dismukes had made with Admiral He, although she rather suspected they’d agreed to uphold the farcical claim he’d acted entirely on his own in exchange for his cooperation and de facto defection. The diplomats were going to have a nightmare sorting out the mess, though if everything was blamed on Admiral He the rest of the matter might be quietly dropped.

Not that it’ll be forgotten, she thought. No one will trust them to uphold the Solar Treaty again.

“Lady Charlotte,” Admiral Dismukes said. He stood in front of the main display, which was closer to realtime than anything else ... even thought it was showing events on the other side of the binary system. “There have been worrying developments.”

“That’s almost British understatement,” Charlotte teased. “What’s happened?”

The admiral sighed and indicated a single icon on the display. “The angel – and Endeavour – has returned.”

Charlotte sucked in her breath. She’d liked Captain Templeton, and she’d met some of the crew, and she’d had her own staffers on the ship, and it was good to know they were probably alive, but ... somehow, she wasn’t sure it was entirely good news. The aliens were dangerously powerful and unpredictable, their actions making little sense. If the angel was back ...

“Endeavour reports the angel destroyed two worlds and attacked a third before retreating,” Admiral Dismukes said. He picked up a datapad and held it out. “The report, even the summary, does not make for pretty reading.”

“Shit.” Charlotte’s mother would have washed her mouth out with soap for using such language in public, or even in semi-private, but the old aristo had never had to deal with anything more challenging than the family estates. Quite how she’d lived through the Bombardment without being affected ... Charlotte had never really known. “If that’s true ...”

She scanned the summery, all too aware naval personnel were trained to make sure all the important points were included. Virus Prime had been destroyed, and another world ... and a third nearly destroyed, spared only because the angel had chosen to retreat. There was no explanation as to why, either. Some boffins thought the alien ship was following a program and, having encountered a glitch, had taken the time to break off and try to fix it; others thought it simply didn’t care about the humans around it, or anything else that wasn’t at its level. Charlotte had worked with enough semi-AIs to know they were rarely capable of handling the unexpected, but ... she shook her head. There was no way to know.

“And now she’s back,” she said, lifting her eyes from the datapad. “What now?”

“I wish I knew,” Admiral Dismukes said. “If she’s hostile, she has to be stopped.”

Charlotte shivered. The report summary hadn’t gone into great detail, but it was clear the angel hadn’t been stopped – or even slowed – by the human fleet. She didn’t want to read the detailed report, with the names of starships and their crews blotted from existence ... her husband and her lover had both been starship captains, men who might go out one day and never return. Mitch had died doing what he’d loved ... how many men had died in a futile battle. And could the angel be stopped?

She met his eyes. “Can we stop her?”

“The analysts are considering the problem now,” Admiral Dismukes said. “We may be able to stop her, or at least force her to open communications, but ...”

He shrugged, expressively. Charlotte understood. The MNF had never been intended to go into battle. The Chinese ships had planned an engagement, if the coup failed to secure its objectives bloodlessly, but there’d been limits to how many ships they could send to the Dyson System. Someone would have noticed the missing vessels, sooner or later, and started asking pointed questions. Charlotte had no idea what would have happened then, but it would certainly have upset their plans.

“We’re going to be holding the first FTL conference in twenty minutes,” he added. “Get yourself some coffee. It’s going to be a long one.”

“And a rather disjointed one,” Charlotte agreed. It would be interesting to see how well the system worked, if they were piggybacking off the alien technology. One boffin was insisting there were actual black hole factories within the sphere, as if black holes were something that could be made to order. Perhaps they could, if one had the right tech. Nukes had once been difficult and dangerous to build, but now they were cheap and easy and it was a constant battle to keep them out of the wrong hands. “We’ll see how it goes.”

She found a seat and forced herself to read the complete report from start to finish. It was a harrowing tale, one she wouldn’t have believed if she hadn’t seen so many other incredible technologies in the Dyson System. Hell, the spheres themselves were the product of a hyper-advanced civilisation. She’d read all the speculations on just how they’d been constructed and all of them required materials and technologies far in advance of anything humans had ever built. The reports had hammered the point home time and time again. No one wanted to go to war with a civilisation that could do even one of the feats she’d seen ...

And we may have no choice, she thought, numbly. The angel was still holding position near the black hole, but ... what was it doing? If it goes back on the offensive, it may be unstoppable.

Admiral He joined them, shortly before the conference was due to begin. Charlotte shook her head in disbelief as the first holoimages flickered into existence, blurring slightly as the computer processors fought to compensate for the unprecedented situation. Commodore Lafarge was near the second planetoid, close enough for realtime conversations with the researchers; Captain Templeton was a little further away, far enough to be affected by the time delay even if everyone else wasn’t. The other captains were closer, she thought, although the fleets were spreading out. The images from Falkirk were far from reassuring. They’d known the Builders had powerful weapons – Charlotte’s shuttle had been shot down by one – but watching them tear through battleships as if they were made of paper was terrifying.

“Greetings,” Admiral Dismukes said. The massed holoimages shivered slightly. Charlotte told herself the next generation of the system, the one built from scratch, would be a great deal more effective. “You should all have read the preliminary report and noted that the angel destroyed two worlds and tried to destroy a third, only to leave without finishing the job. The fleet that challenged it, the third time, was defeated, spared only by alien whim. I think there can be no argument that, if the angel had decided to press matters, the fleet would have been slaughtered.”

Charlotte felt cold. She wasn’t a complete novice where naval matters were concerned, but the starship captains made her look ignorant. They could appreciate the outcome of the battle, and dread a second encounter, on levels she couldn’t possibly match. They might know officers who’d fought in the battle, know – after reading the report – that their friends were already dead. The sheer violence of the brief engagement was terrifying. The angel hadn’t gone after lifepods, or blasted helpless starfighters, but it had killed so many ships so quickly none had a chance to launch lifepods.

“You were inside the field,” Captain Hoskins said to Captain Templeton. “Why didn’t you fire on the alien ship?”

Captain Templeton’s reply was slow in coming, oddly noticeable compared to the others. “We believed, as is clearly stated in my report, that there was no way any of our weapons could do any real damage to the angel,” she said. “We were not inside their hull, or even at point-blank range, and neither laser-heads nor nukes made any impression on the angel at any time. Our best analysis suggested that even trying to ram the ship would have been futile – they would either have restrained us or simply torn us to atoms. We did the best we could, both in spoofing their sensors and then in redirecting the last jump ...”

“I agree,” Admiral Dismukes said, before the muttering could get any louder. “I have no doubt the folks back home will find plenty of reason to carp and criticize our decisions, all of our decisions, no matter how reasonable they seem to us. Right now, we don’t have the time to bicker. We have to decide what to do.”

Commodore Lafarge spoke first. “We have several options. We can do nothing and hope for the best. We can try to evacuate the system before it is too late ...”

“We might be able to get the fleet out of the system,” Charlotte said, quickly. “But that would mean leaving the locals behind, helpless and vulnerable.”

“There is no way we can evacuate the entire sphere,” Captain Hoskins said with a sneer. “Even if the locals we discovered are the only inhabitants, getting them offworld and out of the system will take years. We have neither the shipping nor the time.”

Charlotte brushed off his tone. She’d been talked down to by experts, an operational hazard when one grew up in the aristocracy and wasn't expected to be anything more than a wife, a mother, and a grandmother ... hopefully in that order. Quite why she’d met people who thought she had nothing between her ears puzzled her, not least because estate management was rather more than just sitting around looking pretty. Her ex-husband had trusted her to run the estate ... he, at least, had been smart enough to let her.

“Or we fight,” Commodore Lafarge finished. Charlotte noted, in a brief flash of insight, that Dismukes and Lafarge had probably conferred privately beforehand. It would be interesting, if there was any way to check, to see how many other officers thought outside the box and realised what had happened. It would have been impossible, without the FTL communications network. “Can we stop that ... that thing?”

“We have a duty to try, if there is a chance to succeed,” Captain Baranov said. “That ... thing ... attacked three worlds and killed uncounted numbers of people. It is clearly hostile.”

“And attacking it with everything we have will be no more effective than a child trying to beat up an adult,” Captain Hoskins snapped. “Unless we have some kind of secret weapon up our sleeves, we can’t even touch that ship.”

“There are options,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Professor?”

Professor Rossi stepped into the spotlight. Charlotte wondered, vaguely, where he actually was. He didn’t have to be somewhere close, not now. He might have been dispatched back to the sphere, or the lone planetoid, or ... who knew?

“We have acquired a considerable amount of control over the alien gravity-manipulation technology, some practical and some – unfortunately – still theoretical,” Professor Rossi said. If he was nervous at addressing so many officers, he didn’t show it. “First, we have been able to use their tech to deflect or destroy pieces of debris before they hit the sphere. We may” – a faint quiver ran through his voice – “be able to use that as a weapon, if they don’t have a counter.”

Charlotte felt a flicker of sympathy. Most academics, in her experience, were peaceniks, convinced that all problems could be solved through talking and compromise and mutual understanding.  Perhaps they were right, in an ideal world, but it was difficult to talk to someone who refused to talk to you, and impossible to compromise with someone who would just take it as a sign of weakness and demand more. She’d studied enough diplomacy to know that academic delusions had played a major role in the rise of rogue states, states that had helped to cause the Age of Unrest ... states that needed a spanking before their conduct got too far out of hand to be stopped without serious risk. It couldn’t be easy for Rossi to discuss using his research for war, even though he had to have read the report. The images of an entire planet being blown away were terrifying.

“Second, we may be able to hurl pieces of debris or even fists at the alien ship,” Rossi continued. “The fists currently active inside the sphere cannot be moved out, as far as we can tell, but we have located a handful within the debris cloud that can be turned into makeshift projectiles. We don’t know, however, if the impact will have any effect at all; they have shown a certain ability to absorb kinetic energy, as well as manipulate gravity. We may discover they simply deflect anything we throw at them.”

“Like a batter on the baseball field,” Admiral Dismukes said. “The pitcher throws the ball at him, the batter knocks it away.”

And you’re holding this discussion to calm any panic, Charlotte thought. She had wondered why the admiral had called a full council of war ... she thought she knew now. You don’t just want everyone to agree to go along with you, willingly, but to talk themselves out of their fears before we go to war.

“Yes, Admiral,” Rossi said. “Third and fourth, it may be possible to tear open their field and leave their hull exposed, or even to teleport the angel into a star. If ...”

Captain Hoskins snorted. “You think you can just throw their ship into a star?”

“It may be possible,” Rossi said. “We tossed a drone thirty light years ... and it survived. There’s no reason, on paper, that we can’t do the same to a starship.”

Charlotte felt, rather than heard, a collective intake of breath. The idea a starship could be destroyed by someone pushing a button light-hours away – or further – was terrifying. The Builders had enough power to obliterate the entire MNF, unless there was some reason the technique couldn’t work as well as they thought. Or ... she recalled a very old science-fantasy story in which there really had been such a device. The idea had gone out of fashion years ago, and she wouldn’t even have heard of it if she hadn’t read the briefing notes ...

“If you can, do it,” Admiral Dismukes said. “But somehow I don’t think it will be so easy.”

“The angel is a pretty easy target,” Captain Templeton commented. “It’s just heavily protected.”

“Our ships are not,” Lafarge said. “We must be sure to evade at all times, as we near their observed weapons range.”

“There’s one other possibility,” Rossi said. “We have successfully teleported men from the sphere to both planetoids. We may, and I stress may, be able to get someone onto the angel.”

Admiral Dismukes looked dubious. “I thought you needed a teleporter at both ends.”

“You do,” Rossi confirmed. “But if they have one ... we might be able to use it.”

“If they don’t realise we can hack their old tech,” Hoskins pointed out. “What’s to stop them hacking it right back? Or ... this could be their USS Constitution. She may still be in service, technically, but any modern ship could make matchsticks out of her. There’s a lot we don’t know.”

“No, we don’t,” Rossi agreed. “They are advanced. But they are not gods. Their tech can do things ours can’t, not yet, but ... it is understandable. They’re not waving magic wands and making the impossible possible.”

“And anyone hit by a cannonball will be killed, even if cannons have been outdated for nearly five hundred years,” Admiral Dismukes pointed out. “Just because our tech is primitive doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous.”

“We should also try to communicate with them,” Charlotte said, firmly. “If we can get them to talk ...”

A captain she didn’t know looked unimpressed. “After everything they’ve done?”

“We have to try,” Charlotte said. “If we can talk to them, they might back off.”

“Or offer us terms of surrender,” Hoskins pointed out, sourly. “If they even care to try ...”

“We have to try,” Admiral Dismukes echoed. “And if it doesn’t work, we can fight.”

He paused. “We’re already working on contingency plans, and putting everything into place,” he added. “There’s a great deal we don’t know, but ... I have faith we can find a way to use their tech against them. If they won’t hear our bark, they can feel our bite.”

Charlotte kept her thoughts to herself. The joke was mildly amusing ...

... But there was little else amusing about the sense of impending doom.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Dyson System

“This is not where I wanted to be,” Tobias said, quietly. “How about you?”

He stared out the cockpit, towards the angel. It shouldn’t have been visible at such a distance, certainly not to the naked eye, but it was big and glowing and he had no trouble picking it out against the inky darkness of interplanetary space. The black hole hung behind the alien starship, a pool of darkness so intense his eyes had trouble recognising it was even there. He suspected he couldn’t have seen it at all – indeed, he wasn’t really seeing the black hole – if pieces of debris and vapours of gas had not been falling into the vortex, leaving trails of light behind as they died. It was chilling to realise they might already be gone, that all he was seeing was the afterimage created by the black hole’s gravity field. He couldn’t help feeling they were already too close to the gravity well. If they got too close, and their perception slowed down, would they realise they needed to run? Or would it be already too late?

“I thought we were done with this job.” Marigold’s voice was hushed, her tone so low he had trouble making out the words. “Next time someone asks us to volunteer, we jump backwards. All right?”

Tobias nodded in agreement. It had been bad enough flying close to infected starships to steer missiles right into the teeth of their defences, back during the war. He’d understood the dangers and treated it, mentally, more like a computer game than anything real. He hadn’t wanted to admit to himself, not even in the privacy of his own mind, that the slightest mistake would cost them a very real pair of lives. But here ... he didn’t understand the dangers presented by the angel, or the black hole. The footage from Virus Prime was terrifying. They’d known the Builders had matter-conversion weapons, but they hadn’t realised the weapons could be turned on something the size of a planet ...

Which should have been obvious, he told himself sharply. They don’t have to turn the entire planet into energy to blow it to atoms, just a relatively small chunk of the planet’s mass.

“Yeah,” he said. “After this, we get home and quit.”

He stared at the sight for a long moment, then forced himself to check his sensors. They were holding position alarmingly close to the angel, far too close for his peace of mind. No human weapon could touch them – no human sensor could even find them – but no one really knew what the alien weapons range actually was. Their blasts didn’t move at light-speed, thankfully, yet if they detected the shuttle and fired the shot would reach him mere seconds after the warning. The tacticians were already working on ways to turn the alien FTL system against them, using a drone to provide advance warning that would actually be helpful, but so far they hadn’t managed to get the communications network up and running. Tobias doubted it would work as well as they claimed, in the real world. The aliens used gravity sensors to track their targets and a black hole, no matter how microscopic, would stick out like a sore thumb.

I suppose that seeing the early warning drone being blown away would prove they had bad intentions, he reflected. But we still wouldn’t get enough warning to alter course and speed before we were blown away too.

“They’re not moving, yet,” he said. “Do you have the datalink up and running?”

“Yes,” Marigold confirmed. “The fleet is getting realtime data.”

Tobias gritted his teeth. There was a plan ... or so he’d been told. He had his doubts. The full sensor records hadn’t been made available – apparently, the boffins were still sifting through the datafiles – and he couldn’t help finding that ominous. Captain Templeton was hardly the sort of officer to clutch data to her breast, on the theory that being the only one to know would make her more important than anyone who didn’t, and the fact she hadn’t insisted on sharing everything worried him. Maybe Admiral Dismukes had made the call instead ... Tobias had heard, through the grapevine, that the man was more of a bureaucrat than a fighting officer. But either way, it was worrying. The first fleet to confront the angel had only won by default. Tobias disliked the implications, not least because he didn’t know the details of just what had happened. It boded ill for the future.

“She destroys two worlds and tries to murder a third, then breaks off,” Tobias muttered, sardonically. “What the hell is she doing?”

Marigold had no answer. They’d both seen Virus Prime – and neither would shed any tears for the heart of the alien infection – but there’d been no logical reason to murder thousands of colonists on one world and come very close to doing the same to another. Tobias had no idea if the alien hadn’t known the humans were there and hadn’t cared to check, or had slaughtered the colonists with gleeful malice, yet it hardly mattered. The end result was still the same. A human might tread on an ant intentionally, or quite by accident, but the poor ant was still dead.

“We can stop her,” Marigold said. “The more we learn, the more we know they’re not gods.”

Tobias frowned. Endeavour was a survey ship, hardly designed to stand in the modern line of battle, but she’d tear through one of the fleets that had won the First Interstellar War like a knife through butter. A modern civilian ship, with civilian tech, would have no trouble dominating a world that was barely on the cusp of the space age, or destroying the first warships humanity had launched into space. He had no idea if the angel was a warship, or a civilian vessel, or some strange combination of both, but it hardly mattered. The technological gap between the angel and the MNF was just too wide to be bridged easily.

“True,” he said, finally. “But they’re still awesomely powerful.”

He glanced at the new console, the patched-together FTL communications system. It was crude – the official version would be a great deal neater – but it worked, for the moment. It was strange to see realtime links to both planetoids, the surface of the sphere and the starships assembling around Fujian, yet ... it was real. The admiral and his staffers would have realtime data on what the angel was doing, for a while. Tobias suspected the link wouldn’t hold up indefinitely, once the aliens realised what they were doing. They’d probably blow away each and every black hole within range – or, more accurately, destroying the containment systems that both controlled and fed the microscopic gravity wells. No one was quite sure what would happen then, but it didn’t matter. The communications system would be gone.

They’ll have to take out the second planetoid too, he thought. But we know they have the power to do it.

He shook his head. “What are they waiting for?”

“Endeavour gave them a shock,” Marigold pointed out. “Unless they meant to come back here, and we just think we rerouted them ...”

Tobias swallowed. The reports insisted the alien ship had been steered back to the Dyson System. Back home, he wouldn’t have believed it – news reports tended to focus on the positive and downplay the negative as much as possible, coming alarmingly close to lying without ever quite crossing the line – but Captain Templeton wasn’t one to lie to her crew. If she thought she was telling the truth ...

“We may never know,” Tobias thought. He felt like a child playing with a steering wheel ... but was it really linked to the car, or just something for the children to play pretend? Which one would be worse, in this case? He honestly wasn’t sure. “And all we can do is wait.”

***

“I cannot guarantee your safety,” Captain Templeton said. “If it had been wholly up to me, I would have ordered you to stay on the sphere.”

“You couldn’t guarantee my safety anywhere,” Charlotte pointed out, as she stood in the hastily assembled FTL communications chamber. “Not here and not now.”

It was a chilling thought. She’d grown up in a world that was almost mind-numbingly safe. An injury that wasn’t immediately fatal could be healed; no hostiles could break into the estate, let alone threaten her life. The only real danger had been parental disapproval and school punishment and she’d learnt quickly how to avoid both, growing into adulthood convinced – deep inside – that nothing could really harm her. She was old enough – and she’d been through enough – to know that wasn’t true now, if it had ever been, but she’d always thought she could find safe harbour if she wished. The Builders had proved that wasn’t remotely true. There was no safety in the best-protected places on Earth if the entire planet could be destroyed.

“True.” Captain Templeton met her eyes. “But you might well be safer on the sphere.”

“The sphere is nothing more than a very big target,” Charlotte pointed out. It seemed incredible that something the size of an intact sphere could be threatened, but she’d seen the remains of Dyson One. “For all we know, they destroyed the first sphere themselves.”

“The thought has crossed my mind,” Captain Templeton admitted. “But do bear in mind we saw a battleship get taken out with a single shot, only a day or so ago. Endeavour is flimsy by comparison.”

Charlotte nodded. She wasn’t sure why she’d made the decision to move to Endeavour, not really. It had been easy to come up with a handful of justifications – the aliens had spared the survey ship once, it might be easier to talk to them from a relatively short distance – but in truth she knew she had other reasons. She owed it to herself to be in danger, even though there was a very real chance she couldn’t influence the outcome of the coming engagement. A diplomatic starship would keep her distance, but Endeavour didn’t have that option ... not really. Captain Templeton’s ship would be positioned at the rear of the formation, yet she’d still be part of it. Charlotte knew this day could easily be her last.

“I understand the risks,” she said, finally. The aliens had destroyed two planets. There would have been no reason to think they couldn’t take out the fleet, even if there hadn’t been records of the Battle of Falkirk. The tactical analysts had made it very clear that the battle had been entirely one-sided, with the angel seemingly unscratched by humanity’s most powerful weapons. “And I am prepared to face them.”

“If you can make the system work, be my guest,” Captain Templeton said. “But quite why you think they’ll talk to us now ...”

“They designed the sphere as a series of interlocking intelligence tests,” Charlotte pointed out, dryly. “Perhaps they’ll only talk to people who can figure out how.”

Captain Templeton didn’t look convinced. Charlotte understood. Human invaders had always had to learn the language of the people they were invading, if only so they could demand surrender and submission. They might try to impose their own language, after the shooting stopped, but it was never easy. The Builders seemed to take a very different view ... but she supposed it made a certain kind of sense. Most human invaders were very far from invincible and could be hurt, if not beaten. The Builders were powerful enough not to have to care about the mites swarming around their feet.

And we’ll have to teach them they’re wrong, Charlotte thought. Quickly.

“We’re on our way to link up with the rest of the fleet,” Captain Templeton said. “If you change your mind ...”

“I won’t,” Charlotte said. “I’ll be with you to the end.”

Captain Templeton nodded – her lips twisted so quickly Charlotte couldn’t tell if she’d smiled or grimaced – and then headed for the hatch. Charlotte watched her go, feeling suddenly alone. Most of her staffers had been disembarked and the remainder were in the upper compartment, studying the records and trying to determine which approach might be best. Charlotte knew she should go join them, rather than remain alone, but ... she turned and sat down, feeling all the strength go out of her. It was one thing to bombastically declare she would stay on the ship to the end, quite another to do it. No one would talk if she let the captain order her off the ship ...

She stared down at the deck, her thoughts elsewhere. She’d resented her life ... silly, really, when she’d been born into wealth and power most people couldn’t even begin to imagine. She had had everything she needed, and much of what she wanted, and the only price she’d paid had been fitting into the system, letting her elders and betters determine the path of her life for her. She’d made very few decisions for herself, from her marriage to having children, and even though she’d liked her husband she’d resented him a little too. Her achievements had never really been hers. She’d known she was going quietly mad when she’d seduced Mitch – a man who couldn’t be relied upon to honour the quiet conventions of aristocratic society, in which affairs were fine as long as everyone could pretend they hadn’t happened – but it had seemed a way out, a way to either climb to the top or crash into the abyss ... either way, it would be hers. Mitch’s death had put an end to that, yet ... she’d found something else to do with her life.

Her lips quirked. They thought they were getting rid of me, she thought. They thought they were tossing me into a cesspit, and they did, and I came up covered in diamonds.

She snickered at the thought, then sobered. She’d had to come face-to-face with her own mortality more than once, since the first time she’d laid eyes on the spheres, but ... this time, there was no protection if the Builders wanted her – or the ship – dead. The Chinese hadn’t risked hurting or killing her; the locals had tried to kill the entire team, but the offworlders had been more than capable of defending themselves. Here ... her heart pounded, silently reminding her she might be dead soon. She knew she should be scared, and she was, but she was also excited. One way or the other, she would prove herself or die trying.

A dull quiver ran through the ship. It wouldn’t be long now.

***

“All stations report ready, Captain,” Jenner said, as Staci returned to the bridge. “Your ship is fully at your command.”

Staci took her chair, all too aware of how much remained unsaid. Endeavour had been badly damaged, time and time again, and there were limits to how much could be repaired in a hurry. The damage control teams hadn’t had time to fill out formal reports – or even keep track of much of what they’d done, which would come back to bite them sooner rather than later – but what they’d managed to tell her made grim reading. There were too many components that needed to be replaced, yet there hadn’t been time ... and others that might, might, be on the verge of collapse. It didn’t help, she reflected, that the damage pattern was bizarre. Normally, it was easy to assess the damage and work out which components were most likely to need replacements; now, the damage pattern was too chaotic to be assessed properly.

And none of us are in any fit state for a battle, she thought. She’d ordered her command and tactical staff to get some rest, over the last few hours, but there’d been no way to give the rest of the crew a proper break. There was too much work to do. But then, if they hit us with their weapons there’ll probably be nothing left of the ship to repair.

She sucked in her breath as she studied the display. No one really wanted to start an engagement with the angel, but there might be no choice. The ship had killed two worlds and tried to kill a third ... it was possible, of course, that Lady Charlotte’s attempt to open communications would work, yet ... Staci dared not assume it would. They had to stop the angel while it was vulnerable and yet, it might already be too late. Endeavour had been patched up to the point she could go into battle, if there was no other choice. The angel’s faceless crew might have done the same.

McDougall coughed. “How long do we wait?”

“We wait for the admiral’s orders,” Staci said, disguising her own concerns. The longer they waited, the harder it would be to take the angel down ... if, of course, the alien ship could be taken down. She wanted to believe, as some of the analysts did, that the alien FTL drive had been permanently damaged, and that was why it hadn’t already retreated to lick its wounds, but there was just no way to be sure. “The remainder of the fleet needs to be assembled.”

She sat back in her chair and studied the angel, trying to ignore the part of her training that insisted allowing the enemy to take the initiative was effectively accepting eventual defeat. There were times when one had to wait to let the opponent throw the first punch, but ... she swallowed hard. Here, it was too dangerous. And yet, what choice did they have? The angel had effortlessly defeated a true battle fleet, not a mishmash like the MNF. It would have no trouble wiping the floor with them, unless the new weapons and techniques actually worked ...

“Power surge,” Helen snapped. “She’s moving!”

Staci sucked in her breath. It was time.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Dyson System

“Admiral,” the Chinese officer said. “The angel is starting to move.”

Admiral Newton Wayne Dismukes knew, without false modesty, that he was no combat commander. A man at his rank was expected to be more of a diplomat than a fighter, to smooth out the cracks in multinational command teams and get everyone willingly moving in the same direction, rather than snapping orders everyone would follow without question. He had never really expected to take his fleet into battle; indeed, given the lack of proper warships assigned to escort the civilian vessels, his contingency plans had involved beating a hasty retreat rather than trying to stand and fight. It wasn’t cowardice, although he was painfully aware some REMFs would think otherwise. His duty was to protect the civilian ships, not fight to the death. But he’d never really anticipated being cut off from home either.

And I might turn tactical command over to Admiral He if we were facing a conventional enemy, he thought. He had no idea what the Pentagon would make of that, although he rather suspected his superiors would have problems judging each and every decision he’d made since the tramline had vanished. But this isn’t a conventional foe.

He shivered. The records were all too clear. The angel had torn through an entire fleet ... a fleet that had been far more powerful than his own formation. He had some advantages, he thought, but ideally he would have preferred to avoid engagement altogether. He doubted that were possible, even if the angel hadn’t proven itself hostile – and lethal. The alien ship was faster, in realspace, than anything humanity had ever built and launched, and it could travel light-years in the blink of an eye. There was no point in trying to run, although he’d ordered most of the civilian ships into interstellar space. It was just possible they could retake the planetoids, after the angel left, and use the alien tech to get themselves home. Just ...

The display flickered as the angel opened fire, blasting a piece of debris into nothingness. The flash of energy blinded a handful of drones, holding station near the alien ship ... Newton had no idea if they’d done it intentionally, but the end result was the same. Four more pieces of debris died in quick succession, the angel slowly turning to crawl out of the gravity well and make its way into interstellar space. Newton couldn’t help admiring the sheer power it displayed – its wings beat the fabric of space-time like a bird’s wings would beat the air – even though it was absolutely terrifying. It was in no one’s interest to get into a shooting war with the angel, and the race behind it. If there was one angel, there would be others.

“Admiral, she’s heading right for Dyson Two,” the operator said. “And she’s picking up speed.”

“The acceleration curves are off the scale,” Admiral He added. “It’s fantastic.”

“And terrifying,” Newton pointed out. Having sensors that effectively showed the entire system, in realtime, had long been a holy grail, but he was starting to think they weren’t as great as he’d thought. He could watch the angel climbing out of the debris field, picking off chunk after chunk with terrifying weapons, and know it was happening even as he watched. “Those weapons will burn right through our hulls.”

He took a breath. “Signal the second planetoid,” he ordered. They hadn’t had time to put together more than a very basic FTL net, let alone work out a common language to streamline communications. No doubt some REMF would make a fuss about that too ... if anyone survived long enough to do it. “Order them to engage in twenty minutes, if not countermanded.”

“Aye, sir.”

“And signal Endeavour,” Newton added. “She is to attempt to open communications now.”

He sensed, more than heard, Admiral He’s scepticism. Lady Charlotte had insisted on trying to communicate, using the alien system, but no one was very confident it would work. The boffins had even feared it would tip off the aliens, warning them the human intruders had figured out how to piggyback their transmissions on the alien system, and even arguing they shouldn’t try to communicate at all ... a point Newton would have supported, if he hadn’t known it would be blindingly obvious the moment the aliens used their gravity sensors. They were good enough to really fuck up his planning, denying him half of his tricks ... although, to be fair, he’d known better than to rely on them. The Builders were just too powerful.

“No response, sir,” the operator said. “There’s no confirmation they even heard us.”

Of course not, Newton thought.

He cursed under his breath. On paper, the tactical problem was relatively simple. There was one enemy ship and it had to be stopped, if it refused to talk. In practice, the alien ship was too powerful to be taken down in a conventional assault – or she would have been destroyed at Falkirk – and any attempt to mount one would end in disaster. He couldn’t even rely on his starfighters to cripple the angel while keeping his capital ships back, not when the starfighters were just as vulnerable as the rest of the fleet. If he had more battleships ... he shook his head. If he had the entire navy behind him, it wouldn’t have changed the tactical problem in any real way. He felt like a man standing in the path of a storm and ordering it to stop, and that fool would be killed effortlessly ...

“Signal the planetoid,” he ordered. “They are to engage now.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Newton waited, half-wishing he’d never even heard of a realtime FTL sensor network. They were fighting a battle on an unbelievable scale, coordinating over distances in a manner impossible outside unrealistic computer games, and yet everything seemed to be happening so slowly. The gravity beams were flickering across the system, trying to pick up pieces of debris – and fists – and hurl them at the angel, in hopes of hitting the alien ship with weapons that made mass drivers look harmless. It made him wonder if they’d return to the field again, now it was a lot easier to pick targets and blow them away before they could react ... normally, a combination of evasive manoeuvrings and a simple lack of realtime data prevented mass drivers from being a threat except at relatively close range. Here ... he watched, grimly, as the first set of fists barrelled across the system. He’d seen them take out entire battleships, but now ...

“The enemy is deploying their own gravity beams,” the operator said. “They’re deflecting the projectiles.”

“Baseball bats,” Newton muttered. He hadn’t expected the debris chunks to do any real damage, but ...  “The fists?”

“Flying in now,” the operator said. “The enemy is deploying countermeasures ...”

Newton leaned forward, a faint sense of utter unreality threatening to overcome him. One did not tussle for control of an incoming warhead. Normally, a countermissile would be enough to take out any missile coming in on a predictable trajectory. Normally ... he felt as if they were engaging in a tug-of-war, one side trying to steer the fists into the alien ship and the other trying to push them away. His eyes narrowed as he saw a fist deflected, then slammed so hard it flew out of the system alarmingly close to the speed of light. The alien tactic was crude, but it made perfect sense. They’d shoved the fist outside the planetoid’s sphere of control ...

“They may be unable to destroy the fists,” Admiral He said, quietly. “It would certainly be more effective if they could.”

“Probably,” Newton agreed. The boffins were deeply divided on just how indestructible the fists actually were – and why – but it did look as though the Builders were unwilling to chance destroying them. “But this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”

He studied the vectors for a long moment. The angel was still picking up speed, heading right towards Dyson Two. It could probably – no, there was no probably about it – outrun or outflank his fleet, without bothering to fire more than a shot or two in passing. His window of opportunity was growing shorter with every passing minute, yet ... he was all too aware his window of opportunity might easily be nothing more than a chance to get killed. He wasn’t even sure why the alien ship was ignoring his vessels, including the ones in range ...

“Signal the planetoid,” he ordered. “They are authorised to enact Case Omega.”

“Aye, sir,” the operator said.

Admiral He spoke from behind Newton. “If this doesn’t work ...”

Newton understood, all too well. The angel had brushed off the other attacks. This ... there would be no doubt, now or ever, that the defenders had tried to destroy the alien ship. Newton found it perversely unfair, even absurd, but the aliens had the bigger guns and their interpretation of the incident was probably the one that counted. They were going to do something dangerous, something incredibly provocative, something he wouldn’t have dared try if the angel hadn’t already proven itself hostile. He knew Admiral He, and many of the other fighters, had wanted to try it earlier, hoping a pre-emptive strike would be enough of a surprise for the mad scheme to actually work. But he feared the worst ...

The seconds ticked away. Newton felt a chill down his back, despite the warm compartment; ice tingled along his spine. The boffins had told him it might take quite some time for the trick to work, if indeed it worked at all. The angel might have a counter ... indeed, there were quite a few possible countermeasures, all completely beyond human tech and yet well within the angel’s known or deduced capabilities. He dreaded to think what might happen if the angel tried to do the same to his ships, although it hardly needed to bother. It had enough power to wipe out his fleet without resorting to such measures.

He sucked in his breath as the image of the angel started to warp, light bending and twisting around the alien ship as the gravity beams went to work, trying to teleport the angel into the second-nearest star. The boffins had wanted to use Dyson Two as the target, or perhaps the remnants of Dyson One, but no one was quite sure how the sphere’s automated defences would react. Or how the black hole would react, for that matter. There were researchers who believed the black hole was more than just a black hole. Newton had no idea what they meant, but ...

“Admiral, the gravity nexus is refusing to close,” the operator said. “Long-range sensors indicate the aliens are countering the gravity beams, preventing the eddy from forming.”

Newton cursed. He’d figured the Builders would have a counter – it was an obvious use of their tech, and they’d had millions of years to think of it – but he’d hoped ...

The angel snapped back into sharp relief. Its wings rustled ... Newton couldn’t help thinking, just for a second, that the alien was a living thing ... and it was angry. They’d assumed the alien vessel was just like a human ship, a metal shell carrying humans through the void, but ... what if they’d been wrong? The angel might be a living thing in its own right ... the idea of biological starships, or linking humans directly to starship datanets, had never worked, yet ... the virus had come pretty close. If the ship was alive ...

“Power surge,” the operator snapped. “She’s firing!”

Newton swore out loud as the alien ship fired a single shot, aimed right at the second planetoid. It should have been impossible to get a shot that far, let alone hit such a relatively small target at such a distance. But it had ... he watched in horror, in realtime, as the planetoid started to glow, then explode in a single tearing flash. He’d seen the records and the destroyed worlds had been larger than the planetoid, yet watching it die brought the sheer scale of the threat home to him in a manner that could not be matched. The entire research team, and the alien command centre, had been wiped out. There hadn’t been anything like enough time to evacuate.

“Deploy drones,” Newton ordered. The angel was still heading straight for his fleet. “And prepare to deploy gravity pulsars.”

“Aye, Admiral,” the operator said. He sounded stunned, but professional. Newton made a mental note to recommend him for the Golden Solar when they got home. It would be somewhat irregular, depending on just how the politics played out, yet ... it was the only medal Newton could offer a Chinese spacer. “The drones are being deployed now.”

Admiral He stepped up to stand beside Newton. “If they can take out the planetoid, they can certainly take out the sphere.”

Newton nodded, curtly. The sphere was tough – he’d seen it shrug off falling rocks – but it wouldn’t take more than a few blasts from the alien weapon to tear the giant megastructure apart. The entire population would die very quickly, unless some chunks of debris managed to keep enough of an atmosphere to maintain a biosphere ... it was possible, in theory, but if any such biosphere had survived the disaster that had shattered Dyson One it hadn’t lasted long enough for the human explorers to find it. If the aliens intended to kill it ...

He shuddered. It made no sense! Why build a sphere, and populate it with humans and other intelligent races, and then destroy it? Why had they done anything ...?

“We’ll just have to hope we can stop her,” Newton said, although he feared the worst. The best-case scenario was the angel blazing past the fleet, destroying the sphere and leaving the MNF to die on the vine. “We do have other tricks to play ...”

“Barely,” Admiral He pointed out.

“Admiral,” the operator said. “The angel will be within our engagement range in two minutes.”

“Our engagement range,” Newton said. He studied the display for a long moment, torn between awe and fear. If the angel didn’t slow down, it was going to fire a handful of shots in passing and then carry on, leaving the rest of the fleet behind. “Signal the fleet. We’ll proceed with Case Gamma.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

***

“The drones are linked in now,” Marigold said. “You may engage when ready.”

Tobias nodded, gritting his teeth. “I want my gunboat. And my mummy.”

Marigold laughed, although there was a tight edge to the sound that told him she was nervous too. The shuttle wasn’t designed for missile command and control, nor was it built for flying into the teeth of enemy defences. The techs had outfitted the shuttle with every ECM device and countermeasure they could, in the hopes it would deny the enemy a few of their tricks, but Tobias figured they’d wasted their time. The shuttle’s gravitational signature might be tiny – it wasn’t as if she had a natural gravity field of her own – yet the Builders would have no problems spotting and killing her. And then ...

“Here we go.” Tobias ran his hand down the control panel, turning off the gravity generator and rerouting all power to the drives, then braced himself. “Good hunting.”

The shuttle lurched, then zoomed forward. Tobias swung the craft from side to side as randomly as possible, as the range closed sharply, hoping desperately it might make it hard for the aliens to target the shuttle. It wouldn’t have worked that well, against a human starship crammed with point defence, but the Builders didn’t seem to bother installing such defences. It made a certain kind of sense – their defence fields seemed capable of shrugging off anything a starfighter or shuttle could dish out – yet it might just be a mistake. If the boffins were right ...

“The decoys are going live ... now,” Marigold said. “The missiles will reach their targets in thirty seconds.”

“We’ll have to alter course in twenty,” Tobias said. He hadn’t forgotten the last time they’d flown so close to the angel. “Fifteen ...”

He counted the seconds away, then pulled the shuttle up sharply, skimming over the angel’s upper wings. The light poured through the cockpit, golden light that was subtly wrong ... his head ached in sudden pain, forcing him to tear his gaze away a moment before they could plough right into the fields. A flash of light narrowly missed them – he couldn’t tell if the angel had been aiming at them – and ploughed onwards into interplanetary space. He cursed under his breath. The angel wasn’t completely lacking in close-range defences ...

“The missiles are going in ... now,” Marigold said. “They’re holding position.”

Tobias nodded, unsure what to do. Standard procedure was to turn and run, relying on the incoming missiles to distract the enemy point defence. Here ... the missiles were inching their way into the enemy defences, and the enemy had good reason to think they didn’t really pose a threat. The last engagement had certainly given them no reason to rethink that policy.

They crossed the wing and flashed into interplanetary space. Tobias felt an itch at the back of his mind and altered course, an instant before an alien blast shot past them. He nearly wet himself – that had been too close – and threw the shuttle into a series of evasive patterns. The aliens fired twice more, both practically passing within touching range of the shuttle, then let them go. He wasn’t sure if they thought it no longer worth the effort, or if they had bigger fish to fry. Or ...

... He was staring at the shuttle from a safe distance, watching with calculating eyes ...

Tobias blinked. What the hell was that?

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Dyson System

“The missiles are in place,” Helen reported. “They’re going live ... now.”

Staci nodded, curtly. The angel wasn’t mounting a serious offence, but it hardly needed to bother. It had fired on a handful of drones, and snapped off shots at starships that flew too close, yet the only big target it had destroyed was the second planetoid. Staci had no idea what it was playing at, given its sheer power. Did the aliens think there was no threat? Or were they just toying with their enemies? Or ...

It took out the planetoid at incredible range, she thought, numbly. It might be capable of hitting the sphere sooner than we dared fear.

“Signal the sphere base,” she ordered. It felt incredible to read reports of researchers finally unlocking some of the mysteries, only to find others haunting them, but ... some were just unbelievable. If she hadn’t read the reports, and noted how intensely they’d been verified, she would have believed the teleporter story a joke. “Tell them they are cleared to proceed.”

She braced herself, awe and fear rushing through her as the missiles went to work, disrupting the angel’s defensive field. She’d hoped the gravity pulsars would expose the alien hull to missile fire, although no one was really sure if humanity’s warheads would be enough to do real damage to the alien ship. Its hull was strong, hard enough to stand off most weapons ... Staci feared it was tough enough to stand up to almost anything. The gravity beams had been their greatest weapons, and now they’d lost the planetoid. They could no longer bring gravity beams to bear on the alien ship.

We can hit them with black holes, she thought. The second wave of missiles were already on their way, carrying microscopic black holes towards their target. But they can easily see them coming ...

“Captain, Drake has been lost with all hands,” Helen reported. “They didn’t have time to get to the lifepods.”

Staci nodded, acknowledging the report. There was nothing else she could do. They’d mourn later, if there was a later. The angel was clearing the fleet now, ignoring the puny ship’s attempts to harm it ... the black hole missiles struck the boiling defence field and vanished, reduced to atoms in less than a second. Staci couldn’t tell if they’d done any damage, but she doubted it. The aliens had taken them out well before they reached their hull.

“Keep up with her as long as you can,” Staci ordered. It wouldn’t be long. Endeavour’s top speed was 0.3C, and her acceleration curve was dangerously low, certainly when compared to a battlecruiser or a starfighter. The angel’s top speed – her observed top speed – was over 0.5C and she seemed to have an acceleration curve that would put a starfighter to shame. Staci wasn’t sure why it wasn’t leaving the fleet behind already, if it was waiting to see what the fleet would do, taunting them, or simply didn’t care. “We need to keep the drones in place.”

“Aye, Captain.”

***

“This has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” Private Higgins commented, as his armoured suit took up position in the teleport chamber. “Do we even know it is going to work?”

“The boffins say so,” Colin said, curtly. He couldn’t blame Higgins for his doubts, or for saying what Colin wanted to say. The idea they could just teleport into an alien starship was just ... absurd. If he was in charge of a ship’s security, and he knew people could teleport light-minutes effectively instantaneously, he’d make damn sure no one could teleport into his ship. It wouldn’t be difficult. All he’d have to do was pull the plug. “If it doesn’t work ... we’re going nowhere.”

Except, perhaps, to hell, his thoughts added. The realtime communications link was a mixed blessing. They’d watched helplessly as the second planetoid had been destroyed, with minimal effort, and a handful of ships destroyed with casual ease. If that ship reaches firing range, they could take out the entire sphere.

He braced himself. The armoured suits had been designed for operations in the most extreme environments known to man, from blazing hot worlds to radioactive battlefields, but no one knew what they’d encounter on the alien ship. If, of course, they got there. Colin still found it hard to believe. The boffins thought they had a link to the alien teleporter on the far side, but ... for all they knew, it was on a chunk of debris instead. The suits would keep them alive, if they found themselves in vacuum, but they wouldn’t be able to get the marines into the fight. They might find themselves helpless, or worse ...

“The system is keyed and primed,” a professor said. Colin didn’t know him. He’d been shipped in to replace the earlier researchers, who’d been evacuated to the fleet. Colin hoped he’d volunteered for the job. It wasn’t uncommon, he’d been warned, for an unpopular or disliked spacer to be sent away from his original posting, just to get rid of him. “If this works, you should find yourself on the alien ship in twenty seconds.”

“Last checks,” Sergeant Burris ordered. “Sound off.”

Colin checked his own telltales as the men sounded off, one by one. He’d been into danger time and time again, but this was the first time he’d taken a genuine leap into the unknown ... if it worked. He made a mental bet with himself it wouldn’t, not when anyone with any sense would make sure that any teleporter was turned off if it wasn’t in use. The boffins seemed to think it wasn’t that easy, and dragged up a lot of technobabble to prove their case, but Colin hadn’t been able to understand a word. He half-wished Tobias was with them. The shuttle pilot might have been able to tell him if the boffins were right, or just bluffing. Colin snorted in cold amusement. If they were wrong, the assault force was going to go precisely nowhere.

“Ten seconds,” the professor said. “Nine ... eight ...”

The world blinked off, then on again. Colin closed his eyes as bright light poured through his visor, so bright he felt it was streaming right into his brain, then faded as the visor automatically darkened. His sensors started feeding him data automatically, flashing up biohazard symbols he’d hoped never to see again. The alien ship’s atmosphere was teeming with viral particles, threatening the integrity of his suit ... he staggered forwards, taking up firing position an instant too late. If they’d been met with fire, he suspected they’d all have been wiped out in seconds.

He peered through the visor, trying to see something through the soup. The alien ship was as hot as a sauna, the air so laden with moisture it was easy to see how the virus had gained such a solid foothold. A nasty thought ran through him as he took a step forward, servomotors whining loudly as they tested the gravity field.  The angel might be infected ... or the Builders might have been the virus all along! Or ... he reminded himself not to jump to conclusions as he inched forward, pressing through the muck. The virus might have infected the ship a long time ago, only to discover it couldn’t take control of the angel itself.

“Deploy drones,” he ordered, cursing under his breath. A year ago, they would have brought antiviral agents with them, enough to wipe out the whole infection. “Quickly!”

There were no snide remarks as the assault force kept moving, eyes flickering from side to side. Colin had been in some alien environments before, and he’d been given virtual tours of others, but the alien ship was just ... weird. The bulkheads were a strange mixture of brownish-bronze metal and glowing crystalline pillars, practically growing out of the decks like trees and rising towards the ceiling, half-lost in the haze. The steam was everywhere, carrying the virus from compartment to compartment ... he thought he saw faces within the crystals, flickering at the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look he saw nothing. There was no thrumming, no hint they were actually on a ship ...

Higgins coughed. “Did we take a wrong turning at Albuquerque?”

“Focus,” Burris snapped.

Colin had had the same thought. The teleporter was supposed to put them on the ship, but ... the boffins couldn’t be entirely sure. They might be on an unexplored part of Dyson Two, or a piece of Dyson One that had remained intact, or somewhere hundreds of light years away. The drones were slowly building up a picture of their local environment, but ... it was nowhere as neat and orderly as a starship. It felt more like they were making their way through a network of caves and caravans right out of an adventure serial ...

“If there is a crew,” Higgins said, “where are they?”

“They might be all around us,” Colin said. If the ship was infected, and under the virus’s control, it knew the team was here. If not ... “They might just be beyond our ability to see.”

Ice crawled down his spine as they moved through the interior, staring around with wide eyes. Visibility rose and then dropped sharply, revealing glimpses of machinery far beyond his understanding, pieces of technology that seemed to exist in dimensions his eyes could barely grasp. It was almost a relief as the haze fell again, even though he was uneasily aware an entire assault force could get very close to them without being noticed. Their sensors were online, supposedly, but their output was much reduced. If they were on the ship ...

“The drone reports do seem to fit an odd pattern, but a pattern nonetheless,” Burris said, quietly. “I think we’re somewhere towards the rear of the alien ship.”

If we’re on the ship, Colin thought. The sense of eerie silence was getting to him. He hadn’t felt so creeped out since he’d gone walking on a moor in the middle of the night. The rest of the assault team barely spoke, their weapons twitching from side to side as if they expected to be attacked at any moment. We simply don’t know.

His HUD updated. The drones were slowly mapping out the interior, fitting it into the data they’d obtained from Endeavour. The ship was huge, and the technology incomprehensible, but it did seem no bigger – in most places – than the hull the survey ship had observed. The exceptions were decidedly odd, moments where range-finding lasers insisted the interior was thousands of miles from one side to the other. Colin hoped it was a malfunction, or something caused by the internal gravity field, rather than accurate data. If the ship was bigger on the inside ...

An alarm sounded. The second team hadn’t arrived. “Shit.”

He looked back. The teleport machinery was as inscrutable as ever. Had it noticed their arrival and turned itself off, or was a security team already on the way? Colin would have secured the whole system as a matter of course, but it was just possible the Builders hadn’t realised the humans could use their teleporters. Another shiver ran through him as he recalled just how oddly the virus had behaved, from time to time. By human standards, it had been thoroughly insane. If the angel was a viral ship ...

“I have movement,” Burris said. “Straight ahead, coming in fast!”

“Defensive positions,” Colin ordered. If the newcomer was fast, it probably wasn’t a shambles. The virus had always relied on strength of numbers, rather than tactics, to bring down its prey. It wasn’t reassuring. He knew how to deal with shambles. “Stand ready ...”

Something loomed out of the gloom, a biomechanical creature that moved so rapidly Colin couldn’t pick out more than a handful of details. An octopus, a spider, a creature ... it lashed out at the first marine, tearing through his suit with casual ease. Colin didn’t hesitate. He aimed his rifle and fired, pumping a dozen plasma shots into the alien. It staggered under the fire – for an awful moment, he thought it had a personal forcefield – before collapsing to the deck and starting to dissolve. The haze got worse ...

“Interesting,” Thomas said. The team medic bent over the alien creature to examine it. “It’s very definitely a cyborg of some kind ...”

Colin felt sick. He’d seen a handful of humans with cybernetic implants – the Russians were particularly fond of openly-enhanced soldiers – but the aliens seemed to take it well past the point of sanity. There wasn’t enough left of the creature for him to get any idea of the details – most of the remaining body had turned to goo – yet he could see implants marring the flesh to a disturbing degree. If it was a Builder ... was it? Thomas tried to take a sample of the creature’s DNA, but found nothing. The genetic code was dissolving as fast as the rest of the alien.

“There’s more coming,” Burris said.

“We need to move,” Colin said. Movement in front of them, movement behind them ... it was hard to get any sense of how many aliens were moving in the haze, but they were very definitely on the way. “If we can find a system to disable ...”

He left the rest of the thought unfinished as they left the alien body far behind and plunged into the alien ship, although his men were smart enough to understand what he didn’t want to say. There was no way out, unless they managed to get the teleporter back online and he doubted it was possible. They had no time to figure out the system before it was too late, which meant their mission had just become a suicide run. His earlier doubts mocked him. If they weren’t on the real ship ...

The haze didn’t change as they made their way through a maze of chambers crammed with alien tech. Flickers of power darted above them, brief lights that gave him a headache every time he looked at them; strange shivers ran through the gravity field, suggesting the ship was moving. He checked his timer, trying to determine how much time they had before the alien ship got into firing range, but it was impossible to be sure. The alien ship might have already destroyed the sphere and jumped onwards, aiming to finish off the rest of humanity’s worlds. Who knew?

They paused as they stepped into a vast chamber, larger than any they’d already seen. Great pillars of light were everywhere, the glow growing brighter and then fading away in a pattern that nagged at the corner of his mind. The deck was eerily uneven, reminding him – again – of a cave’s interior. Flickering lights darted everywhere, bouncing from pillar to pillar. Colin couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing, even though his instincts told him they were somewhere important. He thought he saw, just for a moment, a familiar face inside one of the lights, looking down on him, but it had to be his imagination. The alien environment was getting to him. His suit was already blinking up warning lights.

“Sir, we have incoming,” Burris said. “They’re coming from all directions!”

“Defensive positions,” Colin ordered. There was plenty of cover, at least, as long as the pillars weren’t dangerous in their own right. The haze was drawing back, revealing pieces of machinery he hadn’t wanted to see too clearly. They were too alien for him to grasp. “Don’t let them touch you!”

The alien things burst into view, writhing masses of claws and tentacles moving so quickly it was impossible to tell just how many there were. Colin opened fire, shifting from target to target, hoping and praying a single hit would be enough to take an alien down. Some of the blasts went wild, so far off their target he couldn’t understand it. The gravity field shifted a moment later, growing stronger and stronger ... horror washed through him as he realised what was happening. The aliens were using localised gravity wells to protect their biomechanical servants ...

Something caught hold of his rifle and yanked it away, the metal crumpling like paper. Colin lashed out with augmented strength, tearing his way through the alien body. It recoiled in shock, only to be replaced a second later. The alien was so disconcertingly inhuman that Colin promised himself, if he ever got out alive, that he would never make fun of anyone who was scared of spiders or crabs again. Just looking at the alien made his head hurt and his skin crawl, as if the phobia had been lurking at the back of his mind, biding its time to come into full force. It was hard, so hard, not to panic as it came closer, claws cracking his suit. Red icons blinked up in front of him. He was dead.

“Code Theta,” he said. He had to hurry. Either the alien thing would kill him or the virus would infect him and ... in both cases, he would be dead. Worse, perhaps, if the virus took control. It couldn’t always access memories from its victims, but he dared not take the risk of allowing it to gain access to his. “Activate Case Delta, ten seconds.”

“Authorised,” the computer voice said. “Five warheads online, five inaccessible.”

Colin gritted his teeth as he felt something tear into his skin. The mission hadn’t quite failed. He couldn’t believe five nuclear warheads, detonated inside the alien ship, wouldn’t kill it ... even if they had forcefields and gravity wells and God alone knew what else. He was going to die ... he shrugged, inwardly. He’d never really wanted to grow old and die. There’d been too many old men in his life, all so far beyond their prime ...

The world went white, then blinked out one final time.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Dyson System

“The sphere reports it lost contact with the assault force, and the teleporter, as soon as the first party went in,” MacPhee said. “They can’t get a second force into the alien ship.”

We don’t know if they got one force into the alien ship, Staci thought, coldly. The entire scheme had been a reckless gamble. The teleport settings might be for the alien ship – the boffins swore blind they were, using all kinds of technobabble to make their case – but no one knew for sure. It was quite possible the assault team had materialised somewhere else, or simply vanished in transit. All we really know is that the assault force entered the teleporter and disappeared.

She cursed under her breath as the angel slowly regenerated its wings. The salvo of incoming missiles slipped into the forcefield and exploded, doing little – if any – damage to the alien hull. The gravity pulsars had worked, but not well enough. The remainder of the MNF was falling behind as the angel picked up speed, left to watch helplessly as the alien vessel neared Dyson Two. Staci didn’t need to use her tactical console to assess the vectors, or calculate how long it would take to catch the angel. None of the capital ships would reach the sphere ahead of the alien ship ... and if they did, what could they do to stop it? Years ago, Theodore Smith had rammed Ark Royal into an alien superdreadnaught to save Earth and end the war. This time, ramming was no longer an option ...

The angel shuddered, strange flickers of light running down its wings. Staci stared – she had the strangest impression of a human falling into deep water – as the wings twisted, threatening to splinter as the ship staggered under a blow ... what blow? None of the missiles had reached the hull and, even if they had, they wouldn’t have done anything like enough damage to cripple the ship. Endeavour shook as a gravity wave washed against her hull, a second and third following in quick succession. It looked, very much, as though the angel was losing control of its drives.

“The assault team must have detonated the nukes,” Jenner breathed.

Staci nodded. She couldn’t think of any other explanation, as much as it hurt to know her team was certainly dead. Using Marines to deliver nukes onto enemy vessels was a rare tactic, only used when there were no other options, but in this case the assault team had clearly had no way to retreat. And yet ... the angel was clearly damaged, yet somehow still intact. Endeavour would not survive a shipkiller nuke detonating inside her hull. The only ship she knew that would survive, if for a short time, was a battleship.

And the angel, apparently, she thought. What is it doing?

“Signal from the flag, Captain,” MacPhee said. “The fleet is to close with the enemy and disable her.”

“Understood.” Staci suspected it wouldn’t work. The angel had been damaged by something, but the alien ship was hardly crippled. It still had its forcefield up and running, although weakened. “Helm, take us into firing position. Tactical, prepare to engage.”

She gritted her teeth as the range started to close again. The angel was spinning madly, changing bearing so many times she wondered if the pilots had lost control. Or if the internal compensators had failed. A starfighter could turn on a dime, but a capital ship ...? Even a gunboat would have trouble matching the angel’s manoeuvres without killing the crew. Were the crew dead? Or ... she shook her head. They knew nothing about the ship’s crew. For all she knew, they didn’t need to worry about high acceleration.

Jenner leaned closer. “She isn’t venting plasma or streaming atmosphere.”

Staci nodded, curtly. A human ship that had been hurt that badly would be showing obvious signs of damage, but the angel ... wasn’t. She couldn’t tell if that was a good thing – whatever had happened had ravaged the ship’s innards, because the blast had no easier way to go – or if the angel was trying to lure them into a trap. Or ... or what? She braced herself as the range kept closing, all too aware they were already within the alien’s weapons range. It might have been toying with them earlier, but now ... it might feel compelled to wipe out the whole fleet, just to protect itself. She wished she knew more about alien psychology. One could make guesses about what the Tadpoles or Foxes would do, when confronted with a specific problem, but not a race about which they knew nothing.

“Tactical, prepare for volley fire at extreme range,” she ordered. Their one advantage – and it wasn’t a big one – was that the angel was such a large target it was difficult to miss. They could fire missiles without going too close. “Sensors, deploy our final two FTL drones. I want to know if they fire on us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Helen said.

Staci took a breath. They’d be within firing range in seconds ...

***

Charlotte glared at the console, unsure if the system was working as advertised or if the Builders were ignoring her. It should work, if the boffins were correct; the microscopic black hole was tuned to resonate with the angel, giving them a chance to open communications in a manner the Builders couldn’t ignore. Or so they’d said. Charlotte was starting to suspect they’d been wrong, that the Builders either weren’t hearing the messages or simply didn’t care. Perhaps they thought the humans were little better than parrots, mindlessly repeating what they heard without understanding. The hell of it, she reflected, was that they might be right.

Her mood darkened as she keyed the console, sending the message again and again. The signal was supposed to be universal, a mathematical code they could use to build up a common language ... Charlotte reminded herself, once again, that the first contact package had never been tested. Perhaps mathematics wasn’t as universal as the human race thought. It was hard to believe – surely, any race capable of producing a starship would have to understand basic maths – but it hadn’t been that long ago when the human race had thought itself alone in the universe. Perhaps ...

She gritted her teeth. She didn’t know what was going on outside the hull – she’d purposely chosen not to follow the live feed, for fear of distraction – but she didn’t think it was going well. The sensor records from Virus Prime were terrifying. If the angel wanted them dead, they’d already be dead ... she stared at her console in frustration, watching as yet another signal pattern was launched into the void. There was no response. She felt like a man trying internet dating, sending message after message, only to receive less than nothing in return. She’d made fun of such men, once upon a time. She thought she knew, now, just how soul-crushing it could be.

And that is a very silly thought, she told herself. The consequences of not making contact will be far more serious than not finding a girlfriend.

She watched the next pattern go and frowned, inwardly. Why was there no response? Did they have it the wrong way round? Were the Builders unintelligent, building starships and megastructures by instinct rather than intelligent development, or ... or what? Did they not like the messages, or did they see them as a challenge to do battle, or ... she cursed under her breath. The boffins had put the messages together through basic maths, and from what they thought were fragments of alien languages, but ... why wasn’t it working? Her earlier thought hung in her mind. Were they really no better than parrots, parroting back what they heard?

A thought crossed her mind. Did she dare ... she hesitated, torn between the urge to test her theory and fear of possible consequences. There would be no protection, this time, if she did something stupid, something that would earn her the wrath of an alien race. If she was wrong ... she took a breath and put her hand on the console, scrambling the messages as she’d once scrambled piano tunes. The memory made her smile – her mother had given up trying to teach her the piano long ago – although she had no idea if it she was on the right track or if she was about to make everything a great deal worse. She might be adapting the tunes to suit herself or she might just be hitting keys at random, creating a discordant noise. If the Builders took offense, who knew what they might do?

She ignored the squawk of protest from the intercom as she kept altering the signals, trying to make them stand out. The microscopic black hole inside the console was vibrating ... she suddenly found it impossible not to think of it, the black hole dominating her mind in a manner that worried her and yet didn’t bother her at all. The ship was all around her and then ... her awareness was suddenly somewhere else, lost in the darkness. Her memories buzzed around her and ...

... She felt something around her, above her. It stared down at her from a great height, so high ... she felt like a child lying on an examination table; no ... a butterfly pinned to the card and held firmly in place, trapped forever in a timeless moment. The sight was so vast her thoughts staggered, tripping over themselves in a desperate bid to understand what she saw. Or sensed. She felt as if a blinding light was burning through her eyes and into her brain, the light burning into her very thoughts no matter how much she tried to squeeze her eyes closed. Her memories rose in front of her, everything from childhood moments to recent memories, flickers of love and bravery and shame and guilt and ...

She was staring up at her mother for the first time. She was going outside for the first time, She was going to school, then to finishing school, then to university ... she was being presented at court; she was marrying Thomas and making children with him, then slowly growing estranged as his career took him further and further from home. The memory of kissing Mitch for the first time nearly overwhelmed her, followed by feeling him inside her ... demanding his love, demanding his worship, demanding everything he had so she could feel alive once again, and giving everything she had in return. She knew, at some level, that something was accessing her thoughts and scanning her memories, leaving her not one jot of privacy, but there was nothing she could do about it. It wasn’t even the first time ...

They copied us, she thought, numbly. The memories of being on the shuttle, and passing through the alien field, had faded as she dealt with the next set of disasters, but they had never vanished. She’d seen memories that weren’t hers, had the vague sense she was in two places at once. They stole our memories and copied us and ...

The world shifted again. She found herself standing in front of her father. He looked stern.

“Why do you fight?”

Charlotte blinked. Her father couldn’t possibly be here ... no, the aliens were using her memory of her father to speak to her in a manner she could comprehend. Were they trying to make it easy for her, or was there some deeper meaning? Were they hinting they were her father, in some sense? Perhaps the progenitors of the human race? Or ...

A chill ran through her very soul. Parents love their children, but sometimes they have to discipline them.

She swallowed. “Who am I talking to?”

“You know what we are,” the figure said. Its features blurred slightly, giving the impression it was no longer wearing her father’s form without ever seeming to change at all. “Why do you fight?”

Charlotte reminded herself she’d wanted to talk to the aliens. “You destroyed two worlds and threatened a third, and now you’re threatening the sphere,” she said. A hundred questions bubbled up in her mind, questions that would normally go unasked ... now, with an alien race reading her very thoughts, she couldn’t have hidden them even if she’d wanted to. “Why are you doing this? Why ...?”

She felt all the rage and frustration and fear burst through her mind. “Why? What’s the point?”

“We believed your race would destroy itself,” the figure said. “We believed you incapable of reaching a point that would allow you to contact us and talk to us as equals. We acted to save some of you from a fate we believed inevitable and placed you in an environment that would force you to develop true intelligence or remain in stasis for the rest of time. We did not anticipate that you would survive, or develop spacefaring technologies, or that you would eventually reach the spheres.”

“But you also told us how to reach them,” Charlotte said. It made no sense. “Why?”

“We projected that other races would develop spacefaring technologies and head into interstellar space themselves,” the figure told her. “They were intended to find the spheres, to determine how they would treat them. They were tested to see if they’d developed to a point where they could meet us as equals. They were ...”

Charlotte made no attempt to hide her outrage. “This whole affair, everything you did, was a demented test?”

“Correct.”

“You killed thousands ... for what?” Charlotte stared at the figure. It was growing hazier by the minute. “To see how we’d react?”

“The sphere was designed to test both its inhabitants and any visitors,” the figure said. “A fact you already deduced. Your decisions were, by and large, sensible; you displayed the potential to match us, the ingenuity to put our tech to use, and the willingness to face certain death to save the sphere. It speaks well of you. You are a deeply flawed race in many ways, but you are making progress towards unlocking your true potential.”

“We don’t need you to tell us that,” Charlotte snapped, too angry to care she was berating an alien from a hyper-advanced race. “You’re not God!”

“No,” the figure agreed. “And the fact you are capable of saying so is proof your race will become something great, if you do not fall prey to your demons. Or our mistake.”

There was a long pause. “Our races will meet again, hundreds of thousands of years from now,” it said. “And then we will meet as equals. If you survive ...”

Charlotte threw back her head and screamed. Something was being forced into her mind, into her brain, something so vast that her skull felt as if it were going to explode ... she screamed and screamed again, her thoughts splintering around the vast thing in her mind and ...

She blacked out.

***

“Entering firing range, Captain,” McDougall reported. “Preparing to engage ...”

“Captain,” Helen interrupted. “I’m picking up a gravity surge ...”

The display blanked. Endeavour rocked violently, the gravity field flickering madly as it struggled to compensate. Staci couldn’t tell if the angel was attacking them or ... the display rebooted rapidly, building up a picture of the outside universe. The angel was gone.

“Report,” Staci snapped. “Where did she go?”

“A very long way, Captain,” Helen said, after a moment. “We got a surprisingly clear view of the gravity flux from the drones, almost as if they wanted us to see it. The figures suggest the angel jumped over a hundred thousand light years.”

“Fuck,” Jenner muttered.

Staci couldn’t disagree. The human race had explored roughly seven hundred light years from Earth, thanks to the tramlines, and a handful of survey ship and deep space colony missions were supposed to have gone further, but ... she shook her head in disbelief. Travelling so far in the blink of an eye was just ... impossible. And yet ... she wondered if it was a moment of kindness, a quiet confirmation that the battle was truly over. If the angel had retreated to lick its wounds, it wouldn’t need to hop so far to escape. A single light year would be just as good ...

Jenner cleared his throat. “Can you confirm?”

“I believe so,” Helen said. “The gravity fields folded so tightly that it’s unlikely she jumped any less than a hundred thousand light years. She wanted us to know she was gone.”

Staci nodded, grimly. “Stand down from red alert,” she ordered. “Get the repair crews on the job” – they’d barely patched the ship together, and they needed to finish the work before something else happened – “and signal the admiral. We need to determine if we can still get out of the system.”

“Aye, Captain,” Jenner said.

“They were winning,” MacPhee said. “Why did they just leave?”

Staci shook her head. She’d been in enough knife-edge space battles to suspect the angel, and her crew, hadn’t really wanted to win. The whole affair had had the air of an adult playing a game with children, holding back so the children had a chance to win, with nothing really at stake. Perhaps they were looking for something ... or maybe their only real goal had been to destroy the second planetoid. She cursed under her breath. If they couldn’t figure out how to escape the system, they might be trapped ... again.

It seems like a sick joke, she thought, numbly. We hopped all the way to Falkirk and then back here, only to be trapped again.

“I dare say it will make sense one day,” she said, finally. She wasn’t a devoted student of history, but she knew enough to be certain that something that seemed inexplicable at the time would eventually be explained. “Until then ... we have work to do. Let’s get on with it.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Dyson System

“It was a test?”

Charlotte nodded, rubbing her aching head. She’d woken up in sickbay, two days after the final battle, only to be told no one was quite sure what had happened. They hadn’t believed her, either, until she’d discovered the Builders had left her with enough knowledge to unlock the remainder of the system and reopen the tramline to ES-17. Or, for that matter, to toss a starship all the way home.

“That’s what they said,” she explained. It was hard to remember everything. Her head felt as if something had taken out her brains and replaced them with a library of hard data and cotton wool. It was deeply frustrating not to know what she knew, not until someone asked the right question and the answer popped into her brain. “They were testing us, looking for traits they found approvable.”

“It sounds absurd,” Admiral He said. “Why would god-like beings want to test the human race?”

“It does sound like something out of a bad science-fantasy,” Admiral Dismukes agreed, wryly. “But we do know the sphere was designed to test its inhabitants.”

Charlotte nodded. “We have control now,” she said. “I suppose the only real question is what do we do with them?”

“They’re not just humans,” Admiral He agreed. “There are races on the other side of the sphere we’ve never met, and if the virus got them ...”

A shiver ran down Charlotte’s spine. She had no idea why.

“We can operate freely on the sphere now,” Charlotte said. “I dare say we can make contact with the other inhabitants, and if we can’t, we can just give them some space.”

“Quite,” Admiral Dismukes agreed. “If they’re the last of their kind, the least we can do is leave them alone.”

Charlotte shivered, again. The virus had effectively wiped out at least a dozen intelligent races, condemning them to a living death and erasing their culture so completely that there was no way to rebuild it, not even to figure out what it might have been like before the virus arrived. For all she knew, the ones living in the sphere had been saved from a fate worse than death ... in truth, they might never know for sure. The Builders had predicted that the human race would destroy itself and acted to ensure some humans survived. They might have saved a handful of others from complete extinction, too.

Admiral Dismukes cleared his throat. “Endeavour will make the jump back to Earth tomorrow, now that we have sufficient control of the first planetoid to ensure she survives the trip,” he said. “Lady Charlotte, you and Admiral He will both travel on her. I’ve done what I can to ensure the official version of events is the one that’ll be accepted ... officially. I don’t know what’ll happen off the record, or anything else.”

“It was my burning ambition that led to near-disaster,” Admiral He said. “My government will see to my punishment.”

“I’m sure it will,” Admiral Dismukes said, with heavy sarcasm.

Charlotte winced. The official story had more holes in it than a piece of fancy cheese. She was entirely sure that Admiral He had been following his government’s orders when he’d tried to seize the sphere, only to be defeated by bad luck and advanced alien technology. The Chinese were not known for trusting their military officers, and the simple fact no one had put a knife in Admiral He’s back for high treason was clear proof his actions had been authorised at the very highest level. But no one wanted a war with China, so Admiral He would take the fall, his government would be very apologetic and everyone would pretend to believe them. Privately, it would be a long time before anyone ever trusted them again, but in public the matter would be smoothed over before it could lead to open war.

“Lady Charlotte will also report back to our masters,” Admiral Dismukes continued. He winked at Charlotte. “Tell them we need more researchers and trade goods ... a lot more.”

“If they’re willing to take the risk,” Charlotte said. Two planets had been destroyed ... she had a nasty feeling the governments back home would have a string of other problems right now. There’d be panic in the streets and ... even if she told them what she’d seen and assured them the aliens would be gone for a very long time, she doubted anyone would believe her. “I’ll do my best.”

“Please,” Admiral Dismukes said. “If we don’t make full use of the sphere, someone else is going to.”

Charlotte couldn’t disagree. The diplomatic scene was going to become a hell of a lot more complicated, after everything that had happened. The rest of the human race would want access, as would the other alien races, and if they were denied ... it would lead to war. Probably. She suspected the alien tech wouldn’t make one power supreme, not for very long, but no one would take a chance. It was hard to blame them. They stood to lose pretty much everything.

“I’ll see you soon, Admiral,” she said. She had no idea if she’d be allowed to return to the sphere, but ... what else would jog her memory? The interrogators might not know what questions to ask. “And good luck.”

“We need more than luck,” Admiral Dismukes said. “And give my regards to Admiral Onarina.”

Charlotte nodded. “Yes, sir.”

***

Tobias wasn’t sure how he felt.

A few years ago, he would have laughed and cheered if Colin had been reported dead. It would have been a dream come true. Colin had been a bully, an utterly unrepentant arsehole who’d tormented him time and time again, a boy who’d haunted his nightmares ... and still did, at times. The thought of Colin being beaten up by a really tough guy, or dying because of his own stupidity, or ... just dying had comforted him, years ago. There was no justice in the universe – he’d learnt that at a very early age – but sometimes karma bit at the most unexpected times.

And yet, right now, he wasn’t sure what to think.

Colin had grown up, a little. Perhaps a lot. He hadn’t become a friend ... except they had been friends, of a sort. Tobias knew he could have killed Colin, or let him die by doing nothing, and part of him wished he’d done it. But Colin had also apologised, and grown as a person, and put the past behind him. Tobias wasn’t sure what to make of that either. Colin hadn’t been the victim, he hadn’t been the one who’d suffered day after day ... it was easy for him to let the past go. Tobias didn’t have that option. He couldn’t let the past go so easily ...

I suppose no one will ever know what happened to him, Tobias thought. Colin had led a team into the teleporter and vanished. The boffins thought they’d detonated their nukes inside the angel, but no one would ever be sure. If they’d stormed a normal vessel, the nukes would have vaporised the hull, yet ... the angel had been very far from normal. For all we know, he’s trapped on an asteroid somewhere.

It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought. The black hole, and the angel, had destroyed or displaced a great deal of debris, but there was still a considerable amount of space junk orbiting the black hole. It was quite possible there was a working teleporter on one of those pieces, and that the assault team had been sent there instead, although the fact no one had picked up a distress beacon suggested otherwise. Tobias had seen the specs. The distress beacons would outlast everything else, including the assault team’s oxygen supply.

Or they might have gone further away, Tobias told himself. The boffins insisted the teleporter’s range was effectively unlimited, as long as there was a teleporter at both ends. If that was true, Colin might be trapped on an alien world with no way to escape. We may never know.

He stared down at his hands. It would be a few weeks before Colin was formally declared dead, although no one seemed to have any doubt he was, and then ... he didn’t envy the captain, who would have to write to Colin’s parents, or whoever had taken command of the shipboard marines in his absence. And ... Tobias wondered if he should write to Colin’s family himself, or ... he shook his head. He suspected neither of them knew he existed, and – if they did – they probably didn’t like him. Who knew what the young Colin had told them? Who knew ...?

It would have been easy to laugh, a few years ago, he thought. But now I don’t know what to feel.

Marigold entered, looking grim. “We’ll be in the shuttle during jump,” she said, holding out a datapad. “They’re not sure if we can make the jump properly.”

Tobias took the datapad and nodded. “Better to be ready than be caught out of place,” he said, quoting their old instructor. The man had been a bit of a bastard, and Tobias had mentally compared him to Colin once or twice, but he’d been devoted to his students and done everything in his power to make sure they passed the tests before going to war. “We might be the only survivors.”

Marigold shot him an odd look. “What’s happened?”

“Colin might be dead,” Tobias said. Colin had put him on the list of people to be notified if Colin was dead, or MIA, or otherwise unaccounted for. He had no idea why. They weren’t in the same department, nor were they close friends ... it struck him, suddenly, that he might have been the closest thing Colin had had to a friend, at least on Endeavour. Colin had been in charge of his department, and that meant he couldn’t treat them as friends. “He ...”

He scowled, suddenly. He’d had a teacher who’d wanted the boys to treat him as one of them. He hadn’t been a bad teacher – Tobias could name a dozen who’d been worse, either because they were unable to control a class or because they resorted to corporal punishment at the slightest provocation – but he’d been completely useless, unable to be both a father-figure and friend to his students. Colin might have had the same problem, when he’d taken command of his unit. He couldn’t be friends with people who were under his command.

Marigold sat down facing him. “And you miss him?”

“I don’t know how to feel about him,” Tobias said. Talking through his feelings was never easy. He’d miss Marigold, or one of his handful of friends, but Colin ...? “He was an asshole who grew up and ...”

“Better than my tormentor ever did,” Marigold said, a flash of hatred in her voice. “I think he’s still in jail.”

“I certainly hope so,” Tobias said. It had seemed obvious, when he’d been a teenage boy, that teenage girls had a much easier time of it. The girls disagreed ... and, now he was older, he’d come to recognise they had a point. Girls had different challenges than boys, but that didn’t make them easier. In some ways, they were very definitely harder. “Colin was ...”

“You may have to speak at the service,” Marigold pointed out. “What would you say about him?”

“I don’t know,” Tobias said. “A few years ago, I would have danced on his grave. Now ... I don’t know.”

“Let him go,” Marigold advised. “He grew up, which is more than can be said for my tormentor, and gave his life in a desperate bid to stop the angel. He may have succeeded – certainly, everyone will say he played a major role in the battle – and even if he didn’t, he gave his life. Let him go and live your life.”

Tobias had to smile. “Unless he really is on some alien world, wondering what happened to him.”

“We may never know,” Marigold said. “The rumours are already insane.”

“Yeah.” Tobias had heard a dozen explanations of why the battle had come to such an odd end, ranging from the plausible to the downright insane. The official statement hadn’t been remotely reassuring, leaving plenty of room for speculation. “If he was the one who represented humanity ...”

He shivered. He’d read or watched hundreds of stories in which super-aliens put humanity on trial, testing the best and brightest to determine if the race deserved to survive. The idea of Colin being humanity’s representative was terrifying, not least because his entire life – until recently – had been a display of the worst in human nature. The aliens would take one look, then push the big red button that blew up the Earth. Or ... he shook his head. One story had had the aliens confining humanity to the Solar System, trapping billions upon billions on a handful of worlds ... it was madness, and yet they’d done it.

But only in fiction, he told himself. Perhaps no one would ever know the truth. The rumours would become yet another set of myths, or spacer stories told by drunkards, con artists or pranksters trying to impress groundpounders. The real world cannot be that insane.

“I’ll let him go,” he said, finally. Colin would never torment him again. Colin would never try to be his friend again. “And hopefully he’ll rest in peace.”

And in pieces, his thoughts added. It was the sort of joke Colin would have found hilarious, before he evolved into a somewhat more mature person. But then, jokes about everything from being shot to being raped became much less funny when they happened. I’ll raise a glass to him later.

He stood. “We’d better get down to the shuttle,” he added. He’d prefer to be in his bunk, getting a proper rest, but orders were orders. He couldn’t fault the captain for wanting to be sure someone survived, if the rest of the ship was shattered. “We need to complete all the checks before the jump.”

Marigold grinned. “And after that, we’ll be home.”

“Yep,” Tobias agreed. He’d fill out his discharge application the moment they got home, and hopefully they’d be freed within the week. It wasn’t as if the navy had any real interest in retaining them. They might be ace shuttle pilots, and gunboat flyers, but there was no shortage of either. “We’ll be home.”

***

“All decks report ready, Captain,” Jenner said. “We are ready to jump.”

Staci nodded, curtly. The repair crews had spent the last week fixing everything, then checking and rechecking their work to ensure that, even if there was a hull breach, the majority of the crew would survive. The simulations insisted Endeavour would survive the first FTL jump in history – more accurately, the first planned jump – but part of her was unsure. The simulations couldn’t account for everything, and if even one thing was missing the rest of the simulation would be worse than useless. The original idea of sending a shuttle was starting to seem a very good one. But a shuttle didn’t have the drive field it needed to guarantee arrival.

If the jump actually works, she reminded herself. The boffins were sure it would, and Lady Charlotte’s information had proven good, but it was impossible to be certain until they tried. This could go very badly wrong.

She allowed no trace of her inner turmoil to show on her face. “Begin the countdown.”

“Aye, Captain,” Jenner said. “Jump in ... two minutes.”

The timer appeared on the display, counting down the seconds. Staci checked her terminal, noting that most of her crew were in their bunks, strapped down in case of emergency ... she hoped, prayed, the boffins were right. They didn’t dare risk jumping too close to Earth, for fear of being destroyed by the planetary defences, and if they emerged heavily damaged it would be hours, at least, before anyone could come to their aid. Staci had done everything she could, to the point of outright paranoia, but she feared the worst. They were about to make history and yet ... she had no idea if they’d be remembered as brave pioneers or complete idiots.

If this works, we’re brave, she thought, wryly. There were quite a few people who were remembered as heroes, and others who might have joined them if their plans had actually worked. If this fails, we’re goddamned idiots.

“Ten seconds,” Jenner said. The bridge tensed, the crew bracing themselves for everything from a minor shock to a hull breach. “Five ... four ... three ... two ... one ...”

Endeavour lurched, violently. The display went blank – Staci felt a flash of déjà vu – and then rebooted. Navigational programs went online, trying to fix the ship’s location from first principles ... something they’d never had to do, until they’d discovered the spheres. The idea of being lost in space had been absurd, but it wasn’t any longer. If something had gone horrendously wrong ...

“Captain,” Helen said. “We are four light-hours from Sol.”

Staci felt the bridge relax. They’d made it. The internal display lit up, showing a handful of red icons ... they vanished, one by one, as the datanet checked and rechecked itself. There didn’t seem to be any major damage or injuries, thankfully. She made a mental note to remind the crew to report anything, even something minor. She wouldn’t have wanted to admit to a small bruise, when she’d been a junior officer, for fear of being seen as a malingerer, but this time ... they had to know. And besides, a small bruise could be a harbinger of something far more dangerous.

“Communications, signal the Admiralty,” she ordered. “Inform them” – her lips twitched into a smile – “inform them that we’ve brought home the bacon.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Chapter Forty: United Kingdom

“Admiral He died in transit to the holding centre, apparently of heart failure,” Admiral Onarina said. “And you can believe as much of that as you like.”

Staci winced, inwardly. “Suicide?”

“It looks that way,” Admiral Onarina said. “Our preliminary autopsy reported traces of an unknown poison within his veins, but we had to hand the body over to the Chinese before we could perform a more detailed examination. Admiral He will go down in history as one of the greatest traitors in his country’s long history.”

“Poor bastard,” Staci said. She had liked Admiral He and respected his willingness to concede defeat and work with his former enemies and captors. “And the rest of his crew?”

“The Chinese have blamed everything on Admiral He,” Admiral Onarina said. “The rest of his personnel will be free to return to China, if they wish, on the grounds they were only following orders. I suspect a number will defect, even though the government has promised none will face any punishment. They’re unlikely to be flavour of the month, no matter what promises their government makes.”

She paused. “We were lucky the whole affair of the advanced enemy ship was ended so quickly,” she added. “The panic had barely begun.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d gotten our messages,” Staci said. If there was one advantage to the whole affair, it was that they now had far superior FTL communications technology. They could send messages to the Dyson System and back in bare seconds. “We did manage to convince them to leave.”

Admiral Onarina’s lips thinned. “If I hadn’t read the reports, I’d be trying to get you and Lady Charlotte committed,” she said. “Of course, no one really believes they’re gone for good.”

Staci nodded. The world governments had managed to keep most of the story out of the media for quite some time. No one really cared about Virus Prime and Wensleydale was a tiny colony on the edge of explored space, while Falkirk was a military base with enough security to keep word from getting out. Enough had leaked to worry the public, but by the time the full truth was revealed the affair was already over. Staci had a private suspicion the public would largely forget the affair, given how much time and effort had been put into covering it up. It had an air of unreality about it, even after Falkirk.

“Lady Charlotte believes we won’t meet them again for a very long time,” Staci said. It was hard to know what to make of the older woman’s report, even when she was under deep hypnosis. She believed what she was saying, of that there was no doubt, but her story was just so ... unbelievable. “We may never know for sure ...”

“No,” Admiral Onarina agreed. “We may never know.”

She leaned back in her chair. “The governments have agreed to place the Dyson System in common domain, and that everything we find will be shared equally, amongst both humans and our alien allies. The risk of war, if we try to keep anything to ourselves, is just too high. Admiral Dismukes will remain in command of the system, with a new civilian governor, at least for the time being. We’ll do what we can to help the humans on the sphere too.”

“Perhaps that was the point of the test,” Staci mused. “To see what we’d do for them. Or to them.”

“Did we pass?” Admiral Onarina seemed unconcerned. “Regardless, you and your crew will undergo a long series of debriefings, after which you’ll have several weeks of shore leave while we try to determine how best to proceed. You may or you may not be going back to the sphere ... we don’t know yet. There’s certainly something to be said for surveying the systems around the sphere, now that we know how to make tramlines for ourselves, or perhaps letting sleeping dogs lie.”

“Understood,” Staci said. She wanted a new command, but she knew she needed a break. They all did. “The universe is going to be a very different place.”

“Yes,” Admiral Onarina said, dryly. She stood and held out a hand. “This’ll be the last time you see me, at least in a professional role. My retirement has already been significantly delayed, and now that this crisis is over there should be time for my successor to get up to speed before the next crisis. The government will have to deal with the aftermath of the Battle of Falkirk, as well as many other issues stemming from this crisis. It’s better for me to be elsewhere.”

Staci blinked and took the offered hand. “I’ll miss you.”

Admiral Onarina smiled, rather dryly. “Never let them promote you out of the captain’s chair,” she said. “It may be good for your career, but not so good for your peace of mind.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Staci said. She saluted. “It’s been an honour.”

“Good luck with the debriefings,” Admiral Onarina said. “And who knows? We may see each other again.”

***

Charlotte felt as if she’d undergone a full police interrogation, the kind of questioning normally reserved for terrorists and insurgents, as she stumbled out of the conference room and poured herself a drink. The intelligence staff had asked her question after question, bouncing ideas and concepts off her in the hopes the treasure trove of data inside her head would open up and release another secret. It felt like a torture session, or the aftermath of someone raiding the headmistress’s strawberry beds when Charlotte had been in her teens, after the outraged woman had interrogated everyone in the hopes of catching the culprit ... unsuccessfully. Charlotte liked to think the affair was why the headmistress had been moved on, a couple of years later, but she didn’t know for sure. Probably not. Given how much else the headmistress had been allowed to do, interrogating the entire school was small beans.

She took a seat and stared down at her glass, feeling as if there was no way she could drink enough to put her troubles behind her. No one knew quite what to do with her, save milking her brain for as much as they could get. She wasn’t sure if she was still a diplomat, or if she still held her title and position, or if someone else had been assigned in her place. It was probably the latter. Admiral Dismukes would need a civilian administrator, now that more and more civilians were making their way to the spheres. Charlotte just hoped the government would make a good choice. Assisting the locals was vitally important, but assistance could easily become exploitation ...

I need to write my memoirs, she thought. Some of the affair was heavily classified – she was privately astonished the government had played down the Battle of Falkirk as much as it had – but the rest was up for grabs. It would give me enough money to ... do what?

In truth, she didn’t know. She had her title, but otherwise ... what did she even want to do with herself? She owed it to herself to have a proper chat with her ex-husband, now that the pain had dulled and they could talk like mature adults, yet ... what could she do? She was still in her prime, in some ways, but she couldn’t emigrate to a colony or one of the asteroid settlements. She was too old, and besides ... most wouldn’t want her. Her lips twisted in cold amusement. Writing her memoirs was starting to look like a very good idea.

The door opened. Charlotte looked up, then stood as Elizabeth stepped into the room. Her heart caught in her throat. Her eldest daughter had felt the sting of the whole affair far worse than anyone else, hardly fair as she’d had nothing to do with it; Charlotte was uneasily aware Elizabeth had openly said she didn’t want anything to do with her mother any longer, after everything she’d done. In hindsight ... Charlotte wondered if she would have done anything different. If she’d chosen to keep the affair a secret, which would have been easy, no one outside her immediate family would have been particularly concerned. But she’d allowed herself to be caught – and exposed – in a manner that could not be covered up ...

“Liz,” she managed. Her mouth was suddenly dry. Elizabeth was tall and beautiful and her family name would attract suitors even if her looks didn’t. Her dress was designed with elegance in mind, rather than exposure; it hinted at her curves, rather than revealing her body or bare skin. “I ...”

Her daughter met her eyes. “Why?”

Charlotte felt a sudden flash of anger, rapidly quelled. The days when she’d been mummy, and mummy was always right, were over. Elizabeth was a grown woman now, not a little girl. And she owed that grown woman an explanation.

“I got sick of playing my role,” she said. It sounded casual, almost jokey, but it was the blunt truth. “Everything in my life was laid out for me, from birth to death. Everything. I chose to break free, even at a cost ...”

“You shattered the family,” Elizabeth said, flatly. “For what? Your own selfish lusts?”

Charlotte bit her lip. She couldn’t slap her daughter any longer, and she really shouldn’t.

“For a chance to be free,” Charlotte said, instead. “To make something of myself, or not, based on something other than the family name.”

Elizabeth cocked her head. “And what were you raising me to do?”

“I intended to let you make your own choices,” Charlotte said. It was true, although she feared she hadn’t given her daughter as much freedom as she should. “And I still do.”

“By making me a laughingstock?” Elizabeth’s eyes flashed murder. “The entire world knows what you did, and who did you!”

Not the entire world, Charlotte reflected. Just the few who care about us.

She sighed inwardly. Elizabeth certainly felt that way, even if it wasn’t objectively true. Everyone in her circles would have known, right from the moment the affair went public, and few would have been shy about rubbing it in as much as possible. Elizabeth was the firstborn, and she would inherit her father’s estate, which meant there were limits to how far she could fall, but it would still sting. They were lucky the days in which only men could inherit were long gone. That would have made Elizabeth’s life impossible.

“I know what I did,” she said, “and I’m sorry you were hurt because of me.”

“Are you?” Elizabeth seemed unimpressed. “What should I do now?”

“You can build a life for yourself,” Charlotte said. “And you can put the past behind you.”

Elizabeth made a rude noise. “You really think it’s that easy?”

“Well, you can stay where you are,” Charlotte said. It was hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Men will pay court to you, or their families will do it for them. You have some advantages over me, but eventually you will find yourself pushed into marriage. Hopefully, he’ll treat you well, yet even if he does you’ll find yourself raising children and running the estate and pushing your own desires back and back until you reach the end of your life and realise you never tried to follow your own dreams. You’ll feel trapped, caught in a web of family obligations and demands you never asked for, but cannot escape. And if you dare complain about it, everyone will say you’re being silly. You have wealth and power and luxury, but a gilded cage is still a cage.

“Maybe you’ll be fine with it. Maybe you’ll do something to escape. But you know what? You are my daughter and I will always be there for you.”

She reached out and hugged her daughter. After a moment, Elizabeth returned the hug.

But Charlotte knew, even as she held Elizabeth tight, that it would be a long time before their relationship was mended, if it ever was.

***

Tobias hadn’t been inside the church for years, not least because he didn’t really believe in God. The attempts to bring back Muscular Christianity had failed and even government-funded schools tended to keep religious ceremonies as low-key as possible, save for Christmas and Easter. Tobias wouldn’t have returned now, either, if Colin’s will hadn’t requested that he be buried back home. Tobias had thought the whole affair a joke – Colin’s body had never been recovered – but the Royal Navy had honoured his last request and returned an empty casket to the family. He hoped, sourly, that Colin’s family drew some comfort from the affair.

He sat at the back and tried to remain unnoticed as a handful of family, close relations and friends took a few moments to say goodbye. Tobias felt no inclination to join them. He’d joined the ceremony on Endeavour, the brief farewell after they’d returned to Earth, and turned down an invitation to join the remaining Royal Marines on a pub crawl. He wasn’t even sure why he’d bothered to attend this ceremony. It wasn’t as if the navy had any claim on him any longer. If his mother hadn’t wanted a chance to chat to Marigold alone, he might not have come at all.

His eyes narrowed as he spotted a pair of louts nodding to the coffin, then hurrying out of the church. They’d been Colin’s friends, long ago; they’d been bullying arseholes, just like him, but now they looked pathetic. Colin had volunteered for the Royal Marines, at least, but his friends had either gone into National Service or avoided the military completely. Tobias almost smiled at the thought. He had been a coward, and he knew it, but he had fought in the war. His old enemies couldn’t claim to have risked their lives in combat.

“Ah, Mr. Gurnard,” a voice said, from behind him. Tobias froze. The last time he’d heard that voice ...  “I always knew you had great potential.”

Tobias forced himself to turn slowly, despite his heart suddenly racing. The voice ... he knew the voice all too well. His old headmaster ... he saw the man and blinked in honest surprise, suddenly convinced he’d made a mistake. The fearsome tyrant of the classroom, the towering giant who wielded the slipper and cane without mercy, was nowhere to be seen. The man in front of him was smaller, and weaker, and looked more like a used car salesman than a terrifying headmaster. How could anyone be scared of him?  And yet, it was the same person ...

“I hope you’ll have time to come to the school and share your story with the students,” the man said. They’d called him the Beast, back then, but the nickname no longer seemed to fit. Tobias couldn’t remember the man’s actual name. All he could remember was the fear and loathing he’d felt for a man who rewarded the sporty students and punished everyone else for daring to exist. “It would encourage them.”

“And let you bask in my reflected glory?” Tobias couldn’t keep the snarl out of his mouth. He had no doubt the school had already held a ceremony for Colin, allowing the Beast a chance to claim credit for Colin’s posthumous medal and promotion. “Perhaps I could tell them how I never found a trace of your military record.”

The  Beast paled. Tobias smirked. None of the military officers he’d met had bragged about their service, not even Colin. But the Beast had told everyone about his shining career, a career that seemed curiously unsupported by the evidence. Years ago, Tobias would never have dared call the Beast out for being a Walt. But now ...

“I thought not,” Tobias said. The man was truly pathetic. “Be seeing you.”

And he turned and walked away.

***

“How much of the story do you believe?”

“Lady Charlotte’s technical details have proven sound, so far,” Susan said. She was packing up her office, but she’d found time for a final conference. “That adds a certain credence to her story, does it not?”

Paul Mason nodded from his seat on the sofa. “We also have a great deal of hard sensor evidence,” he said. “The universe is going to change.”

“Starships that can jump without tramlines, self-generated tramlines, FTL communications and gravity beams ...” Susan shook her head. The tactical staff were already tearing through the data, trying to determine how warfare would change once the new technologies came online. She suspected most of their projections would be wrong. It took the technology being freely available, and starship captains experimenting, to develop newer and better tactics. “And an alien race watching us.”

“If you believe what she said,” Mason said. “There are too many unanswered questions.”

Susan nodded. Years ago, before the human race had started to climb into space, there had been people who’d believed aliens were watching humanity and protecting it from its worst impulses. She had never thought it plausible, until now, and yet it was clear the only thing the Builders had done was preserve a sample of humanity a safe distance from Earth. They hadn’t intervened any further, as far as anyone could tell. But no one would ever know for sure.

“We’ll have answers one day,” she said. There were too many people who thought they already had the answers. The builders were angels, or devils; completely benevolent or mindlessly hostile. “It might be a long time after we’re gone.”

“Our descendants might understand,” Paul agreed. He grinned and stood. “You want to go for one last dinner in the Admiral’s Bar?”

“Better to eat outside,” Susan said. She’d known retirement was coming, breathing down her neck, but it hadn’t felt real until now. Better to make a clean break, she told herself, rather than become one of the uniformed talking heads on news broadcasts. “We can think about the future later.”

“And let someone else deal with the fallout,” Paul said. “It’s a strange universe, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Susan agreed. “And we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s out there, waiting for us.”

The End

Afterword

When I started writing an ongoing Ark Royal series (composed of trilogies, featuring individual starships and their crews), I had a problem. Each successive trilogy had to be different, yet it had to maintain the general feel of the series. In some aspects, the ongoing development of technology - with more advanced tech available to each set of heroes - allowed me to build on each trilogy as I moved onto the next; in others, it was difficult to find new scenarios without repeating or contradicting myself. I tried to solve this by ensuring that each trilogy featured a different class of starship, at least to some extent, but there were limits to successive scenarios.

My original concept for Endeavour was that the starship would discover artefacts developed by a far more advanced civilisation. The ‘Big Dumb Object’ has a long and storied history in science fiction, ranging from dead alien habitats to silent starships and objects with no apparent purpose that both tempt onlookers to explore and warn them to stay away. Alien artefacts that are vastly more powerful than anything possessed by the main characters, and simply developed by advanced technology, are more than just a setting. Their mere presence often sparks aspects of the plot, from human groups that wish to seize and exploit the technology for their own advantage to others that believe the alien artefact should be destroyed, at least partly because the original builders might not be friendly. An intelligence test might be designed to winnow out races capable of talking to builders, but passing such a test might also mark the race as a potential threat and trigger their destruction. Even if the builders are friendly, direct contact may be devastating. How would our society cope if it encountered a race that is not only much advanced than ourselves, but so far ahead of us that catching up might be impossible?

It is a difficult question to answer. We may never know until it happens.

That said, I do believe that there is a fundamental difference between a race that can barely make fire and one capable of understanding the scientific method. The Royal Air Force of 1940 would be awed by an F-22 Raptor, but they would also be capable of working out the basic principles of the jet engine even if they have no conception of advanced modern computers. Discovering a crashed F-22 thrown back in time would unlock the keys to many more advanced ideas, and as they worked to develop their own jet aircraft using clues from the future aircraft they would learn more about what they were doing. I think a spacefaring civilisation would have a good chance of unlocking the secrets of a far more advanced power, unless the technology was so advanced as to be literally magic (such as the near-omnipotence displayed by Star Trek’s Q). It would be deeply worrying to a spacefaring race to encounter a more advanced race, but I don’t think it would be an outside context problem. The possibility was envisaged a long time before it actually manifested.

Of course, the answers might not be satisfactory. Some books have the alien artefact leave as enigmatically as it arrived, leaving a mystery behind. Others offer answers that are profoundly unsatisfactory, or reminders that the world is not fair or perfect and some races are terrifyingly careless; Thirdspace, a made-for-TV feature set in the Babylon 5 universe, fits the bill perfectly. The mysterious alien artefact was built by a race that presented itself – literally – as angels, yet came to believe its own propaganda and unleashed a far more dangerous threat on the galaxy through sheer hubris. I sometimes think that authors refuse to give definite answers because they may well be unsatisfactory, even though - in my opinion - definite answers can open up whole new fields of storytelling. Why did the aliens leave the artefacts behind? Why did they allow the younger races to discover them? Are they still around, watching and waiting, or have they gone onwards to leave room for their successors to grow and develop? Are they hoping to meet like-minds, or are they planning to destroy any race that might pose a threat? Do they think they are acting for our own good? Or are they only acting out of scientific curiosity? Will they be a deus ex machina, or will their intervention cause more trouble than it solves?

What do you think of my answers?

I’m not sure, as of writing, if there will be another trilogy in this universe. There are plenty more aspects to explore, not least the introduction and development of Builder-derived technology, and the mystery of the connection between the Builders and the virus. I do have ideas, but developing them depends on public interest. If you want to see more books, please let me know.

I hope you found this book satisfactory. If you did, and would like to see more, please go to the place you bought it and leave a review. It has grown much harder, alas, to make a living through indie authorship, so a review - or even a rating - would be very helpful indeed. So would following me on social media, and my blog.

Thank you for your time.

Christopher G. Nuttall

Edinburgh, 2023

How To Follow

Basic Mailing List - http://orion.crucis.net/mailman/listinfo/chrishanger-list

Nothing, but announcements of new books.

Newsletter - https://gmail.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=c8f9f7391e5bfa369a9b1e76c&id=55fc83a213

New books releases, new audio releases, maybe a handful of other things of interest.

Blog - https://chrishanger.wordpress.com/

Everything from new books to reviews, commentary on things that interest me, etc.

Facebook Fan Page - https://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

New books releases, new audio releases, maybe a handful of other things of interest.

Website - http://chrishanger.net/

New books releases, new audio releases, free samples (plus some older books free to anyone who wants a quick read)

Forums - https://authornuttall.com

Book discussions - new, but I hope to expand.

Books2Read - https://books2read.com/author/christopher-g-nuttall/subscribe/19723/

Notifications of new books (normally on the Big River too, but not included in B2R notifications.

Twitter - @chrisgnuttall

New books releases, new audio releases - definitely nothing beyond (no politics or culture war stuff).

If you like my work, you might like ...

Through the Wild Gate, by Dale Cozort

Robinette Thornburg is half-human and half Mangi, the result of an encounter between Roberrt Thornburg, head of a powerful Gate family and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

The Mangi and the Wild are secrets known only to the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but Robert Thornburg is powerful enough to raise Robinette as a fully human child, his daughter, and send her to an Ivy League School, where she passes as human and graduates, only to be kidnapped and left to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette makes her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate, nearly dead from starvation and vowing revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why. That quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the wild and then to a final confrontation with their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

Chapter One: Robinette Goes Through a Gate & Throws A Rock

Guarding a rogue Gate is a crap job, scary as hell when it isn’t boring. My name is Eric Carter, private eye when I’m not on the graveyard shift guarding Don’s Auto Parts. Seedy junkyard. Seedy side of the city. Too seedy even for whores, tattoo parlors and payday loan places. The kind of place where no one asks where you got those catalytic converters. Zoned industrial sewer. Ten-foot-high wood privacy fence so no one has to see where their cars go after they die. Stretch six feet wide around the fence with brown-stained dirt where nothing grows. Paint peeling on the wood fence, but no graffiti.

No graffiti is the only sign that Don’s is a front. Robert Bedford Thornburg, head of a powerful Gate family, opened an experimental Gate here twenty years ago when the families were figuring out how to make Gates. They accidentally created a rogue Gate, one that even now still randomly disappears and shows up fifteen minutes or two days later and a mile or two feet away.

When Gates open, pieces of the Wild come through, mostly birds and insects, but sometimes bigger stuff. The bigger stuff doesn’t mix with polite society, even when it’s arguably human. So, the Gate families pay me to sit on my butt and watch security cameras scattered through a huge junkyard that covers the place where the rogue Gate might open.

Having your own Gate puts you at the top of the hierarchy, above people with yachts the size of World War II cruisers. It also gives you perks almost impossible to get anywhere else. Zero pollution. No antibiotics or pesticides or microplastics in your food and water. Absolute refuge if someone tosses nukes or killer viruses around. When you have everything else, that sort of thing is a nice extra.

I worked for a Gate family, the Thornburgs, fifteen years ago, before they fired me. Golden parachute for an iron clad non-disclosure agreement. Enough money to last the rest of my life, except I went through it in ten years, got bourbon tastes and ended up with a cheap beer budget.

So, I guard Don’s. After a few months, I got used to the constant odor of leaking gasoline and the glaring white florescent lights, both inside and out. As usual, I settled in and got an audio book playing, sound low so it didn’t wake Mike Dickey, my shift partner and an off-duty cop. Mike’s okay for a squatty five foot eight troll of a guy. He changes wives more often than I get my oil changed and has a herd of mini-Mikes and Mickettes to support, which is why he’s always broke and why he works at Don’s. I’ve only got one ex and I haven’t heard from her since she moved in with that movie director in LA. Mike claims they broke up and my ex is doing porn now. I don’t care enough to check.

Mike’s ten years older than me and has a gut, but there is muscle under the sloppy fat and despite being a crap human being, I know he’ll have my back. No, he wasn’t supposed to be sleeping on the job, but he wakes up full tilt like snapping your fingers if things get hot.

And lights. Camera. Action. Before a Gate opens, it gives a brief light show, shimmering in a rainbow of colors. Then it opens to the Wild, like our reality was a piece of paper and somebody burned a hole in it, the edges still blazing, letting us see what’s on the other side. If you’re close enough, you sometimes hear what sounds like an elephant-sized wet fart. In this case, I saw moonlit night sky over short grass, nothing unusual except it was framed in still-glowing red and sat among the wrecked cars, actually in the center of a rusted out yellow van.

As soon as Mike woke up, we jumped into our electric cart, I brought up the camera feed on the monitor and raced down a too-narrow aisle between towering stacks of flattened wrecks.

Mike swore. “I don’t remember who I was dreaming about, but it was good sex.”

“Ever dream about bad sex?”

“When I have the kids over for the weekend.”

I eased the cart around a sharp corner, then glanced at the monitor. The Gate was still there, the glow around its edges fading slowly, still empty.

Most times the Gate closes before anything comes through. When the Gate closes, it makes an unstoppable guillotine. Cuts through metal or flesh like it’s a damp paper towel. Not something to screw with.

Sometimes, bold, curious animals like squirrels slip through. Squirrels, we don’t care about. Same species as ours, or close enough. Other stuff matters, especially Mangi and big predators.

Gate families keep the Wild secret from their children and most of their servants. Only a carefully vetted few get to go through the Gates. Even most of the servants who go to the Wild don’t know they’ve been there. Modern, controlled gates open to walled family compounds in the Wild and almost no one goes outside the gate. As far as most people know, they’re at an ultra-private rich people place.

Robert Thornburg took me on a hunting trip to the Wild when I was his bodyguard. Hunting is a big attraction of the Wild, for people in the know. Trophies from there are unique, not exhibited publicly, but major sources of prestige among those in the know. It takes skill and guts to hunt in the Wild. Big animals there are almost as dangerous as African game like Cape Buffalo that often turn hunter into hunted. “They’ve been hunted by Mangi for half a million years,” Thornburg said then. “Having people hunt them is burned into their DNA.”

I kept one eye on the monitor while I steered through the cluttered junkyard. A Mangi scuttled through, human-like pale white face framed by tangled red hair on a mostly hairless body, standing on two legs. Just one Mangi, thankfully. One Mangi was bad, three times as strong as a strong man. This one was female, breasts clearly visible. She had a deerskin around her waist and moved purposefully, as if the strange sights of the junkyard didn’t bother her.

“Scavenger. She’s been across before,” Mike said. I relaxed slightly. Scavengers come across, grab scrap metal and are rich in a world where hand-axes are high technology, if the Gate doesn’t close when they’re partway through. I’ve never seen that happen and don’t want to. It leaves a dead near-human and a river of blood.

Scavengers usually know the signs a Gate is about to close. They also know to be afraid of guns, though they attack if cornered.

“Don’t get between her and the Gate,” Mike said. I nodded. The Gate families would cover it up if we shot a Mangi, but they prefer that we herd them back through the Gate. I’ve never killed a Mangi, though I’ve fired warning shots. Sure, they’re more different from us than Neanderthals, but they’re sort of human.

This Mangi was more human-looking than most. She had her long red hair tied back out of her eyes in a messy ponytail, exposing heavier than human brow ridges, sharp, high cheekbones and an almost nonexistent chin. She wasn’t built like Raquel Welch in that notorious caveman movie. Instead, she was all sinew and muscle, with taut, strong legs that were long for a Mangi.

She wasn’t gathering scrap. Instead, she strode purposefully through junk cars toward the fence.

“A crosser?” Mike asked. If she was a crosser, we had to head her off, for her own good. Local organized crime knew about the wild Gate. They didn’t challenge Gate families for control, and they didn’t blab about Mangi. They just shot them with tranquilizer darts, hustled them into vans and put them to work, females as low-rent, dangerous prostitutes and males as labor for companies that would otherwise have used undocumented workers and liked workers they could treat even more like slaves. Mangi make awful slaves, but some people never get that memo.

I turned to cut the Mangi off. She changed course immediately. “Crap! She’s tracking our cart by the sound.”

That was new and unwelcome. I was surprised she could figure it out with the echoes.

I turned the cart to cut her off again. She stopped as soon as the cart changed directions. My fists clenched on the steering wheel and a surge of frustration sent my pulse racing. I slowed the cart, hoping the breeze whistling through scrap metal would hide the engine whine. I focused on sound, our tires crunching through the gravel, wrecks rattling in the wind, a transformer humming, distant sirens. How could she hear us through all that?

Mike’s hand hovered close to his Glock. “That poor little bitch is too smart. It’ll get her killed.”

“Think we need backup?” I asked. Backup was five minutes away, but they came in ready to shoot and something had better need shooting. A dozen Mangi or Dire Wolves meant something needed shooting. One female Mangi probably didn’t.

I split the monitor’s view, one view following the Mangi, the other monitoring the Gate. So far only one Mangi. It was night in the Wild too, but any one of half a dozen big predators could show up, none of them afraid of people except around captive Gates, where the families hunted.

I half-wished more Mangi would come through, so we could back off and call backup.

The camera nearest the Mangi went out.

“That little bitch!” Mike said. “She’s going to make us kill her.”

I flipped to the next closest camera. It went out too. That wasn’t a coincidence. She was taking out cameras. I switched to a camera further down the aisle. No luck.

Mike drew his Glock and scanned a half circle toward the broken cameras. “Get the drone up. We need eyes on her.”

The drone was recharging and wouldn’t have much juice. Still, with this Mangi taking out cameras, we had to use it,

“She’s been a servant over there,” Mike said. “That’s the only way she could know about cameras.”

I nodded. Gate families don’t take many human servants to the Wild—too many tongues wagging when people come home, so they capture Mangi as slaves, servants or domestic animals. It rarely works out well for long. Mangi aren’t stupid. They see that Gate families aren’t old and toothless by their late twenties, have enough to eat and stay warm in the winter. They want that, but adult Mangi won’t put up with the Gate families controlling their lives to get it, so Gate families mostly use Mangi children. They grow up and want what the Gate families have, but for themselves, without the slavery or servant crap. Families mostly force their Mangi servants back into the wild when they hit puberty. That causes problems because they know about people and are smart as hell. This one seemed smarter than most.

“That poor little bitch probably got old and cranky, and the Family kicked her to the curb,” Mike said. “That’s a shitty way to treat servants. They give them a taste of our life and then dump them back in the Wild like used toilet paper.”

I nodded. “And we clean up the mess.”

The drone glided toward the Mangi’s last known location. More cameras blinked out. We would have to use guns to herd her back. Tasers don’t have the range and tranquilizers kill Mangi way too often. I know that sounds stupid. Use guns instead of tranquilizers to keep from killing Mangi. They’ll run from gunshots though, so you usually don’t have to kill them.

The drone circled where the Mangi had been. Nothing. I made the circle bigger, my gut clinching. “Crap! Where is she?”

Mike stood up in the cart, one hand on the top frame, his Glock still out, weapon and eyes still roaming, Something rattled behind us. Mike turned and a fist-sized rock smashed him in the nose. Mike dropped the Glock and slammed back into his seat, splattering blood on his uniform and my arm. He gurgled something angry and probably blasphemous through the blood. I ducked, drawing my revolver and wishing for backup.

I spotted the Mangi. She had another rock poised to throw but stopped abruptly. “Mr. Carter?”

I paused but didn’t lower my weapon, trying to see her better in the gloom. Something stirred in the back of my mind, a nearly forgotten memory. “How do you know my name?”

“You saved my life when I was six years old.”

The memory flowed in. I don’t rescue a lot of distressed damsels, and only one child I could remember.

"Robinette Thornburg," I said. Daughter of Robert. The son of a bitch who'd fired me and the reason I spend my nights prowling a shitty junkyard with Mike instead of living a normal life.

***

Mangi and humans can make babies together. Usually, those babies die in the womb. The ones who survive are sterile, like mules. They say the Mangi got to the Wild’s New World half a million years ago. Half a million years is enough isolation that things work different in baby-making between the Mangi and humans.

I mentioned Robert Thornburg. Powerful guy. Harvard grad. Knew all the right people the right way. Inherited a substantial family fortune and supersized it with finance crap I don’t begin to understand. Bought and sold billion-dollar companies like they were trading cards. Rented Senators and Federal agencies to pick up his laundry. Jerk sometimes. Screwed anything female on two legs that held still for him. That included Mangi.

Thornburg had islands of decency. My severance package was one. Robinette Thornburg was another. Half Mangi. Half Thornburg. Robert Thornburg had his servants raise her like a human child. And now she was coming through a rogue Gate, half-naked.

Robinette took a step toward us. Mike reached for his fallen Glock. I grabbed his arm. “Leave it. I know her.”

He wasn’t in any shape to shoot anyway. His nose gushed blood and he looked like he was about to barf. He spat blood, then said in a strangled voice, “Bitch broke my nose.”

“She’s Robert Thornburg’s daughter.”

Mike put both hands to his face. “I don’t care. She still broke my nose. Oh God that hurts!” He wiped his nose on his shirt and took a deep breath. “Half human? At least I don’t feel as much like a perv for checking out her boobs.”

Being Robert Thornburg’s daughter took shooting her off the table. I tried not to stare at her, but my eyes drifted down to her chest. I shook my head and focused on meeting her green eyes, Robinette shifted uncomfortably and folded her arms across her bare breasts. “I got used to going bare. Can you get me clothes?”

She picked up Mike’s Glock, which had fallen onto the gravel beside the cart. “Cheap piece of crap. The families didn’t issue you this, did they?”

She climbed over Mike into the cart before he could say anything, not waiting to be invited and pushing in between Mike and me. I felt her bare breast brush against my upper arm as she settled in and scooted over, my butt hanging half off the seat. I stared at her face, trying to see the six-year-old I had known in the woman beside me. I saw the resemblance under the dirt and wild hair. She covered her face with her hands, then shifted an arm back to her breasts. “Don’t look at me.”

I gave her my shirt, which came down almost to her knees. Once she had it on, she leaned back and closed her eyes. “I made it. I’m back. I can’t believe it.”

“What were you doing in the Wild?” Mike asked. The question ended in a gurgle. When he stopped coughing, he added, “And couldn’t you introduce yourself before you brained me?”

“I didn’t know you,” she said. “You were waving your dime-store want-to-be firearm around like you were expecting a pack of dire wolves to jump out at you. It didn’t seem like an ‘introduce myself’ situation.”

“I spent half a month’s pay for that weapon,” Mike said. “Can I have it back?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Your job is to stop crossers. Planning to keep trying to stop me?”

That brought up an awkward problem. Our job was to stop crossers. On the other hand, she was half-human and raised as human. And I knew her.

“So, what have you been up to lately?” I asked, trying for ironically casual.

She smiled as though she hadn’t smiled lately. “Oh, the usual. I went to the best private schools, then to Harvard. Nothing but the best for daddy’s little girl. I graduated with a near perfect GPA. My bachelor’s is in Physics, with a minor in Chemistry. I went home for a long weekend, drank a martini and woke up in the Wild’s version of Oklahoma, stark naked, with the sun beating down on me, a pounding headache, my hands and feet tied with enough rope for a bondage convention and with vultures eyeing me from two feet away.”

“Any idea why?”

“No, but someone has some explaining to do before I kill them.”

Physics. Ivy League. I was impressed. Robinette was six when I left my bodyguard job, took my payout and thought I was done with the Thornburgs. I saved her life back then, which got me Golden Parachute fired. Robinette could have passed for fully human at age six, with red hair, freckles and green eyes. Smart too. Say what you want about Mangi, Robinette was ahead of where a six-year-old should have been in brainpower. College for her didn’t surprise me.

Her fitting in at college was harder to see. Even at six, something set her deeply apart from her fully human half-brother and sister, differences in how and when she smiled, how she moved. Her voice was uncomfortably high then and unpleasantly nasal then, but she could sing. God could she sing.

Robinette was also ungodly strong for a little girl. Mangi are three times as strong as men pound for pound and having pulled Robinette off her then twelve-year-old brother, that applied to her. A fully human boy twice her age was no match for her and even I had trouble pulling her off him. If she was still that strong pound for pound, we needed to treat her like cranky old dynamite. She could take out both of us hand to hand.

She looked exhausted, unlikely to fight now. She leaned against me, head on my shoulder and looked up. “God, I want to hug you, but I smell like I haven’t had a shower in—” she paused, apparently calculating. “Over two months.”

She smelled ripe, but I didn’t move away from her. “Two months? How did you survive?”

“Because she’s half animal,” Mike said through his bloody nose. “Back in her natural habitat.”

She gave him a look that should have incinerated him, then smiled. “I was sorry I broke your nose and insulted your little gun. Not anymore.”

“What are we going to do with her?” Mike asked. “We can’t let her go.”

“I spent twenty-one years on this side,” Robinette said. “I graduated from fricking Harvard with a near perfect GPA.”

“We still can’t let you go,” Mike said. “They would shitcan us.”

“Forcing Robert Thornburg’s daughter into the Wild would put an expiration date on you. Use by yesterday,” Robinette said. “Besides, you couldn’t send me back if you tried.”

Mike was an old cop, arrogant, probably twice her weight, but he looked away under her gaze. “Okay. How do we get you out without getting fired? Everything is on video.”

“We’ll kick it upstairs,” I said.

Robinette shook her head. “I don’t know who set me up. Until I find out, I don’t want anyone else to know I’m back. I’ll take care of the video. When I’m done, the video will make you heroes. You chased a Mangi back with your drone.” She grinned. “Metal bird make Mangi crap herself and run back through the Gate.”

The Gate closed as I steered the cart to the main office. There was a locker room with a shower there. A lot of guys shower after a shift in the junkyard. I let her in and found clothes in the lost-and-found, guys’ stuff, but it would do. I stood outside until she came back out, her wild red hair tamed as much as it could be, and a man’s shirt cinched around her waist with a belt. The shirt came midway down her thighs and looked like a short dress. She handed me back my shirt.

“I’ll get clothes once I get home.” She paused. “Except I can’t go home until I figure out who did this to me.” She turned to me. “You saved my life once. Can you do it again?”

“I got fired last time. I would save you again in a second though.”

“I know.” She gave me a hug, reaching up to do it. I’m six foot two. She’s maybe five feet tall. That’s the Mangi side. Five feet is tall for a male Mangi, and females are usually a head shorter. She clung to me. I felt her body under the shirt. She was still strong, but hunger and the Wild had stripped fat and muscle from her body, leaving bones standing out among the wiry remnants of muscles.

Mike smirked. “She cleans up nicely. I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for not being entirely in my species.”

“You’ll never get a chance to,” Robinette said.

Feeling her ribcage through the shirt gave me a different view of her. Knowing her when she wasn’t even a preteen added an extra helping of ‘yuck’ to Mike’s thought. Even tired and near starvation, though, she was still a very attractive young woman.

“Not the time for your horndog act,” I said. “She’s been through hell.” She also really needed a friend now. She still had her arms around me, clinging desperately hard. I looked down at her exhausted face. “How can I help?”

She stepped back. “I don’t know if you can. Dad was away on business when someone slipped me knockout drops, but everyone else in the household is a suspect.” She paused and her eyes grew sad. “I suppose Dad is too. Have you heard anything about me being missing? If he didn’t want me gone, he would have moved heaven and Earth to get me back.”

“Why would he want you gone?” Robert Thornburg violated Gate family taboos by raising Robinette as human. Probably nobody else among the families could have made that decision stick. Island of decency in a hard, arrogant man, remember.

“Maybe I was an experiment,” Robinette said. “What happens if you raise a half-Mangi kid as human?” Her lips quivered. “Maybe he took it to heart when I called him a heartless bastard.”

“That might do it,” I said. “Why did you say that?”

She shook her head, her face suddenly cold. “I had my reasons.” She turned away, her shoulders shaking with sobs. When she turned back, though, her face was impassive. “I don’t think he did this. He can be a bastard, but if he wanted me gone, he wouldn’t sneak around to make it happen.”

“Okay. Who else is on your suspect list?”

“My sister and brother dearest would be on there, along with the servants and security people, though they wouldn’t do anything unless Dad okayed it.”

“Your stepmom tried to kill you when you were six,” I pointed out. She got drunk and tried to drown little Robinette in the pool, then accused me of rape when I pulled her off the little girl.

“That was four Mrs. Thornburgs ago,” Robinette said. “If I knew they were going to fire you for helping I would have bit the bitch’s hand off instead of waiting for you to rescue me.”

I had wondered how the drunken woman kept a hold on Robinette. Even at six she was strong enough I could barely restrain her. “Why did you wait for me to rescue you?”

She reddened, then laughed. “You really didn’t notice that I had a huge crush on you?”

Actually, I didn’t. “I can be clueless. Isn’t six a little young for crushes?”

“That was the Mangi side. We mature a little faster.” She grinned. “I’ll have to be more obvious next time. But that will have to wait. We have an attempted murder to solve and somebody’s face to pound my fist through and yank their intestines out their throat.”

I was suddenly almost sorry for whoever stranded her.

Chapter Two: Making Robinette Feel Human

We wrote up the incident for Mike’s workers’ comp claim, blaming a neighborhood kid for the rock to Mike’s nose. I called 911 and our offsite backup as soon as Robinette cleaned up the video and hid.

We had a perfect short time hiding place. A few years ago, a foreman on the first shift hid a large van among the wrecks, fitted it with a bed and used it as a love nest. He got fired for stealing not long afterwards, but the van was still there. We found it on our rounds a while back, but Mike asked me not to report it, probably wanting to use it the same way eventually. We chased squirrels, mice and spiders out of it.

Robinette was still barefoot, so I carried her across the gravel to the van. She leaned her head on my chest and put her arms around my neck. “After two months in the Wild my feet are tough enough to take anything this junkyard has to throw at them, but thanks for carrying me across the threshold.”

“It’s not exactly a five-star hotel, but it should do.” I sat her on her feet. “You should be okay here until the cops and our offsite backup leave.”

The cops just had us fill out an incident form about the alleged rock-throwing. Offsite backup was more thorough. They work for the Gate Family Council, not Mr. Thornburg and they asked a lot of questions, viewing the video several times before they left.

Mike made a rude gesture when they left. “The Council Police are the Council’s private FBI and an arrogant bunch of pricks.”

I’d heard rumors that they’re technically actual federal law enforcement. Could the families manage that? I didn’t know, though the renting Senators thing might make it possible. One of the founding Gate families had a Senator and an assistant CIA director in their ranks, which also probably helped.

“Think the video fooled them?”

“Maybe, but they may have recognized Robinette.”

That left us with a problem. Whoever stranded Robinette in the Wild clearly intended for her to die there. The Council Police probably knew that they didn’t succeed now. If they knew Robinette was alive and near Don’s Auto, Don’s would get a lot more attention when word spread.

“We have to get her out of Don’s,” I said. “We might not get a chance later.”

“Where to?” Mike asked.

That was a good question. Where could we hide her that the Families couldn’t find her? We couldn’t, not if they were seriously looking for her on this side of the Gate, but they shouldn’t be, not after seeing the video.

“My apartment for now,” I said.

Mike smirked. “Yeah, I figured that was where she would end up. What will your live-in girlfriend think of that?”

“Clara? She’s gone. I had her give me her key last time she came back after disappearing for a week.”

“Clara Wolf,” Mike said. “If that’s her real name. I think she’s some rich old guy’s trophy wife who comes to visit you when he’s out of town. She’s way too good for you otherwise. She’s definitely trophy wife material. She also looks familiar, You’re a private investigator. You should do a background check before her husband shows up and has his security people break your knees.”

“No point. She’s out of my life.”

“Until she decides to come back in.”

I didn’t bother to respond, just closed my eyes briefly and let exhaustion flow over me.

Clara Wolf. Late twenties. Tall. Almost, but not quite model slender. Brown hair always perfect, even when she got out of my bed in the morning. Face that said, “I’m too good for you,” except when it didn’t, when it was inviting. Athletic and imaginative in bed. And gone a month now. No contact. I made her leave her key. I pushed Clara out of my mind. Closed chapter.

Graveyard shifts aren’t fun. People aren’t built to work from eleven at night to seven in the morning. Even after years, my body hates it. I have it down to a routine, though. I eat breakfast at a coffee shop a block from my apartment after I get off work, then sleep five or six hours. I putter around the apartment until nine and sleep until I have to go to work. That lets me sleep at night on my days off.

I smuggled Robinette out to my car, hoping the Council Police didn’t have Don’s under surveillance. They probably would soon, but hopefully wouldn’t have time to set it up yet.

I wanted to go straight to my apartment, but Robinette insisted on spending a little time enjoying civilization before she went into hiding. so I took her to my normal breakfast place, where she ordered enough food for a famine victim. She wolfed it down at first, but quickly slowed.

“I want more, but I think my stomach shrank. I’ll have to eat in stages.” She fumbled with her knife and fork at first, but quickly got back her old habits. I had to remind her to keep her knees together. She grimaced. “Yes, mom. I need jeans. I guess I’ll have to wear a bra too. Ordering food and having it handed to me is great. Worrying about pervs looking up my dress and wearing bras, not so much.”

“How did you survive over there?”

“I don’t want to relive it,” she said. “Figure I’m tougher than hell and smart and hate is a good motivator.”

I took her clothes shopping on my dime, knowing it might be her last chance to get out for a long time. I stood and waited while she shopped, with my body screaming for sleep. She was exhausted too, but insisted on buying a toothbrush, makeup and personal items too.

“I can get you a hotel room,” I told her when she finished shopping.

“You would have to use a credit card unless you stuck me in a fleabag place,” Robinette said. “If you rent a hotel room now it might draw the wrong kind of attention. I’m okay with your apartment. I just want to sleep, and I trust you.”

My apartment was the last thing I still had from the bourbon era of my life. It was on the third floor of an upscale apartment building in an upscale neighborhood, with keyed access to the building and good security. It was draining the financial life out of me, but compared to what Robinette was used to, it was undoubtedly a dump. I also had unwashed dishes in the sink and underwear on the floor. I lived alone and wasn’t expecting company.

When I opened the door, she took a deep breath. “Ah, the smell of dirty socks. It smells like bachelor.”

“Close your eyes.” I ran ahead and cleaned up the worst of the mess, then opened a window.

“I’ve been in bachelor apartments before,” she said. “Most of them smell worse.” She insisted on brushing her teeth and putting on fuzzy, much too large one-piece light green pajamas that matched her eyes, then grabbed my hand. “I want your arms around me when I sleep. Nothing else, just a bed with someone I trust holding me.”

She snuggled under the covers with a huge smile. “Three months ago, I took this for granted. Now, it’s way better than sex.” She was asleep in seconds, with her arms desperately tight around me, her too-thin body gradually relaxing.

Her hair smelled of cheap shampoo that she probably wouldn’t have allowed on her head normally. She looked tiny in the oversized pajamas, like the little girl I remembered. I turned off the light and felt her breathing slow into the regular pattern of sleep, then I was asleep too.

PURCHASE FROM THE BIG RIVER NOW!