Текст книги "The Sundered"

Автор книги: Andy Mangels

Соавторы: Michael Martin
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[276] Akaar turned from his console. “Judging from the number of ships apparently still being assembled in orbit around the Class-M world, I would estimate this invasion to be mere weeks away. If not sooner.”

“If any Tholians have seen this, the Neyel must have prevented them from reporting back,” Chekov said. “Otherwise, the Tholians would have set up some fortifications on their side. And we’d have detected more than the occasional skirmish.” Chekov shook his head. “I’m certainly glad you ducked out of that sword fight, Captain. This looks muchsafer.”

Grinning at his exec, Sulu said, “Relax, Pavel. We’re among friends. Janice, please open a channel to Oghen’s Flame.”

“Aye, sir.”‘

A moment later, the gray faces of Joh’jym, Oratok, and Jerdahn appeared on the viewer. Fortunately, it appeared that Jerdahn had succeeded in hanging onto some pretty highly placed friends. Let’s hope his luck continues,Sulu thought. I have a feeling we’re all going to need it.

“Fortune has favored us,”Joh’jym said, a smile slightly bending his blunt features. “We have defeated the Devils’ snare. We owe you our thanks.”

“No more than we owe you, Drech’tor Joh’jym,” Sulu said.

“Would you return through the Rift to your home space?”Jerdahn asked.

“I’m afraid we must, Jerdahn. We can only stay here long enough to check Excelsiorfor damage. Then we’ll have to return the same way we came.”

“To face the Devils,”Oratok said.

“Alone,”added Joh’jym. He sounded wistful, as though Excelsior’sdestruction at the hands of the Tholians were a foregone conclusion. Maybe it is.

“Perhaps death cannot be outrun, Hikarusulu,” Joh’jym said. “But there is no reason to rush into her grasp. Oghen, our Coreworld, lies only moments away at Efti’el speeds. I [277] would like you to see it—and the fleet that will avenge you shortly after you return to Devil space.”

Sulu realized that he still had more than three hours before his honor would be forever tarnished in Yilskene’s eyes. There would be time to visit, at least briefly, the planet the Neyel thought of as their homeworld.

“I would be honored, Drech’tor,” Sulu said, then ordered Lojur to follow Oghen’s Flameto its destination.

 

Excelsiorsettled into a standard orbit only a few kilometers away from Oghen’s Flame.Standing before the bridge viewer beside Chekov and Burgess, Sulu finally found a quiet moment to simply admire the tainted, yet still beautiful world that turned slowly some six hundred kilometers below.

The blue class-M planet that Joh’jym had called Oghen was obviously a busy place. From the brownish-yellow haze that stippled the atmosphere, Sulu concluded that the planet had been one of the Neyel Hegemony’s most heavily utilized industrial sites for at least a century.

And the scores of orbital factories and drydocks, and the thousands of partially-assembled warships he saw everywhere he looked made it abundantly clear to what use the planet’s abundant resources had been put.

War.

Using filters, Tuvok trained Excelsior’svisual sensors on the planet’s primary star, a hot F-type sun whose yellow-white surface rippled with frequent and violent flares and immense, horseshoe-shaped prominences.

Caused, Tuvok quickly theorized, by the close presence of a sizable aperture leading into interspace. Could the fact that this rift connected to the sectors of space controlled by the extremely suspicious, territorial Tholian Alliance be mere coincidence?

“No wonder the Neyel are so bent on destroying the Tholians,” Burgess said. “Maybe they think that the interspatial [278] rift itself is actually a Tholian plot to destabilize their stars and scour all life from their planets.”

“If we were in their position, I wonder if we would have done the math any differently than they did,” Sulu said. He felt a gnawing sadness as he considered the wide gulf of culture that separated this long-sundered branch of humanity from Earth’s civilization. It was arguably a far broader chasm than the even physical distance that lay between Federation space and the Neyel Hegemony’s territory.

“Given the hardships their ancestors had to overcome when they found themselves stranded out here, I doubt it,” Burgess said.

“They’re us and we’re them,” Sulu said quietly, looking to Chekov for a reaction. This time, the exec did not argue the point.

Facing forward, Sulu watched the viewer as a large, oblong shadow came up over the terminator from Oghen’s nightside and continued to rise on its long orbital arc. A few lights and safety beacons lined the object’s exterior, no doubt intended to prevent Neyel spacecraft from accidentally crashing into it.

It slowly emerged into the harsh glare of the sun, which revealed the great rock’s kilometers-long shape and the near side of its rough, battered surface. The object seemed to be composed of both nickel-iron and stone, and bore little resemblance to the relatively smooth, modular orbiting factories and the utilitarian, cylindrical space vessels that Sulu saw just about everywhere else he looked in Oghen’s skies. It reminded him more of one of the moons of Mars, or one of the innumerable rocks that studded Sol’s asteroid belt.

Then he realized exactly what it was he was looking at. “Looks like the Neyel have kept it in pretty good shape,” he said.

“It’s a shrine,” Burgess said. “Like Independence Hall. Or the Peace Dome on Axanar.”

“I never thought I’d actually get to see it,” Chekov said, [279] his eyes riveted to the rocky shape. “It’s like a myth come to life.”

“It’s no myth, Pavel,” Sulu said, shaking his head. “Any more than the Neyel are.”

The sight of the great Vanguard asteroid colony filled his heart with awe and wonder. It was a symbol of both promise and catastrophe. A reminder that the horrors the Neyel intended to inflict upon the Tholians—and vice versa—were, in large part, humanity’s responsibility.

My responsibility,he thought.

PART 8

WAR

Chapter 24

2268. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar

Life aboard Tuskerslayerconsisted predominantly of boredom. From the patrol vessel’s lowliest grunt laborer all the way up to its drech’tor, none aboard could deny that this was the simple truth of the crew’s existence.

Perched in the center of the cramped command deck, Drech’tor Kreutz recalled a joke her predecessor had been fond of making: Boredom, punctuated by tedium.He’d repeated it often enough over the years—even on the very day she had killed him—to make the words all but unforgettable.

But Kreutz was too well trained an officer to give even tedium anything less than her full attention. Tonight, she presided over a third-watch skeleton crew, anticipating a long, plodding march through the ship’s night, as was her wont whenever sleep proved elusive. Tuskerslayer’scurrent mission was shaping up to be a spectacularly uneventful patrol of the vast cometary cloud that bounded the far fringes of the Oghen system.

And what could this patrol possibly be other than uneventful?she thought. The most Aerthlike world yet discovered, the Coreworld of Oghen was the center of the vast [284] KnownconqueredTerritories—the beating heart of the ever-expanding Neyel Hegemony. So close to the innermost enclaves of Neyel influence, the odds of encountering a significant threat were vanishingly small.

Certainly, Hegemony border ships were called upon to answer distress signals from other Neyel vessels from time to time. And they still occasionally came upon lone alien freebooters, or radiation-scorched indigie refugee ships, filled past their capacity with all manner of arguably semisentient M’jallanish trash. Tuskerslayerand her sister ships had made short work of such as these as far back as Kreutz could remember.

Kreutz began to fantasize about finding an indigie refugee ship; she didn’t particularly care what kind of indigies were aboard. Such an encounter would make for a nice surprise. Mrony, the gunnery specialist, could use the target practice.

A sensor-klaxon suddenly blared, prompting the young officer in charge of Tuskerslayer’sremote-sensing apparatus to widen his sleepy, half-shuttered eyelids. His slack tail went rigid, as though he’d accidentally stepped into the ion grid.

“Report,” said Kreutz, her training quickly dispatching her prior listlessness.

The young officer shook his head. “This makes no sense, Drech’tor. The scanners must be damaged.”

Kreutz scowled. “Don’t talk in riddles, lad. What do Tuskerslayer’seyes think they’ve seen?”

“It looks like ... It appears that a seamis unraveling across the cosmos.”

She smacked her tail against the deck angrily. First he spouts conundrums, then poetry.“Still you make no sense.”

The drech’tor’s gesture seemed to have galvanized the young male. “Perhaps I can resolve an image that might render a better explanation than I can provide.”

[285] “Cause it to be so.”

The lightless deeps of Far Oghen vanished, replaced by a highly magnified, computer-enhanced image of what seemed to be a long, slender worm of the purest liquid silver. The tubular shape seemed to twist as it advanced through the surrounding dark, apparently woven from delicate traceries of light. Several faint, tentacular appendages, like meandering river tributaries, branched off from the main body, losing themselves in the eternal night.

“I see it,” Kreutz said, her breath catching in her steel-hard throat. “Now can you explainit?”

“As I said, Drech’tor, it seems best described as a seam. And a torn seam, at that. A juncture between two adjacent regions of space, that is somehow coming unraveled.”

“It sounds like a description of the spreading boundaries between crustal plates back on Oghen’s sea floor.”

“A very good analogy, Drech’tor,” said the young officer. “But an aerthquake fault might make for an even better one.”

Her tail switching back and forth, Kreutz asked, “Might this effect endanger Oghen, or any of the other Knownconquered worlds?”

The officer nodded, looking as somber as death. “It may, Drech’tor, so long as it maintains its present heading. The phenomenon’s apparent motion is determined by the direction, shape, and energy of whatever started the rent in the fabric of the universe in the first place.”

“Source?”

“Indeterminate. It could be fairly close, within local galactic space. Or it might have originated quite far from Hegemony Space.”

“How far?”

The young officer shrugged. “Perhaps from as far off as Milkyway, Drech’tor. There’s no way to know.”

Milkyway. Kreutz almost chuckled at that. The lad had [286] no doubt been reading too much romantic fiction about the Oh-Neyel of old. “Why have we received no warnings from the adjacent systems, or from the periphery outposts, of this thing’s approach?” she said.

He shrugged elaborately, his tail forming an elegant question mark beside him. “The effect seems to propagate directly through subspace, Drech’tor. It may be forming simultaneously throughout Hegemony Space. Therefore, we may be among the very first to observe it.”

“How long until the phenomenon reaches us? What is its speed?”

“Subspace interactions make its speed difficult to gauge. However, I believe I’m detecting boundary effects fairly close by.”

She growled at his tentativeness. “How long would it take Tuskerslayerto reach the vicinity of those effects?”

He looked at her with apprehensive eyes as large as Oghen’s moons. “Under ten mennets at Efti’el Factor Six.”

Grasping the club-end of her tail with one hand, Kreutz stroked her unyielding gray chin with the other. Her bare feet entered a few quick notes into her log.

She paused, wondering silently what force might be potent enough to cause the very universe itself to begin coming unraveled. Might the repeated passage of Efti’el vessels through this region of space be the culprit, stressing the fabric of the cosmos? Or could the cause be some unanticipated consequence of the recent nearby test-firing of the Neyel Hegemony’s newest weapons?

Or perhaps some hitherto unknown foe has deliberately created this phenomenon as a weapon, and has chosen this moment to loose it upon our coreworld.

That grave thought made her next decisions very simple indeed.

“Rouse the firstwatch crew. Lay in a course for the near [287] end of that ... thing out there. Update my logs and transmit them to Oghen Central. We depart on my mark.”

As the command deck filled with busy Neyel officers and the rumble of the Efti’el drive suffused the chamber, Kreutz sat back in her chair.

If this thing is indeed a weapon,she thought, then Tuskerslayer may once again be called upon to earn the revered name she bears.

Chapter 25

2294. Auld Greg Aerth Calendar

Helmrunner Baruclan rose from his station and faced the drech’tor of the Neyel Hegemony Fleet Cruiser Slicer.“We have just passed the last confirmed whereabouts of Tuskerslayer,Drech’tor.”

Drech’tor Faraerth nodded silently, staring at the starscape displayed on the viewer before him. He’d been a soft-bellied stripling when Tuskerslayerhad vanished nearly thirty oghencycles ago, and that lost vessel and crew had since ascended to almost legendary status. To be out here now, exploring in Tuskerslayer’svery warpwake after so many years and so many tales, was an overwhelming honor.

Faraerth wished he’d taken the time to compose some clever turn of phrase, some brilliant utterance destined for the ages. But now that he actually faced the prospect of venturing where few, if any, Neyel had ever gone before, he came up dry. He felt no better able to conjure words than were the Devils the Rift had recently begun sending into Hegemony space.

Faraerth gave the helmrunner leave to return to the delicate business of conducting Slicerthrough this famously unstable region of space, then turned toward the sensorman. “Show me the Rift.”

[289] “At once, Drech’tor,” said the sensorman, a compact, muscular female named Dayan.

On the screen, a tactical overlay appeared, tracing the outline of the inconstant spacefabric that bordered the Rift itself. This bizarre cosmological phenomenon—in fact a gigantic rent in the very stuff of the universe—had steadily faded into the background of space since its initial appearance mere lighthours from the Coreworld of Oghen. Many took heart in the gradual disappearance of the pars’x-long, silver-hued worm that had so unexpectedly riven the skies of the Neyel Hegemony two generations earlier.

For others, like Drech’tor Faraerth and his superiors in the Hegemony Fleet, this unforeseen change was merely a clarion call for greater caution. It’s difficult to avoid falling into a hole whose edges elude one’s sight.Fortunately, Dayan and her remote sensors had prevented Slicerfrom blindly stumbling over the hellhorizon that by turns either drove unlucky Neyel ship crews mad, or sent Devil ships out of the Rift and into Neyel territory. Slicer’screw had been vigilant. And thus fortunate.

So far.

Faraerth rose from his seat, absently using his tail to brush a stray piece of lint from the sleeve of his crisp black uniform. He’d been aware ever since his earliest flight training of his tendency to sublimate stress and nervousness into excessive tidiness. Today, he felt ready to bring the Gran Drech’tor herself aboard for an inspection tour.

He approached Dayan, who was intent on her multifarious readouts and instruments. “Ready the probes for launch, sensorman,” Faraerth ordered.

Dayan complied, three limbs working in speedy tandem to enter the complex string of instructions. The command deck shuddered in response. “Four sensor probes are now away. They should make contact with the Rift interior momentarily. The telly-eyes are already transmitting.”

[290] Faraerth nodded. “Show us what the telly-eyes on Probe One see,” he said, crossing back to his chair.

The sensorman entered another command into her board, and the main viewer shifted the starscape’s orientation, if only subtly. The great eye of Milkyway had moved slightly to port, though it remained impossibly distant, as unattainable as fabled blue Aerth itself, the Ur-world after which his parents had named him.

Staring into Milkyway, he revisited a romantic question that he had entertained in secret for most of his life: Might the other end of this Rift terminate within the ancestral galaxy, the home of the first Oh-Neyel to venture forth from timelost Aerth?

Suppose the Rift’s terminus lies near to Far Aerth itself?

Dayan’s report shattered Faraerth’s reverie. “The probes are entering Riftspace now, Drech’tor.”

Milkyway’s brilliant swirl abruptly vanished from sight, replaced by a silvery wash of static. The electronic eyes remained blinded for perhaps a mennet, shedding no light whatsoever on the Rift’s enigmatic interior. If Tuskerslayer’sbones were interred in the worm’s depths, their recovery would have to wait for another day, another ship.

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the crackling interference cleared. The viewer displayed a starscape that Faraerth didn’t recognize. All he could determine about it was that it harbored a far sparser array of stellar lights than any he had ever seen before, even in the vast, untrammeled hinterlands adjacent to the KnownconqueredTerritories.

It is just as an edgeward region of Milkyway might look,he thought. If viewed from theinside.

Emboldened by this idea, he stood and faced Dayan again. “Spread the probes out from one another to optimal survey distance. Keep Probe One posted near the Rift’s far terminus to serve as a commlink for the other telly-eyes. Then run the whole assemblage in tandem to generate a pulsar map.”

[291] Dayan appeared puzzled, but complied quickly. Within moments, the viewer was displaying a detailed tridee pulsar map that centered on the volume of space surrounding the other end of the Rift. Blood-red icons, set against a dark blue backdrop, represented every pulsar the sensitive telly-eye probes had been able to detect.

“Now overlay this image with the pulsar map of Milkyway from our cartog computer,” said Faraerth.

Though still obviously mystified, Dayan quickly did as she was bid. Within moments, a second map formed on the screen, appearing transparently atop the first. The sensor-man massaged the two images until they were exactly alike in size and scale.

The two pulsar maps matched perfectly, point for point. Faraerth’s insides went nullgrav.

“The Rift’s other end really isinside Milkyway,” Helmrunner Baruclan whispered. He, too, had evidently speculated along such lines, which really wasn’t surprising. After all, scores of popular Neyel novelists and playwrights had advanced similar ideas for many oghencycles. But before today, no one had succeeded in putting the far-fetched notion to the test.

“It appears so,” Faraerth said, his hands clenched behind his back as though each were trying to contain the other’s excitement. With a flick of his tail, Faraerth pointed toward a flashing blue icon located near the edge of Milkyway’s simulated disk. “And note the approximate position of Aerth relative to the Rift’s terminus.”

Baruclan gasped. “It lies only about sixty-two pars’x from the Rift’s far end. Can it be?”

Faraerth laid a thick hand on the younger officer’s shoulder. He did it as much to moderate his own mounting enthusiasm as the lad’s. “Maybe. Maybe not. We will need to make many observations before we can be absolutely certain.”

[292] “Once we are, we may be able to actually reach Aerth,” said Dayan, her rugged eyeslits opened up wider than Faraerth had ever seen them before.

“And enfold it within the Neyel Hegemony, where it belongs,” Faraerth said, confident that he had completed her thought for her. Since he still had no words of his own, he quoted from the Sacred Writ. “ ‘The long-lost Coreworld from which all true sentients sprang, of which even Blue Oghen was never more than the palest of shadows.’ ”

An even older snippet of skiffy verse, which his grandfather had been fond of reciting, occurred to him then. It had been one of the very few pieces of digitized literature to have been recovered from the rad-stricken computers after Holy Vangar’s tumultuous passage from its origin point to the edges of M’jallan’s Cloud.

We pray for one last landing

On the globe that gave us birth;

Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies

And the cool, green hills of Aerth.

Standing in silence, Faraerth marveled at how much closer the ancestral world had suddenly come. Sixty-two pars’x, he thought. To be sure, sixty-two pars’x was no mean distance. But it was as nothing compared to the yawning gulf of Blackempty that separated even the most edgeward Neyel outpost from Milkyway’s nearest spiral arm.

Faraerth’s musings were interrupted by the klaxon that began blaring from Dayan’s instrument array. She hastened back to her scanners to disable the intrusive sound, and immediately set about trying to determine what had triggered it.

“Well?” Faraerth asked, his impatience flaring like an old warwound.

The sensorman looked up from her readouts and displays. Confusion was written across her duty-roughened, [293] hullmetal-hued face. “I’ve just lost contact with the two farthest telly-eye probes.”

“Put Probe One’s visuals up on the viewer,” Faraerth said, still looking expectantly in Dayan’s direction.

“Perhaps thatis the reason for our difficulties,” the helmrunner said, pointing forward. Faraerth turned toward the viewer, surprised that Dayan had managed to carry out his last order so quickly.

Looking through Probe One’s unblinking telly-eye, Faraerth saw a trio of wedge-shaped, silver-and-scarlet spacecraft. Their precise size was impossible to determine. But the alacrity of their approach made their intent crystal clear.

“They’re heading straight for their side of the Rift,” Dayan reported, her voice quavering slightly. She, too, must have apprehended what they were about to face. “I’m picking up intense subspace interference from all three vessels. They must have either jammed our other telly-eye probes, or else they’ve destroyed them outright.”

“Do we fight them?” Baruclan wanted to know. Faraerth noted the dread in the helmrunner’s youthful eyes, a visual complement to the apprehension he could hear barely restrained behind Dayan’s voice.

The drech’tor chose to overlook his crew’s all-too-evident fear. It seemed perfectly rational, considering the nature of the monsters that now stalked them. Faraerth had never seen a Devil up close, but the few who’d survived such encounters had described them as crystalline killing machines, about as receptive to reason as the dead, dry stones of Oghen’s airless moons.

“Alert status,” Faraerth said, working hard to suffuse his voice with confidence. He hoped his crew would respond to it, draw strength and resolve from it. “Hard about, maximum Efti’el. Summon reinforcements from the fleet. The Hegemony will learn what we’ve discovered today about Milky-way and Aerth, but I don’t want it broadcast over the [294] subspace bands.” There was nothing to be gained by allowing an implacable enemy to learn that a Neyel crew had apparently found a means of reaching Aerth.

No one on the command deck wasted any time carrying out Faraerth’s orders. They all held fast to chairs or consoles, using feet, tails, or hands, as the velocity compensators labored to adjust to the ship’s rapid change in course and speed.

The Rift had just set a pack of Devils hard on Slicer’sheels.

And now they stand between us and Far Aerth,the drech’tor thought, his righteous anger swiftly growing as hot as the densely packed suns of M’jallan’s Core.

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