Netlink (14 page)

He plunged into strangeness. Stars filled his universe.

And more stars… and
more.…

Cascades… waterfalls… blizzards of stars.Dazzling hosts of stars, many brighter than Venus seen at its brightest on Earth, though most of these were tinted in orange or crimson instead of the blue-white diamond brilliance of Venus. They shouldered one another across the heavens in crowded choruses, embedded in diaphanous streams and rivers and isolated tags of star stuff.

A globular cluster!
he thought.
I’ve emerged inside a globular cluster!
Then he began studying the almost painful brightness encircling him more carefully and recognized the truth. This was no mere star cluster, but the heart of the Galaxy itself. He was adrift in a star-filled bubble at the Galactic Core.

Excitement throbbing within and behind the center of his awareness, he extended his Perceivers’ range to check his entire surroundings. First things first. Could he return?

A blurred, silver wall stretched across Heaven at his back, a Device identical, so far as he could see, to the one suspended between Frost’s double suns. There was no sign of the stellar gas stripped from the two stars. Then again, perhaps that wasn’t so strange after all. Both streams were being funneled into different gates; with the near-infinite choice of paths available in the bent space near one of those ultra-massive spinning cylinders, it would have been astonishing had the star plasma appeared here as well.

He was as awash in strangeness as he was in the light of myriad suns. Stars and impenetrable walls of glowing dust and gas created the impression of a vast, distant wall, a globe, really, enclosing him, impenetrable in a cloudy ring about the globe’s equator, thinner to the point of star-thick translucency at the poles. Other senses were bombarded besides the visual. He tasted X-rays sleeting past the
Katya,
and with them came the bite and sting of high-energy particles, electrons, and free protons whirling through the Galactic Core. Radio shrilled, a hiss like ocean surf but unending and monotonous. High and to his left, a pulsar strobed, synchotron radiation flickering in pulses measured in hundredths of a second, a steady and annoying buzz mingled with other sounds and sensations and impressions too varied and too intense to assimilate all at once. It was sobering to realize, however, that had he still been organic he would have been dead within seconds of emerging from the gate. The radiation filling that volume of space would have thoroughly cooked any creature evolved for existence on the tame and sheltered surface of a planet.

Which led to the question of why the Naga that formed most of the body of the
Katya
wasn’t being cooked. Nagas were certainly organic; they were carbon-based-organic, in fact, more like humans in that one respect than were the carbon-sulfur-based DalRiss. He queried the Naga fragment about how it was able to survive that torrent of radiation but received no meaningful answer. Massing only a few hundred tons, the probe wasn’t large enough to support many mental capabilities beyond the strictly routine management of life support, of maintaining and communicating with Dev’s downloaded consciousness, of the physics of maneuvering and control. It not only didn’t know the answer, it didn’t even understand the question.

Possibly, Dev mused, the Nagas had evolved the ability to withstand radiation eons ago because their reproductive cells had to survive the long journeys across the great central gulf, high-speed journeys that would subject them to a lot of hard radiation. He didn’t think that was the answer… the whole answer, anyway. He sensed the radiation passing through the Naga ship-body, everything from cosmic rays to free electrons. There was no electromagnetic pulse—fortunately. His survival in this place depended on the Naga’s cells being unable to conduct large jolts of EM radiation.

As he brought his initial surge of excitement under control, he began to study more closely everything within the reach of his sensors. He tried to judge the scale of the star-thronged panorama about him and failed. The cloudy walls circling Heaven, he decided, were the molecular clouds that ringed the Galactic Core, spanning a thousand light years; he could make out a great, fiery knot awash in a brilliant, hissing glow of radio energy to his right that might…
might
be the radio source known on Earth as Sagitarius B2. Within those walls, space was astonishingly empty, swept almost clean of dust and gas but large enough to still encompass uncountable billions of stars. Below, a great, tangled knot of blood and orange suns hung enmeshed in webs of gas and light, a globular cluster, in fact, in the act of being devoured by a hungry galaxy.

Ahead, though, perhaps four hundred light years distant, was greater strangeness still. Three vast spirals of gas, a galaxy in miniature, cartwheeled toward a central point. At the center, gas was compressed, violently, until it radiated throughout the spectrum from deep, thrumming radio to a cascade of glaring X-rays shining at its heart. The spiral arms were light years across; the accretion disk at the center no wider than a typical solar system. The black hole at the center, a monster possessing a million times the mass of Sol, was still invisible with distance.

Elsewhere, shapes, masses, radiations, objects,
things
competed for Dev’s attention, a tumbling cacophony of sensory detail. Above and below, gas arced in wire-fine lines, curved to outline the flow of the Galaxy’s magnetic field like iron filings over a child’s bar magnet. To the left, a neutron star, gravitationally slingshotted from the vicinity of a black hole, was hurtling through space so fast it left a wake of ionized gas and howling radio.

But one object was so close that when he shifted his view to the right and down, it dominated the sky in that direction. He estimated its distance at light weeks rather than light years, though the heart of the thing was tiny with distance. That central accretion disk was not nearly so large as that of the great central black hole, which lay some three or four hundred light years away. Judging from the probe’s gravitational sensors, it massed only fifteen times Earth’s Sun, but it was bracketed by twin beams of X-rays and cosmic rays that made it far brighter than its larger, more distant cousin. Most of the radiation was being generated by great fountains of positrons jetting out from the poles for light years before being annihilated in a seething froth of raw energy by their interaction with the normal matter in space.

Dev knew about that particular radiation source. He had a fair amount of data on file about peculiar astronomical objects, and this was one that had been known on Earth for centuries. On astronomers’ charts of the Galactic Core it carried the prosaic legend 1E1740.7-2942, though twentieth-century cosmologists had tagged it with a more colorful nickname: The Great Annihilator. That radiation signature, tagged by the 511-keV line from the disintegration of positronium, had been known since the 1970s, and in all those centuries, the exact mechanism for the creation of so much energy had been a mystery. Astronomers had been certain that antimatter was being created and destroyed here; what they couldn’t determine was
how.

Closer now to The Great Annihilator than any man had ever been, close enough to
see
the thing by visible light instead of solely by X-rays or gamma rays and the radio yowl of evaporating suns, Dev was no closer to an answer.

And there was something more.…

“Enhance,” he told the Perceivers. “Damn it, give me a better view of that thing! I can’t
see.…
”

The Great Annihilator expanded in Dev’s vision. He was looking down at it from an angle of about forty-five degrees; one of the positron jets flared up and past his line of sight, vanishing into unguessable distance toward the star-thin pole of the great bubble. He guessed that the Device was in orbit about the black hole, though at this distance, a single circuit would take millennia. With his Perceivers magnifying the view, and by stopping down the glare from the hotter, brighter radiations emerging from that hellhole, he was able to make out details of the accretion disk.

The disk itself was little more than a colorful smear of very hot dust and gas, glowing a deep, sullen, somber red-brown near its outer edges but rapidly growing hotter and bluer as it spiraled through the spectrum and swirled into the bottomless pit of the gravitational singularity at its center. But beyond the feathery outer fringes of the disk…

A
ring!

Struggling to make out details, Dev turned the
Katya
to face the enigma. Accelerating would do little good; at his maximum possible acceleration, the accretion disk was many months away, and he would expend all of his hydrogen reserves trying to reach it. But it looked as though the black hole was circled by a ring, an artificial ring more slender in comparison to its diameter than a child’s hoop.

Like the rings of Saturn or Mimir or any of a hundred other gas giants throughout the Shichiju, the ring about the black hole was probably—it
must
be—made up of trillions of separate bits, but Dev couldn’t shake the feeling that he was looking at a solid structure, albeit one on a scale undreamed of by any human engineer. At a conservative guess, that ring would be twenty astronomical units across, yet it showed what looked like regular structures, lines and marks and hard edges that carried the impression of something solid, something
manufactured.

Shaken, Dev decided that it was time to go. He couldn’t reach the thing, and any excursion he made partway toward it in the hope of getting a better view carried the risk that he would not be able to return. He and his Naga host had not suffered from the intense radiation yet, but he didn’t want to assume that they were invulnerable.

And »
DEVCAMERON
« ought to see this, this
thing
at the Galaxy’s core.

The attack came suddenly, without warning. So intent had he been on the accretion disk that all of his Perceivers had moved around to study it; the positron beam came from behind, from the direction of the Device, burning through the Naga’s thick, mottled surface like a laser through butter.

Pain…!

… as quickly stilled as the Naga switched off those portions of Dev’s awareness, but for an instant he’d felt that beam like a blowtorch eating through his back.

Shifting his Perceivers back to where he could see, he saw the ships—a bizarre zoo of wildly different shapes and sizes and textures bearing down on him out of the Device.

Katya
was not unarmed. There’d been just enough doubt about the motives of someone who casually destroyed stars with living worlds around them that they’d jury-rigged a weapon, a high-G mass driver to sling bits of Naga at an enemy, like relativistic bullets… but there simply wasn’t time to put up any kind of a decent defense. That first shot had sliced halfway through
Katya’s
hull, spilling precious hydrogen into the void. A quarter of the hull was in a near-molten state, glowing bright orange, the individual Naga cells that comprised it fused and lifeless.

He tried broadcasting by radio… but there was no response; the attackers flashed past him on every side, and more were emerging second by second from the Device. Their exit paths, he noted, were different from the one he’d arrived through. Another beam hit him; another narrowly missed as he triggered his drive, thrusting ahead at ten Gs. Blue and orange fire lit the sky, bathing him in harsh radiations.

Information. He’d come here for information. If the bastards wouldn’t talk, perhaps there was another way…

He picked a craft that was coming toward him almost bow on, targeting the center of the smooth and organically curved mass and loosing a stream of pellets. With a small quantum power tap for energy, he could accelerate several grams to significant fractions of light speed; when those grams struck, raw energy flared in a dazzling sunburst between Dev and the Device, a ballooning cloud of plasma…

… out of which the alien ship emerged an instant later. The kinetic energy released by that impact would have vaporized any human ship, but then these ships, or some of them, had plunged into the depths of a star and emerged whole days later. These things were
tough.

But then… perhaps they were mortal after all. The craft he’d shot was tumbling, part of its gray-black hull glowing blue-hot with the impact. Dev adjusted his course and accelerated. There would be no better time or way to learn the nature of whatever was behind this technology.

Naga probe and tumbling alien vessel met in direct impact, a shattering collision that shredded much of Dev’s forward half and all but demolished the alien vehicle. The shock jarred Dev, and he felt some of his programming slipping away, parts of his memory, parts of his personality literally fragmenting as the Naga died around him.

But the Naga was clinging to the alien wreckage, assimilating it like a great, black amoeba trying to absorb a bit of food larger than itself.
The alien must measure,
Dev thought,
nearly half a kilometer in length and must mass hundreds of thousands of tons.
Shock and recognition burst within his mind; the alien was much like a Naga, the ship itself a living creature… or was it, instead, a fantastically sophisticated machine?

He couldn’t tell and didn’t have time to investigate with care. He had time for only the briefest of glimpses into an alien mind…

CONFUSION.LACK OF INTEGRATION. PART OF THE WEB REFUSED DIRECTION AND HAS BECOME DANGEROUS. INTEGRATE. REINTEGRATE. CORRECTION. WEB CELL HAS BECOME CORRUPTED. NEGATIVE-INTEGRATE. DESTROY. DESTROY. ELIMINATE NONRESPONSIVE AND NONINTEGRATIVE WEB CELLS IMPERATIVEIMPERATIVEIMPERATIVE…

Contact was broken as the alien wreckage tore free, spinning clear of the shattered Naga’s grasp. Less than a third of the original Naga shell remained now, and what was left was not enough to maintain the stability of Dev’s personality. The strain of trying to assimilate, to understand that bizarre consciousness he’d briefly touched was taking its toll as well. He could still see into the depths of that mind, and what he saw there was burning, unspeakable, unintelligible horror.…