Resolution (94 page)

With a tendril fastened round his waist, Tom was reminded of his schoolmate Kreevil, convicted and imprisoned inside sapphire fluid with a tentacle growing from his body, joining it to some shadowed mass whose true nature Tom had never identified. But this tendril, thin and elongated, snaked out across the echoing cargo hold, carrying Tom, and then held him in place, two metres above the deck.

Avernon was working on a big macrodrone which was mag-fastened to the deck plates. A tendril held Avernon in position, and led back to the arachnargos in which he had travelled.

The drone’s hollow interior was revealed by the opened carapace. Inside, a row of fist-sized copper devices shone. They were making a high humming sound, just at the edge of audible range.

‘I’m finishing up, Tom. There.’ Avernon waved to the pilot in the arachnargos cabin, and the tendril drew him back a few metres. ‘Ready to deploy.’

The drone closed up, then rose from the deck, and headed towards an airlock.

‘How the Fate,’ said Tom, ‘do we get to see what’s happening?’

‘Um ...’ Avernon frowned, then shouted to the arachnargos: ‘Can you get us forward, to the shuttle cabin?’

There was no reply, but two seconds later Tom and Avernon were being carried towards the front of the hold, as the tendrils elongated to impossible cord-like thinness. Then they were at a softening membrane door. The tendrils unwound from Tom’s and Avernon’s waists and gently pushed them through the liquefied membrane.

They tumbled into the main control cabin of the orbital shuttle. All around the huge forward view-window was the black immensity of space. Off to their right was the white, beautiful sphere of Nulapeiron, their home.

Then the shuttle was rising through the ethereal cloud that was the spinpoint layer, where tiny dots of white light shone as proudly as if they were stars in their own right.

Beside Tom, a rumbling voice said: ‘It’s magical, by Rikleth.’ Kraiv was looking out into space, along with half a dozen other carls. ‘It’s magnificent.’

‘Inside each point of light’ - Tom pointed at the spinpoint layer - ‘time flows backwards. It’s magic, all right, but not a kind that I approve of.’

From the forward controls, a pilot called out: ‘No sign of Enemy vessels. We are clear to proceed with the test.’

Avernon pointed.

‘There goes the drone. Look.’

Tom saw it: a small shape, growing smaller in the distance.

‘It’s slowing, relative to us,’ he said.

‘Getting ready to launch the— There. They’re out.’

Copper sparkles caught the sunlight, as the tiny devices tumbled through space and the drone curved away, heading back towards the shuttle.

Such tiny things to pin our hopes on.

There was a pain in Tom’s lip, and the cupric taste of blood. Biting his own lip—

Outside, space wavered.

Oh, my Destiny.

Wobbled.

‘Avernon? They’re in the spinpoint layer, right? Your devices.’

‘Shut up.’ Avernon had no thought of Tom’s rank. ‘It’s happening. I need to analyse ...’

A portion of the spinpoint field grew dimmer.

‘Fate, Avernon. You’ve done it.’

Then something small and dark moved against the spinpoint field, and the shuttle pilot gestured for a magnified display. He opened subsidiary holovolumes, capturing other blackened shapes tumbling against the darkness of space.

‘What—?’

Blackened, melted lumps, that had been polished copper manipulators just a few seconds before, were following Chaotic trajectories in the images.

‘I...’ Avernon looked unsure. ‘The collapse should have been ... bigger. The volume…’

Tom held himself in place against a stanchion. The carls, too, were staring at Avernon, alerted by something in his voice.

‘How much bigger?’

Avernon did not answer.

‘How much bigger?’

‘A lot, Tom. I... Two orders of magnitude.’

A hundred times.

‘Can we still make it work, Avernon? Can we make a shield?’

The shuttle’s cabin felt like ice now.

‘I don’t know ... Warlord. I’m afraid ...’

Chaos.

‘... I just don’t know.’

Half an hour later, the big shuttle hung in the sky, close to Axolon Array, waiting for the terraformer sphere to extrude a morphglass corridor from one of its bays. Inside, near the airlock, Tom waited with Avernon.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Urn, yes, Warlord. I’ll be ...’

Behind them, Kraiv and his carls loomed silently. They were warriors, not logosophers, but they had picked up enough to realize that the problem was serious. Avernon had expected the collapse volume to be a hundred times greater than it was, but it was not simply a question of building a hundred times more devices than predicted. It was obvious that Avernon was no longer sure a shield was even possible.

And they knew that Tom had no backup strategy to employ against the Anomaly. Military action could only postpone the end, and not by long: maybe days, maybe only hours.

Before them, the airlock dissolved, revealing the semi-transparent tunnel which led into the largest docking bay of Axolon Array. Elva was waiting there.

‘Can you manage, Avernon?’

Walking through the tunnel, with hazy yellowish sky above and to either side, and wisps of cloud below, between them and the dark landscape ... it was not easy, but something inside Avernon seemed to have broken. He walked alongside Tom as if he thought he was going to die, and could summon no energy to fight.

The collapse should have been ... bigger.

Kraiv and his carls followed, their expressions grim.

Elva kept tight hold of Tom’s hand as they climbed to the command centre. Scores of holos hung over the conference table, tracked by analysts, but there was one simple image that told Tom everything he needed to know: a hologlobe of Nulapeiron, almost enveloped in darkness. Only a few clear patches remained, all of them surrounded.

‘We’re almost lost, Tom.’

Around the chamber, the carls deployed themselves and stood, impassive. It was obvious they were not going to leave Tom’s presence now.

‘I see. But
almost
may give me just enough to work with.’ Tom did not smile as he kissed Elva’s hand and then released her. ‘Could you go back down to the lab and check on Avernon? We need him to calculate how many shield devices are required, and we
really
need him to calculate a new deployment pattern. Get him anything he wants: he’s the absolute top priority.’

Elva turned to a holo. ‘I can do that from here.’

‘Please, Elva. In person.’

She looked at him, then: ‘All right.’

‘And drag Dr Xyenquil away from the med-wards; put him in charge of the replication teams. I don’t know the number of devices we have to create, but it’s going to be huge.’

‘Xyenquil’s a medic. He’s with the most critical patients.’

‘And he’s a damn good organizer. If this doesn’t work, he won’t
have
any patients to treat. Impress that fact on him.’

‘That I can do.’

When Elva had left, Tom turned to the carls and said: ‘Can you wait outside, please? Just for a minute.’

‘Aye, Warlord.’

Tom had to smile at the way they interpreted his request. The group split up: some stationed themselves by the doors on this level; two more descending the golden helical stairs that led to the deck below; the remainder stepped through the big membrane window and onto the ring-shaped balcony outside. There, they stood in the cold wind with their blue cloaks flapping.

Tom gestured a privacy field into existence, antisound cutting him off from the analysts at the table, diffraction causing the chamber to appear a blur, just as he would appear to others. At the field’s centre, he opened up a comms holo.

Immediately, a leather-clad woman turned to him inside the image, and smiled.

‘Well, my handsome Warlord. How goes it?’

‘Hello, Thylara.’

She was sweating, and her leather suit was smeared with grime. The holo rendered some background; Tom could see riders saddled on speeding arachnasprites, racing across uneven ground.

‘How have you been?’ Tom added.

‘Are you asking whether I’ve bedded any man since you?’

Tom shook his head, swallowing.

‘This is official, Thylara.’

‘And who else have you got there with you?’

‘No-one right now.’

‘Ha. Well, lover. What is it you want of me?’

‘I’m going to need transportation.’

‘Then buy yourself an arachnargos. You can afford it now.’

‘I need fast mobile warriors who can take shuttle pilots and some small, light hardware at high speed through dangerous territory. I’m not just talking about the Clades Tau. I have challenges enough for as many clans as the TauRiders deal with.’

In the image, Thylara looked over her shoulder at the other riders, then turned back to Tom. ‘Tell me the truth. What’s the situation, overall?’

‘Nulapeiron is almost lost.’

‘Fate.’ Thylara leaned over to her left and spat.