Sword of the Gods: Agents of Ki (Sword of the Gods Saga) (133 page)

"Shortwave?" Jophiel asked. "You mean high-frequency?"

"No, Sir," Klik'rr said. "Shortwave. As in eleven meters."

A tingle rippled through Jophiel's feathers. She lowered her voice, even though they were still inside her ship.

"From what direction?"

Klik'rr tapped his command console and displayed the star charts they'd documented so far on one of flatscreens which lined the bridge.

"It appears to be coming from just on the other side of this red giant, Sir," Klik'rr said.

A sun…

Solar activity…

Could be used to as a natural amplifier for eleven meter frequencies, and nobody, not even a civilian ship, would be looking for a broadcast that low in the frequency bands because nobody used such primitive broadcast technology anymore…

"All stop," Jophiel said.

"All stop," Klik'rr called down into the engine room.

The bones of the ship gave a low, moaning shudder at the sudden cessation of their subspace engines. Stopping a command carrier was no easy matter, and it continued to hurtle towards the red giant which was their only cover even though the
Eternal Light
no longer ran under power.

"Order the crew to cease all
radio communications within the ship," Jophiel said. "I don’t care if it's a personal music player. Tell them to turn it off and use the analog system."

"Yes, Sir," Klik'rr said.

Jophiel watched the flatscreen for hints of what was broadcasting that signal. It was unlikely a casual enemy scan would pick up the weak signal they used within the ship, but with so little radio wave distortion caused by the stars which
would
have surrounded them had they been inside the galaxy proper, it was not worth the risk. The same factors which had enabled
them
to pick an eleven meter signal out of the solar noise meant
their
internal signals might be picked up as well.

"What's on the other side of this red giant?" Jophiel asked.

"We sent out a probe," Klik'rr said. "There is a small black hole in the Magellenic cloud between this red giant and the next star."

"Any planets?"

"None," Klik'rr said. "Not even an asteroid."

"How close did the probe get?"

"Not very close," Klik'rr said. "With little prospect of resupply, I did not wish to sacrifice a probe."

"Send it again," Jophiel said. " Have it make a closer loop to the black hole, and then return for manual download.
-If-
it doesn't get caught up in the event horizon."

"Right away, Sir," Klik'rr said.

They waited while the probe was launched, and then twiddled their thumbs, ate lunch, and did all the usual things sentient creatures did to pass the time when pulling duty on a boring deep space mission. At last the analog wall-speaker informed her the deep space probe had returned. She went up to the war room to brief Klik'rr and her other officers who had remained loyal to her after she had fled the Eternal Palace.

She pointed to a peculiar object the probe had photographed orbiting just outside of the event horizon.

"What is that?" Jophiel asked. The image was grainy, but the cluster of objects which ringed the event horizon like a string of beads was most definitely manmade … and massive.

"We ran it through a database of all known technologies," Klik'rr said. He tapped his hard armored green finger on the tabletop. "Sir? What this is couldn't possibly exist."

"What do you
believe
it to be?" Jophiel said.

"I … er…" Klik'rr stammered. "I took the liberty of summoning one of our stellar engineers. He dabbles in theoretical physics as a hobby."

Her second-in-command pressed the call button. A moment later, in hop-walked a small, thin Delphinium man wearing the bars of a master-sergeant. There was no doubt in her mind the man worked in the engine room as his coveralls were crumpled and streaked with grease, but he had the air about him of a scientist, despite his un-scientific pursuits..

"Sir," he saluted. "Master-Sergeant Kaku'el reporting for duty, sir."

Jophiel saluted him back. "At ease, Master-Sergeant. Major Klik'rr tells me you have a theory about what this thing is?"

The Delphinium's frog-like face lit up with a cheerful grin. "It's a wormhole bridge!"

"A wormhole bridge?" Jophiel stared at the blurry image on the screen, wracking her brains to dig out tidbits of science she'd never given a second thought since the day she'd graduated from the youth training academy. "I thought M-Theory was discredited?"

"Discredited?" Kaku'el said. "No. Not discredited. For some reason, right after the Emperor disappeared, all funding for M-Theory research was cut off and the scientists reassigned to other projects. My grandfather was one of those scientists, which is why I'm so familiar with it."

Jophiel pointed at the screen. "So tell me what this is?"

Master-Sergeant Kaku'el pulled up an image onto the small holographic projector in the center of the conference table. It contained a model of two funnels with a bridge between them.

"This is the event horizon in
this
universe," Kaku'el said. "We know there are more than four dimension, though how many, exactly, is still the subject of much debate. We also know there are alternate universes, but according to the Emperor, we are cut off from those universes because it is the will of She-who-is. If, even for a moment, a black hole
here
can be induced to make contact with a black hole in an
alternate
universe, the sub-atomic particles which touch will form super-strings which remain attached. Those strings can be spun to make a natural tunnel between the two which, if it can be stabilized, can be used as a bridge to pass objects back and forth between the two universes."

Jophiel tapped her finger on her lip.

"Kind of like what the Emperor does when he fades out in one place and reappears in another?"

"Only the Emperor does that on what we hypothesize is the tenth dimension of
this
universe," Kaku'el said. "But
this
bridge. It is likely connected someplace else entirely."

"Why make contact with an alternate universe?" Jophiel asked.

"Why not?" Master-Sergeant Kaku'el asked. "It would be little different than traveling from planet to planet, only in an alternate universe, who knows what structures have arisen?"

"Theorizing it was possible to build such a bridge," Jophiel asked. "How much would you say it would cost to fund such a project?"

"Based on how much we were spending just before Lucifer cut off funding," Kaku'el said. "More than the budgets of all four branches of the military combined. That was the excuse Lucifer used when he asked us to direct our scientific curiosity elsewhere."

A trill of
knowing
rippled through Jophiel's feathers.

"And how would such a bridge be opened?" Jophiel asked.

"In layperson's terms?" Kaku'el said.

"In layperson's terms," Jophiel said.

"Well," Kaku'el said. "Picture that all sub-atomic particles are really just resonances or vibrations of tiny strings which correspond to musical notes. The universe is essentially nothing but a symphony of vibrating strings. As a string moves in time, it can warp the fabric of space around it to produce black holes, wormholes, and other exotic phenomenon which we only peripherally understand."

Jophiel remembered the small, black book the Emperor had given her; the one she had tucked into Uriel's needle when she'd sent him away.

"A song?"

Kaku'el's broad mouth curved up into a grin.

"Yes, Sir," Kaku'el said. "That is how we visualize it. Order is brought to chaos by the singing of a song."

Song of Ki. The Song of Creation. According to Uriel's black book, it claimed the mother-goddess of She-who-is had
sung
He-who's-not into creation, and that She-who-is had then used that primordial soup to shape the universe.

"And what if you wanted to
uncreate
something?" Jophiel asked.

Kaku'el frowned.

"I've never really considered such a theory," Kaku'el said. The frog-man's brow furrowed in thought, as if he was running mathematical calculations in his head. "But yes, if one set of strings vibrating in the
right
order can cause stellar bodies to coalesce, then yes, if that song was sung disharmoniously, I do believe the same principles would govern it. You could rattle the strings apart rather than encourage them to join."

Jophiel gave him a polite nod, and then ordered him to wait outside. She turned to Klik'rr.

"We have to get in closer to that object."

"We can't put you at risk, Sir," Klik'rr said. "You are the Supreme Commander-General."

Jophiel gave him a coy smirk.

"I am the lowest ranking person on this ship," Jophiel said. "E-fuzzy, not even a Private Second Class. It will be
me
who goes on this mission, a pilot, and
that
clever young flight engineer."

"I insist we send two men to guard you," Klik'rr said.

"From who?" Jophiel said. "There isn't anyone out here."

A half hour later, their shuttle was off, sling-shotting around the red giant so they could use its gravitational field to burn a minimal amount of fuel, lessening the chances they'd be detected.
Someone
was there, or otherwise they wouldn't have picked up a radio signal despite the black hole which, as far as black holes went, was small and well-behaved.

They coasted in amongst the Magellan cloud which floated along the edge of the event horizon feeding it, a baby as far as black holes were concerned, merely twenty kilometers wide. At last they came to the first of the objects, a large, pyramidal apparatus which glowed with a putrid green light.

"How does it work?" Jophiel asked.

"It would take a massive power source to stabilize a black hole," Kaku'el said. "Even a small one such as this." He pointed to what appeared to be the antimatter induction port of an FTL drive. "That appears to be some sort of feedback loop. Once you start this thing, the black hole will organize the stellar dust it feeds upon to progress it inward in a more orderly fashion, enabling this pyramid to capture some of that matter and use it to fuel the stabilization field, which in turn keeps stabilizing the black hole so even more matter will continue to feed it."

"So it's some kind of self-perpetuating machine?" Jophiel asked.

"Apparently," Kaku'el said. "But I'd love to see it in action."

They fired off their inertial dampeners to push the shuttle towards the next object in the line rather than risk firing the engine and being detected by the bridge-builder's instruments. The next object was the same, as the next one, as the next one, and the next several objects after that. They had explored the twelfth one when the pilot alerted them they were not alone.

"Sir," the pilot said. "You're not going to believe this."

"Company?"

"
Lots
of company, Sir," the pilot said. He pointed to a cluster of dots sitting just outside the event horizon, perhaps eight or nine pyramids beyond where they were now. "Look at them all! I've never seen so many Sata'anic ships in a single place. It's an armada!"

"How many?"

"At least a hundred, Sir," the pilot said. "Some of them are battle cruisers, but most of them are merchant vessels, the kind Shay'tan uses to ferry tribute back into the Hades cluster."

"We had intelligence about missing ships," Jophiel said. "We suspected Shay'tan had sent an annexation fleet to wherever Earth is, but what is it doing all the way out here? This is far beyond where Mikhail's signal could have been broadcast from."

"If Shay'tan wanted to avoid detection, he might have ordered the fleet to come the long way around," the pilot suggested.

Jophiel scrutinized the grainy image of the ships. They were too far away to get a clear image without using their long-range scanners, something this armada would likely detect.

"We need to move in closer," Jophiel said. "How are we doing on power for the impulse thrusters?"

"We can get perhaps two pyramids closer," the pilot said, "but after that, it would force us to use our hyperdrives to break away from the event horizon."

"Get in as close as you safely can," Jophiel ordered.

They had moved past the first of the additional pyramids when the greenish glow of the wormhole bridge began to grow greener and shoot bolts of lightning between each pyramid in the bridge. The pilot adjusted their flight path so they would not fly into the unknown energy source. The shuttle trembled as a sensation Jophiel could only equate to how it had felt to experience uterine contractions during labor squeezed the shuttle and made it feel as though time and space distorted.

Jophiel gripped the control panel of the shuttle in terror.