The Darkness of God: Book Three of the Shadow Warrior Trilogy (27 page)

His hand fumbled in a pocket, came out with a gray stone, the Lumina he’d taken from Joshua Wolfe, and brandished it like a talisman. The Al’ar brushed it aside, and it smashed to the deck and shattered.

The alien changed, and for an instant Cisco saw Joshua Wolfe reaching for him. Then the grasping organ touched Cisco’s chest, and he screamed, flung back as if smashed by a blaster bolt.

The Al’ar vanished.

Hastings had time enough to manage, “What in Mithra’s holy name was …” Then three missiles hit the
Andrea Doria,
and it broke in half. The rear half exploded, the forward section spun away from the battle, into an orbit without end, vanishing into emptiness.

• • •

Then there were fewer ships and fewer still as Chitet ships broke and ran for hyperspace, and Federation ships went after them, or fled on their own. There were no more than a dozen of Man’s ships left in that outer darkness.

“End contact,”
Cerigo commanded, and Wolfe obeyed, pulling his “fingers” back, away. He sat on the bridge of the
Grayle,
panting as if he’d fought a tournament.

“The way is clear,”
Cerigo said.

“Yes,”
Joshua agreed.
“Slave all ships to mine. Now we must approach our real enemy.”

• • •

The
Grayle
emerged in the depths of what had been the Al’ar Worlds. Joshua
felt
redness, death, change, all around him, and his body burned, as if too close to an all-surrounding fire. The stars were dim, the planets indistinct, their shapes blurred, red around them, consuming them, changing them into itself.

The
Nyarlot
and the robot-ships were there.

Joshua
heard
hisses of rage from the Guardians aboard the
Nyarlot
as they sensed their ancient enemy.

No commands were given, none were necessary, and the ships spat heavy missiles at the entity, at what should have been empty space, but Wolfe saw it as red-speckled, pulsing like a diseased organ.

Nuclear fires blossomed, died.

Joshua’s burning pain ebbed, returned more strongly, ebbed once more.

He
saw,
aboard the
Nyarlot,
a fighting pod, as Al’ar flesh smoked, curled, and blackened, and Guardians fell, dying, dead.

A small sun was born in nothingness as the Al’ar sun-ray activated, and fire ravened at the alien. Joshua felt it shrink, writhe.

The sunray burnt itself out, and the alien gathered its force, its power.

Suddenly the
Nyarlot
’s drive went to full power, and it drove away from the
Grayle.

“Die well, One Who Fights From Shadows,”
came Cerigo’s last broadcast.
“Die as we die. Die as an Al’ar.”

The
Nyarlot
’s
e
ngines, fuel, and missiles exploded as one. Flame seared at Wolfe’s eyes, and his screens blanked for a moment. He
felt
the Guardians, the last of the Al’ar, leave this spacetime.

“May you be on The Crossing,”
he said without realizing it. The pain was gone momentarily, and he
felt
the invader recoil. He took the deaths of the Guardians and threw them at the “virus” as he’d once hurled Taen’s death at his murderer to slay him.

The Lumina floating behind him was a flare of solid white, starlike, flaming hot.

Now he saw the invader not as the “red virus,” but, in flashes, as the Al’ar might have, great writhing fanged crawlers, worms, the monstrous worms that had forced the ground creatures who became the Al’ar from their burrows to the surface and then to the stars.

The worms became the serpent of Midgard, gnawing at Yggdrasil for an instant. But Wolfe’s “eyes” went beyond, saw the bits that composed the “virus,” reached below the molecular, the atomic levels, and
felt
the resonance of its ultimate bits.

He allowed the resonance for an instant, absorbed it, then forbade it.

The alien strings/not-strings hummed down into silence, and there was a vortex of nothingness, absolute nothing, not matter, not energy, not antimatter, at the core of the invader, spreading, eating, a not-cancer.

Far away, Joshua
felt
the rift in space, then was standing in the huge cavern, hearing the dripping of liquid from its walls, and the monstrous stone door, carved with strange symbols, was in front of him.

The door to the universe the invader had come from yawned open. Behind him, coming toward him, he
felt
the invader, trying to flee, trying to return to its own place, the universe it had created that became itself.

Wolfe stretched out a hand, and the door boomed shut, and the sound of the booming echoed through creation. He reached up, pulled rock from the ceiling, and it cascaded down with a rumble, burying the passage to the door that his mind had created from a different reality, sealing the rift between universes.

The “virus,” the invader, was around him, and he
felt
it, had it cupped in his hands. He considered it coldly, then denied it permission to exist.

A soundless scream came, like the tearing of dimensions, and the invader was gone.

Joshua Wolfe hung in space. He was enormous, he was subatomic. He
felt
the rhythm around him, normal, strange, warm, cold, dark, light.

Stars were above, below, next to him. He studied them for a long time. Some he knew, others were strange. Far in the distance was a familiar yellow star. He approached it, saw its nine worlds. He leaned over one, blue, green, and white, and knew it for his birthplace.

Wolfe stretched out a hand to touch Earth.

His nose tickled.

Joshua Wolfe was on the bridge of the
Grayle.
Behind him, the Lumina rotated, sending its comfortable, familiar colors around the control room. Wolfe thought of a ceiling, of an artist. His nose still tickled.

He scratched it.

Then he burst into laughter, great, booming waves of total amusement.

The
Grayle
orbited a system that had lived and died long before Man, a system without a name, only a number. Its planets had been devoured when the sun went nova, and now there was nothing but the dying star and a tiny starship.

Wolfe relaxed in a chair, gazing at the screen in front of him. He poured the last of the bottle of Hubert Dayton he’d husbanded in the ship’s safe for years, savored its burn, tasted the grapes of Gascony, remembered a winding road, a girl’s laughter, the acrid smell of woodsmoke as the pruned vines burned, a cold wind coming down from the massif, a storm minutes behind, and the welcome flicker of the fire in the tiny cottage ahead.

“A long time ago,” he said, lifting the snifter in a toast. “Quite a run,” he said. “They gave me quite a run indeed.”

A Une from the long-dead poet came:

“In my end is my beginning.”

He said the words aloud in Terran, then again in Al’ar. Something that might have been a smile came and went on his lips. He drained the snifter.

Wolfe stood. He gave a series of coordinates.

“Understood,”
the
Grayle
said.
“Awaiting your command.”

The flames of the red giant reached for him, welcoming. “Go.” The ship’s drive hummed to life.

He crossed his arms across his chest, brought them slowly out, palm up, as his breathing slowed. The Great Lumina roared life, incandescent as never before. The bits of matter that had been Joshua Wolfe stilled, were motionless.

Joshua Wolfe’s corpse slid to the deck. The slight smile still remained on his lips.

The
Grayle,
at full drive, plunged into the heart of the dying sun.