‘And that’s who the Sandoz encountered?’ asked Luc, unable to keep a note of awe out of his voice. ‘The Founders?’
‘Remember there is no evidence of there ever being any one race of Founders,’ the Ambassador cautioned. ‘The name is merely a collective term for an unknown number of intelligent species who independently created their own wormhole networks, but ultimately used them to access the networks of other species, over vast epochs of time. As you know, the Coalition have continued to explore the Network, despite the Schism, but always with the greatest caution imaginable. By our standards, Cheng’s expeditionary forces have been behaving in a manner almost suicidally reckless.’
‘For all your caution,’ Luc growled, ‘you still didn’t prevent someone travelling to one of your worlds to steal something that could be used to murder billions.’
‘Which is extremely unfortunate, if it does prove to be the case,’ the Ambassador agreed, ‘and it reveals a serious lapse on our part. But to get back to the point, Mr Gabion, Cheng’s Sandoz teams were not the first to encounter alien life. We first made contact with the very same alien species a few decades after the Schism. At first, our discovery was a cause of celebration: first contact with another species, via the Network. But our joy didn’t last for long. If the creatures we encountered ever had a name for themselves, we never learned it, but it wasn’t long before we started calling them the Inimicals. Communication with them proved difficult from the start, indeed more or less impossible. There are many ways to build some kind of common language – by building mathematical and physical constants, for instance. At first we thought we might succeed in learning to communicate with them, and they with us; but every time we tried to advance beyond those initial building blocks towards anything remotely abstract, we ran into trouble.’
‘You mean you couldn’t understand them?’
The Ambassador shook his head. ‘Or they, us. They showed us images of one of their worlds, dotted with what we at first took to be cities, but then later proved to be graveyards, or perhaps some mixture of both. Every time we thought we had a grasp on how their minds worked or what they were trying to say to us, we’d find ourselves having to throw away all our carefully constructed strategies as new data came in.’ He shrugged. ‘Then things turned nasty.’
‘In what way?’
‘You must understand the extraordinary lengths we had gone to, from the very beginning, to prevent the Inimicals from uncovering the route back to our own time and space until we could be certain we would be safe. At the time we first encountered them, the Inimicals had already colonized an entire hub of the Network – thousands upon thousands of transfer gates placed in close orbit around a black hole with the mass of a million stars, located at the heart of a dying galaxy. We never knew just what triggered the hostilities – whether we somehow brought it on ourselves, or if they’d intended to attack us all along – but those of us who survived the attack in our physical forms managed to retreat and warn the rest. We destroyed transfer gates behind us as we went, hoping to block off their pursuit and prevent them from finding their way back to our own worlds, but had only limited success. The Inimicals had already spent millennia inside the Network, and knew routes through it we hardly knew existed. Our exploratory teams came under attack several more times over the next few decades, as the Inimicals attempted to find some way around our hastily erected defences. In response, we initiated research programmes that constructed weapons from certain artefacts we had recovered throughout the post-Abandonment period. Using these, we managed to halt the Inimicals’ progress – but only at a dreadful cost.’
The Ambassador came to a halt as something thudded and clanged on the far side of the airlock door.
‘And that’s what the Sandoz encountered inside the Network? The Inimicals?’
‘Several Sandoz Clans engaged in routine explorations of the deep future via the Network disappeared without trace. We know with great certainty that the Inimicals were responsible. Should they manage to trace the route of Cheng’s expeditions back to the Thorne system, we will all have a great deal more to worry about than just the destruction of Benares – such as the survival of our species.’
‘But you must have told Cheng all this!’
‘Oh, we have, Mr Gabion,’ the Ambassador replied, a trace of wistfulness in his voice. ‘Despite the abundance of evidence, he and his advisors have consistently ignored all of our warnings.’
‘And that’s why you threatened war?’
‘We have no objections to the Tian Di exploring the Founder Network,’ said the Ambassador, ‘so long as it is conducted with an appreciation of the considerable dangers involved. Cheng initially agreed to halt any further explorations for the duration of our negotiations with him, but he constantly reneges or ignores every agreement we have made. We now believe he has no intention of honouring any of our demands.’
‘But why would he do that? Why take such a huge risk with all our lives?’
‘A question that has been on our minds from the beginning, Mr Gabion, but the information you have brought us may answer that question. If Tian Di agents truly have attempted to retrieve artefacts from Darwin – and there is strong circumstantial evidence to support that conjecture – it may be that Cheng has simply been stalling for time until he can acquire those artefacts. It adds fuel to our growing conviction that neither Cheng nor his closest advisors are wholly sane.’
‘So what will you do now?’
‘Since he is apparently unprepared or unwilling to deal with the threat, we will have to deal with it for him, and either seal or destroy the Thorne gate. It is likely this will provoke violent action from the Sandoz, and become a full-fledged conflict throughout the Tian Di. We are extremely well prepared, however, for the coming conflict. Now, Mr Gabion,’ he said, again reaching out with his ungloved hand. ‘Time is running short.’
Luc hesitated for a moment, then reached out and gripped the Ambassador’s hand.
In a moment, the
He saw ships like shards of black ice tear the underlying structure of space apart, triggering the death of a star in a burst of blazing energy. He realized he was witnessing a battle between
