Hyperspace

EVERYTHING UNRAVELED AFTER THE GREAT RUPTURE. all the wonderful structure — the many-layered textures of spacetime — began coming apart.

Wer’Q’quinn’s experts had warned Harry. Recoil effects would be far worse in Galaxy Four, when all its ancient links to other spirals snapped and most transfer points collapsed. Additionally, all the known levels of hyperspace — A through E — would come more or less unfastened, like skins sloughing off a snake, and largely go their own way.

Not only have I lost any hope of going home, he thought during the wild ride that followed. We may all be stuck forever in some pathetic corner of a single spiral arm. Perhaps even a solar system!

That assumed they even made it safely back to normal space.

Harry’s station shuddered and moaned. All the louvered blinds rattled in their frames, while unnerving cracks began working their way through the thick crystal panes. Just outside, a maze of transfer threads churned like tormented worms, whipping in terminal agony, Spaciogeometric links, robbed of their moorings, now snapped violently, slicing and shredding each other to bits.

This seemed a frightfully bad time to try evading the speed of light with shortcuts that had been routine for aeons. Cheating Einstein had become a perilous felony.

It might have been safer simply to drop to normal space and ride out the aftershocks near some star with a habitable fallow planet. Worst case — if FTL travel became impossible — at least they might have a place to land. But Kaa would have none of that. Almost from the moment they dropped out of E Space, the dolphin took over control, ditching the now useless corvette, and sent Harry’s station careening through a nearby transfer point — a dying maelstrom — desperately scouring for a route to the one place he called home.

Harry had never seen piloting so brilliant — or half so mad. His stubby station was hardly a sport-skimmer, yet Kaa threw the vessel into swooping turns, hopping among the radiant threads like some doped-up gibbon, brachiating through a burning forest, throwing its weight from one flaming vine to the next. Kaa’s tail repeatedly slapped the flotation pad. The dolphin’s eyes were sunken and glazed while floods of information poured through his neural tap. A ratchet of sonar clicks sprayed from the high-domed skull, sometimes merging to form individual words.

Peepoe was one Harry heard often. Having done his duty for Streaker and Earth, Kaa had just one priority — to reach his beloved.

Harry sympathized. I just wish he asked me before taking us on this insane ride!

No one dared break Kaa’s concentration. Even Rety kept silent, nervously stroking her little urrish husband. Kiwei Ha’aoulin crouched, muttering to herself in a Synthian dialect, perhaps wishing she had listened to the inner voice of caution rather than greed.

Only Dwer seemed indifferent to fear. The young hunter braced his back against the control console, and one foot on a nearby window, leaving both hands free to polish his bow while a Gordian knot of cosmic strings unraveled spectacularly outside.

Well, I guess anything can seem anticlimactic, Harry thought. After watching a whole chain of supernovas go off at once — and having the Path seize you like some agonized monster — one might get jaded with something as mundane as a conflagration in hyperspace.

Kaa pealed a yammering cry, sending the station plunging toward a huge thread whose loose end lashed, shuddering and spraying torrents of horrid sparks! Rety shouted. Vertigo roiled Harry’s guts, threatening to void his bowels. He covered his eyes, bracing for impact …

… and swayed when nothing happened.

Not even a vibration. Around him stirred only a low chucker of engines, gently turning over.

Both fearful and curious, Harry lowered his hands.

Stars shone, beyond the pitted glass. Patterns of soft lights. Stable. Permanent.

Well, almost. One patch twinkled oddly, as a wave of warped metric rippled past. Tapering chaos disturbances, still causing the vacuum to shiver. Still, how much better this seemed than that awful pit of sparking serpents!

Behind the station, receding rapidly, lay the transfer point they had just exited, marked by flashing red symbols.

DO NOT ENTER, blazoned one computer-generated icon.

NEXUS TERMINALLY DISRUPTED.

CONDITIONS LETHAL WITHIN.

I can believe that, Harry thought, vowing to embrace Kaa, the first chance he got … and to shoot the pilot if he tried to enter another t-point like that one.

In the opposite direction, growing ever larger, stood the red disk of a giant star.

“Izmunuti?” Harry guessed.

Kaa was still chattering to himself. But Dwer gave an emphatic nod.

“I’d know it anywhere. Though the storms seem to’ve settled since the last time we passed this way.”

Rety reacted badly to this news.

“No!” Her fists clenched toward Harry. “You promised I wouldn’t have to go back! Turn this ship around. Take me back to civilization!”

“I don’t think you grasp the problem,” he replied. “At this rate, we’d be lucky to reach any habitable world. Clearly, the nearest one is—”

The young woman covered her ears. “I won’t listen. I won’t!”

He looked to Dwer, who shrugged. Rety’s aggrieved rejection of reality reminded Harry of a race called episiarchs, clients of the mighty Tandu, who could somehow use psi — plus sheer force of ego — to change small portions of the universe around them, transforming nearby conditions more to their liking. Some savants theorized that all it took was a strong enough will, plus a high opinion of yourself. If so, Rety might hurl them megaparsecs from this place, so desperate was she not to see the world of her birth.

Kaa lifted his bottle-nosed head. The pilot’s black eye cleared as he made an announcement. “We c-can’t stay here. Jijo is still over a light-year away. That’ll take at least a dozen jumps through A Space. Or fifffty … if we use Level B.”

Harry recalled predictions made by the Kazzkark Navigation staff — that the rupture would make all hyperlevels much harder to use. In Galaxy Four, they might detach completely and flutter away, leaving behind the glittering blackness of normal space, an Einsteinian cosmos, where cause and effect were ruled strictly by the crawling speed of light.

But that peeling transition would not come instantly. Perhaps the rapid layers could still be used, for a while at least.

“Try B Space,” he suggested. “I have a hunch we may need to drop out quickly and often along the way.”

Kaa tossed his great head.

“Okay. It’s your ship-p. B Space it issss.…”

With that hiss of finality, the pilot turned his attention back through the neural tap, to a realm where his uncanny cetacean knack might be their only hope.

Harry felt the station power up for the first jump.

I’d pray, he thought. If creation itself weren’t already moaning in pain.

Almost from the start, they saw disturbing signs of ruin — debris of numerous space vessels, wrecked as they had tried following exactly the same course, flicker-jumping from Izmunuti toward Jijo.

“Some folks passed this way before us,” Dwer commented.

“And quite recently, by all appearances.” Kiwei’s voice was awed. “It seems that an entire fleet of large

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