Oenone flipped over as it approached Vermuden , inverting itself so that it seemed to be descending vertically towards the blackhawk’s upper hull. An airlock tube extended out from the crew toroid. The marine squad waited in the chamber behind it, fully armoured, weapons powered up. Gravity throughout the toroid had returned to a welcome Earth standard.
Syrinx ordered the Vermuden ’s captain to extend the blackhawk’s airlock.
The Dymasio exploded.
Its captain, faced with the total certainty of a personality debrief followed by a Confederation Navy firing squad, decided his crew and ship were a worthwhile price to pay for taking Graeae with him. He waited until the voidhawk was a scant kilometre away, beginning its docking manoeuvres, then turned off the antimatter-confinement chambers.
Five hundred grams of antimatter rushed to embrace an equal mass of ordinary matter.
From Oenone ’s position, two thousand kilometres away, the elemental energy wavefront split the universe in two. On one side the stars burnt with their usual untroubled tranquillity; opposite that infinity vanished, replaced by a solid flat plane of raging photons.
Syrinx felt the light searing into Oenone , scorching opticalreceptor cells into crisps. Affinity acted like a conductor for purple-white light, allowing it to shine straight into her own mind, a torrent of photons that threatened to engulf her sanity. In amongst the glare were fissures of darkness, fluttering around like tiny birds caught by a gale. They called out to her as they passed, mental cries, sometimes words, sometimes visions of people and places, sometimes smells—phantasm tastes, a touch, the laughter, music, heat, chill, wetness. Minds transferring into Oenone ’s neural cells. But broken, incomplete. Flawed.
Thetis!syrinx cried.
She couldn’t find him, not amid such turmoil. And the light had become a pervasive pain. She howled in anguish and hatred.
Vermuden ’s distortion field distended, strengthened, applying stress against the perpetual structure of reality. An interstice yawned wide.
Chi fired the gamma lasers. But the beams raked emptiness. The interstice was already closing.
Less than two seconds after the Dymasio exploded, a blast wave of particles arrived to assault Oenone ’s hull, supplementing the corrosive electromagnetic radiation already striking against the foam. The voidhawk looked past the immediate chaos, observing Vermuden ’s wormhole forming, a tunnel through empty dimensions. Size and determinant length defined by the blackhawk’s energy input. Oenone knew the terminus coordinate exactly, twenty-one lightyears away, the blackhawk’s utter limit.
This time!Oenone thought tempestuously. Energy blazed through its own patterning cells.
No!syrinx shouted, shocked out of her grief.
There is a way, I know how. Trust me.
She waited helplessly as the interstice engulfed them, some treacherous aspect of her subconscious granting the voidhawk permission, urging them on towards retribution. Worry faded when she saw the wormhole was only thirteen light-years long. As its terminus began to open, she felt the patterning cells activate again. Realization was instantaneous, and she laughed with vengeful fury.
Told you so,Oenone said smugly.
The desperate twenty-one light-year swallow had stretched Vermuden ’s energy loading capacity virtually to breaking point. It could sense its captain prone on his acceleration couch, muscles locked solid, back arched, the exertion twinned. The wormhole’s pseudofabric slithered round the hull, not a physical pressure, but tangible none the less. Finally, up ahead, the terminus manifested. Starlight traced strange shapes as it filtered through.
Vermuden popped out into the clean vacuum of normal space, mind radiating vivid relief.
Well done,its captain said. Vermuden felt arm and chest muscles slacken, an indrawn breath.
Powerful laserlight illuminated its hull, washing out its optical receptor cells in a pink dazzle. A lens-shaped mass a hundred and fifteen metres in diameter hung eighty metres off its central spire in the direction of Betelgeuse’s demonic red gleam.
“What the fuck . . . How?” the captain yelped.
This is just the targeting laser,Oenone said. If I sense any flux change in your patterning cells I’ll switch to the gamma lasers and slice you in half. Now extend your airlock. I have some people on board keen to meet you.
“I didn’t know voidhawks could do that,” Eileen Carouch said a couple of hours later. Vermuden ’s captain, Henry Siclari, and the blackhawk’s other two crewmen, were in Oenone ’s brig; and the navy prize crew, headed by Cacus, were familiarizing themselves with the blackhawk’s systems. Cacus reckoned they would be able to take the ship back to Oshanko in a day. “Sequential swallows?” Syrinx said. “Nothing to stop them, you just need a voidhawk with an acute spacial sense.” Like you.
I love you,Oenone replied, unabashed by the alternate praise and admonitions the Edenists had been bombarding it with since the manoeuvre.
Got an answer to everything, haven’t you?she said. But the humour wasn’t there.
Thetis. His broad, smiling face covered in boyish freckles, the uncombed sandy hair, the lanky, slightly awkward body. All the hours together spent roving around Romulus.
He was a part of her identity in the same way as Oenone . Soulsibling, so much had been shared. And now he was gone. Torn away from her, torn out of her, the voyages together, frustrations and achievements.
I mourn for him too,Oenone whispered into her mind, its thoughts drenched with regret.
Thank you. And Graeae ’s eggs have been lost as well. What a terrible, filthy thing to do. I hate Adamists.
No, That is beneath us. See, Eileen and the marines share our loss. It is not Adamists. Only individuals. Always individuals. Even Edenists have our failures, do we not?
Yes. We do,she said, because it was true enough. but there was still that fraction of her mind which remained vacant, the vanished smile.
Athene knew something was shockingly wrong as soon as Oenone emerged above Saturn. She was in the garden lounge, feeding two-month-old Clymene from a bitek mammary orb when the cold premonition closed about her. It made her clutch at her second great-great-grandchild for fear of the future and what it held. The infant wailed in protest at the loss of the nipple and the tightness of her grip. She hurriedly handed Clymene back to her great-grandson, who tried to calm the baby girl with mental coos of reassurance. Then Syrinx’s alarmingly dulled mind touched Athene, and the awful knowledge was revealed in full.
Is there nothing of him left?she asked softly.
Some,syrinx said. But so little, I’m sorry, Mother.
A single thought would be enough for me.
As Oenone neared Romulus it gave up the thought fragments it had stored to the habitat personality. A precious intangible residue of life, the sole legacy of Thetis and his crew.
Athene’s past friends, lovers, and husbands emerged from the multiplicity of Romulus’s personality to offer support and encouragement, cushioning the blow as best they could. We will do what we can,they assured her. she could feel the tremulous remnants of her son being slowly woven into a more cohesive whole, and drew a brief measure of comfort from that.
Although no stranger to death, Athene found this bereavement particularly difficult. Always at the back of
