For Yirella, aloof on her digital Olympus, that instant stretched out interminably thanks to the quantum computer’s hyperfast presentation, giving her old brain cells a jolt as she struggled to cope with the massive data input. The event hit her like an ice cream headache, each aspect painfully clear.
As soon as they emerged through the portals, the five generators interfaced with the throat of the wormhole, their negative energy output locking the opening in place and providing enough power to maintain it. Less than a second later, they were buffeted by a severe gravitational distortion, coupled with a ferocious bombardment of energy beams. Simultaneous with that, the Olyix generator cut its own negative energy emission. Without that, the wormhole should have collapsed. It didn’t.
Once the defence cruisers confirmed the wormhole had retained its integrity and was under corpus control, they retaliated. The Olyix generator fractured abruptly as the entire bulk was subjected to a massive graviton pulse, twisting the internal structure into an impossible physical alignment. Then the deformation reversed. The entire generator structure shattered, jagged splinters streaking outwards. Thousands bounced off the copper shells of the corpus ships, ricocheting back wildly. The remainder formed an expanding debris cloud scintillating in the tawny sunlight.
‘We got it!’ she exclaimed.
‘We certainly did,’ Immanueel agreed.
At the heart of the twinkling knot of rubble and gas, the violet glow of the wormhole’s Cherenkov radiation was steadfast.
The remaining ten stealth craft infiltrating the star system expanded their portals. Two lightyears away, the history faction’s copper-skinned armada swarmed through – a deluge that lasted five hours. With Ainsley leading one of the formations, they accelerated in sharply towards the Resolution ships.
Saints
Olyix Enclave
They stayed in the bridge simulation as the Salvation of Life passed through the gateway. Yuri took a puzzled moment to examine the images being fed to him from the sensor clusters on the arkship’s hull. At first he thought it was just a multicoloured smear – an instrument malfunction, or maybe some kind of spatial deformation like the interior of a wormhole. Then his brain finally grasped the scale, and he recognized what he was seeing.
The smear resolved into monumental veils of gas twining around each other in a slow, almost sensual, sashay, fluorescing in spectacular hues as they crawled around their prison. A nebula, then. Caged by the enclave, a spherical zone that gave a good impression of infinity but which the G8Turing measured at about ninety AUs in diameter.
‘Fuck me,’ he grunted. Five AUs away, the star at the centre of this artificial micro-universe, just visible through the thick currents of dust and gas, was a twin of the one outside, over one and a half times the size of Sol, and burning an intense white below a highly agitated corona. Yuri had never seen so many sunspots and prominences contaminating a star. Vast braids of plasma were leaping out of the chromosphere, some soaring up vertically over a million kilometres before twirling down in epic cascades of incandescent rain.
This time the star had five rings wrapped around it. The innermost was spinning around the equator in the same direction as the star’s rotation, while the second one was just outside that, inclined at twenty degrees, and spinning in the opposite direction.
The three outermost rings were also inclined at progressively steeper angles, with the outermost encircling the poles. Unlike the solid inner pair, they were composed entirely of opalescent light that shone brighter than the corona underneath.
‘Exotic matter?’ Callum speculated.
‘That’s not the usual Cherenkov radiation wavelength,’ Jessika said. ‘But given the energy level involved in maintaining temporal flow manipulation across something as vast as the enclave, it’s got to be a variant. The impression I’m getting from the onemind is that they’re the generators, and the inner pair of rings are powering them.’
‘Man, I’m not sure I can get my head around this,’ Alik said quietly. ‘Every stage of this trip we’re seeing something more impossible than the last. Maybe humans shouldn’t have gone down the technology route. Shoulda just stuck to the caves on the savannah. Kept it simple, you know.’
Yuri couldn’t recall seeing such an amazed expression on the FBI agent’s face before. And somehow he couldn’t even snark; he was finding the enclave just as imposing himself.
‘We’re not quite in a vacuum any more,’ Jessika said. ‘That nebula has a measurable density. Take a look aft of the Salvation.’
Yuri called up the correct sensor view. She was right. Behind them the gateway hung motionless like a black version of the spectral bubble outside. As the arkship accelerated away from it, they were stretching out a long tail, like an ocean-going ship of old scoring a bio-phosphorescent wake through night-time water.
‘Why?’ Kandara asked. ‘Is this stuff connected to the temporal flow?’
‘No,’ Callum said. ‘The enclave is very finite. There’s nowhere for the solar wind to escape, so it just churns around in here absorbing all the star’s surplus energy. In a billion years it’ll be a proper atmosphere – one of hydrogen, but pretty bloody thick.’
‘And hot,’ Jessika said. ‘And radioactive. The whole enclave will wind up resembling the interior of a red giant star. But hey, with any luck we won’t be here that long.’
‘A billion years in this time, or outside time?’ Alik asked.
‘No way do we care,’ Kandara said, with a sly grin. ‘Even I never planned on living a billion years.’
‘Inside time – but that was just a guess,’ Callum said. ‘Actually, all they have to do is switch the enclave off for a day and let the nebula blast away into interstellar space, then switch it back on again.’
‘Oh, well, if you put it like that . . . Simple.’
‘It doesn’t matter how things work in here,’ Alik said. ‘No one gives a shit. All we have now is the mission. We stay alive
