Void, an irresistible, diabolical tide. Drowning entire worlds, with clocklike precision. Pumped into the system by the rhythm of a cosmic heart. And not one wave. Three waves. Maybe a thousand waves, their crests separated by 108 light-years.
To what purpose?
Was it happening everywhere? All along the Arm? On the other side of the Galaxy? 'The big telescope,' he said.
Hutch looked at him. 'Pardon?'
'I was thinking about the telescope at Beta Pac. It was pointed toward the Magellanic Clouds.'
'You figure out why?'
'Maybe. The Monument-Makers knew about the dragons. Do you think they might have been trying to find out whether other places were safe? Beyond this galaxy?'
Hutch listened to her pulse. 'That's a good question,' she said.
1600 hours.
The Knapp was approaching from sunward. Carson talked at length with David Emory. Despite the time delay, the conversations distracted him from the moment-to-moment terrors of the ride through that fierce sky. Emory asked about everything, the conditions in the city by the harbor, what they had seen at the space station, how they had found the dragon. He expressed his sorrow at the loss of their colleagues. He had known Maggie, had worked with her, admired her. 'I never met George,' he said.
Carson had by then changed places with Hutch. In the cockpit, Angela asked if she understood why Emory was so inquisitive.
'He doesn't expect us to survive,' she guessed. 'He doesn't want mysteries afterward. So he's getting all his questions in now.'
1754 hours.
They had left the dragon behind, and the sun as well, and passed onto the night side. But an eerie red glow lay on the horizon. Below, the land flowed past, rendered soft and glossy by the snow. 'We'll go another hour or so,' Angela said, 'and then we'll look for a plain somewhere, as flat as we can find, where nothing can fall on us.'
The pictures coming in from Knapp revealed that the anomaly had become so tenuous, so inflated, so unraveled, that one could not say precisely where it was. It seemed to have spilled across the system of moons and rings.
At the target area, monitored by the cameras, boiling light filled the sky.
7952 hours.
The shuttle cleared a range of glaciers and glided low over country that was flat and featureless, save for a few hills on the horizon. They had come approximately halfway around the globe. 'Ideal,' said Carson. 'Let's park it right here.'
On board NCA Ashley Tee. 2006 hours.
Ashley reached the end of its forward flight. For a microsecond, a flicker of a moment, it came to an absolute halt, relative to Delta. Then the instant was gone, and it reversed course and began its return. Inside the ship, the moment would have gone unnoticed (the thrust, after all, continued unabated from the same quarter of the vessel), had not a green console lamp blinked on.
'Closing,' said Drafts. He knew that Janet had seen the signal, had in fact been watching for it. But it was something to say. A benchmark to be noted. They were, at last, on their way.
2116 hours.
Angela gave up trying to raise the ships. 'It's getting worse,' she said. Her gauges were all over the park. 'That thing is putting out a hurricane of low-frequency radiation, mostly in the infrared, microwave, and radio bands. But we're lucky: it could just as easily be generating X-rays, and fry us all.'
Their own sky was almost serene, save for the angry glow on the horizon.
2304 hours.
Two hours to impact. More or less. With so ephemeral an object, who could know?
Transmissions from the mesa site were garbled beyond recovery. Angela switched away from them. She also shut down all nonessential systems, and did a strange thing: she turned out the cockpit lights, as if to conceal the location of the shuttle.
The conversation was desultory. They talked about incidentals, how strange the sky looked, how nobody was going to leave home again. And they reassured one another.
Had long-dead Pinnacle experienced these things? 'They have to be part of the natural order,' Carson said. 'Every eight thousand years they come in and take you out. Why?'
'It's almost as if,' said Angela, 'the universe is wired to attack cities. Is that possible?'
Hutch sat in the darkness, feeling like prey. What was the line Richard had quoted? Something there is that doesn't love a wall. 'It might be,' she said, 'that it's part of a program to protect life.'
Carson's brows drew together. 'By blowing it up?'
'By discouraging the rise of dominant species. Maybe it's a balancing effect. Maybe the universe doesn't approve of places like New York.'
In the west, they saw lightning. Coming this way.
'Air pressure's going down fast,' said Angela. The ground shook. It was only a tremor, a wobble. 'Maybe we should get back upstairs.'
'No.' Carson sank into his chair and tried to relax. 'We're safer here.'
Monday; 0004 hours.
Ashley was accelerating. But whatever was going to happen would be over long before they arrived on the scene. Janet had spent much of her time trying to talk with Emory, but the signals had faded in the electromagnetic flux created by the dragon. On her screens, Delta and the thing had joined. Drafts was frantic, and had grown worse as the hour approached. He was not helped by the loss of communications. And being pinned in his web chair did nothing to ease his frustration.
Janet tried to sound optimistic. Hutch and Angela Morgan together! If there was a way to survive, she knew one or the other would find it.
0027 hours.
The skies flowed past, churned, exploded. Heavy bolts ripped the night, and the wind howled around them. Snow and ice rattled against the shuttle.
The plain trembled. One by one, the shuttle's monitors died.
Carson hovered in the rear doorway, between the two women. 'We're doing okay,' he said.
'Never better,' said Hutch.
'You betcha,' said Angela, with mock cheer. 'Here we sit with God coming after us.'
'We'll be fine,' said Carson.
There was no point at which it could be said that contact actually occurred. The dragon no longer possessed defini-
live limits. It had opened out. Filaments tens of thousands of kilometers long had broached Delta's atmosphere hours earlier. But Carson and the women knew that the moon was now firmly in the embrace of its fierce visitor.
The air was thick with ash and snow. It drifted down onto the plain, and a black crust began to form.
'Maybe,' said Angela, 'there really is no core.'
'Let's hope not,' said Carson. And he was about to add, optimistically, that maybe it wouldn't be much worse than a large storm after all, when white light exploded overhead, and a fireball roared out of the sky and
