It just didn’t care.
And barely ten minutes past the jump threshold, it finally caught up with me.
I could feel space rippling almost before the short-range board lit up. My inner ears split into a dozen fragments, each insisting up was a different direction. At first I thought Zombie was jumping by herself; then I thought the onboard gravity was failing somehow.
Then Kali began materialising less than a hundred meters away. I was caught in her wake.
I moved without thinking. Zombie spun on her axis and leapt away under full thrust. Telltales sparkled in crimson protest. Behind me, the plasma cone of Zombie’s exhaust splashed harmlessly against the resolving monster.
Still wanting for solid substance, Kali turned to follow. Her malformed arms, solidifying, reached out for me.
It’s going to grapple, I realised. Something subcortical screamed Jump!
Too close. I’d drag Kali through with me if I tried.
Jump!
Eight hundred meters between us. At that range my exhaust should have been melting it to ions.
Six hundred meters. Kali was whole again.
JUMP!
I jumped. Zombie leapt blindly out of space. For one sickening moment, geometry died. Then the vortex spat me out.
But not alone.
We came through together. Cat and mouse dropped into reality four hundred meters apart, coasting at about one-thousandth c. The momentum vectors didn’t quite match; within ten seconds Kali was over a hundred kilometres away.
Then you destroyed her.
It took some time to figure that out. All I saw was the flash, so bright it nearly overwhelmed the filters; then the cooling shell of hydrogen that crested over me and dissipated into a beautiful, empty sky.
I couldn’t believe that I was free.
I tried to imagine what might have caused Kali’s destruction. Engine malfunction? Sabotage or mutiny on board, for reasons I could never even guess at? Ritual suicide?
Until I played back the flight recorder, it never occurred to me that she might have been hit by a missile travelling at half the speed of light.
That frightened me more than Kali had. The short-range board gave me a clear view to five AUs, and there was nothing in any direction. Whatever had destroyed her must have come from a greater distance. It must have been en route before we’d even come through.
It had been expecting us.
I almost missed Kali in that moment. At least she hadn’t been invisible. At least she hadn’t been able to see the future.
There was no way of knowing whether the missile had been meant for my pursuer, or for me, or for anything else that wandered by. Was I alive because you didn’t want me dead, or because you thought I was dead already? And if my presence went undetected now, what might give me away? Engine emissions, RF, perhaps some exotic property of advanced technology which my species has yet to discover? What did your weapons key on?
I couldn’t afford to find out. I shut everything down to bare subsistence, and played dead, and watched.
I’ve been here for many days now. At last, things are becoming clear.
Mysterious contacts wander space at the limit of Zombie ’s instruments, following cryptic trails. I have coasted through strands of invisible energy that defy analysis. There is also much background radiation here, of the sort Kali bled when she died. I have recorded the light of many fusion explosions: some lighthours distant, some less than a hundred thousand kilometres away.
Occasionally, such things happen at close range.
Strange artefacts appear in the paths of missiles sent from some source too distant to see. Almost always they are destroyed; but once, before your missiles reached it, a featureless sphere split into fragments which danced away like dust motes. Only a few of them fell victim to your appetite that time. And once, something that shimmered, as wide and formless as an ocean, took a direct hit without disappearing. It limped out of range at less than the speed of light, and you did not send anything to finish the job.
There are things in this universe that even you cannot destroy.
I know what this is. I am caught in a spiderweb. You snatch ships from their travels and deposit them here to face annihilation. I don’t know how far you can reach. This is a very small volume of space, perhaps only two or three lightdays across. So many ships couldn’t blunder across such a tiny reef by accident; you must be bringing them from a much greater distance. I don’t know how. Any singularity big enough to manage such a feat would show up on my instruments a hundred lightyears away, and I can find nothing. It doesn’t matter anyway, now that I know what you are.
You’re Kali, but much greater. And only now do you make sense to me.
I’ve stopped trying to reconcile the wisdom of Earthbound experts with the reality I have encountered. The old paradigms are useless. I propose a new one: technology implies belligerence.
Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can’t thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony. What need of fusion reactors if food is already abundant, the climate comfortable? Why force change upon a world which poses no danger?
Back where I come from, some peoples barely developed stone tools. Some achieved agriculture. Others were not content until they had ended nature itself, and still others until they’d built cities in space.
All rested, eventually. Their technology climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—and so they do not stand before you now. Now even my creators grow fat and slow. Their environment mastered, their enemies broken, they can afford more pacifist luxuries. Their machines softened the universe for them, their own contentment robs them of incentive. They forget that hostility and technology climb the cultural ladder together, they forget that it’s not enough to be smart.
You also have to be mean.
You did not rest. What hellish world did you come from, that drove you to such technological heights? Somewhere near the core, perhaps: stars and black holes jammed cheek to jowl, tidal maelstroms, endless planetary bombardment by comets and asteroids. Some place where no one can pretend that life and war aren’t synonyms. How far you’ve come.
My creators would call you barbarians, of course. They know nothing. They don’t even know me: I’m a recombinant puppet, they say. My solitary contentment is preordained, my choices all imaginary, automatic. Pitiable.
Uncomprehending, even of their own creations. How could they possibly understand you?
But I understand. And understanding, I can act.
I can’t escape you. I’d die of old age before I drifted out of this abattoir on my current trajectory. Nor can I jump free, given your ability to snare ships exceeding lightspeed. There’s only one course that may keep me alive.
I’ve traced back along the paths of the missiles you throw; they converge on a point a little less than three lightdays ahead. I know where you are.