He handed the screen back to his Number Three and turned his principal eyes to look out at the hulk again, his rear recessional signal pit and secondary eye complex still facing the junior officer, flickering the words,
Well, one mission-part accomplished. Lay in a return to system base and, once the full contents of the abomination’s memory have been processed, deploy AM charges sufficient to leave residue no greater than elementary particle in size.
Sir.
Dismissed.
* * *
The ship accelerated smoothly but moderately hard, creating a distant humming roar. Fassin had a little pad under his right forearm which sensed muscle movements there and adjusted the screen across from him — above from him, now, it felt, as the couch straightened out and the gee-suit supported him — and so he got a glimpse of Pirrintipiti as the ship turned away from Nasqueron and headed deeper in-system, to the next planet sunward, the more-or-less Earthlike Sepekte.
On the screen, ’glantine’s tropical capital was a towered and shimmering smear draped across a scatter of dark green islands set in a pale green sea. Odd, already to be missing Pirri, he thought. He wouldn’t have had a chance to set foot out of the port there, but he’d been expecting the usual routine of transferring from a suborb to a tube train and then, somewhere in the bowels of the vast stalk, the Equatower, waiting for the lift up the cable to the satport and a space-capable ship there. To be heading straight out from the Autumn House into space just seemed wrong somehow, a curious disconnect of the soul.
Trips to Sepekte usually took anywhere from under five days to over a week at the standard one-gee acceleration, depending on planetary alignment. The ships were large and comfortable and you could move around normally, visiting restaurants and bars, screens and gyms and, on the bigger liners, even swimming pools. The weightless minutes in the middle were an interlude for fun (and, often, some rushed and oddly unsatisfactory sex). People from ’glantine sometimes found the double weight of standard gee a little uncomfortable, but it was pretty much what they’d experience when they got to Sepekte anyway, so it was kind of like getting in training.
The pressure of what the screen told him was three, four and then just over five gees settled into Fassin. The gee-suit was sensing his breaths, gently helping him inflate his lungs without too much added effort.
“Think I’ll take,” First Officer Dicogra said, “a snooze. Or would you,” she asked, “like to talk?”
“Snooze away,” he told her. “Thinking of taking a nap myself.”
“Fine. Systems’ll watch our vitals anyway. Till later, then.”
“Pleasant dreams.”
Fassin watched the screen show ’glantine drop away. Beyond it, revealed, was not initially the night of space or foamy wash of stars, but instead the broad, sunlit face of Nasqueron, a mad, swirling dance of gases the colour of some fabulous desert but moving in colossal ribbons like opposed streams of liquid around a globe a hundred and fifty thousand kilometres across, a planet you could drop a thousand ’glantines or Sepektes or Earths into and never notice the difference; a not so little system of its own within Ulubis system, a vast world that was almost as unlike home for any human as it was possible to imagine, and yet the place where Fassin had already spent most of his unusual, sporadically paced life, and so, for all its alien scale, wild magnetic and radiation gradients, extremes of temperature, crushing pressures, unbreathable atmosphere and dangerously, unpredictably eccentric inhabitants, it was for Fassin as it was for his fellow Seers, something like home after all.
He watched until it too started to shrink, until ’glantine was a mere dot floating above its vast and banded ochre face, and the brighter stars appeared around it, then switched the screen off, and slept.
He woke. Four hours had passed. The pressure was the same as it had been, the ship still roaring far away. He didn’t need any more sleep, so he went into slowtime, just thinking.
Everybody in Ulubis system knew where they were when the portal was destroyed. You knew because as soon as you heard you realised you’d be staying in Ulubis for the next two and a half centuries at least. For most people, even the vast majority — ninety-nine per cent of them human — who would never have the chance to travel out of system, that meant something profound. It meant that they were here for the rest of their lives. No dream they’d ever had or hope they’d entertained about seeing the rest of the galaxy would ever be reflected in reality.
For others, it meant that loved ones, elsewhere in the rest of the galaxy, on the far side of the vanished portal, were for ever gone. Two hundred and fourteen years to Zenerre: over two centuries for light and therefore any sort of message or signal to travel from there to Ulubis; maybe three centuries before the wormhole link was re-established, even if the Engineers set out from there with a portal-carrying ship almost immediately.
And who was truly to know if there were any Engineers or great ships left? Perhaps the Ulubis portal had not been alone, and all the rest had been attacked and destroyed at the same time. Maybe the Mercatoria itself was no more, maybe there was no Complex, no more Arteria and no more portals left anywhere and all that remained of the galaxy’s latest great civil-isation were umpteen thousand separate little island systems, fractured and abandoned and alone.
The usual wash of through-portal comms traffic just before the destruction had betrayed no hint of such a galaxy-wide attack. But then, there had been no hint more than ten minutes before of an attack on the Ulubis portal either, until the biggest fleet of Beyonder craft Ulubis had ever seen had swung glittering out of empty nowhere, throwing themselves against the single greatest concentration of ships and firepower anywhere in the system, being obliterated in their hundreds, but — effectively ignoring the defending ships except where they were directly in their way — pummelling and battering their way through defensive screen after defensive screen, oblivious to harm, straight towards the portal mouth itself, finally erasing everything around them in a flurry of immense antimatter explosions that alone announced to the system the scale and violence of what had taken place, creating a vanishingly brief cluster of novae in the facing skies of every inhabited surface, casting shadows far away, blinding those nearer-to and vaporising most of what was still left of the Beyonder fleet and many of their pursuers.
For a short while it looked as though they had failed, because the last line of defence had held and the portal had survived.
The entire attack up to that point had been a feint, and the real assault took place when a large ship — a few million tonnes of hollowed-out asteroid travelling at over ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light — flicked in from the opposite direction. In a sense, it missed too, darting past the portal mouth a hundred metres away and colliding with a collection of laser battlesats which hadn’t even started to turn towards it when it smashed into them, instantly annihilating them, the entire portal surround, its sub-units and almost all its associated systems and creating another stunning detonation of light in the sky.
None of which destroyed the portal; that was done by the relativistic mass of the sacrificed ship itself.
Portals were only ever positioned at Lagrange points or other orbits distant from large heavenly bodies because they needed a section of space-time that was relatively flat. Too great a gradient — too near the gravity well of a planet or other large object — and they stopped working. Increase the S-T curve only a little more and they imploded and disappeared altogether, usually violently. The hurtling asteroid-ship was so massive and its velocity so close to light speed that it had the same apparent mass as a planet the size of Sepekte. The passing of its gravity well so close to the portal mouth, especially at that extreme velocity, was sufficient to collapse the portal and the “hole beyond, sending one more cataclysmic pulse of light flashing throughout the system.