Sometimes, though, you want to run aground.
Because that’s the problem with building a daisy chain: each gate only goes two ways. If you don’t like the scenery when you emerge from the front door, you can either loop around and dive through the back—head on down the road, for as long as it lasts—or go back the way you came. Eriophora spins a lone thin thread round and round the Milky Way. Any gods who follow in our wake can explore this infinitesimal spiral and no more.
That’s no way to conquer a galaxy.
You need more than on-ramps and off-ramps; you need interchanges and overpasses, a way to string all your isolated single-lane superhighways together. So every now and then we seek out one of those bad-boy singularities. We find something with the right mass, the right spin, the right charge. We build not one gate but many: powered by the singularity, but not wormholed to it. They reach further than the usual kind, they could never consummate union with the daisies in our chain: their roots may be cheek-to-jowl but their gaping hungry mouths erupt into spacetime thousands of lightyears apart, like the ends of spokes extending from a common hub.
Other webs. Other gates, built by other rocks on other paths. Those are the nodes to which they might connect. Thus do our pathetic one-dimensional threads form a network that truly spans the galaxy, that connects not just A to B to C but C to Z, A to Ω. It is these spiderwebbed cracks in spacetime that make our lives worthwhile.
Not that we ever get to enjoy the fruits of our labors, of course. Never for us, the luxury of FTL. The gods and gremlins who come after might hop between stars in an instant—but whether we’re bound for a single gate or a whole nest, we crawl.
Now we crawled toward a supernova. At the moment it wasn’t much to look at but in a few thousand years it would fall so hard off the Main Sequence that any unshielded life within a hundred lightyears would go straight back to raw carbon. It would vomit half its mass into the void; cool; collapse. By the time we arrived it would be ripe for the taking.
It would be a big build, the biggest we’d ever done. We’d have to boot up the Uterus. The Chimp would need a lot of us on deck. Twelve, maybe fifteen meat sacks all awake at once, presuming to act for the thir—twenty-seven thousand who weren’t. With a little luck and my own special influence, we could even decide which twelve or fifteen.
And for once we knew exactly where the Chimp would be.
That was when we’d take the fucker down.
We had a deadline now. So far the Lian Liberation Army had played a waiting game: gathering intel, studying the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, laying low until some unpredictable opportunity presented itself. Now the clock was running. Now there were signposts on the road, reminding us of now-or-never creeping relentlessly over the event horizon. Suddenly revolution was imminent. There wasn’t much time to dick around.
Only two hundred thousand years.
The mission continued in the meantime. Fleets of vons went on ahead to build gates for us to ignite and abandon a century or two down the road. Occasional gremlins broke the monotony. Liquid tentacles—bifurcating and flowing like branches growing in timelapse—hurling themselves out of the portal after us, only to freeze and shatter like icicles. Something almost organic, crawling out around the edges of the hoop and taking root. A flock of schooling tiles, bright as candle-flame but so thin they nearly vanished when they turned edge-on. They swarmed and linked into mosaics, changed color and pattern and for a few moments I allowed myself a flicker of hope that they might be trying to communicate—that our long-lost descendants had remembered us at last, that they were here to take us home and please God, we could call the whole thing off. But if they ever truly spoke, it was only amongst themselves.
Each time I awoke, our destination had leapt that much closer. It aged in increments, an apocalyptic step-function counting down to detonation. Sometime when I was down it ran out of helium to fuse, fell back on carbon. Sodium appeared in its spectrum. Magnesium. Aluminum. Every time I woke up it had heavier atoms on its breath.
None of us were on deck for core collapse—still too far out for the rads to do much harm but why take the chance when Eri was up the whole time, staring down the inferno, immortalizing every emission from gamma to neutrino for our later edification? Buried in basalt, we slept away the cataclysm: the fusion of neon, of oxygen, the spewing of half the periodic table into the void. The collapse of nickel into iron and that final fatal moment of ignition, that blink of a cosmic eye in which a star outshines a galaxy. Eriophora saved it all for posterity. For us.
When I awoke after the transfiguration, I didn’t even wait to climb out of my coffin. I called up the archives and compressed all those incandescent millennia into moments, let them wash across the back of my brain again, and again, until I was left exhausted from the sheer wonder of it all. In the blinding glorious light of such death and rebirth I even forgot what it meant to us, here in this speck of rock.
I forgot, for a few precious moments, that we were at war.
Kaden and Kallie were already at the tac tank when I arrived. They must’ve replayed the explosion in their own heads as I had in mine but there they were, transfixed by the luminous aurorae in that display: that intricate web of cooling gas, the tiny blinding dot of x-rays at its heart, the darker dot hiding inside the brighter one. Who cared if every shimmer was an artifact, if our naked eyes—staring out some porthole at the same vista—would see nothing but space and stars? The limits were in our senses, not the reality; human vision is such a pathetic instrument for parsing the universe.
“Doron?” I asked. The manifest had brought all four of us on deck this time around; a binary with a lot of comets and a few too many organics to trust Chimp alone with the goldilocks protocols.
“On his way,” Kaden said. “Just checking the Glade.”
That was actually my job. Not that it mattered. I’d just been too preoccupied with the light show.
“God,” Kallie said softly. “It’s gorgeous.”
Kaden nodded. “’Tis. Really nice spot for a—oh, shit.”
I joined them at the tank. “What?”
Se tagged a dim red dot lurking stage left. “That dwarf. It’s not just passing by. It’s falling onto orbit.”
Se was right. By the time we arrived on the scene, the newborn hole would have its very own companion star.
I shrugged. “It’s a cluster. Bound to happen sooner or later.”
“The accretion disk is gonna be a motherfucker, is all I’m saying.”
“Hey, at least we won’t be wanting for raw materials,” Kallie said.
“We should give it a name.” Kaden thought a moment. “Oculus Dei.”
“Latin? Seriously?” Through the open hatch, the faint whine of Doron’s approaching roach floated up the corridor.
“So what’s your suggestion?”
I felt myself drawn back into the display, into that pulsing black heart at its center. “Nemesis,” I murmured. Just outside, I could hear Doron parking his roach.
“Charlotte,” Kallie said, and giggled.