Bruno aimed just above the nearest alien shape. There was a crack of static in his headset as he stroked the trigger, and sent an invisible bolt of high-energy electrons over the tops of its waving tentacles.
The reaction was immediate.
Alien shapes turned, tentacles weaving madly, and quickly began advancing on him.
Bruno started backing toward the airlock.
“Tacky?” Carol was back on line, hissing with interference. “I'm getting a lot of static, and have lost video. You reading me?”
“I have a problem, Carol. I shot over their… well, what I think are their heads, and they seem annoyed with me now.”
“Get back inside.”
“Aye-aye, Captain, my very thought.” Bruno turned and swore again. Three of the weaving shapes crouched in front of the airlock. “I'm surrounded.”
“Shoot one.”
“I don't suppose surrender is an option.”
“It looks like they dismantle first, and ask questions later.”
Bruno took a deep breath, and aimed at one of the arms of an alien creature standing between him and the airlock. He didn't give himself time to think, and simply fired the electron-beam rifle.
Instantly, the entire alien blazed in infrared. It leaped up and away from Dolittle, vanishing into the starscape, apparently unhurt.
“Bruno,” Carol's voice hissed urgently. “You all right?”
He started to reply, then noticed one of the aliens to his right aiming a black pointed object at him. A pale purplish bolt of light filled his vision, engulfing him.
His suit went instantly dead, and his head seemed to explode. As the worst of the pain flash faded he realized that the electromagnetic soles of his boots had lost their grip on the hull of Dolittle. Miraculously his arm brushed against a handhold and he clutched convulsively. The airlock was just a few meters—
Bruno was damned if he would let Carol die alone.
Suddenly something held one his legs stationary. Then the other. Bruno pulled harder with his arms.
When he lifted one hand to switch his grip to a new handhold, something very strong looped around his wrist and held it fast. He wished that he could see, but the starlight was too dim without electronic enhancement.
How long had it been since his suit had failed? It was getting stuffy. Bruno felt something thin but very strong pry his fingers loose from his last handhold one by one, methodical and patient. He felt himself being lifted free from Dolittle, suspended and held by dozens of whiplike alien arms.
He wished that he could have said good-bye to Carol.
Bruno waited for the aliens to pull his suit neatly apart as they had started to do to Dolittle. He started yawning uncontrollably in the darkness. CO2 overload…
Just as he passed out, he felt tiny fingers of singing fire burn their way through the interface socket in his neck into his dying brain.
No strength, not even to scream his despair.
Part II
Cold Logic
CHAPTER ONE
There is a deeper Reality beneath the comfortably obvious.
Space is neither empty nor limitless. The cosmos only seems to stretch forever, from the blackened husks of long-dead stars to the incandescent fury of quasars blazing within far distant galactic clusters. Even the yawning emptiness between such objects is not truly vacant, but hums and keens with the ancient melodies of ionized gas and magnetic fields. The bare vacuum itself roils with fertile acts of creation and destruction, of particles and anti-particles born from nothing and returning to oblivion, all within the thinnest shaved shards of time itself.
Yet it was not always so.
There was a time, incomprehensible to minds constrained by time's invariant arrow and a mere three dimensions, when nothingness reigned supreme. Not emptiness.
Nothingness.
Before there was a reality, how could there be existence? Yet time does have a starting point, a beginning. Cosmic symmetry argues an Alpha Time must balance an Ultimate Omega Point. Whether by accident, natural law, or purposeful Design, something appeared where once there was nothing.
Of that mystery, nothing is truly known. Whatever the First Cause, timeless vacancy blossomed into an all-consuming inferno of creation, a totality of what would someday be called matter and energy: a universe.
The first ticks of that time were a blaze of unthinkable energies and infinitesimal motes of mass. Even light was too weak to exist unsundered and free within such an inferno. It was a time of new-birthed reality's seeming raw and unfettered rage against nothingness, an enormous beacon attempting to fill an infinite darkness.
But then as now, all things that burn must eventually cool. Entropy remains the final judge and arbiter of this reality. The bright and implacable All immediately began to expand and cool, as it would forever after that first tortured moment.
Photons at last slipped free of creation's incandescent forge, and fled tirelessly across the face of that new reality. A subatomic menagerie met and merged into new and exotic arrangements. Matter was born, and vied with energies both subtle and gross for supremacy; each won in different regions of the expanding space-time continuum.
The new-birthed universe continued to grow, still many times hotter than the core of a sun, but ever cooling. It stretched like the surface of some cosmic balloon under hurricane-driven inflation. Yet the fabric of space-time is not infinitely resilient, nor was the expansion uniform. Under unthinkable stresses, reality itself strained and groaned with the aftermath of creation's bright birth. Ripples and cracks formed in the very substance of space-time.
As fissures form in water rapidly freezing from the liquid state to ice, so was it with the very nature of reality.
These fissures, spiderweb cracks appearing in the expanding cosmic egg as it hatched, were tiny but powerful. Each crack was far thinner than an atom's thickness, yet stretched for many light-years.
The primordial cracks and fissures thrummed and writhed with raw energies and potential. Their tortured movements struck nearby concentrations of hot matter like a fist. Electromagnetic fields crackled and roared along their lengths, inducing strange and intricate patterns in local clouds of glowing gas.
Some of these cracks in creation joined, building gigantic networks of frantic topology. Still others split into smaller fissures, radiating powerful gravitational waves that spread across the new-formed universe like ripples in a pond.
The expanding universe was distorted unevenly by these tangled knots of space-time, a cosmic fork stirring the stuff of stars. Some large networks acted as gravitational foci; seeds for the aggregation of coalescing matter into what would eventually become great seas of stars. These vast stellar whirlpools would someday be called galaxies.
But that lay many eons in the future.
Most of the fissures and cracks in space-time vanished, their substance and power leached away into loud peals of gravitation tolling across the universe. The furious expansion of reality slowed, and the new universe's grand structure unfolded.
Yet some tangles in space-time remained, diminished in glory and potency. Minds which eventually came into being within our universe gave these remnant structures of anguished topology a host of names, in as many languages. Humans would someday call them cosmic strings.
But they are not strings.
They are windows.
The knots and tangles of space-time were tiny connections between the new universe and an entirely different space-time continuum. Minds roamed in that other reality, on businesses unknowable. Such minds were not constructed of the building blocks basic to this particular space-time. The equivalents of their flesh and blood were not composed of quarks and quanta, electrons and protons and neutrons. They were not subject to the forces and natural laws which bind our reality, linking past and present and future. Flavor and charm were not distinguishing characteristics of even their smallest components.