“I know Dexter.”
“No you don’t. You wouldn’t be doing this if you did.”
The pictures transmitted from Swantic-LI had been accurate after all. From a distance of a million kilometres, the shape of the Sleeping God was quite unmistakable: two concave conical spires end to end, three and a half thousand kilometres in length. The perfectly symmetrical geometry betrayed its artificial origin. The central rim was sharp, appearing to taper down to an edge whose thickness was measured in molecules; its tips had an equally rapier-like profile. There wasn’t anyone on board Lady Mac who didn’t have an uncomfortable vision of the starship being impaled on one of those sleek spikes.
Beaulieu launched five astrophysics survey satellites towards it. Fusion-powered drones with multi-discipline sensor arrays, they arched away from the starship on trajectories that would position them in a necklace around the Sleeping God.
Joshua led the whole crew down to the lounge in capsule C where Alkad, Peter, Renato, and Kempster were gathered to interpret the data from the satellites and Lady Mac ’s own sensor suite. Samuel, Monica, and one of the serjeants had also joined them.
Studio-quality holographic screens sprouted from the consoles installed to process the astrophysical data. Each one carried a different image of the Sleeping God, they were tinted every shade in the rainbow, as well as providing graphic representations. Their main AV projector showed the raw visual-spectrum picture, materializing it in the middle of the compartment. The Sleeping God gleamed alone in space, sunlight bouncing off its silver surface in long shimmers. That was the first anomaly, though it took Renato a full minute of puzzled study to see the obvious.
“Hey,” he exclaimed. “There’s no darkside.”
Joshua frowned at the AV projection, then accessed the console processors directly to check. The satellites confirmed it: every part of the Sleeping God was equally bright, there were no shadows. “Is it generating that light internally?”
“No,” Renato said. “The spectrum matches the star. Light must be bending round it somehow. I’d say it has to be a gravitational lens, an incredibly dense mass. That ties in with the Tyrathca observation that it’s a spatial disturbance.”
“Alkad?” Joshua asked. “Is it made out of neutronium?” That would be the final irony if a God was made from the same substance as her weapon.
“A moment, Captain.” The physicist seemed troubled. “We’re getting the data from the gravitational detectors on line.” Several hologram screens flurried with colourful icons. She and Peter read them in surprise. They turned in unison to stare at the central projection.
“What is it?” Joshua asked.
“I would suggest that this so-called God is actually a naked singularity.”
“No fucking way!” Kempster said indignantly. “It’s stable.”
“Look at the geometry,” Alkad said. “And we’re detecting a torrent of gravitational wave vacuum fluctuations, all of them at very small wavelengths.”
“The satellites are picking up regular patterns in the fluctuations,” Peter told her.
“What?” She studied one of the displays. “Holy Mary, that’s not possible. Vacuum fluctuations have to be random, that’s why they exist.”
“Ha,” Kempster grunted in satisfaction.
“I know what a singularity is,” Joshua said. “The point of infinite mass compression. It’s what causes a black hole.”
“It’s what causes an event horizon,” Kempster corrected. “The universe’s cosmic censor. Physics, mathematics—they all break down in the infinite, because you can’t have the infinite, it’s unobtainable in reality.”
“Except in some very specific cases,” Alkad said. “Standard gravitational collapse in stars is a spherical event. Once the core has compressed to a point where its gravity overcomes thermal expansion, everything falls into the centre from all directions at once. The collapse finishes with all the matter compressing into your infinity point, the singularity. At which time its gravity becomes so strong that nothing can escape, not even light: the event horizon. However, in theory, if you spin the star before the event, the centrifugal force will distort the shape, expanding it outward along the equator. If it’s spinning fast enough, the equatorial bulge will remain during the collapse.” Her finger indicated the projected image. “It will form this shape, in fact. And right down at the very end of the collapse timescale, when the star’s matter has all achieved singularity density, it will still be in this shape, and for an instant, before the collapse continues and pulls it into a sphere, some of that infinite mass will project up outside the event horizon.”
“For an instant,” Kempster insisted. “Not fifteen thousand years.”
“It looks as though someone has learned how to freeze that instant indefinitely.”
“You mean like the alchemist?” Joshua datavised to her.
“No,” she datavised back. “These kind of mass-densities are far outside any I achieved with the alchemist technology.”
“If its mass is infinite,” Kempster recited pedantically, “it will be cloaked in an event horizon. Light will not escape.”
“And yet it does,” Alkad said. “From every part of the surface.”
“The vacuum fluctuations must be carrying the photons out,” Renato said. “That’s what we’re seeing here. Whoever created this has learned how to control vacuum fluctuations.” He grinned in wonder. “Wow!”
“No wonder they called it a God,” Alkad said in veneration. “Regulated vacuum fluctuations. If you can do that, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.”
Peter gave her a private, amused look. “Order out of chaos.”
“Kempster?” Joshua queried.
“I don’t like the idea,” the old astronomer said with a weak grin. “But I can’t refute it. In fact, it might even explain Swantic-LI’s jump to another star. Vacuum fluctuations can have a negative energy.”
“Of course,” Renato said. He smiled eagerly at his boss, catching the idea quickly. “They’d be exotic, that’s the state which holds a wormhole open. Just like a voidhawk’s distortion field.”
Samuel had been shaking his head as the discussion ploughed onwards. “But why?” he said. “Why build something like this, what is it for?”
“It’s a perpetual source of wormholes,” Alkad said. “And the Tyrathca said it assists the progress of biological entities. This is the ultimate stardrive generator. You could probably use it to travel between galaxies.”
“Christ, intergalactic travel,” Liol said dreamily. “How about that.”
“Very nice,” Monica retorted. “But it hardly helps us to deal with possession.”
Liol gave her a pained glance.
“Okay,” Joshua said. “If you guys are right about this being an artificially maintained naked singularity, there must be some kind of control centre for the vacuum fluctuations. Have you found that yet?”
“There’s nothing out there except the singularity itself,” Renato said. “Our satellites are covering all of the surface. Nothing hiding on the other side, nothing in orbit.”
“There has to be something else. The Tyrathca got it to open a wormhole for them. How do we do that?”
His neural nanonics reported a new communication channel opening. “You ask,” the singularity datavised.
The cloud’s luminosity remained constant, but its shading had shifted a long way down the spectrum as Louise approached its epicentre. When she walked across the paved plaza outside St Paul’s cathedral every surface was toned a deep crimson. Stone carvings embellishing the beautiful old building cast long black shadows down the wall, ebony jail bars gripping it tightly, squeezing away the last remnants of sanctity.
Her escort pranced around her like insane Morris dancers, inviting her onward with mocking gestures. The snarls of thunder ended as she reached the large oaken doors, leaving an onerous silence. Louise walked into the cathedral.