Faking a terrible fright, Gill bent his body to the right, close to the foamy water, protecting his head with the left hand in a ridiculous defense attempt.
“It doesn’t hurt… too much,” Ugo grinned, ready to thrust the tip of the sarpan into his neck.
In the meantime, Gill’s right hand gently slipped into the water and grabbed the handle of his own sarpan. He jerked suddenly, thrusting it into Ugo’s hip through an armor joint.
“Aaaargh!” the jure yelled, surprised, and grabbed Gill’s neck with his left hand while Gill released his weapon’s handle and seized Ugo’s right arm to prevent him from using his blade.
They both fell in the whirling water, tumbling over the rock slabs. Gill got to his feet, but Ugo-Dedris’s armor became stuck between two jagged stones, leaving him pinned down on his back in the cold stream, almost entirely covered by foam. After wiping the water from his forehead, Gill unceremoniously propped one foot on Ugo’s body and pulled the sarpan out of his hip.
“Good night!” he wished mockingly, and he thrust his blade under Ugo’s chin.
In an instant, Ugo’s avatar evaporated. And along with him, the whole island.
CHAPTER 12.
The long shadows loomed across the foam of the millions of stars crowded in the galactic plane. Their dark silhouettes, without windows or visible engines, resembled the strange seeds of some plants from a hallucinatory herbarium. The front side was bulged and bent in six asymmetrical swells around a reddish-orange opening, which led straight to the machine’s bowels.
The strange devices stopped all at once to sniff the space through the red eye; they seemed to have a silent chat before they moved again, this time to form a huge circle. The back of each seed opened like a flower, revealing a metal rod that had several green, glowing tubes twisted around it. The petals extended until they touched the side ones of the nearby probes.
A second, larger circle assembled around them.
In a blink of an eye, the inside of the two circles became unclear. The stars grew very bright and stretched parallel to the circumference of the rings, the ones on the edges more distorted than the ones closer to the center.
All the ships were flying in formation, except for the motherprobe, which slipped away from them. When it reached about a mile from the circles, it opened in the opposite direction to reveal six tongues of shiny metal arched toward the center of the rings.
The opening of the motherprobe was the signaclass="underline" the probes of the smaller ring started to move in circle, first slowly, then faster and faster, distorting more and more the sticky space between them, chasing the spaghettified stars until the ones on the edges found themselves accomplice to the rush of the vortex, beginning to rotate their fusiform shape. The larger ring then turned in the opposite direction; as their rotation reached an insane speed, the image became clear and thousands of times larger than before.
The distortion had turned the space into a giant telescope, in whose center the motherprobe was scanning the dark depths, waiting for something…
It didn’t have long to wait: a blinding flash exploded inside the distortion. In a split second, it seemed as if the whole sky burst into fire, the wall of flames whirling like a mad torrent before it quickly decreased in intensity. Right in the middle of the distortion, a new star was born… the newest acquisition of the galactic catalog, named Antyra.
Deep in the bowels of the motherprobe, a blurred image formed, successive blinks making it clearer and clearer. With every click the resolution increased, the probe peeling away another level of darkness. Its hungry eye drank in the zoom’s details, working to find the source of the space distortion that had hidden Antyra for so long.
An area close to the star expanded until it turned into a planet. From a small dot, it grew so large that the scorched surface, wrinkled by deep valleys, became visible. The calculations led the center of the eye to drift near a crevice that any Antyran would have recognized immediately. It was, of course, the Blue Crevice!
The probes broke formation and turned back into the night, heading the way they had come from, running in a compact deformation front to pass the light of the firewall. After they covered a good distance, they stopped and did the circle routine again, this time without hesitation. The wall of fire erupted with all the power of the wrath kept in check by the distorter for 1,250 years. And after each harvest of photons, the resolution in the eye of the motherprobe increased.
Somewhere, not far from the place where the sarken petals were working hard at triangulation, twelve massive ghosts—this time belonging to Grammia—were sinking into the night in the opposite direction, toward Antyra. Although their speed was great, it was no match for what they could have enjoyed, had a galactic highway been built. In the future, the Federation might approve a plan to link it to the closest quadrant node—and maybe the approval would be easier to get because there was no competing interest for the string to have a different route than a direct link between Antyra and the closest space road.
The technological marvel of the galactic highways was possible thanks to the sarken road workers and their wondrous rail-planets. They built the roads by heating matter in the enormous wombs of their worlds to a temperature never seen since the birth of the universe. The fire crucible then cooled it a bit, while a small gravitational fluctuation caused a topological defect to form during the phase transition—which was the birth of a superstring.
The road was made of microscopic superstring rings parallel to one another and in perfect balance, like a necklace. Their gravity stabilized the thread, preventing the rings from fusing; therefore, only the ends had to be anchored. Countless buoys were placed along the route to raise tachyon alarms for the ships in traffic if the smallest problem occurred along the way.
Of course, it would have been better to spin a single thread, a long superstring to anchor the ships and amplify their deformation front, but despite that, its diameter wasn’t larger than a proton; a few dozen miles of the superstring would reach the mass of a planet. The Federation simply didn’t have enough energy for such a continuum.
***
The white mist dispelled from Gill’s eyes, and the slight feeling of dizziness passed in a blink.
The return of consciousness found him lying on the grass, close to a cave opened in a limestone cliff of a tall mountain. The erosion had turned the limestone into a forest of sharp rocks, resembling the thorns of an angered llandro.
Not far from him, several forked paths led to more and more caves—a true labyrinth impossible to navigate without guidance. Above the entrance of each cavern was a carved name, written in archaic letters. On the nearest one, he could read the name: “Acanthia.”
Even though the touch of the icy river had disappeared from his bones, he still felt exhausted from his warring adventure. And he wasn’t the only one. A few steps from him, Sandara was resting on the discoidal grass, leaning against her portal sphere.
The grah female slowly turned her astonished eyes on him, as if she just saw the chimera of a nifle slipping through the white pinnacles.
“Gill! What have you done?” she exclaimed, admiration gleaming in her playful eyes, calling him for the first time by his short name. “You defeated the jure! I must be dreaming!” She burst into laughter.
“Then we’re both dreaming the same dream,” he said, grinning broadly, and rose to meet her.
Exhausted, she made an effort to get on her feet. Gill rushed to take her hand to help her. Only then he glimpsed a tear in the fabric of the cliff, where a portal had recently leaked into nothingness.