“A black hole.”
“That’s why Taggart seeks to find this place. The gravity of that singularity affects every star, every planet, every moon, circumfercirc, ship, asteroid, the list does not end. He intends to destroy civilisation in its entirety with this tiny device.”
“Such must be the wrongs that were committed against his people.”
“I did once come here, before,” said Jed. “There were no chimaera here, only large Heralds. It was not a good place to hunt. The accretion disc was not so turgid then, if I remember.”
“Perhaps it has a cycle, as do some stars.”
“You should rest now.”
“Will you not rest?”
Jed looked back at Wolff. “I cannot. If I don’t keep vigil, there is nothing to stop one of the Heralds coming at us.”
* * * *
Jed watched the chimaera bound toward the bright accretion disc as Wolff slept fitfully. She could not sleep, and she could not leave, and progress was slow in the damaged ship. She leant on the window, and a deep despair she felt pulling on her as much as she did the singularity. In coming where none dared follow, she had immured herself in her own trap. The thought of a distress call came to her again. Mathicur would kill her if she found Jed here with Gerald Wolff. She pressed her forehead against the vitreous alloy and closed her eyes. She had been to this place once before.
Look
, Mathicur had ordered her, and it had been too horrible, too immense, too engulfing and alarming. Jed saw something nightmarish and hideous about that point in time and space where everything became nothing. Something about seeing it in the middle of that sickly torus and knowing it was there had eroded away the final vestigial illusions of safety Jed had still held before she had come here. It was as though her memories of her life before, of her father holding her in his arms with that reassurance of absolute security and safety, were all swallowed by this Dark Tempest. It was the end of childhood, and Jed was not prepared and she did not welcome it.
No, she would not bring Mathicur here. She would never regain what Dark Tempest had taken from her, and now she knew and accepted deep inside her that what had taken away her soul had brought her back, and it would claim her mind and body. She opened her eyes, her mind empty, and looked her nemesis in the eye, and she was at Equilibrium. A shockwave spread across the accretion disc, the gas clouds ripping into reams of tattered fibres.
“Something is happening!”
Wolff was on his feet and at her side, then a pillar of light shot up into space, perpendicular to the disc’s plane. Arcs of blue gas leapt from the center of the torus, bending into parabolic shapes under some weird magnetic field. “The black hole is emitting energy?” Wolff gasped.
Jed examined the view with the
Shamrock’s
tachyon scanners. Massive radiation of every frequency and wavelength streamed from the accretion disc. “It’s the accretion disc that’s emitting stuff, not the singularity.”
Wolff stared at the spectacle, his mouth open, absorbing whatever information it was his eyes did see and the images Jed was supplying him with. “The matter must be spinning so fast down there that it’s like an enormous synchrotron.”
But something had drawn Jed’s attention away from the singularity. The movement of the chimaera surrounding the
Shamrock
had changed. Like dancers answering the call of music, the chimaera separated into pairs, male and female, and took up their places. One pair drifted not far from the
Shamrock’s
bridge windows, and Jed watched as first the one with the potassium barbs began to turn about its forward center point, slewing its long tail around and around, spinning faster and faster. Its partner, too, suspended above it, began to rotate in the counter direction, and when she cast about with her eyes and the ship’s senses, every chimaera pair in range behaved likewise.
The male chimaera’s tail glowed, and with a flare of light, its propulsion exploded. The tail began to burn out, disintegrating from the tip in toward the body, the potassium barbs consumed to fuel a bright purple beam of light that connected the spinning chimaera to its dance partner.
“They’re
mating
.” Jed breathed in awe. “They
must
be. No one has ever seen this before.”
“The light? Is that how they transmit their genetic material?”
“It must be so! The ones with the potassium tail barbs must be males! They use a redox reaction to generate light from it, and use that as a carrier wave to transmit their genetic material to the females.”
The male chimaera’s tail had burnt away now, and the beam of light broke off. The pair began to drift apart, as did all the others. The males, their source of locomotion destroyed in the act of procreation, tumbled helpless toward the accretion disc. The females, still spinning, held their position a little longer before following them.
“I don’t understand.” Jed leant against the window, trying to see the chimaera as they dwindled away. “They’re falling toward the singularity. Their spawn or eggs or whatever they have will fall under the event horizon and be wasted.”
“
Look
,” said Wolff behind her, his voice filled with wonder. “With the tachyon senses, into that light coming up from the center.”
He was right. Riding in the blazar jet were billions upon billions of tiny motes—the fry of the chimaera—being carried off into the halo at near the speed of light by the intense radiation.
The Archer and the halfBlood both gazed upon the blazar, the chimaera, and the storm at the center of the galaxy, until the ship’s senses alerted Jed to another object.
“The
Bellwether
,” she said.
Wolff’s shoulders collapsed. “Curse Taggart!” He cast about the bridge. “Where is that device? Why do we not use it for him? We are doomed anyway, and why spend the last moments of our life running from him?”
Jed turned to Wolff, and his fierce grey eyes met her. “
Use
it?”
“There is nothing by the hand of man in this galaxy that is good.”
“There is nothing in it that is evil, either. Can you say that every man in this galaxy has wronged you and deserves to die for it?”
“All men. They argue over insignificant matters, the Blood, the Moiety.” Wolff gestured to the scene outside the bridge windows. “There are bigger things in this galaxy than men, who think they are above nature and that it is theirs to plunder, even you, Archer. I see your pride, but I see you, and I see that you do not like what you are. I see children brutalised in the name of the Code. I see men of the Blood, masquerading, conniving, scheming, and I see men not of the Blood, who crawl, and fight, and hate.”
“I cannot leave this ship. I am a part of it. I did not choose the path of the Archer, and it was not my choice to make, but it was the only choice. It is what I was born to be.”
“But it is
wrong
.” Wolff clenched his fists and gazed down upon the surface of the bridge floor.
“We are as we are, it is the only way. The moment our science became so powerful we could rid ourselves of predators and disease, rise above natural selection, we sentenced ourselves to this fate. The lower castes only exist as vessels of genetic material that should have been selected out.” Jed turned from him and leant against the bridge window, looking out on the chimaera falling into the accretion disc. “If civilisation was destroyed today, there would be survivors on planets and in places where machines are not depended upon for survival. They would only re-evolve their technology and their caste system, and what’s more in the meantime they would evolve to be different from each other, as the Geminals did, and when they did encounter each other, they would wage war.”
“I have no faith in men,” Wolff said. “They do not deserve to be the custodians of this galaxy.”
“You cannot stop men from breeding. However egalitarian anyone’s intentions may be, the end result will always be the same, so long as men do not obey Darwin’s laws. There is nothing you, or I, or any man can do to make it different.”
Wolff laid one hand on Jed’s shoulder, the other on the elbow of her other arm, and leant against the ship, close to her back. “What are we to do now then?”
“We must destroy this thing, so that if the
Bellwether
captures us, they shall not have it. Then...” Jed watched the chimaera a little longer. “I would choose a swift death in freedom, over death at Taggart’s hands or a lingering starvation.”
In the armoury, Jed gave the command to the ship to open the loophole. She took up her bow and a combat arrow, before glancing once at Wolff.
The man’s eyes had stopped bleeding, although they were still heavily bloodshot and inflamed about the lids. The radiation burns on his face and the whitish synthskin covering his wounds had not taken from that look marking him as a man of the Blood. It was still the same face Jed had come to know, had come to trust, had come to care for, as much as she did for the
Shamrock
itself.
Wolff held the object in his right hand, coiling his arm so it was behind his neck. He took a leaping stride forward and hurled it through the static field and into the vacuum beyond. Jed raised her bow and closed her eyes. The
Shamrock
showed her the device spinning away into the void. She drew back the string and slowed her heart, and released between beats. A brief light flared, then darkness ruled.
Chapter 20
Into the Eye of the Storm
Who dares look upon,
The black baleful eye of unrest,
Would know incarnate destruction,
That is Dark Tempest!
Gravity pulled the
Shamrock
ever down in an unstable orbit that could only end in one place. Jed lay with her head against Wolff’s shoulder on the bridge floor. Even the Heralds would not come this close to the storm, lest they became trapped by gravity and pulled under the event horizon, or seared to atoms in the blazar jet. Out of the range of fear, she at last had been able to sleep, although it had been short and uncomfortable. She could not bring herself to leave Wolff’s side, to be alone before that malevolent eye.
Wolff said he was hungry, so they both went down to the cargo level to fetch the food. For the first time for as long as Jed could remember, she found she could muster some appetite to eat the levigated esculents and fibre loaf. The loaf tasted like mould, the soup like watery leaves. Unappealing as the flavours were, they made Jed realise it had been some time since she had last chewed conurin. The photosensitive alloy that covered the bridge windows had become almost opaque to screen out the radiation that streamed from the accretion disc, and the stars and did not show, just the quasar’s glaring pillar of light and the luminous torus below it. It was peculiar that they should sit here eating at the center of the galaxy while all this went on around them, and the taste of the food when there had been no taste for so long made it all the more surreal.
Wolff motioned to the window. “The chimaera young, could we not do something like that?”
“The synchrotron radiation would ablate the hull.”
“Well, how come it doesn’t do that to them?”
Jed used the
Shamrock’s
senses to study the stream of minute objects travelling in the blazar jet. “They are wrapped up inside some kind of parachute—a photosail that is reflective to all radiation.”
“A photosail, like that stellar galleon we saw in Satigenaria?”
Jed raised her eyebrows. “Exactly like that. I have a photosail to fit the escape pod of this ship, but you threw the escape pod away as I seem to remember.”
“We had to get rid of that
myth
Archer somehow. So the stellar galleon, how does that work?”
“It’s designed to accelerate a ship by radiation pressure from the stellar wind. They are used exclusively to travel outward within the inner parts of settled star systems. They wouldn’t work anywhere else because the stellar wind isn’t intense enough that far from a star.”
“But
that
...” Wolff gave a nod to the scene outside.
“
That
is an event that has not been witnessed anywhere in this galaxy in all the time men have existed.”
“That...light. How far up does it go?”
“It’s called an active nucleus. They’ve been seen in distant galaxies, they’re usually referred to as blazars or quasars. The light is so intense it can be detected by men’s eyes from the surface of
planets
when the source is over a billion light years distant. The chimaera’s next generation is riding the blazar jet at just below the speed of light. They can probably maintain that speed until they reach the lower habitable regions of the halo, two thousand, five hundred light years away.”
“And the photosail, you can’t attach that to the
Shamrock
?”
Jed shook her head. “The sail is too small.”
“What about if we put it on the shuttle, the one I came on with Taggart? It’s still docked on the other airlock, isn’t it?”
Jed stared at Wolff. “Yes,” she said carefully, at length. “It would be the right size for that. I don’t see how that would be any use, though, because travelling with the photosail would take two thousand, five hundred years before you could get within range of any civilisation to even make a distress call.”