“We would be interested in your report …” began Eranas.
Heimdall scurried in, followed by Sammis and two hefty Guards who blocked the entrance.
I presented everything I had, not taking sides in the presentation. I didn’t have to. Sammis added a few remarks about what he and Wryan had witnessed.
Heimdall immediately suggested their destruction.
Freyda ignored the suggestion and asked, “Have you any further observations, Loki? You have been inventive enough to survive and prosper in the face of what these people have attempted.”
“Prosper” was not a word I would have used.
“They once were like us,” I offered, “perhaps even related or descended from the mythical forerunners. Now they rely on machines …”
I went on for a bit, pointing out that their limited control of mechanical time-diving/sliding had led to a totally self-centered and ruthless race, one that destroyed others on sight, and one with little respect for their own wounded and disabled. Even as I spoke, I wondered if the difference between the sharks or the Hunters of Faffnir, or the Guards of Query, were only in degree, and not in kind. The sharks destroyed anything that could oppose them; the Hunters enslaved it; and we merely manipulated it.
“That may be,” noted Kranos, “but the question is of action. What should we do?”
In the end, it came down to destruction. I would try to use the sun-tunnel to fry Lyste and Lead Nine before the remnants of the sharks spread.
After Frey’s unfortunate failure with the sun-tunnel some seasons back, I had decided to investigate the technology employed by my apparent opponents and spent time digging into the sun-tunnel.
Unlike many cultures, where beneficial technologies come out of warlike beginnings, the sun-tunnel first came out of a peaceful use—a simple high-powered matter transmitter used by the same Murians from whom we had stolen fusion power. The early Guard made some adaptations, and, for theoretical reasons I didn’t quite understand, having to do with the need to synchronize the varying energy levels of the universe, whatever was pushed into the input end was tossed out the receiver end as chaotic energy—searing, blasting, and pure destructive power.
The sun-tunnel assembly I put together for the sharks weighed half as much as I did, and it took me several jumps to carry it back.
Not even I could break out in a sun, nor was I crazy enough to try. I slid close enough to shove the input terminal through the undertime and let the sun suck it in. Not all the terminal was in real-time, since the equipment was twisted partly out-of-time-phase.
With that done, I zeroed in on Lead Nine, carting the output side. I decided on a frontal attack near the fortress, and there I half flashed, half tossed the output end into real-time.
Even from the undertime, I could feel the disruption. But it dropped off too quickly, even as I could feel the undertime buckle.
I drifted foretime quickly, perhaps a hundred units after the tunnel collapsed, and did a quick flash-through. Most of the nearby planetary surface was a mess—with the exception of the black fort, which remained intact, if slightly wilted around the edges.
Several black ships, shimmering out-of-time-phase, sat beside the fort, and I had the feeling all sorts of energy were headed in my direction as I vanished under the now.
The sharks were tough, and fast, and very able technically.
I made another dive, foretime about a local year. I almost hung there too long, because the installations surrounding the black fort had been totally rebuilt and the vegetation restored.
Suddenly, I could feel the damnable laser sweeping in toward me, and I was angry, flaming with rage, that the sharks were trying to kill me again.
I had brushed aside Frey’s miserable sun-tunnel, hadn’t I, and a laser was nothing compared to a sun, and this time I was ready. Hardly thinking, I stood there in the air and wrenched the energy away from me, hurling it back at its source in the black fort, drilling it right through the control center.
Then I dropped undertime and back until I found another time buckle—this one strong enough to bend the undertime around the entire planet—just after the sun-tunnel collapsed.
I followed the black path like a highway—right back to one of the black holes—not exactly, but to a moon, asteroid, something, in an orbit. The whole base was shivering on the edge of the undertime—but how?
I didn’t get terribly close, but I got the idea. Somehow, like the spirals of Anemone, the sharks were using the gravity of the black hole as a basis for accelerating or fueling their mechanical time-diving.
It also meant that a sun-tunnel or two in the cluster wouldn’t solve the problem. How could I char an out-of-time base into nonexistence?
I went back to Query, not at all pleased.
Neither was anyone else, especially Heimdall.
“You’re just going to let them take over the galaxy, steam every planet they can reach?”
“I didn’t say that, honored Counselor. What I said was that a sun-tunnel or two won’t do the job. Just let me work on it.”
They did, because no one else had any better ideas. Finally, I cornered Freyda and told her that, if they wanted anything left of their kind of galaxy in another million years, they’d better leave me alone. They did, except for Sammis, who occasionally looked at me with a sad expression. I didn’t mind him, for some reason.
I went back into Baldur’s references. Then I even went foretime to Terra. If anyone had ideas about destruction, it was the Terrans.
Terra was worse than ever, almost strobing through foretime realities, and the only way I could do any research was actually to break out and read it before it changed.
If I’d had more time, I would have liked to dig into the uncertainty that surrounded Terra, but the sharks kept preying on my mind, and I kept dreaming about oceans being steamed.
It took nearly three ten-days before I gathered enough information. According to Terran theory, it ought to work. All galaxies, or clusters, have more highly concentrated suns near the center. Clusters are usually more highly concentrated, and the shark cluster was—with a stellar concentration averaging far higher than even galactic centers. With that it became a matter of applying power in the right spots.
I simply intended to plant linked sun-tunnels across the cluster center, particularly in suns that seemed unstable, and by funneling energy flows, nova the cluster-center stars. From there the process would feed on itself.
Even with their time-sliding ships, I doubted that the sharks would escape, not if it had taken them a million years to get out of the cluster without such a disruption.
It wasn’t that simple. The data banks and my calculations indicated I needed a sun-tunnel with a cross section four times the output we had been using. That created other problems. Baldur had once mentioned the problems involved with stepped-up power requirements, that they increased geometrically as the power increased arithmetically. I shuddered at a tunnel sixteen times bigger. I couldn’t carry one, let alone the numbers I would need. But it didn’t work out quite that way.
What I did need were intake and output ports with four times the cross section. While awkward for me to carry, even in a collapsed form, and even more awkward to use, the increase in mass was minimal—provided I dropped the design safety factors a magnitude.
Even after I got back from Terra, the modification and building process took Narcissus, Brendan, Elene, and me almost two whole seasons, and a lot of minor repairs piled up. No one said anything about that but Frey, and I just looked at him.
It took a while longer to calculate the tunnel linkages, and I insisted on including the stars for Lyste and Lead Nine. I also worried about the linkages—everything was theoretical except the tunnels themselves—but this sort of gadgetry wasn’t exactly something I intended to test on suns in our own galaxy.
When the time came, I didn’t tell anyone except Brendan and Elene, and I started it at night, Quest time. All told, I had to set up more than twenty linkages within a hundred-and-fifty-unit period—objective. That didn’t include the tunnels for Lyste and Lead Nine, which could be done outside the time parameters. I used a corner of one of the deserted planets as a staging base to ferry the tunnels to, because I figured there was enough time energy around a fort planet to conceal what I was doing.
Then I did it. It was that simple. Twenty dives in time dropping forty time-protected packages into forty suns. And I finished with a good fifteen units to spare.
After a quick nap, I repeated the process with Lyste and Lead Nine and then strapped myself into deep-space armor, picked up my trusty holopak, and foretimed ten thousand years to see the results—really to show the results, since the moaning of the change winds and the buckling
of both time and the undertime provided a good indication that something had worked.
As I foretimed, I could sense almost endless swathes of the black ships, but they died out halfway to the foretime end of my dive. Being time-protected is fine, but it generally takes planets to reproduce and prosper, and the ships, at least at the beginning, had limited ranges.
I broke out in quiet desolation, floating in the equivalent of cosmic cinders.
A few white dwarves peered out from the swirling nebula composed of the remnants of the once-glittering cluster. I dropped back and picked up frames showing the pulse of destruction, the stellar winds pushing out ahead of the front of fire. What the holo frames didn’t show was the howling winds of time-change that echoed through the undertime and the anguishes as planetary sentiences were snuffed out.
While some of the sharks theoretically could have escaped in their time and space cruisers, I
knew
none had, just as I knew I could bend energy away from me and use energy to help rebuild injuries.
When I hit the Travel Hall, one person stood in front of those waiting.
Heimdall.
“Congratulations, Loki!”
I knew the moaning, heaving change winds had preceded me. And I knew, for whatever reason, Heimdall was planting the whole thing on me.
I nodded curtly. There wasn’t much else to do. It was my doing. I’d just done what I’d destroyed the sharks for doing. And I had destroyed a hundred thousand systems and a million years of lives because I had no other way of dealing with the sharks. Maybe we were meant for each other, the sharks and me.
Even Brendan and Elene shrank away from me. Why wouldn’t they? Who wanted to welcome back the god of destruction, the lord of fire? They knew me, knew me all too well, as I was coming to know myself
I walked heavily through the corridors of the Tower, still fully equipped, wrist gauntlets and all. Where I walked, Guards shrank, eased away as if I wore the very flames I had kindled, and perhaps I did.
Massive as it was, the Tower seemed small and tawdry in those moments, insignificant against the night skies I had left units before, and infinitesimal against the searing point of light I had created in distant heavens.
Since there was little enough to be accomplished by returning to Maintenance immediately—Brendan and the others could start to catch
up without me, and I needed to unwind—I spent the next few days at the Aerie and on the empty places of the high Bardwalls, watching the eagles, the clean lines of the knife peaks, and the winding shadows of the clefts below.