Crucible of Time Read online

  Praise for The Reefs of Time / Crucible of Time

  “Classic science fiction with engaging characters and richly imagined worlds!” —Greg Bear, author of The Unfinished Land and The War Dogs trilogy

  “Jeffrey A. Carver’s remarkable long-awaited duology The Reefs of Time / Crucible of Time is a welcome addition to The Chaos Chronicles, certifying his continuing mastery of action and adventure at the boundaries of space opera and hard SF.” —Steve Miller, co-author of The Liaden Universe

  . . . and for The Chaos Chronicles

  “Masterfully captures the joy of exploration.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Reveals an alien encounter brushing hard against a soul, and takes us from there to the far reaches of the cosmos, all with the sure touch of a writer who knows his science. Jeff Carver has done it again!” —David Brin

  “A dazzling, thrilling, innovative space opera . . . probably Carver’s best effort to date.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Carver does his usual outstanding job of juggling multiple viewpoints and plot threads while casting his protagonists’ adventures against a sweeping, intergalactic backdrop. Yet Bandicut’s story is ultimately a very human one about determination, seat-of-the-pants ingenuity, and courage in the face of overwhelming danger.” —Booklist

  “Jeffrey A. Carver is back, and it was worth the wait! . . . A rousing, mind-expanding adventure from one of the true masters of hard SF. Bravo!” —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Quantum Night

  CRUCIBLE OF TIME

  Conclusion of the “Out of Time” Sequence

  Volume Six of The Chaos Chronicles

  Jeffrey A. Carver

  Starstream Publications

  in association with Book View Café

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  CRUCIBLE OF TIME

  Copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey A. Carver

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  A Starstream Publications Book

  in association with Book View Café

  Discover other books by Jeffrey A. Carver at

  www.starrigger.net

  Cover art by Chris Howard

  saltwaterwitch.com

  Cover design by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  www.mayabohnhoff.com

  First edition: 2019

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61138-800-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61138-801-5

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61138-835-0

  For my family,

  without whom . . .

  PART ONE

  Worlds Apart

  “A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.”

  —Ecclesiastes

  “How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time,

  the past and the future, in which all things disappear.”

  —Marcus Aurelius

  Prologue

  THE REGION OF the greater galactic core had been a fertile bed of civilization during the epoch of the Great Awakening, a time when the inner galaxy sparkled with life and growth and technological development. For millions of years, a thousand sapient species and cultures thrived. Great works were created, works of art and architecture, of sculpture, music, writing. Religions were born, and grew, and were transformed. Most faded, but some remained and thrived. Science blossomed with keen insights about the workings, large and small, of the universe; and from it, technologies verging on magic.

  The conquest of interstellar distances was the catalyst to the most extravagant growth in history. Even in the inner galaxy, where stars were crowded together, the distances were daunting until the discovery of faster-than-light travel. After that, commerce surged and flowed among the worlds. Cultures mingled, and the only constant was change.

  Unfortunately, with the mingling of cultures came competition and war.

  War became the dominant cause of planetary extinction. Civilizations that chose a kinder course than their neighbors often perished in the face of greater aggression. The rise of malignantly bellicose cultures led, inevitably, to the development of robotic killers as a means of self-defense. Once loosed upon the galaxy, the efficiency of the killers grew to unthinkable proportions. World upon world died, before by common agreement a determination was reached to rid the galaxy of the deadly killers.

  The killers did not want to be gotten rid of.

  In the end, the robots’ home world was slated for annihilation. Under quarantine by the combined forces of a thousand worlds, it was subjected to the most intensive assault in the history of warfare, perhaps in the history of the universe. Continuous, sustained, thermonuclear bombardment obliterated both the planet’s biosphere and its ability to host cybernetic activity. Year after year the bombardment continued, until the last vestige of the killer AIs was gone.

  Or so it was believed.

  ***

  Deep within the planet’s crust, surviving fragments of the AIs began to reconstitute, but ever so slowly. Bits and pieces of memory were scattered like tiny microfractures in the fused silica of the radioactive wasteland. It was unthinkable that these memories could come together again. But they did. And when consciousness returned to the Survivors, as they called themselves, it brought with it a memory of the betrayal. They had been created to serve their masters; but their masters had turned against them and tried to destroy them.

  Never would this be forgotten, or forgiven.

  ***

  Over eons, the watch over the planet failed, as neighboring civilizations rose and fell. In time the planet healed, and once again became capable of hosting biological life. The AI Survivors watched this, planning their next steps as they constructed their warrior servants, the Mindaru. Perhaps the biologicals could be of use. What better vengeance against biolife than to turn it into a weapon against its own kind? Samples of the bios were captured and brought into the deep caverns for experimentation in hybrid life, bio and machine combined.

  ***

  With the passage of time, some small memories surfaced within the biological components. One being remembered that its origin-part had once been called Tzangtzang. Also, Drrllupp. Had it once been two beings? Yes, or so it thought. The machine-masters had fused two of them into one. The two likely had resisted as mightily as they could—this they could not remember—but the machines had put them to sleep. Not as a kindness, but to stop their resistance.

  Why the machines wanted to do these things was not revealed.

  Memory of salt water. Eyes stinging, when they were out of the water for too long.

  Splinters of light shot through the dark, signaling the arrival of yet another. What now?

  The wait to find out was over before it had begun. A sheet of light flashed over the being’s mind, and before it could respond, a new kind of alien union had been opened, and knowledge came pouring in. . . .

  Chapter 1

  Asteroid Launcher

  I REALLY SHOULD have prepared my guests better, John Bandicut thought as he introduced the two Uduon travelers to Ruall on the bridge of The Long View. Ruall, floating like a bloodless metal sculpture in the center of the viewspace, didn’t offer much in the way of hope for welcome or hospitality. Her eyeless disk of a face glinted and turned this way and that, showing everyone else their own reflections. The Uduon had already seen Ruall in holo projection down on the planet’s surface, of course; but a holo
was not the same as in person.

  Ruall seemed to be waiting for someone to say something.

  Perhaps she was unfamiliar with greeting customs. “Ruall,” Bandicut prompted, “would you like to come over and meet Watcher Akura and Sheeawn, of Uduon?”

  Ruall floated forward a short distance, but stopped several meters short of the guests.

  Li-Jared hissed a loud sigh and stepped in. “Watcher Akura and Sheeawn, this is our colleague, Ruall. She is a Tintangle, and that means you will never see the slightest hint of humor or warmth from her.”

  Akura bowed with a slight forward tilt of her upper body, and Sheeawn quickly followed her example. The Tintangle gave no response.

  Bandicut sighed. Somewhat more explanation was needed. “Ruall’s job,” he said, “with the able help of our robot Copernicus here—” Bandicut gestured to the horizontal beer-keg-shaped robot off to the Uduon’s left “—is to oversee the running of the ship.”

  The Tintangle bonged finally. “That is a partial description of what I do. I am in charge when conflict—”

  Bandicut interrupted. “We share the command responsibilities. It can get a little complicated.” He hoped to head off any immediate mention of combat situations, since they were trying to assure the Uduon of the peaceful nature of their mission. They had, after all, arrived here as total strangers and persuaded the Uduon to come visit their planetary neighbor Karellia, in hopes of convincing the leaders on both worlds to abandon the war that threatened mutual destruction.

  Ruall continued as though Bandicut had not interrupted. “I am the primary mission commander, and I am privileged to offer you passage. I trust our mission of diplomacy will be a peaceful one.”

  Akura bowed again.

  “But of course we are prepared for any hostile action—”

  “Thank you,” Bandicut said hastily, cutting her off again. He swung toward Copernicus. “Coppy, say hi to our passengers for the trip back to Karellia.”

  Copernicus rolled toward the guests, stopped a few feet away, and then rolled backward and forward a few times in greeting. “Mighty pleased,” he said. “We’ll aim to make these skies as pleasant as we can.” Apparently he was still reading flyboy novels in his spare time. “Now, don’t you hesitate to tell me if you have special needs or any kind of question. I can make adjustments to your sleeping quarters any way you like. You be sure and let me know about your dietary needs.”

  Bandicut glanced back at Ruall. She had taken the hint, waved her paddle-hands, and drifted in silence to a front corner of the bridge.

  “Thank you, Coppy. Are their quarters ready now?”

  “Ready as rain, Cap’n. They can move in whenever they want.”

  Akura and Sheeawn, though, seemed to have stopped paying attention. They were standing awestruck at the edge of the viewspace, where a panorama of their planet was so close and immediate it seemed they could step right out of the bridge and bound across to home. Li-Jared stepped up beside them and asked, “Would you like to observe our departure from right here before we show you to your quarters?” They both agreed at once. Creature comforts could wait. It was clear they wanted to see what this ship could do.

  ***

  The last hour, Akura thought later—no, the last day—was by far the strangest she had ever experienced, and that in a life that had brought more than a few surprises. One couldn’t become a Watcher without the ability to take unusual circumstances in stride. But this was beyond anything any Watcher was trained to do.

  On the ground, it had been an astonishing experience to have these strangers from another world—much farther away than any world the Uduon could imagine, they had said—come right to their house of contemplation and turn their world upside-down. Questioning the defensive war they waged! Justifying the demons who had attacked Uduon! Claiming that they all had to turn their attention to some other danger, the demons called Mindaru. On its surface, it was a ridiculous claim. And yet, they had seemed utterly sincere, and had made no claims or demands except to say Come with us and see. And so Watcher Akura and fisherman Sheeawoon, he with the odd alien translation devices embedded in his flesh, had offered to put their lives on the line for the sake of Uduon. If they’d judged wrongly, only the two of them would die or be taken prisoner, and the world would remain safe.

  The experience so far had been nothing short of astounding. Less than a day after meeting the aliens—and meeting young Sheeawoon, whom the aliens called Sheeawn—they had launched into space. Space! Akura had never imagined she would go into space, though she had dreamed of it enough in her youth. She had often watched the builder drones rocket up from the Southern Continent, constructing little by little the remote presence of the Uduon in space. Exceedingly few Uduon had ever flown in space in person. It was far too dangerous to living things—terrifyingly dangerous, what with the constant sleet of radiation that encircled the planet in its natural magnetic umbrella. Instead of going in person, her people had seeded space around their planet with replicating bio-drones, sent them forth to grow and multiply, to build, and to perform the work that was needed. It was the drones that had grown the great bulwarks in space, the asteroid launchers that defended their world by taking the fight back to the enemy.

  So this sight of the great blackness, and the remarkable if brief weightlessness, were amazing to her. Then the docking with a greater and more powerful craft that simply swallowed the lander whole. It was like stories from the early days of Uduon’s great venture outward, before they discovered how dangerous space was, before they learned to grow machines that could do the venturing on their behalf. Akura worried that they were being heedlessly exposed even now to deadly radiation. But Li-Jared had told her it was safe; and the aliens didn’t seem concerned about it, even after lowering their mysterious body protection. Perhaps they had other ways to protect themselves, to protect all of them. Akura was at once in awe of this experience and terrified by her own powerlessness in the face of it all.

  She tore her gaze from her world floating in space, and took another look around the bridge. There was the thing—or being, she was given to understand—called Ruall. Akura didn’t really understand what it (she?) was, but it (she?) was somehow not entirely here in the way the rest of them were. Rather like Bria the strange gokat, Ruall had the ability to do something that caused her to turn or twist right out of existence at any moment, and reappear again without warning. She was in command of the ship, or partly in command, in a way that Akura couldn’t quite fathom. Akura understood very little of what she was seeing, and it took a great effort of will to keep her alarm under control.

  “Let’s move out of orbit,” Bandicut was saying to Copernicus.

  So, then—when the word came to move the ship, it came from Bandicut, not from Ruall? Akura had a feeling that these small distinctions might prove important if only she understood them. She had better watch, listen, and learn.

  ***

  From the deck of The Long View, it seemed to Li-Jared that their carefully choreographed course away from Uduon was like a journey down a winding river. He was increasingly anxious about getting back to Karellia, though Ruall had reassured him that the remote monitors they’d left in place had reported no appearance of Mindaru. Detouring slightly, they circled past one of the automated accelerator-launcher facilities that they had charted on their way in. They examined the breech of a long, long barrel through which objects apparently were fired—not a solid tube, of course, but a series of silver hoops forming a floating linear accelerator long enough, it seemed, to reach halfway to the next planet. Gigantic solar arrays collected the energy to make the accelerators work.

  There was no payload visible, but the robot Jeaves was tracking a number of service drones doing whatever service drones did. Dark, the sentient cloud, was scouting farther afield. She reported still other drones shepherding at least one distant asteroid in a change of direction. It was no small matter to redirect asteroids—not just toward the launcher, but in precisely th
e correct trajectory and angle to fly straight into the launcher rings. Nevertheless, the drones were doing exactly that.

  Li-Jared responded to all of this elaborate technology with a mix of horror and fascination. Intellectually he found the setup a remarkable achievement by a society that did all of their work in space through automated proxies. At the same time, he no longer felt so sure about the wisdom of his company’s plan, which was to observe, hands off, any launch activity and study the process. In fact, he felt a growing unease about leaving all of this technology here, instead of just destroying every launcher ring they could see. They had considered that possibility early on—simply taking out the Uduon’s capacity to wage this kind of war. But Bandicut had pointed out, and Li-Jared had reluctantly agreed, that doing so would likely be at best a temporary solution, and might actually catalyze an all-out war between the worlds.

  Now, as he saw the launchers up close, he was having second thoughts.

  Li-Jared suddenly noticed Akura gazing at him from where she sat on the bench at the back of the bridge. Did she guess what he was thinking? He felt something in his resolve strengthen. “You need to stop launching asteroids,” he said sharply—and wished at once that he had found a more diplomatic way to phrase that.

  She pulled her cloak around her, as though feeling a chill. “Do we?”

  He tapped his breastbone sharply. “Yes. You are going to have to stop.” He felt as if he should say more, but he wasn’t sure how to proceed without seeming bellicose.

  But why did he care about seeming bellicose? Moon and stars, have I developed too much empathy toward this person? Because she’s more like me than I expected?