Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) Read online

  As the sun shifted out of his view to the stern, he grinned savagely and unshuttered the forward windows and unlimbered the telescope. He pointed the thing where the computer, using the last known orbital data, said the comet would be; and in his mind, the coruscating near-consciousness of the translator-stones whirled and followed his focus like a swarm of fiery bees.

  *

  It was a blazing ball of ice and stone, viewed from the sunward side—with a great luminous tail that stretched outward from the surrounding gaseous coma, the tail blown not by the comet's movement but by the streaming particles of the solar wind. The comet was a breathtaking sight, glowing through the filters and lenses of the telescope. It looked like an angel, or a cosmic sign, anything but a planet killer.

  Overtaken by sudden self-doubt, Bandicut ran a new computer analysis of the comet's orbit, urgently trying to see if it really was going to hit the Earth. His measurements were uncertain, and he could see the comet emitting jets of solar-heated gas, which were bound to affect its trajectory, even if very slightly. But he suddenly had to know: Was he doing this for nothing? Did he really have to throw away his life? Or...was it possible he could veer away from collision, and ride herd on the comet all the way to Earth? Instead of dying, perhaps he could return home...

  /// John— ///

  croaked the quarx.

  He calculated furiously, the fugue pushing back the bee-swarm of the translator-stones in his head, and he found that his results fell short of proving what he needed to know. The comet was going to make a terrifyingly close encounter with Earth...but would it be a collision? Was the translator right? Would the jets change the comet's course enough to slam it into his home planet? Was it conclusive enough to die for?

  He wondered if authorities on Earth had realized the risk yet, wondered if they had called for evacuations or preparations, wondered if they had gotten his messages, wondered if they believed him even if they had. He couldn't listen to any broadcasts while they were threading space; anyway, he doubted that they even had an antenna left on the ship. He wondered if he would know, afterward, if he had succeeded in destroying the comet. He lobbed his wondering thoughts, like glowing coals, at Charlie, but the quarx answered with stony silence; he was hunkered down, saving his strength.

  The calculations had left Bandicut breathless with indecision. Probably the translator was right...but what if it wasn't? Couldn't he wait just a little longer and see?

  The quarx stirred feebly.

  /// John... ///

  If he plunged into the comet, he would never know for sure. He longed for a chance to run a deep simulation in neurolink...

  /// John...

  I'm going to do something...

  to stretch out your...apparent time flow

  ...to give you more time to...react...

  at the end. ///

  They were beyond the orbit of Mercury, outward velocity in excess of two-tenths of lightspeed. He switched to the low-power telescope and began nudging the translator into small corrections as he tried to peer through the vapor shroud surrounding the comet's core. They needed to penetrate that vapor shroud; it was the nucleus in the center they would have to hit, in order to destroy the comet.

  The time-shift hit him, with a sudden feeling that his fingers were moving like molasses. A bitterly icy calm swept over him, even in the heat of the fugue. He'd played this game of EineySteiney dozens of times in his mind already—the sudden veers and accelerations that might be needed to zero in on the target. It always played out just right in the fever of his imagination. In real life it would be harder—orbital docking maneuvers were tricky, even at slow speeds. But he still had Charlie with him, and Charlie was the best EineySteiney player in the universe, and even if he screwed up, the quarx could do it.

  If he decided to do it. He peered at the comet and imagined Neptune Explorer moving in a nice, slow pirouette around it, escorting it to safety. He listened as the planets murmured with uncertainty at his thoughts, and broke into scattered applause.

  Now he was gazing straight out the window at the comet. It had grown, in direct view, from a pinpoint to a luminous, vapor-shrouded tennis ball.

  /// Are you...ready...John? ///

  He nodded absently. He felt a growing tingle in his mind, and a burning in his wrists, and the fugue-state was in the full flower of heat and...this was it...he felt the time-shift kick in even more powerfully...he watched his own eyes blink like shades rolling up and down...and it was dizzying, but he knew that they were falling toward the comet at a fabulous speed... falling... but not too late to veer off...

  The quarx suddenly convulsed, and he felt a sickening shudder.

  /// John...oh, mokin' foke... ///

  /Punch it in, Charlie,/ he whispered. /You take it. It's your shot./

  The comet grew astonishingly fast now, slowed time sense or no. Wisps of vapor were obscuring the stars beyond...in a moment they would be in whiteout, inside the vapor envelope.

  /// Ohhhhhhhhhh..... ///

  He felt more than heard the wail, reverberating off the walls of his consciousness, and then he heard the quarx's voice echoing off into a great distance. /Charlie? CHARLIE?/

  /// The con......is yours......

  do it......for both of us...... ///

  He felt a gasp of breath go out; it was his own, and yet not. Something went silent inside him, and he felt a bottomless emptiness where the quarx had been, like a well into forever. /CHARRLIIIE!/ he screamed. /CHARLIE! GOD DAMN YOU!/

  The fugue snapped away, leaving him breathless but clear-headed. Was he going to destroy the comet or not? The hard ball in his stomach told him: of course, he had no choice. He could not wait and see; he and the comet were flying headlong toward each other and he had only this chance and no other.

  He stared at the growing coma, holding his terror at arm's length. The stars were gone, there was nothing except white cloud before him, and an enormous, planet-busting nucleus of ice and rock somewhere inside it, and he was still threading space, accelerating. He wanted to curse, and weep, but his wrists were on fire, telling him that the translator was waiting, he was at the controls...and the retarded time-sense could give him only a precious few moments to think.

  In the whiteout he searched for the killing form of the nucleus. His fear and despair churned through him, then fled. He glimpsed his parents and brother and sister-in-law for the last time; and Dakota, hunched over her sims; and Julie, eyes wide and blue and intense; and he felt a final piercing grief...

  And then the dark nucleus of the comet tumbled out of the fog into view, and it was off course to the right, and they were about to miss it. The translator-stones flashed, and he gave the ship a hard kick; but the time-shift was deceptive, and he overcorrected and had to kick sharply back the other way. That was it; he had it right. He felt an upwelling of light around him as the translator-stones unfolded to transform the kinetic energy of the collision...

  The nucleus lunged toward him, and he knew then that he was going to die. It mushroomed into an enormous mountain blocking his way. For a timeless instant, he seemed to hang directly in front of it, as though he might hang there for a cosmic forever; then, without any sense of the movement of time, he slammed into the mountain like a hydrogen bomb. He felt the hellish light and energy of a small sun, blazing into space; he was aware of it, but coldly, dimly, aware of time frozen, aware of his body and soul bathed in the fire of a trillion-megaton explosion.

  Then the daughter-stones blossomed into cool, iridescent halos, and all consciousness was taken from him.

  Chapter 31

  Translation

  It was the quiet of a dream, the quiet of death. He was lost in darkness, he was plunging into the core of a sun. Darkness and light, all soundless. An explosion, frozen in eternity. This was the afterlife, said a quiet part of his soul, and no one spoke up to disagree. He was surrounded by bursts of fire, concentric rings, in colors he had never known. He was falling through them, or perhaps fl
oating motionless, and these ethereal crowns of light were falling past him.

  It was impossible to tell.

  Impossible to understand.

  He was submerged in a deep ocean of surprise. Never a firm believer in an afterlife, he had always assumed that if there were an afterlife, then some loved one would be there to greet him. Mom? he thought absently. But there was no Mom. There was only the fierce, strobelike movement of the rings of fire, in colors he did not know.

  He remembered a comet...and a creature not human...but his thoughts were like chunks of ice in a packed floe, vibrating with energy, but too jammed together to move.

  A little later he wondered, could this be silence-fugue instead of death? He remembered silence-fugue. But there was no feeling of madness, exactly. Time and space didn't quite seem to exist around him, or perhaps they too were frozen. And yet he was aware of a sense of passage, and suddenly it seemed to him that time was crinkling around him, like a crystal shattering in slow motion. What did that mean?

  *Annihilation.*

  The thought appeared in his mind, unbidden, unspoken.

  He was aware of two points of light blazing close by, pulsing, one white as diamond and one coal-red out of blackness. He felt a burning pain.

  *Transformation.*

  Bewildered, he stared at flickering zigzag images, like fractals forming and disrupting, dancing at the periphery of his awareness. What? he whispered into the silence and emptiness of silence-fugue, or death.

  *Translation.*

  Suddenly the rings of fire exploded into darkness, and his breath erupted in a gasp so violent that it sent a stab of pain through his chest. He lurched up against seat restraints, then fell back, panting, against a headrest. He blinked in confusion. He sensed the dark shape of a cockpit around him, and heard the hiss of life support. He was alive, and not in silence-fugue. He glimpsed instruments, and a window. Out the window, he could see blackness, space, and a sprinkling of stars. He blinked again, trying to focus. It looked different somehow.

  He remembered suddenly, sharply, what had happened. EineySteiney. The comet. Attacking it like a suicidal cue ball. And Charlie dying before he could see the ending...

  The ice floe came unstuck. Memories came tumbling loose in dizzying numbers, cascading backward through space and time, the dive toward the sun, the stolen ship, Triton, Julie.

  Julie!

  He glimpsed her face, her eyes, her kiss...and then she was gone, leaving him with only the memory, the emptiness, the knowledge that he had left her forever.

  Through the cascade of pain and emptiness, he remembered an aching truth: In leaving her, he might have preserved a living Earth for her to return to.

  If he had succeeded.

  Annihilation...

  The word sprang again into his mind. Meaning what? That Earth was annihilated, or the comet? Or was this all still part of some cruel death-hallucination?

  Charlie? he thought—and remembered again, Charlie had died.

  He did not think this was a hallucination, though he wished it were. He thought of the passage he had just been through; and he felt a sudden icy wind blowing through his thoughts, and a certainty that he had left his past irrevocably behind, not just in space perhaps, but in time, as well. The thought made him tremble at the edge of tears. Was he eons from Earth now, centuries from Julie? He found himself weeping at the thought, gasping, unable to stop the bitter tears that were suddenly rushing down his cheeks.

  He felt a stab in his wrists, and glanced down. Something was flashing—the translator-stones. The white diamond was pulsing, with unmistakable urgency. /What do you want?/ he thought, with no real hope that it would answer him. /Charlie?/ he whispered, with no greater hope. The quarx was gone, his life spent saving his human host, in order that Bandicut could do... whatever he had just done.

  The stone pulsed insistently.

  /Stone,/ he thought, resting his head back, staring out the window through his tears. /Can you tell me, did we succeed? Did we destroy the comet? Or was all this...for nothing?/

  He cursed quietly, bitterly—not so much for the loss of his past life, as for the terrible loneliness that had come to take its place.

  *Wait.*

  A window blinked open in the vision of his inner mind. For an instant, he thought it was Charlie, back again, preparing to show him something with one of his visual displays. But there was no hint of Charlie; there was only a flash of something like a graphical display, very complicated, but dimly familiar. When it vanished, he was left blinking. Elements of it burned in his memory like an afterimage; and finally, he realized that it looked like an energy curve. An energy curve with a tremendous spike in it. A spike so sharp that he found himself wondering if it didn't represent the annihilation of a large chunk of matter. A comet, perhaps.

  *Annihilation and transformation.*

  The words hung soundless in his thoughts.

  *Transformation and translation.*

  The white daughter-stone? It was still pulsing on his wrist. Was it speaking? He shut his eyes and glimpsed coruscating particles of fire. /Are you telling me the comet was destroyed?/ he whispered.

  *Twenty-four-point-seven percent of mass was transformed into energy, breaching with a five-point-six percent reserve the quantum threshold for metaspatial translation.*

  He hesitated. /Does that mean yes?/

  *Yes.*

  He grunted. He had saved the Earth, then; he must have. /What...did it look like?/ he asked. There was no answer. He stirred, peering out the window, looking for some familiar patterns in the arrangement of the stars. He found none. /Can you tell me where I am?/ he whispered, suddenly more frightened than he had ever been in his life.

  There was no answer.

  Before he could ask again, he felt a sudden angular rotation. He glanced at the instruments. The fusion tube was still firing, at low power. But the ship was being turned, as though the attitude control system had been activated. The black stone in his left wrist was flickering red; it appeared to be in command.

  He studied the star patterns as they revolved past, straining for something, anything, familiar in the sky. How many light years would one have to travel before the constellations became unrecognizable? He hadn't the faintest idea. He grabbed the telescope and swung it into place for a wide-field scan. He grunted in surprise. Some of those stars didn't look like stars at all; they looked blurry, like galaxies. In fact, most of them did. But that was crazy, unless...

  Unless...he was...outside...

  No. He refused to consider that possibility. Just the thought of it caused a burning sensation deep in his chest.

  The ship had turned about ninety degrees when the curved edge of a great platter of light came into view in the window. Only it wasn't...a platter of light, exactly. It was more like a vast, swirling ocean of stars. He blinked, not quite focusing on it; he couldn't, didn't want to focus on it. Didn't want to let the pieces come together in his mind. There was something else, too, like a shadow across his gaze. He blinked, trying to refocus his eyes.

  There was something out there, dark, floating in space. At first he mistook it for a part of the great swath of stars, but it seemed to be intruding somehow from the darkness of space itself, and at last he realized it was in front of the starry sea. It was hard to make out, a shadowy silhouette against starlight; but it was a structure, perhaps a very large structure. He squinted, his heart pounding; as the ship continued to turn, he brought the telescope to bear with trembling hands. It was too dark to focus on clearly, but he glimpsed enough to guess that whatever it was, it was artificial.

  He looked up from the telescope, and gasped at the vast swath of stars behind the structure. The ship's rotation had brought a much brighter feature into view: a blazing galactic center, partially wreathed in dark dust lanes. The sea of stars was, unquestionably...a galaxy.

  Bandicut couldn't breathe. His diaphragm spasmed, trying to draw breath into his lungs. He heard himself making little involu
ntary crying sounds.

  This is frightening me, whispered a thought somewhere in the back of his mind.

  He blinked, searching inward for the source of that thought. But it was only his imagination, his subconscious.

  Something inside him released—and he gasped in one frantic breath, then another. He began to hyperventilate as he wrenched his gaze closer to the enormous structure shadowed against the light...and then back out to the majestic ocean of stars, tilted toward him. As he gazed at it, and its great glowing center, he knew with a sudden, terrifying certainty that this was the Milky Way galaxy. His galaxy.

  And he was viewing it from the outside.

  He blinked, and swallowed, and clamped his eyes shut against an uncontrollable rush of tears.

  *

  It took a long time before he could bring himself to gaze again at the sight of the Milky Way; and then he did so with a kind of anguished fascination, imagining that he might locate the sun, lost in that sea of light—or even identify the portion of the spiral in which the sun lay. It was impossible, of course. He knew that Earth's sun lay in the Orion spiral arm of the galaxy, but even that was impossible to identify from this perspective.

  When he drew his gaze back in to focus on the nearer structure—now a hard-edged shadow cutting across most of the breadth of the galaxy—he realized with a start that it seemed closer than it had been just minutes ago. Was Neptune Explorer moving toward it? The silhouette angle seemed different. He turned to check the sensor array, then remembered that Charlie had burned the sensors out pointing them at the sun.

  *Wait.*

  He felt the daughter-stones sparkling in his wrists.

  *Look outside.*

  Frowning, he peered out the window, shifting his gaze along the length of the mysterious object. He felt a flicker in the back of his mind, and realized that the stones were making calculations, steering by his eyesight. /Are we still threading space?/ he whispered.

  *Translating.*