“Why is it called a Herald?”
“That’s not what it’s properly called, fool! It was in a poem written about the cold fall, the death of the universe, and the name stuck. They need heavy metals, supernova products, to grow, and sunlight to live at maturity. When the galaxy grows dim, it’s said, they will breed in vast numbers and leave the core, destroying everything in their search for energy, only to die in their trillions.”
By now they had reached the bridge, and the floor wobbled slightly as the
Shamrock
took off. A scraping sound penetrated the hull as Jed turned the ship to face the
Bellwether’s
airlock. Outside the bridge window Winters got up and ran into the corridor. The hum of the
Shamrock’s
engine rose, and a fierce beam of light cut from the prow, burning the airlock door. It only took a few moments for the synchrotron cannon to burn around the thin edge of the inner door. Alarms started going off. The synchrotron cannon fired again, cutting out the
Bellwether’s
outer door. With a bang and a loud rattle, the door fell away into the void. Turbulence buffeted the
Shamrock
as it eased out, and the sound of the alarms faded away. Behind, the
myth
ship knocked against the airlock as it pulled after.
Viprion let out a shout, and Wolff looked in the direction he faced. Toward the starboard a dark gap lay in the stars. It moved with a flapping undulation, like a sheet flying in the wind.
“I know it’s there,” Jed said. “You need not announce it.”
“If it’s chasing the
Bellwether
it’ll ignore us,” said Samphrey.
Jed turned and looked at the girl, her expression stern. “It is not your place to speak. Don’t. Now sit.”
Samphrey’s expression dropped and she stepped back to the bridge seating, her eyes downcast in subservience. The
Shamrock
was accelerating, its engine noise a thrum that rose in pitch endlessly.
“Where is that weapon?” Viprion asked. “It sounded as though one of the ground crews had found it. Please do not tell me that the Geminals have it.”
“No, it wasn’t in my toolbelt, and that thing they found on me was a morran’s diary.”
Viprion let out a snort, his mouth twisting.
“The thing’s on the floor over there somewhere, I think.” Wolff went behind the seating and found the object lying against the wall. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Bring it.” Viprion held out his hand imperiously.
Wolff glared at Viprion then looked at Jed. She turned away, scowling. “Oh, give it to him, Wolff. He seems better equipped to make sense of it than you.”
Viprion examined the item, turning it over several times in his hands. “It is
primitive
. As I would expect of technology made by such people as the Geminals appeared to have been, and with their population virtually annihilated and their scientists all dead, it is understandable why it’s imperative for them to reclaim it. Either they only made one, or the others were lost when they tried to attack and were defeated.”
“What is it?” Wolff said.
“From what I gathered from Taggart, it’s an activator for something, something they’ve spent a long time infecting civilisation with.”
“An activator? But there was only one component in there I recognised.” Wolff took the device back from Viprion. “It’s used in graviton devices—inertia dampers and graviton beam generators.”
Jed’s face tightened. A pattern of lights flickered across the
Shamrock’s
console. “It’s following.”
“Perhaps it changed its mind?” Wolff suggested.
“It’s not intelligent. It doesn’t have a mind to change. It just chases electromagnetic signals and eats them.”
“Perhaps,” said Viprion, scrutinising his hands, “we have inadvertently brought with us the source of whatever signal originally attracted it. It did seem there was some sort of rogue transmission going on.”
“The only things we brought with us is ourselves,” said Jed, “and the ship.”
“Precisely.” Viprion shot Wolff a wry look. “How long was your sentence?”
“My sentence? Three months, from...” Wolff thought back. “It’s today, isn’t it?”
“There you have it. Your bail slave chip has expired, and it’s broadcasting a Freeman signal to alert any nearby computers to your location. Whichever ship you are on picks it up and re-broadcasts it.”
“He’s right,” said Jed uneasily. “The ship’s broadcasting a radio signal, but it did it automatically with no input from me.”
“Can you outrun this Herald thing?” Wolff asked.
Viprion made a scathing noise in his throat. “Would be easier to get rid of the source of the transmission.”
Jed raised her hand to Viprion. “No, wait. Wolff, your blood has the Moiety in it, and your nervous system has grafted onto that chip. If you can use it to communicate, you can probably turn it off by yourself if you can work it out.”
Viprion’s eyes moved restlessly. “What of that thing that’s following us?”
“Once the ship gets close to light speed, it won’t be able to follow. It’s not an Alcubierre organism like the chimaera. It’s the reaching light speed that’s a problem. I’m running in for a close slingshot round the nearest sun. That might lose it.”
Wolff sat beside Samphrey. He leant his elbows on his knees and concentrated on what he could sense of the
Shamrock
. Jed detected his intrusion and turned around.
“I’m just trying to concentrate on my own signal by following it back!” Wolff protested. “I’m not trying to do you any harm!”
As he concentrated on the signal an orange hemisphere appeared in the bridge window, its glare dulled by the photomitigators in the vitreous alloy. He could feel the heat and light coming off it, through the
Shamrock’s
senses, as it grew larger. He began to feel the great dark shape occupying the sky behind the ship, and the light of the red sun caught its wings, like a bird riding a thermal, and reflected from innumerable bright scales. The sun’s honeycombed surface lay directly below the
Shamrock’s
keel now, and it bubbled and seethed with gas and light. The Herald was gaining on them, its head stretching out, horse-formed. It opened its jaws, showing two great fangs each as long as the
Bellwether
from prow to propulsion, and reached for the ship, and a reverberating groan thundered through the photosphere and penetrated the
Shamrock’s
walls.
Stop transmitting, damn you!
Wolff willed in panic.
The jaws closed with a muffled noise, and the Herald began to lose distance. The lurid fusion horizon was falling away beneath them, and the
Shamrock
was accelerating out into the void. “Five minutes to the light barrier!” Jed announced, her voice more full of hope and relief than Wolff had ever heard it.
“The Herald’s stopped,” said Wolff. “Its course takes it away from us.”
A massive concussion shook the bridge, throwing everyone forward and onto the floor toward the main console. The
Shamrock
shuddered, the engine made an earsplitting noise, and all over the bridge alarms went off.
Chapter 17
Wild Card
Time devours body and mind,
Slow attrition, strongest alloy cannot resist,
Decay takes all from our kind,
Only in deeds and progeny shall we persist.
“Did the Herald do that?” Wolff shouted over the alarms.
“No!” Pain contorted Jed’s face. “Fool, we’ve been shot in the head. She used the slingshot to stay out of detection range and ambushed us!”
“She?”
“The other Archer!”
Wolff got to his feet, keeping his knees bent. Tremors still reverberated through the ship’s hull. “So now what, are we going to be boarded?”
Jed closed her eyes, grimacing. “No. She’s not old enough to be able to mindlock me. I’m stronger than her. Her only chance was to ambush us.”
“Then mindlock her!” Viprion shouted. He was sitting on the floor with his feet on the seating, and he tried to lever himself up with his arms.
“There’s no time! She’s ahead of our course, her flank is to us. Two of the engine’s chimaera were wrecked in the explosion. I can’t get out of her line of sight!”
“Why’s she attacking you?” Wolff stepped forward, but he could see nothing ahead. The other ship must have been too distant.
“She’s young.” Viprion swung his legs sideways and got to his knees. “Probably a former apprentice of the other Archer you killed.”
“The other Archer you told to kill us,” Wolff added. “The Geminals’ weapon. We could use that.”
“No,” said Viprion. “We don’t even know what it is. It’s moronic to use something we don’t understand!”
“It may be our only choice,” said Jed.
“Better morons than dead,” Wolff said.
“Can’t you use your arrows? The synchrotron cannon?”
“The synchrotron cannon won’t work at this distance, and I can’t fire arrows from the bridge. That thing, where is it?”
“It’s here.” Samphrey picked up something from the floor and gave it to Jed.
Wolff studied the device in her hands. “It looks as though it could be fitted into the graviton beam machinery of a ship, like this one. Can you do that?”
Jed turned back toward the console and one of the ship’s robots scuttled out. She raised the lid on the back of it and placed the device inside. The robot retreated backward into the walls of the ship. “I will fire the graviton beam at the other ship as soon as it is in place.”
“Please reconsider!” Viprion raised his hands and stepped forward. “The weapon could damage this ship too!”
“If it transmits a signal on a gravitational wave and we use it through the
Shamrock’s
graviton beam, the ship’s inertia dampers will protect it from anything in that beam. Wolff is right. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain. I’m firing the beam now.”
The only indication the ship gave was a slight increase in engine noise and a flicker of lights from the console.
“What happened?”
Jed frowned. More lights pulsed. “Nothing. It’s still there. It looks like the propulsion is out.”
Viprion sighed.
“I’m not picking up any signals from it. It should be coming into visual range soon.”
Wolff stepped beside her and peered ahead. A starlike object was growing brighter, and the
Shamrock
decelerated as they came closer. It began to take form, the light coming from its reflective Teng steel hull. No fusion light illuminated the propulsion bulb at the tip of its tail.
Viprion stood at Jed’s other side and looked upon it. “There are no signals from it at all?”
“It’s electromagnetically dead. How can a signal mediated by gravitons do such a thing?”
As the
Shamrock
closed the distance, it turned, the other ship passing across to the side of the window and moving out of view as the vessel rotated. “I’m docking. Viprion, go aboard and see what has become of it.”
Viprion started, his eyebrows jumping on his forehead. “Go aboard? Prithee, send a robot, or a more… expendable passenger.”
“Why not just leave it here?” Wolff said.
“Because, it is
not
the way of the Code!”
“Whatever happened to that ship could still be a threat! We knew not the nature of the weapon we used, and we should consider ourselves fortunate.”
“Oh, shut up, Viprion. I’ll go.”
Jed looked sharply at Wolff when he said this.
“Whatever’s on the ship has to be better than staying here and listening to you wittering on. Just don’t,” Wolff said, shrugging expansively at Jed, “don’t go off without me again.”
“I shall not leave without you, and as insurance of my intentions, you shall have Samphrey to accompany you.”
Samphrey stood to attention at mention of her name, and made a wide-eyed, nervous expression.
* * * *
Wolff levered a crowbar into the airlock door and strained at it. “I don’t understand,” he grunted through tensed muscles. “The machinery isn’t holding it closed, but it’s still stuck. Pass me that jack... No, the other thing.”
Samphrey handed him the tool and he worked away some more. The hole became wide enough for him to get his hands inside, and he pulled and pushed at it until it became large enough for him to squeeze his body through sideways.
Slipping through, the corridor lay in darkness and he felt a strange sensation in his foot, as though he was dangling it over a hole. “The gravity’s broken,” he said. “Pass those tools through please.”
He put the tools away and took hold of one of the maintenance rails, moving to the side and out of the
Shamrock’s
localised gravitational field so Samphrey would have room to follow.
Wolff switched on his torch. “You hold this for me?”
Samphrey shone the light over the inside of the corridor. It illuminated one of the ship’s ganglia against the corner formed between the wall and the floor, and brown stuff had dribbled from its seal.