Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

Tilly was in the music group, her violin resting comfortably under her chin as the children practiced a cheerful-sounding song for the school’s Christmas Nativity play. “Come here,” Lizzie called as Elsie reached her side. There were twenty seconds left. Out of the corner of her eye, Lizzie saw a mother jump away as she clutched her son.

“What’s happening?” Tilly asked.

“Here!” Lizzie implored. Another two adults materialized in front of her and started to hunt desperately for their children. The youngsters were starting to get upset as more and more parents with worried faces appeared.

Tilly scampered over, still hanging on to her violin. Lizzie’s u-shadow registered a call from her husband. “Not now,” she grunted, and designated the house as their teleport coordinate. Tilly ran into her, and there were nine seconds left. Just for an instant, the emptiness of the translation continuum flashed around them as Lizzie and the kids jumped out.

She let out a little shocked sob as they all materialized in the familiar hallway.

“What is it?” a subdued Elsie demanded. “What’s happening?”

“Mummy?” Tilly appealed, tugging at Lizzie’s skirt.

“I’m not sure,” Lizzie said even as she was trying to make sense of the defense agency displays. The defense agency didn’t have any details on the devices that had surrounded the solar system. Then the T-sphere was diverted from standard use, stranding everyone on the planet in his or her immediate location. She told her u-shadow to accept her husband’s call.

“Thank Ozzie,” he exclaimed. “Where are the girls?”

“Got them,” she promised, feeling slightly superior because she’d reacted so swiftly and correctly. “Where are you?”

“On a starship. Eight minutes out from Gralmond spaceport.”

“Do you understand what’s happening?”

“Not really. It’s the ANA factions; their fights have turned physical.”

“They can’t hurt Earth? Can they?” She didn’t want to let go of the children. Outside, the rain had drained out of the gray London sky as the force field dome covered the city.

“That’s not what it’s about. Look I’ll be with you as soon-”

The connection ended. Strange symbols flipped up into her exovision, showing routing problems with his link.

In the unisphere? That’s not possible!

“-after I’ve landed. Then I’ll-”

“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.

“-hang on! I will be there, I prom-”

“The link has failed,” her u-shadow reported.

“How can it fail?” she cried.

“The wormhole connections with the Commonwealth worlds are collapsing,” her u-shadow said.

“Oh, great Ozzie!” Lizzie hurried into the conservatory, pulling the girls with her. She tried to make sense of the emergency icons invading her exovision as she looked up into the dour sky, hunting for signs of the world coming to an end.

– -

Kazimir’s energy signature halted ten kilometers from one of the Swarm components. He manifested a vast array of sensor functions, yet not one of them was able to penetrate the five-hundred-meter-diameter force field floating serenely in space. “Damnit, they’ve acquired Dark Fortress technology,” he told ANA. Far behind him, the Accelerator ship dropped out of hyperdrive next to the inversion core. It was large for an ultradrive; long-range scans revealed a multitude of weapons on board. A hold door opened in the rear section, and the inversion core slipped gracefully inside. Then a force field came on around it, every bit as impervious as the one he was confronting.

Kazimir was desperate to intercept the Accelerator Faction starship, but with Earth and ANA facing an unknown threat, his duty was clear. He manifested several high-level weapon functions and fired at the force field directly ahead of him. Everything he used was simply deflected away. The force field was completely impermeable to any assault he could bring in spacetime and hyperspace.

“The wormholes to the Big15 worlds are collapsing,” ANA reported. “Something is cutting them off.”

Kazimir examined the exotic matter intrusions stretching out from Earth away to the stars, seeing them subjected to enormous interference that was causing them to constrict. Even though he knew the incursion must originate within the Swarm, his manifested sensor functions couldn’t track down its nature.

The Accelerator Faction ship carrying the inversion core went FTL, streaking across the solar system directly away from Kazimir at seventy-eight light-years an hour. His energy signature flashed after it. Enormously powerful exotic energy manipulation functions manifested, but he still couldn’t reach through its force field to disable the drive. He began to manifest some functions that would disrupt the quantum fields around the ship, which would force it out of hyperspace. The ship passed through the Swarm’s orbit. Kazimir was less than two seconds behind. It was too late. The force fields surrounding the Swarm components expanded at hyperluminal speed.

Kazimir’s energy signature struck an impermeable barrier that cut clean across spacetime and hyperspace. He couldn’t get through.

– -

The ship dropped out of hyperspace a light-minute beyond the force field. To the hyperspace sensors, a vast blank shield had sprung up behind them. Its curvature revealed a radius of forty AUs. There was no hint of stress or distortion anywhere on its surface. Whatever Kazimir was armed with was unable to cut through. Neskia brought the ship ’s visual sensor data into her exovision, watching the image keenly as a timer counted down. After one minute, the high-magnitude star that was the Sun vanished, along with the stars across that half of space.

“No sign of it breaking through,” Neskia said. “I think we’re safe.”

“Very clever, that deterrence fleet,” Ilanthe said. “An interstitial energy signature that can extrude into spacetime. The ship wouldn’t have stood a chance in a straight firefight. ANA was more advanced than we’d realized.”

“Even more reason for us to leave it behind,” Neskia said dismissively. “It had so much potential and wasted it.”

“Quite.”

“Where are we going?”

“Ellezelin. I trust our agents are close to recovering Araminta.”

“They are.”

The ship slipped back into hyperspace, heading away at a modest fifty-five light-years an hour. Behind it, the somber sphere imprisoning the Sol system refracted the gentle starlight impinging on its boundary with a cold shimmer reminiscent of a deep forest lake, guarding its contents in perfect isolated darkness.

IT WAS THE FIFTH TIME Edeard had watched the militia forces close in on the hidden valley. There had been a lot of mistakes previously; ge-eagles had been spotted, fastfoxes mauled the first militiamen over the lip, the bandit forces had fought back with a secret cache of weapons, hothead officers didn’t quite follow orders, allowing the Gilmorn to rally his people. Each time there had been too many deaths. Each time Edeard reset the universe to the night before and attempted to mitigate the problem.

Last time he was sure he’d gotten it right, and then the bandit gang had produced rapid-fire guns from a cache that he hadn’t found the first three times. Even with third hands joined together to add extra strength to their shielding, the troopers had been cut to shreds before Edeard himself could reach them. So …

This time he had slipped unseen and unsensed through the valley for two hours just after midnight. He’d destroyed the second lot of rapid-fire guns the bandits had hidden and snatched away the ones belonging to guards after rendering them unconscious. It was politically important that the militias thought they alone had overcome the bandits; Edeard and Finitan wanted the rapid-fire guns to vanish into legend. Now he stood on a small rise half a mile from the valley as the predawn light slowly overwhelmed the nebulae. Buluku was the first to vanish, its undulating stream of pale indigo fading away just above the eastern horizon, as if the land had somehow opened to swallow it. Edeard could well believe that. The valley that the bandits had chosen as their last redoubt was a narrow crack in the undulating grasslands that made up the southernmost part of Rulan province, lapping against the low mountains of Gratham province, which rose in the distance. Not hard to imagine it as a fissure slicing through the whole world.