Judgement Day

(Ark Royal, Book XX)

Christopher G. Nuttall

Book One: Ark Royal
Book Two: The Nelson Touch
Book Three: The Trafalgar Gambit
Book Four: Warspite
Book Five: A Savage War of Peace
Book Six: A Small Colonial War
Book Seven: Vanguard
Book Eight: Fear God And Dread Naught
Book Nine: We Lead
Book Ten: The Longest Day
Book Eleven: The Cruel Stars
Book Twelve: Invincible
Book Thirteen: Para Bellum
Book Fourteen: The Right of the Line
Book Fifteen: The Lion and the Unicorn
Book Sixteen: Fighting For The Crown
Book Seventeen: Drake’s Drum
Book Eighteen: Endeavour
Book Nineteen: The Lone World
Book Twenty: Judgement Day

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Contents
Cover Blurb
Prologue I
Prologue II
Chapter One: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System (Interior)
Chapter Two: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)
Chapter Three: Shuttlecraft, Dyson Two (Exterior)
Chapter Four: North Mountain Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)
Chapter Five: Shuttlecraft/Cousteau, Dyson Two (Exterior)
Chapter Six: North Mountain Lower Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)
Chapter Seven: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System
Chapter Eight: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)
Chapter Nine: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System (Interior/Exterior)

Cover Blurb

For uncounted millennia, the twin Dyson Spheres – one intact, and host to a population unaware of their origins or even the nature of the world around them; one seemingly little more than debris orbiting a dying star – have remained a mystery, their seemingly all-powerful builders as enigmatic as the supertechnology used to construct and maintain the humungous megastructures. But now, in the wake of HMS Endeavour’s discovery of the spheres and the arrival of a multinational fleet to explore – and exploit – the alien tech, everything has changed.

The Builders have returned.

And for all of humanity, and every other known race, it is nothing less than Judgement Day.

Prologue I

From: The Journal of Professor Harrison, Xenoarchaeologist. Baen Publishing House, 2305.

If I hadn’t seen it, I would never have believed it.

The concept of a Dyson Sphere – a shell enclosing an entire star, allowing its builders to make use of every last scrap of solar energy – was first devised in 1960, decades before the first offworld settlements and the discovery of the tramlines allowing FTL travel between star systems. The basic theory was sound, but the practicalities were sorely lacking. It was deemed impossible to gather enough raw material to enclose a star, let alone craft it into a sphere and terraform the interior into something habitable. Smaller concepts – Ringworlds and Orbitals – weren’t much more practical, as far as we could tell. The tech and materials science to make the concept work simply didn’t exist.

And then, on a deep-space exploration mission, HMS Endeavour discovered not one, but two, Dyson Spheres.

It is impossible, even now, to describe the sheer size of the megastructures.  One (Dyson One) shattered long ago, leaving behind a debris field straight out of bad science-fantasy; the other (Dyson Two) remained intact, enclosing an entire star.  When the crew of Endeavour jumped into the sphere, following the tramline, they rapidly discovered the sphere was very far from dead. The interior space was patrolled by ‘fists’ – spheres made of an unknown and seemingly indestructible material, termed ‘unobtainium,’ and propelled around the interior by focused gravity beams – and the surface was inhabited by humans, taken from Earth untold centuries ago and settled on the Dyson Sphere. It rapidly became clear the settlers were trapped in the Stone Age, lacking the metals they needed to make transit to the Iron Age and eventually the Space Age. The local history appeared to be fluid, but from a long-term point of view it was astonishingly repetitive. They simply could not break out of the trap. Indeed, Endeavour herself was almost trapped within the sphere – when the fists took notice of her presence – and she was very lucky to escape.

The news shocked Earth, when Endeavour returned. The human race had long grown used to the concept of technologically-advanced aliens – the Tadpoles had been two or three decades ahead of humanity, when the First Interstellar War broke out – but the Dyson Spheres were several orders of magnitude more advanced than anything humanity had ever encountered. The sheer scale of the megastructures – and the suspiciously-empty star systems surrounding the Dyson System – was incredibly difficult to grasp, suggesting the existence of supertechnology that made humanity’s best look like sticks and stones. The human population on the sphere, worse, was clear proof the Builders had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped a breeding population. The spheres were awe-inspiring, wondrous and terrifying. They promised technology beyond the dreams of human scientists and threatened contact with a race so advanced it might see humanity – and the other known alien intelligences – as nothing more than ants. The shock was great enough to cause no end of turmoil on the homeworld, with some groups worshipping the Builders (and tying them into reputed alien abductions and ancient astronauts), and others insisting the spheres should be left completely alone, for fear of attracting attention from a super-race.

It was unlikely in the extreme that such demands would be honoured. The Dyson System held too much promise with regards to everything from technological development and sociological research for the system to be left in quarantine. The first ships were already heading back to the system within a week of Endeavour’s report; asteroid miners and independent spacers hoping to find something they could claim and exploit so they could turn a profit. It would not be long, everyone knew even if they were unwilling to admit it, before the governments got involved. Indeed, the negotiations for assembling and dispatching a multinational fleet back to the sphere – with orders to arrest independent scavengers and ensure that all discoveries were shared – were concluded surprisingly quickly, with the fleet itself dispatched shortly afterwards. In hindsight, it is perhaps unsurprising that certain governments were plotting to claim the entire system for themselves. The prize was worth almost any risk.

The fleet returned and started to assess the sphere, discovering a handful of installations near the North Mountain (a hatch in the sphere, surrounded by solid walls to keep the atmosphere from leaking out when the hatch was opened) and then a lone planetoid orbiting inside the sphere, apparently a command centre for the entire system. Further research revealed a series of intelligence tests for users, culminating in a device that apparently turned off the tramline linking Dyson to the nearest star. The MNF was, apparently, trapped. It took weeks of additional research, while the military crews were forced to plan an evacuation of the ships to the sphere, before the researchers figured out how to open the North Hatch and discovered, to their horror, that the Dyson System was now completely isolated. The tramlines were gone. The fleet was stranded hundreds of light years from home.

At that moment, treachery struck. The Chinese Government had planned how to take control of the system, and given its representative – the second-in-command of the fleet – orders to strike if it seemed likely the system could be annexed and exploited before the rest of the human governments could react. The attack almost worked – and would have been completely successful, if Endeavour hadn’t managed to hide within the sphere and use the alien technology to destroy two Chinese starships, forcing the remainder to surrender. But this still left the fleet cut off from Earth …

… And, as the fleet came to grips with the prospect of being stranded for the rest of their lives, Dyson One’s star went out …

Prologue II

“What do you mean, the tramline’s gone?”

Admiral Lady Susan Onarina regretted her tone as soon as she spoke. The midshipwoman was so young Susan was tempted to check her birth certificate to make sure the girl hadn’t lied about her age, when she’d joined the Royal Navy, although she wouldn’t have been seconded to the Admiralty if she wasn’t very good at her job. She looked as though she was barely in her teens, hardly old enough to be trusted with … Susan shook her head, cutting off that line of thought before it went any further. She’d been a young midshipwoman too, years ago, and it hadn’t been easy to convince her superiors – and enlisted crewmen – to take her seriously …

And yet, she couldn’t help wondering if some arsehole hadn’t sent the young woman on a snipe hunt. It wasn’t impossible. Senior Midshipmen and Crew Chiefs were fond of knocking newly minted officers and crew down a peg or two, by sending them to find something that simply didn’t exist or couldn’t be found … it was unlikely someone had pranked her by telling her to make an absurd report to the First Space Lady herself, but it couldn’t be ruled out. Not completely. The young officer might be too ignorant to realise she was making an impossible report. 

Midshipwoman Harrington swallowed, hard. “Convoy OCP-Nine-Seven was due to make the hop to Dyson four days ago,” she said. Her voice was shaky, suggesting she knew how absurd the report sounded. “They passed through the tramline to ES-17 and discovered the tramline to Dyson simply wasn’t there. The automated relay station reported losing contact, that it had lost contact with the MNF, two weeks prior to the convoy’s arrival in ES-17. The convoy confirmed the tramline itself was gone.”

Susan keyed her terminal. If it was a joke, she’d have the perpetrator … she sucked in her breath as the report popped up in front of her, confirming the absurd story. The tramline had simply vanished, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned it off. It couldn’t be a joke and yet … it was hard, almost impossible, to believe. She had wondered why the Admiralty – and its foreign counterparts – had had so much trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of alien invaders, back when the First Interstellar War had begun, but she thought she understood now. There hadn’t been any real hint of alien civilisations, not until the Tadpoles had arrived and started shooting. It had been one hell of a shock.

Her heart pounded as the implications dawned on her. The tramlines linked Earth to hundreds of settled systems, from heavily developed worlds like Britannia to isolated settlements like Wensleydale or multiracial colonies like Unity. If the tramlines vanished … interstellar civilisation would vanish with them. The fastest starship the navy had ever designed and put into mass production would take a decade to reach the nearest star, if she were forced to make the trip in realspace. The colonies would be isolated so completely they’d have to live or die on their own. And …

“Go back to your station,” she said, quietly. “And tell Admiral Mason I need to speak with him immediately.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Susan leaned back in her chair as the young midshipwoman retreated, no doubt relieved to be out of her superior’s office. Her career had only just begun, and a single misstep could put it right into the crapper. Susan herself had had problems … she sighed inwardly as she reread the report, wishing it was nothing more than a practical joke. The idea of losing the tramlines was utterly terrifying, a disaster so vast it would make the Navy’s contingency plans look like nothing. She keyed her console, sending a query into the system. They’d have to quietly check the remaining tramlines, just in case. But it might be weeks before they heard back from distant colonies …

The flicker network can be checked, at least, she told herself. It can’t function without the tramlines.

The hatch hissed open. Admiral Paul Mason stepped into the office.

“The tramline to Dyson has vanished,” Susan said flatly, swinging the terminal around so he could read the report. “What do you make of it?”

“We always knew there was something odd about that tramline,” Mason said, running his eyes down the report. It was surprisingly short, for something so urgent. Susan suspected the convoy commander had been too stunned to engage in the usual arse-covering that normally attended any absurd report. Tramlines did not change, yet this one had. “It was extended far beyond the limits of any other known tramline.”

Susan nodded, curtly. The lines of gravimetric force linking stars together were rarely longer than ten light years, and the longest tramline prior to the Dyson Tramline was fifteen light years. The researchers speculated there were longer tramlines, but they were too weak to detect, let alone ride. The Builders had either found a weak tramline and boosted it or … they’d created one from scratch. If that was true … she knew her own government, much less every other government, would do whatever it took to get their hands on the technology and put it into mass production. It would change the universe forever.

“And it went off,” Susan said. “What happened?”

“The MNF was supposed to be exploring the sphere,” Mason reminded her. “Perhaps they pushed the off switch.”

Susan snorted, although it wasn’t funny. She found it hard to believe someone would leave the off switch for a tramline simply lying around, although it stood to reason that if you could make tramlines at will you didn’t have to worry about someone turning it off and stranding you hundreds of light years from home. For all she knew, the tramline could be rebooted by simply turning the system off and then on again. And yet … the last report from Dyson Two had made it clear that it would be decades, perhaps centuries, before the researchers unravelled the secrets of alien technology. The MNF might be stuck there for a very long time.

Or they might have sentenced themselves to death, she thought. The planners had done what they could to make the fleet as self-sufficient as possible, and the crew could always trade with the locals for food and drink, but there were limits. They might not survive long enough to figure it out.

She met his eyes. “What do we do about it?”

“It depends how much our political masters are prepared to commit to the mission,” Mason pointed out. “We could set up a catapult somewhere near the system and launch a relief convoy to Dyson, with the supplies they’d need to set up a relief catapult. The cost would be staggering, but it could be done.”

“It would be difficult to convince the government to pay for the catapult,” Susan said, reluctantly. Catapults were expensive. The Royal Navy could purchase an entire squadron of battleships, or fleet carriers, for the cost of a single catapult. Even with other governments chipping in, it would still be immensely costly. “And some of them, I suspect, will be relieved we lost contact with Dyson.”

She grimaced. The first reports from Dyson had unleashed political chaos. The prospect of alien supertechnology entering the market had changed everything, as had the discovery aliens had visited Earth centuries ago and kidnapped hundreds – perhaps thousands – of humans and transhipped them to their new home. Even if the Builders had abandoned the spheres long ago, and no one had seen any evidence the Builders were still around, the discovery was still incredibly disquieting. She could easily imagine the government trying to wash its hands of the whole matter. It wouldn’t work, she was sure, but … 

It wouldn’t be the first time the government tried to cover its collective eyes and pretend something didn’t exist, she thought, grimly. And if they think they can get away with it …

“I need to speak to the PM,” she said, tiredly. The one advantage of being based in London, rather than Nelson Base, was that she could see the PM at very short notice. It was just a matter of time before the news got out – someone would leak, sooner rather than later – but she should have a chance to shape the political reaction before the media and the opposition had their say. “You go back to the office and get your people looking through every last scrap of data, see if they can figure out what happened and why. And if there is anything we can do from this end.”

Mason frowned. “We can try, but I doubt we’ll find anything.”

Susan nodded. It hadn’t been easy to unlock the secrets of Tadpole tech … and Builder tech was several orders of magnitude more advanced. They could no more understand it at first glance than a medieval peasant could understand a starship or even a simple shuttlecraft. The peasant wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he was so ignorant he couldn’t even begin to grasp just how much he didn’t know. Mason and his team would do their best, she was sure, yet they didn’t know what they didn’t know either.

“There’s another danger,” Mason said, quietly. “There’s a theory that none of the tramlines are natural, that the Builders might have set up a network of gravity beams to allow FTL travel between star systems. If that’s true, they might turn them all off.”

Susan shuddered, recalling her earlier thoughts. “Thanks for that thought,” she said, sardonically. “If you have any more like it, feel free to keep them to yourself.”

Mason nodded. “Aye, Admiral.”

Chapter One: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System (Interior)

Endeavour shook, violently.

Captain Staci Templeton gritted her teeth as the gravity wave crashed against the hull, sending shockwaves through the entire ship. It felt as if the starship was a wet-navy vessel, trying to make her way through rough seas, something she would have sworn impossible before the first gravity wave struck her ship. Red lights flared on the display, Endeavour’s drive field flickering and flaring before quietening down again; she grimaced as she realised the drive nodes were taking one hell of a beating. She had never felt anything like it, even in battle. The damage was starting to mount rapidly.

“We’ve lost two drive nodes,” Lieutenant-Commander David Atkinson reported, grimly. “I’m adjusting to compensate …”

“Get the damage control teams out there,” Staci snapped. In theory, the ship could lose half her drive nodes without losing her drive fields, but she didn’t want to put theory to the test. “We need those nodes repaired or replaced.”

“Aye, Captain,” Commander Mike Jenner said.  “I …”

The ship shook again. Staci cursed under her breath as new reports flowed into the display. Two of her crew were injured, one fatally … she’d ordered all non-essential personnel to tie themselves down, in hopes of avoiding serious injury, but she suspected the civilians were going to be beaten and battered by the time the crisis came to an end. If it ever did … an entire star had vanished, somehow. She had never seen or even heard of anything like it. For all she knew, the gravity waves were going to keep hammering Endeavour until she fell apart at the seams. She didn’t want to think about what might be happening to the remainder of the fleet, or on the sphere’s surface. The sphere might be having the first earthquakes in its long history.

“Captain, we are nearing the hatch,” Atkinson reported. “Do we risk passing through?”

“We have to get into open space,” Staci said. The gravity waves appeared to be random, with no discernible pattern. If Endeavour was caught inside the North Mountain … the entire ship might be dashed against the walls and smashed to atoms, something else that should have been impossible. “Take us through.”

She sucked in her breath as the display updated, her head swimming as she tried – again and again – to come to terms with the sheer size of the sphere.  The North Mountain made Earth’s orbital towers seem tiny, the hatch below bigger than an entire planet … her perspective twisted violently, leaving her half-convinced she plummeting to certain death. It felt as if she’d ordered her starship to ram a planet … the world seemed to shift around her, the gravity field pulsing in a manner that felt weird, as the starship plunged through the hatch and into open space. The drive field twitched – a dull shiver running through the hull – as Endeavour glided through a cloud of dust. The shockwaves had shaken the sphere so badly the layers of exterior surface dust had been blasted into interstellar space …

“Captain, the remainder of the fleet is heading into open space,” Lieutenant Helen Yang reported. “They’re trying to avoid the debris swarms.”

“Communications, raise them,” Staci ordered. The Chinese had surrendered - Admiral He had ordered his crews to hand themselves over to the nearest MNF authorities – but God alone knew what was really going on. No one had expected the alien tech to come into play, let alone an entire star winking out. “Find out who’s in command.”

The display updated, again. Red lights flowed towards Endeavour, icons flickering from red to yellow and back again as the tactical processors attempted to determine what was happening. Staci told herself she shouldn’t have been surprised. Dyson One had shattered centuries ago, leaving behind a shell of debris orbiting the star … and now, pieces of debris were being picked up and shoved into interstellar space by gravitational shockwaves. She hoped Dyson Two could handle the impact, when the inevitable happened and an immense piece of debris struck the sphere, but she feared the worst. The sphere’s shell might be pretty close to indestructible – the researchers hadn’t found a way to so much as scratch it – yet a piece of debris bigger than Britain or Australia might be enough. Even if it didn’t break the shell, the shockwaves would do immense damage. They might even knock the entire sphere into the star.

Unless the Builders intervene, she thought. But they did nothing to save Dyson One.

“Signal from the fleet, Captain,” Lieutenant Andy MacPhee said.  The communications officer didn’t take his eyes off his screen. “Commodore Lafarge has assumed command and is requesting an update from the Admiral.”

“Forward the request to the sphere,” Staci ordered. They’d left Admiral Dismukes on another ship, just in case Endeavour couldn’t make it through the hatch. “And request a full data dump.”

“Captain, the interstellar tramline is still absent,” Helen reported. “I can’t even pick up a hint of its presence.”

Staci grimaced. She’d expected as much, after the tramline had vanished, but she’d hoped …

“Helm, set course for Dyson One,” she ordered. “Best possible speed.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Her terminal updated, again. She glanced at the reports, running her eye down the headings in grim disbelief. The damage wasn’t fatal, thankfully, but it was terrifyingly extensive, the sort of damage she’d expect in a training sim, not real life. There was no rhyme or reason, no pattern … there were damaged sections that were isolated from other sections, internal damage that resembled sabotage or malfunction rather than direct attack. She’d served in combat before – she’d been on ships struck by nuclear warheads or hammered by bomb-pumped lasers – and the damage had been understandable, often predictable.  This … she shook her head, trusting her XO and the damage control teams to fix as much as possible before they reached Dyson One. Or where Dyson One had been …

A wave of unreality washed over her as the ship evaded a wave of debris right out of science-fantasy. The idea of hiding in an asteroid cloud was fantastical anywhere else, but here … she sucked in her breath, bracing herself as pieces of space junk, some so large they had fragments of atmosphere, rocketed past. The display kept updating, projecting trajectories … most of the debris would miss Dyson Two, but some would strike the sphere. She hoped – prayed – the Builders would intervene. The MNF was nowhere near big enough to destroy or divert all the debris before it was too late.

We could assemble the entire navy, every navy, and still not have enough ships, she thought numbly. The whole scene was a nightmare. She was tempted to pinch herself just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She felt like an ant caught in the midst of human machinery, unsure what was actually going on but all too aware of the dangers. And if one impact knocks the sphere off its axis …

“Deploy four sensor drones,” she ordered, as they glided past another piece of debris. It was tumbling through space languidly, slow and stately compared to a starship, but it would be instantly fatal if it struck the hull. Or the distant sphere. “Try to track the debris.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Helen looked up. “Captain, Dyson One’s gravity field is still present. I think the star was crushed into a black hole.”

Staci glanced at her. It was insane, but … what wasn’t?

“A black hole,” she repeated. “How?”

“In theory, one can create a gravity field that compresses a star into a black hole,” Helen said, slowly. “There were some … ah, theories that suggested it might be possible to use a gravity well to trigger a fusion reaction within Jupiter and turn the planet into a star. If you can compress a star, you can just keep going until you end up with a black hole …”

“And then what?” Staci could understand someone trying to ignite a gas giant, although she doubted anyone would take the risk in a populated system, but creating a black hole? What was the point? It would make one hell of a weapon, she supposed, yet using it here seemed pointless. Worse than pointless. There was a very real risk the process would damage or destroy the second sphere, exterminating uncounted millions of humans – and perhaps other races – who lacked the ability to understand what was happening. “Why?”

Helen hesitated. “In theory, again, if you have a black hole at your disposal you could bend space and time into a pretzel. You could create a tramline, or a catapult effect, or …”

“Shit,” Staci said, quietly. She’d seen catapults in action. It was quite possible, at least in theory, to catapult an entire fleet hundreds of light years in a split second, without using the tramlines. Human tech had sent fleets dozens of light years behind enemy lines … she wondered, suddenly, just how far the Builders could send a fleet. A race that thought nothing of dismantling entire star systems might be able to cross the entire galaxy in a single moment. “Are they coming here?”

“It’s possible,” Helen said. “Given enough gravity to play with, they might be able to open a wormhole large enough to swallow an entire planet – or a star.”

“This is all just theory,” Atkinson said, from his console. “For all we know, something went badly wrong …”

Staci doubted it. The MNF had been exploring the sphere for the last few months, pushing buttons without ever knowing what they did … to the point, she reflected sourly, they’d accidentally turned off the interstellar tramline and trapped themselves. And then … they’d worked out how to open the hatch, take control of the fists, and even use them as weapons against their fellow humans. Sure, it was possible the star becoming a black hole was just a huge coincidence, but the odds against it were literally incalculable. A chill ran down her spine as she realised what it might mean. The Builders were coming home.

If Helen’s right, she thought, numbly. Or they may be testing us further.

The thought irked her. The command centres in the sphere – on the surface, in the lone planetoid – were little more than intelligence tests. The researchers had speculated they were designed to unlock themselves, when the local humans – or whoever – reached a point where they could solve the tests and gain access to the centres. Staci wasn’t sure if she liked that idea or not. On one hand, without gaining access the locals would never be able to design and build anything more advanced than a horse and cart, let alone get into orbit; on the other, it suggested a condescending and calculating attitude towards primitive races that chilled her to the bone. If one regarded oneself as superior, so superior there was no way one’s inferiors could close the gap, it was a very short jump indeed to thinking one had to take care of one’s inferiors or use them as one pleased. She was all too aware it had been hard, if not impossible, to keep humans from treating the Vesy as noble savages, rather than intelligent beings in their own right, and the gap between the two races was far smaller than the gap between humanity and the Builders.

Contact with us nearly destroyed the Vesy, and much of their culture was lost in the waves of change washing over their world, she thought, grimly. If the Russian deserters hadn’t made contact with the Vesy, it might have been possible to isolate their world and let them develop in peace, but … there’d been no putting the genie back in the bottle. How badly will we be hurt if we make open contact with the Builders?

She tried not to think about it as Endeavour neared the black hole. The gravitational field was little stronger than the star’s gravity field, the slight increase barely noticeable. She suspected hundreds of pieces of debris had been pulled towards the black hole, when the gravity shockwaves had knocked some of the junk out of stable orbits. The sphere had shattered so long ago the debris that hadn’t fallen into stable orbits had fallen into the sun or been blasted into interstellar space, but now … she shook her head as the display updated, revealing a handful of scavenger craft fleeing the dangerously unpredictable system. They’d have to join the MNF, sooner or later, unless they wanted to try to make an impossible crossing to the nearest star. Hell, even if they did, there’d be no guarantee of finding a way home. It was quite possible they’d fly out of the frying pan and find themselves in the fire.

“Communications, shoot them a copy of the general amnesty,” she ordered, quietly. “If they want to come in out of the cold, they’re welcome.”

She sighed inwardly.  Technically, the MNF was supposed to arrest the intruders; practically, there was no point when there was no way to ship the scavengers back home for trial. If the fleet was permanently stranded in the alien system, they’d need every last pair of hands they could muster … she wondered, suddenly, just what they’d do with the Chinese. They might have staked everything on seizing the system – and she didn’t believe Admiral He’s assertion he’d acted alone, out of a desire to set himself up as an all-powerful warlord – but the MNF could hardly afford to dispose of them. They were trained and experienced personnel, people who couldn’t be discarded … not if there was any other choice.

And they might find a way to rebel again, if we treat them badly, she thought, tiredly. What do we do with them?

It felt like hours before Endeavour finally slipped into the original debris field. The MNF had barely made a start on charting the pieces of space junk, fragments of the shattered sphere, before all hell had broken loose … and now, the charts they’d painstakingly put together were worse than useless. Staci felt uncomfortably cramped as the ship inched through the field, cramped and confined in a manner she’d thought unthinkable. She was all too aware they were passing within bare kilometres of asteroid-like debris, close enough – almost – to reach out and touch. The ship was practically crawling through the field and yet … she shivered, again, as they made it through the shattered shell. Pieces of debris were spinning out of control, some cracking against other pieces like billiard balls; others plummeting down an invisible funnel and spinning straight into the black hole. She’d read a story, once, about a spacecraft that accidentally crossed an event horizon, time slowing down as it plummeted into the black hole …

“Hold position,” she ordered, sharply. They didn’t dare go too close. It was easy to predict the ebb and flow of the gravity field, at least in theory, but no one had ever seen a real black hole. The field might grow stronger with every piece of debris that plunged into the invisible maw, or something else might happen when – if – the Builders arrived. “Deploy additional sensor platforms, then relay our live feed to the MNF.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci’s terminal bleeped.  “Captain, we have completed preliminary repairs,” Jenner reported. “We’re currently working on secondary repairs.”

“We can fly and fight,” Staci said, although she doubted Endeavour could outrun or outfight a race capable of turning a star into a black hole. They’d seen the fists smash entire starships to atoms and they were tiny, compared to the pieces of debris flying towards Dyson Two. “Injuries?”

Jenner lowered his voice. “Nine dead, seventeen injured,” he said. “Seven were thrown into bulkheads and fatally injured, two have no apparent cause of death. The doctor will carry out an autopsy, once the injured are stable.”

Staci nodded, grimly. Her crew was as healthy as any other naval crew – perhaps more so, given the long durations of their voyage – but the civilian complement veered between young and fit and old and decidedly unfit. They’d boarded too many researchers for her peace of mind … she wished, suddenly, they’d brought a pair of passenger liners for the civilians. They wouldn’t have been caught up in the battle to control the system if they’d been based on a civilian ship, with very limited military potential.  But the gravitational shockwaves might have done immense damage to the civilian-grade drive nodes, perhaps even destroyed them and their ships …

“See to it,” she ordered. She felt unusually tired. She hadn’t felt so rough since she’d taken a sailing ship from Britain to Iceland, a passage so draining it had left her with a new respect for the early explorers who’d sailed the seven seas. “And make sure you get some rest. We don’t know when everything will change, again.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci closed the link and stared at the display. The black hole was tiny, impossibly tiny, and yet its gravity field dominated the system. Her sensor crews were having problems trying to track the gravity waves, practically tides, shifting around the gravity nexus. It seemed as though the normal laws of physics were breaking down, tiny flickers of tramline-link patterns coming and going so quickly the sensors could barely keep track. It was awesome and terrifying and left her feeling numb. And yet …

We are ants before them, her mind whispered. She knew she was brave – she had gone into battle more times than she could count – but the scene before her was daunting. How did one fight a race so advanced they could build Dyson Spheres and compress a star into a black hole? And even if they mean well, they may hurt us just by existing …

Chapter Two: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

Admiral Dismukes, Ambassador Lady Charlotte Hammond thought coldly, is either very brave or very stupid.

She stood in Fujian’s CIC and watched, grimly, as the Chinese crew struggled to cope with the unfolding disaster. Admiral Dismukes had decided to move his flag to the Chinese supercarrier, along with enough Marines to ensure the Chinese couldn’t capture him and resume the conflict, but Charlotte wasn’t sure it was a good idea. The Chinese ship was configured for large-scale fleet command and control, and she was better in that role than any other ship in the MNF, yet it still struck Charlotte as incredibly risky. There was no way in hell the Chinese could be trusted completely.

And yet, we have very little choice, she reflected. The tramlines were still gone. The MNF was still cut off from the rest of the human race. It was possible, sure, that the tramlines could be reopened – the researchers were still studying the alien tech, trying to determine how it actually worked – but they couldn’t give any sort of time estimate. We are going to need them if we are going to survive, if we can’t get home.

She gritted her teeth, feeling useless as the military personnel flowed around her, barking out incomprehensible commands as the carrier rocked like a boat caught in a thunderstorm. The entire sphere was quivering under the impact of gravity waves straight out of science-fantasy, blows no one had expected to see outside training simulations designed to test naval cadets rather than consider ways to escape a deadly trap. Charlotte’s husband – her ex-husband – had told her, once, that the Royal Navy had a supernova training scenario, although it was unlikely in the extreme anyone could survive save through sheer dumb luck. The exploding wavefront, travelling at the speed of light, would hit its target well before any warning could arrive, let alone be acted upon. She wasn’t sure there was anything a starship crew could do even if they had warning. If they couldn’t reach the tramline in time to jump out, or perhaps take shelter behind a rocky planet, they were doomed.

Red lights flickered and flashed on the display, centred on the mountaintop base and the settlement at the bottom of the impossible mountain. The Chinese had overwhelmed the original colony and started to put together a military base before they’d been forced to surrender and there were still hundreds, if not thousands, of allied personnel on the surface. Charlotte hoped they were coping, although she had no way to know. The sphere’s defences would fire, automatically, on any radio transmissions from the surface, while the landlines had been cut by the earthquakes. It would take time to get in touch, if anyone survived on the surface. She wondered, numbly, what the locals made of the earthquakes. The sphere had been as geologically stable as any space habitat, despite its far greater size. The natives were experiencing earth-shaking tremors for the first time in their history.

She tried not to think about the unfolding disaster, but her mind morbidly returned time and time again. She’d been a young girl during the Bombardment, too young to remember much of anything, yet she’d seen the videos of tidal waves smashing their way inland, crushing everything in their path, or chunks of debris falling from the sky and inflicting immense damage. It had to be just as bad on the sphere, if not worse. She couldn’t help imagining rivers and seas breaking their banks, tidal waves smashing into local settlements and destroying them beyond all hope of repair. There were entire settlements on the waters, she recalled. Their populations would be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Her heart sank. The locals had been caught in a cultural and technological stasis when Endeavour had discovered the sphere and made contact with the surface dwellers. There had been little hope of them ever climbing outside their atmosphere, let alone finding a way to get out of the sphere. Charlotte had seen their homes, on the surface, and realised their lives were dull and predictable and yet … she wondered if the intruders had caused the storms battering the sphere, shattering the local society beyond repair. It was a disaster on a scale beyond all hope of comprehension. No one was sure how many humans – and other races – lived on the sphere, but even if the population estimates were low …

Billions could have died in the last hour, she thought. She recalled the first village they’d encountered, when her team had accidentally crashed on the surface, and shuddered, remembering names and faces of people who had greeted them as allies, then turned against the offworlders when they realised how dangerous and disruptive they could be. The society had been very traditional – dominated by older women who groomed the younger girls to take their place – and restrictive, but it didn’t deserve to be destroyed. How many of the folk we knew are dead?

The question haunted her as another quiver ran through the carrier’s hull. The display seemed to wobble – for a horrified moment, she thought she saw the star come apart like a broken egg yolk – before she blinked and the image steadied. It was difficult to believe anything the size of the sphere could be damaged, knocked off its axis, or even destroyed, but the remnants of Dyson One were a grim reminder the spheres weren’t completely indestructible. Charlotte had no idea what could damage their shells – human nukes wouldn’t so much as scratch the surface – but … she shook her head, tiredly, as the display updated again. The fists were starting to move, heading straight for the mountaintop.

“Pull us back to a safe distance,” Admiral Dismukes ordered, in Chinese. Charlotte silently blessed her tutors for insisting she mastered the language, even though English was the lingua franca of space travellers and French was more common amongst the British aristocracy. “Deploy two stealth drones to monitor their approach.”

Charlotte stepped back, trying to stay out of the way as the remainder of the fleet backed further into the sphere. She had no idea if the admiral was making the right call, but she’d seen the fists smash entire starships as if they were made of paper; the carrier would be effortlessly destroyed if the alien devices caught her trying to pass through the hatch. It was difficult, if not impossible, to tell what the fists were doing, and it was probably wise to keep their distance … she hoped, desperately, that the fists weren’t intent on wiping out the intruding starships, or merely keeping them confined within the sphere. There was no other way out, unless the tramline somehow booted back up again …

“Check the laser link with the lone planet outpost,” the admiral added. “If they’ve lost control of the fists …”

They never really had it, Charlotte thought. She’d barely had the time to scan the report, before Dyson One’s star had simply winked out, but it was clear the researchers hadn’t had complete control over the fists, or gravity-manipulation technology light years ahead of anything humanity had ever devised. If the fists are operating under alien orders, their actions will be dangerously unpredictable.

She forced herself to wait, watching the timer tick down. The sheer size of the sphere was staggering. They were exchanging laser signals at the speed of light, but it still took hours for a message to pass from Fujian to the outpost and back again. It was possible, she supposed, the researchers might figure out how to use the alien tech to reply instantly, but she dared not count on it. She’d seen the alien gravity technology at work. It was quite possible that sending a message would be incredibly destructive, like firing up a modern communications array next to a primitive system wholly incapable of handling the discharge … it was ironic, she reflected, given how much primitive tech had been brought to the sphere, in hopes of avoiding attention from alien weapons platforms. The landlines on the surface were so primitive …

“Admiral, the gravity beams are growing in power,” a sensor officer reported. His voice was tightly controlled, but Charlotte could hear fear underlining his words. “The inner shell is vibrating rapidly. I think the orbital shell is actually speeding up.”

Charlotte shivered. Earth rotated on its axis, ensuring a day-night rhythm, but there was no such thing on the sphere. The Builders had compensated by crafting an inner shell of heavy plates, orbiting the star to give the sphere a day-night rhythm of its own … a concept that was easy to understand, compared to many others they’d seen on the sphere, yet still a sign of just how big the Builders thought. The plates were huge, each one larger than an entire planet, and rotating at terrifying speed … if they were speeding up, what did it mean? And why?

The locals will see day turn to night and back again faster than they would have thought possible, Charlotte realised. She’d heard stories of eclipses shocking primitive societies, although most of the stories – including brave Western explorers using the eclipse to prove the gods favoured them – were massively exaggerated or made up of whole cloth. The primitives might not have understood quite how eclipses worked, but they’d been perfectly capable of understanding the pattern and predicting them. Here …

She swallowed, suddenly feeling as dull and stupid as a caveman who’d stumbled through a space-time portal and found himself in modern London. She’d thought the locals would be scared shitless by the sudden changes in their local environment, but … she was scared too. A star had gone out. A star! It was impossible, and yet it had happened. Endeavour was making her way towards Dyson One, in hopes of determining just what had happened, but somehow Charlotte doubted the explorer ship would be able to figure it out. They were ants, crawling across a machine so vast they couldn’t even begin to grasp the sheer immensity of the device, let alone its purpose. She’d read a story, once, about a hamster who’d made a home inside a grand piano. She knew, now, how that poor beast must have felt.

Admiral Dismukes joined her, his face grim. “The gravity fields are speeding up,” he said, quietly. “It looks as if the sphere is trying to steady itself.”

Charlotte frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The star is at the centre of the sphere, but it isn’t actually attached to the sphere,” the admiral explained. “If the sphere’s shell is pushed away from Dyson One, it will eventually brush against the star and the entire surface will be incinerated.”

“Shit.” Charlotte felt numb. It was – would be – a disaster on an unimaginable scale. The sphere was so huge it was hard to believe anything could so much as shake it, let alone push the shell out of orbit, but … she’d studied plans to blow up Mercury for raw materials, concepts that had never – thankfully – seen the light of day. “If that happens, can we get out?”

“Perhaps.” Admiral Dismukes nodded to the display. “The fists are guarding the exit and God alone knows what’s happening outside.”

Charlotte nodded. The communications links had broken down. Hell, there were ships that had fled into the sphere, when the Chinese had staged their coup, and remained out of contact, unwilling to risk radio transmissions for fear of attracting the fists. Charlotte had no idea what, if anything, the admiral intended to do about those ships. It would be easy to use a drone to send a radio signal – the drones were expendable – but difficult to convince the ships to come in from the cold. They might assume, even with disaster sweeping over the sphere’s interior, that the Chinese remained in control. In theory, the admiral’s command and verification codes should have been wiped if he’d been forced to surrender. In practice, who knew? One didn’t have to be paranoid beyond reason to think the Chinese might have captured the codes and put them to use …

And half the fleet is composed of civilian ships, not military vessels, she reminded herself, grimly. Their crews weren’t primed to destroy their computer cores if there was a risk of their ships being captured.

She glanced at the admiral. He’d always been handsome, but he seemed to have aged ten years in the last few hours. Her lips twitched. She probably didn’t look much better. She was tired and worn and she hadn’t so much as had a shower, let alone a few hours of sleep … the Chinese had given her a cabin, to be fair, but she hadn’t been able to sleep even before all hell had broken loose. And … she hadn’t been able to do much of anything, except watch, when the star had winked out and the storm had begun. She was nothing more than a helpless spectator …

So is he, she reflected. Admiral Dismukes knew how to handle himself in battle, and he’d done well when the Chinese had launched their coup, but what could he and his fleet do against a disaster big enough to threaten the entire sphere? Charlotte suspected there was nothing they could do, nothing that might save even a handful of the locals … perhaps not even that. The MNF was in deep shit, caught in a trap it might never be able to escape. And if they couldn’t save themselves …  We might never see home again.

Another quiver ran through the hull. She forced herself to take a long breath, wishing she had somewhere to sit. Perhaps it would be wiser to go to her cabin and close her eyes, and pretend it wasn’t happening, but she couldn’t force herself to leave. She hadn’t felt so helpless since … since ever. Even when they’d been trapped on the surface, they’d had options … shitty options, to be fair, but options nonetheless.  Here … nothing they could do could save themselves, or the local population, if the sphere died. Or if the alien weapons platforms and fists came after them …

Mitch would have loved this, she thought, suddenly. He would have thrived on uncertainty.

“We may be able to gain control of the fists, or at least get them out of the way,” the admiral continued. “But we know so little …”

“We also need to help the locals,” Charlotte said. The live feed from a stealth platform near the surface was updating rapidly, showing a hurricane forming below. The storm was so impossibly vast Charlotte couldn’t help wondering if the sensors were having flights of fancy … or if they were being disrupted by the gravity waves flowing through the sphere. She’d heard of some big storms in the past, but one big enough to sweep over an entire planet …? “Is there anything we can do?”

“We can try,” the admiral said. “But right now, we can barely help ourselves.”

He nodded to the display. “We don’t even dare try to fiddle with the command centres, not as long as the gravity waves are crashing into the sphere,” he added. “Right now, if we push the wrong button, we could make the disaster incomparably worse.”

“You’d think the Builders would expect the locals to eventually get into the command centres,” Charlotte muttered. The locals hadn’t been able to get near the centres, from what she’d heard, but she could think of a few ways around that. “Or did they think the locals would figure out how the system works before they started pushing buttons?”

She shook her head, tiredly. The Chinese had designed their ships to be very compatible with foreign vessels – a precaution dating all the way back to the First Interstellar War – and yet she couldn’t even begin to fly the ship. She had almost no naval experience worthy of the name. A British naval crew might be able to steer the carrier, even take her into battle, but she’d have a few surprises for the foreigners, even if they thought they knew what they were doing. The technology might be practically identical, but the layout was very different. She could easily imagine a crewman trying to power up the drive and accidentally opening fire instead. Builder tech was so different it was impossible to predict what would happen until it was far too late …

And so advanced it can generate tramlines at the drop of a hat, she reflected, sourly. How can we even begin to guess at what else it can do?

“All we can do is wait, and hope for the best,” Admiral Dismukes said. “When the fists settle down, we’ll try and get back to the hatch – and down to the surface. We’ll do what we can for the folks down there.”

Charlotte tried not to wince. The military tended to be more practical than government officials who couldn’t understand that disaster relief, no matter how well-funded and equipped, couldn’t hope to save everyone. The Bombardment had been as well-handled as any disaster-relief planners could have hoped, and yet millions of humans had died in the days and weeks after the rocks had fallen from the sky, despite the best efforts of tens of thousands of soldiers, doctors, and countless civilians. Here … they couldn’t even scratch the surface. And yet, they had to try. Their mere presence had shattered the local society beyond repair.

Perhaps it needed to be changed, she thought. She had no truck with people who insisted oppressive or stagnant societies should be left alone, even if it meant condemning the locals to suffering, but still … she couldn’t help shuddering. It was one thing to introduce new technology and medicine, to help the locals get out of a trap, and another to shatter their society without doing anything to put the pieces back together. The locals had been friendly, at least at first. And their world …  But not changed like this.

But she knew, deep inside, there was no way to put the pieces back together.

Chapter Three: Shuttlecraft, Dyson Two (Exterior)

“Jesus!”

Shuttle Pilot Richard Tobias Gurnard bit himself, none too gently, as the shuttle flew through the sphere’s hatch and out into interplanetary space. The sphere appeared to be shaking the dust from its shell, clouds of it spreading through space as if the sphere was caught in a sandstorm, and pieces of debris were flying towards the surface. Tobias had played countless computer games where local space was filled with dust and asteroids and other hazards that simply didn’t exist in the real world … it felt like a nightmare, rather than anything real. Even after everything he’d seen …

He bit himself again as the shuttle glided away from the sphere, pushing its way through a dust cloud that really shouldn’t have existed. The surface was caked in powder, layer upon layer of interstellar dust that had accumulated over uncounted millions of years, but now it looked as though windstorms were sweeping over the sphere, tearing the powder from the surface and tossing it into vortexes that reached into interplanetary space. It was so impossible he couldn’t help wondering if the sphere had suddenly developed a surface atmosphere, though the shell lacked the gravity to keep an atmosphere for more than a few seconds. Or … perhaps there had been an atmosphere, at one point in time. He’d seen the Builders twist gravity fields in ways he’d thought impossible before he’d seen them shape gravity into a twisted morass or use it to throw fists across the system at near-superluminal speeds. Who knew? Perhaps the sphere had once been inhabited on both sides.

A dull thump echoed through the shuttle. Tobias felt a flash of panic, convinced they’d hit something, before he realised the gravity wave had crashed into their drive field and raged on, striking the sphere itself. He glanced at the display, half-expecting to see the sphere shatter into a cloud of debris … it wasn’t impossible. He’d flown through the wreckage of Dyson One and he knew there was no reason Dyson Two couldn’t go the same way, although no one knew for sure what had happened to Dyson One. Tobias privately suspected the gravity field had unbalanced slightly, putting a little stress on the megastructure … too small to be noticed, at least at first, but enough to steadily damage the structure over millions of years until it had finally shattered. It was funny, he’d been taught in school, how a tiny imperfection could lead to disaster. Even something as simple as a bike could be ruined if …

He gritted his teeth as another gravity wave slammed into the craft, leaving him fighting to control his sudden terror. He knew how to fly the shuttle into danger – he had flown into danger – and yet he had never felt so helpless in his entire life, not since joining the Royal Navy and learning how to fly gunboats. He was in control – he was hardly a passenger – and yet he couldn’t help feeling as though the shuttle was spiralling out of control. He’d flown through storms as well as enemy fire, but storms had been predictable and he’d known how to handle them. Here … the shuttle shuddered again, hard enough to destabilise the gravity field. For a moment, it was so intense he was afraid the crew were going to be crushed by their own gravity generator.

“We lost a drive node,” Marigold reported. Her voice was high, suggesting she was on the verge of panic too. “Two more are going to break, unless we shut them down.”

“Do it,” Tobias ordered, curtly. The shuttle had seven drive nodes. In theory, she could lose half of them without losing anything else; in practice, he wasn’t so sure. They’d be completely safe, if they were in interplanetary space, but the gravity field surrounding Dyson Two was dangerously unpredictable. It reminded him of training sims where wannabe pilots had to thread their way through gravity wells, only with real consequences if you misjudged your flight. “And try to make contact with the ship.”

“Aye, sir,” Marigold said. “The MNF is heading into interstellar space.”

“I can’t blame them,” Tobias muttered. The starships could probably handle the gravity waves better than the shuttle, but it was quite reasonable for their commanding officers to want some distance between themselves and the sphere. “See if you can get a link to whoever’s in charge over there too.”

He grimaced as the shuttle cleared the last of the dust cloud and headed further into interplanetary space. The sphere was just too big, a solid wall so vast it was impossible to make out the curve with his naked eye. He’d read comics where the universe was enclosed with a vast wall, keeping the chaos outside from destroying all of creation, and he couldn’t help thinking the sphere wasn’t that different even if it was tiny compared to a universal wall. He had no idea what it was made of, but it blocked everything from radio transmissions to nuclear missiles. They’d lost their link to the mountaintop base, and the remainder of the fleet, the moment they passed through the hatch.

His console sounded the alarm. Tobias cursed under his breath as a piece of debris shot towards them, so close he couldn’t help wondering if it had been aimed deliberately at the tiny shuttle. It wasn’t alone either … he swore out loud as he saw an impossible debris storm hurtling towards the shuttle and the sphere beyond. The shell itself might not have much of a gravity field, he reflected, but the star inside sat at the bottom of a gravity well, pulling pieces of debris towards the sphere … he yanked the shuttle to one side, gritting his teeth as another piece of space junk rocketed past. Whatever had happened to Dyson One’s star – and he refused to even think about it – had knocked countless pieces of debris out of their relatively stable orbits and thrown them in all directions. He shuddered to think what would happen if one struck the shuttle. They’d be atomised and no one would even notice.

“I have a solid link to the fleet,” Marigold reported. She sounded steadier now … Tobias envied her. “They’re holding position well clear of the debris storm.”

“Try and get a link to Endeavour,” Tobias said. The mothership had passed through the hatch hours ago and headed straight for Dyson One. No matter what, it was unlikely they’d get a reply for several hours … if they were lucky. He tried not to consider the possibility the explorer ship had been hit by flying debris. Endeavour was the largest ship he’d ever served on, but she’d be destroyed if something struck her at a reasonable percentage of the speed of light. “The captain may have orders for us.”

The words sounded silly, even as he spoke. They were a long way from the remainder of the fleet, either the ships inside the sphere or the ones holding position light-minutes from the debris field. They were effectively alone, unless they turned and flew back through the hatch and he didn’t think that was a good idea. The dust storm was intense enough to interfere with laser signals, something else he’d previously thought impossible, and radio signals would draw hostile attention. They were so far from everyone else, there was no point in asking for specific orders. By the time any arrived, events would have moved on.

“Crap,” he said, as a piece of debris – merely the size of Belgium – slammed into the sphere. Giant waves washed over the surface and exploded into interplanetary space, waves so intense he thought for an insane moment the sphere was covered in water before he realised the towering waves were actually dust. It didn’t look as though the impact had damaged the shell itself – it really was unbelievably strong – but it was impossible to be sure. “If the sphere is punctured …”

He looked at her and saw her staring back, horror clearly visible on her face. The sphere was an entire world, only turned inside-out. If the shell was damaged, if something hit the surface hard enough to break through … he had a sudden mental image of a punctured balloon starting to deflate, the air flowing out until it was gone … the sphere had more atmosphere than a hundred planets, he thought, but once it started flowing out it would keep going until the entire population suffocated. He’d endured emergency drills in which they’d had to patch up the hull, with everything from purpose-built patches to duct tape, yet … how did one patch up a hole the size of Belgium? Or something bigger? Some of the debris chunks were big enough to pass for planets!

“We can’t even begin to deflect them,” Marigold said, grimly. “We don’t have the power …”

The shuttle rocked again. Tobias cursed as a hundred pieces of debris altered their courses, as if they were litter caught up in an ocean wave. It wasn’t a bad analogy, part of his mind whispered. He’d only been to the beach once, as a young boy, but he’d seen the waves pick up litter and carry it out to sea or toss it back onto the shore. Here … he evaded a piece of debris that came right at them and plunged onwards into interstellar space, fortunately heading nowhere near the fleet. Another piece spun out of control and glanced off the sphere, spinning back into interplanetary space. He shuddered helplessly as more dust storms marched across the surface, seemingly small from their vantage point, but in reality they were so immense they would’ve swallowed up an entire country back on Earth. It was like the Bombardment all over again, but worse. Far worse.

He tried to think of options, as more pieces of debris hit the sphere, but there were none. The shuttle wasn’t designed to push an incoming asteroid onto a trajectory that wouldn’t hit a planet, nor did it have the weapons to shatter the asteroid into chunks too small to pose any real threat. The entire fleet wasn’t big enough to make a difference, even if it had been in position to intercept the incoming rocks; the fists might make a difference, he supposed, but they’d never seen the alien structures operating outside the sphere. There was no way, he thought, to focus the gravity beams into interstellar space.

Or if there is we don’t know about it, he thought. It stood to reason it could be done – the Builders had dismantled entire planets to build the spheres, and they clearly hadn’t needed the spheres to do it – but he had no idea how. There were no command-and-control structures outside the sphere, as far as they knew. Perhaps they were buried under the dust.

The thought mocked him. The Dyson System was a binary system … or had been, before one of the stars had winked out. Any star system was immense and a binary star system was larger than most, and searching it would take thousands upon thousands of years. An entire fleet could go dark within a star system and effectively vanish … for all he knew, the command-and-control system was only a few hundred kilometres from his current position, yet it was so dark and silent he wouldn’t have the slightest idea it was there unless he stumbled across it. The sheer size of the system was daunting. Hell, for all he knew, the original command structure had already been picked up by the gravity waves and thrown into the sphere.

“The dust is going to pose a major hazard,” Marigold said, in a tone that suggested she was fighting hard to remain calm. “I don’t know what’ll happen if it gets into the sphere itself.”

Tobias had no idea either. The Builders had shaped the gravity field so perfectly that there was no gravity within the mountain. Flying through the hatch was more like flying through an oversized launch tube than trying to thread an impossibly huge needle. In theory, there was no reason the dust would fall into the mountain passageway and contaminate the interior; in practice, he had no idea what to expect. A massive influx of dust would do immense ecological damage … the Bombardment had thrown tons of dust and water vapour into Earth’s atmosphere, and that had been relatively minor. A full-fledged nuclear war might have rendered the planet uninhabitable or worse …

“We can’t do anything,” he said. The realisation hurt. He hadn’t enjoyed his brief time on the surface, and it had been no surprise to him that the locals had tried to kill him and the offworlders, but the locals didn’t deserve to die. The impacts might not punch through the shell, as incredible as it seemed, yet … they had to be shaking the surface violently enough to do real damage. “I think …”

He watched another piece of debris strike the surface and shivered. The dust cloud was expanding rapidly, rippling oddly as gravity waves passed through the system and vanished into interstellar space. It made him wonder what, if anything, the distant colonies would pick up, when the gravity waves washed through their systems. The nearest colony world was forty light years away, in realspace … the gravity waves would hit them in forty years, unless they faded before they got there. Would they blame the whole affair on alien supertechnology, he asked himself, or would they assume a distant star had gone supernova or … or what? Perhaps they’d deduce the truth, or something close to it. They’d certainly notice an entire star going out.

A chill ran down his spine. Anyone standing on the colony world and looking towards the Dyson System would see Dyson One, glowing as brightly as always. It would be forty years before the colonists saw the star go out, even though it had happened only a few short hours ago. Forty years … it would be interesting, he reflected, to see what could be picked up if the fleet travelled far enough to witness the event from light-weeks away, but that was impossible without the tramline. He grimaced, wondering what would happen if the entire system came apart. The fleet was supposed to be equipped for long-term deployment, with enough supplies to set up a self-sustaining settlement if they lost contact with Earth, but they’d always assumed they’d be able to trade with the locals for food and drink. What if they couldn’t? Would they be able to survive? Or would they find themselves slowly dying out?

We’ll last longer than the locals, if the sphere shatters, he thought, numbly. It was difficult to imagine the scale of the potential disaster, impossible to grasp how many innocents would die without ever knowing what had happened … lacking even the knowledge to understand they lived inside a Dyson sphere. But we won’t last forever.

He glanced at Marigold, her head bent over her console, and felt a pang of guilt. It would have been easy to resign, in the wake of the war, and find employment in the asteroid belt or even purchase a small starship for themselves. They’d planned to do just that … and they would have, if they hadn’t been convinced to join the first voyage beyond the rim of explored space.  Now … he didn’t regret seeing the spheres, but they were trapped light years from Earth and the colonies. They might never get home … he could do the maths, as easily as everyone else. The nearest colony was forty light years away, which meant it would take at least a century to reach it if they travelled in realspace …

And if we could keep the drives online indefinitely, which we can’t, he thought, bitterly. He was no starship engineer, but he understood the dangers of keeping the drive nodes operational for far too long without repair or replacement. The wear and tear on the system would be enough to degrade the units and ruin their performance, if they didn’t destroy themselves completely. If we can’t reactivate the tramlines, we’re fucked.

“I think that’s the last of the first wave,” Marigold said. “But other pieces of debris were pushed into orbits that might intersect the sphere.”

Tobias made a face. In theory, it would be easy to track the debris and predict which pieces would hit the sphere. In practice, if there were more gravity waves, it would prove impossible to be sure of anything. The debris might pick up speed or be tossed away from the sphere or … who knew? He hoped the researchers were looking for ways to steer the fists outside the sphere or … could a gravity wave push through the sphere? Was it possible? He had no idea, and it struck him as incredibly dangerous, but … he made a mental note to forward the suggestion to the research team. If they could push a gravity beam through the shell without damaging the sphere itself, it might give them a way to deflect the next wave of debris. Might.

“We’ll just have to wait and see,” he said. The laser link to the Chinese carrier was gone. Naval protocol was to re-establish the link as quickly as possible, but he had no idea if that was even possible. “Forward our sensor records to the exterior fleet. We’re going to need pick-up sooner or later.”

Marigold wrinkled her nose. “It’ll have to be sooner,” she said. “Our systems took one hell of a beating. The damage pattern is bizarre.”

“Yeah,” Tobias agreed. A laser burning through the hull, damaging everything in its path, would have made sense. The pattern in front of him was erratic, seemingly random. “It makes no sense at all.” 

Chapter Four: North Mountain Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

“Don’t say a word,” the pilot said. “One cough and we’re dead.”

Captain Colin Lancaster, Royal Marines, swallowed several nasty responses – he was in no mood for pilot humour - as the shuttle glided towards the mountaintop base. The fists were orbiting directly above the shuttle – his sense of perspective kept shifting as the craft moved over the mountain shaft leading down to the open hatch – and there’d be no time to react if they sensed the shuttle and attacked. He’d seen alien objects smash shuttles to atoms, and alien weapons slice through others effortlessly, and he knew the dangers … even though he also knew sound didn’t travel in a vacuum and the fists wouldn’t hear anything they said, no matter how loud. It was good discipline though, he reflected. He’d been in dangerous environments before, where the slightest radio signal could bring death and destruction down on their heads, but the sphere was easily the most dangerous. The Builders didn’t seem to have any qualms about collateral damage when they fired on radio sources.

The shuttle rocked faintly, the gravity wave rippling over the hull and on into the sphere, as they neared the mountaintop base. It should have been anchored to the base material, but it had proved impossible to drill into the mountain to properly secure the collection of modular structures that made up the station. The engineers had practically had to clamp the structure to the mountaintop – he couldn’t help thinking of something perched on the edge of a volcano – and it hadn’t been enough, anything like enough, to keep the earthquakes from doing immense damage. His heart sank as he surveyed the live feed from the shuttle’s optical sensors. Half the base was missing – he hoped the modules had been thrown into orbit, rather than down to the surface – and the remainder looked badly damaged, as if the base had been caught in a storm. It should have been impossible – they were well above the sphere’s atmosphere – but what was impossible these days? An entire star had just … gone out.

“The outer airlock appears to be defunct,” the pilot reported. “There’s no way I can dock. You want to try to open it from the outside?”

Colin shook his head. “We’ll go through the gash in the hull,” he said, curtly. It was hard to be sure, but the gash looked big enough to take an armoured man. The interior was no longer pressurised … he hoped, prayed, that some of the modules had remained intact, but he feared the worst. “Hold position near the base. I’ll take the first team.”

“Aye, sir.”

He nodded to Sergeant Ben Burris and Corporal Rowntree, of the Royal Engineers, then led the way to the airlock. The pilot kept up a running commentary as the marines prepped for the jump, cautioning them to remain tethered to the shuttle at all times. Colin found it hard to believe there was a dust storm below, blocking visual access to the outside universe, but … he told himself to take the report seriously. An entire star had gone out and the sphere, a megastructure so vast it made Earth look tiny, was shaking. He couldn’t imagine anything powerful enough to do that, let alone shatter Dyson One. If Dyson Two went the same way …

The hatch hissed open as soon as they checked each other’s suits, revealing the mountaintop station dead ahead. Colin couldn’t help thinking that the station looked like a child’s toy, one battered repeatedly by the child’s older sibling … the damage so extensive, even to the naked eye, that all hope of finding survivors was lost. The Chinese might have done the MNF a favour, he reflected sourly, by capturing the base and taking the crew down to the surface. They might still be alive, as long as the locals stayed well away from the surface outpost. Whoever they’d left in position on the mountaintop was almost certainly dead.

He triggered his gas jets and flew out of the hatch, straight towards the gash in the base’s hull. Up close, the gash was larger than he’d thought, opening directly into the crew’s sleeping compartments. They’d had slightly more room than the Royal Marines, he noted absently, but they’d probably had to hotbunk if they weren’t making their way down to the surface. He paused at the gash and peered inside, carefully activating his suit’s spotlights. The interior was as dark and silent as the grave. A shiver ran down his spine as he glided inwards, his eyes flickering from bunk to bunk. They were all empty, stripped of bodies and blankets alike when the air flowed out of the station. A handful of eReaders floated in the air, left tethered to the bunks by their owners. Colin hoped they were safe – it was possible the compartment had been empty, when it was opened to vacuum – but there was no way to be sure. The clean-up crews would have a lot of work to do, figuring out who’d owned what. He didn’t envy them.

And if someone was sleeping when the hull was breached, their odds of getting out before it was too late would be precisely zero, he thought, grimly. He’d done extensive survival training throughout his career, with endless drills for donning life support gear in the middle of an emergency, but his instructors had made it clear survival depended on having the right gear within reach. There should have been survival gear in the module – the base was in a dangerous environment – yet he couldn’t see any. The crew had been caught by surprise. They wouldn’t even have time to kiss their ass goodbye.

The sense of unreality grew stronger as they forced open the hatch to the next compartment and glided inside. The station had been designed to seal off any breached compartments before the entire structure could depressurise, but the damage was too great to allow any part of the station to be isolated and saved. The bulkhead looked so battered and holed he couldn’t help wondering if someone had opened fire inside the compartment, although the damage didn’t look like bullet holes. It looked more like someone – or something – had bent the structure as if it were made of taffy. He gritted his teeth as he made his way into the command compartment and cursed under his breath. Two bodies hung in the air, faces frozen in a rictus of agony. One male, one female, both Chinese.

Rowntree glided past him and started to work on the console. Colin left him to it and made his way to the upper funicular station. It should have been secure – God knew the funicular was the only way to get up and down without a purpose-built vehicle, one of which had suffered a terrible accident on the way down the mountainside – but much of the station was simply gone. Colin guessed the earthquakes had shaken it free and sent it tumbling down the mountain, into the sphere’s gravity field. He could see nothing below, save for the upper atmosphere’s haze. The sphere was as daunting as ever. He forced himself to look away before vertigo overwhelmed him.

And I thought the Beacons were bad, he thought, as they inched back into the station. The mountaintop didn’t look that bad, but there was something about it that wore him down in a way the forced march through the Brecon Beacons had not. There’s no way anyone could get used to this environment.

He checked the line tethering him to the shuttle, then keyed the communicator. “We’re going to need the car. Team One can get the car out and meet us by the funicular; Team Two can start patching holes up here.”

The pilot put on a mock maternal tone. “See that you bring her back without a scratch.”

Colin had to smile as he went back to the command centre, although it wasn’t funny. He’d totalled his mother’s car a few years ago and he’d been damned lucky he hadn’t been sent to jail, given how careless he’d been. He could easily have killed himself and the girl he’d been trying to impress … he couldn’t even remember her name. She hadn’t put out for him either, he recalled. His old self had been outraged she hadn’t given herself to him; his newer, more mature, self argued she’d probably had a point. What sort of idiot would date a guy who’d nearly gotten her killed?

“The main system is completely fucked, sir,” Rowntree reported. “All the local datanodes are gone, and most of the sensors and datalinks are either lost or operating at very low capacity. I might be able to extract some of the smaller datacores, but … I’ve never seen internal damage like this. The fusion core and batteries are ruined beyond repair.”

Colin was too numb to be surprised. The Royal Navy was a firm believer in building as much redundancy into its ships and stations as possible. He’d seen battleships and carriers soak up a hell of a lot of damage and keep going, even when they’d been streaming atmosphere and plasma from gashes in their hulls. The station should have survived the earthquakes … and even if the modules had been pulled apart, the datanodes should have survived long enough to be recovered and scanned. But then, no one had expected gravity waves so powerful they shook something the size of a Dyson Sphere. It made him wonder if the ships outside the sphere were gone. The gravity waves could have smashed them as easily as a tidal wave shattered a wooden sailing ship.

That’s someone else’s problem, he told himself, sharply. Worry about your own problems.

“Team Two is on the way,” he said. “When they arrive, do what you can to help them patch up the station.”

“We’d be better off building a whole new station, sir,” Rowntree pointed out. “The hull is fucked too.”

Colin could hardly disagree. The station was completely exposed to vacuum. The team would have to find and seal all the holes before they could repressurise the station and that wouldn’t be easy, not when some of the holes would be tiny. Rowntree was right, but Colin didn’t think the MNF had anymore modules on hand. They might have to put them together in the fleet’s machine shops, or adapt a starship to serve as a base of operations, and either way it would take time … time they didn’t have. Besides, he had no idea if there would be more gravity waves. It was quite possible the admiral would refuse to take the risk of throwing good equipment after bad.

“Do what you can,” he ordered, quietly. “Good luck.”

He turned and hurried back to the funicular station. The car – a strange combination of rollercoaster carriage, spider-walker and IFV – was already waiting, the crew carefully attaching one end of the cable to the mountaintop station to ensure they could communicate with the shuttle crew as they made their way to the surface. The mountain had been wired, a few short hours ago, but the cables had been snapped or simply torn from their mountings by the earthquake. He gritted his teeth as he clambered into the cab and buckled in, bracing himself for the coming fall. The old sweats had talked about disaster relief efforts, back during the First Interstellar War, but they’d had it easy. They’d been able to use radios and drones and hundreds of other pieces of military technology, none of which could be used on the sphere. He tried not to think about the orbiting weapons platform high overhead, ready to fire without warning … if it decided to strike the car, they were dead. There was no armour known to mankind that could stand up to the alien weapons for even a second.

“Go,” he ordered.

The car lurched into motion and plunged down the mountainside. Colin had always loved rollercoaster rides as a kid – being helpless was part of the thrill – but the rides had always been relatively safe. The riders might be upside down, or thrown around at terrifying speed, yet … there was little real danger. It was no worse than flying on a modern aircraft. The odds of something going wrong were very low. But here …

He gritted his teeth, closing his eyes as the vehicle picked up speed. In theory, they could lose their grip and tumble all the way to the ground … and survive. In theory. In practice, he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen men survive dreadful accidents – he’d watched helplessly as a tank ran into a canal and got stuck under the water, where the crew had had to wait until they could be rescued – but they’d been in controlled environments. Here … he found it hard to believe they could survive if they rolled all the way to the ground. 

His heart sank. They needed to rebuild the funicular as quickly as possible.

The shaking grew worse, his stomach twisting … he couldn’t help thinking he’d left it behind, hundreds of miles away. The vehicle lurched back and forth, the ground heaving underneath them, then slipped further down the mountainside … the wheels almost losing their grip before catching themselves, an instant before they lost control. Colin mentally kicked himself for volunteering for the mission, half-wishing he’d thought to apply for a transfer instead. If he’d been reassigned to the units patrolling the Security Zone …

Right now, charging stark naked into a terrorist base sounds pretty damn good, he thought, as he heard someone behind him throwing up. It would be better than this.

The vehicle bottomed out and skidded to a halt. Colin opened his eyes and peered towards the base camp. It had grown since the last time he’d visited – the researchers had brought more tents and prefabricated buildings, the Chinese had landed everything they needed to set up a garrison – but half the buildings looked badly damaged, as if they’d been caught in a mighty thunderstorm. He couldn’t help wondering if that was what had happened. They’d tracked hurricanes from orbit, giant storms large enough to swallow entire planets. If there had been human or alien settlements under the storm, they’d likely been destroyed. Even a modern settlement would have been battered beyond repair.

He opened the hatch and stepped outside, glancing up the mountainside. The cable was still intact, thankfully. The crew were already establishing a secure link to the shuttle, and through the shuttle’s laser communicators to the remainder of the fleet. Colin had always liked being far enough from his superiors that he was able to run the show without referring every decision to someone sitting in an air-conditioned office, as detached from the reality of life on the edge as it was possible to be, but it was good to know he wasn’t alone. The first time they’d set foot on the sphere, there had been a very real risk they’d spend the rest of their lives there.

“Look sharp,” he muttered, as the remainder of the platoon formed up around him. The Chinese had surrendered, but there was no way to know how the troops on the surface would react. Would they refuse to honour Admiral He’s surrender? It was never easy to tell how anyone would act, if they thought they were being sent into a POW camp … or worse. He’d heard the Chinese government had murdered POWs, and even committed genocide, and he knew he would keep fighting if he thought surrender meant death. “If they’re hostile …”

He braced himself, counting down the seconds. The Chinese had had enough time to ship thousands of troops to the surface, along with enough weapons to make digging them out a very difficult task. Normally, a military base could be smashed from orbit if it refused to surrender, but no one knew how the alien tech would react to that. He wouldn’t live to see it. If the Chinese decided to make a fight of it, his platoon would be wiped out so quickly they might not even get a shot off before it was too late …

Someone moved, dead ahead. Colin allowed himself a moment of relief as he spotted a Chinese officer and a researcher in a makeshift uniform, designed to provide protection against poison darts and arrows. The locals were hardly harmless, but modern technology and medical science could neutralise most of their weapons. That might have changed, he reminded himself. The Chinese had given their local allies enough semi-modern weapons to make them masters of the local area, at least until the ammunition ran out.

“Sir,” the Chinese officer said, stiffly. “As per my orders, I am surrendering this base to you.”

Colin wondered, suddenly, if the man knew what had happened. The communication links had gone down so quickly that they might not know anything had happened, save for the earthquakes. They might have seen the wreckage tumbling down the mountain, but … would they realise the earthquakes weren’t natural? Could they even imagine a star going out?

“Understood,” Colin said. “Please have your men assist with recovery work …”

“We need help,” the researcher said, quickly. “The entire region has been devastated. The natives need our help too.”

Colin nodded, trying not to think about how little they could do, compared to what was needed. Calling it a drop in the bucket would be a gross exaggeration. More like a drop in the ocean …

“We’ll do what we can,” he promised. The camp looked ruined, although the Chinese were already repairing what they could. He hoped the garrison walls were still in place. If the locals decided to blame the offworlders for the crisis and attacked … they might wipe out the landing parties before they could be beaten off. “But all hell has broken loose.”

Chapter Five: Shuttlecraft/Cousteau, Dyson Two (Exterior)

“This could go very badly wrong,” Marigold said. There was an edge to her voice that suggested she was terrified, despite having flown shuttles and gunboats for as long as he had. “Don’t fuck up.”

“Yes, Mother,” Tobias said. There was no humour in his tone. There was nothing to joke about. “I won’t.”

He gritted his teeth. They’d made contact with the remainder of the MNF as the starships started to return to the sphere – leaving a number of civilian vessels watching from a safe distance, or what everyone hoped was a safe distance – and received new orders to do what they could to deflect incoming pieces of debris. Tobias wasn’t sure if the small fleet of shuttles and gunboats, armed with pressers and nuclear warheads, could make any real difference, but it had to be tried. The sphere wasn’t indestructible – the ruins of Dyson One were clear proof the spheres could be destroyed – and it was quite possible the constant hammering, as chunks of debris struck the shell, would eventually do real damage. Tobias didn’t need to see the simulations to know what would happen if something punched a hole in the shell. He’d seen it in his nightmares.

“Get ready to deploy the presser,” he ordered. He didn’t blame her for being nervous. They’d barely had an hour of sleep between them and they’d drunk far too much coffee and eaten too many energy bars for his peace of mind. He felt edgy, all too aware his tiredness could lead to a deadly mistake that could get him and his lover killed. Back home, such wanton dismissal of safety regulations would have landed them both in hot water, perhaps even led to a dishonourable discharge. Here … there was no time to follow the rules. “We won’t be holding position for long.”

Marigold sounded waspish. “You do your bit and I’ll do mine.”

Tobias fought down the urge to snap at her as they neared their target, a piece of debris large enough to pass for the Isle of Man. It was hard to keep his temper under control, a grim reminder he really was tired. Normally, they didn’t snap and snarl at each other … he gritted his teeth and angled the shuttle towards the nearest debris chunk, altering their position to match its course and speed. He couldn’t help thinking that it looked like a giant baseball bat – or, more likely, a caveman’s club – heading right towards someone’s head. He hadn’t played baseball very often – it had never been a thing in his school – but he’d loathed it as much as every other sport. He bit his lip, all too aware his mind was wandering. It would be dangerous enough under any circumstances, when he was flying a shuttle, but here … if another gravity wave struck the shuttle, it could toss them into the debris chunk or send it tumbling away from them. There was no way to predict when and where the next gravity wave would strike.

“Moving in now,” he said. The range was closing with terrifying speed. His reactions were good, normally, but they were dulled right now. “Deploy as soon as possible.”

“Got it.” Marigold worked her console. “Ready to deploy …”

Tobias looked up and out of the cockpit and wished he hadn’t. Space was dark, inky dark; the debris chunk darker, somehow, than space itself, twisting and tumbling as it plummeted towards the sphere. He keyed a switch, bringing the main lights online as the shuttle neared its destination, revealing more detail than he’d wanted to know. It was normally easy to calculate ballistic trajectories, and work out how best to approach a target, but here … he tried not to think about it. A single shift in movement might get them both killed – or worse.

“Deploying … now,” Marigold said. A dull clump echoed through the shuttle as the presser was released. “Contact made. I say again, contact made.”

Tobias breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled the shuttle away from the debris chunk. “Time to activation?”

“Two minutes,” Marigold said. “It’ll be launched away from us.”

“And straight into interstellar space,” Tobias finished. His imagination pointed out that the debris chunk would keep flying until it hit something, although cold logic insisted the odds of hitting a star, let alone something smaller, were very low indeed. Normally, no one would take the risk, but here … “Make sure it isn’t pointed at us when it fires.”

“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” Marigold teased. “I know what I’m doing.”

Tobias had no doubt of it, as the timer ticked down to zero, but the system was dangerously unpredictable. A faint flicker of … something … ran through the shuttle, so faint he couldn’t help wondering if he’d imagined it, as the presser triggered, creating a gravity nexus that tossed the debris chunk away from the sphere. He frowned as he studied the trajectory – either the projections had been wrong or they’d missed something – then relaxed slightly as he realised the debris chunk would still miss the sphere by a comfortable margin. His lips twitched into a tired smile as he realised just how absurd that would be, almost anywhere else. The sphere was just too large. It made all the normal safety margins look meaningless.

“The trajectory is wrong,” Marigold said. “I don’t know why.”

“It was already moving at speed,” Tobias pointed out. The last time they’d used pressers to move asteroids across a star system, the asteroids had been in stable – and predictable – orbits. “Or the gravity field might have been twisted in some way.”

He rubbed his forehead. Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin were personal heroes, for him and nearly every other spacer in the known universe, but neither man would have understood modern technology. They’d be stunned if they saw starships larger than wet-navy battleships, awed if they watched the ships jumping light-years in a single bound … there was no way they could understand what they were seeing, let alone predict what effect it had on the universe around them. He felt the same way too, as the presser disengaged from the debris chunk and started signalling for pickup. There was no way to even begin to predict what the Builders could do.

For all we know, they might knock the asteroid back towards the sphere, he thought. He couldn’t imagine any reason to do it, unless the Builders really did want to commit genocide, but they were so alien it was impossible to predict what they might do. He’d read theories that suggested the Builders had actually evolved on gas giants, or developed themselves to the point they were beings of pure energy, rather than matter. Or they might do something so impossible we can’t even begin to imagine it.

He yawned, helplessly. “We need a break.”

Marigold yawned, too. “You tell the admiral that.”

Tobias laughed, humourlessly, as he steered the shuttle towards the presser. They’d have a chance to repeat the trick, to deflect another chunk of debris, unless they did manage to convince the admiral to let them take a break. He doubted it, somehow. There were thousands of pieces of debris moving through the system, hundreds either going to strike the sphere or pass close enough to kiss the surface. The latter shouldn’t be a problem, normally, but the gravity surges were dangerously unpredictable. It would only take a moment of bad luck for a passing debris chunk to be slammed into the sphere …

“And even if we did get a rest, could we sleep?” Marigold’s voice was tired and drained. “How much coffee did you drink?”

“Too much,” Tobias said. “It’s all going to catch up with us, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Marigold agreed. “It will.”

***

Commodore Gillett Lafarge had thought himself used to the idea of an ever-changing universe. He was old enough to have served in the Second Interstellar War as a young officer, when the human race had encountered its second major alien enemy, and fought beside old enemies against the all-devouring threat of the Virus, before being assigned to the MNF as one of its senior officers. He’d been fifth in command, before the Chinese had staged a coup that had killed the third and forth in command, and he’d barely had a chance to get used to being second in command before his squadron had lost contact with Admiral Dismukes …

… No, he thought. Before a star turned into a black hole.

He stared at the main display, feeling more than a little out of his depth. Cousteau was a deep space explorer, very similar to Endeavour, and her crew was supposed to expect the unexpected, but none of them had expected to see a star crushed into a black hole. They knew the Builders were advanced, yet … creating a black hole was technology so advanced it might as well be magic. Gillett would have been less surprised, he thought, if it turned out the technological world had a magic counterpart existing at right angles to itself, a world that had suddenly been merged into his. Humans with magic would have been easier to accept, he told himself, than aliens with godlike powers. All the stories of strange encounters on the edge of explored space, encounters that somehow were never recorded or relayed by reliable observers, suddenly seemed more than a little creditable. And yet …

The display updated, again, as the sensor drones picked up more asteroids – debris chunks – heading towards the sphere. He’d never seen anything like it, not in his worst nightmares. Meteor storms weren’t uncommon on Earth – the planet’s gravity well drew tiny meteorites into the atmosphere with astonishing regularity – but it was rare for a starship to be caught in a meteor storm … at least outside bad fiction. Normally, a lone asteroid could be avoided with ease. Here …

“Commodore, we’re deploying additional shuttles now,” Lieutenant Archambault reported, grimly. She looked as tired as everyone else, her uniform so untidy she’d fail an inspection. “But we’re running short of pushers.”

And we can barely hope to deflect even a fraction of the incoming rocks, Gillett thought. The fleet could use nukes, but nukes were one-shot weapons … and, in truth, they didn’t have enough to make a difference. His lips twisted sourly. Clearly, not setting up a nuclear weapons production plant, the day they’d entered the binary system, had been a grave mistake. We don’t even have a clear idea of which chunks of debris should be prioritised.

“Tell the shuttles to concentrate on the larger pieces of debris,” he ordered, tiredly. Whatever the Builders had used to construct the sphere’s shell, it had survived impacts that would have vaporised the largest structure the human race had ever built. The dust storms looked impressive, but they didn’t seem to be anything more than purely cosmetic. There was no hint the entire sphere was coming apart, let alone exploding into a cloud of debris like Dyson One. “We’ll do what we can to protect the sphere.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Archambault said. She sounded as though she wanted to argue, to point out that even the smaller pieces of debris could do real damage if they hit the sphere. Small was relative, particularly here. There were small pieces of debris that were orders of magnitude bigger than a battleship. “We … ah … we need the rest of the fleet.”

“Attend to your orders,” Gillett said, curtly. Survey crews were often less formal than regular military, but there were limits. “Do the best you can.”

He sank back into his chair, never taking his eyes off the display. The system was crazy, utterly unprecedented. The MNF had barely catalogued even a tiny fraction of the system before the gravity waves had picked up pieces of debris and tossed them in all directions … worse, the burst of energy from Dyson One as it became a black hole had fried nearly every sensor platform within ten light-minutes of the former star. They’d practically had to start rebuilding their charts from scratch, a task made much harder by gravity waves warping debris trajectories, seemingly at random. Gillett knew he’d been lucky – if the squadron had been nearer the star, it might have been disabled or destroyed – but the crisis unfolding in front of him was immense, so vast they couldn’t so much as hope to scratch the surface. They could stop dozens of debris chunks from striking the sphere, but dozens more would make it through and then …

You’d think the Builders would do something about the threat of asteroid impacts, he thought, as another set of icons blinked up on the display. Thankfully, they appeared to be heading well away from the sphere. The sphere is a bigger target than just about everything else … and the star inside is sitting at the bottom of a gravity well, pulling asteroids into trajectories that will intersect with the shell.

He rubbed his eyes, cursing the Chinese under his breath. He’d spent the last few hours helping to pick up the pieces, taking Chinese officers into custody while keeping their enlisted men under supervision, a task he simply didn’t have the manpower to do properly … not without alienating the Chinese to the point that resistance and rebellion would become inevitable. Gillett had been told Admiral He had decided to become a warlord – that was the admiral’s story and he was sticking to it – but Gillett rather suspected the Chinese officer was lying through his teeth. The Chinese government wasn’t known for trusting its officials and there was a very good chance they’d had a secret agent positioned close to Admiral He, ready to put a knife in him if he turned traitor. The fact Admiral He had survived long enough to surrender suggested his government quietly approved of his actions, both in trying to seize the system and in taking the blame on himself when the coup failed. It had probably been planned that way, he told himself. The Chinese Government could blame everything on a rogue warlord and avoid the wrath of the other human governments. Gillett had no idea if they could get away with it, but they clearly thought they could.

And we were so worn out by the first crisis that we were unprepared for the second, he thought, tiredly. What else is going to go wrong?

He glowered at the fleet communications console. Half the fleet was missing, trapped inside the sphere. A dust storm shouldn’t pose any threat to a modern starship inching its way through the hatch, but … who knew what was happening on the far side? Admiral Dismukes might be alive and well, and in command, or … Gillett shook his head. He could hope for the best, and he did, but he had to plan for the worst. He’d have to send a shuttle through the dust storm soon, once they’d deflected as much of the debris as they were able, and hope they could make contact. Losing the laser link was not encouraging.

“Commodore, long-range passive sensors are picking up more high-energy bursts from Dyson One,” Commander Desjardins reported. “They … sir, they defy analysis.”

“What doesn’t, these days?” Gillett eyed the display warily, reminding himself to be aware of the time delay. It took nearly twenty hours for a signal to travel from Dyson One to their current location. Whatever was happening … it had already happened. “Make sure you record everything, and back it up to secure locations. The researchers back home will …”

He felt his mood turn black. They were stranded, trapped for the rest of their lives. The civilians might talk about flying to the nearest system, in realspace, as if it was just a cruise from Earth to Jupiter, but Gillett had been a naval officer too long to have any illusions. They were stuck, cut off completely … unless they worked out how to turn the tramlines back on. If they didn’t … in theory, they could set up a stable community and keep themselves alive indefinitely; in practice, he wasn’t so sure.  They’d certainly have real problems putting a colony on a steady footing, particularly if they couldn’t rely on trade with the sphere’s inhabitants. There would be no way to prevent a technological regression, no matter what they did. It would take decades, at best, before they could start building shuttles and starships for themselves. 

“Never mind,” he said. The MNF had hundreds of researchers, experts in everything from gravity theory to social studies. He doubted they were true experts, not compared to the Builders, but they were amongst the best and brightest of humanity. Who knew? Maybe they’d work out how to reopen the tramlines or … who knew? “Make sure you spread the data as widely as possible.”

“Aye, Admiral.”

Gillett nodded, curtly, as the hours wore on. He would have killed for a space battle, for an enemy he could engage and destroy, rather than a natural disaster … a very unnatural natural disaster. It felt as if they were facing an invincible foe, one who had no malice and yet no care either … he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to turn a star into a black hole. Did the Builders know Dyson One had shattered centuries ago? He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if the sphere had remained intact. The entire sphere would have been destroyed, along with the population. Had they chosen the shattered sphere to avoid damaging the intact sphere? Or were they indifferent to the carnage they were inflicting on the system? They didn’t seem to be doing anything to save the intact sphere from the debris storm …

“Commodore, we just picked up a laser signal from a shuttlecraft,” Lieutenant Archambault reported. “Admiral Dismukes is trying to make contact.”

“Send him a full status report,” Gillett ordered. It would be an hour, at least, before the admiral knew what was going on, but at least they were getting back in touch. The situation was too dire for him to resent the reappearance of a superior officer. “And inform him we’re doing our best to protect the sphere.”

“Aye, sir.”

Chapter Six: North Mountain Lower Base Camp, Dyson System (Interior)

Colin had seen some nightmarish scenes in his time, but this …

He shuddered, recalling a deployment to the Security Zone. That had been bad. A desolate wasteland, dotted with refugee camps half-heartedly protected from roving terrorists, religious fanatics and outright bandits, made incomparably worse by the virus spreading through people utterly unprepared for it … it had been a grim reminder that, for all the hardships of his early years, Britain was a far safer place for a young man to grow into adulthood.  Here … the camp, half-ruined by the earthquakes, was already groaning under the weight of refugees – locals and offworlders alike – and he was sure more were on the way. The original landing parties had tried to keep their distance from the locals. The Chinese had bought allies by giving them modern weapons, medicine and even some communications tech. Greed had overcome fear of the newcomers.

His nose wrinkled as the wind shifted, blowing the stench of countless unwashed bodies into his nostrils. The sphere’s weather had been dull and predictable, a few short hours ago, but now even the most advanced weather-tracking and monitoring systems couldn’t even begin to assess what was coming next. They were lucky none of the really big hurricanes were anywhere near the North Mountain, yet … the rainstorms that came and went with astonishing speed were quite bad enough. Colin had heard all the jokes about Britain melting under the weight of near-constant rainfall – a gross libel; British weather wasn’t that bad – but he was starting to think the nearby settlements were screwed. They were designed for light rainfall, not the heavy showers sweeping the lands as water vapour condensed into droplets and fell back to the ground. The rapid shifts between day and night were probably making it worse. Colin couldn’t remember much of what he’d been taught about weather, in school, but he was fairly sure the sun had some effect. Probably.

“Get the bioreactors up and running,” he ordered, as he surveyed the mess. The Chinese had done what they could, he supposed, but it wasn’t going to be enough. “Get everyone organised to dig latrines and everything else.”

He glanced up at the sky, wondering just what was happening in orbital space. The fleet had to send more troops and supplies, and quickly, or evacuate the camp … if it could be evacuated. The engineers had found the remains of the original funicular and determined it couldn’t be repaired, not without a proper machine shop and plenty of raw materials. Colin was tempted to write an official complaint – the device had been designed for rough environments – but there were probably limits. Rolling down the largest mountain in known space, a mountain high enough to poke all the way into low orbit – or what passed for it, on the sphere – was a little outside the scope of the device’s warranty. His lips quirked at the thought as the rain started again, water splashing down amongst the camp. The ground was already waterlogged, the tents starting to sink in the mud. He hoped the prefabricated installations survived long enough for the weather to calm down, although he feared the worst. They hadn’t been designed for such an environment either.

“We’re shoving all we can into the bioreactor,” a young civilian said. Colin tried not to notice the way the rain made her shirt cling to her breasts, water running though her hair and down to pool in her boots. She was being practical, which was more than could be said of most of the researchers. Half were still in shock and most of the rest were demanding an immediate return to orbit, even though it was impossible. “But the ration bars won’t be very tasty.”

“As long as they keep people alive,” Colin said. Bioreactor food was bland and boring and served only as a last resort, not least because too many people knew what went into the food, but it would have to do. He remembered eating some of the bars as a young boy, when his family hadn’t had the money to buy real food, and slathering them in sauce in the hopes of tasting something – anything – other than cardboard. “Shame we don’t have any condiments.”

“The locals probably do,” she said. “But …”

She broke off. Colin nodded in grim agreement. The locals had served fantastic food, when they'd made contact for the first time, but their food stockpiles and fields were already waterlogged, if the earthquakes and high winds hadn’t destroyed them first. It was unlikely they had much of a reserve left, not least because they didn’t have many ways to preserve the food. No, the locals would be starving soon, if they weren’t already. Bioreactor food would be all that stood between them and population collapse.

A nice polite euphemism for mass death on a scale unseen since the Troubles, Colin thought, although he knew it was – if anything – an understatement. The crimes of Hitler and Stalin and Mao would pale, in comparison to the waves of death sweeping across the sphere. And how much of this is our fault?

“Keep churning out the crap,” he ordered, curtly. “And have it ready.”

The hours wore on, day shifting to night and back to day again and again. Colin patrolled the edge of the camp, directing troops into position to watch all the approaches. The landscape provided far too much cover for possible visitors, friendly or hostile, and he dared not risk deploying any modern technology to cover the gap. It was galling to think he had drones that could fly so high they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, with sensors so sharp they could track an individual ant across the ground, yet there was no way to use them without radio or datalinks, both of which would draw fire from the alien defences. There might be ways to deploy them without radiating any betraying emissions, but no one was sure what else would draw alien fire. Would they ignore the drones, on the grounds they were too tiny to pose a real threat to the surface, or would they mindlessly blow them away anyway? No one knew.

His heart clenched as more local refugees stumbled into the camp. They’d been welcoming and friendly, at least at first, when his team had been forced to make contact with them; they’d been confident and striking and … the refugees in front of him looked like drowned rats, too scared of their own shadow to speak openly. Colin caught sight of a young woman’s bare breasts and felt a pang of guilt, recalling the bare-breasted women he’d seen in the local settlement. They’d been … they’d been at home, seeing nothing wrong with their near-nakedness, but now … they looked hopeless and vulnerable and scared. He made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on the men under his command, to keep them from taking advantage of the locals. It had always been a dirty little secret of the refugee camps back home that the refugees were exploited, no matter how many officers and politicians promised harsh punishment for anyone who crossed the line. Colin suspected the truth was that no one really cared, certainly not enough to do anything after the media outrage died down. The days in which advanced countries tried to help the less fortunate had ended long ago.

“We need to push them away from the camp,” Major Yu said. The Chinese officer’s position was a little odd. On one hand, he outranked Colin and should have been in overall command of the camp, as per the international treaties that had laid the groundwork for the MNF; on the other, he was technically Colin’s prisoner, and – equally technically – his troops should have been moved to a POW camp rather than being put to work. There was so much irregular about the arrangement, legally speaking, that the international lawyers charged with sorting the whole mess out wouldn’t even know where to begin. “They’re far too close.”

“We don’t have the manpower to make any sort of arrangements for them,” Colin disagreed, although he saw Yu’s point. The refugees looked harmless – now – but they could do a great deal of damage if they charged the camp’s defenders. Some had had the presence of mind to bring poison darts with them, tied to their wristbands; others might be unarmed, but that hardly made them harmless. “We’re going to need to put them to work when the weather calms down.”

“If it ever does,” Yu said. The darkness was sweeping across the land, moving with astonishing speed. Colin didn’t want to imagine how fast the inner shell had to be moving, to cast such a shadow on the sphere. “We’re already running short of shelter.”

Colin scowled. There was no point in trying to disagree. The tents were increasingly waterlogged and the prefabs were already crammed with people, mostly unhappy researchers and support staff. There were supposed to be more prefabs in orbit, waiting to be shipped to the surface and assembled, but Colin had no idea what had happened to them. The freighters might have been ordered to high-tail it out of the sphere or they might have gone dark, hiding somewhere within the interior. He’d sent a request for resupply – and reinforcements – up the chain to the mountaintop base, but he wasn’t expecting either in a hurry. The mountaintop base would have to be repaired first, before more than a trickle of supplies could be sent down to the surface.

“We’re going to have to get them chopping down trees and turning them into makeshift houses,” he said, finally. The base had plenty of unpowered saws and axes, thankfully. Some bright spark back home had worked out they’d made ideal trade goods, to people whose environment had barely any metal. Stone axes weren’t completely useless, but they didn’t compare to metal tools. “It’ll have to be enough.”

He stared into the distance, wondering what was happening only a few short miles away. The locals had never taken much interest in the mountain, from what he’d heard, but that had changed when the offworlders had arrived. Would they blame them for the earthquakes, for devastation and death on a scale beyond their imagination? The locals had fought wars, of course, but they’d been surprisingly ritualised, to the point they’d been shocked when the offworlders had helped them. The sheer brutality of offworld warfare …

The hours wore on. More and more refugees arrived, some clearly too stunned to be dangerous and others angry, simmering with quiet rage. The soldiers patrolled the makeshift camp as best as they could, breaking up fights between different tribes with as much force as necessary; the translators tried to coax the newcomers to join work parties, doing what they could to make the camp more liveable. Colin had the nasty feeling the situation was turning sour, conflicts between locals growing sharper as they were forced to work together. The locals had had a surprisingly elaborate culture, almost matriarchal, but how could it survive under the impact of so many disasters? Colin had been sure, during his first visit, that there’d been resentments bubbling under the surface, resentments fuelled by young men who felt deprived and degraded by their elders. And now …

They’re going to be eating bioreactor crap, he thought, sourly. That’ll put them in a bad mood …

Someone shouted. Others shouted too, their voices blurring together into a cacophonous howl. Colin turned, just in time to see a fist fight breaking out in the middle of the camp, an outburst of violence that sucked in more and more young men like a whirlpool. He couldn’t see who had started it, but it hardly mattered. Blows were struck, others were struck in retaliation … there was little hope of calming the crisis before it was far too late. An older woman stepped into the morass, saying something – Colin couldn’t hear her over the racket – only to be knocked down a second later, blood streaming from her nose. There was a pause – it could only have been a few seconds, but it felt like hours – and then the fighting resumed, worse than ever …

Colin blew his whistle, cursing – once again – the lack of radio communications. There was no way to isolate the fight, let alone keep word from spreading … the fleeing women and children alone would be enough to trigger fights in other parts of the camp. He wished his superiors had thought to equip his men for riot control, although it was hardly something they’d had any reason to expect. They’d assumed they’d be attacked and they’d have to kill or be killed, not put down a riot without seriously hurting – or killing – the rioters. Colin had heard horror stories of urban unrest, during the Troubles, but that had been a long time before his birth. He wondered, sometimes, how the troops had coped. Knocking heads together on the streets could not have been pleasant, even when the gloves had been taken off.

His mind raced as the troops formed up around him. Their body armour was good, and they’d been immunised against local poison darts, but if they charged the rioters there was a good chance they’d be beaten to death by sheer weight of numbers. They weren’t equipped for non-lethal takedowns, certainly not of hundreds of young men used to fighting with their fists. He cursed his superiors under his breath for not considering the possibility. They could have armed the men with capture gear, the kind of gear they’d use to snatch a terrorist from the middle of a camp and get him out before his friends could react. There weren’t many other options. The machine guns would make mincemeat out of the rioters, but … it would be mass slaughter. There was no way in hell he could kill hundreds of men unless there was no other choice.

He signalled a runner. “Get the IFVs up here, quickly!”

The fight kept spreading, the rioters heading towards the assembled troops. Colin snapped his mask into place, barking orders. They didn’t have clubs and shields, let alone stunners or knockout gas or anything else that could be used to stop the crowd. He hoped whoever had taken command, back in the prefabs, had had the sense to shut and lock the doors – they were solid enough to resist fists and hand-powered weapons – but there was no way to know without a combat datalink or even a simple battlefield radio. He’d wondered, years ago, how officers had coped when their men were out of sight, when they’d had no way to know what was happening a few short miles away; he knew, now, how isolated they’d felt, how much they’d needed to depend on their juniors to handle matters without their supervision. They were lucky, he supposed, that they’d known they couldn’t rely on their communications net. It would have been a great deal harder to cope if they hadn’t already planned for it.

He gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to cause a slaughter, but he had to protect his men and the researchers behind them. “If they try to snatch weapons, open fire.”

A rustle ran down the line. Colin hoped they’d follow orders. He’d be happier if the entire unit was composed of Royal Marines, or at least British soldiers, but there were men from a dozen different nations brought together in a makeshift battle group. The command arrangements had been a nightmarish hodgepodge before the Chinese had fucked up half the system and the earthquakes had fucked up the rest. He didn’t know half his men; he didn’t know if they’d follow orders or panic when the shit hit the fan. There hadn’t even been time for any combat drills!

Something glinted off his mask. He cursed, an instant before the crowd charged his men. He couldn’t tell if it were planned or not, but it hardly mattered. There were too many of them … he brought up his rifle, switching to automatic fire as the rioters closed, too late. They crashed into him, bowling him over by sheer weight of numbers. The body armour provided a great deal of protection – someone pounded his mask hard enough to break his skull, if it had been unprotected – but there were limits. He’d fucked up and his men were going to die …

A dull chattering echoed through the air. The rioters seemed to hesitate, a moment before they broke and ran. Colin forced himself to stagger to his feet, his body aching even though his armour had taken most of the blows. The three IFVs were nosing forward, their engines surprisingly loud … someone, he realised dully, had had the presence of mind to deactivate the sound baffles, ensuring the IFVs sounded about as loud and dangerous as a dragon and just as supernatural. The machine guns had been terrifyingly intimidating, when fired over their heads … Colin looked around, breathing a sigh of relief as it became clear none of his men were dead. Two were injured, and were being supported by their comrades, but the remainder were alive and well.

“Good thinking,” he said, as the hatch popped open. “Keep nosing forward, keep them running.”

He sighed, inwardly, as they started to pick up the pieces. Many of the rioters had fled, but they’d be back. They weren’t stupid. The IFVs might look magical, but they were hardly invincible. Colin could envisage several ways to take them down and he dared not assume the fleeing rioters couldn’t, once they calmed down. God alone knew how many of the remaining refugees could be trusted. There were still so many of them …

“Tighten up the lines,” he ordered. Force protection came first, now more than ever. They’d have to draw a line and be ready to shoot any local who tried to cross. “And get some of the refugees to start working on earthworks. We need to strengthen our defences.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chapter Seven: HMS Endeavour, Dyson System

Staci had never considered, not in her wildest imaginations, what it might be like to gaze upon a black hole.

It hadn’t seemed like something she’d ever do. The nearest black hole was over a thousand light years away, far – far – beyond the reach of any human starship. It would be centuries, perhaps decades, before exploratory starships made their way to the nearest black hole, assuming – of course – there were tramlines that led there. The researchers had been unsure if there would be a direct connection, and the latest computer models suggested the gravity field near a black hole would be too warped to allow it to exist, but there’d been no way to be certain. The tramlines themselves were mysteries, despite the best efforts of hundreds of researchers. Staci had never wasted time worrying about it.

And yet, standing in the observation blister and staring into the darkness, she felt … unsettled.

She’d expected a glowing whirlpool of light spinning into utter darkness, even though she knew it was unlikely. A black hole’s gravity field was so massive it even sucked in light itself. It should have been darker than the inky blackness of space and yet … it was dark, to the naked eye, but there were flashes of light, twinkles of energy, that flickered and flared into reality and then vanished again so quickly it was easy to believe she’d imagined their mere existence. The researchers were going mad, trying to understand what they were seeing – the word ‘impossible’ had been tossed around a lot – and some of their theories were just absurd. The idea the black hole might be a gateway to the other side of the known universe, or a higher dimension, or …

Staci shook her head. She’d managed to snatch a few hours of sleep, in between reassuring her crew and keeping tabs on the repairs, but it hadn’t been anything like enough. Endeavour was badly damaged, yet there was still no rhyme or reason to the pattern … and no way to be sure it wouldn’t happen again. One of the researchers had suggested the gravity waves had interacted with the ship’s drive nodes, and gravity generator, and created localised nexuses of gravity distortion that had caused the otherwise inexplicable damage, but he hadn’t been able to propose any way to counter it, save for shutting down both systems and hoping for the best. Staci hadn’t known if she wanted to laugh or cry. It might work, if they were desperate, but it would render the ship effectively defenceless, if all hell broke loose. She wouldn’t care to take the risk if she were flying in convoy, let alone so far from the rest of the fleet. If something went wrong, it would be days – at least – before someone could arrive to help.

She sighed, inwardly. She’d had to order her crew to rest too, but it hadn’t been easy even though the gravity shockwaves seemed to have subsided. Morale was in the crapper and who could blame them, when they’d witnessed an entire star get crushed and compressed into a black hole … and then spent hours trying to fix damage that should have been flatly impossible. Her crew had barely gotten used to the spheres when all hell had broken loose – again – and now … she let her eyes linger on the darkness, cursing under her breath. She’d read reports that stated the Aztecs had literally been unable to see the Spanish ships because they were so alien to their experience, although her tutors had pooh-poohed the concept as absurd. She wondered, now, if there hadn’t been some truth to the idea. The Dyson Spheres were so big it was hard to wrap their heads around their sheer size, and that had been before witnessing impossible feats. She was a grown woman and an experienced naval officer and yet part of her wanted to turn and run for her life, as if the devil himself was after her. It was just a matter of time, she thought, before someone started running through the corridors with his underpants on his head. Why not? It wasn’t as if they were facing a normal foe.

We don’t know we’re facing anything hostile, she reminded herself, sharply. But the Builders are so powerful they might destroy us unintentionally, without ever knowing what they’ve done.

The thought was daunting. She suspected a handful of scavenger ships had been sucked into the black hole and crushed, although no one would ever know for sure. Endeavour herself was maintaining position at what should be a safe distance, yet – again – it was impossible to be certain of anything. The last set of gravity waves had swept across the binary system, battered Dyson Two, and raged into interstellar space. For all she knew, they’d be causing havoc on the nearest colony in forty years. Or worse. She wondered, numbly, just how many ants she’d stepped on, over the years; how many insects and worms and whatever had died because of her … she didn’t know. She couldn’t even begin to guess. A race capable of building the spheres was so advanced it might not notice humanity’s mere existence …

But we know they took humans to the sphere, she reminded herself. Why?

A dull quiver ran through the ship. Her wristcom bleeped a second later. “Captain, we’re picking up gravity surges, coming from the black hole.”

“I’m on my way.” Staci looked up at the black hole – it was unchanged – and then headed for the hatch. “Sound yellow alert, beat to quarters.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Staci heard the drumbeat echoing through the hull as she made her way to the bridge, trying to hurry without looking as though she was. They’d had a few hours to put together contingency plans for further gravity waves, including ordering all unnecessary crewmen to tie themselves down, but it was impossible to guess at what might happen, if the situation changed yet again. They were supposed to be at a safe distance from the black hole, yet … they didn’t know what truly was safe. Her father had been an army sniper and he’d told her he’d picked off terrorist leaders, during his time in the field, because they’d been so convinced they were safe they’d stepped out in the open. They hadn’t realised a skilled sniper could pick off a man from over five kilometres away …

“Report,” she snapped.

“Captain, the black hole’s gravimetric pattern is twisting,” Helen reported. The sensor officer looked nervous, and completely out of her depth. She wasn’t a trained scientist, no matter how skilled she was at teasing data out of her sensor arrays, and the black hole was utterly unprecedented. “It’s producing newer gravity waves, shaking the entire system.”

Staci took her seat. “Helm, prepare to alter our position, or to evade incoming debris,” she ordered. Local space was relatively clear, but that could change. “Tactical, prepare to deflect or destroy anything that might strike us.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lieutenant-Commander Philip McDougall said.

Staci could hear the concern in the tactical officer’s voice. She understood all too well. Endeavour’s weapons were incredibly destructive, compared to starships from the First Interstellar war, but they weren’t destructive enough to shatter an asteroid the size of a small country. If a tidal wave picked up a chunk of debris and threw it at the ship, they’d have to evade the rock or risk destruction. There’d be no time to do anything more complex … she scowled, inwardly, as she stared at the display. They needed to stay close, to collect as much data as they could, but there was a certain danger in going too close. The survey service had quite a few horror stories about researchers taking their ships too close to particularly interesting stars and being unable to escape before it was too late … hell, half the reason the navy provided the commanders and most of the crews was to keep eggheads from risking the entire ship. And yet … she glanced at the live feed from the sensor platforms, inching as close as they could get to the black hole without being sucked into its gaping maw. The data they were collecting would fuel genuine, original, science …

Another shudder ran through the ship. The internal sensors didn’t report any damage – Staci hoped to hell that didn’t mean the internal sensors themselves had been damaged – but physical damage wasn’t the only problem. Her crew would have felt the impact, and not all of them had duties to take their minds off the growing threat. An unpleasant feeling washed over her, a kind of dizziness and queasiness that came and went so quickly there was no time to react. She doubted anyone would be able to sleep, not if they were being jerked around by an unseen force … she wished, against her common sense, for an encounter with an understandable foe. She would sooner have taken her old frigate up against an infected battleship, than face a threat so powerful it was beyond her comprehension.

“The gravity waves are falling into a pattern,” Helen reported. “And … they’re spinning.”

Staci glanced at her back. “Spinning?”

“I’m … I’m not sure how to describe it,” Helen said. The frustration in her voice was all too evident. Staci knew officers who would have reprimanded her for it or made puerile jokes about Underlings Inability Descriptive Syndrome. “The gravity waves are spreading out of the black hole, but … they’re folding back too. It’s impossible. Half the data doesn’t make sense! It looks as if the distance between us, the black hole, and the sensor platform on the far side is growing wider, as if something is expanding the local region of space-time …”

The ship rocked, once again. Staci kept her voice calm. “Does it pose any threat?”

“Impossible to say,” Helen said. “The data is just … inconclusive.”

“Helm, hold position,” Staci ordered. “Communications, channel everything – and I mean everything – to the remainder of the fleet.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The console lit up, again. Staci felt a moment of hope as tramlines – a dozen tramlines – flickered into existence, then vanished again so quickly there’d been no hope of jumping through them even if they’d had advance notice of their creation. It confirmed some of the theories about them, part of her mind noted, but … why hadn’t they appeared the moment the star had been crushed into a black hole? Or … were the Builders actually creating new tramlines? Or … or what? She keyed her console, trying to determine if there was an alien command centre nearby, an entity directing the storm, but there was nothing, not as far as her sensors could tell. She suspected it was meaningless. Modern flicker transmissions would have been undetectable, a few decades ago. Their mere existence would have been regarded as fantastical. For all she knew, the Builders used telepathy to communicate …

Her lips twisted. Like all officers on the command track, she’d had to study alien contacts – historical and potential – in hopes of preventing a repeat of the First Interstellar War. Some of the class modules had discussed the possibility of telepathic aliens, capable of reading human thoughts effortlessly … she’d thought the concept nonsensical, and the role-play beyond absurd, but she had to admit it was a possibility. There’d been no verified incidents of telepathy amongst humans, yet … there was no way to be sure an alien race wasn’t telepathic. And besides, the module had helped them think about outside context problems. It was just a shame their imaginations hadn’t encompassed the spheres themselves.

Endeavour rang like a bell. Staci felt as if she’d been slapped, as if someone had drawn back his hand and slapped her face … for a moment, she honestly thought someone on her bridge was launching a mutiny. There hadn’t been a naval mutiny in modern history, save for infected crewmen trying to seize control of their ships before they were sniffed out, but … the gravity field twisted wildly, her head spinning as she fought to steady herself. Someone threw up behind her, someone else coughing so violently Staci feared he was going to be sick too. The internal status display was covered in red lights, a handful winking off as the internal sensors updated … the remainder burned brightly in front of her. The external display had blanked completely …

“We lost half the hull sensors,” Helen reported, between gasps. Her tunic was stained with vomit. Normally, Staci would have called Helen’s relief and dispatched the sensor officer to sickbay, but right now she had no idea if Helen’s relief was still alive. The officer should have been strapped down, yet … “I’m deploying additional sensor platforms.”

Staci nodded, feeling cold. Endeavour was blind without her sensors. It was bad enough in interstellar space, where the odds of a collision were minimal, but here … for all she knew, a chunk of debris was rocketing towards them and there would be no warning before it slammed into the hull. She kicked herself, mentally, for not pulling back before it was too late. The Board of Inquiry was going to have a field day, when – if – they got home. If they didn’t … Admiral Dismukes would certainly have a few things to say about it. It was going to be one hell of a mess …

“Captain,” Helen said. “I’ve deployed the sensor platforms and …”

She broke off. Staci glanced at her, then up at the sensor display as it came back online. It was … her mind froze, unwilling to accept the sight in front of her. The bridge fell silent as all eyes turned to the display. There was a … a ship … holding position near the black hole, far too close for comfort. For a horrible moment, she thought the vessel was going to be sucked into the maw and destroyed, before realising the alien ship seemed unaffected by the gravity field. It was hard to be sure of anything, but … it looked as if it had popped out of the black hole. Staci didn’t want to believe it.

“I …” Helen swallowed and started again. “Captain, the energy readings are off the scale.”

So go get a bigger scale, Staci thought, waspishly. The alien ship was just too big. And alien. Tadpole starships looked oddly melted, and Fox starships were crude and brutal, but they were understandable. The alien ship was very different. If that thing is hostile …

She leaned forward, her heart pounding like a drum. The alien ship – the Builder ship – was wrapped in a field of light, a haze so bright it was hard to determine the shape of the hull underneath. If there was a hull … for all she knew, part of her mind pointed out, the entire ship was composed of energy, or the ship might be a living intelligence in its own right. It wasn’t impossible. Researchers had been experimenting with linking a human brain into a starship for decades and, if they succeeded … hell, the alien ship might be controlled by an artificial intelligence. No human AI was up to the task, but the Builders were so far advanced … who knew what they could do?

Her eyes itched as she studied the alien ship. Were those wings in the haze? Or was her imagination hinting at form or meaning when there was none? The display updated, trying to categorise what the sensors were picking up and turn it into something comprehensible. Staci suspected they were wasting their time. The ship was just so different. She’d read the reports from the First Interstellar War, when humanity’s spacers had come face to face with advanced alien technology … but at least it had been understandable. They’d been able to determine how the technology worked, and how to predict what it could do, even if it couldn’t be duplicated in a hurry. The ship in front of her, holding position over a black hole as if it wasn’t there at all …

Staci cleared her throat. If it was a Builder ship, and she didn’t want to imagine two hyper-advanced alien races, the humans were trespassing in their system. If the Builders took offense … she had no idea what weapons that ship carried, or even if it did carry weapons, but a race capable of twisting gravity fields into pretzels would have no difficulty turning them into weapons. The humans had used Builder tech to crush a Chinese battleship … she had no doubt the Builders themselves could do the same thing, or worse. They had to make contact before it was too late.

Her voice was steady. Somehow. “Communications, transmit the first contact package.”

“Aye, Captain,” MacPhee said. There was a long, chilling pause. “No response.”

Staci hesitated. The energy levels surrounding the alien ship were so intense it was quite possible the signal had been lost or disrupted. It was also possible, she supposed, that the Builders simply didn’t understand. The protocols were meant to be universal, but … there was no guarantee they were. Aliens were alien, and the Builders more so than most. For all she knew, they were sending up the equivalent of smoke signals, something so primitive modern humans might not even recognise them for what they were …

“Transmit a full update to the admiral,” she ordered, finally. The admiral wouldn’t know everything had changed, not yet. She wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to see from the other sphere. “And tell him we will be holding position as long as possible.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Commander Jenner frowned at her. “Captain, what’ll we do if they don’t make contact?”

Staci shook her head. What could they do? Leaving the system wasn’t an option, nor was hanging around indefinitely while waiting for something to happen. She felt unsure of herself in a way she hadn’t felt since joining the navy, years ago. The entire universe had just changed. She knew it, even if the rest of the human race didn’t. A recorded encounter with a super-race, even if the race didn’t try to communicate, would change everything. God alone knew where the pieces would fall.

She kept her voice low. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Chapter Eight: CV Fujian, Dyson System (Interior)

“Just how big is that … thing?”

Charlotte sucked in her breath as the Chinese sensor officer tried to answer. The alien ship was immense, a sensor blur so big it was impossible to make out any real details. She couldn’t tell if the craft really was hundreds of miles from bow to stern, or if the field surrounding it concealed something far smaller. The wings – she couldn’t help thinking of the shimmering formations as wings – rippled steadily, as if the giant starship was standing firm against an invisible current. It might well be, part of her mind gibbered. The angel-like starship was far too close to the black hole for anyone’s peace of mind.

The Chinese woman sounded unnerved. “It’s impossible to tell. Admiral,” she managed. Charlotte felt a flicker of sympathy. She’d heard that female Chinese naval officers had to be at least twice as good as their male counterparts if they wanted to rise in the ranks, something the Royal Navy had left behind years ago. “The alien craft’s drive field – if it is a drive field – is immense, but we cannot detect the starship underneath …”

“If there is a starship,” someone muttered. “The alien ship could be composed of nothing but raw energy, steered by a guiding mind.”

Charlotte felt oddly detached from the near-panic dancing around the CIC. She was no naval officer, although she’d picked up a great deal from her ex-husband, much less Mitch, and her first cruise on Endeavour, but somehow her lack of experience made it easier to take the alien ship in stride. She’d seen engineers caught up in their own disbelief, when they’d laid eyes on the spheres for the first time, and she assumed the starship crews felt the same way when they saw the alien ship. The largest starship humanity had ever built was a colonist-carrier, ten kilometres from bow to stern, and the angel made that ship look tiny. It’s mere arrival, if the reports were accurate, had come close to destroying Endeavour. She dreaded to think what would happen when – if – the ship glided away from the shattered sphere and made its way towards the intact sphere. Who knew what it would do?

The display updated. Charlotte felt a flicker of panic, before reminding herself the long-range sensor feed was hours out of date. Whatever they were seeing, either with their own sensors or relayed from Endeavour, had happened hours ago. Captain Templeton and her crew might already be dead, or worse, and no one on Fujian would know until much later. She sucked in her breath as red-yellow icons popped up on the display, more pieces of debris displaced from stable orbits and tossed randomly across the system. The Chinese systems computed trajectories, then forwarded alerts to the shuttles and starships trying to shield the sphere from debris impacts. Charlotte hoped the crews weren’t too bust gawking at the angel-ship to protect the sphere. It drew the eye and, at the same time, repelled. She wanted to believe it didn’t exist, that Captain Templeton was playing a joke, that the ship’s long-range sensors were having flights of fancy. It was just too … big.

If Captain Smith and his crew encountered Fujian, they’d understand her even though she was far more advanced than Ark Royal, she thought, numbly. She’d read a book in which HMS Theodore Smith, the Royal Navy’s most modern fleet carrier, had been tossed back in time to meet HMS Ark Royal and the greatest naval hero of the modern age. The tactical alterations had bored her, and the sex scenes were possible only by a contortionist, but Ark Royal’s crew not being particularly wowed by Theodore Smith made a degree of sense. The modern carrier was merely a logical extrapolation of past starship designs. But this ship …

She wondered, suddenly, how a Roman vessel would have reacted if it had come face-to-face with an aircraft carrier from the wet-navy era, or a cruise liner – a ship built for luxury – that was still light-years beyond anything they could imagine. The gap between sailing ships and steam powered ironclads wasn’t that large, historically speaking, but to the locals … they might as well be demons from the lowest pits of hell. By the time they worked out how to duplicate the ships, to build the tools to build the tools to match them, it would be already too late.

Admiral Dismukes cleared his throat. “Lady Charlotte, Admiral He, Professor Ratingen … my office. Now.”

It isn’t your office, Charlotte thought wryly, as she made her way through the hatch. The office had belonged to Admiral He, before it had been formally surrendered along with the Chinese task force. She wondered, idly, if Admiral Dismukes was making a point … or if he just wanted to remind the Chinese they’d surrendered. Or … 

Charlotte couldn’t help wondering if it even mattered. The alien ship changed everything. She shivered, helplessly, as she considered the implications. Whatever happens next is out of our hands.

She looked around the office with interest as she took a seat on the sofa. Admiral He – or his superiors – didn’t believe in luxury or decoration. There were no pictures of the admiral’s loved ones – she had no idea if he was married or had children, although his British counterparts would be expected to have both by the time they reached flag rank – nor were there any certificates, military honours, or even commemorative plaques. The only decoration was a Chinese flag, draped across the rear bulkhead. She couldn’t help wondering if it was a sick joke, a clear sign the admiral hadn’t forsaken his country after all or … simple proof no one had had the time to take it down. God knew, the admiral had had too many other things to worry about …

Admiral Dismukes waited for the Chinese orderly to pour four cups of coffee and withdraw, then leaned forward. “Professor, what’s the word from the research teams?”

Professor Ratingen looked as if his world had turned upside down. Charlotte rather understood how he was feeling. He was an expert in exotic drive systems and other technologies, his field more theoretical than practical, but … she had the nasty feeling the term expert might have been grossly misused. It was one thing to project possible uses of alien super-technology, or outline what might be possible as human technology advanced; quite another, she reflected, to come face to face with an alien starship that effortlessly outmatched the entire squadron. Professor Ratingen had expected to spend years dissecting the spheres, the seemingly abandoned spheres; he hadn’t expected, not really, to encounter the Builders themselves …

“Admiral, we know very little,” Professor Ratingen said, finally. The research teams had been scattered by the Chinese, some taken into custody and others hiding inside the sphere, and the communications network allowing the different teams to work together had barely been re-established before all hell broke loose. Again. “What little we know comes from long-range sensors and hasty analysis, none of which may be accurate …”

“We do understand,” Admiral Dismukes reassured him. “What can you tell us?”

“Very little,” Professor Ratingen said. He sipped his coffee gingerly. Charlotte couldn’t help suspecting he was stalling for time. “The alien drive field is so powerful we cannot determine anything about the ship within, if there is a ship. We’re unsure, even, how it works! One theory is that it is comparable to one of our drive fields, just on a far greater scale; another is that it is literally reshaping the fabric of space-time around it, pulling it onwards … if that is the case, and we don’t know for sure, the power requirements must be off the scale.”

Charlotte kept her voice calm. “And in layman’s terms?”

Professor Ratingen didn’t sound reassured by her tone. “A standard drive field creates a … ah, think of it as a wave for the starship to surf. It’s a little more complex than that” – Admiral Dismukes snorted – “but that’s the basic idea. This would represent something an order of magnitude more powerful than our own gravity-manipulating tech, yet … that would fit in with the rest of their observed technology. They manipulate gravity in ways we cannot even begin to match. But if the other theory is true, the ship might be dragging itself along the fabric of space-time and …”

His voice trailed off. Charlotte did her best to pretend she understood, although – in truth – she didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant. She kicked herself, mentally, for not studying the concept at school, rather than estate management and everything else she’d needed to be a young aristocratic wife who’d stay at home while her husband went off to war … but then, why had she ever thought she might need it? If her life had followed the expected trajectory, she would never have left the estate. Her husband would have stepped sideways into politics, with her at his side; her daughters would be married to good men and having children of their own.  And …

She bit her lip. What was done was done. She had to live with it.

Admiral He had a different question. “If that ship is hostile, professor, what could it do to us?”

Professor Ratingen said nothing for a long moment. “Where does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit down? Anywhere it wants!”

“Professor?”

The professor looked as if he was on the verge of hysteria; his face flushed, his eyes too bright. “They can project gravity waves that will damage, even destroy, our drive nodes and gravity technology,” he said. “They can pick up pieces of debris and propel them around the systems at impossible speeds, so fast there will be little warning before they hit us; they can generate gravity nexuses that can crush our ships effortlessly, or at least injure or kill the entire crew. And that’s just based on what we’ve seen so far, when we first started to survey the spheres. They might be capable of feats well beyond our imagination, let alone our comprehension.”

He chuckled, humourlessly. “The sheer power of that ship is daunting, Admiral. I’m certain that all our weapons, even nukes, won’t make so much as a scratch on her hull. We never managed to deploy a working force shield, something capable of protecting a ship from incoming fire, but their drive field is powerful enough to protect their hull. If they have a hull. And if their hull is composed of the same material they used to build the spheres, it might be indestructible even without the drive field.”

Charlotte reached forward and touched his hand, gently. “Professor, can you tell us anything else about the ship?”

Professor Ratingen shook his head. “We don’t have anything like enough data,” he said, quietly. “It will take years, at least, to unravel the science behind it, years we don’t have.”

He paused. “Admiral, that ship arrived without a tramline,” he added. “It’s quite possible it can leave again the same way.”

“Crap,” Admiral Dismukes said.

Charlotte nodded in understanding. Human starships needed a tramline to jump from star to star. It was the fundamental reality of interstellar travel, one barely challenged by the development of catapult technology. The task force was stranded in the Dyson System because the tramlines had vanished, or been turned off, and … she gritted her teeth. If the angel-ship was capable of jumping light years without a tramline, it could leave at any moment or …

Admiral Dismukes cleared his throat. “Professor, go back to your cabin and get some rest,” he ordered. “We’ll see you in the morning.”

He waited for the professor to leave before continuing.  “Lady Charlotte, I assume there are contingency plans for actually encountering the Builders themselves?”

“Yes, Admiral,” Charlotte said. “But the plans are quite vague.”

Her heart sank. She wasn’t sure if the admiral had been briefed on the plans or not, although – given how vague they were – it was possible the details had slipped his mind. Insofar as there were details … the Royal Navy’s planners hadn’t been able to come up with any halfway plausible scenarios and the Foreign Office hadn’t done any better. The United States’ State Department knew how to deal with alien races on the same level as humanity, or close enough, but a hyper-advanced race? It was impossible to predict their mindset or … or what they might think of humanity.

They might have their own version of the Prime Directive, she thought, recalling the non-interference edict that was supposed to govern humanity’s interactions with primitive non-human races. No contact, under any circumstances, until the primitive race had reached a point it would survive contact with a far more advanced race. And yet, the one time we did meet a primitive alien race, the edict was discarded faster than a social norm, when society is genuinely threatened.

She sighed, inwardly. Humanity’s first contact with the Vesy was a textbook case of what not to do. The Russian deserters had made contact with the aliens in hopes of turning them into humanity’s allies, then other countries had gotten involved … some devising nonsense about ‘the civilised race’s burden,’ others not even bothering to come up with justifications for their actions. The original Vesy culture had been shattered and … the hell of it was that it had been easy to justify. It had been barbaric, by human standards, and deserved to be destroyed. She could see their logic. But … would the Builders feel the same way about human culture?

“The general concept is to establish friendly contact as quickly as possible,” she said, trying to put her fears aside. “This is their territory. We might have a claim on it, in our legal framework, but they might feel differently and they have the big guns to back it up. We have to make contact before they decide we’re intruders and kill us. Or decide our mere presence is an act of war, deserving of a full-scale genocidal war.”

Admiral He chuckled, darkly. “They are strong and we are weak, at least in comparison, and that means their interpretation of the law is all that counts.”

Charlotte nodded, curtly. The idea of an international legal framework for settling disputes was a good one, on paper, but such ideals hadn’t survived contact with reality. The strong did as they wished and the weak suffered, as they must, unless they managed to band together to put restraints on the strong … human history suggested the weak eventually became the strong and bullied the weak in the same way they’d been bullied, learning nothing from their experience of being weak. China’s history could be divided into sections when she had been bullied and when she’d done the bullying, and the same could be said for nearly every other major player in global politics. There was no reason to think interstellar power politics would ever be anything better. Power talked, ideals walked.

“Yes,” she said. “We need to find a way to make contact.”

“They ignored Endeavour’s attempts to signal them,” Admiral Dismukes said. “What else can we try?”

“There are other ways to send signals,” Admiral He pointed out. “For all we know, they’re waiting for us to send a shuttle.”

“Our ships have standing orders to fire on any shuttlecraft that crosses the line without permission,” Admiral Dismukes countered. Starships were heavily armoured, but a single shuttle crammed with nuclear warheads could do immense damage if it latched itself to the hull and detonated before anyone could react. “They might have similar orders.”

“They’re incredibly advanced,” Charlotte said. “What do they have to fear from us?”

“Primitive weapons can be no less deadly,” Admiral Dismukes said. “A soldier with modern weapons and all the support we take for granted can still be killed if someone hits him over the head with a rock. The local settlements down there” – he jerked a finger at the bulkhead – “use poison darts, which were lethal before we immunised our people, and spears that are still lethal if they hit an unprotected human. The Builders are powerful, true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have reason to fear us.”

Charlotte swallowed, hard. “If they fear us, will they attack?”

“It might be their safest course of action,” Admiral He said. “How different would the history of America have been, perhaps, if the Native Americans had attacked every European ship they saw on sight?”

Admiral Dismukes didn’t rise to the bait. “They are so far advanced they may feel they have little to fear, even if they know we could prove dangerous,” he said. “And we don’t intend to harm them.”

“But we must make contact,” Charlotte said. She was the leader of the diplomatic contingent, although half her staff were still on Endeavour. “I need to go there.”

“And we need a way to talk to them,” Admiral Dismukes said. “Gravity waves? If we use their own systems to make contact …”

“We also need ways to counter their technology,” Admiral He pointed out. “They might harm us quite by accident.”

Charlotte couldn’t disagree. “Should we evacuate the sphere? If they take offense at our presence …?”

“Getting our own people off will take days, even if the fists don’t interfere,” Admiral Dismukes said. “And that means abandoning all attempts to help the locals.”

He stared down at his hands for a long moment, then looked up. “Lady Charlotte, you can go to Endeavour and try to make contact, if possible,” he said. “The remainder of the fleet will keep a safe distance from the alien ship.”

“If there is such a thing as a safe distance,” Admiral He said, pessimistically. “If we could leave the system, I’d suggest it.”

“Yeah,” Admiral Dismukes said. He sounded older, as if he’d aged a decade overnight. “Me too.”

Chapter Nine: Shuttlecraft, Dyson System (Interior/Exterior)

“I feel like Stellar Star,” Tobias muttered.

Marigold giggled. “In the sense you want to go to bed with her,” she teased, “or in the sense you want to be her?”

Tobias flushed. Stellar Star wasn’t real. The actress who played her wasn’t real either, the product of computer-generated imagery mated to perverse sexual desire. There were no girls in the real world, even with advances in cosmetic surgery, who looked anything like her … he bit down on that thought quickly, before it could show on his face. The days when he’d known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no girl would ever look at him once, let alone twice, were long gone. And that meant …

“I meant the scene where she guides her starship into a nebula,” he said, quickly. “This is almost as bad.”

Marigold nodded, thoughtfully. Stellar Star’s body wasn’t the only impossible thing in the series. She flew her starship through asteroid fields that didn’t exist in real life, ducking and dodging and darting through gaps that were barely large enough to take a small starship, hiding within nebulas and dancing over black holes … all of which, he thought wryly, existed within the Dyson System even if they didn’t exist anywhere else. The dust cloud covering the hatch was as thick as any fictional nebula, the storm so intense he couldn’t help feeling they were utterly blind. He trusted his craft’s computers, but …

The shuttle shuddered, slightly, as she nosed her way into the storm. Tobias kept a wary eye on the hull monitors, unsure what would happen if the shuttle was caked in dust or caught in a storm … a storm that really shouldn’t exist. Shockwaves marched across the sphere’s surface every time a piece of debris crashed into the shell, but … none of the computer models could explain why the dust hadn’t cleared by now, either drifting back to the surface or out into interplanetary space. The best theory anyone had been able to come up with was that the sphere’s gravity field was somehow attracting the dust, although the outer shell had almost no gravity field of its own. It was just another impossible thing that couldn’t occur anywhere else. The sphere was just … alien.

“We should be dead centre,” Marigold said. “But passive sensors are useless.”

Tobias nodded, sweat prickling down his spine as the eerie dust storm washed over the cockpit. Stellar Star had nearly crashed into an alien starship that had been making its way through the same nebula, something else that was impossible in the real world, but here … the communications links to the ships inside the sphere were dangerously unreliable, to the point they failed completely at random intervals and needed to be patched back together manually.  The paranoid part of his mind wondered if the Builders were screwing with the datalinks deliberately, although they hardly needed to bother. If there was a shuttle coming the other way … the hatch was vast, so big a thousand shuttles could pass simultaneously without any real risk, but … it was hard, so hard, to convince himself to believe it. Cold logic was meaningless, when everything he’d thought solid and settled had been shattered beyond all hope of repair. What did his tiny craft matter, when the gods had arrived?

Not gods, he told himself. Just immensely powerful beings.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought. He’d spent his entire life being pushed around by people stronger than him, even if they weren’t smarter. What did brains and knowledge matter in the face of raw strength and stamina and naked charisma? Power was all that mattered and the Builders had it all, enough to do as they pleased and never have to worry about consequences. Who could hold them to account …?

The dust storm cleared. He breathed a sigh of relief as he nosed the shuttle through the funnel, his perspective shifting rapidly. They might be flying up the mountain, as if they were climbing out of a volcano, but the gravity field suggested otherwise. It was yet another grim reminder of just how much the aliens could do with gravity fields. They’d given the sphere’s surface a regular gravity field, yet somehow ensured the interior of the North Mountain had had about as much gravity as interstellar space. Some researchers suspected there were gravity beams ready to pull starships into the sphere or shove them out, but they were nowhere in evidence. Tobias suspected the Builders had never needed to bother.

Marigold sucked in a breath. “The fists are waiting.”

“We’ll keep our distance,” Tobias said. He’d never grown used to passing near the alien projectiles, perfect spheres made of something so indestructible they’d smashed entire starships without so much as taking a scratch. He had no illusions about what would happen if they noticed the shuttle, after so many close encounters since they’d first entered the sphere. They might have to bail out, if the decoys failed to distract the fists. “Prepare to launch decoys …”

The range closed slowly, the shuttle practically inching towards the mountaintop. Tobias spotted the base, a handful of men and automated drones moving around the structure, and made sure to keep his distance from that too. It would be bad enough for his shuttle to be targeted, but losing the supply base would be even worse. He knew people who’d gone down to the surface and … his breath caught in his throat as they crossed the lip and climbed into interplanetary space. Or interior space … his lips twisted in droll amusement. They needed to come up with a common terminology for flying inside a Dyson sphere. Was it still interplanetary space if it was enclosed by a shell large enough to surround an entire star?

“They didn’t notice us,” Marigold said, relieved. “What are they doing?”

“They might be watching for pieces of debris,” Tobias speculated. The hatch was immense by human standards, and tiny compared to the sheer size of the sphere’s shell, but it would only take one piece of bad luck to send a chunk of debris flying through the hatch and into the sphere. He dreaded to think what might happen if it struck the inner shell or flew past the star and hit the shell itself. It might exterminate all life on the surface. “They have to know what’s happening outside, don’t they?”

Marigold shrugged. She didn’t know. Tobias could hardly disagree. It was impossible to imagine a human settlement sealing itself off so completely it could no longer monitor what was going on outside the shell, but … if there was an intelligence governing the system it had never bothered to make itself known to the human explorers. There was something about the way the sphere reacted to intruders that suggested it was an automatic system, rather than a genuine AI or a biological intelligence. It attacked anyone foolish enough to send a radio transmission, or anything that might crash into the sphere, but ignored everything else. Tobias couldn’t help wondering if the Builders had assumed they were the only race capable of mastering spaceflight. God knew, humanity had thought it was alone in the universe until the Tadpoles had taught them otherwise.

He relaxed, slightly, as they left the mountain hatch far behind and flew further into the sphere, heading straight for the human task force. The interior was so vast there should be plenty of warning, at least in theory, if the sphere’s automated defences decided it was time to destroy the human intruders. In theory, he reminded himself. The sphere could launch a projectile at immense speeds, so close to the speed of light they’d strike their targets mere seconds behind any warning, or … for all he knew, the Builders had weapons that moved faster than light, something capable of picking off a starship from the other side of the system or even entire light years away. Hell, their weapons might be so advanced they wouldn’t even be recognised as weapons before it was far too late. A race capable of dismantling entire planets and crushing stars into black holes might be capable of doing things he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

What do we do, he asked himself, in a war against the gods?

He leaned back in his chair. “You may as well get some rest,” he said, tiredly. “I’ll keep an eye on things here.”

“Thanks,” Marigold said. “Wake me in a couple of hours.”

She unbuckled herself and stood, the flight suit drawing his eye to the shape of her breasts and hips. Tobias had a sudden mad urge to join her in the rear compartment, to leave the automatics in command while they made love, an urge he ruthlessly suppressed. The automatics couldn’t handle everything, no matter what the boffins insisted, and if they were caught they’d be lucky if they were merely dishonourably discharged. He wondered what that even meant, if the squadron remained trapped in the system. Would they be stranded on the sphere, tossed out an airlock or simply flogged? It was legal, technically, but he didn’t think it had ever been carried out. The rule dated back to the days starships and wet-navy vessels had been out of contact for months, if not years …

And we may never see Earth again, he told himself. They can’t afford to discard crewmen with irreplaceable skills, can they?

He sat back in his chair and allowed his mind to wander. The sphere’s interior was so immense it would take hours to reach the squadron, even at full speed … and charging around the interior like a bat out of hell was asking for trouble. The interior didn’t seem to have changed that much, despite the gravity waves and the alien starship; the gravity beams, nexuses of high-energy transmissions and weird objects, some defying any form of analysis, were still flickering and flaring, dancing to a very alien tune. And yet … he put the thought aside as he contemplated every science-fantasy encounter with advanced races he’d watched, quietly mining them for ideas. What did one do, when dealing with a hyper-advanced species intent on putting the entire human race on trial?

His blood ran cold. One book had featured a godlike alien with a sense of honour, of sorts, but another had seen testing primitive races as nothing more than a blood sport, and he’d had no intention of letting his victims win. Bullies were bad enough under any circumstances, but a bully who could literally do anything? How did one fight something like that? He was almost reassured to contemplate the tricksters, races who were little more than con artists, races that could be beaten if one figured out how the trick was done and countered it. He remembered the report from Dyson One and shuddered, again. If the angel-ship was hostile, somehow he didn’t think a stirring speech from a starship captain would be enough to change its mind.

It was almost a relief when the Chinese supercarrier came into view. Marigold joined him as the shuttle exchanged IFF signals with the ship, then came in to dock. Up close, the Chinese ship was very different from its British counterpart, with six launch bays positioned around the hull rather than just two. He wondered, idly, how well it worked; the supercarrier might be able to soak up more damage and keep going, at least on paper, but there might well be downsides that weren’t immediately apparent. A British carrier would be able to put out more point defence, he thought. The Chinese launch tubes would mount their own point defence, unless her designers were insanely optimistic or absurdly incompetent, but he doubted the tubes were armoured heavily enough to keep the enemy from shutting them down with a relative handful of hits. It would be interesting to match two supercarriers and see who won … he pushed the thought out of his head as they docked, tested atmospheres, and opened the hatch. Lady Charlotte and a pair of staffers stepped into the shuttlecraft, looking surprisingly out of place.

“Taxi, please,” one of the staffers said.

I must be tired, Tobias thought. That actually sounded funny.

He smiled. “Ten bob to your destination, me lord, and twenty bob if you want me to be quiet while I’m driving.”

“Twenty bob?” The staffer pretended to have a heart attack. “You must be joking!”

Lady Charlotte cleared her throat. “Do you need to fetch anything from Fujian before you set course for Endeavour?”

“No, My Lady.” Tobias hadn’t thought highly of Lady Charlotte until he’d met her. She’d coped well, better than he’d expected, when they’d crashed on the sphere … back when they’d thought the Builders were dead and gone. He briefly considered trying to pick up some food and drink, but Chinese naval rations were no better than their British counterparts. “Just so you know, we’ll be in transit for thirty-seven hours. If there’s anything you need, fetch it now.”

“We should have everything we need,” Lady Charlotte assured him. Tobias hoped she was right. The shuttle might be much larger than the average human being, but it was cramped and confining and hours on the craft would get to anyone, sooner or later. She was lucky there were only five people on the shuttle. Tobias had flown shuttles so cramped they’d been lucky no one had had to go to the washroom. “If you can get us there quicker, please do.”

“I can’t,” Tobias said. The shuttle didn’t have a pusher drive. Even if it had, the drive would have been worse than useless. Lady Charlotte probably hadn’t quite realised, not really, that there was no way to hop from Dyson Two to Dyson One in a split-second. She’d have to make the transit in realspace. “You can be sedated, if you wish …”

“No, thank you,” Lady Charlotte said. “Just get us there as quickly as possible.”

Tobias nodded and returned to his console, running down the list of pre-flight checks. It was annoying to set out again so quickly, but they could get some proper rest once they were out of the sphere and heading through interplanetary space. There might be more debris flying through space, but their active sensors should pick them up once they risked bringing them online. He hoped Lady Charlotte and her team had brought their own eReaders or other entertainments. The onboard archive was crammed with the crew’s choices – he’d picked half, Marigold had picked the other half – but he had no idea if Lady Charlotte would like their selections. Not, he supposed, that it mattered. The shuttle was still the quickest way to travel from Dyson Two to Dyson One.

He disengaged from the supercarrier and set course back towards the hatch. The Chinese had offered to deploy a handful of drones to distract the fists, as they passed the mountain top, but Tobias had declined. If the fists started swarming, they might attack everything in range, from the shuttle itself to the mountaintop base. It was better, he thought, to sneak past … if nothing else, the fists had never been observed passing through the hatch themselves. They could sneak past and be relatively safe, even as they made their way through the dust cloud.

Lady Charlotte joined them as the shuttle powered onwards. “Is there any update from Endeavour?”

Tobias shook his head. “No, My Lady,” he said, deciding not to point out she would probably have received any update before a relatively junior shuttle crew. Any signal from Endeavour would have been relayed to Fujian through the laser datalink and repeated time and time again, to ensure the Chinese flagship received an intact message. “Everything we know is hours out of date.”

“So they could have made contact already,” Lady Charlotte mused, “or simply been destroyed. And we wouldn’t know.”

“No, My Lady,” Tobias said. He’d heard stories about entitled aristocrats demanding the impossible, but Lady Charlotte hadn’t thrown a tantrum when they’d been stranded on the sphere. She had had no real naval training, from what he’d heard, yet she should have picked up the cold fact some laws of nature were simply immutable … or had been, a couple of days ago. “Anything we get will be out of date, at least until we reach the edge of the debris field.”

“Or what’s left of it,” Lady Charlotte said. “It’s a nightmare, isn’t it?”

“Yes, My Lady,” Tobias said. He’d flown a gunboat into the teeth of enemy fire, but this was worse. Much worse. “I pinched myself twice, but for some strange reason I refused to wake up.”

Lady Charlotte chuckled. “Perhaps I’m having the nightmare and I’m just dreaming you’re with me,” she said. “Or maybe it’s real … nah, couldn’t be.”

Tobias had to smile, even though part of him was tempted to wonder if he was trapped in a VR fantasy. He’d never had the money for an hour or two in the machine, and even if he had he would have known it was fake, but … perhaps thinking he didn’t have the money was part of the scenario, a trick to make him think it was real. And yet … he dismissed the thought with a flicker of irritation. It was about as bad as the belief the universe was nothing more than a simulation in alien computers, a concept that made absolutely no sense. And it didn’t matter. Real or not, it sure as hell felt real.

“We’ll see the alien ship with our naked eyes soon enough,” he said. He wasn’t looking forward to it. The sensor records had been bad enough. “Until then, all we can do is wait.”

“And see,” Lady Charlotte said. “I’ll get some sleep. Wake me if anything happens.”