Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

SJH1231-K, The Relay Station 263

SJH1231-K, The Relay Station 361

Epilogue: SJH1231-K, The Relay Station 407

Epilogue: The Twins 409

The ship drove towards its hellish perihelion.

On its cramped flight deck spun a simulacra of a binary system: two white dwarfs locked in an vicious gravitational embrace, a combined orbital period of two minutes, twenty-five seconds. An endless, futile pursuit. Their luminosity had been muted to make them bearable. Even so, the display cast double shadows throughout the cabin, a confusion of intersecting lines and hard shapes that slashed across walls and deck like whirling blades.

Too late, he thought from the confines of his narrow cell. Too late to change anything.

A bright green designator appeared at the periphery of the display. His ship. Then, before he could draw another breath, seven red indicators like flotsam in his wake. Drones.

His ship had no weapons.

A heavily armoured gravity-whip vessel, it was shielded against the temperatures and tidal stresses of the stars it skirted. Not against warheads. The drones had particle weapons too, but those would be useless, the fan of his exhaust consuming anything they might fire at him. But the warheads….

If he could lock into the gravity well before one detonated, then he could kill his telltale plasma-fusion drive and wink out of existence-at least as far as his pursuers were concerned. A millisecond power manoeuvre at perihelion, and he would be flung out of the system at twice his current velocity.

Two of the furthest indicators shifted to orange, one immediately after the other.

Out of range, their warheads useless. Even if detonated now, their expanding shells of radiation would be beaten back by the furious solar winds, what was left damped by the powerful shielding of his ship.

Another indicator turned orange. Four drones left. The corner of his mouth twitched up in a crooked smile. But the smile collapsed almost immediately under the weight of a bilious memory: the face of his betrayer. Years of meticulous planning had been unravelled by one weak man. A man he had chosen for his political acumen as much as for his overweening ambition. He had thought the man strong, not weak. But he had been wrong. That man was still dying. A painful lingering death that would go on for days, perhaps weeks. It was far too small a consolation.

Another indicator turned.

The cabin temperature had risen sharply in the last few moments. Sweat sheathed him. His body had been enhanced in every conceivable way; yet, there were limits to what even he could bear. Soon he would have to seal his cell, order protective agents to pack around his body, turning off his metabolic processes, insulating him. He watched the display, unwilling to surrender to the oblivion of stasis just yet. As soon as he was out of range of the last drone-_Where will you go?_

The words thrust themselves into his mind, a jagged edge of glass on which he caught himself. He sucked in a sharp breath, fought to block the intruder’s thoughts.

You cannot hope to survive. Cold this time, malevolent. What do you hope to achieve?

He squeezed his eyes closed, concentrated on shutting out the other’s words.

Please. An abrupt change in tone, a whisper, a sad, niggling presence in the back of his mind. Do not abandon me. Surprised at this, he relented, an unconscious softening. Something exploded in his skull, like a pinpoint charge had been detonated in his medulla. He screamed, clutching his head.

You see. The words tore through the sheets of his pain. I can still hurt you.

Dizzy and nauseous, he clutched the sides of his cell. He sensed a rising wave of anger gather force, come crashing towards him. It hit. He gasped beneath its crushing weight-but it hadn’t the strength of the first and he was prepared this time. It broke against his will like a wave against a solid breakwater, and receded quickly. He wiped sweat from his eyes and checked the display. A lone red indicator remained. And then it turned orange.

Too late, he answered at last, triumphant.

A howl of outrage filled his mind.

The cabin temperature continued to climb. Magnetic inductance danced over the hull, his ship reciting a litany of distances, rising temperatures, and falling measures of structural integrity. He ordered the lid to his cell to coalesce. A prominence rose from the chromosphere of the sun and sent his instruments momentarily off-scale.

His display wobbled, then refreshed, a new red blip ahead of him.

Another ship. It had been hiding, its engines shut down.

In seconds he would hurtle past it. But for the next few heartbeats, he would be exposed to its weapons. He cursed aloud, the sound of his voice odd in the cell.

I can’t let you go. This time the other was almost apologetic. You’re too dangerous.

His ship shuddered, pitched violently like it had been struck a tremendous blow, and he was thrown into the cell’s transparent lid. He fell back onto his pallet, stunned. The ship rocked again. Through a fog he saw the forward bulwark buckle, vaporising in a fiery cloud. Smoke swirled madly, tore past him, rushing towards vacuum. Vaguely, he was aware of his ship intoning its warnings, shutting off a damaged engine and jettisoning its leaking deuterium/helium-3 reaction mass.

His head spun and his ears rang; his cheek burnt like it had been splashed with acid. Tasting blood, he felt the sharp edges of tiny fragments of teeth swimming in his saliva. Darkness swirled around him, sucked at his consciousness, tried to pull him down. He fought against it; bringing his hand up to his face, he pressed his palm against his shattered cheek. He screamed in agony. Bright spurs of pain drove the darkness away.

He was sealed in his cell, a red smear of blood on the underside of its lid. The cabin was dark, the display gone, most of the instruments off line. Debris tumbled listlessly through the vacuum, rebounded off walls and his cell with dull clicks and hollow thumps. Through the ragged tear forward he could see stars.

The ship seemed to stagger. Two engines were down, it reported flatly, the third partially operational, its magnetic field fluctuating intermittently. A steady stream of figures detailed the imminent collapse of the field. The display flickered back to life. Incredibly, they were past the red indicator. But still well within range of its weapons.

The last engine cut out altogether. And with it the protective plume of exhaust. He sucked in his breath, waiting for the final blow, the one that would transform him and his ship into an expanding cloud of radioactive debris.

But there was nothing.

What happened? he asked his ship urgently. Why hasn’t the drone fired?

When I jettisoned the reaction mass, his ship replied, I directed it at the other vessel.

You’re alive. The other voice was astonished.

For a moment he felt astonished too. Then despair supplanted relief. Alive, dead. It made no difference. Before, he hoped to reach those sympathetic to his cause. But he had been knocked off course, his injection into the gravity well irrevocably altered; his engines were severely damaged, perhaps beyond the capabilities of his ship to repair. Though he might escape, it would be to his own death among distant, unfamiliar stars. His stasis cell would become his coffin.

No matter, the other said, understanding too.

No, he replied. It doesn’t.

A brief pause. Then, one word: Goodbye.

Goodbye, brother.

Silence, as broad as the millions of kilometers separating them, opened up. The other presence fled. His ship plummeted pointlessly towards the gravity well.

Briefly, he considered ordering the ship to break the seal on his cell, to let the vacuum rush in and finish the job. But it was only a momentary lapse. He was still alive. Somehow, he would survive. He ordered the biostasis process begun.

A grey mist spilled into the cell, enveloping him. Tiny molecular machines swarmed into his lungs and bloodstream, spread throughout his body, diffusing into his cells, binding to proteins and other reactive molecules. The machinery of his body slowed. A soothing warmth crept into his limbs, filled his chest, slowed his heart. His anger ebbed. Peace, as warm as the balmy equatorial seas in which he and his twin brother had played as children, washed over him. His extremities tingled; the pain in his cheek faded.

Trying to sort out the information from his ship became increasingly difficult, and finally impossible. He ignored it. An amber liquid rose and covered him. Cryoprotectants packed around the molecules of his cells as vitrification began. His thoughts, already torpid, became muddy and disconnected. He didn’t understand when his ship announced that they passed perihelion. A series of disconnected images, fragments of memories, crawled through his mind as neurons fired one last time.

Then, for him, time stopped altogether.

Special Transmission to Bendl My-Fenoillet, Nexus Assumption Committee, Third Senior Deputy, Representative of the Greater Systems Council, Locutor-Nota of the world Nalitman, etc.

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Re: Background Material on the Assumption of Bh’Haret; Related Issues of Placement of Bh’Haret in the Nexus Polyarchy Ascension Program; Concerns Pertaining to the Effects on Local Systems.

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Located at the tip of the Right Leg Cluster, twenty-one point one two light years from The Twins, Bh’Haret is one of the most distant seeded worlds, in close proximity to twenty-three other planetary systems, fourteen of which are non-affiliated. Of the fourteen, seven have reached the technological threshold but have not yet