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

There_, she thought._ If the bogey crosses into the exclusion zone, I’ll be right there. No one can question my motives then_._

Satisfied with her decision, Lien spun on her heel and headed for the aft garden; the bath had made her sleepy, and, for the last week, the mossy embankment beneath the arch of the waterfall had been her favourite place to nap.

They had come out of nowhere: fourteen fist-sized objects, bullet-shaped and colourless as dark matter, orbiting The Viracosa. According to the onboard instruments, they didn’t exist. Except visually, when they betrayed their presence by eclipsing background stars. As soon as they appeared, the ship had begun revival procedures on its three crew members. Sitting at the ops panel, Sav stared at the display hanging in the centre of the bridge. He was dumbfounded. The ship’s log showed that one moment the things hadn’t been there, then the next they had. “Where the hell did they come from?”

Josua, who sat at the comm station to Sav’s left, lifted his shoulders with a grunt and shrugged indifferently. Gravity, still nearly a third above normal, stooped his shoulders.

“You don’t seem too damned concerned.” Sav shifted uncomfortably, feeling the extra weight more acutely than he would have thought possible. It would be another ten days before deceleration would drop to the one-gee mark-and normal gravity returned.

“No, I’m not. Nexus had almost three thousand years on us technologically before we left. Since then they’ve had another five hundred and twenty-eight. Whatever they’ve got is bound to look like magic.”

Ruen groaned. He still fumbled numbly at the grab bars to Sav’s right, having just emerged from the circular opening between decks, his long, thin fingers moving like he had been anaesthetized. His beloved cane hung from a strap around his wrist, repaired mid-shaft with glue and secured by a winding of rope after Binlosson had snapped it back on Bh’Haret. The holy man’s breath came in wheezes and gasps after his struggle up the ladder from the crew quarters and his pallid face seemed to have aged another decade from when they had set out. That he’d made it up to the bridge on his own was a minor miracle.

“They haven’t responded to any of our signals yet,” Sav said. “We’ve scanned the entire bandwidth four times. So what do we do now?”

“Nothing.” Josua said.

Sav blinked. “But we don’t know what they are. Or where they come from.”

“Nexus sent them. Yilda told me that they monitored space at least a quarter of a light year out. Possibly more. And that an exclusion zone begins a light hour out from the binaries. That’s where we’ll meet them.”

“No.” It was half throat clearing, half word, but Ruen managed to wheeze it out. “Not Nexus,” he said before a phthisic cough rattled in his throat, choking off his next words. He spat noisily; a globule of green-grey phlegm shot from between his dry lips and, its arc foreshortened by the increased gravity, dropped abruptly to the deck. “Can’t you see?” he said hoarsely, wiping his mouth awkwardly with the back of his arm, his cane clacking against the rungs of the ladder. “They’re agents of the Dissolution; anhaa-10 sent them from a higher dimension into this one.”

Sav glared at him. “Save your idiot theories. You’ve got no brain-dead followers here to listen to your nonsense.”

“He could be right,” Josua said. “A higher-dimensional vehicle would explain their appearance.”

Sav stared at Josua blankly. “What do you mean?”

“Well, imagine a two-dimensional universe. The inhabitants of such a place could only see along a flat x-y plane and would know nothing of three-dimensional reality. But suppose a three-dimensional object-a cone, say-moving through three-dimensional space along a third, z axis, pierced the two-dimensional world. To the inhabitants of the plane, it would appear to come from nowhere. The way the drones appeared to us. If the cone continued to move in the same direction, the two-dimensional people would see it growing, until it had passed entirely through the plane of their world, at which point it would seem to vanish without a trace.”

Sav shook his head in disbelief. “You think these things are higher-dimensional vehicles?”

Josua shrugged. “I doubt it. In all probability, they’re simply devices that are adept at concealing their presence. In any case, if they don’t want to talk, I don’t see any way of persuading them.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“Our only other option is to attack them. But I doubt very much we’d succeed. And in all likelihood, we’d be destroyed in retaliation. We can’t risk it.”

“So we have to sit and watch them.”

“You can, if you like,” Josua said. “But I’m going back to my stasis cell.” Slowly, like an old man, he raised his right arm so Sav could see the watch on his wrist. The display read 11-18:46. “We’ve only got twelve days left. The exclusion zone is another thirteen away. The Hub four more after that. If we don’t go back under, we’ll be dead before we get there.”

“Repent before the Dissolution,” Ruen admonished them loudly. “It is your only path to salvation!” He had recovered enough to deliver his pronouncement with the unflappable certainty of the faithful. Both his arms were raised over his head now, his cane held high in one hand, the other wrapped around a grab bar high on the bulwark. “I will guide you,” he added quietly, almost consolingly. But his words were directed not his companions; rather, he seemed to be addressing his remarks to the display, to the black objects circling the ship. His rheumy eyes followed the their slow, hypnotic movements, his unkempt grey hair bobbing slightly with the motion.

“If we take shifts,” Sav said, “we can have someone up the whole time. And both be back up a day before we hit the exclusion zone.”

“No. The risk of reinfection will cut short our time-”

“We can program the ship to blow the seals after the first shift. That will kill anything infectious. Then whoever goes second can be revived after we’ve re-established atmosphere.”

Josua looked at him thoughtfully. Oddly, he seemed a little less sure of himself. Of his authority. “Perhaps you’re right. Six days apiece. Leaving us six days when we’re both up again. That will allow us to reach the Hub with a day to spare. And, if we haven’t heard from Yilda by then-”

“- there will be no point,” Sav finished Josua’s sentence. “Yes.”

Sav thought about returning to his stasis cell. But the notion of going under right now repulsed him in a way he couldn’t articulate. “I’ll take the first shift,” he said.

“Fine,” Josua answered. With a grunt, he heaved himself out of the seat and started for the ladder.

As he passed the comm station, Sav caught his sleeve; he nodded in the direction of Ruen who was still completely absorbed by the display. “What about him,” Sav whispered low enough so the holy man couldn’t hear.

“He’ll keep me company on my shift.” Josua turned to the patrix. “Ruen?”

The older man reluctantly turned his gaze from the display. He raised grizzled eyebrows.

“Come along. We’re returning to stasis.”

Ruen narrowed his eyes, drew his thin lips together. “No. The Dissolution is at hand!” He stabbed the point of his cane towards Josua.

“Not yet,” Josua said. “Soon.”

“Soon?” Ruen looked disoriented; his eyes seemed to swim in their sockets.

“When we’re disinterred, the Dissolution will come,” Josua added. “I promise.”

The assurance seemed to placate the holy man. Nodding, Ruen let himself sag onto his hands and knees. He crawled haltingly to the ladder belowdecks, dragging his cane along the deck. Moving with painstaking caution, he lowered himself onto the rungs of the ladder and climbed slowly from sight. Josua grasped the ladder and began his own descent.

“Six days,” he said over his shoulder before his head disappeared under the lip of the hatch.

The objects continued to follow The Viracosa. Sav watched them from the bridge. Increasing the magnification of the optics revealed no more or no less detail-the impossibly uniform surfaces grew until featureless black filled the screen. Sav ran every other scan he could think of, monitoring the objects on dozens of frequencies simultaneously, but The Viracosa‘s instruments consistently reported no radiant energy. When their silent escort drifted into new orbital configurations-and so should have been expending energy-there wasn’t the tiniest of bit of telltale radiation. The instruments continued to insist the things weren’t there.

For five days Sav watched, eating intermittently and sleeping poorly. When he dreamt, his dreams were filled with images of those silent watchers. During his waking moments he busied himself with a thousand small improvements to the scanning equipment. Nothing helped. The results remained the same. He began to doubt their existence.

On the sixth day, Sav donned his EVA suit.

It was a foolish thing to do during deceleration; Josua would never have approved. The ship was still travelling at a significant percentage of the speed of light and the debris of space streamed past at incredible relative velocities. The exhaust from the ship and the electromagnetic collar that shielded the engines would offer him protection as long as he stayed close to the hull. Nevertheless, a single micrometeorite, intersecting their ship at the proper angle, would maim or kill him. Despite this, Sav went external, crawling from the airlock and lying flat against the scarred and pitted hull, securing himself with magnetized clamps. He had to see the things first hand, prove to himself that they were really there.

At the mid point of their flight, the ship had used its attitude jets, rotating one hundred and eighty degrees on its axis to point the engines forward for braking. Now, past the rounded edge of the feeder tanks, and a few degrees to port, were the double suns of the Twins, needlepoints of brilliance too luminous to bear even through a polarised visor. Raising his arm to cast a shadow across his visor, Sav stared out into the depths of space. Unfamiliar stars cluttered the night. For a moment, Sav forgot about the things circling The Viracosa. Instead he tried to pick Bh’Haret’s sun out of myriad of visible stars. He knew he was on the correct side; it should be visible beyond the slender nose of the ship. But the constellations had shifted, twisted round in a way that he found impossible to sort out. He closed his eyes, tried to imagine how the distance they had travelled would alter the starscape-and how the cluster of background stars near Bh’Haret would appear from the Twins. Like a cross, he thought; the image burnt in his mind. Opening his eyes he found it almost immediately, a cruciform constellation of seven stars about two handspans in size. If he was correct, the last star on the horizontal arm would be-The star winked out of existence.

Sav gasped; he strained forward against the clamps.

Then the star reappeared. A second later, the one next to it disappeared. Sav let out a