Phillip Thales – that was as good a name as any, and how he usually thought of himself these days – woke in the cell where he’d spent more time than he cared to remember, and gazed up at the dark.
Mentak Coalition prisons weren’t the overcrowded hellholes he’d first expected based on the culture’s bloodthirsty reputation – indeed, the Coalition’s history, rooted in a horrific penal colony, had led them to create more benign conditions for their inmates. Thales was better off than he would have been if he’d failed the Barony or the Federation. Still, the irony of being imprisoned in a small space – him, the man who was supposed to open up the whole of the galaxy – was not lost on him.
There was sufficient food and water, and if the meals were repetitive and bland, that didn’t matter. Food was just fuel, and his body was only a vessel for what truly mattered: his mind. He’d often thought he was born to the wrong species, first as a human in a world full of Hylar, and later, as a creature of matter at all – he should have been Creuss, composed of light and intellect.
The worst thing about being here was the boredom. There was a prison library, but it was limited and contained almost no technical material – certainly none on his level. When he complained about the lack of mental stimulation, one of the warders – in what she considered an act of kindness! – brought him a thousand-piece puzzle depicting some artist’s conception of the Lazax imperial palace. Bah. Thales should have lived in a palace. Thales still had the puzzle, unopened, under his bunk. Perhaps someday things would get so bad he’d start putting it together.
His powerful mind had nowhere to go but in circles, retracing old grievances and plotting elaborate revenge fantasies – including revenge against the universe.
Why was he awake? His wing of the prison was quiet – the inmates who screamed all night were kept together elsewhere so they could only annoy each other. The dark was deep, no glimmer through the small high window, so morning must be a long way off. He didn’t have to urinate, which was usually what woke him in the night, as he got older. So then…
“Thales. Thales. Thales.”
The voice was whispery, like crumpling paper, and Thales moaned. He’d heard that voice before – and its difficulty with, or amusement at, his assumed name.
That voice belonged to the Ghost of Creuss who’d destroyed his lab, so long ago.
Thales started to sit up in bed, then glimpsed the shape of the armored figure sitting on the cell’s one uncomfortable chair, and decided he was fine where he was – on his back, looking up at the ceiling, not at the creature. “Why are you here? I’m not meddling in your affairs any more. I’m in a box. Me, the man who was going to–”
“See.” The Creuss gestured, and light appeared on the ceiling, a vision in the darkness. Thales saw a star system, and nearby, a wormhole – not the misbegotten thing he’d made, but a real one: a bulging convex bubble in space-time.
“Acheron,” the Ghost whispered.
“Eh?” Thales said. “Never heard of it.”
The wormhole bulged, and burst out red light, like a popping blister. The planet below was torn apart by a cataclysmic twist in space-time, a piece of pottery smashed with a hammer, shards and fragments flying everywhere.
“Did you do this?” Thales said. “Your mistake this time, so much worse than mine?”
“Mahact,” the Ghost said.
“This is something that happened in the age of Mahact kings, then? Why are you showing me this? Why–”
“No. Now. This is now. See.”
Thales looked back at the – recording? Dramatization? Where the wormhole had been, there was something new, now – a long tear in the fabric of space, a ragged rift, very much like a wound. Beyond the wound there were writhings, and glimmerings, and light in an alien spectrum.
Thales whimpered. “There. Yes. That. It’s – what I saw, when I turned on my device. But, no… ours was smaller. That one, with the scale of the planet and the star… that rift is huge.”
“It grows,” the Ghost said.
Thales squinted. Yes, the rift did appear to be growing, both widening and lengthening, like someone pulling at a rip in a piece of cloth. The star began to distort and twist in the strange gravity, and other planets in the system started to crumble as well. “Why are you showing me this?” Thales said.
“See.”
The wound in reality began to spill out new forms. They were too small for Thales to make out at first, but the perspective moved closer, until the rift filled his whole field of vision. There were ships emerging from the tear, but not like any he’d seen before – these vessels were broken, twisted, organic things. There were creatures too, crawling and slithering and flying through the void, which should have been impossible – they were creatures with too many eyes or none at all, teeth and mouths in the wrong places, spines and fur and spikes and scales and feathers, sometimes all on one beast. But… were they ships, too? They couldn’t be individual creatures, the scale was all wrong, or else his perception was. None of this made sense, in terms of biology or physics or anything else, so – “This is an entertainment? Fiction? Some sort of horror vid–”
“Truth.” The Ghost shifted, and when Thales turned his head, the armored creature was kneeling beside his bed. One of its gauntleted hands touched his leg, and the metal was terribly cold. “Truth. Now.”
“What is it? What are they?”
“Vuil-raith,” the Creuss whispered.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“From outside.”
“Outside what?”
“Outside everything. Outside the universe.”
“That’s nonsense,” Thales said. “There’s nothing outside the universe.”
“Monsters are outside.”
Monsters. This coming from the Creuss, who were monsters, by most accounts. Thales glanced at the helmeted creature, so strange and blank… but the armor was broadly humanoid, wasn’t it? The Creuss made an attempt to take on a form that would be comprehensible to other beings in the galaxy, even though as energy creatures, any shape they took was optional. The things pouring through that rift – insofar as they resembled anything known in the galaxy – were the nightmares of a score of different species.
Something tumbled through the rift. A great burning wheel, with spokes of ragged bone. The hub a single bleeding eye. He’d seen that eye before.
“No,” Thales said. “My device. I got something wrong, and I didn’t open a wormhole at all. I opened a rift, to another place. One teeming with monsters. That’s what happened.”
“A crack. A glimpse. Yes. See.”
“And now you want my help.” Thales smiled in the dark. The Ghosts had come to him, because, expert as they were in wormhole technology, Thales was the first person to open an interdimensional rift – he was a pioneer in a whole new branch of physics. “Absolutely. Just get me out of here, and–”
“Fault.” The Creuss pointed at the rift – how was it still pouring out monsters, how could there be so many, and – and were they far away? Please, let that hole in space be far, far away from here.
“Yes? I suppose it is a bit like a fault line.”
“No. This is your fault.”
“How can it be my fault?”
“You opened the way.”
Thales shuddered. “Yes, I opened a crack, but not a great horrible gash like this–”
“You looked. The Vuil’raith looked back. They are still looking. They can see.”
“You’re saying those things only noticed us in the first place because of my invention?” His guts turned to ice. “And they’ve been, what? Waiting, ever since, all these years? Waiting for a chance to come through? A chance they have now, for some reason you haven’t bothered to explain?”
“Yes,” the Creuss said. “You see now. Your fault.”
Thales groaned. “But what do they want?”
The Ghost held up its armored hands about half a meter apart. “They are here.” It waved one hand. “We are here.” It waved the other. “They want this.” The Ghost slowly pushed its hands together, palm to palm, and then interlaced its fingers.
“They want to… bring our worlds together? But from what little I can see, their universe, or whatever it is, it’s incompatible with ours, the rules are different... That would destroy everything. That would turn this universe into hell.”
“Yes. You see. You were warned. You ignored our warning.”
“All right. I made a mistake. I know that. But I don’t know what you want me to do now.”
“You can do nothing. We can do something. We will do this.”
The Ghost stood up, turned its back to him, and stepped into the darkness.
“Do what?” Thales shouted. “What are you doing?”
He tried to get out of bed, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, he realized, because his legs were gone. He threw the sheet back, and grains of something like sand sprayed across the cell. He watched his thighs come apart, painlessly, swiftly, reduced to individual inert components, just like the contents of his lab, the first time the Creuss warned him, so long ago.
Soon, his body would be nothing but a thin layer of sand, scattered across the bunk and the cell floor.
No, he thought. No no no.
But then, at least he wouldn’t be around to see what this universe would become when the Vuil’raith were done with it. What hope did the galaxy have, against a threat like that?
Last words. He only had a moment to make his final statement, to sum up a life of potential greatness, viciously denied. But there was no one to hear what he said, no one to record it, no one to ponder a final wise exhalation, no one to appreciate him, no one had ever appreciated him–
“Idiots,” Thales said, and then his heart dissolved.