The witnesses had gathered in the bore hole, behind Korzenowski’s control center: the president, presiding minister, the director of Thistledown, official Hexamon historians, Judith Hoffman, selected senators and corpreps.
Directly ahead, through the blister, a circle of night expanded slowly until it touched the smooth-cut edges of the open seventh chamber, banishing the stars. Within the darkness swam afterimages of Sun and Moon and Earth, growing smaller and dimmer.
Korzenowski opened the test link. A pinpoint of milky light glowed in the center of the dimensionless blackness. Concentrating on the clavicle, refusing to be distracted by any display but the abstraction provided by the machine, he “felt” through the link and explored what lay beyond.
Vacuum. The nearly empty void surrounding the flaw; the brightness of a plasma tube.
The frequency of light matched that of the Way’s own variety of plasma tube.
A few meters behind Korzenowski, President Farren Siliom heard the Engineer whisper, “It’s here.”
Now Korzenowski broke out of his trance long enough to pict an instruction to the console hovering beside him. Olmy’s mysterious signal passed through the open link and down the Way.
“Is everything—” the president began.
The point of light in the darkness ahead of them flashed. Korzenowski felt a tremor in the clavicle. That tremor seemed to growl throughout the Thistledown; warning picts appeared in front of him, telling of disturbances in the sixth chamber.
Korzenowski made sure the link had been correctly established. It had.
Something was trying to pass through the link from the other side.
Korzenowski focused all his attention once again on the clavicle. A force had inserted itself into the link, intent on keeping it open; a force stronger and more sophisticated than Korzenowski had imagined possible.
“Trouble,” he picted quickly at Farren Siliom.
He tried to sever the link. The point of light remained, even grew in size. He could not reduce the link; all he could do was expand it, and he did not think that was wise. Whatever was on the opposite side apparently desired a complete re-opening, a reconnection with Thistledown.
Returning to the clavicle’s simulation of the weave between universes, Korzenowski examined the link from a wide variety of “angles,” searching for a weakness, something that in theory had to exist. He could exploit that weakness to destabilize the link, clamp it down on whatever was trying to pass through.
Before he found that weakness, a hideous flare of energy shot from the point and pierced the traction field blister over the end of the bore hole. The blister sparkled and vanished and everything spun in an instant wind, other traction fields flickering desperately as air rushed out of the bore hole.
Farren Siliom grabbed Korzenowski’s robe. The flare of energy whipped this way and that, searing the walls of asteroid rock and metal, arcing over the witnesses to touch the lead flawship and blast its nose into shards. The flawship swung out of its traction dock and smashed against Korzenowski’s spherical personal quarters, squashing it against the smoking wall.
Korzenowski could not breathe, but that didn’t matter. He closed his eyes and in the expanded instants of implant-augmented time, searched for the defect he knew must be there.
Farren Siliom lost his grip and shot past Korzenowski. An emergency traction field net expanded across the gap, lines glowing fiercely as it tried to stop the outrush of air and debris and people. The president struck this net and spread out against it, arms and legs held fast.
Olmy had fetched up against a pylon and now clung desperately, watching people fly past. Judith Hoffman, wrapped in a flickering emergency environment field, rolled by, and he reached out to grab at her. His hand was burned by the malfunctioning field, but he caught her and held, and the field extended around both of them.
Korzenowski, body spinning like a pennant cut loose in a storm, held in place only by the traction field connecting the clavicle and the console, felt his natural consciousness fade. He immediately switched all thought to his implant processors…And saw a glimmer of inequity, a hint of instability, from a certain “angle” on the link. The implant was wildly interpreting the flow of data from the clavicle; the defect “smelled” like something burnt, and left a sharp resinous taste in his mind.
The rush of wind slowed, the bore hole pressure having dropped almost to the level of the outer vacuum, but the blaze of energy pouring through the tiny link with the Way was narrowing, seeming to grow more specific in its targets. It had not yet, as far as Olmy had been able to see, hit any people, concentrating instead on large chunks of machinery, but now in its curls and convolutions it was coming dangerously close to the Engineer.
Korzenowski felt the heat but with eyes tightly closed, did not see the edge of his robe glow and disintegrate. More traction fields fought to regain the bore hole’s integrity, and emergency fields quickly formed spheres around the remaining people, but they were still being disrupted by the energy pouring out of the link.
The bore hole filled with spinning debris, stunned and unconscious people, agonized whorls and streamers of smoke; the loose flawship rolled and bounced slowly against the wall, threatening to crush the confused remotes that had gathered at the sides, awaiting instructions and an end to the chaos.
Korzenowski directed all the energies of the sixth chamber through the clavicle, at the defect in the link, seeking to open a gate there, a premature and disruptive gate that would force the link to close or create a violent crimp in the Way itself.
He wondered for a dark instant if they were facing the power of the Final Mind, as Mirsky had threatened; his intuition said otherwise.
The link blossomed into redness, like an expanding rose, and the petals lashed and abraded the cap of the open seventh chamber. He saw all of this briefly through the clavicle, and then felt an implant overload. If he did not disconnect, the implant—and part of his natural mind, as well—would probably be erased.
He removed his hands from the clavicle, but the work was already done.
The rose shrank against the blackness and stars. The blaze of energy vanished. The point of light, dimming rapidly, winked out.
Air stopped its painful rush past the Engineer. The traction fields held, and somewhere in the bore hole far behind, huge pumps began to replace the air lost in the past few…
How long had it been? Korzenowski queried his implant.
Twenty seconds. Only twenty seconds.
Olmy made sure the unconscious Hoffman was not seriously injured, then picted instructions for the environment field to separate. He tracted alone toward the console and Korzenowski. The Engineer steadied himself against his own emergency field, sucking in the thin air with painful gasps.
“What happened?” Olmy asked.
The Jart within him supplied the answer: Automatic defenses.
“I was about to ask you that,” Korzenowski said. “Your signal…” He stopped and looked around. “How many people lost? Where’s the president?”
Olmy looked through the transparent field now sealing the northern end of the bore hole. He could see a few twinkling bright objects flying outward on trajectories away from the seventh chamber and Thistledown. The traction field holding Farren Siliom had failed. Remotes were already speeding out to capture them.
“He’s out there,” Olmy said.
Korzenowski curled up in exhaustion and misery, collapsing like a pricked balloon.
“I think,” Olmy said, “that most of the dead are neo-Geshels…they all have implants.”
“Disaster,” Korzenowski said, shaking his head forlornly. “Was it what Mirsky warned us about?”
“I don’t think so,” Olmy said.
“Jarts, then.”
Olmy took hold of Korzenowski’s arm and gently urged him away from the clavicle. “Most likely,” he said softly. “Come with me.” The Jart did not attempt to control his actions; Korzenowski was as important to it as to Olmy.
The Engineer was almost babbling. “They tried to force the link to open completely. They want to get at us. They want to destroy us.”
Olmy asked the Jart if that was what they wanted.
Unless and until they receive the signal, that is almost certainly their goal.
The screams and groans within the bore hole subsided as medical remotes began to issue from the staging areas in the walls. Olmy guided his mentor toward a hatch. “We’re going to have to talk,” he said. “I have some things to explain.”
He did not know whether he had spoken the words voluntarily, or at the Jart’s command. Did it matter?
The message had been sent. Something had happened that could have destroyed the seventh chamber, perhaps the asteroid. The connection was not irrefutable, but it was strong…
Olmy’s failure was bearing its first fruit.