Flinx Transcendent_ A Pip & Flinx Adventure - Alan Dean Foster [200]
Within the crimson sphere, where there was no time and no space, Flinx in his near-comatose state recognized that Clarity was safe. A great surge of relief rushed through him, a relief born of the exhaustion that arises out of desperate circumstances. Meanwhile, the cetacea held him together, the Krang held him up, and the greenness became one with him. On his chest, the emotional lens that was Pip convulsed as all that care and concern flooded through that inimitable part of her master's mind that marked him as a unique and unduplicatable accident.
Clarity's okay, he thought. He could refocus, redirect, rededicate himself. He proceeded to do so with everything he had and all that was in him. The result was that for the first time, the triangle opened fully to the key. The composite force of the multiple mind sources was unleashed. The fabrication the Xunca had contrived was activated.
The trigger was pulled on the Great Attractor.
For something that existed in the minds of the most advanced intelligences only as an abstract mathematical concept, the sudden surge of pooled charged gravitons had a decidedly quantifiable effect. So immense was the shaped thrust of forces that they punched a hole in the continuum itself.
In another part of the cosmos the brane that was the known universe split. Pressing forward at a velocity slightly more than incredible, the onrushing intrusion of another reality Flinx had called the Great Evil flowed into the unforeseen fissure. Before it could slow itself, before it could react, before it could even recognize what had happened, each and every iota of its annihilating malevolence spilled into the newly ajar congruent universe. The resulting shock wave was so powerful that it sent a ripple through all of space-time. The path of galaxies was slightly altered, including that of the local group of which the Milky Way was but a part.
Though this greatest single burst of energy since the universe formed was highly localized, its aftereffects would still have shredded groups of galaxies for millions of megaparsecs around—if not for the fact that within nanoseconds of its advent it commenced to collapse back upon itself. The fracture in the continuum closed and the impossible-to-measure flow of charged gravitons was sucked back into the very cleft they had created, leaving an improbably straight line of newly forming stars and nebulae in their wake. Upon discovering this singular astronomical phenomenon some time in the future, human physicists with a spiritual turn of mind would dub it God's Ruler, not realizing that its agent was actually a long-dead representative of their own kind.
Subsequent to The Event, several seemingly unrelated occurrences took place simultaneously throughout the length and breadth of the Commonwealth.
On its inner border, a powerful automated distress call suddenly flashed outward through space-minus from a world notorious for winking in and out of reality. Responding to the unexpected call from Quofum, a Commonwealth peaceforcer dispatched to that anomalous world found three scientists who had been marooned there. Two human and one thranx, they had been reported missing four years earlier and had been presumed lost.
In his official report, the commander of the rescuing vessel made a point of emphasizing two anomalies: for individuals who had been deprived of humanx company and resources for such an extended period, the trio were in good, even remarkable health. Additionally, and despite repeated scanning and the carrying-out of a thorough search, he and his crew had been unable to establish the actual source of the mystifying distress signal.
On the world called Comagrave, a xenoarchaeologist named Arleen Mapelle was hard at work at a well-known subterranean site, one of several where the famous technologically advanced preserving mausoleums of Comagrave's inhabitants had been excavated. At that moment