Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [151]
‘How do I get out of here?’ Granger said.
Herian didn’t answer.
‘How do I gain control of the ironclad?’
The old man continued to gaze into the crystal.
‘The icebreaker,’ Granger insisted. ‘Tell me how to steer it.’
‘You don’t steer it,’ Herian said. ‘Only the captain can do that.’
‘The captain is dead.’
Herian smiled again. ‘That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it?’ His gaze returned to the jewel, which was now shining even more brightly than moments before. The colour and texture of its light had altered, too. A scattering of pink and orange rays swept across the old man’s mail suit, his weathered face and his tin crown. ‘Don’t you find it mesmerizing?’ he said. ‘The light, I mean . . .’ Radiance flooded over the mounds of trove behind him. As the rays touched the Unmer devices, many of them activated. Deep within the heap it seemed that embers began to glow. Energy weapons hummed and crackled. To Granger’s astonishment, additional copies of himself began to appear. He moved towards Herian, and his simulacrums moved too.
‘Draws you in, doesn’t it?’ Herian said.
Granger stopped.
‘Time’s horizon,’ the old man went on. ‘Entropaths use it to control the gradient, the rate of aspacial flow. You can’t see it, but it’s all around us now. If this device let it all through at once, our universe would collapse like that.’ He glanced up at Granger and snapped his fingers. ‘Bang. Crushed in a blink.’
The radiance from the crystal now filled the entire chamber. Through its facets Granger spied an image of a black plain under a burning sky. Curtains of red and pink light tore across the horizon. Lightning flickered. He took another step forward and then stopped himself. Had he meant to approach? His instincts screamed at him not to get any closer. The sky within that jewel continued to pulse and writhe. All around him, his simulacrums began to walk forward. And Granger found himself following them.
He halted beside Herian, without having made the decision to approach. And now he saw that the plain within the jewel was not land at all, but a great black sea, empty but for a single cone of rock rising above the tarry waters. Upon this solitary island stood a cylindrical metal tower as tall and broad as the interior of this chamber. ‘What is that place?’ he said.
‘It’s this place,’ Herian said, ‘and yet it’s not. It’s a fortress, a refuge, a doorway, the last bastion of thought in a dying universe.’
‘The source of brine?’
Herian chuckled. ‘Do you even know what brine is?’
Granger hesitated.
Herian grinned even more fiercely. ‘What happens when the seas rise?’
‘We drown.’
‘That’s the sort of limited answer I’d expect from a human,’ Herian said. ‘The seas rise, the land shrinks, and woe to all mankind.’ He laughed. ‘Brine never stops flowing. Not in a hundred years, nor in a million; not when our air thins and boils away and this bloated planet pulls the moon and the sun down from the sky. It will fill the vacuum between the stars long after my race has departed this world and yours has perished. It isn’t a weapon, it’s a catalyst – the broth from which a new cosmos will be manufactured.’
‘Who sent it here?’
Herian shrugged. ‘We made a deal.’
‘With whom?’
At that moment the whole chamber gave a sudden shudder. Light burst from the trove all around, as though those dull embers within the mountains of scrap had suddenly been fanned into flames. Herian cocked his head to one side and grinned. ‘You’re about to see for yourself,’ he said. ‘They’ve sensed you and activated the conduits.’ He gestured towards the nearest wall, where a dim green glow now pulsed within the passageway openings. ‘They don’t like trespassers.’
Granger grabbed the old man’s mail shirt. ‘Who are they?’
Herian beamed. ‘Your race would call them gods,’ he said. ‘Mine think of them as masters of entropy. They have stalled the end of their own universe.’ His eyes sparkled with awe. ‘Can you comprehend the sheer magnitude of that achievement? To actually