Synthesis - James Swallow [147]
Questing tendrils struck forth to block the path of the beam and were rendered into base particles that stuttered out of existence. The encoded energy matrix fell into the jaws of the anomaly, phasing into the barrier between this universe and the microdimension connected to it across the screaming border of the event horizon.
Here was the place where Zero-Three had burned itself on strange and alien fires; here was the line that no matter could cross. Here was the gate that the avatar’s disembodied mind broke open.
Inside was only chaos and disorder. No worlds, no stars, nothing but a raging sea of churning no-forms, the empty vessel of another universe eaten alive by protomatter, consumed and converted and fed upon until nothing else remained.
And in this atomic inferno, there were convections and currents, interaction cells lit by discharges of raw power, forms so vast and uncountable that they had become complexities like the most basic of living minds. Something more than a virus, something less than an animal. A predator without prey. A mad and furious thing, as changeless as only something so random could be.
Here the matrix holding her began to unravel, and the protomatter world poured in, threatening to engulf her.
But not yet.
Even in this place, there was such joy. The sheer, exhilarating freedom of moving beyond the confines of a tritanium shell, beyond even the virtual reality of a dataspace. The utter, unfettered freedom simply to be.
I think, she told the Null, therefore I am. She reached for the split skeins of subspace torn wide open by one fatal mistake, centuries ago. From within, the flexing, ever-changing rift was so easy to perceive, the intricacy of it abruptly clear and compelling. This is my gift in return for this freedom.
Without hands, she reached out for the threads of space-time and gently wove them closed.
The rifts—every one of them—collapsed with a collision of energies that shook the darkness. Millions of tons of Null, great islands of extradimensional protomatter, was suddenly cut loose from its parent realm, and with nothing to feed it, to fight off the inherent instability of existing in a place where all natural laws demanded that it could never exist, the Null began to die screaming.
Tides of spatial shock radiated outward from the disappearing rifts, blasting the smaller masses into nothing, propelling the larger pieces away on a bow wave of displacement. Luminosity brighter than the twin stars of the system flared, as greater and greater sections of the abandoned Null passed the point of no return and succumbed to catastrophic implosions.
Amid the expanding shock wave, caught in the tide of wreckage pressed by the ripple of energy, the Titan fled with the death throes of the protomatter tide tearing at the ship’s heels.
The surge blew through the vessel’s shields, battered and slammed the craft like a boat in a hurricane, but still the Titan blazed on, inexorably pulling ahead.
She turned into the wave and shattered it.
EPILOGUE
In the wake, the battle zone was a place of horrors and miracles.
Tides of wreckage drifted among the radiation, some of it already beginning to show signs of forming into a broad, ragged accretion disc around the Demon planet. Small, nonsentient drones from platforms and spacedocks in high orbit, the ones that had survived the hyperincursion relatively intact, crawled amid the debris in the slow, laborious process of salvage and recovery.
The number of dead Sentries was high; some of them would never be recovered, their masses absorbed into the protomatter hulks of the Null. But there were some exceptions to the growing list of casualties, a few nexus cores that had survived the destruction of their shipframes, others bled dry of energy but still ready to return to life with a new transfusion of power.
The sullen world below turned, its stormy surface stirred to great heights by the actions of the Null