Now some incursions were expanding and mating up, while others were closing. As further citizens suddenly appeared around the two men, they watched more of the beast’s mass flowing in towards the city, tearing out walls and boring through the superstructure. Those displacing from there were now arriving injured, sometimes dead, till their numbers dwindled and finally reached zero. Now they could see the beast like the forever-turning back of a sea giant, diving in between the abutments of the wormhole and attenuating—flowing away like sump oil draining into some huge invisible funnel. But this was a flow that seemed as if it would never end.
‘Palleque! Palleque you bastard!’ The heliothant who stumbled up the slope towards them was drawing a weapon from his belt.
Goron held up his hand. ‘Palleque did his duty.’ He gestured towards the beast and the remaining skeleton of Sauros. ‘This is what we wanted to happen.’
This news was spread gradually as the endless transit of the beast continued. Hours passed and the surviving citizens gathered around Goron to hear his explanation.
‘But that means we are trapped here now,’ someone managed.
‘It means the survival of all we hold dear, and that is all that should concern you,’ Palleque replied.
That stilled them, while in shock, then growing horror, they saw the seemingly endless monster flowing through their temporary home towards what they truly called home: New London.
Goron leaned close to Palleque. ‘Get some help and find Theldon.’ Palleque raised an eyebrow. Goron nodded to the heliothant who had earlier been intent on killing Palleque. ‘Take him with you, and any others like him.’
‘So my position as arch-traitor has been superceded,’ said Palleque. ‘What should I do when I find him?’
Goron just stared at him.
Thirteen screens flicked on, one after another, as the tachyon feed from the abutment chamber of Sauros caused vorpal sensors—spaced all the way down the wormhole—to come into phase. Talk ceased immediately, and it occurred to Maxell you could pluck a dismal tune on the tension stringing the air of the New London Abutment Control Centre.
‘It’s in,’ said one of the interface techs needlessly, for the first screen briefly displayed a giant feeding mouth flung out from an incursion in the abutment chamber of Sauros, before that particular sensor in the wormhole was knocked spinning through the air. All in the room now glimpsed the heaving roll of beast, its probing tentacles and glistening red caves, and one brief glimpse of a defence raft, with its back end sheered off, falling and burning, spilling screaming Heliothane into a tree on which every leaf was a mouth.
‘Anything yet from Goron?’ Maxell asked, walking over to stand behind the sensor operator’s chair and peering up at the view on his first screen.
‘Nothing,’ said Carloon, as he too gazed up at the chaotic image and tried to get his first sensor back under control. Abruptly the first screen blanked and the man swore, pushing his chair back from his console, then turning to Maxell.
‘The attack hit them too quickly, so maybe he didn’t get out,’ he said. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’
On the second screen a tiny speck grew into a distant darkness, at the centre of the triangular tunnel.
Already?
Maxell made a rough calculation: ten thousand million kilometres, and no sign of closure from Sauros. Of course, inside the wormhole, the distance the torbeast extended itself through and its speed were a function of the energy it could expend, nevertheless…
‘Any mass readings yet?’
The interface tech who had first spoken said, ‘Nothing yet, we can’t get that until it’s all entirely in the wormhole, where we can calculate then subtract its energy level.’
‘Mother of fuck,’ said Carloon.
Now, in the second screen, the image had grown and was becoming clear. Maxell considered this view similar to what the prey of a piranha shoal might see in its last moments. The wormhole was filled with a great triangular plug of flesh that consisted almost entirely of mouths. This was the sharp end of the torbeast—that which was the essence of its ferocity and voracity. There was something wolfish about this mass, but with everything else but teeth and jaws stripped away. There could be no doubt, seeing this, that the torbeast’s intentions were not benign.
‘It’s pressed right up against the walls. I’ll not be able to get my sensor out of the way of that,’ said Carloon.
‘Can you take it out of phase?’
‘I can, but how will I know when to bring it back in?’
‘When I tell you.’
As the torbeast completely filled the screen, Carloon put that particular sensor a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase, folding the picture into black, speckled with the flashes of potential photons generated by the beast’s energy front.
Maxell considered her options. If they left bringing the sensor back into phase until the last moment, and then saw that the beast was entirely inside the wormhole, this would indicate that Goron had failed. If it revealed, however briefly, that the beast was still pouring in, they could drop the structural energy feed and thus extend the tunnel by perhaps another third of a lightyear. After that, without closure at Sauros, they must act. It meant catastrophic feedback to Sauros and the certain deaths of any survivors there, along with most of the life existing on that past Earth. It was still a matter for conjecture whether this might shove the Heliothane Dominion down the probability slope just as firmly as anything Cowl might achieve.
On the third screen the beast came into view, eventually filled the screen, then folded away as Carloon put that sensor out of phase too. Maxell felt her body growing damp with perspiration.
Damnation! Twenty thousand million kilometres?
At fifty thousand million kilometres the sweat was actually trickling from her armpits.
‘How big is that damned thing?’ asked Carloon.
Maxell didn’t try to formulate a reply. There was a contention amongst Heliothane chronophysicists that the creature was potentially infinite—and it was a contention she didn’t want to think about.
‘I’ll bring the third sensor back into phase,’ said Carloon. ‘It doesn’t matter if we lose that one.’
The sensor operated for less than a second. Carloon froze the view, displaying a blurred image as of a torch shone through someone’s cheek from inside.
‘Coming up on number seven,’ said Carloon.
Maxell noticed how the man’s hand was shaking as he poised a finger over the virtual icon that would put this next sensor out of phase. Three more sensors went the same way and when Carloon got the same view from number four as he had from number three, she knew there was no point in saving any more of them for a hoped-for rear view of the beast.
‘Cut the structural feed to minimum sustainable,’ she instructed the interface techs.
The immediate energy surge caused the floor to vibrate, and she knew the Heliothane population would be feeling this all across the city’s disc. Now microwave projectors and terajoule lasers were pumping the energy excess out into space, but this was an emission the city could not sustain. Eventually something would burn out, and then systems would begin to break down. If that happened the wormhole extension would have to be cut, else the microwave beam transmitted from the sun tap would create a molten sea in the centre of their fine city.
‘Coming up on eleven,’ said Carloon. ‘It’s taking longer.’
‘When it hits twelve, we do it,’ said Maxell. She looked around, seeing that most of the superfluous control-room staff were now standing in a semi-circle behind her. ‘And then we see if we survive.’
Theldon gazed back for a second to where the survivors of Sauros were setting up camp on the mountainside, then turned and negotiated his way down what was once the course of a stream between stands of charred vegetation. He needed a deep pool to take the emergency manifold and there was none around here, the water having been evaporated literally in the heat of battle.