A billion years in the future, in one possible future, a tachyon signal instantly caused thousands of displacement generators to switch on, where they had been placed on the ceramic shielding of thousands of giant antigravity motors. A second was all that was required, as in that second everything moved: sun, solar system, galaxy… Displaced spheres of tightly packed ceramo-composite components, sheered-off pure metal coils and optics, and silicon-controlling matrices appeared outside the motors, where their temperature rose some thousands of degrees. Metals burnt in bright primary colours, silicon melted, components shattered and the spheres flew apart. Down ducts wide enough to swallow Earth’s moon, walls of fire travelled from these gaseous explosions. From outside, the sun tap blinked with a million stars as flame vented into the chromosphere and joined that fire.

With its antigravity motors no longer focusing and transmitting the candent energies below, the vast device now suffered the true brunt of its proximity to this fusion inferno. The ceramic materials of its construction were created to take huge temperatures, but not this. The underneath of the tap began to melt and ablate. For long minutes, like a drop of water dripped onto a hot plate, it skated on the vapour of its own destruction. It now glowed with an intensity as impossible for a human eye to view directly as were its surroundings. Then it distorted, structural plates the size of continents buckling and springing free. Now firestorms raged out through the gaps as further unprotected components, planetary in scale, felt the savage bite of the solar furnace. Then, as if the fiery elementals had tired of toying with this example of human hubris, gravity closed its fist and dragged the sun tap down into harsher flame. The only sign it left was a smear of cooler red on the sun’s surface, and that lasted minutes only. And by then the back end of the microwave beam the sun tap had been transmitting reached New London and that vast source of power was cut off.

In the Abutment Chamber of New London, Heliothane soldiers watched in horror from behind the heat shields of their attack rafts as the fore of the torbeast fountained from the interface and treed out over them and came down: thousands of open mouths eager to rend and feed. Then light died as the power that kept apart the mono-singularities in the abutments shut down. It took less than a second for the three huge devices to slam together at a central point, severing this fraction of the monster that had shown itself, and incinerating much of it in the subsequent heat flash. The tree fell, writhing and burning, yet containing life still, and the Heliothane rafts attacked, cutting apart necks and smashing mouths, killing any of it that still moved.

The last shield generator burnt out, so nothing remained between Saphothere and Cowl. The Heliothane killer casually pointed his weapon at Cowl’s torso and half expected to feel a lack of satisfaction in this moment, but he could not feel better about what he was going to do.

‘You saw and felt the shift,’ Cowl told him. ‘We are now so far down the probability slope you will never again travel in time unless I can do something.’

Saphothere shrugged. He had seen interspace through the gaps in this control sphere and of course he had felt the shift. He was not sure what Cowl had done, but it seemed unlikely he was lying or that it could be undone. Saphothere was fatalistic about such things and, in his heart, had never expected to return from this last mission. He glanced across at the corpse of Meelan and then to the shattered remains of Coptic.

‘And how should I respond to that?’ he asked.

‘You can survive here. There will be Umbrathane still alive in this citadel. We can build something.’

Yeah, thought Saphothere—now he knew Cowl was lying.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘I was always better at destroying things.’

With improbable speed for one so injured, Cowl leapt towards him. Saphothere triggered his carbine, hitting the black shape in mid air and stepping aside as it flailed past him, smoking and with pieces of its carapace splintering away. Cowl hit the ground then writhed round, coming up into a crouch. Hissing, he opened his face. Saphothere concentrated his next shots into that and killed him there.

Saphothere briefly relished the moment, then went to pick up his second carbine from behind the fallen transformer. Touching the transformer’s surface, he found it only warm, and seated himself there with his carbines resting beside him. He took out a hip flask containing the last of his stash of nineteenth-century whisky, and sipped at it. Then he waited for the Umbrathane to come.

The wormhole collapsed from both Sauros and New London. It took one and two-thirds years, it took all time and none. Like a hair singed at both ends by lighter flames, it contracted—huge forces closing it down to non-existence. Inside this contracting tube the torbeast raged against impenetrable surfaces—utterly confined in a self-referencing universe—without alternates on which to feed, without even time—and, in that infinite moment, the vast forces of this collapsing universe closed down on the beast’s leviathan mass. But the Heliothane plan to crush this monstrosity out of existence failed, in the end, as mass and force found balance.

To human perception, motionless in interspace, rested a perfect black sphere nearly a kilometre in diameter.

Inside this the torbeast howled.

Forever.

Epilogue

Sauros was a radioactive ruin and the surrounding area uninhabitable. Only three mantisals had survived the battle, sitting nearby, a hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. One of them was dying, much of its complex internal workings wrecked by the EM pulse from a tactical nuke directed against the torbeast. Six survivors were chosen to take the remaining two uptime, and with luck return to New London. Their journey would be long and dangerous as, without the energy feed from the wormhole, their jumps would be short and they and their mantisals would require long intervening rests. It would take them over twenty time-jumps. However, they were envied by the other survivors, which was why Goron had made their selection utterly random and why he and Palleque had discounted themselves from it. Those who remained then had to move to safety.

The march through the mountains to find a cleaner environment had cost the lives of eight survivors, but the Engineer felt certain they would have died anyway, so severe were their injuries. No lives were lost to the local fauna, with Silleck and the other interface technicians keeping an eye on the immediate future. There had, in fact, been only the one attack from a small pack of carnosaurs, most of which had ended up suffering the same fate they had intended for their human prey. The creatures had tasted of chicken.

As he fed a large worm onto his hook, Goron gazed across at the city of tents now occupying the river valley they had selected. He was glad to see that it was slowly transforming into something more permanent, which he hoped meant that most of the survivors had now accepted their fate—to live and die here—though some things he had recently overheard made him doubt that.

Palleque had managed to rig a catalyser to fuse sand dug from the river bottom, and by using wooden moulds was producing building blocks and slabs. He was even managing to produce sheets of rough glass, and claimed he would soon be able to do better. His industriousness had helped greatly to eliminate the distrust many heliothants felt for him. Others were prospecting for ores which could be catalysed into pure metals. Still others hunted, while some were clearing the level ground lower down for the planting of crops, once seed suitable for that purpose was gathered.