INEVITABLE

SEAN WILLIAMS

Australian writer Sean Williams is the author of many novels in collaboration with Shane Dix, including The Unknown Soldier, The Prodigal Sun, The Dying Light, The Dark Imbalance, Chaos of Earth, Orphans of Earth, Heirs of Earth, and Geodesica: Ascent, along with three Star Wars novels. As a solo writer, he’s written both fantasy and high-tech science fiction, and is the author of the Books of the Change series, consisting of The Stone Mage and the Sea, The Sky Warden and the Sun, and The Storm Weaver and the Sand; the Books of the Cataclysm series, consisting of The Crooked Letter, The Blood Debt, and The Hanging Mountains; and the Astropolis series, consisting, to date, of Saturn Returns and Earth Ascendant. His stand-alone novels include Metal Fatigue (which won Australia’s Aurealis Award for 1996), The Resurrected Man, and Cenotaxis. His stories have been gathered in the collections Doorway to Eternity, A View Before Dying, and New Adventures in Sci-Fi. His most recent book is a Star Wars novel, The Force Unleashed, and coming up is a new novel in the Astropolis series, The Grand Conjunction. He lives in Adelaide, Australia.

In the intricate story that follows, he takes us on a headlong chase across time and space, where it’s hard to tell who is the hunter and who is the prey — or if they’re one and the same.

CAPTIVE

The prisoner was both young and male, which suited Master Bannerman perfectly well. She had encountered his type before — headstrong, shallow, visceral — and refined numerous techniques for extracting what she needed. He would give her what she wanted, and possibly more besides. It was only a matter of time.

For his part, Braith Kindred was still struggling to wake up. His head ached, and his body was covered in bruises beneath an unfamiliar uniform. The air seemed as thick as honey, but only when he moved in a particular direction, encountering resistance when he sat upright, but none at all when dropping his arms to his sides. That his inner ear told him he was in free fall was another puzzling detail.

He rubbed his forehead, taking in the details of his cell. It was rectangular, six metres long and three wide, with white walls and a square cross-section. The cot he sat on was bolted to the floor. He noted circular holes where furniture had once been mounted at points on walls and ceiling as well. Clearly ‘down’ was variable.

That triggered a memory. He raised and lowered his right arm, testing the honey effect. He had heard about such things. ‘Weird fields’, they were called. They were never used inside the Structure.

There was only one place he could be.

A Guild ship. In the belly of the beast.

“How did I get here?” he asked the empty room, certain that someone would be listening.

“Play him the recording.”

Master Bannerman stood with her arms folded tightly across her chest, watching the prisoner’s reaction via life-size hologram.

The sound of his voice filled the brightly lit cell. The strain in the words, the effort it took to get them out.

“I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.”

The prisoner frowned.

“Now do you remember?” Bannerman asked him.

He remembered setting the last of the charges and testing the trigger that would simultaneously ignite them. There had been a break in one of the relays. He had been on his way to fix it when he had stumbled over the intruders: a pair of them, moving stealthily through the empty lower tunnels. They had no business there; Hakham topside had been abandoned for weeks. So he had fired at them, hitting one, and then hurried back to the hub to trigger the demolition ahead of schedule. Faulty relay be damned; he wasn’t about to blow the mission on account of Guild agents getting in the way. Fortunately, the hub hadn’t been interfered with. He had entered the codes and braced himself to read the script. This was his big moment. In seconds, it would be all over — for Terminus and the free people of the Structure, but most of all for his brother, who had died at the hands of a Guildsman and deserved the honor.

Then what?

His captors played the message again. It was his voice, all right. The words were his, too. The script was so deeply embedded in him that it had become part of his skeleton.

He didn’t remember saying it, though. Not on Hakham. Not ever. He had rehearsed the speech in his head a thousand times. It had never once issued from his mouth.

Perhaps, he thought, the shockwave had given him amnesia.

Or perhaps a much stranger solution awaited discovery.

“You pulled me from under the wreckage,” the prisoner said. “Or you beat me up. Which?”

She studied him closely. He held himself still, very still, as though thinking for his life. What new treacheries was he planning behind those cold blue eyes?

“The former,” she said.

“So I did push the button. Good. What are you going to do now? Interrogate me?”

“No amount of interrogation will reopen the shaft. Hakham is closed forever.”

“Execute me, then?”

She let him ponder that possibility for a moment, imagining the fear of ignominious death eating into his certainty like acid. He would reach the obvious conclusion, given time.

“You’re soldiers on a war footing,” he said slowly. “If our roles were reversed, if I was the one pulling you out of the rubble, I would’ve shot you on the spot. You haven’t done that, so you must want something from me. What is that, exactly?”

“Just one thing,” Bannerman said. “By blowing those charges, you cut yourself off from everyone you know. More: you stranded yourself a thousand light-years from your fellow conspirators. I’ve kept you alive because I think you’ll come to realise just how stupid that was.”

“You want to watch me suffer?”

“No. There are other ways into the Structure. We know of two, and Terminus has sealed both of them. You’re going to help me find a third.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It’s the only way you’ll ever get back inside.”

“Well, that’s true.”

A slow smile crept across his face.

Whatever he was thinking, she didn’t like it.

Kindred wished he could see the woman addressing him. Guildsmen he was familiar with; they were uniformly compact and handsome, practically indistinguishable from each other, like clones. No one had ever seen a Guildswoman before. What strange hive queen might she be?

She was right about him, anyway, whoever or whatever she was. He did know another entrance to the Structure. More than one, in fact. He had memorised his brother’s charts, even added to them himself, once he too had become a Terminus agent. Exits weren’t commonplace, and they were sometimes difficult to map, but they weren’t impossibly rare.

The truth of his situation was settling heavily into place, like a shipwreck coming to rest on the bottom of a sea. The detonation of the charges, the script, and his own voice reading it aloud — amnesia had nothing to do with his predicament. There was about as much point fighting it as there was fighting time itself.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”

“With the intention of betraying me when you arrive, I presume.”

“I don’t doubt that you’re planning something similar for me.”

She didn’t reply. He sat waiting for a quarter of an hour, elbows holding his illusory upper bodyweight on his knees. Then he gave in to his body’s need to rest and eased back flat upon the cot. Closed his eyes on the bright white-ness of the cell and tried his best to ignore the feeling of falling. He had a lot to think about. Whatever his captor was doing, displaying impatience would only give her a sense of satisfaction he intended to withhold forever.

The prisoner had capitulated much more quickly than Master Bannerman had expected. She trusted him even less for that, but his verbal concession gave her enough to convince the Grand Masters that her plan should proceed. Once the flurry of FTL packets between her Great Ship and the parent world ebbed back to vacuum noise, Master Bannerman handpicked two Guildsmen and went immediately to where the prisoner lay waiting.

“I am Master Bannerman,” she said. “I speak for this Great Ship.”

She came two long paces into the cell, giving him time to look her over. A full head taller than the average Guildsman, she was easily a match for the prisoner’s stature and strength. When he stood up, moving warily through the artificial gravity, they faced each other eye to eye.

“Braith Kindred,” he replied, glancing at her escort, which had taken position by the open door. “But you knew that already.”

“We have a vedette waiting.”

“A what?”

“A scout ship.”

“And you’ve come to ask me for a destination, I suppose.”

“You wouldn’t possibly tell me now. The information is all that’s keeping you alive.”

She indicated that he should turn around. One of her two Guildsmen moved forward to fasten restraints around his wrists.

“You’re going to show me, rather than tell me,” she told him. “So long as you honor the terms of agreement, you will be permitted to live.”

“What about your ship?”

She wasn’t about to reveal the intricacies of her existence to him. The Great Ship would be well looked after by another avatar of herself, identical in every respect to the one searching for the Structure. Let him think that she was abandoning her station to go roaming on a fool’s quest, and that the treachery he planned would make the slightest difference to the Grand Masters’ war.

“Attempt to harm me,” she told him, “and you will be instantly killed.”

He didn’t doubt that Bannerman possessed that capacity. The Guild might have installed a dozen lethal devices into him while he was unconscious, which she could activate with a gesture.

When the Guildsman working on his wrists had finished the job, he turned to face her again.

“Oza,” he said.

“Explain that remark.”

He enjoyed her puzzlement, just as she had no doubt enjoyed his.

“The place you’re looking for. That’s its name.”

“It does not appear on our charts.”

“Oza is beyond your borders. Still in the galaxy, but a long hike from Hakham. You’ll need a fast ship if you want to get there any time soon.”

Her expression didn’t change. “You are testing the capabilities of the Guild.”

“I’m giving you what you asked for. Take it or leave it.”

He waited while she thought about it. The Guild had searched all its worlds for other entrances to the Structure, and found only Gevira and Hakham. Any obvious destination, therefore, she would likely recognise as a lie. That didn’t have to make her happy, though. When she met the Decretians, her unhappiness was certain to compound, but he wasn’t about to tell her about them yet.

His fear was gone. It had been replaced by a cool, confident certainty. She would accept the deal and they would go to Oza. Or if not Oza, then somewhere more distant still. They would get in, and she would not kill him. She couldn’t kill him, and neither could the Decretians or anyone else. He was protected by the Structure now, no matter how far he roamed from it.

If she turned him down, another possibility would present itself. The universe had, for him, become a maze with a multitude of paths and only one exit.

“The vedette is ready,” she said. “Come.”

Master Bannerman moved off with long, confident strides. He found his field-legs after a dozen steps and did his best to keep up.

HARDWARE

More FTL packets flashed. More decisions were made. Master Bannerman secured the ship she needed — the Guild’s fastest razee — and received in return a warning that, should she fail, her surviving avatars would be stripped of Ship privileges and demoted to brood service. That risk was acceptable. She was asking a lot, after all. If the razee were to fall into the wrong hands…

She quelled that misgiving and pressed on.

The vedette was waiting for them with airlocks open and a complement of twelve Guildsmen at the ready. A mixture of astrogation, maintenance, and security, they saluted as she entered and made space for her and the prisoner in the forward passenger compartment. Kindred didn’t struggle as he was secured to an acceleration couch. Master Bannerman took a couch opposite him, and sat patiently as the small shuttle craft disengaged from the Great Ship.

Over the staccato drumming of reactionless thrusters and the rising hum of ultralights, the prisoner broke his silence.

“Don’t you want to know the course?”

“Eventually, yes.”

“But not now, so we’re headed elsewhere. Care to tell me?”

“No.”

Artificial gravity shifted with a lurch as the vedette switched to internal life support.

“You may view our departure, if you would like to.”

“Yes, I would.”

She instructed the forward bulkhead to present an illusion of transparency, and together they watched the looming, star-shaped bulk of the Great Ship recede. There was nothing over Hakham that he had not already seen. The world was drab and reddish, made remarkable only by the ancient mines its citizens had stumbled across three centuries earlier. Apparently bottomless, their mysteries had only begun to be fathomed by the Guild before Braith Kindred and the terrorist organisation called Terminus had destroyed the uppermost levels and the machines maintaining the so-called ‘transcendent shafts’ that led to far more mysterious spaces. The crater left in their wake was just visible from orbit, a yellowish dimple several degrees south of the equator. Now Hakham had returned to being utterly uninteresting, and she was glad to be leaving.

The vedette‘s thrusters propelled them a safe distance from the Great Ship, at which point the ultralights kicked in. She felt a giddy sensation in the pit of her stomach as life support worked hard to preserve her from the unnatural forces at work around the vedette. Furious energies, understood in full only by the Grand Masters and their architects, smashed the usual laws of physics and propelled the vedette at speeds not possible since the moments of creation, when the universe had boiled and time and space were one.

The prisoner was fascinated, although he tried to hide it. His eyes never left the bright points of light gliding smoothly by: the stars of the Guild in all their glory, as fragile-seeming as glass baubles.

She took the time to tell him that, were he ever to be exposed to their radiance as it truly struck the perpetually regenerating hull of the vedette, he would be destroyed in an instant.

He nodded distantly, no longer smiling, and she was satisfied.

Their journey lasted six hours, relative, while, outside the vedette, two days passed. Kindred had access to basic telemetric information — granted, he supposed, in order to awe him into submission. In that time, they crossed twenty light-years, which accorded well with the intelligence Terminus had gathered about the Guild’s technical know-how. Stars shifted smoothly around them, forming and breaking constellations with eerie transience. One star became brighter and ballooned into a vast red sun. Cool by stellar standards but seeming hot to a human’s eye, it boasted no habitable worlds, just a complex tangle of asteroid and cometary haloes. Among the cosmic debris, he saw an orbiting construct that was to the Great Ships as a mighty tree was to leaves. The ships jostled alongside its many tapering limbs, docking, refueling, undergoing repairs, exchanging material and personnel — doing everything the vessels of an interstellar empire needed to maintain their functionality.

He performed a quick mental calculation, starting with the thousand-metre reach of a Great Ship’s arm and ending with a figure in the tens of thousands of kilometres.

“Impressive,” he said, because it was. “Makes me wonder why you’re going to so much trouble over the Structure, when you have something like this to play with.”

She stared coolly at him. “Do you truly have so little conception of the Structure’s worth?”

“Do you? You haven’t asked me any questions about it. You don’t seem curious at all.”

“We already know what it is.”

“That puts you one step ahead of us, then.”

His remark pricked her steady reserve. “You and your kind cross leagues in a single step, thanks to the artifact you have inherited from makers unknown. But you don’t understand the physical principles behind the technology you use. Your inheritance is one of ignorance. What wisdom can you, a terrorist, offer the Guild of the Great Ships? We have worked for our dominion; we have earned the right to expand. Our knowledge will inevitably prevail over your dumb luck.”

He lacked the energy to argue with her. Words weren’t sufficient to describe how wrong she was.

The vedette joined a steady stream of support vehicles looping in and out of the construct’s fractal docking points. Thrusters kicked in again, and the drumming they caused kept perfect time with the strange gravity nudging his insides. They descended into the construct’s forest of antler-like branches. When they docked, it was to a relatively small outcrop that was over thirty metres thick.

With one last tattoo, the vedette came to a halt. The airlock slid open and a Guildsman stepped up to release his bonds. He stood warily, flexing his limbs, still aching in every joint and sinew, and now tired as well. He wondered what they would do if he asked for something to eat. Luckily, he could survive on internals for weeks, if he had to.

They led him into the echoing complex, which boomed and hummed with ceaseless industry. A short ride on an electric transport brought them to another docking point, and from there to the ship that he assumed would take them the rest of the way. According to the telemetry data he had glimpsed, the vedette‘s reserves had been almost completely exhausted crossing barely 1 percent of the distance ahead of them.

The new ship was sleek and silver and small: fifty metres long from stem to stern and barely three wide, its every angle broadcast speed. He doubted there was a single wasted molecule anywhere in its pared-down frame. Light slid off its rolling skin in bizarre curves and knots. It looked brand-new.

“Is this thing safe?” he asked Bannerman. When she ignored him, he pressed, “At least tell me it has a name.”

“Guild ships do not require names,” she stated.

Seals hissed and the variable hull flowed elegantly open. Inside the cramped cockpit were just two acceleration couches.

“Cozy.”

“Get in.” She took his shoulder in a tight grip and propelled him through the airlock. She seemed tense, and he wondered if she was nervous about the mission ahead or just impatient to get going.

The weird fields ceased within, fading out with a chaotic flutter that made him feel briefly nauseous. There was nowhere to step but on the couches and transparent instrument panels. The ceiling was so low he banged his head as he folded himself awkwardly into the seat, telling himself to relish every free movement while it lasted. He would be effectively supine until they exited the coffin-like space. At the velocity the vedette had managed, it would take five hundred days to reach their destination.

“How fast did you say this thing is?”

She ignored him again, taking the couch next to his and activating the ship’s internal systems. Lights flashed in unreadable patterns; the airlock closed; internal life support kicked in, but still no strange gravity. An unnecessary luxury, he presumed.

“Now,” she said, “the course to Oza.”

He gave it to her. The coordinates placed the world on the far side of the galaxy, approximately thirty thousand light-years away in a straight line, almost fifty if they were to curve around the complex foams and tangles of the Bulge.

“Six days, relative,” she said.

He didn’t believe it.

“I told you,” she said. “We have earned the right.”

LONG HAUL

The razee surged away from the staging area, and Master Bannerman turned the cockpit’s interior walls to full apparent transparency, giving her and her prisoner an unparalleled view. The fat, red sun burned balefully behind them, painting the instrument panels in blood. She checked and triple-checked the course, mindful that she was heading into unknown territory at the urging of an enemy combatant.

He covered his eyes when she engaged the ultralights. The sudden acceleration took her by surprise too. Stars leaped out at them and swept past with alarming speed. She fought the urge to take manual control, knowing that this would only make matters worse. One incautious move and they would plunge right into the heart of a sun. The inbuilt navigator could fly better than any mere human, even the Master of a Great Ship.

With shaky commands, she altered the plotted course, urging the razee out of the galactic disk and into the relatively sparse halo. It shed and gained momentum with all appearance of resistance, as though it resented her interference. It was made for near-misses and wild manoeuvres. She was fighting its nature.

“I can’t die,” the prisoner breathed as a neutron star crackled past, so close tides rocked and pulled at them. “I can’t die.”

A mantra, she assumed, designed to soothe in the face of his helplessness. Or a prayer, if he was religious. It wasn’t important enough to query.

He instantly relaxed when she opaqued the cockpit walls. Some of her own tension evaporated too. Out of sight remained out of the primitive layers of the human mind, even in this age of avatars and galactic empires.

“If you’re trying to intimidate me,” the prisoner said, wiping a tremulous hand across his brow, “you’ve very nearly succeeded.”

“That wasn’t my intention,” she said, despite knowing it to be an incomplete truth. His admission did please her. “This is simply the fastest ship I could commandeer at the time.”

“I don’t think so. If ships like this were commonplace, you’d have found Oza already.” His shrewd eyes regarded her closely. “You must really be keen. Why?”

“That is no concern of yours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the enemy. Everything about you is my concern.”

“You will learn nothing from me.”

“Maybe you’re fighting on another front, worried someone’s going to get into the Structure first and attack you from the rear. Is that what this is really about?” He swiveled awkwardly in his seat to face her. “The enemy of our enemy would not be our friend. You should know that. We resist everyone equally,” he said, “everyone who wants to use the Structure as a weapon.”

“The Guild wants access to the Structure purely for its scientific value.”

“Yeah, right.” His scorn filled the cockpit. “We’ve heard that before. No spacer has ever managed to claim the Structure successfully. What does that tell you?”

“That none of them belonged to the Guild of the Great Ships.”

He laughed.

Bristling, she returned the walls of the cockpit to their former state. A trio of golden suns swept by in balletic silence.

“The instruments of this vessel are linked exclusively to my implants,” she said coldly. “Attempt to take control or interfere with my commands and it will self-destruct immediately.”

He sighed. “Six days, huh? It’s going to be a longer trip than I thought.” Folding his arms and easing back into the couch, he closed his eyes on the ever-changing view. “Wake me when we get there.”

His nonchalance needled her as much as mockery. “Aren’t you afraid that I will jettison you the moment I confirm our destination?”

“Not at all, Master Bannerman.” One eye opened a crack. “You can’t kill me.”

“I could stop your heart with a thought.”

“You could try. It wouldn’t happen. Trust me.” The eye closed again. “I can’t die.”

Those words again. His confidence was both irrational and infuriating. She stilled her tongue behind a cage of grinding teeth, and let him go.

Six days of dreams.

His brother featured in them, of course. There was no escaping him, not even now that he was dead. Their childhood on Alalia had been a hard one, and their relationship had been strained. Not for them an easy bond in the face of hardship. Huw, the eldest, had fled shortly after his eighteenth birthday, seeking his fortunes down a mineshaft and never returning.

Braith Kindred had followed him, less out of loyalty than from a need to compete that found itself without expression, then as now. He supposed in his more self-aware moments that the Guild of the Great Ships had become the focus for all the fears his brother had once embodied: of being ignored, of coming last, of being unworthy. Learning of Huw’s death had stripped his life of meaning, until Terminus had given him a chance to fight against the spacer incursions.

The sabotage on Hakham had very nearly killed him, judging by the hammering his body had endured. It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. Neither, of course, was collaborating with the enemy — but life was nothing if not interesting. In one dream, Braith tried to explain to Huw why it was so important he stay dead. If Huw wasn’t dead, Braith wouldn’t have set the bombs, and if Braith hadn’t set the bombs, the Guild wouldn’t have captured him, and if the Guild hadn’t captured him, he wouldn’t now be coming back. Huw wasn’t getting it, though, and wouldn’t lie back down. Sometimes, just to confuse the issue, Huw looked like Master Bannerman. Sometimes he looked like Braith himself.

In his dreams of Alalia, the sky was never blue. It was gray and heavy, like an ancient marble roof on the verge of collapse. He had seen other skies on other Structure worlds, but never the stars as Bannerman had shown him. He dreamed that they leaked in through the crater on Hakham and filled the Structure with thousands of glowing sparks. He pursued them with a net but couldn’t catch them all. When they touched him, they burned. Fleeing in flames, he trailed new stars behind him in their thousands.

The view from Bannerman’s couch was no less spectacular. Passing over the Bulge, she appreciated the galaxy from a perspective few people ever saw with their own eyes. She wept on realising the boldness of the Guild of the Great Ships’ aspirations. Its present tally of ten million stars was of no significance at all against the total number in the galaxy. Were the Guild to disintegrate that very day, the arms would go on turning, the bar wouldn’t shred and dissipate, the thick dust lanes would coil unchecked, spawning still more stars with their cold, hard light.

That mood lasted less than a day. The Guild had once claimed just three suns, and would maintain its present growth until something stopped it. Some other power, perhaps, or the internal rift that the Grand Masters feared. Their architects warned of a time when even cutting-edge ultralights, of which the razee was a prototype, would be insufficient to knit the aspiring empire together. Lacking the means to bind the stars, all would unravel and turn to ash.

The Structure would unite such an empire, allowing it to expand beyond all projections. If the architects could only fathom the principles behind its transcendent shafts, there would be no limit to the Guild’s reach. Great Ships would explore every corner of the universe, and her avatars would be among them.

All that stood between her and that grand dream were people like Braith Kindred.

She watched him sleep, learning the planes of his guileless face and the angles of his limbs. His bruises faded to yellow and disappeared like clouds on a summer day. Pristine, he looked even younger and all the more vulnerable for it. Over three days she tested his body’s defenses, searching for the source of his bizarre confidence in her inability to kill him. Something new, she thought, something developed by Terminus that the Guild had not seen before. Proceeding carefully, wary of sentinels and snares, she explored every vein, every muscle, every synaptic pathway, and found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. He was defended, yes, but no more than she.

Tendrils of her will reached the valves of his heart. He had dared her to do this, to try to kill him, and now she had the capacity. How long would his brain last if she shut down his circulatory system? An hour or two at most, less if she began severing links in his brain stem and cortex as well. She could rewire his glands to produce neurotoxins instead of hormones, if she chose, or send powerful acids coursing through his stomach wall into his chest cavity. There were a thousand ways to end someone from within.

The only certain way to test his assertion was to actually try. She came close on several occasions. A mixture of fear and excitement welled in her, tugging her in both directions. Each time, she backed away from the brink, following the call of duty. She might need him if his directions proved unreliable. The Guild might need the knowledge still trapped in his skull.

She was glad she had refrained when the razee reentered the galactic disk and began detecting signals of an unknown government in the vicinity of their destination. They were rapid-fire, sharp and powerful, like radio spikes during a thunderstorm. And there were a lot of them.

The razee decelerated like a tiny sun, drawing attention from all sides.

COMPLICATIONS

“Wake up, Kindred.”

The voice intruded on his dreams, wrenched him from the well of unconsciousness with an urgency that was utterly irresistible.

“Damn you, Kindred, wake up!”

He woke gripping the arms of his acceleration couch. Powerful forces were tugging him from side to side. Stars rolled and flared through the cockpit’s transparent walls. Something bright that he had mistaken for a nearby sun exploded with a flash of blue light, sending the ship tumbling like a twig in a waterfall.

“What the hell — ?”

“You didn’t tell me there would be people waiting for us.” Bannerman was rigid beside him, all of her conscious mind focused on what was happening outside the ship, apart from the small segment talking to him. Her hands twitched as she brought the ship back under control. “You dropped us right in the middle of an ambush!”

That couldn’t be right. He thought desperately, trying to make sense of the situation. Oza was abandoned, bombed by the Decretians and left to lie fallow. The idiots didn’t know what lay hidden below the surface levels of the mine. If they were attacking now, it had to be for another reason.

A second missile exploded nearby. The view blacked out for an instant as a blast of hard radiation struck the ship. He fought a wave of automatic fear. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be.

The prisoner reached out with his implants and found that she had revoked his small telemetry privileges.

“Don’t be an idiot, Bannerman,” he said. “You woke me to see if I could do something. At least let me try.”

She relented. There were three short-range fighters on their tail, with a long-range raider of some sort bringing up the rear. She didn’t recognise the design, but he nodded on seeing them.

“They’re Decretians,” he told her. “Very nasty sorts. We have no contact with them, but there are Terminus agents stationed on Oza to keep an eye on them, ready to blow the shaft if they ever look too close. The Decretians must have left a monitoring station in the area, which spotted us when we powered in.”

She nodded. That theory matched her observations. “We can outrun them, but that won’t help us get any closer to the Structure.”

“I know. Give me a minute.”

She wasn’t certain they had a minute. On a 3-D grid, blue-gray Oza was receding behind them as the Decretian fighters drove them away. The drumming of the razee‘s reactionless thrusters was relentless and numbing.

“Are we armed?”

“Not for heavy or sustained combat.”

“I didn’t think so. A ship like this, on the cutting edge of your technology, must be for covert surveillance, not attack-runs.”

She didn’t grace that with a reply.

“Whatever. We’ll work with what we’ve got.”

“You are suspiciously unconcerned,” she said. “You planned this.”

“I swear I had no idea what was waiting for us. The empire, yes, but I hoped to get in unnoticed. Whatever happens now, though, I do know we’ll make it. Trust me.”

“You say this, but I have no reason to do it.”

“Your choices are limited, Bannerman.”

She fumed in silence for a second, and then gasped as another missile detonated dangerously close to the ship.

When the spinning starscape had stabilised, she found herself agreeing to at least hear his suggestion, if he had one.

“I think I do,” he said, hoping against hope that his wild plan would succeed. “Here’s what you’re going to do. This ship accelerates faster than anything I’ve ever seen. I presume it can decelerate just as quickly. When I give you the word, I want you to hang on the brakes as hard as you can. Drop us back level with those three fighters. Come in firing.”

“We can’t defeat all three at once.”

“Not with conventional weapons. I know.” He studied the disposition of the fighters, wondering if he was insane to place so much trust in something over which he had so little control. He wasn’t a space combat expert, and he certainly didn’t know how the Structure did what it did. All he could do was take a chance. “Once we’re in the midst of them, you’re going to turn the ultralights on full.”

“Are you insane?”

“Maybe, but it’s either that or abandon Oza and go somewhere else. What’s the range of this thing, exactly? Fancy another hop across the galaxy with me in tow?”

She answered neither question, not with words. Furious — at him, he supposed, for getting her into this mess and at herself for letting him — she looked forward again, at the starscape ahead, and prepared the ultralights for activation.

“I don’t know what this will do,” she confessed. “So close to a gravity well, the ultralights could explode, taking us with them.”

“If it makes you so nervous, why don’t we try ramming instead?”

“Now you are testing my patience.”

He smiled, wishing he could banish the butterflies from his stomach. “It’s a serious suggestion. Given the speed this thing flies at, its anti-impact shields have to be pretty effective. A collision or two could be survivable, especially if — “

The ship’s thrusters hammered deafeningly, cutting him off in mid-sentence. Light blurred around him. His seat shook, throwing him from side to side. For a small eternity, it was all he could do simply to hang on.

Master Bannerman felt utterly disconnected from the actions of her body. She knew that Kindred’s plan was madness of the highest magnitude. Activating experimental ultralights in the middle of a solar system was a recipe for instant annihilation. No sane Ship’s Master would ever put a vessel at such risk. It couldn’t, therefore, be her behind the commands that were even now dropping the battle-hungry razee back into the midst of the Decretian fighters. It couldn’t be her laying down a pattern of covering fire intended to mislead the enemy. It couldn’t possibly be her locating the optimum point to activate the ultralights, in the hope of taking out the heavy-raider as well. She felt as though there were two avatars in her head at once, wrestling for control of her fate.

The fighters flashed by, tumbling wildly as they recalibrated their weapon systems. Thrusters flashed and flared. The optimum point arrived.

One Master Bannerman activated the ultralights while another stared in fascinated horror, dying to see what happened.

The razee screamed, and both of her screamed with it, fused back into one as a bubble of energy radiated out from the heart of the ultralights, tearing space into ribbons as it went.

The cockpit walls went black. All the instruments and virtual feeds died in the same instant. Smoke filled the cockpit. She heard Kindred crying out — not in fear or alarm, but crying the same three words that had haunted her all the way to Oza.

Without questioning the impulse, she found herself praying for the first time that he might be right.

I can’t die!

I can’t die!

I can’t die!

Her acceleration couch eased its grip the very instant fresh air reached her nostrils. Sobbing with relief, Bannerman sagged forward, eyes blinking in the stroboscope light of the revived instrumentation panels. Her implants located several active streams among the dozens that had once issued from the razee, now filled with noise. A quick glance over the status indicators told her everything she needed to know. Red was the dominant shade. The razee would soar no more.

Of the fighters and the raider, there were no signs.

A hand groped for hers and she jerked out of the data, startled.

“We made it.” Kindred’s voice was raw with relief. “I told you we would.”

She surprised herself by not immediately pulling away. “We got lucky,” she said, “and we’ll need to get lucky again soon. The ultralights are dead, burned completely out. Thrusters are down to half a percent capacity. We’ll be doing well to hit Oza, let alone land on it.”

He was unflappable. “That’s all we need. Don’t you see? No matter what the universe throws at us, we’ll come through just fine.”

She withdrew her hand. “I don’t share your confidence.”

“That’s because you don’t understand the Structure. You think you do, but you don’t.”

“So explain it to me.” When he didn’t answer, she dismissed the mystery with an irritated snort. “I thought not. You’re as ignorant as I am.”

“No, wait. Give me a second. I’m thinking.” He tapped his right index finger on the side of the couch. “Yes, why not? You’re caught up in this now. The only way back to your ship is through the Structure. You have a right to know what you’re getting yourself into.”

He spoke so seriously, so earnestly, that she braced herself against the back of her chair, as though the revelation might convey a physical impact. When she noticed what she had unconsciously done, she cursed herself for being so gullible. This was what he wanted, to throw her off-balance even further than she already was. Striking when she was weak was a sensible tactic. She gave him credit for trying, even as she hardened herself to resist his web of lies.

He told her everything he knew. It didn’t take long, and he could tell she didn’t believe him. The story did sound crazy; he had once thought it impossible too, until it had happened to someone close to him.

Living in or near the Structure tangled people up in time, sometimes. No one knew why, or how. It just happened, and people lived with it. Some found a comfort in it, as he told himself to, now. Until the loop in which he had found himself unraveled — until he was back on Hakham, so he could read out the script and push the button that he had failed to push the first time around — he was untouchable. How could he die anywhere when he knew he would be alive later?

She said: “You are telling me that you did not, in fact, set those charges to detonate.”

“No. It was me. Must have been. I just haven’t done it yet.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“The Structure makes you do that. It’s unavoidable.”

“Knots in time cannot exist. The laws of temporal entropy forbid such things.”

“Is that your best comeback?”

“I don’t need another. What you are telling me is impossible.”

“So was FTL travel, once. Hell, so was flying! I don’t think the word is in the universe’s dictionary.”

The ship was nearing Oza’s tenuous atmosphere. Soon, she would be too busy to argue. He guessed that she would keep pondering it, though. Maybe another near-death experience would convince her of his claims.

She seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

“If I did try to kill you now, what would happen?”

“The command would fail somehow. Or you’d die of an aneurism before you could issue it. I don’t know. Do you want to try?”

“Not right now.”

“Good,” he said, “because at this moment, I might be the only thing protecting you from dying when we crash-land.”

Her brown eyes narrowed. They were so dark that in the dim light of the cockpit they looked completely black.

“Thanks for your concern,” she said, “but your faith would be better placed in my ability to pilot this ship.”

He smiled. “Either way, I’m looking forward to going home again.”

Home, she thought, even as she wrestled with the controls of the moribund razee. For all she had studied the Structure and its inhabitants from afar, she had never once thought that people might actually consider it such. Was that, perhaps, why they fought so vigorously to keep it to themselves? Not because of its military or scientific value, but out of love?

The Guild of the Great Ships was made of clones and avatars, but love was just as powerful a force to them as it had ever been to any human. For the first time, she began to wonder if the campaign to take control of the Structure might prove more difficult than even the Grand Masters had imagined — hypothetically unkillable Terminus agents notwithstanding.

SACRIFICE

They came down hard a kilometre from the ruins that had once been Oza topside. Kindred and Bannerman stumbled from the new crater they had made, leaning on each other’s shoulders and brushing themselves down as best they could. The walk to the apparently lifeless shaft wasn’t a long one, but under a diamond-coloured sky and with no liquid water anywhere on the planet, it wasn’t one Kindred was looking forward to. He took only a small consolation from the fact that he was back under real gravity again.

“When we get there,” he said, “let me do the talking. My access codes should still work. Once we’re in, it’s just a matter of hopping from level to level until we get where we need to go.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the crumpled wreckage of the ship. Her expression was unreadable, but he thought he could guess what was going through her mind.

That guess was confirmed when she said just one word in reply.

“Hakham.”

“Back to your ship.” He nodded. “Also, if the shaft is open, you’ll know I’m telling you the truth.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’ll wonder if you’re as good a pilot as you say you are.” He smiled. “You’ll have to be if I’m wrong, because that’s the only way you’ll ever get back home.”

The Terminus agents stationed at Oza didn’t once question her status. Master Bannerman watched closely for any sign of deception as Kindred walked up to the security cordon hidden deep in the ruins, braving a trio of upraised weapons without flinching and talking his way smoothly into their confidence. He showed no inclination to betray her just yet. She assumed he wanted to prove himself to her first, and that was perfectly in line with her own objectives. She had no doubt that before long his talk of time-loops would be revealed as the fantasy of a very lucky man.

They entered a dank, stuffy mine, traveling first by wheeled vehicle and then by elevator. The way was only intermittently lit, and they relied on infrared to pick their way when visible light was absent. Strange smells assailed her. Mud and dust soon coated her Guild uniform almost beyond its capacity to clean itself. Far behind her lay the antiseptic glamour of interstellar travel. To date, the Structure had proven disappointing and uncomfortable.

Only when they reached the first of the transcendent shafts did she realise that they hadn’t actually entered the Structure proper. At a sliding, airtight portal, Kindred entered a complex code into an alphanumeric keypad. The portal slid aside, revealing an elevator carriage large enough for thirty people.

“After you,” Kindred said, waving her inside. “From here on, we’ll make good time, better than that ship of yours. In fact, we’ll arrive before we left. If that doesn’t make you curious, nothing will.”

He pushed the carriage’s only button, and they stood at opposite sides of the carriage as it began to descend.

‘Descent’, however, wasn’t the right word for what she felt in her gut. They were undeniably moving, but she couldn’t accurately pin down in which direction. Guild training had given her many ways to assess acceleration without instruments. Something about the shaft confounded all of them.

A wave of dizziness passed through her. With no other warning than that, the carriage came to a halt. When the portal opened and she stepped through, she noticed immediately that the ambient gravity had changed.

At a five-level stack three transcendent jumps away from Oza, Kindred called the first halt on their journey. He had never been to Shosori before, but he remembered the name from the charts he had memorised and knew some of its basic geography. It was harmless enough, except for newbies.

“Are you okay?” he asked Bannerman.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

He knew she was lying. Her expression was too blank. Her eyes and hands moved abruptly and too quickly at the slightest stimulus. Maybe she thought her self-control was impeccable, but he could tell. He’d seen this kind of reaction before.

“Let’s stop here for a bit.”

They were in an observation deck that clung to the underside of ceiling made of roughly carved, reddish stone. Below them, visible through a bulging transparent blister, was the surface of a solid world, its gray features obscured by drifts of frozen atmosphere except where deep fissures had been carved by mineral-seeking engines, each as large as a Great Ship. They watched it for five minutes. In that time, the world within the Structure rotated thirty degrees.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“You want me to say that it’s impossible.”

“That word comes to mind, you have to admit. Something like this, inside a mine — “

“Is not beyond an engineering solution, however extreme. The Guild of the Great Ships could accomplish it, given the need.”

“What if I told you that this lump of rock didn’t come from your universe, the one containing the Guild of the Great Ships? Could you manage that as well?”

She looked at him through eyes wakened from their numb sightseeing. “You say ‘your universe’ as though you are not part of it.”

“I’m not. My birthplace wouldn’t appear on your maps no matter how far you explored.”

She waved that away with some of her old fire. “The multiverse is no mystery to us. Cross-continuum jumps will be within our grasp, one day.”

“Engineering again, huh?”

“I stake my life on it every time I board the Great Ship.”

“You’re not on the Great Ship anymore, Master Bannerman.”

She found his attempts at repartee clumsy but distracting. The ponderous rotations of the captured world below no longer seemed so threatening. This was the Structure, exactly where she had wanted to be for so long. Each ‘stack’, as Kindred called the named locations they passed through, had a unique character. Some were close and utilitarian, while others were more like giant shopping malls. Occasionally, she detected evidence of earthworks, as would be expected of a mine. Diligently and thoroughly, she recorded every detail for her avatar back at the Great Ship.

“Shall we get moving again?” she asked.

“Of course. Adrigon’s next, then Malmelia — and then Estes, where they suck minerals out of the bottom of a planet-wide ocean…”

The names meant nothing to her, his attempt to awe likewise.

Between transcendent shafts, they moved invisibly among the crowds. The strangest thing she had seen so far wasn’t the evidence of science far in advance of the Guild’s — for all that she bluffed regarding the architects’ ability to mimic it — but the people who inhabited the Structure. They had passed hundreds of all ages, living and working under artificial lights in halls large enough to hold thousands. They grew flowers. They raised children. If they cared at all about the universe beyond, it didn’t show.

“This is it.”

Kindred pressed his palm against the portal ahead of them and spread his fingers wide. The white plastic was inert against his skin. If anything was active on the far side, it neither vibrated nor radiated any heat.

All the times he could have died meant nothing, now. He had had only to count them down until he reached the loop’s end — which was, of course, its beginning. And then, once he blew the charges and the loop closed, he would be mortal like anyone else, but safely rid of Hakham and the Guild of the Great Ships, for now.

“What are you waiting for?”

He didn’t know.

The strange thing was that his return to the Structure hadn’t touched him as deeply as he had thought it would. The tunnels seemed cramped and crowded to him now; there were no distant horizons, no far vistas. Although every level was different, there was a homogeneity to it all that he could swear hadn’t been there before.

He couldn’t tell Bannerman. She would think that she was responsible, and he couldn’t have that.

“Nothing.”

He keyed in his access code. The doors slid open.

They stepped inside. The doors slid closed.

With a hint of movement, they were on their way.

“Well?” Her silence irked him. “This shaft is supposed to be destroyed, isn’t it?”

“You don’t understand the technology, Kindred. We might be going somewhere else, or nowhere at all.”

He nodded and settled back to wait. Words would not convince her. Only the cold, hard evidence of her senses.

Bannerman’s insides shifted as the carriage came to a halt. Not nerves, she told herself; surely just a side effect of the Structure’s arcane technologies.

The portal opened. Kindred waved her ahead of him. She stepped into a boxy antechamber with gray walls, floors, and ceiling. A functional space that smelled of abandonment. The air was still and quiet. Kindred’s footsteps as he came up behind her were the only sounds.

He radiated satisfaction. “Now what do you say?”

“This proves only that your demolition charges failed to do their job down here,” she said. “Assuming this is Hakham.”

“Of course it is. If we can get to the surface, you’d see your Great Ship in orbit above. Hell, you could try to talk to yourself, if you wanted to.”

“Is that possible?”

“No — unless you remember such a conversation taking place, in which case it’s not only possible; it’s compulsory.”

A yearning to try filled her, regardless of the apparent absurdity of the notion. To reconnect with her avatar, to see the Great Ship again, both were possibilities she had been preparing to abandon on the other side of the galaxy. She could do more than just say hello, too. She could stop Kindred from setting off the charges and prevent herself from going with Kindred on a crazy odyssey across the stars. She knew the location of Oza now, so there was no need to go through that charade anymore. She had everything the Guild needed right here in her head.

But she didn’t remember having such a conversation with herself before she left the Great Ship, and the charges had gone off. Those were facts. If Kindred were right and it was truly impossible to change history, what consequences might she inadvertently provoke by trying? The knowledge she had earned might disappear completely, leaving the Guild back where it started and her avatars doomed to an ignominious fate.

“Take me up,” she said. “I need proof, not suggestion.”

He shrugged and obeyed, apparently unconcerned that — if he was right — the area they were walking into was full of deadly explosives.

They took a rattling elevator cage up to the next level. He experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu as they went. It seemed a lifetime since he had followed this very path on his mission to blow Hakham topside to pieces. It seemed like yesterday.

He looked for evidence of the charges, and found them exactly as he remembered them, anchored to stress points and beams where they would cause the most damage. His plan had been to blow the upper layers first, then the shaft itself on a timer, once he had gotten away.

They stepped carefully through an unlit area, heading for the next elevator. This location rang a definite bell. Something had happened in this place the first time around — but what?

Bannerman grabbed his arm and hissed into his ear.

“There’s someone ahead.”

A figure moved at the far end of the passage, deep in the shadows.

Acting instinctively, Kindred took Bannerman by the shoulder and put himself in front of her.

Coherent light flashed once, twice.

The first shot missed them both. The second caught him low on the left shoulder, just above his heart.

He fell, remembering too late the two intruders he had surprised in Hakham’s lower levels. Enemy agents, he had assumed, since they had both been wearing Guild uniforms.

Remotely, as though through a thick glass window, he heard footsteps receding into the distance.

PARADOX

Master Bannerman stared after the fleeing figure, shocked into immobility. The man who had shot Kindred was moving quickly through shadows, but she recognised his profile, the planes of his all-too-human face. It was undoubtedly, impossibly, Kindred himself.

For an instant, she could not move. Everything he had told her was true. They had crossed from one side of the galaxy to the other and returned before they left. Her prisoner had looped back along his own time line, protected from her, from the Decretians, and from the crash-landing on Oza…but not from this.

Kindred gasped. The shot had made a ruin of his chest. Each breath caused him agony. It was amazing his heart was beating at all.

His right hand came up, reaching for her.

“Didn’t — ” he tried to say, ” — get to — “

Bannerman leaned over him, blurry but real.

He clung to the sight of her even as the rest of his world unraveled.

” — finish — “

“Quiet. You’re only hurting yourself more.”

Kindred shook all over. He was afraid for an instant that this was his body’s last gasp, that death was upon him, too soon by far.

She put a firm hand on his forehead and the pain went away. He was dying: that certainty remained, but all fear evaporated. In its place, a new understanding grew. He had crossed his own path again and closed the loop earlier than he had expected — and how fitting to signal the end of his indestructibility by mistakenly shooting himself! His journey was over.

Bannerman’s journey, on the other hand, still had some way left to run. In her own way, she was as trapped as he was. She just didn’t know it yet.

“Do it for me,” he said quickly, while he had the strength. “Two levels up. Wait until he’s inputted the codes, then — don’t kill him. Put him — the Guildsmen — need him afterward. Get back here — now, later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The script,” he said. “The charges. Only you can do it.”

The reassurance of her warm palm disappeared, and he knew that at last he had gotten through to her. Causality was tangled in a knot. If he died before he could enact her past — their immediate future — then she would have to do it herself.

They hadn’t betrayed each other as they had originally intended to. Time and the Structure did it for them.

“You expect me to blow the charges?”

“Yes. Record me. I — I strike — ” He broke into a fit of bloody coughing. When it subsided, he tried again. In the recording she had played him, he had sounded strained but hadn’t stumbled. “I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.” For Huw, he added silently to himself. And now for me, too. “Got it?”

She nodded, and he let his head fall back. He had no strength left. The pain had started to return. His lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air, no matter how he strained.

“And then what?” he thought she asked, leaning low over him with anxious eyes. “Kindred, and then what?”

Whatever you want, he wanted to say. You’re free now, or soon will be. Close the loop and decide for yourself. It’ll be easier now I’m out of the equation.

But all he could manage was one word.

Kindred stiffened and died, leaving Bannerman alone in the basements of Hakham.

“Why should I?” she had asked. “Kindred, why should I?”

The answer he had given her made no sense at all.

She crouched over him, spattered with his blood, too stunned by the sudden turn of events to think. He who had claimed invulnerability was now dead, and she was trapped in a paradox of her own making. Why had she thought to test his bizarre theory? Hadn’t she ever wondered what it would mean if it turned out to be true?

A cold fatality swept through her. She could either die trying to change history or do exactly as Kindred had said. What other choices did she have? Perhaps he had faced just such a dismal dilemma on realising that he had to help the Guild in order to see his own mission through. She vowed not to die as he had, bleeding in the dirt, knowing that she, his enemy, possessed the only opportunity to finish the job for him, the last thing she wanted to do.

The other Kindred was still loose, heading off to blow the charges.

Think, she told herself. Find a way to stop him.

Everywhere she turned she foresaw terrible consequences, not just for herself but for the Guild of the Great Ships as well. The Grand Masters had no conception of what a concerted assault on the Structure might cost them. An indestructible resistance would be much worse than an agent or two armed with bombs. In such a battle, the full weight of the universe’s laws would be on the Structure’s side — just as they were arrayed against her now. Losing such a war would cause deeper instabilities than mere internal discontent.

She stood up and raised a hand to her temple, feeling light-headed. She saw now that she would blow the charges, exactly as Kindred had asked, but not out of sympathy with him and the terrorists of Terminus, or out of fear of the consequences of breaking the time-loop. She had all the free will she ever had. The choice was entirely hers, now she saw what it needed to be.

Being silent wasn’t enough to save the Guild from harm. Averting open conflict with the Structure had to become her first priority, which meant closing the only remaining exit in the Guild’s territory, on Hakham. If the Grand Masters still wanted to tackle the Structure, they would have to find the entrance at Oza and win a very different conflict with the Decretians first. That could take decades, perhaps centuries — in which time, new technologies might evolve to tackle the time-looping menace.

She would save the Guild by betraying it — and herself.

“The Structure makes you do that,” Kindred had once said. “It’s unavoidable.”

He had been talking about speaking gibberish, but the thought held in both contexts. She was in two places simultaneously, caught in a loop, as he had been, and she had no choice but to turn her back on everything she held dear. But a perverse hope remained that she might redeem herself. Kindred would have prepared an escape route; she was sure of that, for he had displayed none of the characteristics of a suicide bomber. Now that her indestructibility was assured, who knew what she could learn before fate brought her inevitably back? She could only take the opportunity given to her, and try, as Kindred had, to make everything right.

The corpse’s cold, blue eyes were still open, staring up at an invisible sky.

“Stars,” he had said, and she wondered if he had meant it as a warning or an entreaty.

Pausing only to close his eyelids, she headed up the tunnel in pursuit of Kindred’s earlier self — the young man who had given her far more than she had wanted, and taken an equal amount in return.

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