Right now, Idris felt space stretching to infinity on all sides, making the mere idea of travel in any direction laughable. Behind it, he sensed the mind of the Hegemony pilot, the Ogdru. It was like an arrowhead, a killer. There was no real sentience there, just an animal hunger – a predator whose environment was space, both real and otherwise. Unspace would hold no horrors for this creature; it didn’t have brain enough for existential dread. And the Essiel had given it access to ship systems so it could hold prey in its net as it stalked them.
Yet the net wasn’t perfect. There was a gradient to it, as though the Vulture was caught in a bag full of water with a leak in one corner. Perhaps it simply wasn’t possible to isolate space perfectly. A maze, then.
Idris closed his eyes and cut himself off from his senses, searching. The hunter was undulating towards him like some vast underwater thing. His imagination cast it with a thousand eyes, tentacles, toothy jaws – all the sea monsters that had ever troubled human dreams. It was a shadow beneath him, rising from the depths, opening out like the rose petal structure of its own vessel, seeking to engulf . . .
And while his conscious mind shrank from the horrors he’d concocted, the rest of him had taken that gradient, analysed and followed it. He’d found the flaw in the trap and instinctively solved the proofs required to exploit it. Any human catching a ball must solve complex three-dimensional equations of space and velocity without conscious thought. And for Idris, this wasn’t much different.
The Vulture God twisted, tangled in reality, halfway between everywhere and nowhere. It was both real and unreal all at once. Idris felt a terrible wrench in his mind, which resonated equally in the keening ring of the ship’s drives, and then they were gone. They’d skidded sideways out of reality and into the underlying mechanics of the universe.
There was a moment when Idris wasn’t sure they’d survived it. Instead of the transition into the familiar nothingness of unspace, what greeted him was too bright, too unfocused. The ship around him seemed to exist in five or six different slightly out-of-phase versions. And he thought: We’re lost, we’re coming apart. He felt they were suffering a loss of integrity, not physically but philosophically. Perhaps only his own waning belief was holding the ship to this side of existence.
He faced this doubt by screaming at it, there in unspace where nobody would ever hear. Just a mad animal bellow of I am here! The ship shuddered around him, then came sharply back together in a way that owed nothing to material sensation. Finally the glare turned into the dead-screen radiance of unspace. He felt his heart slamming painfully against the cage of his ribs. His lungs burned as though he’d been breathing something other than air. His splitting headache was like an axe to the skull.
Idris Telemmier sagged in his seat, weeping. He wished more than anything that he could let go, just let himself lose consciousness like any sane human being. Who even cared if they were all lost to unspace? Just a moment’s peace, a moment’s rest. But he was denied that release. It just wasn’t in him anymore. The Intermediary Program had taken that part of his mind out. He’d signed a waiver for it and everything. The Program had affected all of them differently, but this was why he was such a good Int. Even when he wanted to give in to the darkness, he couldn’t.
He threw calculations together, hasty and slipshod, sending the Vulture out beyond the Throughways, off beyond everything – and who cared where? Just away for now. Away into the void where nobody would ever find them. There was always more void. It was the universe’s greatest resource and you could mine it forever and never run out.
Twenty minutes and he drove them back into real space. He’d sunk even lower in his seat, pale and sweating, thinking: Why do I do this? Why would anybody do this? But what else could I do? Then he ordered the ship’s higher systems to reassemble themselves, and woke everyone up.
*
‘You look like shit,’ was Olli’s considered response.
‘Good.’ Idris tried for a smile but barely felt his lips twitch, ‘Hate false advertising.’
None of them looked particularly perky, he thought. Having to get yourself into suspension after hitting unspace would do that. Nobody seemed to have noticed the whole we-almost-ceased-to-exist thing either. That particular struggle must have only been apparent to someone with Int senses.
‘Seriously, though,’ Kris pressed. ‘What the hell happened there?’
‘The Broken Harvest had countermeasures,’ was all he said. No point spooking people more.