Branegate Read online

  “What?” came a muffled voice.

  “Joseph. Faith called me.”

  The door opened, and it was dark inside. Joseph stepped in with trust, for his weapon was not yet loaded and locked. “Keep going straight ahead,” said a voice.

  A door opened, and there was bright light. A burly man motioned him through the doorway. It was an office, a desk heaped with papers, three chairs. Two men stood over a young kid sitting in one of the chairs. The kid took one look at Joseph and blanched white as a ghost. “No! I said I’d cooperate. I won’t give anything away. You promised!”

  “Promised what?” said Joseph, and then the other men looked nervously at each other, eyes darting.

  “He lives if he leads you to Quraiwan.”

  “He’s a traitor,” said Joseph.

  “They threatened my family. They said they’d kill them all if I didn’t cooperate,” whined the kid.

  Can’t be more than fifteen, thought Joseph. “How’d they find out you’re in the underground?”

  “I don’t know!” said the kid, and tears welled up in his eyes.

  Joseph bit his lip. “You know where Quraiwan is?”

  “No, but I make the drops and someone picks them up. I can tell you where it is and when and you can follow whoever makes the pick up.”

  “You ever see the guy?”

  “No.”

  “So when’s the next drop?”

  The kid looked at a clock on the wall. “Three hours; it’s at four. I have to be there exactly at four.” His breathing seemed to ease, now, as he calmed down.

  “Tell me where it is.” Unlike the terrified kid, the other men only looked at him darkly, and he sensed their fear.

  The kid told him what he needed. “I’m leaving now. You won’t see me when you get there. You do anything that looks or sounds like a warning and I’ll blow you to pieces. Understand?”

  The kid nodded his head rapidly, eyes wide.

  Joseph left the room in deathly silence. The door to outside was open for him; he walked to it through a darkened room. “Good hunting,” said a voice in the darkness, and the door closed behind him.

  Again he kept to side streets and darkened alleyways. It was a twenty minute walk and he was nearly delayed when two toughs came out of an alley and blocked the sidewalk in front of him. Joseph’s steps did not miss a beat. His hand flashed to his waistband and came up clutching his weapon, loaded and locked, the hammer back. “I will kill you,” he snarled, and the men jumped away from him and into the street, a knife clattering to the pavement. He passed them without looking back; if they even said anything he would come back and kill them, but they were mute.

  He came to the site of the drop: a wire-mesh trash can at the head of an alley next to a neighborhood grocery. A light glowed dimly in the back of the store’s interior. Above it and along either side were cheap apartments, lights glowing in a few windows even at this hour. Joseph melded into the shadows at an entrance to one building and waited. The watch for any movement along the street or above it kept him alert for nearly three hours. It was cold and damp, but he didn’t feel it. There was nothing he could feel but anticipation.

  The kid arrived exactly on time. He carried a white paper bag with him and casually dropped it into the trash-can as he passed by. Did a good job of keeping his head down and not looking around to see where Joseph might be. In minutes he was out of sight.

  Joseph waited again, prepared for a long one, and was surprised when only a few minutes later a man appeared at the alley’s entrance by the trashcan, took three steps from it and retrieved the bag left by the kid. Immediately he stepped back into the shadows of the alley and was gone.

  Oh, oh, a bad situation. Joseph had to cross the street first, and his target could be watching from the darkness. He froze in place, his senses acute for any sound, scent, or motion. He was rewarded with a faint thud coming from the alley. The man was moving. Joseph sprinted across the street on cat’s feet, body scraping stone as he flowed around a corner into darkness. Light came from a street at the other end of the alley and a shadow moved there, away from him. When it turned the corner, Joseph sprinted again.

  His target had doubled back in the direction from which the kid had come. The street was dimly lit and Joseph darted from shadow to shadow, his target looking back several times. But the distance he had to follow him was mercifully short. The man went to a doorway, and next to it another man stepped out of the shadows and unlocked the door for him. They both went inside, and came out again moments later after Joseph had moved to an entryway only a dozen steps away. His target walked away, and the white bag was no longer in his hand. The other man stepped back into the shadows. Joseph waited a few minutes, then shuffled slowly down the street, his head swaying drunkenly from side to side. His gun was back in his waistband, safety on, hammer at half-cock. The man guarding the door did not move, but Joseph knew exactly where he was, and reaching his position, stumbled into him hard.

  “Hey!” The man was heavy, his neck thick, but Joseph’s arm was a steel snake around his throat, knuckles of his other hand digging into the carotid artery. The man thrashed for only seconds, then slumped, and Joseph snapped his neck with a single, violent twist.

  It took him four tries to find the key that fit the door. Every little scratching sound made the hair on his arms rise, but the door itself opened quietly. It was gloomy inside, a set of stairs rising to a landing where a single bulb hung from the ceiling. Amazed, he heard music, a violin playing something classical.

  Weapon in hand, he ascended the stairs sideways, back to the wall. There was only one door at the top of the stairs, the music coming from beyond it. Too easy, he thought. It can’t be this easy.

  He swallowed hard, gun leveled, boldly turned the doorknob and the door opened. Before he was inside, an angry voice said, “What’s wrong now! I’m trying to—”

  Fedor Quraiwan was sitting at a desk in an otherwise bare room. Music came from a recorder on his desk, sitting next to a white paper bag, and the man had been reading from a small sheet of paper. He took one look at Joseph, and his eyes got very large.

  “Greetings from The Source,” said Joseph, and shot him three times through his left chest, the explosions deafening in the small room.

  Quraiwan tipped over backwards off his chair, slid on the floor and banged into the wall. In a minute he was lying in a pool of blood. Joseph waited until satisfied with the size of the pool, then picked up his empty cartridge cases and left the room.

  The street was still silent, and no lights had come on in any windows. Joseph walked quickly and retraced his steps back to the garage where he’d interviewed the young traitor to The Church. He was let in as before. Two men and the kid waited for him, as before. “It’s done,” he said. “Quraiwan is dead. Do not go out on the street for any reason. There might be retaliations.”

  “The boy is the only one known to them,” said a man. “We can have him out of the city before dawn.”

  “They don’t even know my real name,” said the kid. “My aunt has a farm fifty miles from here. They’ll never find me there.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Joseph, and instantly the kid was panicked.

  “What do you mean? I did what you said, and you got Quraiwan. You promised to get me out of here!”

  “I promised nothing, and neither did The Church. The promises came from these ignorant men who should know better.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said one man as Joseph drew his gun from his waistband. “You have no authority in this cell.”

  “You’re not even a priest,” said the other man. The kid made a squeak, and backed up against a wall.

  “We make no promises to traitors in The Church,” said Joseph, and he shot the kid through the heart with a single round. The body crashed to the floor and a great, red oval framed a single hole in the wall.

  “Whoever you think you are, there’s gonna be a reckoning for that when the right people know what you did
.”

  Joseph put his weapon back in his waistband. “Better you worry about the reckoning for what you were about to do,” he said.

  He turned his back on the men, and the gore in the room, and left them without fear of his own safety, a true Soldier of The Church.

  CHAPTER 12

  I don’t believe you,” said Trae. “My father’s somewhere near the galactic core, and you’re right here.”

  “True,” said Petyr, and smiled faintly. “Mysterious it is, but I’m still your father. Not complete, of course. I don’t get the regular upgrades you get, but I just got a big one while you were strolling in the flowers. We’re all copies, Trae. The originals have long since died one way or another.”

  The man was excited, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. Trae had never seen him so animated.

  Petyr sat down on the edge of the bed next to him, leaned until their shoulders touched. “Here’s the wonder. I’m only two days older than you. I was cloned to watch over you, two days before little Anton was reborn. Actually, you were six months old at birth.”

  “I’m a clone?” said Trae.

  “Of Anton, yes, but modified. Anton would not have looked exactly like you, just like I don’t look like the previous clone of your traveling father. Our identities are changed. They’re constantly changing. We’re partially loaded with genetics, memories and experiences of people we’re similar to. We’re new people, Trae; that’s the secret of The Immortals, that and all the nanochemistry inside us. Our bodies last a long time, but even nanomachines can’t repair random DNA damage. Our neural nets are scanned regularly to update our cortical files. When we die we’re cloned at centers all over the known universe. Some of us are even placed in good families of normal people, but there’s always a watcher.”

  A pause, then Trae was startled when Petyr put an arm around him. “I was your watcher, Trae. Your father never left you.” He squeezed Trae’s shoulder. “Well, I guess a piece of him did. I didn’t really know who I was until a few minutes ago. I guess it’s safe to know, now that we’re off Gan.

  “The memories I’ve had are from a priest Leonid Zylak knew on his homeworld when he was a young man. The priest was a militant who fought corruption in The Church. I had no context for the memories; for me, it all happened on Gan when The Church was young. Leonid just now gave me two lifetimes of his own memories, up to the time you were born. I’m two people: Leonid Zylak, and an unnamed priest.”

  Petyr shook his head slowly in wonderment. “I’m a father,” he said softly.

  “And an Immortal,” said Trae.

  “Not quite. I received nanochemistry at birth, but nothing since then. I don’t have your enhanced neural network, but my health has been perfect. I might have suspected something, but didn’t. Leonid seemed amused he fooled me so good, but he was serious about the fact I’m the part of him he left behind to take care of you.”

  “Two fathers?” mumbled Trae.

  “Maybe more,” said Petyr. “It’s Leonid Zylak who has to go through that gate and solve whatever crisis exists in the home universe. He didn’t tell me a thing about it. He did tell me what we’re supposed to do next. How about you?”

  The knowledge came to Trae without conscious effort. “We’re going to Elderon and the Zylak corporate headquarters. That’s over two years travel from here.”

  “Time to prepare for what you have to do. Pulling antimatter and other exotic stuff out of the vacuum of space does not sound like a simple task.”

  Trae shook his head, and felt a first twinge of the excitement that would continue with him until the end of his life. “Easier than you might think, but even with all the tech stuff I just got, I don’t have the slightest idea about how I’m going to build a vacuum-state energy drive small enough to fit in a regular space vessel. And be able to generate enough energy to move a planet? Why would we even want to do that?”

  “Ask him, Trae. Within a few months he’ll be gone from this universe.”

  Suddenly Trae could accept all of it. He leaned against Petyr. “You’ll still be here,” he said, then smiled, and shook his head. “It sort of comes together, now. I thought my father had run away, abandoned me. It made me angry, Petyr. When I was little, I wished that you were my father. Guess I finally got my wish.”

  The soft squeeze of a hand on his shoulder was reassuring.

  “You have a family, Trae, and maybe someday you’ll meet all of them,” said Petyr.

  CHAPTER 13

  The great ship plowed through swirling dust and gas where pressure waves began to distinguish between the core and the great spiral arms of the galaxy. To the naked eye it was like a great comet, a small, rocky planet-sized nucleus with tails of dust and gas, a great halo and bow shock where the electromagnetic shield ionized and dispersed particles rushing past at near light speed.

  Far beyond the vision of a human eye was the light-year-long, bright tail of a vacuum energy drive, exotic particles and their cousins giving themselves back to the false vacuum of their birth. Beyond the bow shock, at energies going back to the beginning of time, a stressed space-time glowed dully as particles once virtual were ripped forth to power the great ship.

  The tiny fraction of the ship that served as living quarters for crew and passengers was larger than a major city, and built in seven radial layers, like an onion. Its occupants numbered in the thousands: crew members and their families, mostly, and only a few hundred passengers who had enough leisure time or interest to enjoy the views as they neared the portal to their home universe. Many had been gone for a short while. Others, like Leonid and Tatjana Zylak, had been gone several lifetimes, for they were missionaries to this universe, and it had taken a crisis to bring them back to their true home.

  Leonid had worked late in the ship’s environmental cycle, and the red lights of evening were already on when he left his office. Tatjana hadn’t waited dinner for him, had left a list of places she might be when he got home to their suite of rooms near the shopping and arts quad on level five. The stores were closed, and nothing was playing at the theatres this evening. This left the exercise rooms and the many observation lounges on level seven. People were gathering there even now to witness their passage through the great portal to home. It was the end of a long journey, and a time for celebration, and everyone was in a festive mood. Everyone was going home.

  He finally found Tatjana in the second lounge he visited. She was sitting by herself in a dark corner, nursing a tall drink made in layers that looked like a rainbow. Conversations were quiet in this lounge, everyone gazing up at the big video screen over the bar. He sat down beside her, put an arm warmly around her shoulders, felt pleasure when she leaned her head against him.

  “Sorry I was so late,” he said.

  Tatjana sipped her drink through a blue crystal straw. “No matter. I wasn’t hungry anyway. I’m not as excited as I should be about going home. I miss Anton.”

  Leonid kissed the top of her head and squeezed her shoulder gently. “It’s Trae, dear. I don’t want to leave either, but I couldn’t let you go back alone. Besides, I have to defend the mission or the Council will simply abandon it and close the portal, or allow the Conglomerates to take the colonies over.”

  Tatjana pointed at the video screen over the bar. “It won’t be long. I can remember when I would cry with joy to see that sight. Remember?”

  “Yes,” said Leonid. It had been over a hundred years and two clones ago, though his beloved had looked the same as she did now. Young missionaries on a quest in a strange universe with hard living conditions, and she had cried herself to sleep for several nights, wanting to go home.

  The portal seemed alive on the screen, swirling green in vortices at the edges of the vertical ovoid, layers of yellow and red in bubbling depths. Still unstable, of course, as the planet-sized maintenance ships appearing as black specks focused a trickle of the very expansion energy of the universe to distort spacetime and move the portal’s black holes into an optimal confi
guration. Leonid had a sudden, naughty thought, something he hoped might lighten her spirit.

  “If I were in a festive mood, and maybe a bit drunk, I might describe that thing as the mother of all vaginas,” he whispered.

  Tatjana giggled, and her eyes flashed when she looked up at him. This made him happy. “I do see the resemblance, dear,” she murmured.

  They went back to their quarters and for the next two hours forgot all about what they were leaving behind or what they were facing in a universe that had once been their home but now might be hostile to them. And the few times Tatjana cried out, it was not in sadness.

  They had experienced transition before, and unlike spacetime jumps in normal space it was not particularly disturbing to the senses. People were encouraged to be asleep during a spacetime jump, since the folding of space produced a discontinuity in time perceived as an event lapse by the brain. People in a conscious state suffered chaotic daydreams and hallucinations that seemed to go on for hours, but in fact only lasted seconds as the brain searched for a new reference point in time. Very disturbing. Transition, on the other hand, involved no trauma except to those subject to seizure in the presence of flickering lights. In transition, one only passed through the brane separating one universe from another, a single pore of the brane magnified hugely to accommodate passage. No discontinuities, since space and time for both universes melded together smoothly at each point on the surface of the brane.

  Transition was nonetheless a spectacular event; the energies used to create a portal made memorable displays of ionized gases in the molecular clouds that often accompanied clusters of black holes. People bought and saved recordings of their transition adventures to show to their grandchildren, since each portal was different and any given portal changed from day to day.