The Negator, page 16
“You can’t do this,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Reality doesn’t work like that.”
“You think you understand, but that’s just the narrow view of insects. For High Polarions who have learned the great secrets? I am beyond such concepts, such paltry ideas.”
He spread his arms wide.
“How else do you think I had the power and imagination to discover the Null Equation? I couldn’t be ordinary. And with this power, I will become the supreme entity of the universe.”
“You’re calling yourself God?” I said.
“Am I?”
“I’m not calling you God,” I spat. “You’re a prick, a devil, at best.”
“Whatever I am,” he said, “I’m crushing you. You will never wake, Kane. You are eternally asleep until—yes—I use the Negator on you. How does that strike you?”
He leaned forward, his eyes boring into mine.
“You will never have existed. All your thoughts, all your dreams, what your mother thought she was raising—gone, finished, never to have happened.”
“That’s insane,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Perhaps not to an ape like you, but it is reality nonetheless.” His smile turned cruel. “Someone stole your little wooden knife, little boy. I’m going to steal your existence.”
“You know what?” I said, an idea forming.
“Tell me.”
My neck prickled as sweat beaded, my gut churning with fear, but I looked down at my hand. In the dream, it was bare. No ring. But I knew—I knew—that in the real world, in my cabin on the Theron, I was wearing the High Circle Polarion ring.
“That won’t work here,” he said.
I looked up at him, met his stare for a few seconds before having to look away. Those eyes were like staring into the abyss.
“I think it will,” I said, and started concentrating on the ring.
He shouted, saying words that made reality hiccup.
But I kept concentrating.
Then the ring activated, releasing the same power it had shown on the Dreadstar when it knocked out Colonel Pendance and the Collector’s android.
The Burnt Polarion’s study exploded like a mirror hit by a sledgehammer into thousands of glittering shards. They rained down around me, each piece reflecting a fragment of his furious face.
His spirit—or whatever part of him that had invaded my dream—flew backward as if he’d been hit by a hurricane. He screamed curses and threats as he was expelled from my mind, forced back across space to wherever his body waited.
I woke up gasping, staring at my hand. The ring was glowing cherry-red, and there were burn marks on my fingers. The sheets under my hand were actually smoking.
Then I realized why I’d finally woken up—the smoke alarm was shrieking.
The door burst open. Alina rushed in, then stopped when she saw I’d stripped before crashing.
“Hey!” I yelped, grabbing for the sheets.
She actually blushed and spun around, but Gorrax barreled past her, grabbed a blanket and started beating out the small fire that had started on my mattress.
“What happened?” the big Tokari rumbled through his translator.
I looked at him, at Alina, then at the burn marks on my hand from when the ring had saved me.
“We need to get to the Dreadstar,” I said. “Right now.”
Because if the Burnt Polarion was waking up from stasis, if he was getting strong enough to invade dreams and trap people in their sleep, then we were running out of time.
-39-
I was back on the bridge, showered and dressed, and had a full stomach for the first time in what felt like days. Alina and Gorrax were already here, studying the tactical displays that showed our predicament in glowing detail.
“How do we get past the three ships?” I asked, settling into the pilot’s chair. “We can’t fight our way through, and I doubt we’re fast enough to outrun them.”
“I have an idea,” Alina said. “I’ve been studying the quarantine ships while you were sleeping. They’re positioned like a giant ring around the star: think Saturn’s rings, but made of warships and much wider.”
“More of them?” I said.
Alina nodded.
“We thought they were all clustered in one area,” she said, “but they’re stretched out at different nodal points. If we try going in the opposite direction from where we came in, beyond the star, we’ll just run into more quarantine ships.”
“So we’re trapped,” I said.
“Not necessarily. Only these three have activated so far—first two, then the third. Maybe if we move quickly in an unexpected direction, they won’t have time to activate any others.”
“That’s a big assumption,” I said.
“Do you have a better idea?” Alina asked.
I leaned back in the chair, thinking. “Wait, you remember Axion? His name, what he did?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Alina looked confused.
“The Burnt Polarion said—” I stopped and explained everything about the dream, about how the Negator didn’t just kill but erased people from existence. How even the Burnt Polarion was starting to forget Axion had ever existed.
“That’s disturbing,” Alina said. “Maybe because we were close to where it happened, that knowledge didn’t or won’t leave us as quickly. Or perhaps there’s another explanation.”
She pointed at my hand. “Your ring might have something to do with it.”
I raised my hand, looking at the High Circle ring.
“It had enough power to dispel the Burnt Polarion’s astral form,” she said. “Maybe its abilities are greater than you realize. Maybe it’s protecting us from the Negator’s reality-warping effects.”
“Huh.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Could be.”
“So what’s the plan?” Alina asked.
“I thought you had one,” I said.
“No. That was clarification of the situation.”
I thought about it until I grinned.
“You know,” I said, “I was in LA one summer, riding dirt bikes with some friends. Cops chased us, and I remember jumping my bike over a drainage canal to get away while the cops had to find another route.”
“That was reckless,” she said.
I shook my head.
“I’ve had a lot of experience being chased by the law—and figuring out how to make my escapes stick.”
“You want to approach our problem like a biker?” Alina said, and I could hear the skepticism in her voice.
“Yeah,” I said, “because it’s what I am.”
“No, you’re more than that now.”
“You can think that if you want,” I said, settling my hands on the neural interface plates. “But I know who and what I am.”
Alina looked at Gorrax, and I’m pretty sure rolled her eyes.
“Here’s the point,” I said. “Let’s head straight at the planet.”
“And do what?” Gorrax asked.
“Skip across the atmosphere like a skipping stone. I read about it once—the Apollo 13 astronauts were worried about bouncing off Earth’s atmosphere if they didn’t hit the angle just right.”
“You want to do a gravity assist,” Alina said, her tone shifting from skeptical to interested.
“That’s the term,” I said, with the AI helping me understand what she meant. “We use a gravity assist to slingshot us out faster than we came in.”
The ring on my finger warmed as I pressed my hands against the interface plates. For once, the connection felt smooth and easy. The ring was filling in whatever gaps my partial Polarion genetics lacked.
I pushed the engines, aiming straight at the planet I’d just left.
“The angle of approach is critical,” the ship’s AI said. “Atmospheric contact will occur in three minutes and thirty seconds.”
Through the sensors, I could see the planet growing huge in front of us. The purple continents and blue-green oceans blurred together as we screamed toward the upper atmosphere.
The three quarantine ships out there had noticed what we were doing, as they started moving, but they were too far away to intercept. They’d have to chase.
As we continued to accelerate, I could feel Alina and Gorrax holding their breath.
“We have contact,” I said.
We hit the upper atmosphere fast, higher than the planetary defense debris. The Theron’s shields flared brilliant white as friction tried to tear us apart. The ship shuddered and groaned, stressed. Through the viewport, all I could see was plasma, streaming past us in rivers of light.
We weren’t going straight down. I’d calculated the angle—okay, the ship’s AI had calculated it while I flew by instinct. We were skipping across the thermosphere like a flat stone hurled at a lake. Each contact with the atmosphere slowed us slightly but changed our vector, bending our path around the planet.
The G-forces crushed us into our seats. Even with the inertial dampeners at maximum, I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Gorrax growled something unintelligible. Alina’s knuckles were white as she gripped her console.
“Come on, baby,” I whispered to the Theron. “Hold together.”
The ship screamed through the upper atmosphere, using the planet’s gravity to whip us around faster than our engines alone could manage. It was like grabbing hold of a spinning merry-go-round—dangerous as hell, but if you did it right, you could launch yourself faster when you let go.
The plasma outside the viewport faded as we shot away from the planet, propelled out of its gravity well like a stone from a sling. I checked our velocity—far faster than when we’d gone in.
“It worked,” I said.
“The three ships are pursuing,” Alina said. “They’re accelerating, trying to match our new trajectory.”
“So it didn’t help,” I said.
“I wouldn’t say that. We’re much faster than before, and we’re building a lead. I think we should keep applying your idea.”
“How so?” I asked.
On her display, she highlighted the system’s star. “Let’s use a gravity assist around the star this time.”
I checked some numbers. “That’s crazy. The white dwarf will cook us.”
“Not if we do this right,” she said. “The Theron’s shields can handle it for a short time. And with the speed we’ll gain some real separation this time.”
I looked at the pursuing ships, then at the star, then at our increasing velocity. The idea still seemed crazy to me.
“Are you chicken?” Alina said.
I looked up at her.
She was grinning.
“I’m not chicken,” I said.
“Then do it,” she said.
“Fine,” I said, as I adjusted our heading toward the star. “Let’s see how fast this ship can really go.”
-40-
The white dwarf loomed larger in our viewport, a stellar furnace compressed into a sphere the size of Earth but with the mass of the Sun. Even from here, I could feel the strain on the Theron as we approached, her hull groaning under the increasing gravitational stress.
Through the neural interface plates, with the ship’s AI helping translate what the sensors were picking up, I could see things my human eyes never could. The star wasn’t just white—it was a maelstrom of radiation across every spectrum: X-rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet light that would cook an unprotected human in a flash. The surface temperature read 25,000 degrees Celsius, and the AI told me that was considered cool for a white dwarf.
“The three ships are beginning to close with us,” Alina said. “That aligns with the physics of space. They’re heavier, and thus have better engines for straight-line acceleration.”
I checked the rear sensors. The quarantine ships were eating up the distance we’d gained from the planetary slingshot. But they were still too far back to stop what we were about to do.
“Good thing we’re not going straight,” I said, adjusting our approach vector.
The AI fed me calculations, showing the invisible river of gravity we were about to surf. See, gravity assist wasn’t just about going fast. It was about stealing momentum from something way bigger. When a ship fell toward a massive object like a star, it accelerated. But if we hit the angle right, we wouldn’t fall in. We’d whip around and be flung out the other side, keeping the extra speed.
It was like a stellar version of Crack the Whip, and we were about to be on the business end.
“Heat shields at maximum,” the AI said as we dove toward the white dwarf.
The temperature readings started climbing. Even though we were still thousands of kilometers from the surface, the radiation was intense enough to start heating our hull. The shields flared, creating a bubble of protection around us, but I could see the power drain. We couldn’t do this for long.
Then the gravity grabbed us like a giant’s fist.
I felt it through the interface, not just the G-forces trying to crush us, but the way space bent around the star. The white dwarf had compressed matter so dense that a teaspoon of it would weigh as much as a mountain. That kind of density warped everything around it, including time, I’m told.
We fell faster and faster, the Theron blasting through the star’s magnetosphere. Streams of charged particles slammed into our shields, creating an aurora of light around the scout ship. Through the sensors, I could see solar wind that would have sandblasted an unprotected vessel down to its frame.
“Periapsis in ten seconds,” the AI said—a fancy word that meant the closest point in our approach to the white dwarf.
This was it, baby. The moment where we’d either slingshot out with incredible speed or be pulled into a death spiral around the star.
The white dwarf filled our entire view, a wall of nuclear fire. The Theron’s hull temperature spiked. Warning lights flashed across my vision through the neural link.
Then we hit periapsis and I fired the engines at full thrust.
The combination of our engine thrust and the star’s gravity multiplied our velocity. The AI showed me the math—we were essentially falling sideways now, using the star’s pull to accelerate us perpendicular to our original path. Every second we stayed in the gravity well added more speed, but every second also brought us closer to cooking inside our own ship.
I yanked us into a hard turn, pulling up relative to the ecliptic plane—the imaginary disc where all the planets orbited.
We shot away from the white dwarf at a ninety-degree angle from our original trajectory, going straight “up” from the perspective of anyone still thinking in terms of normal space navigation. The gravity assist had worked. We were moving forty percent faster than when we’d entered the maneuver.
I checked our velocity. “We’re hauling butt.”
But something was wrong. The AI pointed it out to me. Through the rear sensors, I watched the three pursuing ships begin to decelerate.
Why would they do that? It didn’t make sense. Then it hit me. “They’re shutting down,” I told Alina.
She checked on her display and her face turned pale. “This is bad.”
“Why?” I said.
“We know their drill,” Alina said. “If some shut down, others come online. I’m sure this means others ahead of us are switching on. I should have foreseen that.”
I expanded the sensor range, pushing the Theron’s detection systems to their limits. There—about as far from the white dwarf as Jupiter was from our sun—a cluster of energy signatures flared to life.
Three more quarantine ships, their cold hulls suddenly blazing with power as their reactors came online. And they weren’t behind us anymore. Thanks to our ninety-degree trajectory change, these ships were now positioned to intercept us, even if it would take time.
“The whole fleet is networked,” I said.
“Yes,” Alina said. “And we already knew that. We need something more.”
The tactical display showed the three fresh warships, starting to accelerate toward us.
Alina studied her console. She’d said before that the cybernetic enhancements the Ick had added to the Mindship apps from the DIA in America allowed her to think faster than ever. Now, I could practically see her calculating angles, velocities, and intercept vectors.
Time passed as she stood there. I checked with my neural link, and saw that she was engaging the ship’s AI at near computer speeds. Her head would twitch, and her eyes would blink, and sometimes she would shift her shoulders. Mostly, she stood like a statue.
Abruptly, she turned her head, seeming normal again.
Gorrax cleared his throat to alert me.
I gave her my attention.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“They’re going to intercept us in a few hours,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“So we’re screwed?” I asked.
“Not if they can’t see us.”
“Can we jam their sensors?” I asked.
“No. We disappear.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s the big question.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I might.”
“Well?” I said, exasperated.
She gave me a mischievous smile and brushed back her hair. “Are you ready for it?”
I stared at her, waiting for her to tell me already.
-41-
“First, we’re going to have to do the same thing you used to shear off the tractor beams from the Dreadstar,” Alina said.
“How does that help us disappear?” I asked.
“It won’t by itself,” she said. “But combined with something else it might.”
“No more riddles, okay?” I said. “Either you know or you don’t.”
“I don’t know, but I’ve been picking up hints from the AI. I’m going to have to do a deep dive again. I might need to breach some ancient Polarion protocols. Is that okay with you?”
I nodded.
“Don’t freak out,” she said.
