Chapter 430

It had taken Ricky hours to get into position, using stasis sleep several times so there was no atomic movement outside of the shielded timer. Hours had passed as he had gotten into position in full stealth in a ship that had barely managed to scrape through the wormhole and into the enemy's territory.

Outside only a little more than 10 seconds passed.

The wormhole generator was destroyed. Three hours passed before the antimatter charge had gone off.

During that time the Atrekna struggled to keep the wormhole open, to send through another fleet.

Just over five seconds passed in Ricky's home universe.

The wormhole was still open, held open by the rulers of the Atrekna, when the charge went off inside the sun.

The last remaining 'space' in the universe Ricky had managed to reach turned into energy.

The wormhole was only open for a fraction of a second.

Energy, like water and humans, always seek the path of least resistance.

Outside the entropic shield was less than nothing. Not even empty space. Space had long since died. All that existed of the entire universe was the small bubble protected for billions of years by the entropic shield.

The entropic shield, used to hold back less than nothing for billions of years, held long enough that the blast intesified even as it ripped and tore at the entropic shield.

That meant the energy needed to go somewhere, and that energy, that explosive force, went the only way it could.

Through the collapsing wormhole.

A last gift from a younger sibling to a dying elder.

A witness to the final, complete death of the elder.

----------------

Admiral Smith was looking straight at the temporal lens system board when it happened.

Haymaker had entered the wormhole only a second before, she was still listening to estimations of the telemetry on the group of fifteen ships sent into the wormhole when it happened.

The wormhole erupted into an explosion of energy.

The time counter read eleven seconds.

She reached out, slapping the button to connect her to Great Grand Most High Cu'udchu'ar. The connection was established instantly and she could see Cu'udchu'ar turning toward the holotank.

"JUMP JUMP JUMP!" Admiral Smith yelled.

She knew there was no way the Lanaktallan ships could survive the blast wave coming out of the wormhole according to the temporal lens.

On his own ship, Cu'udchu'ar did not bother asking questions. He could see something on the human's face that he had never seen before but had no trouble recognizing.

Fear.

Cu'udchu'ar didn't pause, just turned to LTC Cricket.

"ALL SHIPS! JUMP JUMP JUMP!" Cu'udchu'ar bellowed out. "EMERGENCY TRANSIT!"

Lieutenant Colonel Jumping Cricket had seen the terror on Admiral Smith's face and reacted before Cu'udchu'ar had called out the second 'JUMP' by ordering every other DS and eVI to jump right there, heading for the rally point coordinates.

For a split second Cu'udchu'ar could see dozens, hundreds of himself, all nearby but far away. Staring at the holotanks, watching flat screens, reading dataslates, examaning scrolls of vellum. Some were in full armor, others covered in chitin plating, still others wearing only a sash. They all blinked at the same time as him, looking around, just as the dozens, hundreds, of copies of his flag bridge crew looked at themselves and each other.

Cricket, hundreds of her, screamed in agony.

Cu'udchu'ar felt blood run out of his nostrils and across his mouth. The dozens, scores, hundreds of him bled with him.

Cu'udchu'ar reached out and slapped the master emergency jump translation button, seeing that he was the only one not paralyzed by staring at himself, repeated over and over again with slight differences, through infinity.

The Lanaktallan ships made emergency translations to jumpspace, some of them even as they launched missiles. Millions of ship fled into jumpspace, hitting the emergency translation button and hurtling themselves away from the system.

His ears were bleeding.

All of the copies vanished, the farthest from each one collapsing into the nearest of each one, in an impossible recombination.

Cricket screamed again.

Cu'udchu'ar watched the holotank, locking eyes with the dozens, hundreds of Admiral Smiths displayed in the prisms of the shattered hologram.

"We will meet..." he got out.

The holotank rezzed out, going blank.

Cu'udchu'ar turned to the other holotank, looking at LTC Jumping Cricket. The Digital Sentience was sitting down again, her legs folded in front of her, hands on her knees, slightly slumped.

"Are you all right?" Cu'udchu'ar asked.

"Holding the ship together," Cricket said. Glitter, like sweat, covered her brow. "We were the last to go."

"And the Terran fleet?" Cu'udchu'ar asked.

"Still firing on the Atrekna. I detected energy pulses from inside the gas giants," Cricket told the Lanaktallan commander.

"What caused her to order us out of the system?" the Grand Most High Executor asked.

"This," Cricket said. She brought up the image of Admiral Smith, then focused on something to the side, zooming in on it.

Cu'udchu'ar inhaled sharply when he realized what he was seeing. A torrent of energy pouring from the wormhole to explode into an omnidirectional wave of catastrophic reactions.

"That's the temporal ranging system used to guide C+ cannon shells," Cricket said. Cu'udchu'ar noticed she sounded tired. "We were still light hours out from that wormhole, but the energy signature I could make out on the TRS display looked bad."

Cu'udchu'ar nodded. "How bad?" he asked.

He needed the Terran fleet to survive. Needed to be able to point at the Terran fleet to force the Unified Council to surrender to the Terrans before billions of his people, the very people he was sworn to protect, were killed prosecuting a hopeless war.

"When I was younger I fought in a really bad war," Cricket said. She rubbed her eyes. "I saw a nova-spark used on a white dwarf that had a singularity core."

The Executor inflated his crests in shock. "A hypernova?"

Cricket nodded then did something that made Cu'udchu'ar look at her more carefully. She took out a pack of Treana'ad smoke sticks and lit one, her hands shaking. "Yes," she said, exhaling smoke. She looked at Cu'udchu'ar. "That leading wave of energy that came through the wormhole matches the energy profile of what I saw during the Clownface Nebula War."

She exhaled smoke again.

"Worse, is we didn't jump quite fast enough," Cricket said. She coughed and when she raised her face, glitter was running down her chin. "We should have jumped faster, but I needed to coordinate all your ships, all your men, getting out of there."

"What is ailing you?" the Executor asked softly, clopping forward. "Is there anything I can do, or order done, to ease your discomfort."

"Too many of me in one place. Code packet swapping was automatic. My error checking and defrag and virus checkers are working overtime," LTC Cricket shook her head. "No. I'll be OK. The leading edge of that hit us. Psuedo-particles moving basically faster than light hit me like a runaway freighter."

Cricket gave another sigh, exhaling digital smoke. She reached out and began pulling spots of brightly colored light out and arranging them. "Just in case, I'm putting together an eVI to run your ship if I go out."

"What about the Terran fleet?" Cu'udchu'ar asked, wringing all four hands. He had come to respect and grudgingly admire Admiral Smith in the hours they had worked together.

Cricket was silent a moment.

"I don't know."

---------------

"Get the lighter ships out of here!" Admiral Smith barked. She turned to the Temporal Warfare Section. "Fire temporal stabilizers to all points. Keep those bastards pinned!"

"STATUS CHANGE! INCOMING PARTICLE WAVE!" tactical called out.

Smith turned around and stared at the holotank holding the wormhole in view even as ships began vanishing into hyperspace.

----------------

An interdimensional wormhole, especially one crossing the majority of the dimensional mobius tesseract (commonly referred to as the 9D Stack), required a lot of energy to keep open. It was not a self-sustaining creation.

Usually.

The energy from the dead universe only had one way to go, and that was through the wormhole. The energy pushed the wormhole wider, shredded the borders of it, and energized the whole thing. As the entropic shield held, the pressure increased, forcing the wormhole even wider, increasing the pressure rushing through it.

The entropic shield was devoured and the energy should have spread out.

Only space was dead. There was less than nothing, which meant there was nowhere for the energy and hyper-excited plasma to go.

Except through the wormhole.

Like a balloon, the energy rushed out the wormhole, the last pocket of anything remotely related to a reality shrinking rapidly as everything that remained in the universe poured through the wormhole and into the younger universe.

With a tiny flash, it was gone. There was no space for the lower end to anchor to, and the wormhole collapsed, the seared and ravaged borders of the wormhole pulling upward toward the only remaining opening as the energy rushed through.

---------------

Light was the limit of speed for particles, even energy, in the younger universe. There were spooky particles and sub-atomic particles that moved through space differently, seemingly faster than light. Subspace objects, traveling through the 'foam' that separated the universes, moved faster than light.

Of course, there were the hyperplanes 'above' the younger universe where the speed of light was faster, merely a suggestion, or had not yet solidified, but those had no meaning.

What exited the wormhole was energy not normally seen outside of a big bang, or possibly a hypernova.

The leading particle wave hit the Atrekna ships, which were pinned in place by the temporal warfare countermeasures of the Terran fleet. The ships had been built to enter the no-space of the dead universe, to search out remaining suns and particles. They were capable of riding a wormhole through dimensions, designed to handle the sheering forces of temporal movement.

What hit them wasn't exactly energy, nor was it matter. It 'predated' both, in a cosmic way.

The only thing that saved them was their low energy states, as they were still 'acclimating' to the higher energy state of the younger universe. As luck would have it, half of the massive Quorum capital ships had roughly the same energy state as the leading particle wave.

As the energy washed over them, they found that the temporal stabilizers were no longer effecting them.

Half were stunned from the sudden backlash of the death of the remainder of their species, from the final, unrewindable death of their home universe.

The other half panicked. It didn't matter where they went, as long as they went somewhere that the ravening energy washing over the hulls wasn't.

It was at that second that the gas giants, from the largest supermassive to the smallest moon, suffered a sudden energy and graviton spike, increasing their density as they shrunk down.

And ignited.

The system went from a trinary system to literally dozens of miniature suns, the gravity rippled around them, all of space-time thrummed as the gas giants ignited and joined the three stellar masses in burning away.

The huge shipyards down where pressure turned liquid to metal and crystal burned away in nuclear fire. The vast dweller spawning seas boiled and ignited. Tens of thousands of dwellerspawn still 'swimming' toward the surface of the gas giants were turned into fuel for the nuclear reactions as the gas giants first increased gravitational pressure and then ignited.

With gravity and heat and energy, even the most inert matter could burn in the nuclear furnaces of the cosmos.

That was enough to disrupt the temporal stabilization just enough for the still conscious full Quorums to shift the massive Quorum ships, back to the First System.

Half of them escaped.

The rest didn't.

-----------------

Admiral Smith watched as the white haze covered the Atrekna ships, then the rolling white energy billowing out of the wormhole like an out of control blowtorch rolled over the ships. The wave of non-euclidean/Einsteinian energy had slammed into her ships, even the Lanaktallan ships, before they started making their translations to hyperspace and jumpspace.

"SHIELDS UP! COME TO THREE ONE NINER! ENGINES FULL!" Admiral Smith barked. "ALL POWER TO FORWARD SHIELDS!"

The massive ships of the Terran fleet turned, facing the oncoming blast. The bigger ones were still cycling their hyperdrive engines. The ships groaned and creaked, crackling and shuddering, as energy that couldn't be seen or measured raked them like spectral talons.

"TRANSLATE WHEN ABLE!" Smith yelled out, trying to be heard over the screams of inanimate agony from her ship.

Come on, hold together, hold together, she thought.

She saw, on one of the scanners, one of the burning gas giants suddenly contract slight, then explode.

Admiral Smith watched as Courage in Despair jumped. Not completely out, but into the boiling mass of particles, energy, plasma, and even more exotic matter states, reappearing in the middle of the Atrekna fleet, which was reeling in the face of the onslaught of energy from the wormhole.

Which finally collapsed with a loud crash that could be heard by ear even though there should have been no sound traveling through space.

Courage in Despair, the teenage Vuknaraan's name burning in quasi-liquid chromium warsteel on the prow, fired everything it had at the Atrekna ship. C+ cannons going to rapid fire, both phased wave plasma motion guns hammering out fire, regardless of the chance of the piston seizing up, missile launchers firing before the rails cooled down.

She was point blank in a knife fight, armed with chainsaws.

The remaining Atrekna ships were pinned by the massive super-dreadnought.

The rest of Courage in Despair's division mates micro-jumped next to their youngest sister.

The Atrekna, unable to escape thanks to the temporal stabilizers aboard the super-dreadnought division, lashed out at the Terran ships, pounding on their shields. Phasic munitions splattered ineffectively against shields infused with rage and desperation.

The Atrekna didn't understand it. Didn't understand the suicidal actions of the twenty super-dreadnoughts.

Anyone who understood humans, even Lanaktallans, could understand what Courage In Despair and her sister ships were doing as they hammered at the Atrekna ships, keeping them from jumping out, getting outrageously close.

Close enough that the Marine boarding parties were launched.

Close enough that the sheer rage and hatred pouring off the ships caused the Atrekna neural computing arrays to explode inside their crystal globes, splashing the interior with biological slurry.

"Order them to jump!" Admiral Smith barked, pointing at the icons for the super-dreadnought division.

But they'd made their decision, a decision that the Atrekna couldn't understand.

You can always take one with you.

"BRACE FOR IMPACT" the captain of the vessel, Captain James Kallak, called out over the interlinks, the intercoms, and through the emergency suit channels.

The leading wave of energy hit the few ships left, the few ships remaining to keep the Atrekna as pinned down as possible.

The entire system vanished in one big explosion.

---------------------

The great armada of the Lanaktallan Unified Council, every ship from Corporate, Executor, Planetary Defense, and Military fleets that had been stripped from nearly every system, arrived in the system in dribs and drabs.

The neutron star was happy, in the way stars can be, to have some company for a little while.

They came in by the dozens, the scores, the hundreds.

Dribs and drabs for millions of ships.

Some were damaged. A few were dead sticks. Some were piloted by the dead.

Some weren't the ships that had arrived, the crews slightly confused by the minute differences between what had been and what now was.

Cu'udchu'ar watched as his ship made the exit from jumpspace onto the resonance zone, which was not far from the neutron star, a reason that star had been picked.

He felt battered, bruised, even though he had not been tossed around or suffered any blunt trauma.

Cricket looked up and smiled. "There's my babies."

She slumped again.

"Signal the fleet. I want accountability. Let's find out how many of us remain," Cu'udchu'ar ordered.

His Executor looked at him. "Did that just happen?" the Grand Most High Executor, who was the Grand Most High of the Executor Council, asked quietly.

"Yes, otherwise we have been driven mad," Cu'udchu'ar said. He shook his head. "I saw myself, over and over and over, where major decisions had changed my life. Decisions made by me, by others, by the stars themselves."

The Executor turned to Cricket, who had her eyes closed, leaned forward slightly, breathing slowly. "Are you all right, Lieutenant Colonel?" he asked.

Cricket raised her head. She had 'bruises' under her eyes, sparkling lines of code emulated bloodshot veins in her eyes. She had slick code running down from her nose. She coughed out smoke.

"I will be. It got close."

"You are welcome aboard this ship, as are your fellow digital sentiences," the Executor said. He stepped forward and let his fingers graze the edge of the holotank as if he was touching a glass shield around Cricket. "You and your compatriots saved millions of my men. Millions of faithful Lanaktallan. I can never thank you enough."

Cricket reached out and put her fingertips against the edge of the holofield as if she was touching the Executor's fingertips.

"Don't waste their lives, Executor," she said.

"No. Too many lives have been wasted already," the Executor said. "Will you accompany us to the Unified Council core worlds?"

Cricket frowned, then coughed, then looked up frowning again. "Why?"

Cu'udchu'ar trotted up, looking at the wounded Terran Digital Sentience.

"To convince the Unified Council to unconditionally surrender to the Confederacy."

-------------

The universe was finally, completely, beyond dead.

No longer was it weighted down by entropy, for even entropy had died as the last of the energy had been pulled through a wormhole that had pulled its tail after it.

It rose/slid sideways/inverted.

A dancing, whirling, giggling mote of everything that ever could or would be raced to embrace it.

When they met, something happened.

An explosion that contained everything that would be.

Normally, it was clinical, just a law of physics, however they might be in the new reality.

But things had changed.

The emptiness and the everything remembered.

It remembered what had been done to it.

Remembered how it had been freed.

For a split second as massive stellar masses made up of only hydrogen and helium burned brightly for a split second before exploding, adding their own birth spasms to the explosion, it was written in the very particles of the universe.