Nigel hurriedly reviewed the flight data in his exovision, with particular emphasis on the force fields. They were protecting the hull against the prodigious flood of ultra-hard radiation outside, but it was taking a lot of power to maintain them.

Three massive Raiel warships were holding station behind the wormhole, their shielding only revealing dark spectres, like globes of solidified smoke that were hard for the sensors to focus on. And behind them . . . ‘Sonofabitch,’ Nigel muttered. A Dark Fortress sphere glowed an intense indigo from the swirl of exotic energy it was manipulating. The size of Saturn, the sphere was a lattice of dark struts. Its external shell was wrapped round a series of concentric inner lattice shells, each possessing different physical properties, with a core that was full of extremely odd energy functions.

‘No wonder they can produce a wormhole that reaches halfway across the galaxy,’ the clone Nigel said. ‘The size of the damn thing!’

Humans had first encountered the awesome machines during the Starflyer War. The Raiel had used one to encase an entire solar system in an impenetrable force field, imprisoning the psychotic alien Primes inside. The starship crew who first encountered the sphere that was generating the force field had named it, somewhat quixotically, the Dark Fortress.

It was only later, when the Commonwealth was invited to join the Raiel in observing the Void, that the Navy discovered it was the Raiel who had built the Dark Fortress. At which point the nomenclature was diplomatically shortened to DF sphere. There were a dozen DF spheres in the Centurion Station star system, and many thousands more positioned all the way around the Wall. All the Raiel would say about them was that they were part of their defence against the Void should it start its long-feared catastrophic expansion phase.

A link opened from one of the warships. ‘I am Torux, ships-captain. Please stand by for teleport on board.’

‘Thank yo—’

The Umbaratta was abruptly sitting in an empty, softly lit compartment the size of a CST terminal just as Nigel’s exovision icons were telling him a T-sphere had manifested. The Skylady sat next to it. Nigel had to smile at the guilty thrill his clone was emitting into the gaiafield; it matched his own.

‘We are proceeding to the insertion point,’ Torux told them. ‘Transit time, seven hours fourteen minutes.’

Nigel’s excitement was instantly replaced by a twinge of anxiety, also matched then surpassed by his clone.

‘Welcome aboard, Nigel Sheldon,’ Torux said. ‘You are welcome in my habitation section. Please deactivate your ship’s force fields.’

There was a moment of hesitation, the petulant thought: What if I don’t? Which he knew his clone would also be having. Umbaratta was just about the pinnacle of Commonwealth technology, yet it was nestled here in some obscure corner of this monster warship and he finally knew what the NASA astronauts had felt after they landed on Mars to plant their flag, only to find him waiting there beside a prototype wormhole laughing at them because his technology was oh so superior. No human had ever been on board a Raiel warship. It was a historic moment on many levels.

He switched off the force fields and a T-sphere manifested in the cabin. He was snatched away . . .

. . . to a Raiel’s private chamber similar to those he’d visited in the High Angel. His link to Umbaratta’s smartcore remained; he had courteous hosts, then. The room was circular, fifty metres in diameter, with a ceiling that was lost in the gloom above him, making it seem as if he was standing at the bottom of some giant mine shaft. The walls rippled as though they were a single sheet of water; small coloured jewels glimmered behind the idiosyncratic surface effect casting a wavering sheen of phosphorescence.

A warrior Raiel stood before him. Nigel was expecting it to be larger than the Raiel on High Angel. If you’ve spent a million years breeding for war, everything should be bigger and tougher. But this one was actually smaller than Vallar, although its skin had metamorphosed into an armour of blue-grey segments with tiny lights sparkling below the surface like entombed stars.

‘I am Torux,’ it said in a high-pitched whisper. ‘Welcome aboard our ship, Olokkural.’

‘It is impressive.’

‘I would like to personally thank you for helping us.’

‘The Void affects all of us, ultimately,’ Nigel said. ‘Helping you was the least I could do; your vigil is truly selfless. I will do what I can, though I have to say I am not terribly confident.’

‘Paula Myo considered this to be a worthwhile attempt.’

‘Yes, indeed. Do you know Paula?’

‘We have heard of her from our cousins on High Angel.’

And why does that not surprise me? Nigel could feel his clone laughing.

‘We have a link that will enable you to observe the external environment,’ Torux said.

‘Thank you,’ Nigel replied as his u-shadow reported that a connection to the ship was opening.

*

Seven hours after coming aboard, Nigel watched the Olokkural and its two sister warships drop out of FTL and slow to a relative halt half a million kilometres from the lightless boundary of the Void. Greater than the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and it had taken millennia for humans to bridge that gap, but the scale unveiled before him was severely intimidating to Nigel’s primitive core. This was the eater of stars, of cultures beautiful and terrible, consumer of hope. The one true enemy of all species across the galaxy.

Five more Raiel warships were already waiting for them, along with seven DF spheres. When he saw what else was out there, Nigel gave a smile of complete admiration.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he heard his clone say in the Skylady’s cabin. ‘Win or lose, this is going to make it all worthwhile.’

The DF spheres were using an intricate mesh of gravitational forces to suspend three blue-white supergiant stars, preventing them from the final plunge into the infinite gravity tide of the event horizon which would tear them apart. Even here, half a million kilometres out, surrounded by a cage of inverted gravity fields, their incandescent coronas bulged and writhed, spitting out brutal flares that played across the boundary, dissolving into meta-cascades of radiation as their individual particles were sucked inward and crushed into their sub-atomic components.

‘Please stand by,’ Torux said.

‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ Nigel asked. ‘Even an ordinary event horizon is impossible to break.’

‘This is the method by which we inserted our armada.’

And look what happened to them, Nigel thought.

‘We begin,’ Torux announced.

The DF spheres changed the quantum characteristics of the cage. Nigel could sense the forces alter even though he couldn’t comprehend their nature. The surface of the stars, already impossibly hot, bright and violent, began to burn still brighter as their atoms lost cohesion and transformed into pure energy. For over a quarter of an hour the compression wave grew, travelling inwards, while the coronas mutated to relativistic barbs of raw energy stabbing out in every direction through the cage bands. Subjected to the artificial implosion dynamics even their own incredible gravity couldn’t absorb, the three supergiants went nova.

Instead of allowing them to detonate in a radiative blast of energy and superdense hydrogen, the DF spheres did something weird to local spacetime. The power of the novas was converted into negative gravity, and directed in one direction. Straight into the Void’s boundary.

‘Ho-lee crap,’ Nigel grunted, his arms instinctively waving round trying to find something to hold on to as the Olokkural accelerated fast across the horribly short distance to the Void. Skylady was teleported outside, held in place by a gravity node. The warship’s force fields protected it from the cosmic energies wrecking local spacetime.