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  THE WAY HOME

  “That is the way of the Maelstrom,” the greenish-gray Kalira named Harxae said. “After you have been here as long as we, you will understand.”

  “Right,” David said. “How long have you been here?”

  Harxae and Gavwin stared at one another for a moment, telepathically communicating, then Gavwin said, "We have been here for two hundred and seventy-three of your years. We are relative newcomers. The Shard have been here for thousands."

  “Have you—I mean, can you—”

  “There is no escape,” Harxae said.

  David leaned forward and looked out the window, where the white cloud surrounding the probe still swirled softly. “Are you sure? Look at that cable. The other end is on the other side. If I followed it, wouldn’t I end up back home?”

  Both aliens were silent for a few seconds, before Harxae said, “We don’t know. Nobody has ever managed to leave a lifeline before . . .”

  VOR: THE MAELSTROM

  Vor: Into the Maelstrom

  by Loren L. Coleman

  Vor: The Playback War

  by Lisa Smedman

  Vor: Island of Power

  by Dean Wesley Smith

  Available from Warner Aspect®

  VOR: THE RESCUE. Copyright © 2000 by FASA Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  VOR: The Maelstrom and all related characters, slogans, and indicia are trademarks of FASA Corporation.

  Aspect® name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Time Warner Company

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2216-9

  A mass market edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: January 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  1

  David Hutchins had just gotten to the trickiest part of repairing the base’s nuclear generator—aligning the fuel injector and the ignition lasers to meet in the exact center of the reaction chamber—when the communicator at his hip vibrated. He didn’t want to answer, but the Union situation here on Mars was too tenuous for him to ignore any calls.

  Leaving the lasers hot, he slipped the commlink off his belt and thumbed it on. “Hutchins,” he said absently, his mind still on the generator problem.

  “David, this is Raedawn. I need you down here right away. Something is happening to Earth.” She sounded either excited or upset, and that caught David’s attention. Captain Raedawn Corona, the expedition’s intelligence officer, was known for her trademark cool.

  “You mean something is happening on Earth.” Even as he spoke, David leaned over and peered into the exposed reaction chamber. The lasers crossed in a perfect six-sided star as they poured their energy into one central point. A little squirt of deuterium to that same point would flash to plasma in an instant, and the magnetic containment field would keep that plasma squeezed into a tiny, ultra-hot mass until it underwent fusion.

  “David, you’re not listening. Something is happening to Earth. And to Luna as well.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. I hear you. Something is happening to Earth. Like what? What kind of something?” The generator problem still tugged at his mind. The containment field had already been tested. All he had to do was align the fuel injector and the generator would be ready to return to service.

  “If I knew that, do you think I’d be calling you?” Raedawn’s voice rose in pitch. “The reports are garbled. A . . . a thing has appeared in space. It’s like a monster dark cloud with arms reaching out toward Earth creating havoc everywhere they touch.”

  David straightened up again as he listened. The generator problem would just have to wait.

  “It’s been going on for the last few minutes,” she said. He could tell from her voice she was scared—another first. “Ten at most. Plus light-lag, of course.”

  He calculated mentally. Mars was about seven light-minutes from Earth at the moment. If something was going on out there, it had been happening for about a quarter of an hour.

  “David, are you there? David?”

  He reached out to the generator control panel and switched off the lasers. “I’m on my—”

  “Get down here,” Raedawn snapped. “Now! I need your analysis.” She disconnected abruptly.

  “Is that so?” David muttered, deactivating the communicator and hooking it back onto his belt. Heading toward the door, he stumbled over some scrap metal pieces he’d left lying on the floor, and he cursed under his breath. They’d only been on Mars two days and already his lab was a maze of dismantled equipment, scattered tools, and sundry other items.

  But the mess had a purpose. David was the expedition’s chief science officer, with a specialty in physics. He was also a master of improvisation who could turn his expertise to the most ingenious practical applications. That was one of the reasons he’d been assigned to the Mars mission. He could make a telescope out of a couple of empty beer flasks and a liter of clear water or devise an air scrubber from a cooling fan and a dead carbonyl battery.

  Exiting the lab, he hurried down the ragged rock corridor leading to the cavern housing the communications center. The entire base was underground, concealing it from the Neo-Sovs as well as from the harsh Martian environment. It was a warren of ancient lava tubes in the Noctis Labyrinthis region near the three major Tharsis volcanoes. They hadn’t even needed to tunnel. A tech crew had sealed the cracks in the ancient caverns and pressurized them with oxygen, and the Union forces had moved right in. In most places the last of the lava had even pooled to make flat, hard floors.

  David’s lab was a long walk from the command center, but not as long as the same distance would have been on Earth. Mars’s two-fifths gravity let him take loping strides that sped him along fast enough to feel the wind on his face. He managed to dodge the masses of cable snaking across the floor and hanging from the tunnel walls, but accidentally clipped his head on one of the hastily strung lights that lined the tunnel.

  The base represented a major accomplishment for the Union. Until now, the Neo-Sovs had wiped out, to a man, every previous Union attempt to challenge their stranglehold on Mars. This time, however, the Union had succeeded.

  Upon landing, the expedition had immediately broken into smaller groups, maintaining cover by laying booby traps and false trails to throw off the Neo-Sovs. The plan was to establish a secret command base while smaller units conducted guerrilla operations from satellite camps. The Neo-Sovie
t empire was bent on dominating all of humanity, and the North American Union was equally determined to stop it.

  Colonel Kuranda, the expedition commander, had sent their three ships to an open-ended cavern several kilometers to the north. From there the craft could come and go without detection if the pilots took them out on agravs until they were well away. Those ships had started life as supply shuttles, but once unloaded on Mars, they’d been converted immediately into reconnaissance scouts and troop transports.

  A platoon of Union soldiers made up the military core of the expedition, but not everybody was a grunt. David was a captain in Space Command, and the team also included a physician, additional medical personnel, and maybe half a dozen other specialists. Including Raedawn Corona, their intel officer. She was good at her job, if a bit prickly.

  David picked his way over the last in a series of small generators and followed the lava tube’s gentle curve toward the left, which took him to the entrance of the comm center. He stepped inside.

  “Okay, Raedawn, here I am. What’ve you got so far?”

  “What do you want?” she asked. “Diameter? Density? Spectral signature?”

  “That’ll do for a start.”

  “Too bad. It doesn’t have any of that. Come and see for yourself. It’s got these arms like tentacles reaching out in all directions from a central blotch of fuzzy gray stuff that doesn’t actually emit or reflect light. It’s just attenuating the starlight from behind it, and I don’t see any absorption lines, either. It’s more like a hole in space than an actual cloud.”

  David stepped up to the monitors as she spoke. Seeing the monstrous size of the cloud, he felt the first real jolt of alarm since Raedawn’s call. The thing stretched from Earth to Lunar orbit, not even including the multiple arms. “What are the chances those arms could reach all the way to Mars?”

  Raedawn’s laugh was a quick, precise tool, a vehicle for expressing contempt, derision, and occasionally even humor. Until now he’d never heard it express bafflement. “Ha! Who knows? Ten minutes ago I would’ve sworn something like this couldn’t even exist.”

  She sat in a swivel chair at the controls of the command panel. Around her were racks of transceivers and decoders optically linked to the phone, vid, and radio switchboards.

  David noticed the way her short, dark hair stuck straight up on the left side, probably from being pulled in her nervous agitation. He also noted the black jacket hanging from one side of her chair, another first. In the short time he’d known Raedawn, he’d never seen her without that jacket on, even in the hottest of temperatures. But her bare arms glistened with sweat now, and the front of her black T-shirt was damp in spots, too.

  He shook his head slightly and focused on the screens. “Let’s see what’s going on,” he said, looking over her shoulder.

  Raedawn had propped up five flat panel monitors in front of her, and more lay on the desktop. She shuffled through those until she found one that showed a city on fire, with a dark streak flickering back and forth across the sky overhead.

  “That’s the live hovercam feed from Denver,” she said. “Live at the time, anyway. It’s time-lagged about ten minutes instead of seven because I had to oversample the signal and reprocess it to account for all the interference. Whatever that thing is, it messes with the feed something fierce.” The transmissions were coming from Earth, beamed directly to the stealth satellite the Union had orbiting Mars. It was set up to show routine scans of the planet, in addition to providing a way to send and receive direct communications.

  The scene on the monitor was still shot through with static despite the signal processing. It showed traffic hopelessly snarled while crowds of people ran in all directions in the streets below. Cars left the pattern as drivers attempted manual control. Two of them collided and tumbled to the ground from twenty or thirty stories up, taking another five or six cars with them on their way down.

  “Looks like total chaos,” he murmured. “How much of the planet is like this?”

  Raedawn handed him the stack of screens. There were easily a dozen of them, each one only a couple millimeters thick and all of them showing similar scenes of destruction. Denver was the largest city in actual flames, but one screen showed a huge gash torn into Earth, with hot magma welling up inside it. Seawater pouring into the submerged end flashed to steam where it hit the magma, billowing up in huge clouds that hid the ocean as winds carried them eastward.

  “That’s the ’scope feed,” she said, referring to the stealthed telescope the Union expedition had planted on Deimos, one of the Mars moons, before landing. The telescope was directed at the Earth-Moon system, and the image was clear as a photo.

  “My God.” David squinted at the gash looking for any sign of life left on the ground, but the scale was too large. The gash had to be twenty or thirty kilometers long, and at least two or three kilometers wide. Not even a fusion bomb could do that. Unlike the image of Denver aflame, he couldn’t really comprehend the magnitude of it.

  “No reports or other communications?” he asked.

  Raedawn shook her head. “I suspect they’ve got better things to do than feed us updates. Besides, the interference is getting so bad I doubt a single message would make it through. We’re only getting this much because I can compare redundant feeds off multiple satellites.”

  He looked at the displays again. There was plenty of information there, none of it good. “Are you recording all this?”

  “I have a brain.”

  “Surprise, surprise.” He checked the access number for the top screen in his hand, then reached over her shoulder and pressed the hot key on her main screen that turned his into an auxiliary control panel. He took a half-dozen more screens with him to a desk behind her, velcroed them together in an upright arc in front of him, and started tapping in commands.

  There was no point sifting through scrambled signals for what he wanted. Within seconds he had a spectral analysis, gravimetric readings, radiation levels, and a dozen other parameters on display. None of the data made any sense, but he sifted through it looking for patterns, connections, anything that might shed some light on what was going on. After a few minutes he switched to optical and just watched with his own two eyes.

  Earth looked like a bright blue-and-white butterfly that had been caught in a spiderweb. A high-voltage spiderweb, crackling with lightning bolts that spanned continents and inhabited by a spider with hundreds of twitching black legs that raced back and forth across its surface. Part of him wanted to jump up and down and scream and yank his hair out, but another part was mesmerized by the interplay of unknown forces. He clung desperately to that part, knowing any help he could offer the beleaguered planet would come from rational thought, not emotional reaction.

  “Where the hell is the energy coming from to power that thing?” he murmured to himself.

  Raedawn turned half around in her chair. “What was that?”

  “Just talking to myself. Sorry.” He looked at his indicators again. Magnetic field strength was off the scale. Radiation levels were as high as during a major solar flare. The error bars in the measurements were at least two standard deviations wide, but whatever the actual figures were, they were high. This thing was pumping out terawatts of energy. The only reason it didn’t glow was because it was all coming out as hard radiation. But where was it getting that kind of power? And more importantly, how could they snuff it out before it destroyed the whole damned planet?

  He tried accessing the Helios XII research satellite in polar orbit around the Sun, but its signal was just as garbled as what came from Earth. He waited patiently for digital redundancy to fill in the blanks, but even after he built up a reliable reading from the neutrino detector, he saw no unusual activity there. The anomaly wasn’t tapping the fusion reactions at the solar core, then.

  He looked back at the black amoeba in the visual image, just watching it move. It didn’t look real. It was a different kind of darkness than the fathomless black backgroun
d of space. It looked somehow inverted, like a naked black hole might look if you could see past the event horizon.

  He checked the gravitometers again. Nope, no extra mass. But the gamma-ray spectrum caught his eye. It showed a sharp spike in a narrow band he’d seen before, a band characteristic of matter-antimatter annihilation. Could the whole thing be a cloud of antimatter that had somehow drifted into the solar system undetected?

  He couldn’t see how. It would have hit a comet and flared bright as a supernova while it was still out in the Kuiper belt, or at least glowed like the full moon when it reached the heliopause and started plowing through the solar wind. Space was empty, but not empty enough for an antimatter cloud to slip all the way into Earth orbit without announcing its arrival along the way.

  The antimatter had to be coming from someplace else, and there was only one other place that could be: the tension in empty space. Zero-point energy, as it was known in physics. It had been discovered nearly a century ago, but nobody had yet figured out a good way to tap into it because, for all intents and purposes, the stuff didn’t actually exist.

  The energy came from the spontaneous creation and annihilation of paired particles in free space. It happened everywhere—between the Earth and the Moon, between two falling raindrops, between two whirling atoms—and it happened all the time. The concentration was theoretically infinite, because the energy required to create the particles was given back almost instantaneously when they annihilated one another again, leaving a net flux of zero.

  The key was that “almost.” For the briefest instant, something new existed in the universe, and E=mc2 no matter how short its duration. And there were so many new particles popping in and out—millions of them every second in every cubic centimeter of space—that at any given moment they outmassed the rest of the universe. Astronomers had finally realized that this was the source of the “missing mass” that held the galaxies together, and quantum physicists suspected that the cumulative instants of duration were responsible for the smooth, linear flow of time itself.