The Reefs of Time: Part One of the "Out of Time" Sequence

By Jeffrey A. Carver

The starstream is beautiful. But beauty turns deadly when an ancient AI bent on destruction uses it to travel uptime, to humanity’s future.

The Mindaru are dead. Or so exiled-Earthman John Bandicut and his alien companions believe, after their intervention to save the Orion Nebula and surrounding worlds. But now a part of this ancient and malicious AI colony is swarming toward the present from its birthplace deep in the past. Their opening: a temporal disturbance in the starstream, a hyperspatial thoroughfare used by myriad civilizations. The disturbance emanates from the planetary defenses of nearby Karellia, whose people know nothing of the starstream or the galaxy-threatening Mindaru.

Only Bandicut and his friends have the knowledge and experience to act. But when several of the company go missing, he and Li-Jared must team with the pandimensional Ruall and her gokat—the oddest aliens Bandicut has met since the shadow-people—and journey to Karellia to find a way to cut off the timestream.

Meanwhile, on Shipworld, the “missing” Ik meets another human of Earth—a former lover of Bandicut’s—and embarks with her on a perilous mission far back into deep time, seeking a way to stop the Mindaru at their source.

The Chaos Chronicles returns at last in The Reefs of Time, part one of a heartstopping, two-part adventure. Concluded in Crucible of Time—available now from Nebula-nominated Jeffrey A. Carver!

PRAISE FOR THE REEFS OF TIME / CRUCIBLE OF TIME:

“Classic science fiction with engaging characters and richly imagined worlds!” —Greg Bear; author of The Unfinished Land and The War Dogs Trilogy

“Jeffrey A. Carver’s remarkable long-awaited duology The Reefs of Time / Crucible of Time is a welcome addition to The Chaos Chronicles, certifying his continuing mastery of action and adventure at the boundaries of space opera and hard SF.” —Steve Miller, co-author of The Liaden Universe

“Rich, dignified prose wedded to excellent and imaginative storytelling on the grandest scale. If you've grown weary of the hasty, hyperkinetic stories and styles that typify so many other independently-published novels, come home to Jeffrey Carver's timeless and triumphant The Reefs of Time.” —Charles E. Gannon, author of the Caine Riordan world

“Mind-blowing in its complexity... I settled in to enjoy a wild ride.” —Ann Tonsor Zeddies, author of Riders of Leviathan and Steel Helix

PRAISE FOR THE CHAOS CHRONICLES:

“Remarkably expansive vision.” —Analog

“Masterfully captures the joy of exploration.” — Publishers Weekly

“Master craftsman of compelling hard science fiction.” — Booklist

One of the best SF novels of the year — Science Fiction Chronicle

“A dazzling, thrilling, innovative space opera.” —Kirkus

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeffrey A. Carver
• Release date: Jul 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611387988

Jeffrey A. Carver

Jeffrey A. Carver was a Nebula Award finalist for his novel Eternity's End. He also authored Battlestar Galactica, a novelization of the critically acclaimed television miniseries. His novels combine thought-provoking characters with engaging storytelling, and range from the adventures of the Star Rigger universe (Star Rigger's Way, Dragons in the Stars, and others) to the ongoing, character-driven hard SF of The Chaos Chronicles—which begins with Neptune Crossing and continues with Strange Attractors, The Infinite Sea, Sunborn, and now The Reefs of Time and its conclusion, Crucible of Time.A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver lives with his family in the Boston area. He has taught writing in a variety of settings, from educational television to conferences for young writers to MIT, as well as his ongoing Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop with Craig Shaw Gardner. He has created a free web site for aspiring authors of all ages at http://www.writesf.com.For a complete guide to Jeffrey A. Carver's ebooks, visit:https://www.starrigger.net

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Prologue One

In the Starstream

A RIVER OF light, a ribbon of tortured space, the starstream was a new feature in the galaxy by any cosmological standard. A mere human-century old, it had been created by Humanity and Humanity's galactic friends, or perhaps not so much created as jiggered into being. It was sentient tinkering that had triggered the fusion of three cosmological objects: two black holes and one cosmic hyperstring. The hyperstring, a longline flaw in space-time, was by good fortune already anchored at one end by the star-gobbling black hole at the center of the galaxy. It was the other end that was the object of Humanity's engineering, which was to trap it like a dinosaur in tar in the black hole left by the collapse of a star called Betelgeuse.

The starstream twanged and hummed like a harp string. Stretched between the two black holes, it spanned two thirds of the radius of the galaxy. That alone would have been a glorious achievement; but it was useful as well as interesting. It formed a perfect n-space transport system, speeding starships toward myriad new frontiers. In the century since its creation, it had become a major thoroughfare for interstellar commerce and migration, involving dozens of races and hundreds of worlds. From the inside of the starstream, it was a luminous pipeline, seeming to extend forever. From the outside, it was practically invisible.

The creation of the starstream was not without conflict or loss of life—a price that continued to be paid long after its creation. It was discovered and used by others, as well as its creators. And not just the Throgs, who killed worlds and millions of people before they were stopped (an action in which I played a small part¹)— but by others, even more dangerous. Things out of not just deep space, but deep time.

And that was when the worst of the trouble began. Intelligent and malicious dust that devoured, reports whispered. Things that destroyed minds, murmured others. Things that were terrifyingly like other adversaries galactic humanity had faced, but maybe worse, and with more to follow.

Eventually the rumors and reports traveled all the way out to Shipworld, beyond the outermost edge of the galaxy. On Shipworld, the governing bodies took such reports very seriously. Some sort of action would have to be taken, for the protection of inhabited worlds everywhere.

I was a part of that action, too.

There is much to tell about it, and about related matters. I will do my best to make it all clear . . . starting with another and completely different introduction.

—Jeaves, an AI currently residing on Shipworld

______________________________

¹A story I told at somewhat greater length in my earlier mission report, entitled Down the Stream of Stars.

Prologue Two

Karellia

KARELLIA: WORLD OF beautiful, perilous sky.

The planet Karellia was a cerulean and white and earth-red gemstone—pretty enough as inhabited worlds went, bearing significant areas of arid terrain, forest, and maroon fungal plains. Less than a fourth of the planet's surface was ocean, so the blue regions were relatively small and scattered. Still, rich underground water reserves blessed the world with verdant fields and forests, from the tropics to the colder climate zones. Even the deserts were host to abundant ecologies. But none of these things accounted for the name given to the world by its inhabitants.

Karellia: world of beautiful, perilous sky.

Karellia's sky was alive; the world was cradled by a terrible, fire-breathing dragon. Its mother star and all of the star's planets were bound in by a nebula of awesome and terrible energy, a nebula called Heart of Fire, that continuously sleeted the entire planetary system with charged particles and a billow of soft radiation. Around Karellia itself, a tight, fiery belt of trapped particles glowed and danced with an even brighter auroral display—a display that threatened death to any living thing that dared enter its realm.

Beneath the Belt, under that draconic gaze, lived the denizens of Karellia, sheltered from the astral storm by the same planetary magnetic field that held the Belt in place. From Karellia, the Belt was a halo that arched like a vast, misty cathedral ceiling over the curvature of the planet. In daytime it sparkled almost gaily in reds and golds; at night it glowed in ghostly shades of cyan and scarlet, its beauty belying its perilous nature. No one living entered the Belt.

But of late, there was something new in the sky, even more perilous. Something not caused by nature:

Asteroids, flung down from the stars.

***

Whatever initial uncertainty there had been about the source of the asteroids—thirty years now since the first—had been erased by the tracing back of the rocks' trajectories. A planet circling Karellia's sun's binary companion—barely glimpsed through the intervening dust and plasma—had been discovered only a few decades before the first attack. A few old robotic probes to the planet and its system had gone missing. But that planet was unquestionably the source of the asteroids.

Some enemy on that planet wished Karellia ill, and was hurling dangerously large rocks at its neighbor.

The Karellians didn't know why, but they did know that the attacks were threatening their very survival.

***

Karellia lacked long-range space travel—the radiation was simply too horrendous—but its scientists were shrewd, and they had conceived a planetary defense. It was effective, for now. But for how much longer? Attempts at communication had failed. Following years of debate, a consensus emerged that perhaps it was time to take the fight to the other—whoever the other was.

A fleet of offensive weapons now orbited Karellia: a deadly array of sixty-four deep-space rockets, all bearing thermonuclear warheads—ready to launch at the Ocellet's command. The Belt and the Heart of Fire might keep the Karellians from taking the fight to the enemy in person; but these well-shielded rockets just might get through, just might put an end to the falling asteroids.

Or they might start an even larger conflagration.

The Karellian leader with her finger on the trigger was deeply mindful of the uncertainty over that prediction. For that reason if no other, the missiles remained in check. But for how much longer should she hold back a retaliatory strike?

Meanwhile, the planetary defense held, its invisible glitter unlike any other defense in the known galaxy.

Chapter 1

In the Triton Ice, 207 Sp.

(2176 C.E.)

DAKOTA BANDICUT PEERED to the left and to the right, forward and backward, through the windows of the passenger transport as it crawled across the icy surface of Triton. She had come four and a half billion kilometers to see this, and she did not want to miss a thing. After almost an hour, the transport ground to a halt. Scott, the tour guide, announced their arrival on site from the front of the van, and the half dozen passengers, all clad in silver spacesuits, began crowding toward the door. Stepping with feathery lightness onto the icy surface of Neptune's moon, kilometers from the mining base, Dakota felt a shiver inside her spacesuit—not from the cryogenic cold, which she couldn't feel at all, but from the personal momentousness of what she was about to see.

For years, she had been hoping to visit this place. Now that she was here, she didn't know what to expect, or how to feel—or even, in any rational sense, why she was here. But now that the moment had arrived, she felt . . . awed, uncertain, and a little afraid. Afraid? It's silly to feel afraid, she thought. You're just going to see an empty cavern that hundreds of other people have seen. What's there to be afraid of? And yet, the butterflies in her stomach weren't going away—and she had this still, expectant feeling that something special might be about to happen.

Gonna feel pretty silly when it turns out to be nothing much, and you walk away with a few pix of a hole in the ground.

As last out of the van, she had to sidestep around a few people to see anything. But there it was: the place where humanity, for the first and only time, had encountered an alien intelligence. That alone is worth some chills, isn't it?

Can we do a quick comm check, please, before anyone moves away from the crawler? That was Scott trying to keep everyone—all six people—corralled next to the vehicle for a moment. Aimee here. Joe. Misha. When everyone else had spoken, Dakota said her own name, so softly she doubted anyone could have heard it; so she repeated it. Satisfied, Scott waved them forward.

Dakota's heart beat even faster as she stepped ahead of the others to cross the thirty meters to the edge of the cavern. Triton's surface was the color of dirty ice, with a bit of orange and brown seasoned into the mix. The sun, low in the sky, was little more than a bright star against blackness, while the blue crescent of Neptune hung like a shield behind her right shoulder. Daylight out here at the edge of the solar system looked more like dark twilight; but amplified by the circuitry in her suit visor, it allowed enough illumination for safe walking. As she approached the cavern opening, the underground lights flared into view, forcing the amp in her visor to dial back for comfort. Dakota paused a moment at the top of the long ramp down into the cavern. The bank of floodlights at the bottom shone on the spot where the translator had once stood.

The translator. Dakota knew it only from holos and from Julie Stone's descriptions. It looked to the eye like an impossible assemblage of squirming balls, black and silver and constantly in motion, balanced like a perpetually spinning top. The pix couldn't reveal its powers, but her Uncle John's friend Julie had told her in her long-distance holos: It is an astounding intelligence; it can speak in my mind; it can drive spaceships at impossible speeds; it is so alien.

That was twelve years ago, when Dakota herself was twelve, and thought she'd be stuck on Earth for the rest of her life. But in those twelve years, Dakota Bandicut had worked and studied doggedly, and with some major strokes of luck, had made it into the space services and been hired to pilot survey drones in Neptune's atmosphere—much like her uncle, John Bandicut, who had arrived here as a survey pilot. It was Uncle John who had been selected by the alien translator for first contact. And when he had gone—died, everyone said—saving the Earth from a comet, a few people said—stealing a spaceship in a psychotic breakdown, others said—the translator had picked Julie Stone for its next contact.

Officially, that hadn't worked out too well, either. While en route to Earth with the translator, Julie had hared off with the translator on another crazy mission. Just like Uncle John, Julie had claimed she was saving the Earth from a menace no one else could see. The last anyone had heard from either Julie or the translator, they'd been hurtling straight into the sun, supposedly with some dangerous object in their grip. Were they both crazy? Dakota didn't think so. But whatever the truth, Uncle John and Julie and the translator were gone.

Dakota blinked and forced the thought out of her mind. While she'd been standing motionless in reflection, several other members of the tour party had started down the ramp. She stirred back into movement.

The ramp led down into a carved-out space that had once been an enclosed cavern and was now partially open to the sky. There wasn’t all that much to see, though the play of floodlights on the blue-white ice was beautiful to look at. It was a space that the translator had apparently carved out beneath the surface while it sat here for millions of years of hibernation, awaiting humanity's arrival. Dakota swung left and right, looking around. Someone—Misha—was asking Scott if alien alloys had been found in the ice near the translator. As Scott answered, Dakota tuned out, because she already knew there were no alloy deposits of any note found here, although significant traces had been found elsewhere in the region around the mining encampment. The translator had apparently used the metal alloys, somehow linking together all of the deposits scattered around the moon into an antenna for its surveillance of human activity around the solar system. By which means it had identified John Bandicut and drawn him toward the fateful discovery.

Dakota thought, half seriously, that it wouldn't surprise her to hear voices in this cavern—the voices of long-dead aliens, or maybe the voices of her uncle and his girlfriend. Or maybe that other alien thing that had joined Uncle John—what he had called in his message to Julie a quarx.

She heard no voices, though, except those of the tour group.

Scott was still answering questions, and now was leading them in a straggling group to the exact spot where the translator supposedly had once been stuck in the ice. Dakota, rather than following, felt an inexplicable compulsion to crouch down and probe a little farther back in the cavern space where there still remained a low ceiling. Was she looking for something in particular? She had no idea. She just felt somehow that the spot over there had been well scoured over; but here, just maybe, she would find some lingering evidence of an alien intelligence. Crouching lower, she scratched at the ice with her gloved fingertips, feeling perhaps the slightest hint of cold coming through the thermal protection. Her touch left a thin imprint. She scratched again, imagining that she might expose . . . what? A vein of alien alloy? Silly.

Except, at that moment, something sparkled in the ice, and—Ow!—she felt a sharp pinch in her right wrist, as though a rubber band had snapped her. She rubbed her wrist, puzzled. An instant later, she saw another glint and felt a similar pinch in her left wrist. What the hell?

Backing out from under the ceiling and straightening, she raised her hands and examined her wrists. There was nothing to see; the silver exterior of her spacesuit looked as it always had. She rubbed her right wrist with her left hand, though, because it still tingled. Damn. Did that translator leave little stingers lying around for people who poked around too much?

A heartbeat later, she froze. The translator had put tiny stones in the wrists of both her uncle and Julie. Translator-stones, Julie had called them. Stones with extraordinary and peculiar powers. Dakota's heart pounded furiously; she suddenly found it hard to think.

*Hello, Dakota Bandicut. Do we have your name right?*

Dakota made a choking sound, which carried on the suit radio, and brought a call of concern from the group leader. Is everyone all right?

Yes. Yes—sorry! Dakota said. I’m fine. Fine? Her thoughts were whirling. Get a grip, girl. What had she just heard? A voice. In her mind. Just like Julie. Just like Uncle John.

Oh damn. Oh damn oh damn oh damn!

She didn't know exactly what she had hoped for, coming here. Some closure, some understanding. Not stones from the translator. The translator was gone. Twelve years gone. This was not possible.

She felt a soft stirring somewhere inside her skull. Then she heard the voice again:

*Is it really so bad?*

She pawed at the sides of her space helmet, shaking her head. What's happening to me? After a moment, she dropped her hands to her sides and stood still, trying not to clench her fists. She didn't want the others in the cavern to think she was having a breakdown. Did any of them know she was John Bandicut's niece? They might. Should she tell them? Tell them what? That she, too, was hearing alien voices in her head?

*Please don't.*

/What? Who are you? What are you?/ She was so rattled, the noise of her own thoughts was hard to distinguish from the voice.

*We are daughter-stones of the translator. We have joined with you, as our sister-stones joined with Julie Stone and John Bandicut. Please don't be alarmed.*

Dakota closed her eyes. Please don't be alarmed? She repeated the words to herself. Don't be alarmed. She was plenty alarmed. /How can you expect me not to be alarmed?/ she thought.

*We will not harm you. We may, under some circumstances, be able to aid you.*

Dakota took a slow, careful breath. Two of the others were looking in her direction, but all she could see was shiny faceplates. She was trying to parse what the stones had said to her. /Exactly how,/ she thought with great deliberation, /might you aid me?/

*That remains to be seen,* the stones said. *We may be able to help you open doors of opportunity, Dakota Bandicut.*

/Doors of opportunity?/

*We believe your future will take you to the stars.*

That jolted her. She hardly knew how to respond. /To the stars?/

*And sooner than you might think.*

To that she could only raise her face toward open space and stand in dumb, shivering silence. Filled with both awe and apprehension, she gazed up at the black dome of space that crowned this desolate moon at the solar system's edge, and wondered what sort of turn her life had just taken.

Chapter 2

Regrouping on Shipworld

FROM JEAVES SITUATIONAL SUMMARY: 384.17.4.9

Call me Jeaves. Everyone else does.

I’m a robot, high-level sentient. My original makers were human, but I’ve received numerous upgrades from others in the intervening century. That fact tends to make people give me credit for having accumulated more knowledge than I actually have. Yes, it’s true that I carry information that others in my company lack: details about Shipworld, for example, and some about the early history of the galaxy. But there’s so much I don’t know, such as:

What exactly are we supposed to be doing, now that we’ve arrived back on Shipworld? Does anyone care that in completing our last mission we saved a thousand worlds? And on a more personal note, when will I be able to merge myself back into my real, physical body? Haven’t I been virtual long enough?

I have many such questions.

Here are some things I do know: We’re back on Shipworld, a gargantuan structure orbiting just beyond the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The structure contains somewhat over a thousand immense habitation modules, most of them honeycombed with smaller subsections, as well as some ancillary structures. Shipworld shelters survivors from untold thousands of galactic civilizations threatened one way or another with extinction. Shipworld (as an entity, rather than a structure) is always on the lookout for more folk in need of rescue.

So.

We just completed one such mission. We’ve been back awhile, and our situation remains unclear. Upon our return, we were not greeted by a brass band or by much of anybody except the docking crew. I moved my soulware from the ship to an iceline node, and filed our report via the iceline network, attempting to connect to the authorities who sent me out in the first place. But despite the extraordinary nature of our report—not to mention the exotic hyperdimensional mode of travel on our return from Starmaker—we received little in the way of acknowledgment or gratitude from the authorities at the other end of the iceline. Had the hierarchy changed in my absence? I couldn’t quite tell. We received no further information. Instead, we were invited to take some R&R at an unused lake resort in an idyllic location in the Benzalli sector, close to where we had docked.

My team is there now, as I write this. Meanwhile, I relentlessly seek additional information. From my vantage point in the iceline node, I have more flexibility than my companions to reach out—but that has made no discernible difference. I still have few answers, and have gained no official recognition for my companions of the significant contribution they made toward the safety of the galactic worlds. I’m never exactly blocked in my search, but then again I never quite find my way to the answers I seek. It’s puzzling, and frustrating.

But maybe not altogether surprising. Shipworld is a truly vast place. Out here at the edge of the galaxy, where you wouldn’t expect to find anything more than a little dust and a lot of vacuum, floats this vast necklace of enormous, infinitely diverse habitats, joined together like beads on a string. It can take time to find what you’re looking for.

And so.

What’s next? We got back to Shipworld by, as my human designers would have said, the skin of our teeth. But will the mysterious and deadly Mindaru Survivors come after us for interfering with their efforts to destroy the Starmaker Nebula? Do they know where we are? Is there another job awaiting us? Will I even stay with the company? All these things and more, I wish I knew.

End of summary.

***

Ik sat motionless, gazing across a dusty console and out through what appeared to be a window at what appeared to be the lights of a settlement at night. The Hraachee’an ached with frustration and longing. The window was set out of reach, and he couldn’t tell for certain if he was looking at an actual living settlement or a projected image. He wondered if there might be a door around here somewhere, a door he could step through. Perhaps this was actually a real window through a habitat partition, and it might be possible simply to walk into the next habitat. More likely, though, it was just a viewscreen. Ik had found this room in a bunker near the lake, and while the others were sleeping, he’d walked over by himself to investigate. It looked almost like a control room, but he couldn’t see what, if anything, it controlled. Rows of nondescript panels of touchscreens and buttons, mostly dark, were set along the walls.

The view through the large window was appealing, sighting across a darkened valley at night, toward a town or small city nestled in the woods. Did it mean anything? Had they been brought within sight of it for a reason? Moon and stars, he wondered if anything they were doing these days was for a reason. Killing time, it seemed like to him. All this waiting. They didn’t even have the robots Napoleon and Jeaves to talk to, and they were the only ones Ik could talk to. Jeaves, who wasn’t physically in a body anyway, had disappeared like a wisp of smoke while his more organic companions rested by the lake. Napoleon was gone, too; Jeaves had asked the robot to accompany him on some errand.

Ik did not like resting by the lake. He thought a visit to the nearest town might break the depressing monotony.

He felt slightly guilty about leaving his friends without a word in the middle of the night. If any of them woke and found him missing, they might be worried, knowing his state of mind. But sometimes he felt worse being with them, unable to communicate and dragging them down by his presence. They’d gone through so much together, and built such a sense of common purpose. But the loss of his voice-stones on that last flight had left him isolated, unable to participate even in simple conversations. The voice-stones were the linchpins of their little community. Without the stones, none of them could understand a word of the others’ languages.

While they were still on The Long View, the loss had been tolerable, especially with the robot Copernicus helping to translate. But Copernicus was now integrated with the ship’s AI, and they’d been given no choice but to leave him behind at the docks. Since leaving the ship, things had deteriorated steadily for Ik. Sometimes he felt he could barely even speak to himself. The only thing that really kept him going was his hope that he might finally have a chance to search for others of his own kind on Shipworld. But Shipworld was a big place. To search in any reasonable way, he needed a search tool, something like the iceline, the local network structure. He’d used it extensively the last time he was on Shipworld; in fact, he hadn’t just used it, he’d helped save it. But then he’d had voice-stones, and a connection to the iceline. Everything had been different then.

Might he someday have voice-stones again? He had to; he couldn’t bear to keep going without that hope. But in the meantime, if he just could find some other Hraachee’ans, he wouldn’t have to feel so alone.

Leaning forward, over the console, he saw movement out there in that nightscape. Lights moving through the air, probably vessels. He sat back and stared at the controls in front of him. In one elliptical cutout, sparks of lights floated through a three-dimensional display. What did that mean? Who knew? Perhaps his friends could make sense of it. Or their stones could. But right now he was on his own.

Ik tried to remember how similar devices had worked the last time he was on Shipworld. Machines like this varied from one section of Shipworld to another, and for him, the voice-stones had been key to interacting with them. But surely he could manually operate the viewing equipment, if that’s what this was. He thought about it, and made a decision. Until now, he had been careful not to touch the controls. But now he stroked them with his long-fingered hands. Here was an icon with an engraved shape of a curved arrow. Might that change the view? He pressed it. Nothing happened. He tried to rotate it, but it didn’t budge. He thought a moment, then placed the palm of his hand against the icon and turned. Nothing. Growling softly, he delicately traced the line of the engraved arrow with one finger.

The window abruptly changed. Where the lights had been, there was now a placid lake. The same lake they were camped beside? He couldn’t tell. There were no people in view.

He traced the arrow again. The view blinked to a large indoor concourse, with an arched-glass roof and throngs of people of all kinds, a hundred species, all alien to him. Ik braced his forearms on the console and studied the view. Were there any Hraachee’ans? He studied it a long time, but he saw no Hraachee’ans.

Reluctantly, he changed the view again. This time it changed to a series of magnificent but desolate gorges in an arid-looking land. He sighed through his ears. The window’s operation seemed to be random, then, a meaningless travelogue—or maybe an array of selections from a vast monitoring system.

So far he’d tried only the one control. To its right was a star-shaped icon. He hesitated. Should he be fooling around with these settings, with no idea what he was doing? On the one hand, he could be meddling with things he shouldn’t; on the other, it seemed unlikely that critical controls would be left carelessly unattended. Presumably the masters of this place knew the controls were here, and had intended for them to be here. Which meant visitors were expected to explore.

All right. He lightly touched the icon with one finger, and traced a radial line out one of the starbursts. He looked up, and was surprised to see the view replaced by something that did not seem to be inside Shipworld: flashing yellow pulses of light in the dark of space, and then a few streaks. Both faded, and something else appeared in the field of view, something in space. Something long and extremely thin, like a glowing wire stretched across the view from low and near on the left, to high and far away on the right, and out of sight. Something was moving along its length.

Hrrm? Ik murmured. About halfway down its length, much smaller yellow bursts were winking on and off, almost like indicator lights. A warning? In the upper corner of the display, a circle appeared filled with incomprehensible writing.

Clacking his mouth, Ik ran his finger along another radial on the star icon. The view flicked to something different: an exterior view of an enormous structure in space—the familiar chain of huge segments that made up Shipworld against the dark of extragalactic space, the tiny disks of distant galaxies behind it. A slice of the home galaxy’s misty spiral was just visible at the bottom of the view. Ik felt a shiver. Several times now, he had approached Shipworld from the outside. Each time it had left him shaken with awe, and overwhelmed by his own smallness.

Just looking at this view reawakened the feeling. There was so much about Shipworld he still didn’t understand. And much that he feared.

His gaze was drawn to a point of light moving slowly toward the enormous structure. A craft approaching Shipworld? Maybe a star-spanner bubble? New arrivals from a newly rescued world—or one that had been destroyed? Hapless people like him, returning from a harebrained expedition, lucky to be alive? Just wondering about it made him ache inside again.

He stroked the starburst, and the view switched back to the inside of Shipworld, or so he assumed. Now a meadow filled the window, and daylight—and a figure walking toward him, with a small, scampering creature leading the way. Ik recognized the small creature, or at least its species. It was a krayket, one of the charming little fellows who had once helped him and his friends. Was this krayket helping another new arrival?

Ik waited, as they came closer. Then he froze, staring at the bipedal creature. Moon and stars! John Bandicut! he whispered to the empty room. Hrah! You must come see this! Was that another human he saw walking with the krayket? He was almost certain it was; the being had longer hair than John’s, and was a little curvier in the midsection, not unlike Antares, and was possibly female. John Bandicut! he cried hoarsely, desperately wishing his friend were here to see this.

Ik started to turn away, to run and fetch Bandicut—and then swung back, tortured by indecision. There was no telling how long this being—this human!—would stay in view. If he left to get John, she could well pass out of sight before he returned, and be lost!

He dared not leave the console. Tapping his brow, he studied the controls, looking for anything that might bring the human female here, or at least would open communication. There were transport mechanisms on Shipworld; it was not an entirely unreasonable hope. But touching the wrong control could lose her faster than doing nothing. What was this icon here, which looked like two funnel shapes end-to-end? Ik pressed his hands to his head, to keep them out of trouble while he thought the problem through.

In the window, the humanlike figure paused, turned, bent down to look at something. Then she straightened. Holding his breath, Ik touched the control. The image froze. The human stood still as a statue, and a green light flickered near her head. Hissing softly, Ik wondered what he had done. He waited for her to unfreeze. When nothing more happened, he touched the control again. The human came back to life—in fact, seemed to jump forward, across the view—and out of sight. She was gone.

Gone! Ik leaned forward, crying out, Hrah! Come back! He beat on the console in fury. How could this have happened? He’d had a chance to help his friend find another human, and he’d let her slip away.

There is nothing you could have done.

He knew that was true. But he couldn’t help feeling that he had failed John Bandicut—and Ik didn’t even have the words to tell him.

***

The lights of distant dwellings shimmered across the placid surface of the lake, silent and mysterious, beckoning to John Bandicut like forest sprites, quivering with a languid pulse of life. By this lake, Bandicut never had to feel alone . . . at least when he was dreaming . . .

If he wanted, he could walk across those waters and enter into the mystery there.

And what about those stars peeking from behind the wisps of cloud, a painter’s vision of heaven spattered across the sky? If he let his eyes go out of focus, he could fly out to meet those stars. Fly on the winds of space . . .

The winds of space where the Mindaru roamed.

The vision went dark, his mind spasming. Oh hell, no! Get away!

Stay out of my mind!

A struggle erupted for control of his thoughts. A struggle he would lose if he tried to fight them off directly. So he did the only thing he could do. Put space between us. His thoughts lurched away from the Mindaru and back to the beginning. Chaos revisited . . .

First encounter with the alien quarx, on Triton, the shock and disorientation. The start of a journey, a mission proposed by the alien in his head, unimaginable, insane, inescapable. Preposterous to think of saving Earth from a rogue, dark comet. In secret. How can you think of leaving when you’ve just met someone and fallen in love? Which will it be? Dizzying, heady union with a beautiful woman? Or an impossible mission ending in death? A simple choice. Or would have been, except that Earth was at stake. And so, rocketing in a spacecraft energized by alien technology, he saved the Earth . . . instead of staying with Julie.

Oh yeah! Mad with silence-fugue, he streaked across the solar system and smacked the comet to kingdom come . . . and himself to exile in an inconceivable place out on the edge of the galaxy. Shipworld, this place, where he met the aliens who would become his friends. Ik. Li-Jared. Antares. Friends of circumstance, thrown together to fight the mysterious boojum and save Shipworld—and was that enough? No, next to be flung without a thank-you back into the galaxy to a water world, where the precarious existence of the deep-sea Neri folk hung teetering.

Danger and pain. Weariness, oh . . .

 . . . out of which had come new love with Antares, and the bonding of his new friendships. But then what—home and rest? Hah! No, an even more perilous journey: to Starmaker, the Orion Nebula, where sentient stars were dying violently at the hands of the treacherous group-AI, the Mindaru. He and his friends won that. They won. Against all hope and peril. After that victory, all the accursed things should be dead. But no, still Mindaru roamed the galaxy, looking for life to murder.

Reaching closer, across time and space; and him in their sights.

Closer, looming large, threatening suffocation.

Piercing directly into his thoughts, all malice and hatred . . .

Bandicut sat up with a gasp, his sleep wrap falling to his waist. His heart was pounding; he shook from a bone-deep chill, from the terror of the dream. Rasping air into his lungs, he pressed his sweaty palms flat to the grass beneath him, steadying himself. God damn it. The dream again.

Dream? He had been on the edge of full-blown silence-fugue, not imagining but reliving events, starkly real. It had all happened.

So much they had lived through. So much! They had defeated the Mindaru, hadn’t they? So why did his breath still catch in cold terror when he thought of them, even now that he was safe back on Shipworld?

/// You all right? ///

Charli the quarx asked carefully, in his head.

/Yah,/ he answered silently. The noncorporeal quarx never seemed to sleep. /It’s just . . . /

/// I almost had to pull you back again.

You were on the edge, I think. ///

Bandicut sighed. Charli had saved him any number of times from the madness of silence-fugue. /I was, yes. Damn, you know, I miss home./ Earth, where there were no Mindaru. The lake here was dark and still, the far shore difficult to see now in the low-lying mist of night. Looking at the sky with its scattering of artificial stars, he could imagine it was Earth. But it felt like a very long time since he had seen the constellations of Earth’s sky.

/// We all miss our homes, ///

Charli said wistfully.

/// The machines are still coming after you

in your dreams, yes? ///

/Yah./ Bandicut peered around the camp. Oddly, the dreams had started only after they’d come here, to this place of peace and safety, to rest and recover. Almost as if they were telling him, You’re not done yet. The fire had burned down to dull red embers, and Li-Jared and Antares were asleep on either side of him, bundled up in sleeping bags on pads. And Ik. No—Ik’s pad was empty. Bandicut scanned the area. Ik was nowhere in sight. /Oh damn, not again./

The Hraachee’an had wandered off while the rest of them were asleep. Without his translator-stones, he couldn’t talk to anyone, or work any of the enigmatic Shipworld devices, or seek help if he needed it. He’d probably just gone for a walk. But Bandicut worried about him. /I shouldn’t be mothering him. It’s just—/

/// Ik hasn’t been himself.

We all know it. ///

/Yeah, but—/ Charli was putting it mildly. Ik had been acting depressed and erratic, and increasingly distant.

John, what? Antares asked, pushing herself up onto one elbow. The Thespi female looked groggily at him, and her concern sharpened. You had the dream again. Statement, not a question.

Yah. He swallowed, composing himself. But that’s not it.

What, then? She looked around. Is it Ik?

Yah. I don’t see him anywhere.

Antares closed her eyes and pressed a hand to the knowing-stones in her throat. After a moment, she looked back at him and shook her head. I don’t feel him nearby.

Should we wake Li-Jared?

You don’t have to wake me, the Karellian muttered, rolling over and sitting up. He looked vaguely simian in the gloom, except that his electric-blue eyes managed to capture and reflect what little light there was. You people are noisy enough to keep anyone awake.

Sorry, Bandicut said. It’s Ik. He’s gone.

So I gathered. Li-Jared started to crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering to himself. Shall we go for another walk?

Why don’t you two stay here and watch the camp, Bandicut said. No point in all of us wandering off and getting lost. I was awake anyway. I’ll just take a quick look down along the water. He can’t have gone far.

***

Ik stumbled out of the bunker, reeling with frustration. He’d started out hoping to find someone of his own kind. Moon and stars, locating that human for John Bandicut would have been a step in the right direction! Maybe there was no way for him to have brought his friend together with that other human, but if only he could have found a way to communicate with it! At least then he might have brought Bandie something to hope for, the possibility of finding one of his own kind here, in the alien vastness of Shipworld.

Right now, though, he had a more immediate problem: relocating the trail he had come in on. It was dark, and that was one problem; the other was that nothing looked quite the same as it had when he’d walked in. There were several trails and streams threading through the woods and along the water, and now they all looked alike to him. Especially in the dark.

Ik stroked the side of his sculpted head with a long finger. He was feeling confused so much these days. Would he ever be given a new set of voice-stones? Maybe not; maybe you were just allowed one set, and if you didn’t take care of those, you didn’t get another pair. That would be cruel.

He shook his head and set off down the left path. It led to a stream, on the far side of which was a pleasant little meadow. That was the way, he thought, and kept going.

A few minutes later, he heard his name being called out in the dark. At least he could still understand his own name! It was John Bandicut. Bandie! he called, Over here! The sounds coming out of his mouth, in his real tongue, were quite different from what his friend used to hear; but he could only hope that Bandie could make some sense of it.

Ik! he heard. Then Bandicut appeared out of the trees and spotted him at once. Ik could feel John’s relief almost as palpably as if he had Antares’ empathic abilities. Even without the stones, he could recognize many of his friend’s emotions.

Bandicut strode up and seized him by the upper arms. Cascades of words followed, none of which Ik understood; but clearly Bandicut had been worried and was urging him to come back with him. Ik started to follow, then stopped. Wait! he cried, hoping that something of what he was saying might get through. I have to show you something! Come with me! Come! Bandicut looked startled. But when Ik pulled the other way, Bandie acquiesced—though he first paused to shout something in the other direction, probably telling the others that he had found Ik.

In the darkness, the entrance to the control room looked like a simple door in a low concrete bunker. Bandicut was hesitant, but Ik gestured urgently and finally just went through and waited for Bandicut to follow. "This is where I saw someone who looks like you! Human! One of your people! Ik pointed to the viewer and gazed back at Bandicut. But the view had changed and his friend simply looked bewildered. Ik clacked his mouth shut in frustration. He slapped a hand to his chest and turned to the controls. If I could just find it again . . ."

Running his hands over the icons, Ik tried to navigate back to the view he’d had before. But any control he’d had before—or illusion of control—was gone now. He seemed able to bring up only random images and locations. At first Bandicut looked interested, but as Ik struggled in vain to get the human back, John began to look around the room more than at the window. No doubt he was wondering what in blazes Ik had brought him here for.

Suddenly Bandicut glanced back at the window, and with a guttural sound pointed at something in the viewing pane. Animals. A group of large, four-footed beasts plodding across a field. Did Bandie recognize them? Were they domesticated?

Bandicut reached in front of Ik to point more closely. Besides the large quadrupeds, there were several smaller animals as well. Herding the large ones? Kree-ayy-ket-t-t-s, Bandicut said, his voice sounding garbled to Ik, but not so garbled that he didn’t recognize the word. Kraykets. Ik bobbed his head and made a whistle of pleasure through his ears.

Bandie seemed to understand and share his reaction. Now, if Ik could just convey what he’d brought Bandie here to see! Human! Like you! Ik waved his hands, made a rough outline of Bandicut’s shape, then turned and recreated the outline against the viewer.

Bandicut cocked his head; he looked back at the kraykets and the large animals, made a shape such as Ik had just made, and chuckled. He thought Ik was reminding him of the time they had all seen the kraykets. No! How could he communicate human? Ik struggled in vain to think of something to say, and then he sighed through his ears and reached out to search for another scene.

As

Reviews for The Reefs of Time

[liscarey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the first of the Out of Time duology, which together are part of the larger Chaos Chronicles series. The second book of the duology, Crucible of Time, is due out in September. And since I have the ARC, I feel confident in saying, yes, it exists, and yes, you can pre-order it, and can have it in September.There's a brief intro to get you caught up on where the characters are and why, and then se plunge into the story.John Bandicut, Antares, Li-Jared, Ik, the robot Napoleon, and the AI Jeaves, are hanging out in a perfectly nice meadow on Shipworld, waiting for something, anything, to happen. It's not that they don't need the rest, after a series of intense, dangerous missions, but they also feel a bit disconnected and even bored.Not to mention the fact that Ik's translator stones died in their last mission, to the Starmaker Nebula, and he can't really communicate with the others. So it's a bit of a relief when Jeaves shows up to ask them to come to a meeting. Just, you understand, to give advice, not to take on a new mission just yet. They deserve their R&R!Yeah, well, you know how that goes, right?Except for the part where, Ik, not able to understand much of the discussion, wanders off to try out one of the nearby workstations, to see if he can find anything useful. Watching events on another part of Shipworld, he sees something very unlikely--another human. He winds up with a choice, either step through the workstation's portal to meet the human, or stay and try to tell John Bandicut--while losing track of this new human. He decides to step through the portal.He meets the new human, who turns out to be John Bandicut's old girlfriend, Julie Stone, recently arrived on Shipworld from her own intense, near-fatal mission to defeat a lethal threat to Earth. He's no more able to communicate with her than with his other companions, and his clever plan of bringing her right back through the portal he arrived by to meet Bandicut is thwarted when the portal dumps them someplace else.We learn, from both the people they meet up with, and from Jeaves' explanations to the main group, that communication between areas on Shipworld is becoming difficult, due to factional conflicts within the governing body. But there's a major new threat from the Mindaru, and Julie and Ik get recruited for one faction's urgent mission to deal with it, while Bandicut and the others get recruited for a different faction's urgent mission to deal with it.Both plans are very, very dangerous. It's also possible they might be unintentionally in conflict with each other.Everybody is trying to do the right thing; that doesn't mean it's going to be the right thing,. Or that it will work.More people split off the main group, for what seem unavoidable reasons, and everyone also meets more people, of varied species, whom they will need to work with. They're all complex, interesting people, and first impressions don't tell the whole story on any of them. Shipworld, the Starstream, the ghoststream, the Heart of Fire nebula and the worlds within it, all contribute to a rich, varied, fascinating future cosmos that's a delight to explore.There are reasons I wait, more or less patiently, for the next Chaos Chronicles book, and it has never been a disappointment. This is no exception.Highly recommended.Yes, yes, I received a free electronic galley of this book from the author, and am reviewing it voluntarily. I've also pre-ordered the published book, which will be hitting my Kindle about the time this review goes live.I mean it. Highly recommended.