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more of the unknown than the sharks.
For all the fuss and furor of the afternoon before, only Sammis was at the
Travel Hall the next morning as I suited up. He didn't say a word. But it was
funny how he was always around, and on good terms with everyone.
From the instant of mind-chill with the departure from the Tower, I
was tense. Wryan was the first Immortal I'd known closely who had
gotten zapped, and the holo shots Sammis had brought back had conveyed all too
starkly the sheer destructiveness of the culture I was tracking.
I had planned to back-time to the limit of my range, a good two million years
back, and work forward; calculating that it would reduce the risk factor. When
a diver reached range limit, it felt like the paths and time branches were all
curling back with a searing red-fire edging.
I stopped as soon as I began to sense the curl, checked the time register, and
my blood chilled. The read-out registered at a touch over a million, half of
what my spinning mind insisted it should.
The rest of the equipment registered normal. I passed it off as a peculiarity
of the cluster and began my sliding around undertime looking for a likely
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shark-people planet.
Dull
that was one word for it. Tiresome was another. Careful was the third. Close
to a hundred thousand systems in an unexplored cluster, and I was trying to
find the one that would erupt into mayhem a million-plus years fore-time of my
search.
I kept track of my progress and got past sixty days without finding anything.
It took work to be a coward. The rest of them all had the feeling they were
invulnerable, but being Immortal has nothing to do with that.
I was the one being called upon to stick my neck out, and I didn't like what I
was finding.
First, there wasn't any intelligent life on any of the planets I
checked. Second, I was blocked from going deeper in the back-time at half my
normal range. I could usually glide to a million and a half, struggle past two
million. In the shark cluster, I could barely get past a million years
back-time, and that was with full effort.
I had hunches, but I kept them inside. Maybe my whole approach was stupid, but
I was scared. The more I looked, the more the pieces didn't add up.
Item:
A star cluster presumably destroyed by an intelligent race.
Item:
An intelligent race which destroys all other life on sight, and injured
members of its own species.
Item:
A cluster in which time-diving is difficult.
Item:
A cluster which has large numbers of inhabitable planets with no intelligent
life
a million years before the destructive species presumably emerges.
The last item bothered me, really bothered me. All inhabitable planets, with
exceptions too rare to consider, develop at least semi-
intelligent life.
For that reason alone, the surveillance boundaries of the Guard were limited
to one sector of the galaxy. A substantial part of a galaxy is too much even
for Immortals with the equivalent of instant travel. We forgot how big the
universe was. I kept at it, though, and skip-scanned through one thousand-plus
systems in ninety days, feeling proud until I
realized it amounted to about one percent of the cluster.
I spent another thirty-seven days skip-scanning before something clicked.
It was a plain, seven-planet system, normal G-type sun, hard core inner
planets, with two small gas giants further out. The life-detector showed the
same low readings I'd been worrying about, but I sensed
something different
Planet number three had an aura, and I slid in, following the feel, the
shading of time toward the ancient. The Tower of Immortals on Quest had that
feeling, like the pyramids on Terra, and the Sacred Forge of the Goblins on
Heaven IV.
Planet three had that tinge, faintly.
After tracing my strange feel to its strongest point, I set my own holopak for
instant exposure and made a flash-through. I repaired to my staging planet to
study what the holo showed.
The one frame I'd taken was stark enough, and ugly enough. The years of
erosion, wind, rain, fires, and time itself had only blunted the edges of the
'black fortress. The Structure was a good kilo on a side, if not more, and
nearly as high.
Black it was, so deep a black that there was light in the space between stars
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by comparison, black enough to swallow light. And old.
That black monstrosity dripped years. The Tower of Immortals was built
yesterday compared to the black fort.
I sat down on a grassy knoll of my rest planet and studied the frame again.
Other details now stood out, like the laser which was sweeping toward the holo
center, or the absolute smoothness of the plain.
I shivered. Big, strong Temporal Guards who could leap centuries with a single
dive weren't supposed to shiver. I did.
What sort of mechanism was it that could last millennia and track and attack
an object that appeared in real-time for only milliunits?
The first contact, strictly with an artifact, and it was hostile.
I forced myself to keep concentrating on the holo frame. The regularity of the
distant hills behind the fortress, virtually all the same level, was another
disturbing note. Sharks, shark people, staging base, sterile planets, weapons
they all ran through my mind. The sharks had been there longer than Sammis or
Heimdall figured.
With a deep breath, I slipped through the mind-chill of the time-
tension and headed back to the planet of the black fortress. I stayed in the
undertime beneath the structure, grasping for a link, a direction. In a funny
way, all created objects in the universe have time links, shadow paths,
branches linking them with then: creators.
The black fort, staging base, whatever it was, had a thready link further
back-time. I couldn't follow it because I was near the end of my own back-time
range, but I grabbed a damned good feel for the direction, and I slid along
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