Chapter 13

I stumbled and fell to my knees, my paws skidding along the floor. Nausea hit me and for a bleary moment, I thought that maybe someone had hit me in the back of the head with a heavy metal pole. Instead, the whole bridge of the Menagerie groaned and creaked, rolling hard to the side. I skidded and fell to my side, managing to get my breath back enough to shout.

“Alin! What’s happening?”

Seconds before, everything had been fine. We had been prepared to jump to the home solar system of the elves, to where the Dark Lord had been sending out his fleets – to learn precisely what my attempts at diplomacy had managed.

And, like usual, there had been no actual travel time. Between blinks, we had been in one solar system, the next? Back at SOL.

Except it was all wrong. The sting of vomit at the back of throat and the smell of burning plastic made it hard to focus on anything but my discomfort. I forced the feelings down, shoving myself up with one arm and using the nearby computer console as a support. Alin was looking wobbly – which was impressive, considering she was sitting firmly in a computer chair. Across the bridge, the rest of the girls (and Lokken) were sprawled and groaning. I saw the ceiling above Alin’s head bulge and ripple and for a horrifying, heart wrenching second, I swore it was going to explode into a spray of lethal shrapnel. But the metal wasn’t distorting as if it was being hit by some kinetic force – it was twisting as if space itself had become putty and some large finger was rubbing along the skin of our hull. As I watched, the puckering distortion swept to the far wall, then vanished, continuing on to other components throughout our ship.

Alin, shaking her head, leaned forward and glowered down at her computer screen.

“We’re in SOL,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “I think.”

“I don’t know, Matt,” Alin said, forgetting to even use the play-rank that she liked to use for me. “G-Get over here, look at this.”

I managed to walk. The ship was no longer feeling as if it was reeling beneath my feet, and with every step I took, I felt the nausea retreating and my heart rate slowed. I leaned over Alin and peered down at the screen that she was showing me. The solar system was displayed on the normal astrographic charts – but everything past Earth was... wrong. The sun looked like a vast, swollen brown-red egg, oblong and reaching upwards and downwards. The read outs on the computer screen showed all the data that the Menagerie was bringing in, and none of it made any sense, even to my relatively scientifically illiterate self.

“It appears the sun has gone funny,” I said, quietly. Then I noticed while the sun had swollen, it hadn’t grown large enough to consume Mercury and Venus. And yet, both of those worlds were gone. In their place was a thin band that read as solid material, despite hooping around the entire orbital path of Mercury. I didn’t know how long that kind of ring would be, but I immediately pegged it as being one of the largest constructs in the galaxy – the kind of mega-structures you’d see in an old golden age sci-fi novel like Rendezvous with Rama or Ringworld.

Or... Halo, if you wanted to be a bit more modern.

“That ring is rotating extremely rapidly,” Alin said, quietly. “The structure is creating an intense geomantic field – similar to the magnetic fields on a planet with a rotating iron core. The fields are focused on the sun and are altering it into some kind of inchoate spacetime where the laws of reality break down to the fundamental principles that they had before or right after the Big Bang. When the universe was first formed, before the values collapsed into what describes our modern universe.”

“How long between the Big Bang did it take for that to happen?” I asked.

“Between five or six ... um ... what’s the term humans use? We elves call it Lamerkin’s Wink, after a pre-isekai god of tricksters,” Alin said, while behind me, Kanagoraga groaned and started to push herself to her feet.

“Uh, what’s the unit like?” I asked.

“It’s the length of time that it takes light travel the smallest possible unit of measurement,” Alin said. Then she snapped her fingers. “Planck Time! So, about twenty times ten to the negative forty fourth power seconds.”

I frowned. “That’s ... zero point zero, zero, zero ... but there are forty four zeroes. Then a twenty five? That many seconds?”

Alin nodded.

I whistled.

“Why do I feel so gross?” Keke groaned, laying on her back.

“The shockwaves of whatever the Dark Lord is building is disrupting our biologies – it’s probably an extremely focused effect, we’re only getting a very mild wave effect, likely thanks to the inverse square law,” Alin said.

“T-This doesn’t feel mild,” Keke said.

“Think of it like this,” I said, my voice grim. “It doesn’t take that much randomization in your biology to kill you. Like, imagine if our blood couldn’t bond with oxygen suddenly. Or if our nerves didn’t transmit electricity at the same rate. Or anything like that.”

“ ... oh...” Keke’s voice was very soft.

Kanagoraga grumbled. She had gotten to her feet and was glowering at the main view screen which, now that the strange disruptions had either faded or were being compensated for, now displayed the live camera view of whatever the Dark Lord was doing at the heart of the solar system. The sun looked even worse with my own eyes. The brown that the computer had rendered was actually a kind of messy slurry of conflicting, interfacing colors – it was like the static of an old TV mixed with the flowing of a sewer. The ring surrounding it was visible even from this distance, a massive glowing line of light that bisected the star, with just enough detail that my eye kept seeing the motion and feeling sick at the rate of its rotation. The egg shape of the star grew more and more puckered at the two poles, and thin lines of brownish-red stuff came off the top and bottom, tracing lines of magical force created by the megastructure. Then the stars visible around the horrid thing rippled. The distortion wave was visible by the way the beads of light mixed and swirled together, and I turned to Alin, shouting.

“Incoming!”

“Working on a solution!” she said, her fingers flying. The Menagerie shuddered as her shields came online, and then shifted from an invisible glow to a brilliant blue flare. The distortion became visible as well as it touched our shields, leaving behind glowing fingers of green flames. But none of us dropped dead, nor even felt sick. Alin sagged with relief. “A-Arcanite insulation works on the distortion effects – and good thing too. I think that was going to be a much stronger waveform than the prior one.”

I frowned. “How much stronger?”

“Uh ... a hundred percent,” she said.

I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “Any theories? Or hypotheses?”

Lokken, who had gotten to his feet and was now holding his staff, smirked. “Well,” he said. “Distortions of reality like this were the effect of the Great Cataclysm on my fictional home planet. But that fiction claimed that the Cataclysm was caused by Khandrian mages misusing their power. Tampering with the fundamental natures of reality.” He sniffed. “If there is any truth in art, then maybe, this Dark Lord is seeking to manipulate those rules of reality your fetching construct mentioned. The rules that did not exist, until moments after the dawn of the world.”

I blinked, then turned to Alin. Alin was frowning down at her computer.

“It’s theoretically possible that if you recreate the cosmological conditions of the big bang, you could effect new laws of reality,” she said, pursing her lips. “But where is the heat? The readings we’re getting from this magical alterations are that the sun’s surface temperature is several million degrees below absolute zero and several billion degrees hotter than plasma. Which either means our sensors are broken or ... we’re getting data so alien that they might as well be broken.”

“Obviously,” Kanagoraga said, huffing. “The Dark Lord is recreating the magical conditions of the Big Bang.”

Everyone looked at her. Alin’s jaw had dropped. “Kanagoraga you’re a genius,” she said, blinking. “He doesn’t need to make the universe a hot diffuse ball of gas, he just needs to alter the geomantic web – and we have a whole arcanite network he can pull on that can provide enough power easily!”

“I ... well ... yes, of course, I am a genius,” Kanagoraga said, smirking and puffing up her chest. Keke, who clearly didn’t trust her legs, glowered up at her from where she sat.

Another wave of distortions emerged from the heart of the solar system. Despite the shields surrounding the Menagerie, I still felt a queasy flip in my belly – one that went from physical to purely psychosomatic when Alin whispered. “Oh no.”

“What is it?” Ara Ara asked, walking over to lean over Alin’s shoulder. Alin, tilting her head to avoid squishing her cheek against Ara Ara’s massive chest, sighed.