“With Ulmoc?” I asked.

  She nodded slowly.

  “Well?” I asked.

  She took a bite this time and practically gulped the pastry piece. That started her coughing, half-choking. Finally, she slurped more coffee, coughed a little more and set down both pastry and cup. The words began to gush out of her then as she spoke in a rush:

  “I’ve been anticipating this moment for longer than you can believe. I have calluses on my knees and my lower back hurts every night. The ancient one—Ulmoc—is extremely condescending. He believes we’re a lower order of species, possibly too stupid to understand the higher ways of Lokhar.”

  “You say that as if Lokhar was a person,” I said.

  Ella nodded. “Oh, yes, Lokhar was the first person as Christians, Muslims and Jews believe Adam was the first man. Ulmoc can quote pages and pages of their holy writ. It’s very tedious. He waxes philosophical on everything. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to clap my hands over my ears and run out screaming. The tiger infuriates me. But I smile. I nod and listen to every word. I’ve been waiting for him to show me the artifact.”

  “He already has several times before this,” I said.

  Ella’s head snapped up so one of her neck bones popped. Suspicion shined in her eyes. “You’ve been spying on the cell?” she asked.

  “Of course I have. I’d be crazy not to.”

  “Then you’ve seen everything, I suppose.”

  “I’ve seen some,” I admitted. “Every time he drew out the artifact, the sensors stopped recording.”

  A slow smile spread across Ella’s face. It made her prettier when she did that.

  “Interesting,” she said. She laughed before pressing her lips together, as if her laughter might turn into insane shrieks. “What I’ve witnessed today…” She stared intently into my eyes. “Commander, the artifact is alive.”

  “What? How is that even possible? Isn’t it supposed to be thousands of years old? Nothing can live that long.”

  “I still don’t know enough yet,” Ella said. “But I know what I heard. Maybe the Forerunner object is like N7, a construct. It spoke in High Speech to Ulmoc, and he spoke to it, trying to silence the thing, I believe. It shocked the high priest when it began speaking in my presence. I think that’s making Ulmoc reassess some of his beliefs about us.”

  I pursed my lips. Okay. The artifact was a thinking machine. That made better sense than it being alive did. The Jelk produced androids. The First Ones simply made their models more durable and long lasting.

  “This all sounds interesting,” I said. “But why does any of this have you up in arms?”

  “Surely you jest,” Ella said.

  I shook my head.

  “Why, it speaks, it talks, it communicates. The object belonged to the Forerunners, the First Ones. That means I can ask it questions about then. I can riddle it concerning the Altair Object and the portal planet. It may be the key to our victory. It certainly could be the key to unlocking our understanding about the universe.”

  Oh. Yeah. Those were interesting points. “Do you really believe it’s that old?” I asked.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Maybe someone else built it and called it Forerunner tech.”

  “Yes, yes, that is certainly a possibly,” Ella said. “Yet the Lokhars believe it a treasure from the distant past. Surely, they must know something concerning it. This is incredible.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “No,” Ella said. “If you are this calm then you do not understand its significance. This is as if the Sphinx started talking and told us about ancient times. This is scientifically exciting.”

  “I’m more interested in what it can tell us about the Altair Object and the portal planet.”

  “Exactly,” Ella said, and her smile became predatory.

  “What now?” I asked. “Am I missing something?”

  “You of all people should understand the next step.”

  I frowned, and then it hit me. “You’re talking about taking the artifact with us.”

  “I most certainly am,” Ella said.

  “Venturi isn’t going to agree to this.”

  “He won’t be alive long enough so it matters,” Ella said.

  “You don’t think we can beat the Kargs?”

  “I don’t think any of the dreadnoughts are going to survive our initial landing, provided any of us can even make it down to the planet. If the creature calling itself Abaddon is right, and the Kargs swarm around the planet, we’re going to be lucky to get anyone down. Remember, Commander, our battle plan calls for successive waves of troopers and legionaries to secure surface area and then bore for the center. Yet we don’t have enough shuttles and dropships to land seven million soldiers all at once.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, “that’s a problem.”

  Klaxons began to wail, and we both knew what that meant. The time had come to jump into the Karg universe.

  “Let’s hurry,” I said, as I eased forward on my chair.

  “We’re going to have to use the T-missiles in some innovative manner,” Ella said in a rush.

  My mind had already drifted onto other subjects. I stood. She stood, and we raced for the hatch.

  What do you want me to say? How specific should I go into what happened next? We reached the control room and lay on the cots as N7 kept his station.

  Our android didn’t declare the beauty of the shift out of hyperspace. Our guts did shrivel—at least mine sure did—but none of us puked that I could hear. I tell you the truth, this time we each sensed a greater feeling of dread than before.

  It wasn’t like a demon standing over me. Instead, I felt hopelessness as waves of despair attempted to drown me in the apathy that leads to suicide. How could a space-time continuum provoke such a feeling?

  I heard weeping around me, and I felt dejection ten times worse, a hundred times worse, than when the judge had pronounced my sentence and said I was going to prison. I had the feeling of bars clanging shut times one thousand, or like a guy’s first hot girlfriend telling him she was splitting up with him. It was that ache deep in the gut welling outward with waves and waves of anguish.

  Yet humans are creatures of thought, not just feeling. Despite the weeping, the dread, the loneliness and the uselessness of everything, I unbuckled my straps.

  N7 stood transfixed at his station. He stared at the screen in his panel. He said nothing and neither did he move.

  I swallowed in a parched throat. Did I want to see this? No. But I was going to do it anyway. I’d once broken free of the Jelk bastard Claath. I was going to beat this, too.

  I stood up, shuffled to my station and studied the screen. What I saw boggled my mind. First, I saw dust as the sensors registered vast fields of gas molecules. Then I saw worlds, planets, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps, drifting uselessly. Among them were cool black dwarf stars and neutron stars. In the far distance, I saw something much worse and more intimidating: a mighty glow of superheated matter and it seemed to stretch everywhere, from one end of the horizon—if one could say such a thing regarding space—to the other end.

  Glancing at the sensors, I was startled at the radiation levels emanating from it.

  “That thing…” I whispered.

  “I assume you mean the accretion disk,” N7 said in a hollow voice.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The incredible quantity of glowing matter is an accretion disk,” N7 said. “It circles an enormous, supermassive black hole. My sensors say the black hole is trillions upon trillions of solar masses.”

  I tried to understand his words. A solar mass was the amount of matter that made up the Earth’s Sun. Trillions upon trillions of solar masses meant an inconceivably huge amount.

  That meant the accretion disk—the stuff circling the black hole—must be the remnants of billions of black dwarf stars, planets and other interstellar debris. The supermassive black hole was in the process of devouring everything. It must have been doing so for…an amazingly long time. I remember reading that black holes were messy eaters, and that not all the matter would descend into the singularity. The continual breaking down of atoms released gobs of radiation up and down the spectrum.

  “The gravity from this universe’s last supermassive black hole pulls at our dreadnought,” N7 said. “You can hear our engines strain.”

  I did, and it worried me. “How far are we from…it?” I asked, gesturing helplessly at the horizon.

  “Fortunately, many light-years,” N7 said, “but the inconceivable mass makes the black hole irresistible.”

  I thought about that. Looking at the accretion disk, the way matter went down into the center…it reminded me of the times I drained water from a bathtub. I’d watched that happen a thousand times as a kid. The last water always swirled around the drain, but in the end, all the water was sucked down and disappeared.

  My few words dried up. I concentrated, but I still couldn’t talk. Getting angry had helped last time. I needed something different, because I couldn’t even generate the resolve to get mad.

  I sighed deeply once, twice, three times and felt overwhelming misery build in me. This was unnatural. Could a universe emotionally defeat someone like this?

  It is doing it. Instead of theory, you need action. Yeah, but first I need to believe my action can help anything.

  The thought put a seed of, of…hope in me. If we were lucky, heck, if the Creator really was with us, maybe we could survive. I clung to the idea, because I tell you the truth, I didn’t have anything else.

  “N7,” I whispered.

  The android moved with infinitesimal speed. It agonized me to watch his slowness. His haunted eyes finally looked up into mine.

  “What exactly is all this?” I asked.

  “You are observing the Karg universe,” N7 said in a monotone.

  “Why are all these planets, dead stars and supermassive black hole in such close proximity with each other?”

  “Indeed,” N7 said.

  I studied the screen. We passed near a dead hulk of a planet, like Hell with all its fires gone out, with giant empty pits, cold mountains and steely ghost cities of empty buildings. And then I realized what must be the truth of this space-time continuum. If a universe expanded—think Big Bang—couldn’t it contract? And if it contracted—they called it Big Crunch—couldn’t there be a time when a universe became small indeed? If that small universe still had stars and planets—matter—wouldn’t they all be squeezed together like this into the last super-supermassive singularity devouring it all?

  I looked upon the black dwarf stars, neutron stars and the incredible black hole once more. The Kargs had to escape this place, for it was shrinking back into what—a single singularity? I wanted to shriek like a madman. I’d read stuff on the end of the universe before. Scientists and ivory tower eggheads had argued like crazy over these things. Once, people pushed Big Bang theory hard, until they realized that implied a start to the universe. And if there was a start, who started it and put the matter there to Big Bang in the first place? Had the matter always been there? That didn’t make sense. But something couldn’t come from nothing. That did seem to imply a big “C” Creator because a cause needed a reason, and for something to be there—as it is and was—there had to be a self-caused thing or being to start everything. Therefore, some scientists no longer liked the Big Bang theory so much. Others, particularly the Intelligent Design guys and gals, loved it. In any case, other theories began to abound, flat universe, open universe and closed universe. Only in the closed universe did you have the Big Crunch. I don’t know about other space-time continuums, but the Karg universe was as closed as could be and getting closer every second. Could it be a pocket universe?

  “Commander,” N7 said in his monotone, interrupting my thoughts. “There are massive levels of X-rays, gamma rays and other radiation striking the outer hull. We are shielded for a while. But we can remain in this universe for only a limited time until we all die from radiation poisoning.”

  I nodded even as the desolation of this place pulled at me again. How had the Kargs managed to survive in this shrinking universe? Where could they live to outlast the radiation?

  That didn’t matter now. Hope. We needed hope, otherwise… I opened a wide channel with all my troopers. I spoke to them about hope. I spoke about the Creator and that we were the ones who were going to save our universe. I told them to fight doubt, fight the dejection in their hearts. We had a duty and a purpose. I didn’t want them to despair.

  What would have happened if I hadn’t gone on the horn? Let me tell you what did happen. During our short time in the Karg space-time continuum, one third of the troopers gave into the misery pounding at their hearts and minds. They used grenades, rifles and knives and did what they needed to escape the insufferable gloom closing down around them. In three words: they committed suicide. I wish they hadn’t. We needed everyone, but we no longer had a full one hundred thousand soldiers, but two-thirds of our former numbers.

  Fortuitously for us, lucky for the universe maybe, the Lokhars didn’t have that problem. Despair led Lokhars to extreme indifference and lassitude. It didn’t cause them to take their own lives.

  “Look,” I heard Admiral Venturi over the comm. “I’m patching through to your main screen,” he said.

  I turned to the screen. I saw the hatching of an armada and an answer to my question about where the Kargs lived. I never wanted to see something like that again. A husk of an earth-sized world floated in oblivion. It had dried seas and cold mountains, with a flat silver area like a molten lake that had hardened. I wonder what that had been. In any case, the great breaking began on the flat silver. It split apart with lightning zigzags. That jagged line grew into a worldwide catastrophe. Mountains of debris fell away as the gigantic crack deepened, as if God used a titanic invisible chisel to break the world in two. The halves separated, and the core of the planet was cold and hollow. Out of it flew more than one hundred Karg snowflake-shaped vessels. To escape the radiation perhaps, they had burrowed into a world’s cool center. Perhaps they had kept things going by feeding nuclear reactors with the core iron-nickel mass.

  There was nothing majestic or awesome about the spectacle. Instead, there was something vile and evil in the action. It reminded me a black widow spider sac, one guarded by a poisonous mother. I’d watched once as a child, absorbed with the tiny hatchlings crawling out of a silk egg sac. I’d watched until my stepdad crushed the sac and the black widow with the sole of his shoe, twisting his foot back and forth. A hard smack to the back of my head and a stern lecture taught me why I shouldn’t have been bent over like that, watching.

  “You kill black widows whenever you can,” my stepdad had told me. It had been one of his few useful lessons.

  “The Karg vessels are accelerating,” Venturi said. “I will follow them at a discreet distance.”

  “Right,” I said. “They must be heading for the portal.”

  “I am of a similar opinion,” Venturi said.

  For the next several hours, we followed the Kargs. Another burnt-out planet burst apart, and more giant, snowflake-shaped vessels headed in the same direction like a horde of lemmings, only these were fantastically massive ships instead of rodents. And these lemmings didn’t head for a cliff to dive into the ocean and oblivion. The fleets headed for a portal that would give them life and endless combat in a new, fresh universe. Their numbers were staggering. I was witnessing thousands of ships, masses that should never exist.

  How many vessels would it take to conquer a galaxy, two galaxies or three, four or more? Well, I was witnessing the recruiting ground, or recruiting space-time continuum for such a campaign. Sure, it would take the Kargs a million years to get the job done, but they would be starting with our spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  “Admiral, you might need to jump to the head of the line,” I said.

  “I have reached a similar conclusion,” Venturi said.

  Seconds later, there came a bump, and then another and another as the dreadnought increased velocity.

  The gas molecules and dust made our shield red with energy. That was bad. If the dreadnought’s electromagnetic field overloaded…

  “I suggest you get your troopers ready,” Venturi said.

  “Do you see the portal?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But if this universe is shrunken to this tiny area, I doubt the portal will be far from here. Look at the masses of ships.”

  I observed the big screen, and there were tens of thousands of enemy starships in long lines, all heading inward toward the portal presumably. The inner misery threatened to return in my heart. I shook my head. I refused to give up. I never had yet. Why begin now here in this infernal pit of a universe?

  Yeah, it was time to get ready. Time to don a symbiotic suit, check my rifle and make sure I had a ton of grenades ready. Time to talk to my colonels and number off. Seeing these Karg ships, I imagined that the portal planet swarmed with vessels the way ants swarm an open jar of honey. The only good I could see from this would be that the new Karg ships would push the others away to make room for more, more, more. It also showed me there was only going to be one attack wave for us, the first one. That meant loading each transport and dropship with three times the regular numbers. Every inch of each aisle would be crammed with troopers. Even that probably wasn’t going to be enough.

  During the next few hours, I found out that I was wrong. The colonels soon informed me of the many suicides. By tripling the numbers in the drop-boats, I could now take every human left alive on the dreadnought.

  I worked hard, cajoling, pleading, shouting and slapping endless backs. Halfway through the proceeding, Venturi informed us he saw the portal.

  A ragged cheer went up as I oversaw troopers.

  “Let’s load up the boats,” I said. “Once we’re back into hyperspace, I don’t think we’re going to have much time but to race into combat.”

  Work helped keep me from despairing. The bio-suit also helped. Had Claath known about this universe and its effect on humans? Had his scientists done things to the symbiotic suits that allowed us this extra margin? Had his reason for coming to Earth been different from what he’d told us? Maybe the Lokhars had known more than they told us, too.