Dyson's Drop by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins [Collins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429
ISBN: 9781921665660
Publisher: Ford Street Publishing
Published: 2012-10-02T07:00:00+00:00

HE needed the lost coordinates, needed them like a drug. The thought of them burned in his brain, day and night. None of the others understood, or had ever understood. The empire was an old dream to them, a relic that existed in the past, a fairytale of heroic deeds from an age long gone and all but forgotten.

But they were fools.

Company and Clan alike, they saw only profit and mistook control of the galaxy for a new entrepreneurial enterprise. It was as if the great web of star systems, the trillions and trillions of souls who inhabited them, and the sheer weight of military, economic and political infrastructure that they represented, were just one big business opportunity.

How short-sighted of them. How blind.

Black was perhaps the only one, not counting the Envoy (whose visions still remained opaque to Black), who saw clearly. Who saw precisely.

The empire wasn’t a thing, wasn’t even a symbol. It was a machine.

A vast system-spanning machine that would weld millions of worlds, and quadrillions of beings, into its spider-like web to produce the one true coin of value: raw omnipotent power.

And in the process, it would turn Black into a god.

The call Black had been waiting for came late one night as he stood on a Quesadan batdement that overlooked the capital city. Nearly a kilometre above the ground, Black could survey the entire core of the city, including the spectacular lava pits that erupted regularly and which pinpointed the headquarters of that now sidelined organisation, the Regis Imperium Mentatis.

A shadow moved. Black had his blaster out and aimed in a nanosecond.

‘You are fast. For a human.’

Black put the weapon away. ‘Coming from you, Envoy, that is indeed a compliment.’

The Envoy bowed his head slighdy.

‘You have news?’ Black could not keep the hunger from his voice.

‘This place is secured?’

Black nodded impatiendy. ‘No one can hear us.’ The Envoy emerged fully from the shadows, his hood thrown back, revealing his alien face. As unreadable now as when Black had first met him.

‘Kanto Kantoris.’

Black groped out till he found the cold stone of the battlement, and steadied himself At last. He was on his way again. He couldfiel his destiny beckoning. Taste it.

‘You ‘re sure?’

‘We can read the decoded coordinates. They contain internal validations. There is no doubt.’

‘How did Enigma crack it?’

‘Ingenious,’ said the Envoy, as if speaking to himself ‘They used quantum time entanglement. Paradoxical, but it appears to have worked.’

Black closed his eyes. Of course. In another universe somewhere, the Enigma team had cracked the code the hard way. That information had then been retrieved by this Enigma team, creating - spawning - a new universe entirely.

Did that mean there was a universe in which Black did not succeed?

Well, who cared? He was stuck with this one. And it was stuck with him.

‘Good work,’ he said. ‘Make sure Mika, Karl - andjeera- are rewarded.’

‘You do not intend to kill them?’

‘No. I gave them my word.’

‘Interesting.’

‘That I keep my word?’

‘No, that you gave it in the first place.

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