Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Laughingly the Minion ejected him and hovered jeering. His ability to alter him in size gave Aton a real appreciation of the greater power of his enemy. He began to despair.

‘Hee hee hee! First I will reform the world, and then I will take you down again to Hulmu, poor little captain!’

Tenaciously Aton circled, and then moved in again.

Through his brain was running a prayer, one he had known since he was a child. Something within him was urging him to say this prayer aloud, and when he came near the Minion again, he sent the vibrations of the words spearing into the strat.

‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’

That was all, but surprisingly the Minion recoiled as if in horror. Aton pursued him, speaking the prayer over and over again.

‘Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time. Holy Father, bringer of comfort, deliver us from the enemy of time.’

The Minion shrieked with pain. He flashed out and writhed in a million illusory shapes, running the full gamut of his evil energies in an uncontrolled spasm. The prayer seemed to reduce him to a condition akin to the effect of nerve gas on a normal nervous system. Aton dived in and seized the time-distorter. The Minion struggled briefly to retrieve it, then fell back.

Then the Minion suddenly fell headlong into the gulf at extraordinary speed. ‘Hulmu! I have failed you again! Ohhhhhh …’

And Aton had carried out the orders of the Imperator.

The God’s Imposer was junked.

The huge ship had run head-on into countless enemy vessels. Smaller craft it had swatted like flies. But finally the total of those collisions had proved crippling. The twisted and shattered hulls of upwards of a dozen Hegemonic vessels were embedded in the God’s Imposer, and the giant drive units now were silent.

‘The ortho field won’t last long, sir!’ gasped an ensign. ‘It’s down in parts of the ship already.’

‘Then kill yourself, you little fool, like the others are doing,’ growled Commander Haight. ‘Me, I’m not hanging around like a trapped rat.’

And in fact the bridge was littered with suicides, including Prince Philipium. No one had bothered to use the ship’s many life rafts or strat suits. But Commander Haight was not on the bridge. He was down in the guts of the ship, just within its outer wall. And the ensign was stationed at one of the ports that, had the armada succeeded, would have been pouring troops on to the ground.

‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to experience,’ Haight grated out, ‘and now I’m going to. Open the port, Ensign.’

‘But, sir!’

‘You heard me, you young squirt. It’s an order. Get that port open!’

Trembling, the ensign turned his back to the port and operated a series of switches. The port whined slowly open, dilating iris-fashion. The safety cover went up.

Pressing his forearm against his eyes so that he would not be struck unconscious and fall to the deck, Commander Haight flung himself at a run into the strat.

‘To understand what has happened,’ said the Imperator to Aton, Inpriss Sorce, and the assembled archivists, ‘it is necessary to understand the nature of time and the origin of Church and empire.

‘Orthogonal time is reality. But reality cannot continue to subsist by itself. Like every structure in the universe it requires a certain kind of feedback on itself to remain steady. It requires something against which to rest itself, to react upon, otherwise, if it simply existed in a void, it would soon collapse into nothing.

‘This something is the temporal substratum. The strat is, if you like, aberrated reality; it provides the feedback that keeps real time stable, or relatively so. As such, it is potential, not actual, and less than real.

‘The deeper one goes, the less like reality the strat is. In the uttermost depths are forms of quasi-existence inconceivable for us! And they are only there at all because somewhere – in orthogonal time – is the authentic existence from which they are degraded.

‘The quasi-beings in these depths have a terrible hunger for authentic existence. But they are unable to emerge into it because they are too far removed from its nature. Some of them, however, are immensely powerful in their own realm; such a one is Hulmu.

‘He is the enemy of mankind.’

‘I had thought Hulmu was just a superstition on the part of the Traumatic sect,’ Mayar said hesitantly. ‘I hadn’t even believed the Church when it identified him with the Evil One.’

‘He is genuine and we have been fighting him for countless aeons. The empire is much older, in terms of eternity, than you think.’

The Imperator hummed meditatively. ‘Until the discovery of time-travel the existential world was safe from such monsters. There was no possibility of their touching orthogonal time. Then, in some unique accident of history, a man called Dwight Rilke hit on a flaw in the structure of the world. He discovered that there was a way whereby matter could be moved through time.