The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 39 The Island
to.
"Still in front of us! Look at the sun!"
"Look at the signal," I tell him.
Because it's nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we've
followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It's almost—
random, somehow. It's spur-of-the-moment, it's panicky. It's the
sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with
mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this
pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be
saying.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even
slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the
center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her
cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming
to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms
into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every
living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.
The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a
thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will
subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe,
we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent
monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.
I wonder if you'll notice the corpse we left behind.
"Maybe we're missing something," Dix says.
"We miss almost everything," I tell him.
DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our
rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole's online,
blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its
great metal mouth. We'll keep looking over our shoulders right up
until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it'll do any
good.
So far, though, nothing's come out.
"Maybe our numbers were wrong," he says. "Maybe we made a
*