It turns out that the Captain’s name is The Most Illustrious Supernova of the Universe, the Legendary Navigator of the Space-ways, the Right Honorable Quinnar Gentry. He’s willing to go by “Quinn” for short, for such an auspicious occasion.
The team are now piled into the most ostentatious of the habitats, Quinn’s apparent throne room-slash-command headquarters. They listen to Adam and Quinn trade information, all while surrounded by other members of the Dark Drifters.
Adam has related a highly edited version of the team’s story. And as he finishes, he realizes what it’s like to really deal with someone who has a functioning Shard.
“You’ve told me some lies and hidden some truths,” Quinn says firmly. “I’m inclined to have my people throw you in the brig for it. But the truths you told are compelling enough.”
He gestures with his starry sword in the direction of the Love Bug, parked outside. “The presence of that ship, for example. That’s useful to us. We want revenge on those aliens, the ones you call ‘Blockheads’. But this is important enough to take to the masters at the Temple.”
Adam smiles. This sounds promising.
Quinn goes on, thoughtfully. “Your other matter, this ‘broken Shard’, is also a matter for the Temple. None of us understand the mechanisms of the Shards very well. Oh, we’ve mastered a few tricks. Clearly you’ve done the same - I can see your proficiency. But to fix one that is broken? That is beyond us - and perhaps we’ll learn something if we accompany you to see it through, eh?”
Adam nods. This, while a bit concerning, seems fair.
“I don’t see any ships here,” he comments aloud. “But we can take you in the Love Bug. At least a few–”
Quinn laughs, and other drifters laugh with him. “Ship? No, it’s safer here. Just in case the Temple’s people feel like taking it for themselves. I’d rather have it to study. We’ll take the Negamatrix.”
“Oh, you do have a ship?” Adam asks. He doesn’t understand the term that was used, or the strange emotional impressions he gets hearing the term.
Quinn looks baffled. “Your recruiters… the people who endowed you with whatever shard you have… didn’t teach you about the Negamatrix?”
“They did not,” Adam says truthfully.
“Tell you what,” Quinn smiles. “We’ll bargain. We’ll share your ship - its our biggest lead on these Blockheads - and in return, we’ll take you to the Temple. We’ll even stand up for you, instead of letting you plead your own case. If I can hear your lies, the masters there certainly will. And along the way, I teach you how to enter the Negamatrix.”
Quinn, Princess Peri, and Adam float in space, away from the others.
“It’s like this. If you’ve teleported, you know how those emotional links work. But there’s a deeper layer. It’s woven out of negative emotions. Here, take this…”
Adam feels Quinn offering Jordan and himself some kind of psychic machine. It’s similar in concept to what Adam has been building on his journey, but far more complicated.
“Your pass-keys,” Quinn explains. “Now, when you’re about to teleport, instead of going forward, you go down.”
He demonstrates, and disappears entirely.
Adam looks at his sister. Although both of them are transformed to look like strong, powerful warriors, he sees her through the eyes of a protective older brother as a little girl, out here and confused and afraid.
He holds out a hand. “I’m with ya,” he says, smiling.
She takes his hand, and smiles brightly back.
Together, they leap into the nothingness of the emotional network of the universe, and direct themselves downward, to where they feel Quinn is waiting.
The dark universe of the Negamatrix is a flat plane. Around them, Adam can perceive connections leading everywhere, crisscrossing each other. He can feel the cold, clinical evil of the Blockheads’ ship. He can feel the uncaring chaos of the Dark Drifters’ habitat. And he feels threads of anger, despair, fear, and other things leading away from them.
Quinn is here, floating patiently. Adam can feel the wrongs this super-pirate of space has committed, and see the threads those acts have left behind that still tie him to his victims, his former superiors, his rivals.
This is not a healthy place to be. But it is a new discovery, and Adam has to grapple with it.
“Your friends without Shards can stay here,” Quinn offers. “I’ll bring a few of my folk and we’ll head to the temple.”
Adam thinks about asking William to come along. But there’s every good reason for him to stay. If the masters of the Temple are anything like Concordance Coordinators, they’ll recognize Excalibur’s true nature immediately. And it would be good for both him and Keri to look after Jaycee, Space Bug, and the ship.
“Let me tell my friends, and then we’ll be ready,” he says.
Travel through the Negamatrix is much like the teleportation Adam is familiar with. But he’s learning to think of that process in an entirely new way.
Here, the emotional links aren’t ephemeral bridges of emotion, but more like roots of primal psychic energy that nourish - or strangle - nearby life. Here, hate and fear build and fester, the exact way they do in the mundane world.
Is the world bad because of this place, Adam wonders, or is this place so bad because of how it is in the world?
He asks Quinn, as they travel from node to node.
“Why is the universe at war, anyway? Why is everything so bad everywhere?”
Quinn laughs. “Your recruiters really didn’t teach you anything, did they.”
“No, they didn’t.” Adam frowns, thinking back to his interactions with the Concordance, and how getting them to share wisdom or acknowledge inconvenient facts is like pulling teeth.
The Dark Drifters’ captain is all too happy to answer in their place. “Well. Space is big, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s easy to get on a spaceship. Or take a teleporter. Or whatever. Right?”
“Yeah?”
Quinn smirks. “So when you don’t like how things are going, and you aren’t strong enough to change it, what do you do? You just leave.”
The simplicity of this answer feels weird to Adam. But Quinn is still talking.
“When the strong and the weak come into conflict, it’s the weak that usually loses. But what does losing mean, eh? There’s capitulation - you give up, join the victor’s cause, and so on. There’s destruction. But if you’re losing, the safest move is to go elsewhere. Regroup, find allies, whatever is your excuse of the moment. But you run. And if there’s people where you run to, maybe you push them out, because you’re stronger.”
“Meanwhile, if anyone weaker than you gets pushed out of where you are, you can just keep on making things more and more how you like them. And your tastes get more and more specialized, because you’re used to getting your way, so you become more self-indulgent. Pretty soon you’re pushing away old allies - or making them conform - over little differences. So you’ve got these pockets of society where things are just sharpening themselves into ever finer points, where the strongest people dictate more and more narrow ways of living. Because everyone who doesn’t like it can just leave.”
Adam struggles to process this. “But don’t people… have a responsibility to stand up to the tyrants and stuff?”
Quinn laughs again. “Responsibility? From where?”
Adam has to think about that. “You know. Religion, or freedom, or ideals, or whatever. Isn’t there stuff to believe in where you come from?”
The Dark Drifter shakes his head. “The people I heard teaching those things left too, when it was their time. Or they’d squabble with each other and split into their own factions. The only time you have to take a stand is when you’re backed into a corner. And it’s my job as leader of the Drifters to make sure we never get trapped like that.”
The trio emerge among standing stones, half-fallen, half-crumbled, on a barren and desolate world. A dim red sun can be seen through a hazy atmosphere, and constant lightning discharges provide most of the illumination.
The site looks to Adam like a ritual spot of some kind, but he has no idea who might have built it, or what it’s for. The emotions of the place bleed together into a melange, but don’t speak any truth to him.
“The temple isn’t far,” Quinn explains. “We’ll take the godstones the rest of the way. Just step onto one, then look down and pick the one to step onto next. If you get dizzy, just step back.”
The first ‘godstone’ is near the ritual site. It’s simply a stone disc, embedded firmly in the dessicated soil of this world, and it has curious spirals and characters on it. Nevertheless, Adam can feel an overwhelming power inside of it, kept in check by some kind of special psychic machinery. It is perhaps the oldest thing he has ever experienced.
“What are these?” Adam whispers.
“There’s rumors,” Quinn says with a smile. “The first source of the Shards. A mechanism for apotheosis. Nobody’s sure. They’re not meant for transportation - we just use 'em for that.”
And so saying, he steps onto one. For just a moment, Adam gets the impression that Quinn has grown, big enough to blot out the sky. But then he’s gone.
A quick check of the emotional linkages tells Adam the Dark Drifter is now far, far away. A teleporter?
Adam smiles reassuringly at his sister, who is frowning in restrained fear. “I’ll go first,” he says. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“Okay, Adam,” she says.
He steps onto the disc.
The planet recedes beneath him immediately. Not recedes - shrinks. He is the one growing, at incredible speed. As he grows, he becomes intangible, translucent, even invisible, as the fabric of his being is spread across a much larger zone of space.
He sees other godstones, on other planets, in other solar systems. He is growing - still growing. Soon he’ll light years across.
He feels the one where Quinn is waiting. He moves a foot at speeds many times of light. His big toe, now big enough to engulf stars, touches the destination godstone. And Adam steps out, normal sized. to find himself on a jungle planet.
For a moment, the universe was his. If he’d let the journey continue just a few seconds longer, he could have held the galaxy in his hand.
He feels a sudden dizziness, and falls to his knees.
Quinn is there, leaning over him, a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Hey now. It’s always like that the first time.”
He’s still recovering a minute later, when he sees Jordan stumble out of the transition, and fall flat on her face.
Adam picks himself up and stumbles over to Jordan. She’s laying in the dust, crying. But as he surveys her emotions, he can feel why. She isn’t hurt or terrified. She’s still fearful. But mostly, she’s simply overwhelmed.
He pulls her into a careful hug and soothingly pats her head. “It’s okay. You made it through. You did good.”
Quinn watches, and Adam can feel the mixture of emotions from the man. There’s derision, for showing such obvious emotional weakness. There’s envy, that Adam guesses might be from the times he received similar comfort. But mostly there’s regret, for not offering it more, for not getting it more.
The jungle world has a godstone that leads to a lava world. The last transition lands the trio inside an alcove, adjacent to stone that must have been carved in antiquity.
There are beings here. They wear body-covering garments, each unique because each body is unique. Some of them seem like centaurs, or scorpions, or snakes. Others seem entirely unlike anything Adam has seen.
One of the robed beings spots the newcomers in their alcove, and approaches. “Your name and business,” it hisses, and like Quinn, Adam can hear and understand because it possesses a Shard.
“The Most Illustrious Supernova of the Universe, the Legendary Navigator of the Space-ways, the Right Honorable Quinnar Gentry,” Quinn announces proudly.
“I’m sure,” says the robed acolyte in a bored tone.
“We seek a recruiter,” Quinn explains.
This is better received. “Enora Dralis is here,” the acolyte says after a moment’s thought. “Come. Wait. You will be attended to.”
The trio are escorted to a room, carved out of the rock like so much else here. The furnishings are likewise shaped out of rock, and padded with some kind of gel that’s contained in flexible plastic-like bags. It’s like sitting on a waterbed, Adam thinks.
A robed snake-like woman, her eyes blindfolded and hands bound in what look like high-tech handcuffs, slithers in.
“I am Enora Dralis. Quinnar Gentry, I remember you. Your sword is serving you well?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Quinn effuses. “We’ve put the power to rewarding uses.”
“Excellent. And your guests?”
Adam looks to Quinn, curious how the Dark Drifter intends to fulfill his end of the bargain.
“A pair from another part of the universe. They came to us. You remember we said that there were aliens hunting us? And that some of those meant to receive the power never got it? The same thing happened to them. And one of them has a Shard which isn’t responding. I promised I’d try and help them.”
Enora Dralis hisses in thought. Adam watches her tongue flicker in and out of her mouth at high speed, snake-like.
“You’ve brought a Concordance Agent here, Quinnar Gentry,” she says, in the most relaxed and conversational tone that Adam can imagine.
“He- he’s what?” Quinn exclaims, and spins.
Before the captain can draw his sword, Adam throws out his hands. Not to shield himself - “Wait,” he exclaims.
Enora Dralis tilts her head curiously. Quinn pauses, looking angry and confused.
Adam glances back at his sister, the would-be princess who trusts him to do the right thing. He thinks about Somber, who isn’t on anyone’s side but their own, yet claims to be a Concordance Agent “sometimes”. He thinks about William Eddison, who wields a super-sword that put the Coordinators to shame despite not knowing anything about the organization.
He opens himself up to full broadcast, letting Quinn and this recruiter receive honestly and completely what he wants to say.
“The Truth is, I’m not here for the Concordance. They’ve done some bad things. I’m here for myself, and my sister. I’m not here to start a fight or steal your secrets or anything. I fought one of your agents on Earth, but to be fair she attacked us first.”
He looks again at Quinn, and thinks about what he’d said about how easy it is to run away, and how easily war breaks out because of that. And, unbidden, he thinks about a time he rewrote his family to have a little peace, and how that went.
He looks back at Enora Dralis.
“I’m here to understand. And I’m here to help the people I care about. I’m here because running away from my responsibilities always hurts people in the long run. I don’t want people hurt. So I’m doing something about it. So please, just please, help me make things a little better.”