The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois

Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?
    But—
    â€œIt’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.
    Two minutes.
    â€œMiscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”
    â€œWe did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.
    â€œ Still in front of us! Look at the sun !”
    â€œLook at the signal ,” I tell him.
    Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followedover 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.
    Â 
    â€œMaybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œMaybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”
    Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.
    I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart . To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…
    I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.
    â€œMaybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”
    â€œMaybe didn’t know, ” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”
    Why would you think that? I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.
    My son is trying to comfort me.
    I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.
    But I’m better now.
    It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on