Stars Beyond

by S. K. Dunstall

  It was better than the alternative, that something was on the outside of the ship.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Roystan said. “But I remember it.” He shuddered and tried to laugh. “I don’t remember it being so bad.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  The howling increased.

  “Four times before.” Roystan let go of Josune’s hand to reach over and give Carlos’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “It gets worse before it gets better, but it does get better.”

  Four times!

  “You remembered?”

  Roystan looked at her. Nodded. They didn’t need to speak.

  A consortium of three companies, each supplying ten people, had followed Roy Goberling on his last trip. They’d had a ship called the Undertaker. The captain—who’d been somewhat deranged, by all accounts—had a macabre sense of humor. The weapons list for the Undertaker had included five plasma cannons, seventeen blasters, and enough ammunition to fill a cargo hold. No one had ever found the ship. Some people thought they’d found Goberling’s lode, killed Goberling, and then fought to death over the proceeds.

  “The Undertaker,” Josune said. “Is that how you knew what would happen to the Boost?”

  He nodded.

  For a young Roy Goberling, that had probably been the decider. The reason he’d chosen to forget it all. The first people he’d killed, or been responsible for the death of, anyway.

  “You must have been so lonely.”

  The expression on his face was so raw Josune had to look away. Here he was, remembering it all again now, without even a hundred years to dull the pain of it.

  “No wonder no one had ever found Goberling’s lode before. The Hassim would have hunted forever and never found it. How did you find it?”

  Who would think to jump into the middle of the most dangerous natural object in the galaxy, something that spanned twenty light-years across, just to find transurides?

  But then, it made sense in a weird kind of way.

  The metals were high in the periodic table. There were metals lower than them that could still only be made to exist for fractions of a second inside a laboratory. It had long been speculated that transurides had to be made under intense stress. How else would the atoms ever be pulled together in the higher formations that allowed them to become stable?

  The Vortex was the most dangerous known natural pressure cooker in the galaxy.

  “We are all so stupid,” Josune said.

  How did their ship survive pressures strong enough to smash atoms together or pull them apart? It didn’t. Which meant that eons in the past the Vortex must have been much stronger than it was now.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Roystan said, raising his voice above the increasing noise of the Vortex. “About a young explorer. Let’s call him Roy.”

  No prizes for guessing who Roy was.

  “This Roy was determined to find new worlds. And he was fascinated by the Vortex, had been ever since it had been discovered. For there were transurides around the Vortex, you see. Not in any great quantity, but more than in other places.”

  The external creaking and groaning didn’t seem anywhere near as bad, with Roystan’s voice holding back the cold of space.

  “Roy learned the hard way about forces in the Funnel. He sped up to get out and nearly wrecked his ship doing so. Then, to compound the problem, he nullspaced as soon as he exited, and learned the hard way that you don’t do that while your engine has any force at all.”

  Roystan smacked his closed right fist against his left palm. “Straight into the nearest gravitational force. Which, luckily for him, turned out to be an asteroid. He lost his engine.”

  “Literally lost it?” Carlos asked.

  “Not literally, no. But smashed it up so badly it wasn’t even worth the scrap that was falling off the back of his ship.”

  Josune glanced at the others, all sitting around, all of them close. At Carlos, curled into a ball; Jacques, staring at the wall as if it would rip away at any moment; Snow, flinching at every new sound; and Gramps, staring at the blank screen as if he could still see the Boost there.

  None of them seemed to realize what Roystan was telling them.

  “But young Roy didn’t despair,” Roystan said. “Not yet, anyway. Because he was like Josune. He liked to be prepared. He had a spare engine in the cargo hold. All he had to do was put it together. But then—”

  Roystan paused as a particularly loud squeal came from outside.

  “Sound doesn’t travel in space,” Snow said.

  Josune wasn’t sure they were still in space.

  “If you look at the controls,” Roystan said, “you’ll see nothing is out there.”

  “You call that nothing?”

  “I call it a force, or a wind, or a tunnel, or something, but it doesn’t seem to harm the ship. And it spits us out eventually, without harming us.”

  “That’s assuming we’re not providing opposing forces,” Josune said. Like an electromagnetic engine.

  “That’s what I think, yes,” Roystan said. “I think that it’s some sort of medium, which allows it to come through as sound waves when it hits our ship. I don’t know what it is. I only know it’s not dangerous to us, provided we don’t exert any force on it.”

  “Scientists are going to have a field day,” Snow muttered.

  That they were.

  “So back to the story,” Josune said.

  “Yes. Back to the story. Where was I?”

  “Engines died,” Carlos said. “You had spares.”

  “One spare, anyway. But while I . . . while Roy was congratulating himself on his forethought, the Vortex caught him. Dragged him in.”

  “Like we are now?”

  “Yes. Now, young Roy may have panicked a bit, even tried to restart his engines, but they were as dead as Earth-cats. Not even a sputter. As you can imagine, that saved his life, for anyone who’s caught in the Vortex gets ripped apart as soon as they try to fight the force.”

  Roystan attempted another smile, this one not so successful. “Young Roy didn’t appreciate, at the time, just how lucky he was. He spent a harrowing sixty hours convinced he was going deaf, or going mad, or he’d be pulled apart by the Vortex.”

  “Sixty hours,” Josune said. Less than one hour had passed.

  “Sixty hours.”

  Carlos moaned.

  The emergency battery should be good for a week. Suits for a week after that. They had enough suits to go around. Josune would check supplies later. After Roystan finished his story.

  “Until finally, Roy was so tired he went to sleep. He woke to silence. Nothing but the hum of circulating air.”

  “I meant to ask about that,” Josune said. “Isn’t the emergency system another force?”

  “I think it’s because the emergency system runs on a chemical battery,” Roystan said. “I’ve only ever tried the battery.” He shrugged. “If it works.”

  Which was why power was the first thing he’d turned off when they’d gotten caught by the Vortex. Josune shuddered. What if you couldn’t get out? What if you ran out of battery before you got anywhere?

  “After a bit, Roy suits up and goes out to look at the damage to his ship. It’s a mess. Unsalvageable. And there is nowhere on the ship he can attach his new engine without it pushing right through the bridge the first time he fires it. All that’s left between him and space is a thin metal wall and some insulation.”

  Josune shivered.

  “Oh, and the cargo truss underneath, which Roy had bought to carry back all the treasures he was going to find on the worlds he was sure he’d discover. Along with the nets to carry that cargo in.

  “His ship is losing power. Slowing down. It’s going to stop soon. There’s a big asteroid in front of it. It’s three kilometers long.”
/>
  Josune tensed. She knew all about that three-kilometer-long asteroid.

  “Roy uses the rockets on his suit to nudge his ship toward the asteroid.”

  “That’s impossible,” Jacques interjected. “A ship’s heavy. How can a man push it?”

  “Force, mass,” Carlos said. “You could do it, Jacques. The heaviest part of your ship is your engine.”

  “What about the cargo?”

  “He doesn’t have any cargo. And any action will cause a reaction. Give a good blast with the suit rockets. It doesn’t have to be much. It’s not as if you have gravity to fight against.”

  “It’s kind of like finessing the angle on an airlock with the smaller rockets,” Roystan said. “The ship was still moving, you see. It was more a matter of stopping it before it overshot the end of the asteroid. That was hairy, I tell you. And when it was done, the ship was three meters above the rock. I had to winch it down.”

  This was living history. The story Josune had dreamed about all her life. Being told to them by the man who had lived it.

  “But why?” Carlos asked. “Shouldn’t you have been trying to escape?”

  “I had no engine, Carlos, and nowhere to put my spare. Nothing but a broken shell, which at least was keeping me alive.”

  Roystan laughed suddenly. “The funny thing was, I wasn’t scared. Not that first time. Not once the noise stopped. I was too busy trying to stay alive. I’m in space, and I figure that if I can get my little ship started, I can still nullspace out and get rescued. The ship doesn’t care where the rockets are; all it cares is that it can use them, and nullspace will bend around whatever is moving at the speed.”

  Within reason. Nullspace had limits, but some of the big ore carriers were as long as ten kilometers.

  “What about the Vortex?” Josune asked.

  “Not there. You come out the other end into I don’t know where and space is as calm as anything.”

  “You can nullspace out. Can you nullspace back in again?”

  “I tried that. You have to go down the Funnel and let the Vortex take you.”

  Snow shuddered. “Sixty hours every time. You have to be joking.”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “How horrible.”

  It was horrible.

  “And that,” Roystan said, looking at Josune, “is the story of how young Roy jumped out into space near Kitimat with a three-kilometer chunk of rock. He wasn’t looking for transurides. He had no idea what he had.”

  Josune’s eyes misted over. She had to swallow before she could speak. “I think it’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Romantic,” Snow said. “How?”

  “Ingenuity. Inventiveness. Perseverance. Snow, this is about a man who didn’t give up, even when the odds were stacked against him.”

  “I suppose.” Snow thought about it a minute. “Like Nika doesn’t give up when a mod’s not working.”

  “Exactly like that.” Josune was proud of him, that young Roy she’d never known, who—stranded and alone—had worked out a solution and saved himself.

  “It’s not how most people imagine it,” Roystan said.

  Was he embarrassed? She couldn’t tell under the dimness of the emergency lights. He sounded it.

  “They want something amazing, swashbuckling. It’s just . . . ordinary.”

  “Ordinary for you, maybe,” Josune said. “To the rest of us it’s rather inspiring.”

  “But I didn’t know—”

  “What you had. That makes it even more amazing.”

  “People like you,” Roystan said. “You’ve been chasing a dream all your life. You have done so much more than me. Roy Goberling was a stupid kid who wrecked his ship, got lucky getting out of it, and then he spent the rest of his life running from that luck.”

  Carlos leaned over and awkwardly patted Roystan’s shoulder. “None of us are perfect.”

  “This is what happens when you fall in love,” Jacques said in an apparent aside to Snow that Josune thought he made deliberately loud enough for them all to hear. “You try to impress the other person. A hundred and twenty-five years old and he’s worried about something he did in his twenties.”

  “If he’s like this now,” Snow said, “imagine what Nika’s going to be like when she’s a hundred and twenty-five.”

  It made them all—except Gramps—laugh, even though it wasn’t in the least bit funny.

  Josune pushed her way over to sit on the arm of Roystan’s seat. “For that, Jacques, I’m going to cuddle, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Roystan was cool to her touch. “Snow?” His cool was their regular temperature.

  “Unless he’s dying, I can’t do anything for sixty hours.” He sounded so much like Nika it made her smile.

  Josune draped an arm across Roystan’s shoulder, leaned into him. “I was young and foolish once, too, Roystan. Chasing a dream that was mostly in my mind. Hounding a man and I didn’t even know it. But do you know what? Sometimes reality is better than the dream.”

  32

  NIKA RIK TERRI

  At first the damage to the shuttle seemed—relatively—minor.

  “We’ve lost communication and sight,” Laughton said. “But autopilot seems fine.” He switched auto back on. “We’re still moving, anyway.”

  “Deaf and blind,” Nika murmured.

  Laughton flinched.

  “Sorry,” although she wasn’t sure what she was apologizing about.

  He shrugged. “Sensitive subject. Going blind. My biggest worry when I came out of that machine of yours, and the one on the Boost, was that you’d have tried to fix my eyes.”

  “Surely you know that’s impossible.” She’d seen the mods, seen the way the electronics had been connected. “You don’t have human eyes, Agent Laughton. Why do you think I agreed to come?”

  “Call me Alistair.”

  “Likewise, Nika.” Her reply was automatic. “You do know you have to be careful which modders you go to.” What if he went to someone who didn’t understand his eyes? Or even to a hospital?

  Laughton—Alistair—nodded. “I know.”

  Good.

  Nika busied herself inspecting the contents of the shuttle. “There are space suits,” she said. “Can we use them to communicate?”

  “Maybe.” Laughton—Alistair, she’d have to think of him as Alistair—came over to look.

  They pulled one of the suits out.

  Suits had a range. Nika remembered Roystan saying that, after Josune had been lost in space when they had escaped from Atalante. She couldn’t remember how far the range was, but in space it was tiny.

  They both suited up so they could use the suit communicators.

  Nika tried to contact Another Road.

  She’d known how unlikely it was to get an answer, but she had to swallow hard when she couldn’t.

  “Nothing from Zell either.” Alistair sounded as depressed as she felt.

  “What about the other shuttles? There were some out there.”

  They found six lifepods nearby, but the occupants weren’t answering. Nika remembered Josune saying some lifepods put you into suspended animation. Maybe the occupants of these were unconscious.

  Or maybe no one was talking to them.

  “I hope they all brought food,” Alistair said. “There isn’t much on Zell.”

  One of the lifepod signals dropped out.

  Then two more.

  “I think we’re off course.” Nika didn’t want to think of the other option. Surely Norris wouldn’t destroy potential mercenaries, especially if he didn’t have to pay a fee for them. “One of us needs to go outside this shuttle and see what’s happening.”

  She’d been in space twice. Both times attached by rope to Josune, who’d given some basic instructions on what to d
o if you found yourself out there. Not panic, breathe evenly, and use the suit link to call.

  None of which looked to be of much use right now.

  “How will that help?”

  She had no idea, but it was better than sitting in the dark, knowing you were off course.

  She checked her suit to be sure it was airtight and found two ropes with latch hooks on either end.

  It had been a lot simpler when Josune was there to help.

  “Talk to me while I’m outside. It can be scary out there.”

  “I presume you know what you’re doing.”

  She didn’t, but she didn’t think he knew any better than she.

  “Something other than that, please.” She closed the inner airlock door. “Can you still hear me?”

  “Yes.” Suit sound was clear. But then, it would be, wouldn’t it? This was Another Road’s shuttle. Josune and Carlos maintained it. She cycled the air out of the airlock. Opened the outer door. “Talk to me.”

  She didn’t want to step out. Not into that vast blackness of space. Although, it wasn’t exactly black. Half the sky was a dirty, pulsing gray. The rest—there was light. A dim red star, nothing else. She hoped the suit was strong enough to cut the radiation she’d be exposed to.

  Weren’t they supposed to be heading for a planet? Shouldn’t she see it if they were only an hour away?

  “Talking,” Alistair said. “What do you want me to talk about?”

  Anything. Didn’t he understand she needed conversation, something to concentrate on rather than what she was doing? “Tell me how you met the Ort. Zell. How you see. Anything.” She moved cautiously away from the airlock.

  “The Ort. They’re like cylinders with four legs and four arms. They’re almost as tall as I am, and they don’t turn, they just change direction.”

  That would be an interesting mod. How would you manage the joints?

  Nika turned around again. There had to be a world out here somewhere. The only explanation was that the shuttle was blocking it.

  Josune had shown her the holding loops built into the outside of the ship, and the markers on the ship itself that showed where each loophold was in relation to the ship. It was a way, Josune had said, to move around the ship without using power. “Always, always, always, be sure one latch is securely attached to the ship loopholds, the other attached to you. You can drag yourself around the ship by attaching and releasing the ropes. Always hook and unhook the right-hand side so you never accidentally break the loop.”