Bender of Worlds

by Isaac Hooke

  “Maybe the shipyard’s AI detected Jed’s hack last night?” Tane said. “And reported it to the TSN?”

  “It’s possible,” Gia agreed. “But if the AI had reported it, the TSN would have arrived in force. As in shortly after you entered the hangar. So no, I think the TSN is just following protocol.”

  “They’re sticklers in that way,” Sinive said.

  “So what do we do?” Tane asked. “Throw on our blurring caps and let them search the ship?”

  “Your ID won’t stand up to closer scrutiny,” Jed answered. “Plus, how do you plan to explain the dweller hiding in our cargo hold? We can’t let the TSN board.”

  “What do you suggest we do, then?” Gia asked.

  “Why not do what we did when we first took Tane away from his homeworld?” Sinive said. She glanced at him. “You won’t remember this, since you slept through it apparently, but—”

  “That’s because Lyra put me to sleep against my will,” Tane said. The Stamina Transfer work could do that at the higher levels.

  “Anyway, so we launch,” Sinive said. “Fly over the city, and stay low. Avoid any armed drones the TSN or police send our way. We wait until we’re well away from the city before heading into orbit. Say a hundred kilometers. Then when we reach jump altitude, we jump.”

  “Good idea, but it won’t work,” Jed said. “You’re forgetting that they have not only defense platforms in orbit, but ships as well. They’ll have all their weapons pointed down at us.”

  “They won’t dare fire,” Sinive said. “They want Tane alive.”

  “I know that,” Jed said. “But you’re forgetting, these TSN ships are Disruptor capable. They’ll end our jump before we can complete it.”

  “So it’s a bit of a puzzle we have, isn’t it…” Gia said.

  “What if we could fly to the far side of the planet before we jumped?” Tane asked. “Well away from the orbiting ships.”

  “How?” Sinive said. “They’ll just pursue.”

  “We’d have to travel counter to their orbital direction,” Tane said. “Forcing them to decelerate. That’ll cause them to fall, so they’ll have to compensate for force changes occurring in essentially two vectors. Meanwhile, we’ll be heading in the opposite direction, maximum speed, maintaining a height just within jump altitude until they drop from view behind the planet’s horizon. Then we jump.”

  Gia nodded, seeming to regard him in a new, slightly more respectful light. “I was already planning something similar. But that’s because I fly starships for a living. But you? You have no starship experience. How did you come up with that?”

  “He’s an engineer,” Sinive explained.

  “Well, either way, it just might work,” Gia continued. “My ship is way smaller than a battle cruiser. They’ll have to expend a lot more energy to reverse course and maintain their existing altitude, especially this close to a gravity well. We’ll need to determine their orbital positions, of course. I’m assuming they’re in geosynchronous orbit. They’d have to be, if they wanted to beam LIDAR into the city all night to search for curfew breakers. Muse, can you feed me the moon’s rotation, and overlay it with my tactical map.”

  “Done,” Muse said.

  “All right,” Gia said. “Now I need to look at the orbital space lanes, and find out where those ships are. And confirm that they have all of them concentrated on this hemisphere, like we expect. I’m checking the space traffic control data as we speak.” She paused. “It looks the TSN has vessels in geosynchronous orbit above three cities: this one, Durahepte, and Hargon. We’re in luck. The latter two will be behind us during our flight as well.”

  “The shipyard AI informs me that TSN troops are approaching the hangar bay to proceed with the inspection,” Muse announced.

  “Buckle yourselves in,” Gia said. “This ride is about to get a little rough.”

  “Why would the passengers need to buckle up?” the Mosaic’s AI said. “I am equipped with inertial dampeners.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” Gia said.

  “Can I get access to the external cameras?” Tane said.

  “I’ll give you the nose,” Gia said.

  “I’ve got this,” Jed said. “He’s not allowed to connect to your ship’s mixnet, like Sinive.”

  “All right,” Gia said.

  Tane received a sharing request from Jed and accepted. The nose cam video feed appeared on his HUD. He saw the currently sealed hangar bay doors residing directly in front of him. Tane shrank the feed down and moved it to the upper right quadrant of his vision.

  “Muse, charge and aim our plasma thrower at the hangar bay doors.” Gia shifted in her angled seat. She glanced at Tane. “It looks like I’m going to lose my license for you after all… you owe me for this, World Bender.”

  “I owe a lot of people,” Tane said.

  “Plasma thrower is aimed at hangar bay doors,” Muse intoned. “And fully charged.”

  “Fire,” Gia said.

  A white flash completely occluded the video feed in Tane’s upper right, and when it faded, he saw that a large hole had been drilled into the bay doors, with the surrounding edges white hot.

  A robotic voice came over the cockpit intercom. “Warning, Scud-class vessel Mosaic, you are in violation of protocol—”

  “Shut that off!” Gia said. “And take us out!”

  The deck shook, and a soft hum filled the air as the engines powered up. On the video feed, the deck fell away as the breached doors approached.

  The Mosaic accelerated suddenly and smashed through the hole, tearing away the metal on either side as it emerged above the city.

  Gia was doing the flying, not Muse. Her interface was virtual—it was as if she manipulated an invisible joystick and thrust control in front of her while she lay in the jump chamber.

  On the video feed, the tall silos of the buildings moved past in a blur below. Gia kept close to those buildings, and she weaved in and out of the sky lanes ordinarily reserved for the city’s flyers and delivery drones.

  “Energy shields up!” Gia said.

  “Shield are up,” Muse replied. “Police drones and shuttles are incoming.”

  “Can’t you go any faster?” Tane asked.

  “Not this low!” Gia replied. “Too many other ships and buildings to avoid!”

  “Then take us higher?” Tane suggested.

  “And put us in the line of fire of their surface-to-air defenses?” Gia said. “No thanks. The TSN won’t fire on us, you say. But how sure are you that the city’s security forces won’t?”

  “Energy shields are taking laser fire from the police drones,” Muse said. “Shield levels currently at eighty percent.”

  “See what I mean?” Gia swooped hard to the right, narrowly avoiding a silo-shaped skyscraper. “Open fire with our dragons, Muse. Take down some of those drones.”

  It took about three tense minutes for Gia to leave the city behind. By then the Mosaic’s shield strength was down to ten percent, but since she was clear of the buildings Gia was able to accelerate to full speed, and quickly outpaced the less capable pursuers.

  Gia stayed low, keeping just above the tops of the jungle trees that canopied the surface. It looked like a veritable green ocean down there.

  Tane remembered a similar mad dash across this colonized moon, undertaken just below the canopy only a day previous.

  Thinking about that earlier flight gave him an idea...

  22

  How easy would it be to fly the Mosaic underneath the canopy?” Tane asked.

  “Difficult,” Gia said. “A Scow isn’t a shuttle.”

  “But the option is there, correct?” Tane said.

  “If we have no other choice, I’ll do it of course,” Gia said. “But so far, the TSN has kept quiet in orbit. I haven’t heard a peep out of them except for the usual stand down transmissions. If they really wanted to, they could have opened fire already, but they haven’t.”

  “They won’t risk it,�
�� Jed said. “Not if they have even a suspicion he’s aboard.”

  “Muse, what’s the status of the orbital vessels?” Gia asked.

  “Orbital vessels are decelerating to match our trajectory,” Muse replied. “The fastest will reverse course in approximately three minutes.”

  “And once they do, they’ll have to accelerate back up to speed to catch us,” Sinive said. “We’ll be long gone by then.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Gia said. “It’s going to be close.”

  The tense minutes ticked passed.

  “Okay, we’re five hundred kilometers away from the city,” Gia said. “And the TSN cruisers in orbit still haven’t fired. Most of them have reversed course by now, though, and they’re beginning to accelerate toward us. It’s time to pull up and make a run for it. Muse, emergency speed, please.”

  The deck shook gently.

  “Emergency speed engaged,” the Mosaic’s AI said. A moment later, Muse added: “We’re taking laser fire.”

  “They’ve realized they won’t be able to catch us in time…” Sinive said.

  “Come on,” Gia said. “Just a little longer.” She was moving one of her hands left and right at random intervals in what Tane thought were evasive maneuvers.

  Tane glanced at Jed. “I thought you said they wouldn’t risk firing?”

  “They’re willing to risk knocking out one of our engines, evidently,” Jed said.

  “Energy shields have failed,” Muse said.

  “Come on…” Gia said.

  The deck shook harder than before.

  “We just took a shot to the left engine,” Muse said.

  “Engine status?” Gia asked.

  “Still operational,” the AI replied.

  “They’re trying not to hit us too hard,” Sinive commented.

  “Their next shot won’t be so light, I suspect,” Jed said.

  “We’ve dipped below the horizon,” Muse announced.

  “Jump!” Gia rested a palm against the silvery bulkhead beside her.

  The jump chamber lit up: the entire bulkhead was indeed Chrysalium, and was likely connected to the outer hull. To the naked eye it appeared she simply touched that glowing surface, but Tane knew a tornado of stellar wind was erupting from her core at that very moment, visible only to Gia. A terrible, frigid wind that threatened to rip her body apart and atomize her bones.

  Tane felt it then, the nausea that came whenever he was in the presence of an Essenceworker who manipulated that much of the stellar wind. The deck vibrated, and a rising hum filled the air.

  Gia’s gaze was directed toward the top of the alcove, where she was likely steering the howling Essence. Some sort of focusing array would accept the stellar wind there, and the AI would take over and create the actual Branchwork for the ship-sized distortion tunnel.

  The light from the jump chamber abruptly faded, as did the hum, vibrations, and nausea. Gia, still lying down in her seat, lolled her head to the side to look at Tane.

  “Welcome to Geneva Prime,” she said weakly. “Muse, take us to the rift. Maximum speed.”

  “Proceeding toward the rift,” Muse echoed.

  “How far away are we?” Jed asked. “Distance, and ETA.”

  “Eighty million kilometers,” the Mosaic’s AI replied. “We will arrive in approximately one hour.”

  “Distance to the closest TSN base from our current position?”

  “The closest TSN base is located on Geneva II, Torpentus,” Muse said. “Four hundred and fifty million kilometers to starboard, ten degrees inclination. There are four TSN cruisers in the system: two located in orbit above Torpentus, the third on the opposite side of the system’s ecliptic plane at a distance of three billion kilometers, and the fourth positioned in front of the rift, seventy million kilometers ahead of us.”

  “Guarding it, just like we suspected,” Tane said.

  “According to the star charts, the rift is five hundred thousand kilometers long,” Jed said. “Gia, have your AI alter course so that we’re heading toward the extreme far right of that rift.”

  “Do it, Muse,” Gia said.

  “Trajectory altered,” Muse intoned.

  Jed glanced askance at Tane. “Our success depends entirely on where the remaining TSN jump in. More of that luck you hate to rely on.”

  There were only two systems with rifts within jump range of the system they just left: Povern, and Geneva Prime. It was expected that the TSN would jump to both systems fairly quickly to look for them, and once they arrived they would alert the existing TSN vessels in the system.

  “If it’s of any consolation, I dislike relying on luck, too,” Jed continued. “But in this case, the odds are in our favor. Space is a very big place, and the distance between planets is immense.”

  Because of the nature of interstellar distortion tunnels, with gravity wells exerting such influence on the endpoints, it was difficult to choose a precise destination in the target system. Even with the advanced jump technology available to the TSN, their interstellar jumps still opened into mostly random locations in the destination systems, with the specialists using the vibrations they felt along the partially formed tunnels to guide the endpoints between gravity wells. A skilled specialist could probably use those vibrations to differentiate between stars, gas giants, and smaller rock planets, and that might help them to jump closer to one or the other, but otherwise the endpoint was still relatively random.

  And technically, while it was possible to jump between two points within the same system, according to Nebb, such jumps were extremely dangerous, with the odds of ending up inside a planet or star quite high. And the destination would probably still end up being fairly random.

  So yes, like Jed had said, space was a very big place.

  “We have achieved maximum speed,” Muse announced. “Cutting engines.”

  Only about a minute passed before the Mosaic’s AI spoke again.

  “Three groups of four TSN vessels just jumped in,” Muse said. “All three groups have appeared at different locations in the system.”

  “Three groups?” Tane said. “That was a little unexpected.”

  “More ships jumping in means higher odds of finding us,” Jed said. “Muse, how far away is the closest?”

  “One hundred million kilometers off starboard,” Muse replied.

  Tane glanced uncertainly at Jed, but the Volur warrior seemed unworried.

  “Well beyond weapons range,” Jed told him. “And the vessels certainly won’t reach us before we’re through the rift.”

  “They won’t have to,” Sinive said. “They have a TSN vessel ready to cut us off up ahead, at the rift. Or at least that’s what they believe.”

  “And let them continue to believe that,” Jed said.

  “How did the TSN manage to jump here in three groups anyway?” Tane asked Jed. “Wouldn’t they end up scattered all over the system?”

  “You’d think so,” the Volur told him. “But the more advanced ship classes can share the same distortion tunnel. They pass through in sequence, with each subsequent ship supplying the necessary maintenance Essence to ensure the tunnel remains open.”

  Two minutes later Muse announced: “I’m detecting a transmission from the closest TSN vessel behind us. Encrypted. The transmission is passing us by, heading toward the rift.”

  “Some final instructions for their friends lying in wait, no doubt,” Jed said.

  “Another transmission just arrived, this one for us,” Muse said. “It’s asking for our surrender.”

  “Ignore it,” Gia said.

  Thirty tense minutes passed. The Mosaic’s shields had fully regenerated by that time.

  “The vessel near the rift is altering course to intercept,” Muse announced. “They’re accelerating toward us, away from the rift. We’ll be in weapons range in fifteen minutes.”

  “Continue on present course,” Jed said.

  At the fourteen minute mark, one minute before they were within weapons
range, Jed said: “Launch the decoy along our current course, and then alter our heading: aim for the opposite side of the rift. The extreme left. And then cut all emissions.”

  “Do it, Muse,” Gia said.

  “Decoy has launched,” Muse said. “Firing decelerating thrust, and altering course for extreme left side of rift.” The AI paused, then: “Course updated. Cutting engines. Deactivating running lights and shields. Ceasing heat venting. We’re running cold.”

  Jed had updated Tane on this part of the plan earlier. The Volur had talked to Gia, who confirmed that the Mosaic could cease external emissions and heat venting on the fly like that, just like a small shuttle could. Because of the absolute cold of space, the hull would cool very rapidly, and the Mosaic would drop from the thermal band. The catch was, the Mosaic could cease heat emissions only for a maximum of ten minutes before the ship’s regulator systems began to melt.

  It would have to be enough time.

  Until then, they would drift onward, essentially dead, while the decoy proceeded along the previous path. It was essentially an inflatable balloon with power sources attached to mimic the default heat signature of the Mosaic. Something Jed had printed up alongside the other emitters that were meant to alter the Mosaic’s thermal profile for the upcoming dweller encounter.

  “The decoy just entered weapons range,” Muse announced. A moment later: “The incoming TSN vessel fired upon the decoy. It’s destroyed.”

  “The ruse is up?” Sinive said.

  “Not yet,” Jed said. “First they have to find us.”

  At that range, even without any thermal emissions, the Mosaic would still be present on the visible band—but only if the TSN ship knew exactly where to look. Without knowledge of the Mosaic’s precise speed and trajectory, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, given the vastness of space.

  Ten minutes later, Muse said: “Permission to re-enable heat venting? The regulator systems are beginning to melt.”

  “Just a bit longer…” Gia said.

  “How far away are we from the rift?” Jed asked.

  “Five minutes,” Muse replied.

  Thirty seconds passed.

  “I’m sorry, but if I don’t enable heat venting now, the regulator systems will be damaged beyond repair,” Muse said.