“Stable exit,” he announced, and realized that most of the alarms had gone silent.
“Engines running in emergency mode,” someone said, “but stable.”
“Environmentals?” Kimura asked, and there was a brief pause before that technician answered.
“Stable. In the green.”
That was as close to a miracle as Val ever wanted to come. He took a deep breath, and saw the younger of the female justices sitting up slowly, holding her head. A medic hurried toward her, and he looked back at his boards. Still green, though not the full robust color of a good transit, but he would take what he could get.
“Somebody get me a position fix,” Kimura demanded.
“Working on it, Captain.” There was a moment of silence, everyone bent over their controls, and then the main screen shimmered and refocused, showing them to be on the edge of a solar system—the numbers at the edge of the screen read 4-3HJW9, but the common name wasn’t displayed, and he didn’t recognize the code. Patrika hung about five kilometers off their port side, about waist-high, and there were several smaller dots visible at long range that Val recognized as mining-and-manufacturing stations. That was a good sign, meant that the parent system was likely to have tugs available to bring them into dock if necessary, and for the first time he allowed himself to relax a little.
“Not bad,” Kimura said, and the relief in her voice belied her words. “Pepin. Release the passengers from emergency stations and secure the lifepods. We’ll be heading to port here for running repairs, and should be back on schedule within a day or three.”
Val lifted an eyebrow at that—he doubted they’d be able to get hold of a suitable AI in that short a time, and he was reasonably sure that the Judiciars weren’t going to go on loaning their codices—but it wasn’t his place to say so. He hoped Caridad was all right. It had been bad enough waiting out the last minutes till Drop on the bridge, with plenty of work to do; he didn’t like to imagine what it had been like in the lifepods. The spheres were well-equipped, intended to handle almost any emergency, but they were intended to be launched by the ship’s AI. He was just glad they hadn’t been needed.
“Comm,” Kimura said. “Contact Patrika. Tell them we’ve made it through, and thank them for their help.”
“Sen Millat.”
Val jumped at the soft voice, looked up to see the Supreme Justice standing beside his chair. She looked exhausted, her skin ashy, fine lines showing at the corners of her eyes and bracketing her mouth, and for the first time Val realized how old she must be simply to hold her rank. He started to rise to his feet, to offer her his chair, but she put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine, thank you. But you—I think you need to visit a fresher.”
Val blinked, then recognized what she was saying. Now was his one chance to get away. “Yes. Yes, your Honor, I think I do.” He scrabbled free of his safety harness, and grabbed the nearest back-up pilot. “Minna. Take over for me, I’ve got to—” He mimed something that he hoped would be taken for sickness, guts cramping over their near escape, and the woman nodded, sliding into his chair. No one else seemed to be paying attention, and Val slipped from the compartment.
Kiet dodged a woman he hardly knew, then ducked into the main control room. Thanh hovered before her databoard, knitting from a free-floating ball of yarn about a meter away from her. She was the only one in the room.
Kiet kissed her. “Good morning.” He flicked on his own databoard, instructed the system to scan surrounding space.
“You’re up early,” Thanh said.
“Dropping another buoy today. I wanted to get started.” He stretched.”I’ll tell you, it’s amazing how things have changed in the last month. It’s getting crowded.” Fifty days ago they’d just finished welcoming Jamahl and his son, configuring rooms for them—now there were more than two dozen newcomers on board.
Thanh tapped her board, shook her head. “Run it again.” Turning to Kiet, she said, “Word gets around. We’ve attracted people who truly want to go refugee. I have a feeling we’ll be glad of them.”
“I’m already glad. That pair of ex-navigators from Accelerative were a find.” A display caught his eye, and Kiet frowned. “Oh, I do not glitching believe this.”
“What?”
“I’m getting the hyperflux signature of a ship Dropping out eighty light-minutes away.”
Even as close as Zavod Sualti was to the Fissure, it was rare that a ship Dropped out anywhere near them. Ships could enter the Plane anywhere within a sphere of about half a lightyear radius from the Fissure.
Thanh leaned her head back and looked directly at him. “A ship emerging this close is going to trigger flux boundary waves that won’t damp down for hours.”
Kiet shrugged, “Sorry, hon. I think we’ll have to postpone our launch.” He raised his eyes. “Antoku, can you alert today’s launch team that we’re officially on hold?”
“I will take care of it, Kiet.” The AI paused a moment, then said, “Thanh, I suspect you will want to recompile the equations again?”
On Kiet’s display, the field lines of the hyperflux boundary lurched and frothed like a pot of soup just starting to boil. “Looks like this is a rough one.”
Thanh pushed off from her console and stopped herself against Kiet’s shoulder. She stared at the display. “Who do they have piloting that thing, an infinite number of bots with an infinite number of keyboards? I could do a better job myself.” She glanced upward. “Antoku, there’s no point in recompiling anything until this mess settles down.”
Along the normally-invisible hyperplane that marked the flux boundary, cold green and blue fire lurched and sheared, pulsing in irregular waves that crashed upon one another. Kiet felt an emptiness in the pit of his stomach. “They’re in trouble. Antoku, who’s nearby with a breakdown tug?”
Arcs of lightning split the blue flames, and three of Kiet’s scanners flashed red. After a moment Antoku responded, “Jamahl says he can get there fastest.”
“Well for the love of physics, tell him to watch himself and stand well clear of the disturbance until that ship’s well and truly Dropped.” Instrument readings showed flux that could tear a tug to pieces. “They’re coming in a hurricane’s eye.”
For long minutes Kiet and Thanh stared into the display, until a blinding nova-flash temporarily overloaded the scanners. As the image returned, Kiet whistled. “That’s not one ship.There’s two.”
“They must have been entangled in the same Dropspace.” Thanh said. “I think we need to give their pilots a little more respect.”
“It was still the sloppiest—” An alert tone interrupted him, followed by the urgent squeal of a distress call.
“Pan-pan-pan. This is Quintile Illumination, request immediate assistance. Repeat, pan-pan-pan…”
1.18 Negotiations
Val ducked into the first washroom he found, ran the water and blowers while he stripped off his too-identifying crew vest. Like most of the operational crew, he wore a plain shirt and pants under it, could pass for a passenger if no one looked too closely. The corridors were still crowded, passengers trailing back from the lifepods talking loudly about their adventure, some swearing they’d never take a transplanar ship again, others complaining about the life pods and the crew—herding us like goats, and then making us wait for hours—while some of the younger children, picking up on their parents’ fear, were wailing inconsolably. A trio of the perpetually-smiling creche attendants had a pod of unattended children in tow, and were doing a miraculous job of keeping them calm and quiet as they waited for a lift to Juvenile Services on Deck Three.
“—And the ice cream machines will be up and running,” one of the attendants promised as Val passed, and he was grateful that his job was entirely technical.
The stairs were as crowded as the corridors that led to the lift lines, but at least they were moving. People were mostly keeping to the standard protocols, a sure sign that the passenger-side crew had done a good
job of preventing panic, and Val wondered if they’re keeping the bars closed. As in in answer to his thought, a mellow chime sounded overhead, and the ship’s recorded voice announced, “Attention, attention. All passengers. Food service has resumed on the Main and Promenade Decks, with full service available at all food stations. Liquor service will resume in forty minutes, or can be accessed via cabin service. All ships’ activities will resume as scheduled in sixty minutes. Thank you for your patience.”
That would send the most shaken back to their cabins to self-medicate, Val thought, or at least get them fed. He didn’t envy the service staff dealing with passengers’ fears, especially when their own nerves had been rubbed raw by the long Drop.
He fitted himself neatly into the queue heading down the Blue North stair, following the broad spiral down toward the Boarding Deck and most of the Third Plane facilities. The stairwell channeled the rumble of voices, and he caught snatches of conversation as the upward spiral of Red North wound around them.
Damn lucky to get out of this… Wouldn’t have put us in lifepods if it hadn’t been serious.
I still don’t understand—does anyone really know what happened?
Came out of it all right, but now I want a drink.
…the spa. Every nerve in my body…
Personally, he was in complete agreement with the woman who wanted a drink, but knew he couldn’t relax yet. Maybe the Supreme Justice was exaggerating, but after everything he’d been through before coming aboard Quintile Illumination, he wasn’t going to take that chance. And he wasn’t going to let Caridad take it, either. He’d dragged her on board when she might well have been safer staying at the University, and he was responsible for keeping her safe.
At the bottom of the stair, he let the flow of people carry him along the main corridor until he could turn off into one of the residential branches. From there, it was easy to find a brown-painted stairwell door, and make his way down to Caridad’s cabin. As he tapped on the annunciator, he only hoped she was there, and not in a lounge somewhere celebrating their escape.
To his relief, the door opened, and she beckoned him in. “Well. Was that as nearly a disaster as I thought it was?”
“A lot closer than any of us would have liked,” Val answered. “Were you ok?”
Caridad nodded. Her cabin was no bigger than his own, but somehow she had arranged her few belonging to make it seem both spacious and home-like. Practice, he guessed: he tended to forget that academics traveled almost as much as vertical folk. “They put us into the lifepods—as a precaution, they said.”
Val said, “If we’d broken apart after exiting the Drop, there was every chance the lifepods could have gotten everyone safely away.”
“That’s assuming we broke up after exit, not during.” Caridad said, and Val nodded. “Well. I’m assigned to one of the smaller pods, along with a crew member’s family and four Third Plane passengers. We played cards with the children to keep them quiet.” She smiled suddenly. “It’s a good thing we were playing for imaginary money, or the little girl would own the ship by now. Though to be fair the steward in charge of the pod was a bit distracted. I still think the child was cheating, but I can’t say how.”
“Caridad.” Val held up a hand to interrupt the flow of words. She was clearly just s shaken as any of them, though she carried it better. “Caridad, we’re still in trouble.”
Her eyebrows rose, and she motioned him toward a chair. “Would a drink help?”
“Not yet.” Val leaned one hip against the fold-out table, feeling the adrenaline drain out of him. “Caridad—you know we have a Supreme Justice on board, right?”
“I’d heard. And several juniors.”
Val nodded. “They—we used their codices to get us out of Drop, after the AI was destroyed. And we also got help from a self-proclaimed merchant who just happened to Drop at the same tie we did, and was entrained with us in Dropspace.”
“An interesting coincidence.” Caridad opened the storage unit beside her neatly-made bunk and began pulling out her belongings.
“Yeah. The Supreme Justice suggested we take a lifepod and abandon ship before things get any more complicated.”
“Did they, now?” Caridad put a shirt and a last bundle of underwear into her satchel. She collected the disk with her papers and tucked that into her shirt, glanced around the room. “Do I have time to take the rest?”
“We should go now.” Val glanced at the ship’s time projected on the bulkhead, calculating. By now, both Quintile Illumination and Patrika should be completely stable, and establishing communications; there wasn’t much time left. “Right now.”
Caridad didn’t move. “Who’s the Supreme Justice?”
“Space, I don’t—” Val stopped, remembering. “Thurgood IX.”
“Ah.” Caridad tossed a final data block into her satchel and slung it over her shoulder. “All right.”
“You know her, then?” Val opened the door, but looked back curiously.
“She overturned a capital judgment against me,” Caridad said. “I trust her word.”
There was no time left to collect Val’s belongings; he had his papers and datablocks in his pockets, including the problem Quintile Illumination had set him, and just enough pay already accrued to let him buy kit once they hit the nearest settlement. The sensors had shown mining machinery within easy reach; probably they could get one of them to take them on board, and then continue to the planet once Quintile Illumination and Patrika had moved on. And if they didn’t move on—miners had a reputation for stubborn independence that he hoped was justified.
He saw Caridad shudder as they opened the hatch to lifepod access, but she seemed to have herself otherwise well under control. The lights flashed on at their entrance, revealing a few food-bar wrappers and drink boxes littering the bright-red tiles. There were four lifepods on this node, three large and one small; Val opened the cover of the control box and pressed his thumb against the ID plate. The screen lit, acknowledging him, and he readied himself to hack the system to gain non-emergency access. At least he wouldn’t be going up against an AI.
To his surprise, however, the secondary window opened, accepting him as a responsible crew member in charge of a lifepod. The Supreme Justice’s work, he guessed—or rather, her data engineer’s: Milos seemed like the sort of person who’d think of these details. He punched in the codes for non-emergency and then for a system test, and finally the commands that would detach the lifepod’s internal systems from the ship’s. So far, that was standard test protocol—nobody wanted to set off alarms in the control room when they were just checking to be sure the pod’s environmental worked—but he breathed a sigh of relief anyway as he opened the hatch.
“Physics, this one’s even smaller,” Caridad muttered, but hauled herself aboard.
“These are for last-off crew,” Val answered. “Passengers shouldn’t ever have to see them.” Passenger lifepods were like little shuttles, their seats configured for comfort and the illusion of normality; this pod was four acceleration couches in a heavily armored sphere.
“I have to say, I’d as soon not have seen it,” Caridad said. She found the cargo webbing quickly enough, however, and secured her satchel under it. She took the co-pilot’s seat and began strapping herself in with unexpected competence. “Just don’t expect me to do anything useful.”
“I’ve got it,” Val answered, and hoped it was true. He unlocked the board and woke the controls, pleased to find that the lifepod’s minibrain was fully functional. It wasn’t anything approaching AI, but it would help with the calculations and was a competent autopilot.
“Do you have a plan?” Caridad asked.
“There are a couple of mining stations close by—mining-and-manufacturing stations, that is. My idea was to get one of them to pick us up. Miners tend to be sticklers for emergency protocol. Failing that, the pod will get us to the nearest planet. It just won’t be very pleasant to live in.”
Caridad nodd
ed. “If Thurgood IX says we should run—we should run.”
“I agree.” Val took a deep breath. Hopefully Milos had either disabled the pod’s connection with the ship altogether, or he had told the surviving systems to ignore a dropped pod; if he hadn’t, their trip could be quite short. “Ready?”
“As I’m going to be.” Caridad pulled her belts tighter across her body.
“Launch.” Val pressed the button as he spoke, and watched the outer door roll back. A spring-loaded arm fired, pushing them free of the dock, and Val killed the autopilot’s attempt to light the maneuver engines. Better to look like a mistake, one more thing that had gone wrong, than drawn Patrika’s attention. The lifepod fell away, Quintile Illumination receding gently in the viewscreen, and Val switched off the emergency beacon as well. That was standard procedure for a launch-in-error, and Val held his breath, waiting for someone to ping the pod. Nothing happened, and he reached for his controls again, opening a passive sensor screen. There was Quintile Illumination, looking remarkably undamaged; further off, back toward the planet, was Patrika, a flicker of high-ion energy coming off her hull. Hot guns? Val had no desire to find out for certain, and adjusted the sensors to focus on the mining stations. They were closer to the Fissure, Quintile Illumination’s bulk between them and Patrika; the pod’s current trajectory would take them within 1500 kilometers of the closer of the stations. And that was without using maneuver engines, Val thought. Surely that will be enough.
“What now?” Caridad asked.
“We’re on course,” Val answered. “We wait and hope the big ships go away.”
Five Planes Page 22
