by Timothy Zahn
“But—”
“Don’t argue!” the High Senator snapped. “You want to end up like that other ship?”
Chandris swallowed, the image of the burned and battered Hova’s Skyarcher flashing through her mind. “We’ll try. Kosta, get up here.”
“Right” Kosta scrambled past the others and dropped into Hanan’s seat. “What’s working?”
“I’m guessing the major control lines are okay,” Chandris told him, toggling through the Gazelle’s sensor packs. “They’ve got a lot of redundancy and extra shielding. But I can’t get anything out of the sensors.”
“Burned out,” Kosta grunted. “That, or the data lines are down.”
“Must be the lines,” Chandris agreed. “I don’t get any response from the feedback register circuits, either.”
“You don’t need registers to fly the ship,” Kosta pointed out impatiently. “If the control lines still work, fire up the engines and get us out of here.”
“Yeah, well, there’s just one problem,” Chandris snarled. Her throat was beginning to hurt from the need to keep shouting over the gamma-ray noise. “I don’t know where Angelmass is anymore.”
“Is that a problem? We were heading more or less toward it. Just turn around and go.”
“We could; except that with the registers gone I won’t be able to tell when we’ve done a one-eighty.” Or maybe it wasn’t just the shouting that was hurting her throat. Maybe it was plain, simple fear. “You said yourself that the Hova’s Skyarcher must have gone in pretty deep.”
For a long minute the only sound in the control room was the roar of the gamma-ray static. Chandris kept toggling through the sensor packs, searching for something—anything—that could still be read. But it was all uniform snow. “What about the ship’s inertial nav equipment?” Kosta asked. “Does it have an external case display?”
Chandris had to search her memory of the Gazelle’s spec manual. “It’s got one, but you have to get the cover off to get to it. I don’t think we’ve got enough time.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kosta suddenly hunch over Hanan’s board. “Wait a minute,” he called. “I’ve got an idea. Check your VK-5 display.”
She keyed for it. It was the same pattern of colored snow that was on all the others. “So?”
“Keep watching. The static should increase and decrease, with about a half-minute period.”
She glared at the display, wondering what game Kosta was playing. But he was right. It was tricky to see, but the cycle was definitely there. “Okay, it’s there. So?”
“That’s the feed from my experiment package,” he told her. “It’s tied into one of the command lines, so we can still get data from it.”
And the highest intensity snow would be when the package was pointing at Angelmass … “Doesn’t help,” she shook her head. “Not enough. We could wind up running lateral to Angelmass instead of away from it.”
“Hang on, I’m not done,” Kosta said, clearly working this out as he talked. “Okay. We’re already rotating around our centerline; so what we do now is put a slow dual-yaw rotation on the ship and watch the display. The sensor cluster I’m tied into is in the bow, and it’s also recessed a little. That means the only time the snow pattern will be steady will be when we’re pointing away from Angelmass. Right?”
Chandris thought about it. “It sounds like it could take awhile. I don’t know if we’ve got that much time to spare.”
“It’s that or risk running us in closer,” Kosta countered. “You have a better idea?”
“If I come up with one, I’ll let you know,” Chandris gritted, keying in a dual-yaw command. “All right, here we go. Keep watching.”
She could sense the slight change in inner ear pressures as the Gazelle began its sluggish midpoint rotation. On her display the snow continued its barely detectable rise and fall. Distantly, she wondered if they really had a chance, or whether the radiation from Angelmass would burn out their control lines—and them—before they could figure out which direction was the safe one.
Wondered if Angelmass had already killed Hanan.
“I think it’s starting to even out,” Kosta called.
Chandris peered closely at the display, the stuttering lights hurting her eyes. Maybe; but with all that background gammaray sparking it was hard to tell. If there were just some way to block off some of the radiation coming through the hull …
Maybe there was. Reaching for her board, she keyed in a command. “Keep watching,” she ordered Kosta.
For a single heartbeat nothing happened. Then, just for a few seconds, the snow on the displays faded a little. The pattern she’d been trying so hard to see was suddenly right there—
“That’s it!” Kosta shouted. “We’re there. Go!”
Chandris jabbed at her board; and the scream of the gamma-ray crackling was joined by the deeper roar of the drive. “You sure?” she shouted to Kosta.
“Positive,” he called back. “I was able to get a halfway clear look at the numbers during that dip in the static. What did you do, anyway?”
“Dumped all our drinking water and half our fuel,” she told him. “I thought it might block some of the gammas.”
“Shouldn’t have worked,” Kosta said. “Not enough mass there to make a visible difference. Can’t argue with success, though.”
And on his last word, as abruptly as it had begun, the surge was over.
For a minute Chandris just looked at Kosta, her ears ringing with the sudden silence. A stray gamma-ray spark crackled, sounding almost friendly in comparison to what they’d just been through. “I didn’t think we were going to make it,” Kosta said at last.
“Me, neither,” Chandris said, wondering vaguely at her willingness to admit such a thing in front of Kosta.
Kosta held her eyes a moment longer. Then, looking almost embarrassed, he turned back to his displays. “Did we take any damage?”
Chandris was turned halfway back to her own displays when it hit them simultaneously. “Hanan!” Chandris got the word out first.
Kosta was already poking uselessly at the intercom. “Not working,” he said tightly. “Go—I’ll watch things here.”
“Right.” Chandris popped her restraints and slid out of her chair—
And came to a sudden stop. Forsythe was at the door, a grim expression on his face. “You need to get on the radio right away,” he told her, handing her a data cyl. “Call Central and tell them we’ve got an EmDef blue-three emergency— here are the authorization codes. They’re to give you a priority catapult back to Seraph.”
Chandris’s heart skipped a beat. “Hanan?”
Forsythe nodded. “He’s still alive, but not by much. Something to do with his exobraces—I’m not sure what Ornina says it’s critical that he get back to ground medical facilities as soon as possible.”
Chandris spun around and climbed back to Kosta’s seat Not Hanan, she pleaded silently. Please. “The radio?” she breathed.
“Starting to come back,” Kosta said, his voice as grim as Forsythe’s as he took the cyl. “Go on. I’ll make the call as soon as I can get through.”
“All right.” Taking a deep breath, unlocking suddenly stiff knees, she headed for the door.
“Blue-three,” Forsythe reminded Kosta as Chandris came up to him. He looked down into her eyes, just for a second— “And if they give you any trouble, you put my name on it. Understand?”
He looked at Chandris again. “Come on. I’ll take you to him.”
The proximity alarm on the Komitadji trilled its warning. “Catapult remote: launch when ready,” Commodore Lleshi ordered. The paraconducting underskin gave its usual stutter of protest; and abruptly, the stars vanished from the viewscreens.
After all these months in the middle of nowhere, the Komitadji was going home.
Lleshi gave his displays a quick check, but it was more from habit than anything else. The Komitadji had been ready for this flight for a long time.
“Breakout in five seconds,” the helmsman announced. “Three, two, one—”
The stars came back. “Position check,” Lleshi ordered.
“Position computed, Commodore,” the navigator said a minute later. “We’re just under three million kilometers from Scintara.”
Lleshi nodded. Considering that they’d started nearly seven hundred light-years away with an essentially untested catapult, they were lucky to have gotten even this close. “Compute course for Scintara,” he said. “Engage when ready. And get a comm laser on the planet; let them know we’re here.”
“They already know, Commodore,” the comm officer spoke up. “Message coming in.”
Lleshi keyed his board, and a moment later a familiar face appeared on his screen. “This is Captain Horvak aboard the Pax Warship Balaniki,” he said. “Repeat: Captain Horvak calling Commodore Lleshi.”
“We’ve acknowledged, Commodore,” the comm officer said.
Lleshi nodded, mentally counting off the twenty seconds it would take for the signal to make the round trip. He’d reached twenty-one when Horvak’s face changed. “Welcome back, Commodore,” he said briskly. “You’re the last to arrive—the rest of the task force has been assembled for nearly a week now. Everything seems to be go; we got a kick pod from the Skean two days ago with the cocoon’s confirmation that it’s built itself a hyperspace net. At least it thinks it has,” he amended. “I suppose we won’t find out for sure until we try to use it. Final green light came from the Supreme Council yesterday, along with the usual spate of last-minute amendments to the plan. Nothing major—I’ll dump you a copy.”
His lip twitched. “And the doomsday pods are here, sitting under heavy guard in far orbit. That’s making us very popular with the people of Scintara.
“That’s about it from this end, unless you have any questions. If you can give us your ETA and status report, we’ll set up the operation count-down.”
“Navigation?” Lleshi invited.
“ETA will be a little over thirty hours, sir,” the navigator said. “Plus probably an hour for orbit insertion. We’re too low on fuel to make more than a tenth-gee acceleration.”
Lleshi glanced at the proposed course profile on his board. “How much can we cut that by having Scintara send out a fuel ship to rendezvous with us?”
Across the balcony, Telthorst stirred. “There’s no need for that, Commodore,” he said. “A few hours’ savings isn’t worth the effort of sending out a fuel ship.”
Lleshi glared at him. First that power-play nonsense about moving their catapult halfway across the solar system, and now this. “You heard Captain Horvak,” he said, keeping his voice as civil as he could. “The task force is waiting. Has been waiting, for a week.”
“Then a few hours one way or the other isn’t likely to make a great deal of difference to them,” Telthorst countered coldly.
Lleshi turned away from that thin face, resisting the urge to push the exchange into a full-fledged argument. He should have expected Horvak’s mention of the four doomsday pods to spark this kind of reaction from Telthorst. With two hundred kilograms of painstakingly created antimatter in each pod—an explosive yield theoretically in the gigaton range—they represented a huge expenditure of Pax money. But there was no way around it. The four hyperspace nets that sealed off all approaches to the Lorelei system had to be taken out if this attack was to accomplish anything at all.
And given the Empyreals’ fancy sandwich-metal construction this was the only method that the experts had come up with that had a chance of doing that.
But Telthorst undoubtedly didn’t see it that way. Until me assets of the Empyrean lay open before him, he would see nothing but how much this whole operation was costing.
He probably hadn’t even gotten around to considering the danger the pods in their current positions represented to the people of Scintara. Except, perhaps, for how much an accidental detonation would cost to repair.
“Inform the Balaniki we’ll be arriving at Scintara in approximately thirty hours,” he instructed the comm officer quietly. “Mission refitting will begin at that time.”
“Yes, sir,” the comm officer said, and turned back to his board.
Lleshi leaned back in his seat. Someday, he told himself silently, the Adjutors would overreach themselves. They would push the rest of the Pax just that little bit too far and bring destruction down upon their own heads.
He could only hope that he would be there to see it.
CHAPTER 27
The Seraph catapult had called in the report while the Gazelle was on its way down, with the result that an ambulance was already waiting when Chandris set the ship down on the landing strip. An ambulance, and a dozen reporters.
“Uh-oh,” Kosta muttered under his breath as he eyed the latter group.
“What?” Chandris growled as the ship rolled to a stop. She’d mentioned earlier that this was the first time she’d ever landed the Gazelle on her own; but if she’d found the prospect daunting, Kosta hadn’t been able to see it in her face during the approach. Then, as now, her single-minded obsession with Hanan’s condition had left no room for anything as trivial as nervousness.
“Those reporters,” Kosta said. “The High Senator didn’t want anyone knowing he was here.”
“Nurk the High Senator,” Chandris said shortly, releasing her restraints. “Stay here and watch things—I’m going to open the hatchway.”
She all but ran to the door, nearly bowling Forsythe over as he stepped into the control room. A muttered word that might have been an apology, and she was gone.
“How is Hanan?” Kosta asked.
“Not good,” Forsythe said, walking over to Chandris’s vacated seat and sitting down. He looked tired. “He doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, though.”
“Any idea what’s wrong?”
“Some kind of neural feedback through his exobraces, I assume. Beyond that, I haven’t a clue.”
Kosta nodded soberly. “I know the feeling. Oh, your cyl’s still there in the comm panel. Thank you.”
“No problem,” Forsythe said, pulling it out and dropping it into his pocket. “You have no idea what’s causing these surges, do you?”
Kosta shook his head. “What happened out there is theoretically impossible. At least, by any theory I’ve ever heard.” He threw Forsythe a sideways look. “And it’s getting worse.”
The High Senator was gazing at the hatchway display and the medics busily preparing their equipment “You’re saying the surges are getting stronger?”
“I meant the whole thing is getting worse theoretically,” Kosta said, wondering if he should be telling Forsythe this. The numbers he’d pulled were still highly preliminary, particularly given that they’d been recorded in the middle of that surge.
But if they were right … “You remember when we saw the Hova’s Skyarcher I said that it must have gone pretty deep toward Angelmass to have gotten that much radiation damage?”
Forsythe nodded. “Hanan agreed with you.”
“Right,” Kosta said. “I’ve pulled the records from the Gazelle’s inertial navigational system and compared them to the position data from Angelmass Central’s beacons. There’s a definite discrepancy between the two.”
“So the inertial data is wrong.”
“I wish it was that simple,” Kosta said. “The problem is that during the surge the beacons show us moving closer to Angelmass while the inertial system shows us moving away from it. A drive misfire wouldn’t have done that. Neither would the maneuvering jets or the solar wind.”
“Which leaves what?”
“Only one thing I can think of. Gravity.”
Forsythe frowned. “I don’t follow.”
“I’m not sure I do, either,” Kosta admitted. “But it’s the only scenario I’ve come up with that fits the data. The small test masses in the inertial nav system would respond much faster to a sudden increase in Angelmass’s gravitational attraction than the Gaze
lle itself. And since the test mass movement would be inward, the system would interpret it as an acceleration away from Angelmass.”
Forsythe gazed hard at him. “You realize what you’re saying?”
Kosta nodded, meeting the other’s eyes with an effort. “That the radiation surge was accompanied by a similar surge in gravitational attraction.”
“Which I presume is theoretically impossible?”
Kosta nodded again. “Extremely so.”
Forsythe held Kosta’s eyes another moment, then turned back to the hatchway display. Chandris and Ornina were visible there, standing helplessly back out of the way as the medics got Hanan’s stretcher into the ambulance. “Is there any way to get independent evidence?”
“I think so,” Kosta said. “If Angelmass’s gravitational field was somehow being polarized toward the Gazelle, then the other hunterships operating around it should have registered a drop in gravity at their positions. Not a big one—the Gazelle didn’t get all that much of a boost. But again, it’ll show up as a discrepancy between their inertial systems and the beacons. And it ought to be measurable.”
“Can you get copies of those records?”
“Yes, but not for a while,” Kosta said. “Most of the hunterships will be staying out for at least a couple more days, and the Institute won’t get their recordings until they return to Seraph.”
Forsythe nodded slowly. “Perhaps Central can get them faster. They could contact the hunterships directly, pull copies of their data, and then laser it all back here.”
“It won’t hurt to ask, anyway,” Kosta agreed.
“I’ll see what the government center can do,” Forsythe said. “You’ll be at the Institute later?”
“Ah—yes,” Kosta said, frowning. From the way the High Senator had talked earlier—for that matter, the whole reason he’d been aboard the Gazelle in the first place—
Forsythe might have been reading his mind. “There’s no way I can keep my presence on Seraph a secret anymore,” he told Kosta. “Aside from all this, I need to take Ronyon to the hospital and have him checked over.”
