by F P Adriani
“That’s the simplest explanation, and normally I’d say you were right. But, look at this….”
Gary switched the computer to display the feed from two of the cameras on the Demeter’s back end, which cameras normally produced a view of the pale nozzles protruding there. On the right side of the viewscreen now, there were the usual readouts from the engine feeds, and I could hear the usual mechanical noises and whirrings in the room, so I knew that at least one of the engines was still running. Yet, as far as was visible to the cameras, though I could clearly see aft Nozzle 1, there was no energy, no matter, no exhaust coming from the nozzle. It was just black beyond there.
I didn’t know what to say, except the simplest explanation again: “We must still have electrical outages, and the camera view is probably missing pixels of data. Run a diagnostic.”
“I’m already doing it,” Karen called from another computer terminal, and there was an obvious shake in her voice.
I turned to Gary, to look him right in his eyes. “What do you really think is going on, Gary?”
“Well, it looks like we’re in a void—similar to the normal ones in space, only with this one, I can’t get any readings on any dark matter or energy or forces, not even any gravitational effects, including any spacetime-bending generated from us. Yet what we’re in seems to be immediately sucking the beam-engine exhaust-stream away, or outright making it disappear. And, as far as I can tell, we’re just not moving, though it seems impossible to get a clear reference-frame position here. I only have the void to judge by. That could be moving inside something else; we just don’t seem to be moving relative to the void.…”
In my mind, I scrambled to remember what had happened right before the power went out—but Shirley suddenly came up beside me, which reminded me of the stone.
“Gary,” I said, “could we somehow be inside that actual fucking stone?”
“No,” Gary replied, his eyes falling on Shirley. “I think we’re inside the actual fucking well.”
*
“But Gary—” I said a moment later “—the infinite well’s just supposed to be a theory, or maybe it’s even a myth. No offense meant to you, Shirley, but, here’s the thing: I had Chen search the computer’s database for that planet the bartender mentioned—Rintu. It’s located in a gravity cloud, and it’s full of monks who play with their stones.”
Both Gary and Shirley laughed loudly, but it sounded like nervous laughing all the same.
I pulled a half-silly, half-mocking face, then quickly punctuated that with a smile of my own. “Chen never said the monks are all males, but I couldn’t help making the joke.” I ran my fingers through my sweaty-again hair. “I really don’t want to deal with this. I’m inclined to just get the hell out of here, drop off the stone at Rintu, and let it be someone else’s problem. To think I intended to put the damn thing on a chain and wear it as jewelry.” I sighed at where I’d flung the stone. I couldn’t see it anywhere, but then I had much bigger problems now.
“Captain Lydia,” Shirley said, “even religious myths are occasionally based on fact, and this myth apparently is. Wherever we are, if it’s an energy well—it might be converting our exhaust into the energy form it uses—a form the Demeter’s equipment can’t detect. But it’s nevertheless there. Actually, I now think the stone doesn’t seem to be a bucket; it’s more like a navigation key that brings a ship to a well and maybe gives the ship’s structure access to the energy inside. Maybe the ship is like the bucket then—I’m not sure! But, somehow, when you threw the stone or the way you did—that led us here. Don’t forget: we had the curon engine running and we were inside a curon-induced space. Maybe that combined with the stone somehow, and that led us here when this ship really isn’t supposed to be here.”
What Shirley said was fascinating, but no matter how fascinating the problematic situation I was in might be, I was still in a problematic situation. “Well, what the hell do we do now? We can’t move. Are we stuck here for forever?” I whipped my head toward the beam engine again. “We’ve got to find the stone—can anyone see it? Gary, Karen—I think you should run more analyses on both that and the space or the well or whatever—do it all now. Maybe you’ll notice more about what they both are when they’re closer together now.”
“That’s a good point,” Gary said. “Karen, you and Shirley take care of looking for the stone and running further tests, and I’ll keep running systems-checks here; then Steve can take over in an hour. If we work together, we’ll crack this.”
“I hope,” I said in a low voice.
*
Half an hour later, we still hadn’t found the stone, we were still stuck inside the weird void, and I was screaming at myself inside my head—over my stupid impulsive anger, which had clearly gotten me and my crew into a dangerous situation. But my crew—they were dealing with this better than I was, or at least if they were very worried, they weren’t showing it, or maybe they were too busy working to show it.
Turning off the curon engine and the reactor was one of the first things they had to do now; the engines had lost effectiveness in propelling the ship because thrusting and bubble-creating apparently weren’t possible in this void, and, from inside the Demeter’s belly, Steve would soon be starting on making the repairs to the ruptured back nozzle.
I felt afraid now that turning off the beam engine might push the ship into some other strange place. I also felt afraid that the void’s existence could possibly be dependent on the beam engine’s running, but Shirley, Gary, Steve, Karen—they all thought that we had to take the chance that our presence here wouldn’t change in a dangerous-for-us way once the beam engine wasn’t operating.
As several of my crew began turning off that and the reactor, a few others began putting the zenite engine fully online and switching the ship’s settings to using only that engine to power our internals, which engine’s exhaust they set to flow out the Demeter’s front nozzle only.
I stood in the middle of engineering now, watching Sam at one of the beam-engine control terminals. His gray-haired head and his shoulders in his white shirt were slightly bowed toward the screen, and his trembling long fingers hovered nearby; he was about to push the final buttons to turn off the engine.
His wary brown eyes shot in my direction right before he said, “Here goes!”
I watched every move his fingers made at the buttons, my spine straight and tense as I waited for what would happen next….
Nothing happened next. There was no change to our status in the void; we were “safe” still.
Sam’s posture inside his white shirt jerked downward in relief.
I exhaled a huge breath; then I frowned heavily. “A part of me was hoping turning off the engine would free us from this space. But that would be too easy. Anyone been able to find out anything more about the void’s properties? Has anyone found the stone yet?”
The damn thing had turned out to be not only a pain in the ass, but also an elusive pain in the ass. It couldn’t have just disappeared. On the other hand, given all the weirdness attached to it….
I was looking at Sam again; he was very experienced in space so was usually quite unfazed by events on my ship. He also tended to freely offer the rest of us guidance when we needed it. Yet now, he only stared back at me in silence, his lined face curving in a way that suggested he was feeling as confused as I was feeling.
Gary passed near me as he walked up to one of the computer terminals. “Karen’s looking over the camera and sensor data—we should be able to find the stone…. Lydia, I think Shirley’s descriptions have almost all been right on the money. That electrical quake when the lights went out? We’re still getting that happening, but on a much smaller scale and on the exterior of the ship, which keeps making the shields have these weird fluctuations in energy level; it’s almost like there’s a vibrating fluid out there, sliding over the hull, probing it. Maybe it’s looking for some kind of connector, or maybe it’s the normal way the void works. If ther
e’s an energy supply here—some type of alien technology—it could be automatic. Like you pull into the spot, the spigot opens and the energy is transferred to you.”
“That sounds like a very high-tech gas station,” I said.
Gary nodded, slowly.
“And now we’re stuck inside it, with no car that can use that type of fuel.”
Gary frowned now, worry deepening the soft brown of his eyes. And I suddenly realized how messy his hair was—and that he’d never changed out of his pajamas.
“I imagine,” I added now, “that if you, a human, could develop a ship to access this, that would give you an immense, maybe limitless supply of energy to do whatever kind of ‘work’ you want with it.”
Now Gary’s red-covered legs nervously shifted as he sighed. He began punching at the computer keyboard, and a line of sweat slid down his forehead.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You’re thinking: what have we gotten into here, and how will we get out of it?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Gary said, one side of his mouth finally shifting upward.
*
“How the hell can we ever get out of this void when we don’t even know what it is?” Chen asked in an alarmed voice, his dark eyes darting around at the rest of us in engineering.
I had called just about everyone in charge of every area of the Demeter—and Shirley—to down here, so we could get some ideas critical-mass going. Steve wasn’t here though; he and Sam and a few engineering technicians had disconnected the engine-joints to the ruptured aft nozzle, and they were now making the repairs to the nozzle inside the ship’s belly.
May was with us in engineering too—not just because she was in charge of the cargo bay, but also because I figured she and Chen might want to form an opinion together on our next steps….
“We’ve all been guessing here, Chen,” I said now. “That’s all we’ve got. But I really think the first order of business is: find the stone I stupidly threw. Karen’s running scans inside here, but the sensors got messed up by the ship-quake, and the camera data got corrupted. She’s cleaning it up. Hopefully, if the stone’s still in one piece and is still here…well, hopefully I can reverse this then.”
There were a few nods around me, and Gary said, “I’ve been thinking about your gas-station analogy. Maybe it’s possible to back out of this ‘station’ without filling up. Maybe you don’t have to fill up in the void. It’s waiting for some kind of signal or move or for the proper ship’s exterior to show up—I don’t know. But maybe we can just leave, provided we get the portal to here back.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand where it could have gone. If we can’t find it in the nooks and crannies around here, I guess we’re doomed.” I probably shouldn’t have said that: the postures of my crew visibly tensed, and Shirley began twisting her hands together.
She had been so enthusiastic about coming onto my ship, but I could tell that a lot had changed for her since: her dark hair was knotted and there were worry lines around her mouth.
I felt bad for her. I felt bad for us all.
*
“Captain, I think I’ve located the direction it went,” Karen said several minutes later. She was at one of the computers, and that same group of us had been standing together in the room, still trying to figuring out what to do. But now we all walked over to Karen.
On the wide viewscreen beside her keyboard, there was an enlarged camera view of my crazy arm from when I’d thrown the stone as if I were pitching in a ballgame. Karen let that footage run till the room around my form went black; then she rewound the video and slowed it, and I saw that shocking flash of light against the beam engine again, only of course the flash lasted longer this time.
From behind me, Shirley said slowly, “I wonder if the curon field activated the stone? I remember Steve told me the engine has to be shielded because there isn’t always 100% containment of the curon stream, and, before, I noticed an open container of Evan and some curon and ion pads stacked along that side wall.”
“We’d just reloaded Evan into the engine’s shaft,” Karen said. “We needed more juice than we planned because we had to make the locked curon bubble.”
I touched the computer screen with a forefinger, circling one spot on the dark image of the room. “Karen, can you rewind and blow up that area more, then replay it even slower?”
She did as I asked, and, this time, I noticed something different: after the room went black, for an instant—which would have been an even shorter instant when it happened at the speed of real life—there was a small spot of blurry red between the curon casing and the gray wall on the right side of engineering. But the red spot disappeared mid-air.
“The stone must be somewhere around there,” I said.
Karen threw up her hands a little. “We looked there five times.”
I sighed. “Maybe something’s happened to it that’s made it less visible.”
Apparently, I was increasingly “getting” the nature of the firestone: we found it a few minutes later, right in that area where the red spot of light had been, and, indeed, the stone didn’t look the same. The shape of it seemed exactly the same, but it had shrunk to a quarter of its previous size and was mostly a dull gray now, with little flecks of brick red that shimmered occasionally, as if the mechanism was idling. But, overall, the stone was now almost the exact same gray color as the base seam of the side wall and floor—little wonder no one had noticed the stone lying against there.
My hands covered in protective white gloves now, I picked up the stone from the floor. “What the hell happened to it? It looks like a shriveled seed.”
Karen moved closer to me. “Maybe it’s spent, or waiting to repower so it can be used again once we leave.”
“Let’s hope we leave,” I said in a dry voice. I glanced at her and the others. “Well, what do you all think? Should I try throwing it at the engine again? I can’t speak for any of you, but, we’ve already gotten a bunch of data from it since we’ve been in here. I’d rather not remain any longer. Whatever it is, whatever this place is, I think I’ve learned enough.” With my free hand, I clicked the communicator on my belt, setting it to broadcast my words ship-wide: “We’re going to attempt to get out of the void. Everyone stop all unnecessary work and get strapped in somewhere.”
I strapped myself into a ceiling-to-floor strap and stood in front of the curon engine; my heart was going crazy now, and my chest felt slick with sweat. What I was about to do might kill us all….
I looked around me, back toward where several others were strapped-in: Gary, Karen, Shirley—and Steve too, because he and the others had to abandon the nozzle repair and secure themselves.
My eyes lingered on Gary’s face one last time; he smiled at me then, his mouth and mustache moving a little hesitantly. I could see in his eyes that he wanted me to throw the stone, but he didn’t want to be the one who had told me to do it. He was afraid of the unknowns here…we all were.
I turned back around, took a deep breath and flung the shriveled stone toward the beam engine. The stone hit the black casing and fell to the floor. Then nothing. No changes. No power outage. And when I turned around now, I saw that the black of the void was still there on engineering’s computers and viewscreens.
“Shit!” I said, spit flying out my mouth.
However, almost immediately, I smacked my forehead hard. “Are we stupid or just so frazzled? These aren’t the same conditions as before! We had the engine on then.”
“Duh-uh,” I heard Gary say from behind me, and I couldn’t help laughing.
My strap’s swiveling attachment to the overhead bar and floor track was long enough that I could move quite far without undoing my strap, so now I rushed forward to look for and finally pick up the shriveled stone.
“Karen,” Steve said, “when the captain moves back behind the shield, wait two minutes, then fire up the stream on low to the top port nozzle. Captain, I think you should move farther back tha
n normal outside the shielding point.”
I did what Steve said—I knew that when you initialized a curon stream, the particles behaved more randomly, and given what we’d experienced with a power failure before, it was possible the shield wouldn’t work properly—not that a slight curon release would kill me, but it would give my body a jolt of energy I didn’t particularly want.
“Ready to initialize,” Karen finally said in an abrupt and wary way. “Everyone in engineering prepare again, for any bucking from…whatever might happen.”
I finally heard the normal, rhythmic whirring that indicated that the curon stream was active; I waited a few moments; then I raised my arm as far back over my head as I could and aimed the stone for the same black part of the engine—the firestone crashed into it and then—black. No lights in the room.
Except, this time, I had seen the glow of the rock as it made an arc toward the gray wall. I rushed in that direction just as the lights came back on.
“We’re out of the void!” Gary said in a voice that was both relieved and pleased.
“We’ve actually wound up quite near The Alexi Layer,” Karen said. “It seems we remained on almost the exact same trajectory after all.”
Gary spoke again and his voice sounded louder to me now; he had unstrapped himself and followed me toward the side-wall. “The void space apparently moves with the user. It’s a subset that doesn’t affect the larger set of your location in normal space. We were right inside there the whole time, as if we were still in a curon bubble, finishing our path in normal space…. Wow, that looks back to normal too.”
He was talking about the firestone, which was in my right hand again, only this time I’d removed my glove. Against my skin, the stone felt like a familiar friend with its cool-feeling exterior, yet there was that same visual heat from its red fire. I hated what the stone represented; I hated what it had done, but, I couldn’t help feeling beguiled by it all the same.
