by Ellis, Don
On a whim, he tapped his wristwatch into calculator mode and called up pi. The display read 3.1415. He did it again and got 3.1414.
“What the—?”
“Something wrong?” asked Raedawn.
“I think the magnetic effects of passing through the anomaly must have tranged my watch. Use the main comp to calculate pi for me, would you?”
She tapped at the controls, and a moment later said, “Three point one four one three two five.”
David had recalculated it the moment she did, and that’s what his watch said, too. “Son of a bitch. They couldn’t both be wrong exactly the same way. That means the value is really shrinking. Space is growing more curved.”
“Vi shotetye!” Boris said. “Your watch doesn’t actually measure pi. Is calculation. Mathematics is same everywhere, nyet?”
“Apparently not.” David ran the calculation one more time and said in amazement, “It shouldn’t work this way, but it does. I can’t explain it.” He tried to imagine what would happen if space were curved more tightly. If pi was smaller, then the circumference of a circle would be smaller as well, compared to its diameter, and since any path in space was actually a segment of a cosmic great circle . . .
“We’re going faster than we think we are,” he said. “Watch out we don’t overshoot.”
He looked at Harxae, not even trying to hide his smug expression, but if the alien was impressed, he sure didn’t show it. He should have been, though. David had solved in ten minutes something that had stumped the Kalirae for over two hundred years.
Sure he had. He didn’t know much about these aliens, but they were smart enough to stumble across a changing physical constant. Which meant Harxae knew how to locate spatial anomalies. The alien had been holding back.
And with telepathic ability, he also knew that David knew he’d been holding back, and so on ad infinitum.
“Did I pass your little test?” he asked.
“Admirably,” said Harxae.
“What else are you hiding from us?”
The Kalira held his hands together at the base and spread his long fingers out wide. “Many many things. More, even, than you are hiding from me.”
“That’s no surprise, if you’re reading my mind.”
“Perhaps I should have lied to you about that? Yes? No?” He lowered his hands. “Communication is easy. Trust takes longer. We will eventually share all we know. Be patient.”
David snorted. “You may have found the concept in our language, but patience is not a human virtue.”
“Perhaps you should try it sometime.”
“What for? So we can wait around inside this planet prison for what was it—two hundred and seventy-three years? No thanks.” David nodded toward the pile of electronic equipment in the corner of the cargo hold. “I plan to bust us back out of here just as soon as possible, with or without your help.”
11
They were halfway to Earth when Harxae said to Boris, “Your weapon is useless now.”
Everyone glanced at the Russian’s pistol, which he still held loosely in his right hand. The power indicator glowed green, but now there was a tiny red light beside the security lock plate. David felt a momentary rush of adrenaline at the thought that he had no backup if Harxae suddenly attacked, but the Kalira sat impassively in the airlock, folded up his knees next to his head to be out of the way during the free-fall portion of their flight.
Boris flipped the pistol to David, who caught it lefthanded, thumbed the lock plate, and handed it back. The security light blinked until Boris thumbed it himself, then it went out.
“Thanks,” he said, but whether he was talking to David or Harxae was unclear.
It seemed pointless to continue guarding the alien at gunpoint when he could apparently read their minds well enough to know when they would or wouldn’t shoot, but David didn’t know what else to do. The way Harxae treated everything like a test, he might feel obliged to take over the ship if they gave him the opportunity.
Things had seemed so much simpler back on Mars. He hadn’t expected it to be easy to follow the Earth through an interdimensional rift in space and bring it back home, but he hadn’t factored in trying to deal with hostile aliens—maybe hundreds of species of them—in the process.
Raedawn was still in the control cabin with the door cracked open just enough to listen in on the conversation in back. David heard her combing through the radio frequencies again, searching for a clear signal.
“So what’s this place for, anyway?” he asked.
Harxae didn’t need to ask what David meant. He said, “No one knows, but theories abound. Some think it’s divine retribution for their wrongs. Others think it’s a test. Others think we’ve been put here merely to entertain the makers with our struggles.”
“The bug jar theory.”
Harxae tilted his oblong head and squinted in concentration. “We do not have ‘bugs’ on our world, at least not as you know them, but I understand the concept. My own personal theory is that we are put here to rid the galaxy of us, so the makers can live there in peace. It can’t be coincidence that every race brought here is warlike, or that they all were poised to spread beyond their home planets when disaster befell them.”
“Maybe it is,” David said. “I discovered that intense magnetic fields will open a gateway into here. Spacefaring races at war would be manipulating all sorts of magnetic effects. Maybe this is just where you wind up if you twist space a little too tightly.”
With iron certainty in his deep voice, Harxae said, “No. There is malevolent intent. I can feel it.”
David wondered if he meant that literally or figuratively, but he didn’t pursue it. Either way, it was a subjective impression. “Okay,” he said. “Assuming there is, have you got any idea who’s behind it?”
Surprisingly, Harxae said, “Yes. There is evidence of a race even older than the Shard, a race we simply call the Ancients, who had powers far greater than any in the Maelstrom today. What few artifacts of theirs we have been able to recover show a mastery over space and time that we have never been able to achieve, or even fully understand.”
“And you think they created this place on purpose.”
“Either them, or someone even more powerful than them. The Ancients may have been stuck here just like the rest of us.”
Boris had been listening quietly all along. Now he said, “If that is true, then we are here for eternity.”
“No” said Harxae. “Even the Shard will not be here for eternity. The Tkona is always hungry.”
Knowing he wouldn’t like the answer, David nonetheless asked, “The Tkona?”
“Surely you noticed it. At the center of the rings, the blue-white nebula that passes for a sun here?”
“I saw it.”
“It is not a sun. It may be a black hole, but if so, it is no ordinary black hole, either. There seems to be no event horizon. Light pours from it, and tendrils of energy reach out from it to snatch planets at random from the rings. Gravitational anomalies abound. The inner worlds sometimes fall out of orbit and drop straight into it in a matter of hours, and even the outer worlds inevitably drift inward.”
Harxae’s tone of voice grew soft. “The Kalirae have been lucky. We’ve managed to stay in the outer ring, but those who fall inward seldom survive more than a few years.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Ah, sarcasm. How refreshing. Humor is the first thing to die here, it seems.”
Boris said, “I will tell you joke about the academician and the bezabrazny babushka. There was this ugly old woman, you see . . .”
David heard Raedawn’s voice in the control cabin, so he pushed the door into the bulkhead and stuck his head in.
She was talking to someone over the radio. “Montana?” she asked. “Why there?”
“Security,” said a thin voice, shot through with static. “The Neo-Soviets have already nuked Seattle and Detroit, and they’ve got fighters in the sky and in space a
ll around us. Right now the middle of the continent is the safest place to set down.”
David felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. The people of Earth had dropped nukes in the middle of all this? The world had gone insane.
“Who are you talking to?” he asked.
She switched off the microphone. “Union Space Command.”
“Did you tell them who we’re bringing with us?”
“Yep. I think that’s why they want to make sure we get down okay. They’re sending out an escort just to make sure. Apparently the Neo-Sovs are shooting at just about anything that moves, above or below the atmosphere.”
“Good,” David said. “About the escort, I mean.”
He turned back into the cargo hold, only to see Boris holding his pistol pointed straight at his own head. “Take ship to Cuba, or Russian gets it,” he said.
“What?” David raised his gun. Boris’s mind was obviously under Harxae’s control, but he didn’t know what to do about it. Shoot Boris? There would be no more point in that than letting the man shoot himself. Shoot Harxae? But he didn’t know if he could kill the Kalira before he made Boris pull the trigger. He held the gun on the alien anyway and said, “What the hell are you trying to pull?”
He heard Raedawn duck to the side to be out of the line of fire, then draw her own pistol from its shoulder holster under her jacket.
“Nothing!” Harxae said, holding his hands out in what was apparently a universal gesture of appeasement. “I’m not influencing him.”
“I’m supposed to believe he’d hold a gun to his own head?”
Boris laughed uproariously, then lowered his pistol. “Who do you think invented Russian roulette? I grow tired of pointing guns at one another, so I make little joke to lighten mood, is all.”
“Little joke?” David said. “You call that a joke?”
Harxae said, “David could have shot me!”
Boris looked from David to Harxae, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. At last he said, “You’re right, sense of humor is first to go.”
“If that’s what you call funny . . .” David growled. “Give me that gun.”
“Oh, come now, I meant nothing by—”
“Give it here!” David held his own weapon pointed straight at the bridge of Boris’s nose. The Neo-Sov locked eyes with him, staring him down, and at that moment David realized his mistake. If Boris didn’t obey, David would either have to shoot or lose what little authority he had over him. He couldn’t even blink, or Boris would know he had won the battle of wills.
Boris could blink. He did, even glanced at Harxae. But he couldn’t look back. David watched him try, his face quivering with the effort to move his head—or even just his eyes—but he was frozen into place.
Then, slowly, he stretched out his hand and let go of the gun. It pinwheeled slowly through the cargo hold, right past Harxae, who could easily have plucked it out of the air, but neither Boris nor Harxae moved until David had caught the gun clumsily in his left hand and passed it behind him to Raedawn.
“All right, you can let him go,” he said, noticing a swirling pattern of light around the pendant hanging down the alien’s chest.
“He will recover on his own in a few minutes,” said Harxae.
“What is that thing?” David asked, motioning to the pendant.
“A symbol of my race. It also has . . . certain powers.”
“I can see that,” David said testily. He was kicking himself that he hadn’t thought to check the talisman when Harxae first boarded. It could’ve gotten them all killed. Of course, the fact that the alien hadn’t used it until now was some confirmation of David’s uneasy trust.
“Give it to me,” David said. He was both surprised and relieved when Harxae took off the pendant and held it out to him. David half expected to feel a jolt when he touched it, but it only felt like a small cold piece of metal. He put the pendant in his pocket.
He turned back to Boris, who didn’t jerk free all at once. His eyes slowly came unstuck, then his head, then his limbs. He raised his arms out before him and flexed his fingers, making sure they all worked, then clenched his fists a time or two. David waited to see what he would do. He expected an angry outburst, maybe even a physical assault, so he wasn’t ready for Boris to pull his knees up to his chest, wrap his arms around them, and howl with anguish.
“What? Boris?” He tucked his gun into his belt, thought better of that, and handed it to Raedawn to add to her collection, then pushed himself across the open cargo bay to where Boris floated, shaking with emotion.
“Boris, are you all right?”
“No,” he said. “I am not all right! Yesterday I simple communications specialist. Now my country in all-out war with yours, our homeworld has fallen—literally—into chaos, I have lost Mars, my rank, my nationality, to become second-class citizen in your Union, and now even our prisoner can control me like puppet. Why should I be all right?”
“When you put it like that . . .” David said, awkwardly putting an arm around the other man’s shoulders. He decided not to tell him about the nukes just yet. “I’m sorry. We’ve all had a rough day, and I suppose I haven’t made it any easier.”
Boris didn’t acknowledge his touch, but he didn’t flinch away, either. David wished Raedawn were doing this instead of him, but at the same time he was glad she wasn’t. She would probably just tell Boris to get over it. Or worse.
“We’re landing in Montana,” he said. “The top brass there is pretty eager to meet you. And you,” he added, nodding to Harxae.
“No doubt so they can interrogate us,” Boris said.
“I’m sure they’ll want to debrief you.”
“It’s not the questions I’m worried about. It’s how they’ll ask them.”
David let go of his shoulder. “You won’t be harmed, Boris. Colonel Kuranda didn’t give you any trouble, did he?”
“He had no time.”
“We’ll tell them you’ve requested asylum. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.”
Harxae murmured something too soft to hear, then said in a voice that held a note of surprise, “Foolish as the practice seems, I sense the truth in his words.”
David straightened up and looked at the alien. “You think we should strap you to a chair and zap your feet with electricity until you tell us everything you know?”
“Yes, you probably should, though I am grateful to learn that you won’t.”
David wondered if that meant that the Kalirae would torture information from him if the roles were reversed, but then he realized there would be no need for them to do that. They could simply read whatever they wanted to know straight from his mind.
He crouched down next to Boris again. “Look, I’m sorry. Things look pretty lousy right now, but they’re bound to get better.”
“What makes you think so?”
David slapped him on the back. “Because they can’t get much worse.”
“Uh-oh,” said Raedawn from the control cabin.
David instantly regretted his words. He wasn’t superstitious, but the universe certainly did seem to take perverse delight in punishing foolish optimism. He looked to Raedawn, who was focused on the controls, and she looked as tense as a wire.
“Raedawn?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Our escort is under attack. Brace yourselves for maneuvers. We’re going to have to try to get through on our own.”
12
David jumped for the control cabin, pulled himself into the copilot’s chair, and strapped in. A side-lit Earth filled the view through the windows, but the telescope screen held the action: against the dark side of the planet two ships spat bright flame under hard acceleration, one pursuing a third ship that was arcing around to avoid them, the other coming straight on. An expanding cloud of gas and debris behind them showed where a fourth ship had already failed to dodge a missile.
“How’s our armament?” he asked.
“We’ve got three shots left.”
That’s how many she had launched in one burst at the Kalirae. “Not good. Have we got time to reload before you boost?”
“No. But if Boris can get suited up now—”
David turned halfway around in his chair. “Hear that, Boris? Suit up and get ready to reload our missiles. Please.”
Boris had recovered some of his aplomb. “Da. Harxae, toss me suit from there beside airlock.”
The alien found it for him, then began pulling on his own suit.
“Thrust in five, four, three, two, one,” Raedawn said.
Weight slammed them backward, way more than Earth normal. She was pouring on the gees, trying to build up velocity so they would be harder to hit and harder to catch if they made it past the approaching Neo-Soviet ship.
“Slave the missile controls to my side,” David said. “You can fly, and I’ll shoot.”
“All right.” Raedawn’s fingers danced over the weapons panel to her far right, and the screen directly in front of David lit up with the tactical display. He checked the stats on the craft that was coming for them: range, 15,000 kilometers; relative velocity, 25,300 kph; accelerating at 3.5 gees. With their own acceleration added in, their courses would intercept in . . . call it ten minutes, but the battle would be over long before then. Missiles accelerated at ten gees or more.
Plus there was the curvature of space to consider. If there were any fast or slow spots between the two ships, that would make accurate targeting impossible. The missiles would have to rely entirely on their onboard homing devices.
He checked the value of pi again: 2.8604. Space was tight here.
“I think we should coast,” he said.
Raedawn looked over her left shoulder at him. “Why?”
“Because there’s no way in hell they can hit us ballistically with the physical constants of space as mixed up as they are around here. And if we shut down the engines, they can’t track our heat signature.”
