VOR 04 The Rescue

by Ellis, Don

  “Fast space?” Raedawn asked.

  David tapped his watch. “Pi equals two or less.” He set it into calculator mode and called up the constant, but space was actually flatter here than usual: 3.37 and rising.

  “Have you got a better way of finding tightly curved space than I do?” he asked.

  Harxae said, “Yes, I can sense it.” He stepped away from the others, held his arms out wide, and turned around like a radar antenna. “There,” he said, pointing upward and to their right. “It is not strong, but it is faster than where we are.”

  “All right. All four of us should angle toward it, then drop more water so the ships behind us have to go around.”

  “An old strategy, but a good one,” Navrel said.

  The ships drew closer, and David kept checking the value of pi until it bottomed out at 2.5. “This looks like it,” he said, just as Harxae said, “We have reached the heart of it.”

  The ship beside them vented another water tank, but needn’t have bothered. None of the pursuers had even attempted to follow directly behind them this time.

  The faster space gave them half again as much lead as they had before. Harxae did his radar trick twice more, and the distance increased each time. After that they were far enough ahead that the other ships could see the vapor clouds coming and dodge, then tuck back in and use the same fast space to keep up.

  “What’s ahead of us?” Raedawn asked. “Any friendly planets we can loop past for some cover fire?”

  “There are no friendly planets,” Navrel said.

  “Not even your homeworld?”

  “We will not take our problems there. They have battles enough to fight without us bringing more.”

  David had never let go of Raedawn’s hand. He liked the feel of it in his. “It’s hard to believe nobody makes alliances here,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Situations change too quickly,” said Navrel. “A strong planet today could be rubble tomorrow. No one wants to be allied with refugees.”

  “That’s a pretty harsh attitude.”

  “This is a harsh place.” Navrel pointed back toward the pursuing ships. “Look. More have joined the chase. These may not even know what the others are after, but they know it must be valuable so they come to investigate. They will attract even more.”

  “Then we’ve got to shake them once and for all.”

  Navrel shook his head, a human gesture no doubt borrowed just for his human audience. “We should have fought our way through when it was just the curious. They only suspected that we had something they want, but by running, we proved it. They will not shake easily.”

  “How about that instant-elsewhere thing you did back on Earth? Can you do that with the whole ship?”

  “That would require the power of our entire population. Neither we nor the ship would survive the attempt.”

  “Well, we’ve got to do something,” David said. “If this goes on much longer, everybody with a spaceship is going to be on our tails.”

  “Agreed,” Navrel said. “Have you another brilliant Earth strategy?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?” David was at a loss for more ideas, but there must be tons of them rattling around inside his head.

  Navrel focused on him as if looking through his skull into his thoughts, then said, “You have a bloody history. The Trojan horse is an interesting idea, but I don’t see how it would work for us here. Pongee sticks are equally diabolical, but equally useless in space. The same goes for ambush, sniper fire, poison, terrorism, blitzkrieg, siege, and playing bad music at high volume.”

  “You’re looking for attack strategies,” Raedawn said. “But we’re trying to get away.”

  “That is a foreign concept. Perhaps I simply don’t recognize the solution when I see it.”

  She said, “You should look into my head if you want foreign. Spies don’t fight unless they have to. We go to ground, or disguise ourselves, or strike a deal, or—”

  “Or fund guerrillas, or spread rumors, or rig elections to destabilize governments. Yes, I see. None of which will work here.”

  “How about giving up?” she said.

  David had been looking out at the pursuing ships. He snapped his head back toward her again. “Give up? What?”

  “It’s the oldest trick in the book. When they’ve got you surrounded, surrender. But swallow the data, and give them a useless chip with a code that’ll take ’em weeks to decipher. Then when they put you in the cell full of snakes, toss one at the guard who brings your food, take his gun when he panics, and make your escape. Of course you sabotage the power plant and blow up the bad guys’ headquarters on your way out, but that’s just for fun.”

  She was grinning by the time she reached the end of her “idea.”

  “You forgot the part about seducing the sexy henchman,” he said.

  “We save that trick for emergencies. Along with suicide pills and jumping out of a moving train from a bridge over a river.”

  He squeezed her hand, then looked up at Navrel. “Okay, so we’re fresh out of ideas. What do you suggest?”

  “You just said it,” the Kalira said. “Giving up. Suicide pills. And jumping out of a moving train. Together, it just might work.”

  26

  You want to take the ship where?” David asked.

  They had gone to an observation alcove at the front edge of the control room, where they took in a nearly unobstructed view of the entire pocket universe while Navrel outlined his plan.

  He said, “To the edge of the Tkona. The vortex at the center of the Maelstrom.”

  “I know what the Tkona is. From Harxae’s description of it, it sounds like a good place to stay away from.”

  “Precisely. We will lose most of our pursuit when they realize where we intend to go.”

  “But not everyone.”

  “That depends on how closely we approach it. If we accelerate straight toward it, it will look as if we intend to sacrifice ourselves rather than let the enemy have our secret. But to do that, we must pass through areas so dense with energy whorls that sensors will be useless. Nontelepathic races will have no way to navigate there, but we can keep our ships far enough apart that we can watch out for one another. We should be able to shake our pursuit there.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then we will attempt the ‘instant elsewhere trick’ as you call it. But we will do it your way instead of ours.”

  “My way requires a spatial anomaly like the one that brought us here,” David reminded him. “And from what Lamott told me, it doesn’t actually take you anywhere anyway.”

  “The Tkona is anomaly enough for our purposes. And even if we cannot escape the Maelstrom, using it as a temporary route to someplace else within it would allow us to shake our pursuit and study your discovery at the same time.”

  “My discovery isn’t really much of a discovery,” David said. “You can attract an existing anomaly and manipulate its shape with magnets, and you can blow one open with bombs. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can open up where there wasn’t one before. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s more than we knew before. We knew how to open a gateway with our minds and how to direct where it takes us, but only to another point within the Maelstrom, and we were never able to duplicate the effect mechanically.” Navrel looked out at the vortex in the distance. “Your way seems to allow the same kind of thing on a larger scale. We will not try it this time, but if we can move instantly through the Tkona without detection, it will look as if we were swallowed up.”

  It would be so much simpler if everyone would just cooperate, David thought. What did he care if the Pharons or the Shard or anybody else got out of this place, so long as humanity did as well?

  “You would care if they became your neighbors,” said Navrel.

  Raedawn looked at him, then at David. Harxae said, “Private thought,” and she shrugged.

  “So how long before we get there?”
she asked.

  “Most of one of your days,” said Navrel.

  A day to the center of the universe. David was amazed at the notion that all of the Maelstrom—hundreds of planets and thousands of asteroids—was now such a short distance across. Given the high acceleration the Kalirae ships were capable of, that meant it was maybe twice the width of the solar system at most. And his discovery might make it even shorter yet. When he was younger and more naive he might have considered such a situation to be a good thing, but after a lifetime of watching the nations of Earth squabble for resources and living space, he knew better. Bringing people closer together merely gave them more reasons to fight one another.

  “You begin to understand,” said Navrel.

  Raedawn looked at David again with a peeved expression. “It’s not polite to carry on half a conversation silently.”

  “I’m not trying to carry on a conversation,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”

  “Well, think out loud. Or better yet, don’t think at all. It was your thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.”

  How could he argue with that? If he hadn’t decided to try to track down Earth and bring it home, he and Raedawn and Boris would still be happily squabbling over resources on Mars.

  Navrel opened his mouth, but Raedawn said, “Not on your life,” and he shut it again without speaking. She pulled the slowly drying front of her shirt away from her skin and said, “Look, if we’re not in danger of dying right away, I’d like to clean up and get a little rest while I’ve got the chance. It’s been a long day, and it looks like it’s just going to get longer. Do you have a room with a shower and a bed in it anywhere on this ship?”

  “You sleep in the rain?” asked Navrel.

  “No. Jeez, you’d think someone who could read minds would—”

  “Precisely,” said Navrel. He and Harxae both smacked their lips in alien laughter.

  She said nothing, just looked at them, and they immediately shut up. Harxae bowed his head and said, “Follow me.” He led the way back to the doors at the rear of the control dome.

  David tagged along, figuring he should at least learn where to find the bathroom, but when they got to her quarters, a palatial mansion of a suite that would put most luxury apartments to shame, Raedawn said, “Come on in. I could use somebody to wash my back.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  She laughed. “You should see your expression.”

  He realized he was grinning like a goof, but he couldn’t stop. “Why don’t you at least show me where my room is first,” he said to Harxae.

  “You will require only one,” said the alien.

  “Are you—I mean—oh.” He looked from Harxae to Raedawn, who was grinning now herself. “Okay.”

  “I will return for you when we reach the Tkona,” said Harxae, stepping back into the corridor and letting the door slide shut.

  “Don’t let us get blown up in the meantime,” David said, knowing the door wouldn’t stop Harxae from picking up the thought.

  Raedawn reached up and put her hands behind his neck. “Yeah, really,” she said softly. “It would be a drag to get distracted at a time like this.”

  * * *

  There wasn’t even a scar. When they removed her blood-soaked clothing and washed the sticky brown residue from her skin, David and Raedawn could find no evidence that she had ever been shot. She didn’t even feel any tenderness when David pressed on the spot; only ticklishness, which led to a long, loud game of “does this tickle?” in the shower, which led to a longer game of “so what does this feel like?” after they toweled off.

  Later, as they rested somewhere near the middle of a bed that had to be extravagant even by Kalirae standards, David asked, “So what did it feel like to get shot?”

  She was resting her head on his chest. She turned and bit him, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to make him yelp in surprise and real pain. “No,” she said, laying her head back down, “on second thought, I don’t think it was like that at all. More like a bee sting. A really big bee, with a stinger as long as your finger.”

  “Ouch.”

  “That’s what I thought. Then I fell down the stairs and I remember thinking very clearly, ‘Shit, now I’m going to break something, too.’ Then I tried to breathe and that didn’t work so well, and I heard you shout ‘No!’ and I thought, ‘This really isn’t good.’ I think that’s when I realized I’d been shot.”

  Her voice had been growing louder and more animated, and he could feel her heartbeat picking up again. He said, “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “No, that’s all right. I need to sort through it all, and I’d rather have someone to hold onto while I do it.”

  “Oh. Okay, then.”

  She laughed softly. “I remember being really embarrassed at the thought that you were going to land the ship in the hospital parking lot. I was all, ‘Oh, jeez, he’s going to get himself into even more trouble and it’s all my fault.’ ”

  “Like you got yourself shot on purpose.”

  “It’s funny, but part of me figured I must have done something wrong, or it wouldn’t have happened. I think that’s the thing that surprised me the most. I’ve always thought I was a cynical bitch, but—”

  “Me, too.”

  “Quiet, you, or I’ll bite you again. As I was saying, I always thought I was cynical, but apparently some part of me down deep still thought that the universe was basically a fair place. Bad things wouldn’t happen to people who didn’t deserve them. Isn’t that a laugh?”

  “Hilarious.”

  “So I was lying there, bleeding and telling myself what a horrible person I must be, and you were flying me maybe three blocks to the hospital, and I see all these little mushrooms rolling around on the deck. I thought I was hallucinating, you know? But then I heard them rattling, and one of them bounced over close enough that I could see it, and I realized they were bullets.”

  David remembered the ricochets smacking into the back wall until he closed the airlock. Space Force weapons used soft bullets so they wouldn’t penetrate the hull if they were fired on board a ship, but they made a nastier wound.

  “I remember looking at that lump of metal on the deck and thinking, ‘One of those things is inside me.’ It just felt so weird.” She rolled sideways and pressed her fingers against the skin beneath her right breast. “You know what feels weird now?”

  “No, what?”

  “Not being shot so quickly afterward. I barely had time to get used to the idea that I had been, but you know, it’s happened to a lot of people and I was thinking, ‘Well, I guess this is the way it works.’ But then all of a sudden it wasn’t anymore, and I had to start thinking about what all that meant.”

  He took the opportunity to kiss where her fingers had touched. “What does it mean?”

  “What’s the meaning of life? I have no more idea than I ever did, but look at it this way. In a couple more hours we’re going to do something even crazier than what we did when we left Mars. Half the population of this nightmare place apparently wants us dead, and I half expect they’ll get their wish. So this is where I choose to spend my last hours. What does that tell you?”

  “A lot,” he said. He looked into her green eyes, brushed a lock of her dark hair away from her forehead. “I love you, too.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” she said, tickling him playfully.

  “Well, I am surprised. I used to think you were . . .”

  “A cynical bitch.”

  “Right. But then everything started happening at once, and I sort of forgot about that, and, well, here we are.”

  “Here we are,” she said, laying her head back on his chest.

  * * *

  They were up and dressed again by the time Harxae came for them. Raedawn’s clothes had taken a good deal of scrubbing to get the dried blood out, but fortunately the clothing was all black. Drying it off had proved the hardest part until they discovere
d that the bathroom could be turned into a sauna, whereupon they cranked up the heat and toasted it dry in a matter of minutes.

  David was glad of the heat as well. Seeing all that red-tinged water swirling down the drain had made him shiver. How fragile we are, he thought. How fragile, yet humanity had learned to harness such immense amounts of energy. They had built weapons that could completely vaporize a person. Their spaceships—hell, even their hovercars—channeled forces strong enough that an accident was often fatal. A simple power cord could kill if its insulation was compromised. People faced death from all directions every day and hardly thought about it, yet their lives depended upon everything working smoothly. They had grown complacent.

  He wondered if that was such a bad thing. Maybe that was the ultimate triumph of civilization: to make traumatic death so rare that people became complacent.

  That was about to change. The Union and the Neo-Soviets had been teetering on the brink of Armageddon for years, neither side truly understanding what they were about to unleash, and now Earth had been plunged into even greater chaos. People were about to learn just how fragile their world and their lives actually were.

  Maybe, like Raedawn, if they survived it, they would gain a new appreciation for what really mattered.

  27

  The Tkona was much closer now. When they stepped out into the control room, they saw its bright blue-white glow spread across half the heavens. The clear dome had darkened to near opaqueness to prevent its light from blinding the crew, but David could still sense its intense energy in the way it washed color from everything and increased the contrast to stark white or inky night.

  The ship was passing over the innermost ring of worlds. There were few actual planets left intact; collisions had split their crusts and spewed their molten cores into space, where the magma had cooled to form asteroids that had in turn smashed themselves to rubble. Electrical discharges thousands of kilometers long arced between them, evidence of the enormous magnetic field that reached out from the spinning core.

  It looked like the accretion disk of a black hole must look. David wondered what the radiation level was inside the ship, but he didn’t have any familiar instruments to check, and there wasn’t much he could do about it if it was lethal anyway.