Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  Neil dropped a hand on Hubler’s shoulder. “Thanks, mate. Good job.”

  “What, blowing the bejesus out of Oberon?” Hubler snorted. “Just so long as Harrison Shapiro nails Vaurien’s ass to a wall for it, not mine!”

  “Nobody’s going to get nailed to anything,” Marin said in a voice that shook slightly. He took the combug from his ear, adjusted it, replaced it, and called, “Richard?”

  A dry chuckle over the loop answered him. “The Tycho is on its way. They’re putting some polite distance between us before they jump out of here, and the little prick is threatening me with every legal action he can think of. Good luck to him. Fleet Borushek already has every one of us, Harrison Shapiro especially, on its most-wanted list. We lose this war, and like Ramesh said, we better get out, get lost in Freespace and not look back.”

  “We win,” Jazinsky added cynically, “and it’s Danny Ramesh with the egg all over his nasty face. Forget him, Richard. He’s always been the same – rich kid, his mama’s a Middle Heavens industrialist. When conscription time came around she bought him a Fleet commission, fast-tracked through officer school and straight into administration at Fleet Sector Command. He never saw the inside of a troop carrier, never mind a warship. Hey, Neil, Curtis, why don’t you come up here? Bill said something about Irish coffee … I believe I’ll join you.”

  And Judith Fargo, over the comm from Hangar 4 where Bravo had just put away the Capricorn and powered her down: “Make it a half dozen.”

  The thermal blanket was barely adequate and Marin was still shivering as Travers stepped down out of the Harlequin and shepherded him in the direction of the lifts.

  Chapter Two

  The aftertaste of Velcastran whiskey was still rich on his tongue as he stood under a shower that began cool and was soon hot enough to take his skin off. He was pink, shoulders to ankles, before he turned off the water and grabbed a bath sheet, which Travers swiped out of his hands and used to rub him down. Marin leaned both palms on the tiles, luxuriating in the hot air jets, and in Neil’s hands on him.

  “I’m all right, really,” he remonstrated at last. “If you don’t want to believe me, believe Bill Grant. He didn’t haul me into the Infirmary.”

  Travers paused for an instant and began again. “You scared crap out of me. Again.”

  “I’d have done a lot worse,” Marin argued gently, “if the Harlequin had been just a few minutes late getting to us, and you cracked the seals on the armour about a minute after Bill called quits on me.”

  “I know all that.” Travers stepped back, apparently satisfied with his handiwork. He threw the towel into the chute and dragged Marin into an embrace. His face was buried in the damp mass of Curtis’s hair as he said, “Just give my shattered nerves a few seconds to catch up.”

  “Shattered what?” Marin turned his back on the hot air vents and took Travers’s face between both hands. The blue eyes were dark, troubled, and Marin said carefully, “Neil, you’re a soldier. We both are, for the duration. We volunteered for this duty. Don’t tell me you never took risks right alongside a comrade you were close to.”

  “Not someone I was actually handfasted to.” Travers’s eyes closed for a moment and he seemed to mock himself for the power of the emotion coursing through him, making him tremble slightly. The dark head shook and he visibly dragged his thoughts together through an effort of will. “For the duration, is it? Till the Colonial Wars are decided, and we’re home, safe, from the Lai’a expedition.”

  “It was the deal we signed for.” Marin sighed, and then leaned over and set a kiss on Neil’s open mouth. Soft lips molded to his own, and Travers’s tongue greeted him eagerly. “I’m all right,” Marin said, slurred against the kiss before he drew back. “The suit took a hit from a scrap of shrapnel about the size of your thumbnail, dead center on the power coupler. The system shut down because it figured it was going to start shorting or venting, and was very likely to fry me like a chicken. You know the odds of that impact happening?”

  “Oh, about half a million to one, I expect,” Travers admitted, obviously trying to sound casual about the risk while his fingers raised bruises on Marin’s arms.

  “Actually, more like a hundred thousand,” Marin said shrewdly, “but if it was ever going to happen, I’m glad it was right here, right now, and not in the middle of some battle.”

  Travers gave him an odd look and planted a bemused kiss between his eyes. “You don’t call that a battle?”

  “A skirmish,” Marin amended. “Eighteen automata, two targets, Bravo Company, you, me, the Harlequin.” He nodded slowly. “We did okay.”

  “We’re alive,” Travers said sharply. “Any time you go up against Zunshu hardware and walk away from it, you pat yourself on the back and say you did bloody well.”

  Marin smiled, shrugged. “We did bloody well. And we saved Oberon.”

  “Most of Oberon.” Travers’s arms went around him again with a hint of desperation, held him close while his lips devoured Marin’s right ear. His voice was rough. “That was a good call, to take a bite out of the platform and salvage the rest.”

  “And Hubler’s an excellent gunner.” Marin groaned as pleasure licked through him, banishing the goblins he had been trying to deny since the Harlequin picked up the flock of aeroshells exiting the Drift. “We’re expected. Ops room. Irish coffee.”

  “They can wait ten minutes,” Travers growled as he turned Marin around physically and propelled him toward the bed. His tone, his expression, would brook no arguments.

  “Ten minutes?” Marin hit the mattress. It was still bouncing as he said, “Lights, low.”

  The cabin plunged into companionable dimness, where the brightest object was the threedee opposite the bed. Data continued to scroll through it but for the moment was ignored as Travers settled beside him, his torso and face picked out in the surreal colors, blue, green, mauve, cast by the display. “Could be twenty,” he said like the rough-silk purr of a big cat as Marin’s hands slid inside the pale blue cotton of his shirt.

  The adrenaline rush was still tingling in Marin’s extremities, making his heart fast and his nerve endings prickle. His fingers left transient marks as he pulled Travers against him, wrestling with him for a moment, though Neil had put on a lot of muscle in recent weeks and Marin was under no illusions. Blood pulsed through him, an affirmation of life, health, strength, and he wanted Neil more fiercely than usual. Travers knew; the adrenaline must have burned through him just the same, leaving him shaking slightly with the age-old fight or flight reflex for which there was no outlet –

  Or, no outlet save for sex. Marin knew what had prompted the sudden storm of desire, and if it was artificial, he did not care. His fingers clenched into Travers’s hair, his legs seized him around the hips, hard enough to make him yelp, and then they were humping together, rolling across the deep bronze quilt, hunting for release, pleasure, a celebration of survival and freedom.

  Part of Marin was tempted to use the ancient skills of the Resalq martial arts and flip Travers over into the passive role, show him that muscle, bulk, stature, were not nearly as important as most humans thought they were. Part of him took a delight in Neil’s strength, the breadth of the muscular torso, the life burning through him like a wildfire. He slipped, slithered, in Travers’s hands, evading him, defying him, making him work for it; and when the moment came, made the gift of surrender when Neil had come to appreciate it.

  Sweat shone on Travers’s face as he poised on hands and knees over Marin, holding him down on the rumpled bed. His breath was short, his voice a growl. “Hey, if you’ve changed your mind –”

  “If I do,” Marin panted, “it’ll be all about who gets on top, and when, and how.” He caught Travers’s head and pulled it down to kiss.

  It did not last nearly as long as ten minutes, and they mocked each other as they sprawled across the mattress, cooling down, still panting. Marin’s head rested on the hard pillow of Neil’s shoulder; Travers’s clothes were tan
gled on the foot of the bed, and Curtis mocked himself with a throaty laugh as he groped blindly for a wad of tissues from the nightstand.

  A little service drone popped out of its nook and then vanished again as it correctly identified the human behavior. It would return to the job when they left and tidy the bed, cycle the air, dump the discarded clothes into the laundry chute.

  “We,” Travers said with rueful humor as Marin swabbed sketchily across his belly, “are just dead lucky.”

  “Lucky to be handfasted? To ever have found each other in the first place?” Marin yawned deeply, scratched his ribs and sat up in the dim, companionable light. He lobbed the tissues in the direction of the bathroom, but they fell short. The housekeeper drone would take care of them.

  “Both of the above … and dead lucky to be alive right here, right now, with the option of screwing our brains out on a whim,” Travers added.

  “Not quite on a whim!” Marin set his flat palms on Travers’s broad chest, thumbed his nipples, felt the heavy beat of his heart, which had just begun to slow. “For what it’s worth, I doubt we’ll blunder into this kind of engagement again. Not where we’re going.”

  “Don’t remind me of where we’re going,” Travers groaned.

  “You don’t like to think about Elarne?” Marin was not surprised.

  “It makes me dizzy.” Travers’s hands charted Marin’s lean arms, his shoulders. “I just let Barb and Mark crunch the numbers, and I’ll go where they send me when the time comes.”

  “Us,” Marin corrected. “Could you handle another drink?” He stooped and pressed a kiss to the hollow of Travers’s throat, right over the pulsebeat. Travers was still stretching when he shuffled to the side of the bed. He got his feet on the deck and worked his back to and fro before he went to fetch the bottle.

  “Why not?” It was Neil’s turn to yawn, and he rolled over to watch with heavy lids as Marin reached for the Flynn’s Red Label.

  The whiskey was Irish in character, from a distillery in the north of Velcastra’s big continent, where glacier water flowed over peat and limestone to produce unique piquancy. They had not bothered with glasses, and Marin took a swig before passing the bottle over. His eyes were drawn irresistibly to the threedee, and he blinked at the data.

  “Here’s to us,” Travers toasted in a slightly hoarse voice. “Lucky to be alive, and smart enough to know it.”

  “You got that right.” Marin frowned as he looked into the blue and green threedee. “Well, now, that’s … interesting.”

  “Business?” Travers set the bottle down by the bed and reached for the slacks and underwear he had abandoned minutes before. He was not even looking at the threedee. “They actually got some useful data from Oberon, from the AI? It’ll keep Jazinsky amused.”

  Marin’s head shook slowly. “No. Half of this is Wastrel stuff – Tully doesn’t want to risk a Weimann start, and if they put it to a vote, I’m with him. We might be a few percent out of alignment – looks like the impact of the detonation was close enough to the engine deck to give the drive unit a shakeup. Who in his right mind wants to take chances? This says Richard’s going to send a courier to Alshie’nya, get us a tow. But Etienne is tracking … something else.”

  Legs already fed into his shorts Travers stood. “What, something out of Hellgate?” He peered into the threedee, took a moment to skim what Marin had already seen. “Now, what in the hell is that?”

  “They’re asking themselves the same question.” Marin circuited the bed and leaned into the closet for fresh clothes. A crushed silk tunic in abstract patterns of deep burgundy and even deeper green, a pair of gray slacks which fluoresced subtly as the light shifted.

  “Ops room,” Travers decided as he reached for his own slacks with one hand and slipped a combug into his ear with the other.

  The loop was quiet by comparison with the turmoil of an hour before, but Operations was still fully manned and half of Bravo Company seemed to have gathered around the three meter navigation tank, where Etienne was displaying tracking information. Michael Vidal had pulled up a chair, and as usual lately he was eating steadily.

  He still looked like an apparition, but Marin could see the difference in him. He was in the gym twice a day, lifting flea weights, and his muscle mass had begun to increase. He could walk the length of the Wastrel’s habitable decks three times before exhausting, but Marin was sure he was not sleeping. The remarkable blue eyes were still sunken, with a haunted, haunting look about them. His hair had begun to grow back, disguising the hollows of his skull, and he was going to be lucky. It was all growing back. He might have discovered himself with thin wisps where the more typical thick, lush Pakrani hair had been – the genetic legacy of his mother’s side of the family.

  “Yo,” Vidal said by way of greeting as Travers dropped one hand on his shoulder. His eyes passed on to Marin, and he nodded. “You’re a lucky boy. I took a look at the hardsuit when Roark brought it back up to the lab. The micro-pellet of Orion trash that hit you was about the size of a grape. The size of a grapefruit, and it would have taken your head right off.”

  “You pay your money, you take your shot,” Marin said darkly, with a sidelong glance into Travers’s shuttered face. “You did some damned good work, Mick.”

  “Not bad for a cripple.” Vidal glared at the food he had half eaten, a soft roll stuffed with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.

  “You’re not a cripple,” Travers argued. “Not anymore. Not unless you decide that’s what you want to be – and Curtis is right. You did good work on Tactical.”

  “Just trying to be useful.” Vidal swiped up the food and began to eat, though it was clear he was not hungry.

  On the other side of the tank, Richard Vaurien was cradling a mug between both hands and frowning into the threedee display. As Travers headed for the autochef, Marin circuited the tank and considered the visual from Vaurien’s perspective. Richard touched his shoulder briefly and gestured with the mug.

  “Welcome back to the land of the living. You’ll have to teach me that trick one day.”

  “Semcaram, and it’s not a trick… what the hell is this?” Marin could not make any sense of the display. “Is it a real object or just a sensor echo?”

  “It’s almost a philosophical question.” Jazinsky was at one of the flatscreens, a workstation opposite the tank, running a series of analyzes. “It appeared out of the Drift noise about ten minutes ago, and it’s still beating the hell out of me. Mark might recognize it –”

  “But Mark ain’t here.” Vidal stood and stretched. He was still wearing the same kind of clothing Marin had chosen for him, a loose tunic over black pants and a sash around the hips, but there was more substance inside the garments, Marin was sure. He dusted off his hands, still chewing as he joined Jazinsky and peered at the flatscreen. “Is this the pingback from active imaging?”

  “Yeah. But the pingback from what? A sensor echo?” She reconfigured the instruments. “Let me try something else. This is like … like trying to use a mirror to see something that’s directly behind your own head, but the damn’ thing moves with you, so you never get a clear look at it.”

  “It’s like …” Vidal rubbed his face and looked again. “It’s familiar from somewhere, but I can’t remember. Neil, have a look at this.”

  Travers was on his way back from the ’chef with a mug in either hand. He passed one to Marin and they shouldered in beside Vidal and Jazinsky. And Vidal was right, Marin thought. Something about the odd data was familiar.

  But it was Gillian Perlman who nailed it. She had flown the Bravo gunship for over three years, the insane years when the crew had referred to the ship as a flying asylum. Those were the years when the Intrepid chased the phenomena that clustered around the sites of the big gravity storms, and too often gunships were caught, torn apart, like Eddie Kwei’s flight. Memories of the demise of Echo Company, the death of the Intrepid, still troubled Marin’s dreams, and Perlman was right.

  “A Hellg
ate ghost,” she said slowly. “They used to tell us they were wreckers, Freespacers using some kind of cloaking, or jamming our imaging gear, and we’d go out there and play tag with objects that vanished, or else led us into deep, dark water where we’d get squashed like tin cans. Neil?”

  “She’s right.” Travers glanced from Marin to Vidal and back. “Neither of you two ever drew this assignment, but we were in Hellgate for way too long, pushing our luck, chasing – well, things a lot like this.”

  Jazinsky’s eyes were bright and hard as polished gimlets. “I’ve worked in the Drift almost as long – long enough to have seen my share of Hellgate ghosts.”

  “And this is different?” Marin drank the coffee without tasting it. “How different?”

  “For one thing, it’s starting to exit the Drift now,” Jazinsky mused. “It’s crossing the boundary line and it’s still holding a specific trajectory. For another thing, we’ve been tracking it for more than ten minutes.” She looked up at Perlman. “You chased enough of these, Gill. How long did they hold together before they gave you the slip?”

  The pilot shrugged eloquently. “Five to ten. Long enough to get a gunship in the air and go chase a handful of smoke.”

  The data was fluctuating wildly, as if Etienne were trying to get a firm image on a body of water which was changing from moment to moment. Marin was half mesmerized by the warp and ripple of something that looked like a solid object one second and like a high-frequency energy signature the next. “Like bouncing a light off a spinning glass ball,” he mused, “and sometimes the light passes through, and sometimes it bounces off.”

  “Exactly.” Jazinsky pointed out a peak and a trough in the data. “Here, it’s solid enough to be an object. Here, you’d swear it was just an energy pulse. Look at the velocity – whatever it is, it’s cruising at a fraction under a million kilometers an hour.”