Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  With an obvious effort Vidal shoved himself up to his feet and pulled back his shoulders. Standing straight, he was much taller than Rusch, with the half-Pakrani stature which made him so resilient even now. “You give us Tactical and a super-carrier to work with, Alexis, and you won’t be looking at those numbers, or even half of them.”

  For a moment they were locked, eye to eye, and Travers felt the crackle of some electricity pass between them. He glanced across the stateroom, and Ernst Rabelais was intent on the pair – both of them were blood of his blood, and what Travers saw on his face was a pride so profound, he could never have framed it in words.

  At last Rusch thrust out her hand. “Deal.”

  And Vidal shook it. He took a long breath, as if he must suppress a shudder. “If you want me, I’ll either be with Jo and Ernst running the simulator, or with Roark and Asako, figuring one god-almighty firing solution. We can do this.”

  She held onto his hand as she dropped back her head and glared at the ceiling. “Christ! I must be insane. You’re not ready for this Michael. You still ought to be in the Infirmary.”

  “Sod that.” Deliberately, Vidal withdrew his hand. “I’m going to get some sleep,” he announced, and gestured farewell to Rabelais and Queneau. “I’ll see you in the hangar, 06:00.”

  “Make it 07:30.” Rabelais was clasping his own skull. “I’ve had a couple, and this stupid old body’s not used to it anymore. Got to sleep this off.”

  “Ditto,” Queneau slurred. “Damn, did I really drink that stuff?”

  “All right.” Vidal turned back to Rusch. He hesitated one moment and then said, low, husky, “Trust me.”

  A faint smile tugged at one corner of her mouth. “I do. I just hope I don’t need to have my brains examined. Good night, Curtis, Neil.”

  She was gone with that, and Vidal visibly relaxed. A vast yawn ambushed him, and he knuckled his eyes. Travers took him by the shoulders, watched him force himself awake. Vidal mocked himself with a humorless chuckle.

  “Get outta here,” Rabelais told him with rough affection. “People want to sleep.”

  “Makes three of us.” Vidal was already moving.

  Travers and Marin followed, wondering where he was going. Neil had expected him to head for the stateroom where he had slept a whole night through, in the middle of their bed, but Vidal turned in the opposite direction. He took a service lift most often used by drones, and moments later they were in a staff lounge high on the spine of the Wastrel.

  The view was dominated by the gantries, the disabled crane, the swarm of drones working on the damage the tug had suffered at Oberon. Vidal ignored it all. He sank onto the long couch under the viewports and swung his legs onto the cushions. Travers wondered how often he came here, perhaps to get away from people, most of whom tried to either mollycoddle him or suffocate him with advice.

  “Will you sleep?” Marin asked quietly, “or do you need to take something?”

  “I might sleep this time.” Vidal’s eyes were closed. “If I’m tired enough, the dreams don’t come. Or if they do, they don’t wake me. I talked to Mark.”

  “About the Resalq trick, memory suppression?” Travers glanced at Curtis, who was studying Vidal. “You made a time?”

  “When we get back to Alshie’nya.” Vidal was settling fast. “He told me about it … a little like deep hypnosis, so he said. And I’ll tell you right now, the idea scrapes my nerve endings.”

  “It’s bad?” Travers was surprised, and looked at Marin for answers. “You did this. You didn’t say it was so bad.”

  “It depends on the person,” Marin said pragmatically. “For me it was a release, but as Dario told you, I was about as low as you can go and still find a way to come back.”

  “He said he thought Mark had brought you to Saraine to die in peace,” Travers remembered.

  “Yeah.” Marin shrugged off the old memories. “For me the ritual was a liberation, but I was ready to take everything I was, everything I had left, and cede responsibility to someone else. If I hadn’t been ready to relinquish control, power, whatever, it wouldn’t have been so easy. Mick’s still fighting.”

  “So it’s going to be a struggle,” Travers mused.

  “It could be.” Marin frowned at Vidal, who was listening closely as Curtis said, “Mark would have told you it’s like being stripped naked. You won’t have a secret left to hide, so be sure you want your skeletons seen, known. All of them.”

  The blue eyes were dark with exhaustion. “You did this?”

  “Yes, but...” Marin took a long breath. “I didn’t have much to hide. I’d killed a man in cold blood and called it execution, but that was the worst of my sins at the time. And it was the very reason Mark was interested in me. I didn’t know it then, but he was recruiting and he needed a human.” He paused. “No two people are the same. You’re ten years older than the pathetic kid I was, with a lot more living behind you.”

  “I’m a thousand years older.” Vidal’s face was filled with shadows. “And I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “No one’s forcing you,” Travers began.

  “But I have a powerful desire to hang onto my sanity,” Vidal muttered, “and I won’t, Neil, not for long. I’m a basket case. You just haven’t noticed.”

  “You think? So you’ll do it.” Travers watched the ghosts play across Vidal’s face.

  “Like I have a choice,” he said at last. “But it scares me spitless, Neil.”

  Marin cleared his throat softly. “You can trust Mark.”

  “I know.” Vidal looked away. “Like trusting a surgeon to lay you wide open with a knife.”

  “Then, will you trust me?” Travers offered.

  Vidal frowned up at him. “You’d be there?”

  “Of course I’d bloody be there for you!”

  “Some of the skeletons rattling around in this closet of mine are going to shock you,” Vidal warned.

  “I’m a big boy,” Travers told him fatuously.

  At last Vidal smiled, and it was a genuine expression. “Yes, you are.”

  “Besides,” Travers reasoned, “I think I know most of it. You told me enough about the memories of things that never happened – the Hellgate nightmares. I can imagine the rest, we all can. And I’ve talked to Ernst and Jo. They told me about the cold and the dark, the hunger, when Rabelais was out of his head with pain, broken bones, there was no heat, no food, no drugs, not even much water. You’d talk for hours and weeks, till you knew each other better than your family ever knew you.”

  “She saved his life two, three times,” Vidal said vaguely as his mind began to drift with tiredness. “She literally picked him up and carried him. The reason he made it through is Jo Queneau … the same Big Jo who busted me out of that club, in the sim, remember?”

  As if Travers would ever forget. As heads of Shapiro’s security detachment, he and Marin had watched the whole simulation, part of the recruitment process, and his nerves had crawled. His doubts about Queneau were dispelled in that moment, and he was quite ready to believe she had done for Rabelais in reality what she had done for Vidal in the sim.

  “They’re inseparable now,” Marin observed quietly.

  “Mmm.” Vidal settled deeper, closer to slumber. “You heard how he calls himself ‘the ghost.’ He asked me, would the clan welcome him back or just resent him? Damnit, how would I know?”

  In fact, characters like Trick and Ying were quite likely to be resentful, but Travers was not about to say it. He was still hunting for the right words when Vidal’s breathing settled into the steady cadence of sleep. Marin’s hand on his arm drew him away, out of the lounge, and at the door Travers dimmed the lights.

  They were in their own stateroom minutes later, and he sprawled diagonally across the bed, watching as Curtis undressed in the soft light of the threedee. The Wastrel hummed with activity which never stopped, and he had lost track of the time. The ship might be underway when they woke, or soon after, with the Omaru blockade
ahead of them – the Kiev battle group.

  The Sark. He tried the name for fit as Marin stretched out beside him, curled around him, head on his chest. Rusch was right, it fit well. He closed his arms around Marin and a groan rumbled from his throat as his eyes fell shut. He should shake himself awake, he thought, contribute to his own seduction, but sleep was tugging at his mind. “Who gets on top,” he growled, “and when, and how.”

  “Was that a question?” Marin yawned.

  “No. It’s what you said … before.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” Curtis had settled, boneless with relaxation, and his voice was muffled.

  Travers’s thoughts were fast unraveling. A smart retort was out there somewhere, but just then it eluded him. “Later,” he promised, but Marin was already asleep.

  Chapter Four

  Salvage tug Wastrel,

  Omaru system

  The gleam in Alec Tarrant’s eyes might have been zeal, or it might have been fear. Marin was unsure which, but fear would have been a healthy reaction.

  The Hydralis militia commander who had been elected to represent all of Omaru stepped aboard the Wastrel at Toshiko Szebek, the last node of the Deep Sky data conduit on the very fringe of the system. A Kotaro-Fuente spaceplane had slithered out of Hydralis a day before, small enough to go around the blockade, or through the fringes of it, like a mosquito flitting on heavy summer air. Unless a directive was issued from the Kiev to stop everything, tiny ships were allowed to pass. Their cargo capacity was insignificant, and chasing them en masse was potentially ruinous for a battle group of finite size, limited resources. The priorities, as Alexis Rusch had often said, focused on the freight haulers which ran the blockade to deliver munitions, tech and medical aid to the besieged colony; and at this time, the Kiev’s command corps was deliberately allowing tiny ships to pass.

  The spaceplane was a Wyvern, five years old, in red and gold trim with the Kotaro-Fuente logo emblazoned on the high tail. The model was Weimann enabled and would make the crossing to Jagreth at a stretch, though few travelers were inclined to spend a week in cramped quarters. Tarrant’s plane was configured for short-range speed and stealth. On approach to the almost abstract art design of rings, rods and kilometer-wide dishes forming Toshiko Szebek, every sensor on the Wastrel was looking for the craft, yet she popped out of concealment without warning.

  “Crafty,” Marin observed, amused. He was watching the graphical display of the installation, framed in the navigation tank. The Ops room was on standby, with weapons cold and the Weimann drive cycling back to ignition procedures. The tug would drive deep into the Omaru system before she dropped out again and approached the Kiev with all due caution. Marin looked up through the threedee haze of the tank at Vaurien, who sat in one of the high-backed chairs, long legs crossed, content to watch though he was keenly aware that history was unfolding about them.

  “They used the sensor node as a blind.” Vaurien approved. “Tarrant’s pilot is an old Hellgate hand. And speaking of old Hellgate hands –” He touched his combug. “Harrison, we have company.” He listened to a channel Marin could not hear, chuckled softly. “Good enough.”

  The Wyvern came up fast to meet them as Etienne opened Hangar 4, and Marin’s eyes were on a vidfeed as the plane came aboard. Rusch, Jazinsky and Vidal were waiting for the hangar to blow back up to pressure and temperature, and Marin himself was waiting for Travers.

  Thirty minutes before, Neil had been in the gym, sweating through a workout Marin did not envy, but he knew it was Travers’s way of burning off stress. The Kiev might have weighed heavily on Michael Vidal’s mind, but it was Hellgate that haunted Travers – or, more specifically, transspace. An old Resalq mantra repeated endlessly in the back of Marin’s mind, bringing calm, but those things did not yet work for Travers. Perhaps they never would. Jazinsky had work to occupy every waking instant, but as he frowned at Vaurien, Marin wondered what Richard did to keep the apprehension at bay. Elarne was a spectre looming over them all.

  Vivid in the sphere of the small threedee, Tarrant shook the hands of Rusch and Vidal and Jazinsky before the group passed out of range of the lens. The pilot remained with the plane, but Tarrant’s aide walked with him now, as she had accompanied him to Vidal’s official memorial on Velcastra. Zulika Garret was tall, raw boned, not the usual recruit for the personal aide of an imminent president; but everything was different on Omaru, Marin thought. The world had lived under the gun for so long, courage, skill and mulish determination were qualities valued far above business degrees and celebrity looks.

  The AI whispered an update, that the party was on its way up in the executive elevator, just as Travers stepped in. His hair was still damp, his skin glowing, cheeks just a little ruddy after effort, and the sinews in his arms still stood out, visible under the short sleeves of a pale shirt he wore over tight black slacks. Marin approved of everything he saw as he watched Neil make his way to the autochef for a bottle of water and a mug of green tea. He was carrying the formal jacket and the sidearm harness, while Marin’s own lay on a dormant workstation.

  “What I miss?” Travers came to a halt by the navtank, where Toshiko Szebek was slithering down and under, passing out of sight as the Wastrel nosed on into the Omaru system. He chugged half the water and set the bottle on the side of the tank as Jon Kim – smartly dressed in grays and dark blues, quite ready to attend to business – appeared in the passage beyond the Ops room’s open armordoors.

  “Alec Tarrant’s plane is aboard,” Marin said thoughtfully. “It’s just a short Weimann hop from here to the blockade, and … here we go.”

  A tiny shiver through the airframe told them the Wastrel had skipped back into e-space, and he glanced at the chrono. From the midnight realm of ice asteroids and comets, where the data node was parked on station keeping, to the comparatively warm, bright zone of the blockade was less than an hour. The Wastrel would drop out well short of the battle group – Rusch had supplied coordinates already known to the command corps aboard the Kiev.

  “Do you ever question your sanity?” Kim asked in an oddly plaintive voice as he joined them at the tank.

  “Every day,” Travers assured him. “You want out? Shapiro wouldn’t hold you to any promise you made in the heat of the moment.”

  “No, no way would I leave him,” Kim said quickly, “but …” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbed. “We’re on Fleet’s shit list, Neil. You know that. It’s one thing, being tucked in safely at Alshie’nya, but here –? It’s Fleet, goddamn it. A super-carrier.” He rubbed his face hard. “I’m from the boonies. Ulrand. I’ve never even seen a super-carrier, except on CityNet. I’ve seen enough of them in the vids, of course, but it’s not the same. You guys?”

  “We’ve served on several of them,” Marin said without arrogance. “The Intrepid, the Kiev itself, albeit briefly.” He gave Travers a sidelong look, and Neil’s head shook minutely, an expression of odd feelings.

  “Coming back is weird.” Travers chugged the rest of the water and tossed the bottle back toward the autochef, where a little servitor drone would scoot out and collect it.

  “And that,” Marin breathed, “is today’s major understatement.”

  A burr of heavy servos announced the elevator, and he lifted a brow at Travers as the door slid over. “Showtime,” Neil said softly. “Where’s Harrison?”

  Kim gestured over his shoulder. “He was finalizing some documents. He ought to be here, well, now.”

  As if it were a cue, Shapiro walked up from the executive staterooms as Jazinsky and Vidal stepped out of the elevator. The diplomatic smile was in place on his face, as if it were a mask he assumed at will, and he greeted Alec Tarrant with a quiet word, a shake of the man’s hand.

  They had not met since Vidal’s memorial – and the look on Tarrant’s own face was nothing short of bemused, Marin saw. Vidal’s return, his survival, was absolutely classified. No one outside of his father’s house and Chandra Liang’s establishment knew about it;
but here was the dead hero, looking like a ghost only half exorcized.

  “We were way beyond lucky,” Mick was saying. “My copilot survived too. In fact, she’s in better shape than I am. I took a heavy load of rad poisoning on top of the, uh, the crash.”

  The cover story was that they had flown a mission on the skirts of Hellgate, suffered a mechanical failure and put the plane down hard on a planetoid. The impact smashed the generators; little power was left in the cells to run the heaters – no food, no heat, no medication for injuries, poorly recycled water. It was a common enough misadventure, especially among Freespacers; and it protected the truth. Knowledge of Ernst Rabelais and transspace and Lai’a was classified along with the Zunshu data.

  “Well, I’m damned pleased to make your acquaintance, Colonel Vidal,” Tarrant said honestly before he also took Marin’s hand, and Travers’s, with a word of greeting.

  He was just as Marin remembered him: a thick-set man in the throes of middle age, with crisp hair cut short and swiftly silvering, startlingly alert blue-gray eyes, a weather-beaten face and the battered, capable hands of a man who had worked hard most of his life. Soon enough he would be the first president of the Republic of Omaru, but here, today, he was clad in black, simple, inconspicuous clothes. Nothing about him set him apart, not even the presence of a secretary at his shoulder.

  A pace behind him, Zulika Garret was as poker faced as any Marine still wearing the uniform. She even wore the shorn hair and blunt fingernails of a soldier, and where Tarrant wore black, she was in shades of charcoal. She deliberately stepped back into the shadows, almost blending into the background with a display of subtlety Mark Sherratt would have appreciated. Marin exchanged nods with her, a tiny acknowledgment that he remembered her, and had not forgotten Mitch Garret, the brother who fought with the Hydralis militia, or Marty Cimino, the husband who was still sleeping in cryogen, waiting for cloned lungs.

  “As it happens,” Tarrant was saying to Vidal, “I came to know quite a lot about you, Colonel. I watched a couple of bios, at the time of the memorial. Half of Velcastra was in mourning.”