by Mel Keegan
“Get out of here, the lot of you,” Bill said curtly. “He needs to sleep, let the fresh nano repair some of this damage, and he won’t sleep with the three of you standing around like a bunch of expectant fathers!”
“We’re gone,” Travers swore. “Hey, Mick.” Vidal made some semi-lucid sound. “We’ll stop by later,” Travers told him.
The blue eyes opened to slits. “I’m not going to die, Neil.”
“Despite his best bloody efforts!” Grant was still furious. “What am I, a fucking magician?” Then he relented and held up both hands as if Travers and Marin had levelled a gun on him. “All right, I know, he did good, it was his job, he’s the best, and this was history. Understood. Now, clear off and let me do my own job, all right?”
“You see what I’ve got to put up with?” Vidal’s eyes were closed again. “Later, okay?”
They were outside a moment later, and while Marin and Rabelais shared trivia about the transfer of power on the blockade, Travers listened to the loop. Perlman and Fargo had taken the Trofeo right back to the Kiev – to the Sark, he reminded himself for the tenth time – as soon as the drones had offloaded Vidal. Twenty minutes later they were leaving the carrier yet again, and Fargo’s call to Wastrel Ops reported Hubler and Rodman aboard.
“All over, barring the shouting,” Marin observed.
“Leave it to Rusch and Shapiro.” Travers was unconcerned. “I asked him yesterday who’ll command the Sark after Rusch officially signs out. It might have been Mick, if he’d been up to it, and if he hadn’t been aboard the Lai’a expedition.”
“But since he’s with us,” Marin mused, “they could promote Pat Haugen. She’s been holding it together since Alexis came to Alshie’nya.”
“Classified, isn’t it?” Rabelais made a face. “All this cloak and dagger crap makes my teeth ache.” He stirred, rubbing his palms together with a shrewd look. “You want to take a look?”
“A look?” Travers echoed. “Your project?”
“Hangar 5.” Rabelais was heading for the nearest service lift. “Lex worked the kinks out of it – she’s got the smarts to put numbers to stuff Jo and me just do by the seat of the pants.”
Travers lifted a brow at Marin, and Curtis shrugged. “Why not? The ship’s way too busy for dinner to be formal tonight, and even if it was, I’ve got no appetite. It’ll be at least another hour before the Wastrel’s done pushing wreckage around and sending escape pods to the Sark.”
“And a lot longer,” Travers added, “before Shapiro and Rusch are through. They could be talking all night.”
“Rather them than me,” Rabelais said tartly. “Come on down, come see what we’ve been working on, Jo and Mick and me.”
The lift opened – a battered techs’ car smelling of drones and machine parts – and Rabelais stepped in. “You got the adjustments right.” Marin kept hands and clothes well away from walls that were less than spotless.
“It’s …” Rabelais’s blue eyes – so like Vidal’s own – seemed to haze over. “It’s the ride of your life.”
“An accurate simulation of transspace?” Travers was doubtful.
“As accurate as it can be,” Rabelais allowed. “Good enough, anyway. Mick and Jo have flown it a dozen times. I’ve flown it a few times with Jo. I don’t have Mick’s edge. Remember, he actually flew the Orpheus in, and he flew the hybrid out of that graveyard. I basically cruised the Odyssey in on her own momentum, and I was tanked on the way out.”
“Which is the only reason you’re back on your feet so soon,” Marin said pointedly. “Don’t knock it.”
“I don’t.” Rabelais paused as the doors opened, and as a waft of cooler air swept into the lift he called, “Hey, Jo – he’s going to be okay. Bill’s pumped him full of fresh nano. He’s sleeping now.”
She was working on the simulator even then, and Travers took a moment to glance over the product of weeks of labor and a lifetime’s worth of ingenuity. From the outside it looked like a freight container, just a crate; but it was mounted on pitch jacks, and the near side of it was fitted with the boarding hatch from something like the Capricorn. Queneau had been working underneath it, on a rollerboard, and Travers saw an open service port dribbling a spaghetti of cables which snaked away to the power and data conduits in the nearest bulkhead.
Wiping the gray and white muck of insulating gel off her hands, Queneau came to her feet. She was still slender to the point of thinness, but her hair had begun to grow back. She wore gold hoop earrings, and the effect was piratical. The small hangar was comfortably warm, so the black coveralls were shoved down around her hips. Travers saw a hard, thin body in a khaki teeshirt with the sleeves ripped out to display a lot of old unit and service tattoos on deceptively frail arms where veins and tendons roped.
“I was in the Ops room, saw the whole thing,” she said, throwing away the rag. “I was impressed. Gotta tell you, Travers, I’d had my doubts. A whole battle group? Shit, I was ready to see carnage.”
“So was Shapiro,” Marin said shrewdly, “and he was quite ready to file the whole thing under ‘collateral damage’ and weather the storm later. You know the incident would have been investigated after the war. Families who lost kids here under so-called friendly fire would have demanded somebody’s blood to pay for it.”
“So Mick did everybody a favor,” Rabelais said with a definite smugness. “That’s my boy.”
“Your nephew?” Travers discovered a smile.
“Through about six generations, going sideways through the Vaughans, the Liangs, the Rusches, the Elstroms, the Shackletons.” Rabelais gave him a mocking grin. “I looked up the genealogy. You have any idea how the first families are inbred? I don’t think they have any idea, but I found a whole bunch of this last generation, like Trick and Ying Shackleton, and they all go back to just two couples … and one of those couples was my eldest son, Roger, and his second wife, Christy Elstrom.” His expression darkened. “They’ve been gone for a long time now.” He sighed. “Just as well, I suppose. I’d have been an intruder. I’d have just come back to make a mess of the inheritance, the legacy, even the goddamned breeding book, or however they organize their bloodlines. Damnit, Neil, they’re inbred as racehorses.”
Travers chuckled richly. “Have you told Mick? Obviously you looked at his lineage, to see where he comes from.”
“Oh, sure, I looked.” Rabelais snaked an arm around Queneau’s waist and frowned at the simulator. “Mick’s a Vidal on one side and a Rusch on the other; the Rusches are Shackletons on the side. The Shackletons are Elstroms on the distaff side, and as for the Elstroms –” He snorted. “They’re Rabelais, all the way back to Roger and Christy in a straight line. Now, the Vidals go back in two generations to the Vaughans, who were Deuels on the distaff side; the Deuels were Shackletons on the other side, just one generation back, and who should be showing up in their charts but bloody Edson.”
“Edson?” Marin asked, as amused as Travers.
“My half-brother. We share the same father, but Edson was already twelve when I was born. My father was married three times. Me? I was the last chick on the nest, the one nobody wanted to pick up the college fees for.” He leaned over and pecked Queneau’s cheek with a kiss. “So I made my own way in the world. These days they drone on about the Voyage of the Odyssey as if it was this great mission, undertaken with the blessing of the Deep Sky, for the good of all mankind, and I shipped out with a tickertape parade and eight-gun salutes across Velcastra.”
“And the truth?” Travers asked, though he could guess.
“The truth is,” Rabelais said with deep, dark self-satisfaction, “I put the funding together for the prep work, I found the ship and had her modified, and then I tendered for the job, which was posted by the Merchant Astra. They wanted some maniac who’d go out there for eighteen months on a tight-fisted budget, lay down a thousand beacons, break trail for their freighters, find a way to get around the Drift, even through it, if a passage could be charted that avoi
ded the gravity storms…
“Which is how I got myself caught in one,” he admitted with a pragmatism Travers envied. “I thought I might’ve found a passage right through. Turns out I was wrong, but not by much. The route the big cargo haulers fly today, to cut a week off the flight through to Omaru, is damn’ close to the passage I was exploring. I was just on the wrong side of the Bronowski Reef, and I got caught.” He shook himself. “I was four lousy months short of being done, finished, and heading home to pick up the paycheck.
“I’d have been set for life. More money than I could have spent in the rest of my days – me not being a total chowder-head with money like Patrick and Mei Ying.” He shrugged expansively. “You know, I made discreet inquiries, to see if my fee was still payable.”
“No joy?” Marin guessed.
“It was paid in full to Irene, my late wife. She lived well, sent Roger and Allie and Pam to the best schools, bought a mansion in Greensward … fair enough. They had good lives. I got nothing to be guilty about there – and the Merchant Astra Commission would have looked out for them, anyway. The name of Rabelais would’ve taken them far, even though the name itself died out after Roger’s grandson, Charles, had three daughters.” He grinned broadly. “I scored six grandchildren and over twenty great-grandchildren. The name of Rabelais opened doors, took ’em all into high society. They married well … Rusch, Shackleton, Deuel, Elstrom, and all the rest. Vidal.” He nodded slowly, satisfied. “Good for them.”
“And what about you?” Travers wondered. “I mean, the calendar says you’re so old, you ought to have been a citation on a memory wall fifty years ago, but check the mirror, Ernst. You’re starting to get your health back, and you look … what are you, seven or eight years older than Curtis and myself? If you’re not going back to Velcastra – notice, I didn’t say home! – what are you going to do?”
Rabelais’s face was a study in bemusement. “I’m forty, or maybe forty-one. I’m not actually sure … can’t be certain how long I spent drifting in that graveyard of dead ships, or if time was running slow for me, and if it was, what any of this esoteric shit means. But I do know I’ve got my life in front of me, and I don’t want to go back there and turn into some living fossil like Mick’s father – and you bloody know they’d do it to me, if I showed my face around Elstrom or StarCity!”
“So, onward and upward,” Marin guessed.
“Yeah.” Rabelais stirred with a will. “There’s a universe beyond the frontier – Freespace. There’s transspace, the other side of the galaxy, and the new Resalq worlds in the Mare Aenestra. Don’t you love the sound of the words? They’re like music. Damn, space is a bigger place than I remember.” He gestured at the simulator. “Speaking of which, you want to give her a shot?”
“Before dinner?” Marin asked doubtfully.
But Queneau was adamant. “That’s the best time. Ground rule number one: do not fly this contraption after you eat. It’s going to give your middle ear a heavy workout, and you can heave the lot. It’d make a far bigger mess than you’re thinking – you fly her from tanks, remember? You haven’t seen a transspace simulator yet.” She lifted a brow at them. “Interested?”
In fact, Travers had been fascinated for days. He gave Marin a look, and Curtis nodded. The hazel eyes were almost green in the harsh illumination of the worklights, and wide with intrigue. Travers himself could fly several different craft, but Marin was more widely qualified. The Dendra Shemiji work had demanded odd skills, and as assignments necessitated it, Mark Sherratt made the training available.
It was Marin who led the way to the open hatch and peered inside. Over his shoulder, Travers saw a velvet dark interior with the dove-gray shells of two cryogen tanks and hanks of cabling, a makeshift data conduit – perhaps fifty color-coded cables, each labeled and all taped together into a two-meter python connecting the tanks. The gullwinged canopy was up on one of the tanks and inside he saw a veeree hookup, identical to any of those found in the citybottom dens, with a top-of-the-range, full-head veeree visor complete with outsized earpads to deaden all external sound.
Piece by piece, Travers recognized every item inside the crate, but the sum of their parts gave him a shiver, made his hackles rise. “It works?”
“It works a damned sight better now we have two tanks – well enough to give you the best feel for transspace you’re ever going to get without actually going into transspace,” Queneau growled. “I fixed the data coupling – again, Ernst. It was getting a static jolt off the powerlines, every time the system got good and hot.” She gave Travers and Marin a shrewd glance. “The sim would jerk, like a vid skipping frames. Your middle ear’s already struggling, and it was enough to shove you over the edge. Seasick, or something … not that I ever rode on a boat. I might like to, after the war.”
“Fixed?” Rabelais hazarded.
“Oh, sure. I had half an idea of what it’d be even before I saw the scorch marks on the data couplers. I’ve put in a kevlex separator spar and packed the whole cavity with insulating gel. That one’s cured.”
“So she’s good to go.” Rabelais gave Travers and Marin a look of intense speculation. “We just got her set her up with the two tanks – both the pilot and navigator work at optimum in total immersion. The tanks were gutted, which didn’t please Bill, going into a potential bloodbath. Still, we got what we wanted so we’re happy.
“The entry level sim is a routine flight, into the jaws of the event. The AI’s pre-loaded, it’ll come online with real visuals cobbled together from a bunch of actual Class 5 and 6 events. Let the AI talk you through the first couple of flights, till you get a feel for flying straight down the throat of something you spent your whole life running away from. On the threshold … the place where the conventional Weimann drive never operated; where the hyper-Weimann kicks in … you switch over from edited vids to full veeree.
“Then you’re in transspace.” Rabelais swallowed once, twice, and his eyes darkened. “You want to know about this, talk to Mick. Me? Like I told you before, I was a passenger, along for an accidental ride. On the Orpheus, Jo was navigating for him, which is a big enough job, and I’m sweating on catching up with them.” He drew a breath to the bottom of his lungs. “One day we’ll be able to generate a hyper-Weimann field, we won’t need to use the big Hellgate storms to get into transspace. Could take thirty years, or fifty, but the inkling of the idea is there in Jazinsky’s work. She showed it to me.” His face was alight with some dreamlike quality. “One day, you’ll transition from Weimann jump to transspace jump, no need to play tag with Hellgate storms that’re trying their best to fry you. Till then –
“Well, we’ll use what we got. Even now it’s the way the Zunshu do it, how they’ve been doing it for a thousand years we know of, and maybe another thousand we don’t.”
Marin reached into the tank and toyed with the veeree visor and earpads. “You have to wonder about The Zunshu. You just predicted how human engineers, maybe even Jazinsky herself, are going to develop a way to slide into transspace without using a place like Hellgate, and they’ll do it in another few decades. The Zunshu have been using the big storms as their gateways for millennia. What is this, a case of arrested technological development?”
The question had troubled Travers for some time. “Dario Sherratt was saying the same thing. He’s spent his whole life taking apart Zunshu tech, and from everything he’s seen, and everything in the Resalq database, the Zunshu tech hasn’t changed by so much as a rivet since the days when they were snuffing the Resalq homeworlds.”
“Who knows?” Queneau said restlessly. “I’m not a historian. I don’t really give a shit. If I tell you the truth, all I want to do is snuff the Zunshu and come home, back to the real world. Shapiro can talk about negotiating with them, arranging a ceasefire, a truce, whatever. You really think bastards like the Zunshu are going to buy into some political crap? You want to lay bets, Travers?” She made a grim face. “The Zunshu are going to see us coming, and you know the
y’ll try to blow us the hell out of their skies.”
“Lai’a,” Marin said softly. “They’ll attack Lai’a. But it’s armed and armored with derivatives of their own tech. They have nothing we’ve seen the size or power of it. They do have devices like the ‘Borushek bomb,’ but we recognize those now. They can’t pull that trick again, not against Lai’a.” His brows arched at Queneau. “Do I want to lay bets – on who’ll walk away from this one?”
“No, not that.” Queneau met Rabelais’s eyes and they shared a dark look which spoke volumes to Travers. They had talked this over before; Vidal had likely been part of the discussion. “Give me odds,” she invited, “of the Zunshu listening to the voice of sweet reason and coming over all peaceable.”
“Zip,” Rabelais said in a hoarse whisper. “Nada.”
And Travers had to agree. “Zero – but it’s not ours to worry about.” He leaned over, closer to Marin, and looked into the simulator. “Let Shapiro lose sleep over this one.”
“So.” Rabelais rubbed his palms together in something very like glee. “You guys fancy a joyride?”
For a moment Travers hesitated, but he had heard the challenge in Rabelais’s voice, almost a dare. Marin was fascinated and Neil had known for days, they would have to fly this simulator sooner or later, as would Perlman and Fargo, Hubler and Rodman. Shapiro and Rusch had taken Vidal in complete seriousness: Lai’a was one machine, one pilot, and no matter how extraordinary it was, the expedition could not fly confidently without backup.
“All right,” Marin said guardedly. He shrugged out of his jacket, threw it over the nearest chair. “So, who flies, who navigates?”
“Depends.” Rabelais took Travers’s jacket from him and hung it over the back of the same chair. “You both fly crates like the Capricorn, the Trofeo, gunships … is either of you qualified on fighters?”
