by Mel Keegan
Shapiro made a soft sound that might have been acid humor. “You hadn’t thought of this? Oh, I had, Neil. I have three choices. One, live in the bosom of a security detail, as you suggested, and hope a sniper doesn’t take me from a thousand meters’ range in a year, or five years. Two, manufacture a fresh identity, try to lose myself deep in the crowd of a world like Velcastra, where the population is big enough to allow anonymity, and hope I remain hidden. Three …” He nodded into the infinity of distance. “Leave. Richard’s name is also on the Confederate blacklist. He’s been identified as one of the major conspirators and enablers of the Colonial War.”
Marin’s lips compressed. “It had to happen. Fortunately, the Wastrel is the safest territory in the Deep Sky. Confederate agents have no chance, none at all, of reaching him.”
“But you can’t live the rest of your life on one ship,” Travers protested. “It’s as good as a prison sentence.”
“And lately he’s been talking about leaving,” Shapiro added. “Heading out – see what’s on the other side of Freespace. See if we can find another jewel like Velcastra.”
Now, Marin had to smile. “Found a whole new colony?”
“It’s been done,” Travers mused. “Ulrand was a breakaway from Pakrenne. Celeste has potential. Not that anyone these days would waste time and effort terraforming a rock with such a crap biosphere, but a couple of hundred years ago they were glad to colonize planets like Aurora. You know it?”
“Way back in the Near Heavens, not far from Darwin’s and Rethan,” Marin remembered. “It’s a ball of ice – strategically positioned. Humans could live there, if they didn’t mind some fierce cold … cool star, close orbit, was it? And the system was in the right place.”
“Which was critical in the days of sleeper ships,” Shapiro mused. “It’s difficult for us to imagine, today, a time when it was easier, cheaper, faster, to reengineer humans for difficult worlds like Mazjene than to find more terrestrial worlds.”
“Thank gods it all changed with Weimann technology.” Travers lifted his cup in a mock toast. “Here’s to Foster Weimann and the lads at Arago.”
“Indeed.” Shapiro joined him in the toast. “And now … I think Richard may have the right idea. I can live for a while in the close embrace of a security squad, but a lifetime of it –?” He shook his head.
For a moment Marin hesitated and then asked, “You’ve, uh, seen the whole arrest list, have you?”
He was asking, were the names of Marin, CJ and Travers, NA, on that list. Shapiro knew exactly what he meant. “You haven’t come to the attention of the Confederacy – yet. The Commonwealth is sweeping for agents at this time. With luck they’ll sweep the Deep Sky clean, but it’s not impossible for Earth, or even individuals, to deploy agents in ten years, or thirty years, to dig out the roots of the insurrection – us – for the purpose of belated revenge. It would be termed ‘justice’ but in the end semantics is only a game.”
“Damn.” Travers gave Marin a look that mocked them both. “Well, shit. There goes that horse property in Three Rivers.”
“We might put the same property in a similar region on a world that’s so far out, the Confederacy doesn’t even know it exists, and even if they did, they’d couldn’t reach it. They’re centuries away from developing anything remotely like hyper-Weimann tech, and we sure as hell aren’t about to share.” Marin gave Travers his hand, and Neil took it. “We return to the Deep Sky, safe on the Wastrel. Security detail around us … bodyguards assigned by Dendra Shemiji. Mark will be surrounded by his own people at home on Saraine – Jai Serrano would take the assignment in a year or two. Us? We have the place you’ve always wanted somewhere far beyond the reach of Confederate agents, and when we visit the Deep Sky, they’re welcome to take a crack at us. They’ll find it’s a big mistake.” He looked along at Shapiro. “Yes?”
“Very wise,” Shapiro said gravely. “There, you see? Long-term plans for the future are the best therapy to offset the dread that shrouds any high-risk mission. Lai’a?”
“General Shapiro?” The AI was everywhere, seeing and hearing everything, seldom intruding until it was called.
“How long till we reach the Ebrezjim Lagoon?”
“We will be in the driftway adjacent to the horizon in 28 minutes,” Lai’a told him. “Captain Vaurien has suggested a hiatus there for diagnostics, engine realignment and data gathering prior to transit of the temporal field enclosing the lagoon. I concur.”
The AI was still speaking when Travers got to his feet. “Armor.”
“You want to go aboard the Ebrezjim?” Marin was surprised.
“I do.” Travers rubbed his palms together. “I’m curious –”
“Restless,” Marin hazarded. “Sizzling with adrenaline, desperate to blow it off some way … an excursion to the Ebrezjim, an hour pumping iron, or a couple of hours in the sack, with a locked door and the comms turned off?” He cocked his head at Neil, pretending to weigh the three and enjoying the luxury of an opportunity to tease; Travers’s eyes darkened by shades as he watched. Curtis dropped his voice. “I’d take the locked door, the dead comms and you, inspired with a grand passion.” He cast an amused glance around the crew lounge. “But I’m thinking, I’ll settle for the excursion.”
A tray of combugs lay in the middle of the table. Travers took a deep breath, cleared his throat and slid one into his ear. “Bravo, we’re about a half hour from the lagoon. You want to break the armor out of storage, check it over?”
An identical bug slid into Marin’s ear and he heard Tim Inosanto: “Hey, we get to take a hike? So soon?”
And Fargo: “Don’t be so goddamn’ puppy-dog eager. Hey, Roo – get your ass back in gear. You want a day trip or not?”
“Day trip to where?” Kravitz demanded.
They could banter this way for hours, and Marin tuned them out. He finished the tea and followed Travers aft to the service elevator. It dropped them from the bright, warm crew deck to the dimmer, colder hangar level, where the Capricorn and the Trofeo were stowed, and the Harlequin was hangared. Lights in both ceiling and floor flickered on across the suiting room, and Marin took stock of it with a soft curse. Any Fleet ship was similar. This facility was smaller than Bravo’s compartment on the Intrepid, but much larger than the ‘jump bays’ on the Mercury.
Fifty hardsuits stood in lockers off the port side of the suiting room, and both Travers and Marin knew the feel of this armor. They had field tested it on the hull of the Wastrel, taken it into a combat situation which had never been on the agenda. The suits were a uniform gray with a dull surface gleam, red chevrons on the breast and back, yellow chevrons on the arms and both sides of the helmet. Only those helmets were personalized; everyone aboard had their own, and many spares had been manufactured.
The hardsuits themselves were almost identical. Only Bill Grant had a suit deliberately geared for a Lushi, while the Resalq, Jazinsky, Vaurien and Vidal had units designed around the Pakrani body dimensions. Richard Vaurien was the only unengineered human among them. Even among Earthers, Marin reminded himself, it was in the genetics for an occasional man to be tall, broad. Vaurien had lost track of most of his French forebears. He knew only that five generations ago some of them hailed from the South Pacific, a region renowned for conjuring some of the biggest, as well as the best, players on the pro aeroball circuit.
The helmet fit was snug, perfect. The chrono over the inner armordoors was counting down to hyper-Weimann shutdown, and with ten minutes to spare Travers and Marin tried the new suits for comfort. Fargo and Inosanto had drifted in some time before and were fiddling with the life support of Inosanto’s armor. He liked the environment hotter, more humid – ‘like home,’ he would say, referring to the bayou regions of Omaru’s southern hemisphere, where he had lived until he was sixteen.
“Transspace drive shutdown. Driftway,” Lai’a announced. “Vid feed available. Comparative relative velocity, proper velocity and deceleration parameters are streaming to Ops
Navigation. Colonel Rusch, Engineer Fujioka, as requested, drive data is streaming to Ops Tech 4.”
“I want to see this.” Like Marin, Travers was still in the armor, tweaking the environmental settings to his liking. Helmet under his arm, he headed back out to the elevator, and Marin was a pace behind him.
The vidfeed blazed in the navigation tank, three meters wide, vivid, dazzling, challenging to human eyes as well as the middle ear. Marin struggled to resolve the image and was conscious of his mind laying one object after another over what it saw as it tried to get a match and recognize any feature it saw. Dizzy nausea assaulted him for a moment and he took a long, calming breath.
He squeezed his eyes shut, looked again … and saw a smooth, slightly-flattened sphere fluorescing in blues and purples and greens, like a sheen of oil on water, extending to what appeared to be infinity, though he knew the lagoon was finite. And around it, over it, through it, pulsed white-gold flares like helixes of fork lightning, several per second in any small area, which made the horizon difficult to focus on, impossible to recognize.
Beyond the horizon of what Lai’a prosaically described as an ‘oblate spheroid,’ all was dead black. The driftway was so vast, from this vantage point even the nearest temporo-gravity tide was too distant to be seen. This was not a graphical representation, repackaged for the human eye and brain; this was a vidfeed, and –
“Look long enough, and it’ll drive you right out of your head,” Ernst Rabelais warned in a hushed voice. “You go whackadoodle. Like looking into the heart of hell.”
“How do you know you’re not looking into the face of somebody’s god?” Jo Queneau whispered. “Doesn’t look evil to me, Ernst. It’s just … there, and we don’t understand it. Yet.”
Around the tank, Rusch, Jazinsky and all of the Resalq were transfixed by the visual. Only Vidal was able to find words. “Remember, Jo? We burned out the engines, trying to stay out of there.”
“Burned the engines right out of the Orpheus,” she said, a rasp, “and in the end, soon as you quit your fighting and bitching, it just sucks you up, like you’re swallowed into the bottom of the ocean.”
“Lai’a,” Vaurien said into the electric quiet.
“Reading over 300 gravities off the surface layer of the horizon,” Lai’a reported coolly, “and spikes of up to four thousand gravities within.”
“Problem?” Richard and Mark shared a pensive look.
“None,” Lai’a informed him. “Ingress is effected via a Heisenberg tunnel, a phenomenon of the horizon itself. We will, essentially, be in freefall. This is empirical observation, not hypothesis: I salvaged the Orpheus-Odyssey from exactly this phenomenon. Would you care to review the method? I am realigning the transspace drive. Estimated time for reconfiguration, eight minutes. The drive will be tested before transition through the temporal horizon. Transition at your discretion, Captain Vaurien, Doctor Sherratt.”
“As humans say, now we’re cooking.” Mark took a step closer to the tank. “Lai’a, what is the nature of the horizon?”
“Temporal flux,” it said simply. “It may appear as a solid, but it is not an object, nor any force described by conventional physics, though it can be categorized as a field. Temporal flux generated by diverse hyper-gravities oscillating in a comparatively narrow band prevents any transmission of perceptual information across a fixed horizon, the radius of which is determined by the average gravity of the –”
There was much more, but the longer Lai’a spoke, the less Marin followed. Instead he focused on what he did understand. “It’s like the ‘shell’ of a stasis chamber,” he said with rich satisfaction as the epiphany broadsided him. “Neil, you remember the stasis chamber that fool of an engineer, Mulholland, destroyed on Ulrand, and took half a continent with him?”
“That’s something you don’t forget.” Travers was hushed. “Mark, you said at the time, the ‘shell’ wasn’t a shell at all, it was … an event horizon. The – what was it? The time differential, between inside and outside, and no information got through – like two different time zones, so the thing not only looked solid as a sheet of kevlex-titanium armor, but you couldn’t cut through it with a charged particle beam.”
“Mulholland tried,” Dario said with a lot of residual bitterness. He and Tor had worked months on that project, in harsh conditions, and they were still wanted criminals on Ulrand. “He put some kind of a probe into the surface layer, and the temporal backlash off it converted right into pure energy. More than enough to lay waste to the El Khouri highlands … Lai’a?”
“Correct,” Lai’a affirmed. “This horizon is essentially the same, though immeasurably larger.”
“So … energy composition of the horizon?” Jazinsky prompted shrewdly. She already knew the answer.
“Null,” Lai’a responded, as if comparing notes. “The horizon has no physical composition and no native energy signature. It simply is, where two gravity tides create absolute balance.”
“Stability of the horizon?” Vaurien prompted. “We’re about to punch a large hole in it.”
“‘Large’ is a relative term, Captain,” the AI said in an almost musing tone. “I am a large body in relation to known shipping types. However, the Ebrezjim Lagoon is an area roughly the cubic dimensions of the solar system of Omaru, measured to the heliopause: substantially greater in radius than the solar systems of Velcastra and Borushek. The perforation in the temporal horizon caused by my transit will generate slight variations in temporal and gravitic values consistent with mass, density and relative velocity, resulting in localized disparity of approximately plus or minus .000025% of the overall field average.”
“I had to ask,” Vaurien said dryly.
Mark chuckled quietly. “If you hadn’t, I would have. There are no stupid questions, Richard. We’re off the map now. Trust nothing you see, assume nothing, question everything, and if Lai’a hands you a lot of gibberish you don’t understand, tell it to go back and explain, in plain Slingo. Or French, if you prefer.”
“We’re getting ten times the data we ever got from any probe or from the Orpheus,” Jazinsky said hoarsely. “Lai’a, can you handle the datastream?”
“With a margin of 70% capacity.” The AI expressed no shade of scorn; the question was valid.
“Will we drop another comm beacon here?” Alexis Rusch wondered.
But Lai’a said, without judgment and with infinite patience, “Possible but somewhat pointless, Colonel. We are situated in a driftway. This is the same mild gravitic current which, governed by the intense gravities of the temporal horizon, brought Captain Rabelais to this lagoon. Any drone we drop into the driftway has no hyper-Weimann capability. Unable to maneuver, it will certainly be carried into the lagoon, just as inert ships are carried there. We would derive useful data for a time measurable in hours at most, and it is highly probable the drone would be inside the lagoon long before we transit back into the driftway. Useful data stops with its entry. However, I remain in contact with the comm beacon I dropped at the Orpheus Gate. Its chronometers register 46.7% of the elapsed shiptime as perceived by anyone aboard here; demonstrably, we have been riding a temporal current a fraction over twice as fast as normal time.”
“We saw the same effect when the Orpheus rode this same current,” Rusch mused. “Michael, when you took off, while the Hellgate event was still open the Wastrel systems could barely keep up with the accelerated datastream.”
“We knew you were in a fast-time current,” Jazinsky added. “Up to that point, accelerated time had been no more than a tantalizing theory. You proved it out, Mick, within about a minute of launching through the storm – though you wouldn’t have been aware of the difference.”
“And at the end of it,” Vidal whispered, “we fetched up right here, looking at this, and trying to keep the hell out of it. At the time, all Jo and I could think was, find another current headed back, tack on it, maybe find a freefall driftway and wait for another storm around Naiobe. We figured, if we co
uld stay on the right side of this horizon – not that we knew it was a horizon at the time! – we could get ourselves home.”
“It’s … beautiful,” Dario murmured, mesmerized by the visual. “Tor?”
“It’s gorgeous.” Tor Sereccio slung one big arm over Dario’s shoulder. “I want my kids to see this. Our kids. It’s – it’s my bloody life’s work, and yours, Dar, all rolled up into one glorious thing. When we have kids, the little snots are coming here, they’re seeing this, soon as they’re old enough to know what they’re looking at, and not just dribble on us.”
They were the last words Marin had expected to hear, and they broke the tension across the Ops room.
“Drive alignment, Lai’a?” Jazinsky had recovered a grip on her sense of awe and was back at work.
“Ignition test in four minutes.” Lai’a was untroubled. “Transit is at the discretion of Captain Vaurien and Doctor Sherratt.”
“Expedition,” Vaurien said sharply. “Mark, choose your team – looks like Neil and Curtis are along, since they already have the armor on … though what they expect to do for you is another question.”
“The heavy lifting,” Travers said fatuously. “Seriously, Mark, the more pairs of hands you have going spare, the better. Ask Mick.”
For just a moment Sherratt hesitated, and then gestured toward Vidal. “You call it, Michael. A risk shared is a risk doubled.”
“Not in there,” Vidal said tersely. “We go in with all the hands and all the gear we can manage. Trust me.”
“I do,” Mark said thoughtfully. “And you are staying right here.”
The blue eyes widened. “You must be blooding joking.”
“I’m not.” Mark took Vidal’s chin, turned his face to the light. “Your pupils are still dilated. Four hours ago, you were full of drugs.”
“I’m fine,” Vidal began.
“If you’re fine, you can be on the next shift.” Mark was emphatic. “I’ve conferred with Ernst and Jo, and I know the condition the Ebrezjim is in. She’s deep cold, not much above absolute zero. Even in armor we’re going to be struggling to stay warm. A shift will be two hours, maximum, since we’ll be using power almost faster than the suits can keep up with it, just to prevent frostnip. One mistake, and somebody will be badly injured before he or she can get back to Lai’a. Barb?”
