by Mel Keegan
“Neither are you,” Vidal said defensively, and then relented as Mark popped a piece of fruit into his mouth. “My mind won’t shut up for long enough to let me sleep.”
“It will if you tell it to,” Mark said mildly.
“What, meditate?” Vidal sighed. “I seem to have forgotten how.”
“Relearn. All the Daku meditate.” Mark frowned at him. “You’re not still worried about dreaming?”
“I … might be.” Vidal took a step closer. “Mahak, it’s not that I don’t trust you, just …”
“Just that after months, you’ve grown afraid of fear itself,” Mark guessed. “Quite understandable. Still, you need to sleep.”
“And wake up sweating and screaming,” Vidal said, a barely audible mutter.
“If you do, I’ll be there to catch you,” Mark said simply.
It took a moment for the sense of what he had said to reach Travers, and then he angled a glance at Vidal as Mick reached out, gave his hand to the Resalq. “Richard,” Mark asked quietly, “You won’t need us before morning?”
“If I do, I’ll buzz you,” Vaurien told him, “but it’s all about analysis now, while Dario and Tor put together a gang of drones. Go on, Mark, take the chance to put your head down.”
“All right.” Sherratt collected Vidal with an arm loosely about his waist, and turned toward Travers and Marin. “Good night, Curtis. Neil.”
Rosy colour flushed around Vidal’s cheekbones as they made their way out, as if it embarrassed him yet again to be where he found himself, but Curtis said quietly, for Travers’s ears,
“Mark does this. He takes in strays. Heals them. Mick is where I was, all those years ago.”
“And Mark Sherratt made a Dendra Shemiji agent of you,” Travers said slowly. “You think he’s recruiting right now?”
“I don’t know,” Marin admitted. “Possibly. Even as a Daku, there’s a lot Mick could learn – though I’m not sure he’d be interested in doing the kind of work I did. Not after what he’s endured.”
“Still, those two are going to be close,” Travers said softly. “At least for a while. I’m glad, for Mick’s sake.” He leaned over and nuzzled a kiss into Marin’s ear. “You said you were hungry.”
“I am.” Marin stirred, stretched, knuckled his eyes and dealt Travers a swift embrace which challenged his ribs.
Minutes later they were in the cabin that felt strangely different, though it was identical to the quarters they had occupied on the Mercury. They were cross-legged in the middle of the bed while Travers balanced a single heaped plate on a pillow. The food was rapidly cooling while the neglected wine was a little too warm. Curtis seemed not to care.
Travers watched him eat with cursory interest in the food itself, as if anything that filled his belly would have done. He drank a half glass of a decent Velcastran merlot and sprawled out across the bronze sheets. “Lights, dim,” he groaned. Obediently, the lights muted themselves, leaving Travers to finish the risotto and omelette in near darkness.
Sleep stole his mind like a thief, a moment after he had set down his head, pulled Marin into a loose tangle of limbs and told the lights off. The threedee was idling, Lai’a was busy with its own work, and Travers’s dreams overtook him before he realized they were on him – dreams of intense cold eating into his marrow, of being at the bottom of a cave where the river was frozen, and if he looked into it, through a surface like polished glass he saw dead faces.
And he knew them. Roark Hubler was there, and Tonio Teniko. He was utterly alone and calling Marin’s name, and Richard’s, produced only echoes. He passed Hubler’s and Teniko’s icy faces, hunting for others, praying not to see them, until his feet slithered on sheet of ice. He toppled, and suddenly it was himself looking up at the layer of polished glass. But unlike Hubler and Teniko, his life was not suspended. He was awake, aware, hammering on the ice, shouting wordlessly and sure no one could hear, not in this place –
“Hey, quiet now, hush, you’re only dreaming.” Marin’s voice was soft in the warm darkness. “I guess Mick’s not the only one. There’ll be a few bad dreams on this ship. It’s just knowing where we are, what we’re doing. You all right, now?”
Travers had jerked awake into an instant of disorientation, but reality clicked back into place soon enough and he groaned. He dragged both palms over his face, feeling the dampness of a cold sweat on his forehead. “What time is it?”
“About 06:00.” Marin rolled flat on his back. “Go back to sleep. They’ll call us if they want us, but if they’re working shifts over there, we already did ours.”
But Travers was awake now. They had been asleep for only three hours but it was enough for his mind to be clear. He reached for Marin, hands exploring while his eyes were still closed. Marin was only feigning sleep, and when Neil drew the roughness of his cheek gently across his breast, dwelling on the pebble of each nipple, Marin gave a bass groan and capitulated.
The long slender legs spread, catching Travers between, and he rolled, bringing Neil right where he wanted him. Travers gave a breathless chuckle and sat up, watching Marin tug a pillow under his head. The only illumination was the pale blues from the threedee, and Curtis might have been an ice sculpture, half in darkness. The last faint threads of the dream still haunted Neil, making his heart pound and sweat prickle around his ribs.
The adrenaline rush might have been unpleasant, but he used it – thrust away the images of frozen faces and buried his own face in the curve of Marin’s shoulder as Curtis’s arms went around him. The mattress was softer than they were used to, but it conformed dutifully to Marin’s shape and their combined weight as Travers moved, restless, hunting for release, pleasure – his own and Curtis’s. One fine, slender hand dipped between them and made mayhem with Travers’s nerve endings, till he caught his breath, hissed through his teeth.
“Slow down,” Marin murmured, his voice a little hoarse, a little rough. “There used to be a saying – where’s the fire? I never appreciated it.”
Slow down? Travers sat back on his heels while Marin’s legs draped artlessly around him. The ice blue light from the threedee outlined him, from the form of jaw, nose, brow, to the curve of his shoulder, the hard plane of his chest, the elegant fullness of heavy genitals that would have inspired a sculptor. Times, Travers had come to wish he was an artist, and for a moment he wondered if there might be an opportunity, after the war, to see if the talent was in him.
And then Marin caught him, pulled him down, and thinking was the last thing his body wanted to do. Travers surrendered without complaint and let impulse – ‘grand passion,’ as Curtis had lately called it – take him where it would.
They slept again, and this time Neil slept so soundly, the call from the threedee did not wake him. He stirred as Marin shook his shoulder, reached for him again, but this time Marin only caught his hand, kissed the palm and then fended him off.
He pried open one eye and swore as he saw the time. It was not much before noon, shiptime, and Marin was not only up and dressed, he was back from Ops room or crew lounge with a wide handy displaying the vidfeed from the Ebrezjim. “Give me a minute,” Travers groaned, peeling himself off the bed and heading for the bathroom.
Coffee was waiting for him when he returned. He shrugged into an indigo silk kimono and sat on the foot of the bed, where Marin was cross-legged, watching the feed. “Dario and Tor are pulling the strings,” Curtis said thoughtfully. “But they decided to do the whole thing on remote – drones. Telepresence is a whole lot safer. We’re disturbing the wreck the way Ernst never did. All he did was bring the old handling drones online, power up the generators and undock the engine deck.” He chuckled. “All external – it didn’t impact much on the inside of the ship. The interior’s like…”
“A tomb,” Travers finished. “It is a tomb.”
“Yeah.” Marin took a swig of coffee. “They’ve explored the whole thing with viddrones, all the compartments that were not crushed ... they found four more de
ad. The ship took some damage on the way through the temporal horizon. Mark’s theorizing that she had enough engine power to almost hold herself out of it. You do that, it’ll crush you, unless you have the power to run Aragos that’ll hold off maybe a hundred gravities. The Ebrezjem didn’t – she had just enough to make a fight of it, run the engines counter to the horizon. Part of the structure twisted and tore apart under the force of her own propulsion. Something like hooking the nose of a car to a docking crane, putting it in reverse and tramping on the accelerator. If there’s enough power, she’ll pull herself to pieces.”
“Then the engines overheated, scrammed, and she went through the horizon fast,” Travers mused, “the way Lai’a did. Or the Orpheus. What did Lai’a call it? A Heisenberg tunnel. Mick said, you burn out your engines and then it sucks you right in.”
“Lai’a,” Marin said darkly, “drove in hard, under power. No strain whatever on the hull, frame or engines.”
“Getting out will be a different story.” Travers was frowning over the display in the handy, where three robust industrial drones were using particle beams to cut deep into the deck under Ebrezjim Ops.
And Dario and Tor had taken Rabelais’s advice. They were cutting half a meter away from the AI core on all sides. They would lift it out with infinite slowness, on the softest possible Arago cushion.
“This is going to take a while,” Marin said redundantly. “Another hour, minimum, to free the core, and an hour after that to lift it out.” He passed the handy to Travers. “It’s as thrilling as watching paint dry.” He leaned over and dropped a sucking kiss on Travers’s nape. “Dario and Tor are in Ops, but Mark has better things to do.” He paused. “Vidal looks like a much happier boy this morning.”
“You wake up in someone’s arms, you usually are,” Travers observed. “So long as you can remember the night before, and you know who you’re with!” He ducked the pillow that angled toward his head. “You know what I mean.”
“I … know what you mean,” Marin allowed.
“Are we shortlisted for some duty shift?” Travers stretched his back.
“Not as such. But the simulator’s set up, and we ought to be flying it.”
Travers groaned eloquently. “Another chance to drop ourselves right into another black hole!”
“We learn by doing,” Marin intoned. “Vidal is reporting results to Shapiro and Vaurien. We,” he added, “are shaping up as the best of the rest. Vidal and Queneau are the veterans, the survivors – the best. But of the rest of us, you and I are doing it better – a lot better – than Hubler and Rodman, Perlman and Fargo, or even Ernst and Jo, come to that. Turns out, we have a knack for this.”
On his feet and rummaging for clothes, Travers looked over his shoulder at Marin, who was still cross-legged on the bed. “Where’s Mick? Does he want us in the simulator right now?”
Marin gestured vaguely with his coffee. “Hubler and Rodman are in it at the moment. Give them an hour.”
A chance to crash it, take a breather, go again, crash again, Travers thought as he fed his legs into track pants and pulled a tunic over his head. “I want to stretch out, get my muscles working. You …?”
“Had all the workout I needed.” Marin patted the bed. “Every joint I possess is … comprehensively stretched. But I’ll cheer from the sidelines. There’s not much for us to do now. Jazinsky and the Sherratts are going to be in the lab, running the Ebrezjim data backwards and sideways.”
He swiped up the handy as they stepped out, absently monitoring the vidfeed from the ancient wreck, though it was uneventful. Travers led him down and aft, to the compartment – twenty meters by thirty, cool, breezy, dark until a visitor’s presence tripped the lights, and then bright with full frequency daylight – which Bravo had set up as their gym.
Even here crates and barrels were stacked along one bulkhead, wasting no space, as if Vaurien, Shapiro and Mark Sherratt were allowing for Lai’a not seeing the Deep Sky again for a very long time indeed. Travers frowned at the stacks and then turned his back on them and fed himself into one of several contraptions which would not have looked out of place in a dungeon.
He was slung in a cradle that formed up about him, pulling and pushing on a pair of bars where the weight was set by the mechanism, always just a few percent outside his ability to handle it without injury. Telemetry monitored heart, pulse, blood pressure, and he had only to push, pull, until the machine said stop, then rest until it said go. He set the mechanism for a heavy workout, leaned back into the cradle, and put his mind in neutral while his body went to work.
Sweat was running freely, his veins roped, the blood sang in his ears, when Marin said, “You’re a masochist, you know that?”
“If I was a masochist I’d pump iron every day,” Travers argued as he paused to drink. He gestured at the handy. “How goes it?”
“They’re through to the core now. Setting up to pull it out.” Marin was sitting on the bench opposite. “Dario wants to get it into laboratory conditions, warm it up one degree at a time over the space of days.” He looked up over the handy. “As soon as it’s aboard, they’re planning a memorial for the dead of the Ebrezjim, and then – we’re leaving.”
Leaving the freefall lagoon, by way of the radiation storm Vidal had described as a scene from some barbarian hell. A thrill of something very like dread stitched through Travers and he threw his weight against the bars again.
An hour later he was rubbing his hair, naked and comfortable in the cabin, when Joss said from the threedee, “Colonel Travers to Ops.”
“On my way,” Travers pledged. “What am I doing there?”
It was Lai’a who answered. “The Doctors Sherratt have asked you to supervise drones,” it told him with what sounded like a hint of scorn.
“What, Joss can’t wrangle them?” Travers grabbed up a fresh pair of slacks. “Or you?”
“Doctors Dario Sherratt and Sereccio,” Lai’a said with the familiar patience, “appear to prefer that their drones should not be AI supervised.” It paused. “Machines in command of machines.”
“They don’t trust an AI to tell drones where to go?” Travers snorted as he grabbed a fresh shirt. “That doesn’t sound right. Where’s Curtis?”
“Colonel Marin is in Physics 4 with Doctor Mark Sherratt,” Joss told him.
“And Vidal?”
“Colonel Vidal has just exited the simulator bay, in company with Captain Rodman and Major Hubler. They appear to be headed for Operations. Do you wish me to call Colonel Vidal?” Joss asked.
“Not at this moment.” It was a long time since Travers had heard Hubler referred to by his rank. Since he left the service, Roark had regarded himself as a civilian freelance, inclined toward the Freespacer. Barefoot, shoes in hand, Neil padded forward in the direction of the Ops room. The way took him past several labs and he heard Mark’s voice, and Curtis’s, before he reached the open door to the smallest, quietest of them.
“Ten blown escape pods,” Mark was saying, “which would have accommodated twenty people each, if they were full; sixteen dead left aboard – and as you noted, there’s nothing of the disfigurement or disarray you see when people perish in vacuum, much less when a ship decompresses. They were on the lower deck when the Ebrezjim peeled open, in a sealed compartment that didn’t collapse.”
“And the entire crew complement, at launch?” Marin asked as Travers stepped into the lab.
They were sitting at the long bench, watching a threedee, an edit of the vidfeed from drones that had explored the whole ship. The lab was the same as any other, and Travers did not even spare it a glance as Mark said, “There would have been two hundred souls aboard when the ship launched, give or take a few percent.” He looked up over Marin’s shoulder. “Neil, you look rested.”
“I am.” Travers pulled a stool up to the bench as Marin swiveled toward him and shuffled over to make space. “So – if the ship had a couple of hundred aboard and we’ve found sixteen, you have to guess the rest had a
lready blown out in the escape pods. But, where?”
“Exactly.” Mark set the playback on pause and turned toward Travers and Marin. “There’s no point in ejecting into the lagoon. There’s nowhere to go. If the Ebrezjim were raided by another crew that arrived in this void at the same time and came hunting for the tech to effect an escape, all the Resalq crew could reasonably do was fight to the death.”
Travers lifted a brow at him, and gestured into the threedee. “You’ve seen a lot of the ship. Any signs of a firefight?”
“That,” Mark said slowly, “is the oddest thing. There’s no sign of any fighting at all. From what we can see, the ship just made her way here, got caught in the gravity tide – the Odyssey Tide, as we call it – fought with the temporal horizon, overcooked the engines till they scrammed, and made the transit into the lagoon as we did, and Michael’s driftship before us. Inside, the Ebrezjim drifted on momentum. If the engineers did manage to restart the engines, they didn’t have the power to make it back out through the horizon. Nor did Michael, when he took the Orpheus-Odyssey hybrid – which was driven by the same engines, remember – into the radiation field.
He paused there, frowning over the data for some time. “But I don’t think the crew of the Ebrezjim even tried to make it out of the lagoon,” he added at last. “Look at the numbers. If she’d made any attempt the hull would still be highly radioactive, since she had no decontamination facility remotely like anything Lai’a possesses. The hull,” he said finally, “is very little hotter than Lai’a, post-decontamination.”
“So sixteen Resalq were aboard when the ship arrived back here,” Travers mused. “They were headed for the Orpheus Gate, obviously. Trying to get home. From there, they’d have headed to Saraine or Jagreth, any of the worlds where the Resalq homeworlds were at the time. The engines failed, they were stuck in the lagoon here...”
“And the same engines wouldn’t pull Mick out either. He tried.” Marin sighed heavily. “Maybe the crew left on the Ebrezjim knew better than to tackle the radiation barrier at the horizon. Maybe …” His teeth closed on his lip and he frowned at Mark. “Maybe they were intending to go scavenging through the void, same as Ernst did. Maybe they were going to be the raiders. Smash and grab, take whatever they could find, either build something new, seize someone else’s tech, or find gear to get their own engines back up to specs.”
