by Mel Keegan
And it was one of the fixed-point benchmarks that were bringing Marin and Travers home to the Orpheus Gate like a series of milestones. Travers gave a whoop as the driftship skipped clear, tacking a zigzag across Gloria’s fearsome gravity before she bolted free.
“Driftway,” Marin said with a definite self-satisfaction. “We’re just about home, Neil.”
“Acquiring zero-point navigation markers,” Travers said quietly – the words were comfortable, familiar, automatic. “Here we go … there’s Naiobe … and Raishenne-G … and the 2631C pulsar. Got it. I know right where we are.”
So did Marin. The Odyssey Tide swept away like the wing of an eagle above and to his right. The Ebrezjim Lagoon was that way, but he had skipped into a driftway that was taking them back to the Orpheus Gate. They were actually back inside Hellgate even now, and just cruising, watching for an event through which to exit.
The region was thoroughly charted. According to the object database built by Lai’a itself and dovetailed into the simulator, Raishenne-G was a cousin of Gloria, born from the same stellar nursery. Leon Sherratt had told Marin how Resalq navigators set course by Raishenne-G in the days when tallships cruised the seas of their homeworlds.
Deep beneath the fabric of normal space, and just beyond – or behind – the e-space conduit, transspace wove and skeined between these monstrous gravity wells; and from within Elarne, pilot and navigator could see the big Hellgate events beginning.
The physics would always be a mystery to Marin, but Mark had tried to phrase it in layman’s terms. The storms were driven by tumult in the cores of fast-spinning stars like Gloria, and by gravity surges within feeding black holes like Naiobe, where mass was always increasing, never quite constant. It was a mistake, Mark insisted, to think of a black hole as being so dense, nothing within it ever moved. This was true only in normal space. In transspace, the deep roots of Naiobe and Orion 359 seemed to coil and writhe – to Marin they looked like strangler vines which would climb a living tree and choke the life out of it. As they writhed around the roots of supergiant stars like Gloria, the serpent dance created great tidal heaves of slightly-unbalanced gravity. Colossal forces emanating from Naiobe reached right into Raishenne-G, made the roots of the giant star dance and strike in great arcs, reminding Marin of the backs of porpoise racing just below the surface of the ocean. Where they broke surface for a time to be measured in instants, within transspace, Hellgate brewed up an ‘event.’ For a matter of minutes, as measured in normal space, the storm would tear open the way into transspace.
“Got one,” Travers said sharply.
He had been taking readings off both Naiobe and Raishenne-G, and he had developed a knack for seeing the formation of conditions that would open a gate. Marin still had to analyze the data and make predictions, but Neil had begun to see something in the patterns – waveforms, gravity spikes, energy signatures – which spoke to him.
Without question, Marin rolled his hands in the filamentary gloves to follow the steer Travers had sent him. Naiobe was above and far to the right. Raishenne-G was way off to the left and ahead of them, and the ghost-pale, membrane-like surface of e-space had just begun to ripple and ruck. It would rupture in minutes, and seconds later the outer membrane would be torn open, like the last veil dropped by a dancer, leaving the unfathomable secrets of Elarne laid bare.
“Three minutes, max,” Neil warned. “It’ll be tight.”
The Orpheus Gate did not hold an absolutely fixed position – no gate could. Like the Orion Gate, the point at which it opened moved through many light hours, depending on the caprice of the black holes and stars. Marin throttled up the hyper-Weimann, redlined the generators for several moments and sent the driftship diving toward the ruck, which was effervescing now, in every shade of blue and mauve. The pale skin of the e-space conduit was tortured, stretched until it must rupture. It was as if a balloon was being over-inflated, and the analogy was not too far from the truth.
In the tail of Marin’s eye, distance, time, velocity and engine potential were performing their old, familiar quadrille. He could squeeze no more out of the transspace engine, and the driftship was driving toward the heart of the event Travers had glimpsed. “You’re spot-on,” he told Neil. “She’s got the makings of a monster.”
“Which suits us,” Travers mused. “The bigger they are, the easier it is to find the freefall channel right through, especially for a ship this size.”
A month ago, the words would have been more alien than the ancestral Resalq language. A Hellgate storm was the most terrifying event Travers or Marin could have imagined, and phantom memories of the death of the Intrepid were never far away. Now, Marin heard what Travers had said and permitted himself a grim smile. A monster storm suited them fine. The virtual driftship they were flying had been tested right up to Class 6, and Travers was adept at picking out the freefall passage. Marin’s task was to get them to the storm in time – which made Travers’s ability to see them early so much more valuable.
“Can’t get any more out of the drive,” he mused. “I’m looking for a gravity stream heading our way, but …” Gravity streams were scarce in any driftway. Their absence created the driftway.
“If we miss this one, we can wait for the next,” Travers said quietly. “Not that you’d want to. But we could.”
The next gate would be hours away, and at the end of that time they must chase again, with no guarantee of catching it. The driftship’s power was limited; every flight was a balancing act. Marin was juggling numbers. “I’m going to overrun the generators. Even when they’re sizzling we’ll get a few more seconds out of them, and as soon as we’re out of the gate we can cruise on momentum till they cool enough to refire.”
“If they refire,” Travers said sharply.
“I said I’m going to overrun them to reach this gate – not burn ’em right out,” Marin remonstrated. “Hold tight.”
A second time, he pushed the generators into the red zone and heard the AI whispering over the comm about overheats, underruns, and a system shutdown in 20 seconds. But according to instruments, a ten second burn at this power would get them there, and Marin gritted his teeth, ignored the AI until navigation parameters clicked over into green.
He shut down the drive with ten spare seconds, well inside the safety window, and the driftship was cruising. “Got it, Neil ... sit back for the ride.”
“Cheeky,” Travers observed.
“Effective.” Marin indulged himself in a chuckle. “It got us here.”
The storm was already boiling – the Orpheus Gate was open even now, and the best algorithms Mark Sherratt and Barb Jazinsky had yet developed were unable to predict how long it would remain open. Marin was frowning over hyper-Weimann data as the driftship raced on. The drive must have ignition potential, they must have the ability to abort the transit through the gate, if it began to collapse too soon. If the ship were caught, it would be smashed to elementary particles, spat back into Hellgate.
“How’s she look?” he asked tersely.
Like any navigator, Travers had studied the decay of the events from the transspace side, using hundreds of simulations generated from data supplied by Lai’a. “It’s … starting to close,” he whispered.
“How long?”
“Maybe 30 seconds, and we lose our window.” Travers took a breath, audible over the comm. “Can we do it?”
“Just.” Marin could actually see normal space through the eye of the storm now. He recognized the constellations of Omaru, where Jagreth’s own sun appeared as one extra star in the tail of The Cats. “So long as the collapse doesn’t accelerate – give me five seconds’ warning, minimum, Neil, to shear off this vector, or we’re history.”
“Tell me about it,” Travers muttered. “She’s holding … 20 seconds. Holding … 15 seconds. Damn, I don’t like the look of the perimeter – check it out, at your three o’clock.”
Marin had seen the same tidal surges, like breakers smashing on rocks, bu
t the freefall channel was off-center, diametrically opposed. “We can still do it.”
“Maybe … 10 seconds. Nine. Eight –”
After the five second marker they were committed, and the decision to go or abort could not be made by pilot alone. “Call it,” Marin invited.
For a split second Travers hesitated and then, “Go. Six. Five. Threshold. Four.”
“Lined up and cruising. Freefall,” Marin reported as his eyes skimmed the displays and, ahead, space became a roiling, seething cauldron. “Reading 300 gravities off the far-side perimeter, they won’t touch us –”
They went through like a grain of sand being caught between the hammer and the anvil, and slithering through a fissure in the surface of one or the other. Marin held his breath, eyes squeezed shut against the brilliance of the event which, even dimmed by the display, was harsh enough to shrivel his irises. A moment later Travers gave a whoop of triumph, and Curtis began to breathe again.
“We’re out!” Neil crowed. “Navigation points fixed … I know where we are. A tad bit under 50 light minutes from Oberon – hold on. I’m sending you a Weimann steer for Alshie’nya.”
“Home in ten minutes, soon as the generators refire. Let me give ’em a go now … yes!” Marin relaxed for the first time since they had entered the gate, and ran a swift diagnostic of the mundane old Weimann drive. All systems showed green, and as he locked in Travers’s coordinates he hit the igniters.
The drive fired without protest, and he handed over to the automatics. “Sim complete,” he said for benefit of the recorders. “Done and dusted.”
Over the comm, like a whisper from the loop as Curtis took off the veeree set, Vidal’s voice said, “Nice one, guys. Very nice indeed. You’re getting good.”
The simulation was cycling down into darkness and the cryogen tanks opened, admitting a flood of dim hangar lighting. Marin had just withdrawn his hands from the sensor-mesh gloves as Travers said, “Not perfect yet, Mick. That’s four out of the last six flights we survived.”
“And four consecutively.” Vidal appeared at the hatch in the side of the oversized crate. “If this was live, the real thing, necessity would add any extra kick you think you need. Just knowing it’s for real would give you the edge.”
“You’re sure about that?” Marin sat up, stretched, ran both hands through his hair. “What’s on the sim clock this time?”
Vidal turned a handy to show them the display. “You did it in 88 minutes, which is a damned good time – not just a good time to survive, but also a great time to get through this particular flightplan. You picked up the right tides at the right moments, tacked efficiently, and connected with a gate first time out …even if you did take liberties with your generators.”
“Nothing that’d stop ’em getting us home. I was careful.” Marin lifted himself out of the tank and reached down a hand to pull Travers up.
“I know. Like I said, you’re getting good.” Vidal aimed the handy into the simulator and shut down systems. “Anything happens to Jo and me, you two are the next team up. You’re way ahead of the rest. I mean, you guys can do this. Even now there’s only two teams I’d like to see flying this for real, in an emergency. Coffee, or something cool?”
“Something cool,” Travers decided.
A ’chef was parked in the corner of the pocket-sized hangar, and since Rabelais and Queneau had configured it, few items on the menu were inedible. Vidal was drinking iced green tea with lime and ginger, and while Marin fetched something similar for himself and juice and tonic for Travers, Mick withdrew to the workstation behind the simulator. Bill Grant sat there, fiddling with the equipment of his trade. Marin might have asked what brought him here, but the hypogun was already in his right hand, and Vidal was pulling down the collar of his tunic.
He hissed as the shot fired in, but made no comment. Grant took readings and gave him a nod of approval. “You’re looking better, Mick.”
“I look like crap,” Vidal scoffed.
“Not from where I’m sitting.” Grant gestured with the handy. “It’s all in the numbers. And they’re looking a lot better.” He wore a philosophical look which seemed to have little to do with what he was saying.
“Something’s not right?” Travers guessed.
“Oh, I dunno.” Grant closed the case on his equipment and sat back with a frown. “I just can’t help thinking about the idiot. Teniko. I never saw a guy get himself reengineered while he was wide awake. I don’t think you’re supposed to do it this way. In fact, the only cases I’ve ever seen of the large-scale reengineering are ancient vids. I watched a study of the process to turn old fashioned human migrant stock from North Africa into Mazjeet. Took ten months, while the colony ship Alexandria was on her way out in the Deep Sky.”
“So the colonists were not actually suspended in cryo?” Marin was surprised. “That is, cryogen tanks are full suspension, every life process stopped, which would also stop the body growing, changing.”
“Tanks are most usually set for full-suspension,” Grant agreed thoughtfully. “But if you want to engineer a whole body, the way Teniko’s rebuilding himself, you don’t want to suspend life processes. Turns out, the old tanks had incremental settings. They could slow life processes down far enough to put the subject into a state not unlike a medically induced coma – under the level of brain activity where a person could be conscious. Not even dreaming, but perfectly healthy. Then the tanks maintained life support, muscle tone, organ function, the works, while the engineering took place. Done this way, at high intensity, it takes less than a year to morph a normal size human into a normal size Mazjeet. Growing from Lushi to Pakrani takes a lot longer, obviously. Think about the growth factor in the long bones, for a start, not to mention the skull dimensions. That’s a lot of bone to generate…
“Anyway, when the reengineering was finished the tanks switched over to full cryogen suspension for the rest of the journey. Shit, can you imagine? You climb into the tank as a normal, homeworlds human. Go to sleep. Wake up two years later – and you’re not aware of time passing – and you climb back out of the tank as a Mazjeet. Or a Lushi,” he added. “You know, I never even asked my parents what it was like. Never thought to ask the question. At least they didn’t have to grow, or lose height. They’re Vietnamese Australian, from someplace on the east coast. Queen’s … something. I forget. Truth is, I never had much interest in the old world.”
“It’ll give you something to talk about,” Vidal suggested, “if you go home after the war.”
But Grant’s head was shaking slowly. “You think I’m slogging through med school so I can go back and treat diaper rash and ingrown toenails in the fair spaceport city of Moresby? Christ, what an idea. Rick Vaurien’s picking up the bill for this, and me –? I get to be CMO of one of the biggest ships on the frontier. Not bad for the kid who used to be a company medic.” But his face creased doubtfully as he got to his feet and slung his bag over one shoulder of a gaudy shirt. “None of which qualifies me to know squat about what’s going on inside Tonio Teniko’s head.”
“But you know enough to make a guess?” Marin prompted.
“A guess?” On his way to the armordoors, Grant paused. “My professional opinion is … he’s losing it. He’s halfway around the bloody bend with self-loathing, and he’s lucid a lot less of the time than he ought to be, because I don’t think he can live with what he’s become. Before, he had a problem with being so beautiful, people were dumbstruck. Now he’s turning into this shambling wreck of a thing, and he sees people turn away from him. He sees them look anywhere else in the room, and – well, I guess Teniko’s still human, even if he’s a nut-job. It’s got to make him cringe when people won’t even look in his direction.” He strode on to the door. “And it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. He’s got a long, long way to go. From what I’ve read, it’ll be an absolute minimum of 18 months before he’s finished, and he could find it difficult to get continuous therapy from here on.”
He would have been expecting to return to the clinic in Riga, Marin thought, but with the Resalq headed out with their sights set on a new world, those genetic specialists might not return. Teniko would have to follow them, wherever they had gone. The probability was, the clinic would reopen on the new Resalq colony world founded by the Freyana, under the command of Emil Kulich.
“Nothing you can do for him, Bill, I suppose?” Travers wondered.
Framed in the armordoors, Grant turned back. “I’d need to be a bloody magician,” he said sourly. “Short of keeping him as comfortable as possible, there’s only one other option. Tank him, and see if anyone can figure out how to configure a modern tank to suspend him the way the colonists were suspended, if it can even be done, so he can spend the rest of the trip comatose – excess baggage, as far as this expedition is concerned. If he was going to do that, he should’ve been tanked on the Freyana and gone west with his geneticists … besides which, I don’t even think a modern tank allows for anything except full-on cryosleep. Centuries ago, they designed them to accommodate colonists who were being reengineered in flight, but those days are so far in the past, I didn’t even know any of this stuff till Teniko laid this crap on me. I had to look it up!” He raised his hand in farewell. “I’ll catch you guys later. Bravo’s playing folgen tonight, if you’re interested.”
He was gone with that, and Marin frowned after him until Travers dropped both arms around him from behind and a kiss fell on the back of his neck. “This one’s not ours to worry about,” Neil said wisely.
“Still, if worst comes to worst and he’s going to be tanked …” Marin turned into Travers’s arms, keenly aware that Vidal was studiously ignoring them, fiddling with the setup for the next simulation. Perlman and Fargo were expected in a few minutes.
