Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “True – but not for long.” Vaurien gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the labs. “Talk to Barb and Mark. They’re talking about a ship they want to call the Elarne Zhivun, which means Transspace Gypsy, or perhaps Transspace Wanderer. As it happens, there’s an asteroid miner sitting, wrecked, on the other side of the Bronowski Reef. We beacon-marked the claim on it years ago, never had any reason to go out and bring it to Alshie’nya – now we do. The engines are no good, the AI was fried by a close Hellgate event, but the hull is sound. We’re assigning the Esprit de Liberté to the salvage, soon as we get back. Four to six months and the Gypsy should be viable, especially since she doesn’t need the warload of a carrier battle group.”

  “Because there’s no one to fight,” Travers said in a groan of something very like relief. “There’s no war.”

  Vidal breathed a long sigh. “It happened. ‘After the war’ – how many times have we said those words? I came to hate the sound of them. But it’s now, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” Vaurien’s dark eyes had regained their sparkle. “And we know exactly where the Veldn are. We could beg a favor – a science crew could ask for a ride home, if they were in a real heap of trouble. The Veldn have comm drones all over the 161 system. Contacting them is simple.”

  “It’s kind of nice having friends out there,” Vidal mused. “You better tell Robert and Alec we invited them home for tea.”

  “Top of the agenda,” Vaurien agreed. “We’re on the Wastrel, headed for Borushek and Velcastra, soon as we’ve touched base with Tully. The Esprit ought to be just about ready to come online. Load up the AI, hand her to Tully, watch him take off on a shakedown cruise, and we’re out of there. Mark wants to offload data to Riga, take a look around the old homestead. And you,” he added to Vidal, “need to spend some quality time with the old man. Your Aunt Alexis is planning to spend a while with the husband and son who’ve almost forgotten what she looks like, so you’ve no excuse for running away to transspace … at least for a while.”

  “But Lai’a will be gone soon,” Vidal protested, “and it won’t be back for months, maybe years.”

  “And the Gypsy should be flying transspace trials in four or five months.” Richard cocked his head at Vidal. “You want her, or not?”

  Vidal’s mouth dropped open. “You’re not serious.”

  “Why not?” Vaurien folded his arms across his chest, cautious with his left side. “You’ll need to recruit and train a navigator – you’re losing Jo. She and Ernst want to ship with us. You won’t separate Neil and Curtis, and they’re on the Wastrel, too. Perlman will want to stay with Jim Fujioka, and I already offered Jim the Wastrel. I’m losing Tully, remember. He’s taking the Esprit, so I’m short an engineer, and a Weimann specialist. So Gill Perlman will be on the Wastrel with her other half.”

  “And you won’t separate Hubler and Rodman,” Travers added. “They’re dying to get back on the Harlequin and vanish into Freespace till they get bored with bumming around backwater worlds for the thrill of it. Then – it’s Sanmarco and Dominguez and Marak, the casinos, splurge the spoils … back to Alshie’nya, rendezvous with the Wastrel when it’s time for Roark to have the new legs grafted.”

  The remark inspired a chuckle from Grant. “I already made the date. I’ll be here, with the tanks and an OR online.” He gave an animated shiver. “God, I’ll be through finals, qualifying as a specialist long before then.”

  “You already have your berth.” Vaurien paused and angled an amused glance at Grant. “So you have your finals coming up, so what? Don’t tell me you’re nervous!”

  “Scared spitless,” Grant confessed.

  “Don’t be.” Vaurien gestured at Vidal, and at himself. “You’ve done more work, and better, in less time than any other doctor I know. You know this stuff inside out, Bill. You’re ready. Trust me.”

  An enormous shudder ambushed Grant. “God, I hope so. If I blow it on some stupid details I go blank and can’t remember on the day, it’s another year of study before I can re-sit the finals.”

  “We’ll be gone by then.” Vaurien studied him with a frown. “I’ll be candid with you, Bill. I don’t really care about certificates and diplomas. I’ve already signed you as my CMO, and you’re welcome aboard. We’re a Freespacer operation – I’m not bound by Deep Sky red tape. And we’re headed out, way out, soon enough. If you’re coming along, what’s your worry?”

  “Point,” Grant admitted. “But it would be damn’ fine to have the piece of paper, the validation, formal recognition.”

  “You’ll get it.” Vaurien paused as Grant brandished the loaded hypogun intended for Vidal. “If you don’t, kill a year with the books in your spare time. Specialize. Work with Etienne … come back and take the finals in your own good time.”

  “I will.” Grant was busy with Vidal’s nano now, loading the hypogun. “Okay, Mickey-lad, which side d’you want this in?”

  “Pick one,” Vidal said resignedly. “Six shots a day, I’m black and blue all over.”

  The gun thudded, inspiring a grunt, and he pulled his collar back up over lean muscle. He was wiry now, where the Delta Dragon, the Kiev’s CAT leader, had been gloriously full-bodied; but he was strong, Travers knew. He was healthy, and no one valued his health more than Vidal. An hour every day, he was in the gym. The weights he pushed and pulled were not the impressive loads he would have pressed years ago, but they were comparable to Marin’s numbers, and nothing to be ashamed of. Still, not a spare ounce clung to Vidal anywhere. He had a fashionable leanness which would soon be turning heads in Elstrom, and in the last week, while Lai’a made its way back through the labyrinth of transspace, he had taken to dressing in charcoal denims and black silk.

  “Recruit yourself a navigator, Mick.” Richard was on his way out. “Take over the Gypsy project, if you want it.”

  “Answerable to whom?” Vidal worked his shoulder around to ease the tightness left by the shot. “I won’t be a monkey on the end of some chain held by a Commonwealth politician.”

  The remark made Vaurien’s face darken. “Nor would I. But the Gypsy will be a Freespacer. She’ll belong to the same consortium that built Lai’a. You go out, find us a Zunshulite lode,” he added, “and you’ll be so stinking rich, you could buy and sell the clan estates back on Velcastra … you could,” he said thoughtfully, “commission your own driftship.”

  The possibilities had just begun to dawn on Vidal, and he gave a low whistle. “Well, now … that changes the color of everything, doesn’t it? Hey, Billy, can I get out of here?”

  Grant waved him away. “Feel free. You too, boss. You’re doing good, just don’t push it too soon. You might not be aware of it, but you’re actually still healing.”

  “Oh, I’m aware of it,” Vaurien assured him. “Since the neural bridging, I can feel every little thing.”

  “It aches?” Travers was not surprised.

  “It aches.” Vaurien lifted both shoulders in a careful shrug. “But everything’s still attached right where it ought to be. It’s not the first time I’ve slogged through this process, Neil.”

  “I know.” Travers laid a hand on Vaurien’s chest, felt the hard warmth there. “You be careful. More careful,” he corrected.

  But Vaurien was unconcerned. “Lai’a was as much warship as science vessel. We all knew the risks. Four casualties was less than Harrison, Mark and I actually expected.”

  “Two dead,” Travers said doubtfully.

  “Yes.” Richard looked away. “And like Harrison, I’ll regret it as long as I live.”

  “Tonio really did love you,” Travers said quietly.

  “I never doubted it, but …” Vaurien shook his head. “Damn, he made it hard. Too hard. In the end, I didn’t know what to do with him. I almost tanked him, but if I had, maybe neither of us would be here to tell the tale. Tonio was there when we needed him, and his family’s going to know it. It’s all I can do. That, and remember.”

  As if any of them was eve
r likely to forget, Travers thought. He might have said as much, but Joss’s quiet voice intruded. “Colonel Travers, Colonel Marin, Colonel Vidal, Captain Queneau, report to Ops immediately.”

  “What the hell?” Vidal muttered.

  “I don’t know.” Richard plucked the combug from his pocket and slipped it into his ear. He listened a moment, and then, “Barb – slow down. What is it you’re seeing?”

  His expression hardened as he listened again, and Travers’s belly gave that curious shiver. Something was not right, and Joss had called both qualified transspace flightcrews to Ops. Neil searched for a combug, and as it slid into his ear he heard Marin at once.

  “You there, Neil? You got any idea what’s going on?”

  “No more than you have,” Travers told him. “I’m with Mick – we’re coming up to Ops right now. Richard?”

  “I’m right behind you,” Vaurien promised. “If there’s one thing a mission commander soon learns, it’s when to butt out and let the specialists do their job.”

  Specialists? The word was under Travers’s skin, prickling, as they headed out of the Infirmary. Marin and Rabelais were in the passage outside Physics 2; Queneau was on the loop, calling from the simulator, where she was tinkering.

  “You need me up there?” she was insisting. “I’m busy here.”

  “Finish it, Jo,” Jazinsky told her. “Get the simulator online. Now.”

  Her tone brought Travers’s hackles up. Mark, Dario and Jazinsky were standing around a workstation, intent on a display that made their faces as bitter as a winter night on the Wulff Glacier. As Travers joined Marin there they sent the data to the navtank, but Neil was no more enlightened. He looked from Marin to Vidal and back, but Curtis only shook his head minutely. Mick was already saying,

  “Okay, it’s a waveform … from what?”

  “From Lai’a,” Mark said quietly. “More specifically, from one of the logic processors, a fourth level sub-routine.”

  “Critical?” Marin wondered.

  Mark looked up, golden eyes lit with witchfires from the tank. “It all depends where we are and what we’re doing. A breakdown in any of the logic processors is critical when you’re riding the gravity express.”

  “I can recognize a waveform.” Marin reached over into the tank. “I also know how to read the color code right here ... green, blue and gold are datastreams and functions. Red and black are incongruities.”

  “Give the boy a cigar.” Jazinsky looked up through the haze of the threedee into Vaurien’s pensive face. “We never saw incongruities before, anywhere in any routine. This is new.”

  “As Ernst would say … bloody hell,” Vidal whispered, barely audible. He touched his combug. “Make it quick, Jo, and triple check everything.”

  Her voice rasped over the comm: “You want to tell me what goes on? Who’s so impatient to fly?”

  “Standby,” he told her noncommittally, and then, to Mark, “is this incongruity something you can fix?”

  “Not without shutting Lai’a down.” Dario pulled up a virtual schematic, a confused, confusing representation of the holographic memory matrix. A speck of it, buried down deep, was wandering from red to purple and back while the rest sang in blues and greens. “There’s no way we can get to this – even to find out what it is – without shutting down the AI.”

  “All right, can Lai’a identify the fault?” Vaurien reasoned.

  Mark took a step back from the tank. “That’s the whole problem, Richard. Lai’a can’t tell the problem is there. It’s run diagnostics, and this is a blind spot. Like trying to see the freckles on your own back. Whatever this is, Lai’a would never have known about it. It was only sheer luck Dario and Tor were going over routine, mundane ship data, killing time while Tor’s on restricted duties.”

  At that moment Tor was back in the stateroom he shared with Dario, spending two of the mandatory six hours per day in zero-gee, which took stress off the massive repairs in his abdomen. Several organs were missing altogether, and the psychological blow was so immense, Travers had only seen him three times since Lai’a made the transit into Elarne for the flight home.

  “Two days.” Vaurien took a calming breath and looked at Jazinsky and the Sherratts for answers. “Will it hold together till we make Hellgate?”

  But Mark’s lion-maned head was shaking emphatically. “It’s deteriorating steadily, and quite rapidly. We’re talking about hours, not days, if you want to retain any safe margin.”

  “Then, it wouldn’t get us to, say, the Ebrezjim Lagoon,” Vaurien wondered. “Two hours from home.”

  “No.” Mark was certain; and he was frowning at Vidal. “The thing is, we can shut Lai’a down easily enough – and I’d like to, before something we don’t yet understand gets away from us, and suddenly we’re looking at wide-scale damage, major repair work, patching that adds up to memory loss. But we can’t guarantee to bring it back online – not quickly. We’ll get it back up, but it could be a month or three months of lab work. We need the facilities on the Carellan Djerun, where Lai’a was born.” He paused. “And I can hear Tonio sneering at my use of the word.”

  “Oh … my gods.” Vidal pulled both hands across his face, which of a sudden wore a sheen of cold sweat. “Two days from home.”

  Travers groaned. “Nobody can fly transspace for 48 hours! The longest Curtis and I ever managed was 195 minutes, and we were so exhausted, they lifted us out of the tanks and we were useless for the rest of the day.”

  “Don’t talk about stimulants, drugs, Mick,” Marin warned. “They’d fry your brain long before you got us home, even if the rest of your body would take the punishment. Which it won’t,” he added pointedly.

  Vidal gave them a pained look. “Credit me with a crumb of sense.” He gestured through the threedee, swept the waveform and the schematic aside and pulled up a chart of the region – a compromise between threedee and multi-dimensional images, rendered comprehensible to human eyes and brains. “If you had to fly transspace, Drift to Drift, without a break, no human could do it. The thing is, you don’t – we’ve always known this.

  “There’s slipways, on and off the gravity express, to and from the driftways, about every two, three hours down the track.” His tonguetip flicked over his lips. “They’re marked, see? Like highway slip lanes, or the taxiways at a groundside spaceport.” He straightened, hands in the pockets of black denims, brow creased, eyes brooding on the charts. “Have Lai’a get us off at the next slipway, Mark. Just have it put us in the driftway – safe, if it can, and if not, safe enough for the couple of minutes it’ll take Jo and me to get a grip on the nav details and take over.”

  “You’d take us to the next driftway,” Mark mused. “And there?”

  “Same deal.” Vidal was frowning at Travers and Marin now. “Jo and I will get us into the driftway – safe enough. Neil and Curtis can fly the next leg. Then we all take a long break. Eight hours, minimum, to recover before we go again. That’s four driftways closer to home in a day, Richard – it’s the best we can do with the qualified transspace crews we have.” He gestured over his shoulder. “Roark and Asako still need more work. Perlman and Fargo are getting good, but they’re not quite up to speed. The time we’d save, putting them in the hot seat, wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

  He made good sense, and Vaurien agreed without hesitation. “I’m seeing 17 driftways to get home – and the last driftway is Hellgate itself. That’s four days.” He lifted a brow at Mark and Dario. “Gives you four days to work on Lai’a. You might get lucky.”

  “We’ve already been incalculably lucky,” Mark said aridly. “If Dario and Tor hadn’t been killing time with routine data, we’d never have seen this … and I honestly don’t know what it is. It could be a flaw in the holographic crystal itself. A dead zone in the matrix. It could also be an error in the fundamental code – but I was prepared to bet my life, and everyone else’s, that the matrix and the code were flawless.”

  “Well, you’ll know when
you get in there.” Vaurien had already moved on. “The next driftway is coming up in fifteen minutes.” He paused, and his voice sharpened. “You have discussed this with Lai’a?”

  “In so many words,” Mark said ruefully. “It can’t see any fault. Its diagnostics report no error.”

  “Then you’d better open a dialog,” Vaurien said flatly, “while Mick gets down there and gives Jo a hand to get the simulator prepped.”

  “On my way,” Vidal said quickly. He slapped hands with Travers on his way by. “The next driftway reads as around 2.8 hours, Neil … don’t you and Curtis go anywhere.”

  Travers’s skin prickled as he turned his back on the tank and met Marin’s dark eyes levelly. Curtis looked so utterly calm, Neil knew the expression was a façade for turbulent emotions, the most rampant of which would be sheer dread. They were qualified, but a chasm of difference separated the simulator from the realities of transspace, with the security of the Deep Sky riding on their shoulders.

  With a soft oath in the ancient Resalq mother tongue, Mark pulled up a chair. “Lai’a, did you run the extra diagnostic on all fourth level logic processors?”

  “I did,” Lai’a assured him. “There is no fault.”

  “Yet Dario and I can see the fault,” Mark said, slow and calm. “It’s streaming to the navtank at this time. See for yourself.”

  “I see the waveform,” Lai’a agreed. “It disagrees with diagnostic results.”

  “Faults sometimes do.” Mark frowned at the data. “You would not be able to see a minute flaw in your own holographic crystal matrix, but it would cause incongruity.”

  “It would. But the crystal matrix was tested below the molecular level before I came online,” Lai’a reasoned. “No flaw exists.”

  Mark looked up at Dario. “We could have missed something.”

  “I do not believe you would miss such a flaw, Doctor. You have always been too thorough, too meticulous.”

  “Thank you. But that thoroughness,” Mark said carefully, “is what makes me ask you to work with us at this time.”