The Crystal Variation

by Sharon Lee

  “I’m curious, Pilot,” he said while she was in the midst of rough calculating in her head to back up the ship’s computer, “how long you’ve had these Jaythrees and Jayfours on hand?”

  The “Jaythrees and Jayfours” in question were currently loaded in Gun One, which he was using for his own, while she was firing general purpose tracking rounds with only a minimum of on-board guidance from Gun Two. It looked like he was practicing, too, because it was obvious he was calculating like mad, and doing something special and antsy with the settings . . .

  “You’re making it hard for me to concentrate . . .” she muttered. He fidgeted briefly, and she sighed, giving up for the moment. “Which I guess is about right for combat conditions . . .”

  He nodded, then fired the rounds; Cantra watched for his finger mark to indicate that she should start tracking, her mind maybe a quarter on his question.

  “Garen bought ‘em when she bought the guns,” she said finally; “I never used them ‘cause they was listed as close-in combat support in the docs, and I never had need.” She moved her shoulders, and glanced at the side of his face.

  “I’m a smuggler,” she said, her voice sharper than she’d entirely intended “not a pirate. The guns’re defense.”

  The finger move came; she started the ranging, saw in her head that the shells were in a highly elliptical—no, make that a parabolic—orbit so tight it might even graze the distant star, would likely, in fact, fall right into it . . .

  From the co-pilot’s section, she heard a small sound, almost as if Jela was humming, which was nothing new, though why he was inspired to hum or sing now . . . but she could hear him busy on the keyboard, tapping queries or commands in a real hurry.

  There! The computer and her calcs had reached an accord! She fired, let the computer take the next shot, fired the next on manual, let the computer have the next, and sat back to watch the tracks on the computer screen.

  Even with Jela’s rounds being “underpowered” it would take quite awhile for the interception, if she’d been accurate enough to—

  Jela wasn’t humming so much as growling. She turned her head to look at him.

  “Can you tell me,” he asked in a low, gravelly voice, “can you tell me exactly who sold you those shells and the manuals?” His face was so absolutely neutral that she felt dread rising through her, despite her training. Jela mad—really mad and out for balance—wasn’t a sight she particularly wanted to see, she realized. Not that it would be smart to let him know he’d managed to unnerve her.

  “Hah!” She shrugged carelessly and waved her hands in a casual not my job.

  “Will the ship’s log give us any idea?”

  Her hands moved themselves; indication—perhaps. And expanded—maybe, low probability.

  “Garen was pretty careful about some stuff she didn’t want me to know about . . .”

  He looked away from her, fingers moving on the query pad, and spoke as if from a distance.

  “At first opportunity—and you will remind me if I fail in this, please, Pilot! At first opportunity, we will replace your documentation for these guns. We will also inspect—two sets of eyeballs so we’re sure—the munitions themselves.”

  He paused, sending her a look out of hard black eyes.

  “Try to remember where these shells came from, Pilot. Any clue would be good.”

  The man was serious, and—not mad, no. Something else, stronger and sterner than mere anger.

  “Pilot, there’s cause?” she managed, bringing the Rim accent up. “They out of spec?”

  He rubbed his face with those broad hands, like he was trying to wipe away sweat, or a sight he wished he hadn’t seen.

  After a sigh he looked at her straight on again, not quite so hard.

  “Jaythrees are rounds one might use to deny a landing ground to an enemy. A landing ground one wishes not to occupy for oneself. In addition to a fairly lethal explosive charge, they release a fine mist of plutonium powder. Jayfours . . .” He rubbed his face again.

  “Jayfours are binary cleansers. The gas they release is . . . inimical . . . to most air breathing creatures and plants. In the presence of oxygen it will deteriorate to mere poison in about twelve days, and to an irritant in another twelve.”

  “Depending on the winds, one could cleanse half a continent.”

  Cantra blinked, swallowed and had cause to be briefly grateful for her early schooling.

  “The docs?” she said, matching him quiet for quiet.

  “Apparently someone wished to make you and your Garen into household names. Or else your seller, too, was tricked.” She looked to the screen, where her shots, and the computer’s, raced after the deadly payloads, and then back to him.

  “You aimed them for the star then . . .”

  His hands fluttered into hand-talk.

  Best course, she read.

  And again—best course.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Spiral Dance

  Jumping Off the Rim

  TARGET PRACTICE WAS OVER, and so was the meal, eaten companionably together. The pilots were strapped in at their stations, while the third member of the crew sat in the jump-seat.

  “All right, Dulsey,” Cantra said, her eyes on her board, “I’ll need those eighteen numbers now.”

  Dulsey stiffened, relaxed, shrugged diffidently.

  “Pilot, I do not have eighteen. The numbers I was given come in three sets of twelve.”

  Jela, damn his hide, laughed. Cantra sighed.

  “Let’s have ‘em, then,” she said resignedly, and waited while Dulsey activated the jump-seat’s tablet and tapped her info rapidly in.

  They came up on the pilot’s work screen—and the co-pilot’s too—three neat rows of twelve, and anything more like plain and fancy gibberish Cantra hoped never to see.

  “I’d guess,” Jela said quietly, “that you’ll be able to construct something reasonably familiar to you from those numbers. Maybe even something—” he wiggled his fingers in the pilot-talk for comfortable.

  Comfortable. Right. Fuming, Cantra fed the numbers to the nav brain, not that she expected it to be able to do much with them—and she wasn’t disappointed, damnitall.

  “Easy for you to say,” she snapped at Jela. “But out here, numbers ain’t quite so casual as they are in the heart. Down there you got lots of reinforcement, including some places you just can’t go, ‘cause it’d take too much power, and lots of experience and references to let you know what’s possible and what’s not. Out here, almost any number’ll get you somewhere. Twelve to five says most of where you can go is even safe. Sort of.”

  While she was talking, her fingers were busy shuffling and reshuffling Dulsey’s pack of thirty-six.

  “Well, if we pile ‘em up backwards and split ‘em in two, we get one coord that’ll take us into somewhere just a bit inside the wavefront of a gas pulse pumping out an X-ray beacon. So I guess we’ll discard that one. If we stack ‘em straight and divide in two, we get more gibberish. But . . .”

  On a guess, she re-shuffled the digits the old way, the one that’d been real popular with the Dark traders along back years ago and—yes.

  “If we do it this way,” she said aloud, being careful not explain exactly which way, “we get two sets of honest coords, and one looks a lot like something I think I recognize.” She spun her chair to face Dulsey.

  “So, did you get any more of that key? Any way I can confirm? I might expect an engineer to know we was missing something here.”

  Dulsey sat up straighter—a good trick, considering how upright she kept herself as a matter of course.

  “Pilot, understand that the information was not all given to th—to me. One of my pod had the first set of numbers, which I became party to. The second set was mine to keep. The third . . . I broke a seal to get. It was assumed by our source that if we came, we would come all together.”

  “Hah!” Jela said. Cantra threw him a glance and a nod.

  “Maybe,” h
e said to Dulsey, “there were other numbers scattered among the rest of your Pod?”

  But Dulsey shook her head.

  “No, those were all we were given.” She looked carefully at Jela, and continued almost inaudibly. “The others would not have been able to conceal the numbers and so were not given them.”

  Cantra grinned. “But you, not having all the numbers yourself, thought you ought to, and was ready to go with or without?”

  Dulsey closed her eyes briefly, sighed, and faced her. “I cannot apologize for surviving,” she said, and despite the brave words, her voice carried shame. “Nothing I did risked my Pod mates, and there was nothing else I could have—”

  “Stop!” Jela held up a hand. Cantra looked at him with interest, Dulsey with concern.

  “Dulsey,” he said, “I believe you. I believe you did the right thing. We’ve all become soldiers in this life—you as much as me or Pilot Cantra, here. You acted to preserve resources, which you have done; and you behaved with honor. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Your right to be alive is not in question. What Pilot Cantra must judge—as pilot and captain of this ship—is the safety of the routes you’ve given her. This is for the good of the ship, and the good of the crew.”

  Not bad, thought Cantra, admiringly. In the jump-seat, Dulsey shook her head again.

  “I understand,” she managed, voice shaking a little. “Truly, Pilot Jela, if I had more information, I would gladly—but these are the numbers. I have nothing else.”

  Cantra sighed. “Were you going to steal a ship, then? These numbers would’ve got you killed straight off, if you didn’t know—”

  “No, Pilot.” Dulsey faced her again, chin lifting. “We were a group, before the bankruptcy, and in the group were pilots who had experience . . .”

  Cantra lifted a hand, palm up.

  “Dulsey, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t steal a ship, given necessity. I’m thinking Pilot Jela’s of the same opinion, is that right, Pilot?”

  “That’s right,” Jela said comfortably.

  “I wonder, though—how wide-spread was this attitude in your group? Were you going to depend on stealth, or on surprise?”

  Dulsey’s face hardened.

  “They were depending on accident, coincidence, and rumor. With the application of reasonable energy some time ago, we could have all been gone.”

  Cantra barely avoided smiling. The girl wasn’t a fool. Indeed, indeed, she hoped the Uncle was ready.

  “I understand,” she said, pitching her voice easy and calm. “In which case, I’ll put the ship’s back-up brain on the problem of a proof for those two sets of coords. In the meantime, since we’re all strapped in and well-fed, let’s get ourselves out to the Rim.”

  SHE WAS GOING to transition now? Jela looked to his board, in case he’d missed—but no.

  “I’ve only got two beacons, Pilot,” he said, keeping his voice gentle.

  She was concentrating on her board, feeding that coord set to the “back-up brain,” he supposed—whatever that might mean—and he didn’t expect any answer, which would have been more informative than the one he got.

  “Have faith, Pilot Jela,” she murmured. “Have faith.” And as if on-cue in some story-play, the nav-brain twittered, and a third set of coordinates marched across the center screen—Rathil Beacon, that was. They still needed one more, to balance the equation, and insure a safe and uneventful transition.

  “Rathil’s up,” Cantra breathed beside him, and, louder— “Dulsey, strap in.”

  There was a tickle at the back of his mind, tasting something like a query—but he was too busy grabbing the coords off the screen, doing the math in his head and coming out with nothing good.

  “Pilot,” he insisted, keeping it gentle, “we’re still down a beacon.”

  She shot him a look out of bright green eyes.

  “When you don’t got four, you fly on three,” she said. “Hang on to your board, Pilot. This might be rough.”

  Her hands danced across her own board with that light, sure grace he admired so much, and before he could draw a breath or begin to think an answer for the tree—

  They hit transition.

  And they hit it hard.

  RADIAL VELOCITY, he was thinking.

  The math was a soothing balm against the frenetic vibrations the ship and crew were experiencing; a flash image inside his head showed that the tree knew what an earthquake was, and what it might do.

  But no, radial velocity was not the whole answer. Part of it was the gravitational effect—a tidal effect almost—with the galaxy edge-on and the ship prying itself into otherspace against millions of stars and only the halo of diminishing dark energy a balance at this distance.

  Cantra sat the board calmly, hands poised a moment, then stabbing a button, poised again, flipping a toggle—

  They were out.

  CANTRA LOUNGED at ease at the board, well aware that both Dulsey and Jela were much surprised.

  Jela, for his part, recovered quickly, with a hand signal more to himself than her, Cantra thought—a long, slow smooooothhh—his only public comment.

  Dulsey, cleared her throat.

  “The pilot enjoys an excellent rapport with the ship,” she said seriously, “and the ship enjoys excellent numbers!”

  Cantra laughed.

  “The ship goes where we send it, right? Just I do know some places to take off a bit and some places to add a bit to the equations. Them equations was done for the average ship on an average course somewhere down in the midst of that mess—” She pointed to the representation of the galaxy on the side monitor— “and if you look close, we’re about as far as you can get from as much as you want to count of it and still say we’re in the thing.”

  The Rim accent had come up hard all by itself, along with the side-drawl that helped make Rim cant both distinctive and muddy to some of the light-lappers who thrived down to the center of things. Well, it comes with the territory, she thought, and didn’t fight it.

  For effect, she centered the galactic image . . . and sure enough, as the image shifted, the blue dot representing their position moved way off to the left side of things before disappearing. She’d known that was going to happen, since the arm they were in was the longest of the three arms, and the most twisted. Some folks with a lot of time on their hands figured that this arm was what was left of an intergalactic collision somewhere on the far side of time. The truth was that once things got into the billions of years, she, for the most part, lost interest because—as they said out here—her fingernails grew faster than that.

  “If you would be so kind to keep the scale but center on our position, Pilot?”

  Cantra looked up at Jela’s voice, caught the notion that he’d apparently made the request first in finger-talk, and she’d missed it.

  Smart of him, actually. No good could come out of directly interfering with a pilot staring down into that much of a think.

  “Same scale?” she asked.

  “Indeed.”

  And so now it was that there was all this near empty on the left-side of the screen. The arm they rode twisted back into the density of stars like a snake, coiling for a second strike.

  Against that she upped the magnification a dozen clicks, and now there were a few smaller clusters yet showing out in the Deeps, and a couple places where stars had escaped from the embrace of others by a nova or supernova which had dashed into the darkness trailing gas, and the arm loomed big and important, like it ought to for folks and suns who spent their lives in it . . .

  She upped the magnification again, and now—now they could see why it was called the Rim—that it was an actual rim of gravity and colliding grains of dust and gas. And since this arm was half-again as long as the others, this was the arm that spun itself against the intergalactic medium uncleared by the previous passage of the other arms, and here was the interplay of magnetic fields with the bow wave of light pressure, wild gas, and . . .

  “The Uncle . .
.” Dulsey’s voice wavered a bit, and ended on a gulp.

  For all that, Cantra allowed as how she was doing better than most folks she’d seen when faced with the fact of the Rim, for who expected it to ripple with a glow of purple so deep you’d swear it wasn’t there, and who expected—having learned about years and parsecs and light years and such—to find that there were things so much beyond them that mere billions was a kidstuff toy.

  “The Uncle,” Dulsey tried again, “lives—out there?”

  “Almost there,” Cantra said cheerfully, and shot a glance to Jela, who gave her his blandest face to look at.

  “Now, we’ll see how good those numbers are, Pilot,” she said. “Ready for adventure?”

  He smiled for that one and nodded. “Ready.”

  TRANSITION WAS QUIET this time, drop-out smooth and easy.

  “Pilot,” Cantra called, “shut down the running lights, the auto-hail, and active radar . . .”

  His fingers flickered—rock—and she answered, though he hadn’t seen her look his way.

  “I know, but we’ll take the first ten ticks as free and clear ‘cause if they ain’t we should be able to slide in there anyway . . .”

  “Pilot,” he acknowledged, began to deactivate the systems, adding the dock-ranging equipment, and—

  “ . . . and anything else you think we ought to do to be quiet . . .” she said, over a sudden, head-rattling series of thumps, which would be the rocks, of course.

  “Good thing sound doesn’t transmit,” he muttered, and Cantra laughed.

  “It’ll pass,” she said—and that quick it was done, leaving behind nothing but smooth silence and the sounds of normal ship systems.

  “Video!” Cantra called, but he was ahead of her, clicking on the infrared scanners just ahead of the video feed, hand poised above the meteor-repellor shielding switch.

  The scanners began registering objects far away enough to be minor concerns; nothing close. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Cantra spun the ship quickly on its axis, pressing Jela’s aching left leg into the webbing.