Darreth was the last to go through the opening into the huge quiet cavern. The abrupt change of venue was a welcome relief to their journey, which had been completely out in the open. The utter pitch-blackness caused all of their night vision devices to no longer function though. Rehl had been the first one to go in. He activated his lantern. With that, he found the other lantern they had left behind. Its warm even glow barely cast enough light to fill the cavern. In the very center of the huge expanse lay the gateway.
Darreth had expected Naylon and Tann to no longer have the disc devices that had brought them here. But during his conversation with Naylon, he had discovered they still had theirs, and how they had gotten hold of them in the first place. He had told Naylon how Kestin had duplicated the one he had. But now there was a problem. They were one short.
“Rehl. You go first. Take Tann with you. Then you come back and bring the disc that brought Tann through.”
“You think that’ll work?”
“It better or we’re going to have a problem.”
“I don’t look forward to this,” Rehl said.
“Why?” Tann asked.
“I got some serious vertigo when we came this way. I’m going to get it a few more times.”
“Fruck. I forgot about that,” Tann murmured.
“Go,” Darreth told them.
“Where does that tunnel go?” Efren asked as he pointed a light into the interior of the smooth cylindrical opening.
“To where we came from. Back to our universe.”
“And to your ship?”
“That, too. Go back to the opening and take another reading. Make sure no one’s coming.”
Efren went back to the crack. The sky was starting to turn a soft gray. He pointed the scanner outside. It produced no reading, Terran or Telkan. “It’s clear. I get nothing from here.”
“Good.”
“Ready Tann?” Rehl asked.
“I guess.” He pulled out the disc from his pack, held it firmly in his hand and followed Rehl. Seconds later, they disappeared.
Unexpectedly, a shaft of light illuminated part of the rectangular rock. The three remaining men looked back toward the jagged vertical opening. Dawn. As quickly as the light beam shone it disappeared, hidden by morning clouds.
Darreth looked back down the empty tunnel. “What’s taking him so long?”
Chapter 37
Rehl stumbled from the other end of the tunnel into pitch blackness. Tann, directly behind, ran right into him. He couldn’t get through fast enough.
As quickly as he could, despite the disorientation, Rehl found the little square depression on his lantern and touched it. The beam instantly widened, casting a much larger and more intense light around them.
Both of them fell to their knees, breathing hard and gagging.
Tann shook his head. “Why does that happen?”
Rehl held onto the outside of the tunnel’s rock wall and stood. “Maybe we aren’t biologically suited to be slipping between universes.”
Tann felt like he was going to retch but the sensation started to subside before it got too bad. He slowly got to his feet and leaned against the rock face, too.
“Here, give me your disc,” Rehl told him.
Tann handed it to him.
“Fruck, you have to go back again,” Tann said, glad it wasn’t him.
“Will you be okay?”
Tann still felt dizzy, but the intense feeling of the transition was fading even more now. Regardless, Tann had a metallic taste in his mouth. He smacked his lips a few times, trying to get rid of it. He nodded. “Go get ‘em.”
Rehl pulled out a second lantern from his pack, activated it and set the end on the closest flat surface. “More light for you,” he told Tann. He pressed the dispersion button until it widened as far as it would go. “Here goes,” he said. He stooped until he got just to the barrier, then went down onto his knees.
“What are you doing,” Tann asked.
“In case I pass out.”
Rehl secured the discs in his pack, then crawled as fast as he could through the tunnel. He wasn’t wasting any time.
“Something’s wrong,” Darreth said. More than ten minutes had passed since Rehl and Tann had left. That had given him enough time though to fill in the rest for Naylon about what had transpired after they had gone missing. The majority of it was through their internal comm so Efren wouldn’t hear a lot of it.
Everyone had been watching the tunnel, waiting for Rehl to return. Efren had been taking readings at the crack in the cavern wall every couple of minutes, scanning for errant biosigns. So far, nothing had come their way.
Darreth heard a scuffling in the tunnel. He aimed his light into it. Rehl’s head emerged, then his entire body, from the strange grey shimmering.
Rehl crawled the rest of the way and stopped. “Help me up. You have no idea how intense that is.”
Despite Efren and Darreth on each arm, Rehl could barely stand up.
“Is something wrong over there?”
“No.”
“What took you so long?”
“Darreth, I’ve been gone, what, a minute?”
Darreth looked at Naylon. “Maybe the tunnel causes some sort of time shift.” Then to Rehl, “Where’s the disc?”
Rehl leaned against the entrance of the tunnel and pulled his pack off. Out came the extra disc. Darreth took it from him and handed it to Efren. “Here. Hold this and don’t let go or you won’t make it through.”
“Get ready,” Rehl told them. “That dizziness gets worse the more times you do this.”
Seconds later they were all on the other side with Tann. This time Rehl vomited before nearly passing out.
The shuttle was exactly where they had left it. Efren looked all around as they made their way out of the other end of the cave to the dry riverbed. The first thing he noticed was how cold it was. How bizarre it was that all they had done was walk through a tunnel. It nearly made him retch, and now everything was different.
Once they reached the ship, Darreth spoke to the security system from his internal comm. The back end of the shuttle opened and let them inside. Everyone discarded their gear while the shuttle sealed for spaceflight. Rehl activated the ventilation system to warm the cabin up. It was just above freezing outside and only slightly higher inside the craft.
Efren took a seat behind Rehl and strapped in as he watched Rehl power up the rest of the systems along with the engines. “What is this language?” he asked. He pointed to a label on the wall next to him.
Tann told him. “Lingua. You’re going to have to learn it. No one here speaks Empire Spanish.”
Efren didn’t like the sound of that.
“Z plus one kilometer,” Darreth spoke to the engine system. The ship slowly rose from the stony riverbed and sailed silently into the air. At a point exactly one kilometer above the surface, it halted. Rehl had already activated the scanner.
“Clear. We’re good for orbital injection.”
“System, nav on,” Darreth told the ship. His visual field instantly changed to a clear 360-degree view of the surrounding area. Calculations for the shortest distance into orbit were made six microseconds later. A red line, curving away slightly to the left, projected onto the field. Seconds later the sublight engines kicked in and the nose of the craft pointed slightly upward. Two minutes later, they were clear of 99% of Rylerra’s atmosphere.
“Autopilot on,” Darreth said. The visual nav field collapsed and the almost claustrophobic surroundings of reality presented itself.
“How long before we reach your world?” Efren asked.
“Andakar is four days away,” Naylon responded as he unbuckled the shoulder straps and headed for the food dispenser cubbyhole.
Tann was quick to respond, too. “Darreth. Maybe Efren knows where a conduit is.”
“Conduit?”
The next hour, over coffee and snacks, was a long and involved discussion by Efren as he described the naturally o
ccurring conduits between star systems. But did they exist in their universe? Efren quickly discovered that the detection system normally used on all starships he was acquainted with simply didn’t exist on this one. Efren was terribly anxious when he learned that Tann had discovered all this because of some Terran prisoners. Prisoners that the Telkans had on the very planet they were headed toward, only in his dimension.
“Any idea who they might be?” Tann asked.
“There are over five million soldats on various missions and in billets across the empire. It is impossible for me to know who they are. And they may not be the only ones either. Entire ships have simply gone missing.”
The mood was somber for several moments.
Tann was the first to break the silence. “What if Efren can figure out a way to detect the conduits anyway.”
Rehl looked at him. “I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“It would give me something useful to do,” Efren offered.
“I’ll show you the sensors we use but you’re not going to be able to read any of them. They’re all labeled in our language and use our measurement system,” Rehl told him.
“Then you will interpret them for me.”
For the next two hours Rehl and Darreth both went over the various sensor equipment used aboard the shuttle, explained how the propulsion system functioned and how the nav field enveloped the pilot with a full view of the trajectory they were flying.
“Your sensory equipment appears to be quite old,” Efren said at one point.
“This is state-of-the art,” Rehl shot back.
“State-of-the-art for your civilization, but not for mine. War accelerates invention. You’ve told me your culture doesn’t engage in warfare. That may explain why this equipment seems to be lacking.”
Darreth was completely taken aback at Efren’s assessment of the ship. As far as he was concerned, this vessel was one of the finest passenger-class ships on Andakar.
Regardless of what he considered primitive equipment Efren continued to ask questions about the sensors. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that he might be able to use one of the wide-spectrum radiation detectors along with the long-range dark matter detector, and combine their outputs to another display.
“I’m unfamiliar with this equipment, but the waveforms conform to standard ones I’m used to viewing. Here, tune this display to the upper range,” Efren told Rehl.
Efren watched the output on a third display, asked which controls manipulated the output, then fine-tuned the resulting graph himself. He was watching for the x and y-axis of one of the detectors to cross as two waveforms came together. He was sure they would work as a crude detector for the presence of the two conduits they had already mapped in this star system. It took another twenty minutes before he felt comfortable with the displays. But something seemed to prevent the sensor sweeps from allowing the waveforms to cross.
“Huh,” Efren said. “I’m sure you’ve explained this to me enough for it to work. Maybe I missed something.” He asked a dozen questions of both Rehl and Darreth, mostly about the precise function of the two detectors. Both of them had to refer to the maintenance manual flimsies for most of the answers. Finally, Efren realized why the waveforms wouldn’t cross.
“Look. See what happens when I vary this along the y-axis? There. It skips over the reading altogether. Your equipment is not at fault. That can only be caused by a filter. It would prevent the display from showing where the waves cross.”
“Prevent it?” Rehl asked.
Efren nodded. “We need to remove the filter.”
Rehl consulted a maintenance flimsy. “The circuit that has the filter in it is integrated into the sensor.”
Efren shook his head. “This ship may be less sophisticated than what I’m used to, but it is clearly advanced enough for you to prevent the filter from functioning. I’m sure of it. Ask the maintenance computer to bypass it.”
“I’ll try.” Then to it he spoke in Lingua, “System maintenance computer, activate.”
“Working.”
Rehl took the flimsy and set it down on the nav console in front of him. He zoomed in on the circuit Efren was sure was the cause of the problem. “Diagnostic of sensor circuit J11, junction H7886. Describe this filter.”
“The quantum node filter at that junction is designed to mask phantom radiation uniquely found at the 23 angstrom wavelength.”
“What phantom radiation?” Rehl asked.
“Command not recognized.”
“Damn.”
Darreth translated while Rehl interrogated the computer.
Efren shook his head. “That’s no ‘phantom’. It’s vunian radiation. It signals the mouth of a conduit! It’s exactly what we’re trying to detect. That filter is preventing you from finding it, much less see it.” He looked disgusted. “Why would anyone design such a filter?”
Everyone looked at each other. Darreth shrugged his shoulders. Naylon was the only person who responded. “Maybe the Consort doesn’t want anyone to know about the conduits. And maybe this could all just wait to be figured out after we’ve reached Andakar. It’s just a few days from here, using a way we know that works. Can’t this wait until we’re safely back home?”
“Are you kidding?” Tann exclaimed. “I don’t know how you guys can stand it. I’m ready to get home now. Efren already figured out a way to get us back faster than normal. You have to at least help him get inside that conduit.”
Darreth thought about it for a moment then shrugged his shoulders. “It can’t hurt to try. After all, it’s still hours to the wedge insertion point.”
Both Darreth and Rehl spent the next hour culling information from the maintenance computer and from the flimsies. Their objective was to bypass the filter. It didn’t look promising until Rehl located and isolated the quantum code that ran the sensor circuit.
“Thunder! This line of code activates the filter. It can be deactivated.” He pointed while Darreth looked on.
“Can it be that easy?” Darreth replied.
“There’s no way it could be that easy,” Tann offered, looking over his shoulder.
“Let’s see. Efren, you watch your display. I’ll tell the computer what to do,” Darreth told him.
Several minutes later, the circuit display flashed red at the junction where the filter had been deactivated. Peripheral circuits took over to receive and process the input from the bypassed filter. Efren continued to watch the display. Finally, the two waveforms crossed as he expected. He zoomed in to look more closely.
“This waveform is exactly what we look for, but without the proper scale I can’t be positive.”
Efren instructed Darreth to dim the interior lights. He zoomed the display to 10X, then started a sensor sweep thirty degrees from Kaskalon’s north magnetic pole and continued outward. A green dot flashed briefly as the sweep continued. Efren wasn’t sure because the display was nothing like a standard conduit detection system, but the waveform at the bottom of the screen was what he was expecting.
“There it is. The entrance to your conduit is there,” Efren announced. The fact that their efforts had resulted in nothing more than a brief green dot flashing on the screen was a major letdown.
Darreth spoke to the nav computer, then translated for Efren. “The coordinates indicate the conduit is two hours from here at maximum sublight. Now how do we get inside it?”
Joll Zenatel decided that Manager Raxi had paid him enough to be away from his normal job hauling cargo to Andakar and bringing finished goods back to Rylerra. Ever since the shuttle in the riverbed had taken off from the surface he and his co-pilot had followed just outside normal sensor range. And, if they happened to stray into the shuttle’s sensor net, their transponder would show them to be a standard cargo ship anyway. Nothing unusual about that.
Joll’s assignment had been to report back the moment anyone entered the shuttle. The data Zelin had obtained led him to believe it had managed an unauthorized landi
ng on Rylerra. The Rylerran shuttle identification satellite network had plenty of holes in it, but had successfully tracked its landing. And he had an in which allowed him to follow the data stream.
Joll was in the pilot’s seat. “They’ve changed headings. Where do you suspect they’re going now?”
Co-pilot Thal Asrattem looked puzzled as he looked at the projected coordinates his display was showing. “I have no idea. Follow them anyway.”
“Look at that. Their vector will take them far outside the normal transport routes to Andakar. They’re taking a high orbit outside the ecliptic.”
“Why would they do that?” Thal knew Eratil and Kaskalon orbited within six degrees of each other. Making a heading outside the ecliptic would require hours more of time and plenty more fuel than normally used to achieve enough distance to wrinkle a wedge of spacetime, then get back to the ecliptic once they arrived in Eratil space.
“Beats me, but they are.”
“Guess it’s time to send another message to Raxi.”
Efren had been working on a way to pry open the conduit non-stop. Naylon had to hand it to him. Efren could have easily not done a thing. They could have wrinkled a wedge along the ecliptic like normal, and been home in a few days. But for some reason Efren was determined to work on the issue. He seemed to think if they could detect the conduit, they could also open and slip inside it as well.
Tann was sitting next to Efren discussing it with him. “You use that Tetra-G substance in this resonance chamber, right?” Efren said, pointing to a schematic of the engine system.
The Rylerran Gateway Page 37
