James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01

by Meridian

  Light glittered off chandeliers and cut-crystal dinner services. The parquet floor glowed softly golden.

  Stars twinkled in a hologram sky. The scent of sweet flowers wafted through the room on ventilator breezes. A popular Sapphirean melody swelled across the dance floor, sending the well-dressed men and women of the ship’s company into motion. Gleaming gold and silver and/oroid waiters hefted trays of drinks and food through the happy crowd.

  Keeler didn’t dance. His customary role at this kind of function was chatting up and shaking down alumni and benefactors for donations to the Chancellor’s Fund. The crew were having a good time, but his attempts to mingle had resulted in them awkwardly reporting on the status of their section. He supposed it was hard to relax and cut loose when the captain was on the floor. When Tactical Tyro Commander Redfire approached him, he was acquainting himself with one of the buffet tables, which had proven a much more congenial companion.

  “Good evening, Commander,” Redfire greeted him. “Fearless bash.”

  “Returning to the stars is a fit occasion for celebrating. A thousand years was far too long.” Keeler answered, taking a drink from an and/oroid waiter, juggling his walking staff from one hand to the other.

  “Do you find it interesting, in both our ancient past and our more recent present, it took a gift of alien technology to enable us to move into space? According to some legends, Earth only developed spaceflight technology because of the crash of an alien spacecraft in a desert, somewhere.”

  “Even without Caliph, we would have made it back eventually,” Redfire said.

  Would we really? Keeler wondered. “Oh, look, there’s Tyro Commander Lear. I have to speak with her.

  Will you come?”

  Keeler and Redfire moved through the crowd to a corner of the dance floor where Lear, resplendent in her full dress uniform with its impressive display of service medals stood next to her husband, a tall, sturdy man whose black hair was flecked with iron gray. “Good Evening, Tyro Commander,” Keeler said cordially.

  “Excellent party, Prime Commander,” Augustus Lear replied graciously.

  “Indeed,” Goneril Lear agreed.

  “Somewhat subdued for my tastes,” Keeler continued. “I mean, so far the only frontal nudity has been tasteful. I wanted you to know, Tyro Commander, I have met with all the department heads on the dress code. A great bunch of guys, with one or two exceptions.” His eyes slid sideways to Redfire, who was biting his lower lip as if he knew something was afoot.

  Tyro Commander Lear didn’t. “And you thought that was going to be such an odious duty. You see, commander, we established procedures long before you came aboard, and once you look at the way we do things, and the reason we do things the way we do…”

  “Exactly!” Keeler exclaimed. “Procedures and the way we do things were exactly the topic of discussion at the meeting. We took a good long look at the Standard Procedures manual, decided it was really stupid, and voted, 18 to 2, to just throw the whole thing out.”

  “You voted to throw out our entire Manual of Standard Procedures?” She was nearly strangling on her incredulity. “Those Procedures were agreed to by the Republic Odyssey Directorate and the Sapphire Odyssey Project Affiliate. You can’t throw them out.”

  “The Odyssey Directorate is 100 billion kilometers that way,” Keeler said, pointing his staff toward the rear of the ship. “We’re going to set up our own Procedures Committee, including a Stupid Procedures Sub-Committee to do the actual… er, throwing out. They will meet, uh, once a week until we get rid of all the stupid procedures. As for the uniforms, we decided how the crew dresses was beneath my threshold of interest as ship’s Prime Commander.”

  Lear shook her head and waved her arms slightly before locking them on her hips. “Are you playing politics with me?”

  “Politics!” Keeler answered. “Please, there is no reason to be vulgar. You know, on my planet, we don’t have the p-word. We consider the end of the… p-word to be our highest achievement, on a par with the time ancient humans invented plumbing, and to the similar end of eliminating something foul, odorous, and unhealthy from our presence.”

  “Goneril,” said Augustus Lear, taking his wife by the arm. “They’re playing the ‘Minister’s Waltz.’

  Shall we dance? Excuse us, Prime Commander.” He gently pulled his wife toward the dance floor.

  “There goes a brave, brave man,” Keeler said.

  Redfire grabbed a glass of wine from the tray of an automech and raised it in salute. “Well played.”

  “Too easy,” Keeler responded. “Oh, look, Tialkal, the Sumacian Holy Man. I wonder if he’s heard the joke about the Saintist Prophet, the Iestan Counselor-Priestess, and the Sumacian Holy Man who were crossing the Nef Desert in a buzz-car…”

  Redfire’s face suddenly lost all expression. “Excuse me.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard it before?”

  “Neg,” he said. He began to walk, then turned back. “I’m sorry. Someone just came in who I … don’t want to talk to just now.”

  Keeler turned around. The only one walking away from the entrance was a statuesque blond woman in a Flight Captain’s uniform. He was about to josh Redfire that he couldn’t possibly mean her, but when he turned, his Tactical Officer was beating a hasty retreat toward a side exit.

  Matthew Driver was standing by himself near a table at the side of the ballroom, eyes fixed on the entrance. A hand touched his shoulder. “Good evening, handsome,” said a husky female voice.

  He turned to see his sister, standing next to her semi-husband, Lt. Cmdr. Morgan, the Chief Science Officer. “Don’t look so disappointed,” Morgan said.

  “How are you, Matthew? Still looking for that Sapphirean girl?”

  “She’s a guilder, and I am looking for her.”

  “Aye, a guilder, my mistake,” Kayliegh said. “The ship’s navigator?” Matthew nodded. He saw a flash of dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail. Not her, just a trick of the light. “You would think it would give us something in common, but…”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “It does, but since we both know about navigation, there’s nothing we can talk about that we don’t already know. I tried to talk about the control systems on mining ships, but she’s… she doesn’t like to talk about mining ships.”

  “Imagine that.” Unlike her brother, Kayliegh had never had any difficulty with inter-sexual relationships. “Have you shown her Prudence yet?”

  “I was thinking maybe tonight.” Wait a second. Over there, next to the walk-in salad bar. She disappeared inside, but he could tell it wasn’t her. Too tall, the wrong walk. “You don’t think it’s too soon. I only met her five days ago.”

  “I think you should,” Morgan said. “I don’t think I ever would have had the steel to talk to Kayliegh if not for those late nights in the Climatology Laboratory.”

  Kayliegh blushed. “If she says nay, don’t be alarmed. There will plenty of time on this voyage to work with the legendary Driver charm.”

  “Excuse me,” Driver said, walking away. This time, it was Eliza, no mistaking. He cut through the crowd, making for a place near the main exit where she was standing. He tracked from the main exit toward the dance floor without seeing her. He tracked the other way toward the buffet table. He thought he saw her

  “Lt. Driver?” someone asked.

  He turned to the voice. It was Flight Lt. Kyoto. She was handing him a beverage, which he took and drank without tasting. He realized she was asking him something. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Are you going to join the rest of the Angels on the observation deck for the transition?” She and Matthew both belonged to Flight Group Gamma, nicknamed the Quicksilver Angels

  “Oh, uh, I haven’t decided.”

  “Are you looking for somebody?”

  “Sort of…”

  She looked disappointed. “I’ll save you a place.”

  He turned to the buffet table, caught a glimpse of Eliza. He was sure it
was she. He pushed his way urgently through the crowd again. By the time he reached the place she had been standing, she had moved on again. He scanned the ballroom again.

  There she was, at the entrance again, carrying a large food basket and, he saw to his horror, walking out of the ballroom with another man.

  Pegasus — Mediplex Four – Deck 14

  David Alkema gingerly balanced himself on one leg while carefully drawing the injured one from his recovery bed. Carefully, he lowered it to the floor, feeling like thousands of tiny needle were pricking it.

  Gingerly he tried putting weight on it. The needles became knives, stabbing through his shattered knee.

  He bit down hard to keep from screaming.

  “And where do you think you’re going,” said the physician-on-duty, a younger-looking-than-he-actually-was Medical Specialist called Jersey Partridge, appearing suddenly from the forestation.

  Alkema grimaced. “No where… just seeing if I could walk yet.”

  “Not for another five days, minimum.” Partridge was thin, with straight brushy hair cut short around a handsome-enough, albeit slightly pug-nosed, face. He wore a MediCore jacket, which was dove-gray trimmed in sky-blue, and softer than the normal crew jackets.

  Alkema glared at the brace on his leg. “I slept through the launch because of this leg. Now, I’m going to miss the Transition Ball.”

  “If you had stayed in bed, per instructions, you could have attended the Transition Ball, although I doubt you’d be dancing.” He offered a shoulder to support Alkema, and helped him back into the healing bed. “Unfortunately, you got out of bed, tried to stand on your leg, re-broke your patella and tore ligaments besides.” His tone was sympathetic, not admonishing. Still, Alkema did not answer, but crossed his arms and laid back petulantly against his pillows.

  “If it makes you feel better, I’m also missing the Ball. But, I’m having wine and food sent up from the Ballroom. We can toast transition from here.” He ran a medical scanner over Alkema’s leg. The muscle grafts the ship had built were taking hold, but were not nearly strong enough yet. “No dancing, though.” Alkema felt a little guilt. It was not Partridge’s fault he was in this condition. He tried to smile. “That’s all right. I’ve never been much of a dancer anyway.”

  “I could dance for you,” Partridge suggested in a tone so perfectly pitched Alkema could not tell if he were kidding or not.

  “Ah… you could,” Alkema answered. “But I’d prefer you didn’t.” The UnderDecks

  Eddie and Eliza had escaped the party with two bottles of Carpentarian Grigio, a plateful of canapés, and a basket of dinner rolls and headed for Pegasus’s UnderDecks. The UnderDecks housed the enormous machinery, conduits, and power-substations that serviced the gravity engines, artifactories, and recycling plants still further below; all of it built to the scale of giants. Their surroundings were organic composite and functional, throbbing with the lifeblood of the ship. Down here, the ship was itself, no plants, no garden-parks, no sculpture, no amenities.

  The acoustics were marvelous. A soundbox blasted raucous Carpentarian bar music. Eliza Jane sat across from him. “So, what’s this pilot like?” Eddie asked.

  Eliza Jane shrugged and chewed a mushroom-like pod stuffed with yellowish cream. “Nice, in a socially-inept sort of way.”

  Eddie rested against a cold-water conduit. “I’ve seen him in the landing bay. In my opinion, these three-way marriages never work.”

  “He’s not married.”

  “Neg, but so deeply involved with his ship, I think he sleeps with it. If he ever finds the tritium-fuel intake socket, it’s all over.”

  “At least he eats breakfast with me, Eddie.”

  “That’s an afterdawn meal isn’t it?” It would have taken Divine Intervention to get Eddie out of his bunk before 1400 hours. “Anyway, the food on this ship bites worms. I mean, it’s all thinker chow, not what a working class assolÀ from southeast Halifax is used to. They should have found space for a Slam-n-Jam or a Burger Bunker. I miss real food.” He paused in complaining about the food to shove a large meat sandwich into his mouth. Still chewing, he asked. “If you like him so heli-much, why didn’t you invite him here?”

  “I didn’t see him in the ballroom. Maybe he didn’t show.” Eliza raised her head and looked around.

  “Are you sure we’re alone?”

  “Za, why would anybody want to come down here?”

  Eliza nodded and took a sip of her wine, but she could not escape the strong, uncanny feeling they were being watched.

  The Avalon Ballroom

  The music was stilled. The celebrants gathered around a projection of Pegasus, flying through space.

  Precisely at midnight, exactly when Lieutenant Navigator Change had calculated, Pegasus achieved 55c, transition speed. A few seconds later, a tightly-stitched energy field projected into an adjacent set of dimensions. A wormhole formed directly in front of the ship. Beautiful curves and parabolas of light and energy, surrounded Pegasus like a sailing ship in a full wind. With the sail extended, the ship was pulled into another universe.

  In the moment the threshold was breached, the space around the ship filled with brilliant light as though every star in the universe suddenly exploded and penetrated Pegasus’s thickly shielded decks. It would not be precise to say that the crew was blinded. Rather, for a thin moment, everything around them became pure white light.

  When it passed, Keeler noted that his chronometer had stopped, as had almost every timepiece on the ship. “Impressive.” he said.

  chapter five

  Hyperspace

  From the Sapphirean Writ of Common Wisdom

  Hyperspace is the ancient name for a brother universe, born of the same Big Bang. It is also known as e-space, with our universe known as n-space. Hyperspace is highly chaotic, without stars, planets, or physical laws. The dimension of time is smaller in hyperspace, therefore, hyperspace expanded more slowly. Although every point in hyperspace corresponds to a parallel point in our universe, hyperspace is only about 1% as large.

  These properties greatly facilitate point-to-point travel if a trip passes through hyperspace, entrance to which requires warping space to form a “wormhole” around the ship. There are two tricky parts to using this shortcut. One is, any ship passing through must be insulated, that is, it must create a pocket of n-space around itself in order to keep from flying apart in the absence of gravity and the weak and strong nuclear forces to hold it together. The other challenge is navigating without four-dimensional reference points. Without precise navigation, a ship may emerge from hyperspace thousands, or even millions, of light years from its destination. The ship could, theoretically, emerge millions of years in the past or future if exit is not timed carefully.

  The Pathfinder ships meet the first challenge by surrounding themselves with energy sails, that both allow the ship to be propelled through hyperspace and insulate it from the hyperspace universe.

  For the second, each Pathfinder ship has two models built into its navigational braincore, one of our universe, one of hyperspace. It uses inertial guidance to determine its course and position in hyperspace. However, even with artificial intelligence, a ship’s navigator, people who posses rare skills and gifts, is essential to successful hyperspace transit.

  Pegasus – Hangar Bay

  Prudence streaked through a green sky in which a dawning orange sun was burning red highlights into banks of blue clouds floating high above a forest of yellow trees. The Aves bore westward, past the dawn into night, passing over a large emerald lake as it crossed the twilight, heading dead on toward a distant range of black mountains.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Driver asked the beautiful woman in the second seat of the command module.

  Eliza Jane Change She looked out over the landscape. “Interesting game.”

  “It’s not a game, it’s a training simulation produced on Sapphire, one of 14,000 in our database. They have names like Storm World, Snow World, Mech World�
��”

  “What do they call this one?”

  “Bad Color Scheme World.” He shrugged, but he wasn’t the one who named it. Prudence entered the mountain range. “Hold on.”

  At approximately three-and-a-half times the speed of sound, Prudence banked right and dove steeply into what the Sapphirean weldmachers had named, ‘The Canyon of Doom . Rough granite walls rose up on either side of the speeding ship, their sides only a very, very small number of meters away from Prudence’s wing tips. Driver hit the ship’s searchlights to show her the huge boulders strewn on the simulated bottom of the canyon.

  The Head’s Up display was crowded with red terrain warnings. A wall came closing in. Just as Change saw it, Driver flipped Prudence down a side canyon and into a pitch-black tunnel in the rocks.

  Halfway through, Driver had to bring the ship straight up onto its back to make it into an escape tunnel that rose up through the cone of an extinct volcano. He traced the ship around the inside of the caldera until his sensors located a narrow tunnel that required him to fly Prudence on her wingtip to make it through.

  “You may be wondering why I didn’t fly out through the top,” Driver said.

  “Why?” she asked without a lot of enthusiasm.

  “The designer put in a false escape route. If you try to fly straight up, you’ll collide head on with a flock of… some kind of dragons.”

  The tunnel broke back into the main canyon. Almost immediately, Prudence was confronted with a series of rock bridges which she had to maneuver over and under.

  “This is the first really hard part of the course,” he said. “I used to be unable to handle it at all without the terrain avoidance system.” He wondered if the lady was impressed. Of course, she’s impressed, something inside him answered. Do you think that guy she left the party with can navigate an Aves through the Canyon of Doom?