by Ian Whates
Chapter Sixteen
Kyle felt sure there was an old saying about frying pans and fires that would have fitted his current situation perfectly. Byrzaen engines?
He hadn't seen much of Leyton in the past couple of days, nor of Joss, the pilot who'd pulled them off the rooftop in Arcadia and whom Jim had subsequently dumped him on in the rec room. She was an odd one, Joss. He couldn't quite make out whether she liked him or despised him. For all her outward politeness she treated him with a reserve that bordered on distaste at times, as if afraid that he was going to infect her with some hideous disease. Perhaps she simply resented the fact that she'd had to put herself at risk to rescue him. There was definitely some issue. All of which he found intriguing. She wasn't the sort of woman he usually went for - not that she was ugly as such, but he certainly wouldn't have called her pretty. More homely. There was a warmth to her, though, a passion that showed sometimes in her smile, her humour. The fact that he felt excluded from that passion and warmth much of the time galled him, offending his male pride.
He hated to admit it, but he was beginning to think of Joss as a challenge.
Most of his time since coming aboard had been spent with Emily Teifer - a stocky, solidly built rock of a woman whom he wouldn't have cared to face in an arm wrestle. He'd expected her to resent him for arriving out of nowhere and taking over her position, but nothing could have been further from the truth. So much for his expertise in women. He'd never seen anyone more relieved to relinquish responsibility and pass it on to someone else. Then he got a look at the ship's engines and began to understand why.
The energy veils were instantly familiar, though the engine units they fed into were less so - not Kaufmans, that was for sure; the fruit of some other line of development. That aside, he could easily have been back aboard The Noise Within.
"Gods in heaven," he said. "Byrzaen technology. They don't seriously expect me to work with this, do they?"
"'Fraid so, lover man," Emily replied. He'd made the mistake in an off-guard moment of referring to some of his previous sexual exploits and she'd taken to calling him 'lover man' since. "That's why they chased halfway across the galaxy to find you: 'The Man Who Works with Hybrid Engines.'"
He opened his mouth to say something and closed it again; thought for a second and then had another go. "I tinkered with the engines on The Noise Within, that's true, but that was all I did: tinker! I haven't a clue what to do about this." He gestured to where the shifting, multi-coloured veils that led to or from the drive units were clearly damaged. There were no pastel shades in the veils, the ever changing patterns were depicted in dark greens, royal blues, deep purples and burgundy reds - gothic silk that never stopped flowing, shifting, mutating. Except where the silk was torn. For some reason the energy didn't simply flow over the rents, closing them as if they'd never been; the tears remained, as if the veils genuinely were a type of material with defined form and boundaries. Yet clearly, they weren't. Energy shouldn't behave that way, not in this universe. Around the damaged areas the shifting colours slowed, as if the rents formed a choke point, and the edges of the holes themselves were jet black; blockages around which the energy could flow only sluggishly.
"Tinkering is more than most of us have done, Kyle," Emily said. "It still makes you the expert."
"Haven't you tried to fix this?" he asked in desperation, certain that others here must know far more about these energy fields than he did.
She guffawed. "Oh, yes, I've tried... sort of. Did bugger all good, though."
"What do you mean 'sort of'?"
She shrugged. "Well I didn't want to make things worse."
In other words she'd looked at the problem from a dozen different angles before deciding to leave things well alone. He could understand that. In fact, he sympathised entirely, which was why he said after a moment's consideration, "I need to talk to the captain."
"You could do that, of course."
"But?"
"Look, the captain's a busy lady, with a hundred things on her mind. If you asked to see her, she'd make the time, I'm sure she's that sort. Then you explain to her that you don't really think you're up to the job. Bearing in mind that she took the ship all the way across ULAW space and then risked her own neck to extract you from some backwater world, all just to get you here, what do you reckon she's likely to say?"
He sighed. "Give it a go anyway."
"Exactly. So why not cut out all the bits in between and just go straight to the giving it a go part? If you're as unsuccessful as you seem to think you'll be, then go and trouble the captain."
"That's certainly a plan," he conceded. Actually, even though he hated to admit as much, it was a pretty good plan.
So instead of approaching Kethi or even Jim Leyton and pleading his ignorance - not incompetence, no, he'd never admit to that - he decided to take a closer look at things for himself, starting with the most familiar element, the drive units. Outwardly, they looked similar to those he remembered from the war, but as he began to delve beneath their shiny metal cowlings he soon realised they were a far cry from anything he'd ever seen before. These were no Kaufman drives jerry-rigged to accommodate the Byrzaen energy fields as on The Noise Within, but had been purpose-built to utilise them.
"They had to adapt what they learnt from the Byrzaen derelict into a more familiar form," Emily explained. "No one could fully understand the mechanism of the alien drive units themselves, still can't as far as I know. It's one of the things they keep working on. We suspect our version isn't as efficient as the original, but who cares? It works."
Energy from the veils was drawn in through intake valves, he could see that much... computerised regulation, as precise as any he was used to... He summoned up instructions and 3D schematics, which scrolled across a virtual screen and hung suspended in the air before him, enabling him to compare the details in the manual to the physical reality. He rotated the schematic, studying every intricacy, freezing the image in place and crawling under the drive unit, pulling himself out to squint at the diagram once more before going back again, as he traced the flow of energy. Gradually, the whole process began to fall into place.
Then, once he was confident that he'd mastered the principles and mechanics of the drive units, he took another look at the energy veils, and realised that he still knew absolutely nothing.
"This is hopeless."
"Hey, don't be so defeatist," Emily said. "You're doing great."
"Yeah, until it gets to the difficult bit."
He frowned and stared at the tattered veils for the hundredth time. It still made no sense whatsoever - how energy could behave like that. One rent in particular claimed his attention, for good reason; it was getting bigger. When he first arrived, the tear reached perhaps a third of the way across one of the central energy curtains, it now stretched across at least half. What would happen when the veil tore all the way across was anyone's guess, but Kyle was willing to bet it'd be nothing good.
For the moment, The Rebellion hung in an anonymous part of space, going nowhere very slowly indeed, Kethi unwilling to risk another jump with the energy fields in their current state. Nor could Kyle blame her. In fact, the only detail he had a problem with was the bit where he was the one expected to fix things.
Suddenly he raised a finger and smiled, as if struck by sudden inspiration. "I know what I need to solve this."
"What?" Emily asked, all eager.
"A beer."
"And you really think will help, do you?"
"Of course; stimulates the old grey cells. It's a well known fact."
Emily shook her head. "Come on then, lover man, let's go to the rec room and feed those grey cells of yours. Maybe we can even get them tipsy enough to spark an answer, preferably before the engines pack up for good."
Who was he to argue?
Kyle walked around the engine room. There was no one else there. Emily had hit the sack an hour ago and he should probably have done the same, but he was restless
and felt compelled to come back here to do... what exactly? He wasn't sure.
Joss hadn't been in the rec room and he didn't really know any other crew that well yet, so after Emily left he just sort of ended up back here again.
There was a new wall in place, where the old one had been holed and melted in the attack. Gun metal grey, like all the rest. If Emily hadn't told him he might never have known about the damage. The wall looked no different, no newer, than any of the others, apart from the fact that a patch of flooring in front of it was blackened in a streaky, irregular pattern. Evidently the cowling to one of the drive units had also been partially warped and blistered, but again that had been replaced before he arrived, and Emily had taken care of any slight glitches in the drives themselves. He'd run a diagnostics first thing, and the engines were purring along nicely, which just left those damned energy veils to worry about. Problems only arose when the ship initiated a jump. Kyle had seen it for himself. The engines' performance dropped drastically, and there was no mechanical reason for that. It was the veils. During a jump they became stretched, pulled towards the drive units, the flow of energy around the tears interrupted. Damaged as the veils were, the feed wasn't constant, and the rents grew a little wider each time, causing performance to drop a little lower still. Eventually, the engines would fail completely, starved of energy, and if that should occur in mid-jump... There were rumours of ships which had suffered that fate. Only rumours, because no one had ever come back to give an actual report.
Kyle knew that if he didn't find some way to fix the damage soon Kethi would risk one more jump, back to a base somewhere deep in uncharted space, where The Rebellion would be pulled out of the action until her engines were given a full overhaul. Personally, Kyle couldn't have cared less whether that happened or not, but, although he was still new around here, he didn't want to let these people down. They were looking to him, hoping he could pull off some sort of miracle, and if he failed he'd always be remembered for failing, whatever he did after that. Professional pride took care of the rest. One way or another, he was going to fix these damned veils.
If he could fathom how they worked, then at least he'd be in with a shot. He understood engines, always had done, an affinity that enabled him to feel when something was out of kilter and sense what adjustments or repairs were needed. Nothing taught; it was something that went beyond all the training he'd received. There'd never been an engine yet that Kyle couldn't get a handle on. But these were proving elusive.
The ship's database held plenty of explanation and discourse on how the drive units operated and what the veils were, all of which he'd trawled through, yet none of which seemed to really get beneath the surface. The more he studied the information which the habitat's experts had accumulated, the more convinced he became that none of them truly understood what they were playing with here.
There were tools, many of which he recognised, while some were unfamiliar, and these he was highly dubious about. He clasped one of them now, weighing it in his hand and scowling. There was a plasticky feel to the handle that he instantly mistrusted. It seemed more like a toy, something lifted straight out of a child's play kit, totally inadequate for purpose. However, he was new to all this, and willing to put his doubts to one side until they were proven or otherwise. So he took the toy with him as he stepped beyond the drive units and between the energy fields.
Whatever Kyle's reputation might claim, on The Noise Within his tinkering had been restricted to the Kaufman units themselves; he'd never needed to interact with the energy veils - a detail he felt it politic not to mention, bearing in mind the trouble everyone had gone through to get him here. This was as much virgin territory for him as it would have been for anyone else on board. And yet there was something here, something he felt drawn to, which he couldn't even begin to explain.
When he'd encountered these veils aboard the pirate ship they had unnerved him. He'd imagined a machine or a presence lurking beyond them, just out of sight. The sense of presence remained, but this time around much of the fear was gone and he felt able to look directly at the veils and where they emerged from. According to the habitat's records, the veils were part of another universe, a completely different state of being. They provided a radically new breed of energy which enabled the habitat ships to punch holes in the fabric of space and initiate jumps without relying on pre-existing wormholes.
All fascinating stuff, but at the same time a little confusing. On New Paris, Kyle had been intrigued by talk of the Byrzaen stardrive, which apparently utilised zero point energy to effect jumps. It promised to open up a whole new avenue of science, but there was no sign of anything like that here, no suggestion of massive energies released by the localised collapse of space from false vacuum to true vacuum, just the siphoning of energies from another brane. Impressive in its own right, no question, but light years away from zero point energy.
Either the habitat were relying on outmoded Byrzaen technology - possible, bearing in mind their drives were based on those of an ancient derelict - a whole form of tech which the Byrzaens had since abandoned, or the aliens were lying through their teeth; assuming they had any. Bearing in mind that what he'd encountered on The Noise Within bore such a striking resemblance to what he's found on The Rebellion, Kyle's money was on the latter. It seemed to him that the Byrzaens had created a dazzling yet tantalisingly feasible myth about their engines to avoid explaining the true nature of the tech involved. It suggested they had no intention of ever sharing with human kind, which suddenly cast them in a whole new, sinister light.
All of which made Kyle wonder whether the 'false' Byrzaen he'd encountered in Virtuality not long after leaving New Paris might not have been the real thing after all.
Right now, though, he had to focus on repairing these energy fields and saving them all from being stranded in the back of beyond. He could quite go for the idea of becoming part of spacefaring folklore, though preferably not as crew on a vanished ship, thanks all the same.
Kyle squatted down beside one of the veils - minor damage only, a hole towards the top of the flow - no point in tackling one of the big boys until he was confident he could actually achieve something.
The tool was shaped a little like an adjustable wrench, moulded from shiny grey composite as if trying to convince the wielder this really was metal, with two open jaws opposing each other at the business end. The jaws were lined with black spongy pads that looked like rubber but were actually made from a stiffer polymer. Kyle opened the jaws to maximum extension and slowly inserted them into the veil, either side of the hole. He steeled himself, half-expecting to feel a tingle of current or receive a jolt. None came, of course, which was presumably why the tool was cast from non-conductive material rather than metal.
Once in position, he gently closed the jaws, using a ratchet built into the handle. To his surprise and great delight, the pads seemed to catch on the edges of the hole and pull the energy with them, until finally they met. For long seconds he held the tool in place, trying to keep his hand steady, and then he slowly pulled it clear.
Bugger! It worked! Where the jaws had met, the energy now flowed freely, with no indication there had ever been a breach. Typically, he'd gone for the centre of the hole, which was bigger than the jaws, and that now left two smaller gaps, one above and the other below his repair, but they were quickly fixed.
That had been easy. Why couldn't Emily have done this, at least fixing the smaller breaks? Maybe she'd tried and botched the job, or perhaps she'd simply shied away and left it for him to deal with. Much as he liked Emily, she struck him as a reluctant mechanic at best.
Now that he had the knack, Kyle swiftly moved around the veils, forgetting all about their nature, forgetting all about the peculiar otherness that he was working so close to. Before long, he'd fixed all the minor tears that the little wrench - which he now fully accepted as being useful and well designed - was capable of dealing with.
He had no idea what the time was and didn
't care; he was buzzing. Yet all the he'd done so far would make only a slight difference. The real problem wasn't these small nicks and holes, but the larger rents. He toyed with the idea of going to bed and tackling the rest in the morning when he was refreshed, but only briefly. Buoyed by success and adrenaline, he determined to try at least one of the bigger bastards now, and that meant using the bow.
Light, moulded from the same composite as the wrench, the bow resembled a large stylised hacksaw but with the blade missing. It looked like some artist's tool rather than anything a mechanic might use. Kyle picked the bow up by its centrally positioned handle and wafted it through the air a few times as if this were some exotically shaped sword.
Unlike the wrench, the bow was powered. Again, he'd seen its use demonstrated via the ship's databank, but was even less convinced than he had been by the wrench. Still, he wasn't proud; he'd be perfectly happy to be proven wrong a second time.
Avoiding the largest rent, he approached one of the other damaged veils, braced himself and switched the bow on. Nothing visible, but in theory energy should have started flowing between the two tips, forming an intangible blade. Trusting that it was, Kyle slowly pushed the open end of the bow into the veil, directly beside the tear. Immediately the 'blade' became visible - a pale bright line within the dark primaries. He very deliberately drew the bow sideways, pulling the blade like a windshield wiper across the tear. As before, the energy moved with it, reaching out to bridge the gap, but just as Kyle dared to hope this was going to work, the solid block of energy following the blade began to fray and tatter, so that only thick strands and threads arrived at the far side. For a second he thought that might be enough, as the strands seemed to bond with the energy as they made contact, but they thinned and weakened almost at once and then snapped back, disappearing all together.
