Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  On those words, she drank, and so did Marin and Travers. “You should be standing up in the auditorium and saying that,” Marin said softly.

  But Rusch made scornful noises. “They asked me to speak, and then handed me a prepared little speech that sounds like a Fleet press handout. Oh, I’ll read it while I glare at that little sod, Trick. I’ll read it because the families need to show the polite, diplomatic face to CNS, but this is my memorial, with the men who served with him, knew him, called him a friend.” She looked from Marin to Travers and back, with a wry little smile. “Harrison’s twitchy enough to head back to the Mercury right after the memorial, so you’re off duty. You want to hang around, get a little drunk? Michael would have approved.”

  “Yeah,” Travers agreed, “I do. Curtis?”

  “Mick would smile.” Marin glanced back at the house, but of Shapiro’s group there was still no sign. “Are we missing the main event?”

  “No. They’ll be an hour getting settled and started, and the auditorium’s only five minutes away, right below us. Bob has executive parking, and I can be the last into the hall. I’m the eleventh to speak, and what they’ve given me won’t take three minutes to read. Then … I’m buying.”

  “I’m drinking,” Travers decided. “I guess you’re right. He’ll live forever – he’s a damned legend. There’s immortality for you.”

  “Hellgate,” Rusch argued. “You didn’t see the Orpheus data?”

  “I wouldn’t have understood it, if I had,” Travers confessed. “I wait for the plain language translation. Jazinsky said something about the ship having caught a gravity tide. Mick was surfing at right angles across it, like tacking an iceboat ahead of the wind.”

  “And he was headed into a temporal current,” Rusch added. “You probably think of time as a line, straight as an arrow – in fact, this is what they used to call it. Time’s arrow. They were dead wrong, but trying to think of time as an infinite number of nested bubbles, all of which can warp out of shape and nudge each other, intersect with each other, is beyond the normal human brain. Jazinsky can think in these terms. Mark Sherratt has a grasp on them that leaves me in the dark, but I do know this.

  “Time speeds up and slows down as it eddies around gravity wells. The heavier the gravity, the slower the time current. Even your college physics class should have covered how time stops at the event horizon of a black hole. Inside the guts of Hellgate? You can take all those physical laws and throw them away. Hellgate ties them in knots.”

  Her eyes were bright with the zealot light Marin recognized, and he forced himself to listen, to understand, as she said, “The gravity tide Michael was surfing was driving a temporal current before it, and the analysis of the direction and decay of the gravity event suggests that it was an absolutely stable stream. To us, he was traveling at double the speed – meaning, time was running at twice normal speed. To him and to Pilot Queneau it would have seemed perfectly normal, and stable...

  “And here’s the sting in the tail of the data. Mark got enough out of it, or perhaps it was Lai’a who made enough sense of it, to be able to predict, almost plot, a slingshot course around the gravity well of Naiobe. The Orpheus was on its way into a kind of pocket of temporal freefall, where time would be like ...” Rusch struggled to find an analogy. “Like the deep, calm water at the bottom of an ocean, where molecules move at a glacial rate.” She looked into their faces, saw them struggling to comprehend, an tried again. “Think of time as a fluid. Water, in fact. Then think of water as ice.”

  Travers’s brows rose. “Time would stop.”

  “Almost stop,” Marin mused. “Glaciers flow, rivers of ice. And ice itself isn’t absolutely in stasis. The molecules within it move – crystals form up into structures. The patterns of organic molecules can form up in ice.” He gave Travers a lopsided smile. “This much, I remember from college science classes.”

  “You have it. Top of the class.” Rusch chuckled. “Michael should, by all accounts, be in temporal freefall, suspended between gravity currents, where the interplay of forces between those currents almost, but not quite, cancels out time.” She seemed entranced by the concept. “In a thousand years from now, he might still be falling between one moment and the next.”

  “You say should, and might,” Marin said shrewdly. “So you’re not absolutely certain? What’s the alternative?”

  Now she pursed her lips, brow furrowed, eyes narrowed in thought. “Well, continuing the water analogy, the Orpheus is in a temporo-gravity current, and what do we know about ocean currents? They’re generated and driven by several mechanisms including salinity and thermal layers and regions, and also, on a much more localized scale, the forces ensuing when geometric formations such as coasts, seabeds, must funnel enormous amounts of water which are under extreme pressure due to the force of the prevailing tide behind them.

  “This localized model is more similar to the kind of temporo-gravitic phenomena you’ll see in the guts of Hellgate. Gravity affects time, but time is the medium which makes everything go, and which decides how it all goes. Now, Michael and the Orpheus are in a fast-flowing current generated by the tides around the gravity wells of Naiobe and its handmaidens, the supergiant stars you can see from here on Velcastra, on a clear night. The current is strong and quick, but it’ll eventually slow down and diminish as it encounters other gravity wells which drag on it, warp it, erode it.”

  “So …” Marin wrestled with the concept. “So the speed at which time is passing will drop back to normal –”

  “Or slow way down,” Rusch added. “And then – well, if time, space and gravity continue to behave like water, which there is every reason to expect they do, the Orpheus could find itself washing along with an eddy into something like a lagoon or tidepool. Quite stable, balanced between gravity wells, with time passing at one minute in every century according to our perspective … or with time passing quite normally, for all we know! The inside of Hellgate, the guts of the beast.” She smiled wistfully. “I dream about it.”

  Marin and Travers shared a glance, and Travers asked very softly, “Colonel, have you spoken to Shapiro? I mean about … that?”

  She chuckled throatily. “You’re trying to ask, without asking, if I’ve had an offer to sign aboard and go hunting Zunshu. Yes, Major, I know all about the Lai’a mission.”

  “And you’re in?” Marin guessed.

  “How would I pass it up?” Rusch drained her glass and stooped to pick up the empty bottle. “It’s the culmination of a life’s work, Marin. A chance to do something significant for the Deep Sky, to vanquish an old enemy and answer so many questions. Every time we get data out of Hellgate, it spells more questions.” She gestured vaguely with the bottle. “Like this last data lode. Jazinsky sent me a squirt, highly encrypted. Yes, I know we received a signal from the beacon aboard Ernst Rabelais’s Odyssey, and yes, I know it had been broadcast only a couple of hours before we received it!

  “This is a perfect illustration of the eddies and currents of gravity and time. The Zunshu mastered this riddle so long ago, the Resalq were no match for them. Ernst Rabelais vanished into the Drift centuries ago, and the Odyssey has been drifting with one of these currents. It probably loops right around Naiobe in an orbit so long, he could have passed by this way two, three times, or this could be the first time.

  “And my guess is,” she added thoughtfully, “Michael was lucky enough to pick up the same stable, navigable gravity tide. He’s surfing across it on the most powerful Aragos every conceived of, much less built. God, what a thought!”

  The concepts stretched Marin’s imagination as well as his grasp of physics. He puffed out his cheeks and turned toward Travers. “You know, part of me wants to sign with Shapiro, just to be there and see this.”

  Travers’s blue eyes were distant, half focused. “I wish I had a better grasp of this stuff. I think I might have cut too many classes.” He seemed to shake himself awake and pinned Rusch with a hard look. “Mick is surfing in
freefall, right?” She nodded. “And the Orpheus is drifting on a current, being carried with it, not actually navigating?” Again, a nod. “But when Lai’a gets in there, it’ll have the power, the armor, the Aragos, whatever, to actually navigate in there?”

  “It’s being fitted with the hyper-Weimann drive,” Rusch said with fat satisfaction. “It’s Mark Sherratt’s and Barb Jazinsky’s finest work. Their ninth symphony. Lai’a is the greatest creation of our species, and the modern Resalq’s closest approximation of the lost science of their ancestors. It’s a feral hybrid, Neil. Part human – the hardware and the drive; part Resalq – the intelligence to understand and navigate in a realm the human mind finds dizzying; and part Zunshu – the armor and the fuel to shoot the rapids of a Class 7 event and then ignite the hyper-Weimann drive.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “And Michael tested this, flew its maiden flight. Blood of my blood, and Rabelais’s blood.” The tears spilled. “And nobody at his stupid goddamned memorial knows, or can ever know, what he did, why he died. You know how they think he died?”

  “Chasing wreckers in the Drift,” Travers said acerbically.

  “In line of duty, on the DeepSky Fleet payroll,” Marin added. “What he did can be made public after the war, though, and –” He left the thought hanging as he heard voices from the house, and turned to watch Shapiro, Liang, Prendergast and Tarrant strolling through the gathering afternoon shadows in the courtyard. “Looks like we’re on our way.”

  Their faces were grim, and Marin did not have to ask which world would be first under the Fleet guns. Robert Chandra Liang was pale, stressed. Tarrant and Prendergast were frowning at him, as if imagining themselves in his position. Some world had to be the first. Some statesman had to be the one to stand up and volunteer his people. Marin was impressed and chilled at once. Shapiro was in mid-conversation, holding a comm to his ear and concentrating on what might have been a poor line, and Liang was intent on every word, listening in on a repeater, a bug in his left ear.

  The colonel of the Omaru militia headed out of the courtyard and offered his hand. Travers shook it, and Tarrant turned to Marin with a wry smile which sat well on his weathered face. “It’s a long time since Hydralis, Major.”

  “Not as long as it seems.” Marin clasped the man’s hand for a moment. “Damnit, Colonel, it’s happening. It’s now.”

  Tarrant’s hand was offered to Rusch now, and she took it with an ironic smile. “If any Fleet surveillance drone is imaging us at this moment, Colonel Tarrant, you realize we’re both dead. Executed. Military firing squad.”

  “I realize it,” Tarrant agreed, “but I set up Robert’s house security for this little tea party. Drones can’t get inside StarCity without us knowing about it, and if you’re worried about being imaged at long range, relax. There’s a field right over this whole property, low level distortion. It’ll look like a heat shimmer, like a localized fault in the atmosphere processing. Not enough to be suspicious, just enough to screw up imaging systems, if Fleet has drones outside the pressure skin – which they could.”

  “All right.” Rusch looked him up and down critically, and smiled. “So you’re the one who’s been costing me so dearly.”

  “You’re the one,” Tarrant countered, “who’s been putting gunships in my city. You think we’ll sit back and watch?”

  “I’d be disillusioned if you did,” Rusch admitted. “And gunships in the city of Hydralis were never my idea, Colonel. The Kiev was on the far side of Hellgate until Harrison retasked us, sent us to the blockade … to watchdog the situation. Try to control it. If not the Kiev, you’d had drawn the Shanghai on the same assignment. And they would have hit you hard.”

  “We know how to hit back,” Tarrant said with deceptive ease.

  She nodded deeply. “I know you do. It would have been a bloodbath, Colonel Tarrant.”

  “Call me Alec,” he invited.

  “After the war.” Rusch was still studying him almost rudely. “You’ve been an interesting adversary.”

  “I could say the same,” Tarrant admitted. “But it’s almost over. It’ll be Velcastra first – it’s been decided, twenty minutes ago. The republican government will be announced with a day to spare before the Chicago battle group arrives in range, so you know where they’ll strike. Omaru is old news, strangled by the blockade. We’ve been under your guns for so long, we’re not much more than smoking wreckage. But Velcastra … now, there’s the jewel in the crown. And they’ll fight to keep it.”

  “Christ.” Rusch’s eyes closed, squeezed shut. “I was saying to Travers and Marin, not half an hour ago, I can’t believe what’s happening. I know Allan Bronhill and Valerie Sung personally – I’ve known them for years. I can’t make sense of this, Colonel. Alec. They’re scientists, engineers, humanitarians, and they’re coming out here to crush this colony, round up the republicans, force them through some meatgrinder of a mass trial and execute them by the thousands.”

  “Yes.” Tarrant looked away. “People are never who you think they are. Times change, and people change to fit the times, and you see them for who they really were. You realize how you fooled yourself.” He paused, grim, haunted. “For what it’s worth, we have to believe the battle is winnable. The Chicago battle group will come to Velcastra, and the bloodbath you and I worked to prevent on Omaru will happen here. But it’ll be Fleet blood, not ours.” He glanced over his shoulder at Shapiro and Liang. “The weapon is ready, it’s being delivered.”

  The mines – a case of Zunshu alloy, a speck of Zunshu fuel, powering a simple mechanism generating a single event. A catastrophic implosion of such power, it would smash a large ship, swallow small ones whole, and leave wreckage where most of a super-carrier had been. Marin and Travers had watched the whole process, from concept to design to manufacture, and Marin was seared by the irony of it. The weapon, as Tarrant called it, which was the pivot point in the Colonial Wars, was a Zunshu device.

  “Years of waiting, planning, speculating,” Alec Tarrant said quietly, “and suddenly it’s on top of us and we don’t feel ready for it.” He turned his face to the late afternoon sun, closed his eyes to the brilliance and let the heat soak into him. “The truth? We’re as ready as we’re ever likely to be. And there’s no more time.”

  “And we are ready for it.” Marin was watching Shapiro, who was still engrossed in the comm exchange and looking more worried by the moment. “Colonel Tarrant, you don’t happen to know what’s going on?” He gestured at Shapiro, and Liang, who was hovering at Shapiro’s elbow. “Something’s gone pear shaped.”

  Tarrant seemed almost unconcerned – too intent on the business of war. “He took a personal call … some guy he was going to meet here, a friend, I believe.”

  “Jon Kim.” Travers stepped closer to Marin. “And from the look on Shapiro’s face, there’s trouble.” He gave Rusch an apologetic look. “We might have to give you a raincheck, Colonel.”

  She was frowning at Shapiro. “Jon Kim. I know the name. I heard the scuttlebutt, Harrison found himself someone at last – Ulrish, isn’t he? What’s he doing on Velcastra?”

  “Running,” Marin said simply. “And I think it’s come to trouble. Colonel Rusch, it’s been a genuine pleasure. I have a feeling we’re about to miss the public memorial, but this was the real one. The other’s just going to be a performance for CNS. We’ll catch up with you soon.”

  “Alshie’nya, perhaps,” she said tersely. “Lai’a.”

  “Ma’am.” Travers sketched an approximation of a salute and gave her a smile. “Colonel Tarrant.”

  As they stepped into earshot, a note in Shapiro’s voice brought every nerve in Marin’s body alive. A chauffeur was coming up from Liang’s private hangar, waiting to take the party directly to the auditorium, but both Shapiro and Liang held back, and Liang beckoned Travers and Marin into the house.

  “I’ve got the proverbial bad feeling,” Travers warned. “You?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Marin glanced after Rusch, Tarrant and Pre
ndergast, who were leaving with the chauffeur, and then gave his attention to Shapiro. “Trouble?”

  Chapter Eleven

  The call was audio only, and the quality was poor. Travers groaned as he listened to the playback via the threedee in Chandra Liang’s study, because he recognized the distortion as surely as Marin and Shapiro recognized it. Jon Kim was at the Blue Lagoon Motel in Scott’s Harbor, a fishing town on the east coast, where the Inman Gulf stretched more than four hundred kilometers to the western reaches of the Shirubamira Islands. And the motel’s phones were bugged.

  “I’m being watched,” he was saying from the threedee as Travers looked up through the blue-green haze of the display. “I went out for some chow for the dogs. Just to the store across the street, not far. I saw the same faces I saw last night and this morning – they’re not locals, and I’m dead sure they were scanning me. They just want to be certain they’re picking up the right poor bastard before they come in and get me.” Kim paused for breath.

  “Calm down,” Shapiro’s voice said from the threedee. “Where are you right now?”

  “I’m back in the room, Harry, and I’m not going to budge. The motel’s full of people – families, kids. They won’t just come blazing in, will they? They’re waiting for me to leave. Aren’t they?”

  “Probably,” Shapiro’s recorded voice said quietly. “The plan could have been to wait for night, and come in then. Can you get to the car? Is there a back way out?”

  “No.” Kim swallowed audibly.

  “Then, stay where you are,” Shapiro told him. “Don’t go near the window. If there’s a bathtub, that’s the most bulletproof place. Grab the dogs, and all three of you get in the tub and stay down.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kim whispered, and then, in a plaintive tone, “come get me.”

  “Right now,” Shapiro’s voice promised from the audio track.