by Mel Keegan
Three light Arago sleds moved the cryogen tanks toward the big lifts, and as the smallest went by, he looked in through the observation plate at the gaunt, wasted face. Grant hung back, twisting off the cumbersome helmet with the red and white squad leader chevrons. He frowned up at Travers as if he wondered if he were about to receive another patient.
“I’m all right,” Travers lied.
“Is that what you call it?” Grant snorted. “You want my advice? Get a couple of double scotches under your belt.”
“It’ll help?” Marin sounded less than certain.
“It couldn’t hurt,” Grant said with acid humor before he followed his team to the lifts, and the yellow mesh cage door closed over them.
Jazinsky was holding the service elevator, a dozen meters away. “Hey, you want this ride, or are you going to the Infirmary?”
“We’re with you,” Marin said firmly, and gave Travers a solid shove to get him moving. He dropped his voice. “And Bill makes a good point. Coffee with a drop of the Irish. Then you can tell me what you saw. Thought you saw.”
The giddiness abated as the lift rose back to the dorsal level, and Travers was never more grateful to step into the light and dry, forced heat of the tug’s working environment. Carrier duty soon taught a man to dislike the bottom decks of any military or industrial ship, where darkness, dankness and harsh chemistry too often seemed to presage violence and blood.
He looked from Vaurien’s face to Mark’s, hoping for answers, and what he saw there were guarded expressions. Without a word, Jazinsky swung a chair toward the workstation and ran the data several times faster than Travers could hope to follow it. He turned his back on the flatscreen and took a deep breath.
His heart had begun to race, uncomfortable in his own chest, as he asked, “You want to illuminate me, Richard?”
But Vaurien gestured at Mark, and deliberately stepped back into the shadows beyond the navtank. He was talking in soft undertones with Ingersol as Marin fetched the coffee. Travers wrapped his hands around a mug, only then realizing that he was cold to the bone.
“Mark?” Marin perched on the edge of a vacant workstation. “We know Lai’a’s chronometer was off.”
But Mark’s head shook slowly. “Its chronometer is absolutely accurate. It was in the Drift for over 44 hours. Its logs detail every nanosecond of the time. Suffice to say, I’ll be dissecting them for days.”
“But it came back in – what, ninety minutes?” Marin protested.
“Ninety minutes in our timestream,” Jazinsky said without looking up. “The temporal steam Lai’a was riding was many times faster than anything we understand as normal time.”
“Then it found itself another massive event,” Mark added, “and exited Elarne just as it entered. It’s been laying beacons. The point of entry has been marked, charted. It’s almost a fixed point, which has been identified as the Orpheus Gate. A place where a vessel entering Elarne can take its initial navigation fix on several constants. First, the gate marker, as laid down by Lai’a, which will only drift by a small margin, because it’s anchored by the other constants, which in Elarne are perceived as the e-space footprints of Naiobe and several of the local supergiant stars. Lai’a also beacon-marked the feeder chute to the temporal stream which Vidal and Queneau rode away, during the flight of the Orpheus. We witnessed this, if you recall.”
“Like I’ll ever forget,” Travers whispered.
“The temporal stream is charted to a high degree of accuracy. Lai’a named it the Odyssey Tide.” Mark thumbed a remote, and the navtank filled with a representation of the course Lai’a had taken. “There are constants inside Elarne, as we always knew there had to be. Areas which remain fixed within transspace, though to observers in normal space they appear to drift. All the fixed points are anchored by the massive gravity wells, and there’s no surprise in this. It’s a confirmation of everything we thought we knew.”
“Hallelujah,” Jazinsky said acerbically. “Now tell me about cryotanks that are two centuries obsolete, and … this.” She fed her own data into the two-meter navtank, and stood up for a better angle of view into the display.
It was a nightmare of a ship, Travers thought, yet the hairs on his nape were rising because something about it was horribly familiar. “It’s a hybrid,” he murmured.
“It’s a mongrel,” she corrected. “It’s a bunch of bits and pieces, some not even welded together. Most of it’s holding itself together on meshed Aragos, and if the generators ever shut down, it’ll fly apart. As far as I can tell, it’s made up of segments from four ships. Two of them are Resalq. Two are of human construction. The Resalq sections are far older than either of the human pieces, but one human piece is still very old. The final section is more or less new. You see the cockpit, Neil? It’s sitting up there, looking like a wart or a carbuncle, on the shoulder of a troll, ugly as sin. It doesn’t look familiar?”
“It should,” Mark said, hushed.
“Christ,” Travers said, hushed. “I should have seen it, should have known.”
It was the cockpit of the Orpheus. The last time he had seen it, it was standing in a hangar aboard the Wastrel, about to be christened with a bottle of champagne in a naming ceremony for the odd ship beneath it, because Michael Vidal – with the old spacer’s superstition – refused to fly a ship that had not been named. She was christened Orpheus after the first human in myth or history who ever went into hell and wrestled the god of the underworld to get what he wanted.
“Not much of her is left,” Jazinsky was saying tersely. “They salvaged the cockpit, probably because the flight systems were sound after some event blew the drive engines.”
“They?” Marin echoed. “Who?”
She looked up at him, ice-blue eyes wide and unblinking. “You saw the two cryogen tanks. Three occupants made it out of there alive. God only knows how many perished. Like I said – I’m seeing bits of four ships. But at least three people made it out, and we can identify two of the donor vessels which were scrambled together to build this mongrel.”
“Two?” Marin came to the edge of the tank, intent on the image of the weird hybrid. “The Orpheus, and …?”
“And the ship from which they scavenged the old cryogen tanks,” Vaurien said as he stepped back into the lights. “I just heard Tully’s preliminary report. It’s going to take around three days and we’ll fry about a thousand drones to get Lai’a decontaminated, before the tech gangs can get the habitation module finished. Damn, I wish we’d been able to outfit the hab module before it was mounted on Lai’a.”
“We ran out of time with the fittings,” Jazinsky said tersely to Travers and Marin. “The module had to be mounted before the transspace test flight, because its mass shifted the geometry of Lai’a by a couple of percent, enough to skew the hyper-Weimann solution. We thought, sure, just finish fitting the crew quarters after the flight. We didn’t expect to get Lai’a back in this condition.”
“The good news is,” Vaurien finished, “this level of contamination is atypical. It won’t be like this every time we get a ship back out of transspace. This is just the result of a place Lai’a went, to answer the distress beacon.”
Mark rotated the image around in the navtank and, piece by piece, stripped the threedee model apart. “The rear segment is Resalq. Old but serviceable. It’s the engine deck and generator housing of a freighter – I haven’t seen the type since I was young, but I remember them well. They used to run the Drift between Saraine and the system we know as Omaru now. The generators are still running smoothly, delivering plenty of power, for which we can all be grateful.”
The stern segment lifted away, silvered out, and he parked it at the bottom of the tank. “Then there’s a hollowed-out hull, also Resalq, strapped in place with a web of powerful Arago fields … they seemed to be using it as shielding to protect a much more delicate ship cocooned inside. The old hull had the armor to get them through transspace, but it wasn’t viable as a habitat for a living crew. I
t’s just a series of cargo holds, no life support. They needed something that would hold air and heat. Like this.”
The hollow hull lifted off, dropped out to silver-gray, and he parked it beside the stern section. What was left, now, was the cockpit from the Orpheus, and a small vessel, no larger than the Mako and not nearly as robust. Its engine deck was battered but the crew compartments looked sound.
“The drive is inoperable,” Mark said thoughtfully. “By the looks of this, it suffered a catastrophic event, after which I would speculate it had to enter some kind of freefall which swept it along like a barrel in a current.”
“The way the Orpheus was carried along,” Marin guessed.
“Exactly.” Mark placed both hands in the curve of his spine and began to rub taut muscles there. “One can presume it fell right into what Lai’a has charted as the Odyssey Tide, and that at least two old Resalq ships, as well as the Orpheus itself, fell into the same current at different times.”
“If they did,” Jazinsky added, “it means the current fetches up somewhere … somewhere stable.” She looked from Mark to Richard. “We’ve been speculating about regions in transspace that are like Alshie’nya. Tidepools, regions which are held in a balance between gravity fields, where time is stable enough, and you’re either in freefall or in some tolerable gravity well.” She gestured at the fragile little ship framed in the navtank. “He must have found one.”
“He?” Travers licked his lips as his eyes explored the old vessel, and he knew he should recognize it. “I’ve seen it before. Haven’t I?”
“Everyone has.” Vaurien took a deep breath and pulled both hands over his face. “If you grow up in the Deep Sky, you do this in fourth grade. History of the Pioneers. The one great explorer who came out here ahead of the terraformer fleets and the colony ships, marking the positions of black holes, wandering planets, navigation hazards. He laid down the ring of beacons right around Hellgate, gave his name to that space.”
“Jesus,” Marin breathed. “It can’t be.”
“It can.” Jazinsky was studying the image, rotating it, looking for greater levels of detail and resolution in the scans, which both Ingersol and Lai’a were constantly updating. “It is. We’ve always known he vanished, but there was never any sign of wreckage, though the Merchant Astra Commission searched for years.”
“Then –” Travers cleared his throat and marshaled his thoughts with an effort. “Then, if I’m looking at what’s left of the Odyssey, and she fell into some kind of tidepool in transspace, the signals we’ve been getting out of the Drift …?”
“Those distress signals that appear to be no more than two hours old,” Jazinsky whispered. “We also heard them when the Orpheus went in, and we speculated that they might have been bouncing around for centuries – inside the Drift, you can never tell.” She was gazing into the navtank, not even blinking. “You know where the signals came from.” She gestured at the ancient, battered little vessel. “And you know who broadcast them.”
It was Alexis Rusch’s voice, speaking from the wide, open door of the ops room, that said what none of them could. “Ernst Rabelais. That’s his ship. That’s the Odyssey. And if he’s in one of those cryogen tanks – if he made it out of Rabelais Space –” Her voice caught.
“He’s not the only one, Alexis.” Jazinsky’s long fingers pattered over a few keys, bringing up an image, a face behind the observation pane in the Wastrel’s own emergency tank. “You saw this. He’s in bad shape, but Bill’s working on him, and I’ll tell you, I’d trust Bill Grant further than I’d trust most service doctors.”
On her flatscreen was the best frame captured by the viddrone. She had enhanced it, zoomed it, and Travers heard Marin curse softly. Michael Vidal’s face was so thin, with sunken cheeks and eyes, that even now Neil looked hard to recognize the man he had known. Stands of silver threaded the hair at his temples, and the lines between his brows were deeply engraved, almost like scars.
A wounded sound issued from Rusch as she came closer. “Dear God, he looks like he’s been to hell.”
“And back,” Richard added as he joined her there to study the face beneath the observation plate. He touched the combug and said softly, “Bill, any word yet?”
Travers had been unaware of the loop whispering in his ear for some time, and only began to pay attention as Bill Grant spoke.
“It’s early days, boss, but … he’s busted up pretty good. Still, I’ve seen worse. You there, Neil?”
“Right here,” Travers responded. “You’re thinking about the last time you walked off the Intrepid.”
“And the hours we spent on the gunships, while we were waiting to get reeled in out of space,” Grant added. “Damnit, I did good work there.”
“You always do,” Vaurien told him. “Prognosis? Will he fix?”
“I … think so,” Grant said guardedly. “It’s just going to take some time. There’s a lot I can do, and some I can’t, you understand.”
“Is he awake?” Travers wondered, looking sidelong at Marin, who was listening with a shadowed, shuttered expression. Memories of the Argos would be slithering like so many goblins out of the corners where he locked them away. Michael Vidal’s plight was Marin’s nightmare come true.
“He woke briefly when I cracked the tank,” Grant reported, “but I’ve induced a coma. I don’t want the poor bugger knowing anything about what’s happening to him in the next day or so.”
“Amen to that,” Marin whispered. “Then, he’s not in any immediate danger, Bill?”
“Not now,” Grant said thoughtfully. “I’ve got him on full life support. He’s being transfused, and I’ve got a batch of nano cooking. There’s big, big liver damage, lung damage, heart, adrenals, virtually every organ. He’s rotten inside.”
Rusch’s face clenched. “His brain?”
“Oh, yeah.” Grant sighed. “As soon as I’ve got the nano into him, I’m going to wheel him through a scanner, have a look at the brain, see how bad it is.”
“Salvageable?” Rusch asked, with the dark pragmatism of a DeepSky Fleet commander.
“Probably,” Grant warned. “I’ll tell you more when I’ve had a look. The least I can do is stop the rot, make sure it doesn’t get any worse. I might have to ship him out to the specialists if the damage is already more than I can handle with the gear I’ve got aboard.”
Mark was there at once. “The ICU on the Carellan can handle it, Bill. If the brain is salvageable at all, we can repair the structure.”
“And the memories?” Travers wondered, with a painful twist in his belly. “Will he remember anything that happened, or any of us?”
Grant sighed audibly over the loop. “I don’t know, Neil. Look, let me run him through a scanner, like I said … ask me later.”
“We will,” Vaurien said quietly. “Have you had a chance to examine the old tanks yet?”
“Not since we’ve been chatting,” Grant said in rueful tones. “You still there, Barb?”
“Of course,” Jazinsky responded, “and I know what you’re going to say – and you’re right. Those tanks are so old, you don’t trust them, and I probably know a whole lot more about the technology than you do.”
“You’re psychic.” Grant actually chuckled. “Hey, a tech I’m not. I just know which buttons to push. This gear? It could be in perfect condition or it could be garbage. I wouldn’t know. You want to get down here, run some kind of diagnostic?”
“Yes.” She was already moving. “I do.” She frowned sidelong at Rusch. “Bill, you said Mick’s asleep?”
“Medically induced coma,” Grant affirmed. “He should wake naturally about this time tomorrow. If he doesn’t, I’ll revive him. By then he’ll be through decontamination. It’s a bloody nasty procedure – ask Neil and Curt. They went through it, after the job at Hydralis University went bung. Thing is, they were healthy, in good shape, mentally sound, going into it. This poor bastard … Jesus Christ, boss, where’s he been?”
And Vau
rien could only shrug. “We don’t exactly know. When he wakes, he can tell us.”
“If he remembers,” Jazinsky said pointedly. She was still frowning at Rusch, and asked with all due caution, “You want to come down to the Infirmary and sit with him a while?”
“He won’t know I’m there.” Her eyes glittered in the instrument lights, bright with tears she refused to shed. “Will he, Doctor Grant?”
“True,” Grant admitted. “And it’s still Medic Grant, ma’am. I don’t take the finals and get the certification for another ten months.”
“Yes, well, I’ll forget about the calendar if you will,” Rusch said with a deep, dark pragmatism. “And yes, I’ll sit with him for a while. Is he in decontamination already, Doctor?”
They were out of the ops room now, and with a glance at Marin, who nodded, Travers followed them. Grant was saying, “He’s just come out of the shower. I’ve taken the top four layers off his skin, and he’s being transfused while I set up the nano. As soon as I can get his heart, lungs and liver up to speed, even if the means are artificial, I can take him off life support.”
This was where the process began, Travers thought bleakly. Every drop of moisture in Vidal’s body would be changed, not once but several times. His IV would be chemical-heavy, and in the next twenty-four hours, every body cavity would be washed repeatedly with the same solution, especially his lungs, which would be thick with the toxicity of having breathed air where every mote of dust was contaminated. The process was painful and debilitating for a fit, healthy body. For one who was emaciated, frail, it was dangerous.
The doors closed over on the big lift right behind the ops room, and he looked levelly at Jazinsky and Rusch, wondering how to frame the question he must ask. At length it was Marin who said, “I went through this myself when I was just a kid. I was on the Argos. He’ll be okay physically – sterile, of course, and he’ll have to work to get his muscle tone back. It’s his brain that I don’t know about.” His brows arched at them both. “You ever see anything like this before?”
