Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  “Are we still short of a pilot?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “You’ve got your hired hand.”

  She looked pleased, as if she thought she’d talked me into it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Three days later, I thought I was familiar enough with the controls to lift the ship. DelArco wanted me to do so, right there and then, but I was more cautious. I wanted to work the controls on the ground—inside the tower. I think delArco was offended by the calculated deliberation of my schedule. He was in a hell of a hurry to commit suicide.

  The captain couldn’t seem to understand that while I sat in the control cradle, hooked up and doing absolutely nothing, I was working hard. I was doing necessary work, too—just acclimatising to the sensory range and potential of the ship, just feeling the size and the shape of my new body. DelArco knew every relay in those controls, all right. He knew what every inch of wire was for. But he didn’t understand how to use it.

  I had to have the contacts in my neck resculptured in order to fit the spinal electrodes comfortably. It’s hell to fly with an itch where you can’t scratch, or with a clip that pinches even slightly. I insisted on having the hood modified as well so that it was perfectly tailored to the shape of my skull, the distance between my foveas, the depth of my face. All this took time that delArco thought was dead. He seemed to believe that all I had to do in order to learn the ship was to take her on a joyride to Pluto and back. I wondered long and hard why the New Alexandrians had made him captain of the vessel. It was a job he simply wasn’t fitted for. He was a screwdriver and bank-balance man, not a spacer.

  Only Eve seemed to understand the process of getting into the ship’s skin—and she was the only one I could stand to have in the cabin during most of the time I spent there. But I still didn’t manage to fathom out exactly why she was on board, except that it was connected with a vague idea she had about following in her brother’s footsteps. I didn’t know whether she was trying to follow his example and escape from her claustrophobic home life by the same route, or whether she was on some kind of pilgrimage to try to justify his existence. Lapthorn was dead, but he was still hanging around. He was riding inside Eve just as the wind was riding inside me.

  Four days before our scheduled lift, delArco hit flat panic. He practically tore the hood from my head in order to get my attention.

  “They’ve got it,” he said. “They’ve collated all their mapping data and they’ve found her. They know where the Lost Star went down.”

  “So what?” I said.

  “So we have to move! They’ll reach her as soon as possible.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Approximately three months, if they start from Hallsthammer.”

  “They’re in the Drift already. One of them might be practically on top of her.”

  “No chance,” I said flatly. “The Lost Star is in the core. The ramrods are outside the core. They wouldn’t go in there just to poke around. There’s a big difference between the velocities you can maintain in the corpus of the Drift, and those you have to keep to in the heart. They haven’t a cat’s chance of getting within spitting distance for weeks. Mapping the Drift worlds is difficult enough, thanks to the distortion. Reaching them is a problem of an entirely different order. Don’t worry, Captain, we have all the time in the world to finish the game and beat them too, provided that this bird lives up to the advertising material.”

  He didn’t like it, but I wasn’t breaking my schedule for the sake of pandering to his raw nerves.

  I didn’t actually take her up till the day before our official lift. She had to be moved anyway, from the tower to the take-off bay. The port authority didn’t take kindly to having the full power of a ship’s cannons released over the shipyards.

  I decided to stay inside atmosphere, and just put the ship through some elementary procedures. There was nothing that hadn’t been done while she was test-flying, but it was the feel that was important this time. I could get some idea of what she’d actually do while we were en route for Hallsthammer.

  It was sacrilege, of course, to use a ship like that for creeping about at thirty thousand feet and a thousand miles an hour. But you have to learn to crawl before you can attempt to stand up on your hind legs and howl.

  Despite all the hours I’d spent sitting at the console with everything switched on, the first time I put the hood on for real it felt completely different. The sensors were beautiful—tuned and focused exactly. Through the ship’s thousand eyes I watched the tower split, and the halves roll back out of our way. I put my hands around the levers, and felt the power growing inside them, swelling up from the bowels of the ship.

  For the first time, I began to get some positive sensation in my ship-body. I could feel the wind that blew across the yards. I could feel threads of force reaching out from the gathering drive to the limits of the nerve-net. I felt the Hooded Swan come alive inside me. My heartbeat fused with the rhythmic discharge inside the piledriver. The flux-field of the mass-relaxation web was cold and inert, but I could sense its enfolding presence, like a carefully clutching hand. And the background sensation—the knowledge that I was the ship, the admission of common identity—grew stronger.

  The dials whose information was reflected in the hood around the image of the empty sky showed the gain creeping up to the meagre potential that was all I could use in taking off from the yards.

  “Count me down,” I told Rothgar, and he began calling off the last few seconds. As he reached zero, I tensed, and the whole ship with me. The cannons began to burn, with no real power. The reaction in the thrust chamber swelled calmly, and we rose from the ground in the arms of the blast.

  Lazily, the massive hull heaved herself from the ground, standing on the cannon-fire, balancing with utmost ease, climbing up and up and up. I was holding her back right from the start, cradling her as she was cradling me, holding her gently like a great big baby, balancing her, blowing her over feather-light, into horizontal flight, buoyed up by the air and not by her own power. I let her soar for a moment or two, and then pushed her into our predetermined path.

  The wings carved the air like great knives. I counted seconds until the first turn, and then eased myself into the nerve-net, curling my left wing and turning to the right. With a calm, fluid sweep of my fingers, I brought us back again, smooth as silk and feeling as natural as if I’d been born a bird. The thrill of the wind was all over my arms and along my spine and under my belly and between my legs.

  The Hooded Swan was a bird. She could fly. I took her high, furled my wings and dived. I swept her around and around and around, and out into straight flight again.

  And then we went home. I was flying myself—high as a kite on my own adrenaline. I practically floated her down to the bay where she was scheduled to spend the night. There was a crowd on the port watching us. Either the HV had been tipped off about our clearance to lift, or they were very quick off the mark. A lot of people had drifted in from the port conurbation to watch us drop. They didn’t see much. A drop is a drop. Things fall down. A lift is something else again. I wondered how many of them would be back at six tomorrow morning to wave goodbye.

  Once I’d burned off the high and got a chance to relax again, I began to add up the score. On the surface, everything had been perfect. I had the feel, and I knew now that I could fly her. But was it the right feel? The test flight was a sham, in a way, because atmosphere makes a big difference to the performance of any ship. Anything could do aerobatics under the conditions I’d used. Supercee manoeuvres were a completely different matter. I’d proved nothing, except that it felt good to be inside her hood.

  Rothgar came up from the depths and we congratulated each other silently. Eve and delArco left to make preparations for lift. I didn’t envy their task of coping with inquisitive sightseers.

  “Everything OK?” I asked Rothgar.

  “How do I know?” he replied. “The deration field is the key to the drive, not the thrust chamb
er. Until we use the flux we won’t know for sure whether she works or not.”

  “But nothing’s wrong?”

  “Of course nothing’s wrong. Would I allow anything to go wrong? She will do whatever she can.” Rothgar turned, and went back to his glory hole.

  I turned my attention to the slightly uneasy Johnny Socoro.

  “Don’t you have any work to do?” I asked him.

  “I have to check the cannons from outside,” he replied. “But not while that crowd’s still hanging around.”

  “DelArco will get them cleared away,” I said. “He’ll give the port authority hell for letting them in, in the first place.”

  “Can’t keep them off the port;” Johnny pointed out.

  “A little effort would keep them out of this bloody bay. It could be sealed, if the authority could be bothered. Legally, they’re trespassers.”

  “Does it matter so much?”

  I shrugged. “Not to me. It’s delArco’s ship.” There was a pause. “Well,” I continued. “You got what you wanted, didn’t you? Shipping out from Earth in the morning. The Halcyon rim in a couple of days.”

  “I don’t know why they hired me,” he said. “I’ve no experience in space, and I’m not too familiar with this type of drive.”

  “Maybe they were in a hurry,” I said. “I shouldn’t worry too much about it. If they had any specific reason, then it was in the interests of neatness. The New Alexandrians are neat people. The pilot of the ship is the key man, and they probably planned to build the crew around me. All that’s really new in this ship is in my job, so they could afford to pass up the best men for the other jobs in the interests of giving me people I know and can work with.”

  “Then why is delArco captain, not you?”

  That had been bothering me, too. I had to tell him that I simply didn’t know. But I had my suspicions. While delArco was captain, I was nothing. A ship’s captain has a great deal of responsibility, and hence a certain amount of authority under the law. A captain can exercise discretion about where to take his ship, how and when. Maybe the New Alexandrians only wanted my talent, not my ideas about how things should be run. While I had no power in the eyes of the law, they had complete power over me by virtue of their contract.

  Johnny left to help Rothgar check out the drive. I had work to do as well—laborious checking of every circuit I’d used, to see that everything was still working as it should. But for the moment, I wanted a couple of hours’ rest. The flight had left me exhausted. So I leaned back in the cradle and talked to the wind.

  You got your way, too, didn’t you?

  That was the first time that I ever initiated conversation with the wind. I was getting used to him, and accepting his presence as something more than just an unpleasant fact that I couldn’t do anything about.

  I got your way, he replied.

  It’s nice to know someone has my interests at heart.

  I have both our interests at heart. So should you. They ought to be more or less the same. A dispute could prove embarrassing.

  Maybe so, I agreed, then added: But more so for you than for me. I have the casting vote, don’t I? I own the body.

  This was a point which bothered me—just what was the wind capable of, once he was settled in? Could I be dispossessed of my own body?

  But he agreed readily enough that I had the body, and in the event of a dispute, he’d have to go where I took him. I reflected that if I were him, I would object most strongly to being taken into the Halcyon Drift.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The second take-off wasn’t like the first. The day before, I’d choked the life out of the piledriver before it had any chance to develop real thrust. This time, it was all for real—the cannons would really let go and the flux would flow.

  I held her on the pad while I poured impulse from the discharge points into the deration system, to cycle the flux and build up a syndromatic power charge that would hurl us clear of the Earth within seconds after I let her go.

  The bird climbed on the blast as if she’d been lusting for clear space all her young life, and now it was offered to her, she couldn’t wait to grab it. I threw the relaxation web into operation the moment I closed the cannons, and a surge of power spread through the nerve-net like a shockwave. Suddenly, the whole subsurface was alive and participating in the thrust. The bird was really going now—not lifting on the cannon-blast or soaring on her wings, but driving on the internal release and consumption of power. She was living.

  Faster and faster and faster.

  I couldn’t see the Earth in the hood, save as a location mark. Even the sun was dwindling visibly into a forlorn point of light.

  “Countdown to tachyonic transfer,” I told Rothgar calmly. I always sound calm during take-off. He began in the two hundreds, which meant that I was anticipating slightly—a fraction overanxious. I spared a second or two to pull myself into perfect concentration. I ignored the count till it was down below eighty, accelerating smoothly and gathering more power in the web, bleeding thrust out of the driver into the flux and preparing to flood it back. The relaxation field began to grow around the thrust, balancing out the mass-gain.

  Rothgar was holding the plasm in absolute balance. It flowed as smooth as a great river, despite the load it was carrying. I caressed the load with my fingertips, feeling its readiness to respond to the slightest pressure. I eased her gently into the line which delArco and I had plotted as a course. She slotted neatly into the groove without the slightest bleeding from the flux-field. Most ships had trouble grooving—they lost power and time, and occasionally damaged their shields in the matter-dense outer system space. But the Hooded Swan moved with the grace of perfection.

  The count reached twenty and I had time and power in hand. She was clean and even—no delay in reaction, nothing she couldn’t do. No force, no persuasion—the ship was myself and we acted as a whole. We were one.

  As the count dropped to single figures, the relaxation field grew taut and began to strain. The loaded flux wanted to break and jab, but Rothgar and I had it between our fingers and it kept flowing. I had thrust in my right hand, deration-plasm in my left. I had to keep the balance perfectly, as well as holding the groove. Approaching the Einstein barrier, whether from subcee or transcee, the balancing equation became more and more difficult. The tachyonic transfer from one to the other had to approach instantaneity as nearly as was possible. If I overdid the thrust, the flux-field would blow and all the plasm would bleed out of the system. If I over-extenuated the piledriver we’d fail the transfer and lose the load from the flux. Either way, we’d have to start all over again.

  But the count reached zero and I didn’t even have to think. Just reflex and feel. The load swelled back into the piledriver and the impulse hurled us across the barrier without a phase-flicker. She was stable during every instant. The plasm held her perfectly. Immediately, I calmed the deration field right down. The thrust grew in my hand as I took the restraint from the impulse. In tachyonic reverse, the velocity climbed exponentially as I denatured our effective mass. I eased off at five thou and let her coast at constant. She was still sitting in the groove, and we were in clean space.

  I leaned back, and closed my eyes.

  “She’ll move a lot faster than that,” I heard delArco say, as if from a great distance. I was tempted to invert the gravity field and hope he didn’t have the clasps in his chair fastened.

  “Not now, she won’t,” I told him. “She’ll do as she’s told.”

  He said nothing more. I detached the hood carefully, pulling away the contacts from the base of my neck. I unclasped, but I didn’t leave the cradle. Real pilots never do, while their ship’s in space—only liner jockeys.

  “Somebody get me a cup of coffee,” I said.

  There seemed to be a certain amount of confusion about who was doubling as steward. The finger finished up pointing at Johnny. Eve, for the moment, at least, did not consider that a woman’s space-place was in the kitche
n.

  I surveyed the instruments directly with a critical eye, but everything was as it should be.

  “Well?” said delArco.

  I paused a moment before replying. “OK for now,” I said finally.

  He’d been expecting praise for his ship, but doing without wouldn’t injure his pride too much. I wasn’t going to rush into enthusiasm regarding her performance and potential.

  Once we were well clear of the solar system, I got down to the serious business of finding out what the Hooded Swan was capable of doing in deep-space. I increased velocity gradually, cradling the thrust control in my hand and waiting for Rothgar to complain, or for the flux-field to waver and threaten to lose its integrity. The further I damped the relaxation web, the more delicate the required manipulation would become. The resistance to the control lever was geared, but there were only a hundred and fifty degrees to move it through, and the gearing was inadequate once we were over twelve thou. After that the only limit was the delicacy of my handling. She was up to forty-seven thou—and I still thought I had her well under control—when the warnings began to come through. The field was beginning to evaporate. I brought her back to thirty thou and rested. Rothgar never said a word. Apparently, he could balance the flux at any velocity. The limit was defined solely by the continuity of the field, which was determined by the design of the drive. She was faster by a factor of ten than any other mass-relaxation ship I’d ever heard of.

  DelArco, seeing that I was resting at the controls again, came over to scrutinise the instruments.

  “Get out,” I said. “And keep your mouth shut.” He moved away without saying anything.

  “Is everything all right?” Eve asked him, whispering in an effort not to disturb me. He must have nodded in reply, because he said nothing and she lapsed into silence again.

  I slowed down again to twenty thou, paused for thought and then decided not to be ambitious. I took her down to ten.