Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  The bleep changed slightly.

  “She’s being turned,” I said, and explained: ‘the cloud’s blowout from the centre, cross-time or through gravity holes. She’s pushing me off line in order to keep the pressure on her hull even.”

  I let her drift, of course. You don’t fight your own ship. I tried to sense which way the lines of distortion ran, in case I could use them to adjust the wings to the shape of the stressfield. I eased back the thrust, letting the burst of power flow briefly into the shield to let me flutter my wings. Then I ebbed the strength gradually out of the shield. It was like peeling off a glove. The prickling of the dust became sharper—almost painful. I explored the contours of the field that was carrying it. I thought I had the shape for a moment, but it was tenuous and I had to keep feeling it as it changed slowly. I moved to meet its demands, and then boosted the drive a little. I fed the motor nerves and began moving my wings slowly but forcefully, creating stress of my own, integrating it into the contortive fabric of the storm. The power in the piledriver, of course, was negligible compared to the awesome power blasting the dirt out of the Halcyon core. But that was random power. It was even available for manipulation, open to persuasion. I was the first man ever to harness the power of the Drift for my own purposes.

  My skin began to burn as the angle of attack of my wings shifted to let the dust strike harder upon the thin shield. There was awkward pain in my back and my groin, but I had to disregard it. Then, with a sudden pressure like a breath of wind, the cloud disgorged us smoothly and effortlessly. It took only seconds for me to regain the trace-path.

  Carefully, not allowing relief to hurry me, I eased the shield back to its former strength.

  I reflected that many ships might have gone through the cloud unscathed, but not without putting heavy strain on their drive units, and certainly not anywhere near our velocity.

  “We beat that one,” I commented, as deadness crept into my aching back to replace the muscular pain. I stretched slightly, and sat back to flex my fingers.

  But there was no relaxing.

  We were beginning to close up steadily on the Hymnia, but Alachakh was still moving very fast. Bearing in mind that he did not have our advantages, I calculated that the load on his drive must inevitably blow it out in a matter of days. He was flying like a madman. Whatever reason he had for braving the Drift, it was moving him in one hell of a hurry.

  I couldn’t see Alachakh’s ship, not even with the fine sensors, because there was too much confusion in the visual spectrum. But the instruments hooked into the bleep measured her loud, clear and close. Sometimes, I felt the wave of warped space that was dissipating in her wake. That bothered me too—if she were throwing up a wash like that, she could be tossed like a cork if she hit a lateral lesion. The Swan could take that—if I was fast enough—but the Hymnia couldn’t.

  If only you’d ease up, I thought at him, you’d stand a damn sight better chance of getting there. But something was driving him hard enough that while he had clear space, he’d use it to the limits of his tolerance. He was going like a bat out of hell.

  Minutes drained into hours, and he began to pull even more out. I wasn’t about to risk getting hurt, and I didn’t copy him, so he drew slowly away again. Then he hit a cloud and had to slam the anchors on. The cloud was local and narrow, and I went through it without difficulty, needing no particular cleverness to negotiate it.

  At seven hours, distortion began to force us apart. Alachakh didn’t slow down, so I supposed that the warp was coming in on his tail. I rode the waves for a while, but they kept pressing in on my chest and bending my back, so I had to slow down and take things a bit easier. Even so, a dull sensation of pain began to gather in my intercostal muscles. I was sweating heavily and feeling very tired. I’d taken a shot before we lifted which should have guaranteed me for ten or twelve hours, but I suppose the load was unusual.

  “What’s the bloody fool trying to do?” I wondered. “It’s not a race. Or does he think that I’ll cheat him unless he reaches the Lost Star with a couple of hours to spare?” But that wasn’t it. He knew I’d give him the first crack at the wreck, just as I’d promised. If it really came to a race, I’d win. I had a bird and he had a bullet.

  More hours.

  The strain got to be too great. I know as well as anyone else the danger of hyping up too far, but I daren’t go to the other extreme and risk getting too slow or even blacking out. “Get me a strong shot,” I told delArco, “and rig the intravenous feed with a bottle and a half. I can’t take this on the standard procedure. Not without slowing down—and I want to stay close enough to Alachakh so that trace-path holds. I don’t want a lesion obliterating the space he’s flying through.”

  The captain moved to comply.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Rothgar.

  “I can eat,” he replied. “Johnny can take the drive while I rest.”

  “Take a shot,” I told him. “Don’t let Johnny take too much. When there’s trouble, I want you on that drive to keep the flux steady. Johnny’s not trained to juggle plasm.”

  I think it was Eve who pushed the stay-awake into my arm, but I didn’t look around. I felt the needle of the feed go in as well, and the tape to hold it. I felt uncomfortably as though something had punctured the shield on the port wing, and several minutes passed before I had rid myself of that strange sensation.

  Dust, dust, and more dust. We were in the dead halo-plasm of the nebula now, well inside the fringes where the outblast from the centre re-formed. Bearing in mind what we’d already accomplished, there should be nothing here which could hurt us, unless it took me absolutely by surprise. I wondered how Alachakh kept going. The Khor-monsa are not as strong physically as humans. Perhaps he had a perpetual drip rigged up with some sort of brain-booster added. I’d flown like that before now—it felt good while I was actually in the cradle, but it had taken me three days to recover from a hundred-hour flight. It’s not good for the health to ride a constant high.

  The crazy chase went on and on. He touched six thou several times, but mostly stayed at four to four and a half. That was plenty for me, and I didn’t copy his occasional bursts. As a result, he drew away over a period of time, but lost all the ground he gained when a web of cloud forced him to a crawl. Later, he seemed to rethink part of the course he had plotted, and I closed right up on his tail while he worked out a new way of getting from some unknown point A to point B. Caradoc’s mapping had held up perfectly until then, and the fact that it had finally led him into quicksand was no fault of theirs. Mapping the Halcyon Drift is an essentially optimistic task.

  The bad storms which Alachakh had avoided by his course amendment were encroaching upon my field of view to my left. A chaotic fuzz became steadily larger inside the hood. Well before it threatened to touch the ship, its presence was hurting my eyes. Alachakh brought his velocity up to ten thou, obviously planning on outrunning the monster. I had no alternative but to follow him. There were only about six or eight minutes separating the ships, but the storms were threatening all kinds of evil. I took the Swan up to eighteen thou before I was sure we’d beat the bad weather.

  The high velocity involved penalties of its own. The distortion waves coiling away from Alachakh’s tail caught us hard, and tried to turn us inside out. The bird used my reflexes to flip the pressure aside while I debated the slimness of our chances. I shouted Rothgar to full attention and played tricks with the thrust, hoping he could keep the flux under a tight rein. I had to let the g-field go at one point in order to ride a kink in the wave. If there’d been temporal deterioration melded with the warp, we would have lost all our flux, or been badly crippled.

  As it was, we were kicked high and wide. It was like being tossed by a bull. There was only fragmentary pain during the seconds we were held by the warp, but the real bang came when we were free again. We were all wrong-way-everywhere. I felt like I was being beaten up comprehensively in a matter of microseconds. It took everything I had
to right the ship and get our g back.

  When I’d eased back to a comfortable velocity and resettled the Swan on Alachakh’s trail, I spared the time to apologise.

  “With luck,” I added, “There shouldn’t be many moments as rough as that one.” The hurt showed in my voice—much to my surprise. The pain had been just a matter of fact. I’d had to bear it, because I couldn’t spare the time to bend to it.

  The pain was soon gone again, though, and things became relatively easy for a time.

  The Hymnia began her steady gain once more. Alachakh was impatient. He wanted to reach his appointment with death early. I didn’t know how much further we had to go, but our destination had to be inside the core, which meant another day or thereabouts. I tried to guess how much punishment we’d have taken if we were the Hymnia; it wasn’t a pleasant thought. I became uncomfortably sure that Alachakh simply wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die—achieving nothing—and that bleep was going to carry his last despairing cry: the co-ordinates of the Lost Star and the mapped course for getting to her.

  As the time passed, I wondered if the Khormon would even spare the time to rest. He must need to stop, I thought, even to give him a chance. Whatever elixir of life is draining into his veins, he can’t keep going forever. He must make a drop soon. Caradoc must have plotted the worlds if they’d mapped this channel. He must know of somewhere he could set down. I was so dead tired, I even began to think that he ought to stop for my sake.

  And eventually, when patience had all but been strained too far, he slowed to a crawl, and fell away toward a star-system. We followed her down. I knew that even on the surface I’d be on call at every moment. But if trouble came, it would come slowly. I’d have time to wake up and run. In the Halcyon Drift, it can be a great relief simply knowing that you don’t face instantaneous disintegration.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The landfall was a ball of bare rock about the size of Earth’s moon. Airless and completely lifeless, completely devoid of character and identity.

  The instant I closed down the drive, I called the Hymnia.

  “Is she still in one piece?” I asked Alachakh, somewhat breathless after the release of tension.

  “We fare well,” he said. “And you?”

  “Unscathed,” I said. “But you don’t fare well and I know it. How bad is the bleeding?”

  “We can contain it. Cuvio and I can direct some time to revitalising the unit, now we are down. She will fly again, and fly high. Don’t worry.”

  “Can you make it to the core?”

  “Yes, I think so. Tomorrow. There will be no more stops.”

  “Take it easy.”

  “I can’t. It has to be tomorrow. Once we have landed, we can never take off.”

  “You are in bad shape, then?”

  “Shape enough for our purposes, I hope. We have only one thrust to make, and we are home. You must make another drop before entering the core, or go into a tight orbit around a safe sun. I will transmit you the co-ordinates of the worlds which I know, and you may take your choice.”

  “And what will you be doing?”

  “Don’t worry. The trail will be clear. You can follow me when you are able. But remember that you have to come out again. Take care of yourself.”

  “How far is it?” I asked him.

  I could almost see him smile. “Twenty-eight hours to the core. Twelve or thirteen within. If I do not reach it then the signal will tell you all you need to know. If you want to know more than that, you will have to come to me when the Hymnia dies. I hope she will not be blasted all over the core as thin dust.”

  “Good luck, Alachakh,” I said.

  “I hope that you do not need luck, my friend,” he replied. “I hope that your ship is more reliable than luck.”

  I closed the circuit, and lay back in the chair for a moment or two. I unclasped, and stretched my limbs. But I didn’t leave the cradle.

  “Is anybody dead?” I asked. All four were in the control room. They were all watching me.

  “No,” said delArco.

  “Good.”

  “Will he make it?” the captain wanted to know.

  “No.”

  He breathed a sigh of relief. He’d never liked the idea of being beaten to the Lost Star. It had been all I could do to make him comply with necessity. I felt sure that if I’d given him the time to confer with Charlot there’d have been trouble. I knew that Charlot would never forgive me that usurping of his authority, but the situation was practically a fait accompli by now, and it was—when all was said and done -the only rational course of action.

  “I’m going to sleep here,” I said. “I need something to clean yesterday’s shot out of my system and set me up again for the morning.”

  “I’ll see to it,” said Eve.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Johnny. He nodded. I knew that Rothgar could and would take care of himself. “Get some deep sleep,” I advised Johnny. “Take something to make sure.”

  Eve came over and handed me a draught of health-restorer.

  “You the doctor as well?” I asked her. “The captain’s supposed to be the guy with the know-how.”

  “I’ve been trained in space drugs,” she assured me.

  “Great,” I said, then added—glancing at the captain—“And I suppose they also serve who only stand and wait.”

  “What are our chances?” asked delArco patiently.

  I decided there wasn’t much point in letting him worry too much. “There’s nothing can stop us tomorrow except a thousand to one freak,” I told him. “I can’t say for sure about the core. But it shouldn’t be essentially different from what we’ve already suffered. Just more so. I think we can handle it.”

  “So it’s all ours,” he said. There was no quality in his voice—it was dead flat. He didn’t want me to think that he was displaying greed.

  “That’s right.”

  “What about Caradoc?”

  I shrugged. He knew full well that Caradoc wouldn’t have made it yet. Ramrods are dead slow. They could be within a couple of light-years and we’d still beat them.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Captain,” I reassured him. “It’s all easy. We’ll win the game.”

  “You don’t sound as if you want to,” said Eve.

  “That won’t stop us either,” I said. “Now get me a light sleeper. Something that won’t hang around tomorrow morning. The stuff in the pink wrapper’s what I usually use. That’ll do.”

  She winced at the mode of reference. In actual fact, I knew perfectly well what the drug’s name was, but in the training schools they teach liner jockeys to be polite to chemicals, and I always avoid school methods whenever possible.

  Eve prepared the sleeper, and everyone else drifted out of the control room.

  As I took the beaker from her and handed back the empty one, I asked her what she was doing on board the ship.

  “I’m a member of the crew,” she said.

  “You said you were monitoring for Charlot. You aren’t. The monitor was set up by delArco. DelArco clears it and checks it. You haven’t even been near it.”

  “We lied to you,” she said. “I’m here because I insisted.”

  “And why did you do that?”

  “Because this is my ship, Grainger. I was the first to fly her. I went to school on Penaflor, by the way. A school for pilots.”

  I was surprised, and I wanted to laugh. But I didn’t, because at the same time I realised what it must have meant for her to hand over a ship she had flown to someone else. Taxi driver or not, she’d felt the ship just as I had.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I demanded.

  “After what you said about liner jockeys? Besides which, when we first met, you made it abundantly clear that you didn’t want to know anything about any of us. How would you have reacted if I’d told you I was a space pilot too?”

  “I’d have laughed,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she sa
id, mimicking my cocksure tone. “Now drink your Mickey Finn.”

  If you could slam a spaceship door, she would have. I drank my Mickey Finn.

  Almost instantly—or so it seemed—somebody began shaking me. I came to life rapidly, thinking that something must be wrong. But the sense of urgency wasn’t there. Johnny was rousing me in a normal, unhurried fashion.

  I had to stand up to ease the cramp out of my body. I glanced at my watch. It was eight hours to the minute since we had set down.

  “Alachakh just lifted,” said Johnny.

  “He didn’t call?”

  “No.”

  “Just like him.” I eased myself back into the cradle, but didn’t reaffix the sensory hook-up or the hood. “Get me some solid food,” I said. “Got to get my gut working properly.”

  “It’s ready,” he said. “Eve’ll bring it up.”

  “Good,” I said. “Given a year or two of practice, this may yet turn out to be a reasonable imitation of a spaceship crew.” Eve brought me the gruel and I shovelled it down at top speed. It’s not that it tastes bad, or anything like that, it’s simply that it hasn’t the character to be worthy of any more attention. Eating in deep-space is purely functional.

  Within minutes, I’d woken up completely and felt fit and ready to tackle the Drift. We had as much behind us as in front of us—in terms of mileage, at least. There was nothing to fear any more, provided that I kept my eyes open and my wits alert.

  And, in fact, day two went almost exactly the same as day one. It was fast and tricky, but it never looked like flooring us. There was dirt in vast quantities—the further we went, the denser the clouds. But only dust, calm dust, which rustled softly against my wings. The distortional effects grew steadily worse, but familiarity bred sufficient confidence and facility for my task in flying through it remained more or less at the same level of difficulty. I suppose it was easier to handle than I’d had any right to expect, but I wasn’t offering any thanks to fortune. We didn’t need luck. Storms we saw in plenty, but none chased us. We took a battering once, about twelve hours into the day, from bad swirling dust, which hurt me a bit as it peppered my face and burned my arms, but the strain in my mind wasn’t nearly so bad, and that made up for the hardship.