Hooded Swan, Book I: Halcyon Drift

by Brian Stableford

  Alachakh was indomitable. The Hymnia seemed to be taking it all in her stride. She was a fraction slower than the previous day, rarely touching five thou. It was still far above what I’d previously considered to be prudent for Drift work, but on the basis of yesterday’s experiences it was practical, if not wise.

  It was twenty-seven tiring hours before I decided to part company and take a break before we made our final hop. When I began to drop, the bleep gave a kind of strangled burp. I played it back through the recorder, suitably slowed down. It said:

  “Make good use of your time. Everything is well. I may see you again tomorrow.”

  I’d slowed down the bleep enough to hear the words clearly, but I’d missed absolute synchronisation with the recording speed. It didn’t sound like Alachakh’s voice. It was fast and high. It had an almost hysterical note that couldn’t have been further away from the calm, deep tone which he would have used. The important word, I knew, was ‘may’. It was practically a guarantee that Alachakh wouldn’t make it. He knew the Hymnia couldn’t do it, but he was too polite to say so.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Don’t say goodbye yet.”

  I set down on the nightside of the innermost planet of one of the suns Alachakh had bleeped co-ordinates for during the previous night. It was as desolate as our last stopover, which pleased me. The world which is devoid of everything is the world in which you can place most trust. And when the core of the Halcyon Drift is only an hour’s flight away, you need as much trust as you can muster.

  I took a long look at the sky, using the ship’s eyes. The core sprawled across the entire sky, filled with coloured light and roiling with storms. In there, I thought, are Caradoc’s thirty ramrods. And the Lost Star. And Alachakh. And the corpses of six or eight ships which tried to do what he—and I—are trying to do.

  Roll on tomorrow, contributed the wind, with more enthusiasm than I had. We’re almost there.

  This is no time for you to return to the fold, I reminded him. The fate of this ship depends exclusively on my peace of mind.

  As you wish, replied the whisper. But I’ll be here. Don’t forget me.

  How could I?

  I unclasped myself. Eve already had the pick-me-up ready. It was sharp to the taste, but sapped away all the pain and tension within minutes. When I turned to look around, delArco was busy with the monitor. “Nice collection of snapshots?” I commented. “Make sure the folks back home don’t miss a thing.”

  He glanced briefly in my direction, vouchsafing no reply.

  I called Rothgar, since he hadn’t appeared, to make sure nothing was wrong. He sounded unhappy, but he assured me that the drive was in perfect health. I contemplated leaving the cradle and going to my bunk, but decided that I’d better stick to the formalities. The moment I turned my back, something was bound to go wrong.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I didn’t take a knockout drop, but I slept peacefully for nearly thirteen hours. When I woke up, the first thing I did was to listen for the faint, steady sound of the Hymnia’s bleep. It was clear and bell-like.

  Johnny was on watch. He turned to face me when I sat up.

  “He’s made it after all!” I said. “He said twelve or thirteen. He must be there by now.”

  Johnny shook his head. “I’ve been watching the trace, and he’s still moving. It’s been dead slow for a while now. I think it’s more difficult than he anticipated.”

  “You can’t tell that,” I said. But I checked with the instruments, and he was right. Alachakh was still flying transcee. And while I sat there, peering at the trace he was making, the Hymnia screamed.

  The ship’s dying wail cut across the note of the bleep like the hopeless cry of a child. Though the bleep itself was hardly noticeable, the scream was enough to wake the dead. DelArco heard it, from his cabin. As he burst into the control room, the scream was replaced by a garbled sequence of noises. Then it cut out entirely.

  “We’re off,” I said, sliding into the cradle and clasping up.

  “Rothgar!” I bawled into the microphone. There was no answer. “Get him up!” I told Johnny. “And Eve. I want the drip rigging for feed. I can’t spare the time for gruel. I’m lifting in three minutes and everybody goddamn better be ready.”

  “Aren’t you going to play that back?” demanded delArco.

  “No,” I retorted irritably. “I am not going to play it back. I’m going after the Hymnia first. The Lost Star can wait. If the ship’s still in one piece, Alachakh still might be alive. Maybe we can give him a lift.”

  “Let’s at least make sure...,” he began.

  “Go to hell,” I told him.

  “I’m here,” Rothgar’s voice came over the phone, as I adjusted the hood. “Get to work.”

  I got to work, ignoring delArco. If he said anything more, I didn’t hear it.

  I almost lifted too fast, and wobbled the g-field, but I held her and she slipped into transcee as smooth as silk. I gave her every ounce I could, and I could feel that it was too much. But it wasn’t going to take me thirteen hours to reach the Hymnia if I could help it. I owed him five hours at least, six if I could clip the trip by that much.

  Before I even realised it, we were inside the core, and I felt the not-so-tender caresses of the vast distortion fields which enfolded a globe of space many light-years in diameter.

  The strain was steady, and the changing of the matrix gentle but forceful, like a tidal flow. I knew the effect on both the Hooded Swan and on myself would be cumulative. And the faster I flew, the faster it would accumulate. At two thou, it might take a day to cut to our heart. At four thou it might take six hours. I couldn’t tell exactly how far away Alachakh was, nor what additional peril might lie in between. I decided that seven or eight hours at a steady one thou should reach her, without hurting us permanently.

  Within an hour, I knew things were worse than I’d guessed.

  “Ready for trouble?” I asked Rothgar.

  “What kind?”

  “The Hymnia’s left one hell of a wake. It’s disturbing the local field and setting up eddies. It’s slowly building up to create havoc. There are time-mutilations bubbling all around us.”

  “No way around?”

  “No way around,” I confirmed. “I’ve got to stick to the trace or I’ll never find him in this warped space. There’s only one thing I can do and that’s to ride on the distortion flow. It means going fast, but if I can stay with the current instead of cutting across it, it won’t hurt us.”

  The one flaw to that argument, of course, was that the basic orientation of the field was crosswise to our path. We’d have to ride inside the storm, rendering ourselves vulnerable to its whims.

  “I’m going to try to make the storm-wind blow the way we want to go,” I told Rothgar. “I’m going to give the storm an eye.” I licked my lips. “We’ve got to blast a hole behind us with the cannon and jump at seven or eight thou to avoid being blown through it. If the flux jams we’ll be so much smoke. And half a million years ago at that.”

  “OK,” said Rothgar calmly. I’d just told him to do the impossible. Like a good spacer, he didn’t question the order.

  “Count me down to the blast,” I told him. He began the count at twenty, which was too high for my liking, but it was his drive. In the meantime, I tried to balance on the edge of the vortex that was swirling in around us.

  At five I began to run. Two thou, two-fifty, three. As the count closed in on zero, I flipped her out to seven, opened the atomic cannon, and shut my eyes. Less than a second, I held the leap. I shut the cannon and closed back to three thou, holding tight and praying that I could keep her in the bounds of the known universe.

  With her body contorted like a spitted fish, we writhed in agony. I was held by the clasps, I couldn’t yield to the tortuous demands of my muscles. I felt my spine bend and my limbs tried to flail. I knew that if a bone broke we’d be dead. The shield was all but stripped away by the jump, but I pushed just enough powe
r in to hold it while we cart-wheeled. Dust drilled into me, and I could feel blood on my arms. But the ship didn’t bleed—she was strong as well as lithe, her veins were bedded deep. I could feel the power faltering and I knew the flux was going to catch. I prayed that Rothgar could take her through the crisis. I fought for her as we climaxed, and we won. She rode the shockwave.

  I’d turned the perversion of Drift-space to our advantage. It was running with us, helping us, carrying us.

  “Damage?” I asked sharply.

  “Don’t do it again,” advised Rothgar. “If you open the cannons at transcee again, you’ll lose them for good.”

  I redirected my attention to feeling the exact strength and motion of the storm-wind. The instruments indicated my speed at one-thirty, but I reckoned, as far as reaching the Hymnia was concerned, we were making the best part of two thou. If conditions held, we’d be there in four hours.

  Naturally enough, conditions didn’t hold. They grew steadily worse as things reverted to their previous state. I had only made a little hole. For hours I was riding one set of waves and fighting another. I slowed down, but I was still taking punishment, and so was the ship. But the constant ache in my body was cancelled by the sheer determination to go where I wanted to go. I was at war with the Drift now, and my respect for its inherent dangers was becoming a far more personal feeling—aggression, even hatred. There was an elation to be found in slashing through the cords of contorted space. There comes a stage in any battle when you forget the pain, and even the reason behind your motives. You just slog on and on, a creature of pure direction. I guess that having an empty, sterile, crippled mind helped me a lot just then.

  It was as well that I wasn’t too far away from the object of that particular thrust, because the ship might have cracked up about me while I was in that kind of a mood. There was no courage or heroism involved, any more than there was caution or patience.

  To be honest, I can remember very little of what happened during that ride. I know that it took me exactly five hours and two minutes to reach the Hymnia’s crack-up point, because the instruments later told me so. I wasn’t aware of the passage of the time.

  The plasm apparently clogged twice, but both times Rothgar kept the relaxation field steady and effective for the vital instants. I don’t know how he did it. He was working miracles.

  All in all, we were very lucky.

  The Hymnia was drifting free—dead as could be, but still intact.

  She was drifting fast on a tachyonic wind, so I couldn’t slow to subcee and call her. I had to use the drive to match her, at nearly total relaxation. I knew we couldn’t sustain that for long, after what we’d already thrown away through the cannons.

  I couldn’t transfer from one ship to the other while we were travelling faster than light. I couldn’t hang around forever hoping that she’d lose momentum, or that the wind would reverse its direction.

  “I’m going to nudge her,” I announced, “and take her off that wind.”

  That was dangerous too, but the wind itself wouldn’t hurt me and I ran no risks from dust or distortion at this velocity. Provided that I didn’t injure myself fumbling with the Hymnia, I thought we could do it.

  So I did.

  Gently, I caught her wings in mine, and curled her around from the wind. I made a slightly rough tachyonic transfer, still contriving to hold her, and then I let her free again.

  I got no reply when I called her. If Alachakh was alive, he was not conscious. Ditto Cuvio. The question was, could I open her up from the outside? Some people valued privacy more than safety, and it showed in the way they designed their spaceships.

  I unclasped, and beckoned Eve. I sat her down in the cradle and gave her the hood.

  “I have to go over there,” I said. “I don’t think that at this stage anything can go radically wrong. But if something comes up, she’s all yours. Don’t wait for me. If you pray hard enough for bad weather, you just might get your job back.”

  She went pale, and shook her head.

  “Thanks,” I said. “It’s nice to feel wanted.”

  I grabbed Johnny as I went out.

  “The lines working perfectly?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I still want you in the lock. If anything goes wrong, start reeling as fast as you can.”

  I donned my suit, climbed into the airlock, clipped my line, and dived out. I didn’t take the trouble to say goodbye.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The airlock was already open. I thought for a moment that somebody might have come out, but of course that was absurd. It was open because they were expecting company. Specifically me.

  I climbed in, shut the outer door and flooded the chamber with air. But I didn’t take off my helmet. The ship might be holed and leaking for all I knew. There was a pressure gauge in the lock, but it was calibrated in Khormon and I couldn’t read it. I opened the inner door.

  There was a corridor curling away around the waist of the ship, and a ladder leading both up and down from the platform on which I stood. The ship was orientated vertically rather than horizontally, as was the Hooded Swan. I climbed the ladder. The gravity field was still working, which was a hopeful sign. It meant that the power unit wasn’t wholly dead, even if the drive had cut out. One advantage of the hopper drive was the fact that it was entirely separate from the ship’s internal power circuit. Which meant that heat and light stayed on and life could be maintained. Why, then, had the bleep cut out? I wondered. Had Alachakh cut it off (in which case he must have survived the crash)? But it was more likely that the cut-out had been automatic—that the bleep had been programmed to stop as soon as it had delivered its last cry and its vital message. That marked the end of its purpose—the Hymnia’s path was recorded, its death signalled, its knowledge passed on. Old or not, Alachakh still had a tidy mind.

  In the control room, Alachakh reclined in his big contoured cradle, clasped there and looking for all the world as if he were flying the ship. But the ship was dead, and so was he.

  He wasn’t broken up by the climatic burst of energy which had destroyed the drive, but simply drained away with the power pile. In all likelihood, he had lived for some hours after the disaster. But I had come too late, and he had known that I would. Pinned to the instrument panel was a letter. It wasn’t addressed, but I knew who it was for. For the time being, though, I ignored it.

  I descended the full length of the ladder to the engine room, to make sure that Cuvio, too, was beyond all help.

  The drive unit had burst, and he had been burned to a cinder by a flood of hot fuel. I shut the hatchway quickly, to seal in the heat. The radiation would be contained within the sheath of the pile. It was only the raw mass of the conversion compound which had escaped. The same thing had happened on board the Javelin after she went down. The scene was strongly reminiscent.

  I went back up to the control room and looked once again at Alachakh’s corpse. It was taut and hard with rigor mortis. In all probability, I thought, Alachakh’s death had been no more peaceful than that of his engineer. Just as the pain of the Hooded Swan was my pain, the suffering of the Hymnia had been his. I opened the letter, and read it.

  My Friend,

  As you will guess, this letter was written some days ago, on Hallsthammer. I wrote it while Cuvio was delivering the device to your ship, immediately after I spoke to you in the tower building. Now you are reading it, of course, I am dead. I speak these words as a dead man.

  A year ago, I found a world out beyond what humans call the rim. It is a world which some of the Khor-monsa know to exist, and which others suspect to exist. It is perpetuated in our language only by the word Myastrid, which refers to what you might call ‘never-never-land”.

  It is the world from which the race now known as Khormon originally came. The evidence exists—on Khor—but it has been suppressed, and—wherever possible—destroyed. The Khor-monsa, for the most part, believe themselves to be exactly that—men of Khor. We have
told lies to all other spacefaring races. It is a small matter of pride.

  I ask you not to reveal this information to any other person of whatever race. I ask you not for my sake, but for the sake of the Khor-monsa who do not know, and those who do not wish others to know. I will not tell you where Myastrid is to be found. I hope that it will not be found. There are some of my friends there now, trying to make sure that it soon will not exist to be found. We wish to obliterate Myastrid entirely, save as a nonsense word used only by children.

  We are a relic race, who now call ourselves the Khor-monsa. Our home was lost but our colony on Khor survived. We have found no trace of any other colonies, but ships are searching now, beyond the rim.

  The Lost Star also found Myastrid. I found unmistakable traces of her in several of the dead cities—you humans are a vain people, and like to leave your mark on every world which you visit. I do not know for sure what the ship took away from Myastrid, but I am sure that the search conducted by her crew was comprehensive enough to leave them in no doubt as to the identity of the native race of Myastrid. This led to my reckless and—if you get to read this—futile attempt to reach the wreck in the Halcyon core. I did not want to steal her cargo but to destroy it. I do not know, as I write this, how close I came to my goal.

  The Lost Star is now yours. Her cargo belongs to you and to the others on board your ship. The secret of Myastrid is yours also. It would be impolite for me to ask you to do with the cargo as I would have done. You may need the cargo. You may stand to gain a great deal by returning it to your employers.