Sorus obeyed, even though turning her guns off her attacker was as good as suicide. “You heard him, targ,” she snapped. “Get the gap scout. Hit her now.”
In a rush of keys, a flurry of desperation, targ did what she told him.
She obeyed Taverner—but not because she feared him. She’d left that old apprehension behind; or it’d been burned out of her by hope and extremity. Soar was too badly hurt; couldn’t absorb much more punishment. Nothing remained in Sorus Chatelaine’s heart except her prayers.
She obeyed because she thought she knew what was going to happen next.
And again she was right. The instant Soar’s matter cannon spoke, another wild tsunami of distortion struck: so much random boson fury that every spectrum which Soar’s sensors and sifters could receive dissolved in chaos, as if the entire material existence of Free Lunch and Trumpet and the surrounding swarm were a quantum joke.
The gap scout must have done that. She had a defense against matter cannon. The cops were developing weapons Sorus had never heard of. Weapons she could hardly imagine.
Nevertheless she was ready. Trumpet had already produced too many surprises. Sorus didn’t intend to be caught by another.
A fraction of a second after scan failed, she shouted at helm, “Veer off! Get us out of here—hard and fast!”
She’d watched the man work for years: she knew he was good. He didn’t need to be told that he could trust scan data which was only a few seconds old to help him pick his way through the hurtling torrent of rocks.
Instantly thrust slammed her to the side; strained her ribs to the cracking point on the arm of her g-seat. At the edges her vision seemed to drain away into darkness as thick as blood. Around her, her people fought g to run their boards. Taverner was forced to flex his knees in order to hold his position. The pressure snatched his eyeshades off his face, shattered them to splinters on one of the bulkheads.
While Free Lunch and Trumpet were as blind as Soar, Sorus’ ship swung away from the battle. If Free Lunch fired again, scan couldn’t see it—and the ship didn’t feel it.
As Soar finished her swerve and came to a new heading, Sorus settled more comfortably into the support of her g-seat. Another few seconds, that was all she needed: if the ship burned for a few more seconds without a fatal miscalculation, a killing collision, scan would begin to clear. Then she could look around her; estimate her chances of turning in time to intercept Trumpet’s escape beyond the covering fire of the gap scout’s ally. If helm kept the ship safe that long; if Sorus could go on breathing, resist unconsciousness, for those seconds—
Without warning Soar faltered as if she’d stumbled into a wall. Her thrust seemed to sag, leak away. Sorus feared for an instant that the ship had holed a tube. But at the same time g increased. Between one heartbeat and the next Sorus felt her weight double.
“Gravity!” data croaked. “Jesus, that’s gravity] There must be a black hole back there!”
A black hole? Here? All of a sudden? Sorus couldn’t understand it—and didn’t try. Black hole or not, its pull was tremendous. And any force strong enough to suck at Soar this hard would affect everything around her. Already metal thunder pounded through the ship as asteroids of all sizes hammered the hull, trying to drive straight through Soar in their hurry to obey the hunger which summoned them.
If she couldn’t break free, break free fast, she might be dead before the black hole took her. The rush of rock might smash her to pieces.
For no reason Sorus could imagine, Taverner said in a constricted tone, “An induced singularity. A weapon.
“We—I”—he had difficulty referring to himself—“I have heard of such things. Singularity grenades. When I was human. They were spoken of in rumors. It was said that they were impractical. Our research concurs.”
Impractical? Sorus raged. If a black hole ate her ship, no one aboard would give a shit whether it was impractical.
Humankind endured by being impractical.
Uselessly she noticed that the screens were clearing. The force behind her drank down bosons even faster than it swallowed asteroids. Soar would be able to watch herself die.
“Full power, helm,” Sorus ordered urgently, pitching her voice to carry through the thunder. A vise of g held her chest: she sounded like she was trying to scream. “Don’t fight it directly—angle around it. If it’s a black hole, maybe we can pick up enough lateral velocity to sling ourselves loose.”
That would expose Soar’s flank to the stone torrent; make her a bigger target. But it gave her her best chance to escape.
“Stop charging,” Sorus gasped at targ. “Feed your power back to the drive. Matter cannon won’t save us now.”
If anything saved the ship, it would be the fact that she’d turned away before the black hole came into existence.
The thunder swelled to a din—an endless battery, stone on metal; slower than cannon, but no less fatal. She couldn’t hear. In another moment she wouldn’t be able to think. G sang in her bones like a subsonic drill: she felt them turning to powder. Her skin seemed to flow and gather like hot paraffin. How long before a rock massive enough to open the hull landed? How long before the event horizon caught her; before hunger and time carried her backward to her death?
She didn’t want to die like this. She couldn’t move her hands, had no chance whatsoever to reach the impact pistol at her belt. And she’d sworn, sworn, that she would kill Milos Taverner before she died. Blast him straight in his fat face—one small payment for the long debt of harm she owed the Amnion.
She didn’t want to die like this!
Prayer—
—was sometimes answered.
Slowly at first, almost too slowly to be felt, Soar began to win free.
Curving around the depths of the gravity well, she took on centrifugal inertia to combat the pull. At last the black hole’s own force helped swing her hard enough to carry outward. Scant moments snatched away from the dark by will and yearning gradually drew Sorus Chatelaine’s command out of the well.
The hammering eased as gravity receded. Fewer asteroids answered the singularity’s hunger. They answered less avidly. Sorus was sure that one whole side of her ship had been flattened; that every gun, antennae, port, receptor, and vane on that flank had been beaten to metal ruin. Virtually every damage system and warning Soar possessed cried alarm. Yet the decompression klaxon was silent. The ship may have been battered almost to scrap, but she hadn’t been breached.
As g let her go, Sorus started breathing again. For a moment the return of blood to her eyes and brain overloaded her optic nerves. Then her vision struggled like scan out of a phosphene storm, and she could see again.
Blips on all the screens shouted amber panic. Her command indicators and readouts burned fearfully, as if her board were full of St. Elmo’s fire. But Soar was alive.
Helm was already at work, firing unmodulated bursts of thrust to control the ship’s headlong trajectory. Soar staggered as she plunged, yawing and pitching while helm fought to impose a course. And a moment later scan resumed feeding useful data to the helm board. After that his efforts improved. One last clang ended the assault of rocks.
Taverner remained in front of the command station, braced there with one hand under Sorus’ console. With his eyeshades gone, she could see his alien eyes.
He wasn’t looking at her. Instead he studied the incomprehensible readouts on his SCRT while his fingers sped across the keys. Talking to Calm Horizons. Instantaneous communications. If he suffered from the effects of so much g, he didn’t show it.
Sorus decided to ignore him. Whatever he was doing—whatever he wanted—could wait.
Sipping air past the pain in her chest, she breathed, “Data, give me damage.” Then, because she hurt too much to concentrate on everything at once, she added, “Keep it simple. Just the highlights for now.”
Blips on the command board signaled for her attention as well. They, too, could wait.
“Not good, Captain,�
�� data croaked. Roughly he scrubbed his eyes; squinted at his readouts. “Shit, I can hardly see.
“No decompression,” he reported, “but we took a hell of a beating.” He recited a list of vanes, guns, receptors. “All gone. We’re deaf, dumb, and blind on that side. Structural damage to both hulls. Metal stress way past our tolerances.” After a momentary hitch, he went on, “We’ve lost a 30° arc of maneuvering thrust. And one of our main tubes was crushed flat.
“In clear space,” he concluded, “we could probably limp along for a while. We might even be able to pick up enough velocity to use the gap drive. But it wouldn’t do us any good. We don’t have the control to choose a heading we can count on.
“Navigating this swarm will be like playing pinball.”
Sorus listened to him as if he weren’t pronouncing a sentence of death. The control to choose a heading we can count on. Gap capability meant nothing without precise heading and velocity. In other words, Soar couldn’t escape the Massif-5 system. She couldn’t save herself.
To keep the ship out of human hands, Taverner would order self-destruct. The Amnion were like that. If Sorus refused, he would release the airborne mutagens which he’d prepared in the scrubbers. Then everyone aboard would be changed—and his orders would be carried out.
Yet Sorus heard nothing but hope in data’s report. Obliquely and unpredictably, her prayers were still being answered.
“Where are we?” she asked scan quietly.
The woman looked up from her board. “Hard to say, Captain. Suddenly our charts are”—she tried to chuckle—“out-of-date,”
Perhaps she, too, understood something about hope.
“But at a guess, we’re here.” She routed a schematic to one of the displays. Soar appeared to be roughly thirty k past the limits of the singularity’s gravity well—a considerable distance off the departure which dead Lab Center had assigned to Trumpet. “I can’t speak for helm, but we ought to be able to find our way from here. It just won’t be as clear as the course Lab Center gave us.”
Sorus nodded. “Any sign of Trumpet? Any ships at all?”
“Not that I can see,” scan replied. “As far as I can gauge it, Free Lunch was sitting right at the center of the singularity. She must have been the first thing it ate. And Trumpet wasn’t as far away as we were. If she survived, she’s got God on her side. It would take a goddamn miracle.”
Sorus smiled at the woman. No question about it: the scan first understood something. Her rueful answering grin told her captain that Sorus wasn’t alone.
One more answer, that’s all I need, she thought. Just one. Is it too much to ask?
She took a moment to consider the blips flashing on her board. Most of them warned her about dangers she already knew; threats she expected. But one came as a surprise.
Someone had used an airlock. Specifically the airlock to the cargo bay which had been breached by debris from the destruction of Thanatos Minor.
Shit! That was insane. All her people knew better than to leave their g-restraints in combat. And any sentient being knew better than to enter a breached cargo bay under these conditions.
Nevertheless it was unmistakable. Someone had opened the airlock; used it; closed it again. Without sealing it. According to her status readout, the sealing mechanism was inoperative.
No. She didn’t believe it. It was probably just stress damage—too much g, too much pounding. She’d seen stranger readings that turned out to be false.
And she didn’t have the timé or energy to worry about it. Her scant remaining resources were needed for prayer—
Shaking her head, she shifted her attention to Milos Taverner and inquired, “What do you want us to do?”
He didn’t glance up at her. He was fixed to his SCRT, feeding and receiving data. Nevertheless he replied promptly, as if he’d heard everything she’d said. As if like God he had the power to grant miracles—
“Captain Chatelaine, analysis of Trumpet’s thrust-to-mass ratio during her escape from Thanatos Minor suggests that her drive is adequate to retrieve her from the singularity’s event horizon. It is conceivable that she has survived. Indeed, it seems plausible that she ensured her capacity to survive before she activated her weapon. That is—”
He faltered as if he’d come to a translation barrier. His grasp on human language, like his ability to comprehend human patterns of thought, drained out of him with increasing rapidity. After a moment, however, he seemed to find a way to reach back to his former self; his former mind.
“That is,” he repeated awkwardly, “consistent with what I know of Captain Thermopyle. He would sacrifice his companions and even his ship to survive.” The idea may have pained him. “We must act on the assumption that Trumpet is alive.”
More strongly he continued, “Calm Horizons has taken her position to guard against Trumpet’s egress from the swarm. It is probable that she will be able to destroy the gap scout. However, she is heavily engaged by a UMCP warship.” Again he paused to grope for translation. “You would call the vessel a ‘Scalpel-class cruiser.’ At present the warship’s cannon cannot penetrate Calm Horizons’ defenses. Yet the warship’s presence diminishes the likelihood that Calm Horizons will be able to ensure Trumpet’s destruction.
“We are instructed to advance to the edge of the swarm so that we may watch for the gap scout—and also so that we may assist Calm Horizons. I have the coordinates we must attain.
“The cost of Trumpet’s survival is too high to be met. She, must be destroyed.”
Yes. Sorus could hardly contain herself. Yes!
Thank God Taverner wasn’t looking at her. If he’d glanced up then, he would almost certainly have seen the quick flare of glee and fury in her eyes, the sudden, killing hope on her face.
Everything she asked had been given to her.
Simply to preserve appearances, mask her joy, she rasped back, “This is your fault. I hope you remember that. If you hadn’t stopped me from killing her when we had the chance, you would be on your way home by now.”
Now at last Taverner raised his gaze to hers. His alien eyes never blinked. “Calm Horizons is aware of the decisions which have been made, and of their outcome.”
“In that case”—she turned away because she didn’t trust herself to conceal how she felt—“we’d better get going.
“Helm, this Amnioni will give you the coordinates. Getting there won’t be easy, but you can do it. If you engage a little rotation, you’ll have enough maneuvering thrust to point us in the right direction.”
“Right, Captain.” Helm spent a few seconds keying commands. Then he gestured Taverner to his board so that the Amnioni could enter the coordinates.
Taverner didn’t delay. Apparently he saw no reason to thwart Sorus now. Releasing his grip on her console, he let himself drift in the direction of the helm station.
While his back was turned, Sorus met scan’s look. Just for a moment the two women grinned at each other like idiots.
DAVIES
He came out of the darkness of anoxia and acceleration wondering why he was still alive.
Stupid. He was forever wondering why he was still alive. What was the matter with him? Didn’t he ever learn? Wondering changed nothing; helped nothing. Only the fact mattered.
G had let go of him, and every bone and sinew in his body hurt, but he endured among the living.
No, g hadn’t let go. He still weighed more than he should have. His pulse seemed to cut and scrape in his veins, as though his blood were clotted with broken glass. Mortality held him in his g-seat, leaning down pitilessly on all his pains. Someone had driven spikes through the cast into his arm; into his ribs. He wasn’t sure that he could lift his head, or swallow. He was doing his best when he opened his eyes.
At first what he saw didn’t make sense.
Through a migraine of phosphenes and dehydration, he recognized the bridge. That remained constant, at any rate. And the decompression klaxons were silent. He could breathe, as lon
g as he didn’t try to inhale deeply. To that extent, at least, Trumpet remained intact.
But the scan display in front of him seemed to indicate that she wasn’t moving. Thrust said she was: the muted hull-roar of the drive said she was: g said she was. Scan said she wasn’t.
The screens were big enough to see, but his eyes refused to focus on anything smaller: his board’s indicators; the messages on his readouts. Simply lowering his head to get a better look at them hurt too much. He had no idea what was going on.
Respiration whispered around him, as if the air-scrubbers were gasping softly. That didn’t make sense either. He’d never heard scrubbers produce such a sound. When pads were clogged, they sometimes emitted a low, aggrieved sigh, like an asthmatic moan. But never this choked clutch for breath.
He had to move his head; had to.
The pain of tipping his head forward brought tears to his eyes. That helped: when he’d blinked the dampness away, he was able to see more clearly.
His readouts answered his first question. Trumpet was running on automatic, and her failsafes had overridden helm. Too much rock in the way: Morn’s preset instructions would have killed the ship. In self-defense the automatic systems held Trumpet stationary in the swarm, shifting her from side to side only when an asteroid threatened collision.
But she was still in reach of the black hole. Its hunger called to her constantly, urging her backward. She couldn’t refuse unless she used thrust to counter the commanding tug of the gravity well. Fortunately her failsafes provided for that.
Thank God Morn had thought to activate them before she lost consciousness.
Where was the gap scout? Where in relation to Soar and the other ship?—to the singularity and the swarm? Davies hunted scan for information.
No sign of Soar; of any ships at all: that was good. And the black hole was precisely there. But—He gaped, and his heart stung, as he realized that Trumpet had covered less than five k since he’d blacked out. No wonder the black hole still gripped her.
Chaos and Order: The Gap Into Madness Page 70
