by Mark Wandrey
“I’m sorry I lied; I didn’t know how to handle these feelings.”
“You’ve never been afraid before, why now?”
“I really don’t know. I’ve just been feeling different. I get angry for no reason, and now I’m afraid for no reason.”
“Oh,” Minu said, suddenly concerned.
“These feelings are distracting. I was confused about how to handle them and the anxiety I am feeling from the upcoming tactical drive jump.”
“Can you find a way to handle them?”
“I don’t know how.”
“We’ll be here for you. Me, your father, your friends.” Minu smiled and stroked her daughter’s hair. “We need you and believe in you. Do you know that?”
“I think so.”
“Okay, we’ll leave it at that for now.” She glanced at the main map as Lilith reached out and manipulated the script. The course returned to the original. “Will you be okay when we are ready to jump?”
Lilith looked at the map, then at her mother. Minu could see a tiny shiver run up her back. “I would appreciate it if you could be here with me.”
Minu smiled and took her daughter in her arms again. “There is no where I would rather be. Do you want Aaron here too?”
“I’d like this to be just between you and me. Mother and daughter?”
“Okay.”
* * * * *
Chapter 10
April 17th, 534 AE (subjective)
Deep Space, Galactic Frontier
Four hours later, Minu floated in the little CIC with Lilith as the Kaatan precipitated into normal space, quickly slowing below light speed and coming to a relative stop. There were no stars for five light-years in any direction. Lilith admitted there was nothing in the protocol that suggested it was any safer to use the tactical drive in such an extreme deep space void, but it made her less nervous.
“Do you want me to do anything?” Minu asked her, floating a meter to one side.
“Not right now,” Lilith replied, all business. “I need to concentrate. Minu nodded and waited. The chamber went completely dark for a moment, then a pair of script ports appeared, Lilith’s hands dancing in them. The dim blue glow of the flickering script characters illuminated her face, frozen in a mask of concentration.
In the space before her appeared a circular shape, reminiscent of a regular Portal. Script symbols, instantly familiar to Minu, came alive along its perimeter. Just as she’d unlocked the rigged Portal on Sunshine, Lilith reached out and began manipulating the script.
Minu watched for a minute, her mind effortlessly processing what she was seeing. Unlike a lot of the programming and piloting of the Kaatan, this made sense to her. Up to a point. Lilith was programming a destination, like you could manually do with a Portal if you knew the script.
But unlike a regular Portal, the destination was a dizzying, complex coordinate. As she entered the destination, Lilith’s squeezed her eyes to mere slits and perspiration popped out on her forehead.
Finally, she sighed and moved away from the simulated Portal. “Done,” she said simply. The Portal disappeared, and the wall of the CIC displayed a view outside the ship. Darkness and pinpoints of starlight were all they could see, until some of the stars began to move.
In moments a pattern began to form, a circle of stars seemed to be stretching and swirling. Minu gasped as the stars stretched and spun faster and faster until they became a gut-wrenching kaleidoscope.
Lilith’s hand reached out, and Minu was instantly there.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Minu asked.
“No,” was the simple reply. “We are at the mercy of the Weavers and my ability to navigate. The parameters of the programming have thousands of variables, and some of them are beyond my understanding.”
“How do you know it was the right information?”
“I copied the data from records in the database. Using known destinations, I extrapolated the changes needed for a unique jump.”
It made sense to Minu, as much as it could make sense to her limited knowledge.
“According to the instructions of the tactical drive, the Weavers are the biggest safety feature. They would not allow themselves to be harmed.”
“That is comforting.”
“Somewhat. The problem is they are a lot harder to kill than we are. The Weavers are quite happy in the core of a neutron star, while we are not.”
Minu swallowed and looked at the hellish event horizon of the Portal. “Now what?”
“We jump.”
Minu was about to ask how, when the ship came alive. Lilith gestured with her hands and gently the Kaatan moved forward on its impulse drive, the pointed nose pushing toward the event horizon.
Oh shit, Minu thought as it drew closer. Her daughter’s free hand moved again, and the PA system came alive. “All hands, prepare for tactical jump.”
In the other CIC and the various staterooms where the Rasa soldiers waited, everyone braced themselves for the unknown. Lilith took a deep breath and closed her eyes, her grip on Minu’s hand bony but strong.
The tip of the Kaatan touched the unspeakable wrongness, and the universe blinked.
* * *
“Oh no!” Minu gasped, her breath rasping, and her mind spinning uncontrollably.
“Mother!” Lilith cried out, and the two women clutched at each other.
“It’s okay, I’m here,” Minu somehow managed to say through lips that didn’t seem to want to respond to her bidding.
“It was like nothing; there was absolutely nothing!”
Minu nodded and stroked her daughter’s copper hair. “We just ceased to exist. I know, I felt it too.” She spoke to the open air, knowing the ship would record her words and send them throughout the ship. “All hands, report in.”
Aaron reported in first, quite a bit less shaken than his wife and daughter. Minu wasn’t sure what that meant. In quick order, they accounted for the entire crew. Pip was last, though not because of any problems from the jump. He’d been busy examining their stellar coordinates.
“We are exactly where we are supposed to be,” he reported. “Excellent job, Lilith.”
“My thanks,” she managed, though to Minu she still looked more ashen faced than normal. “Quite a few more jumps are ahead if we are to save time en route to Dervish.”
“How could the Kaatan be so effective using these drives?” Minu wondered. “They are so hard on the crew!”
“The Kaatan’s Combat Intelligences were computers, not hybrids like me. They would not be affected as I have been.”
Minu nodded and shook her head to clear the cobwebs. It had been a singularly disconcerting experience.
* * *
In the main CIC, Pip sat back from the simulated navigation console and sighed. Everyone seemed to have been affected differently than he had by the jump. As the ship entered the event horizon, the moment seemed to stretch on forever. His cybernetic implants ceased to function, and for a timeless moment, he was once again a prisoner inside his own brain.
Only it didn’t feel like a moment to him. It felt like a year. Or maybe a thousand years. Then, just as he began to scream at the desolation of his mind, reality returned with a jolt, and his implants came alive again. To everyone else, Pip looked unaffected. But in his soul, he felt utter horror.
After completing the navigation fix to verify their position, he called up the course Lilith had set. Eleven more uses of the tactical drive lay between them and Dervish. And that was with Lilith being conservative, as she slowly became more confident in the drive’s reliability. If she went by the book, she could make a dizzying fourteen jumps back to back and have them there in less than an hour. Pip shivered at the thought, a cold sweat running down his back.
Minu floated into the CIC, a smile on her face, as she drifted to her command chair. “Lilith was a little concerned about the tactical drive, but the concern turned out to be unfounded. Based on the success of the first jump, she’s recalculating the
course with additional jumps.”
“How soon?” Pip asked, not looking away from the screen full of unimportant data before him.
“Two hours. After that—”
“Can we talk?”
She looked at him. Something in his voice caught her off guard. “Sure, go ahead.”
“In private.”
“Okay.”
A minute later they were in the empty galley, sitting on opposite sides of the bare table. “What’s wrong?”
“What makes you think anything is wrong?”
“I’ve known you a long time, Pip. We trudged through the Trials together, attended our first classes to become Chosen together. We received our stars at the same ritual. We taught each other about sex…mostly. And we bled in the same dirt together.”
“Some bled more than others,” he said darkly, staring at the table.
“No one is more aware of that than me, which is why all your closest friends broke the rules and risked their lives to rescue you. So, from someone who knows you better than anyone, what the fuck is wrong?”
Pip sighed and looked up at her, and that was when she saw the fear in his eyes.
“When we went through the jump, it wasn’t easy for me.”
“Wow,” Minu said after he’d finished his account. Was some of it what Lilith had instinctively feared? But her daughter said nothing about a phenomenon similar to what Pip described. “What can we do about it?”
“I have no idea. All I can think of is to go into hibernation. Maybe if Lilith can do the jumps in quick order, I can be knocked out for the whole thing and awakened afterwards.”
“That’s going to mean keeping you out when we arrive at Dervish. If there are any hostile ships there, we might need you. Can’t you stay awake for the last—”
“No!” he barked, then looked down in embarrassment at his outbreak. “I cannot go through that again. Not after all those years trapped in my mangled brain.” A tear ran down his cheek, and he wiped it away, looking at the moisture in amazement. “I guess I’m a little shaken.”
“Considering the description of what you went through, it’s understandable. But how are we going to avoid spending several years finishing the trip if we can’t use the tactical drive?”
He sighed and stared at the ceiling for a long moment before responding. “I can disconnect my implants.”
“That’ll make you—”
“Messed up, I know. Using anesthesia is a lot more uncontrolled, trust me, and the effects will linger. It’ll take quite a dosage to put me under. Lilith says we’ll be making a jump every few hours. I won’t have time to recover between jumps.”
“Maybe the drugs the ship has are better?” she suggested.
“We have the same stuff on Bellatrix. They’re chemically identical, thanks to the codex.”
His green eyes met hers, and she saw the fear again. “You’re in charge, Minu, so the decision is yours. Put me under for the whole trip until we reach Dervish or have me shut half my brain off during each jump.”
“I can’t order you to do either of those.”
“Maybe not, but I know you, and you’re going to use that drive to get us where we’re going. It is who you are, and why you succeed. You make the hard decisions. Sometimes it hurts you more than you tell anyone, but you still make the decision. So, if I am to be of use upon arrival, you only have one option.”
Minu took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, shaking her head and staring at the table. She reached out and tapped an order onto the clear surface. A steaming cup of tea appeared after a moment.
It bought her time to think. From her early days as a Chosen she had detested ‘no-win’ situations more than anything else. In her heart she simply didn’t believe there was such a thing as a no-win situation.
“Damn it, there’s always another way.” she said and sipped the tea. Every time she ordered it, it got a little better. The computer was becoming almost psychic in detecting what she wanted.
“There is, but that costs us months in space.”
“Pip, I hate it when you’re right.”
“That’s what my ex-wife says.”
Minu nodded and put the tea down. “I’m asking you to deactivate your implants, so we can haul ass to Dervish.” Pip smiled slightly and nodded. “I’m really sorry,” she said quietly.
“It can’t be any worse than it was with the damn things on.”
* * * * *
Chapter 11
April 18th, 534 AE (subjective)
Deep Space, Galactic Frontier
With the same gut-wrenching dislocation, Minu felt reality return. Everyone in the CIC shuddered and shook their heads to clear the cobwebs. Even the Rasa, who seemed less susceptible to the brain-twisting effects of non-being, were visibly shaken after six consecutive tactical drive jumps.
As soon as she had her wits about her, Minu released the harness on her chair and moved over to where Pip floated in a reclined position.
He slowly turned his head and looked at her, a slack expression on his face and a little drool in one corner of his mouth. Her heart jerked at the look of confusion mixed with recognition on his face.
“Lilith, have the Medical Intelligence reinitialize his implants.”
“Under way,” her daughter confirmed over the intercom.
Pip jerked, his eyes blinking rapidly, and his face going blank. A second later, he opened his eyes wide and looked around in surprise. “Are we there?”
“Yeah,” she told him and gently touched his cheek, casually wiping the drool away with her thumb. “You okay?”
“Sure,” he said with a little, hollow laugh.
“How bad?”
“Better than if the implants had been turned on. The bots fixed my brain better than it was before, but without the implants I can’t concentrate enough to put a coherent thought together. It’s not like being trapped in my brain for years. It’s more like the worst mead bender you can imagine.”
“Doesn’t sound too bad!” Aaron joked. But the look on Pip’s face said it all.
“Thank you for enduring it,” Minu told him.
“So, let’s see Dervish,” Pip said, and the walls of the CIC became a huge bubble with the crew floating in deep space.
A hush fell over the room as everyone took in the spectacle. The Kaatan floated in space that glowed slightly from energized plasma. Millions of kilometers away, cataclysmic forces dueled. A trio of stars danced around each other. An orange K-class star and a red M-class star orbited around a monstrous B-class blue-white star. Both smaller stars were in irregular orbits, and they were cannibalizing their much larger sibling.
Lilith brought it alive for them on one section of the wall, speeding up the orbits in a simulation of the intricate dance. Even without the assistance, the crew could see the movement. The two smaller stars were orbiting at fantastic speeds.
“A vista of fantastic beauty,” Kal’at said in his hissing voice.
“Fantastic and deadly,” Pip agreed. The streamers of star stuff flashed around the stars in magnificent stellar prominences, often arcing away into space hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
“What is our destination?”
A section of the animated display flashed and began to zoom in. Amidst the most intense area of protospheric flow between the K and the O was a space station.
Despite the apparently tiny size of the station, it quickly became obvious they were viewing a truly immense structure. A cluster of massive cylinders surrounded a wheel, mounted perpendicularly. Trailing from each cylinder were long antennae with hundreds of delicate filigrees along their lengths. The station was slowly spinning, and the trailing antennae cut swaths through the solar prominences and swirling clouds of plasma. They left empty spaces in their wakes as they passed.
“The cables are harvesting the plasma from the stars much as I did with the ship during our first encounter,” Lilith told them. “This is what your scientists have dubbed a ‘solar tap.’”
“Most of the power of the Concordia comes from these?” Minu asked.
“Most solar taps are not designed like this one. The most common are in the low orbit of a star trailing the tap down into the photosphere. This is a rather unique design intended for special purposes.”
“And what is that?”
“It is made to power combat ships. This station’s capacity is many thousand times more than that of an average solar tap.”
“How long has it been here?” Aaron asked.
“According to records, it was placed here by The People just before the end of the war, about a million years ago.”
They were silent as they digested that bit of information. Only Lilith and Pip seemed comfortable discussing such long periods of time when it related to engineering works, even ones as fantastic as this one.
“There is no place in the galaxy that is better for harvesting the specific types of plasma used in powering Concordian technology. It was planned by The People to power a massive offensive.”
“How long can this exist?” Pip asked. “If this is a perfect situation, these stars can’t remain in perfect sync forever, right?”
“Correct. This symbiotic existence will only last an intermediate amount of time. My sensors indicate that time is coming to an end.”
Aaron laughed. “Not much time? For the Concordia that means what, another million years?”
“The M-class has already begun to reach instability from gorging itself on the O-class protosphere. In less than a hundred years it will destabilize and collapse.”
“Supernova?” Kal’at gasped.
“No, it isn’t lacking fuel like in a supernova. This is too much super-heated plasma. The star doesn’t have the density to contain its bloated body. It will be torn apart by the other two stars with a forty percent probability of perturbing the orbit of the K-class enough for it to break away from the O. The remains of the M will likely flash, furthering the destruction of the trinary, leaving only a brown dwarf remnant spinning around the remaining, but diminished, O-class star.”
