Starplex

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Keith smiled "Fancy that--a prisoner of war." He spoke loudly.

  "Excellent work, everyone. Thor, Lianne, Rhombus--excellent."

  He paused. "Thank God the darmats sided with us.

  I guess it never hurts to be on speaking terms with the stuff that makes up most of the universe, and--"

  "Jesus.!" Thor's voice.

  Keith's head snapped up to face the pilot. He'd spoken too soon.

  Tendrils of dark matter were now closing on Starplex.

  "We're next," said Rhombus.

  "But we're orders of magnitude bigger than the Waldahud ships," said Thor. "Surely they can't toss us into the star?"

  "Only a third of the dark matter participated in the attack on the Waldahud forces," said Rhombus. "If it all comes after us--PHANTOM, can they do it?"

  "Yes."

  "Hail Cat's Eye," said Keith. "I better talk to him."

  "Locating vacant frequency," said Rhombus. "Transmitting . . . No response."

  "Thor, get us out of here," said Keith.

  "Course?"

  Keith considered for half a second. "Toward the shortcut."

  But he immediately realized that dark-matter tendrils had already started to intervene between Starplex and that invisible point in space.

  "No, change that," he snapped.

  "Bring us in close to the green star, in the opposite direction.

  And get Jag down here, PHANTOM."

  "You ordered him barred from this room, sir," said the computer.

  "I know that. I'm giving you new instructions. Get him down here right away."

  There was a moment's silence while PHANTOM conferred with Jag. "He is on his way."

  "What're you got in mind?" asked Rhombus. Dark matter was approaching Starplex on three sides, like a fist closing around a bug.

  "Hopefully, a way to get out of here--if it doesn't kill us."

  The starfield split open, and Jag walked in. For the first time, Keith saw a look of humility on the Waldahud's face.

  Jag had presumably been watching the space battle, and had seen his compatriots slammed into the emerald star. But still some of the old defiance was in his voice as he looked suspiciously at Keith. "What do you want?"

  "I want," said Keith, his voice tightly controlled, "to slingshot Starplex around the green star, and hurtle it into the shortcut from the far side."

  "Jesus God," said Thor.

  Jag grunted a similar sentiment in his own language.

  "Can it be done?" said Keith. "Will it work?"

  "I--I don't know," said Jag. "I would normally like a few hours to do the calculations for something like that."

  "You don't have hours--you've got minutes. Will it work?"

  "I do not--yes. Maybe."

  "Melondent," said Keith, "transfer control back to Jag's station."

  "So doing," said the dolphin.

  Jag slipped into his usual spot. "Central Computer," he barked, "put our trajectory on this monitor."

  "You are barred from issuing nonhousekeeping commands," said PHANTOM.

  "Override!" snapped Keith. "Jag's house arrest is suspended until further notice."

  The requested schematic appeared. Jag squinted at it.

  "Magnor?"

  "Yes?" said Thor.

  "We have only perhaps ten minutes until we are engulfed.

  You will need to fire all our ventral thrusters. Copy my monitor six in touch-screen mode."

  Thor pressed buttons. "Okay."

  Jag ran a flat finger in an arc along the schematic. "Can you manage a course like that?"

  "You mean on manual?"

  "Yes, on manual. We have no time to program the run."

  "I--yes, I can do it."

  "Execute it. Execute it now!"

  "Director?"

  "How long until the Rum Runner is anchored to our hull?"

  "Four minutes," said Rhombus.

  "We don't have the time to wait for her," said Jag.

  Keith turned to snap at Jag, but stopped himself. "Options?"

  he said generally to the people on bridge.

  "I can put a tractor beam on the Rum Runner," said Rhombus. "I won't be able to haul her in before we hit the shortcut, but she should be dragged over to it with us and hopefully Longbottle can pilot it through."

  the"o that. Thor, get us out of here."

  Starplex rushed toward the star at an oblique angle.

  "Thrusters on full," said Thor.

  "There's another problem we still have to deal with," said Jag, turning to Keith. "There's a good chance that I can get us to the shortcut, but once there, we'll just plunge through it. W, '

  e won t have any time to slow down and do a controlled approach at a specific angle, and with our deck-seventy hyperscope array damaged I can't even predict which exit' we'll pop out of. It could be anywhere."

  The dark-matter fingers were still stretching toward Starplex. "In a few minutes, anywhere will be preferable to this place," said Keith.

  "Just get us out of here."

  The ship began to careen around the star. Half of the bridge hologram showed the green orb, its granular surface detail and dumbbell sunspots visible. Most of the rest of the view was cloudy, with dark-matter tendrils eclipsing the background stars. "Rhombus, do you have a solid lock on the Rum Runner?"

  "It's still four hundred kilometers away, and dark matter is starting to intervene, but, yes, I've got it."

  Keith breathed a sigh of relief. "Good work. Have you been able to contact Cat's Eye, or any darmat?."

  "They're still ignoring our hails," said Rhombus.

  "We can't go in as close to the star as I would like,"'said Jag.

  "There's not enough water left in the ocean deck to make an effective shield, and our force screens are still burned out. There's a thirty-percent chance that the darmats will ensnare us."

  Keith felt his heart pounding in his chest. Starplex continued to swing around the star in a parabolic course, the tendrils still stretching toward it. The Rum Runner was indicated in the hole bubble as a tiny square, with an animated yellow tractor beam lancing out to it. The starfield wheeled--Thor was angling the ship as they grazed the star's atmosphere.

  Finally, Starplex reached the cusp of the parabola and, picking up enormous velocity from slingshoting around the star, raced toward the shortcut. In the hole bubble, PHANTOM brightened the yellow tractor-beam animation, indicating that additional power was being pumped into it.

  Starplex's course, four hundred kilometers closer to the star, was significantly different from the path the Rum Runner would have been following if it had been leoping around the orb under its own momentum.

  "Two minutes to contact with the shortcut, mark," said Rhombus.

  "We've never gone through a shortcut this fast before--no one has," said Jag. "People should secure themselves, or at least hold on to something."

  "Lianne, pass on that recommendation to all aboard," said Keith.

  "All personnel," said Lianne's voice, reverberating over the speakers,

  "brace for possible turbulence."

  Suddenly a large, irregular object eclipsed part of the view. "Gawst's ship," said Lianne. "He's pushed off our hull. Probably thinks we've all gone insane."

  "I could grab him with another tractor," said Rhombus.

  Keith smiled. "No, let him go. If he thinks his chances are better with the darmats, that's fine by me."

  "Eighty seconds, mark," said Rhombus, orange clamps rising up from the invisible floor to hold on to his wheels.

  "One-point-four degrees to port, Magnet," said Jag.

  "You're going to miss the shortcut."

  "Adjusting course."

  "Sixty seconds, mark."

  "Everyone hold on," said Lianne. "It's--" Blackness.

  Weightlessness.

  "God damn it!" Thor's voice.

  Barking--Jag speaking'. No translation from PHANTOM.

  Flickering lights--the only illumination in the room: Rhombu
s saying something.

  "Power failure!" shouted Thor.

  Red emergency lighting came on, as did emergency gravity--a priority because of the Ibs. There were loud splashing sounds from either side of the room: the water in the dolphin workstations had swelled up into great dome shapes under zero gravity, domes that had collapsed, splattering liquid everywhere as weight returned.

  No holographic bubble surrounded the bridge; instead its blue-gray plastiform walls were visible. Keith was still in his chair, but Jag was on the floor, obviously having lost his balance during the brief period of zero-g.

  The three consoles in the front row--lnOps, Helm, and ExOps--flickered back into life. The back-row stations were less critical, and stayed off, conserving battery power.

  "We've lost the Rum Runner," said Rhombus. "It was cut loose when the tractor beam died."

  "Abort the shortcut insertion!" snapped Keith.

  "Way too late for that," said Thor. "We're going through under momentum."

  Keith closed his eyes. "Which way did the Rum Runner go?"

  "No way to tell until I get my scanners back on-line," said Rhombus,

  "but--well, we were hauling her in, meaning she would have been moving pretty much in a line back toward the green star . . ."

  "The number-one generator blew," interjected Lianne, consulting readouts. "Battle damage. I'm switching over to standby generators."

  PHANTOM's voice: "Re-in-ish-il-i-zing. Onqine."

  The holographic bubble re-formed, beginning as a burst of whiteness all around them, then settling down to the exterior view, dominated by the green star, the rest obscured by the pursuing tendrils of dark matter.

  Keith looked in vain for any sign of the Rum Runner.

  Thor's voice: "Ten seconds to shortcut insertion, mark.

  Nine. Eight."

  Lianne's voice, overtop, coming from the public-address speakers. "We should have full power back in sixty seconds.

  Prepare--"

  "Two. One. Contact!" The red emergency lighting flickered.

  The shortcut appeared like a ring of violet arcing around thems visible above their heads and beneath their feet, as the infinitesimal point expanded to swallow the massive ship.

  Everything to the stern of the ring was the now familiar sky of the green star and the pursuing dark matter. But in front of the ring was an almost completely black sky. The passage through the shortcut took only a few moments as Starplex hurtled through at breakneck speed.

  Keith shuddered as he realized what had happened.

  Rhombus's lights swirled in Patterns of astonishment. Li-anne made a small sound in her throat. Jag was reflexively smoothing his fur.

  All around was black emptiness, except for an indistinct white oval and three smaller white splotches high above their heads, and a handful of fainter white smudges tossed at random against the night.

  They had emerged in the empty void of intergalactic space.

  The white splotches weren't stars; they were whole galaxies.

  And not one of them looked like the Milky Way.

  Chapter XVIII

  Rissa felt her throat constricting as the Rum Runner was flung away from Starplex.

  "What happened?" she called.

  But Longbottle was too busy to answer. He was twisting and turning in his tank, fighting to bring the ship under control. On her monitors, Rissa saw the green star swelling ahead of them, its surface a roiling ocean of fiery emerald, jade, and malachite.

  She fought down a wave of panic, and tried to assess for herself what had gone wrong. There's no way Keith would have cut power to the tractor beam, so either Gawst had used some sort of interfering transmission to sever the tractor, or Starplex had suffered a power failure. Either way, they'd been hurled away from the mothership, and almost directly toward the star. Through the clear wall between her air-filled chamber and Longbottle's water-filled one, Rissa saw the dolphin sharply arcring his body in what seemed to be a painful way, and bashing the side of his head against the opposite wall, as if by that sheer additional effort he could force the ship in the direction he wanted it to go.

  Rissa looked at her monitors, and her heart skipped a beat. She saw Starplex disappear through the shortcut to--to wherever it had gone.-The great ship's windows were dark, confirming that a power failure must have occurred. If the ship was truly without power, Rissa hoped it had come through the shortcut network at New Beijing or Flatland--where there would be other vessels to help it.

  Otherwise, it might not be able to return through whatever exit it emerged from--and a search of all the active exits might not be completed before Starplex's batteries ran out, leaving it without life support.

  But Rissa only had a few moments to think about the fate of her husband and colleagues; the Rum Runner was still heading toward the green star.

  The bow window had already darkened considerably, trying to filter out the inferno ahead of them. Longbottle was still struggling with the controls attached to his flukes and fins. Suddenly he flipped around in his tank, and Rissa saw the green star wheel away from view.

  Longbottle was bringing the main engines around to face the star, and firing them as brakes. The ship rattled; Rissa could see Longbottle disabling emergency cutoffs with presses of his snout.

  "Sharks!" shrieked Longbottle. At first, Rissa thought it was just a swear word for the dolphin, but then she saw what he was referring to: tendrils of dark matter were now obscuring half the sky, the gray spheres within the miasma of luster-quark gravel like the knots on a cat-o'-nine-tails.

  Longbottle twisted to his right, and the ship followed suit.

  But soon a much more sharply defined blackness obscured their view.

  "Ship of Gawst," said Longbottle.

  "Damn," said Rissa. She brought her hands down on the two grips that controlled the geological laser. She wasn't going to fire unless he did, but -- Ruby dots on Gawst's hull. Rissa'moved her thumb over the laser's twin triggers.

  Longbottle must have seen her do that. "ACS jets," he said. "Not lasers. He, too, tries to get away from darmats."

  The view in the window changed again as Longbottle

  . altered the Rum Runner's course. Green star to the rear, enemy ship to port, darmats to starboard and coming in above and below. There was only one course possible.

  Longbottle jabbed controls with his snout. "To the shortcut!"

  he shouted in his high-pitched voice.

  Rissa flipped keys, and one of her monitors showed the hyperspace map, the maelstrom of tachyons visible around the exit point.

  "More maneuverable are we than Starplex," said Long-bottle.

  "An exit we may choose."

  Rissa thought for half a second. "Can you tell where Keith and the others went?"

  "No. Shortcut rotates; I can match their angle of approach, but no time to work out if that will mean we exit at the same place."

  "Then--then go for New Beijing," said Rissa. "Starplex will eventually end up there for repairs--if it can."

  Longbottle squirmed in his tank, and the Rum Runner arched upward then down, coming at the shortcut from above and behind. "Insertion in seconds five," he said.

  Rissa held her breath. There was nothing visible on her monitors.

  Nothing at all--A flash of purple.

  A different starfield.

  A massive black starship.

  A starship firing on a flotilla of United Nations vessels.

  Four--no, five!--dead hulks pinwheeling against the night, surrounded by clouds of expelled atmosphere.

  Everything was bathed in bloody light from the red dwarf that had recently emerged from this shortcut.

  It flashed in front of Rissa's eyes, the words fully formed, like a chapter title on some future textbook screenThe Rout of Tau Ceti.

  Waldahud forces attacking the Earth colony, seizing the one shortcut that serviced human space, a giant battle cruiser easily dispatching the tiny diplomatic craft normally stationed there-- A giant bat
tle cruiser that had all its force screens aimed forward, protecting it from the returning fire being launched by the UN ships-- A giant battle cruiser that the Rum Runner was directly behind.

  Rissa had never killed before, had never even deliberately injured before, had The Rout of Tau Ceti.

  She swung the handles that aimed the laser, and leaned on the triggers.

  PHANTOM wasn't here to animate in the beam for her, and the Waldahudin battleship was too far away for her to see the red dot moving across its hull -- Moving across its thruster fuel storage tanks--Ripping them open--Igniting the fuel--And then-- A ball of light, like a supernova-The bow window going completely black-- Longbottle arching in his tank, moving the Rum Runner away from the expanding sphere of debris.

  Rissa took her hands off the triggers. The window grew clear again.

  She was shaking from head to foot. How many Waldahudin had been aboard a ship that size? A hundred? A thousand? If they'd planned to actually move on to Sol system and storm Earth and Mars and Luna, perhaps as many as ten thousand soldiers--All dead.

  Dead.

  There were other Waldahudin ships in the area, but they were tiny one-person fighter craft. The big black vessel must have been their mothership.

  Rissa exhaled noisily.

  "You acted well," said Longbottle gently. "You did what you had to."

  She said nothing.

  The UN ships were banking now--New Beijing was a human-dolphin colony--and coming in to attack the small Waldahud fighters. The Rum Runner buffeted slightly as it passed through the cloud of expelled atmosphere from the destroyed battleship.

  Rissa's console beeped. She looked at the glowing red indicator, like a drop of blood, but did not move. Longbottle eyed her for a moment, then nosed the similar control in his tank. A woman's voice came over the speakers. "This is Liv Amundsen, commander of the United Nations police forces at Tan Ceti, to Starplex auxiliary craft." Rissa glanced at her monitors. Amundsen's ship was still three light-minutes away; no point in trying a real-time conversation. "We have identified your transponder signal. Thank you for your timely arrival. Our casualties are heavy--over two hundred dead--but you've saved New Beijing. You can bet they'll pin a medal on your chest, whoever you are aboard that ship.