Panglor

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  "Great." The demands of piloting were mounting rapidly; he had to make a course change in one minute, and he had to hold his present course right on line. The drivers were running hot but holding stable.

  "Balef, we are monitoring your orbit. So far so good. You are within range of our weapons, and there is a remote charge aboard your ship which we control on this beam. If you do the job right, we won't have to use the charge. Keep that in mind, and good luck."

  Gee, Panglor thought, watching the computer feeds like mad, funny they didn't mention that time fuse they had on the other bomb.

  "You going to talk?" Alo asked brusquely. "Who are those guys?"

  Panglor cleared his throat and snapped several relays. A loud feedback hum from the com filled the room until he yelled, "Turn the damn thing off!" She obeyed, and the hum went off. "Goddamn junk they give me," he complained, turning off several other unnecessary systems. There was a surge as the drivers changed thrust, and the ship pitched several degrees. Damn com was probably defective, he fumed. Like Garikoff's soul.

  The Cur accelerated on a course now that would take them within a dozen kilometers of Deerfield, if he made no further changes. But he was going to make another change. In half a minute, he would swerve to give Deerfield more room and line up for his own insertion. It would take everything his drivers had, for a minute and a half.

  The collapsing-field was visible in the screen now, a bluish-white dot glowing fuzzily against space. Deerfield was still a silver bug, but growing. There was no sign that its crew had heeded them; both ships were accelerating at converging angles toward the collapsing-field. Two other slivers moved visibly: Garikoff and the patrol.

  Panglor wanted to switch on the com again, but didn't dare; he needed all his concentration. The next maneuver was coming up now: the ship lurched and pitched nineteen degrees. They continued to accelerate toward the field, but started killing some of their sideways vector. Drivers went to full power, running smooth but hot.

  "Give me center view again."

  Alo readjusted the screen. "I wish you'd tell me—uh!"

  He looked. A bit of light streaked across the screen and flared, more or less where the Cur would have been but for the course change. He suddenly had trouble breathing. LePiep jumped into his lap, crying. "Christ!" he whispered, nudging her aside. He kept his eyes on the controls.

  "That came from the patrol ship," Alo murmured. "Hey, maybe you should talk to them and—"

  The viewer went white. Alo fiddled for a moment and produced a picture again, but a slash of discolored fuzziness cut diagonally across the view. "Laser cannon," Panglor said, swallowing hard. "Warning shot." He was surprised that they were good enough to pick off his sensor-fringe that way. They were good.

  Alo switched on the com.

  "—last warning. Veer outward—"

  The sound broke up, and a static-filled voice came through, on Garikoff's channel: "You are off course. We are opening fire, and will fire until you have—"

  That broke up, too, but a hull sensor lighted. Hot spot on the hull. A laser was grazing them, but unsteadily; Garikoff was a poorer shot than the patrol. Panglor's fingers danced at the console. The drivers began to stutter, varying in thrust around the correct value. "Kid! Pipe that last message over to the patrol and tell them we're under fire and have to go through the field."

  The Cur shook dangerously from the pulsating thrust; it wasn't built to accelerate that way. Judging from the hull sensors, though, the maneuver was succeeding. The computer was varying their acceleration randomly, and Garikoff couldn't keep a laser on them. Now he worked furiously at the program, trying to make their final velocity come out right.

  "NO!" he roared, hammering on the console. They could no longer make the angle he needed.

  The collapsing-field was growing, and he had lost his track on Deerfield. "We've lost the window! We've lost D17!" He worked frantically, thinking. Was there another insertion window they could still hit?

  The collapsing-field grew fast, blue and terrible, filling a third of the screen.

  Alo and LePiep were both yelling as he tried desperately to remember the insertion windows available. There was another, nearly at the same angle . . . could he make it? Throttling the drivers to full, stable, he pitched twenty degrees back toward Deerfield's course. They were far enough apart by now that a collision was impossible, for sure.

  The hull sensors flickered. The viewscreen fluttered and went dim, but not out. The guidance-lock sensors went dead. Garikoff was burning him; their control system was blind. "Bastards!" he screamed. In a fury, he took the controls completely on manual.

  The collapsing-field filled the screen. Warning lights blinked. Panglor grunted and held his breath and cut the drivers.

  A silver ship slid into view from the upper side and hurtled down off the screen. It was big. Alo shrieked.

  The field blazed, the ship shuddered, and the screen went blank.

  Panglor sat shaking, staring dumbly at the screen, a great emptiness in his chest. Alo was still shrieking. LePiep clung by her claws to the front of his shirt, trembling.

  That was Deerfield they had nearly hit. And an instant later they had plunged through the collapsing-field—off course—and they were now coasting between the stars, encapsulated in a flowing cell of stressed, foreshortened space. They were free of Garikoff, and they had escaped the D3 system alive. Where they were going, he couldn't say. But he thought he knew. And he would rather have died.

  Chapter 6

  Eventually Alo stopped shrieking.

  It was a while longer before the voice in his own head quieted down. Then he pried LePiep's claws loose from the front of his shirt, and calmed himself enough to stop gasping; and he squinted at the console, as though in calm, scholarly curiosity, rather than the crippling anxiety he actually felt. The computer log produced a record of the preceding minutes, and what he had actually done in those blind, frantic seconds. The record was bewildering, especially with the loss of the guidance sensors. He was more numb than frightened. Almost certainly he had sent them on a no-return journey into limbo; he just had to confirm it, that was all.

  "Where are we going?" asked Alo in a subdued voice.

  Panglor grunted. "Don't tell me you're worried, suddenly."

  She stared at him. "I'm not scared. I just want to know where we're going."

  "Well, now, if you'd bought a ticket for this trip, I might feel like telling you. But you know, stowaways don't have the same rights as passengers." He was muttering words, not even listening to himself. He needed to babble to calm his nerves, because he couldn't make heads or tails of the information on the screen. LePiep crooned, nuzzling him.

  Limbo.

  That was where. That was the answer.

  "Anyway," he said, trying to ignore the buzzing in his head, "I'm still mapping out the course."

  Alo crossed her arms impatiently. Panglor went back to figuring. He knew he had come close to putting the Cur into another foreshortening window, but he couldn't remember what the destination star was. That he could check later; what he needed to know now was whether he had hit any window, because if he hadn't nothing else mattered.

  "You don't know, do you?" Alo said.

  "I will know. Except our sensors got burned, so there's no way to be sure. I'm doing inertial right now." The computer could figure it based on internal measurements of acceleration—assuming that the instruments were accurate.

  "Why were they shooting at us, anyway?"

  Panglor felt his temper slip close to the edge. He said nothing, but replied with a silent expression.

  Her face darkened. "We've had it, haven't we?"

  He bristled. "Not necessarily. Do you know anything about foreshortening piloting?" He rolled his eyeballs toward her.

  "Some," she said. She shrugged. "Well, I know more straight space stuff, but foreshortening I know theory and mechanics. I've never actually piloted it."

  Panglor nodded. Maybe she knew somet
hing, maybe she didn't. He returned his gaze to the console and worked for a moment. The program ran and gave him the answer.

  The answer was, if the internals were correct, they were finished. He had missed the window.

  He sagged in despair.

  LePiep shoved her face up to his, peering. Waves of reassurance cascaded from the ou-ralot, washed over him like a soothing rain, like a mistmassage. He breathed deeply, and found his voice and it was filled with fighting anger. "There's something you ought to know, and that's that you don't always have to be exactly on the beam in your insertion. Sometimes you can be pulled along from one field to that other one lightyears away—pulled right on into line as if you were on a string."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "As though there's something in that stressed space, something that we don't know anything about, that nobody, not even the big brains, understands—that wants things in foreshortening to move from one point to the other. Like a big strand of taffy. Hell, we'd probably miss half the time if there wasn't something like that to keep the trajectories honest."

  "Yeah, but you have to be close," Alo objected.

  "We are close. We're just a little off." And it was true, nearly enough. "So. Sometimes ships get pulled off course, and we never see them again, and sometimes they get drawn in the right way." He looked up at the screen, a dark blue blank. His heart beat fast again. There was nothing any instrument could show him about their trajectory. Only the scoopscope functioned in foreshortening, and that only just prior to emergence.

  Alo thought about it for a while and finally said, "What about that other ship that missed us? It followed us right in."

  Panglor stared at her, dumbfounded. He had totally forgotten the Vikken ship. "Well," he said slowly, "it could be right here with us, actually. Or right behind us. Even if they were on a diverging course." He rubbed his temples hard, thinking. Now that was a real possibility, though it involved some unknowns. It made him nervous as hell. On top of everything else, they might have Deerfield in transit with them . . .

  Alo frowned in puzzlement.

  "Field effect," he said. "Two bodies go through a field close enough together, and they can be entrained in the same foreshortening distortion. Even if their tracks are different. The lines of space bend to convergence by the time the field is captured and undistorted."

  Alo looked skeptical. She sat in silence for a few moments, then said, "How about some food?"

  "What?" he said, startled. "I don't even know what you're doing here or why I haven't tossed you out, and here you are, asking—"

  "You didn't toss me out because I was helping you," she huffed. "Anyway, I told you, I brought extra food."

  "Huh? Go ahead, then—and bring me something." Her nerviness gave him the jitters, but he had to admit she had been helpful.

  While she was in the galley, he fed LePiep from a packet he found under his seat, and snapped hot a moke for himself. Alo returned, eating an enormous flatwrap sandwich. She handed him a smaller one. "What happens," she said, "if the two ships are flying too far apart, and they don't converge in the field?"

  Panglor stared at her, his mouth halfway around his first bite. He grunted and chewed slowly. He swallowed and drank from his brewed moke. "What happens if they don't converge?" He shut his eyes, opened them again. "Probably they rupture the field, and then it's all over. The field disappears, and both ships—" He shook his head, unable to complete the statement.

  Alo studied her sandwich. They ate in silence.

  * * *

  An empty mug toppled from the armrest and clunked to the deck. Panglor blinked out of a brooding reverie and glanced at Alo. She plucked at her shirt and returned his glance. He sat upright. "I think it's time for you to talk," he said. "Who let you on the ship, anyway?"

  She rolled her eyes. "Ye gods, no one let me on. I just came." She smoothed her shirt down, then stretched and sighed.

  Panglor remembered the observatory door. "Yeah? What for? You must have known you'd never get back home."

  She snorted. "Home? You kidding? That place was a prison."

  "What'd you do wrong?"

  "Who said I did anything wrong?" Her eyes flashed. She reached under her hair to scratch.

  "What'd you do wrong?"

  Her mouth scowled, but her eyes moved from side to side.

  Panglor felt the familiar pressure in his forehead. "What kind of trouble were you in?"

  She jerked her gaze away. "They were going to come after me. I don't know if they knew yet."

  "What?"

  "I fixed a girl's shuttle scooter. They had to go out and rescue her. She had it coming."

  "A spacecraft? You sabotaged a spacecraft?"

  "Well, why not?" she answered hotly. "It was no big thing. And what were you doing? Looked like you were pulling something funny back there, with them shooting at you and you doing crazy maneuvers. What are you yelling at me—?"

  "So you came on my ship?" he demanded.

  She stopped talking, mouth open. "Yah," she said. "You seemed different. I thought it had possibilities. And I couldn't stay there—they'd have run me in, and the way those people are they'd have put me in confinement and forgotten about me." She shrugged and turned to face the lifeless viewscreen.

  "Yeah, well, you haven't said why you sabotaged a spacecraft," he said. "You try something like that on my ship, and I'm going to break both your arms and both your legs, and after that I'm going to break your neck." He gripped the arms of his seat, his tendons bulging.

  Alo faced the screen silently.

  "Well?"

  She shrugged. "Well, what?"

  Panglor growled to himself and shook his head.

  Half an hour later, he told her to go bunk out in the cabin. "We're going to stand shifts. When you're on, you're going to do nothing with those controls but watch, and you're going to wake me if anything happens that I need to be awake for." Alo squinted uncooperatively, but when he reached for her arm, she yelped and scuttled out of the control bay. "Witch," he muttered. And he meant it. But he wasn't so sure anymore that she was a ghost.

  Though physically and mentally exhausted, he kept working at the console. He wanted to find out what star system he had, maybe, flung them toward. The answer, when it came, made him sweat—and made him check the library files for confirmation of what he thought he remembered hearing once, sometime, somewhere. When that answer came back, he stared at it, trembling so hard that he woke up LePiep with his unhappy feelings, and she leaped up onto the console and peered questioningly at him.

  Dreznelles 1. That was where they were going, if anywhere. Dreznelles 1. A nearby star, in the same group as D3. It was the site of a relay way station rather like the one at D3—but with a difference. "It's empty, Peep," he whispered. "Abandoned. There's no one there. Do you know what that means?" He gazed into her moist eyes and tried to keep himself steady. It's okay to shudder, but don't let it go too far, don't let yourself slide, don't let yourself come apart, don't. LePiep crooned to him—but what could she do?

  The waystation at D1 had been closed down and abandoned half a century ago, when D3 had taken over its functions. The foreshortening field generators, if they still existed, were defunct. It did not matter if he had made the insertion or not, because he might as well have been aiming straight into limbo.

  He shuddered harder. He had done to himself what he had always feared, and not even LePiep could reassure him now. Thank God the witch was in the cabin and not here to see this. Jesus! He was making grunting noises, almost sobbing, and there were tears in his eyes.

  LePiep twitched, startled by something. He looked up, eyes blurred, and saw Alo standing just inside the control bay. No, he thought, no. Jesus Christ, not her, not now.

  "What are you doing here?" he croaked.

  "I wasn't tired, and I wanted to find out something."

  His voice cracked. "What?" His patience was gone. His world was gone.

  "You sure are upset about something," she s
aid. "Maybe you should go to sleep."

  "What do you want?" he shouted. LePiep flew off the console and batted about the control room in terror. "Peep!" he cried. "Come here." She landed, trembling.

  "Well," said Alo, "I just wanted to find out where we were going. Optimistically speaking."

  Panglor sank back into silence. LePiep sat with him, radiating misery.

  Alo found out what she wanted to know, though. It was right there on the console screen, and after she read it she blanched, then pursed her lips and sat with her chin in her hands, staring at LePiep.

  * * *

  There was only one practical thing they could do, and that was to start whatever repair work on the ship was possible. Alo proved surprisingly skilled at working with the technics, and though Panglor would never had admitted it, he could not have done the work without her. They checked the hull integrity and adjusted the drive-converters, and then started working on the guidance sensors. Though it was impossible to go outside the ship while they were in the foreshortening field, the external sensor probes were designed to be removed from inside the ship, first into a space between inner and outer hull sections, and then through a service lock into the repair section of the power deck. They worked over the probes for some time. The damage was considerable, but they managed to restore most of the visible light and radar sections. The guidance computer would still be missing half its input, but they would not be blind. That was assuming that they would emerge somewhere, with somewhere else to go—and that they were not in a tin coffin bound for limbo.

  They lunched in silence, until Panglor said, "So what was wrong with the station? You grew up there, didn't you?"

  Alo sat in the corner of the galley, ignoring him while she ate. Finally she said, "Nothing wrong with the station. Just with the people."

  He shrugged.

  A few moments later, she added, "Of course I didn't grow up there. I grew up on Earth. They're too stupid to realize that people from somewhere else might have something. They're too dumb to know that they're provincial, closed-minded jerks." Her lunch was disappearing in ferocious gulps.