It was one of hundreds of such places in the galaxy which, for unknown reasons, had from dozens to hundreds or even thousands of natural holes winking in and out. It was not a region that ships stayed in for long, but almost all trips had to go through such a region, since the genholes themselves tended to anchor at these spots.
Normally, a ship would emerge from a genhole and then immediately head into another in a preprogrammed sequence; in this case, they emerged into a kind of space that looked as ordinary and as empty as the rest but which set off every sort of alarm a ship might have—and caused even one the size of the Stanley to shudder, shake, and apply some real power just to stay in one spot for long. Things were happening out there, things well outside the visible spectrum.
There were no windows in the Stanley, nor any space-based visible cameras. They weren’t needed and wouldn’t show much in any event. The master board, though, in the C&C could show things the way the captain, with all sorts of sensors, could see things. The main difference was that they could see each method of viewing serially, while the captain saw them all at once.
They were looking at energy surges and hot spots, and the only things that came to Randi Queson’s mind were a Christmas display and some sort of ancient artillery battle.
“We’re supposed to go in there?” she asked, incredulous. It didn’t appear that there was enough room to do it without getting potted by one or another of those flares.
“Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Cross assured her. “I’ve been on ships that went all through this area, and hundreds of ships come through the genholes here all the time. Things are a lot farther apart than they look. We’re looking at several parsecs of space here. No, getting in the way of one of those isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that the next thing we have to do is fly into one.”
“You can sure see why nobody’s found this thing,” Sark noted. “I don’t think you’d get far with trial and error.”
“Maybe not,” An Li responded. “One of them keeps winking on and off in the same space for generations.”
“It is not as easy as all that,” the captain’s voice came in. “No wild hole is all that consistent in where it emerges. It could emerge almost anywhere in this field, and the only thing you’d notice was that it lasted a bit longer than most—several seconds, in fact. But once I get the pattern, it becomes predictable. When we get one flash that holds for precisely the same length of time and repeats a location or a series of locations according to the pattern fed into my memory banks, then we will be able to go right through. I will have to match speed, trajectory, and a lot more, but the figures I have will allow me, with the observations, to know which one is the one and only gateway to the Three Kings.”
“Um, out of curiosity, what would happen if you picked the wrong one?” Queson asked anybody else in the C&C.
“Simple. You either go the wrong place if you make it through,” Cross responded, “or, more likely, you wind up in an uncontrolled vortex that sucks you in and instantly compresses you to the size of a pinhead. Gives you a whole new respect for the ones who set up the first genholes, don’t it?”
“They were mostly robots,” Jerry Nagel told her. “Very few lives were risked in that kind of operation. Robots made the tries, drew the energy needed to keep the things open and stable long enough to get the genhole anchor on one end, then—if the robot inside made it through—it retained enough of a linkage to allow another anchor to go through the hole and shore up the other end. Even when they had it down cold, they ran robotic ship after robotic ship through until they were sure it was safe.”
“That isn’t correct, Jerry,” the captain commented. “First a scout went through, a cybership like me, only designed specifically for the job of threading the wormhole needle. It was the scout that provided the anchor on the other end and used it to transmit data back. The Three Kings, of course, are an exception. Somehow most of the report got back, but there was no anchor, and, thus, nobody knew which of these was the right one.”
“Somebody knew,” Randi Queson pointed out.
“What? What do you mean?” the captain asked.
“We have the information. We got it from somebody else who had it, and they got it from somebody else who had it and so on. No, that information got back here, somehow. It just never got into the public record. I bet if you really worked on the problem enough you’d discover that somebody got greedy, that that somebody truncated or erased part of that report after they’d copied it. They went for the Kings themselves, and vanished just like everybody else, and now they’re pretty well lost to history. But they knew. This doesn’t have to be an alien plot. Just some good old-fashioned greed and corruption, I’d wager.”
“Interesting idea,” Nagel said. “If not, that description sure covers people like Sanders and us, doesn’t it? I guess all us greedy, corrupt skunks get attracted to things like that.”
“Kind of ironic, though,” Randi noted.
“Huh? Why?” Nagel responded.
“Discovered by a monk who named them for the three rich and powerful men who brought gifts to the Christ child, then turned almost immediately into an object of greed and a source of death.”
“Well, that’s what people have always done to religion. Why stop with this?” An Li said cynically. “Cap, when do we go through? You found it yet?”
“I have it, yes,” she replied. “But it will be a very difficult maneuver to enter it at just the right time and angle so that I can avoid damaging the ship. You do seem exceptionally eager to get on with this, though, which could very easily be the last thing any of us does.”
“Beats being bored, Cap,” Sark commented. “Nobody lives forever.”
“I dunno,” Jerry Nagel said. “I always thought an exception would be made for me.”
“Very well,” the captain replied. “I think you all should strap in for this one. It will make things much easier for me. Once you do that, I think we might be able to do this in another twenty minutes.”
Randi Queson exhaled loudly. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said.
VIII: THE THREE KINGS
“Get out of here and hang on, you little creep!”
Eyegor didn’t seem to have real feelings but it was apologetic. “I am sorry, but I have nothing else to photograph at the moment.”
“Well, go photograph the C&C board or something!” Randi Queson snapped. “Just not me, not here, not now! Understand?”
“Yes, I believe I understand. You are—”
“Get the hell out of here before I smash you! Now!”
“Oh, well, if it’s that way…” Eyegor responded, but it floated away and outside the room.
Go piss off An Li, she thought with a wicked smile on her face.
They were all in their cabins, lying down and strapped into their bunks, waiting for the big bang that would tell them they were in a wild hole. It might well be instant death, or at least a quick death, or it might be nothing at all, but if they were to live through it, nobody wanted to be the one with the broken arm or gashed forehead because they didn’t heed the captain’s cautions.
No human pilot could do what the captain was doing now. It could only be done by a pure machine or a hybrid like the captain and the Stanley. At velocities approaching a third of light speed for short bursts, with no real margin for error, and with a target that had to be hit dead center even though it wasn’t there yet, this was one hell of a tricky maneuver. Any mistake, whether in calculations on where and when the wild hole they wanted would appear, or in just when to start for it or precisely how much thrust was sufficient, meant they were either doomed to fail or they were burnt toast.
This was what the captain was designed for, what she gained from her sacrifice of her humanity.
The calculations came through as simply as a grade school addition, and she didn’t even consciously think of doing them and putting them into action. She had done three trial runs and had completed full diagnostics on the har
dware involved, and now she was ready.
It was almost certainly best that none of the people within the ship could see what was really going on, for nobody without the captain’s massive calculating abilities and tremendous database of information would believe that this was anything more than idiocy.
The ship came around, sighted on a trajectory so precise that the margin of error was under one millimeter over the vibration of the ship at full thrust. The engines roared into life, shuddering as they did so and causing a massive series of subsonic vibrations that went through the entire ship and all within it, and then it was off at increasing speed, on that precise line to a point in space where there was most assuredly nothing at all.
Although cushioned in artificial gravity and a stable internal environment, they could all slightly feel what was going on, and for the longest time nobody breathed.
At just the precise vanishing point of the original trajectory, and just as the ship reached the mathematical point it had represented, a hole opened up, a hole in space and time. It had no elegant look, no sense of symmetry, nor did it give off the sensation of brute force, although it certainly had that. It looked in fact like a ghostly, twisting plasma of something indefinable, some sort of plasma that was unlike anything in the known universe, and which throbbed and swirled.
The captain took her best data and punched right into the center of the throbbing mass, which slowly enveloped the ship. At that moment the ship seemed to sway in all directions at once, and it took some fast experimenting to keep it solid, as it now appeared to be riding dead center through a ghostly translucent tube.
Most instrumentation was now useless, but enough was known about the energy properties of a wormhole to allow at least a calculation of the amount of subjective time they would be inside and during which the captain would have to be constantly in control.
There was no need to add power now, beyond positioning; the hole simply ignored things like thrust and mass and did its own things according to its own dimly understood extra-universe rules.
The main engines cut off and the internal buffered living environment stabilized. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet and even more disconcertingly still.
An Li unbuckled herself from her bed, sat up, opened a small box on a nightstand near it and removed a Styngan cigarette and an elegant lighter with a stylized rat embossed on its side. She pressed the stud, and the top element glowed. She brought it up to the cigarette.
For some reason, it took her several tries before her hand would obey enough to get the heat where she wanted it to go.
She finally got the thing lit, but just sat there, staring at the blank bulkhead, barely puffing on it, allowing her nerve to come back and her heart to slow down.
Everybody, she thought, needed at least one bad habit, if only for moments like these.
And there would be several days more to go with things probably getting worse for everybody. Days and days with nothing to do, but also nothing more to learn. They didn’t have anything new, no data on what was at the other end. But it was going to be bedlam and constant tension and work once they broke out, from the very moment they broke out, assuming all went well.
And she was right. By the time they got the warning that it was only a matter of hours left, they were through all the diversions and all the drugs and cyber entertainment aboard and were starting at each other’s throats. That, though, would change the moment things started to happen. It was already happening as they began to think of the job ahead.
The captain, though, was quite pleased. “We managed to get in, we’ve had no incidents, and we’re in excellent condition,” she assured them. “I was afraid that others would try following us in; that’s a good way to destabilize the interior of a wild hole and cause all sorts of nastiness. We had a few followers, early on, but if anyone was present to tell our course, speed, and match us going in, it wasn’t clear on any of my sensors.”
“Do they really need that?” Randi Queson asked her. “I mean, if they have a surveyor unit in the area and just register us—course, speed, which hole—they don’t have to risk any destabilization or detection, do they?”
“Perhaps not, but it’s not that easy. Without the data Sanders had downloaded into me, I do not see how they could determine the pattern and pick the correct hole and appearance with sufficient time to get through. And if we get back, we’re going to own the destination.”
“Do you think you can hold us together on the way out?” Lucky Cross asked her. “I always suspected that it was that that tore ships apart. Got to be a fuckin’ monster to keep a hole like that re-forming over and over. Those forces and the inevitable debris field have got to be Hell itself.”
“Who can answer that sort of hypothetical?” the captain mused. “I don’t know. I think so. The ships that returned as beaten-up wrecks appeared to be victims of the wormhole itself, and the one that didn’t showed no apparent outward damage, although its data banks were fried. If that happens to me, then you will have to take it through. I am confident that this ship can do it, with or without me, if need be. In the meantime, I’m going to ask that you be strapped into the emergency bridge in the C&C while we emerge, just in case, and that everyone else be firmly fixed in their bunks. I will transfer holograms of the C&C board to every cabin so that you can see what we see and are facing. If we get clear, I will unlock and extend the visual camera, which has so far been useless to us. Fair enough.”
Cross sighed. “I guess.” She didn’t see how the hell she was going to fly this thing if the captain couldn’t, though.
“All hands,” the captain announced throughout the ship. “If you have not eaten, I suggest you do it now, then secure everything loose throughout the ship. At the fifteen-minute mark I will sound an alarm indicating that you are to go to your assigned places and strap in. I will then cue you up until we emerge. At that point, deduction suggests that there may be some periods of brief power fluctuations, weightlessness, and/or severe movement of the ship beyond the abilities of the inner core to compensate. Just hang on until Lucky or I tell you it’s safe to move about.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Sark grumbled. “Me, I don’t care what happens by this point, just so long as it’s something.”
Nobody ate a meal, although a couple of them drank a little bit and nibbled on some energy bars, mostly to settle nerves. There was a lot of loose stuff to pick up and store, but they all knew they’d miss some of it anyway. Nobody was really thinking of anything but the end of the trip that everyone else had spun stories and legends about, and many had died trying to get to and from. And there wasn’t one damned thing they could do except wait for it.
At fifteen minutes, the emergency alarm sounded and the captain said, “All hands to rough-condition stations and strap in.”
Everybody except Cross went for their quarters with one last look around to make sure they weren’t forgetting the obvious. Lucky headed down and aft to C&C, only to find Eyegor waiting for her there.
“You better find a way to hold on or you’re going to get smashed against this equipment,” she told the robot.
“I will use internal energy beams to secure myself to the bulkhead,” Eyegor told her. “I have determined that nothing critical runs through it, so I should not disrupt anything. I must be here and active to record this historic event.”
Lucky Cross sat in the command chair and belted herself in, then reclined, triggering two command panels next to her right and left hands and activating voice control. It would have no effect unless the captain were cut off from the controls, but if that happened she would have complete command of the ship in nanoseconds. It was the last thing she wanted, nor was she trained for it, but she was the best qualified of the group if it came to that.
“Comm check,” she said in as cool a voice as she could manage.
“Comm check aye,” responded a more mechanical-sounding version of the captain’s voice from the panel in front of her.
“Emergency backup power.”
“Backup power at one hundred three percent of nominal,” the board assured her. “Connection time three nanoseconds.”
“Very well. Display on, forward, wide.”
The big display board came on and showed… nothing. There was as yet nothing really to see that any of the instruments could pick up other than constantly fluctuating energy surges.
And then there was the clock. The simplest, most primitive device on the board, it was the one that interested Cross the most. It read “00:00:05:35:16,” and it was counting down.
Five and a half minutes.
She felt a curious detachment now, as if she were cut off, watching from some safe and far-off place and time Eyegor’s recording of the moment rather than experiencing it. It was often like that, when push came to shove. It also somehow caused five and a half minutes to go by in a kind of agonizing slowness that physics would never explain.
“Five minutes,” the captain’s voice said throughout the ship. “I will call each minute now until one, then count from ten seconds.”
Lucky Cross wanted a cigar, but she knew it would be some time before she could have one. She sat there now, watching the timer crawl down, and she found some personal satisfaction in the situation as tense as it was.
Big, fat, foul-mouthed, coarse lowlife Gail Cross, she thought. They’d laugh and tease me, they’d call me names and make me the butt of their jokes, and they’d go off to their fine places while I went home to a ramshackle junk house built from yesterday’s disasters. Nobody ever gave me nothin’, but I didn’t take like An Li. I learned and I earned, and look who’s sittin’ in the C&C chair now ready to set eyes on the Three Kings!
“Thirty seconds.”
C’mon, c’mon! If we’re gonna die, then let’s do it. Either that, or a share of the biggest pie in creation!
“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… egress!”
Melchior's Fire tk-2 Page 16
