The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  Bee gathered up her sensor equipment again, having recharged all of it, and nodded. “Finally. Just sitting around here like this, what were we even thinking?”

  “Bee,” Mud said softly, “can I just say, from experience, that sometimes you need to pretend the world is small and normal and makes sense?”

  She looked at him, eyebrows raised. “Really? I thought this was just another mission for us. Sir.”

  “Don’t pull that,” he told her. “When the strange builds too hard? Maybe not you, you can be the exception. But for me, when the going gets so strange that even the strange peel off for saner grounds, just pretending, for a minute, that this isn’t my life helps me stay sane.”

  “Whatever you say. Captain Madison.”

  “Bee.”

  “Mud.”

  “It’s all right to be freaked out by this.”

  “Oh, I am,” she agreed, “but I want to do something about it, not sit in my kitchen and pretend nothing is happening.”

  “That’s not what...let’s just get going,” he said, “all right?”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “Hey, Bee?” he asked, as he checked his suit and GravPack systems carefully.

  “Yeah?” She looked up from doing the same.

  “Having a coping mechanism isn’t a bad thing,” he told her. “Promise.”

  “Stop treating me like I’m new,” she said, trying to hold back anger. “I know I didn’t grow up like you did, but—”

  “It’s just experience. You’re getting yours now. No real difference.”

  “Can we just go?” she asked, finishing putting her sensor equipment away in various pockets and bags attached to her suit.

  “Sure.”

  They left Bee’s apartment without another word and walked out of the building, back onto the street. No one recognized either of them, or seemed to care that they were dressed in thinsuits with large, silver-bullet–shaped GravPacks strapped to them.

  They took off slowly, drifting upward from the street. That, a few people took note of, watching them start to fly off. They allowed themselves to drift upward like that, lazily, until they reached a few thousand feet.

  “Orbit then work out a flight plan?” Mud asked. Bee grunted a response and they both sped up, setting the GravPacks to repel the planet and switching their HUD displays to larger targets out of the gravity well in preparation. It left them unable to make small maneuvers until they got to low orbit, but they both accepted readings on their surroundings telling them they’d be moving fast enough and the sky would stay clear ahead of them that it was safe.

  They broke orbit and drifted free in clear space for a minute, working to settle on a course back to the Amalfi. Pushing the GravPacks to go faster than light meant they wouldn’t have to worry about most smaller objects, but large gravity wells could be a problem. Luckily their HUD navigation system had most planetary orbital data stored, so they could preroute a flight taking planets and suns between here and there into account.

  Space, being mostly empty, presented far less problem in that regard than many people thought. Huge stretches of their flight would be through utterly empty space, their movement relying on momentum, out of range of anything for the GravPacks to latch on to.

  Route plotted, they double-checked their data with each other, made small corrections so they would take exactly the same path home, and accepted the routes. The GravPacks strained a bit more than usual, needing, Mud knew, a teardown and rebuild after being in the other universe, but otherwise behaved normally. They shot off, gaining speed faster than anything had a right to, and before they could really notice it they were moving faster than the speed of light toward the Amalfi.

  CHAPTER 18

  THEY FLEW STRAIGHT and true, personal shields set at ten feet to deflect particulate matter and ensure they didn’t arrive full of microscopic holes that would kill them along the way. Traveling fast enough that the normal laws of physics didn’t hold saved them time dilation and still allowed them to cross the distances involved in a matter of hours instead of weeks or months.

  They moved in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Bee considered Mud’s words and tried to be honest with herself about why she felt so angry. He wasn’t, she knew, trying to be condescending, but he kept ending up that way. She needed to lay that out for him, to explain why he really needed to back off more and not treat her like a little sister as much.

  She wanted to make excuses for him, knowing that overall it wasn’t intentional behavior, but fought herself on continuing to brush it off. He needed to grow up, and on top of that, let her grow up as well and be the person she knew she already was.

  Mud felt bad—he knew he fell back on old bad habits born of being treated like a kid, still, by his parents. They tried to correct that, and he tried to not fall into their patterns with his own team, but none of it came easy. He needed to apologize, and try harder. He knew his parents, both of them, would insist on finishing the job first and worrying about feelings second.

  But he didn’t want to be his parents. He respected them, admired them, even, but also saw the problems of their behaviors laid out for him in the way that all children can when it comes to their parents.

  So he tried to balance the two, in his head. He would talk to Bee when they arrived at the Amalfi. He knew he could just talk to her as they flew through the emptiness of space, but he also wanted to give her time to think. No, he admitted to himself, he wanted to give himself more time.

  While they flew, Mud decided to, putting bigger thoughts behind him, just fly. He closed his eyes and paid attention to GravPack, listening to it, making sure everything felt smooth and normal.

  It didn’t.

  “Bee,” he said, opening his eyes, “does this feel off to you?”

  “I don’t do that much hard travel like this, so I’m not sure. But yes,” she replied.

  “Something with the GravPacks, maybe from exposure to the Sweeperverse?”

  “We’re not calling it that.”

  “Bee.”

  “Sorry,” she said, with a hint of a laugh, “but I don’t think so. Still, if we’re sure that going this fast ends us in the other universe—”

  “It doesn’t,” he said, “it really doesn’t. We would’ve noticed, just in how it felt—this isn’t that, but it’s like we’re riding the barrier. Maybe that’s what this travel is, riding that barrier.”

  “All right,” she agreed, “then why is this different?”

  “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, if I had to guess,” he said.

  “Of course,” Bee said, “sure, sure—now that we’ve seen the other universe we’ll see it everywhere, the seams at least.”

  “So what happens if we kick the GravPacks a bit harder?” Mud asked.

  “Are you suggesting we try it? I would assume we’d actually see the barrier for real instead of just feeling it.”

  “We should,” he said, “wait to test it.” He knew she’d want to wait and agreed. It was a dumb risk, even if it was the sort of dumb risk he liked to take at times.

  “We should. But if we set the acceleration to last only, say, two seconds relative …”

  “We’d see something, or not, and drop back before anything could go wrong.” Bee thought for a second. “Or we’d pierce the barrier again—”

  “—and be in a lot of trouble,” Mud finished. “Slave me to your GravPack, you have a better sense of the timing than I do.”

  “Is this some sort of apology?” she asked, not enjoying the idea that he could be soft-balling her.

  “Nope, but one of us has to control the timing, and you know the science better,” he told her, meaning it.

  “You know the packs better.”

  “And they’re fine,” he assured her, setting his display to accept her control when requested. She slaved his GravPack to her control and set up some safety parameters. Pushing the GravPacks’ throttles higher than they stood now set them into a dangerous place—the
y were already theoretically pinned at max. But you could go into an overdrive if needed. Too long there and the entire GravPack would burn out. Neither of them knew of a case that overdrive had even been used, which should have counted as a warning. But then, they were also sure it had been, by the original team—they’d just never documented what they’d seen.

  “All right, sensor arrays online,” Bee said, “overdrive in three...two …”

  They felt a lurching as the GravPacks spun up to a higher speed, pushing against a passing gravity well quickly, harder than recommended. The light around them shifted, starting to gain the feeling of the other universe. A white light, the same as they flew into on Bercuser, started to glow softly around them.

  Just as they each started to say something, as they realized the barrier laid right there around them, the GravPacks tried to drop out back to normal full-throttle conditions. But brushing against the barrier and pushing away from it confused an internal system.

  Bee and Mud felt their packs shudder badly and grind as automatic systems detected a fault and cut all power, trying to bring them to a stop by pushing, repelling, and attracting strands against anything in range. Sadly for them, the only thing in range was the barrier between universes itself. Not being actually physical, the barrier couldn’t be pushed against or pulled to, and the GravPacks turned off, but not before managing, somehow, to bring them to a complete halt.

  “What the hell—”

  Mud checked and double-checked his readouts before answering. “The GravPacks couldn’t handle it. And we should’ve been right, just shot back to full throttle fine.”

  “I’m seeing the same thing,” Bee agreed. “So how’d we dead stop?”

  “That’s what I need to know, because Bee, I hate to tell you this, but we’re out of range.”

  “Out of range of what?” Bee switched her HUD back on and scanned. “Oh...oh, but...how can we be out of range of everything? There’s not a gravity well the GravPacks can latch onto. But they can latch onto planets half a system away,” she insisted.

  “Sure thing. And space is really big, and really empty, and we’re between systems, Bee. There’s just...nothing of note. We’re out of range.”

  “So how do we restart flight?”

  “That’s,” Mud looked at the readings off his own HUD, “that’s the problem, Bee. You solve the how we got here. I’ll solve the how we leave here. Fair?”

  “Fair,” she said, pulling up the historical data and starting to parse it, running theories in her head. Bee held two facts steady to start: Momentum still worked in space, and if they had nothing in range to repel or attract to then they had nothing to stop against. Given those two facts, how could they have gone from faster than light to a dead stop in an instant? Furthermore, their small gravity shields couldn’t compensate for that sort of change.

  Even expanded to the size of a tiny ship, gravity fields started to have issues compensating for big shifts—it was why you shouldn’t use the same tech as a GravPack to move a ship even as small as a fighter. The difference in space between the front and back of a fighter were enough to break a ship apart during a turn. Only a person remained small enough to allow the shields to act as a single capsule.

  That capsule though, given the relative speed change, should’ve collapsed itself. Mud and Bee, she knew, should’ve been reduced to small puddles of goo contained inside gravity bubbles if what happened had actually happened. Which was all well and good as far as the science went. Except for the fact that the event had happened and they were still alive.

  She needed more data, data they simply didn’t have. Bee realized she needed to look at the original specs for the GravPacks to work this out. Surely Mud had access to Doctor Williams’ files, being his legal grandson and all.

  While she worked through the data to that point, Mud focused on getting them out of this alive. They carried enough air to last a few days, and the small food and water stores in the suits could stretch as well, but a few days would be it. Meanwhile, they would float out here and die.

  There was nothing in range. Nothing. At the very edges of his scanning for targets, Mud could just make out a possible point, but without some way of getting closer in time it didn’t matter. Traveling at a speed substantially less than light speed would take them right to the edge of their air supply to get there, without enough left to get home.

  At least, Mud thought, if he could get them moving at all in that direction, maybe he could make sure their bodies got back. A grim thought, but better than just vanishing in the darkness forever.

  He shook it off and started over. They needed something to push against, or pull toward. More than that, though, whatever they used had to be big enough for them to gain serious speed. The GravPacks couldn’t push you to interplanetary speeds by leveraging against a small rock—they needed a gravity well of decent size to throw things around that fast.

  Mud searched with his HUD display again. Still nothing. Not that he expected a rogue stellar body to just wander by, but he needed to check, to keep distracting himself so his hindbrain could gnaw at the issue. There had to be a way to jumpstart their movement again. Mud just couldn’t see it. He flipped through the GravPack’s manual, something he hadn’t needed his thinsuit to display for most of his adult life, and read through the still-familiar text.

  Nothing. He wanted to knock his head against a wall, but if they had a wall they wouldn’t be in this position. He flipped through settings on his HUD, looking for something, anything that could help. And then he saw a glimmer of hope scroll by.

  “Bee, I got us a plan,” he said, trying to sound far more confident than he was.

  “So you’re saying it’s really thin and we’re in trouble?” She knew his inflections far too well for his liking just then.

  “Pretty much,” he admitted.

  “Thin is better than nothing. When we get back to some sort of base, can we dig out your grandfather’s original research and specs on the gravity shell stuff? I can’t work out how we stopped without it.”

  “Yeah, we’ll need it to work out the comm issue, too. I’ll get the parents on it. So, ready to go back to the Amalfi?”

  “More than,” she said. “How’re we doing this?”

  “Give me your GravPack,” he said.

  “Wait, seriously?”

  “Yeah,” he said, unspooling a length of heavy-duty tow cable from a compartment in the side of his GravPack.

  “No, but,” she said, seeing where this was headed, “having the GravPacks linked and pushing then pulling against each other would get us started, but the time it would take us to get to any decent speed would be far out of range of our air supply.”

  “Sure, if we were doing that,” he agreed. “GravPack please?”

  Bee took her GravPack off and pushed it across space to him. He grabbed it and sent a small strand toward her, pulling her over to him. He attached the tow cable to her GravPack and hooked the other end to himself.

  “Wait, but even if whatever you have cooked up works, two people riding one GravPack at that sort of speed, is that possible?”

  “It’s been done,” he said. “At least once I know of. But it isn’t pretty. It’ll work, though. I know that.”

  “There is no part of this I’m going to like, is there?”

  “Bee, there’s no part of this that I like, so...nope,” he told her, opening her GravPack’s access panel and messing with the wiring. “So here’s the plan. We spin the stupid thing.”

  Bee’s eyebrows rose slowly. “So an arc of repulsion on my GravPack at an angle to spin it on the cable?”

  “While your pack has a strand of attraction to mine. We should be able to get the centripetal to something insane, then we cut bait and leave.” He closed the access panel. “Better, the attraction strand should carry your pack with us. I’ve hotwired it a bit, so that it’ll shut down and blow on a distance relative to us. We can’t leave this tech floating and can’t take it with us.”

/>   “So we have exactly one shot at this,” she said, shaking her head. “But the centripetal forces involved will kill us. We’ll have to be spinning at something that would, what, escape orbit on most planets?”

  “Something like that,” Mud admitted. He grabbed out the tow cable from her GravPack and hooked that to himself as well. Then he handed the other end to Bee.

  “That sort of force, focused on us, even if the tow line holds—” She attached herself to the tow cable between them, making sure the line had almost no play. They couldn’t afford to be separated by much of any distance for this to work.

  “That, I’m sure of.”

  “Fine, so the tow line holds and we end up crushed to death.”

  “The gravity shields should be able to compensate. In a straight line it’s fine, of course, otherwise we couldn’t do the speeds we normally do. It’s the constant vector changes from the spinning—I think the shields can compensate. They should be able to.”

  “See, Mud, that ‘should’ is my problem. ‘Should’ isn’t a great measure for this.”

  “I’m open to other ideas, but this is all I got.” He pushed Bee’s GravPack away from them, letting it play out the tow line.

  “I really wish I had a better idea,” she said, wrapping an arm around Mud’s side. “This is going to suck.”

  “I know,” he said, setting up the angled strands in advance. “Even if the shields hold, given the angular momentum at play, and the fact they’ll have to constantly adapt...there’s bound to be some light crushing.”

  “Light. Crushing,” Bee repeated.

  “We might break a bone or two, is all I’m saying. Hopefully we won’t pass out. If we pass out before we untether, we’ll die.”

  “All right, can you give me back-up controls for your GravPack? Just in case?”

  “You got it, shit, sorry I almost forgot that. That’s...well, hopefully not necessary but, yeah.”