“But the barrier, you saw it?” Jonah asked.
“We breached the Fold and ended up in the other universe. Then, once we came back, we hit overdrive while at full throttle on a GravPack and could physically see the barrier around us,” Mud told his father.
“Which seems to be why,” Bee said, calling up a section of gravity research, “Doctor Williams capped the throttle where he did. He knew the barrier existed and found the line to draw.”
“We knew there was a barrier,” Shae said, “and to stay away from it—except that one time, remember that?” she asked her husband.
“With the really tall pink scaly things?” he replied.
“Yes,” Shae laughed, “and you had to overdrive us out because they could latch on, and—”
“Mom, come on. Dad, let’s stay on topic,” Mud said, trying to not sound annoyed.
“Sorry,” Shae said, “anyway, yes we knew there was a barrier, but all my father would say was that getting too close to it would destroy us.”
“Which, it turns out, isn’t quite the case,” Mud said. “But I see why he wanted to keep you all away from breaching.”
“I’m not even sure a full breach can just happen anywhere,” Bee said. “I think there are soft spots where it’s possible, but otherwise...think of it as a wall, all right? There are places in the wall where the surface has worn down, and you can get through those easily with some force. Breaking the wall where it’s still strong, though, would take a lot more force.”
“And you don’t even need to fully breach for some strange things to happen,” Steelbox said. “I think you’re dead on about the soft spots.” He pulled over his star charts. “I had been working on the Bercuser problem myself, just in my spare time, right? And I noticed this,” he pointed at the maps, overlaying each other. “See how the two systems Bercuser inhabits line up when you overlay them, but flip one totally? Just one hundred and eighty degrees and suddenly…” he made sure one of the cameras pointed at the maps, while his team looked on.
“They match,” Jonah said.
“Perfectly,” Shae added. “How did not one ever catch that?”
“Because,” Steelbox said, “they didn’t used to.” Everyone stared at him, confused. “These star chats are recent, around fifty years old. But if you go back before that, they don’t line up, not enough to be spooky, right? But when you take a few hundred years of charts and stack them all, flipping the same set the same way...the systems have drifted into a reverse-identical layout.”
“How?” Mills asked, flipping through star charts.
“I couldn’t begin to guess,” Steelbox said, “until Bee and Mud handed it to me. If the other universe has a different concept of gravity and Bercuser breaches—”
“I don’t think it fully breaches, though—” Mud pointed out.
“Even if it slides along the barrier,” Steelbox said, “it’s going to cause hell for nearby space that just gets exposed and washed in that crap, right? And over enough time, I think the gravity differences have been trying to stabilize as best they can, orbits and all just matching up.”
“Are we sure this is how Bercuser moves?” Olivet asked. Everyone looked at him and fell silent. One by one they realized they’d been discussing his home world, revealing a secret no one knew. They couldn’t predict how the planet’s population would react to such a revelation, much less this one man. “That’s it, all of our myths, our history, and relationship to the mists, our culture, everything is just an accident of nature?”
“Accident, yeah, probably,” Mud said, “but not of nature. Chances are—and this is a guess, I don’t know where we’d find records—but if someone else, someone from Bercuser, tried to build a gravity engine, before Granddad did, and pushed it too far, it could’ve taken the whole planet and upset things.”
“And the mist?” Olivet asked. “Just all in our heads?”
“The opposite, really,” Mud told him, smiling. “It’s particulate matter moving at strange speeds both faster than light and—I don’t know how to make this make sense—faster than light but still slower at the same time. The mists are strange stuff, and given the particles involved, they could easily, if you’d adapted to ingesting them, allow you to see possibility waveforms before they collapse. Sometimes.”
“They’re real?”
“They are,” Mud agreed. “And stranger than we could’ve imagined. It explains why any scan of them made no sense. Because they make no sense. We just know why now.”
Olivet looked around the room, then back at the star charts and data on the screens. “When this is over, I wish to go home and explain the new truth to my people.”
“Of course,” Mills told him.
“Thank you. So, these soft spots—the accident on Bercuser, or whatever did truly happen, you think that caused a soft spot to form?” he asked Steelbox.
“Maybe? Or maybe the soft spot already existed in both places and the accident, or whatever, just pushed through. I mean, if there’s a soft spot near here, I don’t know if an accident caused it.”
“But, circling back,” Bee said, “I do have to wonder, if we’re all right on the soft-spot-being-the-only-place-to-breach concept. How do communications packets breach fully every damn time?”
“Size, or maybe that they’re not physical objects,” Chellox offered. “But more to the point, what are we going to do about it?”
“Go talk to them,” Jonah said. “Make sure the problem is what we think it is. Bring them in on this. They know more than we do about their own universe, I promise.”
“Jonah’s right,” Mills said, “so how do we talk to them?”
“I recorded them, along with everything else. Mud got them to understand us some through sign, but we mapped it to words as well, so we might have some translatable data. But their language is so unlike anything we’ve heard.”
“Bee, that’s what humanity has said after each new race we’ve run into,” Shae told her. “How about you, me, and Olivet work on that?”
“May I join as well?” Chellox asked. “I can offer an angle on this that you humans will not have, being from one of those other races.”
“Great,” Bee said, “we’ll set up a small war room for translation efforts.”
“And the rest of us will work up an insertion plan,” Mud said. “We need to find a way in that can cover us when we get out, since we can’t take ships.”
“Why can’t we?” Mills asked.
“Something in that universe kills engine cells. Specifically, whatever is in the mix there. When the Fold opened wide enough, that’s what did Bushfield’s engine in, and then the Ratzinger when the creature touched it.” Mud switched one of the screens over to a display from a sensor showing what he meant. “See there? That leeching, that’s what I mean. We send a ship in, it’ll deadstick instantly.”
“Then how do normal craft land on and leave from Bercuser?” Mills asked.
“They,” Olivet stopped and looked at Mills. “Wait, how do you not know this? We allow normal ships landing graces so long as they empty or load cargo and passengers quickly and leave. We have long established that ships caught during transition would not be able to fly. We thought the fuel loss was a side effect of the...I guess it really is.”
Mills shook his head. “Then what do you do for fuel cells on Bercuser?”
“We have special shielded packs that can survive the planet shift.” He stopped again, realizing what he’d just said. “Yes, but we won’t be able to get our hands on the technology quickly. The adapted packs are not compatible with normal-use fuel ports and carriages. There would be an entire retrofit exchange needing to be built. Questions would also be asked, and we’d have to answer them. Those answers...I do not yet know how my people will take this information.”
“So we’re back to GravPacks only,” Mud said. “Let’s go and work out an insertion plan that includes extraction and retrieval, all right?”
Mills laughed. “Both groups a
re going to use a different space? Guys, one set of you stay here? We haven’t finished moving into the Amalfi yet. You don’t get all of it. Translation group, come with me. The rest of you stay here and work. I’ll run go-between for both groups.”
“Thanks, Mills,” Mud and Jonah said simultaneously. Father and son eyed each other through a monitor. Jonah ran a hand through his short hair and laughed. Mud shook his head and pulled over star charts. They got to work.
CHAPTER 21
CHELLOX, BEE, AND OLIVET set up a smaller room, flipping on a monitor and relinking Shae in. Bee called up translation data histories while also queuing her recordings of the Sweepers. She played the recordings for the room.
“That static, is that in the recording?” Shae asked.
“No, that’s part of their vocalization.”
“Many nonhuman species use sounds you can’t replicate,” Chellox said, “which is why, I assume, almost no one speaks Tsyfarian but we learn your languages all right. Your vocal ranges are tiny.”
“They really are,” Olivet agreed. “I worked with Chellox on my Tsyfarian and at best I sound like a small child with a dislocated jaw.”
Chellox laughed, “Close, yes.”
“All right, but we can replicate it digitally,” Bee said. “We just need to translate it. These sections here,” she chose a selection of recording, playing it for the room, “is Mud saying our names and the Sweepers repeating them. We think. At least, they seemed to repeat the same sounds each time. So we have to go down that road.”
“The problem is,” Shae said as Bee ran the recordings through a program designed to break speech down and translate it, “your names have no sounds in common, so I’m not sure what we can really claim here.”
Bee frowned and thought for a minute before brightening, “Fold! I’m sure we had them repeat Fold as well! That will tell us at least one letter, one sound length. We can average and see if the math works from there.”
“It’ll give us a guess,” Chellox said, “but this is thin, frankly.”
“It is, Bee,” Olivet agreed. “But it’s what we have, so let’s try it.”
“One thought,” Shae said. “Listen to Mud’s voice here. What’s wrong with it?”
“Their...atmosphere? Whatever it was that allowed sound to carry in what should have been space, it made us sound like that.”
“Right, sure,” Shae said quickly, “so modulate all the recordings back until Mud sounds normal. We need to hear how they would sound in our atmosphere if we except a computer to speak, in their universe, and have it sound right.”
“Wait, what?” Olivet looked at Shae in the monitor.
“Whale calls. Sound moves differently in water than air. So a recorded whale song sounded deep and thick to us, but if we adjusted for how the sound would move in air, they were completely different. Now, if you play a whale song recorded underwater while underwater, the water would slow the sound waves down again, see?”
“Of course,” Bee said, shaking her head. “Thank you.” She set about restructuring her program to take medium into account.
They continued to work, deep into the night.
Back in the other meeting room, Mud and his sub-team worked out a tentative plan for insertion and extraction. There remained one major sticking point in the plan.
“If your mother and I leave now and hard burn, we can be there in time.”
“Dad,” Mud said with a sigh, “stay home. Please. We have this under control.”
“We really do, Jonah,” Bushfield added.
“This one is big,” Jonah said, “it’s damned big, and the more hands on deck the smoother—”
“Nope,” Mud insisted. “I need you and Mom as backup. If this entire thing goes sideways, you’ll need to come to our rescue. But until then, until Mills calls you in, you need to stay put.”
“Shouldn’t we at least head to the Amalfi, and—”
“And what if another creature comes out of a new Fold and attacks this time? Or a hundred other things. Like you said, you’re not that far. So the best thing is to stay put.”
“You just don’t want your old, annoying parents sticking their noses in and taking over,” Jonah told his son.
“You want me to deny that’s a part of it? Of course that’s part of this, Dad. This is my team now, and if you guys jump in every time something big happens, how will you ever enjoy being retired?”
“Who said I enjoyed it?”
“You did, a few weeks ago.”
“Jonah,” Mills cut in, “hang back. I promise I’ll call you in the second I need to.”
“This is what you all want?”
“It is,” Mud said. “And it isn’t personal. But we have a team that’s used to working together.” He wished he was as fully confident in his team and his skills as he forced himself to sound. “Shaking that up in the middle of a mission never works out well. You taught me that.”
“Fine. But, Mills?”
“Jonah?”
“I expect regular updates.”
“Of course. Now,” Mills said, “about the deployment areas—how many ships are we really talking?” He pulled up the star chats they’d focused on and started marking them up, working out how he could swing the manpower needed for the operation to go smooth.
They kept working, determined to get this right—and to not risk lives any more than was actually needed to get the job done.
When they finished, they shut off the monitor connecting Jonah and went for food. Most mess halls and commissaries in giant Gov ships were simple grey affairs, all industrial footprint and no personality. That night, Mud’s team brought personality with them. They drank, they partook, they reveled. If not quite as heartily as they might have liked, given a mission launching the next morning, they still made sure to attempt a memorable evening of friends and teammates.
An hour or so into their evening, Bee’s translation team joined them, settling deeply into chairs. Exhaustion draped over the table, and yet they enjoyed themselves. Most missions they stayed away from any sort of preassignment quasi-party. Not out a sense of decorum, but because throwing yourself a little party before you left made the mission feel doomed. The celebration would feel funereal, even if only accidently.
This night, however, that was intentional. Each one of them felt it. A pall loomed over them, and they fought it back the only way any of them could think of. Denial, fueled by laughter and mostly decent food. Mud and Bee had only survived an insertion into the other universe by a shade of luck. That time, nothing had even tried to attack them. This time, they couldn’t be sure that would hold—and worse, they had exactly zero idea of what an attack would honestly consist of.
None of them could even be sure that communication beyond basic hand gestures sat in the realm of the possible. No part of their plan felt secure. But still, they planned departure times. They laid out resources and goal markers. They did their jobs and never gave voice to their concerns, seeing as how they were shared and unsolvable.
Late in the night they departed, each to their own restless sleep.
CHAPTER 22
THE INSERTION TEAM STRAPPED on GravPacks and stood around the hangar of the Amalfi, waiting. Bushfield and her fighter unit loaded into their ships and performed system checks. They needed to leave first, for the plan to work, but the Amalfi’s older infrastructure proved hard to deal with and the ready teams rushed, trying to make sure everything actually worked before they launched ships.
Far later than Mud would have liked, Bushfield led her team out and they broke off, still in visible range, heading in different directions. Each fighter trailed a small environmental enclosure, neither fancy nor comfortable, but designed to keep living creatures alive.
Bee looked at a time readout along the arm of her thinsuit and resisted the urge to tap her foot. The longer it took to get underway, the worse the mission felt. She shifted the gear strapped to her, and then went and helped Olivet recheck his own gear, the two act
ing as the translation team for the mission.
Mud also checked the time and looked around the hangar. “Insertion Team mission status green,” he said into his communicator. “Off and hot in five.”
“About time,” Bee said, patting herself down and checking suit seals one final time.
“Are you sure we can’t take the Arrow to the soft spot, at least?” Chellox asked. “The GravPacks are just annoying.”
“They’re all we have,” Steelbox reminded him, “so hey, we’ll be fine. We’ve all logged enough hours by now.”
“You guys have been briefed on what breaching felt like and how the GravPacks performed in the other universe,” Mud told them, “and you’re ready for this. Just remember,” he looked at each of them in turn: Steelbox, Bee, Chellox, and Olivet, “no one can predict what’s about to happen. We do our best, we watch each other’s backs, and we survive. Above all, we all come back safe. Understood?”
They all nodded, prompting Mud to nod in return before he walked toward the edge of the hangar. A thin gravity shield stood between him and open space. The team walked up around him, meeting him at the edge. “Go in three...two …” Mud stepped off the edge and walked out into the blackness, followed by his team.
One by one they activated their GravPacks and flew in light formation around the Amalfi, doing a systems check. Satisfied everything worked, they got down to it.
“Soft spot should be where we remember it,” Mud said.
“If it’s still there,” Bee added.
“Only one way to find out,” Olivet said, trying to sound confident.
“Right. We’ll loop the Amalfi again, head over to the wreckage of the Ratzinger, then switch strands and build to full throttle. Stay in formation and on target.”
As they completed their loop, they fell into a V formation, with Mud on point, and headed to the Ratzinger.
They switched as planned and started to accelerate hard away from the wreckage, toward the location of the Fold. Open space loomed in front of them and they rushed right toward it. Their speeds crept up through percentages of light speed, and they logged distance quickly. A final coordinated push and—
The Endless Sky Page 16
