‘That’s what you get from buying cheap missiles,’ said Lana. ‘They should demand a refund from whatever dirty skeggers are running ordinance to the Invisible Port these days.’
‘I reckon that used to be us,’ said Zeno.
‘They may not need reimbursement,’ squeaked Polter. ‘By our blessed lord on high, the sun is now undergoing a full gravitational collapse.’
‘Frying tonight,’ mumbled Zeno.
‘Mister Durk,’ demanded Lana. ‘Singularity formation any time soon? Dumping that much solar mass into energy has got to help our exit numbers.’
‘The wormhole has almost formed, but nowhere close to clean, we’re still too near to Abracadabra’s gravity well. Our minimum jump window is twenty minutes away at best.’
Lana checked her instruments. ‘And we’re going to collide with the supernova’s neutrino jet in seven minutes and cross the main kinetic energy wave a couple of minutes later.’
‘Can our shields protect us until we jump?’ asked Calder.
‘Your highness, nobody has ever survived a supernova intact enough to report back either way. But frankly, I wouldn’t go making any long-term plans.’
‘On the positive side of the ledger, dear fellows,’ announced Skrat. ‘It appears as if the battle group have found something to occupy themselves with a tad more important than any feelings of wounded pride concerning the loss of the Doubtful Quasar. They are now desperately boosting for an emergency system exit. All we have to deal with are any particularly spiteful pilots in their fighter wing, who appear to have been rather abandoned by the two carriers.’
‘I hope they all burn,’ snarled Lana. ‘And I really wish that scumbag Dollar-sign Dillard was in-system to enjoy the payback on his investment. Does that sound vindictive?’
‘Yes,’ shrugged Calder.
‘Blessed creator, shield us in your mercy,’ whistled Polter.
‘Yeah, I’ll take some of that.’ Lana swivelled in her chair. ‘Polter, pre-set an automated jump with Granny and leave it counting down on a timer, in case the bridge is out of action when we have a stable wormhole.’
Out of action, that’s an understatement. Calder imagined the ship passing into hyperspace as a half-molten ruin, crew and passengers dead – and that was if an A.I. could handle navigating a jump, which they usually couldn’t. Wasn’t that how the Gravity Rose was found when Lana had inherited her the first time around? Floating dead in space. Maybe history really did repeat itself. Calder just wished history had left a certain ex-prince off this particular merry-go-round. He hadn’t even had a chance to convince Lana Fiveworlds how she should feel about him. This really wasn’t fair. On any of them. But most of all, him.
‘Incoming transmission from the fighter wing,’ said Zeno. ‘The squadron’s twigged we’re attempting a barycentre jump and are ordering us to land them in the Rose’s shuttle deck or they’ll take us apart.’
‘If we’re going to get a supernova suntan, I’m damned I’ll burn with an armed company of the Invisible Port’s killers on board plotting to seize my ship,’ snarled Lana. ‘Tell them to boost for what’s left of the sun and pray there’s a black hole with a clean jump singularity forming inside it when they arrive.’
Predictably, it didn’t take long for the abandoned pirate fighters to make good on their threat, swooping in, seeming oblivious to the fact that they were about to try to destroy their last chance of jumping out of the system. Looks like if they can’t hitch a ride, they’re going to make sure nobody’s getting out alive’.
‘Those mopes are packing torpedoes!’ called Zeno. ‘I’m detecting nuclear warheads – x-ray laser nukes.’ Calder felt a shiver go down his spine. As if there’s not going to be enough radiation from an exploding star. There was only one use for such ordinance, overwhelming a ship’s shields and killing the crew in a deadly radiation flash.
‘Blasted fools,’ said Skrat. ‘That supernova’s going to detonate their missiles whether they launch or not.’
‘We’re within the warhead’s blast radius,’ warned Zeno. ‘Proto-wave from the supernova is incoming.’
‘Keep our vanes turning,’ Lana shouted at the ex-prince, half-ordering, half-pleading. ‘Set us up for a clean dive.’
Whether we have one or not. Calder tried to keep his eyes fixed on the formation of the artificial black hole they needed to use to rend space-time, slipping the Gravity Rose through the tear. Keep his eyes on that rather than the supernova’s incoming front. The mass fluctuations went off the scale across his instruments, the ship’s A.I struggling vainly to model the dying star’s interactions with his emergent black hole. Something about those numbers really didn’t make sense, but what was it? His head throbbed as though his skull was being drilled sans anaesthetic, as it always did when he tried to access neural connections that had been made under sim – even the future’s artificial knowledge came with a price, it seemed.
His flagging concentration was shattered by Lana’s yell. ‘Brace for impact!’
The projection of the stars clouded over as the hull turned opaque to protect against the fierce detonation of the fighters’ payload, the Gravity Rose’s shields flaring up to full strength as she rocked in the early slurry of the dying sun, a mad swaying that only grew worse as the wavefront strengthened. Calder’s seat went into armour mode around him, instruments dying; not that he was able to concentrate on the controls and screaming alarms, his retina flooded with a web of burning scratches, exotic particles treating his skull to its own private firework display. The ex-prince felt as though a giant troll had picked him up and was slamming him from side to side across the bridge, the very air burning. A beating that went on for minutes before suddenly subsiding. If that was merely the proto-wave, he’d hate to be around when the full surge of the dead star smashed into them. Calder moaned in his seat. A medical unit had appeared from inside the chair, latching onto the skin of his bruised, burning ribs, pumping him full of drugs and miniature nanomechanical healers. Their sensors were burned out, his consoles blank apart from damage report after damage report, the ship’s hull trying to seal itself across multiple impact points. How in the universe had they survived this? Calder had been in Hell Fleet sims – supposedly accurate down to the last rivet - where capital ships with shield generators larger than the Gravity Rose had taken less punishment and still been left dead in space. They had lost all incoming sensor information. They were flying blind. But there was something about what Calder thought he had seen in the sensor readings before the ferocious detonation off the ship. And he had a hunch about it what it might mean. The professor’s final possessed words inside the machine cavern came back to him. This must be preserved.
‘Main surge from the supernova on its way,’ said Zeno. ‘We’ll be riding the solar swell any second.’
‘We can dive for hyperspace now,’ coughed Calder.
‘We’re still three minutes away from anything other than immediate disintegration if we dive, revered captain!’ said Polter. ‘Please, don’t do it! We’ll be crushed attempting to translate.’
‘Do it!’ said Calder through shaking teeth. He was being buffeted so fiercely by early plasma from the supernova’s second shockwave that his seat’s fields could hardly compensate for the violence. What’s that doing to the hull integrity? ‘We’re not going to survive another minute, let alone three.’
‘Do you know how many jumps Polter has transited, new boy?’ Lana shouted over the roar of crackling shields. ‘And how many he’s been wrong about? He’s the best damn navigator in the Edge.’
‘For the love of the gods, Lana Fiveworlds, if you’re ever going to trust me, trust me now and dive for that singularity.’
‘May the creator shelter us!’ wailed Polter. ‘This heathen polytheist counts beyond the unitary for the number of true deities in the universe, and he asks us to trust his grasp of jump mechanics?’
By way of the skipper’s answer, Calder felt the deck lurch out from under him, taking his
stomach with it, as if he was hurtling down a well with a one-way ticket to a very dark place. He managed to squeeze out a second or two’s elation at Lana’s decision to go for the dive and then the translation process kicked in. He tried hard not to throw up as his matter was torn apart and rebuilt in anticipation of an exotic new reality. Hyperspace. He prayed his hunch proved correct, or this would be a real short process, smeared across the singularity in his eagerness to put the raging system behind him.
Minutes later, his hunch was born out. Still alive! Calder could tell he was becoming a practiced spacer – this time he hadn’t even needed a sick bag. That’s progress. Calder met the expectant eyes of the rest of the bridge crew, no doubt wondering why they weren’t dead. ‘Abracadabra vanished behind us. That’s the only way those last sensor readings made any sense… to survive the supernova the whole world teleported out of the system. This must be preserved.’
Zeno hit his forehead with his palm. ‘Along with the gravity well disrupting our dive!’
‘No sun left, no world left,’ said Lana, in amazement. ‘With an exit mass that light a cadet could have jumped us out of there.’
‘A cadet did not,’ said Polter, annoyed, drumming his claws against his carapace. ‘I did.’
‘With your usual level of artisanship, Polter,’ said Lana, but she looked in the ex-prince’s direction and silently mouthed a thank you. To Calder, that felt a lot like progress, too.
CHAPTER SIX
Of epilogues.
Lana Fiveworlds glanced up from her cabin’s desk at the knock on the door. She was half-expecting Calder to step through, but it turned out to be Skrat instead. A small part of her felt disappointed. The last time the new boy had stepped over her threshold after making a suggestion that had saved the ship, he had claimed his reward by launching a surprise swoop on Lana’s lips. Skrat had many fine qualities, but kissing wasn’t one of them. At least, she hoped not. Lana suspended the star map display running across her desk’s surface like a river of stars. She trusted her first mate wasn’t coming to complain about their non-paying passengers getting drunk in their cabins and trying to smash the ship up again. The sooner the miners were dumped on the next inhabited system they jumped into, the better. ‘Mister raz Skeratt – you looking to suggest a port with a good shipyard and a half-decent chance to make up for losing Dollar-sign’s contract?’
‘I have been perusing our log entries for what happened back on Abracadabra, skipper, including the recording of events taken by Zeno’s eye cameras.’
‘And why the skeg would you do that? You planning on making a sim of that snarl-up on Abracadabra? Dumping the movie in the data sphere on the next civilized world? Knowing my luck, it’d go viral and Fiveworlds Shipping’s name would end up as a joke across half the galaxy.’ Zeno had given up his acting career centuries ago. She didn’t think he’d enjoy being famous again.
‘Let’s just say events on the surface – or rather, below it – made me more than a little curious, dear girl. As part of said perusing, I checked up on Calder’s bio-profile in the medical bay – accessed data from the nano-surgeons injected into him during our recent contretemps. What I found confirmed my suspicions. His junk DNA has been encoded with an at-first seemingly random pattern that’s more than a tad unusual compared to say, yours, or any other base human genome for that matter.’
‘What are you telling me?’ asked Lana, confused.
‘You’ll recall the professor mentioned the original alliance science team mutinied and deleted the Heezy genetic control codes after they witnessed their research being misused during the war,’ said Skrat. ‘That wasn’t quite accurate. They didn’t delete their research. Destroying knowledge is a little more than most scientists can bear… instead, they hid it. They stored it as series of genetically resequenced codes in their junk DNA. And the team vanished around the time that Calder’s world, Hesperus, was being opened up for colonization. An ideal out-of-the-way backwater to lay low on. A tad too effective a refuge in retrospect, given how its settlers were abandoned to their fate when the world’s ice age started.’
‘It can’t be!’ Calder couldn’t be…?
‘Unlike you, I never hacked the Heezy transportation system or their curious corridor-on-demand system,’ said Skrat. ‘It just worked for us – or rather, the systems only activated for us because we were travelling with Calder. It had to be a Heezy sentinel that kidnapped Calder and dragged him through the base’s laser fence like a phantom. But the sentinel didn’t kill him in the jungle, or later in the hunting lodge or even when we uncovered the wreck of the Never Come Down… why do you think that was? I watched the recording of what the Heezy defences did to the pirates in the camp – it wasn’t because the sentinels weren’t up to the task. No. As far as the Heezy ruins were concerned, Calder Durk was one of the ancient masters returned. The ruins were curious about Calder. That’s why it took him. It wanted to see where in their ecosystem the new boy fitted.’
Lana remembered the circle of sentinels closing in on the survivors inside the cavern and then halting. She had thought they had been bowing before Professor Sebba’s possessed form… could it have actually been Calder they were recognizing? What if the machines hadn’t stayed their murderous assault due to any residual humanity left inside Sebba. What if the only reason Lana and the rest of the crew had been teleported to the Gravity Rose was to maximize Calder’s chance of survival? It must be preserved. Sebba hadn’t just been talking about Abracadabra, it seemed.
Skrat swished his tail thoughtfully. ‘So, this rather begs the question, what do we tell our Mister Durk of what we’ve uncovered?’
‘Absolutely nothing. The fewer people that know about this, the better,’ insisted Lana. ‘The triple alliance, the skein, there isn’t a superpower in the galaxy that wouldn’t chase us to the ends of the universe to get their hands on Calder. Imagine! A key for every Heezy artefact they’ve collected and haven’t got a hope in hell in understanding for the next few millennia. What a mind-skeg. The best Calder could hope for is having his DNA scanned before being locked in a very deep, very secure pit for the rest of his life.’ She didn’t have to say that the more likely option was a trip to a cellular-level incinerator via a very hard, cold dissection table.
‘From what I understand, he’s the last of his family line,’ said Skrat. ‘Hesperus’s ice age was savage… it claimed millions of lives among the original settler group after their civilization collapsed. Mister Durk may well be the only surviving descendant of the original science team that worked on Pluto. He’s quite possibly unique.’
‘We’re all unique, Skrat.’
‘That’s as maybe, but nobody’s willing to kill for my blasted DNA. There’s something else,’ said Skrat. ‘I think that Zeno might suspect something of Calder’s true nature. He was plugged into the Heezy control board in the cavern, seeing whatever Sebba was seeing. The professor was about to tell you about something she had noticed, something “impossible”, but Zeno interrupted her before she could finish speaking. What if the good professor had detected the presence of a living Heezy genetic control set interacting with the cavern’s machines?’
‘Zeno’s said nothing to me about Calder?’
‘Maybe he’s considering selling Calder to the highest bidder? The dear boy is utterly priceless, you know. What I discovered hidden in his DNA was enough to give even an honourable chap of my calibre pause to think. I could purchase back my lost position in the nest. Good heavens, I could buy enough voting shares to anoint myself President of the whole blasted skirl home world!’
‘Zeno wouldn’t do that,’ protested Lana. ‘There has to be an alternative explanation for what he discovered down on the planet while plugged in.’
‘Your people place too much faith in your AIs,’ said Skrat. ‘It’s not a mistake you will find many skirls making. We prefer our machines dull, obedient and resolutely without sarcasm and a talent for answering back.’
‘When I came out of a cold s
leep capsule as a vegetable, it was Zeno who nursed me back to health. I was nothing more than a penniless amnesiac refugee,’ said Lana. ‘One among thousands. He’s been with me from the start. Zeno’s never betrayed me yet and I can’t believe he ever would.’
‘The android’s survived for over a thousand years – who knows what strange alien perspectives his mind’s developed across the centuries. To him, we’re little more than mayflies flickering out in the dark. A brief dance and… gone. Keep both your eyes and mind open for unpleasant possibilities, captain,’ advised Skrat. ‘That’s all I suggest.’
Unpleasant possibilities? After this Dollar-sign debacle, she’d need to find something a little more profitable than those to haul across the galaxy. And the irony was, in their latest crewman they had their very own dreams-beyond-avarice-fortune walking around on two legs. Lana snorted and her eyes drifted down to the star charts on her screen. Somewhere in the Edge was a job that paid well and wouldn’t leave the Gravity Rose with hull damage. Somewhere out there.
Skrat made for the door of her quarters. ‘Maybe you should consider selling Mister Durk, captain. We could all depart the next port as trillionaires.’
‘What, and live it large like a damn episode of Lives of the Planet Kings? I have something that most trillionaires will never have,’ said Lana.
Skrat flicked his tail curiously. ‘And that would be?’
Lana reached out and tapped the hull of her ship. ‘Enough.’
FIN
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