Across the Great Rift

by Washburn, Scott;

  Not that they didn’t have good reason to hate her, she admitted.

  This was not a situation which Carlina had anticipated. She had steeled herself to perform the grisly task that she had been assigned, but she had not expected to ever have to confront the friends of the people she had killed. It was unsettling and she found she could not look them in the eye.

  There was nothing whatsoever to do in her cell. No vid or sound players, no book reader, not even a clock. She found it terribly frustrating not to know even what day it was. She had lost track while she was in the sick bay and no one would tell her. It had to be getting close to the day they would drop out of hyper at their destination. If she was awake, she’d be able to feel that happen and get her reckoning back. And after that, it would just be a matter of more waiting until the relief squadron arrived—assuming she was still alive.

  That was a very big assumption.

  She was starting to resign herself to the idea that she was going to die. Once her captors had gotten everything they wanted out of her they would have little reason to keep her alive; and plenty of reasons—nine thousand of them—to kill her. Even if they did not kill her right away, she could not see them allowing her to live and be rescued by her friends. No, even when they realized they could not win, they would still kill her. Probably the only reason they would want her alive was in hopes that she could lead them back to the other conspirators in the Protectorate who had worked to set up this mission. They would probably be disappointed in that, too: she knew almost nothing.

  Of course, the mere fact that they had existed in the heart of the Protectorate would create a good bit of panic, she suspected. That made her smile. One last blow struck against the enemy. Well, perhaps not the last. She had one more blow planned, but the timing of it was uncertain.

  She just hoped she was still alive when it fell.

  * * * * *

  Everyone got to their feet and applauded when Governor Sir Rikard Shiffeld entered the huge conference room on Starsong. The man looked a lot better than the last time Crawford had seen him. Hair, beard, and mustache were trimmed and groomed, and he was wearing a very expensive suit of clothes. He was even wearing his ceremonial governor’s sash and star across his chest and over one shoulder. He’d never done that before, that Crawford could remember, except during the pre-departure ceremony with the Protector. Maybe he was trying to reassure himself that this was still his expedition. His face looked gaunt, dark circles under his eyes, and a pair of the ship’s enlisted ratings stood by his sides, but he smiled at the applause and nodded to the people in the room as he took his place at the head of the conference table.

  “Thank you, everyone, thank you. It’s good to be here. I’m just saddened that so many other people aren’t.” He glanced at the rows of empty seats and then sat down and bade everyone else to do likewise. “I’ve read the reports you were all kind enough to send me while I was… recuperating, so I’m more or less up to date on the situation.” He paused and frowned. “I won’t try to deceive you, people, the situation is very serious and our task, which was already a large one, has become truly enormous. However,” and now he paused and ran his gaze over the entire assembly, “our task will be accomplished—no matter what!” He glanced down at the folder he had brought with him and his scowl deepened. “Along with your various reports, I received an anonymous… petition, asking that the Rift Fleet be turned around and that we go home. People, I am not going to try and find out who sent me this traitorous document, but I just want all of you to know—and pass this along!—we are not going to let anything stop us! The system we are heading for will be colonized, the gate will be built and we will finish our mission!” There was a smattering of applause which quickly grew alongside a few hear! hear!’s, but Crawford noticed Tosh Briggs squirming in his seat.

  “Now, please bring me fully up to date. I’m assuming the fleet has begun its deceleration, correct?” A number of the captains began nodding and glancing at each other.

  “Yes, sir,” said Captain Jervis, taking the lead, “we are decelerating at one half gravity; you can’t feel it because the artificial gravity field compensates, but we are on schedule, despite a few minor glitches.”

  “Such as?”

  “Uh, four of the ships have had reactor malfunctions. One navy ship and three transports. We were expecting about that rate of failure after ten years without active maintenance. But the computers have automatically adjusted the thrust from the other ships to compensate and re-routed fuel flow. We should reach our drop-out point without problem, sir.”

  “Good. What about the bridge crews for the… for the ships which didn’t have them?”

  “Well, they aren’t exactly bridge ‘crews’, sir. We have at least one officer and a few crewmen on each ship, but all they can hope to do is keep an eye on things and yell for help if there’s a problem. We have a trouble team standing by if need be. But the truth is, sir, we are stretched pretty thin right now.”

  “Damn thin,” growled one of the other captains, “even on the ships the saboteur never reached.”

  “Yes,” said Shiffeld, “but I’m afraid we are going to be stretched even thinner. We need more than caretakers. We need to man all our ships—especially the warships—man them so they can function and fight.”

  Jervis looked doubtful. The other captains shook their heads and muttered among themselves. “I-I don’t know where we are going to find the people, sir…”

  “We’ll find them, don’t worry. Mr. Crawford?” Crawford jerked when he discovered the governor now looking at him.

  “Uh, yes, sir?”

  “Your gate construction team is intact, correct?”

  “Yes, sir, no casualties—er, well, one, actually, but he’s recovering quickly.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, and before I forget, let me offer my thanks to you and the men who stopped the traitor.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir, it was…”

  “But tell, me, how many people do you have working for you?”

  “Um, including all the subcontractors assigned to Dougherty, Ltd, it comes to four thousand eight hundred and ninety-seven, sir,” said Crawford dredging the figure up from memory. A flicker of a smile passed over Shiffeld’s face.

  “I appreciate precision, sir.” He turned to look along the table. “Mr. Karrigan, how about your mining operation?”

  “Ready to go, sir. I have about twenty-five hundred rock hounds under me.”

  “Mr. Sowell? Refining and manufacturing?”

  “We’re ready, too, sir. I have around four thousand.”

  “Mr. Briggs? Habitat construction?”

  “I uh, I have all my people, Sir Rikard, about three thousand, I think, but…”

  “Mistress Nassau? Are your terraformers ready?”

  “Yes, Governor. There are eight hundred and seventy-nine people in my department and we are ready to begin operation as soon as we drop out of hyper.”

  “Good. Now, over the next few days I want you all to start streamlining your operations. There is redundancy in every organization, no matter how efficient. Combine your activities and squeeze out every spare person you can. I’m expecting at least twenty-five percent ladies and gentlemen. That would give us nearly four thousand extra personnel, to man the warships and fill critical administrative posts.”

  Crawford leaned back in surprise and exchanged glances with the other managers. “Uh, sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, our operations were already streamlined. We cut things to the bone to make this as cheap and efficient as possible. There’s damn little fat to be cut out.”

  Shiffeld frowned as if reevaluating Crawford’s worth. “There’s always fat, Mr. Crawford. And you will simply have to ask your remaining people to work harder. Put in more hours.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we were already planning on double shifts. I can’t ask much more from my people.”

  “You’ll have to. We shall all have to do more
than we had planned.” He fixed his gaze on Crawford and seemed to be daring him to speak. He was tempted to continue; there were only so many hours in a day, and if you asked people to work too many of them, the results were inevitable: substandard work and accidents. They could afford neither. But Shiffeld was also correct: there really wasn’t much choice.

  “Yes, sir. We’ll do our best,” he said at last.

  Shiffeld looked around with an expression to quell any further objections. “Good. Now, I’ve made up a list of what I’m going to need immediately to reconstitute my staff here and the civil authority. I’ll want about four hundred people right away. Secretarial types and men who can perform security duty for the most part, but here, I’ll put it up on the screen…”

  Crawford looked at the display and started making notes. He’d have to find these people somehow…

  “Well, he’s certainly taken charge, hasn’t he?” a voice whispered from next to him. He turned and saw Regina Nassau with grim smile on her face.

  “Yes, he certainly has.”

  * * * * *

  “Time until drop-out?” demanded Captain Frichette.

  “Twenty-two minutes, sir,” replied the rating sitting at the astrogation station.

  “Very well, have all stations report their status.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Charles Crawford sat in an unused seat on the bridge of Neshaminy and watched the activity around him. The Rift Fleet was nearing the end of its long, long journey and was preparing to drop out of hyperspace. Ten years earlier they had entered this strange, shrunken universe and slowly built up their velocity using their reaction drives to about one percent of the speed of light. Not much for an interstellar voyage, but modest distances traveled in hyper equated to much vaster lengths when you returned to normal space. The acceleration had been a ticklish proposition because instead of ninety-eight individual ships, there had been this one, monstrous conglomeration of ships bound together. The thrusts of each vessel had to be very carefully calculated and balanced to keep the stresses from tearing the whole thing apart.

  Now, they were reversing the process. A week earlier the computers had fired up the drives on the ships and applied about a half-gravity of thrust to kill their velocity to allow the drop-out.

  “All stations are reporting ready for drop-out, Captain,” said Duncan, the acting first officer. “Velocity is six KPS and falling. Drop-out in twenty minutes. It will be good to see some stars again. I’ve spent a hell of a lot of hours in hyper, but I always miss the stars.”

  “Yes, Mr. Duncan, I know what you mean,” said Frichette. “I just hope that whatever stars we see will be friendly ones.”

  “Amen to that, sir. A friendly star, with a nice thick Kuiper Belt and asteroids sizzling with fissionables, eh?”

  “Let’s hope so. And ice, don’t forget the ice.”

  Crawford’s eyes went to the read-out on the ship’s store of reaction mass. It was down to eight percent. They would arrive at Landfall with nearly dry tanks. Fortunately, unless the solar system which was their goal was a complete freak, astronomically speaking, there should be plenty of ice balls floating around which could be processed for the liquid hydrogen they typically used as reaction mass. Several entire ships in the fleet would be devoted to that function exclusively. Duncan’s wish for fissionables was another matter, of course. Landfall’s star was a typical G3 star and the odds were that there would be fissionables, uranium and thorium primarily, in sizable amounts, but there were no guarantees. G3 star systems had been found in the Orion Arm which were almost completely devoid of those vital elements.

  While they would definitely need the hydrogen for reaction mass, they could complete their mission without finding any fissionables. The Rift Fleet had been well—lavishly, in fact—supplied with fissionables, despite the tremendous cost. The gate, itself, would require an enormous set of fission reactors to power it, and the backers of this mission were not going risk failure by not having enough fuel for them already on hand.

  Still, it was the hope of finding fissionables in abundance which was a major driving force behind the desire to cross the Rift. Over two thousand years of intense usage by the United Worlds and the civilizations which had followed, and a failure to find any other power source that was practical for deep-space operations, had depleted the reserves in their section of the Orion Arm and driven the price of what could still be found to great heights. It was hoped that an untouched and unexploited Perseus Arm might produce fissionables in quantity and with relative ease. The men who could stake a claim on those deposits could make huge fortunes. Several of the fleet’s ships were dedicated to that purpose as well, and hundreds more were waiting back home to pour through the gate once it was finished.

  “But why do we have to stop here?” muttered the man at the helm. Frichette halted his pacing to look at him. Heads turned all over the bridge.

  “Do you have some problem with the Landfall system, Mr. Kelley?” asked Frichette.

  “No, sir. I mean, well, a lot of us have been wondering, sir.”

  “Wondering what?” The man was blushing and looking distinctly uncomfortable now.

  “Well, it’s just that with those Venanci bastards on their way, why are we going to hang around for them to find us? Maybe we ought to go somewhere else instead of stayin’ right where they expect us to be.”

  “There really isn’t any other choice, Mr. Kelley,” said Crawford from his chair. Heads were turned his way now. Frichette smiled thinly.

  “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to explain, sir?”

  “It’s simple enough, really. It takes a hell of a big gate to punch the wormhole across a distance like the Rift. Big and expensive. The people paying for it did not want to have to make it any bigger than absolutely necessary. So we picked Landfall because it’s the closest G-type star we could find. It’s in a little cluster that sticks out in our direction and the range of the gate can’t reach much beyond that. There are maybe fifty other systems within range, and if the Venanci don’t find us at Landfall, it would not take much searching to find us in one of the others. Clear enough?”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” said the helmsman. “But what if we just hid out for a bit until the Venanci give up and go away?”

  “Not a good option. First, they aren’t likely to go away, because they’ve got nowhere to go. Our gate is their only ticket home. Second, unless we get our end of the gate done on time, we’re looking at another four years before we can open it up.” The man looked puzzled and Crawford continued. “I’m not a physicist, but basically, the gates project a ‘carrier wave’ of sorts through a different sub-spectrum of hyperspace than our ships use. Its effective true-velocity is around eight hundred cee, so it takes a little over four years to cross the Rift. If our gate isn’t ready to receive the carrier wave—and it’s already on its way from home—the wormhole will collapse and then we have to try to initiate it from our end, which will take another four years. That’s too long to wait. So, I’m sorry, but we are sort of stuck with the Landfall system.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Crawford,” said Frichette. “That answers a lot of questions. All stations report status.”

  The crewmen turned back to their posts and began reporting. “Five minutes. Velocity is at one point five KPS and falling. Thrust steady. Hyper generator is at full charge. Standing by on computer control.”

  The minutes ticked by and the thrust died away. He watched on the status board as the drive was secured and the final preparations for the drop-out were made. Capacitors were feeding power into all ninety-eight hyper generators and an immense bubble of Wolcott Distortion began to form. Crawford could feel nothing; the forces involved did not register on human senses. But they were there and shortly they would rip a hole between the universes and spit the Rift Fleet back into the continuum from which it came. “Wolcott Field is nominal, ten seconds.”

  The final seconds fled past and then it happened. This time he did feel something, a
tiny shock like a jolt of static electricity after walking across a certain type of carpet. The instruments indicated that the jump had been completed and suddenly there were stars in the viewscreen. A cheer went up on the bridge of Neshaminy.

  “Astrogation, confirm our position,” ordered Frichette. The man at his station was already doing so. Or trying to, the rating looked confused and flustered and Frichette went over to help him. Crawford imagined that the same thing was happening on all the other ships—all the other ships which still had bridge crews, he reminded himself. After a moment, the man looked up with a large grin.

  “Bang on target, sir. Five hundred and seventy million klicks out from the primary designated as Landfall. Right where we are supposed to be.” This brought another cheer. Three thousand four hundred and sixty three light years across the Rift. Ten years in hyper and they were bang on target. Frichette gave off a long sigh of relief and then smiled at Crawford. They had made it. Made it across the Great Rift.

  Frichette walked around the bridge congratulating the other people there. Crawford got up from his chair and shook Frichette’s hand.

  “Uh, sir? Sir?” They turned and saw that Thomas Stone, the man at the communications console, was not smiling. He was staring at his panel and frowning.

  “Is there a problem, Tom?” asked Frichette.

  “I-I don’t know, sir.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This place is supposed to be uninhabited, isn’t it?”

  “Yes…” A shock went through Crawford and he and Frichette leaned over to look at Stone’s instruments.

  “Well, it ain’t, sir!” said Stone.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Captain, I’m picking up radio communications from all over the place! Hundreds of signals!” Stone waved his hands at his control panel and then looked up at Frichette.