Rue opened her eyes a squint. They stood at one end of a long corridor that stretched away, apparently to infinity. Chandra grinned at her; Rue was amazed at what she saw. If not for the catsuit and the pistol, Corinna Chandra might have been anybody's aunt or older friend. She had iron-gray hair, and the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth suggested she was in her late forties. She looked like she would have been at home in a library— certainly not in a gunfight.
"Come," she said, gesturing down the tunnel. "These utility ways don't go all the way to the keep. We'll have to rendezvous with our team and get up there before the soldiers find out we've taken this way." She started to jog away down the tunnel.
The lights overhead flickered; a cloud of dust suddenly appeared far away down the long tunnel and moments later a loud bang! left Rue's ears ringing. Then the lights went out completely.
Another series of loud reports made Rue crouch with her hands over her ears. Then bright lights reached through swirling dust and pinioned her and the others.
"Hands up!" shouted a man from somewhere behind those lights. Rue saw Chandra reluctantly drop her pistol and raise her hands.
* * *
THEY WERE MARCHED back into the courtyard, where at least a dozen men dressed as soldiers waited. Rue, Max, and Corinna Chandra were ordered to kneel, their hands clasped behind their heads. The whole scene seemed a bit unreal to Rue; it was like something out of a movie.
The leader of the squad walked up and inspected each of them in turn. Satisfied, he nodded to his men. "It's them. Let's make this quick and get out of here." He stepped aside and the men raised their weapons.
"Remember, this is live!" said a strangely familiar voice from somewhere overhead. The soldiers reacted to the words as though they'd been shocked, jumping back and raising their lights and weapons.
Rue craned her neck to look up and behind her. Perched on the wall of the courtyard, monocle gleaming in his eye, was Blair Genereaux. Beside him on the wall sat a powerful looking portable inscape transmitter. Its indicators glowed warmly.
"Yes, folks, it's a real paramilitary execution and it's happening live and on the inscape net!" continued the newshound, seemingly unperturbed at all the guns aimed in his direction. "If you're really lucky, you'll get to see this reporter killed as well. But before this happens, let's shed a little light on the killers. Let me open up our recently declassified military personnel database…"
Rue glanced back down in time to see the blood drain from the squad leader's face. Then the man cleared his throat, turned to his men and said in a stilted voice, "These are not the criminals we are after." A moment later he was fast-walking out of the courtyard. His men stared after him for a moment, then followed in confused haste.
Blair hopped down off the wall and brushed dust off his pant leg. He grinned as Rue ran over to hug him.
"Well, folks, seems there's no story here after all," he continued in his announcer's voice. "But stay tuned to the visual feed, just in case.
"Hi," he said in a more normal tone. "Glad I found you guys."
"But how?" asked Max.
"It wasn't hard, actually. I've been camped out in the monastery for days now. I figured you'd have to come here eventually, so I'd wait and interview you when you arrived." He grinned. "When the alarms went off and a bunch of people dressed in black started running out the gates… well, let's just say I came to a logical conclusion and followed some of them."
"Well, good for you!" She kissed him on the cheek. Blair's smile grew even broader.
"I can't believe they just left," said Corinna Chandra, staring after the departing troops.
Blair laughed. "Power of the press. The provisional government couldn't get away with overt murder. These guys know they'd have been the patsies if they'd gone through with it and it got onto the net."
"Come on," said Max. "Let's get to the monastery before those goons come back." They left the courtyard and began marching up the road to the distant, open doors of the giant building.
Blair matched his pace to Rue's. "So, you'll give me another interview before you leave?"
Rue laughed. "I'll do better than that! How would you like to be the official chronicler of the adventure?"
"You mean…"
"I mean crew! I mean come with us. We haven't got all our crew together. You too, Ms. Chandra."
Blair looked stunned. "I… I yes, that would be… Rue, this story would make my career."
Corinna Chandra appeared to be thinking. Finally she smiled. "I would be honored," she said.
"Then it's settled."
Blair had seemed calm staring down the barrels of a dozen guns. Now he looked dazed. "Blair Genereaux, author of The Chronicles of—" He frowned. "Chronicles of what?"
"Huh?"
"Rue, haven't you even named your cycler?"
Rue pretended to think about it, but a name for the cycler had popped unbidden into her head the instant Blair asked and she knew it was right. "You want a name? How 'bout Jentry's Envy?"
Max laughed. "If you want. You're the captain."
Yes, I am, Rue thought and then she had to stop and sit down for a while.
6
RUE KNEW ALL about cyclers.
She had read cycler romances, watched movies about cycler captains, participated in sims about them ever since she could remember. They were a matter of practical fact in her life. They were also unbelievably romantic.
In sims, she had walked the decks of interstellar cyclers that were more like grand hotels, some even modelled on old Earth styles, with sweeping staircases and statues in niches and stained-glass windows that looked out on Mother Night. Only the richest, most important, or most talented could afford to travel between the stars: delegations of diplomats, eccentric billionaires, mad scientists, and artists from many different worlds were thrown together here and asked to get along for months or years at a time. Naturally, there was intrigue.
How you got to and from cyclers was itself a study in legend. So when Rue awoke on her last morning on Treya, grabbed her carefully packed bag and dumped it in the back of Max's aircar, she had all kinds of embarkation stories in mind. You rode particle beams or microwaves, or used a pion drive to rendezvous with passing cyclers; that was the trite truth. But there were thousands of gripping tales of how that rendezvous might be accomplished. One that was on her mind as she waved away the column of midges flittering above Max's car and watched him lock up his house, was a movie where some bad guys inserted their magsail into the beam behind the hero's. This cut off his acceleration and boosted theirs; they had stolen his beam and would reach the cycler while leaving him stranded. This kind of piracy was known as beam-stealing and it had been known to happen. The monks couldn't turn off the beams if it happened without dooming both crews to die adrift.
The various envious powers of Erythrion— ranging from Max's mom to the government— seemed to have decided on letting them go, which considering recent events seemed very suspicious. As they flew out to the orbital elevator she constructed frightening scenarios for herself about the government secretly beam-stealing their power and riding out to claim Jentry's Envy while they died in interstellar space.
She had barely shaken hands with the last member of their crew, a shy man named Evan Laurel, before they were all shooting to orbit. Her dark fantasies had no time to properly germinate.
As they rode up the elevator, Rue stayed glued to the window, watching the people, then the streets, buildings, and towns, dwindle below. The world resolved itself as a giant sunlit disk with blackness beyond it, and they ascended the center of a well of light that descended from impossibly far above. Clouds drifted to the wall of this well, faded and vanished. Beside Rue, Blair was doing a report, describing the crew and their impending adventure. He seemed so serene and engaging when he talked, it both calmed and infuriated her. Did he not realize what they were getting themselves into?
They managed to avoid several ships' worth of other newshounds and made
it to her modified cycler shuttle. She barely recognized it; Max had removed nearly everything made of metal, even the hull, replacing it all with lightweight alternatives. It was a testament to his fanaticism that what little metal had been in the shuttle before had been lightweight beryllium alloys; even that was too much for him in his determination to cut mass. The hull was now a balloon-skin coated with shipfur, pale against the black sky. Several windows gleamed in the short cylinder; that was all. Nearby, Max's second shuttle hung like a brooding cloud. That one held life-support stacks and supplies. It was all they could afford to bring— and the total mass of both shuttles was under sixty tonnes.
The shuttles had small nuclear power packs which doubled as maneuvering engines. They had no other drive source, but coiled around their waists were some kilometers of superconducting cable. Charged, they would spring out to form rigid magnetized rings attached to the ships by tethers: plasma sails, they were called. Rue knew the principle, but wouldn't get to see the famous acceleration aurora those wire sails would kick up; she would be asleep in a life-support tank when the million or so particle-beam accelerators orbiting Erythrion turned their baleful gazes on these two little ships and pushed them at three gravities' acceleration on their way. For a few weeks, a significant portion of Erythrion's immense magnetosphere would be tapped and transmuted into these beams and yet those tens of trillions of watts were barely sufficient to boost sixty tonnes up to relativistic velocity. Halo worlds like Erythrion had power to spare for their colonies, but couldn't afford to launch something so gigantic as an interstellar cycler. Only the lit worlds could muster that kind of energy, and the lit worlds had abandoned the halo. Since its colonization, Rue's world had maintained its tenuous contact with the rest of the universe only through cargo packets and the rendezvous shuttles that met passing cyclers. The cyclers were gone; only the occasional packet came and went. Hers would be the first passenger shuttle to rendezvous with a cycler in twenty years.
Beyond the halo, millions of FTL ships of the R.E. might be winging to and fro between the lit stars. Perhaps— but no one at Erythrion could know, except from the evidence that there was less contact with the lit worlds every year, as their economies shifted away from launching expensive cyclers. As existing cyclers were decommissioned, they were not being replaced. It was becoming impossible for humans to travel between the halo worlds. It was this fact that made Jentry's Envy priceless.
They cycled through the airlock; when the inner door opened, Rue said, "Shit," very quietly. She had been expecting the familiar, cozy interior of the shuttle— but the interior had been gutted.
"We've got everything we could possibly need," said Max, waving expansively. "Even a few kitchen sinks thrown in for thoroughness."
Corinna Chandra and Evan Laurel were the least known of Rue's new crew. She watched them as they settled in; they had similar appraising looks in their eyes as they went through the supplies, occasionally tossing questions back at Max. Rebecca had gone to put her luggage in her little stateroom; Blair drifted around, recording everything.
In cycler romances, the key figure was always the captain. The cycler captain was the prime mover of many stories; he or she was the epicenter of intrigue, the judge, jury, and executioner of villains. He was frequently a rogue, or a perfect gentleman— but the captain in his jet-black uniform was always in godlike control of events.
Rue supposed she was, or soon would be, such a captain. The idea was ludicrous. Still, here was her crew, all looking nervous in one way or another. She had intended to give a stirring speech to them before they all entered the cold sleep tanks. Now that they were here, though, her mouth was dry and she couldn't say a word, until Max came over and took her hand.
"It's real now, isn't it?" he asked. Rue nodded quickly.
The others gathered around. They looked expectant. Rue cleared her throat. She knew they could see the fear in her eyes and the knowledge shamed her. Indeed, her motley crew did not look like a band of adventurers, but like a random group of citizens pulled out of their ordinary lives and condemned by unknown powers to senseless exile.
"I'm scared," she said. Corinna and Evan glanced at one another. "But I'm only scared because I haven't done this before," Rue continued quickly. "We're doing something that our people have been doing for centuries. We're going out to meet a cycler. Nothing unusual there. We don't know what we'll find when we get to it, but we're well supplied and ready for a long trip." She wracked her brains, trying to think of something inspiring to add. "I–I'm glad you've put your faith in me and Max and…" Her mind went blank.
Rebecca came and took Rue's hand. "Let's focus on one thing at a time," she said gently. "What's next?"
Rue tried to pull herself together. "Cold sleep," she said. "Let's get ready for it."
Her crew went to check on the cold-sleep tanks, all except Blair, who stayed by her side. Rue tried not to cry, but she was really, really scared, in a way she had never been on Allemagne. And she couldn't hide it from these people who now depended on her for their lives.
* * *
C OLD SLEEP WAS not really sleep, but more like a long half-waking nightmare. Rue hadn't appreciated that before and nothing prepared her for the experience. She felt suspended in timelessness, comfortable and cocooned. Dreams came and went, some beautiful, some terrifying. Every now and then, a cold brittle voice she later realized belonged to the shuttle rattled off statistics. She would rise almost to waking, pondering those numbers until she realized that they represented the shuttle's status: acceleration, heading, integrity of the cold sleep capsules. When she knew all was well, she would drift away again.
Sometimes her body roused and she dimly knew she was flailing about, limbs under the control of a nervous system shunt. She was exercising. At other times she heard her own voice, croaking or singing aimlessly. It sounded like a stranger's voice.
There came a time when she really did sleep, then woke slowly to hear voices— real ones, this time, murmuring nearby. The feeling of huge weight that had pressed down on her for so long was gone. She had survived a month at three gravity's acceleration and they must now be approaching the Envy.
As this awareness dawned Rue struggled to sit up. It was surprisingly easy; she had expected stiff joints but everything seemed supple. Her eyes, though, wouldn't focus properly. A flesh-colored oval hovered in front of her. A familiar voice emerged from it. "Do you know who I am?"
"Re-Rebecca."
"Do you know where you are?"
Rebecca asked a few more questions, apparently satisfying herself that Rue was sane. Then she wrapped her captain in a blanket and towed her to the galley. "It'll take your eyes a few days to fully recover," she said as Rue groped for a coffee bulb she could dimly see floating in front of her. "You haven't used them for a month and the muscles have loosened up."
There was a gray bulk to Rue's left. She gradually realized it was Evan Laurel. He and Corinna had been roused before her, according to Rue's own instructions. Medical staff, engineering, and avionics first, that had been her decision. Blair and Max were being decanted now; all seemed well with them.
"Are we there?" Rue asked. After the health of the crew, it was the first and most important question on her mind.
The gray oval shook in a shrug. "Not sure," said Evan. "Corinna's checking now."
"I feel so…"
"Helpless, yes," said Evan. "It'll pass. I've done this a few times. It's always like this."
Another blob swam into sight, above and to her left. "Bad news," said Corinna.
Adrenaline had Rue instantly alert. "What?"
"The radar didn't make it through accel. We can grow new parts with the custom nano we brought, but it'll take weeks…"
"So we can't see where we are?"
"We've got the scopes," said Evan. "We'll manage. Right, Cor?"
"Yes," said Chandra in her usual neutral tone.
"Great," muttered Rue. As the adrenaline passed, she felt infinitely weary. She s
upposed that this weariness was on her now like a mantle; she was a captain, or at least had to pretend to be. The weariness was doubtless part of the job.
"We'll wait, then," she said. "When our eyes are up to it, we'll see where we are."
* * *
I T TOOK SEVERAL days before their eyesight came back. Evan stumbled around, his hair mussed, checking the stability of their life support and power. Every now and then he would glance out a window at the starry blackness and look longingly at the telescope. But the necessities of life had to be established before they could investigate where they were.
They huddled like invalids, growing stronger slowly; Blair was chatty as always and Rebecca efficient and kind, but Corinna maintained her aloof silence, Evan seemed perpetually nervous… and Max had sunk into himself. Rue was to learn that she had never before known him in his «normal» state— that is, surly and introspective. It was as though he had switched on some hyperactive part of himself in order to get them out here and once that was done he sank back into himself, reserves of charisma and genius exhausted. He hovered in a corner, blanket around his shoulders, playing Penrose Go with the computer. He seldom spoke.
Blair set about interviewing them on the third day and they perked up, all except Max. Blair started with Evan, sitting him in front of the window and chatting. The conversation became imperceptibly more focused and at a certain point Rue realized the interview had begun— but Evan himself either hadn't realized it, or was just very relaxed with the process. She smiled proudly at Blair's cleverness.
"I was born and raised in the Rights Economy," said Evan, "so I'd never been on anything like a cycler before I enlisted in the Cycler Order. A cycler's like a station, I guess, only moving. They're a lot like this shuttle, too. The first one I was on, the Martine, was pretty opulent, I guess— but small. There were fifty staterooms, a small garden, a banquet hall. It had several annexes which were separate balloon habitats floating next to it. One of those had a spherical swimming pool."
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