Return to Camerein

by Rick Shelley

  Here comes the crunch, Alfie thought.

  Behind them, the rest of the squad moved up onto the porch and fanned out to either side, ready to flank the doorway and the nearest windows so that they would be able to cover the captain and their sergeant when they went inside.

  The double doors opened inward. Each had a full-length oval windowpane in it, and there were flimsy white lace curtains on the inside. Spencer and Edwards stood in front of the doors looking in, then looking at each other.

  “Together?” Alfie asked, and David nodded.

  They pushed the doors open and moved inside. This was apparently the main reception area of the hotel, the lobby, but there was no one in sight. The music came from somewhere ahead and off to the left, on the river side of the hotel. David gestured toward a wide-open doorway on the left, thirty feet away.

  The two men moved cautiously toward the opening. They heard a mumble of voices, and then a woman’s high-pitched laughter. As the commandos got closer they could see tables and chairs, and made the obvious guess that it was the dining room. They looked at each other. David shrugged.

  “We might as well introduce ourselves,” he whispered.

  For perhaps twenty seconds, no one in the dining salon gave any indication that they had seen the two men in military battledress standing in the archway leading to the hotel lobby. The men had helmet visors raised, and carried rifles. They simply moved into the center of the opening and stopped there.

  David’s quick count showed fourteen people in the room. He spotted Prince George at once. Even in profile he looked so much like his brothers that he was impossible to mistake.

  Twenty seconds. Then, once one person noticed the newcomers, the others seemed to receive the message as if bytelepathy. The soft music continued, coming from speakers in the corners. But the talking ceased for several seconds. Heads turned. Eyes opened wider.

  Then the babel.

  David ignored the confusion of voices and walked toward Prince George. David stopped across the table from the prince.

  “Your Highness, I’m Captain David Spencer, 2nd Regiment of Royal Marines. His Majesty sent me to collect you and your, ah, companions here.”

  13

  Commander Archibald Billingsley was one of a small number of officers who had spent virtually his entire naval career aboard one ship. He had reported aboard HMS Avon twenty-three years ago as an ensign, the most junior officer in the engineering section. Except for several short periods of detached duty, he had remained assigned to the ship ever since. Since Avon had been refitted to carry commandos, Billingsley had been chief engineering officer. It was only in the engineering department that an officer, or rating, was likely to spend most of his service on the same vessel. The Admiralty’s rationale was “No two ships are truly identical, not even sister ships of the same class, and by leaving the same people in engineering, we are improving the readiness of those ships by making certain that the people who maintain the vital systems are intimately familiar with all of the peculiarities of their specific vessel.”

  “It can’t be done, Captain,” Billingsley reported seventy hours after Avon’s Nilssen generators failed. “I’ve tried every combination possible, and a few that aren’t, and it’s no go. Our Nilssens are dead. I can’t even cobble together one functioning generator from the three we had. We lost the same key modules on all three, and I haven’t been ableto make replacements. Right now, I’m willing to concede that I never will be able to.”

  Billingsley and Captain Barlowe were alone in the wardroom. The captain had chased out the few officers who had been present when the engineer entered. Zero gravity had made the wardroom a much less welcome retreat in any case. Naval crews had not had to deal with zero gravity routinely in centuries. The backup system against rare (and normally very temporary) failures in the artificial gravity produced by Nilssen generators was as primitive as it could be—boots with magnetic soles.

  “Are you telling me that there is no way for Avon to escape Q-space?” Barlowe asked, very softly.

  “Not quite yet, Captain, though it may well come to that. But there might be one alternative.” Arch shrugged, an awkward gesture for a man tired beyond all measure. “It shouldn’t be possible. Every simulation I run using Admiralty parameters fails, but that’s mostly because the computers have been told that it’s not just impossible but inconceivable.”

  “Go on,” Barlowe invited when the chief engineer hesitated.

  “We’re carrying a dozen message rockets, Captain.” He let that hang, waiting for the captain’s inevitable reaction.

  “An MR’s Nilssen hasn’t a tenth the capacity of a ship’s Nilssen.”

  “That’s true, Captain. And the difference is actually closer to one-twentieth. We can’t simply strap an MR to the hull and use its Nilssen. All that would do is hurry the end for us. The MR would transit and break Avon’s back. If that weren’t enough, the MR’s jump would probably disrupt our little bubble so much that it would fail catastrophically.”

  “You mean it could destroy the Q-space bubble around us?”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Could we rig it so that Avon could survive and return to normal space that way?”

  Even I’m not that crazy, Arch thought. But he could not say that to the captain. “I wouldn’t want to try it unless I were absolutely certain that there wasn’t the slightest possibility of anything else working, and even then I’d hesitate as long as I could, because if that were to go the way I think it would, there wouldn’t be any extra innings.”

  “Then what is it you’ve dreamed up?”

  “Something that might be almost as drastic, I’m afraid. I did tell you right off that all of the manuals and simulations say this is impossible, but I think there may be a chance, and if you give me the go-ahead, I’ll know more about the chances before we have to commit ourselves irrevocably.”

  “You’re stalling, Arch.”

  “Yes, I am. It will sound daft. What I’m thinking is that I might be able to rig the lot of our MRs together to run in parallel. I think I can salvage the dimensioners from the ship’s Nilssens and tie those in. With ten or twelve MR Nilssens, we might produce a strong enough field to let us escape.”

  “You’re right, Arch, it does sound daft. All of the circuits in an MR are submolecular etchings, as I recall, including those in its Nilssen. How can you possibly patch them together and connect the lot to the ship?”

  “If my thinking is right, Captain, the basics are there already. There are couplings for external test equipment. I think programming should be able to provide the necessary internal links. After that, it’s just a matter of providing shielded cables to link all of the units together—after we strap them around the hull—and connecting them to the ship’s control circuitry.”

  “Strap?”

  “Well, molecular welding, actually. The connections have to be strong enough to make certain that we don’t have separation at the critical moment. That would take us straight back to the other problem. Of course, it might still come to that.”

  Louisa Barlowe did not make a snap judgment. She sat—hung against the lap strap on the bench—and spent several minutes thinking back over everything that Billingsley had told her, and all the other information she had gathered on the ship’s condition since the Nilssen generators had blown. The engineer waited. He had explained everything as clearly as he could. The decision had to be the captain’s.

  “You say that you’ll be able to test this rig before we commit to actually using it?” Barlowe asked eventually.

  “I’ll be able to run routine diagnostics on the system, tell that we’ve got all of the connections fit. As for the theoretical part, we won’t know until we try it. But if it does fail, and we’ve got everything right up to that point, Avon might survive. We might just blow the MR Nilssens the way the ship’s have gone.”

  “Will you need all twelve MRs, or can we reserve one to try to blow a hole in the bubble if this fails
?”

  “If we had twice as many MRs, I wouldn’t be certain that we had enough, but I can try linking eleven and see what numbers the diagnostics give us. If the field looks adequate …”

  “Do that then, Arch. Rig all but one of the MRs and get them situated. Run your tests. I’ll decide then whether or not we dare try it. How long do you think the work will take?”

  “At least twelve hours, and that might be an overly conservative estimate. There are two other things I think I should mention now, Captain. The first is that if we don’t do something to get out of this bubble we don’t have to worry about being stranded here until we all die of old age.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ambient temperature. This little piece of infinity we call a Q-space bubble has a finite, and quite limited, volume. Initially, the temperature of the space inside the bubble was the same as outside, roughly three degrees above absolute zero. Avon occupies slightly more than ten percent of that volume, and the ship produces a certain amount of heat. That is unavoidable, and there’s precious little we cando to minimize it. Given time, and less than you might think, our private universe could become a close approximation of a classical Hell. Very hot, that is. Hot enough that the ship’s systems will be unable to cope.”

  “Wait a minute. Won’t we reach some sort of equilibrium?”

  Billingsley shook his head. “Not soon enough to do us any good. The warmer it gets outside, the more the life support systems will have to work to keep the inside temperature bearable, and that will simply generate that much more waste heat. Systems will fail, even if they last longer than we will.”

  Barlowe frowned as she tried to think through the problem. Although her academic background was not centered on engineering, any naval officer had to survive several advanced physics courses. But those courses were many years in her past. “How much time are you talking about?” she asked finally.

  “It’s not so near that we’ll have to rush our work on the MRs to beat the deadline, Captain. It’s not a nail-biter out of some adventure vid. The rate of increase has already started to decline, and the warmer it gets outside, the slower the rate of increase will get. My computer models may have been too simple to be very precise, but the range I get is seventy to one hundred standard days before the temperature gets so high that the ship won’t be able to compensate. Before we start to cook, literally.”

  “Okay, that’s something I’ll have to keep in mind. You said there were two items you wanted to mention?”

  He nodded. “Saying, for the sake of argument, that this jury-rigged system does spring us free of Q-space, I wouldn’t want to count on being able to make two more jumps, in and out, with it. That means that wherever we emerge from Q-space is it. We’re going to be stuck in normal space until we can get to someplace or until somebody receives our radio signals and comes to collect us. And the way I understand things, nobody knows where we might come out after our, ah, unorthodox entry into Q-space. Navigation can’t count on its calibrations. They won’t even hazard a guess as to where we might emerge.”

  The captain blinked once. “All the more reason to reserve one MR, Arch. We come out and determine our position, then use the last MR to send our distress call. If we’re anywhere in the same galaxy we started in, navigation will be able to find out where we’re at as soon as we can see the stars again.”

  “I’ll get started on the work straightaway, Captain.” Billingsley started to turn away.

  “Just a second, Arch. How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?”

  Arch hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “I can’t say, Captain. I simply don’t remember.”

  “Then you’d better give yourself at least four hours of sleep before you even think about starting this work. If it’s as marginal as it seems, you’ll want your faculties at full speed.”

  “I’m okay, Captain. I wouldn’t be able to sleep just now in any case. This is too much on my mind.”

  “If you can’t sleep on your own, have the pharmacist’s mate give you a sleep-patch, Arch. I mean that. You need sleep, at least four hours. Six or eight would be even better. We’re not going anywhere.”

  “Captain …”

  “That’s an order. No discussion. Sleep first, work later. Get to your cabin, now. I’ll send the pharmacist’s mate along. She’ll probably be there before you are.”

  Billingsley hesitated for an instant, but he had no choice. “Aye, aye, Captain. If you insist.”

  In a naval career that spanned thirty-seven years, Master Chief Petty Officer Homer O’Neill had logged no more than ninety hours in vacuum—in a spacesuit outside a ship. At that, he had more than three times as much vacuum time than anyone else aboard Avon. There was simply little call for extravehicular activity in the modern navy. Virtually all outside work could be accomplished by automatons.

  O’Neill wasn’t even from the engineering department. Now the senior enlisted person aboard Avon, most of his experience was in navigation and ships’ controls. But this job couldn’t be done by robots, and the man with the most experience clomping around outside a ship in vacuum had to be part of it.

  More than sixty people, including five officers, had cycled through the maintenance airlocks to manhandle eleven message rockets into place around the hull, and to seed the molecular welders that would secure the MRs to the ship’s hull. The chief engineering officer had been out the entire time, supervising, even doing some of the physical labor. Fiber-optic cables in thick protective sheathing linked the MRs and snaked through the hull, some of them through holes that had been drilled especially for the purpose, then sealed to maintain the gastight integrity of the hull.

  A bloody mess, O’Neill thought. The work had been going on for ten hours. Like Commander Billingsley, O’Neill had been out the entire time.

  “This is our best hope for getting out of this mess,” the commander had told him.

  O’Neill suspected that the “best hope” wasn’t all that good. It all sounded like something out of a poor adventure vid. If it’s time for us all to cash in our chips, why work us to death first? O’Neill had been a noncom too long to say that, or to give his feelings away by looks or body language, especially around subordinates. If the captain and chief engineer thought that it was worth a try, Who the hell am I to say different?

  Finally, the last MR was secure, and all of the cables linking them. Commander Billingsley had a portable testing unit plugged into one of the MRs. Half of the ratings had already been sent back inside. The others remained out with the engineer, gathered around him, watching the readouts on the tester, talking on a radio channel that O’Neill was excluded from.

  “Okay, Master Chief,” Billingsley told O’Neill after several minutes. “Let’s get everyone inside. Make certainthat no one leaves a spanner or anything else out here. We don’t need bits of debris complicating this maneuver for us.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” O’Neill said. “I’ve kept a careful count and we’ve been sweeping. I’ll be the last man through the airlock, so I’ll be certain nothing or nobody is left behind.”

  “And I’ll be at your side, Master Chief,” Billingsley said.

  The nearest airlock was sixty yards forward. This far back, most of the interior of Avon was given over to machinery and to the containment fields for the main drives and fuel storage—the antimatter that had to be held in magnetic canisters until it was routed into the propulsion chambers.

  O’Neill gathered up the rest of the ratings and inventoried tools and other gear to make certain that nothing would be left behind. There would be another check as soon as everyone passed through the airlock. A yeoman had remained on station there with detailed lists of everything—and everyone—that had passed through. By the time O’Neill started moving the men toward the airlock, the officers had started cycling through, and Commander Billingsley was waiting for O’Neill and the final ratings.

  “A good job, Master Chief,” Billingsley said. “You and
all of the men. I’ll try to tell them all myself, but I’d like you to pass on my commendation as well. They’ll probably take more stock in it coming from you.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir, but I’ll tell them. I just hope this gizmo you’ve rigged up works. I’d purely hate to end my days here in this little piece of the never-never.”

  “You and me both, Master Chief.”

  “If I’ve got the theory and practice right, Captain,” Billingsley said when he returned to the bridge, “then our little kludge will work something like interferometry, giving us the effect of a Nilssen the diameter of the hull. It’s not really that simple, of course, but it’s the best analogy I can find.”

  “And if you’ve got it wrong?”

  Billingsley shrugged. “Two possibilities, Captain. One is that nothing will happen—that it, nothing significant, and the only result will be that we burn out the MR Nilssens. The other … Well, you’ve studied the accounts of the space fight over Buchanan a few years back?”

  Louisa Barlowe nodded.

  “You’ll recall that at one point two of our ships entered Q-space simultaneously, one just at either end of a Feddie dreadnought. The dreadnought was caught in the turbulence between the Q-space bubbles formed by the two Commonwealth ships and was torn completely apart. I don’t think that’s likely in our case, Captain, but I can’t rule it out completely.”

  “I don’t recall you mentioning that possibility when you sold me on this idea, Arch.”

  “I didn’t think of it myself until I started calibrating the system. Fact is, I was too tired to think straight when I talked to you before.”

  “How do you assess the probabilities for your three scenarios?” Barlowe asked.

  “This is mostly guesswork, Captain, but out of ten tries, I’d say three that it works and we jump back to normal space, six that we don’t do anything but burn out the MRs, and one that we come a total cropper.”