The Deep Beyond: Cuckoo's Egg / Serpent's Reach

by C. J. Cherryh

  Duun might have smiled; on the ruined side such motions were ambiguous and made him deceptive to read. It might have been a grimace. “Right now,” Duun said, “we’re on course for Gatog. It lies some distance out. We’re not capable of stopping, of course. But that’s not a great problem. A miner’s already moving into line to be on that course a few weeks hence, a simple salvage job. If nothing intervenes. We’re moving very slowly. Our enemies are closing at ten times our speed. We have no weapons. Those ships do. Fortunately so do our friends. It’s a very touchy business, minnow, hour by hour. A ship spends fuel; the other side does; each move changes the intercept point and the schedule. We’re the only fixed quantity because we can’t maneuver, no more than a world or a moon. We just sail on. And hour by hour those ships out there burn a little, figure, discover what the enemy’s doing, refigure, maneuver and do another burn. Faster and faster. It depends on how willing crews are to die, and at what point they commit themselves. For the nearest of our friends the earth is close to the infinity point: they were never built to land, and if they overspend on fuel they’ll not have the capacity to do the necessary vector change and get back again: the gravity well is just that, a treacherous slope, and a ship that spends everything can find itself going downhill. For our enemies, the infinity point is infinity— or some star a hundred years away. And someone could eventually fetch them back. They don’t need to be as brave. Or as careful.”

  “What will our friends do?”

  “Some of them are hatani.”

  “They’ll do what they have to, then.” The guild house. The laughter which no longer sounded cruel, but innocent and brave. (They didn’t know then they were in such close danger. Even hatani failed to read it. They saw the ghota; they knew trouble had come in, but they couldn’t know it all.) “Are they armed?”

  “Yes.”

  Thorn looked about him, at the crew who worked so unceasingly, who talked calmly over the radio and sometimes joked with each other or did whimsical things, like sailing a morsel of food toward a fellow crew member for that one to catch. “These are brave people,” Thorn said, as if he stood at the foot of some great mountain. It was that kind of awe, making him quiet inside. He thought of Manan and his copilot, the plane running ahead of the maelstrom the shuttle would kick up. The woman at the shuttle hatchway, sealing them in, staying in the shattered world.

  Sagot kissing him good-bye.

  Tangan accepting an old student’s betrayal of him and giving kindness to one more incoming boy.

  Tears filled his eyes and he wiped at them and found Duun looking at him. “I’m sorry, Duun. I don’t know why I do that.”

  “Don’t you know by now I can’t?” Duun asked him.

  Thorn stared at him with the streaks drying on his face.

  “Duun,” Weig said. And Duun went to see what Weig wanted.

  “We’re down to twenty hours,” Weig said.

  • • •

  There was suit drill. “If we get hit, at least there’s some chance.” Duun said, and opened that long locker which hugged one side of the bridge, where spacesuits nestled one behind the other like embryos in a womb. Duun pulled one out and shoved it at him, fastenings all undone. “Try it.”

  Thorn tucked up and got his feet inserted, struggling with the rest. Duun showed him once how to do the fastenings, then made him do it over and over again until his hands hurt. Duun showed him how the backpacks fit against the rear of the seats, and how an automation on the seat back would bring the helmet down and release it in his grip. “So you don’t have to sit in that damn rig for hours,” Duun said, and showed him the air connectors to the shuttle’s own emergency supply, and how to disconnect and use the backpack. “Helmet first, then disconnect and you’ve got air enough in the suit to get to the pack and get it started.” Duun made him work it all again and again until he was exhausted.

  “Sleep awhile,” Duun said then. “You’ll need it.”

  It amazed Thorn that Duun could do that so readily, anchored to his couch down in their own compartment; and most of all that up above in the activity and bright light of the bridge, Ghindi and Spart tethered themselves in a corner by the closets and went to an honest and quick sleep, while Weig and Mogannen kept computing changes. Thorn tethered himself beside Duun and tried, succeeded at least in resting; but the plane got into his half-dreams; so did the flight; and Betan.

  Then he unclipped and sailed up to the bridge to discover Ghindi and Spart at work and the other two asleep. The computer ticked away. Thorn came gingerly closer off the overhead, hanging upside down over Ghindi’s post and a little back so that he could see the screen.

  Ghindi turned her chair around and looked up. She had that look people had when they came face-to-face with him; and then she banished it for one he could not well read. Exhaustion. Sadness. Was it love? It made no sense. He tumbled over and righted himself with a move of his hand that helped him turn. Perhaps the look made more sense right-side up.

  “I’m sorry,” Thorn said, meaning for bothering her in her work. He wanted to go and hide himself below before Duun found out.

  She started at him, bewildered. They were both tired and a little crazed. They could not make sense to each other. “We’ll get you there,” she said.

  (To Gatog?) Thorn was dismayed. He showed it like a child. Less seemed dishonest toward Ghindi. “Are you kosan?” he asked. He remembered the pilots.

  “Tanun,” Ghindi named her guild. Tanun, seafarers. It seemed appropriate to him.

  “Ghindi,” Spart said from his computers. “We’ve got another burn from Kandurn.”

  Ghindi turned as if Thorn had fallen suddenly from her world. “We’re getting short, aren’t we?”

  “We’re getting short. I think we’d better get Weig and Mogannen up.”

  Thorn began to turn, found purchase with his foot and dived for the downward hatch, sailed through into that dim light and tumbled to hit a wall and stop. “Duun. They’re calling the crew up. It sounds like we’re short of time.”

  Duun moved in his drifting and looked at him. “How short?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell, except there’s some good bit less time than we had, forty minutes one time and now they’ve had another burn.”

  Duun touched bottom and shot up like a swimmer for the light. Thorn touched and followed.

  Mogannen and Weig were getting into spacesuits. There were three spare seats at one counter that could be powered back from it and locked. Duun did that with the two of them that were assigned to them when they were on the bridge. “When matters get to it,” Duun said. “Suit up now.”

  All very calm. The routine of the bridge went on, except the suiting. Spart and Ghindi took their turn and got back into their seats. Duun drifted loose, suited, helmetless. The waiting became tedium. Thorn’s, heart once beating in panic could not sustain it. Panic ebbed down to long vexation. He wanted a drink of water. If he did that he might regret it. In such small indignities the worst moments proceeded. Thoughts of itches inaccessible. His own sweat inside the suit, gathered and undispersed. He hung in midair, watching the viewpoint for want of other distraction in this slow creeping of time and the beep of incoming messages droning methodically about the insane business of ghotanin who wished to kill them. Ships had begun to overcommit. Calm voices reported the facts and called it things like zero-return and no-turnaround.

  (Strangely enough you don’t get to see the stars much. You can see from the shuttle if you get up front. . . . It’s beautiful.)

  A star brightened while he watched, brightened and brightened, and his heart slammed into rapid beats. “Duun! Weig!” It began to be a sphere.

  “Get to that seat!” Duun yelled, and shot that way himself. Thorn dived, caught the back of one and hauled himself into it by the armrest, reached for the furled restraints and started fastening them. He looked up, ahea
d of them where the star had vanished. “Where is it?” They had not turned, could not have turned: the shuttle had nothing left.

  “Helmet,” Duun said. Thorn pushed the button on the armrest, pulled up the connecting hose and communications plug and inserted them as the helmet came down. He locked it in place, selected the third communications channel. One was unified and two was crew-only, three was non-crew. Himself and Duun. He could hear his breathing, could hear Duun’s, and it was steadier than his own.

  (O gods, how do people get used to this?)

  There was another star. All in silence. Only the breathing sounds, the faraway noises of the shuttle’s operations that were everywhere ambient, but dimmed by the helmets.

  He switched channels, heard the crew talking and the messages coming in. The sweat gathered on his body and his arm was going to sleep until he shifted it. (“Damn suits never fit,” Duun had said.) It was better than the flightsuit. Looser.

  (Another star. Are those missiles or are those ships? Are those ships dying?)

  The crew-talk made no sense to him, full of codes. He cut third channel in. “Duun, what’s happening?”

  “They’re within range of each other. And of us, with far less accuracy. The hatani have headed them off. Outmaneuvered them, if they don’t let one get past. If they do they’ll never get a second chance and we can’t stop it.”

  The flashes went on. Thorn shut his eyes and opened them again, wishing he dared take the helmet off. The air was cold and stung his throat and nose and eyes.

  “That’s Ganngein,” Weig’s voice broke in on third channel. “They got them all. We’ve got debris on intersect. That’s all.”

  “How’s Ganngein?” Duun asked.

  A pause. “Zero-return. So’s Nonnent. Ganngein wishes us well and says they’ll stay in contact. They’re trying to determine their numbers now; they’ve been skewed.”

  “Can’t the station send something out?” Thorn asked. “Couldn’t earth?”

  “Station’s in ghota hands,” Duun said. “Unfortunately. Hatani there were too few. But there’s no ship at the station now— Hatani got that, thank the gods, or ghotanin’d have overhauled us from behind. It was the ghota outliers that hit us up ahead. Station’s got one shuttle left; earth has a few. But a shuttle can’t stop Ganngein. Not a question of slowing down that mass, which they couldn’t in the first place. Just of catching them in a docking maneuver. They can’t match those speeds even to get the crew off.”

  (Sphitti’s voice: “Here’s an application now. If you were drifting in mid-air— no friction and no gravity—”)

  (“You can’t.”)

  (“Say that you could.”)

  (Angles and lines on a schoolroom screen—)

  There was a long time that the crew and the doomed ships talked, business only.

  “That’s it,” Thorn heard one say. “We’re going to hit the well— looks like three days on. It could be worse. Like four.”

  “We hear you,” Weig said. There was sorrow in his voice. Thorn listened and stared at the points of light. His arm and his leg were numb. No one moved to take off the suits. Debris on intersect. He remembered that. The other two ships talked awhile. There was no better news.

  (This is more dreadful than the planes. This silence. This inevitability of ships that meet that fast, with distances that take days. For Betan it was quick. These men and women will have time to talk and eat and sleep and wake three times before they hit the ground. Before they skim through the well and get caught and dragged in.)

  “. . . we think,” Nonnent said, “we think we may have the angle to transit. We don’t know yet.”

  “We’ll miss your company then,” Ganngein said.

  A long pause. “Yes, we hear that.” Quickly, from Nonnent.

  “Don’t be embarrassed about it. This isn’t a trip we want to share.”

  Hatani. Or tanun guild.

  There was long silence. Eventually there began to be a hole in space, small at first, that grew and ate the stars. “Something’s out there, Duun. Isn’t it?”

  “Dust,” Duun said. “Particles. We won’t use the lights. We’re conserving all the power we’ve got and we can’t dodge it anyway.”

  (How long can it take us? What if a mostly whole ship were in our path?)

  (Fool’s question, Thorn.)

  Wait and wait and wait. All the stars were gone. The ships talked now and again. They talked about the cloud.

  Static began. Transmission broke up. A noise penetrated the helmet, a distant hammer blow. Another. The sounds accelerated to a battering. It stopped.

  “We’re still in it.” Weig said. “This is going— uhh!”

  The shock rang through the structure and up through the deck. Thorn clenched his gloved hands on the armrests and forgot the pain. Silence a time.

  “Clipped the left wing,” Mogannen said. “We’ve got a little spin now. Don’t—”

  Another shock. Shock after shock. Silence then. An occasional strike, none large.

  (Pieces of the ghotanin. Or of one of our own. We’re flying through dead ships. Dead. Bodies. Or bits of them. Blood out there would freeze like snow.)

  The stars came back. “Hey!” Weig shouted. “We’re through!”

  (For me. For me and Duun, the dead back on earth. Ganngein and Nonnent. Ghota and hatani ships.)

  “There’s a ship out there,” Spart said, and Thorn’s heart stopped. “It’s Deva. It’s going to serve as pickup. It’s about nine hours down.”

  “Thank the gods,” Mogannen said.

  • • •

  “We go out to it,” Duun explained. “They can’t stop our spin to pick us up. We’re easier to manage in suits.”

  Deva shone a light for them. The shuttle turned slowly, wedge-shaped shadow against the sun. Debris trailed from one wing edge, and from the tail. A touch came at his leg and Duun snagged him, maneuvered and got him by the hand. Near them three became a chain. One of them was still loose but in no danger. Deva’s beacon brightened among the stars, a white and blinding sun.

  • • •

  Deva was not so fine inside as the shuttle— was all bare metal and plastics; but it had shonunin in it. It had welcome.

  “Duun-hatani,” the captain said.

  “You’re a good sight, Ivogi-tanun,” said Duun.

  Thorn held his helmet in his hands. He saw the others’ looks, the crew who stood gazing at him. As they might look at some strange fish they had hauled up in their nets.

  “This is Haras,” Duun said. “Hatani guild.”

  “We heard,” Ivogi-tanun said.

  XV

  There was silence from Ganngein now. For four days. Static obscured Nonnent’s voice. Earth spoke in code, and Deva had no facilities. Gatog spoke back, constantly; and that was coded too, even when it was Deva’s code. Machines read it out. There was seldom a voice, until the last, when Gatog began to shine in Deva’s viewport like a scatter of jewels.

  (It seemed sinister till we saw it. It’s like an ornament. Why is it out here?)

  “Duun, what is this place?”

  Duun was silent. Thorn trembled, looking at it from the place on the bridge where Ivogi-tanun called them. It was foolish. Perhaps it was all the other shocks. But there seemed no other destination. Earth and Gatog spoke in some hieratic tongue past them, sharing secrets; and earth had drunk down Ganngein— “Gods,” the last transmission had been, or it had sounded like that. Then static from Nonnent too. “They’re behind the earth,” Duun said. They expected transmission to pick up again. But they never found it, though Deva asked Gatog. “We’ve lost it too,” Gatog said, one of the few uncoded transmissions they had gotten from this secretive place.

  (Can silence be worth so much here, so far from earth?)

  The lights shone against the stars, white and gold, a cl
uster here and removed from it, another.

  “Five minutes to braking,” Ivogi said; and: “Go aft,” Duun said. Deva had no spare seats for six passengers. They had to brace themselves in a narrow place where Deva had provision for passengers during maneuvering: there was no viewport there, and nothing more than padding. Thorn went with them. Duun did not.

  But Duun came for him after the hard burn. “We’re going to suit up to cross,” Duun said.

  It was a cold place, Deva, gray and smelling of chilled metal and electrics and their own bodies and their own food. But Deva was a known place, and Thorn looked over it while he fastened up his suit. He did these things for himself and looked at Deva and thought of Sheon’s woods, and the hearthside. His mind leapt from one to the other. From that to the glittering lights.

  (Duun, I’m afraid. I want the world again, Duun, I want to go home. I knew things there; but I go from one thing to the other, and you change, Duun, you go away from me, you talk with Weig, you talk with Ivogi, you talk a language I don’t understand and you’ve lost interest in me. You go farther away.)

  (Don’t look at me like that. Don’t think about leaving me. I can read you, Duun, and it scares me.)

  “Good-bye,” Ivogi said, and Deva’s hatch spat them out as impersonally as it had taken them in.

  Thorn’s hand froze on the maneuvering gun in all that unforgiving dark. He drifted. His eyes jerked wildly from light to light to light— a great dish suspended, building-wide, or close to them; his eyes refused perspective. A web of metal stretching to insane thinness in the distance, dotted with brilliant lights. “Gatog,” Duun said, a voice gone strange with the speaker. “That’s the great ear, that dish. It listens. So does another, considerably across the solar system. Out in Dothog orbit.”

  (What does it listen to?) But Thorn could not ask any question. His soul was numb, battered with too many answers. Duun dragged at him and turned him, and aimed him at another down with such a shift in perspective his sense of balance sent terror through him.

  A great pit yawned, all lit in green: it went down a vast rotating shaft to a core; and his peripheral vision formed it as the hub of a vast wheel.