"Forget it, Wester! Even if we were dealing with antimat on a Legion ship, with a week's intensive preparation, maybe the two of us could handle it without detonating the antimat. But not here, and not with D-neg."
"Damn it! So what do we do? Give up?" I was sweating and furious. All our efforts, come to naught. And our wonderful prize, the Omni ship with all its awesome secrets, blown away in a microfrac probably because one of these damned controls was stupidly set in the wrong position. I glared at the instrumentation. There was no way we could possibly decipher any of it.
"The alternative," Tara said, "is to abandon ship."
"I'm not leaving this room," I said, "until this problem is resolved."
"According to the tacmod, it may be resolved very shortly. And it's not going to be a happy ending."
The claxons wouldn't stop hooting. Was the tone becoming more urgent? I frantically scanned the controls. Death was certain, whether or not we abandoned ship. We had no idea where in the vac we were—no idea at all.
"Sweety, report!"
"Analysis is continuing, Thinker."
"Are we going to die?" Willard asked. He was still clutching his mother's shoe.
"Assuming we do nothing," I asked Tara, "what do you think will happen?"
"There'll be a nova, and we'll die."
"So we should do something."
"Absolutely. But what? Abandon ship?"
"On the far side of the galaxy, we abandon the only starship we've got? I don't think so. This is the control panel, isn't it?"
"It sure looks like it."
"So our solution is right here," I said.
"I'm sure it is. And your point is?"
Some of the instruments were lit. Some were not. I reached out and brushed my fingers over one of the lit ones. It moved. I moved it over to one side.
"What are you doing?" Tara cried out. Some of the other lights abruptly changed color.
"I've no idea," I replied. I snatched another lighted control and jerked it downwards. It glowed a sudden phospho green. Another warning tone sounded, a deep buzzing.
"You'll kill us all!" Tara shouted.
"We die anyway." I was frantic—I did not care. I only wanted to do something—anything—to change the situation.
"Can we play?" Willard grabbed at a lever and snapped it back and forth, laughing.
"Sure!" I said. "Get the ones that are lit, kid! Come on, Tara—live a little! Not much time left!" I ran my hands over the control panel, moving every switch and tab that emitted light.
"You're crazy, Wester!" Tara was just staring at me in shock.
"Gildron—help us! Get the ones that are lit up. Slowly!" I called out. He joined in, slamming decisively at the controls with his fists.
The claxon suddenly cut off in mid-blast. The flashing ceiling lights snapped off. Now there was only that insistent buzzing.
"Hold it!" I said. "Stop! That's enough!" Everyone froze. Where the hell was that buzzer thing? I remembered the control and snapped it upwards again. The buzzer cut off, and the green light vanished. A shocked silence settled over the room.
"There. Nothing to it," I said. "Let's eat. I'm hungry."
"You may have only turned off the alarm system," Tara said. "The D-neg could still detonate."
"Check it yourself, if you're so concerned. I'm not going back in there. If it happens, it happens. We've done all we can." I collapsed and slumped against the wall. I felt terrible. "Can anybody get me some water?"
###
"Are you awake?" An angel's voice. I blinked my eyes, drifting slowly into consciousness. I was back on the bridge under a blanket and Tara knelt beside me, holding a canteen cup of steaming dox.
"Dox!" I awoke instantly, struggling to sit up, the heavenly odor teasing my nostrils. My shirt was missing.
"Where in the vac did you get that?"
Tara smiled, a dazzling phospho white smile that warmed my heart. She was totally lovely and completely relaxed, wearing a sleeveless top and litepants. "For you," she said, handing me the cup. "From Gildron's ratpak. He doesn't drink dox, so we've got plenty."
I drank slowly, savoring it. Renewal! The dox warmed my entire body. What a kick!
"Did you have a good sleep?" Tara asked.
"Wonderful," I said. "I feel like a new man. Thanks for the dox, Gildron." He showed me his teeth. He was leaning against one of the O's body chairs, still clad in his Elektra violet ship's uniform.
"Have any dreams?" Tara asked.
Dreams—I had dreamt of the O's. I had been an O, in my dream, strolling in a dark garden with someone I loved.
"No," I said, frowning. "No dreams." I went back to my dox.
"I slept a little," Tara said. "I had strange dreams. About the O's. I saw their world through their eyes. It was so sad. So far away. And lost to them forever. I'm not sure we did the right thing, Wester."
"It's done," I said. "I don't want to hear about it. Where's the kid?"
"Still sleeping—over there." He was on his back under a blanket, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, breathing deeply, his face angelic and peaceful.
"Where'd you get the blankets?"
"I've been exploring. There's a lot of Systie gear and also Uldo civilian stuff on this ship. Enough Systie rats to allow us to survive for years."
"Does this mean we're getting married?"
Another dazzling smile. Her hair was soft and silky, a rusty brown, and her skin was as smooth as satin. "You haven't asked me. But I'm hoping we won't have to use all those rations."
"So what's the sit? I see we haven't gone nova yet."
"No—when you went to sleep I suited up and went into the stardrive. Just far enough for Tess to get a reading. The situation appears to have stabilized. Pressure is back to normal. Tess says the unitium containment system no longer appears to be in danger of failing."
"You shouldn't have gone in there without me. How about the D-neg?"
"Tess had the same readings you did. She has concluded that it is a stardrive, powered by D-neg. She cannot explain the D-neg, or the containment unit. She says it is not physically possible. She also cannot explain why they need both antimat and D-neg. What do you think?"
"I think I really like the way your nipples stand out against your blouse. When do I get my reward?"
Tara laughed. "You've got a one-track mind, Wester, but I don't mind. That was brilliant, what you did in the control room."
"It wasn't brilliant, it was desperate. If I had blown us all to smithereens, it wouldn't have seemed so brilliant. But I had to do something—if I had done nothing, we'd have died. When in doubt, attack—old Legion saying."
"I've got to admit you've kept us alive so far."
"That little kid kept us alive. Thank him."
"That's true. I'm going to take very good care of him, Wester."
"Great. So tell me—where are we?"
"You're not going to believe it."
"I'm not? Why not?"
"Tess looked out at the stars, and didn't recognize anything. Then I put her on those artificial stars that keep flashing to life over the controls. And that's what they are, Wester. She was able to identify our position."
"Good! So where are we?"
"We're in the Null-Six Sector."
"The what? I've never heard of it."
"The Null-Six Sector is in the zeroes—Zone Zero Zero Two Six."
"I've never heard of that, either. Doesn't it have a name?"
"No name, Wester. You haven't heard of it because it's on the far side of the galaxy from our own neighborhood. Out beyond the Outvac and the Gassies, past the Icy Way, all the way into the core, past the Black Dog, through the nucleus and out the other side, through the Web, past the Smokescreen, through the Silky Way and beyond Doom's Drift, past the Dropoff, past the Great Deep, out in the furthest reaches of the Omega Spiral, out on the rim, on the very edge of the galaxy. The entire zone is unmapped. It's completely unknown."
I listened, taking it in. I d
ecided I was going to be totally calm.
"Is your Persist certain about this, Tara?"
"Absolutely, Wester. She knows exactly where we are, now."
"Well, I'll be damned. I wonder how we got here. I mean, considering that the stardrive doesn't work."
"It obviously does work, Wester."
"If the damned thing was working, why didn't this ship leave the Mound when the other ships left?"
"I don't know, Wester."
"But we weren't in stardrive, Tara. We would have felt it! We were in the vac, the whole trip!"
"That's not possible, Wester. As you very well know. I'll admit it didn't seem we were on a star run. I didn't feel the pressure, either. But we were. Maybe it happened when we were unconscious. After the O's captured us."
"Just like that? We couldn't have been out that long! A star run to the far side of the galaxy, and we didn't notice it?"
"It's worth thinking about, isn't it?"
"The Omega Spiral, huh?"
"That's where we are."
"Do you think anyone's been out this far before?"
"No—nobody has."
We could see the stars out the plex. It looked terribly cold and lonely out there.
"You ever been this far from home before?" I asked.
"I don't have a home."
"Neither do I." I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her to me. I kissed her, on the forehead.
"We'll get out of this, Tara," I said. "And when we do, I'll buy you a drink."
"I don't drink," she replied, "but if we do get out of this, I may start. There's something else you should know."
"What's that?"
"Tess was able to make some exact correlations between the stars out there and the artificial display in here, along with some of the instrumentation on the control panel there. Very precise measurements. We can understand part of the display now. Come on—I'll show you!"
###
It looked like a master control panel set just below the plex, directly in front of one of the O's body chairs. This particular portion of the control panel had not been hit by our x's. A dazzling display of silver dust hung in the air just over our heads. I was cold, dressed only in my litepants.
"Look on the panel here," Tara said. "These are quantum math readouts, believe it or not. According to Tess, they are super-accurate. Watch this." She touched a flat tab with one slim finger. The stardust spun around us, hurtling past our heads.
"All right! It's moving!"
"What are they, Wester? Do you know?"
"Galaxies! Those are galaxies! That's the Great Wall!"
"Exactly. It's the universe, Wester. The whole, bloody universe. Now watch this." Tara touched another tab. The display flashed, and silently exploded into a stunning panorama of cold silver nebulae and hot golden stars. Tara touched the tab again and the stars rushed past us wildly, out of control.
"It's a nav function," I said. "And this is our galaxy!"
"That's right, Wester. Watch!" The display exploded again, then stabilized. A starry field hung just above our heads. "And here we are, Wester—the Omega Spiral. It's the last stop in our Galaxy. Do you know what Tess found out?"
"No—but I'll bet you're going to tell me."
"With an exact fix on the stars, Tess was able to calculate the GZT—galactic zero time."
"And?"
"She didn't have to correct her chron."
"Yeah? So?"
"Because the chron was correct. Check your own chron—ask your tacmod. She'll say it's 314/06 on the 17th, galactic zero. And it is."
"Why don't we just pretend I'm stupid, and you explain it to me in simple terms, all right?"
"We're on the far side of the galaxy, Wester. We've just made the longest star hop in history. A trip like this would be a huge project. It would take the Legion months—maybe a year—of continuous star hops. We've done it pretty much instantaneously."
"You're saying this ship is functional; you're saying the damned stardrive works."
"You're a little slow, Wester. Of course the stardrive works! Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. And the time would be a lot different."
"So the stardrive works—terrific! It makes you wonder why the O's were hanging around the Mound when the subnorms were overrunning it."
"I can't answer that, Wester. Perhaps they didn't think we were important, just as Merlin said. But I can tell you this D-neg drive is extremely powerful. Do you know what we have here, Wester? This is the key to the future. It appears this ship is equipped with D-neg drive. Antimat allows us to bore a wormhole in spacetime, connecting two regions of our own universe, holding open the hole and cheating time and distance. Antimat is the only exotic matter we have, and it works fine, but it has serious limits.
"We've used antimat to create quantum antigravity effects that generate negative pressure, essentially through brute force, and it's only negative pressure that keeps the wormhole open while we're in it."
"Hold it, Tara. We haven't come close to the speed of light, have we? I mean—we're not in the future, are we?"
"No, Wester. That's what I was trying to tell you with the chron. Everything is just as we left it. It's just a wormhole—this isn't superluminal. It's just a better, more efficient stardrive. But it's not only that. There are other universes out there—some of them connected to our own through black holes, and some connected—intermittently—through natural wormholes. And if you run into one of these alternate universes on antimat drive, you're gone forever, never to return. Because, assuming you survive the trip, when you try to return here on antimat drive, chances are you will just return to the alien universe. On antimats, you don't have the power to leave one universe and enter another, except by accident. But it's always been theoretically possible, with a more powerful exotic material, to burn a wormhole between universes and keep it open. It took us a long time to learn how to use antimat drive correctly; we lost a lot of people and ships, and when we finally succeeded, we thought it was the ultimate tool for the exploration of the galaxy. But D-neg has always been there, the holy grail of generations of spacetime physicists. It's the backbone of our own universe, it's the stuff that created the dark energy that expands our own universe, the energy of a white hole, the cosmic glue of the Gods. But it's not in this universe—it's just beyond the gates, and there's no way to get at it, if you want to return. Well, we've got it, Wester—right here, right in this ship. A thimbleful of holy dust, the grains of creation, right in the heart of this ship! Nobody knows what it can do, Wester—but it's far, far more powerful and dangerous than antimat."
"And this D-neg stardrive put us here, on the far side of the galaxy—instantaneously."
"More or less."
"All right—I'll accept that. Whatever it is, it's at the very least a new method of star travel. Right?"
"Not only star travel. Maybe even time travel."
"All right—then it's more important than ever for us to deliver this ship, intact, to the Legion. Do you agree?"
"Absolutely!" Tara said.
"And we deliver it to the Legion—not to ConFree!"
"Absolutely!"
"Good. Then we agree. I'm freezing! Where's my liteshirt?"
"It's drying. I washed it. It was starting to move. I killed it, and then I washed it."
"Well, thank you. You'll make somebody a good wife."
"No, I won't. I can't cook, and I can't live with deadheads."
"Why don't you move in with a psycher?"
"No thanks—they're worse than deadheads."
"Mmm. So—this nice little nav function doesn't tell you how to operate this ship, does it?"
"It most certainly does not. By the way—I have another fascinating piece of trivia for you."
"Well, I can hardly wait." I picked up a blanket and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders.
"Look out the plex." I looked out.
"See that bright star there?"
"Yeah?"
"We're he
ading right for it—Tess checked."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Only it's not a star."
"What is it?"
"It's a planetoid—no atmosphere. Tess says it's a bleak, lifeless chunk of rock."
"And we're heading there?"
"Yes."
"That's interesting. What do you think is going to happen when we get there?"
"I don't know."
"Hmm. Well, look, I've got an even more urgent problem. You said you looked around the ship. Did you find anything that looked—even vaguely—like a toilet?"
Another dazzling smile. "As a matter of fact, I did. I'll show you. It appears to be either a vaporizer unit, or a matter duplicator. It's a container, with an open top. But after you put something in it, you press a lever, and it's disintegrated."
"You think it might be a matter duplicator?"
"Could be. It could be that an exact visual duplicate of whatever you put in there shows up someplace else."
"You mean, some Omni postal worker might be puzzling to find an address on whatever I deposit into this device?"
"Maybe. However, remember the original of whatever you put in there is vaporized when you hit the lever. In your case—if you plan on sitting on the thing—I'd advise you to be very, very careful you don't hit that lever until after you stand up."
"Good advice," I said. A gigantic O snapped into being right at my side. I jumped, almost knocking Tara over. "Deadman!" I shouted. "I wish it would stop doing that!"
"Calm down!" Tara hissed. "You'll wake up Willard."
Chapter 16
Last Stop
"That's it—we're going into orbit. A perfect orbit."
Tara gazed grimly out the plex—so did I. I was back in my liteshirt. It smelled a lot better. Gildron had Willard in his huge arms. Willard pulled viciously at Gildron's hair. They were getting along well.
The dead world we were approaching was glowing a dark silver, lit only by distant stars. It was hurtling through the vac on its own—it had no sun. A lost world, alone in the immensity of the vac.
"No advanced signals, Thinker," Sweety reported. "No atmosphere, no life, no movement on the surface."
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