Helplessly, Coffer pounded the console before her. She looked up at a vu-plate. The black of the rift now dominated the screen, like ink slowly spreading out over a pool of stars.
There was nothing more that could be done.
Even though he had lost the battle of the mutiny, Captain Darsen may well have won the war.
The giant maw of the space rift neared.
SIXTEEN
Every fitting and seam of the Pegasus seemed to squeal with stress as the ship plunged into the lightless emptiness of the rift. “We’re being crushed!” cried Norlan, voicing Coffer’s own fear. She felt as though hundreds of gravities pressed in on her. Yet although she could barely move, the pressure was causing no obvious injury.
A flash of light bright as the heart of a sun blinded her. She heard the ship’s overloaded external sensors click off—
The sensation of acceleration disappeared. The lights on the sensor board flashed back on. How long would this passage take—and how far? The vu-tank revealed only blackness—no, there was a star, bright and distant. As her vision cleared, Coffer could pick out a second, then a third star. The ship was in normal space again, then the rift had propelled them almost instantly to this place—wherever this was.
Hesitantly, Coffer sat back down at the communications console. The intercom board was jammed with incoming calls. She switched to the emergency override. “This is Acting Captain Leana Coffer. Attention all crew. Please remain calm. There is no cause for alarm.”
The hell there isn’t, she thought. But it sounded good.
“We have just passed through a spatial discontinuity we’ve tagged a ‘space rift’ for lack of a better term. The passage caused no apparent breech of our vacuum-tight integrity—” She paused, glancing for reassurance at the console warning lights. “I repeat, there is no present cause for alarm. Please commence with your reports.”
They began. Evidently, the mutiny had gone surprisingly well, all in all.
After a time, Norlan said, “If you can tear yourself away from the victory reports, Leana, we have a problem with navigation.” Coffer looked up to see the man standing over her. “We can’t get a course reading. Just look at the vu-tank!”
The sphere had finally resolved into a clear picture. The contrast to the previous points the Pegasus had occupied on the other side of the rift was remarkable. Obviously they were on the edge of some galaxy.
But what galaxy?
And so very few stars. Somewhat larger than the stars were a number of hazy, glowing discs, grouped together in the middle of the tank. Galaxies? Clusters of galaxies?
“Oh, God,” said Coffer. “Where are we?”
“That is what the navigation board can’t tell us,” replied Norland.
“Perhaps it needs more data. Have Lieutenant Volfe start feeding new data to the chart computers.” She commanded a search for Volfe, which further revealed the barely controlled chaos that existed on all levels. In the meantime, Coffer consolidated her position. Captain Darsen was safely in custody—and under sedation—in MedSec. Dr. Kervatz reported his state as remarkably calm, considering. Indeed, the news that they had passed through the rift brought a marked smile to his face. Or so Kervatz said.
After an hour more of hard work, Coffer began to believe that everything was as under control as she had indicated it was long before to the crew. Being pragmatic, Security had long since given in.
The search for Volfe, however, revealed that she had been killed in one of the spates of fighting following the take-over.
Someone else Coffer could trust would have to be placed in charge of the chart room.
“How about Mora Elbrun,” suggested Norlan.
“I completely forgot about her,” said Coffer. “I hope she’s still alive . . .
At one time—perhaps when she had joined the Space Service—she had believed that there might be a point to her life. Now it seemed to her as though if indeed some god had previously mapped out the course of her existence, it had been a cruel and malignant one.
I seem to go through life losing people, she thought. My parents, Div, Ston . . .
Abruptly, she realized that she didn’t know what deck she was on. Or what corridor in that unknown deck, for that matter. She had simply been numbly wandering since she had awakened, since she had visited Ston’s badly burned and torn body, down below the sensor platform.
She seemed to be on a lower level-but beyond that, she wasn’t sure.
Judging by the curvature of a concentric corridor, she headed toward the center hub of the deck. What with the unusual lack of activity here she could hear the hissing breath of the ship’s air circulators; she even fancied she heard the thrumming heartbeat of the engines. In her shocked state she imagined herself the sole survivor of the revolt, alone in the guts of this cold artificial world.
“Are you okay?”
The voice startled Mora. She turned. A young man in an ensign’s uniform was walking up behind her. Concern shadowed his features.
“You need some help—are you hurt?” he asked, stretching out his hand to her. How young. Unlined brow. Open face.
“You’d better get away from me,” Mora said. “I don’t want to know you.”
“You’re Mora Elbrun, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You’d better come with me,” the young man insisted. He sounded nervous. She was too drained of energy to resist when he took her arm. “Captain—Coffer—sent me to look for you. I’m taking you to MedSec.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what’s happened?”
Mora shook her head.
“We’re through the rift—evidently way beyond our galaxy.” He held her arm firmly as he walked her to a lift. “The mutiny is over. We won—that is, the mutineers won.”
“Coffer is captain?” Mora sighed as she stepped onto the lift. “For some reason I thought only the children had survived.”
“I’m not a child.”
As the lift began to move up its chute, Mora looked at him again and began to cry.
“Well, she’s in good condition and responding quite well to our psychiatric tests,” said Dr. Kervatz to Coffer. “She’s had a bad shock, but she’s still in one piece.” Coffer nodded absently, preoccupied with the bridge’s vu-tank. She sighed, leaned back in her chair, and gave the doctor her full attention.
“However . . .” she prodded.
“However, she’s listless. She lies in bed. She speaks rarely, usually only when spoken to. She’s . . . disinterested.”
“I see,” Coffer said. “Perhaps if she had an assignment, it might prove, ah, therapeutic?”
“Perhaps.”
“Good, because I have one for her. Look at the vu-tank, Doctor.” Kervatz looked and saw the thing that Coffer had been brooding over for two days. Shortly after braking the Pegasus’ headlong rush into intergalactic space, the sensors had picked up what seemed to be a homing signal from a nearby dark object. Following it, they had found the rift station.
It could be nothing else, floating here so close to the rift, so far from any world. The size of a small planetoid itself, the station was a sphere made up of open metal webwork surrounding a much smaller, denser core. It was a gigantic, complex construction; what purpose could it serve here other than to monitor and perhaps generate the rift?
“I’m impressed,” said Kervatz. “It looks like you could sail the Pegasus right into it, past the latticework and right to the—”
“You could—if you were crazy,” Coffer said, cutting him off. “That thing is putting out hard radiation. A human being wearing the best protective pressure suits we have on board could safely remain in that place for maybe eight hours.”
“Nasty,” Kervatz agreed. “But that wouldn’t worry you unless you intended to investigate anyway.”
Coffer was surprised. “That’s true. We’re low on raw supplies—chemicals, foodstuffs—”
“I should think the casualties would cover at least a portion . . .”
“Watch it,” Coffer snapped. She lowered her voice. “The less the crew thinks about that, the better. At any rate, we can’t afford not to investigate the station.
“I want to send a shuttle with five people on board to that place. Not only for possible procurement of supplies, and simple curiosity—maybe we can get hold of some information on the rift itself. Just because we made it through this way doesn’t mean it operates both ways. I want to make sure. Anyway, you’ll have to wear specially prepared suits.”
“What do you mean you’ll have to—” said Kervatz, disconcerted.
“We’ll need constant on-the-spot monitoring of the radiation hazards inside the station, performed by a medically competent individual,” Norlan explained. “Of course, if you’d care to recommend a qualified subordinate—”
Kervatz glowered at him. “I thought it was customary to ask for volunteers in this sort of situation.”
“Don’t be a romantic. Now, do you think I should assign Mora to this?”
“After what she’s been through? She seems to have been quite attached to that Ston Maurtan fellow.”
“It’ll give her something to do, to think about,” Coffer pointed out. “Further, she knows more about Tin Woodman and Div Harlthor than anyone else. And her Talent might come in handy.”
“You’re really certain the rift and Tin Woodman are directly related?” Kervatz asked.
“Aren’t you?”
Kervatz shrugged. “Does Mora get a choice about this?”
“Yes. Next question?”
“Why don’t I get a choice?”
“You were a neutral during the fighting,” Coffer said quickly. Then she smiled.
“Bitch.”
“Captain Bitch to you, Doc. Ask Mora if she’ll go. With or without her, the shuttle will launch at 1600 hours.”
Kervatz shrugged and rang MedSec through the intercom on Coffer’s desk. “Is Mora Elbrun awake?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” answered Ensign Harris, the young medical technician who’d responded to the call. He sounded strangely nervous. “But, Doctor—”
“Fine. I want to talk to—what’s wrong?”
“We have a problem—a missing patient.”
“Not Mora?” Kervatz asked.
“No, sir,” Harris replied, swallowing hard. “Captain, I mean, Mister, uh, I mean—Edan Darsen, sir. He’s gone.”
Coffer swiveled in her chair and pushed Kervatz away from the intercom. “This is the captain. I thought you had Darsen under control down there—what happened to Security?”
“I—we guess that one of the security people helped him, or just let him walk away,” Harris replied. His voice was faint.
“Great.” Coffer cut off the intercom. She and Kervatz stared at one another in bewilderment for a moment. “Well, we’ll just have to organize a search for him,” she sighed at last.
“Do you think he can do any harm now?” Kervatz said.
Coffer shook her head. “No. In fact, I wonder if he isn’t—” She stopped. It was better not to speculate on Darsen’s state of mind; she would simply wait and see what happened.
It didn’t take long for Security to find Edan Darsen. He had gone directly to his own quarters, discarded his Medfiec smock, and put on his seldom-used gold dress uniform. Apparently whatever security person who had been loyal enough to Darsen to help him escape had also lent him a hand laser.
It took a three-man work detail several hours to clean up Darsen’s quarters. They placed his headless body in a plastic bag and took it to the hangar deck and ejected it into space without much ceremony.
Mora was eager to leave the haunted corridors of the Pegasus, if only for a few hours. She had agreed to join the expedition team, though she had no idea what useful purpose she could serve.
The others aboard the shuttle with her were specialists. Dr. Kervatz would monitor the station’s radiation and its effects upon them—and was nominal leader of the group. Melanie Wellow was a civilian biochemist, a member of an exploration mission which the Pegasus had been transporting to its destination. Ensign Freitag was a physicist, and Lieutenant Sauk was a structural engineer.
As the shuttle passed through the rift station’s outer structure, Mora couldn’t help feeling like a fifth wheel.
This station, with its giant bare metal skeleton, glowing lights, and dangling cables resembled a crazy cosmic carnival ride. Mora could see things which looked like seats: concave plates attached to the structure at regular intervals. As the shuttle passed close to one of these, Mora saw that it was almost as big in circumference as the Pegasus was long.
“Those aren’t structural beams,” Freitag announced, regarding the others owlishly, “Those metal parts which ring the station, I mean. They’re cylindrical in cross section; probably tubing.”
“Why tubing?” asked Sauk.
“Just a guess,” Freitag admitted, adjusting and rechecking his suit as he spoke. They had put them on before launching—the shuttle was too confined for the maneuvering needed to don suits of the sort they wore. “I’m assuming that the outer shell of the station is a functional part of the rift-generating apparatus. Maybe they just hold coolant fluids—or perhaps they have plasma pumped through them at high velocities . . .” He rambled on through an increasingly esoteric series of speculations concerning the nature of the rift generator, which Mora found incomprehensible.
“What are those big, curved things like seats?” she inquired at last.
Freitag shrugged.
“Docking rests for other creatures like Tin Woodman?” suggested Sauk. “This place is built on a scale suitable for such creatures.”
The plural struck Mora. She had always assumed that there were, somewhere, many creatures like the one which had taken Div. But Sauk’s remark and the sight of the rift station brought new understanding and imminence to the idea.
“The inner core is coming up,” Kervatz announced, watching the navigation display console. “I hope this goddamn ship knows how to stop itself.”
“Coffer knows,” Mora reassured him. “She’ll take over control from the compilot by remote.”
The inner core of the station was a solid walled sphere which could hold thousands of ships the size of the Pegasus. Under Coffer’s apparent control, the shuttle slid around the circumference of the sphere in a tight orbit until it reached a circular recess of about ten meters’ diameter in its surface. “I guess Coffer thinks this is a door,” commented Kervatz. “Do we knock?”
“Use the shuttle’s lasers,” said Sauk. “This has to be a sort of airlock. You can’t expect that the inhabitants would suit up and evacuate the air from this whole thing every time someone entered.”
“If indeed Tin Woodman’s race built this, why would they need air?” asked Wellow.
“Perhaps they can operate in both. In space, certainly, they must have to generate some sort of inner atmosphere,” said Sauk.
Then the lasers licked out at the door. Evidently Coffer had reached Sauk’s conclusion independently. The twin beams slowly drilled a four-meter hole in the metal surface.
“Everyone have their jets on?” Kervatz asked. “Good. Check your oxygen. And once you’re outside the shuttle’s shielding, for God’s sake, don’t stop to gawk.” He stole a glance at the radiation meter on his left wrist. “This part of the station is cooler than the rest, but that’s not saying much. We’ve got four hours inside, with an hour’s safety margin. Remember that we have to get far outside the outer station before we’re in the clear.
“Move it!”
The shuttle’s pumps sucked the air from the cabin. The doors opened, and the five explorers jetted out, steering for
the hole in the station’s skin. Mora was last. As she reached the interior of the airlock, Sauk was examining the inner door of the huge cylinder.
“The lock seals automatically when the outer door is punctured, of course,” he announced. “Call Coffer and see if she can focus the lasers on the inner door through the hole in the outer one.”
“You’ll kill anyone that might be inside!” protested Wellow.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in there. They’d have given us some sort of indication if so,” countered Sauk.
Kervatz established communication with Coffer and explained the situation. Coffer told them to flatten themselves against the airlock wall furthest from the puncture—several minutes later the shuttle’s laser flashed, drilling a hole smaller by half than the first one into the inner door. There was no explosion of escaping air.
“Not pressurized in there,” said Freitag.
“This place has been a ghost for a long time,” Mora returned. She could sense it. Now, drawn by curiosity, she took the lead. She jetted through the hole before its edges were completely cooled.
The interior of the station was different from anything she had imagined. As the others, one by one, followed her inside, they too were silent, stunned.
Sank finally broke that silence. “I thought it would be designed like a starship,” he said. “With enclosed levels, rooms . . .”
It was not. The greatest area of the sphere was one vast, open space. There was no appreciable gravity, strangely. Mora began to feel slightly ill. The dark void of space was unfathomable to her senses; the rift station had a sense of scale which space lacked. She felt as though she were high above a city, falling.
The walls were lined with tens of thousands of compartments, like small dwellings but open to the gaze of an outsider. On the far side they resembled a hive or skyscraper built by a mad architect who had never felt the deadening clumsiness of gravitation, nor known the human need for privacy. Lights blazed from many of these compartments, though Mora saw no movement in any.
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