by Mel Keegan
“Yeah.” Marin was rolling up his sleeves. “I took the ticket.”
“Makes you the pilot,” Queneau said at once. “Doesn’t mean the navigator’s job is any easier, Travers. In fact, it might be tougher than just flying the bird – and in any case, you’ll have to trade off, cross-train. Something happens to one of you, the other needs to be able to slide into either role and pick up the pieces with another partner.”
Travers had plucked the combug from his ear. “Two tanks … are they the same, or did you rig them individually, pilot, navigator …? Where do you want me?”
Moving in beside him, Rabelais thumbed a remote and the second tank’s curved upper surface lifted in a smooth gullwing. “The tanks are pretty much the same but the one in the back is slightly better prepped for navigation – because it’s the one we started with. The new one, this baby in the front, is a little better suited to the pilot.”
“How?” Marin wondered. “I heard what Mick was saying about how it’s easier to fly transspace from a tank, but I’ll confess, I can’t get a handle on what he meant. I’m not arguing the point, just wondering.”
For a moment Queneau and Rabelais blinked at each other, hunting for a way to frame what they knew and felt in words. “Easier to show than tell,” Queneau said at last. “Take her for a spin. You’ll see.”
“Boots off,” Rabelais added. “Climb right on in, I’ll configure the tanks for the both of you.” He was aiming a handy at Travers first, frowning over the display. “Height, weight, body temperature.”
“Hunh?” Travers paused, heeling off his boots.
“The tanks,” Queneau told him, “are going to simulate zero gee, neutral temperature, no light, no sound, no … nothing. This is how it works, kiddo. Mick and me, we did it the hard way, nearly killed ourselves a dozen times. Then, while we were drifting around in hell, we had the time to think the whole thing through, mentally take it apart and put it back together. Scratch-paper designs. We figured out how it ought to work best.” She gestured at the simulator. “If you don’t trust me, trust Mick. It was Vidal who came up with the idea of flying her from a sensory deprivation tank, and he was dead right.”
“O…kay,” Travers allowed. “I’ll try anything once.”
It was odd to climb into the tank. He had been through cryogen storage and retrieval in training, as a rookie in the first six months of his conscription hitch, but the exercise was also designed to prepare field medics for the real thing. He had lain on a gurney, ostensibly terminally injured, and was fed into the tank by two small Arago bots which lifted him up, dropped him in without a jolt.
He remembered claustrophobia as the tank’s gullwing closed down, and the sensation was the same now, though this tank was illuminated softly from within and Queneau’s voice was in his ears. “Just relax, Travers,” she was saying. “There’s a veeree headset on your right. Put it on, and put the visor down.”
Moving in the cramped space was difficult. The tank’s bed was a thick pad of smartfoam which molded to his shape; he had just enough freedom to move his arms, if he did not move them too far. The combugs settled in his ears, the earpads were comfortable enough and Queneau’s voice said, so clearly that she could have been standing right behind him,
“Relax your arms at your sides, both of you. You’re going to feel the mesh gloves right there … extend your hands into them. They’re part of a sensor net. Your head’s lying on a bunch more sensors, and these bugs you’re listening to aren’t just combugs. They’re part of the same sensor net.”
“Reading brainwaves?” Travers felt for the gloves and worked his fingers into them. He flexed his hands, felt the fine tracery of wires form up about his fingers, palms, wrists, forearms. Several mosquito bites took him by surprise as hair-fine needles threaded into key points. “Whoa.”
“Problem?” Rabelais asked.
“No. Just strange. Curtis, you feel this?” Travers took a breath, held it as the gravity dwindled to nothing; and as he adjusted to weightlessness the soft light dimmed into utter darkness.
“I feel it,” Marin said softly. “It’s just a little weird, Ernst.”
“Did I say strange?” Travers was moving his fingers a little, aware of what felt like light, tiny feathers fluttering over the skin of his arms, shoulders, neck, scalp. “Understatement. Curt?”
And Marin’s voice, intimate in his ears: “I have the veeree set on … am listening to the AI. The sim just came online.”
In Travers’s own veeree visor a deep threedee image had come alive, and he knew they were seeing the same display. “Got it. Hellgate. A storm. Big one.” Data streamed in the bottom of the image, giving the strength and size of the event. “It’s a Class Six monster.”
“There’s your gateway,” Rabelais said very quietly. “I’m going to start the sim rolling. Listen to the AI. It’ll talk you through this time, and a dozen more times if you need it. Don’t fight it, let it hold your hand. You’ll need it for a while.”
“Christ, will you look at this beast … running diagnostics on flight systems,” Marin murmured. “I don’t know much about hyper-Weimann tech, but we look good to go. What’s the mission profile?”
Before Travers’s eyes, the threedee encompassed his entire field of vision. He had seen the big Hellgate events before, but always framed by a screen or the finite surrounds of a navigation tank. Here, he seemed to be disembodied, floating in space itself, as if there were nothing, no veneer of armor or hull or Arago field, between him and the yawning maw of the beast. He remembered what Vidal had said about flying transspace with the living mind, the living body, as if there were no hull, no engine, no computers –
What he felt now was vertigo, as if he hovered, poised at a great height, looking down into an abyss and if he fell, he would keep falling forever. He heard Marin’s voice as if from a vast distance as Curtis confirmed flight readiness and asked for the mission profile – and then the data streamed through both the threedee and the combugs, synched and harmonized until for a surreal moment he could not tell which feed was which.
The mission was a simple reconnaissance flight. They would enter the Orpheus Gate, take a navigation fix on Naiobe, go out by the Pleiades Drift, loop around an artificial beacon tagged as Taurus 894, and return to their gate riding the Kronos Tide.
“Uh … roger that,” Marin responded. “Be aware, I have no idea of most of those locations – not what they are, nor where.”
“You don’t need to know,” Rabelais’s voice whispered. “You have a navigator, you’ll get his feed in realtime. You go where he points you – and if you think it sounds easy, you’ve a thing or two to learn.”
To learn about transspace? Travers was listening to his own heartbeat as Marin eased his hands in the sensor-mesh gloves, felt out the flight controls, fed power to the virtual sublight engines –
And the simulated craft they were flying raced forward. Dead ahead was the event, like a slash carved into space itself, flaring blue-white about the margins, seething red and green and gold in the heart with energy storms like surf crashing onto a beach, and right in the center of the event, a single calm, clear passage. The eye of the storm, Travers thought, the narrow corridor of freefall through which craft like the Orpheus, the Odyssey and Lai’a itself might plummet through the jaws into somewhere, somewhen, beyond even e-space.
Travers’s heart quickened again as the event raced toward him. The illusion of the tank disembodied him – he felt nothing, heard only the simulated feed, saw only the all-encompassing deep image which overwhelmed his senses. His hands and forearms tingled, and as he flexed them he caught his breath sharply.
Each wriggle of each finger shifted the display, changed the angle of view, the depth of field, brought up a graphical overlay of the vista ahead and changed the color coding of the plot to reflect different information. He blinked hard, made himself look, and recognize the blizzard of data. Plot, distance, vector, time, velocity, shearing forces, gravities – and extra
channels in shades of blue and green and red not normally seen in navigation sims –
He saw time flux, represented by the Resalq helical symbol, Urs. He saw mass density. Correlation coefficients calculated in realtime and shifting with blinding speed. Mathematic matrixes projected through x,y,z plus the super-square vector represented by the triangular Resalq ‘air’ symbol, Shu, shifting and oscillating faster than his physical human eyes could follow. His eyeballs spasmed and he squeezed the lids shut.
And it was then that he realized he was getting feedback along his neural pathways from both the handsets and the headset. Feedback was common in veeree simulations, but every commercial rig he had experienced employed it to supply the sensory input that made games so real, the physical body was fooled. Pilots on the asteroid miners used similar rigs to take massive ships through impossible places, and he began to appreciate their work.
Here, where normal space had given way to e-space which in turn was about to merge into Elarne, the mathematics describing transspace were translated into a dizzying graphical environment. Travers perceived mass, distance, time, in rainbows of color streaming and cascading over and through a threedee image. He groaned as he glimpsed the truth. Human eyes could not actually see beyond the third dimension, but the brain could imagine and infer higher dimensions.
The cascades and rivers and rainbow arcs of false color exploded through the threedee image, expanding it in directions his physical brain struggled to comprehend. He did not realize he was holding his breath until his lungs began to burn, but he was aware of the hammer of his pulse. Sweat coursed off him as he stretched for comprehension, orientation, grasping for the furthest reaches his mind could perceive. For an instant he thought he had it, but it slithered through his clenched hands like water. He forced in a breath to ease his lungs and reached again.
In his ears, as if from a thousand miles away, Marin said, “Over the threshold. Jesus God … it’s …”
The AI was a tenuous, thready murmur, so subtle, its words could almost have been thoughts unfolding in Travers’s own brain. Turn left-down, 338/44. Naiobe. Record positioning data, reference: zero point, benchmark: Orpheus Gate.
This was Naiobe? In Travers’s memory the black hole was a swirling lightstorm of massive and still growing accretion disk, glaring through the mist and haze of the nebula on which it was feeding. Naiobe was small on the galactic scale of black holes, but it would gradually devour Hellgate, stars and all, and become a monster. Travers was ready for all that, but this –
His middle ear spasmed and his belly turned over as he looked into a void which extended forever, like a crater without any bottom. Gravity well, he thought – he was not seeing the real-space black hole with mortal human eyes; he was sensing the immense cavity of its gravity well, which plowed through normal space, punched into e-space, and clean through it.
Energy currents fetched up around its shores, broke like waves around it, and his lungs were burning again as he felt the ripped lines of gravity tides streaking away into infinity. In his perceptions of the transspace continuum they were crackling green and paralleling them, meshing around them, were other streams of fiery blue, sparkling with diamond-like coruscations. The flashes were visibly slower where they lapped against the gravity lines, much faster where they sheared away, and he knew instinctually what they were.
“Time currents,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’re temporal currents.”
Turn right-up, 56/311. Locate Pleiades Drift.
He swallowed hard on the wave of motion sickness and listened as the AI repeated the directive, and again, with the ultimate patience of a machine. His first task was to find the Pleiades Drift which would take them to the beacon, Taurus 894. It had already given him the heading – 56/311 – and he realized the AI had not given it to Marin.
In his ears, Marin’s voice was thin, ethereal. “You okay, Neil? I need a heading. Getting the hang of the rig, but … gods help me, I’m lost. I have no bloody idea where I am – like ‘blue orb syndrome,’ but worse.”
“Let me …” Travers swallowed his nausea. “Gotta figure this through.” Control was all in the neural nets into which his hands and arms had thrust, and now he must learn to play them like an instrument.
Delicate, cautious, he moved his fingers, flexed his wrists, felt his way through the labyrinth until he had it. Like searching all over the keyboard in order to pick out a simple tune, but once the notes had been found, they were known forever.
“Got it,” he whispered hoarsely. As his right fingers moved, the visual display wheeled around, ranging data flew. He oversteered, corrected, walked it back in increments and centered on a writhing, twisting maelstrom of blue-green which tore his breath away.
Pleiades Drift. Locate Taurus 894.
“Object database,” Travers rasped.
The AI responded with another graphical overlay – a threedee grid in shimmering white-gold. Scores of objects were charted on it, and Travers was momentarily overwhelmed. Vector potential, magnetic flux density, gravity potential, temporal flux –
He squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them and swam in the graphical continuum where colors, shapes, sensations, sounds, made tangible sense of the almost incoherent babble of the raw data. It was as if he could smell color, see sound … as if the nebula were sweet with a scent like honey and lilac and the stars chimed like bells, each with its own unique voice, and Naiobe roared like a cathedral organ beneath them all –
“I see the beacon. Standby.”
Navigational data flowed through the veeree rig as if from his mind directly to Marin’s, and Marin, immersed in an almost identical tank, could only be feeling the same sensation of disembodied transfer.
“Got it,” Curtis whispered hoarsely. “Omigod … here we go.”
Enter Pleiades Drift. Caution: gravity shearing at 44/117. Caution: temporal flux at –
Travers stopped listening and took a moment to catch his breath as Marin’s half of the battle began. The veeree hookup was feeding him the same wheeling, racing visual which caused the middle ear to protest and the belly to rebel, but his voice was even, calm – Travers knew he was handling it. His task was to hold them in the Pleiades Drift, maintain a heading on the beacon, Taurus 894 … keep them out of the crushing gravity tides which ripped around the e-space roots of the giant stars of Hellgate and beyond. And he must also avoid both the zones where the temporal streams slowed to a fraction of normal time, and those where time raced so fast, the ship would be utterly uncontrollable.
The AI continued to whisper in half-familiar terms which Travers grasped without wondering how he understood them. A flurry of warnings and cautions – a whispered profanity from Marin, and Travers flexed his right hand. The display zoomed from global to local. He no longer saw the beacon, far off, or the gravity express they were riding like a monstrous, lethal maglev rail. He saw the immediate area, with storming gravity tides and temporal flux like jetstreams arcing and flaring in red and gold.
“No way I can hold this,” Marin panted. “I’m going to lose it. Neil, a little help here, for godsakes.”
“I’m on it.” By now Travers had forgotten this was a simulation. His whole world was a hurricane of magnificent vistas, mountain ranges and abyssal canyons molded from pure energy and sculpted by the gravity wells of black holes and supergiant stars. He heard the stars, they seemed to sing with bell-like voices, and as he and Marin raced from peak to trough to peak along the gravity express, he began to feel a terrible, wonderful sense of power, as if he had never known the exaltation of true freedom before. He could get used to this – he could come to crave it. Could a man be addicted? He gave a thought to Vidal, and then was too busy to think of anything beyond the thrill of what seemed to be living flight through a cosmic fantasia.
He flexed his fingers and felt for the way through the labyrinth of tangled time and gravity streams. It was like threading a shuttle through a vast loom on which the weft and weave were crackling rivers of en
ergy, any one of which would have burned the fragile driftship like a mote of dust in the path of a solar prominence.
Together, he and Marin soared and dove around, through, between, beyond the mountain ranges of blue fire, while exhaustion began to snap at their heels. Travers was blinking sweat out of his eyes when he heard Marin’s hiss of dread, and the AI whispered a litany of warnings.
“Too fast,” Travers shouted. Was that his own voice? High and sharp. “Brake, brake – gotta lose some speed.”
“Can’t,” Marin growled. “The gravity tide’s got us – see that well, like a crater – I’m trying to cut across it, surf on it.”
Warning: engine temperature critical. Shutdown in thirty seconds.
“I’m burning us up to stay out of it,” Marin sobbed.
“Shut it down, let it cool,” Travers suggested. “I’m trying to find us a vector out of here.”
“If I shut it down, we’ll fall right in.” Marin was panting as if he had run for miles.
Warning: engine coolant pressure falling. Generator underrun, 88%.
“Shit,” Travers said, no more than a rasping gasp. “Can’t find us a way out.”
Warning: main engine shutdown in ten. Nine. Eight.
Marin surrendered and hit the main system cutoff. In Travers’s display all ship data zeroed, and his heart hammered in his throat as he watched the space-time fissure of the bottomless gravity well of a black planet yawn open ahead of them.
The ship spun, turned nose down, rolled over on her back, and the darkness washed up over his head. He heard Marin cry out as his own senses spun in a storm of dizzy reaction. He could barely breathe and his body had begun to fight. His belly was dry heaving when the simulation phased out and the tank’s soft illumination came on.
Dislocation left him floating in a stunned, gasping silence in which he heard Marin’s rhythmic groaning, as if Curtis were in pain. He cleared his throat, found his tongue strange and swollen in the alien space of his own mouth.