by Mel Keegan
The words inspired a peculiar sensation which Travers set aside with an effort. Marin obviously felt it too. His cheeks picked up the slightest hint of color for a moment before it was gone again, and Neil reminded himself that this time the battle would be fought out in the space of home. Marin could deny that Jagreth was his home, but he had grown up there and the associations would always be strong.
The car opened opposite the Infirmary, where the lights were low. With only one occupant in residence the threedee was on, delivering a companionable buzz of news streamed by CityNet. Mick Vidal was sitting up, clad in a pale linen gown, nursing a plate of food he obviously did not want and watching the broadcast from Omaru with a cynical expression. Of Bill Grant there was no sign.
“Hey.” Travers came to a halt at the bedside as Vidal looked away from the threedee.
“Hey.” Vidal pushed the food away across the tray-table.
“You stuck in here?” Travers caught a line or two of voiceover from CityNet and grimaced. “Hydralis is acting like the war’s over!”
“Let the poor sods party,” Vidal said easily. “They’ve been under the gun for so long, just knowing there’s a carrier out here to protect them instead of hammering them is magic. And yeah, I’m stuck in here at least till tomorrow.” He paused. “But I did good.”
“Yes, you did.” Travers permitted a smile. “You ought to be certified bloody insane, but you did very good. Kristyn Bauer just came aboard. She’s in talks with Tarrant … you know she’s taking the Sark?”
“Bill told me. He heard the news from Jon Kim. Now, how ’bout that?” Vidal lifted the glass of juice he had pushed away. “It might have been my command.”
“Except you’re foaming at the mouth to get back into transspace,” Marin observed. “Speaking of which, we flew your simulator.”
“I know.” The blue eyes narrowed. “Ernst and Jo swung by a while ago to nag me some more.”
“We crashed it,” Travers chuckled.
“You almost didn’t.” Vidal was nodding slowly. “You guys’ll be brilliant. I knew you would. Part of it’s being a good pilot to start with, but there’s more. You have to have a … a rapport with your partner. Jo and I fly well together. She also flies well with Ernst. He’s starting to catch up. You guys? You can be the best.”
But Marin’s head was shaking. “Not in the same league with you. You didn’t fly a simulator, Mick. You flew the Orpheus. One shot, for real. One mistake, and you were gone. You did it.”
The thin face first twisted in memory and then remolded itself into a smile which looked a little like the Michael Vidal of old. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Damn, I’m good.”
“Modest, too.” Travers shoved the plate of white fish, steamed vegetables and sauce back toward him. “Eat.”
“Not hungry.”
“Doesn’t matter if you’re hungry or not.” Travers looked into the threedee, where wide shots were unfolding of the street party in Hydralis. People were dancing, banners streamed, music blared, strangers embraced in a camaraderie that might never be seen again. “They have to know the battle itself is still coming,” he whispered.
“They do.” Vidal picked up his fork, skewered a piece of fish and examined it as if it were a curious, alien specimen. “They’ve also been promised the system is defended. A new super-weapon. They believe. They’ve had the news from Velcastra, and in a week they’ll get the news from Jagreth too.” He popped the fish into his mouth and chewed mechanically. “We’re headed there, before we swing back to Alshie’nya. Harrison needs to confer with Prendergast, shit that’s way too sensitive to transmit, even if the signal lag wasn’t a week, which it is … and the London battle group is only a few days away. Damnit, she could strike Jagreth within hours of Prendergast announcing sovereignty.”
“She will,” Marin said quietly. “She’ll pounce like a raven on a rabbit.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “And please gods the battle group commanders should have the brains to back off.”
Vidal looked up hauntedly at him. “You know they won’t.”
“We all know.” Marin closed his eyes. “Harrison and Barb ran the whole thing through the computers in simulation. We can expect the carrier to be damaged if not destroyed, and the battle group...” He shrugged. “You’re the smart one, Mick. If you can figure out a way to turn them back, you tell me.”
“Me? Smart?” Vidal choked off a mocking chuckle. “According to Bill Grant I’ve got a pail of oatmeal where my brains ought to be.” He was tiring fast, and heaved a yawn as he spoke.
“You need to sleep.” Travers laid one arm over Marin’s shoulders. “We’re just getting in the way – Bill catches us, he’ll take a bite out of us.”
“Tomorrow.” Vidal muted the threedee, ignored the food and put his head back. “I’ll be out of here. I want Roark to get a feel for the simulator.”
“It’s a wild ride,” Marin admitted.
“Roark’s a wild animal.” Vidal’s voice was slurring.
The sound made Travers tug Marin out of the Infirmary, and minutes later they were in their own quarters. Wastrel data scrolled endlessly through the threedee but Travers ignored it utterly. “Jagreth,” he mused.
“Not my home,” Marin said easily as he hung up his jacket and shrugged out of the shirt. “Just the place where I grew up.” He gave Travers a smoldering smile as he stepped into the bathroom, before the door closed over.
“I have my assignment,” Travers said to himself, dumping his clothes randomly at the bedside. “You, me, and that bottle of weird green goo … now, where did I put it?”
A long time later, he lifted his head from the pillow of Marin’s belly when they both felt the telltale shimmy through the whole massive airframe as the Wastrel’s engines ramped up. They were en route to Jagreth, but just then Travers had much better things to think about.
Chapter Seven
Salvage tug Wastrel,
Jagreth system
The realtime clock in the corner of the display showed shiptime. Marin flicked a glance at it as Mick Vidal adjusted the feedback between the transspace simulator and the monitors, and spoke in a murmur. “We’re late.”
“The colonial mutiny’s not going to run away on you,” Vidal muttered, preoccupied with his instruments.
The Wastrel had dropped out of e-space minutes before, but from what Marin recalled of his youth in the Jagreth system, the ship would spend long enough negotiating with the authorities to secure entry rights for Richard Vaurien to begin to simmer. Jagreth was more obsessed with detail than Borushek, more fanatical about documentation than Velcastra, and more likely to turn a ship away than either world. It happened rarely to major commercial vessels but Harrison Shapiro’s files would be verified according to strict procedure before the tug would be granted an approach vector. Even then, if she strayed from the assigned flightpath she would be escorted by an ATC Police gunship launching from a platform in high orbit, and fines would be levied.
The Wastrel had flown here many times, Marin knew, but never as a cargo hauler. She had brought a celebrity yacht home after a catastrophe on the run to Velcastra; she had hauled in a clipper when the Aurora Trans-Colonial flight from Lithgow suffered a Weimann malfunction. The service was enough for the Jagreth ATC AI to know her; permits were a formality.
And if they were problematical, Marin thought amusedly, Shapiro would call the office of the president. They were expected. Rob Prendergast could not have been aware of exactly when the ship would arrive here, but he would have been waiting for her, for some time.
The transspace simulator had been running for three minutes and the external monitor was filled with the visual of a Class Six monster, already huge and still growing. Marin frowned at it, acknowledged a shiver and listened to Roark Hubler. His voice was a rasp over the comm, talking steadily as he took the virtual driftship in on approach. Rodman was almost silent. She would be far too busy to talk. It was not merely four-dimensional space she mu
st learn to interpret, but also an interface she must master. Marin’s own time as a navigator would come, and he was apprehensive.
The maw of the Hellgate event ballooned to swallow the virtual camera and Hubler said, “We’re in. Hyper-Weimann drive is operational … across the threshold.”
The threshold was the transition zone where e-space crossed some fundamental line into transspace – a domain where the hyper-Weimann drive would function, and where the driftship entered its natural environment.
“Jesus freakin’ Christ,” Rodman rasped. “Give me a minute, Roark. I never saw anything like this before, it’s – it’s enough to drive you right out of your skull. Lemme catch up with you.”
“Take your time,” Hubler growled. He must be similarly bemused. Like any Fleet pilot, his only experience with Hellgate was one of dread.
Already the AI was whispering – Turn left-down, 338/44. Naiobe. Record positioning data, reference: zero point, benchmark: Orpheus Gate – but it would continue to repeat with ultimate patience until the humans were ready to take the next step. For the moment, both Hubler and Rodman were overwhelmed. Most of their voice log was a steady stream of profanity, as they struggled to get their bearings.
The mission profile was simple enough, but the first time was beyond anything an ordinary pilot had ever faced. Vidal was watching the monitor, waiting for Rodman to make sense of the interface. She was cussing fluently, and still sufficiently aware of the fact this was a simulation for her to yell,
“Mick, for godsakes, you couldn’t have come up with an easier bloody interface than this? I never played a musical instrument!”
“Yeah, and maybe you’ll learn after this,” Vidal snorted. “Get used to it, Asako. That’s the easiest fourdee interface we were ever able to design. You don’t like it, talk to Jo and Ernst, see if you can dream up something better!”
“I’m getting it,” she muttered. “O…kay, Roark. You got Naiobe?”
“I got a chute straight to the ass-end of hell, and I’m guessing it’s Naiobe.” Hubler’s voice was taut. “Position is fixed – zero point. All right, like the fuckin’ AI keeps saying, find me the goddamn’ Pleiades Drift!”
Travers ouched and turned his back on the display. He gave Vidal a rueful shake of the head. “They’ll figure it out. Seriously, Mick, this is the simplest interface?”
“For humans.” Vidal looked tired but he was back on his feet and eating steadily. The dark blue smudges around his eyes had begun to fade and his lips were a healthy color. In the hangar’s comparative chill he was bundled into a tech gang hoodie and his hands were wrapped around a hot mug as he watched the display. “An AI can technically wrangle both sides of the job and do it a hell of a lot faster, but only in simulation when it’s fed a finite set of pre-calculated data to work with.
“In the real deal, in transspace itself, the AIs seem to try to calculate eight or ten dimensions in nearly infinite space-time, and they go buggo while you count to ten. Even the modern Resalq don’t have the math to properly wrangle ten dimensions plus temporal flux, much less do it in realtime. The Ancestrals did – the Ebrezjim flew the course about a thousand years ago! But the science was lost, and you can thank the Zunshu for that one. Our own AI guidance cores can’t sort out what to ignore and what’s critical – and I’m not saying a human pilot can work it out, either.
“But a human pilot can stop the positive-feedback, deliberately ignore the morass and just get on with the job. Right now, the Sherratts and Barb are trying to design an AI pilot that can selectively tune out its own sensor data. But it takes instinct, intuition. Those are qualities you can’t program.”
“And Lai’a?” Travers wondered.
“According to what we’re seeing, Lai’a can handle it,” Vidal admitted, “and I’ll be glad to let it fly. As long as it can.”
And if or when it failed he would be standing by to pick up the pieces. Marin frowned at him, watching him closely. During the two-day crossing from Omaru he had gotten a grip on the scruff of his own neck, shaken himself, but he was not sleeping and nor would he take drugs to knock him out.
As if he felt Marin’s eyes on him, Vidal angled a sidelong glance in Curtis’s direction. “Sorry,” Marin said bluffly. “I worry about you.”
“We both do,” Travers added. “What is it, the dreams?”
“Dreams. Memories. I wish I believed they were just dreams.” For a moment Vidal popped the bug out of his ear and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve done some reading. Research. Turns out, we store memories of memories – did you know that? Every time you remember something, you store the memory of the memory, and the brain keeps old memories in random locations. Eventually some ugly kind of crap you can’t stop thinking about is stored all over your brain, hundreds or thousands of copies of the same nightmare, till you can’t get away from it. It’s there, everywhere you turn.” He glared at the steel spars in the ceiling right overhead. “I was a prisoner. You know this much.
“I was shot down over Hydralis, a nasty cell of the Omaru militia had me for weeks. Maybe months. You lose track of time when you’re living in a hole in the ground, never see daylight, or any light at all, till they open up the hole and pull you out for another session. Naked and cold; filthy – they’d hose me down. Guess I reeked like a hog. And then bang! It’d be another shot of something … maybe chimera, but a big dose, close to the edge of what a guy of my weight can tolerate. Makes you … imagine things. But it’d wear off and I’d find my fingers broken. Or missing. A bunch of times, somebody was on me, using me, when I was half-conscious. I never knew who. Several guys, I think; some were rougher than others.”
He wound down into silence and Marin drew a deep, raw breath. It was Travers who said, “Damnit, Mick, you’ve got to forget this stuff. If you don’t stop thinking about it, it’s going to drive you right out of your gourd.”
“Oh, I know.” Vidal visibly grasped hold of himself again, gave himself the visible shaking Marin had observed several times. The blue eyes opened wide, glittering in the worklights. “Soon as we get back to Alshie’nya, I got a date with Mark Sherratt.” He hugged himself. “And I am not looking forward to it. Like getting teeth pulled.”
“Not quite,” Marin mused. “If you’re worried about offending Mark with the things you’ve done, said, seen – don’t. Mark’s so old, there’s nothing you ever did or saw that’d even surprise him. And remind yourself, he’s not human either. One of his pastimes is observing human behaviour, the way our zoologists observe primates. The few taboos we have left are curiosities to any Resalq, much less one as old as Mark.”
“Well, now,” Vidal said softly, “that does change the color of the issue.” He gestured vaguely toward the upper decks, where the lights were bright and the music upbeat. “I suppose I’ve been starting to feel like the little twerp.”
“You mean Tonio Teniko?” Travers sounded surprised.
“He went through hell for real.” Vidal’s mouth compressed. “I remember hell, but Teniko lived in it. He came out of there a little nuts. Sound familiar?”
“Not the same,” Travers said emphatically. “Mark made him the offer of forgetting. He also offered to teach him Aramshem, the martial art. I know a little of it myself – let me tell you, Tonio could use it to toss me all over this hangar, if I made a pass at him he didn’t like! He threw the deal back in Mark’s face. He’d rather live with the nightmares, dope himself to the gills and reengineer his entire body – and for what? In the fond hope he can get on top of Richard Vaurien? He might not be able to see it, but he’s creeping Richard out.”
“It’s so … weird,” Vidal said darkly, “watching him turn into something else, day by day, and be totally skulled while he does it.”
“Besides which,” Marin added, “Tonio never went through one tenth of what you did ... or at least, what you remember. I know it never actually happened in our history stream, but you remember every minute of it, as if it did. Sure, Tonio was an unwilling crewdeck boyto
y. Nasty, but it happens. It’s not legal, in or out of Fleet, and a bunch of officers should have been up on charges.”
“There’s twenty years in Jackson waiting for anybody convicted of that crapola,” Travers added darkly, “except it almost never comes to trial.”
“And it should.” Marin physically shut out the memories of the Intrepid – Roy Neville and Holdfast, Malteppe and Hellgate itself. “There’s always been bottom-deck predators. There probably always will be. Remember, Robert Chandra Liang hired Dendra Shemiji – me! – to get a shred of justice for his kid.” He shook his head slowly. “People like Tonio … they have to find a way to get past it, get over it. If they don’t –”
“It’ll bury you,” Vidal finished. “I know. I live with this.” Deliberately, he slid the combug back into his ear to monitor the simulation. “Tell me something I don’t know, Curtis … I’m trying, every bloody day. Bill has a whole suite of my organs cloning in vitro – me? I just want to be rid of this frigging nano. Makes you feverish, dizzy, off, all the damn’ time. Bill’s setting up to transfer my organs and Roark’s legs over to Lai’a. Who knows how long we’ll be in transspace? Five months, and Roark can get his new legs under him. Real, living legs. And I can tell you, he’s as sick of those rubbish prostheses as I am of the nano that’s holding me together. Now, either shush or get lost, I gotta listen to this.”
The simulation was displaying in realtime in the monitor, and Marin watched as the virtual ship connected with the Pleiades Drift and began to ride it. The beacon, Taurus 894, was still so distant, it showed only as a locator tag while Hubler jockeyed the temporo-gravity tide with something like the skill Marin had expected.
And just as Marin had held control for a time and then lost it, so it escaped from Hubler. Rodman switched from long- to short-range sensors to assist, exactly as Travers had, but it was already too late. The ship was beyond the boundaries of control. Hubler was overrunning every system he had to hang on and the AI began to whisper too-familiar cautions –