Event Horizon (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “There’s a little more to it,” Shapiro argued. He looked once at his chrono. “We just hadn’t expected showtime to come quite so soon.”

  “And your insides feel like jelly,” Hubler rasped. “Where’s Mick?” He glared up at Travers, as if it were Neil’s fault he was missing.

  “He’s coming over with the Resalq. Curtis, you want to eat? See if you can get hold of Mark, find out what’s keeping them, while I get us some food.” Travers thrust the handy at him. The message was done, such as it was; Marin would tag it for Etienne, and transmission, earliest possible.

  In fact, his belly was refusing the offer of food but it was too long since any of them had eaten. Vaurien was merely pushing the noodles around, though he took a mug of paint-like black cacao with red chili and clotted cream, while Travers selected pure carbs and caffeine for himself and Marin. Croissants and coffee might have suggested breakfast, but Marin accepted them and chewed mechanically as he waited for Mark to respond.

  “They’re loading right now,” he told Travers moments later. “Mick actually went back to the Wastrel, something to do with the simulator. Jo and Ernst are coming over with it on the last freight shuttle. Mick and Alexis are catching a ride with Mark’s people, and they’ll be the last aboard.”

  “Damn.” Travers squeezed his eyes shut and then looked over at the status display. Lai’a was already running preflight hyper-Weimann diagnostics while the tangible precursors of the storm began to flicker even on routine ship instruments. The Orpheus Gate was about to gape open like a split in space itself, and –

  “We’re out of time, aren’t we?” he whispered.

  “That’s an odd way to put it,” Vaurien observed as he surreptitiously dumped most of the food into the recycle chute. “You could also say we’re about to get an early start.”

  “Depends where you’re standing when you say something like that,” Jazinsky said with razor-edged humor. “Lai’a just wants to get away from mundane, boring three dimensional space, get back to where the gravity tides race and temporal currents tangle between the big gravity wells. Harrison just wants to get face to face with the Zunshu and hammer out an armistice. Mark wants to get onto the Ebrezjim, see if any part of its brain is still functional, which is a way of making contact with his illustrious ancestors. Me? I want all of the above, but I also want to prove out ten years’ worth of work. If I’m wrong, I just burned off a decade of my life. But I’m not wrong,” she said smugly.

  Marin was still listening to the loop. “The Resalq shuttle launched a few minutes ago. The last freight load from the Wastrel is right behind it.”

  “And we,” Hubler said as he shoved up onto his feet, “have work ahead of us. Move your butt, Asako.”

  “There’s only a half hour’s work,” she argued, “and we got better than eighty minutes to do it in.”

  “Unless something needs fixing, in which case we’ll run out of time real fast.” He dumped his plate into the chute and was stomping away without waiting for her.

  She headed out after him with a curse just as Jon Kim gestured with the handy. “Done. The last aboard will be Carellan 101, while Captain Rabelais and Jo secure their freight. Update from Captain Ingersol –”

  “That sounds too weird,” Jazinsky muttered.

  “But accurate.” Vaurien finished the cacao and made a face over the bitter dregs.

  “– the Wastrel,” Kim finished, “is on alert. Ops is powering up. The storm’s going to break ahead of schedule.”

  “You better give Roark and Asako a revised guesstimate.” Vaurien dropped his mug into the recycle. “Lai’a, I assume you’re monitoring the datastream?”

  The AI seemed to be everywhere, all around them, enveloping them. “I am generating most of the datastream myself,” it said with the surreal calm of the machine and the self-awareness that always made Travers sure it was alive in some very real sense. “On current calculations, the Orpheus Gate will open in approximately 50 minutes.”

  “All right, Lai’a, we can do this. Joss, tell Jo and Ernst they better hustle.” Vaurien was moving. “And crank up Ops. I want to take a good look before we commit to this.”

  He had been aboard twice before, Travers knew, but never in a ‘live’ situation. It was like the difference between knowing a circuit was carrying current and actually sticking a finger into the socket. Still working on the coffee, he and Marin followed Vaurien and Jazinsky forward from the lounge, where Operations was just coming online with scores of flatscreens, ten full workstations, six modest threedees and the three-meter navigation tank.

  Months before, the bow compartments of the old cruiser had been converted to cubic storage. The flightdeck was gutted, sensor pods, AI housing, forward weaponry, all stripped out just as the engines and generators were gone. The habitation module was a mere shell, Zunshu-armored, sheathed in Arago fields, a tiny bubble of environment where fragile creatures could survive in a cosmos that wanted only to rend them to the level of subatomic particles.

  Seventy meters back from the bows, the Ops room itself was pleasantly familiar, like a clone of Mercury Ops. The instrumentation had been upgraded with tech from the Wastrel and Carellan Djerun, but it remained a Fleet Ops facility, and they differed so little between ships, Travers had even found Kiev Ops oddly familiar, though he had never stepped into it before the battle on the Omaru blockade.

  Hands on hips, Vaurien turned a full three-sixty, shrewd eyes covering every threedee, every flatscreen. The navtank was online and loaded, and when Travers looked into it he swore quietly. The display might have been borrowed from the transspace simulator – he and Marin could easily have been looking into the face of the event that was about to engulf their virtual driftship.

  “Gives you a chill the whole length of your spine, doesn’t it?”

  Vidal’s voice took Travers by surprise. He turned his back on the tank and met the dark blue eyes with due concern. “You, uh, you’re okay?”

  In fact, several shades of color flushed in Vidal’s pale face. He was embarrassed. He might not remember the nightmares keenly enough to wound himself with them, but he knew Neil Travers had come to know things about him that few people indeed had ever known.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” Travers told him. “You think you shocked me? Forget it.”

  “I bloody know I shocked you,” Vidal murmured. “I shocked the hell out of Mahak, but he’s old enough, wise enough, to roll with the kind of punches that deck one of us.”

  “Mahak?” Travers echoed.

  “Mark.” Marin was not eavesdropping, but quite close enough to overhear. “Mahak is actually his name. We call him Mark for simplicity, or familiarity.”

  “‘Mahak’ isn’t so difficult, or so strange,” Vidal said in a soft tone like crushed silk. “Why pretend he isn’t Resalq? Why pretend anything at all? He’s …” He looked over his shoulder as Mark Sherratt appeared, coming up from the service elevator, and Travers saw a quick smile rush over the gaunt features.

  “There you are.” Mark dropped both hands on Vidal’s shoulders. “I thought you’d come right here.”

  “Where else?” Vidal leaned back into him, rested his head on Mark’s chest, closed his eyes for a moment. “I wanted to see the navtank load. I’ve been using it as the basis for the transspace simulation.”

  “And it’s about to become reality.” Mark gave the thin shoulders a gentle squeeze and let him go. “This is where the rest of us catch up with you, Michael – where we see with our living eyes the things only you and Jo and Ernst have seen.”

  “Wonderful,” Marin guessed in an odd tone.

  “And terrible. Beautiful. Horrible.” Vidal leaned on the side of the tank, gazing into the graphical depiction of the growing event. “This one’s going to be a monster.”

  “Yes, she is.” Vaurien glanced sidelong into the comm threedee. “Tully, you there?”

  “Yo,” Ingersol’s voice said. “You should be seein’ what I’m seein’. Damn, it’s a beast
.”

  “We’ll need to be quick,” Vaurien agreed. “What about that last freight shuttle?”

  “Docking right now,” Ingersol assured him. “Soon as Ernst and Jo have the simulator off and nailed down … Jesus, Rick, you’re gone.”

  “Got to cut the umbilical cord sooner or later,” Jazinsky said dryly. “Take a pill, Tully. What, you don’t trust Lai’a?”

  “I guess I do,” Ingersol admitted. “I’ve been going over your manifest – anything to do, to distract myself! You know you’re overloaded.”

  “With what?” Vaurien traded glances with Jazinsky.

  Ingersol chuckled. “You’re supposed to have one thousand, exactly, sensor drones to drop in Elarne, comm buoys marking your way out, way back, whatever. According to my freight logs, you’re carrying eleven hundred.”

  “Well, I think we can live with the diff,” Jazinsky decided.

  In fact, every cubic meter of Lai’a was crammed with ordnance, drones, raw materials to feed the factoring shops where anything could be made, from engine parts to hull plating. Jazinsky and Sherratt liked to say Lai’a had the ability to clone itself, right through to the Prometheus generators and the hyper-Weimann drive itself, so long as its thousand-odd mining drones could be delivered to a Jovian world or perhaps a reef like the Bronowski, where they could access rare metals, the ‘impossible’ elements which wove the alchemy of Zunshu technology.

  The Resalq AI’s voice was as soft and rich as Mark’s own, yet it still startled Travers as it said, “Revised forecast. The Orpheus Gate will open in approximately 30 minutes. I must be on vector with a margin of at least five minutes.”

  “Damn, we’ll to have to scramble.” Vaurien touched his combug and said into the loop, “Ernst, Jo – you hearing this?”

  And Rabelais: “Go. We just sent the shuttle back. We’re stowing the simulator right now, and there’s a regiment of handling drones down here to do the job. Don’t wait for us.”

  The most peculiar sensation crawled through Travers’s belly, leaving every nerve on edge, a feeling of being not-quite-ill while heat rushed through him and his skin chilled. He had not felt this since his first action as a rookie conscript facing live ammunition. On the crewdeck the older inmates called it ‘virgin panic.’ He swallowed on a moment of nausea, and then his body adjusted, as it always did.

  “Time, Tully,” Vaurien was saying.

  On the other side of the tank Shapiro and Rusch were standing close as if to conference in whispers, though they had fallen silent. Jon Kim’s hands were clasped before his chest – Travers thought he might be praying, and if he was, he hoped Jon knew some good ones. Both Sherratts, Tor and Jazinsky were too busy to be anxious, but Travers and Marin had nothing to do but watch; and what Travers watched was Vidal’s face.

  His expression was exultant as Lai’a said, “Mission clock started. Departing Alshie’nya. Orpheus Gate in 14.75 minutes, via e-space transit from Beacon 72.”

  Vaurien said quietly into the hush of the loop, “All hands, secure for Weimann sequencing.”

  And Ingersol: “Wastrel will stand by you until transspace insertion. We’ll hold well off, Rick, and monitor you till the event closes.”

  As he spoke, the sublight engines began to drive with a power that shouted through the whole airframe like distant thunder.

  Chapter Eleven

  Surges of eighty gravities smashed like ocean rollers around the jaws of the event, spiking to well over two hundred. In the heart of it glared a blinding vista of roiling, heaving lighting shot through by streamers of blood red and purple, and in the places where the naked human eye could see beyond the ravel of lightning it seemed a pit opened up beneath the skeins of writhing energies. A bottomless chasm fell away to infinity.

  After more than twenty simulator flights, Marin could almost handle what he saw. His heart was too fast, too hard, but as his eyes skimmed the displays surrounding the navtank he saw familiar data, plots he recognized as well as Travers knew them. They stood mutely, just watching as Lai’a raced toward the event on full sublight thrust. On the other side of the tank Vaurien was still talking to the Wastrel, but comm was intermittent, sheeting out with the burgeoning interference off the storm. Soon they would not hear the Wastrel at all, and Marin resisted the impulse to cling to the voices of Ingersol and Etienne – they were not a lifeline. They were more an anchor chain, and Lai’a had cast off that anchor.

  Still accelerating, the driftship bolted not for the absolute heart of the event but for a freefall channel it could actually see with eyes so far beyond anything living. Few humans or Resalq could read the graphical data plot, and Marin murmured softly as he realized he actually could comprehend what he saw. The navtank was a blizzard of skewed, twisted strands, tangles of energy, gravity, time. Ten days ago, he would have made nothing of it, but now –

  He saw the way through. The germ of a transspace pilot was alive and growing inside him and, like Lai’a, he actually saw the way into, and through, a Hellgate event such as ships like the old Intrepid and the Wastrel might dance with, even flirt with, but eventually must flee. Lai’a had done the dancing, the flirting, but when it ran, it dove toward the storm, just a little off-center of its hub, into the freefall passage where the unspeakable gravities were held in balance by the pattern, the form, of the storm itself.

  A glimmering of the science of horizon dynamics had begun to kindle in Marin’s mind, and he was breathless as he looked sidelong at Jazinsky, Mark, Teniko, even Midani Kulich. They understood a thousand times more than he knew yet, but he would learn. As a transspace pilot he might never grasp the science of Elarne the way the others did, but he and Travers had a feel for it, an affinity. The same quality had brought Michael Vidal back through the stormy side of the sky.

  Vidal was so intent on the tank, nothing else might have existed. His hands were reaching, fingers splayed and flexing, in what Marin knew was the sensory ballet of the transspace flight. He was not flying this ship – Lai’a was Lai’a; but Vidal could fly this space, and in his mind he was so immersed in the brains and heart of Lai’a, he was aware of nothing else. His face was ecstatic.

  Not a meter behind him were Shapiro and Kim, Leon Sherratt and his partner, Roy Arlott. Of them all, only the ‘old Hellgate hand’ was stoic. The political aide, the techno-archaeologist and the linguist were paralysed with a kind of mesmerized dread. Leon, Dario Sherratt and his own partner, Tor Sereccio, were consumed by the datastream. Like Midani Kulich, they knew more than enough to understand what Lai’a was doing, and how it was done.

  And Richard Vaurien? Marin glanced up at the mask of his face, but no flicker of expression showed there. Vaurien had lived with Jazinsky’s work – funded it, supported it – for over fifteen years. He might not have flown the transspace simulator, but he had a profound grasp of the broad concepts of horizon dynamics. He was dead calm as he watched the displays, trading comm with Ingersol and Etienne until signals were so distorted, nothing meaningful was exchanged.

  The last they heard from Ingersol was, “–can’t read your … safe distancing man– … ninety gravities off … –ling back out of … luck Rick. See you g– later.”

  Then the comm sheeted out to pure white noise and the synchronized clone of Mark’s AI, Joss, shut it down. This iteration of Joss and the one loaded into the computer core on the Carellan Djerun were now discrete systems. All this, Marin registered on automatics as he watched the navigation plot expand, turn inside out, and Lai’a said,

  “Over the threshold. Reading 227 gravities off the starboard quarter. Maintaining freefall passage. Zero-point benchmarks set: Naiobe, Raishenne-G, 2631C pulsar. Locating Odyssey Tide. Warning: Orpheus Gate is beginning to close.”

  The aftscan was displayed on a flatscreen off to the right of the tank, and Marin’s heart squeezed as he saw the heart of the storm there, a dazzling tornado of blue light and gyrating lightning arcs, collapsing on itself. Through the eye of the storm the naked eye could still glimpse norma
l space … ordinary stars, the filaments of the nebula which was all that remained of the supernova 2631C, at the heart of which was the tiny pulsar Lai’a used as one of three of its zero-point navigation markers.

  The storm crashed in on itself all at once – normal space was gone and beside Marin, Travers whispered a soft profanity which might even have been a prayer.

  “That’s … we’re … fuck,” Roy Arlott said succinctly. He reached out toward Leon as if he might stumble, and Leon caught his arm.

  “We’re in,” Vidal said to no one in particular.

  “Joss, synch navigation from Lai’a to the tank.” Vaurien was frowning over the display, which had spun, blanked, and not yet realigned. “Barb, you’ve seen it do this data lag before?”

  “Yeah.” She was working with a handy. “It’s exactly like signal lag … takes a few seconds for the tank to catch up. Remember, I warned about this – we’ve got the processor power to display a threedee representation of ten-dimensional transspace, but not quite in realtime. Nobody does. ”

  “So, everything we see,” Travers mused, “is on a few seconds’ delay.”

  “The lag time will contract,” Mark assured him. “It’s the initial load, right after crossing the transspace horizon, that incurs setup time.”

  The display was coming back up as he spoke, and Vaurien was satisfied. The Odyssey Tide was a river of blue-white energy around which white and gold threads wove, tangled, unraveled and began again. It was so bright, so complex, it hurt the eyes. Marin looked away as Lai’a remarked, as if the information were almost too normal to be worthy of note,

  “Odyssey Tide acquired. I am dropping the first comm beacon. Standby for transspace engine ignition.”

  Vaurien said into the loop. “Standby for hyper-Weimann procedures.” He looked over at Vidal, and beyond him, at the armordoors which had begun to close as Ernst Rabelais and Jo Queneau darted through. “Welcome back to Elarne.”