by Mel Keegan
As disagreeable as Tor’s tone might have been, he was right. Mark sighed heavily. “The people local to this area might be at war, as we are; they may be in the process of annihilation, as the Resalq were, so long ago. Lai’a, have you detected any sign of gravity weapons, swarms, such as we laid down around Hellgate?”
“None,” Lai’a said promptly. “They were my priority, upon exit from the event, and before leaving the Drift. If Resalq and humans are able to seed minefields into the exit lanes, equally advanced alien species would theoretically do the same. They would also post marker beacons to alert friendly traffic. I have detected no such beacons, and have identified no such minefields.”
“Then, the local civilization – if it still exists at all – is probably still trying to develop appropriate weapons,” Dario mused. “If their tech is lagging behind us by even a century or two, they’ll be gone before they find something to hit the Zunshu with. We were scrambling to get there.”
“We could help them,” Jazinsky whispered. “We have the technology to make the difference for them, catch them up.”
“And we can shake them by the hand – claw, tentacle or whatever – on the way out of Zunshu space,” Tor snapped. “Our people come first, Barb. Home is the whole fucking reason we’re out here, fifteen years away from – from –” He turned away to hide quick tears, and Dario reached for his hand, clasped it tightly.
“Doctor Sereccio is quite right,” Rusch said softly. “If you wanted my ten bucks’ worth, Richard, I’d drop a comm drone right here, broadcasting greetings from the children of the Deep Sky in as many languages as we can manage. I’d tell them where we’re from, how we got here, where we’re going and what we intend to do. I’d also tell them we’ll be back, unless the bloody Zunshu obliterate us; and when we’re back this way, if the local folks want to come out and say hi, we’d be delighted to supply the hardware to destroy the Zunshu.”
Vaurien had been nodding in agreement, and as Rusch fell silent he said, “Do it, Lai’a. Resalq, Slingo,– whatever languages of Earth you can manage, and as many types of language as we can supply. These people might make sense of Hindi or Cantonese while Slingo is so much gibberish, who knows? Append a key to the language ... let’s give them half a chance to talk to us! How long?”
“The message has been drafted, Captain. Would you care to see it? It is displaying on Comm 2,” Lai’a told him. “Upon your approval, I will load the comm drone. Standby for negative Weimann transition.”
The thrum through the deck told Travers they had dropped out into normal space, and the live vidfeed in the tank was as beautiful, as cold, as hostile as any starscape in the Deep Sky. He stood with Marin and Vidal while the Sherratts, Jazinsky, Rusch and Vaurien dickered over the exact wording of the message. Both Tor and Mick were fuming when at last Lai’a said,
“Comm drone is launched. Standby for Weimann ignition. Returning to the Gojin Drift. Captain Vaurien, do you wish to option the first appropriate event?”
“Yes.” Vaurien passed both hands over his face as the stars wheeled in the navigation display.
The drone was already transmitting as Lai’a came about fast, and ahead was a blood-red place in the sky. No wonder the navigators on the Ebrezjim called this the Blood Gate, Travers thought with bitter clarity as Hellgate’s bizarre sister rushed up out of the darkness. Lai’a was already hunting for a likely storm, and the return vector took them so close to the red giant and the feeding black hole that the bloody nebula streamed by like tattered silk torn to shreds and cast on the wind.
This hunt was seven hours long, and the Ops room was idling, the human and Resalq complement stood down, when at last Lai’a found a storm to its liking. Several smaller events had passed by, too immature to afford the freefall channel needed by a big ship, though something like the Orpheus or the Odyssey might have slipped through.
After midnight, shiptime, Travers was on the edge of sleep when the threedee brightened a little, the familiar amber bars appeared and the AI murmured, “Gojin Gate acquired.” He turned over, one arm draped across Marin’s hip. Curtis lifted his head, peered at the threedee and set it down again. The deck was thick with the heavy throb of powerful engines. “Transspace drive available,” Lai’a whispered. “Transition in four. Three. Two –”
The scream of compressing, twisting metal seemed to tear Travers out of sleep. He was on his feet without knowing how he got there, panting as cold sweat started from every pore. “What the hell was that?”
The cabin lights came up, and in the threedee all amber status bars had clicked over to red. Marin was out of bed on the other side, groping for the pair of combugs, and he tossed one to Travers. As it slid in, he heard the shouting from Operations and his heart slammed heavily against his ribs.
“Neil, you’re hearing this?” Marin had shoved his legs back into the slacks he had dropped not an hour before. He had a shirt in one hand and was barefoot as he headed for the door.
“They lost a generator … and I’m hearing something about a decompression – hangar deck. Christ, this can’t happen.” Travers had scrambled into pants and ignored shirt and shoes.
“Apparently it can.” Marin was out a pace ahead of him at a dead run, heading forward toward Ops, where the armordoors had closed to a single meter which could be sealed, if necessary, in under a second.
Voices were still shouting across the comm and an alarm clamored on the lower deck. Travers’s heart was in his throat as they saw a peppering of red across every environmental monitor. Vaurien and Jazinsky were calling repeatedly into the loop. Jim Fujioka, half clad in an incongruous sky blue kimono, was wrestling with an intermittent datastream from at least one of the reactors while Joss murmured a litany of woe. Warning. Hull breach at ventral 440. Warning. Decompression in ventral 300 to 480. Warning. Ventral deck armordoors are sealed –
“Hull breach?” Travers echoed. “Richard, we have people in there?”
“We don’t know yet.” Vaurien pointed him at a flatscreen where the event report scrolled faster than Travers could comprehend it. His hand splayed over the pad, slowed it, scrolled it back, while Marin – thinking like a transspace pilot – focused on the flight systems.
“We’re through into the driftway,” he said tersely. “Looks like the event collapsed. Lai’a!”
“Stable in the driftway. The Gojin Gate has closed,” Lai’a reported with a surreal calm. “Number 2 generator scrammed –”
“What? Why?” Jazinsky barked.
“Gravity spiked up to 650 Gs, causing critical Arago overrun,” Lai’a said baldly. “Habitation module armor collapsed over six meters, resulting in a minor breach to both inner and outer hulls and explosive decompression through nine compartments. Armordoors sealed according to emergency protocols. Arago function is now restored at satisfactory levels. Compartments are repressurizing. Tolerable temperature for unsuited Resalq and humans will be restored in 40 seconds.”
The flatscreen before Travers was garish with a graphic of the lower deck, where fields of blue picked out the compartments that had reduced to partial vacuum before Arago fields could seal them. Gold icons marked the positions of people. His voice was a whipcrack – he heard the master sergeant there again as he bawled into the chaos of the loop,
“Bravo – Fargo, talk to me!”
Six gold icons were clustered close together in the hangar where the Trofeo and the Capricorn were stored, and Travers held his breath until he made sense of the wild gabble over the combug.
“Yo,” Fargo bellowed, cutting across the others with volume of a squad leader and the sharpness of a woman’s voice, pitched much higher. “Where the fuck did that come from, boss? If we weren’t the luckiest bastards you ever knew, we’d be dead, the whole bunch of us.”
“Casualties?” Travers willed his heart to slow.
“Mild case of vacuum bloom here and there – Kravitz and Inosanto look a little rosy in the cheeks with it, and Perlman’s got a case of red-eye. Nothing t
hat won’t fix. Talk about luck? We were playin’ folgen. The Capricorn was open, we were using its ’chef and sound system and heaters – like we always do. Suddenly there’s alarms screamin’ up a shitstorm about a decompression, so we dove on board, slammed the hatch. We’d never have gotten out of the hangar, boss. The armordoors slammed so fast, we were locked in – pressure was low enough to strip your lungs and it’s cold out there. What the fuck was that? We blew the hull?”
“At least one Arago collapsed during the transit,” Travers told her in sparse terms. “That’s all I know. Let me get back to you.” His pulse had just begun to slow and he looked up from the screen as Vidal, Rabelais and Queneau appeared. The event clock read 1:14 but time had stretched with an uncanny elastic quality. The Sherratts were behind Vidal’s group by just a few seconds, while Travers heard Shapiro, Rusch, Grant, Hubler on the comm, shouting for information.
“Stay where you are, all of you,” Vaurien told them. “You’re safe, and we don’t know much more than you do. There’s nothing you can do here – Joss, stream the event data to personal system access. Sit tight, all of you.”
Predictably, Hubler and Rusch utterly ignored the order. Hubler was stomping toward Operations before Vaurien fell silent. Rusch was right behind him, and joined Jazinsky and Vidal, viewing flight data. Hubler began to curse with impressive fluency as he scrolled through the event log.
“Pressure is restored to all compartments,” Lai’a announced. “Drones are deployed. Estimated time to effect satisfactory repairs, 12 hours. Bio scan of all compartments reveals one casualty.”
Travers’s head came up. He had been racing through the roster, accounting for everyone. “We missed somebody? Who? Alive, Lai’a?”
“Alive,” Lai’a told him. “Doctor Teniko is in the forward bunker adjacent to Chemistry 2.”
“The drone bunker?” Marin demanded. “What the hell would he be doing in the drone bunker?
“Dove in there during the decompression?” Travers guessed. “It was a handy compartment with a sealable hatch. Normal air inside; it’d take an hour for one person to breathe it down … and if the ship didn’t come good in an hour, it wouldn’t really matter if you ran out of air, would it? Hey Bill, you there?”
“I’m on the Capricorn,” Grant said tersely. “I was playing folgen with the rest of the luckiest bastards you ever knew. I heard – Teniko’s in the drone store, and he’s alive. Richard, is it safe to come out and play?”
Red indicators had been turning amber and then green across the monitors, and Vaurien said, “Stay out of anything between ventral 400 and 480, but the drone store is forward of there. You should be safe.”
“Should be?” Fargo echoed loudly. “You’re not sure, Cap?”
“Lai’a?” Vaurien invited.
“All compartments are satisfactory.” Lai’a was as imperturbable as any machine. “The hull breach took place at exactly ventral 448, port lateral, two meters forward of bulkhead 1345. The inventory of two storage compartments is compromised. Damage occurred in the aft crew lounge and Chemistry 2. The outer hull of the habitation module is open over an irregular area, approximately six meters by two. The inner hull is already sealed by maintenance drones and holding normal air pressure. Aragos remain in place, closing the outer hull to radiation spill from the drive, pending repairs. Zunshulite armor plates are being transported from Storage 7 at this time.”
“You heard all that, Jude?” Travers asked.
It was Bill Grant who answered, “We heard – and I’m on my way, Neil. I already sent for an Infirmary sled. Lai’a, you got any bio readings on Teniko?”
The AI was unmoved by human calamity. Lai’a was never more obviously a machine as it said, “Doctor Teniko is unconscious. Body temperature is within normal human parameters. Respiration is faint.”
“Okay, I got this,” Grant said into the loop, breathing heavily – hurrying.
And Fargo: “Anything we can do, boss? We all know where we are with torches, if you need a welding gang.” She gave a humorless chuckle. “Christ, you remember the Intrepid?”
The memory was seared into the roots of Travers’s brain – and Marin’s, from the look on Curtis’s face. Neil glanced across at Vaurien, and it was Jazinsky who said, “Jude, hustle your people into armor, grab some gear and check the hull seals, fifty meters all around the breach. The drones are welding, but we want to be sure.”
“Will do, Doc,” Fargo acknowledged. And then, “Well, you heard the lady. Move!”
“And speaking of hull integrity,” Jazinsky went on, “Lai’a, give me structural data. How’s the airframe look after the shock of the breach?”
“Put it in the tank,” Vaurien said softly.
A schematic of the whole habitation module replaced the graphical display of the Drift, and Lai’a overlaid local feeds from every place where force, tension, shear, torque, temperature and rad nodes were embedded. Frowning deeply, Vaurien digested the numbers and gave Travers a wry glance.
“Maybe we were lucky,” Jazinsky said tersely.
“I don’t like being lucky.” Vaurien’s arms folded on the chest of the rumpled blue denim shirt, and he sighed. “But I guess I’ll take good luck over bad.”
The Sherratts had been taking to pieces the navigation feed, and they seemed satisfied that Lai’a was where it thought it was, and the driftway was stable. Mark straightened from their workstations and pushed his hands into the deep pockets of a burgundy robe he had thrown on over long bare limbs. He and Vaurien shared oddly similar frowns, and Mark said quietly,
“We just learned something extremely valuable.”
“Lai’a is not invulnerable.” Vaurien’s voice was low, steely.
But Mark’s tousled head shook. “The structural failure didn’t involve Lai’a. It was the Zunshulite armor shielding the habitation module that warped, and it punched in a very small section of the hull.” His shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug. “Think back to the beginning of this scheme, Richard. The mission was originally not intended to involve a live crew. Lai’a was to fly it … but of course this was never really possible. How could we expect a positive result if we built the most formidable war machine in your history or ours and launched it to annihilate an enemy – even the Zunshu – without benefit of a living intelligence? No perspective of the live intellect, no real capacity for intuition.” He sighed. “Lai’a is a biosynthetic creature of extraordinary complexity, but when your whole species is negotiating for its very survival, could you assign a machine as your advocate?”
“No,” Richard admitted. “The hab module was tacked on as an afterthought, and it’s the weak link, isn’t it? If Lai’a has any Achilles’ heel, this is it.”
“We are certainly the expedition’s vulnerable spot,” Mark allowed, “and it’s unavoidable. Lai’a, would you care to comment?”
“What would you have me add, Doctor?” the AI said with its unwavering patience. “There is always a possibility that gravity tides around the periphery of an event might spike unusually high. They did, when the event closed sooner than was possible to forecast with data gathered from normal space. The Arago generators protecting the habitation module are powerful, but not limitless. I overran them to shield you. The breach was minimal and the inner hull was sealed in 1.27 minutes, which is the minimum time required to cryo-cool and restart the scrammed Arago projector, routing power from Number 3 generator. Armordoors sealed across the ventral deck to safeguard the remainder of the ship. These are the emergency protocols and they were perfectly executed.”
“And if Bravo hadn’t opened up the Capricorn to use its facilities while they were playing folgen, we’d have six dead right now, including our CMO,” Marin added with all due cynicism.
“Recommendation,” Lai’a suggested. “Crew should be armored during transit.”
“Oh, shitshitshit,” Tor groaned, “I bloody hate the armor. I’d rather be in the frigging drone locker with a rebreather mask!”
“T
or, hush now,” Dario shushed.
“Hey, it’s just belt and suspenders, kiddo,” Leon said coaxingly. “I’ll give you a hundred to one, Tor – so long as we’re in armor, we’ll never pop another rivet. Lightning does strike twice, but not so fast, and never when we’re watching out for it.”
He made a good point, but the old master sergeant was alive in Travers now. As he joined Marin, Vaurien, Vidal and Mark by the navtank he deliberately clicked out of the loop and dropped his voice to a whisper. Richard’s face was set into granite hard lines, as if he knew what Neil was about to say.
“We’re heading to war,” Travers murmured. “We can expect the Zunshu to throw everything they have at us. And we’re … vulnerable. We just found out how vulnerable.” He looked from face to face.
“We shipped out with an even-money chance of making it home,” Vidal said in the same level tone. “You thought they couldn’t touch us? Like we were indestructible?”
“No,” Travers admitted. “But the one thing I wasn’t calculating on was having holes punched in us halfway through a gate event.”
“There’s an old saying,” Vaurien said acidly. “Forewarned is forearmed.” His brows rose, creasing his forehead. “So we take no risks. We know where and how we’re vulnerable. We’re in the hardsuits … we blow the hull down to zero pressure before we go anywhere near anything remotely resembling an encounter with Zunshu. Knowing where we’re at our weakest gives us one more advantage, doesn’t it?”
“Pragmatist,” Vidal accused.
“Cynic,” Vaurien corrected. “How do you think I’ve stayed alive this long?” And then, “Lai’a, give me a repair update.”
“Reassessment of damage and resources indicates, nine hours,” Lai’a responded. “Repairs will be adequate for transspace navigation, not for gate transit.”
Ice water seemed to trickle down Travers’s spine and Vaurien took a sharp breath. It was Mark who said, “I assume more structural work will be necessary before you can safely transit a storm on the Zunshu Drift.” Not a question.