by B. V. Larson
“About what?”
“You may not be aware of this,” she said, “but I’ve been seeking sex with you for a long time.”
“You don’t say?”
“It’s true. That’s what troubles me now—because we must end that part of our relationship.”
Tilting my head, I looked at her seriously. “That’s it? We’re through?”
“Yes.”
“Because of the opinions of others?”
“Partly. But the biggest problem is that it’s causing me more distraction and worry than it’s worth.”
“I see,” I said. Internally, I felt relieved, but I was smart enough not to show it. I tried to look injured but thoughtful.
“Have I hurt your mind?” she asked.
“You mean my feelings?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be okay, Zye. I enjoyed it, and I hope you did too.”
“Yes, I did,” she said.
She poured herself a second glass, threw it down her throat and stood up suddenly.
“What’s the hurry?” I asked.
“I have a date with the one called Andrew in engineering. I only have sixteen hours left to live before we hit the breach. Therefore, haste is necessary.”
“I see. That’s why you don’t want me to follow my plan. It was all a matter of timing?”
She nodded.
“Well then, good luck with your date.”
She left, and I chuckled bemusedly when she’d gone. I poured one more to “dying well.” Privately, I thought that if we lived, Zye was going to have a very interesting sex life due to her pragmatic attitude.
* * *
After everyone had time to eat, sleep and make their peace with the unknown, we reached the artificial breach again.
The bridge entrance grew on our screens, and we soon drew close enough to make out details. This time around it looked like the finger bones of a reaching metal hand.
“The guns, sir,” Rumbold said in a hushed voice. “They’re tracking us, but they aren’t firing. That code-key must be doing something.”
Swallowing hard, I gave the order to make the final approach. We flew toward the spidery network of metal and into it. A moment later, we left the system and found ourselves somewhere new.
This time, the boundaries of hyperspace were cramped and grey—suffocating us like a blanket.
“All engines, reverse!” I shouted.
The crew was already in panic-mode, bringing us around and firing every thruster we had to slow us down.
“Yamada, how close is the nearest wall?” I demanded. “Will we make contact with it?”
On the screen, it looked like we were driving right into a fog bank. The surface of it roiled and pulsed.
“A second ago, yes—but now we’re green. The variables seem to be dynamic and changing.”
I looked at her. “You mean because we’re braking hard?”
She shook her head and gave me a look of confusion and wonder. “No sir, the walls are retreating from us. This region of hyperspace is still forming, still unstable. It’s… expanding, Captain.”
Nodding slowly, I thought I understood. The artificial bridge system didn’t just allow entry into a breach, it had created the breach we were in now.
I looked at the ballooning walls, which were now clearly in retreat, shaking my head in amazement.
“This is impressive technology,” I said. “The Stroj are going to be even more dangerous opponents than I’d previously believed.”
“I must correct you on that point,” said a voice behind me. It was my aunt, the venerable Lady Grantholm.
“Madam,” I said, “I didn’t know you were coming to the command deck.”
“I’ve lived a very long time,” she said. “I’ve earned the right to watch you extinguish my existence.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” I said, making a sweeping gesture toward the screens, “but I think your prediction is premature. We’re still very much alive and well.”
“For now,” she said. “We’re in a newly hatched slice of hyperspace without a paddle, as they used to say.”
Her reference was lost on me, but not her attitude. I turned away to go over what little data we had so far.
We were in a small pocket of hyperspace—the smallest I’d ever even read about. It was expanding however, and it already encompassed a region about an AU in diameter. But the rate of expansion was falling fast and my techs estimated it would stabilize completely within a few minutes.
“So,” Lady Grantholm said as she followed me to the nav table. “Where are you taking us this time?”
“To the other side of this breach,” I said. “We can’t be sure where it leads.”
She released a long sigh of exasperation. “Exploration is one thing, William. Wandering around lost in the woods is quite another. I’m hereby ordering you—you would agree we’re not under immediate threat, wouldn’t you?”
I glanced at her. “Perhaps the pursuing dreadnought will come after us and change things,” I said.
She made an exasperated sound. “Until they do, I insist you relinquish command.”
At last I nodded. “There’s no immediate danger,” I admitted.
“Good. At least you’re still honest. What I want you to do is take us home now. We’ve seen enough of these worlds and peoples. We’ve made contact with several colonies, and it’s time we reported home.”
I nodded thoughtfully. I assumed that meeting a Stroj dreadnought had taken some of the spirit of adventure out of my aunt.
Unfortunately, I had no idea how to get us home right now. I was simply glad not to be running in circles away from a killer enemy warship.
But I said none of this. I didn’t lie to her, of course, I simply gave her a tight smile.
“As soon as we can get our bearings, Ambassador, we’ll head home.”
“Excellent,” she said, and she left the deck.
Rumbold eyed me strangely. “Captain,” he whispered loudly, “we have no damned idea where we are.”
“Yes, I know. But when we figure it out we’ll head home—as per the Ambassador’s instructions.”
He chuckled and went back to his duties.
A powder-monkey came up to the deck after an hour of cruising, exploring the bridge and dropping probes. We’d found the region to be quite unstable. The probes had distributed themselves in a broad series of undulating curves, despite the fact we’d been flying in a straight line from our point of view.
“What is it?” I asked the girl who’d come to speak to me.
“That thing in the brig—Captain Lorn—he demands to talk to you. The guards ignored him at first, but he’s become obnoxious.”
“He always was obnoxious,” I pointed out. After making sure the command center was running smoothly I went down to talk to Lorn.
“About damned time you showed up!” he roared from inside his cell.
His appearance, always disturbing, was now hideous. He’d grafted on extra digits on each hand, among other things. The digits were curled and useless-looking.
He must have seen me eying them, because he lifted them with a grin.
“You’re admiring my new fingers, aren’t you?” he asked proudly. “Don’t bother to deny it! I couldn’t resist just a few more. And don’t worry, they’ll start working soon. Right now, they’re dead flesh. But they’ll revive with enough resprayings of nu-skin and nanite paste.”
“I’m sure they will. What do you want?”
“I want you to keep to your bargain.”
“How so?”
“Let me out of this ship! Give me the pinnace and dump me out—right here.”
This demand took me by surprise. “Right in the middle of hyperspace? How will you get out of here? A pinnace can’t breach out of this new pocket of space.”
“It won’t have to. You’ve opened a new path. Other Stroj ships will follow in time.”
“You mean the dreadnought?”
<
br /> “Possibly.”
I considered. Every second I spent doing this seemed to irritate Lorn. He shuffled his feet, then glared, then shook the bars with his hands. His fingers clenched into fists, both the living and the numb, dead ones.
“Sparhawk, you’re reneging, aren’t you?” he demanded after a time.
“No,” I said, “but I am trying to figure out why you don’t want to wait until we exit this universe.”
“What? Are you trying to say I’m playing a trick? A helpless man in a cell? No… that’s not it, is it? What you’re up to is far more sinister.”
“Calculating the motives of a proven enemy is not sinister.”
“Nonsense. You’re trying to weasel out of our agreement. I got you out of that star system. I wanted my freedom in return. What do you call it when one man keeps his end of a bargain and the other immediately begins to hedge when it comes time to pay up?”
“I’m not—”
“Dishonesty, that’s what it is! Skullduggery. Bait-and-switch. Go ahead, confess your vile intentions. I’ve been tricked and played for a fool, haven’t I?”
Heaving a sigh, I decided he was right. There was no going back on the deal now. If I couldn’t keep a simple agreement with a Stroj—the first one ever made, to my knowledge between our two peoples—how could I expect them to ever trust us?
“All right,” I said. “Take the pinnace. Guards, take him there. Keep him chained. Free him remotely, only when he’s been ejected from the ship and our shields are back up.”
I turned away from Lorn and left. I hoped never to have to meet up with him again.
Less than an hour later, the pinnace puffed out into space. Shortly thereafter, the engines sparked, and it pulled away from us. It soon drifted in our wake, lurking near one of our probes.
“That creature is a monster,” Rumbold said when I returned to the command deck. “A ghoul without a soul.”
“True enough,” I agreed, “but I’m not. We struck a bargain, and he kept up his part of it.”
“Maybe, or maybe we’ll come out of this breach right into a supernova.”
“It could be, but why would the base commander of a Stroj outpost possess a code-key that leads to a deathtrap?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I still smell a rat, sir.”
“That’s rotting flesh,” I commented.
Rumbold shuddered and turned back to his duties.
We sailed on at a gentle pace for three more hours before anything happened. I was about to retire when a klaxon sounded.
Everyone turned toward Yamada, as the sensor-arrays had triggered the alarm.
“Do we have an exit point calculated?” I asked hopefully.
She shook her head slowly, her face bathed in blue light as she studied her instruments.
“I’m afraid not, sir. The computer is warning us that we’re being pursued.”
She reached for the screen activation, and she piped her data to the forward screens. I saw a speck, and red lettering appeared beside it, identifying the contact.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes, Captain. The enemy dreadnought has followed us somehow. It’s pretty far back still, but it never had to brake like we did when we first entered and discovered the tightness of this newly formed bridge. It’s moving at full velocity.”
“Helm,” I said, “increase power. Give us two Gs of acceleration.”
Almost immediately, I was staggered. My weight had dramatically increased. With great effort, I made it back to Yamada and sat heavily beside her, studying her raw data.
“Can we make it out of here before the dreadnought catches up?” I asked.
“Only if we find the exit very soon.”
Slowly, I turned my head back toward the forward screen. I nodded thoughtfully. This was why Lorn was so adamant about getting off my ship out into hyperspace. He hadn’t wanted to be around when his friends caught up to Defiant.
-47-
Studying the situation behind us with interest, I watched the dreadnought approach. It was overtaking us.
Periodically, I swung the optics to locate and study the pinnace I’d given Lorn. His situation was also of interest. He wasn’t heading for the dreadnought—in fact, he appeared to be running away from it. He was already lingering near the billowing walls of this hyperspace pocket, staying as far from us and the dreadnought as possible.
Yamada took note of what I was doing.
“That bastard looks like a fly on a curtain, doesn’t he?” she asked. “The dreadnought is pinging him in the clear. They know he’s there.”
“Any hint that they may pause to swat our pesky fly?” I asked.
“Negative, unfortunately. Why do you think he’s running from them, sir?”
“I recall that the base commander told Lorn his treachery would be broadcast far and wide. I can only assume the crew of this warship knows that patchwork traitor gave us a code-key to escape the system.”
“I see…” she said. “In that case, they’ll get him.”
“Unfortunately, it appears their priority is to run us down and swat us first.”
She nodded glumly and returned to her duties.
Moving to the nav table alongside Durris, I gave him a nod in greeting. He returned the gesture, but winced when he did so.
“Sir, we’re going to be overtaken. We’ll have to turn and fight.”
“We have options, Durris.”
He looked at the nav table with me, baffled. At last he shook his head. “All I can think of is to slow them down with missiles and mines, but we expended every warhead we had destroying the moon base. We don’t even have a pinnace anymore.”
I thought he might have let a twinge of accusation enter his voice at that point, but I chose not to respond to it.
Reaching over the table, I tapped time controls and spun the scene backward. Once it showed the walls of our fledgling wormhole at the first moment we entered, I used two hands to magnify the zone ahead of us.
“When we first entered hyperspace, this is what the region looked like,” I said. “Space narrowed at the far end of the hyperspace bridge. It’s since expanded outward, but the far end is still identifiable.”
I circled this region, which in the old vid files resembled a blunt tapered point in the distance.
“The breach must be here,” I said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Durris stared at the table, dumbfounded. “Aim for the blurry spot? Have you got any evidence to back up this theory?” he demanded.
“Only logic—and a careful analysis of our previous passage through an artificial bridge. Let’s review those files.”
After working with the table for a time, Durris displayed the first artificial breach we’d discovered. The pattern was again clear. There was a large region off to one end of the universe that was elongated. As time progressed in flickering motion on the displayed scene, the hyperspace expanded and billowed into a new configuration.
“I’ll be damned,” Durris said. “When the new bridge is formed, you really can tell where the way out must be. It’s a large area—but much smaller than our previous guesses have been.”
“Exactly. I propose that we increase our speed, locking down in our crash seats and pushing our luck. We’ll slam into the far end of this tiny existence—or shoot right through the breach and back into normal space.”
He stared at me thoughtfully. “We’ve got no chance to take out this monster on our trail, sir?”
“She displaces more mass than we do by two to one. Logically, she’ll out range us with the main cannons by at least fifty percent. That means we’ll have to absorb six to ten volleys before we can return one of our own.”
He looked over my equations grimly. “Battle in space is even more susceptible to mathematical realities than combat on a planetary surface. We can’t even hide behind a tree and jump out in ambush. I have to agree with your assessment, sir.”
“I’m g
lad you see it my way. Begin implementing our escape plan.”
He left the table and began making the rounds to the other stations. The helm, sensors, life support and crew safety officers were all informed. Alarmed, they took up battle stations and sounded alarms all over the ship. We were about to take a drastic risk.
Soon, the engines were thrumming deeply, the pitch rose steadily until it vibrated the teeth in my head.
“Ready, sir,” Durris said, casting me a reluctant glance.
I gave the order, and we were all pressed back into our seats even more firmly than before. The effect was a painful one, and it made the skin pull away from my skeleton as if it were elastic.
“Primary engine chamber overheating,” Zye said calmly. “Secondary chamber coming online.”
“Maintain course and speed,” I said, determined to ride it out.
Watching through blurred eyes, I saw the computer update our positions steadily. The increased speed was now projected to cause us to reach the exit point before the enemy dreadnought could catch us—provided that the exit was where I hoped it was. Where it had to be.
The following hours were both painful and stressful. We watched with bleary eyes as the end of the line approached. Only with the greatest effort could we rise to drag our bodies around the deck, exhausting ourselves quickly.
Few of us even spoke as the probable breach point loomed at last. We weren’t exultant, or relieved to know the ordeal would soon be over one way or another. We were too bone-weary for that. We just wanted the ride to end.
When at last we approached the proposed breach-point, I thought I could see it. They had a certain shimmer, an amorphous outline when you knew what to look for. But I couldn’t really be sure I was witnessing this with a clear mind.
“Captain,” I heard a faint, weary voice call to me. “Captain…”
“Rumbold? What is it?”
“Permission to nudge our course, sir.”
“Why?”
He stirred in his chair, but his head didn’t turn to face me. Perhaps he couldn’t manage it.
“The coordinates are off… I can see it. I can feel it.”
I stared at the forward screen. With an effort of will, I rotated my chair and saw that Yamada had slumped over her boards. She was out, either sleeping from exhaustion or unconscious due to the force being exerted on her body.