Talbeck hardly dared hope what that serenity could mean. ‘You mentioned a trial,’ he said to Ivanov, as the guard moved on to search Baptista. ‘As a civilian, I request the right to be tried by my peers, not hauled up before a summary court-martial. As a citizen of the Federation, I am not subject to military law.’
‘Oh no,’ Ivanov said gleefully. ‘Oh no. You will soon find out just how wrong you are, Barlstilkin. You are aboard a vessel of the Federation Navy, in a declared war zone. You didn’t know about that? Too bad. You’ll be lucky to get anything more than a summary hearing before they strip you naked and kick you out of airlock. Incitement to mutiny, conspiracy against the authority of the ship’s commanding officer, either one will get you an orbit of your very own.’ His smile stretched his sallow skin tight across his high cheekbones: he looked like a death’s head. ‘And I will be there, watching. Last thing you see before your lungs come up your throat will be my face.’
‘I would not count on it,’ Baptista said, and the lights went out.
The darkness lasted only a moment before the lurid red glow of the emergency lighting cut in with a bang, but it was enough time for the bonded servant to kill the guard nearest her, for Alverez to snatch the pistol from the guard standing over him and turn it on Ivanov.
‘Don’t shoot him,’ Talbeck said quickly. His servant held out the dead guard’s pistol. He took it from her, although he hadn’t the faintest intention of using it.
Alverez said, ‘I wasn’t going to. Not yet.’
Ivanov said, ‘You still have a chance to die with honour, Lieutenant. Give up now. I’ll put in a good word at the trial.’
‘Jesus Christos, you think I’m a fucking pirate or something?’ Alverez was breathing hard through his mouth. ‘It seems we have our little revolution a little sooner than planned. Dr Baptista, I thank you for your help. But I hope your people will have the sense to keep out of the way until the ship is secure.’
‘I cannot speak for them, I am afraid.’
‘Then pray for them,’ Alverez said lightly. ‘It will not be an easy fight.’
Baptista said, ‘It will be easier than you believe, Lieutenant.’ There was a distant rumble, a bass vibration that shook Talbeck’s bones. The emergency lighting flickered, steadied at a dimmer glow.
Alverez said, ‘That’s one of the modules cutting loose. Baptista, did you do that? You crazy?’
‘An accommodation module, to be precise. Rescuing the scientists and the Navy personnel aboard it will keep the captain of the liner busy while you, Lieutenant, take the Vingança through the wormhole.’
Baptista stepped back, and suddenly half a dozen people were around him, all armed with pistols. As if they’d sprung out of the decking…no, there was a drop shaft in the angle of the corridor. For a moment, Talbeck thought it was his entourage. But he’d left them behind in Melbourne. He was alone here. The Witnesses had pinned Alverez to a wall and taken his pistol; Talbeck bowed to Baptista and surrendered his own pistol to a woman he recognized as the head of the planetology survey team.
Baptista told those around him, ‘Evangeline is dead. She died fighting for us all, and when there is time we must remember her. Take away Seyour Ivanov and his helpers and kill them. Barlstilkin and Alverez can live. They may be of use to us.’
12
* * *
A figure arrayed in dazzling patterns stood over Dorthy. Its face was a golden bowl that reflected her own pressure-suited self, its bulky legs splayed awkwardly, one glove half-raised to its helmet.
Ang’s voice said in her ear, ‘It’s over, Dr Yoshida! Come on now. It’s time to go!’
‘Just give me a moment, Ang. I’ve been on a trip.’
‘Oh, I know, I know. I wasn’t sure about all this mystical mindreading bullshit until you started babbling. Here, now.’
Despite the moon’s low gravity, Dorthy needed Ang’s help to get to her feet. Her legs were knotted with cramps. The other woman’s anxiety thrilled through her. ‘Babble? I haven’t done that since I was a kid. Well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I know. I know!’
The history of the core was still playing out somewhere in Dorthy’s mind. The war of the marauders against the other Alea family nations, the refugees fleeing the core, out into the myriad field stars of the spiral arms…‘I know where it goes!’ She could feel a manic grin pressing the bones of her cheeks against the rim of the helmet liner. ‘Down the hole! All the way in…all the way to the centre!’
Ang made an impatient gesture, gloved fist sweeping out from her chest in a flat arc. ‘Of course. But we are behind schedule and it really is time to go.’
‘I know! All the way to the centre of the Galaxy. To the core. That’s where it’s happening, that’s where it’s always happened.’
‘You are rapping. Come on, Dorthy Yoshida. Come on, now. We return.’
‘Yes, of course. I must tell Barlstilkin. And Abel Gunasekra, Valdez…he’ll be so happy about this.’
‘There is no need. Come, now.’
They clambered back into the tug, clumsy and slow, banging into each other in the confined space which, the hatch shut, roared and roared as blowers pressurized it. ‘I was right,’ Dorthy said, once they had taken their helmets off. ‘I was right all along.’
‘That is good,’ Ang said neutrally. But two vertical lines dented the skin between her glossy black eyebrows as she began to run through the instrument checklist. She said, ‘You rest now. You have done much.’
‘I’m not crazy. Really. Or no crazier than I was before. I’ve never really led a normal life, Ang. I tried, after I left the Institute, tried so hard to be an astronomer. But history wouldn’t let me, you see. Not just human history, but the secret history of the Universe. We’re living in its echoes right now. They reverberate through us, the way water trembles in a glass in time to the tolling of a great bell a hundred kilometres away. I’m sorry, yes, I am a bit manic. I’ll sit down and rest, if there’s somewhere to sit.’
‘Pull this out, here,’ Ang said. ‘You sit quietly, now. I must get us home. You have made us very late, and things are moving faster than we expected.’
The seat was no more than a padded bar that swung out from the wall, but when she straddled it Dorthy found it comfortable enough. The LSP of her suit held her upright, jammed against the cabin’s curved wall. The air of the cabin was cold, and her breath hung in a little cloud before her. There was the fierce peppery scent of gunpowder and it took Dorthy a long time to realize what it was. It was the smell of the dust they’d carried in with them. It was the smell of Colcha.
Meanwhile, Ang talked quietly with someone on the Vingança before at last igniting the motor and taking the tug into orbit. After the jarring thunder of lift-off, as the tug left Colcha behind, Dorthy fell into a kind of half-reverie. It was hard work, diving into your own mind. But she had won something…or been given it. She was too tired and too elated to realize that the distinction mattered, and she didn’t begin to understand just how her vision had decided the fate of the expedition until the tug’s motor suddenly cut off.
It had been burning for a long time, Dorthy realized tardily, and at a good fraction of a gee. Ang really was in a hurry to get back. Dorthy let her attention expand the smallest amount, cautiously impinging upon Ang’s jittery anxiety. Spikes of undirected nervous energy spitting and fizzing around a kernel of fear…fear of failure, of being left behind. Left behind by what? Dorthy tried to sit up in her suit’s heavy embrace, tried to concentrate.
Ang was hunched over the control column, the dusty boots of her p-suit jammed into stirrups in the mesh decking, her head looking oddly small above her suit’s neck ring. There was an audio spike in her left ear, and she was subvocalizing into her patch microphone.
Although Dorthy’s Talent was waning, the secretions of her implant beginning to win out over the counteragent she’d dropped, she managed to catch the gist of Ang’s secretive murmur. She said, ‘I started it all, didn’t I?’<
br />
Ang didn’t look around, but Dorthy registered the jolt of her surprise. The Witness said, ‘It was waiting to happen, my dear. From what I understand, Ivanov tried to arrest Dr Baptista, and your Golden friend, too. How are you at spacewalking?’
‘Out of practice…You mean to say the Witnesses have taken the Vingança, but they can’t run it properly?’
‘We didn’t count on being forced to act so quickly. Now we must hurry, before the Navy personnel are rescued and are able to regroup. And there is a kind of problem with deployment of the launch cradles. We will jump ship as soon as we are close to the Vingança, and get inside as quickly as possible, in any way we can.’
‘Your people want to fly the Vingança through a worm-hole to the Galaxy’s core, yet they can’t deploy the launch cradles? Doesn’t that worry you, Ang?’
‘That’s not going to stop you, is it?’
‘Damn right. Oh, I see. It was sabotage. You shouldn’t try and hide things from me, Ang, I’ll pick them up anyway.’
‘The damage was not serious, and we have complete control of the ship now. There is simply not enough time to do even running repairs. You had better put your helmet on again. We are nearly there.’
‘What else did the Navy people do, before the Witnesses rounded them up?’
Ang confessed, ‘We don’t know.’
‘They could have set charges to blow the ship into pieces. Or sabotaged the phase graffle. Perhaps I’m not so sure about this after all, Ang.’
‘You don’t have any choice, my dear. If you know anything, you know that. Is your helmet locked? Good. Now, do not worry. This is routine.’
‘I’m not worried, I’m terrified. Suppose an interstellar grain hits me? At seventeen thousand kps it’ll vaporize me.’
‘The ship is in the shadow of Colcha, and Colcha is in the shadow of the gas giant.’ Ang hooked her suit to Dorthy’s. ‘Please do not use your reaction pistol,’ she said, her voice intimate over the radio link, ‘unless I ask you to. And do not worry, I have done this many times.’
‘That’s good to know.’ Dorthy really was scared. She’d always disliked microgravity, and the prospect of crawling over the Vingança’s hull was terrifying.
The hatch slid open in back of Ang’s psychedelically-patterned suit. Ang passed a loop of silvery tether through her gloved hand. She said, ‘Stay close to me, now. You might even enjoy it.’ Then she kicked off before Dorthy could reply, falling neatly through the hatch and pulling Dorthy after her.
The Vingança stretched above them, a ladder rising against the gas giant’s green disc towards the shining crescent of Colcha. Cubes and blisters and polyhedrons clustered at intervals around its long central spine. It was pitted with open hatches; haloes of debris scintillated in the tarnished light of the white dwarf.
Dorthy revolved slowly at the end of the tether, saw beyond her boots the clusters of bulbous bolt-on drive units that had supplemented the ship’s reaction motor during the year of acceleration needed to catch up with the hypervelocity star. The elongate sphere of the liner stood off a dozen kilometres away, shining against the field of stars. For a moment, vertigo clawed through Dorthy’s nervous system. Infinity yawned all around, drenched in stars. Stars everywhere beyond the ship, no beginning and no end. She could fall forever and never reach the nearest.
And then the tether went taut as Ang fired the reaction pistol and Dorthy was whirled sharply around. They were moving away from the tug, towards the sharply shadowed edge of an accommodation module.
‘Hold the line close,’ Ang’s voice said in Dorthy’s ear, ‘and you won’t spin around so much. How are you doing?’
‘I’m not convinced anyone could enjoy it.’ When they’d gone over the edge of the tug’s hatch, Dorthy’s stomach had done a flipflop; atavistic reaction to what would obviously happen: go over an edge and you fall. It was only a little better now that they were gliding a hundred metres or so—in the sharp-edged chiaroscuro of light and shadow it was difficult to judge distances—above a staggered row of open hatches.
Ang said, ‘All we have to do is get inside. It won’t be long.’
‘It was waiting to happen, wasn’t it? I was just the spark to the tinder.’
Dorthy was certain that Talbeck Barlstilkin must have had a hand in the mutiny; but even without him, even without her, the Witnesses would have made their move sooner or later. It was why they were here, why so many of the scientists here were Witnesses. They knew that the hypervelocity star was connected somehow with the supertechnology that the marauders had plundered. They believed that it was a Message, a Sign. They believed that this whole expedition was simply the cutting edge of the political and cultural forces that were slowly but inevitably pulling the Federation apart. Falling free along the ship, it all seemed so simple to Dorthy: it never would again.
Ang told her to look up, and she saw a module slowly split away from the Vingança’s spine, beginning to tumble as the gap widened. ‘My people put the crew in it,’ Ang said, ‘to give us time to get away. We will find a place to cling to in the graving docks, Dorthy. No time to find any better place.’
The reaction pistol fired again, and again Dorthy whirled on the end of the tether. Nausea squirmed in her gullet. They were heading straight for one of the open hatches.
Dorthy said, ‘I’ve waited so long for this…and now I don’t know, Ang. I thought I knew what was at the other end, but it could be anything, anything at all! I’m scared silly. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Not strange at all, Dorthy. It would be strange if you weren’t.’
‘A few years ago I wouldn’t have been. I thought I knew it all. But it’s so much more complicated, Ang. There could be anything there.’
‘There will be the Enemy there. We are all sure of that. And you saw something else. Something glorious awaits us!’
‘But that was all so long ago…even the marauders may have gone. There may be nothing there at all. I just don’t know.’
‘Do not tell anyone else your doubts. It is why we are going, to take from the Enemy what is rightfully ours. To win the heritage left by the old ones.’
‘All the way to the core to fight a war that’s been going on for more than a million years. It isn’t even our war, not really.’ Dorthy felt a sudden dreamily detached clarity: perhaps the suit had responded to her climbing heart rate and given her a tranquillizing shot.
They reached the open hatch and clung to its edge. A faint continuous vibration was transmitted through Dorthy’s gloved hands, tingling through her bones. The ship’s reaction motor had been candled. The liner’s teardrop was slowly receding against the stars. In the other direction, beyond the prow of the Vingança’s spine and its clustered command blisters, silhouetted against the turbulent skies of the gas giant, Colcha was growing perceptibly larger.
The two women made a perfunctory search for shelter, but everything was in darkness and the hatch of the only tug within easy reach was dogged down, so they wedged themselves within the framework of one of the grapples. Ang cut the tether in half, and they lashed themselves to a slim steel spar.
The mutineers up in the command cluster had either forgotten to close the hatches, or sabotage had prevented it: Dorthy and Ang could see the surface of Colcha slide by as the ship went into low orbit. The reaction motor had been switched off after injection into orbit, but after one pass it went on again. The surface of Colcha swung away as the ship turned, nose down to the moon.
Dorthy clung tightly to the spar as she felt herself being pulled down towards the stern of the ship: a fall of several hundred metres through a space packed with machinery would be fatal no matter how marginal the gravity field. The suit had definitely given her a shot of something to calm her down. It was screwing up her implant and her Talent was wakening again, a giddy sense of internal expansion that took in the dislocated flow of Ang’s mind, touched the half hundred people elsewhere on the ship: distant stars sluggishly coming into focus.
&n
bsp; Dorthy tried to turn away from these distractions, closed her eyes and tried to look inward towards the false Alea personae that had been fixed down in her limbic cortex. They knew all about wormholes: they had wanted her to come here…
It was difficult to relax, to purge her mind, while clinging in a p-suit above a deadly drop, on a ship slowly manoeuvring towards a hole in space-time. The rhythms of her mantra took her so far and no further, enlightenment a step away, but a step she could not make. And then Ang started to say something about seeing it coming, seeing the light, a frantic disbelieving edge to her voice that brought Dorthy back to her quotidian self just as Ang’s voice was cut off, and with it the whirling flood of her fear, and the half hundred other minds of the people on the ship. They had entered the wormhole. Dorthy opened her eyes. And saw…nothing.
During her brief career as a freelance, catering to the whims of wealthy neurotics who felt they needed a Talent to share and externalize their feelings, whoring her mind to pay her way through Fra Mauro, Dorthy had once been a part of a saga writer’s entourage during a bizarre trek across Antarctica. The writer had had the idea that the ice fields and dry valleys would be a kind of palimpsest on which she could discover herself anew; Dorthy was supposed to be a part of the process, although she never did see how the writer found time for serious self-contemplation amidst the distractions of the dozen or so friends she’d brought along, not to mention the drivers and cooks and baggage masters and mechanics and guides—even a masseuse. It was more circus than spiritual quest. Then, one arbitrary morning in the endless day of Antarctic summer, the pure blue sky had begun to whiten. Within an hour a storm had driven down upon the party, reducing everything to a bubble of whirling whiteness a couple of metres across. While everyone else was running around in circles, trying to make camp, and the saga writer was screaming her head off that it was a personal insult, a conspiracy of the gods, Dorthy had deliberately wandered off into the storm. Soon, everything human had dwindled behind her to the merest spark, sunk deep in illimitable whiteness. For the first time in her life, Dorthy had known what it was to be alone.
Eternal Light Page 21