Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “The time for last-ditch heroics is still a long way in the future, Curtis, and you may believe me, when it comes, it will have nothing to do with the DeepSky Fleet.” His eyes were wide, dark, filled with something very like dread. “Not for a moment am I trivializing the battles which will be fought if the Confederacy forces its hand out here. But those are simply battles, with friends on one side, foes on the other, weapons deployed, lines drawn, every parameter easy to grasp.

  “And we believe we have the means to win. We have Lai’a, and we have tens of thousands of mines by now, manufactured aboard the Wings of Freedom and the Wastrel ... hull alloys, Zunshunium. Odd, don’t you think, and ironic, that our old enemy has placed into our hands the means to destroy your enemies?

  “This is why I’ve asked Harrison to manipulate the coming drama, if he can. Make it fall into place according to our needs. Fight the battles where we must and when we must, because time is so short.” He took a breath, drew a hand back through the mane of his hair, and for the first time Marin thought he saw the signs of age about Mark. He looked tired, strained, older, and for one of his people, it was unhealthy.

  “You’ll be heading back from Freespace soon,” Mark was saying, “with or without the Shanghai survivors. You’re heading into what you people call a hornets’ nest, and I don’t think I ever fully appreciated the term before! I’ve also messaged Richard, with this same information and data more pertinent to his operation. You’ll be making best speed out of Freespace, and headed to Borushek, no stops. We need you here.

  “I’ve also messaged Barb, with a great deal more technical data which would be of little interest to you, and of no practical value to you. She’s the tech-head, not you, Curtis! But suffice, here, to say we’ve been working with the Zunshu automata we captured on Kjorin, and also with the ancestral Resalq, who have been tractable since they grasped the gravity of the situation.

  “There is ...” Again he paused, and seemed to marshal his thoughts with some effort. “There is more work to be done than could rightly be done in years, and we have a matter of weeks to deal with it. Perhaps less. These human squabbles ...” His head shook, a sharp gesture betraying his impatience. “We no longer have the luxury of looking on, amused spectators, while you humans bicker amongst yourselves over who is going to play with which toys, and where! Those days are over, Curtis.

  “You must decide, and soon, where your allegiances lie. If they lie with Harrison, and you rate the squabble for the Deep Sky territories your priority, then by all means make your stand there. But if you agree with me – and I’ll tell you candidly, there are many who do, and many who don’t! – that for the bickering to have any meaning, human society, culture, heritage in the Deep Sky must first exist, then ...” He looked into the vid pickup. Looked right into Marin’s eyes. “Then your allegiance will be with the Resalq, and those humans, like Richard and Barb and Roy Arlott, who have worked with us for years. Our devotion is no less to the Deep Sky, but our objectives are different.

  “If you’re interested in the raw data, ask Barb to run it for you. Be warned, it’s almost esoteric. The most abstruse logic, the most convoluted physics even I have ever seen, and you know where Resalq physics have gone, in the centuries since we’ve been left in peace to reconstruct them! I’ll give you the short version here, in layman’s terms. I’ve given Richard essentially the same information.

  “Since you shipped out to Freespace, hunting for the Shanghai survivors, we’ve spent every moment processing the data return from both the Orpheus and the Kjorin confrontation with the first Zunshu automata we’ve seen in almost two centuries. What we have learned is a small fraction of what will be derived from the data in due course, but it’s already astonishing, and …” Mark sighed heavily.

  “We all keenly feel the loss of Michael Vidal. He has assumed the status of an immortal hero even among the Resalq, and his copilot, Queneau, is remembered in the same breath. There’s talk of a memorial to the both of them in Riga, the heart of our own community. Obviously, no one in the general human community knows who Vidal was, what he did and how he died, but the Resalq know.

  “Michael Vidal walked in the footsteps of my own ancestors, aboard the driftship Ebrezjim. He flew the same course as they did, with the same courage – in fact, with a good deal more courage, because Vidal took the Orpheus into Elarne with a great deal less technology and know-how than my ancestors had to work with! What he achieved was magnificent, and he will be remembered along with our own heroes, and yours. Indeed, I believe that in centuries to come … perhaps long after your own lifetime, Curtis, human that you are, and when I’ve grown old as even we Resalq eventually do … at that time, Resalq and human heroes will be venerated side by side by both species. Michael Vidal will be foremost among them. His loss is incalculable, and I can only stress that his life was traded for data which will be the salvation of us all. There is no doubt about this.

  “The data is still being processed, and I’m using every machine our community possesses, and everything Harrison can make available. The results are still early, but much has already been verified, and what we have learned in these last days leaves me giddy and breathless.” His eyes brightened, fox-sharp and compelling. Marin could not look away.

  “There is a … a structure to the interior of Elarne. The region your people have called Rabelais Space – the yawning pit of Hellgate – is just the beginning. Rabelais Space is like the shallows, where the waves pound on the shore, and the water is so violent, it is often utterly unnavigable. This analogy is extremely apt. If normal, three-dimensional space were water, this is exactly how it behaves on the threshold of a gravity event. Gravity tides around the periphery of the event predict – rationally and dependably – the flux, the warp and twist of space, like the eddies, currents and backwash of water around land masses. In this case, those ‘land masses’ are of course the super-heavy objects which create Hellgate. Black holes, supergiant stars.

  “As Barb and I have proved through meticulous research, we can chart a path through these tides, like taking a surf boat through currents and backwashes that are known, and which behave according to fluid dynamics we thoroughly understand.

  “We provided the nav’ware, and Michael Vidal had the courage to test it. But once through the violent tidal region, where the surf batters the shore – once beyond that, and inside the ocean of Elarne itself … this is the region we’ve only been able to glimpse, on the very rare occasion when we could get a probe through the jaws of Hellgate in good enough condition to transmit data.

  “And of course, never being able to achieve a drive ignition inside the Drift, we had no means to maneuver any probe.” He paused, smiled faintly, shrugged. “Foster Weimann’s drive engine, which revolutionized propulsion, is in fact a system for sliding a body out of normal space into e-space. The energy requirements are monstrous, much more than the requirements of the Auriga engine which was Weimann’s predecessor. Weimann’s model was infinitely more refined, more stable, and as a result, far more energy-hungry.

  “But both engines achieve the same goal. A means to literally rotate, or project, a body out of normal space and into e-space.” Mark was on his own turf now, confident of what he knew. “For years, our physicists have been predicting that the reason the Weimann drive apparently refuses to ignite inside Hellgate is simply that the guts of Elarne are already comprised of e-space. The physics of the transition from one space to the other are superfluous. The Weimann drive does, in fact, ignite; there are simply no measurable results, so as a system of propulsion, any conventional drive is ineffective.

  “Hence, the hyper-Weimann derivative, which in every real sense is Foster Weimann’s grandchild, the next-generation technology – and far more energy hungry than the previous generation. The energy problem always defeated us, but we knew the answer was just out of reach of our fingertips...

  “The Zunshu solved this problem at least a thousand years ago. We didn’t have to solve it a s
econd time. We just had to reverse-engineer their technology, define what they already knew, and what the ancestral Resalq had discovered, before we were destroyed.

  “The way of the future both for your people and mine is the hyper-Weimann drive, powered by Zunshunium – stable but dangerous, hot and radiotoxic, and generating gravity tides of its own so intense, it must be housed in a chamber of pure Zunshu alloy.” He gestured in some vague direction which would have been relevant in his location, when this message was recorded. “Lai’a is, at this moment, being fitted with the drive. The work will soon be finished. Lai’a,” he said, hushed, “is eager to taste the universe for which it was bred and born.” His brows arched. “Soon, Curtis. Lai’a will be slipped off the leash sooner than you know. Sooner than any of us expected, and certainly long before any of this was initially planned.

  “Because the Zunshu are on our doorstep.” His voice hardened. “The stasis chamber on Kjorin did transmit. Its signals were received. The automata are moving. And we find ourselves with only two options.

  “First option: meet each squad of automata as they appear, deal with them on a one to one basis.” He sighed, and his lips compressed. “If there were a thousand times more like you, Curtis, like me – if Dendra Shemiji were a vast army of agents trained and armed for this duty and billeted on every colony world, then yes, we could rise to this challenge.

  “But we were never so many. We never needed to be, because the Resalq were never so numerous as humans, and in the centuries when Dendra Shemiji was formed, cultured, we were in hiding. Humans are spread across the frontier now, and on into Freespace, making their usual noise and mess. Their worlds are lit up like beacons. It’s no surprise to anyone that the Zunshu are targeting them first!

  “And it’s time to get down to cases, isn’t it? Define the real enemy. Define the threat. Develop a response to that threat, and implement it. But … who are the Zunshu, where are they? What do they want, why are they destroying us, still? These questions are unanswerable, on this side of Hellgate. No amount of analysis of captured hardware or AIs will provide this information. And you know, Curtis, where this is going – where it must go.

  “Question one: are the ways through Hellgate actually navigable? The answer is – they are. The Ebre'zjim proved this long before I was born. She passed right through Hellgate, exited somewhere, somewhen else in this universe, confronted the Zunshu, and … the rest, as your people say, is history. But yes, the ways are navigable.

  “Question two: do we, here and now, have the ability to navigate them? The answer is almost certainly, we do. Michael Vidal gave his life to prove this, not in the actual transition through the jaws of Hellgate and into the belly of Elarne, but in the minutes following, when the driftship Orpheus achieved a successful ignition of the hyper-Weimann drive, and we watched it surf away across gravity tides, into time currents which ran at different speeds from our own.

  “The data feed from the Orpheus continued until the nanosecond the event closed, but the further Vidal traveled across temporal currents different from our own, the more irrational the data became.” Here Mark paused, pulled wryly at the lobe of his ear, and he gave the vid pickup a rueful smile, much like the Mark Sherratt of old. “I suspected there was useful data even in the most nonsensical transmissions at the very end of the Orpheus telemetry stream, but after three days of effort, I was still far from developing any system for processing the data.

  “I messaged Lai’a, and in fact Lai’a wrote the algorithms which rationalized the seemingly irrational. I feel almost as if my child has done something wonderful, since I designed the mind inside the machine. Is Lai’a alive? I’ve begun to believe it is. And the data returned from the very end of the Orpheus telemetry stream is among the most useful of all – and the most astonishing.

  “This part of the transmission was captured by the Wastrel in the last 1.27 seconds before the event closed. Etienne, your AI, was barely able to keep pace with the feed, which was coming in at several times normal speed as Vidal and Queneau rode the gravity express into different temporal streams.” His eyes glittered with a zealot light, not unlike the unholy gleam that could get into Jazinsky’s eyes. “They were in what any pilot would call a ‘clear sky,’ and they were navigating smoothly, riding gravity waves like a flat rock skipping on the surface of a calm pond.

  “Their instrumentation had cleared. Gravitational forces had resolved to a mean of around 20G, give or take a modest flux factor, after the transit through the jaws, which was well within the compensation capacity of the driftship’s Arago generators. The hyper-Weimann was running as smoothly as we could have wished.

  “Oh, yes, we can transit Hellgate. Lai’a can handle anything the violent transit through the jaws of a major event can throw at it, and the new hyper-Weimann being installed at this time at Alshie’nya is vastly more powerful than the drive aboard the Orpheus.” Mark’s brow arched. “Which brings me to the second of our two options, Curtis. Neil, are you listening to this? If you are – and you should be – you’ll know now why I asked you to make your choices. Decide where your allegiances lie.

  “Because our second option is to pass in the wake of the Ebrezjim and the Orpheus. Go and find the Zunshu. Discover how they are still wreaking this vengeance on the Deep Sky, when the Resalq have almost vanished out of these heavens – and more importantly, why. No one ever knew why the Zunshu became determined to annihilate my people, and all my life I’ve yearned to know the reason. Did my ancestors commit some heinous crime? Did the Zunshu suffer at Resalq hands, as the result of some hideous mistake?

  “I’m not saying we’re going there to make amends. Far from it. Whatever my ancestors did that was so heinous, their crime has been paid for in Resalq and human blood, probably many times over. The time has come for the vengeance to be called complete. It must end. If a show of force is necessary to make the Zunshu call off their dogs, so be it. The Ebre'zjim was a science vessel, armed only with the usual geocannon and field generators which would take her safely through regions like Hellgate. She was not a warship...

  “My child, Lai’a, is. Lai’a is the most fearsome warship ever conceived, much less built, with the crystal-pure mind of a machine and the soul of a Resalq. She was born in the tumult of battle, and her baptism at Ulrand was a triumph for us all.

  “So.” Mark hesitated, and the wide shoulders in the colorful Resalq kaftan shrugged. “Time has caught us up, Curtis. And Neil, if you’re there. Your comrade, Michael Vidal, gave his life to prove that we can fly Hellgate as my ancestors did. Lai’a is our greatest creation. The Zunshu aren’t coming. They’re here. And I have little faith in our first option. Meeting the Zunshu killer squads one by one will merely delay the inevitable and very likely get us killed, a few at a time, until Dendra Shemiji is just a memory. Any chance we have of saving the Deep Sky won’t be forged on this side of Hellgate.

  “In a way,” Mark said slowly, “Michael Vidal has been just as great a pathfinder as Ernst Rabelais himself. Rabelais vanished into Hellgate so long ago, yet Barb’s findings were absolutely accurate … that is his beacon we picked up, when we lost the Orpheus. The signal was transmitted by Rabelais’s Odyssey inside the Drift, though we don’t know how. The Odyssey should have been destroyed in the transit through the jaws of some event, yet it survived, and either it or Ernst Rabelais himself survived for long enough inside Hellgate to make at least one transmission.

  “The oddness of it stretches your imagination, even though you can have seen the physics to explain all this. There seem to be temporal freefall pockets inside the Drift, areas falling between two time currents, where the drag from one has roughly equaled the drag from the other, and the space between is in slow-time, or no-time, like the cusp on the tangent of the event horizon of a black hole, where time literally stops and one is suspended, essentially forever, in the instant before annihilation.

  “Who knows? It’s possible Rabelais and his Odyssey could still exist in such a pocket. It’
s possible,” Mark added thoughtfully, “Michael Vidal could be adrift in one, or perhaps still surfing the time currents. If he is, he’ll be in a future far ahead of our own by now. The Orpheus had no way to read such currents, and insufficient energy to pick and choose between them. She was sucked up by the first one to contact her and carried away. Vidal could easily be alive, somewhere, somewhen –

  “None of which does his family and comrades any slightest bit of good. He’s gone and, as you know, his family is planning a major memorial. Harrison will address this in his own message to you, but I … well, my message is much more delicate, more difficult.

  “Where do you stand, Curtis? Don’t answer this question too quickly. These are difficult decisions, I know. Do you stand with Harrison Shapiro, will you fight on those battle lines? Or will you stand with the last of the Resalq? Or do you choose to get out, subtract yourself from this conflict entirely, preserve the culture and heritage of the Deep Sky so that we may one day return and restore it, as my people survived before. This is an equally valid decision. You’ve been placed at ridiculous risk far too often since Harrison cornered us, and your luck is certainly threadbare! If you want out, say nothing of it to Harrison, obviously. But you know I can get you both well out – back to Darwin’s World, if you choose. Far enough from the Deep Sky for the Zunshu and the Colonial Wars to be just another CNS headline.

  “You’ll be back on Borushek soon enough, but you must have come to your decisions by then. Whatever you choose, be ready to make your stand, or vanish like shadows – possibly both, if you ship out on a Resalq vessel. Harrison might not know what became of you until these wars are both over, one way or another.

  “Keep safe, Curtis. I wish you only the best, you and Neil, and I wish I had better news. The latest casualties are Takashozu Field 9, Sao Paolo Endeavor, and the Strauss Lode. If you need to see the data, I packaged several terabytes with Barb’s message.” He wound down there, studied the palms of his spread hands for a moment, and then looked up with a faint, sad smile. “Keep safe. We don’t see enough of each other these days, and there are times … well, times I miss you, I suppose.