Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  Moments before, the Wastrel had begun to wallow, and twice the deck seemed to fall out from under the feet, giving a peculiar sensation of momentary weightlessness. Greenstein and Cassals, both tug pilots, were on the flightdeck, and Richard was listening intently to the internship loop.

  “Aragos are stacked and overlapped off the port side,” Greenstein said tersely, “and we’re riding the gravity tides, Richard, but she’s not liking it. We either feed her a lot more power and overrun the generators, or we get the hell out of here.”

  “Tully?” Vaurien prompted.

  “Power’s not a problem,” Ingersol’s voice said from the engine deck, “but don’t be overrunning the generators too far for too long – burn one out, and we got no chance of repairing or replacing inside of a week, and Christ knows when we’re going to need them again.”

  “What he said,” Jazinsky seconded. “Lai’a has already made it in. We’re getting data back out faster than we can store it – same as the Orpheus datastream – but there’s no more we can do here, even if it started yelling for help.”

  “Safe distancing, Yuval,” Vaurien said at once. “Back us off till you read clear air. Barb, get all the data you can, as long as you can. Mark, are you making sense of anything you’re seeing?”

  Mark Sherratt’s face was almost incandescent. Travers had never seen such fervor as the Resalq watched the datastream, not even blinking. “Oh, yes. This time around I know what I’m looking for … and I’m seeing it. Lai’a is fine. The transspace drive ignited on time, and I’m seeing its signature. Lai’a is navigating. Not surfing on its Aragos, like the Orpheus – not tacking across a gravity tide, one jump ahead of the storm, as Michael did with enormous skill. Lai’a just changed heading, turned deliberately to follow … something.”

  “The signal?” Marin guessed. “Colonel Rusch said it was like heavily distorted comm.”

  “Possible,” Mark said distractedly, “but Elarne is full of phantoms, echoes. Those signals could be no more than reflections of Lai’a itself. I’m hoping it detected a temporal current that suits the parameters of this test flight, and drove across into the stream.”

  The displays were beginning to shimmer with red alerts, and Jazinsky warned, “Transmissions are breaking up. We’re losing Lai’a – could be the distance or time between us, or it could be interference off the event.”

  “It’s gravitational warping off the event.” Mark was intent on the displays. “It’s starting to break up. Thirty seconds, maximum, and we’ll lose the gateway.”

  Leaning forward toward the navtank, Chandra Liang asked quietly, “Is that bad? Was the ship intended to exit through the same event before it closed? Have we lost it?”

  In fact, the event was collapsing faster even than Mark had predicted. The gravity surges around the jaws soared, light warped and reddened, and space seemed to turn to blood. The telemetry displays slowed to a crawl, and Mark turned his back on them at last.

  “These events never last long enough for Lai’a to get in and out through the same portal,” he said hoarsely. “We knew before we sent Vidal and Queneau into Elarne, the chances of them getting back out before the event collapsed on itself were slim to none.”

  “So Michael knew it was a one-way ticket,” Chandra Liang said, hushed, “and now … what about Lai’a?”

  “The difference is, Lai’a is actually navigating in there, not being swept with the tide,” Vaurien mused. “It’ll explore, gather data, make sense of its surroundings, and look for a point of exit.”

  “Meaning, another big-scale event.” Travers stood and leaned with both palms on the side of the navtank, where the storm had faded to nothing, leaving normal space behind it. The blue supergiant stars of the Rabelais Drift glared through their palls of dust, baleful, forbidding, but the deepscan platforms reported normal temporo-gravitic conditions.

  “It’ll hunt for another Class Six or Seven.” Mark took the combug from his ear and massaged his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “You’re about to ask, when. When can we expect to see it return?” Now he shrugged. “We honestly don’t know. A day, a week, a month. Longer than this, and I’ll begin to suspect problems none of us foresaw. But … trust Lai’a. This is the mission for which it was born. No creature or machine in the universe is as much at ease inside Elarne as Lai’a, with the possible exception of the Zunshu themselves, who use is as a rapid-transit system.”

  Vaurien stirred in the shadows on the other side of the tank. “Then we’ll stand down. Pilot, take us back to Alshie’nya.”

  “On our way,” Yuval Greenstein’s voice whispered into the loop. “Alshie’nya in twenty.”

  “And I’ll start to process this data,” Mark added with feverish intensity. “It’ll be easier this time. The Orpheus data gives us a hundred points of reference.”

  The company had begun to break up and drift out. Chandra Liang and his partner left in the direction of the mess, and dessert; Leon and Roy headed forward, toward the lab where Jazinsky and Rusch were working, while Shapiro and Kim joined Vaurien on the other side of the ops room, huddled there and talking in undertones. Marin hovered close to Mark, clearly hoping for a little of his time, but Travers could have told him this was not the moment.

  Distracted, possessed, Mark was intent on the ocean of apparent gibberish which raced through the threedee at several times the speed even Jazinsky would have run it. He was only peripherally aware of Marin, but he took a moment to touch Curtis’s face, a placating gesture, and murmured,

  “Give me a couple of hours, Curtis, please. I need to do this. Just a couple of hours, and then we’ll say it all. Yes?”

  “Yes.” Marin stepped back and glanced at his chrono. “Midnight, shiptime?”

  “All right.” Mark spared him a glance and seemed to hunt for a smile. “This is the most amazing thing any of us has ever experienced. I know you can’t see it yet, not in the raw data, but – will you trust me?”

  “I’ve always trusted you,” Marin said softly, and stepped back again, to Travers’s side. “You want a drink, Neil? I think I need a large one, and then maybe another.”

  The mess was busy, and they passed it by. Travers heard snatches of a serious political debate – Liang and Shapiro were thrashing out the fine points of the handover of Fleet Borushek, from Confederate to Commonwealth authorities. According to Liang it would be simple, and all standing contracts and commissions would be honored. Shapiro seemed less certain, but was clearly willing to cede to Liang’s experience in civilian matters. And he seemed to respect the Daku elders, Travers saw, the people who had worked for decades in the shadows, and who would soon step out and become Borushek’s government.

  The political challenge was far from anything Travers wanted to know about. He felt unaccountably weary as he followed Marin back to the quarters they always shared on the Wastrel, and he wondered where Shapiro found the energy, the focus, to be ‘on’ every minute, every day.

  Nothing had changed. The housekeeper drones had cleaned the stateroom; the air was fresh and warm, the threedee was idling and the bed wore fresh linen. But the handy Travers had forgotten was on the floor by the bed, exactly where he had left it, and the half-bottle of Velcastran whiskey was on the salver where Marin had set it, the last time they walked out of this room.

  The closet door remained half open, and the bottle of cedar and sandalwood soap was still on the tiles inside the shower stall. Travers smiled faintly at the comfortable disarray. Housekeeper drones assumed humans knew exactly where they wanted things to be kept. They cleaned around discarded items, perhaps moved them temporarily, and set them back with a precision only a machine could manage.

  The whiskey brimmed two glasses, and Marin handed one to him. He lifted his own in salute, and swallowed half the contents in one swig. The spirit roughened his voice as he said, “Here’s to Lai’a. Wherever it is. Whenever.”

  The spirit was smooth and heady. Travers savored it before he sat on the edge of the bed and held o
ut his hand. He left it there till Marin would take it and sit beside him. “Give Mark an hour, and he might be able to unravel enough of the feed to be able to know where and when it is.” He drew his knuckles across Curtis’s cheek and neck. “You heard Leon. Mark still wants to be in two places.”

  “He said we’d know, and the decision would be easy when the time came,” Marin said cynically as he turned his head and kissed Travers’s knuckles lightly.

  “It will.” Travers finished the whiskey, reached over for the bottle and offered Curtis a second round. “The moment will arrive in its own sweet time. Mark knows that. The answer could be in the datastream from Lai’a, which is why he begged for an hour to process it before you nail him to the wall and demand answers.”

  Marin winced. “We do tend to look at Mark as if he’s some kind of oracle, the great sorcerer who sees all, knows all.” He forced a smile and relaxed into Travers’s side as the whiskey began to hit his bloodstream, his brain. “We forget how mortal Mark really is. He’s just so old, he seems to know everything – and the truth is, he almost always does, because he was there when it happened.” He turned a little, leaned back on his palms and frowned into Travers’s face in the soft cabin lights. “The others are all going. Even Richard. He’s giving the Wastrel to Tully for the duration.”

  “Which is something I never thought I’d see,” Travers admitted. “Richard and this ship?” He shook his head in genuine surprise. “There’s always been something symbiotic about them – which is the main reason he won’t have a top-line, super-sophisticated AI installed. Rick Vaurien is the brains of this ship. He seems to feel it through the fingertips, the soles of his feet. But there’s no doubt about one thing. The Lai’a expedition needs a commander, someone to weave the team together, hold them in harness. There’s no one else I’d trust.”

  “You could follow Richard’s orders.” Marin was not asking. It was a simple statement.

  “Could you?” Travers’s brows rose.

  For a moment Marin hesitated, and then seemed to mock himself with a faint smile. “It’s been a long, long time since I took anyone’s orders. On every Dendra Shemiji assignment, I worked alone … until the Intrepid, I guess. It only looked like I was taking orders from Roy Neville, or that idiot L.T., what was her name?”

  “Fiorelli.”

  “Yes. In fact, I was always right where I wanted to be, doing what I needed to do, to get the job done.”

  “We’ve taken a lot of orders from Harrison Shapiro,” Travers added.

  But Marin was less certain. “The truth is, I agreed to go along with whatever he wanted, because I saw something that needed to be done, and you know me. I thrive on a challenge. Delta Dragons, Omaru blockade … if I’d wanted to, I could have walked away, any time.”

  “And left me to Shapiro’s tender mercies?” Travers was surprised.

  “Taken you with me,” Marin reproached. “We were the best Shapiro had, and we still are, but we’re not the only ones in his private company. If we hadn’t been available for the job, he’d have put someone else onto the Kiev.”

  “True,” Travers allowed. “And we’d never have known Mick Vidal or Alexis Rusch. Though,” he said slowly, “we would all have landed right here on the Wastrel, right now.”

  If they had walked away from the service when Harrison Shapiro assigned them to places, work, they would not accept, they would have vanished into the Resalq community, perhaps aboard one of Mark’s ships or in strongholds like Saraine, where Shapiro could not easily reach. They would have followed every development via Mark and Richard, and when the Lai’a mission came together they would have come in on the Carellan Djerun and rejoined the Wastrel.

  It seemed all roads led to this one point, this one question, and Travers confessed to a shiver as deep as his bone marrow. This was what Mark would call one of the pivot points of history, and he was as painfully aware of it as Marin. Vaurien had already committed himself and his resources. His decision was more than likely made when Jazinsky signed aboard Lai’a. And with both Dario and Leon aboard, Travers saw little chance Mark would put himself on the Freyana, though the academic decision would trail far behind the emotional one.

  “What do you want?” he asked at last. “It comes down to that, doesn’t it?”

  “I wish it did.” Marin set a hand on Travers’s chest, over his heart. “I could say I want the both of us to be safe, and it would be true. We’d be fools to go into the Lai’a mission blind to the risks. And to answer your question, there’s very few people of either race I’d actually take an order from. Mark is one. Richard is another.”

  “And Shapiro?” Travers wondered.

  “Is in no position to give orders!” Marin’s eyes were wide, dark, a little dilated with the whiskey and the dim lights. “He’s as much a Freespacer as the rest of us now, with no way back, and not much authority, except on the Mercury – and you and I are not crew!”

  A military firing quad awaited them all, if they fell into Fleet hands, and the knowledge left Travers with a molten sense of unease. This company had risked everything, and the consequences were dire. He drained his glass for the second time and let his spine go down flat on the mattress. “I might have been here all along, if I’d walked away from Fleet when Richard made me the offer. I’d have been his partner, not Barb, but you and I would still be on this ship, right here, right now. Shapiro would still have cornered Mark, tracked him to Saraine when he bought time on the biggest mainframes on the frontier to handle his data load. You’d have been with Mark, I’d have been with Richard, and … this place, this time, were always waiting for us. Trying to get your head around it could drive you insane.”

  “So don’t.” Marin had relaxed beside him, eyes closed. “Let Lai’a fly the test, let Mark unravel whatever they got before the event collapsed. Get some rest.”

  Only as Travers began to unwind a little did he realize how desperate his body was for downtime. Too much stress, for too long, exhausted a man. He was reminded of the last year aboard the Intrepid, the ‘flying asylum’ where every soul aboard seemed to be riding the thin edge. He caught Marin, hauled him into an embrace, kissed him thoroughly and settled with one leg thrown over him, to hold him there. Curtis did not seem about to complain.

  They had never really expected to doze, and Travers was astonished to jerk back to full consciousness when Marin sat up beside him. He cracked open his eyes, and knew from the line of Marin’s back and shoulders, something was not right. “What?” he pushed himself up, knuckling his eyes.

  “That.” Marin gestured at the threedee, where three amber bars had appeared in the top left quadrant. As they watched, the bottom of the three turned to red. They were the mission status indicators, and when a lick of amber showed there, much less when it was replaced by red, the department heads aboard the Wastrel would be coming on standby. “Something’s going south,” Curtis said quietly.

  Had the ship sustained some structural damage during the encounter with the event? The probability chilled Travers. He pushed himself off the bed and rummaged around the threedee for a combug. It slipped into his ear, cold and hard, and at once he heard the loop. If the ship were in any immediate danger, the AI or Ingersol or Jazinsky would have been there, sharp-voiced and calling the tech gangs to duty.

  Instead he heard Mark, Dario, Barb, Richard, speaking softly in tones of puzzlement. “No, it’s definitely not an echo,” Jazinsky was saying. “That’s the first thing I checked for.

  “But it’s impossible,” Richard protested.

  “Is it?” Mark sounded far less than certain. “Barb, how far out is the source?”

  She paused for a moment, and then, “Far enough, and on the wrong vector to make any sense. It’s heading this way, just sublight. It’ll enter Alshie’nya in fifteen minutes. I suggest you do as it wants, Richard!”

  In the first lull in the conversation, Travers said quietly, “Richard, what goes on? We’re looking at amber and red status indicators.” />
  “Neil, you’re watching this?” Vaurien was unsurprised.

  “Not the data, just the status bars,” Travers told him. “Is something wrong? Something about comm echoes? We used to get them all the time in the Drift. We wasted years, chasing phantoms. Hellgate ghosts.”

  But Mark made negative noises. “This isn’t an echo. It’s a genuine comm signal, from a ship coming in fast with an emergency aboard. The AI is asking for hazmat, medical and tech teams.”

  Travers and Marin shared a frown. Marin had slid in a combug and asked, “Do they identify? What’s the ship?”

  For a long moment the loop was quiet, before Vaurien said tersely, “Get up to the ops room, both of you.”

  As he spoke, a second amber bar turned to red in the threedee and Etienne began to whisper, repeated calls for the tug’s specialists to come on station.

  “Damnit, Richard,” Travers began.

  “Ops room,” Vaurien insisted. “You can make yourselves useful – take Tactical, Neil.”

  Weapons were coming online? Marin swore softly, on his way out of the cabin. “Sounds like it’s a warship coming in. Fleet? They don’t even know Alshie’nya exists!”

  “A warship with a disaster aboard,” Travers added, “on a random course so fast, they might have been mangled and tossed out by an event.” He was on Marin’s heels as they hurried back to the ops room, eager to see the data for himself.

  Vaurien, Jazinsky and Mark were already there, and the navtank was loaded. The atmosphere crackled with tension, or apprehension, and Travers looked from face to face. The incoming ship was a fat red icon in the mauve-blue haze of the tank, and he traced its course back around the outer fringes of the Drift. It had come around Naiobe in a tight slingshot, surfing on the very lip of the black hole’s gravity well, and far off across Hellgate was the last, fading trace of an event that must have been a Class Six monster.