Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Understatement.” Travers cleared his throat. “I could use a drink.”

  “Quarters or mess?” Marin wondered as the lift opened.

  “Neither.” Travers recovered his composure with a visible effort before they stepped out. “I want to talk to my kids. Bravo Company. If Mick says he can fly the Drift, and Lai’a can chart it, and you can see as far as Orion 359, Bravo Company is going to want in.”

  He was right, and as Marin followed him aft to the crew compartments he acknowledged a deep shiver that might have been reaction or foreboding.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They looked, Travers thought, like a trio of escapees from a labor camp, but they were alert, walking, eating solid food. Grant had moved them into the bay off the side of the Infirmary, an area that was seldom powered up, and more often used as a warehouse for equipment waiting to be installed or dumped. A trestle table was set up, and was already littered with magazines and handies. A light meal had been set before them minutes before Grant gave his approbation to what Shapiro probably thought of as a debriefing.

  Of them all, Ernst Rabelais was the one who needed answers. As Travers pulled a chair closer to Marin’s he saw that Alexis Rusch was still beside him, talking in undertones and calling up one reference after another on a series of handies. Rabelais had as much distance to make up as the Kulich brothers, and Travers might have expected him to be wide-eyed as he saw the Sherratts, Tor Sereccio, and especially Midani Kulich.

  But Rabelais was merely curious, and Travers realized at once, he had seen Resalq before. Mark was not slow to notice Rabelais’s reaction, and he was the first to offer his hand. Rabelais took it, studied it, and touched the tiny scars where Mark’s double-thumbs had been removed so long ago, he must have forgotten ever having them.

  “You’ve seen my people before,” Mark observed, letting Rabelais study his hands as long as he wanted to.

  “Yes … but not alive.” Rabelais’s voice was light, when for some reason Travers had expected a bass, and his accent was odd. It was definitely like the modern Velcastran accent, but the differences were noticeable at once in the length of the vowels, the hardness of the consonants. “I saw a couple of dozen of you, frozen … deceased,” Rabelais was saying, “on one of the freighters we scavenged. The engines were dead, power was out, the crew all perished. I said something about it being so weird to see dead Resalq, because I’d always known them as an extinct race, and Mick told me about you. Your people, and you specifically, Doctor Sherratt.”

  “Call me Mark,” he invited.

  The legend was a man of middle height and average looks. He had a pleasant face rather than being handsome, with a high, broad forehead and wide mouth, and a square jaw that wore a light beard, which contrasted strongly with the baby-smooth pink skin Vidal sported after the decontamination procedure. Rabelais’s hair was simply brown, cut short and yet shaggy, suggesting that he had been cutting it himself. Like the others, he was wrapped in a voluminous blue-gray robe which looked several sizes too large, and he still looked cold, tired, anxious.

  The most remarkable feature about Rabelais was the brilliant blue eyes, and Travers saw at once, he talked with his hands. They were rarely still as he spoke. “Mick and Jo told me so much,” he was saying. “We’d talk when we took a break from the work … it was too cold to sleep much, but you have to rest eventually. They told me about the frontier, Freespace as you know it now, the new worlds, the Resalq. My world is long gone.”

  “Not quite,” Rusch said quickly. “A lot of what you remember is still there. Everything just got bigger, more complex. There are more colonies now, and the frontier is a long way beyond what you remember, before you cross over into Freespace, and scores, maybe hundreds of unregistered colonies. So many, no one’s really sure.”

  He smiled sidelong at her, an attractive and engaging expression, and said to Mark, “She tells me I’m her uncle, about six or eight generations removed. And it turns out, the family made good. Damn, I knew they would. They’re rich as all get-out, back home. And this one here, Mick, is a Vidal, and the Vidals and Rusches and Shackletons, they all won’t let you forget they’re descended from some weird-ass bugger called Rabelais, who disappeared into the void.”

  The remark won him a chuckle from Rusch and Mark, but Mick was too tired. He produced a faint smile, and seemed to be stirring a bowl of green jelly with a spoon rather than even trying to swallow it. Travers frowned into his face, seeing the hollow eyes and cheeks, and Mick said softly,

  “I look so bad?”

  “No,” Travers began, too quickly.

  “Yes, I bloody do,” Vidal retorted. He looked past Travers, at Marin. “The look on his face says it all.”

  “So you look like shit,” Rabelais said acidly. “You’re allowed. Christ, you ought to be dead. Be grateful for the chance to get your life back. Put the meat back on your bones, like the rest of us, eh, Jo?”

  She was on Vidal’s other side, staring into a mug of hot chocolate as if it had given her a challenge she could not meet. “Say – what?” She shifted in the chair, an uncomfortable bag of bones with a near-shaven head. “Where’s Bill?” Her voice had cleared in the last few hours, and she was off the IV, while both Vidal and Rabelais were still connected, with a pair of discreet meddrones riding right behind them, monitoring every biosign and constantly adjusting the fluids. “Where’s Grant?”

  “You need something?” Marin was on his feet.

  “For pain.” Queneau was rubbing her shoulders.

  “I’ll find him,” Marin promised.

  Travers watched him make his way across the bay in the direction of Grant’s office, and turned back to the apparition in the chair opposite when Vidal said quietly,

  “Handfasted.”

  “Yes.” Neil hunted for a smile and did not quite find one. “You missed your chance to throw rice.”

  For some time Vidal only looked at him, eyes dark, haunted. “Happy?”

  It was an astute question, and not easy to answer. “As happy as you could be with a war breaking out on two fronts, and the mission from hell right ahead of us,” Travers said honestly. “We’re shipping out with Lai’a, like the Sherratts and Shapiro, and Richard and Barb.”

  “And us,” Vidal added huskily.

  “You’re not strong enough,” Travers warned.

  “Two, three weeks,” he argued. “We will be.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Travers’s head was shaking.

  “Grant swore to me, he could put us back on our feet.”

  Travers’s brows rose. “You and Queneau?”

  And Vidal’s close-cropped head nodded. “Takes two to fly transspace, Neil. You can’t fly it alone. One to handle nav, one to handle the ship.”

  “She told us.” Travers considered the wraith seated beside Vidal with a deep frown. “You in, Queneau?”

  Her head pivoted on a neck so scrawny, he wondered how it held up the weight of her skull. “I’m in. Bill said he can get us there … and we did it, Travers. We fucking flew it. You want to call it transspace? Nice word for it.”

  They were determined, though Travers was filled with doubt, and Vidal’s eyes had a troubling tendency to glaze over. It was as if they fell out of focus, and whatever he was looking at as he peered into the labyrinth of his own mind was so terrible, his mouth twisted into a grimace. Queneau and Rabelais were frail, sick, but only Vidal seemed to be seeing demons behind his own closed eyelids. Travers was far from sure he should return to Elarne.

  What was on his face, he did not know, but Vidal was looking levelly at him and rasped, “Matter of necessity, Neil. Time of war. You do things you shouldn’t, wouldn’t, if you had any choice. You know that.”

  “I know it,” Travers admitted as Marin returned with Grant a pace behind. “You should be going home.”

  Tiredness engulfed Vidal. “I am. Going to see my father … few days, maybe spend a week. He thinks I’m dead.”

  “We all did,” Marin
told him as Grant dealt Queneau a painful shot into the too-thin muscle tissue of her upper arm. She flinched, ouched, and then sighed in relief as some deep pain eased. “We thought you might be riding a temporo-gravitic current, on a long cruise around the Drift, and you might be back this way in a thousand years.”

  It was Rabelais who said, without looking up from the handy Rusch was showing him, “You could do that. We saw the tides and currents – Lai’a charted some of them. But if you can skip across the shoulder of them, you can drop into freefall and pick up another one, headed in some direction that suits you … long as your power holds up. Isn’t that right, Mick?”

  He answered only with a nod. Blue eyes almost the same shade as Rabelais’s own had focused on Shapiro and Kim as they appeared in the bay, and Travers turned toward them. Vaurien and Jazinsky were still in the Infirmary, talking with Dario and Tor, while Leon and Roy Arlott hunted for some oddment of data in a threedee which flared gold and orange.

  At last a smile found its way to Vidal’s face, and he gestured at Jon Kim as Shapiro came closer. “You made it. Found him.”

  “You missed quite a shooting party,” Shapiro told him. “Get him to tell you about it – the Ulrish ID’d him, and he went to ground, called me. I sent Neil and Curtis to bring him up to the Mercury.”

  “And now you’re a fugitive,” Vidal added. “Bill told me. I asked … I need a ride home. Velcastra.” He leaned back, tired to the bone.

  “And I told him,” Grant continued, checking the IV mix, “he can get a ride, but not on the Mercury, because if she shows up in any system with a Fleet base, she’ll be impounded, and us with it!”

  Vidal drew a deep breath. “So, who do I ride with?”

  “I’ll arrange it,” Rusch assured him. “Don’t fret about getting home. Richard? You have a moment?”

  He turned away from Dario and Tor, though Jazinsky remained intent on a sheaf of hardcopies Tor had just given her. “I have all evening, Alexis. I’m on downtime, unless something major comes up.” He sat on the edge of the table while Arlott and Kim organized enough chairs.

  “Transport to Velcastra.” Rusch promoted. “Get him home.”

  “For a few days. See my father,” Vidal said as if he were rationing his energy and had none to spare.

  “Michael, you’ll be staying there,” she began.

  “Bullshit,” he told her in a stronger tone, for a moment belying his exhaustion. “You know how many transspace pilots exist, Alexis? Two. And you’re looking at both of ’em.”

  She sighed heavily and looked up at Vaurien. “He could be right, even if he does look like a ghost.”

  “He is right,” Vaurien said wryly. “And it’s not just you that needs a ride home, Mick. Chandra Liang has to get back there, and fast. He’ll be picking up the reins of government, and declaring sovereignty – the Republic of Velcastra – and it has to happen in four days, before the Chicago battle group gets here. I’d send the whole party home on the Harlequin, but she’s not quite fast enough. We don’t have access to a courier, and the only ships that’ll make the crossing in the kind of time we need, and slip right past Fleet while they do it, are the Carellan Djerun and the Wastrel.”

  “But the Carellan is working with Lai’a,” Mark added, “creating the very navtank load we’ll need, if we’re going to go hunt Zunshu. She can’t leave Alshie’nya for seven or ten days.”

  “We ship out for Velcastra tomorrow,” Vaurien said easily, “as soon as our fabrication shops are through with their last assignment.” He gestured in the vague direction of Lai’a. “Fittings for the habitation module, to buy ourselves a little comfort while we’re in Elarne for who knows how long?”

  Shapiro took this as his cue to call the gathering together, and frowned at Vidal, Queneau and Rabelais. “If you’re up to it, we have a great many questions.”

  “Ask,” Queneau rasped.

  “All right.” Shapiro pulled up a chair. “Jon …?”

  “Recording,” Kim assured him. “Audio and vids.”

  “Then, in your own time,” Shapiro invited, “would you just like to tell us what the hell happened to you, where you went, where you’ve been, and how you came to rendezvous with Lai’a?”

  The enormity of the story seemed to defeat them all for a long moment, and then Vidal said, “Damnit, we flew it. Flew transspace. We knew as soon as we lit the hyper-Weimann unit, we could navigate. We tacked on the gravity tides like … like riding a storm front. Like running before the wind, with a hurricane behind you. It was…”

  “It was the most amazing thing I ever did, ever saw,” Queneau went on. “Takes two to handle it. One pilot –? Toast. Dead in three minutes. But two can do it, and you play it, like making music. You ever been surfing when the waves are huge, surrounded by so much power, you know you’re a half meter away from been pounded to sand?”

  “Yeah,” Roy Arlott said, hushed, “yeah, I’ve done that.”

  “Same thing,” Queneau whispered. “Mick?”

  “You balance the ship on Aragos,” Vidal said hoarsely, “and she rides the shoulders of the big waves, comes skiing down the mountainside … then you fire the engines at right-angles into freefall, and plunge down, or is it up … and catch the next tide that’s going your way.” He shook himself out of the memory with an obvious effort. “Blink, and you lose it. Grab on, hold on, and you’re flying, so long as you have the power.”

  They fell silent there, and Shapiro said quietly, “Only the cockpit of the Orpheus has survived. The rest of the ship was scrapped, and I was told you mentioned burning out the drive engines.”

  Queneau nodded mutely, and when Vidal struggled to find the words, Ernst Rabelais said, “The engines were dead, dark, when they drifted into the lagoon. I saw them come cruising in on inertia – the first ship I’d seen arrive since I’d arrived myself. The drive was hot as hell, I knew it was burned out. Didn’t recognize the tech, you understand … way beyond anything I ever saw. But I knew they’d burned her out, and it was a safe bet they’d cooked the drive trying to say the hell out of the field.”

  “The field?” Mark leaned closer, elbows on the table. “Some kind of energy field?”

  “Dead ahead of us,” Vidal murmured. “Saw it coming. Like a wall, or a skin, or the side of a balloon, glittering, every color of the rainbow. So pretty, but you knew, if you went into it, you’d be fried.”

  “You weren’t fried,” Travers observed. “You’re here.”

  “Osmosis,” Rabelais said cryptically. “You get sucked in through the membrane. The second you stop fighting, the current carries you through. You burn out your drive, cruise on into the backwater. It’s like a lagoon. That’s how I came to think of it. And as soon as you’re inside, you’re in freefall.” He was painting pictures in the air with his hands, and turned to Jazinsky and Mark, who were hanging on every word. “Do you have the physics to describe a region where you’re perfectly balanced between two gravity fields so intense, they cause temporal flux? The flux cancels the gravity – black sound, black light, black gravity – and you’re riding in a bubble of freefall.”

  “We have the physics,” Jazinsky said with grim satisfaction. “We’ve been glimpsing this for the last few years, we’ve just never been able to get a probe to navigate inside Elarne, to go get the hard, observational data.”

  “Elarne,” Rabelais echoed.

  “A very old Resalq word,” Mark told him. “It means ‘the stormy side of the sky.’ The term that’s just been coined is transspace. The region beyond the e-space layer we’ve been familiar with since the original Auriga engine. My ancestors actually transited Elarne … Mick might have told you, they made contact with the Zunshu a long time ago. We paid a high price for the contact.”

  “Genocide,” Rabelais said gravely. “Or is it xenocide?”

  “Semantics.” Shapiro made dismissive gestures. “Mick would also have told you, the same is happening to us. The Zunshu – another Resalq word, meaning simply enemy �
�� came for us too, and we were no better prepared than Mark’s people.” He paused, frowning at Vidal. “Michael, are you well enough to go on?”

  With an effort of will, Vidal seemed to haul himself back to reality. “Yes. We burned out the drive, like Ernst said, trying to stay out of the field, but the current took us in. Happens to a lot of ships.”

  “Lot of ships,” Queneau echoed. “Damn, you wouldn’t believe the place. Big as a major solar system, empty, black as the pit, you don’t see stars … and full of ships.”

  “Wreckage?” Vaurien wondered.

  “Mostly.” She blinked her eyes clear and looked along at Vidal and Rabelais. “Some twisted up, mangled by the Drift, probably when they were sucked in out of Hellgate. Busted up in the event that swallowed them, and then spat out into a driftway.”

  “That’s what we call it,” Vidal went on. “A current that sweeps things along and washes it up, like scum on the surface of a pond. You get into a driftway and you could ride around Hellgate on a hundred-year orbit, slow as mud in deep currents where time moves like the ice in a glacier.”

  “Or the driftway could wash you up in a lagoon,” Rabelais said with a deep pragmatism. “I’ve theorized about hundreds of these backwaters, scattered across what you’re calling transspace. Maybe thousands. Freefall ponds, full of the scum that gets sucked in from Hellgate, and from Orion 359, and the systems beyond.” He tapped his chest. “That’s us. Scum. Happened to me.”

  Alexis Rusch was hanging on every word as surely as Jazinsky and Mark. “But the Odyssey wasn’t mangled in the passage through the jaws of an event, Ernst. You were swallowed by a Class Seven, and you made it through. I’m struggling to understand how.”

  He regarded her shrewdly. “You’re more of a scientist than I ever was, Alexis. I was … am … just a spacer. An explorer. I don’t know the physics to explain it. I can only tell you what I know, because I saw it for myself. You get swallowed, sucked in, and judging from the dead ships we saw in there, about five ships in a hundred seem to slide through in a kind of channel between the gravity tides at the jaws of the event. The bigger the event, the more powerful the gravity tides, and the wider the freefall channels between them – black light, black gravity, like I said.” He gestured at Jazinsky, Mark and Dario. “Ask them. Something to do with J-type gravitons, they cancel each other out when super-high gravities force them back so far into e-space, they rupture space with their own mass.” He shuddered animatedly. “I don’t understand much, but I’ve had a long time to play with the numbers. I often wished I’d been more of a physicist, less of a seat-of-the-pants pilot.”