The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  Adele felt deaf and blind with only the clumsy helmet link to connect her with the outside world. She could shift between communication modes, but she wasn't in touch with all portions of the electro-optical spectrum simultaneously. At a time when she and her companions were within a heartbeat of destruction, she desperately wanted the connection as a security blanket. It gave her the hope that she might be able to do something to help.

  Adele didn't try to control herself, simply allowed Daniel to muscle her through the hatches like a sack of grain. Weightless or not, her suited body was of respectable mass. He gripped the equipment belt in the middle of her back, then simply shoved and jerked. They moved as fast as the unburdened Hogg did in the lead.

  The airlock was open, inner and outer hatches both, turning the chamber into a passage. That made sense since they were abandoning the Goldenfels, but it still shocked Adele's sense of rightness.

  "Parsifal, this is AFS Bluecher," a male voice said abruptly. "Shut down everything but your auxiliary power unit. Do not light your thrusters or High Drive. You will be destroyed if you do not obey these instructions to the letter. Do you understand, over?"

  This system's sun was a tiny dot in the black heavens but so brilliant that Adele's faceshield darkened automatically to save her retinas. The light turned the antennas and rigging into knife-edges where it struck them, but left them rifts in existence when they were in shadow unrelieved by the softening of an atmosphere. Adele had spent little time on the hull in normal space. Its appearance in the Matrix was a liquid, ever-changing thing far different from this harshness.

  "Good God, Bluecher!" Adele said as Daniel dragged her to a line that she wouldn't have seen if he hadn't bent her arms around it the first time. "Have you gone mad? We're Alliance merchants, we're from Bryce! What do you mean by threatening us, over?"

  There was the Princess Cecile! Adele assumed it was the Princess Cecile, at any rate, but she couldn't really make out the shape. The vessel was half-brilliant, half darker than the space between worlds; there at least wide-spread atoms glowed with the energy of their creation. The ship was at least a quarter mile distant, though that too was hard to judge under the present light conditions.

  Daniel clipped the end of a short safety cord to Adele's equipment belt; the other end was already secured to his own. Hogg was pulling himself toward the corvette, his legs crossed around the line connecting the two ships and his arms pulling him with long, powerful motions.

  Daniel sailed past Adele, caught the line, and began doing the same. When he reached the ten-foot length of the safety cord, he jerked Adele along with him. She knitted her gloved fingers, making a loop of her arms, and tried not to brush the line as she wobbled after him.

  "Parsifal, don't worry about what I mean!" snarled the signal from the heavy cruiser. "Just do as you're told, or you'll be piecing the story together in Hell! Shut off all but minimal systems power until our pinnace boards you, or you'll take the consequences. Bluecher out!"

  Because there was no air resistance and they were fighting inertia rather than gravity, Daniel continued to accelerate himself and Adele as they neared the Princess Cecile. The corvette's masts were at full extension, spreading nobly in all four directions from her axis, but the furled sails gave her yards a fleshy, uncomfortable look.

  Adele was echoing both sides of the discussion on Daniel's receiver, but he could speak only on intercom unless she unlocked his unit. She hadn't had time to explain what she was doing, but they didn't dare chance Daniel saying something that would unmask her deception. She'd apologize when they had the time, but the first priority was surviving the next few minutes.

  "Bluecher," Adele said in feigned exasperation, "we'll obey you, but I won't lie and claim I understand. When Captain Vanness gets back you can take it up with him. Parsifal out."

  She'd known a man named Vanness once. He hadn't shown much talent for library work but he'd tried his best, and his bloody murder was one of the scenes that came in the night to plague her. One of many scenes, by now; but she'd chosen the life.

  She looked past Daniel's legs. They were really rocketing toward the corvette's hull now. What if they—

  Hogg, just ahead of them, dived into a billowing length of sail fabric stretched between two stanchions. A pair of waiting riggers swung him out of the way.

  Daniel twisted his body like a skilled gymnast despite the bulk of his rigging suit; his boots hit the left stanchion. He took up the shock by bending his knees, leaving the center of the fabric barrier for Adele.

  She plowed into it face-first. She'd tried to get her arms out, but she'd misjudged the distance and was tumbling when she hit with an impact that jarred her head back unpleasantly. She'd be lucky if she got nothing worse than a headache from it.

  "Cast off!" Daniel shouted over the intercom as hands grabbed Adele. Instead of clanking the weak permanent magnets in her bootsoles down onto the steel hull, two riggers held her between them as they followed Daniel. Adele was still tied to him, she realized, though she wasn't sure he remembered it. "And Mr. Chewning, get under weigh now! Now!"

  "Sir, they're launching!" Chewning shouted, no longer sounding laboriously dull. "They're launching missiles!"

  The line from the Goldenfels to the Princess Cecile was tied to a bitt near the Sissie's open dorsal airlock. Daniel dived into the chamber on top of Hogg, and the riggers carried Adele in just ahead of Tovera. As the outer lock began to cycle closed, she felt the jagged note of the High Drive motors starting up. Their vibration was at a much higher frequency than that of the plasma thrusters.

  "All the more reason to get under weigh, Chewning," Daniel said in a cheerful voice. He grinned at Adele as he reached for the control to open the inner hatch. On their two-way link he added, "While there's life, there's hope, eh, Adele?"

  She smiled back. He really did make the absurd seem possible. And so maybe it was.

  CHAPTER 31

  Daniel wished he had time to strip off his rigging suit, but the best he could do for the time being was to unlock his helmet and twist it to release as he threw himself down at the command console. A quick shuffle through the displays showed him that things were as well as could be expected: they were accelerating at 1.4 gravities, as much as the High Drive could manage when the corvette was so heavily loaded. Woetjans' riggers had begun setting the sails according to plan, now that the Princess Cecile was unmasked as fully operational.

  The Bluecher had launched a spread of twelve missiles, a full salvo, which Daniel supposed he should take as flattering. Captain Semmes thought so well of the Goldenfels' commander that he was using all available force to crush what on the face of it was the crippled remnant of an initially weak opponent. Perhaps when all this was over, it would give Daniel a warm feeling; what he saw now was certain destruction accelerating toward them at 12 Gees.

  Daniel punched a three-stroke combination into his keyboard, triggering the complex program of commands he'd prepared aboard the Goldenfels before abandoning her. Missiles launched from both the freighter's tubes, and her thrusters lit at full power. The missile courses were vague approximations, but that wouldn't be certain to the Bluecher till they burned out.

  He doubted that either of those things were going to befuddle Semmes, but they provided a few more factors on the Alliance commander's plate. Though Semmes seemed to have all the cards from where Daniel sat on the other side of the table, he knew that things would look different on the bridge of the Bluecher.

  Betts had been alone on the Sissie's bridge until the regular crew arrived from the Goldenfels; Chewning and Dorst had been handling gunnery and command duties from their usual station in the Battle Center.

  Sun, still wearing his airsuit, was at the gunnery console now, but the Sissie's four 4-inch plasma cannon couldn't significantly affect the oncoming missiles. There was no hope for escape save into the Matrix, and that was only a momentary bolthole. The corvette didn't have enough way on to get any significant distance from the
ir present location, no matter how many times their relative velocity was multiplied.

  "Ship, this is Six," Daniel said. "We're entering the Matrix—"

  His left hand shut off the High Drive; his right thrust two fingers down hard to initiate the entry sequence. A complex charge built on the Princess Cecile's hull, acting both as pressure and a lubricant, forcing and allowing the vessel to slip from sidereal space into the complex of other space-times.

  "—now."

  To those aboard the Princess Cecile, it was as if time dragged on at an agonizing crawl during which the individual atoms of their beings turned inside out. In fact time was moving just as fast as it ever did, but within the bubble of special space-time movement slowed. The actual process of insertion into or extraction from the Matrix took anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute, depending on the energy gradients involved.

  And it didn't affect the Bluecher's missiles. Daniel had what was either a Matrix hallucination or a flashback to the time he was one with the Tree on New Delphi: the missiles launched on initially diverging courses which then curved back toward intersection; their twin High Drive motors reaching burn-out and shutting down as each round split into three segments, moving at .6 C and packing so much kinetic energy that a thermonuclear warhead would add complexity without increasing the effect of a hit; the segments crisscrossing the volume of space containing the Goldenfels and the Princess Cecile.

  He'd hoped the Goldenfels would successfully make the transition into the Matrix where its track would at least be a distraction for Captain Semmes when he came hunting the Sissie. The freighter'd begun her programmed sequence at the same time as the corvette did, but the bigger vessel still wallowed in normal space when segments of two Alliance missiles plunged into her.

  For an instant the Goldenfels looked like a barbell, untouched amidships but her bow and stern ionized by the impacts. Then the shockwaves met in the center and left nothing but an expanding fireball.

  The vision faded, or the hallucination. Daniel blinked. For a moment he couldn't see the numbers cascading across his display as he ran course calculations.

  A ship is merely a tool to be used, and if she breaks in use, well, that's part of life. Besides, the Goldenfels was an Alliance vessel, never formally taken into RCN service.

  But for a short while Lieutenant Daniel Leary had commanded her. She'd served him and Cinnabar well during that time, and against all logic he regretted her loss. Though maybe it was only hallucination. . . .

  Daniel took a deep breath. He'd seen/felt/imagined a segment of missile passing through the Princess Cecile, a quartering shot that struck on the starboard counter and passed out on the port bow. The missile and the corvette didn't exist in quite the same space-time simultaneously, but the almost-contact had made Daniel shiver for reasons that weren't entirely psychological.

  He focused on his display. The astrogational computer had calculated where the Princess Cecile was in sidereal space. Daniel sighed. He'd entered the Matrix a good minute and a half sooner than he'd intended to. On a hunch, he supposed; and he'd been correct, that flashing missile would assuredly have vaporized the corvette if he'd been even a few seconds slower. Even so, the Sissie would have to return to the sidereal universe very soon to get up to useful velocities if they were to have any real hope of escape.

  The truth was, Captain Semmes was as good as Daniel Leary was, and the Bluecher was far superior in all respects to the Princess Cecile. Daniel didn't really see how the contest was going to have a positive ending, but even the best commanders make mistakes. If Semmes made the first one, the Sissie could capitalize on it to escape. And if Daniel Leary made the mistake, well—

  He grinned as he locked his helmet on again and rose from the console.

  —it was hard to imagine that making their present situation worse. He supposed it was liberating, knowing that he wouldn't have to blame himself for a bad outcome. Of course he probably wouldn't have long for breast-beating anyway, given the velocities at which missiles travelled.

  "Ship, this is Six," he said, starting for the airlock. "I'm going out to view the Matrix and adjust our plotted course from the hull. Mr. Chewning, you're in command of the ship, but I will be conning us through the semaphore system. Do you have any questions, over?"

  Daniel wanted to rub his eyes, but it was too late—he'd closed his helmet. He was very tired, tired to the point that he felt disassociated from his body, but that wasn't a wholly bad thing. The Matrix seemed closer when his mind could float in it.

  "Aye aye, sir," said Chewing, stolid and cheerful again. "Good hunting, over."

  "What I'm hunting for, Mr. Chewning," Daniel said as he closed the airlock, "is a way out of this mess. Over."

  "Roger, sir," said Chewning. "And I speak for all the crew when I say good hunting. Out."

  Daniel heard general laughter as he shut off his intercom to go out on the hull. Then the only laughter remaining was his own.

  * * *

  The great danger of working on the hull of a ship in the Matrix was that you'd lose your grip and sail off into alien space-times, alone for eternity. It was the riggers' great fear, the one they'd only talk about when they were very drunk.

  Adele walked across the hull with her left hand on the safety cord, her boots going click-click-click as the small magnets in the soles mated with the steel hull plating. She was careful because she was always careful doing things she wasn't very good at, but she wasn't especially afraid.

  Death hadn't frightened Adele since the day she learned her whole family had been executed. As for the manner of her death, the part that seemed to bother other people particularly—Adele had always felt apart from the people around her. The irony of becoming Adele Mundy, Bubble Universe, rather amused her. Not that she wanted that to happen.

  Daniel stood at a semaphore platform between the first and second antennas of the dorsal row. The maincourses of both were furled, but the topsails and the sails above the topsails—Adele instinctively reached for her data unit to check the name, then remembered she didn't and didn't dare carry it here—stretched from the pressure of Casimir radiation bearing on them. Above, filling everything beyond the bubble of the Princess Cecile and the crew aboard her, was the pulsing, sullen, magnificence of the Matrix—of all worlds and all times, pressing in on the starship which had intruded on them for this brief instant.

  Daniel's gauntleted fingers moved on the controls while his face remained turned to the patterns above. A rigger moved to the foremost mast and began to climb swiftly hand-over-hand. A latch had stuck or a cable was fouled; a human being was going aloft to free it so that another sail could billow out to match those Adele saw spreading at the peaks of the five masts behind it in the row.

  She stepped forward, placing herself across the semaphore stand from Daniel; there he would see her but she'd remain out of his way. Catching the motion or perhaps feeling the tremble of her boots on the hull, he looked toward Adele and grinned through the heavy faceplate of his rigging suit.

  Daniel motioned her forward, then touched his helmet to hers. Pointing toward the heavens with his right arm, he said, "There's a discontinuity there that we're following." His voice distant but very clear as it rang through the two helmets. "I don't suppose you see it . . . ?"

  But obviously he hoped she did. Well, Adele thought she could make a librarian out of Daniel, but the chance of him making her an astrogator was something below the likelihood that she'd become Speaker of the Cinnabar Senate.

  Nonetheless she looked upward, trying to follow the sweep of Daniel's arm. To her, looking into the Matrix was like staring at a well-stirred vanilla pudding—which was glowing brightly besides.

  "I'm afraid I don't, Daniel," she said apologetically. It was something that mattered a great deal to him, and he doubtless regretted that it meant nothing whatever to her. "Is it a faster way home than, than another way would be?"

  "Ah?" he said in puzzlement. "Oh, I see what you mean. It's a good pas
sage at that, better in this direction than the other, to tell the truth. But what we're actually doing is retracing the route by which we came from Radiance to the rendezvous point. There we'll reenter normal space for the first time, build up speed, and then strike for Todos Santos."

  He paused, eyeing the quivering splendor for a moment in silence. Then he bent into contact with Adele again and went on, "I'm hoping that Captain Semmes will lose our new course in our backtrail. There's so much traffic into Radiance that only God Himself could follow us on a cold track outbound."

  He coughed and added, "And God, of course, is on the side of Cinnabar."

  "Of course," Adele said without emphasis. She assumed Daniel was joking—while religion wasn't an acceptable subject of conversation in the RCN, she'd certainly never known him to visit a temple—but his assurance of the rightness of the RCN was at least very close to religious faith. Daniel was a sophisticated man in many respects, but there were parts of him that were frankly childish.

  Of course, if the God Adele didn't believe in had provided the RCN with commanders like Daniel Leary, then he was correct in his faith.

  "What I'd really like to do would be to load reaction mass on Radiance," he continued, "but at this point I don't trust the Commonwealth government to accept the story that the Sissie is a private yacht."

  He chuckled; Adele heard the sound as a distant grunting.

  "Though in fact that's just what we are, you know."

  As Daniel talked, he continued to watch the Matrix. He made a slight adjustment at the semaphore. Adele didn't see any change in the sails from where she stood, but the glowing pudding overhead began slowly to rotate around the corvette's axis, a motion distinct from the streaks which seemed to move longitudinally.

  "Will we be all right?" Adele asked. She hoped she didn't sound frightened; she wasn't, after all, she was just curious. What happened if they ran out of reaction mass?