by KATHY OLTION
Down a different hallway and around a corner to his right, the lift doors slid open with a barely perceptible whoosh. Careful footsteps padded his way. Who else could be roaming around up here at this time of the sleep cycle?
What if it was a guard, coming to get him? His heartbeat shot up and his skin broke into a sweat, but he forced himself to calm down. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Not yet. This wasn’t a prison ship, though at first glance there wasn’t that much to distinguish it from one. He had as much right as anyone to wander the halls at night.
So did whoever had just arrived. It was probably someone who couldn’t sleep, out perambulating, trying to relax while they had the chance. But the image of a prison wouldn’t leave his mind. The other person’s steps slowed the closer they got to the intersection of the halls. It wasn’t the gait of someone on a casual stroll around the ship. That person was sneaking!
Deloric cautiously sidled up to the wall so that he would be behind the corner as the intruder came around. He felt woefully unarmed, with just his palm-sized flashlight to use as a club. His only other advantage would be surprise. Maybe.
The other’s footfalls stopped just short of turning the corner. Deloric’s body tensed like a bandar string about to break. Any moment . . . any moment. . . .
A female Kauld stepped out from the shadows and Deloric sprang in front of her, shining his light at its brightest setting smack in her face.
She yelped, high-pitched and short. And in return, his pent-up nerves made him jump back and shout, “Yaaa!”
Then he regained his senses enough to recognize his intruder: Terwolan. He quickly clamped his free hand over her mouth and urged her to “shhhhh!”
She didn’t shhhhh. She twisted her head and tried to bite his fingers, while simultaneously swinging a fist at him and kicking out with her right foot. Deloric dodged back, but not before she’d clipped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, it’s me!” he hissed. “Stop it!” He grabbed her arm before she could hit him again.
Terwolan kept struggling, and he finally realized that the light in her eyes kept her from seeing who he was. He turned his flashlight toward his own face, then aimed it at the ceiling. There was a moment of startled recognition on her part, marked by her wide eyes, then he felt her relax.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered when he let her go.
“I could ask the same question of you,” he whispered back.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, her voice full of defiance.
“Me either.” That was true enough.
They stared at one another for a moment, sizing each other up in a way they never had in their weeks of working side-by-side. Terwolan looked tired, but there was something else in her expression, an oppressive weight that hadn’t been there before. Deloric finally said, “You figured out what we’re building out there, didn’t you?”
Her eyes shifted to the shuttle bay door, then back to him. She swallowed and said, “Maybe.”
“So have I.”
They stared at one another again, Deloric feeling the first glimmer of hope he’d had all night. He didn’t believe Terwolan was a spy, but how could he know for sure? And how could he convince her he wasn’t one himself?
“The way I see it,” he said carefully, “A person who didn’t like it would have two choices: treason or exile.”
“I notice you didn’t give him the option to just go back to bed and forget about it,” she pointed out.
“I . . . um . . . don’t think he could do that.” He looked into her eyes, desperately searching for confirmation there, but he just couldn’t tell. “They’re going to fire it tonight.”
That got a reaction. Her eyes widened, and her expression darkened. “How do you know?”
“We’re five light-days out. The human colony will be in direct line with the carbon dioxide stream in five days. And it’s the middle of the Blind time, both here and there. Nobody will be able to detect the energy release.”
She nodded slowly. “That makes sense. So what are we going to do?”
He relaxed just a little. She had said “we.” His flashlight was growing heavy; he shifted it from his right hand to his left and said, “I can’t bring myself to commit treason, but I can’t be part of this any more either. I was going to take one of the long-range shuttles and head for deep space.”
She smiled. To Deloric it was like the sun coming up. “Great minds think alike,” she said. “Let’s go.”
She took her spacesuit. Deloric revised his plan and did the same. You never knew when you might need to do an EVA. They didn’t put them on, just hung them inside the shuttle’s airlock as they entered. They hurried on through the small passenger/cargo bay and into the control room, lights automatically turning on ahead of them as they went.
“Do you know how to fly one of these?” Terwolan asked him as they sat in the control chairs before the instrument panel.
“Not this particular kind, but I’ve flown shuttles before,” he told her. “How about you?”
“I’ve flown this model before.”
“You’re the pilot, then.”
She nodded and got to work bringing the engines online. Deloric switched on the navigation computer and scrolled through the list of preprogrammed destinations, looking for anything that might offer safe refuge to a couple of deserters. He hated thinking of himself in those terms, but that’s what it would look like to anyone else.
The Blood homeworld slid by, highlighted orange. It was interdicted, of course. No contact was allowed with the Blood Many except under direct orders from the High Command. Deloric didn’t want to run to the Kauld’s oldest enemies anyway. He just wanted out of this whole militaristic mess.
“Launch in ten,” Terwolan said.
He looked out through the viewport. The hangar doors were opening. This was it. Alarms would already be sounding in the communication center. Books and games and mugs of skath would be flying as bored controllers leaped up from their midshift diversions to see what was going on.
He thought about trying to bluff their way clear, but he knew he’d never be able to pull it off. He had no reason to be leaving the bunkship at this hour, especially not in a long-range shuttle. Besides, intership communications wouldn’t work beyond the shuttle bay anyway, not during the Blind. He left the communications panel switched off and peered out at the widening swath of starry space, figuring he could help spot trouble by eye if there was any.
Terwolan took them out fast, banking hard just beyond the doors and accelerating away in case anyone tried to fire on them. The comet was a pale half-circle sweeping across their field of view, growing more full as they swung around behind it. Now Deloric could see what he had been forbidden to look at before: a tall tower stuck out the back side, circular coils ringing it all the way up from the base to the tip. It was an accelerator of some sort, and it was aimed straight through the comet’s central hole.
“Uh-oh,” Terwolan said. Deloric glanced over at her, saw that she wasn’t even looking at the comet, and followed her gaze upward to the immense Kauld battleship keeping station just a few rho away.
His breath caught in his throat. The battleship was too far away for him to see its gun turrets, but he could imagine them well enough, all swiveling around to track the tiny shuttle.
“Evasive maneuvers!” he said.
“It’s Blind time,” she reminded him. “They couldn’t hit another battleship at this distance without their tracking sensors.” Nonetheless, she swung the shuttle through another arc and fed more power to the engines.
She was just in time. A bright red disruptor bolt sizzled through the space where they had just been. Another drew a ragged line between them and the ball of ice. Either the gunners were getting lucky, or they were better shots than Terwolan had thought.
“Duck behind the comet,” he urged.
“Good idea.” She banked them around until its bumpy surface eclipsed the warship, then aimed straight out into
space and held their acceleration at maximum. In the rear-facing viewscreen, the comet shrank precipitously behind them, shrinking from a wall of ice to a snowball to a pebble. The warship edged out from behind it, but Terwolan cut the engines, effectively reducing their visibility to nothing before the gunners could take aim. She used the steering jets to alter their course a few more degrees, but that wasn’t even necessary. The warship didn’t fire again, and after a tense couple of minutes, its nose swiveled back to point down the line of carbon dioxide ice stretching in-system.
“They’re not even chasing us?” Deloric asked in disbelief.
“They must have bigger things on their mind,” Terwolan said. She rotated the ship around so they could see the comet straight on. They were way off to the side now, and receding fast. The battleship was almost as distant on the opposite side. The bunkships were much closer, but also out of the line of fire. The string of ice that the miners had launched into space should have been invisible, but it suddenly flared bright red, like a thin knife blade slashing open the fabric of space for as far as the eye could see.
“They fired the disruptor at the core,” he said. “That vaporized the carbon dioxide.”
An instant later, the back side of the comet glowed white. The whole thing lit up from inside, but that was nothing compared to the brilliance of the light beam that shone through the central core and down the long column of vaporized ice. It was so intense Deloric threw his hands over his eyes for protection, but even then it was too bright. The flesh of his hands wasn’t enough to block it; only the bones did that. He turned away, eyelids slammed shut even against the reflections inside the shuttle, but he felt the back of his head grow hot in the glare.
“Get us out of here!” he shouted.
Terwolan groped blindly for the control board. The shuttle turned slowly, the swath of intense light sliding up the back wall as it did. They could actually hear its progress by the sizzling of plastic controls and trim panels, and they could feel the heat of it burning their skin.
And this was just the leakage from the laser beam.
“I can’t find the warp controls!” Terwolan shouted. “I’m blind!”
Deloric peered through the slit between two fingers, wincing in pain. He couldn’t see anything but brilliant white, either, but after another few seconds the ship rotated around so its bulk cut off the worst of the light. He blinked, stuck his face right next to the control board, and peered at the labels until he found the “engage” button. There was no course set yet, but he didn’t care. He mashed the button with his entire fist, then fell back into his chair as the engines wrapped the ship in their magnetic embrace and threw them into darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
SPOCK WAS hunched over the conglomeration of electronics parts he’d cobbled together in the science lab, examining his connections with an inductive logic probe. Something was wired improperly, but this was his second pass through the system and so far he had been unable to find the problem.
It had to be a connection. Everything else was working as it should. The signal generators in the deflector dish at the front of the ship’s secondary hull had been modified to accept greater output from the olivium power source, the data processors checked out when he run a self-test, and everything worked individually. It was only when he hooked it all together and tried to run his modified radar unit at full power that the system malfunctioned.
Gamma Night had once more reduced the ship’s sensor range to uselessness. Crew members with binoculars outperformed even his low-frequency radar, which was the only electronic scanning device that worked at all under the onslaught of charged particles from out-system. And both systems were limited to the speed of light. Anything could sneak up under warp power, and nobody would know until it had dropped into normal space right on top of them.
The Enterprise desperately needed subspace scanning capability during Gamma Night. Spock didn’t normally consider brute force an acceptable alternative to elegance, but in this case brute force seemed the only possible answer to the problem. He needed sensors powerful enough to cut through the interference and return a clear signal, even when they were being inundated by noise.
Gaining the requisite power was not the issue; olivium-enhanced emitters provided more than enough. The problem lay in processing the reflected signals when they returned. If they returned. Energy was pouring into subspace—at least, it was if the power indications could be believed—but precious little of it was returning. At the power level he was using, his signal should have been bouncing off everything, including the tiny gravity wells around individual hydrogen atoms. The receivers should have been overloaded with echoes even if the signal was only reflecting off the gravity wells around the planets; instead, they registered only 2 percent above background, even when the whole system was running wide open.
There had to be a data error somewhere. That much energy couldn’t just disappear. Spock was pumping the equivalent of a small sun’s output into space—it had to be going somewhere. He suspected it was, and he suspected it was coming back to the detectors, too. They just weren’t programmed to handle the intense signal in addition to the intense background noise. They were apparently cutting out when the incoming data grew too complex to process.
Trouble was, he could find no instruction in their programs that would make them do that. Logic probes made while the system was running showed no sign of overload. The system behaved as though it simply wasn’t getting a signal back.
Spock set the probe down on the bench beside the breadboard circuitry and rubbed his eyes. He’d been at this for hours. He should be asleep, but Gamma Night didn’t arrive on a convenient schedule, and he didn’t want to wait for another cycle to test his modifications.
He took a few deep breaths to oxygenate his blood. There was no problem with the connections. He had to believe the evidence: energy was pouring out into subspace but not coming back. How could that be?
It had to be the olivium. Every time he had tried to power something with it, he had had unexpected problems. Mr. Scott had succeeded in overdriving warp engines with it, but the material’s space-time altering nature merely enhanced what a warp engine was supposed to do anyway. Sensors were supposed to do the opposite, and therein lay the problem. Sensors were supposed to bounce signals off the subspace manifestations of whatever real-space objects were out there and read the reflections, all without actually altering whatever they were reading. The Vulcan P’tar—and Heisenberg on Earth—had proved that every act of measurement altered the experiment, but normally the effect was of no consequence on a large scale. Long-range subspace scans didn’t run afoul of the uncertainty principle.
With quantum olivium in the circuit, however, that wasn’t necessarily true. Spock suspected that the emitted signal was doing something he hadn’t anticipated. Its power wasn’t just disappearing.
Where was it going, though? Anything that absorbed that much energy should shine like a beacon, in both normal space and subspace.
There was only one logical answer: He wasn’t using the right detector. Low-frequency gravity-wave detectors obviously weren’t picking up anything, even though that was what he was broadcasting. Electromagnetic waves weren’t any more useful. There was just as obviously nothing returning to the ship in visual wavelengths, or the spotters posted at the observation ports would have reported it. That left ultraviolet and even higher-frequency ranges.
The ultraviolet and X-ray bands were easy to check, and just as easy to dismiss. There was nothing there. And beyond that there wasn’t an electromagnetic spectrum. At ultra-high frequencies, the boundary between energy and matter started to break down. He might as well start looking for exotic particles—quarks and the like.
He could, of course. The range of detectable frequencies went all the way up to matter waves. He just hadn’t believed that it was possible for a signal to be transformed that far from its initial form. But now it was the next logical thing to check.
/> It was the work of a moment to adjust the detectors. He slowly raised the frequency, and with it the energy content of the particles he was searching for, through the elemental quarks, into the lepton range, searching for electrons, positrons, neutrinos. . . .
There was a flash of light, a loud bang, and the entire breadboard circuit on the workbench erupted in flame. Spock grabbed the extinguisher from the wall beside the bench and efficiently smothered the fire, then silenced the alarm and called an “all clear” to security.
The acrid smell of burnt plastic and electronics quickly dissipated through the ship’s ventilation, but a hint of it remained on Spock’s hands. He could detect it as he settled back into a chair and steepled his fingers before his nose in a pose he often took when concentrating on a puzzle.
The theory was simple: the outgoing signal travels from the emitter, encounters either matter itself or its subspatial distortion, then bounces off and returns to the detectors as a signal that the data processors turn into meaningful information. The exploding circuit indicated an overload, proving to Spock that a signal was indeed being detected and that the amplification stage of the detectors was functioning correctly. That the overload occurred while he was scanning the ultra-high frequencies would lend credence to the theory that the signal was being transformed. On the other hand, it could simply mean that he had detected an extraordinarily large, naturally occurring neutrino burst.
Either way, he had some work to do. He picked up the scorched circuit board and studied it. There was enough damage that he would have to build another. It would not take long to reconstruct, but he wanted to determine that the original design of the board was sound.
He checked the time. There were still a few more hours of Gamma Night left. If he worked quickly, he might be able to make another test run before it ended. He rubbed his eyes again and set to work.