The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  (The water passes Ann’s waist. She is thoroughly drenched, of course, and thoroughly revealed. Outside, Jack seizes the torch and uses it to break away. The men struggle at the edge of the pit. Ann’s shoulders go under, and her screams fill the chamber. Jack is down on one knee, forced relentlessly into the pit.)

  THADDEUS

  Ask forgiveness, Hancock. This is your last chance to save your immortal soul.

  JACK

  You crazy son of a bitch.

  THADDEUS

  Then I ask pardon in your name. The Lord forgive you.

  (Secure in the knowledge he has won, Thaddeus releases the pressure on Hancock’s windpipe, and clutches his crucifix. The water is now cutting off Ann’s screams. Jack sees his chance, and seizes the crucifix, ripping it free. He jams it into Thaddeus’ groin, and the giant folds up in agony. He seizes Jack and both fall into the pit. We hear a long scream, and then we see a hand rise over the edge of the shaft. Jack climbs painfully out, unbars the door, and casts the bar aside. Theme swells as water pours out of the chamber, and he moves quickly to rescue Ann. He turns off the water, cuts her bonds, and lifts her, choking and gasping, into his arms.)

  ANN

  Jack, thank God you got here. He said he killed you.

  JACK

  I think he missed. You okay?

  ANN

  Sure. Dragged up a few flights of stairs. Punched out a bit. Half drowned. Otherwise, I’m fine.

  JACK

  Good. Because the evening’s young.

  “How long?” Carson watched the mist drift past. He pushed back in his chair, trying to look calm, dispassionate, but he was excited. Damned near ecstatic.

  All gauges on the jump-status indicator had gone to a bright amber. “Coming up on three minutes.” Hutch began to divert power to the fusion plant. “The jump should be smooth. But buckle down anyhow.”

  Systems lamps went green. The power levels of the Hazeltines were beginning to rise. Real-space mass was showing zero.

  Maggie, closeted with George and Janet in the passengers’ cabin, said, “Please, God, let them be here.”

  Red lamp. Unsecured hatch in one of the rear storage areas. Hutch opened it, closed it again. The light went green.

  Janet said, “This is going to be a terrible disappointment if Beta Pac is a radio star, and the analysts were wrong. They’ve been wrong before.”

  “Two minutes,” said Hutch. The comments around her receded to background noise. Only George’s voice got through. But no one really had anything new to say. They were talking to create a web of security, impose a sense of familiarity on a condition they’d experienced before but which was nevertheless potentially quite different.

  They floated forward.

  “One minute.”

  Lights dimmed.

  The real-space navigational systems, which had been in a power-saving mode, activated. The fusion plant went to ready status. External sensors came on line. Shields powered up.

  Someone wished her luck.

  Navigation came to life.

  And, with scarcely a bump, they slid out into the dark. Stars flowered in the deeps, and she felt a brief flash of vertigo, not unusual during transition. They sailed beneath an open sky.

  “I’m always glad to be out of there,” said Carson, releasing his restraints.

  “Maybe not,” said Hutch. She jabbed a finger at the main navigation screen. An enormous black disk lay dead ahead. “Everybody stay belted in, please.”

  Fusion was about to ignite. She stopped it.

  “What’s wrong?” Maggie hadn’t missed the strain in Hutch’s voice.

  Hutch gave them the image. “Talk later. I’m going to throw on the brakes.”

  “What is it?” George asked.

  “Not sure.” She went to full mag. It looked like a world. “That can’t be right. Mass detectors show zero.” She reset, but nothing changed. “Don’t know what it is. Hold on.”

  Carson stared out the forward screen. “Son of a bitch—”

  “Braking,” said Hutch softly, “now.” She engaged the retros, didn’t ease into them as she normally would, but hit them hard.

  “It’s just an area with no stars,” said Janet. “Like the Void. Maybe it is the Void.”

  “If it is, it’s in the wrong place.”

  The thing ahead reflected no light.

  “Hutch?” Maggie’s voice had risen a notch. “Are we going into that thing?”

  “It’s getting bigger,” said George.

  “It can’t really be there.” Hutch’s fingers moved across keys. “Self test okay.”

  “It’s not a sphere,” said Carson. His beefy features had hardened, and the eager-to-please archeologist had been replaced by the old colonel. Military bearing front and center. In an odd way, it was reassuring.

  “What else could it be?”

  Carson was squinting at the images. “It looks like a football,” he said.

  Worried sounds were coming out of the passenger cabin.

  “Hang on,” said Hutch. “We’re going sharp to port.” She punched in a new set of values, maybe more thrust than they could stand, and hit the button. Again, they were thrown against the webbing.

  A haze had risen before her eyes, and it was hard to talk against the push of the thrusters. “Collision,” she said. “Imminent.” The words hung in the frantic air.

  Carson took time to breathe, steady his voice. “How long?”

  Hutch felt cold and empty. “Seven minutes. And change.”

  The object filled the sky. To their eternal credit, the three in the cabin kept their heads, and did not distract her. She even heard them trying to laugh about their situation. She opened a channel. “You can see what’s happening,” she said, speaking as though she were describing an interesting view. “We have a problem.”

  “How serious?” asked Janet. “Is it as bad as it looks?”

  Hutch hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

  She eased off on the thrusters, and killed the course change. “What are you doing?” asked Carson.

  They were in free fall again. “No point torturing everybody.”

  “What do you mean?” said Maggie. “We aren’t going to give up, are we? Just like that?”

  Hutch didn’t respond. Didn’t know how to.

  “How about jumping back?” George suggested.

  “Can’t.”

  “Try it.”

  “There’s no point.”

  “Try it. What’s to lose?”

  The black football was growing. Carson said, “Not good.” In the passenger cabin, someone laughed. Janet.

  “I’ll try to reinsert when we get closer,” Hutch said. “Give the engines a chance to breathe. But don’t expect anything.”

  Maggie whimpered.

  Carson, strain finally locking his voice somewhat, asked, “How fast will we be going when we hit?”

  Hutch was tempted to dodge the question. Throw back some facile response like fast enough. But they deserved better. “Almost fifty thousand.”

  What was the damned thing? She decided they weren’t quite dead-on after all. They would hit a glancing shot. Not that it mattered.

  “Goddammit, Hutch,” said George, “we ought to be able to do something.”

  “Tell me what.” Hutch had become deadly calm.

  No way out. The object was vast and dark and overwhelming. An impossible thing, a disk without light, a world without rock.

  “No moons,” said Carson.

  “What?”

  “It has no moons.”

  “Hardly seems to matter,” someone said; Hutch wasn’t sure who.

  Four minutes.

  A terrible silence took the ship as her passengers settled into their own thoughts. Janet looked subdued and frightened, but managed a resigned smile; Maggie, tougher than Hutch would have expected, caught her looking, wiped her eyes and nodded, seeming to say, not your fault. George’s glance turned inward and Hutch was glad she
hadn’t waited. And Carson: he wore the expression of someone who had absorbed a prank, and was taking it all quite philosophically. “Bad luck,” he told her. And, after a long pause: “It happens.”

  “Did we get a message off?” Janet asked.

  “Working on it.”

  “How big is it?” asked Maggie. “This thing?”

  Hutch checked her board. “Forty-three hundred kilometers across. Half again as wide as the Moon.”

  It crowded out the stars.

  Hutch saw a blip on her status board. “It’s putting out a signal,” she said.

  “Same one they got at the Tindle?” asked Maggie, breathless.

  “I think so. It’s fifteen-ten. That’s the right frequency. Computer’s doing a match now.”

  “That’s a pretty fair piece of navigation,” said Carson. “We hit it right on the button.” They laughed. And in that moment Hutch loved them all.

  “Transmission’s away. They’ll get a full set of pictures. And it is the same signal.”

  “What now?”

  “Time to try the jump. On a count of ten.” She set up, and shook her head at the energy level for the Hazeltines, which was around six percent of minimum requirements. “Okay.” She hit the “Go” button.

  The engines whined.

  And shuddered.

  Whined again.

  She shut it down. “That’s it.”

  They were beginning to see features in the thing. Ribs. The void became a surface: blue-black, polished like plastene, or an ocean. “You know what’s crazy about this?” said Carson. “We’re still not getting gravity readings. What is this thing? Anything that big has to have a gravity field.”

  “Detectors have a glitch,” said George.

  Under a minute. Hutch stopped watching the clocks. In the cabin, she heard the sound of a restraint opening. “Stay belted down.”

  “Why? Why bother?” It was Janet.

  “Just do it. It’s the way a well-run ship does things.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her training screamed at her to hit the retros. But she only shut down the screens, locking out the terrifying perspective.

  She closed her eyes. “Damn,” she said, not quite able to stop the tears. She felt oddly secure in the sealed bridge, as if the lone plunge had somehow been arrested. She loved the soft leather texture of the pilot’s chair, the green radiance of the gauges, the electronic murmur of Wink’s systems.

  “Hutch?” Carson’s voice was calm.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re a hell of a woman.”

  In the dark behind her eyelids, she smiled.

  18.

  On board NCA Winckelmann. Thursday, March 24; 1103 hours.

  Hutch listened to the familiar sounds of the bridge. To Carson’s tense breathing, to whispers from the passenger cabin, prayers maybe, wishes, things undone.

  She felt terrified and helpless and humiliated, but for all that, she did not want it to be over—God, she did not want it to be over—

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Squeezed the rest of the world down to her heartbeat and the soft curve of the chair. And the countdown that some inner voice maintained—

  Three. Two…

  A hammerblow struck the hull.

  The ship shuddered. Alarms exploded. The electrostatic hum of power in the bulkheads changed subtly, deepened as it sometimes did when the vehicle was responding to crisis. Carson shouted something unintelligible.

  But she was still alive.

  They had problems. The navigation board was on fire; black smoke poured into the air. Warning lamps blazed across the banks of consoles. Two of the monitors died. Computer voices spilled from the commlinks. Deep within the ship, systems sighed and shut down.

  But oblivion did not come.

  She looked at the gauges and could not believe what she saw. Their altitude was a hundred forty kilometers. And rising.

  Rising.

  She silenced the klaxons and stared at her status board. The power plant was going unstable. She shut it down, and switched to auxiliary.

  Then she let out her breath.

  “What happened?” asked Carson in a tentative voice.

  “Damned if I know. Everybody okay?”

  They were rattled. But okay.

  “Is it over?” Janet asked.

  Someone began to laugh.

  In the passenger cabin, a cheer broke out.

  “We seem to have gone through it,” Hutch said. “Don’t know how—”

  “Son of a bitch, Hutch,” said Maggie. “That was beautiful!”

  Hutch’s hands trembled.

  “What did you do?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  She killed the fire, and sent out a distress call. Carson reached over and clapped her on the back. “I don’t think I want to do that again,” he said.

  They passed through three hundred kilometers.

  “Hutch,” said George, “that’s the finest piece of piloting I’ve ever seen.”

  They were all laughing now. She joined in, and if the celebration had a hysterical edge to it, she didn’t care. No one cared.

  The ground was receding. It glowed softly. The illumination might have been internal. Or possibly reflected starlight.

  “Maybe,” said Maggie, laughing and crying simultaneously, “it was just smoke.”

  The sky had developed a distinct roll. “We’re tumbling,” Hutch said. “That’s all right. We can fix that.”

  “Are we okay?” asked George. His voice trembled.

  “Yeah. We’re fine.” Hutch was running through her checklist. Seconds after impact, the fusion plant had sent a blast of energy through the ship. There were systems in place to guard against the effects of a surge, but they were not, could not be, entirely effective. Who knew what might have burned out? She would need a walk-through to assess damage. “We’re in good shape,” she said. “We’ve got some power problems, but nothing we can’t handle.” Their situation was uncomfortable, but she saw no reason for alarm.

  Auxiliary power consisted of a net of batteries and solar collectors. Several of these were also down. Not good. “We can maintain life support. And spin. But we can’t fire the main engines, and the Hazeltines can’t recharge, so we have no stardrive. We are dead in the water.” Navigation readouts implied altitude adjustment systems were out of line. Water pressure had dropped precipitously, but was now holding steady. That meant a tank had burst. The Hazeltine flux detection system was putting out a flat line. Even if she had power to go hyper, she’d have no real way to control their point of re-entry. But we could be worse, she thought. Damned lucky. Her hands were trembling.

  They were getting far enough away now that the object was regaining its ovoid shape. “Could it be water?” asked Maggie.

  “Even that would’ve wrecked us,” said Carson. “Unless it was just a couple of centimeters deep.”

  “Hey.” Janet sounded surprised. “Why do I keep trying to fall out of my chair?”

  “Because we’re tumbling,” said Hutch. “Our gravity’s off center.”

  Carson was preoccupied with the ovoid. “It’s thin. Micro-thin. Has to be.”

  “Can we straighten out?” Maggie looked unhappy. “I’m getting sick.”

  “Trying.”

  The number four thruster showed negative. She disabled it, and set up a bypass firing sequence. “Heads up,” she said. “We’re going to have a little movement.”

  “We have power to spare?” asked Carson.

  “Enough. We’re going to be here a while, and we don’t want to have to deal with all this rolling—” She executed, and felt the satisfying push of the rockets, felt the ship respond.

  The firing sequence was long and complicated, but the stellar dance slowed, changed direction, changed again, and almost stopped. Almost. There was still a mild lateral motion.

  “Best I can do,” she said. “You can stand up now. But be careful, we have a wobble.”

  “You want to try it
again?” said George.

  “No. Too much drain. We’ll live with this.”

  “What do we do next?” asked Janet.

  “Take a look at the damage to the fusion plant,” Hutch replied.

  Carson shook her hand. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Not my doing. We were lucky.”

  “I suppose. Thanks, anyway.”

  The others crowded onto the bridge. The exhilaration was subsiding. “Can we restore power?” asked Janet.

  “I’m running the diagnostics,” said Hutch. “But I can tell you the answer. Fusion plant repair is not something you do on the run. We should proceed on the assumption that we will not have it available. Which means we are stuck here.” She released her restraints.

  “Then we need to get help.” Maggie took a long deep breath. “Somebody’s going to have to come and bail us out. First thing to do, I guess, is get off a distress call.”

  “We’ve already done that.”

  Maggie had arrived on the bridge, and was walking unsteadily across the deck, testing her balance. “Nobody’s going to want to do any drinking,” she said. “The floor runs uphill.”

  “Where would rescuers have to come from?” said George. “Nok?”

  “Probably.” Hutch was looking at flight schedules. “There isn’t much else in the region. Unless you want to ride with Kosmik. They’ve got a ship at Quraqua.”

  “We’re going to be laughingstocks,” said Janet. “We go out looking for an artifact, and crash into it.”

  “The Valkyrie’s at Nok. Just got in, if we can believe the schedule. They normally stay about four days. We’re two days away, transmission time. So it’ll still be there when our SOS arrives.”

  “It does mean,” said Maggie, “that we lose the mission. Everybody’ll want in now; we’ll be squeezed out, and the credit will go elsewhere.” She looked desperately at Hutch. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “No, Maggie. All we can do is wait to be rescued.”

  “How long will it take?” asked Janet. “The trip from Nok, I mean.”

  “The packets are fast. If they leave as soon as they hear the distress call, the Valkyrie will be here in eleven days.”