“Yes—nothing out to—maybe fifty light years.” Charts riffled.
“We’re going to jump along that line. I want a ten minute charge on the plenum, and the current at four hundred.”
“That’s pushing it, sir,” said the pilot.
“I don’t think so, but it’ll give us one more data point and we can extrapolate a lot once we have it. We’re well below critical here. Start the charge, now.”
The hull screeched as if scraped by a steel claw. Loose metal objects, a paperclip, pen, rattled around on the console as the current increased in the monster coil behind them.
They went into the cockpit and squeezed themselves between the navigator and the pilots, getting down on their knees to look past shoulders to the outside. Only two bright stars were showing in the blackness, each window only a foot square, three inches of lutracine polymer and an interference film between them and vacuum.
They were no sooner settled in than the pilot announced, “Charged.”
“Coil steady at four hundred. T up by twenty, and rising.”
“We need bigger vanes on this ship,” grumbled Trae. “I want no T increase up to five hundred meg in the production model. We should be able to cycle regularly at that current.”
“Yes, sir. T still rising. I recommend we jump,” said the engineer.
They craned their necks to look out the windows. “Do it,” said Trae.
The same sensation, as if they’d made a long blink or drifted into a daydream. The stars outside disappeared, but as they did there was a tremendous flash of green, extending out in front of the ship in a cone. An ellipsoid flashed as if on fire in blues and reds, then flickered to blackness as the stars appeared again unchanged, at least to the naked eye.
The instruments said otherwise.
“By the Good Hand of The Source”, murmured the engineer.
“What?” Trae blinked hard to clear away a residual image of green.
“The tables say forty-four-three, sir. We jumped over forty light years that time. T went up to three twenty K, but is already back down to two-eighty.”
“We’ve overshot Elderon by sixteen light years,” said the pilot.
Myra was scribbling notes. “Not quite exponential, but close.”
“Good,” said Trae. “On the way back we can fill in some more data points, keeping the coil current where we had it.”
The pilot turned around to look at him. “Did you see all the fireworks out there? Did you?”
“Yes, we did. I’d sort of hoped to see something like that at half charge of the plenum.”
“It was at forty percent,” said the pilot. “What is it?”
“I think it was the very beginning of a branegate,” said Trae.
“Like the Grand Portal,” added Myra, “only a lot smaller. When we pinch space we create a singularity, as if an infinite mass is there. Additional energy opens up the pores of space, the pores of the brane connecting us to another universe at that point. A branegate was starting to form, but we didn’t have enough energy left to form it, and certainly not enough to keep it stable.”
“For this ship it’s a bad thing, an energy loss that could have gone into a longer jump,” said Trae.
“Oh, maybe ten percent loss,” Myra quickly added. “It won’t matter on a Guppy.” She handed the pilot a slip of paper. “Could we return to Elderon in three jumps at those values? It’ll really help me to fill out my curves.”
Trae suppressed a chuckle, thinking that Myra didn’t need any help in filling out her curves. “The Guppy is that pregnant fish-looking ship that was in orbit near us when we left port.”
Myra gave him a mock-stern look. She’d heard his thought, but taken it as a compliment. “We expect that ship to open stable branegates and jump a hundred times farther than this one,” she said. “Our thanks to you and your crew, sir. We’re having a very good day here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the pilot, and read Myra’s note, then, “If you don’t have a test pilot yet for that new ship, I’d sure like to fly it. Wil Dietz is the name, and my crew comes with me.”
“Got it,” said Trae, “but let’s get this ship into production while we’re at it.”
They went back to sit with the engineer again. Three jumps were made back to Elderon, Myra making predictions from her data each time. She was off twenty percent the first time, ten on the second and the third time, a jump of four light-years, was right on the money. The curves were simple power laws, she explained. Later she would find a special function that fit better.
When they came back into orbit around Elderon, they saw a swarm of workers on the Guppy. During active testing they had traveled one hundred and nine light years in something over three hours. “We should move right into production,” said Myra. “Add the vanes you want. Without pushing too hard, at four hundred light years a day, it’s only five months to the core.”
Her enthusiasm was real, and justified. “Just wait til we fly Guppy,” said Trae, and they were like two kids again, playing with fascinating, expensive and very dangerous toys, for the ships were also weapons of war, a thing they’d not looked at yet.
A butterfly-shaped shuttle kite met them in orbit, and they spent another two hours on a leisurely, helical-pathed float down through the atmosphere of Elderon to make a soft landing at the private port of Zylak Industries. Meza was there to greet them with Wallace and several of the engineers. All were overjoyed by the results of the tests. There were hugs, handshakes and backslaps all around. Wallace hugged Myra, and glowed red when she kissed him on the cheek.
There was a two-hour debriefing in a conference room, everyone taking notes. Myra did a quick calculation and suggested the vane areas be scaled up by two to three times. Another engineer said it was closer to two, and they later settled on that.
Lots of questions about the green glow and flashes observed, and surprise when Trae said it was the first flicker of a branegate. Myra backed him up with her calculations from supersymmetry models. Branegate formation energy for the Grand Portal was thousands of times greater than what either the test ship or the Guppy could generate, but that was for a stable gate. For a small gate the calculations gave a range of energies, and what they’d reached in the tests was just below the edge of it.
“Why was it so visible forward, and not all around the ship?” someone asked. “During jump, the whole ship was in the singularity.”
“Remember this was excess energy being used beyond the requirements of the jump,” said Myra. “The field follows the shape of the ship, and the energy density is highest at the nose. That’s why the snout is on the Guppy. That ship will give us a branegate, I’m sure of it.”
A young engineer raised his hand. “If it’s a shaped field, it can be projected forward, so what happens if something is there?”
“If we make a branegate where the object is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess that something goes away to another universe. There’s only gravity with the exotic matter; I suppose some photon showers from photinos. No, you’d just go away.”
Everybody laughed. It seemed like an amusing idea at the time.
They went to more mundane matters. Myra insisted on more tests when the new vanes were installed. If all went well, they would move straight to production, were already tooled for it. As for the Guppy, current timeline gave six months for working tests and another six to production if everything worked perfectly the first time.
The meeting ended, and the engineers stood to leave. Meza and Wallace remained seated, motioned both Anton and Myra to sit down again. The door closed, and they were alone.
“Something else,” said Meza. “It’s personal, about you, Anton.”
“Oh, I should go,” said Myra, and moved her chair to stand up.
Trae grasped her forearm. “No, I want you to stay.”
She sat down again, but looked embarrassed. Meza smiled, and so did Wallace, a bit unusual for him.
“Wel
l, while you’ve been darting around in space, we’ve received results from some fine detective work our security people have been doing. One man in particular, he has good contacts on Galena and Gan and has apparently done a whiz of a job in the archives. He wants to see you at your apartment tonight, so be there.
“Anyway, we know for sure now who arranged for the murder of Trae, and probably why. We know who hired the assassins, and how they were paid. We know that same person is siphoning information and data on our jump craft and sending it to Gan.”
“We’ve intercepted and altered most of it,” said Wallace quickly, “but some good stuff got through. Gan will be working to build a duplicate of what you tested today.”
“Who on Gan?” asked Anton.
“Gan, the government, the new president they freely elected. Also the richest man on the planet. Pretends to be a believer, goes to church, even set up a council of Bishops to provide guidelines for lawmaking. Calls himself a Bishop, but under all of it he’s nothing more than a thief, liar, conspirator and now murderer. He ordered your murder. Probably wanted your father dead, too, but didn’t get to him in time. A man on our own trustee’s board arranged the assassination, and has been sending him information.”
Little bells were going off in Trae’s head. Council of Bishops. Something his father had said. He’d told both Meza and Wallace about the conversations with him. “If he thinks of himself as a Bishop, we’re dealing with a zealot. I don’t see how he could know about the invasion. It’s too far away.”
“Unless it was planned ahead. Azar Khalil goes back to the early years when your father was preaching freedom on Gan. He might even have arrived at the same time. I’ll give you all I have on him, and on the man he’s been working with. His family also goes back to the founding times, but here, not on Gan. Run this by your father. Maybe there’s a connection with what’s happening on the other side.”
Meza pushed a file across the table to him. “It’s all there. Get back to us soon with anything Leonid can add. This isn’t going to stop, and there’s no defense for it, only offense, and against a sovereign planetary government. We have to keep the new jump technology out of his hands.”
“Or kill him,” added Wallace, a man not known for liberal views on anything.
“We’re not in that business, Wallace,” said Meza.
“The new guy is. Let him handle it.”
Meza shook his head. “The new guy, as he puts it, is John Haight, and he’s the one coming to see you tonight. He wants to meet with you alone.”
“I’ll be there,” said Trae, and glanced at Myra.
“I’ll be at work. A lot of extrapolations to do for Guppy.” She pushed back her chair, and stood up.
Call me when you’re finished with him.
Okay.
“Well, we’ve had a great day, but if you think this was a breakthrough just wait until Guppy flies.”
“Ugliest ship I’ve ever seen,” said Meza, and laughed.
“Looks aren’t everything,” quipped Wallace. “Take me, for example.”
Myra just shook her head at him.
He was exhausted, but still giddy from the events of the day. Trae’s dinner in the cafeteria was a synthburger and protein bar, and he took a taxi home. His apartment complex was a two-story square of units around a central plaza with a pool and scalding sauna he used every evening before sleep. Twice he’d talked to his parents from there, and was eager to talk to them again. The fleet of The Bishops would have made transit by now, and be hurtling towards them at half light speed. Plenty of time, one might think, but no time for sloth.
His second floor apartment overlooked the pool. The sun was just setting when he let himself in. The air smelled of lavender and sandalwood, masking the old odors of overcooked, frozen dinners. A living room, dining room, bedroom and kitchen were spread over a thousand square feet, roomy and comfortable for just him. His computer was in the dining room, and with peripherals filled the area. A holoviewer in the front room was rarely used, and a table in front of a couch was heaped with technical journals. He ate at a small table in the kitchen.
He changed clothes, trading suit for swim trunks and a loose-fitting shirt, and settled himself in front of his computer. The model he and Myra had been working on several nights before was still there. Before his eyes the model was changing, a complex array of geometrical shapes rotating, shifting positions, their intersections representing solutions to families of equations. Myra was working on it at her station in the plant, and upgrading his file as she progressed. They often worked together at a distance; talking in geometries, visualizing, and letting the machines do the work. Trae prided himself in right-brain visualization, but was no match for Myra when it came to calculating. What the machines did exactly in minutes, Myra could do to a good approximation in her head in only seconds.
She’d been to his apartment once. They’d worked for a while, but drifted into talk about anything but work, and nothing got done. They were becoming quite close, and both knew it. The relation could grow at its own pace, but the work had to be done and was their focus, now.
A group of four toroids rotated suddenly on the screen, changing intersections with themselves, and a long cylinder pierced all of them. Myra was deep in supersymmetry, trying to model the very pores of the brane separating their universe from another. He watched, fascinated, and—
There was a sudden rapping on his door, slow but firm.
Trae opened the door quickly, having been warned about a visit. At first sight, the man standing there evoked caution. Tall, slender, his dark eyes were deep-set above a hawkish nose. Thin lips, and a sharp chin, he had a dangerous look. His mouth curved into an attempt at a smile, and failed.
“I’m John Haight, Mister Zylak. Meza said you were expecting me.”
“Yes, come in,” said Trae, and closed the door behind them. Haight smelled like oil and burnt insulation, the odor of his clothing. He was dressed like a workman, with heavy shirt, pants and boots, and he carried a metal box that looked like a toolkit.
“I don’t use Zylak. The last name is Denal. I’m Anton Denal.”
“Just so you know that I know who you are,” said Haight, and put down the toolbox.
“What’s that for?” asked Trae, and pointed at the box.
“I’m a repairman, a plumber. You’re having a problem with your sink.”
“Oh.”
“Actually I’m here to brief you on what I’ve found out about your recent demise. Welcome back, by the way. You’re looking well.”
Something about the man was vaguely familiar, but Trae couldn’t place it. He was sure he’d never seen this man before. “Thank you,” he said. “You’re part of the security division?”
“I work with it as a consultant.”
“Okay,” said Trae, and smiled. He sat down by the computer, and motioned for the man to sit in the chair beside him. “So, what have you found?”
“You’re an important person. The president of Gan, Azar Khalil, wanted you dead, and it was done. His accomplice is a trustee of our company, and I think the men are related, going back to the other side. Their families appear at exactly the same time in the archives, just after Leonid Zylak began his mission on Gan.”
“I looked in the archives, and didn’t see any of that,” lied Trae. “You must have other sources.”
“I do. Some on Gan, a few on Galena.”
“Priests?”
“Only two. Few people go back as far as your father, and The Church of The Faithful wasn’t even around then. It came a few years later, interestingly enough, not here, but on Gan, about the time I think a previous incarnation of Azar Khalil arrived.”
The familiarity was growing stronger and stronger. “I missed a lot in the archives, or the people you know have prodigious memories.”
“They do. Long ago the trustee involved in your murder had a brother on the other side. That brother was a Bishop of The Church, a prominent Bishop, but The Church wa
s not so strong then. It preached love, and had no ambitions for power. A few disagreed with that.”
“These people remember all that?” Trae’s pulse rose. The piercing eyes, the cadence of speech, all so—
“I remember it. I was there on the other side, a novice in The Church. I remember Azar Khalil as the first Bishop of Kratola. I think The Church sent him after your father to gain a foothold in the colonies. And he’s managed to make a substantial fortune while doing it. We even removed the Emperor of Gan for him, restoring democracy, or so we thought. Now he’s taken power under the guise of democracy, but it’s for The Church.”
“Who’s we?”
“You, the Zylak family. You’re the enemy of The Church. It was seen that way on Kratola. It still is.”
“You don’t get any of this from the archives, or other people’s memories. As much as I think it possible, it’s conjecture without proof.” Trae’s pulse was racing, now, Haight’s eyes locked onto his.
“Your father remembers all of it. And do you really think you’re the only person who meets with him on a flower-covered hillside? Only Trae would believe that.”
“You’ve talked to my father?”
“Why not? We’ve been responsible for you since the day you were first born. Only the bodies change.”
Now John Haight really smiled, and the darkness in his eyes went away.
“Petyr?” said Trae, and his voice quavered.
“Hello again,” said John Haight.
CHAPTER 33
In the first youth of Leonid Zylak, ten thousand souls left Kratola and its crowds to search for opportunities in another universe. Others had gone before them, and had never been heard from again. Even with ships cruising at half-light speed and capable of light-year jumps, the distances were too vast for communication.
This time was different. The new colonists vowed they would keep in touch with their home world by settling the first habitable worlds they found. This was not so easy a task as they thought, for it was one hundred and eighty years before they found a system with a suitable world. Many lived out their final lives on board ship, having lost hope of ever setting foot on land again.
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