The Endless Sky

by Adam P. Knave

  He stopped, hoping the Sweepers would get it, and they did, copying the motion and indication, raising one digit and pointing, then a closed appendage and pointing at nothing. That settled Mud worked on mapping them to yes and no, by building in a ‘do not want.’

  He threw his arms up as if to protect himself. The Sweepers recoiled the first time, and he held up a closed hand. “Bee, try and hand me something,” he said quietly. She grabbed a handheld sensor array and offered it to him. He held his arms up to protect himself again, and she lowered the device.

  “Again,” he said, lowering his arms. She offered it a second time and he took it. Then he handed it back. “Once more,” he said, accepting it, handing it back, and then throwing his arms up the second time she offered it.

  “That should do it, I think,” he told her, looking at the Sweepers. They watched, no longer recoiling, and acting as if they understood him.

  Now that basic terms were established, Mud let them know that they did not, in any way, want the creature brought to them and started again, trying to describe the Fold. The Sweepers seemed to understand this time, repeating no over and over.

  They pointed at the creature and mimed a complex series of actions. “Are they saying the creature caused the Fold?” Bee asked. “Can it cause another just for a minute?”

  “Yes to the first, but I think it’s more complex than that. So no to the second.”

  They continued, trying to not get frustrated with each other. A bunch of the Sweepers chattered to their leader about something, growing impatient. They pointed, raising their voices. Mud began to understand they were upset about the pellets. Some of them moved off, angrily it seemed to Mud and Bee, gathering other Sweepers up to move along toward a large collection of pellets.

  While they had been ‘talking,’ more pellets had started to appear from where they’d been destroying them previously, though nowhere near as many as other sections of their space.

  Bee started to try to mime questions about the pellets, but the Sweepers left facing them would only point at Mud and Bee in response. “All right, let’s focus on getting out of here, what do you say?” she asked Mud.

  “For now it’s the best bet, but I’m getting a feeling about this I don’t like. I’ll explain when we’re back in our universe. I want more data.”

  “Agreed.”

  Mud tried to, with Bee’s help, mime their need to leave. The fairly complex concept took a while, but Bee thought they’d made some progress. Sadly, if they had, the only answer they got was the equivalent of a shrug.

  “I have an idea of how to get out, but you won’t like it,” Mud said. “They won’t like it either, I think.”

  “So good chance we’re going to die, then?”

  “Don’t focus on the downside. Look, the GravPacks think we’re going above light speed, but we’re not. So let’s push them to above light speed for real.”

  “How,” Bee said, trying to sound calm, “will that help? Except to show them what happens when a GravPack explodes? They’re already whining like they’re pinned on max, if we push them—”

  “I know,” Mud admitted, “that’s why no one will like it. But, you have to admit, it should pop us out of this universe.”

  “Mud, what you’re thinking may well pop us out of any universe. For good.”

  “It’ll do something, and if we’re both right about everything—”

  “We haven’t discussed what either of us think—”

  “But I’m confident we’re on the same page,” Mud said, setting his GravPack to ask hers for slave control.

  “So let’s discuss this first, then the dumb plan.”

  “The GravPacks aren’t acting like they’re moving faster than light, they actually are. That map to what you’ve got?” he asked.

  “Pretty much, but that doesn’t make your plan any better,” she said, watching the Sweepers that remained near them.

  “I don’t pretend to deeply understand it—you can science it to death later, but for now, I remain pretty damn sure that if we try to go faster than light when we already are, we should loop back.”

  “That’s...that’s not how it works.”

  “All right, how do the GravPacks go faster than light to begin with?” he asked. They still spoke softly, so they wouldn’t alarm the Sweepers.

  “Not knowing one thing doesn’t mean you get to guess at the other.” Bee glared at Mud, wanting to slap him. He did this, got ahead of himself, she thought, and though he’d slowly gotten better, he still wasn’t good at listening too often.

  “So what happens if we do this?” he asked, noticing the Sweepers that were left with them had started to drift closer. “Because I think we have a small window here.”

  “I don’t know, no one knows.” Bee clocked the Sweepers’ advance as well and checked her urge to drift away from them. “And I don’t want to find out, especially.”

  “If we’re natively moving faster than light, Bee, we can’t slow down. There’s no mechanism for it. Our only choice is to go faster.”

  “I know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got there a while back, but kept looking for an out. This is going to be ugly, Mud.” The Sweepers kept closing in on them as they talked. More of them had wandered away to deal with pellets, or other business, leaving only a handful. Neither Mud nor Bee wanted a fight, though. They really didn’t want a fight. Neither of them could think of a good reason to have one unless forced, and if forced, not only did neither of them have an idea how to harm the Sweepers, they were afraid to try.

  If they did try, and managed to hurt a Sweeper, they would still be stuck in a different universe with no backup, no escape plan, and limited weaponry. This wasn’t a fight they could win, if forced to have it. So running stood out as the only good option.

  “I know,” he agreed. “So tell me, how do we do it safely?”

  “Honestly,” she said, thinking quickly, “I hang onto you, we use one GravPack, not both. If yours blows or comes too close to it, we ditch it and hopefully we can get clear of the blast.”

  “Sounds good. Grab on,” he told her, trying to work out a course that would allow them to attain the speed needed.

  “Wait!” Bee shouted in his ear. “Hold on! Look!”

  Mud looked to where she pointed and saw a harsh glow in the distance. “Is that a Fold?”

  “It looks like it might be,” she said. “Can we ditch this party and try for it?”

  Mud tried to mime their intent to the Sweepers. To their credit they looked, saw the light, and looked back before giving Mud a simple ‘no.’

  “Not good,” Mud said. Bee just muttered a nonverbal agreement. “All right, we’re gone,” he said, finding the nearest decent target for a gravity lock and setting his GravPack. Bee set her own coordinates and they launched forward.

  Still moving far slower than they were used to, Mud suggested they try and push their luck and up the throttle. Both their GravPacks complained but complied, and they lurched forward faster still, if uncertainly.

  The light they approached stayed dimmer than the light that had shone from the Fold they’d used to crossover in the first place, but they still made for it. No large creatures floated near the glow, at least. Looking behind them, Bee saw the Sweepers following and said so.

  “Are they gaining?” Mud asked.

  She looked again. “Nope.”

  “Are they aiming those guns at us?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then we don’t care yet. Let them come along.”

  A wide blast of energy shot over their heads. “I thought,” Mud said, “you said they weren’t aiming anything at us.”

  “They weren’t when I looked,” Bee told him. She glanced back. “They are now.”

  “I noticed, Bee. Thanks. We need to push it. Stay sub-light...well, relative...shit, you know what I mean, but get close.” They pushed their throttles harder still, changing anchor points and aiming themselves directly at the b
urst of light.

  As they got closer, Mud realized his sense of distance here landed way farther off than he’d thought. Between the red- and blue-shifting light, the general unease, and everything else about the place, he hadn’t pieced it together until they flew toward the light. From his normal judge of distances in the vastness of space—reference points and relative sizes that he’d learned when he was only a child—they’d come halfway to where the light should be.

  Yet the light sat right in front of them, only seconds away. The fact of it hurt Mud’s head and managed to make him feel nauseated when he tried to reconcile it. Right then he decided he hated other universes. He preferred the laws of reality and physics to stay where they were damn well supposed to be.

  Either way, he decided he’d accept that their goal stood closer than he’d thought, even if it made him want to throw up a bit. “Bee, we’ll enter the light in five...four...”

  “There’s no Fold,” she said, bracing herself.

  “Nope, so let’s see where this goes. It seems like a pre-Fold, or maybe an unpopped one. Wait,” Mud pointed, “is that—”

  “Shit! Mud, that’s a planet! Inside the glow! That’s a planet!”

  “Look at it, it’s not fuzzy like the stuff we’ve seen here. I think it’s on the other side. Either way, we’re going for it.”

  “If we hit a planet,” Bee said quickly, “at this speed...no shield in existence will help us.”

  “We’re not going to hit the planet. Slave to my pack, I’ve had to do this before.”

  “You’ve what?!” Bee yelled, slaving her GravPack quickly, letting him take over controls.

  “Not the other-universe part, but planet fall at this speed. I think this speed. Whatever! Trust me! It was one of Dad’s drills.”

  “Of course it was,” she said, thinking again about how strange his childhood had been, and hoping that wasn’t her last thought in life.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE LIGHT ENGULFED THEM.

  A dizzying transition. The scalding fires of the edges of atmosphere. Mud and Bee headed toward a planet at a velocity so close to the speed of light they shared a mailbox.

  As they entered the light, he called up his GravPack’s HUD and selected the nearest large gravity well, building an arc away from it. He knew the selection wouldn’t kick in until they were already in the edges of the planet’s atmo.

  Mud and Bee reentered their home universe, GravPacks screaming as they tried to shield away the heat of an atmosphere catching fire around them while calculating and compensating for the turn Mud had set up.

  Neither of them could even consciously follow the curve as they slingshot away from the planet, pushing back out of the atmosphere and rocketing away from it. The extra speed, and the way the GravPacks adjusted for it, pushed them above light speed again for a few seconds, long enough for Mud to take stock.

  Not dead. In what looked to be the right universe. Hurtling away from the planet at about a sixty-degree angle and traveling far too fast. Mud cancelled all ties from the GravPacks and then reestablished them back to the planet they’d avoided, this time with regular physics in mind.

  “What did we just do?” Bee asked as they slowed and started to turn.

  “The HUD selector software takes a tick or two to respond,” Mud told her. “Normally it’s a small enough lag in the system you won’t ever notice it. But if you know you’re going too fast to be able to react, well, you can plan for it. Sort of.”

  “I don’t want to know how you drill for that, or what happens if you’re wrong. But I kind of do, you know?” Bee checked her sensor equipment, making sure nothing had gotten damaged in their universe reentry.

  “Set up someone below to catch, really,” Mud said, as if that settled matters.

  “At that speed? What if they miss?” All of her equipment checked out. She looked at the planet they had returned to, trying to place it from the stars nearby.

  “Have you seen my dad miss with a GravPack?”

  “No, Mud, I need you to realize this wasn’t normal. For any child. At all.” She laughed nervously, stopping suddenly when she realized where they were.

  Mud saw her face and clicked his tongue, “Yup. Welcome home.” Though born on Trasker Four, Bee had moved, with what survived of her planet’s population, to Bercuser when the Tsyfarians invaded. With the matter settled, Bee knew of a group exploring a migration back to what remained of Trasker Four, so they could rebuild there. She didn’t blame them.

  They came in for a landing and stood on a small hill, mist gathering below them. Bee scanned the mist and compared readings with the other data she’d collected. “Bercuser must have been relocating. That’s how it—”

  “That’s how it changes systems, yeah,” Mud agreed, shaking his head at the unfolding of the universe.

  “You knew?”

  “No way!” he told her, laughing. “Not until I realized what planet we almost hit.”

  “And the mist,” she held out a scanner and showed him the readings, “that’s what the mist is. It’s Other-Universe Stuff.”

  “Sweeperverse?” Mud asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We need a better name than Other Universe. But anyway, yeah, that makes a strange sort of sense.”

  “It does. The mist is a solid form of that glow, something in how the planet itself moves, a remnant. I mean, it didn’t come fully into the other universe—”

  “Sweeperverse.”

  “Nope, not sticking,” Bee told him, setting her GravPack for free flight and taking off in a slow arc, lazily starting to fly toward her new home city. Mud followed, working the implications through with her.

  “So they snort the mist, inhale it, and the difference in that stuff versus anything from our universe, it just—”

  “It just totally,” she said, nodding quickly, “interacts with their brains. Some of that stuff, at a molecular level, is moving faster than the speed of light, for a bit. While it decays, who knows what sort of tachyonic resonance it’s exhibiting.”

  “The worst part of this,” Mud said lightly, “is that we have to tell Olivet there’s science behind his visions and we believe in them a hell of a lot more now.”

  “Poor Mud, having to admit when he’s wrong.” They landed at the edge of Bee’s new home city, New Kromp, and walked to her apartment.

  “Hey, this place is nice.”

  “Trasker encampment. For now. And it isn’t like I’m ever here. When was the last time we had a total leave come up?” Bee let him in the front door and walked up a flight of stairs to her second-floor studio apartment. “I’m thinking of giving it up.”

  “Don’t. Please. Hold me to better leave time, but don’t let the Insertion Team be your only life.” He looked around her small place and sat on the edge of her dresser. The studio was a room only a little bigger than her quarters on the Ratzinger, a ten-by-twelve space. A kitchen and bathroom both split off from the main room. Besides the dresser, she had a bunch of boxes, a bed, and a small table with one chair. “Find a nicer place, and take breaks.”

  “This from you?” she asked, laying out her sensor equipment on the table. “Since when do you have a life outside of the team?”

  “I’m just saying, be smarter than me. Get a bigger place, hell, something big enough for you and Bushfield, maybe. Have a life.”

  “Now you sound like your mother.”

  “Great. So do we want to talk about the actual problem?” Mud tapped a few controls on his suit and read the results. Shaking his head, he looked back toward Bee.

  “You mean that neither of us has used a comm to call home?” She took a small scanner from the table, looked at the readout, and flipped it to Mud, arcing it cleanly through the air.

  He caught it and looked. “Sure, but before we knew long-range comms were out…”

  “Sweepers,” she said, darkly.

  “Sweepers,” he agreed.

  “The pellets had to be communications, right?”
Bee asked. “It lines up too easily.”

  “That’s the only thing that makes me think it might not be—it lines up.” Mud tossed the scanner back to Bee and hopped off her dresser, wandering into her tiny kitchen. “Except for the fact that our communications don’t go through other universes.”

  “You know something?” she said, wandering to the doorway of the kitchen, leaning on the frame. “I don’t know how long-range comms work. But they’ve always bothered me.”

  Mud ran some water, took off his goggles, and splashed his eyes. Blinking quickly, he settled his goggles back. “That’s a new one.”

  “What? They make no sense. Mud, they’re fairly instantaneous across distances that...the long-range comms have to be going faster than light.”

  “Of course,” he agreed, pouring himself a glass of water, and then one for her. “How else could we keep the Gov together across entire systems?”

  “And that,” she said, taking the offered glass from him, “doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not really,” he told her. He drained his glass and set it in the sink. “But I do think the comms are somehow what the Sweepers—”

  “No, hold on,” Bee said, walking back to the table covered in sensor equipment, “you can’t just ignore that the communications we use break the laws of physics. You can’t just ignore that.”

  “I really can,” he told her, following her back into the main room. “It’s a piece of this, sure, but we should get back to the Amalfi and—”

  “Mud!” Bee shouted. “We’re breaking the laws of physics...again...and I think this other universe is paying the price. We don’t get to ignore that.”

  “And we’re not—”

  “But you’re saying you don’t care how the comms work, and—”

  “No, I’m saying the fact that they do work doesn’t bother me. I agree we have to work it out now and see what’s going on. If we’re both right, then—well, if I had an answer, we wouldn’t be here. So let’s not be here. Let’s hard burn back to the Amalfi and start finding answers.”