One Jump Ahead-ARC

by Mark L. Van Name

  "That's not my problem. Jasmine is safe, and you kept your word. We're done."

  "Yes," he said, "we are."

  As he walked me to the door, he said, "Mayor Barnes told me about your arrangement with him. I understand you'll need some . . . parts."

  I should have known better than to think a bureaucrat could keep his mouth shut. Barnes was already cozying up to his new corporate partner. "I'm fine without them."

  He smiled. "That's your choice, of course. Should you change your mind, I can recommend a dealer on Lankin named Osterlad. He should be able to help you. He's proven useful to our company from time to time in the past." My wallet signaled the incoming data, and I thumbed the clean-and-accept option. A source for Lobo's broken parts might prove valuable.

  "All I want right now," I said as I closed the door behind me, "is to wrap this up and find a new place to continue my vacation."

  As we stood in his office less than an hour later, Barnes proved as curious as Slake and no more gracious.

  "I received an update from Kelco's counsel, and it's amazing," he said. "We have the month to prepare, and Slake is leaving."

  "That was the deal," I said.

  "Yes, but how did you do it?"

  "That wasn't the deal."

  "I know you're not sticking around, but I'll have to handle the Gardeners after you're gone. Knowing how you handled them could make my job easier."

  "Your job is not my problem," I said. "You have what you wanted. I did my part. Now, do yours."

  He sat in his desk chair, leaned back, and said, "I hope you appreciate that what you asked wasn't a simple thing to accomplish. Do you have any clue how hard it was to get Coalition permission to transfer a weapon that sophisticated? Not to mention how hard its absence will be to explain to the people here."

  "None of that is my problem, either. Nor was what I had to do your problem. Are you going to hold up your end," I asked as I leaned over his desk until our faces were level, "or will this have to turn ugly?"

  Barnes cleared his throat, tapped a few times on the display built into his desk—a nice antique touch, I thought, to go with the rest of his office décor—and said, "Complete the transfer." Turning to me, he said, "It's done."

  I took out my wallet and checked. The transfer was complete. The title was in my wallet, along with all the relevant permits, codes, instructions, and keys. After my wallet swept the information for intruders and contamination, I had it back up all of the data, along with Slake's draft, to the local bank.

  "Then we're done," I said.

  As I opened the door, I turned back to him. "Macken really is a beautiful planet. I don't think these thirty days will do you any good at all, but I wish you luck. I hope you take care of this place." I thought back to my childhood on Pinkelponker and tried to remember how much I had loved that place as a child, but aside from a few scattered good memories all that remained was pain from the loss of Jennie and anger at the government that had taken her. I couldn't think of a single place that meant as much to me as Barnes claimed Macken mattered to him. "I truly wish you luck."

  Chapter 5

  I decided to ride in Lobo to the jump gate. I could have sent him separately and taken the shuttle, but I figured it was time to get to know my new weapon. When I was aboard and no longer had to deal with Slake and Barnes, I realized that rescuing Jasmine had left me upbeat, happy to have done something unequivocally good for a change. No one dead, no one even hurt, a girl back with her father, and a big payment in the bargain—everything had worked out perfectly.

  Even Lobo seemed content. He took the news that I owned him about as well as I could have hoped: "So what does this mean to me?" he asked.

  "You won't be stuck here," I said, "maybe you'll see some action, and, with any luck at all, we'll fix you."

  "Excellent," he said.

  For a change, I appreciated his emotion programming.

  "Where are we going?" he asked.

  I thought about Slake's recommendation. Even if Osterlad didn't check out, Lankin had a large enough population that it was sure to maintain a flourishing underground market. I could find someone there who could get me the new weapons control complex Lobo needed. Buying it would take all the money I'd made from Slake, plus some of my own, but then Lobo would be whole. Having a working PCAV would have to be a competitive advantage when it came time to go back to courier work. Plus, I felt I owed Lobo for what he had done to help me before I owned him.

  I would make him whole. We'd head to Lankin.

  Before we did, though, I wanted a last look at some of the Macken beaches. "To the shore," I said, "then up to the jump gate, and on to Lankin."

  I had Lobo follow a lazy trajectory along the shoreline. Most of the territory on this section of the coast appeared untouched, tall trees giving way to lower growth, which in turn yielded to perfect white sand, and then the ocean. As we went higher, I could see the northernmost settlement, a town about half the size of Glen's Garden. Some sort of celebration, perhaps a tourist show, was in progress, fireworks painting the air over the town. We were more than high enough to be out of range of any shells they might be shooting, so I had Lobo hover for a few minutes and open a viewing port in the floor so I could watch the show.

  I'd never seen a fireworks display from above. The projectiles initially looked like missiles so stupid they didn't know how to run evasive routes, shooting upward with long, sometimes colored smoke trails. The dull gray arcs peaked, the missiles winked out, and a split second later, flowers of color burst into the air. Golden crescents flashed below us, mad spirals of reds and blues and whites pinwheeled across my vision, and multicolored gee-gaws danced over the sky. The shapes dissolved as the flaming colors dashed away to the ground, some fading slowly like candles burning down, others winking out like lights snapped suddenly off. Observers in the town could no doubt apprehend more of the shape of each display than we could, but the show was still lovely and awe-inspiring, all the more glorious for the mixture of man-made beauty and natural wonders—the fireworks, the forest, the beach, and the ocean—that you could truly appreciate only from on high. I tried to fix the scene in my mind; more than anything else, the image of Jasmine safe at home and this combination of sights were what I wanted to remember of Macken.

  "The displays in firefights are more intense," Lobo said.

  "Yes," I agreed, "but not as varied in color, and never as big a visual treat. More importantly, these make me happy. Nothing about a firefight is fun."

  When the display ended and the only lights in the area were the glowing pinpricks marking windows in the town's buildings, Lobo shot out of the atmosphere and into space. He closed the floor portal, and I strapped into an acceleration couch. I told him to alert me when we were close enough for a clear look at the gate.

  I've never been one to join a religion, nor have I ever found anything I was willing to pray to, but each time I see one of the jump gates, I understand for a moment why Gatists worship them. The people who discovered the first gate in the asteroid belt in Earth's solar system must have felt the same sense of creepy awe I did. Every jump gate we find is different. They vary in mass and color and, of course, the number and the sizes of the apertures they provide, but they all share several key features.

  Each resembles a collection of huge, interwoven Möbius strips. The apertures—the holes formed by the weaving strips—range in size from barely large enough for a small shuttle to so huge the biggest spaceship can move easily through them with plenty of clearance.

  Each gate is utterly smooth, every centimeter of its surface apparently a perfect part of the whole; no one has ever spotted a seam or connection point.

  The gates are without visible physical flaws: None ever has a pockmark or a scrape or a scar of any sort. Nothing ever damages the gates. They seem to tolerate but not suffer from simple collisions with natural objects, such as meteors.

  Attempt to hit them with anything man-made, however, and highly coherent energy
flashes from points all over the gate's surface and coalesces into a beam that vaporizes the offending object.

  The gates also have no tolerance for violence anywhere near them. Launch a weapon within a gate's neutral zone—a sphere with the gate as its center and a radius of one light-second—and both you and all your weapons get the same treatment. It doesn't matter if you're firing at a gate or shooting anywhere else within its sphere of influence; you must keep conflicts away from them.

  Gates inspire that kind of thinking, the notions that they don't tolerate this or don't like that, that they're living things with preferences. Those ideas may be right, or they may not: We have no clue where the gates came from, or whether they're creatures or machines or some other new thing for which we don't have the right terms.

  What we do know, though, is that if matter enters one of their apertures, it emerges almost instantly from an aperture of the same size somewhere else, somewhere typically many light-years away. Ships must proceed through an aperture in single file, and they must not collide, because gates interpret collisions as violence and destroy all the vessels involved. Ships from opposite sides of an aperture also must take turns; put two ships in an aperture at the same time, and both emerge as wreckage the consistency of dust.

  Humanity learned these facts the hard way. Now every gate has an associated refueling and scheduling station that monitors and controls all jumps through it.

  Low-energy beams, such as radio signals, pass right through apertures and stay in the same local space, as if the apertures weren't there at all. We don't know why they don't make the jump, but they don't. Thus, the gates provide instant transport but not instant communication. Of course, firing a high-energy beam, such as a laser pulse, at an aperture will bring immediate and fatal retaliation, so no one's running any more experiments in this area.

  Every single gate has proven to be relatively close to but not easily visible from a planet suitable for humans. Some Gatists say the gates are material manifestations of God's desire for us to colonize the universe; others claim the gates are God, or at least physical aspects of God. Most people are simply glad to have the gates, though many fear that one day those who made them will come back and demand a toll.

  I know the gates work, and that's good enough for me.

  Each gate glows a single color, every spot on its surface the exact same hue as every other spot. The gate perched behind Macken's smaller moon, Trethen, and silhouetted against a bright stellar background was a very pale green that I found to be a nice blend of the colors of the planet's oceans and forests. Most gates were far bolder, less natural colors. I've seen a blazingly pink gate; if nothing else would have stopped me from being a Gatist, that would have done it. I can't picture myself ever worshipping something pink.

  As I stared at Macken's gate, I felt the same humble amazement I did each time I neared one. This gate currently had only three active apertures. The entire structure dwarfed Lobo, each aperture big enough to permit the passage of a ship ten times Lobo's size. Off to my left I could see the new aperture growing. It was currently small enough that Lobo wouldn't come close to fitting through it, its surface the dull gray nothingness of all new apertures. When it was ready, the aperture would turn the purest of blacks, the color space would be if there were no stars. Pass through the aperture, though, and you'd be in another part of the universe with a different set of stars shining before you.

  The scheduling station told us that a couple dozen ships on our side and as many on the other were ahead of us in the jump queue, so we had about twelve hours to kill. Lobo was set for fuel, his reactors able to run for decades without intervention, so I decided to dock and see if I could pick up any interesting news in the station's main lounge.

  Every gate station runs one. In the bigger gates, the lounges are recreational complexes bordering on hotels, with rooms available by the hour or the day, bars, restaurants, gyms, and stores selling crap planetary souvenirs at inflated prices. With only three apertures, this station didn't have enough traffic for anything so elaborate to be able to turn a profit, so the lounge amounted to a restaurant/bar combo with room for maybe fifty folks. A couple dozen were there when I entered.

  I spent more than a day's food budget on Macken to buy a bottle of water and a sandwich made of some local fish with a firm, meaty consistency. At a table in the back corner, I ate slowly and tuned as best I could into the conversations around me. Some of the monitors scattered on the room's walls blared the official local news, which I didn't trust but watched now and again anyway. Other displays showed the ships coming and going through the apertures. To my surprise, the sandwich was good, the taste strong and a pleasant reminder of some of the meals I'd eaten planetside.

  Given Barnes' reaction, I believed Slake was telling the truth about Kelco agreeing to the thirty-day delay, but that agreement wasn't slowing the influx of Kelco people and matériel. Almost every ship coming through the aperture from Lankin bore the Kelco logo. Most of the ships oozing through the other two apertures, including some very large vessels, were also Kelco's. The company was probably importing modular-construction plants so it could ramp up local manufacturing very quickly.

  "Maybe the new one will let us jump straight to Earth," said an unreasonably sentimental man eating alone at a table a few meters from me.

  I'd never been to Earth and had no real desire to go there; I prefer planets with a lot less wear and tear on them. The guy was dreaming anyway. All the apertures in each known gate connected two adjacent sectors of space. This gate linked two parts of the edge of the galaxy far from Earth and under Frontier Coalition control. If its new aperture were to open onto Earth's solar system, it would be the first ever to bridge two regions of space so far apart. Not likely. We may not know anything about the origin of the gates, but they are nothing if not predictable.

  I was down to my last two bites of sandwich when a man walked slowly into the bar, carefully examined each of its occupants in a controlled left-to-right sweep, spotted me, and headed toward my table. He had Kelco written all over him—literally: In the latest corporate fashion for up-and-coming midlevel execs, glowing tattoos of the Kelco logo crawled around his face, eased gently up, down, and around his neck, and ran circles around the backs of his hands. He was a pale, wispy version of Slake: taller than I suspect his original genes intended, with a skin-and-bones body less powerful-looking than Slake's and hair so blond it verged on white. Though he moved slowly and methodically, his constantly fidgeting hands betrayed his nervousness.

  Conventional wisdom is that you have to belong to some big group, a conglomerate or a government coalition, if you want to make it in this universe, but it's been a long time since I've been able to picture myself linked into anybody's chain of command. I've tried it, of course—you don't get to be my age without having tried a bit of everything—but the only organizations that ever worked for me were the mercenary groups, and then only because they were either extremely functional organizations or not going to last long on whatever world they found themselves. Being a soldier had plenty of downsides, of course, and I'm sick of killing, so now I work freelance and take my chances on my own. This new Kelco visitor looked like one of those people who defined themselves by the company they'd joined, so I instantly disliked him.

  He walked up to my table and stood, clearly waiting for acknowledgment. I ignored him and chewed on the second-to-last bite of my food, curious about how long he'd wait.

  Not long.

  "Mr. Moore?" he asked tentatively.

  I swallowed, stuck the other bit of sandwich in my mouth, and leaned back, watching him. I chewed slowly, appreciating the flavor of the fish for as long as I could.

  He crossed his arms and tapped the fingers of his left hand on the outside of his right arm, unable to keep still even when trying to appear resolute. "Mr. Moore?" He was a bit louder this time.