“Chobainian Kern?” the tiny, silver-haired woman at the desk asked. She smiled when he nodded and gasped for breath. “You still have thirty-three seconds.” Then she winked.
Suddenly, Bain knew everything was going to be all right.
The tightness in his chest faded away completely. His heart slowed its frantic thumping. Bain swallowed, and the dryness left his mouth. He stumbled a little as he followed the woman through a door into the testing room, but he didn't mind at all.
The testing room was small, just large enough for the desk that held a pitcher of water and a cup, two plastic packets of crackers, dried fruit mix and cheese; a computer terminal; a stack of paper, scale ruler and erasable pens. A cushioned chair sat in front of it. The moment they stepped into the testing room, the computer screen lit up with a right-hand print outlined in blue. Bain knew this part from previous tests. He pressed his right hand into the outline, and waited for the computer to read his prints and identify him. It chimed three times to signal everything was ready. “You'll be allowed three rest breaks. Use them wisely,” the woman said. She smiled, nodded to him, and went back out the door.
“Please, Fi'in, help me do this right,” Bain whispered, as he sat down at the desk.
* * * *
Bain made few mistakes. He passed the test with high honors, even higher than Lin had made. That awed and startled him.
He made one notable mistake, though, and Captain Gil and Dr. Anyon were both there to read the test results and tease him about it.
Bain got the date wrong, when he filled out his personal information at the end of the test.
[Back to Table of Contents]
* * *
Chapter Five
“Ready?” Lin asked. Her voice showed just the slightest bit of strain. She didn't look at Bain, but kept her gaze fixed on the blinking bits of silver-tinted light that marked the Knaught Point as they approached.
Streaks of purple and gold zipped past the left side of the observation dome. Sparkles of green-blue danced and spun up near the top. Bain held on tight to his safety strap with one hand, and pressed his hand against his own control board with the other.
“Ready.” He nodded and tried to grin. The sweat trickled down his back faster than his shirt and the material covering the acceleration couch could absorb it.
Two hours ago, the alert had come through from a new sector of Commonwealth space infiltrated by the Mashrami. Usually when an alert went out, everyone moved to get away from that sector, and the Fleet gathered around each Knaught Point that led into it. This time, there would be no Fleet, only a single, specially-altered Spacer ship, followed three hours later by a squadron of Rangers.
The Mashrami in that sector were the advance scouts. If the aliens followed their established routine, the next phase of infiltration wouldn't follow for twenty days. That was twenty days in which the Rangers and their Spacer test pilots could play with the shields.
When the Fleet sent advance scouts into an area of space, they sent small, fast ships filled with deadly firepower. The Mashrami sent big, heavy ships that couldn't run to save their lives. Their weaponry was also huge. Anyone caught in the first blast of the energy flow was torn apart. Yet because it was so huge, the energy build-up before the weapon fired was a warning sign easily detectable even by half-burned sensors. If a ship had even minimal thrusters, they could get out of the way of the initial blast. The longer it took for the Mashrami to correct the aim, the weaker the energy blast, and the less damage it caused.
Bain reminded himself of those details as Lin guided Sunsinger to the Knaught Point. He tried to forget that Mashrami ships waited in the sector of space on the other side of that Knaught Point. It didn't really matter that they were slow and clumsy and bad shots—they were Mashrami. They wanted to destroy all Humans.
“Here we go,” Lin whispered, her voice cracking.
The silver sparkles of the Knaught Point dulled, then spread wide to fill the dome. For a fraction of a second, everything was silent. Then sound returned; the clicks and hums and pings and chimes of the navigational equipment and life support and sensors.
Bain held his breath, waiting for the alarms to blare warning. Nothing happened. Lin and Ganfer took Sunsinger through post-transition check. Bain went over the readings on his own board, checking for any stress damage to the ship, damage to programs or sensors or relays, but he did it without thinking. Every few seconds, he looked out the clear sides of the dome, straining his eyes for a glimpse of the Mashrami bearing down on them. It was ridiculous, he knew, because Ganfer would sense the aliens long before Bain could see them with his unaided eyes.
“Well, what do you think?” Lin said, startling him out of his thoughts.
“About what?” Bain stared down at his board, checking the readings again. Everything looked good, but for some reason that struck him as wrong. He looked at Lin and waited.
“Relax, Bain.” She wiped sweaty hair off her forehead, and pushed herself upright in her own acceleration couch. “The Mashrami are on the other side of the sector. They haven't even come close enough to our robot tracking station to force shut-down.”
“Oh.” He felt very stupid.
“That tracking station is the first test of the shield plates,” she continued. Lin tapped a few more buttons on her control panel, then swung it out of her way on its pivot arm. “If the Mashrami don't destroy it while it's in passive recording mode, we'll know at least that part of the experiment works. If they do destroy it ... well, we won't know until the robot is supposed to come out of shut-down, and it doesn't.”
“Then what do we do?”
“We fly very quietly and carefully until we catch up with Gil's squadron.” She pushed herself off the couch, and flew over to the ladder leading down into the bridge. “Come on, we have too much work to do to sit here stargazing.”
Bain followed, shivering a little as the cooler air hit his hot, sweat-drenched back. Somehow, it just didn't seem right that everything was so quiet and calm and normal.
He was grateful, though. He was glad they hadn't emerged from the Knaught Point, and found Mashrami ships sitting there, waiting for them with their weapons at full charge and ready to blast them into eternity.
If the Mashrami were on the other side of the sector, it could take more than a day to find them. Maybe it was the waiting that bothered Bain the most. Maybe the waiting, and the not-knowing.
In the middle of all this tension that made Bain sweat and tied his insides into knots, Lin smiled and went on with ship's business as if the next few days didn't bother her at all. He thought he knew Lin, how she reacted to trouble and danger. She pretended to be angry and fought when the situation wasn't a problem. She grew very quiet and calm at the really dangerous times. This was a new reaction.
Bain wondered if Lin didn't know how to react or act this time around. Didn't that scare her, too?
“I don't understand grown-ups at all,” Bain muttered, and flew over to the ladder to climb down after Lin.
* * * *
Within two hours, they had taken the ship through post-transition check, and headed out from the Knaught Point. In another hour, the Ranger ships would come through and follow the same course, but at a much slower speed. They had a delicate balance to maintain, keeping the Rangers close enough to Sunsinger to be of help if they ran into trouble, but far enough back that the Mashrami wouldn't sense them.
Bain didn't like it that the Rangers would have nearly thirty seconds of transmission lag between the time Sunsinger sent a message, and they received it. He told himself thirty seconds didn't matter that much. Bain didn't quite believe himself.
Who of all the Commonwealth, besides the first few teams of diplomats (who got themselves killed), had ever deliberately gone looking for the Mashrami? Bain wondered why he had thought it would be a wonderful, exciting, heroic adventure to help the Rangers with the shield tests. He wondered if Lin was having second thoughts now, too.
“Time
to test those passive sensors,” Lin said, when they were more than half a day of travel away from the Knaught Point.
Bain nodded and flipped the new switches installed along the far side of his half of the control panel. The new sensor dishes hiding just under the shield tiles all over Sunsinger came to life. The regular sensors shut down. Bain looked at the screens on the far wall to his right and directly in front of the control panel. Half went dead. The other half changed their images and graphs. They only recorded the information that came to them in echoes and energy waves, bursts of radiation and ripples in the electromagnetic carrier waves. The automatic analysis function had been turned off. Passive sensors only received; they didn't send out new, stronger, more specific scanner beams to analyze and decode what had come in. Theory said that those were the beams that attracted the Mashrami, and maybe even provoked them to attack.
“Lin, what if the Mashrami think our sensor beams are some form of nasty language?” Bain said.
“Hmm?” She turned from examining the screen directly in front of her. “Oh, I see what you mean.” Lin grinned and nodded. “We're just examining them, but to them it looks like we're sticking our tongues out, and using sign language to say something mean about their mothers.”
“Could be, couldn't it?”
“I'm sure the scientists back on Banner thought of that. Our own equipment can hardly detect passive sensors. It's safer.”
“Yeah, I know, but I feel like we're flying blind.” He gestured at the darkened screens.
“Flying blind.” She nodded. “Now, besides flying blind, I'm going to practice playing dead.” She unbuckled her safety strap, and pushed off to fly over to the access closet and the ladder up to the dome.
Bain knew what to do. He and Lin had drilled the procedure often enough while the technicians on Banner had installed the shield plates and passive sensor dishes and the baffles for the exhaust ports. Sometimes Lin had warned him she would be ‘playing dead,’ but other times she would leap up in the middle of a studying period or during a meal and run for the dome. Then, he had to be at his station, and ready in a matter of seconds.
“Power down,” Lin said, her voice coming through his collar link.
Bain ran his hand down both sides of the control center, flipping switches off, starting the shut-down sequence for the engines that would put them into an idle state that left them ready for reactivation at a moment's notice. Almost before the engines stopped their subliminal rumbling, the baffles slid into place at the back of Sunsinger, blocking the ports and absorbing the heat still radiating from the tubes. Bain hit the last new switch, which opened the feed lines from the compressed gas storage tanks in the hold. Now Sunsinger had thrusters that would let Lin control the ship's movement without giving off telltale bursts of energy.
Sunsinger was effectively dead in space. Any ship that hadn't seen them cut engines would think they were nothing but an oddly-shaped chunk of space debris.
“Looks good,” Lin said. “You can come up and watch, if you want.”
Bain pushed out of his chair, and flew over to the ladder before she had finished speaking. He kicked off the middle rung with both feet, and zoomed straight up through the access hatch, then bounced off the side of the dome. Two more rebounds, off the opposite side of the dome and down to the floor, took him directly to his acceleration couch. He caught hold of the safety strap, and swung himself to a halt.
“Show-off,” Lin grumbled. Her eyes sparkled, and she winked at him before turning back to her control panel.
A new swivel arm had been added to the panel, so Lin could have either the controls for Knaught Point transition or for the new, augmented thrusters in front of her, or both. Bain couldn't imagine Lin needing both the thrusters and Knaught Point controls at the same time. He supposed there could be a dangerous situation where they would have to rely on thrusters and playing dead until the very last minute.
Just thinking about it made him say a quick, silent prayer to Fi'in that it wouldn't happen.
“The trick to all this,” Lin said, after a few moments of silence, “is that we have to move like we're solid rock instead of a hollow ball of metal and air. We can drift for a while, but if something brushes against us, or bounces off us, or we run into a strong thread of solar wind, we'll have to change our path and tumble. A ship reacts one way, a hunk of rock reacts another.”
“Oh, okay.” Bain finished strapping himself in. “How do you figure that part out?”
“Instinct. A lot of luck. A lot of praying.” She glanced away from her controls to grin at him. “People who navigate often in domes have an advantage over those who rely on screens and computers to help them pilot their ships. We see the asteroids move, we see how everything reacts. We have a feel for it.”
“How come everybody doesn't do it the way Spacers do, then?”
“Not everybody has the Spacer talent. Fi'in didn't make everyone a Spacer. There are people who get sick in free-fall, and people who will never be able to stand the acceleration of launch without fainting or getting sick. There are people who can study twenty years with a pilot in a dome, and still need to rely on computers and screens.”
“And there are those who insist on doing everything themselves, and learning by their mistakes,” Ganfer offered.
“You were too busy trying to keep the ship functioning to teach me to pilot properly,” Lin shot back. “Whose brilliant idea was it to put an untrained teen in the pilot's seat, anyway?”
“Who were we going to use as pilot once we got the thrusters working? Your rag doll?” The ship-brain was silent for two seconds. “We're coming up on a strong thread of solar wind.”
“Are warnings from the passive sensors fair?” Bain asked.
“Maybe not. The asteroids certainly don't get any.” Lin ran her fingers over the control panel without flipping any switches.
Strapped down to his acceleration couch, Bain could feel the slight shift in Sunsinger's motion when it drifted far enough into the stream of the solar wind to be affected by it.
Some people called the solar wind the solar current. Bain preferred thinking of it as wind rather than water. It felt safer, to him. In reality, the solar wind or current was composed of streams of energy, gasses or particles given off by the stars as they went through their eon-long phases. Long ago, in the pre-Downfall time, some people had learned to harness that wind or current to carry their ships from galaxy to galaxy. Lin had told him stories about people employing solar sails. It sounded rather chancy to Bain. Why ride in a ship that had to go where the solar wind took it? Engines and Knaught Points felt much more reliable and easier to control.
Lin tapped the thruster controls, adding a little bit of push in one direction, then a tiny, half-power nudge in another to correct it. She leaned back into the cushion of her acceleration couch, and tipped her head to the left, studying the panorama of stars and stellar dust and visible energy patterns. Bain kept silent, watching and trying to figure out for himself why she did what she did. He knew Lin would explain it all to him later, but right now while she tried this new maneuver, she needed silence in the dome.
The view through the dome didn't change much. Bain found that if he concentrated on the stars and streaks of golden-white and blue at the top of the dome, he saw no changes at all. If he watched the lower edges of the dome, then he could see change by what vanished into the retracted shield panels or appeared from them.
He watched a swirled, white shape come up from the front of the dome, beyond the foot of his acceleration couch. It took nearly an hour to emerge, from the time he saw the first curved streak to when the bottom edge appeared, surrounded by darkness. Bain checked the passive sensors, and saw that the shape was a solar system more than ninety trillion kilometers away. It had to be huge to be visible from that distance. Maybe someday he would find a Knaught Point that could take him to that galaxy.
Through it all, Bain heard the soft, background chiming of the music of space. Sometimes
the chimes turned into tapping sounds, like someone wanted to get into the ship, and ran up and down the curves of the dome, trying to find a way in. Other times the chimes turned into whispering, wailing sounds like the wind swirling around a badly-caulked window in the orphanage back on Lenga. Bain smiled and listened and remembered the time he had tried to record the music so he could hear it even when he was on a planet. He hadn't been able to, because as Lin explained, the music of space was from a realm beyond the physical. Spacers heard it with their physical ears because they heard it first with the ears of their souls.
“This won't be so easy when we're doing it for real,” Lin said, after three hours of silence and tiny adjustments to the thrusters.
“Why?”
“Because we have to have the dome shields up to let the sensor shields work. That means I'll be flying blind, doing it all by feel.” She pushed the swiveled arm of the control panel away, and unbuckled her safety belt. “I've had enough for today. If I play dead any longer, I just might fall asleep.”
Bain grinned as he followed her down the ladder to the bridge. Lin never fell asleep when she was on watch, even at the most boring times.
Lin let Bain bring the engines back on line all by himself, and correct their course. She went into the galley to make supper, instead of standing—or floating—behind him at the control panel, watching him work. Bringing the ship back to full power was a much more complicated process than shutting down. Bain had mastered that particular task during his first trip with Lin. She had never let him bring everything back on line before without working next to him. Bain was excited and proud—and worried he might do something extremely stupid.
“Does everything look right, Ganfer?” Bain said, when he thought he had everything set. There were several banks of control switches and dials he still had to move, but he wanted to be sure that what he had done so far was right.
“You won't blow up the ship,” the ship-brain responded, after a momentary pause.
Dead World [Sunsinger Chronicles Book 3] Page 4