“Then they left from here.”
“But we’ve combed through the records, master,” Slink said. “There hasn’t been ship on or off Indacar since our draft ship several months ago.”
“I remember Aaron’s Landing shutting down ten years, one month, and sixteen days ago,” the Purveyor said, and he closed his eyes. “It was three days after I assumed my role in the Authority. One of the first closures I signed, as a matter of fact.”
“Then the boy must be on the planet still. Mistress Fris is lying.”
“She’s not lying,” the Purveyor replied, and he pointed to the tarmac at their feet. “Look down, Slink, and tell me what you see.”
Slink obliged. He squinted, trying to catch what the Purveyor was referring to.
“I see dirt, soot, and trash, master.”
“Soot? From what?”
Slink turned around in a circle, following a pattern of blackness blasted onto the tarmac. “A blast radius? From a ship takeoff, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.”
“Pirates?”
“Pirates.” Slink raised his gaze and saw the Purveyor looking right at him with a wolfish smile. “I’d say they’re a day, perhaps two old.”
Slink gulped.
The Purveyor stepped closer to him. Slink braced himself. “That would be right around the time that you landed.”
“We detected no ship.”
“And yet you were here. Isn’t this the kind of thing you keep those Companions around for?”
“Not . . . precisely. They must have left before we arrived, master.”
The Purveyor nodded slowly. “It seems, then, that they slipped right through our fingers.”
“Yes . . .”
“And whose fault do you think that is?”
Slink hesitated, trying to fathom what it was that his master wanted to hear. How could he tell the Purveyor it wasn’t his fault? He could be strung up for insubordination. But if he said it was his fault, he could be strung up just the same for incompetence.
How can I possibly decide without a forecast?
Ultimately he said nothing, his mouth moving with the attempt to find the right words in his Companion-less nakedness.
After a moment, the Purveyor gestured him away with disgust. “You’re spineless, Slink,” he said. “You make me weary. Alert the ship we’ll be leaving for the Wall.”
“The Wall, master?”
“Yes.” He gestured over to the other side of the tarmac, where there were still a couple of piles of belongings, haphazardly left behind. “They’re along for the ride with whoever these draft dodgers are, and draft dodgers only go to one place: the Outer Rim. All roads to the Rim lead through the Wall.”
“They’re retracing his steps?” Slink offered, realizing what it was his master was describing. “The Seeker’s?”
“You’re not as dumb as you act sometimes,” the Purveyor said mirthlessly. He looked at him again. “They’re retracing our steps. Alert General Plodda. We’re not letting them slip through a second time.”
30
SEEN WITH THE NAKED EYE, the Wall was astonishingly large and quite impossible to comprehend except in small sections. There were chunks of rock the size of entire cities, cities three or four times the size of Aaron’s Landing. They dwarfed the Red Robert as the ship aimed straight toward the massive construct. And a construct it was. It was completely unlike the typical asteroid belt of so many star systems. This multitude of rocks was devoid of the rotational pull of a star and had mostly stayed in the uniform straight line along which they’d been deposited a million years ago. Hence the name; it really did look like a wall.
The “million years ago” was, of course, an estimate. It was entirely unknown who had stretched these broken fragments of planets and moons and rocks along the nearly thousand-light-year span of the Wall . . .which obviously meant it was equally unknown how long ago they’d done it. The rocks could be dated to see how old they were, but there was no way to tell when they’d been crumbled and left here.
What was known was why these rocks had been dumped upon each other, or at least what they had been used for: traces of starstuff were everywhere, as were the telltale signs of starstuff mining. This had been a dumping ground for planets and moons and every other starstuff-containing rock for some, or perhaps many, ancient civilizations. They’d been stretched out over an impossibly long length of space and forgotten for a cosmically long period of time.
Balta had signaled the ship that they were dropping out of interstellar speed, and Petrick had immediately known that meant they were arriving at the Wall. He’d raced from their cabin, ignoring Haber’s pleas to slow down, and made his way up toward the cockpit with as much speed as his small legs would give him. It was really the only place on the ship where one could get a good look at what was going on outside.
“Wow,” he’d muttered when he saw the swirling brown mess ahead of them.
“Keep your mouth shut, kid,” Balta said in response. “The next part is tricky.”
It was a sharp rebuke, but she hadn’t told Petrick or Suzy, who’d already been in the cockpit, to leave.
As impossible as it was to imagine how far the Wall actually stretched out on the galactic horizon—the same plane on which the galaxy was turning—it was nearly as breathtaking to look up and see how high the Wall was. It towered over them, and as Balta eased the ship into the outer-edge brown tendrils of dust and slowly rotating rocks, it almost seemed like the entire thing was going to come crashing down upon them. Like the stones in the wall of some towering castle had suddenly all loosened at once.
“Wow.”
This time it was Barry, who had made his way behind Petrick and Clarke. Petrick turned to see that Dedrin and Arris had also come, and they were equally amazed. Even Haber, with his perpetually dour expression, looked up with some sort of mechanical amazement when he arrived behind them. The whole of the ship’s occupants were entranced.
As they moved inside the Wall, they were surrounded by the rocks, and a general brown haze seemed to fall over everything. Every so often, as they plunged forward, dust would smack against the glass of the cockpit window. Petrick could see, too, that the density of the rocks seemed to increase as they went in further.
“Keep watch for those patrol ships,” Balta reminded Colossus, who was actually sitting in an awkwardly crouched position in the back corner of the cockpit, plugged into a data port on one of the sensor consoles.
The dusty brown haze thickened dramatically the further into the Wall they traveled. So much so that it very quickly became impossible to see anything further than perhaps a hundred feet in front of the vessel. Petrick was about to remark on the lack of visibility when Balta activated the same graphic display projected upon the cockpit glass that they’d used when the capital ship had been bearing down on them. No sooner had the heads-up display come on than they saw a Red Robert–sized chunk of ex-planet barreling directly toward them.
“Hang on!” Balta shouted, and the ship twisted and dove violently, much too quickly for the ship’s gravity generators to compensate for.
Everyone who wasn’t strapped down, meaning everyone except for Balta and Colossus, went tumbling against the side wall, then the ceiling, then crashing back down to the floor in a heap. Petrick grunted and reached for Clarke, who’d been pinned next to Haber and Arris. Clarke stared right at his master with the distinct look of someone who had no wish to repeat the maneuver they’d just gone through. Petrick couldn’t have agreed with his furry companion more.
“Strap in and hold on,” Balta called as they picked themselves up off of each other. “Stray rocks sneak through the gravity barriers all the time.”
Once man had finally stretched out civilization far enough to bump into it, the Wall had served as a “natural” barrier to another side of the galaxy for millennia. Though it was relatively free of outside gravity, like that of a star or other supermassive object, the further one plunged into the heart of
the Wall, the denser and more chaotic the inter-gravitational forces became. As the group had just learned, if you didn’t think a city-sized boulder barreling straight toward you wasn’t a major transportation problem, you needed to have your head examined. One could not just fly through it willy-nilly.
Almost certainly it had been dumb luck given how immense the Wall truly was, but eventually space-farers had finally found the Passage. Left behind by whoever created the Wall, it was a swath cut through the rocky jungle using gravity fields and plain old sweat and metal to hold the rocks at bay. At least, it once had been. Man had found the passage in an advanced state of disrepair and moved swiftly to restore it, to reclaim this victory over time and neglect. In the middle of the Passage, a door to the Outer Rim had been reopened: Gateway Station, which smack dab in its center housed the famed Central Gateway. Gateway Station was another impressive relic of a civilization long past, and it was through the Central Gateway that for hundreds of years, men, women, machines, and children had passed through to brave the relative wilds of the Outer Rim. It was arguably the most critical travel junction and trading post in the galaxy, and just like the Wall, in which it was nestled, it was immense. The station, in fact, turned out to house several gateways, and was far larger than man had time to explore and revitalize to this point in history.
Balta brought the structure up on the heads-up display in the cockpit, and Petrick could see it spreading out in all directions, left, right, up, and down, like a spider’s web. Large chunks of rock were webbed together with passageways and studded with domes; carved-out docking and loading bays; moorings for larger ships, some new, some perhaps millions of years old . . . it was a chaotic mess. Right smack-dab in the middle was a huge opening ringed with observation towers built on rocks that appeared to have been pulled from the Wall; there were also, Petrick could see, two or three giant ships that he assumed were Authority cruisers. The structures surrounding the opening bristled with armaments.
“Is that the Central Gateway?” Petrick asked, pointing.
“Yup,” Balta said dismissively.
Petrick looked at Haber, who nodded. The Central Gateway, the point through which every pioneer or prospector or person from any other walk of life had passed for nearly a millennium to get to the frontier of the Outer Rim on the other side . . . including, they assumed, Petrick’s father, Fenton the Seeker. Haber had said the Authority kept fastidious records of ship registries, flight paths, and the like for any traffic that passed through it. The gateway was their destination if they wanted to pick up his father’s trail.
“And we’re staying as far away from that thing as we possibly can,” Balta said, continuing her thought from earlier. A new course lit up, branching off from the main Passage and leading them away from the gateway.
“Wait,” said Petrick, “aren’t we going through the Passage to get to the gateway? I thought we were going to Liberatia.”
“Kid, you think there’s going to be a smuggling colony inside the largest Authority-controlled piece of real estate in Fringe Space?”
Petrick suddenly felt foolish. Of course not.
“That’s Liberatia,” she said, pointing to the very very far end of the web of interconnected rocks, the very edges of the ancient spiderweb structure. “On the far side of Gateway Station.”
Their course stretched out as a jagged orange line through the marked edge of the Passage, through the uncontrolled mess of the Wall beyond it, leading right to a small section that was lit up in bright blue. . . away from the Central Gateway. On that far side, there was no cleared out, ‘safe’ corridor with gravity fields holding the Wall at bay. Petrick looked again at Haber: that was a lot of rock to fly through.
Balta cursed suddenly and flicked a switch, and the lights in their cabin went out. The group could hear a winding down of various systems, including ventilation and thrusters. Only lights from the consoles and the quiet thrum of their engines told them that the ship was still alive. Haber grunted curiously in Balta’s direction.
“We have to run silently from here to our exit point,” the captain said, referring to where their course passed through the Passage’s protective barrier. “Authority patrols seem to be out way further than usual.”
She gestured to a series of dots, and they lit up as she did so. The group could infer, given that those dots were clearly moving, that they represented ships. Small ones. Patrols. Indeed, each seemed to be moving in its own sweeping pattern, back and forth, along a different area of the Passage’s corridor.
“Why would they be patrolling the corridor leading to the gateway?” Dedrin asked astutely. “The Authority already has complete control of that part of the structure.”
“They’re not protecting the station,” Balta replied. “They’re patrolling for ships trying to do exactly what we’re going to.” She gestured to the orange line that he’d programmed in through the melee of rocks and dust, away from the Passage. “It’s a balancing act: sneaking as close as you can to the structure, so you spend as little time as possible in the rocks outside the gravity barriers, but not getting caught by the patrols.”
“We’re going inside the rocks?” Barry asked, eyes growing wide.
“Yup,” Balta said, “as soon as we have a clear shot.”
The captain paused and studied the readouts in front of her very carefully. One of the patrol-ship dots seemed to be moving toward them. As it got closer, it was clear that they were in its path. Balta cursed under her breath and punched several more controls on her console. The Red Robert went completely dark. Not even the consoles were on now, and the engines were quiet. They were hanging in space. The occasional thud of rocks against the cockpit window was the only sound, and Petrick realized they were all holding their breath.
“Are they going to find us?” Barry whispered nervously.
“Whispering will make no difference,” Balta said. “It’s a vacuum out there. They can’t find us from talking. They’re looking for propulsion trails.”
“And that’s why you shut down the engines,” Petrick filled in. “If you did it in time.”
Balta nodded. “That’s the hope, kid. Like I said, they’re way further out than normal. Just our luck.”
“Can we get away if they spot us?” Dedrin asked nervously.
“Well, we can’t go anywhere without our engines on,” Balta replied, and she looked back at them and winked. “So we’d better hope they don’t see us, hadn’t we?”
The offhand remark did nothing to ease the tension in the cockpit, either for Balta or for anyone else. They were all peering out the cockpit windows, trying to spot the patrol skiff they knew was out there somewhere. As it was, they could see nothing but dust and rocks, brown and murky, suspended around them as if floating in a muddy pond that had no top or bottom.
“I can’t see anything,” said Suzy.
“He’s out there,” Balta said.
“What will they do to us if they find us?” Barry asked.
Balta didn’t answer. Dedrin answered instead.
“It’s said they take most to the mines. Some, they make work on the ships. And some, they say, disappear.”
“We’re not going to be found,” Balta said, gritting her teeth. “So pipe down.”
Just then, a beam of light suddenly appeared, cutting through the dusty-brown space. Searching.
“They’re looking for us,” Suzy said, whispering instinctively.
“They know we’re out here,” Barry moaned.
“They’re searching visually,” Balta said, also lowering her voice out of reflex. “That’s bad and good. Bad, because it means we must have blipped on their sensors when we came in. Good, because it means we’re off their instruments now, so they’re limited to their eyes like we are.”
“They’re quite close,” Haber piped, also sounding worried.
The searchlight was slowly moving back and forth, back and forth. The patrol ship knew something was out there hiding . . . but it was also cl
ear that Balta was right. They didn’t know precisely where.
The searchlight passed over the cockpit, and everyone inside froze. Petrick was sure that they were toast, just like when they’d been sneaking onto the Red Robert. But, just like that moment on the gangplank, with their would-be captor squinting across the space to try to see them, the gaze lingered for a moment and then moved on with its search.
Everyone in the cabin breathed a huge sigh of relief.
“You see?!” Balta said, slapping Colossus on one of his giant metal legs. “Told you they wouldn’t find us!”
It was easy to gain bravado now that the searchlight was sweeping ever further away from them, but he had seen Balta’s knuckles go white when the light had shone in her face. She’d been just as worried as the rest of them.
Now it was a matter of how far away to let the patrol ship get before firing the engines up again. “We’ll have to eyeball it,” Balta said, mostly to herself. “Can’t kick on the heads-up and be at risk of popping on their instruments again.”
They waited for several minutes after the searchlight had disappeared behind them. Suzy shifted around on her feet impatiently. It was also starting to get cold in the cockpit. Petrick remembered that the ventilation had been shut off, and the icy temperatures outside the ship were starting to creep in with a vengeance. Suzy, however, didn’t say anything. She just glared in Balta’s direction. She locked eyes with her for a moment, then turned back to her console with a smirk.
“Okay, Colossus,” she said. “Light her up.”
The android nodded, and the lights in the cockpit flared back on. Screens flickered, gauges lit up, and the display overlaying the cockpit windows sprang to life. Balta turned back to her passengers, who were all standing behind her.
“You’d better hold on,” she said.
The Red Robert’s boosters fired a moment later, and the ship lurched forward with a jolt. Had the captain not given them the warning it was coming, they each would have tumbled into a heap like they had just mere minutes before. With the warning, it took each of the children all of their strength just to stay anchored with two hands to the nearest hold, the rest of their bodies flailing about as the ship dove and tumbled.
Starstuff (Starstuff Trilogy Book 1) Page 19