Event Horizon (Hellgate) (121 page)

The words stung. “You, uh, don’t happen to have a copy lying around the lab?” Travers asked.

“It’s the one thing we don’t have.” Mark was glaring into the display. “We have a standby holographic matrix – in the event we had mechanical, physical problems and had to dump Lai’a into the new crystal memory. We can
copy
Lai’a into it, of course, but we’d be copying the Veldn code along with it, and that’s the problem. We don’t know – yet – how much damage has already been done. Working on a copy of Lai’a as it is right here, right now, we’d have no idea if diagnostics were giving us a clear picture of what we were doing.”

“What we need,” Dario went on, “is a copy that was certified clean before
we
infected it under controlled conditions. Then we’d know the kind and extent of the damage, so we’d also know if our virus was doing what it’s supposed to rather than just lobotomizing the AI.”

“We can create a clean AI,” Mark finished, “but not in a few days, this side of Hellgate. Think months. Or,” he said reasonably, “we can pull the AI core right out of the chassis, take it aboard the
Carellan
, into proper laboratory conditions … copy over a prototype of Lai’a, or something very similar; and infect it. Experiment till we have our virus right.
Then
fix Lai’a and reinstall the core.”

“Time?” Vaurien wondered.

Mark’s mouth compressed as he thought it through. “No less than a month, and perhaps closer to three. Can’t do this any faster, Richard, not if we’re serious about fixing
our
Lai’a. Damnit, it trusted me. It shut itself down on my word, my recommendation.” He paused and favored Vaurien with a lopsided smile that might have mocked himself. “Give me the time. Joss can take care of housekeeping at Alshie’nya.”

“Do it,” Vaurien agreed. “There’s no fixed schedule, and I’m in no hurry. Joss is still running the manufacture shops; we have about half the comm drones needed to seed Hellgate, blanket the whole region with the deactivation code. And the
Wastrel
,” he added, “is headed for Borushek and Velcastra. Take your time, Mark.”

“I will.” Mark gave Dario and Tor a speculative look. “Do you want to pull out the core and transfer it to the
Carellan
… or do you want to pull the lab out of the
Carellan
and transfer it, and the core, to the
Wastrel
?”

“There’s a hell of a more space on the
Wastrel
,” Tor said pointedly, “and if she’s headed to Borushek, that suits us. There’s a bunch of stuff we left in Riga. Dar?”

“You can only pack so much, and in a hell of a hurry,” Dario said in philosophical tones. “Sure. Rick, if you’re agreeable, we’ll transfer the whole job to the
Wastrel
. The driftship can stay where it is, at Alshie’nya. In any case, there’s a bunch of work to be done. She took a bad beating and parts of her are still contaminated. We’ll need to rebuild Ops from the deck on up. Not to mention,” he added quietly, “Teniko and Kim are still in there somewhere.”

“I know, and they’ll be taken care of,” Vaurien said soberly, “as soon as we can get to them. Harrison needs to contact Jon’s family, back in Marak. It’s almost certain he’ll be interred on Ulrand, with full
honors
… and I’ll take care of Tonio. We’re drydocking, Dario, soon as we get home.” His voice had a plaintive quality. “Home.” He glanced at his chrono. “Joss?”

“Driftway 884 in five minutes,” Joss responded.

Travers set a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “You want to change over right away?”

“Yeah.” Marin stirred. “While my brain’s still in the groove.” He slid a combug into his ear. “Mick, how goes it?”

And Vidal, from the simulator – the transspace cockpit: “Cruising. Five minutes, Curtis, and you can have it. I’m ready for a break.”

“Food, shower, stiff drink,” Queneau added.

The transspace drive continued to idle as the converted cryogen tanks opened. Vidal was tired but exultant as he took a water bottle from Rabelais and drank it to the bottom. He was trembling with fatigue, but Grant was there at once and a shot fired into the thin muscle of his thigh. Vaurien offered his hand in congratulation, and Mick took it.

“No problems you couldn’t handle?” Richard prompted.

“Nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before – and a lot worse, in simulation.” Vidal worked his spine and shoulders. “Simulation is always worse than a real flight. They deliberately throw crap at you – most of it’ll never happen.”

“But when it does,” Marin added, “you’ve seen it, done it.” He gave Travers a speculative look and asked of Vidal, “Any reason we should delay?”

“Nope.” Vidal was enlivening as the shot kicked in – vitamins, minerals, mild stimulants. “She’s purring, all the numbers are right where they ought to be.” He offered his hand to Neil. “You guys just fly it the way you always do. Forget that it’s not a sim.
Fly
it.
Live
it.”

A pulse jumped in Travers’s throat as he clasped Vidal’s hand and glanced at Vaurien and Jazinsky. Richard nodded. Barb was listening to the loop, ship data relayed by Joss from the automatics. “Go,” she said. “It’s only sixteen driftways to Hellgate.”

“Four days,” Queneau rasped as she let Rabelais pull her up out of the navigator’s tank, and took a bottle of juice from him. “Hey, Mick, you want to eat with us?”

“Soon as I take a shower, stretch out.” Vidal stood back to watch as Travers and Marin settled down into the tanks. “Hey, Neil …”

Travers glanced in his direction as the tank began to close. His hands were already in the filamentary mesh, with the prickles of connectors intruding into his skin. Vidal’s remarkable blue eyes were dark, sparkling. “Showtime,” he said simply.

The tank closed, locked, and Travers licked his lips to moisten them as he seated the veeree visor. His hairline prickled as the hookups connected, and he closed his eyes for one moment, felt his way through the mesh that had formed up around hands and forearms.

When he opened his eyes again he saw the driftway, and the great blue arch of the gravity tide stretching away toward Hellgate, which fluttered in the extreme distance ahead of them, perfectly visible, just as the Orion Gate was visible far astern.

“We’re drifting with the current,” Marin said quietly. “Aragos coming up … I’m going to tack with it, Neil, let it take us right in.”

He would make a thousand minute adjustments, Travers knew, keeping the driftship balanced in the freefall channel. It was not so very different from sailing an iceboat – one blade on the ice, the deck canted at thirty degrees, the kevlex ’chute billowed out, straining against the wind, the second blade high overhead and slicing freezing air with a whistling sound. The wind speed and direction, the ice texture and thickness, the pressure on the ’chute, the ride angle – all factors were critical, disaster was never more than a hand’s span away, and the good iceboat pilots never even thought about any individual detail. The magic just
happened
.

The fast-time and slow-time currents wove like strands on a loom. Ahead was the deep, booming gravity well of the supergiant star known as Eratosthenes, while a thousand smaller stars chimed like bells in Travers’s ears. The thrill was seductive. Vidal was addicted. Transspace would always call him back with a lover’s voice, and Travers shared something of his fascination.

“Here we go,” Marin crooned. “We’re in the channel … driftway in two-hours-twenty. She’s riding well, Neil. Feels a lot more responsive than in the simulation.”

“Power,” Travers guessed. “Think about what you’re flying. The simulator was designed around the parameters of a ship a tenth this size – the tolerances were a lot tighter.”

“Meaning…” Marin paused to slither through a rollercoaster curve “…this baby will be a lot more forgiving. What’s that, up ahead?”

Travers streamed data directly. “Gravity well. Trinary system, three big stars in a mutual orbit. Damn, look at the tangle of temporal currents! Stay the hell away from it. Try … this.” He sent four alternate routes, with ten seconds’ margin for the decision.

“Got it.” Marin sifted the four, discarded three – two took them a fraction too close to the gravity tide, the third set them up for a too-close passage by the transspace footprint of a dead star which howled in Elarne while it would have been anonymous, dark, invisible, in normal space.

The fourth route slung them up over the back of the gravity tide, safe in the freefall channel while Travers read hundreds of gravities off the dead star. From high above the expressway they glimpsed Hellgate itself and Neil whispered, “It looks so close.”

“Looks are deceiving,” Marin said softly as the driftship plunged down a mountainside of blue-white energy, where the e-space horizon swirled with pearly luminescence at the bottom. “Refix the driftway for me, Neil … I’m off by a few percent here … thanks.”

The datastream was not merely
at
Travers’s fingertips, it responded to them as if he were playing an instrument. Elarne seemed to flow through him – or was it that he flew it like a living creature, an eagle so minutely aware of every shift in the windstream that he seemed to
be
the windstream? He did not know, but he knew this was what had addicted Vidal as if he had lived his whole life waiting for transspace.

And Marin was right. This ship handled much better than the simulated craft they were used to. Almost unlimited power gave Curtis the ability to cut closer to the tide, surfing on Arago fields that weathered the storming energies readily while the simulated driftship would have been warning of imminent mechanical failure.

They never heard a warning from the system. Engine and generator data was as sweet as Travers had ever seen from a hard-worked ship, and on the one occasion, when Marin cut critically close to a gravity well before he could slide up and around a ravel of temporal currents, the Arago projectors throttled up automatically, without protest.

Again Travers lost track of time in the thrill and rush of flight, and almost too soon the driftway was ahead of them. Marin was talking to Vaurien even then. “Driftway in five … let me find us a safe eddy, way out of the gravity currents.”

“Do that,” Vaurien’s voice whispered in Travers’s ears. “We’re not trusting Joss to even monitor transspace while you guys are on downtime. Hubler and Rodman might not be ready to fly, but they know what they’re looking at. They’ll take the first watch, and Fargo and Perlman the next. Mick and Jo are on standby, if we need a safe positioning maneuver.”

After which, Travers realized, Vidal and Queneau would be back in the tanks for the race to the next driftway. The process that would repeat over and over, until they exited the Odyssey Tide into the Hellgate driftway and began to hunt for a Class Five or Six event on the Orpheus Gate.
Home
.

“And I’m … out,” Marin reported as he boosted the Aragos at the apex of a rollercoaster turn and let the ship cruise out into the blue-gray shoals of the driftway. “Neil, what you got?”

He was reading colors and eddying waveforms, looking for a stretch of
nothing
, a pool so quiet, a comm beacon would stay more or less in place. The ship cruised on, on inertia for several minutes before he saw the void he wanted. “Got it.” He streamed data to Marin.

With a single pulse from the drive the ship rolled over, and her mass and momentum took her past the last tendrils of gravity from the Odyssey Tide. Satisfied, Marin throttled the drive to standby, shut back one of the generators – the next in line for routine maintenance. Drones would already be deploying as he said into the loop,

“All secure. We’re showing a drift so slow, we shouldn’t be anywhere near the tide for days. You there, Roark?”

It was Rodman who answered. “Any time, Curtis.”

And Hubler: “You guys did good. That was a smooth ride.”

“That,” Marin added as the tanks opened, “was a whole lot easier than flying the simulator.”

“Mick knew it would be.” Travers sat up, took off the veeree set and groaned as he felt the stickiness of his clothes, the tightness of back and legs. He blinked his vision clear, focusing on the dimness of the hangar where Hubler and Rodman waited to stand the first watch.