Event Horizon (Hellgate) (13 page)

For the first time in so long, Travers had the urge to take a comb and slide it through the red hair, as he had once often done. The past mocked him and the future confounded him, and he was still silent when Marin stepped back into the lounge.

“Three minutes till the
Mercury
locks on,” he said by way of greeting, “and she’s docking at the port side rings, Richard, to stay well clear of the damage. It’s like an ants’ nest out there – more than a hundred drones just broke out of storage on the
Wings
.”

“Tully gave me the estimates. Twenty hours.” Vaurien still sounded tired, though he had slept the crossing away.

“And I better get going.” Ingersol had been so intent on his handies, he had barely registered Marin’s presence. “Those Weimanns won’t realign themselves. Don’t look for me at Shapiro’s briefing – too much to do.”

“I’ll check in with you later,” Vaurien promised. “Give me a call if you run into problems.”

Ingersol accorded him some semblance of a salute and stepped out as Jazinsky appeared in the lounge’s wide door. She was carelessly elegant in fresh bronze skinthins and a deep green wrap, and the white-blond hair was caught in a clasp at the shoulder.

“Are we dressing for this?” Vaurien looked down at his own gray denims and pale blue shirt, his usual working garb.

“I can’t see a reason to,” she admitted, “but any chance to get out of the lab is an opportunity to remember I’m human. Alive. A woman.”

“You need reminding?” His left arm snaked around her waist, pulled her close.

“Sometimes, I do.” She leaned into his side and gave Travers and Marin a thoughtful look. “Are you coming to the briefing? Harrison asked all members of the Lai’a expedition to be there, if they can get away.”

“And we can’t seem to find an excuse to beg off,” Travers said with sharp, ironic humor.

“We’ll be there.” Marin was watching the viewports, where the
Mercury
had drifted up into view, moving in alongside the
Wastrel
like a calf beside a blue whale. “Besides, they’re serving dinner.”

The two ships had synched their onboard clocks, and for some time Travers had been aware of the demands of his stomach. He had a fancy for something different. The
Wastrel
’s ’chefs were configured very differently from those on the
Mercury
; and very little on the
Carellan Djerun
seemed to be edible at all, though the ingredients were the same as might be found on any colony world.

The ship locked on with a heavy reverberation of steel on steel, and Etienne’s announcement was unnecessary. “Nine Worlds Commonwealth Fleet cruiser
Mercury
is secured at the forward port docking rings. General Shapiro requests the Lai’a complement report to the conference lounge. Dinner will be served in twenty minutes.”

“That’s us,” Jazinsky said with a faint sigh.

Vaurien let her steer him away from the viewports, and aft, and Travers followed Marin in the same direction. The locks were still clearing and in the minutes while pressure equalized across both ships, the
Wastrel
group formed up. Michael Vidal arrived with Bill Grant, and the Lushi seemed to be reading him some lecture which Vidal endured with a bored, resigned look. Behind them, Jo Queneau walked up from the direction of the hangars; and with her was the legend himself.

Even now Travers sometimes caught himself staring. By all accounts Ernst Rabelais was a very ordinary human being – middle height, with pleasant looks rather than the stunning beauty of a celebrity, and a keen intelligence rather than Jazinsky’s and Mark Sherratt’s brand of fierce intellect. But Travers has always believed a man’s deeds set him apart, perhaps earned him the eminence of a living legend. Rabelais was extraordinary, even if he did flush with embarrassment when he caught someone staring, and might occasionally protest. He was the first human to tickle the skirts of Hellgate – perhaps lift them and try to steal a peek beneath. Mark swore the Resalq had watched the
Odyssey
cruise by, charting black holes and navigation hazards, laying down the trail of beacons which would become known as the Rabelais Track; and then he vanished ‘into the cracks,’ as any veteran Hellgate pilot would say, and the next time he drew a breath of free, Deep Sky air –

He was looking better, Travers thought, and so was Jo Queneau. Like Vidal, they were working hard and eating steadily; unlike Vidal, they had not been literally fried alive by the radiation field at the boundary of the stable zone between the tides of Elarne. Vidal was lagging behind the other two, and he knew it; Travers felt his resentment clearly, though Vidal directed the anger at himself, not at Queneau and Rabelais.

He had changed for dinner as if it were a social occasion, while the others were still in denims and crew shirts. They had just walked out of the private hangar which had become their workshop, and Travers caught a little of their conversation without eavesdropping.

“It’s not right yet,” Queneau was saying, grumbling as they walked into his range of hearing. “I don’t know what it is, but I can
feel
it in the nerve endings, almost like it’s vibrating around in my sinus cavities – it’s still off by a fraction.”

“And damned if I can track it down,” Rabelais mused. “I’m not a physicist, Jo. Neither of us is. We’re doing this by the seat of the pants method. We never put numbers to it. Maybe we should have. Maybe we’ll have to, before we get it right enough to be functional.”

Vidal’s tone was caustic. “Let me guess. You crashed it again.”

“Crash and bloody burn,” Queneau said gloomily. “If this contraption was a gunship, there wouldn’t be a matchstick left of it by now.”

“And we’re starting to chase details around and around,” Rabelais added. “Fix
this
, and
that
goes out of whack; fix
that
, and the other thing goes right out the door. Damnit, Mick, I don’t have the background in physics to nail down what the problem is, not in a year.”

The contraption they were talking about was their flight simulator, and the very mention of it gave Travers an odd shiver. He had lost count of the number of hours he had spent in routine simulators, learning to fly everything from gunships and troop transports right through to the Murchison F-76, which for years had been the mainstay of the fighter complement on the Omaru blockade.

This new simulator was not the same. Everything Travers knew was conventional, designed to duplicate conditions in normal three dimensional space with a time component making up the fourth dimension. Much more complex simulators existed, but he had never flown them. The machines in which pilots like Yuval Greenstein and Piotr Cassals had qualified duplicated e-space conditions to a high degree of precision. A pilot coming up from the ranks of the ‘heavy’ category of harbor tugs and surface-to-orbit cargo haulers would spend three months in the e-space simulators, calculating Weimann solutions, handling every manner of hazard with the hardware and software, and then another three months working hands-on with a senior pilot, in and out of e-space. The e-space conduit had been intimately understood for a little more than three centuries, and the Weimann simulators were almost as conventional as those duplicating normal space.

But beyond e-space, Travers thought with a glance at Marin, there was the place the Resalq called ‘the stormy side of the sky.’ And on the brink of Elarne anything Travers comprehended came to an abrupt stop. Several times, he had looked into the yawning mouths of the Hellgate monsters and glimpsed something, somewhere and somewhen, but much of what he brought away from those encounters was a dizzying sense of dread. A kind of vertigo and paralysis, where his mind could not grasp what his physical eyes were seeing, and refused to make sense of any of it.

“You’ve run the numbers?” Vidal was asking.

“As far as we can. We don’t even
have
most of the numbers,” Rabelais admitted. He leaned both shoulders against the wall opposite the docking rings.

“Who would have them?” Vidal was looking along at Jazinsky, a frown etched between his brows.

“Mark Sherratt,” Rabelais said without hesitation. “The problem is, Mark could hand the whole lot to me on a plate, and I wouldn’t be sure what to do with it.” He gave Vidal a familiar, lopsided smile. “I was a pilot, an explorer. I still am. And I’m way out of my depth here.”

Vidal’s lips pursed. “I hesitate to drag Barb into this project. She’s already buried under a year’s work. But Alexis is catching up fast. You know, this was her life’s obsession, she was so bloody fixated with Hellgate physics, her marriage wound down, soon as she could wrangle a Fleet commission that put her on carriers in the Drift. Did she tell you – she has an ex-husband out there somewhere, and a kid not much younger than me. Every time you see her lately, she’s got her nose in Barb’s work, or Mark’s.”

“Colonel Rusch,” Queneau mused, and jabbed Rabelais with an elbow. “Ask her. Recruit her. God knows, she’s your niece.”

“Great-great-grand, several times over and a couple of times removed,” Rabelais argued, “but I can ask – get the data from Mark, have Alexis crunch the numbers for us.” He nodded thoughtfully.

“Of course,” Queneau said with a disgusted expression, “it might be different if we had the proper equipment to work with!”

“You mean, we’re flying on one tank, and we need two?” Vidal knew exactly what she meant.

Travers was mystified and took a step closer. “Tank, tanks? What do you mean?”

“The transspace simulator design,” Vidal said tersely. “You’re not used to anything vaguely like it, Neil. Every simulator you and Curtis ever flew was controlled from conventional flight systems, from a pilot seat, right?”

“Obviously.” Travers glanced at Marin, who was listening intently.

“Well, transspace is six dimensions different from anything you ever saw before,” Rabelais said with a profound resignation. “If you’re going to handle it properly – if you’re not going to go right out there and kill yourself the first time you try this! – you need to … to …”

“You fly transspace with your living mind in your living body,” Vidal said in an odd voice, “as if there
is
no ship. You start thinking of this job as flying a ship through a medium, and you’re toast in seconds. It’s just you and transspace, like the flight controls are part of your limbs and brain.” He shook himself hard. “Trust me, Neil, it’s the only way this works.”

An edgy silence settled between him, Queneau and Rabelais. Into it, Marin said thoughtfully, “But you took the
Orpheus
into Elarne the first time. You flew it from a pilot seat, joystick, the usual instrumentation.”

A regiment of ghosts and shadows raced over Vidal’s face, through his eyes, and he took a long deep breath which shuddered just a little. “We should have died. Jo and I … I’ll never know why we made it through.”

The same ghosts were in every line of Queneau’s face. “We made it through because there was maybe one human pilot in the whole goddamn’ universe whose brain was so wired for this, he could do it.”

“And you’re lookin’ at him,” Rabelais added. He nodded at Vidal. “Don’t ask other pilots to do what he did, Curtis. It won’t be happening. Even Mick finds it a thousand percent easier flying from a tank, where every sensory input’s been blocked and in the whole cosmos there’s only you and
it
. Transspace.”

“Flying from a tank makes it doable,” Vidal said slowly. “Even for me, there was a lot of luck, too much, involved in getting through the first time. Beginner’s luck? I don’t know. But I do know there was enough of an uncertainty factor for me to get through on
one
flight and crash and burn on the next one. Those are lousy odds – 50/50 isn’t what you want to see when you’re planning a mission, any mission, much less one the whole Deep Sky depends on.”

Anger sharpened Queneau’s tone. “So we requisitioned a couple of cryogen tanks,” she told Travers and Marin, “so we could gut ’em, rig ’em as sensory deprivation tanks, cross-connect ’em so there’s comm between the pilot and navigator so fine, so fast, it’s like you’re reading each other’s thoughts. That’s what it’ll take to do this
right
. But when we put in the requisition, Bill Grant cut us down to one tank.”

“Why?” Travers wondered. “The
Wastrel
must have plenty of them.”