Event Horizon (Hellgate) (18 page)

Again Travers felt a shiver, as if a hand had touched him across countless centuries. He watched Shapiro, Jon Kim and Dario making their way out and took a step closer to Mark, dropping his voice. “Have you talked to Vidal?”

“About suppressing the memories which are punishing him?” Mark was watching Vaurien, Jazinsky and Rusch, who had returned to the ’chef for the coffee that was Shapiro’s one real indulgence. He had shipped a crate of it, the last time the
Mercury
departed Borushek. “We’ve spoken about it, but there hasn’t been the opportunity to actually do it. I’ve been on the
Carellan
, and Mick has been tied to the
Wastrel
, and will continue to be. Doctor Grant won’t let him stray far from the Infirmary yet, and then – you know about his project?”

The work that kept him, Rabelais and Queneau in their private hangar, confounding them until at last they recruited Alexis Rusch, who would bring the skills of a physicist to the project. “They’re building a flight simulator.” Travers heard the odd, hushed tone in his own voice.

“A transspace simulator,” Marin added. “The object is to train more transspace pilots. Myself and Neil. Perlman and Fargo. Pilots fly transspace in pairs, apparently. An individual can’t do it alone.”

“Yes.” Mark rubbed his palms together, brooding on the project. “There’s little I can do to assist, short of tweak their numbers, which Colonel Rusch can do just as well. Understand, my people left this technology behind when I was so young, I honestly have no memory.” He smiled faintly. “Just because I’m Resalq, and ‘as old as God,’ as Michael remarked recently, doesn’t mean I can fly transspace! Far from it. I’d have to go through the simulation training, the same as yourselves. And I,” he said bleakly, “don’t have the time. Twenty-two days. You heard Harrison. And I imagine the last week will be an insane scramble.” He dropped a hand on each of their shoulders. “Speaking of which, Leon and Tor have been calling me for the last fifteen minutes. Dario’s already gone.” He gestured at his combug. “I’ll be in the lab here on the
Mercury
, if you need me – and I’ll try to be at this party of theirs, sometime during the evening.”

“All right.” Marin clasped his hand. “We shove off for Omaru soon. If we don’t see you before we go … take care of yourself, Mark.”

The Resalq touched Marin’s hair with curious tenderness. “I always do. And as for you, keep one eye on Michael, if you can. He’s not nearly as strong as he thinks he is.”

“We will,” Travers promised. “Later, Mark.”

And then it was just Travers and Marin, standing in the middle of the conference lounge while the servitor drones began to clear the debris of dinner and take stock of the depleted autochefs. Vaurien, Jazinsky and Rusch were in the corner by the viewports, looking out at the terrible, beautiful vista of the Drift and talking in murmurs.

The view drew Travers’s eyes, and the
Intrepid
had never seemed so close, to tangible, as if he and Marin might walk off the
Mercury
and back aboard the super-carrier in the late days of the madness. He had to forcibly remind himself that Lai’a had monitored the whole briefing, and if it had had anything to contribute, its voice would have issued over the comm. The
Intrepid
was less a memory than a nightmare, and like Vidal, Travers could not seem to set the acid-bitter images into a dark corner of his mind, lock a door on them and forget them. Mark Sherratt might show them both how.

“We ought to show up with something,” Marin was saying as he led the way out of the lounge.

“What, party gifts?” Travers forced his mind back to reality. “What did you have in mind?”

“I’ve no idea,” Marin admitted. “It doesn’t want to be booze – Mick can’t drink it, and the other two shouldn’t. I’ve no idea what Queneau likes to read or watch, much less wear … I don’t think I’ve ever seen her out of some kind of uniform. And as for Rabelais, he’s about two centuries out of touch, so to him everything looks and sounds weird.”

“They won’t be looking for gifts,” Travers guessed.

“Still, a few minutes in Supply might be well spent.” Marin was already moving.

Supply aboard the
Wastrel
was a compartment the size of a small hold, where oddments salvaged from the Drift over the space of a decade would be found beside the drums of raw materials fed to the autochefs and assorted crates of
stuff
loaded into the smaller fabricating systems. Years ago, inventory would have varied from month to month, but since the tug had been on Shapiro’s contract the content of the rail-mounted shelves rarely changed. Marin consulted the register and was scrolling through scores of pages on a flatscreen by the door to the deep, dim cavern, but Travers had known this vault since his ‘virgin furlough.’

The remote for the shelves was right by the flatscreen, and while Marin was still wading through inventory, he got the three-meter units rolling. They rumbled slowly, pushed by big servos and riding polished steel rails. He had half an idea of what he was looking for, and as Marin abandoned the register he strolled down the track. A glowbot dropped down from the ceiling, riding at shoulder height to light the meter-wide gap between the shelves, and Travers began to rummage.

Much of the stock was tagged CV
Astrid Mukherjee
, with a date just less than seven years before the
Wastrel
took Shapiro’s contract. Even now much about this ship could astonish Marin, and he murmured in surprise.

“I remember the wreck – it headlined on CNS. Freespacers?”

“The Bronowski Reef,” Travers corrected. “She was loaded with luxury goods from the Middle Heavens, headed for Omaru and Borushek, part of a trade deal. The AI pilot scrammed in the fallout from a Hellgate event and she drove right up on the reef, tore her bows off. The drive shut down, the AI never rebooted, and she just sat there, dark, dormant, for years. By the time she was found, the insurance investigation was done. Willhausen-Gough Securities had already paid out, top dollar, on the claim. Nobody wanted to know about assigning salvage rights and reopening the documentation.”

“Richard found her?” Marin was looking through clothing, jewelry, shoes, gadgets, datacubes loaded with classical literature, music, cinema.

“And he made all the usual discreet inquiries with the owner, back on Lithgow … ‘We found your ship, she’s a ruin but the cargo’s perfectly salvageable, what do you want to do?’ And the owner said, ‘Lose it, quick, before WGS reopens the files and it starts to get ugly.’” Travers gestured at the scores of shelves. “This stuff turns out to be useful from time to time. You’d be surprised what you can trade in Freespace.”

“After Halfway, I wouldn’t,” Marin retorted.

For Vidal, a tunic of some synthetic fabric that looked and felt like a cross between silk and skin, with a chameleon characteristic making it change color when the light and temperature shifted. For Queneau, a handful of cubes loaded with the complete works of an old
peligro
band she liked, whose music sounded to Travers like two overworked Arago engines struggling with different loads. For Rabelais, a small blue bottle of a cologne called
Elegante Pecado
, which had become priceless in recent years since the Pakrani manufacturer closed.

“Good enough,” Travers decided, and headed away, leaving the drones to close up and plunge Supply back into its customary darkness.

The
Mercury
’s night staff were on, and the halls were quiet. The docking rings were deserted, but from the
Wastrel
side they heard voices – a tech crew making its way back to the engine deck, arguing about the relative merits of Chiyoda over Zamfir on the firing range. They were all ex-Fleet, and like most veterans they kept their skills honed.

Lights shone from the stateroom assigned to Ernst Rabelais, and the music issuing from within was pulsing, a little odd to Travers’s ears, not quite enharmonic but
old
, without the charm and sophistication of Bevan Daku. For a moment he tried to pick out melody or rhythm, and then dismissed the ‘music’ as pure sound. Doubtlessly, it was the noise Rabelais had grown up with and he found it comfortably familiar.

The stateroom was not dissimilar from the one Travers and Marin shared, with an idling threedee, a wide bed, a recliner by the long armorglass panes with the view of the Drift, a small, personal ’chef. Rabelais had been out of the Infirmary too short a time to put much stamp of individuality on it, but a painting of a square-rigged sailing ship hung opposite the bed, and the open closet displayed an assortment of clothes Travers would have described as quaint. The colors and styles spoke of other centuries, and he would have been surprised to see anything different. Rabelais had read all the history, sampled the different and still changing culture, and through Alexis Rusch he had caught up with the massive, extended clan which traced its lineage back to him. But Travers was unsure how much of their world Rabelais actually
wanted
– how much he could deal with on any personal level.

The man himself had set his back to the view of Hellgate and was peering at the labels of two bottles, neither of which he recognized. One was a rum from the warm seas of Borushek’s equatorial region; the other was a tequila from the hot, dry hinterland three hundred kilometers from Elstrom City. Jo Queneau was in the recliner, thumbing through menus on a large handy. She had changed into a black kimono. It flowed around a body that had only just begun to fill out and still looked little like a woman, much less the Kuchini Travers remembered. Vidal sat on the side of the bed, cradling a cup of green tea and looking as if he had lost all interest in any party, while Bill Grant perched on the swivel chair by the threedee, discreetly scanning the trio.

“Neil.” Vidal stood and held out his hand. “I hoped you’d be here.”

“Happy return,” Travers said glibly, shaking the offered hand with mock solemnity. “From the dead, that is. Here, brought you something.”

“Gifts?” Rabelais looked up from the bottles.

“Welcome back.” Marin passed the cologne to him, and the tunic to Vidal. “Hey, Big Jo, catch.”

She was quick enough to snatch the datacubes out of the air, and murmured in surprise. “Hey, where did you find Bloedbroeders? I didn’t think anybody remembered them these days.”

“You’d be surprised what you can turn up on this ship,” Travers told her, “if you know where to look. If you’re staying on, after the war, you’ll find it all. Enjoy.” He let go Vidal’s hand and sat beside him on the side of Rabelais’s enormous bed. “You look like you’d rather be anywhere else in the Deep Sky.”

“Tired,” Vidal admitted, and Travers knew he would have made the confession to no one else.

“Bed. Sleep,” Marin advised softly.

“Can’t sleep,” Vidal muttered, as if disgusted with himself.

“You did when you were right between us.” Marin’s hand fell on Travers’s shoulder. Neil looked up, saw a question in Curtis’s face and nodded minutely.

Vidal never saw the exchange between them. “Being alone, the dreams hit me,” he said not much above a whisper. “You know.”

“Which tells you where you’ll be,” Travers said bluffly.

“Intruding.” Vidal looked away.

“Don’t be an idiot, Mick.” Travers stood and gestured at the tunic Vidal still held between his hands. “Go and try that on.”

“It’ll fit like a bloody bag. Everything does.” But Vidal stood and deliberately stepped into Rabelais’s bathroom. “Excuse me while I protect your sensibilities. I look like a hybrid between a fucking xylophone and a coat rack.”

The bathroom door closed over, and Bill Grant snorted. “You should’ve brought him something useful, like a sandwich.”

“We just came from dinner,” Marin protested.

“Which he didn’t eat. I noticed.” Grant gestured with the handy. “He’s getting himself worked up over something.”

“We’re going back to the
Kiev
.” Travers jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You don’t know what’s bugging him? Damnit, Bill, you can be an insensitive little sod at times! He’s going to walk back into the same company he used to serve with – the Delta Dragons, the command corps – and you
know
what they’re going to see. They’ll look at him, and they’ll see a shadow of the Mick Vidal they used to know.”