Event Horizon (Hellgate) (2 page)

“After the war, why don’t you buy him a beer and share data?” Travers’s humor was arid. “Then you can watch the bold Doctor Ramesh and associates turn a pale shade of green as they realize what they were doing.”

“After the war,” Marin echoed in a cynical tone. “If I had twenty Ulrish bucks for every time I’ve heard that one –”

“You could buy a cheap cup of coffee on Earth or Mars.” Jazinsky indulged in a chuckle. “The data’s looking good. Better than I’d hoped for. Just one more thing I want you to do, guys. Tweak your Aragos, crank your apparent mass up a couple of percent at a time. Tell me when the mass gets oppressive. Then I want you to pitch the cargo sled back and forth between you like a medicine ball, hard as you can, see how the servos handle the impact. How well they compensate, how fast they respond.”

“Will do.” Travers shifted his attention to the helmet display and keyed on the Arago settings.

The worklights glared harshly from the high gantries. A zug was making its way between holds, and as Marin joined him he turned his back on the strobing effect as the freight car occluded one light after another.

Two thousand meters closer to the Oberon science platform, the bright, hot sterntubes of the
Harlequin
chased like fireflies, and while he and Marin focused on the suits’ Aragos, Travers listened to the loop.

Roark Hubler and Asako Rodman had been working steadily for two hours and estimated they had another two to go before they could call the job done and move on. This was the two-hour window Vaurien was negotiating for.

The
Harlequin
was preparing the sixth of twelve minefields which were methodically, meticulously being set down in what Mark Sherratt called the ‘exit lanes’ skirting Hellgate – the navigation routes via which Zunshu devices
always
exited the Drift, due to the position of the storms out of which they were spat.

The big events the Zunshu employed as the gateways to their ‘gravity express’ had been reasonably predictable since the days of Yamazake and the first generation nav’ware which began to open up Rabelais Space. But with Jazinsky’s own work, and Mark Sherratt’s, Hellgate was increasingly familiar territory. Humans and Resalq were rapidly retracing the steps of the ancestrals who designed and flew the
Ebrezjim.

The data was sound. Mark had run the numbers twenty times, correlating between the positions where the frontier colonies were now routinely being lost, and the major Hellgate storms which took time and space and tore them apart. Without exception, a major event coincided with the loss of a colony. The exit lanes were tightly plotted – the trajectories on which Zunshu devices could be expected to appear were charted; and when the
Harlequin
finished laying down this current minefield, six out of twelve of those exit lanes were safeguarded.

To Travers’s jaundiced eye the defense looked tenuous, but in bad dreams he was back at Velcastra, still seeing the markers wink off in the navigation tank as Fleet ships were destroyed, taking hundreds, thousands, of lives with them. He could wake up in a cold sweat as he acknowledged, even in his sleep, how easy it would have been for himself or any member of Bravo Company to be serving on one of those ships. Only the unfathomable grace of some soldier’s god kept them safe.

“Neil? You all right?” Marin’s voice was low, quiet.

He shook himself hard. “Yeah. Let’s get this done – you want to grab the sled and pitch it at me? My mass is way up … starting to
feel
heavy, sluggish, Barb.”

“But the good news is, the Aragos will nail you down, if you need ’em to,” she mused. “Question is, can you work under these conditions?”

“Could you
fight
under them?” Marin added as he stooped to lift the small Arago sled which had carried out an assortment of equipment. It was unloaded now, and he turned off the power, rendering the sled a hundred kilos of dead weight. “Here she comes, Neil.”

He slung the sled with a sizeable percentage of the force he could still tap out of his armor, and it came at Travers like a missile. Jazinsky was right – the apparent mass pinned him to the hull as the sled hit him squarely in the breastplate, and Travers felt nothing of the impact. The armor was just 0.02% Zunshu metal, and in the lab it had tested impervious to repeated impacts from Shrike and Tomahawk missiles which would have punched through a gunship.

Travers caught the sled, turned it around slightly to get a grip on it and launched it back at Marin with at least as much force. “You getting data, Barb?”

“Getting numbers,” she assured him. “I’m asking for the human input. How’s it
feel
? Machines and numbers can’t tell me that.”

“The armor’s heavy, it
feels
slow,” Marin told her as he caught the sled and heaved it back in Travers’s direction with enough force to draw a grunt from him which carried over the comm. “But it’s an illusion. It’s not actually slow – I’m looking at the same data you’re seeing.”

“Waiting for the brain to compensate.” Travers fielded the dead weight of the sled and ramped up the force as he hurled it back. “As a Master Sergeant, I’d recommend briefing and training before you put my kids into these suits. You give ’em a few hours to get the feel of the new gear, and they’ll be fine.”

“Richard and I were thinking the same.” Jazinsky chuckled. “You know, what you guys are wearing is one of the most rare and valuable substances in the universe. After the war, the patent on Zunshulite could be worth a trillion credits – even the manufacturing process can be patented. Tully and Paul Wymark and Sasha Tomarov and me, we had to invent the whole thing, build the machine. So, how rich do you want to be?”

“Maybe we’ll buy our own planet.” Marin shared her humor.

As he spoke, the
Harlequin
looped around a fourth time and Roark Hubler’s voice said into the loop, “How’re we reading,
Wastrel
?”

From the Ops room Tully Ingersol mused, “Looking a little bit ragged on the last pass. We want to get this part dead right before you start laying the mines – you don’t wanna be back in there later, wading around in the little Zunshu bastards.”

Part of the preparation for the minefields saw the
Harlequin
setting down a chain of passive monitors, very similar to the broken device the
Wastrel
had retrieved from Celeste. The monitors were seeded first, before the mines were set in strict formation. Finally, each site was clearly beacon-marked.

Twenty thousand mines had already been seeded around the shoals and skirts of Hellgate, and connecting the swarms were long ratlines of passive monitors, covering the Drift. When the
Harlequin
was done, five thousand passive monitors would be adrift between the bloated stars, the black hole and the tendrils of dust left by the supernova, 2631C. They were simple listening machines with one objective: they gathered data from the Drift and uploaded to a vessel scheduled to pass by.

The patrol would be the first duty of the
Esprit de Liberté
. Data would be sent to labs on the
Wastrel
and the
Carellan Djerun
; and buried somewhere in the collation, Jazinsky and Mark Sherratt were sure, the keys to the mystery of the Zunshu would be found.

Travers understood only a little of what they were doing, but he grasped the significance of the work, as did Hubler and Rodman, who understood even less of the details. The
Harlequin
swung away, powered out on a right-angle from Oberon and positioned itself for the next run. Six monitors were on the ramps, ready to be set into position, and with fifty more laid down, tested and validated, they would begin to seed the minefield itself.

Mines and monitors alike were churned out by the
Wastrel
’s factories. They were dormant as they left the shops, with the kernel of their rudimentary AI shut down and waiting for an activation code any sane person hoped would never be broadcast. Just one of those mines was enough to erase a small ship from space. Eight would cripple the
Wastrel
; twenty, and too little would be left for observers to be sure a ship had ever been there at all.

Travers was deeply impressed by the care Hubler, Rodman and Ingersol invested in the preparation of each minefield. Tully was on the techs’ loop even then: “Barb, I’m going to bring these units online, see if I can get them to calibrate their own position. They’re not far out of line – pitch jets might get them where they need to be. You want to oversee this? Second pair of eyeballs on the job.”

“Can’t be too careful,” Travers muttered.

And Rodman: “At least they’re just passive listening devices. Every time I remember we’ve got a hold stuffed full of those mines, I come out in cold shivers.
One
nasty little ship-killer, and we’re history.”

Over the loop Jazinsky said, “Sure, Tully, on my way. You can leave it there, Neil, Curtis. If you’re happy with the performance, and you believe we can expect proper efficiency from techs and troops in these suits – good enough for me. Come back in. They’ll be setting up for dinner in an hour.”

Before she finished speaking, Oberon issued another pulse and the comm whited out again. Travers swore into the mass of hissing distortion, and beckoned Marin. He could see Curtis, even see his face through the darkened visor, but they were reduced to hand signs. Marin signaled in the old military visual code which was drilled into draftees in the first month after conscription:
Am securing the sled, wait for me there, then we’ll go back to Lock 9
.

Travers gave him the OK and adjusted his comm, switching from band to band, trying to get over or around the distortion. It was as comprehensive, as dense, as any deliberate jamming, and all he could do was wait for it to clear. He was wondering what kind of deal Vaurien had been able to arrange as at last the loop began to break back through the sizzle of interference.

A word here and there made sense; it was the tone of Roark Hubler’s voice that set Travers’s pulse hammering, and he raised his voice to shout over the white noise, first at Marin, then at the Ops room. “
Harlequin
is reporting bogeys –
Wastrel
, are you hearing this? Richard?
Richard
!”

The interference was clearing, but not nearly fast enough. Travers fed power to the suit broadcast, cranked the comm to maximum and tried again. Marin had retuned the Aragos holding him to the deck and approached in long bounds, covering the thirty meters between Travers’s position and the drone store in three long strides. Proximity improved their comm, and Curtis was shouting,

“Neil, I’m getting audio from Hubler and Rodman. They’re saying something just shot out of Hellgate. Freespacers?”

“Might be.” Travers’s mind was racing. Some associate of Boden Zwerner who recognized the
Wastrel
and was willing to try his luck in a bid for revenge – or some colleague of
Henri Belczak with an axe to grind after the battle at Celeste? “Richard? Ops room!”

The voice answering belonged to Ingersol, thready and intermittent, no matter how much power he fed to the transmitters. “We’re getting one word in three, Neil, and zilch data feed. We’re blind. You’re probably seeing more than we are – what you got?”

“
Kel-
bloody
-brochev
,” Marin swore in a hybrid version of the native Resalq, a humanization of Midori Kulich’s favorite expletive. “Neil, my sensors are maxed out. If it was a Freespacer ship big enough to have Hubler and Rodman running scared, we ought to be seeing it by now.”

“I know.” A line of sweat tickled across Travers’s brow as he scanned visually for the
Harlequin
. She was out of sight, perhaps on the other side of the
Wastrel
or the Oberon platform, or else simply too far away to be picked up by the naked eye. “Tully, can you hear me?
Tully
!”

“I’m getting some of your transmission,” Ingersol shouted. “What’s it look like?”

“No way to tell,” Travers told him. “Sound all-stations, get the ship on alert, clear the geocannons. Call Mick Vidal to Ops – get him on Tactical, and do it fast. Stand to Bravo Company. I say again –”

The interference had begun to clear now, and as he finished repeating the message Travers could already hear Etienne bringing the crew to stations. Travers was not surprised to hear Michael Vidal.