Event Horizon (Hellgate) (32 page)

Marin reached into the tank and toyed with the veeree visor and earpads. “You have to wonder about The Zunshu. You just predicted how human engineers, maybe even Jazinsky herself, are going to develop a way to slide into transspace without using a place like Hellgate, and they’ll do it in another few decades. The Zunshu have been using the big storms as their gateways for millennia. What is this, a case of arrested technological development?”

The question had troubled Travers for some time. “Dario Sherratt was saying the same thing. He’s spent his whole life taking apart Zunshu tech, and from everything he’s seen, and everything in the Resalq database, the Zunshu tech hasn’t changed by so much as a rivet since the days when they were snuffing the Resalq homeworlds.”

“Who knows?” Queneau said restlessly. “I’m not a historian. I don’t really give a shit. If I tell you the truth, all I want to do is
snuff
the Zunshu and come home, back to the real world. Shapiro can talk about negotiating with them, arranging a ceasefire, a truce, whatever. You really think bastards like the Zunshu are going to buy into some political crap? You want to lay bets, Travers?” She made a grim face. “The Zunshu are going to see us coming, and you
know
they’ll try to blow us the hell out of their skies.”

“Lai’a,” Marin said softly. “They’ll attack Lai’a. But it’s armed and armored with derivatives of their own tech. They have nothing we’ve seen the size or power of it. They do have devices like the ‘Borushek bomb,’ but we recognize those now. They can’t pull that trick again, not against Lai’a.” His brows arched at Queneau. “Do I want to lay bets – on who’ll walk away from this one?”

“No, not that.” Queneau met Rabelais’s eyes and they shared a dark look which spoke volumes to Travers. They had talked this over before; Vidal had likely been part of the discussion. “Give me odds,” she invited, “of the Zunshu listening to the voice of sweet reason and coming over all peaceable.”

“Zip,” Rabelais said in a hoarse whisper. “Nada.”

And Travers had to agree. “Zero – but it’s not ours to worry about.” He leaned over, closer to Marin, and looked into the simulator. “Let Shapiro lose sleep over this one.”

“So.” Rabelais rubbed his palms together in something very like glee. “You guys fancy a joyride?”

For a moment Travers hesitated, but he had heard the challenge in Rabelais’s voice, almost a dare. Marin was fascinated and Neil had known for days, they would have to fly this simulator sooner or later, as would Perlman and Fargo, Hubler and Rodman. Shapiro and Rusch had taken Vidal in complete seriousness: Lai’a was one machine, one pilot, and no matter how extraordinary it was, the expedition could not fly confidently without backup.

“All right,” Marin said guardedly. He shrugged out of his jacket, threw it over the nearest chair. “So, who flies, who navigates?”

“Depends.” Rabelais took Travers’s jacket from him and hung it over the back of the same chair. “You both fly crates like the Capricorn, the Trofeo, gunships … is either of you qualified on fighters?”

“Yeah.” Marin was rolling up his sleeves. “I took the ticket.”

“Makes you the pilot,” Queneau said at once. “Doesn’t mean the navigator’s job is any easier, Travers. In fact, it might be tougher than just flying the bird – and in any case, you’ll have to trade off, cross-train. Something happens to one of you, the other needs to be able to slide into either role and pick up the pieces with another partner.”

Travers had plucked the combug from his ear. “Two tanks … are they the same, or did you rig them individually, pilot, navigator …? Where do you want me?”

Moving in beside him, Rabelais thumbed a remote and the second tank’s curved upper surface lifted in a smooth gullwing. “The tanks are pretty much the same but the one in the back is slightly better prepped for navigation – because it’s the one we started with. The new one, this baby in the front, is a little better suited to the pilot.”

“How?” Marin wondered. “I heard what Mick was saying about how it’s easier to fly transspace from a tank, but I’ll confess, I can’t get a handle on what he meant. I’m not arguing the point, just wondering.”

For a moment Queneau and Rabelais blinked at each other, hunting for a way to frame what they knew and felt in words. “Easier to show than tell,” Queneau said at last. “Take her for a spin. You’ll see.”

“Boots off,” Rabelais added. “Climb right on in, I’ll configure the tanks for the both of you.” He was aiming a handy at Travers first, frowning over the display. “Height, weight, body temperature.”

“
Hunh
?” Travers paused, heeling off his boots.

“The tanks,” Queneau told him, “are going to simulate zero gee, neutral temperature, no light, no sound, no … nothing. This is how it works, kiddo. Mick and me, we did it the hard way, nearly killed ourselves a dozen times. Then, while we were drifting around in hell, we had the time to think the whole thing through, mentally take it apart and put it back together. Scratch-paper designs. We figured out how it ought to work best.” She gestured at the simulator. “If you don’t trust me, trust Mick. It was Vidal who came up with the idea of flying her from a sensory deprivation tank, and he was dead right.”

“O…
kay
,” Travers allowed. “I’ll try anything once.”

It was odd to climb into the tank. He had been through cryogen storage and retrieval in training, as a rookie in the first six months of his conscription hitch, but the exercise was also designed to prepare field medics for the real thing. He had lain on a gurney, ostensibly terminally injured, and was fed into the tank by two small Arago bots which lifted him up, dropped him in without a jolt.

He remembered claustrophobia as the tank’s gullwing closed down, and the sensation was the same now, though this tank was illuminated softly from within and Queneau’s voice was in his ears. “Just relax, Travers,” she was saying. “There’s a veeree headset on your right. Put it on, and put the visor down.”

Moving in the cramped space was difficult. The tank’s bed was a thick pad of
smartfoam
which molded to his shape; he had just enough freedom to move his arms, if he did not move them too far. The combugs settled in his ears, the earpads were comfortable enough and Queneau’s voice said, so clearly that she could have been standing right behind him,

“Relax your arms at your sides, both of you. You’re going to feel the mesh gloves right there … extend your hands into them. They’re part of a sensor net. Your head’s lying on a bunch more sensors, and these bugs you’re listening to aren’t just combugs. They’re part of the same sensor net.”

“Reading brainwaves?” Travers felt for the gloves and worked his fingers into them. He flexed his hands, felt the fine tracery of wires form up about his fingers, palms, wrists, forearms. Several mosquito bites took him by surprise as hair-fine needles threaded into key points. “Whoa.”

“Problem?” Rabelais asked.

“No. Just strange. Curtis, you feel this?” Travers took a breath, held it as the gravity dwindled to nothing; and as he adjusted to weightlessness the soft light dimmed into utter darkness.

“I feel it,” Marin said softly. “It’s just a little weird, Ernst.”

“Did I say strange?” Travers was moving his fingers a little, aware of what felt like light, tiny feathers fluttering over the skin of his arms, shoulders, neck, scalp. “Understatement. Curt?”

And Marin’s voice, intimate in his ears: “I have the veeree set on … am listening to the AI. The sim just came online.”

In Travers’s own veeree visor a deep threedee image had come alive, and he knew they were seeing the same display. “Got it. Hellgate. A storm. Big one.” Data streamed in the bottom of the image, giving the strength and size of the event. “It’s a Class Six monster.”

“There’s your gateway,” Rabelais said very quietly. “I’m going to start the sim rolling. Listen to the AI. It’ll talk you through this time, and a dozen more times if you need it. Don’t fight it, let it hold your hand. You’ll need it for a while.”

“Christ, will you look at this beast … running diagnostics on flight systems,” Marin murmured. “I don’t know much about hyper-Weimann tech, but we look good to go. What’s the mission profile?”

Before Travers’s eyes, the threedee encompassed his entire field of vision. He had seen the big Hellgate events before, but always framed by a screen or the finite surrounds of a navigation tank. Here, he seemed to be disembodied, floating in space itself, as if there were nothing, no veneer of armor or hull or Arago field, between him and the yawning maw of the beast. He remembered what Vidal had said about flying transspace with the living mind, the living body, as if there were no hull, no engine, no computers –

What he felt now was vertigo, as if he hovered, poised at a great height, looking down into an abyss and if he fell, he would keep falling forever. He heard Marin’s voice as if from a vast distance as Curtis confirmed flight readiness and asked for the mission profile – and then the data streamed through both the threedee and the combugs, synched and harmonized until for a surreal moment he could not tell which feed was which.

The mission was a simple reconnaissance flight. They would enter the Orpheus Gate, take a navigation fix on Naiobe, go out by the Pleiades Drift, loop around an artificial beacon tagged as Taurus 894, and return to their gate riding the Kronos Tide.

“Uh … roger that,” Marin responded. “Be aware, I have no idea of most of those locations – not
what
they are, nor where.”

“You don’t need to know,” Rabelais’s voice whispered. “You have a navigator, you’ll get his feed in realtime. You go where he points you – and if you think it sounds easy, you’ve a thing or two to learn.”

To learn about transspace? Travers was listening to his own heartbeat as Marin eased his hands in the sensor-mesh gloves, felt out the flight controls, fed power to the virtual sublight engines –

And the simulated craft they were flying raced forward. Dead ahead was the event, like a slash carved into space itself, flaring blue-white about the margins, seething red and green and gold in the heart with energy storms like surf crashing onto a beach, and right in the center of the event, a single calm, clear passage. The eye of the storm, Travers thought, the narrow corridor of freefall through which craft like the
Orpheus
, the
Odyssey
and Lai’a itself might plummet through the jaws into some
where
, some
when
, beyond even e-space.

Travers’s heart quickened again as the event raced toward him. The illusion of the tank disembodied him – he felt nothing, heard only the simulated feed, saw only the all-encompassing deep image which overwhelmed his senses. His hands and forearms tingled, and as he flexed them he caught his breath sharply.

Each wriggle of each finger shifted the display, changed the angle of view, the depth of field, brought up a graphical overlay of the vista ahead and changed the color coding of the plot to reflect different information. He blinked hard, made himself
look
, and recognize the blizzard of data. Plot, distance, vector, time, velocity, shearing forces, gravities – and extra channels in shades of blue and green and red not normally seen in navigation
sims
–

He saw time flux, represented by the Resalq helical symbol,
Urs
. He saw mass density. Correlation coefficients calculated in realtime and shifting with blinding speed. Mathematic matrixes projected through
x,y,z
plus the super-square vector represented by the triangular Resalq ‘air’ symbol,
Shu
, shifting and oscillating faster than his physical human eyes could follow. His eyeballs spasmed and he squeezed the lids shut.

And it was then that he realized he was getting feedback along his neural pathways from both the handsets and the headset. Feedback was common in veeree simulations, but every commercial rig he had experienced employed it to supply the sensory input that made games so real, the physical body was fooled. Pilots on the asteroid miners used similar rigs to take massive ships through impossible places, and he began to appreciate their work.

Here, where normal space had given way to e-space which in turn was about to merge into Elarne, the mathematics describing transspace were translated into a dizzying graphical environment. Travers perceived mass, distance, time, in rainbows of color streaming and cascading over and
through
a threedee image. He groaned as he glimpsed the truth. Human eyes could not actually
see
beyond the third dimension, but the brain could imagine and infer higher dimensions.