Event Horizon (Hellgate) (57 page)

“Brace yourself,” Marin said darkly. Travers shot a glance at him, and as the Capricorn nosed into the bright hangar lights he said, “While you were on the
Carellan
, Barb had the
Wastrel
monitoring Hellgate for a likely event on the Orpheus Gate. The data feed from Oberon predicts one inside the next three hours.”

“So soon?” Travers was aware of the sudden chill sweat prickling on brow and ribs, and angled a frown in Vaurien’s direction. Richard was already immersed in the business of crew and ship, and from what little Travers could overhear, he was hammering out schedules. Oh yes, there was a Hellgate storm looming on the horizon.

“The sooner the better.” Marin released the harness as the plane touched down. The engines were still whining to a stop as he got his feet under him. “Like visiting a dentist, isn’t it?”

“You mean, the anticipation’s worse than the reality?” Travers followed him up.

Jim Fujioka looked bleak as he came forward to the hatch. He carried equipment cases under both arms and a gaudy, green and purple civilian backpack between his shoulders. He looked around Travers, into the cockpit. “Hey, Gillie, I brought your stuff. Anything you forgot this time stays forgot.”

“Thanks, hon.” She was shutting down systems, and waved over her shoulder. “You want dinner? Jude says they just finished setting up the autochefs.”

“Yeah, but who set ’em up?” Fujioka grumbled. “If Doc Jazinsky did ’em, you’ll get half your tastebuds burned off and spend a week in the damn’ latrine!”

“You don’t like Pakrani food,” Travers observed.

“I like it just fine,” Fujioka told him, “it just doesn’t like me!”

“So get in there and fine tune a ’chef to suit you,” Perlman snorted as she joined them at the hatch.

“I intend to,” Fujioka said tartly.

“Besides,” she added, “Roo and Tim were in charge. It’s safe to eat, so long as you don’t mind a sausage on a bun.”

“It’s all about the mustard.” Fujioka pushed half of the equipment cases into her hands.

The hangar was small enough to cycle swiftly, and moments later the hatch instruments blinked green and the mechanism opened with a shush of equalizing pressures. Cold air and the acid reek from hot engines smarted Travers’s sinuses as he followed Marin and Vaurien to the inner
armordoor
. It was growling open when Vaurien said into the loop,

“All right, Barb, if Lai’a agrees, we’ll move out in 100 minutes; start the clock. Jon, I’ll ask you to raise the whole complement individually. We’re almost out of time to remember fiddling personal details.”

Jon Kim’s voice was high, taut with stress he was smothering with the practice of a career in the turbulent, volatile Ulrish political arena. “Will do, Richard … or should I say,
Captain
. I don’t have an office set up yet. We’re in the lounge – you mind if I work out of there?”

“Please do,” Vaurien invited. “I’ll be with you soon enough.”

It was the first time Marin and Travers had set foot in the habitation module, and Travers was surprised at the familiarity of it. The hull of one Fleet cruiser was very like any other. The
Apollo
and the
Mercury
were twin sisters from the same production lines, the shipyards orbiting Mars and several moons in the Jovian system. The
Apollo
might have been dormant for years, but she was resurrected now – bright, warm, and Travers had only to follow his nose to the crew lounge where the autochefs were already working.

The vast painting of the tea clipper
City of Adelaide
under full sail ahead of a white-water storm had been transferred from the
Mercury
, and from the
Carellan
, a reproduction of a ‘solar sailor’ from the early days of Resalq manned spaceflight. The gossamer-winged vessel looked more fantasy than technology, but it had actually done service, tacking on the solar wind between the homeworlds of the ancestral Resalq. Mark’s people were still absent, but Shapiro and Kim were installed in the corner under the clipper ship, and Kim was busy with a combug and a handy.

Before them was a scatter of similar handies, most of them idle. Marin appropriated two and passed one to Travers. ”Messages,” he said pointedly, “while we have the chance.” His fingers were already busy.

At the next table, Rodman, Hubler and Bill Grant were eating as if they had little time to spare, while Jazinsky inspected the ’chef menu and several members of Bravo company kibitzed over noodles,
otsumami
and green tea.

“Richard!” She handed him a plate, which he tried to wave away, but Jazinsky would accept no such refusal. “Anybody tell you lately, you’re looking thin in the skin?
Eat
.”

“I told him,” Grant said loudly. “You want shots,
Captain
? I can pencil you right in between Mick and the nong.”

“The nong?” Travers looked up from the device where he was keying as brief and terse a message as he could manage to his eldest brother. No love had ever been lost between himself and Allan, and the text was purely a formal notification that if this mail were received, Travers, N.A. was deceased and a bequest was accessible, upon legitimate legal application. The wording was so terse, he almost went back and rewrote it. Almost.

“I said
nong
, I meant
nong
,” Bill Grant said brashly.

Memory jogged, and Travers recalled the scathing Australianism from years before. He angled a critical glance at Teniko, who had curled up into a ball in a chair in the lounge’s only dim corner. Heavy eyed, slack mouthed, Tonio showed Grant his middle finger and buried his nose in a mug of mocha so thick, it was like syrup.

“And I said, eat,” Jazinsky repeated, slathering sauce over the plate of Singapore noodles she had handed to Vaurien.

“I guess I’ll eat,” Richard said in tones of resignation. “I don’t have time for this. We’re on countdown to departure, Barb.”

“Yes, you do. Mark and I have been watching a storm brewing for the last hour or so,” she argued. “Looks like it’ll be a beauty, which suits us just fine – but it won’t crest inside at least the next hour.”

“Lai’a seems to like the size and shape of it.” Vaurien was picking around the edges of the food.

“Lai’a identifies it as the Orpheus Gate.” Jazinsky had taken a bowl of mixed seafood and fragrant rice. “Obviously, it can’t wait to get into any storm that’ll take it right back to its natural environment. Homing pigeon. Us? We’re piggybacked along for the ride.”

“There’s a
little
more to it,” Shapiro argued. He looked once at his chrono. “We just hadn’t expected showtime to come
quite
so soon.”

“And your insides feel like jelly,” Hubler rasped. “Where’s Mick?” He glared up at Travers, as if it were Neil’s fault he was missing.

“He’s coming over with the Resalq. Curtis, you want to eat? See if you can get hold of Mark, find out what’s keeping them, while I get us some food.” Travers thrust the handy at him. The message was done, such as it was; Marin would tag it for Etienne, and transmission, earliest possible.

In fact, his belly was refusing the offer of food but it was too long since any of them had eaten. Vaurien was merely pushing the noodles around, though he took a mug of paint-like black cacao with red chili and clotted cream, while Travers selected pure
carbs
and caffeine for himself and Marin. Croissants and coffee might have suggested breakfast, but Marin accepted them and chewed mechanically as he waited for Mark to respond.

“They’re loading right now,” he told Travers moments later. “Mick actually went back to the
Wastrel
, something to do with the simulator. Jo and Ernst are coming over with it on the last freight shuttle. Mick and Alexis are catching a ride with Mark’s people, and they’ll be the last aboard.”

“Damn.” Travers squeezed his eyes shut and then looked over at the status display. Lai’a was already running preflight hyper-Weimann diagnostics while the tangible precursors of the storm began to flicker even on routine ship instruments. The Orpheus Gate was about to gape open like a split in space itself, and –

“We’re out of time, aren’t we?” he whispered.

“That’s an odd way to put it,” Vaurien observed as he surreptitiously dumped most of the food into the recycle chute. “You could also say we’re about to get an early start.”

“Depends where you’re standing when you say something like that,” Jazinsky said with razor-edged humor. “Lai’a just wants to get away from mundane, boring three dimensional space, get back to where the gravity tides race and temporal currents tangle between the big gravity wells. Harrison just wants to get face to face with the Zunshu and hammer out an armistice. Mark wants to get onto the
Ebrezjim
, see if any part of its brain is still functional, which is a way of making contact with his illustrious ancestors. Me? I want all of the above, but I also want to prove out ten years’ worth of work. If I’m wrong, I just burned off a decade of my life. But I’m not wrong,” she said smugly.

Marin was still listening to the loop. “The Resalq shuttle launched a few minutes ago. The last freight load from the
Wastrel
is right behind it.”

“And we,” Hubler said as he shoved up onto his feet, “have work ahead of us. Move your butt, Asako.”

“There’s only a half hour’s work,” she argued, “and we got better than eighty minutes to do it in.”

“Unless something needs fixing, in which case we’ll run out of time real fast.” He dumped his plate into the chute and was stomping away without waiting for her.

She headed out after him with a curse just as Jon Kim gestured with the handy. “Done. The last aboard will be
Carellan
101, while Captain Rabelais and Jo secure their freight. Update from Captain Ingersol –”

“That sounds too weird,” Jazinsky muttered.

“But accurate.” Vaurien finished the cacao and made a face over the bitter dregs.

“– the
Wastrel
,” Kim finished, “is on alert. Ops is powering up. The storm’s going to break ahead of schedule.”

“You better give Roark and Asako a revised guesstimate.” Vaurien dropped his mug into the recycle. “Lai’a, I assume you’re monitoring the datastream?”

The AI seemed to be everywhere, all around them, enveloping them. “I am generating most of the datastream myself,” it said with the surreal calm of the machine and the self-awareness that always made Travers sure it was alive in some very real sense. “On current calculations, the Orpheus Gate will open in approximately 50 minutes.”

“All right, Lai’a, we can do this. Joss, tell Jo and Ernst they better hustle.” Vaurien was moving. “And crank up Ops. I want to take a good look before we commit to this.”

He had been aboard twice before, Travers knew, but never in a ‘live’ situation. It was like the difference between knowing a circuit was carrying current and actually sticking a finger into the socket. Still working on the coffee, he and Marin followed Vaurien and Jazinsky forward from the lounge, where Operations was just coming online with scores of flatscreens, ten full workstations, six modest threedees and the three-meter navigation tank.

Months before, the bow compartments of the old cruiser had been converted to cubic storage. The flightdeck was gutted, sensor pods, AI housing, forward weaponry, all stripped out just as the engines and generators were gone. The habitation module was a mere shell, Zunshu-armored, sheathed in Arago fields, a tiny bubble of environment where fragile creatures could survive in a cosmos that wanted only to rend them to the level of subatomic particles.

Seventy meters back from the bows, the Ops room itself was pleasantly familiar, like a clone of
Mercury
Ops. The instrumentation had been upgraded with tech from the
Wastrel
and
Carellan Djerun
, but it remained a Fleet Ops facility, and they differed so little between ships, Travers had even found
Kiev
Ops oddly familiar, though he had never stepped into it before the battle on the Omaru blockade.