Event Horizon (Hellgate) (67 page)

And then Marin caught him, pulled him down, and thinking was the last thing his body wanted to do. Travers surrendered without complaint and let impulse – ‘grand passion,’ as Curtis had lately called it – take him where it would.

They slept again, and this time Neil slept so soundly, the call from the threedee did not wake him. He stirred as Marin shook his shoulder, reached for him again, but this time Marin only caught his hand, kissed the palm and then fended him off.

He pried open one eye and swore as he saw the time. It was not much before noon, shiptime, and Marin was not only up and dressed, he was back from Ops room or crew lounge with a wide handy displaying the vidfeed from the
Ebrezjim
. “Give me a minute,” Travers groaned, peeling himself off the bed and heading for the bathroom.

Coffee was waiting for him when he returned. He shrugged into an indigo silk kimono and sat on the foot of the bed, where Marin was cross-legged, watching the feed. “Dario and Tor are pulling the strings,” Curtis said thoughtfully. “But they decided to do the whole thing on remote – drones. Telepresence is a whole lot safer. We’re disturbing the wreck the way Ernst never did. All he did was bring the old handling drones online, power up the generators and undock the engine deck.” He chuckled. “All external – it didn’t impact much on the inside of the ship. The interior’s like…”

“A tomb,” Travers finished. “It
is
a tomb.”

“Yeah.” Marin took a swig of coffee. “They’ve explored the whole thing with viddrones, all the compartments that were not crushed ... they found four more dead. The ship took some damage on the way through the temporal horizon. Mark’s theorizing that she had enough engine power to
almost
hold herself out of it. You do that, it’ll crush you, unless you have the power to run Aragos that’ll hold off maybe a hundred gravities. The
Ebrezjem
didn’t – she had just enough to make a fight of it, run the engines counter to the horizon. Part of the structure twisted and tore apart under the force of her own propulsion. Something like hooking the nose of a car to a docking crane, putting it in reverse and tramping on the accelerator. If there’s enough power, she’ll pull herself to pieces.”

“Then the engines overheated, scrammed, and she went through the horizon fast,” Travers mused, “the way Lai’a did. Or the
Orpheus
. What did Lai’a call it? A Heisenberg tunnel. Mick said, you burn out your engines and then it sucks you right in.”

“Lai’a,” Marin said darkly, “drove in hard, under power. No strain whatever on the hull, frame or engines.”

“Getting out will be a different story.” Travers was frowning over the display in the handy, where three robust industrial drones were using particle beams to cut deep into the deck under
Ebrezjim
Ops.

And Dario and Tor had taken Rabelais’s advice. They were cutting half a meter away from the AI core on all sides. They would lift it out with infinite slowness, on the softest possible Arago cushion.

“This is going to take a while,” Marin said redundantly. “Another hour, minimum, to free the core, and an hour after that to lift it out.” He passed the handy to Travers. “It’s as thrilling as watching paint dry.” He leaned over and dropped a sucking kiss on Travers’s nape. “Dario and Tor are in Ops, but Mark has better things to do.” He paused. “Vidal looks like a much happier boy this morning.”

“You wake up in someone’s arms, you usually are,” Travers observed. “So long as you can remember the night before, and you know who you’re with!” He ducked the pillow that angled toward his head. “You know what I mean.”

“I … know what you mean,” Marin allowed.

“Are we shortlisted for some duty shift?” Travers stretched his back.

“Not as such. But the simulator’s set up, and we ought to be flying it.”

Travers groaned eloquently. “Another chance to drop ourselves right into another black hole!”

“We learn by doing,” Marin intoned. “Vidal is reporting results to Shapiro and Vaurien. We,” he added, “are shaping up as the best of the rest. Vidal and Queneau are the veterans, the survivors – the best. But of the rest of us, you and I are doing it better – a lot better – than Hubler and Rodman, Perlman and Fargo, or even Ernst and Jo, come to that. Turns out, we have a knack for this.”

On his feet and rummaging for clothes, Travers looked over his shoulder at Marin, who was still cross-legged on the bed. “Where’s Mick? Does he want us in the simulator right now?”

Marin gestured vaguely with his coffee. “Hubler and Rodman are in it at the moment. Give them an hour.”

A chance to crash it, take a breather, go again, crash again, Travers thought as he fed his legs into track pants and pulled a tunic over his head. “I want to stretch out, get my muscles working. You …?”

“Had all the workout I needed.” Marin patted the bed. “Every joint I possess is … comprehensively stretched. But I’ll cheer from the sidelines. There’s not much for us to do now. Jazinsky and the Sherratts are going to be in the lab, running the
Ebrezjim
data backwards and sideways.”

He swiped up the handy as they stepped out, absently monitoring the vidfeed from the ancient wreck, though it was uneventful. Travers led him down and aft, to the compartment – twenty meters by thirty, cool, breezy, dark until a visitor’s presence tripped the lights, and then bright with full frequency daylight – which Bravo had set up as their gym.

Even here crates and barrels were stacked along one bulkhead, wasting no space, as if Vaurien, Shapiro and Mark Sherratt were allowing for Lai’a not seeing the Deep Sky again for a very long time indeed. Travers frowned at the stacks and then turned his back on them and fed himself into one of several contraptions which would not have looked out of place in a dungeon.

He was slung in a cradle that formed up about him, pulling and pushing on a pair of bars where the weight was set by the mechanism, always just a few percent outside his ability to handle it without injury. Telemetry monitored heart, pulse, blood pressure, and he had only to push, pull, until the machine said
stop
, then rest until it said
go
. He set the mechanism for a heavy workout, leaned back into the cradle, and put his mind in neutral while his body went to work.

Sweat was running freely, his veins roped, the blood sang in his ears, when Marin said, “You’re a masochist, you know that?”

“If I was a masochist I’d pump iron every day,” Travers argued as he paused to drink. He gestured at the handy. “How goes it?”

“They’re through to the core now. Setting up to pull it out.” Marin was sitting on the bench opposite. “Dario wants to get it into laboratory conditions, warm it up one degree at a time over the space of days.” He looked up over the handy. “As soon as it’s aboard, they’re planning a memorial for the dead of the
Ebrezjim
, and then – we’re leaving.”

Leaving the freefall lagoon, by way of the radiation storm Vidal had described as a scene from some barbarian hell. A thrill of something very like dread stitched through Travers and he threw his weight against the bars again.

An hour later he was rubbing his hair, naked and comfortable in the cabin, when Joss said from the threedee, “Colonel Travers to Ops.”

“On my way,” Travers pledged. “What am I doing there?”

It was Lai’a who answered. “The Doctors Sherratt have asked you to supervise drones,” it told him with what sounded like a hint of scorn.

“What, Joss can’t wrangle them?” Travers grabbed up a fresh pair of slacks. “Or you?”

“Doctors Dario Sherratt and Sereccio,” Lai’a said with the familiar patience, “appear to prefer that their drones should not be AI supervised.” It paused. “Machines in command of machines.”

“They don’t trust an AI to tell drones where to go?” Travers snorted as he grabbed a fresh shirt. “That doesn’t sound right. Where’s Curtis?”

“Colonel Marin is in Physics 4 with Doctor Mark Sherratt,” Joss told him.

“And Vidal?”

“Colonel Vidal has just exited the simulator bay, in company with Captain Rodman and Major Hubler. They appear to be headed for Operations. Do you wish me to call Colonel Vidal?” Joss asked.

“Not at this moment.” It was a long time since Travers had heard Hubler referred to by his rank. Since he left the service, Roark had regarded himself as a civilian freelance, inclined toward the Freespacer. Barefoot, shoes in hand, Neil padded forward in the direction of the Ops room. The way took him past several labs and he heard Mark’s voice, and Curtis’s, before he reached the open door to the smallest, quietest of them.

“Ten blown escape pods,” Mark was saying, “which would have accommodated twenty people each, if they were full; sixteen dead left aboard – and as you noted, there’s nothing of the disfigurement or disarray you see when people perish in vacuum, much less when a ship decompresses. They were on the lower deck when the
Ebrezjim
peeled open, in a sealed compartment that didn’t collapse.”

“And the entire crew complement, at launch?” Marin asked as Travers stepped into the lab.

They were sitting at the long bench, watching a threedee, an edit of the vidfeed from drones that had explored the whole ship. The lab was the same as any other, and Travers did not even spare it a glance as Mark said, “There would have been two hundred souls aboard when the ship launched, give or take a few percent.” He looked up over Marin’s shoulder. “Neil, you look rested.”

“I am.” Travers pulled a stool up to the bench as Marin swiveled toward him and shuffled over to make space. “So – if the ship had a couple of hundred aboard and we’ve found sixteen, you have to guess the rest had already blown out in the escape pods. But, where?”

“Exactly.” Mark set the playback on pause and turned toward Travers and Marin. “There’s no point in ejecting into the lagoon. There’s nowhere to go. If the
Ebrezjim
were raided by another crew that arrived in this void at the same time and came hunting for the tech to effect an escape, all the Resalq crew could reasonably do was fight to the death.”

Travers lifted a brow at him, and gestured into the threedee. “You’ve seen a lot of the ship. Any signs of a firefight?”

“That,” Mark said slowly, “is the oddest thing. There’s no sign of any fighting at all. From what we can see, the ship just made her way here, got caught in the gravity tide – the Odyssey Tide, as we call it – fought with the temporal horizon, overcooked the engines till they scrammed, and made the transit into the lagoon as we did, and Michael’s driftship before us. Inside, the
Ebrezjim
drifted on momentum. If the engineers
did
manage to restart the engines, they didn’t have the power to make it back out through the horizon. Nor did Michael, when he took the
Orpheus-Odyssey
hybrid – which was driven by the same engines, remember – into the radiation field.

He paused there, frowning over the data for some time. “But I don’t think the crew of the
Ebrezjim
even tried to make it out of the lagoon,” he added at last. “Look at the numbers. If she’d made any attempt the hull would still be highly radioactive, since she had no decontamination facility remotely like anything Lai’a possesses. The hull,” he said finally, “is very little hotter than Lai’a,
post
-decontamination.”

“So sixteen Resalq were aboard when the ship arrived back here,” Travers mused. “They were headed for the Orpheus Gate, obviously. Trying to get home. From there, they’d have headed to Saraine or Jagreth, any of the worlds where the Resalq homeworlds were at the time. The engines failed, they were stuck in the lagoon here...”

“And the same engines wouldn’t pull Mick out either. He tried.” Marin sighed heavily. “Maybe the crew left on the
Ebrezjim
knew better than to tackle the radiation barrier at the horizon. Maybe …” His teeth closed on his lip and he frowned at Mark. “Maybe they were intending to go scavenging through the void, same as Ernst did. Maybe
they
were going to be the raiders. Smash and grab, take whatever they could find, either build something new, seize someone else’s tech, or find gear to get their own engines back up to specs.”

“I’d buy that,” Travers agreed. “But then … what? They ran out of time? Got sick? Perhaps their life support went on the fritz, like Ernst’s. Have we looked at that, Mark?”

“We have,” Mark told him, “but there’s no way to infer useful data. The system has bled completely away and instrumentation is quite literally frozen. The AI might know more, if we can coax it online, and if no irreparable damage has been sustained during ten centuries of dormancy and neglect.” He shook his head slowly. “The very real truth is, we might never know the answer to the mystery. And this isn’t what troubles me.”

Travers thought he knew what Mark was thinking. “Either those escape pods blew for a good reason,” he said quietly, “or they blew due to a rogue power spike – and it does happen. If they blew for a reason, they’d have been loaded with the crew … but where, why?
Not
inside Elarne. If they blew in a power surge, they’d have been empty.”

“If they were loaded, where in hell are those people?” Marin said bitterly. “And if they blew out empty, the question’s the same – where
are
two hundred Resalq, less the sixteen we found dead?”

Ghosts shadowed Mark’s face. He looked away from the threedee. “Work it out, Curtis. Go through the equation, one variable at a time. Only madmen would eject into Elarne, so – assume the crew blew out in normal space, far indeed from Hellgate. The next station on the gravity express is Orion 359. They might have ejected there – who knows why? Or at a previous gate. Or,” he added quietly, “in Zunshu space.”

For a long moment the lab was silent. The loudest sound was a shush of cooling fans. At last Marin said, “If they ejected at Orion 359, we could find them.”

“If anyone survived.” Mark’s tone was bleak. “The odds are incredibly long on survival, without a support ship, over a millennium. Even finding a habitable world within reach of the escape pods is a massive longshot. Resalq scientists would have known this.”

“They could also have known the location of a decent planet ahead of time,” Travers speculated. “The
Ebrezjim
was on her way home. Being a science crew, they might have done some surveying around the exit gates on their way out.”

“I believe they did,” Mark agreed. “True, information from this era is scarce, incomplete and untrustworthy, but stories have come down to us about messages transmitted back … habitable worlds.” His shoulders lifted in a deep, expressive shrug. “We can look.” His eyes flickered from Marin to Travers and back. “But worlds
favorable
to thin-skinned, endothermic oxygen breathers are fairly rare. I wouldn't
expect
one to fall so close to the skirts of Orion 359 as to be reachable by escape pod. The far greater probability is, those pods either blew due to system malfunction, or the crew ejected in Zunshu space. In enemy territory, at least they’d be in reach of rescue.”

Rescue? The word was ashen in Travers’s mouth. “If your people were picked up by Zunshu, they’d be prisoners. Maybe the
Ebrezjim
tried to get out. There was trouble when they made their run, so they blew the pods, were salvaged. It’s … possible. But it adds up to incarceration.”

“Or execution,” Mark said softly. “Or vivisection, the way both human and Resalq xenobiologists have always been inclined to study alien species ... including each other.” He shook his head slowly. “If the crew fell into Zunshu hands, there’s no pleasant resolution. And we,” he added, pushing up to his feet, “won’t know anything more until the
Ebrezjim’s
AI comes back online – if it ever does. We should be able to get data out of it, even if the synthetic mind itself is dead.” He looked at his chrono. “They’ll be lifting it right now. It’ll be on board in an hour or so, and then I believe we’re departing. In which case, I must give some thought to the memorial Midani suggested. He’s quite right. The ship is a crypt, and these people have waited a long time for
chelemlal
to be said over them.” He dropped a hand on Marin’s shoulder. “I’ll be in the Ops room, if you need me.”

“So will I,” Travers growled. “I was on my way there. Joss said Dario and Tor want me to wrangle drones – apparently neither it nor Lai’a can do the job?”

“They’ll be glad to illuminate you – it gives them a chance to grumble.” Mark gestured sharply in the direction of the stern of Lai’a, above which the hyper-Weimann core blazed, naked and malevolent. “It’s all about interference off the drive … comm has been dropping out, intermittently and increasingly.”

“And we can’t afford any mistakes with the
Ebrezjim
AI.” Marin was a pace behind Travers. “I’ll give you a hand, Neil. You might need it, if comm is squireling around.”

Ops was busy. Vaurien and Jazinsky were absent, but Alexis Rusch was still looking at the Orion 359 data. Dario, Tor and Midani Kulich were working ten drones between them, while Tonio Teniko looked on, sullen, dull-eyed, rebellious, and Vidal sat watching the tank in company with Hubler. Both were eating, and from the ’chef came the scents of nachos and grilled chicken. Vidal had just had his shots; Grant was still repacking a light bag, and before he left he aimed a scanner at Teniko. Travers was right behind him, and peered at the results. Grant looked up and back, and turned the screen to give him a clearer look.

Toxic, Travers observed. The cocktail of drugs in Teniko’s blood would have anesthetized a camel, and the real mystery was how the man was staying on his feet, lucid enough to work two hours out of six. His useful window was approaching right now. In ten minutes he would be in the dark little lab on the far side of Jazinsky’s, alone with a battery of computers and two handling drones – doing what, Travers did not know, and would not have understood if Teniko had explained it to him.

“Neil, thank gods.” Dario beckoned him right to the two workstations where he, Tor and Midani were so focused on the interwoven displays, they barely had the time to look up.

Four meters away, Alexis Rusch and Leon Sherratt were still busy with the Orion 359 data, but Rusch was watching as Travers appeared and Tor observed,

“You’re damn’ good with drones, Neil – see what you can do with these.”

“Ten years in Fleet – I ought to know drones.” Travers gave Marin a glance and pulled up a chair. “What’s going on? Mark mentioned something about comm on the fritz.”

“This.” Tor zoomed swiftly on the quadrant of one screen where he was monitoring comm around Lai’a. “This is the command frequency for the drones, and it’s –
there
! See that
flatline
? Their comm band keeps dropping right out, blitzed by a burst of interference from the drive. The drones glaze over till their tiny little brains come back online. This happens when they’re maneuvering the old AI core, they can slam it right into something. At these temperatures metals are so brittle, all we’re going to salvage is a few bins of trash.”

“Change the command frequency,” Travers suggested.

“Tried that.” Tor gave him a reproachful look. “The interference is coming from Lai’a. All applicable frequencies are susceptible.”

“Wasn’t a problem six hours ago,” Marin mused.