Event Horizon (Hellgate) (72 page)

“If we’re wrong,” Mark said with a lick of acid humor, “we really, genuinely won’t know anything about it.” He gestured at Vidal. “Michael was suspended in the field for some indefinite time. We don’t know how long, but to him it seemed a matter of perhaps a few minutes had passed, while according to the realtime clocks of the rest of the cosmos, the universe
outside
Elarne, months went by. We’ve calculated that he could have remained suspended in the horizon for a couple of centuries – on the available power of the engines salvaged from the
Ebrezjim
. And they,” he added, “were so close to burned out, Barb and I estimate it was just about even money if they started up at all.”

“Jesus,” Rabelais whispered, as nearly a prayer as a profanity.

“Lai’a,” Jazinsky said pointedly, “is so much more powerful, we don’t actually know how much more. The transspace drive has never been throttled out to maximum, with two, much less three Prometheus generators also pushed close to overdrive behind it.” The white-blonde head shook slowly. “The potential power is frightening. Apologies for the hyperbole, Richard, but the more you know about it, the more terrifying it is.”

“All…right,” Vaurien allowed. “So the odds are with us, unless you two have your arithmetic dead wrong.” For the first time in a long, long while, he glared into the shadows on the far side of the tank, actually looking for Tonio Teniko – the freelance consultant. “I imagine you’ve checked them? And if you haven’t, why haven’t you?”

He was sober, sane, functional, at least for the next hour. His eyes looked almost normal as he stepped out of the dimness in the furthest corner. In the warmth and humidity Jazinsky had asked for in the Ops room, he had shrugged out of the omnipresent hoodie, tied it around his hips. His body was thin, almost hunchbacked, arms noticeably too long, hands too big, with misshapen knuckles. Travers had not seen him clearly in months, and his skin crawled a little with the normal human reaction to radical mutation.

For better or worse, Teniko’s early life had always been defined by beauty, but he was beginning to learn the meaning of ugliness, and Travers wondered if physical repulsiveness armored him or wounded him. He always held to the shadows now and Neil knew instinctively, Teniko had come to hate himself again. His own beauty had infuriated him, but now it seemed he disgusted or frightened himself.

Even his voice was strange, deeper, croaking, as if it was breaking a second time. His larynx was reconfiguring for the bigger body, Travers knew without asking. Teniko cleared his throat twice, three times, before he said,

“Why should I run about after them, checking their numbers? Suddenly you don’t trust them?”

“I trust them,” Vaurien said curtly, “but I know you don’t. So I’m assuming you ran those numbers for yourself.”

“Of course I did.” Teniko shoved the big, misshapen hands into his pockets. “You think I’m about to risk my fucking life without checking their math?”

“No faith,” Dario observed.

“Faith is for airheads,” Teniko said dismissively.

“You might get an argument on that score, depending on who you talk to, and what about.” Vaurien lifted a brow at Vidal, but went on, “And your numbers…?”

“Different from Sherratt’s and Jazinsky’s, but we’re all inside of allowable parameters.” Teniko retreated back to the shadows.

“Allowable parameters,” Jazinsky echoed.

“Now, there’s a nice, convenient term,” Alexis Rusch said cynically.

“You want the truth, Richard?” Jazinsky leaned on the side of the tank with both flat palms, which lit her face from below in weird lights and colors and shadows.

“Why don’t you lay it on me,” Vaurien invited.

She, Mark and Rusch shared a moment of silent conference and dark humor before she said, “The fact is, we’re so far off the map here, everything we
think
we know is constructed on skinny material evidence and physics predicated on instinct, intuition, the gut knowledge we’re right. We
know
the Resalq made it through Elarne – and a few almost made it home before they got stuck in quicksand here. We
know
Mick almost made it out of the void with engines that were pretty much junk. Even Tonio will tell you, transspace is all about gravity, time and a bunch of dimensions rubbing shoulders the way they ain’t supposed to, and never would in normal space. To play transspace at its own game takes energies so far off the scale of human experience, the extremes of those energies are out in the realms of philosophy.” She gave Vaurien a faint smile as his mouth compressed “Physics as poetry. Art.”

“But not abstract art.” Mark added. “Poetry written in the language native to Lai’a. It has no wish to self-destruct, Richard, and to it, Elarne is home.”

As they spoke the navtank had shifted from graphical plot to long-range vidfeed, and Travers murmured in reaction. He did not know what he had expected, but though Vidal called it a kind of hell, the inside of the horizon was actually beautiful. It was a tangle of writhing, dancing rainbows, fluorescing in every color visible to the naked human eye, and he knew it flared on into every part of the invisible spectrum. The feed was dimmed down to make it viewable; in fact, it was so bright, it would have
shriveled
living eyeballs.

He looked up from the tank into Vidal’s face, expecting to see horror there, or dread, but Vidal gazed into the image with an expression of awe. What he saw, Travers could not even imagine. “I was almost through,” he whispered. “Damnit, we were coming home. If the Resalq engines hadn’t been damaged, we’d have done it.”

Travers shivered, and Vidal’s words seemed to be all Vaurien needed to hear. “Lai’a,” Richard said crisply. “You have a go for transit.”

“Horizon transit in 50 seconds,” Lai’a acknowledged.

And Vaurien added deliberately, “Sound collision.”

“Collision?” Harrison Shapiro’s voice echoed from the passage just outside Ops. “Are we running into something?” Jon Kim was a pace behind him, with Hubler, Rodman and Queneau coming up from the service elevators, but none of Bravo Company felt a need to be here, and Bill Grant had little interest. Shapiro came to rest by the navtank, looking at Jazinsky for answers.

“It’ll be more like a bow shock,” she mused. “We’ll definitely feel it – Aragos won’t be able to absorb the entire contact. The
Ebrezjim
computer core is secured –?”

“Perfectly,” Mark assured her. “The lab drones will take care of everything, and we …” He was looking into the vidfeed and words seemed to die on his tongue.

“Mother of gods,” Jon Kim murmured. “What is it?”

“A membrane,” Jazinsky said in a hoarse whisper. “We call it a horizon because it marks the place where
here
ends and
there
begins. You could just as easily call it a bridge.”

“Rainbow bridge,” Marin said with the flicker of a smile.

“Right out of legend.” Vidal’s arms closed around his own chest, hugging himself, perhaps as he remembered flying into the field in a craft no larger than a dock shuttle.

Lai’a was as imperturbable as ever. Travers wondered if it would register any flicker of reaction if it were racing to its own destruction, or if it really was a machine right through to the core. “Transit in 20 seconds. All decks report secure. Transspace drive functioning at .006 percent below optimum. Radiation screens to maximum. Transit in 10 seconds.”

“You might want to grab something,” Hubler warned.

Travers and Marin braced against the side of the navtank as Lai’a counted from five, and the display billowed into a dance of color and light, dropping out of focus as Lai’a drove right into it, retracing the sizzling wake of its own engines.

Velocity was almost meaningless here, but if Travers chose to notice instruments he saw numbers that made no sense – gravities, speeds, time indexes, suggesting they were either traveling at millions of times the speed of light, or that time was moving like the molecules in the heart of an ammonia glacier on a world orbiting a long-dead star.

“Two. One. Transit,” Lai’a said evenly.

Sensations of falling, of submerging in an ocean of dark honey, of hollow insides and suffocating pressure, dizziness, an inability to breathe, disorientation and some irrational blend of blinding fear and wild euphoria, overwhelmed Travers for what might have been a split second or an hour. He heard no human or Resalq voices, but Lai’a continued to speak clinically, reporting on engine function, radiation levels, gravities registered, the stability of overlapped and interlaced Arago fields.

Darkness washed over Travers’s head like the murk of deep water. And then the pressure lifted, the hollow sensation was gone and he blinked open his eyes to see Marin, Vidal, Rabelais, Vaurien – dazed, pale, as confused as himself, while Lai’ said,

“Driftway. Transspace engine is stable. Establishing contact with the Orpheus Gate comm drone. Standby.”

Mark and Jazinsky were the first to rally their wits, while Vidal propped himself on the side of the tank and continued to pull deep breaths to the bottom of his lungs. Shapiro and Kim dropped into the nearest chairs. Hubler and Rodman looked merely stunned, as if the ship had just physically ridden a broadside heavy enough to rattle their teeth. Rusch seemed to shake herself and without a word went for coffee. Rabelais and Queneau regained their senses a moment later, and were jubilant. They grabbed Vidal between them in an ecstatic embrace.

“I told you,” Vidal rasped, triumphant, eyes blazing with the same kind of zealot light Travers had seen in Jazinsky’s face, and Mark’s. “We were coming home!”

“And if the engines from the
Ebrezjim
had been any less burned out,” Mark added, “you’d have done it.” He pulled both palms over his face, and gave Jazinsky a nod. “We can do this.”

Shapiro sounded shaken. “You had doubts?”

It was Rusch who said quietly, “There are always doubts, Harrison, until the thing’s been done. Remember your history … the sound barrier was broken by a suborbital rocket plane at the cost of countless pilots’ lives, and for years before, physicists and engineers swore it was impossible. The
translight
drive was four decades in development. It didn’t cost lives because drones flew it, but it cost over two trillion Confederate dollars, and success was supposed to be proscribed by the immutable laws of nature.”

“Well … fuck,” Roark Hubler said succinctly. “That was one hell of a ride, Doc.” He offered his hand first to Mark, then to Jazinsky. “Just don’t do it again real soon.”

“Or ever,” Rodman added hoarsely. “The driftway, I can handle, and the tides, the gravity express. This…?”

“You might get used to crossing a horizon,” Vidal mused. “Lai’a, you take any damage riding the storm?”

“Minimal damage,” Lai’a said with a faintly smug tone. “Estimated repair time is two hours. I will remain in the driftway until optimum function is re-established. Drones have already deployed.”

“Like antibodies,” Marin observed. “Lai’a will rest up for a couple of hours and heal itself.”

“As I said before, this,” Mark said with deep satisfaction, “is its natural environment. And we,” he added, with a frown at Dario and Tor, “have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Not for 48 hours, minimum,” Tor argued. “That’s how long it’ll take the brains of the
Ebrezjim
to come up to a workable temperature. Me? I’m going to catch up on some sleep. The last few weeks before we launched, I couldn’t sleep worth a damn even when we had the chance, which didn’t come often.”

“I have located the comm beacon at the Orpheus Gate,” Lai’a announced. “Comparison between its clocks and my own demonstrate a major discrepancy. Assuming the drone’s clock is approximately true to a clock located in normal space, Captain Ingersol aboard the
Wastrel
will record the elapsed time of this mission at 26 days, 14 hours, 45 minutes.”

For a moment the words refused to make sense, and then Vidal swore quietly and knuckled his eyes hard enough to leave them pink. “We always knew this was going to happen. We certainly rode a temporal stream to get here – who knows how fast time passes in the lagoon? And we could have spent
weeks
in the horizon.”