Event Horizon (Hellgate) (74 page)

“Four
days
to Orion 359,” Vidal whispered, “and the Naiobe Gyre takes about a
year
to swing right around one orbit? And there are driftways every few hours down the track, and then exit gates at the major drifts, like Hellgate itself, every few days or weeks.” He looked almost as dazed as he had when Lai’a broke out of the lagoon. “Christ, half the galaxy becomes accessible.”

“Close to it,” Dario agreed, “which makes you wonder all the more, doesn’t it, who the hell the Zunshu are, and what they want with us?”

“Let’s just get to Orion 359,” Mark said with grim resolve. “We can spare a day or two in normal space to at least search for a Resalq colony, survivors from the
Ebrezjim
or their descendants. We know the range of those missing escape pods, we know we’re looking for a world with a viable environment – it won’t take long to look. Lai’a?”

“I shall be fascinated to explore the region for its own sake,” Lai’a admitted. “If we can find survivors, so much the better.”

Survivors? “It’s been a thousand years,” Marin murmured, “after they punched out in pods? What, Mark, one chance in a million of finding anyone?”

“Or ten million,” Mark said soberly. “But as I said, it won’t take long to look, and we owe it to our ancestors to try … but not for too long. Remember, we’ve been gone for a month already, as far as the Deep Sky is concerned. In that time, you know the Zunshu will have struck again, perhaps more than once. The frontier worlds don’t have months to wait while we perform a meticulous search for people who probably aren’t there to be found.” He was moving as he spoke, as if forcing himself to be busy. “And we have an ocean of data to analyze even before the
Ebrezjim
AI comes up to temperature. Dario, Tor…?”

They were already working. Dario stepped aside to show him a flatscreen displaying two visual angles on the salvage and a steady stream of readings. “It’s getting there. Looks like another 45 hours before we dare handle it, then I’d like to get it into the lab. But first –” He yawned animatedly. “Tor had the right idea. I gotta catch some shuteye, Mark. Been in the lab around the clock lately, till I’m seeing double.”

The proposition of rest was seductive, and yawns were infectious. Vidal in particular looked gaunt with fatigue, and excused himself with a mutter of needing to be in the Infirmary for scheduled shots. The company broke up, drifting in their own directions, and as Marin headed back to the crew lounge, Travers followed.

Curtis recovered the handy, picked up his reading where he had left it an hour before. Tired but not ready to sleep, Travers ambled back to their cabin. From the bag he had stashed in the bottom of the closet he pulled the book – the actual, physical
book
Marin had bought in the gift store at the Jagreth Colonial History Museum.

The heavy plastex sheets were sumptuous, a sheer extravagance, and the art was glorious. An illustrator credited as Ian McGuire had depicted the hero,
Iven
Jagreth, as a tall, big-shouldered, deep-chested male with a penchant for blue and gold bandanas and big gold rings in lobes and nipples. Travers was charmed – reminded of the character of Sinbad, who featured in no few of his childhood fantasies.

But Jagreth was the commander of an exploration ship on an expedition to find new worlds suited to the Resalq. On one likely planet his crew went head to head with smugglers and the love of his life –
Ande
Cailenne, the expedition’s master navigator – was taken hostage to ensure the escape of the smuggler craft. Cailenne was described as a ‘timeless beauty,’ whom McGuire depicted as olive skinned, doe eyed, slender against Jagreth’s solid bulk of muscle, though there was nothing feminine about him.

The smuggler crew had been outlawed many years before; they were infamous for using and abusing prisoners, and Jagreth was sure Cailenne would suffer at their hands. What the smugglers did not know was that Cailenne was already carrying Jagreth’s child; and
Iven
Jagreth convinced his crew to forget their mission of exploration and go hunting. It took four months for them to track the smuggler crew through improbable realms rich with fantasy and dark magic, and recover Cailenne, who by that time was obviously with child. Jagreth fought for him, a physical match between himself and
Rahn
Hawd
, the smuggler prince who was sure the child was his. Jagreth and Cailenne knew better. Jagreth was badly injured – still limping when Samaral was born on the new colony world which would one day be named, by humans, for the captain of the expedition.

The story was charming, the artwork beautiful, and Travers’s eyes were drawn to the native Resalq script, which was given right beside the Slingo translation. The Resalq wrote top to bottom, on and through a vertical line, from right to left of the paragraph. The characters of the written language were curving, flamboyant, gorgeous, and utterly baffling.

“The story is sixteen centuries old,” Marin said as Travers set down the book and went for coffee. “The Resalq were on Jagreth for six hundred years before the Zunshu came – and the planet is so lucky. The colony was still small enough to pack up and run, shut down everything that smacked of industry, before the world-wrecking assault could come.”

“There’s a stasis chamber,” Travers remembered.

“Jagreth,” Marin said bitterly, “was fortunate, like Saraine. And if I knew how to pray, right now I’d be saying one for Borushek and Omaru – they’re far closer to Hellgate than Velcastra and Jagreth, so if the Zunshu strike at a major, populated world –”

“They did.” Travers breathed the steam off a Pakrenne roasted blend. “We caught the Borushek weapon just as it launched out of the Drift.”

“Yes.” Marin set aside his handy and stood. “All the more reason not to spend long at Orion 359. We don’t have a lot of time left.”

As if on cue, Lai’a said into the loop, “Standby for transspace drive ignition. Navigation bench markers are set … acquiring Naiobe Gyre in three. Two. One … Naiobe Gyre insertion successful. Potential transit of Orion 359 in 95 hours, 37 minutes.”

Chapter Thirteen

Lai’a, transspace

It could have been a mountain range before and beneath the driftship, but Marin recognized the illusion. Pure energy was sculpted by immense gravities, pulled and twisted into the form of mountains. What one took to be tendrils of cloud whipping and foaming over their shoulders, driven by a fierce wind, was the visual representation of the slow-time currents. Overhead and deep below were the brilliant jetstreams of the fast-time currents. The trick was to find a viable course between them.

It was a little like contour-riding over a terrestrial landscape, and the pilot in him rose to the challenge. He had done similar flying, and memories of the Santorini skyline flittered through his mind – weaving and darting between comm relay towers and the crowns of sky-high buildings, with an armed Rand
Stratos
on his tail. Death had been a hair’s breadth away then, too.

They were in the Kronos Tide, the gravity stream racing between the Orion Gate and the Tasman 288 comm beacon; and both Marin and Travers had forgotten this was a simulation. The experience was too overwhelming, and the level of commitment essential to survival was so profound, reality dropped away from them like an old, outworn glove.

“You’re a little fast,” Travers was warning.

The AI had remained silent since they acquired the Kronos Tide. Its handholding dialog was less frequent each time they flew the simulator, and now the tone of Neil’s voice was level, composed. Marin heard no edge of panic there, and though he drew a deep breath to slow his own pulse, he was calm. This was the twentieth time he and Travers had flown the driftship, and they were on the homeward leg now. The Kronos Tide returned to the Orpheus Gate via a different route from the Odyssey Tide, but it would get them there – through a chicane, a bottleneck between the gravity wells of two supergiant stars. The cleft between the walls of two towering mountains of unspeakable energy was just wide enough to pass the ship through, so long as Marin could keep it out of the slow-time currents.

“You’re still too fast,” Travers judged, though Marin had shed speed twice. “Brake … and again.”

The energy penalty for overenthusiastic braking was dire, and Marin was watching the instruments every moment now, waiting for the AI to whisper its customary warning, that the generators were overheating and would underrun to compensate. In five flights through the chicane they had made it through three times, and on each flight Marin was keenly aware of the goddess of sheer lucky flying copilot for him.

“I’m going to try something,” he said softly. “Let’s see if dropping us just a
whisker
closer to the slow-time stream bleeds off some of this speed without overstressing the generators.”

“Risky.” Travers was busy with his own work, and Marin’s eyes scanned his data constantly. “It’ll be close.”

“But doable,” Marin argued, “and it’d get us through this chokepoint without killing those generators – and us.”

Twice, they had crashed the simulation right here. The first time, the slow-time channel sucked them in and they were suspended in an eddy leading eventually to a driftway that would dump them into the Ebrezjim Lagoon in a year, or a decade. The second time a fast-time current seized the driftship, raced it away into regions impossible for any human pilot to fly, perhaps even beyond a machine like Lai’a.

The display surrounding Marin synched with Travers’s, and Neil had zoomed to concentrate on the immediate ‘sky’ where Marin would either make this work – or not. Neil’s instruments focused on the mass, gravity and temporal potentials, drawing and redrawing the ‘safe lane’ that should take the ship through.

Marin’s hands were feather-light in the sensor nets around his fingers, wrists, forearms, and he took up the navigational data through the pores. He was unaware of any process of seeing, analyzing, comprehending then acting on the knowledge. What he perceived from instruments seemed to translate directly to the sweeping, diving movements of his hands on the flight controls. The driftship responded more like a living bird than like any aircraft he had ever flown.

She skimmed the surface of the slow-time channel as if she were a pelican trailing a wingtip in order to manage a stable, energy-free turn – and sure enough, the apparent velocity dropped fast. Almost too fast. Marin throttled up the drive and skipped at right angles across the gravity tide swirling around the subspace roots of the super-luminous star cataloged as NHC-5574. To human navigators who had used it as a navigation fix for three centuries, the star was commonly known as Gloria, a young blue giant which would live another million years and die like 2631C. Its fate was to become a Hellgate nebula and patiently feed the master magician, Naiobe itself. But for now Gloria was one of the brightest bodies in the skies around Hellgate, visible even from Pakrenne and Lushiar, and as brilliant as Shikoku in the pre-dawn north over Hydralis –

And it was one of the fixed-point benchmarks that were bringing Marin and Travers home to the Orpheus Gate like a series of milestones. Travers gave a whoop as the driftship skipped clear, tacking a zigzag across Gloria’s fearsome gravity before she bolted free.

“Driftway,” Marin said with a definite self-satisfaction. “We’re just about home, Neil.”

“Acquiring zero-point navigation markers,” Travers said quietly – the words were comfortable, familiar, automatic. “Here we go … there’s Naiobe … and Raishenne-G … and the 2631C pulsar. Got it. I know right where we are.”

So did Marin. The Odyssey Tide swept away like the wing of an eagle above and to his right. The Ebrezjim Lagoon was that way, but he had skipped into a driftway that was taking them back to the Orpheus Gate. They were actually back inside Hellgate even now, and just cruising, watching for an event through which to exit.

The region was thoroughly charted. According to the object database built by Lai’a itself and dovetailed into the simulator, Raishenne-G was a cousin of Gloria, born from the same stellar nursery. Leon Sherratt had told Marin how Resalq navigators set course by Raishenne-G in the days when
tallships
cruised the seas of their homeworlds.

Deep beneath the fabric of normal space, and just beyond – or behind – the e-space conduit, transspace wove and
skeined
between these monstrous gravity wells; and from within Elarne, pilot and navigator could
see
the big Hellgate events beginning.