Branegate (33 page)

“I guess I did,” said Trae. “When I first came back he was just a memory, but then it grew. Even in a new body I still recognized him. Yes, I’m happy. I have two fathers again.”

“I always thought his eyes were cold,” she said. “He frightened me a little.”

“He likes you,” said Trae. “When we first arrived here he used to kid me about you, about the way I felt but couldn’t express.”

She put a hand on his knee. “Still have that problem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, the door
is
closed.” Her hand moved along his thigh. She leaned forward, eyes open.

Trae leaned forward and kissed her gently, his lips together, but Myra leaned into the kiss and her lips parted, his following hers. Their tongues touched, and caressed softly. They exchanged sharp exhales of breath before parting.

Myra smiled, and patted his thigh. Trae swallowed hard. “Good for circulation. We’ll get more work done,” he said, and she laughed.

He licked his lips. “What is that taste?”

Myra took another bite of her sandwich. “Lambsynth and jelly,” she said. Her face glowed.

I think I love you.

Me, too.

I’ll call you Anton in public, but you’ll always be Trae to me.

Okay, but only in private. Uh oh, I just thought of something.

What?

“The field is shaped, right? I mean Guppy’s field. The forward edge moves in and out with energy.”

“Yes.”

“So how much more energy is needed to open the brane at the forward edge of the field?”

Myra laughed. “Your brain never stops, even when we’re kissing.”

“Neither does yours. Well?”

“Well yourself. At high asymmetry, with the new proboscis on Guppy, a fifty percent overload might open the brane a few ship lengths out, a few miles.”

“And if we double the power overload?”

Myra rolled her eyes. “Double the distance. Should be roughly linear.”

He knew that in her head she saw nothing but geometries, the intersections of shapes. Exact calculations would take a day to answer his questions, but he knew her answers would be close. They always were.

“I think we have a way to turn Guppy into a powerful weapon,” he said, but Myra just stared at him until he explained it all to her.

CHAPTER 35

G
randma Nat was in a bad mood, and relished a moment of remorse and self-pity. She was perched on her special chair on the ship’s bridge. Her captain was an arm’s length from her, and looked bored. The viewscreen showed stars and faint nebulae in patterns totally unfamiliar to her. The vibrations of the ship hummed around her, and would do so for perhaps the next fifty years, even with two nauseating jumps per cycle. She had at best twenty years before rejuvenation, and could look forward to the first thirty years of her next life being cooped up in space in a too-small ship staring at a viewscreen showing foreign stars while the home of her first birth drifted even farther away. Her planet was crumbling under the tyranny of The Church, her family had split up in flight, and it was not likely she’d ever see two of her sons again. Other children were in other ships tagging along with her in black space towards a place only her grand daughter knew, a place soon to be under attack. The Bishops’ ships were on their way, and it was only a matter of time.

Feel sorry for me, she thought. Feel sorry for my family. I miss my husband. I wish he were here. I wish I knew why he chose to end the cycles of his life.

She sniffed once, and then wiped her eyes dry with a tissue.

Well, enough of that. Now what?

“You’d think my grand daughter would call more often, just to let us know where they are,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” said her captain. “They’re far out in front of us by now.

She pouted. “Distance has nothing to do with it.”

There had been that one frantic call when she’d been trying to sleep through the buzz of the ship.

Gramma, it’s Tatjana. Please answer!

What? I’m sleeping.

The invasion ships are making transit. We’re making a run for it to meet our son. He thinks the invasion can be repelled, but isn’t sure how. I’ll be in touch later, when we have something new. Bye for now; we’re making another jump. Oh, how I hate these things!

Weeks ago, and nothing since.

She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. “I don’t know how you stand it, all this time in space. I don’t belong out here. I feel like a spore trying to find a place to land so I can really live.”

Her captain smiled. Nice smile. What was his name? Karl something. “I’ve spent a few lifetimes in ships like this,” he said softly. “I love the peace and simplicity. No crowds, no politics. Just drift, and enjoy the view. It’s not for everyone, but I like all of it, even the jumps.”

“Ugh,” she said, and he laughed.

She liked the man, and his attitude, and wished she could share it with him. There were others like him out there, guiding the ships containing the remnants of her family and all they needed to start again in some new place that would have them.
   

To pass the time, she and her captain began sharing stories about past lives, ten lives between the two of them. In the following seven cycles of the ship she tried twice to contact Tatjana, but received no reply. What was wrong now? And finally her captain came to her with disturbing news. The scanners had picked up a fleet of fifty ships, large and small, two days behind them, but coming from the galactic core.

“Fifty? That could be the invasion force,” she said.

“We’ve been following the shipping lane, and so are they. Could be commercial,” said her captain.

“I don’t think so. Can we get farther away from them?”

“Certainly. We’ll do a light-year jump right now if you like.”

“I don’t like, but do it,” she said, and the moment was again both nauseating and disorienting.
I’m too old for this
, she thought.

When they came back into flat space the scanners showed nothing behind them. But only an hour later the fifty ships were there again, following them by only a day and a half.

And closing.

CHAPTER 36

T
here were seven ships in lower orbit, and one of them was
Nova
, the first ship Anton and Myra had tested. That ship had six companions, all tested at jumps up to forty light-years. Seven darts protruding from doughnuts spiked with radial vanes, and two oblong ports along the fuselage forward of the cockpit were the new features. The ships were engineered for war, armed with two railguns throwing thousand pound slugs of ferrite-doped uranium, and one-ton slugs of pure iron enclosing shaped charges of high explosives.

Seven ships were not many, but twenty more were in production, and more scheduled to follow. Anton and Myra surveyed the existing craft from the shuttle taking them to higher orbit for the first complete operational test of Guppy.

“We’re actually going to war with these things?” murmured Myra.

“Yes.”

“The whole concept of war seems wasteful to me.”

“It bothers you.”

“Of course. Doesn’t it bother
you
?”

“It bothers me that some of our own people could be killed or badly injured. Otherwise, no. We’re not the aggressors here. We’re defending ourselves instead of giving up our way of life. Nobody wants to die a violent death, even with rejuvenation. I know from experience, it’s not pleasant.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Myra. “I’m not opposed to war when it’s necessary. I’ve read enough history to know some aggressors can only be stopped by killing them. I just want to minimize the waste.”

The shuttle pulled out in front of seven ships now in echelon formation. Fourteen, black apertures were the muzzles of missile tubes and railguns, there to spew death. Figures moved in the bridges of two ships, the first crews on board. In days, all the ships would be manned and ready to go. Timing depended on the results of the tests with Guppy today.

A two second burn, and they moved higher. Myra put a hand on his arm. “It was Azar Khalil who had Trae killed, not The Church,” she said. “There are innocents involved.”

“From what John tells me, Azar and The Church is the same thing. He’s a Bishop from the other side, sent to establish political power over people’s lives in the name of The Church and to dictate their beliefs.”

“But many believers don’t want that either, people who don’t even attend services. They’re not your enemy.” She squeezed his arm for emphasis, and he looked down at her.

“I know,” he said softly, and put his hand over hers. “My enemy,
our
enemy, is defined well enough. There’s the invasion fleet and the Council of Bishops that sent it. We have Azar Khalil, and the church of extremists he’s set up on Gan. These are the enemies, and I tell you this; they will stop what they’re doing, or be destroyed.”

Myra leaned her head against his arm. “I never heard Trae say such harsh words.”

“That was another lifetime, Myra.”

“I think talking with John Haight has hardened you.”

“It has. He made me realize we have to go to war. I didn’t want it, either.”

“I know. I agree with you. I just hate the possibility of killing the wrong people.”

“John wants to meet you, by the way. He remembers you from when you talked to me in my dreams.”

Myra frowned. “He’s still a security man, a hired killer, from what I hear. People at the plant are talking.”

“They’re wrong. He’s my father, Myra, at least a part of him is. He knows how I feel about you. He wants to meet the woman I love.”

Now she smiled. “Well—if you put it
that
way.”

“After today’s test?”

“If we survive it,” she quipped.

“No reason we shouldn’t.”

“Oh, I can think of a thousand reasons. Can’t you?”

He hugged her, and their eyes went back to the viewscreen. Three yellow specks in blackness, then blobs, then three strange ships coming in closer, each bulging at the front, and slender aft, like giant versions of some deep-sea predator with gaping jaws. The proboscis of each ship was now coiled up inside the hull for flat space travel and pinch topologies for spacetime jumps. Its purpose was singular, to open a pore in the brane, anywhere in space, expanding it to the size of the ship for transit.

They would test that today, the opening of a ship-sized branegate, but there was something else to do, something that would turn a peaceful ship into a weapon of war. That would be the final test of the day.

The three ships now in orbit with them had been tested several times for normal and jumped flight. The record was sixty light years for a jump, but Myra felt a hundred light-years was attainable with only two jumps per day. They’d not pushed too hard, yet, but intended to before taking the ships into battle. And far above them, in geosynch orbit, seven others like them were being assembled. They would be ready by the time the invasion fleet reached Elderon.

Trae had no intention of waiting so long.

They drifted in close to the lead ship in orbit, the first of its kind and the one they’d christened Guppy. Only close in could the size of the vessel be appreciated. Forward it was heart-shaped in cross-section, and over a mile across. Nova was small by comparison. The length was five miles, out of sight from where they came in to dock at a short, retractable port in the nose of the vessel.

They docked with a small bump and lurch, then went down stairs to the access tunnel and waited. A minute later the airlock coughed and opened, and Wil Dietz was there grinning at them. He motioned them forward.

“Thought I would have seen you again a lot sooner than this,” he shouted.

“Slaves to the computer,” said Trae, and they walked swaying down the flexible tunnel to meet him.

They shook hands. “You look like you’re having a good time,” said Trae.

Wil had been principle test pilot for both Nova and Guppy, and had oriented a dozen other pilots during testing. “Great time. Still not sure which I like best. Nova is a racecar. Guppy is more like a heavy truck, but it’s sure more comfortable living in her. Come on in.”

It was almost as if he were inviting them into his home. The hatch clanged shut behind them, and there was a shudder as the tunnel was disengaged, venting lock air into space. An open elevator lifted them up three levels to a passageway with pairs of empty seats on both sides, and they walked it to a roomy bridge seating seven crew. Two seats normally occupied by maintenance engineers were vacant for them. Co-pilot, navigator, and two flight engineers were already seated, and nodded greetings.

They sat down, buckled in, and put on headsets. Once in motion they would stand behind pilot and copilot so they could look outside through carbon-plas windows.

There was no lurch, no sensation as they lifted from orbit. “Ponderous, but stately,” said Wil. “You can fly her with one hand. Here we go, then, ninety degrees above the ecliptic plane to two A.U. and mark.”

Their weight was normal for several minutes, and then they coasted. Wil read the test list on his screen for comparison with the old-fashioned clipboard pages in their hands. Both of them still loved pen and paper for making notes and quick calculations.

“Mark. Setting DEC nine-thirty, RA twelve-thirty five-zero. We have a straight run of seventy light-years from here. Ready?”

“Proceed,” said Anton.

“Deploying Sniffer,” said Wil.

A low hum lasting seconds. “Deployed.” The face of Guppy now had a forty-foot long protuberance that looked like a parrot’s beak. From this would momentarily protrude ‘Stinger’, a tapered cone shaping the space-twisting field to pry open a single pore of the brane connecting all points in space.
   

“Plenum charging. Twenty seconds. Trickle rate twenty-five.”

Anton and Myra made checks on their checklists. Sniffer would discharge the plenum, followed by a trickle of exotic particles interacting with the false vacuum of space. Ernst counted down from five. At zero the windows flashed green. Time to move. Anton and Myra stood up and leaned over Wil and his copilot to look outside. There was a bright green glow around Sniffer’s beak, slightly oblong in shape.