Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (7 page)

“This be our floor?”

“Not yet, hon. We’ll hold on to you.”

“’Kay.”

The car came to a halt, and we were almost weightless again.

“Let’s get him turned before the door opens,” Mama said. Good idea, I realized. When it opened, the room beyond would seem upside down. We gently swung him through 180 degrees. I heard the elevator door open behind us.

“Okay, Jubal,” Mama said. “This is where we get off,
cher
.”

We turned him around and moved slowly out onto the bridge.

—

Most Thunderites (or Rollers, or Rockenrollers; there are several schools of thought on the matter) have never been to the bridge.

The things that keep
Rolling Thunder
thunderously rolling (albeit silently) are managed from different control rooms scattered around beneath the inner surface, out of sight. Atmosphere monitoring, power, water, sewage, recycling, ground ecology, crop rotation, fertilization, weather control, warehousing, the jail, some other things I don’t know much about, and subsystems of all of them each have underground central stations, and some have local ones. Human factors such as policing, courts, schools, scheduling of meetings and entertainment and elections, are all located in civic buildings on the inner surface.

The bridge is concerned solely with propulsion and navigation.

The computers do all the heavy lifting—which, at this point in the trip, consists mainly of small course corrections—so there really isn’t all that much to do, and for that reason and for security purposes, only a handful of trained technicians have clearance to go there regularly.

And, of course, family of the captain.

The great majority of the work is done, as elsewhere, by automated systems. The ring of six almost infinitely powerful squeezer bubbles at the stern is held in place by gigantic scaffolds that must be constantly monitored for heat, but mostly for stress.

There is just one workstation for astrogation, known as the Captain’s Chair, and it is manned twenty-four/seven. Uncle Travis admitted to us, during our first visit to the bridge, that he knew it was silly, but there was just something that fundamentally bugged him about an eight-mile-long ship hurtling through space near the speed of light with no one at the stick.

So there has been someone “at the stick” continually for all my life. Shifts are six hours, or until one is formally relieved.

The ceiling of the bridge is a clear dome, inscribed with lines of declination and right ascension so that it doesn’t seem invisible, so that you don’t get the sense of sitting on the naked rock of
Rolling Thunder
’s bow.

Well . . . actually not.

It’s a superdef screen. Far from being in the actual bow, there was still a quarter of a mile of solid rock over our heads.

You hear about “empty interstellar space,” but it’s not really empty. Compared to inter
planetary
space, it’s pretty thin, but compared to inter
galactic
space, it’s thick as pea soup. The density varies, but the average is one molecule per cubic centimeter. That’s one million molecules per cubic meter, nine hundred thousand of them hydrogen, and ninety thousand of them helium. Even considering the considerable surface area of the ship, that’s not enough to slow us down. If we turned off the engines right now, the ship would continue going at the same velocity forever, for all practical purposes.

However, at .77c—143,000 miles per second and change—that stuff would impact with a hell of a lot of power. I don’t understand it all, but I think that it would hit with the power of gamma rays.

The other 1 percent in that cubic meter is dust. Not the sort that forms dust bunnies under your bed, but particles of just about anything, chiefly silicates, carbon, water, and iron. I think of it as wet rocks. Some of the gas and dust can be very hot. I don’t understand how that can be, since the median “temperature of interstellar space” is three degrees above absolute zero. Papa says don’t worry about it, it’s just a confusion of terminology. As in all things physical, I take his word for it.

Some of that dust isn’t much bigger than the gas molecules, but some of it is
enormous
, relatively speaking. Up to a tenth of a micrometer. That’s one ten-millionth of a meter, which is pretty damn tiny, looked at one way, but when it’s arriving at three-quarters of the speed of light, even if there are only a few of the “big” ones in every cubic meter, we are moving through . . . well, I don’t know the number, but it’s an incredible volume of space every second. It can all add up.

However, all that is mooted by the presence of the Shield.

Captain Broussard is a belt-and-suspenders guy. The thickness of the rock at the bow would be more than enough to protect us from radiation and any damage from incoming dust. It would probably take a billion years for that dust to ablate a few inches. But out in front of us, traveling at the same speed we are, is a silver squeezer bubble, something like half a million miles across. It is held permanently at the same distance from us by one of Papa’s mysterious fields. It is absolutely invulnerable to anything anyone has yet discovered. Molecules and dust grains bounce off it, leaving a wide tube of space in its wake that is, as far as we know, the most perfect vacuum that exists anywhere in the universe. That tube will eventually close up, but
Rolling Thunder
will have passed through it long before that.

So in reality,
nothing
is impacting the bow of the ship.

I once asked my uncle why we needed to have all that rock between the Bridge and the surface.

“What if the Shield fails?” he said.

In the century we have been using them, no bubble has ever failed. But that’s my uncle Travis. A cautious man.

—

I recognized the watch-stander, in her uniform. She had graduated from the Bayouville School two years ahead of me and been the captain of the Gators skypool team when Polly and I joined. She was reading something in a book.

“Hi, Lori,” Polly called out. “Working hard, or hardly working?”

Lori’s eyes grew wide when she saw who was visiting. Papa was not in any way in the chain of command over her, but plenty of people hold him in awe. She wasn’t goofing off, she wasn’t doing anything wrong at all, but I guess she
felt
guilty, up there technically in charge of the ship, reading. She reflexively and unwisely started to spring to her feet and was on a trajectory to bang her head hard on the ceiling, but snagged the arm of her chair just in time. That twisted her awkwardly. She was blushing red as she got herself planted, spine straight, eyes ahead, and saluted.

Papa was way too far gone to notice her; otherwise, he would have smiled, gone over, and shaken her hand. Papa has very little sense of his own importance, and though he is terribly shy in crowds, he always greets everyone individually as a long-lost friend.

We didn’t pause long enough to talk to Lori. Mama marched us right to the only other door on the Bridge, directly across from the elevator. She pressed her thumb to a panel on the wall, then helped Jubal do the same.

The door closed behind us. I helped Mama support Papa, who was still glassy-eyed but no longer looked panicky. I wasn’t sure he was aware of his surroundings.

There were a few twists and turns in the passage. There was nothing obvious, but I knew there were multiple security measures in place. If we had been intruders we would have been stopped a dozen times before we got to the inner sanctum, and killed if we showed the least sign of aggression. If there had been any unauthorized person with us—perhaps holding us hostage—we would have been hit with knockout gas and Tasers. If the intruder was wearing a pressure suit, if he had been using one of us as a human shield, the defense programs were sophisticated enough to take him out without harming us. Or so we all fondly hoped.

We came to another door and had to ID ourselves again. It opened, and we entered a dimly lit room.

There was nothing remarkable about it except for the big black bubble held in place by a delicate lattice. The room was cut in half by a barely visible sheet of very strong plastic. There was a door in the center, thick as a bank vault. I could see complicated mechanisms inside it, moving like clockwork.

“Hello. Podkayne. Jubal. Cassie. Polly.” It was Travis’s voice, but not Travis. “What’s up?”

Papa looked up and around him at the familiar voice.

“Travis?”

“
Cher
, you need to give him the password,” Mama told him.

“Password?”

“The emergency code. The one that will interrupt his sleep before it’s scheduled. It’s never been used, and you’re the only one who knows it.”

“Password . . . oh, right. Only it ain’t a word, it’s a verse.”

“A passverse?” I asked.

He glanced at me and gave me a small smile.

“Yeah, a passverse.” He cleared his throat, and stood like a student reciting a lesson. Then he waited.

“Go ahead, Jubal honey. Say it.”

“Okay. ‘When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.’”

And Uncle Travis appeared.

Polly:

The first five seconds are always the same with Travis. The bubble goes away and there he is, a foot off the ground. The bubble has been positioned so that it is impossible to get behind it. He’s facing the bulletproof and blast-resistant barrier, in a crouch, his hand on the gun in the holster at his side.

That’s the thing about going into a black bubble. Time is suspended. When you come out, anything could have happened. Aliens could have captured the ship and enslaved us all. We could have been hit by the shock wave of a supernova.

“Maybe my ex-wife invented faster-than-light travel and is standing there with a court order for back alimony payments,” he once said to us. Joke. Ha-ha. But he has many, many enemies back at Old Sun, and if they
did
catch up with him with powerful new technology, it could be gruesome.

And don’t tell me that’s ridiculous. When we get really close to small
c
, the speed of light, that old clock will be turning like mad back at Old Sun, while it crawls for us. Who knows what will be discovered in the next hundred years?

He drifts down to the floor, his eyes scanning the people on the other side of the barrier. This time, like always when I have been there, he relaxed visibly when he saw only friends and family. Then he glanced at the clock on the wall behind us . . .

And this time the script changed. The last thing he does, always, going into the bubble, is remind himself what that clock should be reading when he comes out. Every time before this, he had been exactly on schedule. Routine, all systems go, five by five, AOK,
tous sont bien
.

Not today. He did a double take worthy of a comedian. It was almost a year before Groundhog Day, but Captain Travis was definitely seeing his shadow. He hurried over to the door and opened it.

“Jubal! What’s the haps, my friend?”

He put his hands on his cousin’s shoulders and tried to look into his eyes. But Papa was completely out of it, unable to do anything but stare down at his shoes and, probably, wish they would attach themselves more firmly to the floor. Mama came close to him.

“Travis, as you can see, Jubal is very upset about something. We felt we had no choice but to wake you up early.”

Uncle Travis held out an arm, and she moved near him. He pulled her closer and kissed her on the cheek.

“What is it, old buddy? Can you talk to me?”

All Papa managed was to shake his head. He mumbled something.

“It’s the low grav,” I said. Travis glanced at me, then down at my arm in the sling. He frowned, but didn’t say anything to me.

“You want to get out of here,
cher
? Then let’s blow.”

He and Mama started steering Papa toward the exit. Travis held out his free arm to me, and I moved to him.

“Hey there, Chip. Come over here, Dale. How’d you bust the wing?”

That’s what he calls us sometimes. Last time I was Chip and Cassie was Dale. We decided a long time ago that it’s because he usually can’t tell which one of us is which, so instead of getting it wrong, he uses those names interchangeably. It’s a reference to some cartoon squirrels—or is it chipmunks? We don’t have wild rodents, but I’ve seen them at the zoo. Chip is the clever, rational one (that would be me, I think most people would agree) and Dale is the harebrain (Cassie, obviously).

“It’s nothing,” I said. Travis cocked his head, nodded, and kissed me on the cheek. He used to kiss us on the foreheads, but we got too tall.

“Up to no good, as usual, I assume. Hey, Chip, come over here. Why aren’t you looking out for your sister?”

Chip, indeed.
Dale
came over and pecked him on the cheek.

“She takes too much looking out for. I’ll tell you about it one of these days.” She winked at me. I had no doubt she’d fill him in on all the dirty details.

—

Papa perked up when he felt gravity again—well, what we use for gravity, which feels the same—and was almost back to normal when we entered the house.

Where Cassie and I were promptly told to go out and play in the sandbox with our other little friends and their toys.

I really hadn’t expected that.

“Mama,” Cassie groused, “why did you take us all the way up to the Bridge if you weren’t going to tell us what’s going on? I mean, it’s—”

She caught my look, and shut up. As I said, we really don’t communicate telepathically, and we don’t really have a private, secret language like some twins apparently do, but we’re adept at reading each other’s signals. Tiny movements of her eyes or hands that others don’t even notice speak volumes to me, and it works just as well the other way. We are both happy to undercut the other when there’s some advantage to be gained, but when it comes to someone screwing around with both of us, it’s “You and me against the world, sis.” That includes unreasonable parents.

So we watched them steal off to Mama and Papa’s bedroom, like spies or something, and didn’t protest anymore. As soon as the door closed we looked at each other and high-fived. We took off to our own rooms.

We changed into grungy T-shirts and jeans. It was going to be dirty work.

Even here in
Rolling Thunder
, where we mostly get along with each other—except in sports—there are those who would like to learn Papa’s “secrets.” So many people are convinced that, if only they could listen to him in an unguarded moment,
they
could have the secret of unlimited power, too. Travis tried to keep those types out when he was approving the passenger list for the voyage, just as he automatically eliminated everyone he deemed a religious fanatic, but you can only go so far in determining what someone’s inner thoughts are. There are conspiracy theories anywhere you go, and the idea that Travis and Papa are keeping the squeezer technology a secret for their own personal gain, and that it’s something you could write out in a textbook and anyone, or at least any scientist, could understand, is a tempting one.

One reason it’s tempting is that it is
partially
true.

When Travis and Great-grandfather Manny and Great-grandmother Kelly returned from the first trip to Mars, it was clear to the whole world that they had a new source of power, cheap, easy to use, and virtually limitless. Like most great blessings, it came with a curse, and this one was even worse than atomic power. A squeezer bubble could be made into a bomb that would dwarf any nuclear weapon ever built. It was imperative that it not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands . . . but what were the wrong hands? If Travis gave the technology to the Americans, how would the Chinese and the Indians and the Russians and the Germans react? Not well, he knew.

So he kept it to himself. He and Papa became enormously rich, but no bubble was ever used for destruction. No bubble bomb was ever exploded.

The true horror of bubble power arrived from where we were now, from interstellar space.

BLINKLINK:
DEATH STAR
: 1) A fictional space station in the movie
Star Wars
(1977). 2) A starship launched in the early twenty-first century, shortly after the invention of compression bubbles. It was one of many starships of that period, built to take advantage of unlimited thrust. During what was called the Great Stellar Diaspora, many countries and organizations built ships of various sizes and boosted into interstellar space. For unknown reasons, only one of these ships ever returned to the Sol system. It had apparently accelerated to near the speed of light, decelerated, then accelerated again with the intent of colliding with North America. It arrived slightly off course, hitting in the Atlantic Ocean and generating a huge tsunami. It inflicted tremendous damage on the American East Coast, the Caribbean, northern South America, and western Africa. Millions were killed. It was never determined with certainty who was responsible, or what their goals were. To this day, no one has been able to explain how the Death Star alone, among hundreds of other ships, was the only one to return to its point of origin.

The horrible thing is that this big secret, this key to unlimited power that so many people covet, is something that Papa would gladly give away. But he hasn’t been able to. Travis always assumed that someone else would discover the secret someday. That’s just how it works in science. There are no “secrets,” just things you don’t know the answer to yet.

But this thing turned out to be remarkably elusive. Almost a century later, no one but Papa knows how to make either sort of bubble, and Papa hasn’t been able to show anyone how to do it. It seems to be a trick of the mind, and so far, Papa has the only mind that can do it.

—

Our house has great security, though you wouldn’t know it to look at it. We’re protected from any kind of listening from outside. Any audio or video or cyber bug would be sniffed out and stomped on in about a millisecond and, in most cases, tracked back to the source, and somebody would go to jail. These defenses are tested regularly with any new spying technology, and so far have never failed.

In addition, we are physically protected. The windows are not bulletproof—nothing is, against a big enough bullet—but they will stop most stuff. The walls are weathered wood on the outside, but behind that is armor plating.

We are also the only home in the ship that has guns inside it. It pained Travis to go that route, as he is a firm believer in firearms. The ship carries an arsenal worthy of a third-world dictatorship, but most of it is stored away in bubbles until we get to New Sun. There is a range where people can learn to shoot, but you have to surrender the guns after your session. It works pretty well. In twenty years, we’ve had only two murders.

There are guns in our home. We all know how to use them.

So what I’m saying is that if you want to attack us or spy on us, good luck with that. You’re going to lose, and maybe die.

But Travis didn’t plan for one thing: an attack from within. Cassie and I cracked the house security when we were eight.

We got the idea from an old movie about the U.S. Navy. The water Navy, guys riding around in battleships and destroyers in the First Nuclear War. These guys would be talking into little bell-shaped things, and voices would come out of them. We asked Papa what kind of electronics they used, and he said none. He said sound could travel a long way through a pipe.

So one day when Mama was out, we went into their bedroom and planted our spy device. The ceiling in there is knotty pine, actual wood. There is a hanging light fixture that looks like a wagon wheel with kerosene lamps on the rim, something Papa remembered fondly from a house he used to live in. We climbed up there and punched a knot out of the ceiling.

Then Cassie climbed up to the attic access door in the utility room and tried listening through the knot. When she came down, I told her the ceiling creaked when she was up there. Just as well, we figured. There wasn’t much we could see down there because the light was in the way, and anyway, we didn’t want to watch them. We just wanted to listen in. Never can tell when you might overhear something important, something you need to know.

So we rigged a length of flexible hose to run the length of the house to a little listening station near the attic access hatch. We attached a wire to the knot and ran it through some pulleys, then worked and polished the knot so it would lift out when we pulled, and fall back into place when we let it go.

So the first time we used it, what did we hear? You guessed it, Mama and Papa making love. We hustled our nosy little asses out of there and didn’t go back for weeks.

But eventually we listened more. It was only moderately useful to us. We learned of a few plans here and there, but what we mostly heard was routine stuff. That and, over and over again, how much they loved us, how worried they sometimes were about us, how angry they sometimes got with us, and
still
loved us . . .

We tapered off to almost no spying at all. It was embarrassing, made me feel small, and I dreaded to think what it would be like if we were discovered. I don’t think I’d been up there since we were fourteen.

But this was different. We didn’t even have to discuss it. We hurried to the utility room and Cassie made a stirrup with her hands for me since I had the busted arm. I easily one-armed myself up into the attic; then she jumped, and I caught her arm and helped haul her up.

“Jeez,” she whispered. “Dust.”

There was a tiny light. I switched it on. The dust was thick, coating every surface. Cassie sat on the floor and picked up one of the earpieces and moved it toward her mouth.

“Don’t blow the dust off!” I hissed. “We don’t dare sneeze. Let’s get as little of the dust in the air as we can.”

She nodded, and we both cleaned off the earpieces—cups that fit over our ears, attached to lengths of plastic tubing we had salvaged from one of Aunt Elizabeth’s old stethoscopes—and wiped them off on our shirttails. Then we sat together and put the things to our ears.

I switched on my recorder. What follows is an edited transcript of what we heard, minus all the irrelevancies. There was ten minutes of small talk, calming Papa down enough so he could think and speak. Then the interesting stuff begins:

JUBAL:
Travis, we gotta stop the ship.

TRAVIS:
Okay,
cher
, Podkayne told me that already. I guess you know that is not going to be easy.

JUBAL:
But we all gonna die, us, if we don’t stop acceleratin’.

TRAVIS:
Okay, my friend. But first, you have to try to make me understand what the problem is. Can you do that?

JUBAL:
I don’t know. It’s one of those complicated things.

PODKAYNE:
Meaning it’s some science thing we won’t understand.

JUBAL:
I don’t mean . . . I mean . . . it’s not a
stupid
thing, it’s . . .

PODKAYNE:
Don’t worry about that, honey. I know I’m not stupid, and I know that Travis isn’t stupid, and I also know that neither of us are able to understand a lot of the things that you do easily.