Event Horizon (Hellgate) (124 page)

“I have champagne,” Ingersol promised. “Been keeping it, hoping for … well, I guess I was hoping you’d make it back. After three months a lot of people started to doubt. After four, some gave you up. Me? I never stopped hoping.”

“It hasn’t been so long according to onboard clocks,” Sherratt told him. “Check the datastream.”

The Capricorn’s hatches popped with enough equalizing air pressure for Travers’s ears to protest. Perlman and Fargo were still running through shutdown protocols as passengers streamed out, and Travers permitted himself a groan of pleasure as his boots hit the deck. He shared a rueful look with Vaurien.

“Home … though you’ll forgive me if I forego the jigging,” Richard whispered. His right arm lay across Jazinsky’s shoulders, and with the slightly-stiff fingers of his left hand he pulled the tie from his nape, let the red hair fall loose. “Something about champagne –?”

Even the
smell
of the ship was welcome. All ships had their own feel, and Travers realized he had never considered any other vessel to be home, nor any world, since he picked up his bags and walked out of his parents’ house in Delaware, in the north of Darwin’s World, when he was not much more than a child. Fleet waited for him then, and an uncertain future. The future was more certain now, though it was unshaped; a role in it waited for him, and for Marin, if they wanted it. They followed Vaurien and Jazinsky, Shapiro and Rusch into the crew lounge, and pulled up short as Ingersol swore lividly.

“Holy fuck, what happened?” Tully had a flute of champagne in either hand. He had been about to pass them around when he watched Richard limp into the crew lounge – thin, pale, the silver strands noticeable in his hair, the left leg still a little inflexible, uncooperative.

“I died,” Vaurien said simply, taking the champagne and saluting him with it. “Nice to know you care, Tully.”

“He died about four times,” Jazinsky amended, swiping the second flute from Ingersol’s left hand.

“Five times,” Grant corrected as he headed for the ’chef, where he helped himself to a light ale and drank half of it at once. “I was counting … and we’ve got a nasty salvage job for you,
Tull
. We came home beat to hell. The Ops room was totalled.”

“Comprehensively.” Vaurien’s face darkened. “We lost two people, Tully. They’re still in there. Ops buckled up like a crushed can.”

“Oh, shit.” Ingersol’s eyes closed for a moment. “I’ll get a tech gang on it, right now. Radiation?”

“No, we did a good decontamination job. Just two bodies – still in the hardsuits.” Jazinsky sighed. “Don’t even try to get them out of the armor. Just bring them out. Uh, crate them. Sorry, Harry, I don’t know what other word to use.”

Shapiro’s head was shaking slowly. “It’s as good as any other.” He had taken a glass of Velcastran burgundy, and seemed to salute the presence of someone whose absence was painfully obvious.

“
Omigod
… it’s Jon,” Ingersol murmured. “You lost Jon.”

“And Tonio,” Vaurien said quietly.

“And he,” Jazinsky added in philosophical tones, “is the only reason Richard and Neil are still with us.” She drank the flute to the bottom and passed it back to Ingersol. “Refill. Thanks.”

“You got it. Hey, Mick, pass me another bottle, will you?” Ingersol busied his hands with the traditional wired-down cork, but his eyes were shrewd on Vaurien. He knew Richard was waiting. “You guys fought. You came home patched up – but you won the war, right? Armistice, or something just as good?”

“Something,” Vaurien told him. “I told you, it’s complicated. We still have a lot of work to do, but the Zunshu are history, Tully.” His brows rose. “Tell me you didn’t take the
Esprit
into a battle.”

The cork popped with an asthmatic
thud
. “The battle came looking for us, boss. I had the
Esprit
on Arago trials, just me and a small tech gang, and maybe fifty drones working on her. We got big, nasty readings off a monster Hellgate storm – kept a healthy distance, but suddenly there’s this
thing
cruising out of the event. I knew the signature. Same as we saw when the ‘Borushek bomb’ dropped out of the Drift at Oberon. Oh yeah, the bastards took a crack at Omaru, about a month ago.”

Jazinsky’s face might have been a marble carving. “It was supposed to fly into a swarm,” she said in a voice not much more than a rasp.

“It did.” Ingersol had refilled the flute, and passed it to her. “Problem was, the Hellgate monster showered the whole region in so much radiation – some of it so exotic, I don’t even know what I’m looking at – the swarm was slow coming online. Too much interference, Barb. The sensor drone scrammed, and scrammed again. It was late rebooting, and when it did come back up its brains were halfway fried.”

“Christ.” Jazinsky’s blue eyes closed. “This happens every time there’s an event?”

“No,” Ingersol said quickly. “Only when a storm crosses the Class Six line, tickling Class Seven, and they’re comparatively rare. But it was just luck the
Esprit
was in the area. We could’ve been on the other side of Hellgate, and Omaru … well, here’s to our guardian angel.” He lifted his glass, drinking on the words.

“You took the device.” Vaurien’s brow creased in a frown. “Obviously you took it – Omaru’s still there, and so’s the
Esprit
.”

“We took it.” Ingersol drained his glass and poured another. “And we got hurt – you saw.”

“I can see the dark engines from here.” Vaurien had taken the big chair by the long viewport, where he had a good view of the ship – and the driftship beyond it, and the
Carellan Djerun
– against the shattered backdrop of Hellgate. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“Gravity tides,” Ingersol said baldly. “The only way I was going to catch the Omaru weapon was with gravity mines. The
Esprit
still doesn’t have geocannons, much less railguns. We’re still waiting for delivery. They’re coming out from Lithgow, but the dockyards there were thoroughly banged up in the mutiny. They’re being fixed, but freight’s so backlogged by now, we’re just in the queue and waiting our turn.

“So there was the Omaru device,” Ingersol said darkly, “and there was the
Esprit
, with good engines, great Aragos and tractors, and not even a peashooter on us. What the hell was I gonna do, Rick? I had the deactivation code for the swarm, so I used it – the Zunshu weapon had already gotten through, the swarm was useless. So I shut down about a dozen of the little buggers before I caught them in tractors and lobbed ’em at the Zunshu thing. Transmitted the activation code when they were close enough to acquire the ‘Omaru bomb’ instead of us.”

“Ouch.” Jazinsky drank again. “You were too close to the implosion.”

“We were trying to get away with everything we had,” Ingersol said cynically. “I had the sublight engines redlined, we were waiting for a Weimann ignition – five more seconds, and we’d have made a clean jump out of there.” He shrugged. “Major gravity tides hit us in the tail-end. Not enough to crunch the airframe or squish the hull, but
more
than enough to scram the drive engines. Uh, permanently.”

“Fixable?” Vaurien wondered, frowning at the ship which seemed a mirror image of the
Wastrel
.

But Ingersol’s head was shaking. “Nope. There was massive damage to every delicate little thing in there. Sublight and Weimann. All gone.”

“You got anything coming in from Lithgow?” Jazinsky sank into the seat beside Vaurien and looked out at the Drift.

“Not from Lithgow, no.” Ingersol gestured vaguely. “I tried every source I knew, looking for engines, then I hitched a ride over to Omaru, Rick. I used your name to get an audience. Alec Tarrant’s dead easy to talk to, but you got no idea how hard it is getting through the secretaries when you want ten minutes with the president.”

“My name got you through the door.” Vaurien’s eyes glittered with amusement. “And you told Alec what you’d done, the price we’d paid for Omaru.”

“Told him,” Ingersol went on, “I needed new engines … and I even knew where to get ’em, but he’d have to talk a deal with Prendergast on Jagreth.”

For a moment Travers was blank, and then he chuckled. “You’re kidding. Salvageable?”

“Oh, sure,” Ingersol said readily. “It just wasn’t going to be cheap or easy, and I sure as hell wasn’t signing no checks for the job, not after how we got hurt!” He shrugged. “Right now we’re frying drones, about a thousand a day, decontaminating the engine deck on the
London
. She’s still where we saw her, after the battle.
Prendergast’s
people just put a bunch of beacons on her, screaming about rad and navigation hazard, but I knew the engine deck was intact. We saw it, remember?”

“I remember.” Vaurien was impressed. “You went out there, took a look for yourself?”

Ingersol nodded thoughtfully. “I was out there in armor for two days, making sure. Tarrant said, find out if it’s doable, give me a budget, time and bucks. Then he talked a deal with Prendergast. Turns out, Prendergast didn’t want to come up with a dime – according to him, it was Omaru’s trouble. Tarrant negotiated some kind of a trade deal … Jagreth comes to the party with drones and raw materials and support crew. We do the work, we get the engines. Omaru picks up two dollars in three of the cost. The
Wings of Freedom
’s been there for the last two weeks, wrangling the show.”

“Well, now.” Vaurien looked up at Travers, Sherratt, Vidal. “Looks like we’re in business.”

“The engines from a super-carrier,” Vidal added, “are going to put one hell of a sting in the
Esprit
’s tail.” He lifted his glass to Ingersol. “Cheers.”

“Thanks.” Ingersol pulled a chair out at the end of the table and straddled it. “You guys have a lot of catching up to do.”

“We know.” Shapiro was at the ’chef, serving for himself and Rusch. “I asked Joss to give me the short version and stream it to Etienne. If you don’t want to watch it while we eat, I can view it in Ops.”

“No – stream it here,” Vaurien invited. “I’m five months out of touch.”

They all were, and Travers felt a void, as if part of himself was missing. Marin fetched an assortment of food, beer and wine, and they were eating as Etienne played a package of news stories and reports, downloaded from CityNet and edited purely chronologically, which made for a lumpy presentation.

The situation in the Deep Sky had settled down, with the
Elstrom
on station in the Velcastra system and the
Sark
patrolling Omaru’s borders. Borushek did not enjoy the protection of a super-carrier, but the battle group there was made up of the remnants of all the ships seized when the flags were changed at Fleet Quadrant Command. Heading the forty frigates, cruisers, tenders and tractors was the
Mercury
. She had returned to the Deep Sky three months before, and was now in the service of Borushek. She delivered her complement of prisoners to Sark just two weeks after what CityNet referred to as ‘the Borushek event.’

Here, Travers’s ears pricked. He looked sharply at Shapiro, but the older man was simply intent on the flatscreen, absorbing data, no flicker of expression on his face.

The Terran Confederacy tried its hand at Borushek. They had no super-carrier around which to form a battle group, so they sent a fleet of sixty cruisers and frigates culled from the Middle Heavens amid scenes of riot and mutiny. Eight ships were snuffed by the swarms guarding the roads into the Borushek system; the rest withdrew. They did not return.

“They didn’t send the
Avenger
,” Shapiro said pointedly, with a sharp-eyed look at Vaurien, Rusch and Sherratt. “Etienne, stop there and give me anything you have on the
Avenger
.”

File footage began to play, and Travers shared a glance with Marin as they watched. Not long after Fleet’s strategic withdrawal from Borushek, the
Avenger
was reported in the homeworlds. It bypassed the colonies of the Near Sky completely and dropped out in the Jovian subsystem, where Fleet maintained its capital docks.

“As if they’re assuming we’ll come for them next,” Rusch observed.