Event Horizon (Hellgate) (33 page)

The cascades and rivers and rainbow arcs of false color exploded through the threedee image, expanding it in directions his physical brain struggled to comprehend. He did not realize he was holding his breath until his lungs began to burn, but he was aware of the hammer of his pulse. Sweat coursed off him as he stretched for comprehension, orientation, grasping for the furthest reaches his mind could perceive. For an instant he thought he had it, but it slithered through his clenched hands like water. He forced in a breath to ease his lungs and reached again.

In his ears, as if from a thousand miles away, Marin said, “Over the threshold. Jesus God … it’s …”

The AI was a tenuous, thready murmur, so subtle, its words could almost have been thoughts unfolding in Travers’s own brain.
Turn left-down, 338/44. Naiobe. Record positioning data, reference: zero point, benchmark: Orpheus Gate.

This was Naiobe? In Travers’s memory the black hole was a swirling lightstorm of massive and still growing accretion disk, glaring through the mist and haze of the nebula on which it was feeding. Naiobe was small on the galactic scale of black holes, but it would gradually devour Hellgate, stars and all, and become a monster. Travers was ready for all that, but this –

His middle ear spasmed and his belly turned over as he looked into a void which extended forever, like a crater without any bottom.
Gravity well
, he thought – he was not seeing the real-space black hole with mortal human eyes; he was sensing the immense cavity of its gravity well, which plowed through normal space, punched into e-space, and clean through it.

Energy currents fetched up around its shores, broke like waves around it, and his lungs were burning again as he
felt
the ripped lines of gravity tides streaking away into infinity. In his perceptions of the transspace continuum they were crackling green and paralleling them, meshing around them, were other streams of fiery blue, sparkling with diamond-like coruscations. The flashes were visibly slower where they lapped against the gravity lines, much faster where they sheared away, and he knew instinctually what they were.

“Time currents,” he whispered hoarsely. “They’re temporal currents.”

Turn right-up, 56/311. Locate Pleiades Drift.

He swallowed hard on the wave of motion sickness and listened as the AI repeated the directive, and again, with the ultimate patience of a machine. His first task was to find the Pleiades Drift which would take them to the beacon, Taurus 894. It had already given him the heading – 56/311 – and he realized the AI had not given it to Marin.

In his ears, Marin’s voice was thin, ethereal. “You okay, Neil? I need a heading. Getting the hang of the rig, but … gods help me, I’m lost. I have no bloody idea where I am – like ‘blue orb syndrome,’ but worse.”

“Let me …” Travers swallowed his nausea. “Gotta figure this through.” Control was all in the neural nets into which his hands and arms had thrust, and now he must learn to play them like an instrument.

Delicate, cautious, he moved his fingers, flexed his wrists, felt his way through the labyrinth until he had it. Like searching all over the keyboard in order to pick out a simple tune, but once the notes had been found, they were known forever.

“Got it,” he whispered hoarsely. As his right fingers moved, the visual display wheeled around, ranging data flew. He oversteered, corrected, walked it back in increments and centered on a writhing, twisting maelstrom of blue-green which tore his breath away.

Pleiades Drift. Locate Taurus 894
.

“Object database,” Travers rasped.

The AI responded with another graphical overlay – a threedee grid in shimmering white-gold. Scores of objects were charted on it, and Travers was momentarily overwhelmed. Vector potential, magnetic flux density, gravity potential, temporal flux –

He squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them and
swam
in the graphical continuum where colors, shapes, sensations, sounds, made tangible sense of the almost incoherent babble of the raw data. It was as if he could smell color, see sound … as if the nebula were sweet with a scent like honey and lilac and the stars chimed like bells, each with its own unique voice, and Naiobe roared like a cathedral organ beneath them all –

“I see the beacon. Standby.”

Navigational data flowed through the veeree rig as if from his mind directly to Marin’s, and Marin, immersed in an almost identical tank, could only be feeling the same sensation of disembodied transfer.

“Got it,” Curtis whispered hoarsely. “
Omigod
… here we go.”

Enter Pleiades Drift. Caution: gravity shearing at 44/117. Caution: temporal flux at –

Travers stopped listening and took a moment to catch his breath as Marin’s half of the battle began. The veeree hookup was feeding him the same wheeling, racing visual which caused the middle ear to protest and the belly to rebel, but his voice was even, calm – Travers knew he was handling it. His task was to hold them in the Pleiades Drift, maintain a heading on the beacon, Taurus 894 … keep them out of the crushing gravity tides which ripped around the e-space roots of the giant stars of Hellgate and beyond. And he must also avoid both the zones where the temporal streams slowed to a fraction of normal time, and those where time raced so fast, the ship would be utterly uncontrollable.

The AI continued to whisper in half-familiar terms which Travers grasped without wondering how he understood them. A flurry of warnings and cautions – a whispered profanity from Marin, and Travers flexed his right hand. The display zoomed from global to local. He no longer saw the beacon, far off, or the gravity express they were riding like a monstrous, lethal maglev rail. He saw the immediate area, with storming gravity tides and temporal flux like jetstreams arcing and flaring in red and gold.

“No way I can hold this,” Marin panted. “I’m going to lose it. Neil, a little help here, for godsakes.”

“I’m on it.” By now Travers had forgotten this was a simulation. His whole world was a hurricane of magnificent vistas, mountain ranges and abyssal canyons molded from pure energy and sculpted by the gravity wells of black holes and supergiant stars. He
heard
the stars, they seemed to sing with bell-like voices, and as he and Marin raced from peak to trough to peak along the gravity express, he began to feel a terrible, wonderful sense of power, as if he had never known the exaltation of true freedom before. He could get used to this – he could come to crave it. Could a man be addicted? He gave a thought to Vidal, and then was too busy to think of anything beyond the thrill of what seemed to be living flight through a cosmic fantasia.

He flexed his fingers and
felt
for the way through the labyrinth of tangled time and gravity streams. It was like threading a shuttle through a vast loom on which the weft and weave were crackling rivers of energy, any one of which would have burned the fragile driftship like a mote of dust in the path of a solar prominence.

Together, he and Marin soared and dove around, through, between, beyond the mountain ranges of blue fire, while exhaustion began to snap at their heels. Travers was blinking sweat out of his eyes when he heard Marin’s hiss of dread, and the AI whispered a litany of warnings.

“Too fast,” Travers shouted. Was that his own voice? High and sharp. “Brake,
brake
– gotta lose some speed.”

“Can’t,” Marin growled. “The gravity tide’s got us – see that well, like a crater – I’m trying to cut across it, surf on it.”

Warning: engine temperature critical. Shutdown in thirty seconds.

“I’m burning us up to stay out of it,” Marin sobbed.

“Shut it down, let it cool,” Travers suggested. “I’m trying to find us a vector out of here.”

“If I shut it down, we’ll fall right in.” Marin was panting as if he had run for miles.

Warning: engine coolant pressure falling. Generator underrun, 88%.

“Shit,” Travers said, no more than a rasping gasp. “Can’t find us a way out.”

Warning: main engine shutdown in ten. Nine. Eight.

Marin surrendered and hit the main system cutoff. In Travers’s display all ship data zeroed, and his heart hammered in his throat as he watched the space-time fissure of the bottomless gravity well of a black planet yawn open ahead of them.

The ship spun, turned nose down, rolled over on her back, and the darkness washed up over his head. He heard Marin cry out as his own senses spun in a storm of dizzy reaction. He could barely breathe and his body had begun to fight. His belly was dry heaving when the simulation phased out and the tank’s soft illumination came on.

Dislocation left him floating in a stunned, gasping silence in which he heard Marin’s rhythmic groaning, as if Curtis were in pain. He cleared his throat, found his tongue strange and swollen in the alien space of his own mouth.

“Curtis? Curt, you okay?”

“No.” Marin took a breath, audible over the comm. “Christ. We’re dead, Neil. We’re gone. We just dropped her into a bloody black hole.”

Both tanks cracked open with a hiss of equalizing pressures, and the canopies lifted. Travers sat up, still swallowing on the nausea. The simulator was open, letting in a spill of dimmed hangar lights, but even so his eyes protested as he lifted the veeree visor, took off the headset.

“You still with us?” Rabelais’s voice.

“We hung it up,” Travers croaked.

“I’m guessing everybody does the first time,” Rabelais told him. “Damn, you almost had it. For a minute there, I thought you were going to do it! And nobody should be able to do it, first time out.”

“Mick Vidal did.” Marin was sitting. He lifted off the veeree set and massaged his temples. “And he didn’t do it in simulation. He took the
Orpheus
into transspace, and he … he did it, for real. First time. No second chances.”

“Yeah,” Queneau said, amused, “but he’s Mick Vidal. That’s what his brain is wired for. You, me – we gotta learn this.”

“You guys are going to be good.” Rabelais was serious. “I was impressed. The first time I tried to fly this, with Jo, we were toast in about two minutes flat.”

“What time did we make?” Marin rolled up to his knees, held his head in both hands for a moment and then got his feet under him. As he stepped down out of the crate his balance was off, and Rabelais caught him before he could stumble.

“Total elapsed sim time, 32 minutes, 14 seconds,” Rabelais read off a handy. “I told you, you did good. You were within striking distance of the Taurus beacon.”

“Half an hour? That can’t be right. It felt more like ten minutes.” Travers lifted himself out, felt the real world slip off kilter and slither sideways. He grabbed for the folded-up gullwing of the pilot’s tank to steady himself and pulled several breaths to the bottom of his lungs. “God, I feel …”

“Bad,” Marin finished.

Every muscle was shaking and Travers discovered himself drenched in sweat. His hair and clothes were sodden, and when he blinked at Marin he saw the same.

“I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. And I need a shower,” Marin said thickly. He was still holding his head as if it throbbed, and his eyelids were heavy. They looked puffy. “Sorry … I haven’t had my balance screw up this way since I was a rookie in flight school.”

Rabelais was unsurprised. “You’re not going to believe this right now, but you guys were impressive. I really thought you were going to do it – next time, you will.”

“Next time?” Travers echoed. At this moment he could not imagine going back into the sim.

“Or the time after,” Queneau said easily. “It gets easier. Trust me.”

He looked at her out of eyes that still refused to focus properly. “You’ve made this work?”

“Yeah.” She frowned at the simulator she had helped to design. “I’ve made it work, navigating with Mick, and flying with Ernst. Perlman and Fargo are coming in here tomorrow to take it for a spin, and then Roark and Asako later.”

With an effort Travers pushed himself away from the pilot’s tank and stepped down onto the deck. “I guess we’ll be back,” he said hoarsely.

“Like she said, it does get easier,” Rabelais told him, “but only if you keep doing it. You’ve got a lot of potential.”

“Thanks.” Marin pulled his spine straight, worked his neck around. He picked up his jacket. “We’ll catch up with you later.”

They were out the hangar then, and Travers pushed one foot in front of the other until the door slid over on their quarters. He was stripping out of the wet, disgusting clothes as he made his way into the bathroom, and the cascade of scalding water was sheer relief. Marin leaned against the tiles with him, letting it unclench his muscles while it reddened his skin.

“Mick’s been doing this?” Travers demanded. “In his condition?”

“Like Queneau said, his brain’s wired for it.” Marin massaged his scalp with all ten fingertips and shook out his wet hair. “He gets this look in his eyes, like he
wants
to go back there.”

The memories were haunting, and despite the hot water Travers shivered. “I think I caught one glimpse of what he sees, or feels. It was
power
. Freedom. For a minute there, I thought I could get hooked on it. Like veeree addiction, I suppose – the game addiction you were supposed to have, the first time we did business on the
Kiev
. I felt … more than just freedom.”

“With sudden death everywhere you turn,” Marin added. “There’s quite a few games a little like this – they’re banned, with good reason.”

Travers remembered the handful of contraband datacubes Marin had procured from the blackmarketeer, Vance
Botero
, a lifetime ago. On that assignment Marin had played the part of a pilot so addicted to his own adrenaline, the rush of excitement, he could no longer handle the comedown back to reality.

“You reckon Mick’s addicted?” Travers wondered. “I know it’s not a game, but the thrill is the same. You remember that idiot, Frank Berglun?”

“Oh, I remember.” Marin turned to let the water scald his back. “And it’s quite possible Mick’s got himself a little bit hooked. Turn around.” He had swiped up a bottle of liquid soap, and as Travers turned he felt strong hands begin to knead him from shoulders to buttocks. “How the hell did you manage the navigation?”

“It’s in your fingers,” Travers said vaguely. “You have to
do
it, you can’t explain it. I don’t like my chances of handling the piloting. I was never a fighter jockey, and
nothing
about this is like flying gunships.”

“You won’t know till you try.” Marin let the water sluice away the froth of suds and absently soaped his own chest and belly. “Damnit, Neil – I’m just not used to screwing up! At least I didn’t
throw
up.”

A chuckle rumbled in Travers’s chest. “I came close a few times. You all right, now? Could you handle dinner?”

“I think so.” Marin hit the tap to kill the water and flood the shower stall with a hurricane of hot air.

A tall glass of water, and Travers began to feel more like a living human being. He caught Marin by the hips as Curtis was rummaging through the closet, and held him tightly. Marin turned into his arms, and his lips traced a path from Travers’s left ear to his mouth. The kiss was fleeting; the next was not. If Travers had not been so hungry, he might have hit the bed and invited Curtis to do unspeakable things to him, but his belly was insistent.

“Later,” Marin promised, as if he had read Travers’s thoughts.

“Later?”

“You can
do
me,” Marin decided. “I have a hankering to be
done
. Comprehensively, if you can manage it.”

“Oh, I imagine I’ll find a way to cope.” Travers’s arms went around him, held him to a kiss that fetched a faint iron tang of blood. He pressed Marin back against the bulkhead, left a transient bite brand on the base of his neck, low enough for his collar to cover it. His hands spanned the lean, hard planes of Marin’s chest, and he gave a bass growl as Curtis’s hands clenched into his buttocks.

“Comprehensively,” Marin repeated, eyes closed, head tipped back against the wall. “You can
do
me till I can’t remember my own name or what the hell we’re in this system for. Chase the thinking out of my brain for a while.” The hazel eyes opened to luminous slits and his lips quirked. “You have your assignment.”

“Assignment?” Travers echoed. He retrieved one hand and sketched a salute. “Yessir, Colonel, sir.”

“I’ll give you
yessir
,” Marin grumbled good naturedly, and gave him a push.

For a moment Travers resisted, refusing to be pushed. He knew full well, Marin could use any one of twenty
Aramshem techniques and have him flat on the bed, overpowered, almost at whim. But Curtis was not in that kind of mood, and relaxed back into the wall with a sultry look. “I thought you were hungry.”

“I am.” Travers’s hands explored what they could reach, making Marin purr like a big cat. “Or did you mean for food?”

Marin indulged himself in a rumbling laugh. “Both, I suppose. Dinner? Then – mark it up on your busy schedule,
Colonel
. You and me. Back here … with the bottle of green goo you found in Supply.”

“The stuff that smells like fresh mint and makes your nerve endings crackle?” It was Travers’s turn to laugh. “I thought you didn’t like it.”

“Not every time.” Marin stretched easily. “It’s too intense for every time, but I feel like it tonight. It might just stop me thinking, you know?” He looked up at Travers from beneath lowered lids. “Objections?”

“From me?” Travers relented and stepped back. “You’re joking, right?” Marin gave him a dark look over one shoulder as he turned to inspect the closet.
“Dinner,” Travers concluded.

“And a lot of it.” Marin leaned back, flicked his mouth with a last kiss and began to rummage for fresh clothes.

The crew lounge was quiet. The Ops room was still busy and the aromas of coffee and food issued from the ’chef there. Vaurien, Jazinsky, Ingersol, Hubler and Rodman, and to Travers’s surprise, Tonio Teniko himself were still wrangling the cleanup after the altercation at Rashid. The flatscreens in the lounge streamed constantly with mission data, and as Travers ate he took in the bottom line numbers.

Six people had been killed; the last died of his injuries only minutes before and had been tanked while the brain was still viable, pending cloned organs. Fifteen more were injured, two of them so severely, they were also in cryogen. Seven officers were in custody, not including the pair from the
Kiev
’s command corps who had been shipped out under Quarantine conditions. Of the original ten blockade ships, only three were viable now, with sublight and Weimann capability restored after comprehensive diagnostics and a careful reboot. Three ships were rated unsalvageable and drones would break them up for their components and scrap materials. Two vessels had already been delivered to the docks over the pole of Omaru for swift repairs. Five more were parked on station keeping, waiting for service.

The general estimate was a three-week cleanup procedure, and Richard Vaurien was satisfied enough with this to sign off on the assignment. The report was already in Harrison Shapiro’s hands, and the greater issue, now, was the disposition of the crew.

Over nine hundred men and women were in the simulation tank in the belly of the
Sark
, still under the surveillance of the flight of gundrones Travers has brought online, but almost all of them had voluntarily accepted security chipping. The few who refused identified themselves as Confederate loyalists, and a troop transport was on standby to ferry them to a facility on Omaru before midnight,
Wastrel
time.

The food and wine were excellent but Travers tasted little of either. He watched Marin for the pleasure of just looking at him, noticing the little things, like the way his hair curled as it dried, and the green highlights raised in the hazel eyes by the muted glowbots docked to the ceiling. Marin divided his attention between his plate, his partner and the screen, and Travers had lost the thread of the data when he said,