Event Horizon (Hellgate) (51 page)

“Everything’s disappearing,” Marin said quietly as they stepped aside, flattened out against a bulkhead to let another Arago sled go by, laden with equipment torn out of someone’s lab.

Probably Dario’s lab, Travers thought, since several of the code-sealed cases looked shock proof, blast proof, as close to indestructible as a machine case could be while still wearing arrays of stickers proclaiming it fragile. The contents would be half-dismembered Zunshu tech, the last segment in a lifetime’s work. Lai’a was shipping out before the Sherratts were finished. And Marin was right. Everything Travers knew seemed to be in the process of being dismantled, sent away, and it was small comfort to know it would all be reassembled aboard Lai’a.

“If you want to know the truth, it sets my teeth on edge. It …reminds me.” Mark Sherratt’s voice was sharp with a little humor, but it was a rueful sound.

“Reminds you?” Travers wondered as the sled went by and he and Marin unpeeled themselves from the bulkhead.

“Of the time when every Resalq ship was an overstuffed chaos,” Curtis said thoughtfully, “always running, never a chance to stop long enough in one place to unpack before you had to bug out and vanish.”

“Yes.” Mark was standing in a doorway, six meters further forward, arms folded on the breast of a familiar burgundy and green shirt, the lion’s mane of dark gold hair loose around his shoulders. “This is very like the years we spent as fugitives. Save that these ships are in excellent repair!” He gave Marin a thoughtful look. “A very young Resalq, not yet twenty years old, recently asked me, during the years of the
Car’am
anha
, why did we ‘ancients’ not just load up a ship and head out across the unexplored vastness of the galaxy, far beyond the reach of the Zunshu, and simply found a new homeworld.”

“It’s a good question,” Travers allowed. In fact, the same had occurred to him.

“And if we’d been able to do it, we would have,” Mark told him – the same answer he would have given the child. “But our ships were close to broken, Neil. The big ones were destroyed. Anything the size of the
Wastrel
or the super-carriers soon went the way of the
London
, prey to the same breed of gravity weapon. What we had left were civilian vessels that didn’t possess the range, and exactly five freighters which would certainly have made a long-haul voyage, if they were set up as colony ships … and this was actually the plan, for many years.” He shook his head over the memory. “Much of the work we did in those early days – prospecting, mining, taking on water, food, raw materials – was invested in the idea of heading out.

“Needless to say, we lost the freighters one by one. The Zunshu took two of them; another was crippled by structural failure beyond our ability to repair without a dockyard, especially since we were on the run. She was abandoned. The fourth was contaminated, every part of her, in an industrial accident aboard. She was refining fuel to keep the rest of us flying. Her machinery was overworked and under-serviced; the inevitable happened, and a lot of technicians perished, taking with them vital skills and experience. The fifth ship was the
Raishenne
, of course, and she’s still out there. Emil Kulich hopes to find her, and I hope he does, though I’m afraid he’ll find an epitaph written in wreckage.”

“The story you just heard sounds simple,” Marin said fatalistically, “but it spans many decades. It doesn’t make pretty reading.”

“We couldn’t do the long hauls, but we could hop from system to system, trying to outfit a colony ship as we went.” The memories were haunting. To Mark, Travers realized, with the phenomenal memory which was a product of the different brain structure, once he accessed these memories, the
Car’am
anha
must seem like yesterday. “We did actually limp our way out of the most dangerous space,” he said at last, “which is the reason enough of us survived to keep the gene pool viable, and also to let the Deep Sky settle down into the absolute quiet that made the Zunshu lose interest in it for long enough for humans to colonize these worlds. But as for having the resources left, or the skills, to launch a colony ship?” He favored Travers and Marin with a rare smile. “If our ships had been bigger, better, we’d have been long gone when humans arrived in these worlds. Your people would have been alone in the Deep Sky.”

But the Zunshu would still be striking, Travers thought, and without benefit of the elder technology, humans would have gone scuttling back to the Middle Heavens, telling of a demon who lived in the dark near Hellgate. Mark knew this as well as anyone, there was no need to say it.

He had been looking tired for some time, careworn, Travers thought, but at least he seemed relaxed this evening, as if he had enjoyed ten hours of sound sleep. A few of the shadows had left his face and he was smiling as he embraced Marin, kissed his cheek in passing.

“Are we late?” Marin was asking.

“I don’t think you could be late,” Mark said easily. “There’s no schedule to be kept now – not for me, anyway. I’m done.”

“Done?” Marin looked up at him. “Meaning…?”

“Nothing left to do.” Mark stepped aside, beckoning them into the compartment he had opened up – an unoccupied cabin. “My labs are all in crates, my data is transferred, my AI has been installed aboard Lai’a. My kids are still working their tails off to shove their whole lives into boxes, but I finished two hours ago. A few experiments are still running, a lot of data is cooking, but as for me? A loaf of bread, a jug of wine...”

“A book of verse and thou beside me, singing in the wilderness,” Marin said enigmatically as he stepped into the compartment, which was dim, lit by a dozen fat, smokeless candles and smelt sweet, woody, with the incense the Resalq liked best.

The reference was too obscure for Travers. He lifted a brow at Marin, but Curtis only smiled. “Only a poem … not quite a soldier’s poem.” He glanced around the room with appreciation. “Nice, Mark.”

“Best I can do at short notice. Even these ought to be packed.” Mark was fingering a candlestick, very old, very precious, hand-worked in some clay that fired black and bright as obsidian. It was a Resalq figure, naked, arms uplifted to hold the candle.

“I’ll help you get it all together,” Marin promised, “afterward … speaking of which, we’re missing someone. He decided to postpone?”

“Or just not do it at all?” Travers examined the rich embroidery on the cushions strewn on the two couches in the candlelight. A carpet was unrolled between them. On a little antique table stood an incense burner, heavy, bronze – a dragon pluming smoke through both elaborate nostrils; and that smoke had begun to buzz in Travers’s head. “What
is
this stuff?”

“
Charab
,” Marin told him. He had taken one long look at the contents of the table, and then deliberately turned away as if too many memories pressed in on him, too close for comfort. “A Resalq ‘spice’ – and mild by comparison with the crap you’ll breathe in any danceshop, much less a sexshop. But it’ll get to you. It’s very old, and fortunately it affects the human brain too.”

“Hallucinogen?” Travers asked with all due caution.

“Oh, it’ll inspire dreams,” Mark allowed. “It’s a soporific, actually; most people need something to make them relax, unwind, before they’re capable of even admitting they have some kind of psychosis, much less being able to grapple with it, wrestle it down.”

“How’d you like to be phobic about big hairy spiders,” Travers said thoughtfully, “and then be asked to cosy up with a bunch of them.”

“Exactly.” Mark adjusted the candles, trimming this one, that one, lighting another, and tripped an audio track.

Travers might have been expecting some kind of ambient music but at first he heard nothing at all. Then he felt it, a vibration through his bones. Big, bass speakers were issuing sub-
etherics
; together with the
charab
, they would shift brainwave patterns. He could feel it himself, a ‘drifty’ sensation, the inability to focus on any specific thought while memories he had not recalled in years came swimming back.

A green glass bottle and several tiny cups stood by the censer; and behind them, a hypogun, several phials, a few items so unrecognizable, they could only be Resalq. Behind the table stood a little handling drone very similar to those in any Infirmary. It was active, waiting to be summoned, and as far as Travers could see, it had a single instrument which might have been a surgical probe, though Neil had seen nothing like it before.

On the back of the table was a delicate apparatus he did not recognize, though parts of it were familiar. The numerous gold filaments were very like the neural connectors Vidal had used in the transspace simulator, to link pilot and navigator so closely, they might have been sharing the same skin. These were coupled to a pair of large handies, and Mark was fiddling with the rig as he said,

“He’ll be here shortly. I’ve never known Michael to refuse a challenge, and this is something he
needs
… though the concept might scare the daylights out of him.” He frowned at Marin over the pair of synched handies. “Give us an hour, Curtis. Two, at the longest.”

“I’ll take care of our packing.” Marin gave Travers a speculative glance. “Is there anything you want, specifically?”

“Just the stuff we brought from the apartment in Sark … clothes, and the Chiyodas. I’ve gotten used to them.” Travers slid his hands into his pockets. “How long, Mark? Till we’re hunting a major storm?”

“Richard tells me we’re tracking several promising events even now,” Mark said quietly, with a gesture in the direction of Lai’a. “You saw for yourself, on the way in – we’re loading. Every scrap of data we’ve been able to glean is already invested in Lai’a. Dario and I spent hours comparing information from the
Orpheus-Odyssey
with any shred of original records we could find from our own past as well as the
Aenestra
expedition to Orion 359. As you know, the
Orpheus-Odyssey
is a hybrid … in fact, it’s a complete mongrel, but we know beyond doubt, those engines
are
the drive component from the
Ebrezjim
. We knew they had to be – there’s no other transspace engine technology in our history or yours. Dario stumbled over a set of archival records, little more than an account of service work performed on an unspecified ship; but these records reference fuels, fields, temperatures, radiation parameters – they’re describing a transspace drive, and as far as anyone is aware, only one was ever built. Better yet, the service report is specific about the engine configuration.”

“And it matches the salvaged drive Mick flew out of the graveyard.” Travers gave a low, soft whistle. “This tells us a few things.”

“It does.” Mark set down the handies. “We know, fact, the
Ebrezjim
fetched up in the freefall graveyard where Michael and Jo met Ernst. So, whatever befell the ship and crew at the hands of the Zunshu, at least some of them made it away. They almost made it home, in fact. Dario, Tor and I want to get aboard. Lai’a knows the region. It says there should be no difficulty in getting into the stable lagoon, and it’s more than worth the effort of trying to find the
Ebrezjim
. Dario has spent four decades taking to pieces the most ancient computer systems, relics, remnants, scattered across the frontier. If the AI core is viable, we might be able to reactivate it. Midani Kulich knows this technology at firsthand.”

“You want to run the logs,” Marin guessed.

Mark nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “The more we know about the Zunshu before we run headlong into their space, the better I’ll like it. Every extra scrap of information we possess increases our chances of coming back out of there.” One corner of his mouth quirked in something like wry humor. “You’ll forgive me if I find myself with a somewhat stronger reason to survive, lately.”

“Your people are heading out – again,” Travers said pragmatically. “A new Resalq world, a whole new virgin colony.”

“Yes.” Mark’s brows rose. “A Resalq world, Neil – not a Resalq enclave on a human world, or a Resalq community hidden in plain sight. Saraine and Riga are our homes, of course, and several more like them are scattered across the Deep Sky, but …” The gold eyes were luminous with inspiration. “A Resalq world. Now, there’s a fantasy for you.”

“A fantasy?” Marin echoed. “Not if Emil Kulich has anything to do with it! Speaking of whom – the
Freyana
?”

“Shipped out of the Saraine system two weeks ago.” Mark stirred with an obvious effort. “The whole system is running cold and dark. The only people there now are the team of
archeologists
, perhaps twenty men and women fossicking through the ruins of the Eternal City, literally within sight of my house. A few power cells, a single transmitter, a small ship with engines shut down. From what we know, it’s not enough to alert a Zunshu scout.” He stopped, took a deep breath, exhaled it as a sigh. “I could say I just want to go home, and it wouldn’t be a lie.”