Event Horizon (Hellgate) (61 page)

“Day trip to where?” Kravitz demanded.

They could banter this way for hours, and Marin tuned them out. He finished the tea and followed Travers aft to the service elevator. It dropped them from the bright, warm crew deck to the dimmer, colder hangar level, where the Capricorn and the Trofeo were stowed, and the
Harlequin
was hangared. Lights in both ceiling and floor flickered on across the suiting room, and Marin took stock of it with a soft curse. Any Fleet ship was similar. This facility was smaller than Bravo’s compartment on the
Intrepid
, but much larger than the ‘jump bays’ on the
Mercury
.

Fifty hardsuits stood in lockers off the port side of the suiting room, and both Travers and Marin knew the feel of this armor. They had field tested it on the hull of the
Wastrel
, taken it into a combat situation which had never been on the agenda. The suits were a uniform gray with a dull surface gleam, red chevrons on the breast and back, yellow chevrons on the arms and both sides of the helmet. Only those helmets were personalized; everyone aboard had their own, and many spares had been manufactured.

The hardsuits themselves were almost identical. Only Bill Grant had a suit deliberately geared for a Lushi, while the Resalq, Jazinsky, Vaurien and Vidal had units designed around the Pakrani body dimensions. Richard Vaurien was the only unengineered human among them. Even among Earthers, Marin reminded himself, it was in the genetics for an occasional man to be tall, broad. Vaurien had lost track of most of his French forebears. He knew only that five generations ago some of them hailed from the South Pacific, a region renowned for conjuring some of the biggest, as well as the best, players on the pro aeroball circuit.

The helmet fit was snug, perfect. The chrono over the inner armordoors was counting down to hyper-Weimann shutdown, and with ten minutes to spare Travers and Marin tried the new suits for comfort. Fargo and Inosanto had drifted in some time before and were fiddling with the life support of Inosanto’s armor. He liked the environment hotter, more humid – ‘like home,’ he would say, referring to the bayou regions of Omaru’s southern hemisphere, where he had lived until he was sixteen.

“Transspace drive shutdown. Driftway,” Lai’a announced. “Vid feed available. Comparative relative velocity, proper velocity and deceleration parameters are streaming to Ops Navigation. Colonel Rusch, Engineer Fujioka, as requested, drive data is streaming to Ops Tech 4.”

“I want to see this.” Like Marin, Travers was still in the armor, tweaking the environmental settings to his liking. Helmet under his arm, he headed back out to the elevator, and Marin was a pace behind him.

The vidfeed blazed in the navigation tank, three meters wide, vivid, dazzling, challenging to human eyes as well as the middle ear. Marin struggled to resolve the image and was conscious of his mind laying one object after another over what it saw as it tried to get a match and recognize any feature it saw. Dizzy nausea assaulted him for a moment and he took a long, calming breath.

He squeezed his eyes shut, looked again … and saw a smooth, slightly-flattened sphere fluorescing in blues and purples and greens, like a sheen of oil on water, extending to what appeared to be infinity, though he knew the lagoon was finite. And around it, over it, through it, pulsed white-gold flares like helixes of fork lightning, several per second in any small area, which made the horizon difficult to focus on, impossible to recognize.

Beyond the horizon of what Lai’a prosaically described as an ‘oblate spheroid,’ all was dead black. The driftway was so vast, from this vantage point even the nearest temporo-gravity tide was too distant to be seen. This was not a graphical representation, repackaged for the human eye and brain; this was a
vidfeed
, and –

“Look long enough, and it’ll drive you right out of your head,” Ernst Rabelais warned in a hushed voice. “You go
whackadoodle
. Like looking into the heart of hell.”

“How do you know you’re not looking into the face of somebody’s god?” Jo Queneau whispered. “Doesn’t look evil to me, Ernst. It’s just … there, and we don’t understand it. Yet.”

Around the tank, Rusch, Jazinsky and all of the Resalq were transfixed by the visual. Only Vidal was able to find words. “Remember, Jo? We burned out the engines, trying to stay out of there.”

“Burned the engines right out of the
Orpheus
,” she said, a rasp, “and in the end, soon as you quit your fighting and bitching, it just sucks you up, like you’re swallowed into the bottom of the ocean.”

“Lai’a,” Vaurien said into the electric quiet.

“Reading over 300 gravities off the surface layer of the horizon,” Lai’a reported coolly, “and spikes of up to four
thousand
gravities within.”

“Problem?” Richard and Mark shared a pensive look.

“None,” Lai’a informed him. “Ingress is effected via a Heisenberg tunnel, a phenomenon of the horizon itself. We will, essentially, be in freefall. This is empirical observation, not hypothesis: I salvaged the
Orpheus-Odyssey
from exactly this phenomenon. Would you care to review the method? I am realigning the transspace drive. Estimated time for reconfiguration, eight minutes. The drive will be tested before transition through the temporal horizon. Transition at your discretion, Captain Vaurien, Doctor Sherratt.”

“As humans say, now we’re cooking.” Mark took a step closer to the tank. “Lai’a, what is the nature of the horizon?”

“Temporal flux,” it said simply. “It may appear as a solid, but it is not an object, nor any force described by conventional physics, though it can be categorized as a field. Temporal flux generated by diverse hyper-gravities oscillating in a comparatively narrow band prevents any transmission of perceptual information across a fixed horizon, the radius of which is determined by the average gravity of the –”

There was much more, but the longer Lai’a spoke, the less Marin followed. Instead he focused on what he
did
understand. “It’s like the ‘shell’ of a stasis chamber,” he said with rich satisfaction as the epiphany broadsided him. “Neil, you remember the stasis chamber that fool of an engineer, Mulholland, destroyed on Ulrand, and took half a continent with him?”

“That’s something you don’t forget.” Travers was hushed. “Mark, you said at the time, the ‘shell’ wasn’t a shell at all, it was … an event horizon. The – what was it? The time differential, between inside and outside, and no information got through – like two different time zones, so the thing not only
looked
solid as a sheet of kevlex-titanium armor, but you couldn’t cut through it with a charged particle beam.”

“Mulholland tried,” Dario said with a lot of residual bitterness. He and Tor had worked months on that project, in harsh conditions, and they were still wanted criminals on Ulrand. “He put some kind of a probe into the surface layer, and the temporal backlash off it converted right into pure energy. More than enough to lay waste to the El Khouri highlands … Lai’a?”

“Correct,” Lai’a affirmed. “This horizon is essentially the same, though immeasurably larger.”

“So … energy composition of the horizon?” Jazinsky prompted shrewdly. She already knew the answer.

“Null,” Lai’a responded, as if comparing notes. “The horizon has no physical composition and no native energy signature. It simply
is
, where two gravity tides create absolute balance.”

“Stability of the horizon?” Vaurien prompted. “We’re about to punch a large hole in it.”

“‘Large’ is a relative term, Captain,” the AI said in an almost musing tone. “I
am
a large body in relation to known shipping types. However, the Ebrezjim Lagoon is an area roughly the cubic dimensions of the solar system of Omaru, measured to the heliopause: substantially greater in radius than the solar systems of Velcastra and Borushek. The perforation in the temporal horizon caused by my transit
will
generate slight variations in temporal and gravitic values consistent with mass, density and relative velocity, resulting in localized disparity of approximately plus or minus .000025% of the overall field average.”

“I had to ask,” Vaurien said dryly.

Mark chuckled quietly. “If you hadn’t, I would have. There are no stupid questions, Richard. We’re off the map now. Trust nothing you see, assume nothing, question everything, and if Lai’a hands you a lot of gibberish you don’t understand, tell it to go back and explain, in plain Slingo. Or French, if you prefer.”

“We’re getting ten times the data we ever got from any probe or from the
Orpheus
,” Jazinsky said hoarsely. “Lai’a, can you handle the datastream?”

“With a margin of 70% capacity.” The AI expressed no shade of scorn; the question was valid.

“Will we drop another comm beacon here?” Alexis Rusch wondered.

But Lai’a said, without judgment and with infinite patience, “Possible but somewhat pointless, Colonel. We are situated in a driftway. This is the same mild gravitic current which, governed by the intense gravities of the temporal horizon, brought Captain Rabelais to this lagoon. Any drone we drop into the driftway has no hyper-Weimann capability. Unable to maneuver, it will certainly be carried into the lagoon, just as inert ships are carried there. We would derive useful data for a time measurable in hours at most, and it is highly probable the drone would be inside the lagoon long before we transit back into the driftway. Useful data stops with its entry. However, I remain in contact with the comm beacon I dropped at the Orpheus Gate. Its chronometers register 46.7% of the elapsed shiptime as perceived by anyone aboard here; demonstrably, we have been riding a temporal current a fraction over twice as fast as normal time.”

“We saw the same effect when the
Orpheus
rode this same current,” Rusch mused. “Michael, when you took off, while the Hellgate event was still open the
Wastrel
systems could barely keep up with the accelerated datastream.”

“We knew you were in a fast-time current,” Jazinsky added. “Up to that point, accelerated time had been no more than a tantalizing theory. You proved it out, Mick, within about a minute of launching through the storm – though you wouldn’t have been aware of the difference.”

“And at the end of it,” Vidal whispered, “we fetched up right
here
, looking at
this
, and trying to keep the hell out of it. At the time, all Jo and I could think was, find another current headed back, tack on it, maybe find a freefall driftway and wait for another storm around Naiobe. We figured, if we could stay on the right side of this horizon – not that we knew it was a horizon at the time! – we could get ourselves home.”

“It’s … beautiful,” Dario murmured, mesmerized by the visual. “Tor?”

“It’s
gorgeous
.” Tor Sereccio slung one big arm over Dario’s shoulder. “I want my kids to see this. Our kids. It’s – it’s my bloody life’s work, and yours, Dar, all rolled up into one glorious
thing
. When we have kids, the little snots are coming
here
, they’re seeing this, soon as they’re old enough to know what they’re looking at, and not just dribble on us.”

They were the last words Marin had expected to hear, and they broke the tension across the Ops room.

“Drive alignment, Lai’a?” Jazinsky had recovered a grip on her sense of awe and was back at work.

“Ignition test in four minutes.” Lai’a was untroubled. “Transit is at the discretion of Captain Vaurien and Doctor Sherratt.”

“Expedition,” Vaurien said sharply. “Mark, choose your team – looks like Neil and Curtis are along, since they already have the armor on … though what they expect to do for you is another question.”

“The heavy lifting,” Travers said fatuously. “Seriously, Mark, the more pairs of hands you have going spare, the better. Ask Mick.”

For just a moment Sherratt hesitated, and then gestured toward Vidal. “You call it, Michael. A risk shared is a risk doubled.”

“Not in there,” Vidal said tersely. “We go in with all the hands and all the gear we can manage. Trust me.”

“I do,” Mark said thoughtfully. “And
you
are staying right here.”

The blue eyes widened. “You must be blooding joking.”

“I’m not.” Mark took Vidal’s chin, turned his face to the light. “Your pupils are still dilated. Four hours ago, you were full of drugs.”