Event Horizon (Hellgate) (68 page)

“Yeah – and we’ve been sitting here for those six hours, with a naked transspace core right up there.” Dario gestured upward, and slightly aft. “The
Ebrezjim
is starting to sizzle, enough to make comm go screwy. And yes, before you ask, we knew this had to happen – it just happened a hell of a lot faster than we’d hoped. Caught us napping. We’re off somewhere in the forecast calculations – don’t have anywhere near the time we thought we had. Sue us.”

“So tell Lai’a to stand off, put some distance between us and it, and put a decontamination crew on the wreck,” Travers suggested slowly. “Get the radiotoxicity back down to manageable levels, and the drones should come properly back online.”

“We can do that,” Tor agreed, “but it adds up to a full-on job, hundreds of drones,
weeks
of work, because the wreck’s wide open to space. Gotta decontaminate the inside as well as the outside, yes? And inside, she’s delicate as a handful of snowflakes. You can’t just go in and hammer on her, like you can on the hull of Lai’a.”

“Well … shoot,” Travers said lucidly, out of ideas. He lifted a brow at Dario and Tor, waiting.

“Or,” Tor said, rising to the challenge, “we can override the drones. Deactivate their pea-sized brains, take ’em on good, old fashioned remote control, wrangle ’em by hand via telepresence – with a few klicks of cable, if necessary! Take the old AI aboard, and get the hell out.”

“The job’s actually halfway done, damnit,” Dario growled. “The core is actually
out
. The drones didn’t go loopy till they were lifting the whole hunk of matrix out through the deck. And the answer to the question you ought to be asking, Neil, is yes, any decontamination process will wreak havoc with it. We need to get this done
fast
. Every minute we stand around talking about it, we’re ramping up the contamination.”

“O…
kay
.” Travers flexed his fingers, eyes skimming the displays.

One quadrant of one flatscreen showed him a visual. Marin was at his shoulder and they pored over it together. The drones had cut a cylinder out of the matrix of the ship’s cubic material, around three meters in diameter, and they had already trimmed it to five meters long. The AI core was in the middle of this mass, while four pocket-sized drones had clamped on, two at either end of the cylinder, and were holding it safe, right in the middle of
Ebrezjim
Ops. The mass would fit through the fissure in the hull with fifty centimetres on either side, and the consequences of a collision on the way through were dire.

“Can we widen out the hull opening?” Marin asked as he reviewed the same data.

“Oh, we’d love to,” Tor agreed, “but we looked at the numbers. No matter if we try to torch it open or just push it open with Arago jacks, we’ll feed in so much energy, the inside of the wreck will start warming up
fast
. It’ll get so unstable, the
compartments’ll
be full of a mess of drifting ice plus maybe ten
tonnes
of debris that’ll shatter off the structures inside the hull, where we’re trying to cut her open. We dump a lot of cartwheeling debris in there, and we stand a first-class chance of losing the AI core. All this has been for nothing.”

“So we looked at putting the core back into the deck,” Dario muttered, “
then
torching open the hull,
then
putting a gang of drones inside and cleaning out the compartments.” He looked up with a disgusted expression. “We’re back to the time budget. In the days it’d take to go that route, we’d just irradiate the wreck to the point where we’d have to decontaminate it before we could move the core again. Like Tor said, weeks of work. You want to sit here for weeks, while the Zunshu hit the Deep Sky?”

“Damn.” Travers looked up at Curtis and Mark. Beyond them, Vidal and Hubler were listening, and Ernst Rabelais had just stepped in. “Exactly how
bad’s
the radiation?” Travers asked thoughtfully.

“Bad enough.” Dario studied him with a frown.

“Too much for industrial armor to handle?” Alexis Rusch wondered. She had turned away from the Orion 359 data and was watching the other display; and she was thinking along the same lines as Travers.

Dario’s tonguetip flicked over his lips as he looked from Travers to Rusch and back again. “You guys want to do this, uh, manually?”

“With the drones jacking around, there’s no absolute guarantee of getting the AI core out of there without critical damage,” Travers said reasonably, “even if we wrangle them on remote, by cable. One cable snags, breaks – it’s over. You know all this, we all do. How important is this data you’re looking for?”

“Invaluable.” Mark folded both arms on the breast of a dark gold tunic. “This ship has
been
in Zunshu space. The AI has seen it, navigated it … it’s seen the Zunshu face to face. It has hard data about
them
, their worlds, their space –”

“Their defenses, weapons systems, their home fleet,” Vidal added in acid tones. “How important is it to get this data? What’s locked in the core could raise our chance of forcing an armistice and getting back out of Zunshu space to maybe eighty percent.”

“Seventy,” Mark corrected.

“Seventy’s one hell of a lot better than fifty.” Travers splayed his right hand over the pad and zoomed on the radiation parameters. He whistled softly. “It’s getting hot out there.”

Marin leaned on his shoulder. “Too hot?”

“Depends –” Travers skimmed data, visuals, charts, looking for exactly the angles of view he wanted “– how long you’d need be out there in the badlands. I’m figuring an excursion time of about 30 minutes, tops, before somebody’s going to be laid up in the Infirmary, going through the fun and games Bill put Mick through.”

“Well … shit,” Vidal whispered. “I was going to put my hand up and volunteer.”

“Michael, for heaven’s sake,” Rusch began.

“Not a bloody chance in hellfire,” Bill Grant said loudly, cutting right across her with the voice of medical authority. “And not you either, Neil, nor you, Curtis. Not after what happened to the pair of you on the campus in Hydralis. There’s only so much of this crap the human body can take – or the Resalq, come to that. This kind of shit busts you up right at the chromosome level. You’ll pay a high price for it, in ten years, or twenty. It’s somebody else’s turn – there’s a
few
other jocks on this ship!”

“Well, now.” Roark Hubler swung his weight onto his feet, balanced on the awkward, uncomfortable biocyber legs. “Sounds like somebody punched my number.”

“Or ours,” Tor said doubtfully.

“Just yesterday you were talking about how you wanted kids,” Travers said pointedly. “You do this, Tor, and you can walk away just as sterile as me and Curtis and Mick.”

“And me,” Hubler said with a self-mocking chuckle. “I been sterile as a mule since I tangled with a hot-core generator that took a shell fragment and steamed its guts out into the body of a gunship, ten years ago.” He stomped over to the workstations between Dario and Rusch and glared at the displays. “Goddamn, that’s gonna be tighter than a virgin at an old prude’s convention.”

“Doable, though,” Travers said thoughtfully. “You just need to be
quick
, Roark. Maybe … wrap the cylinder in a thermal air blanket, at ambient temperature. Zip it shut and inflate it till you got a hand’s span on both sides as it goes through the fissure, right? One guy on top, one on the bottom – put a couple of gloves between it and the hull as it goes through, give it a punt, slow and steady from the bottom. She’ll cruise on through. Catch her on Aragos, come right back to Lai’a on suit thrusters. I wouldn’t even bother with a sled – takes time you won’t have.”

Hubler frowned down at him. “You’ve done this before.”

“Something similar,” Travers confessed. “It’s doable, Roark, you just need a second pair of fast, strong hands.”

“I, me, am always having fast, strongly hands,” Midani Kulich offered. “I was worked on ships like
Ebrezjim
when was just not twenty years aged.”

But Mark was doubtful. “It shouldn’t be you, Midani. You’re one of very, very few ancestrals with the pure genes. We don’t want to run any risks with those genes. If a human becomes sterile, it’s an inconvenience. If an ancestral Resalq were to be sterile –”

“What is this thing, this ‘
sturull
?’” Midani’s brow creased.

“
Bowcushe
,” Mark told him gravely. “
Sem
cushenlal
.”

“Me alike to Major Hubler, but,” Kulich said. He shrugged, spread his hands. “Engine tech, me, whole life. Was inside engine housing for working doing, and … no words.” He huffed an impatient sigh and switched into the Resalq.

Mark listened, and his brows rose. He gave Hubler a sidelong look. “He was working in the reaction chamber on a freighter. It was supposed to be safe enough to work without armor but, in his words, a ‘
sludgebrain
’ decided to test the igniters, which primed the system with raw fuel, with four live techs in the chamber. It cost them two days in decontamination, a year of medical nano, sterility.”

“It’s always been common among engine technicians as well as line crews, pilots and troops,” Rusch allowed.

“Accidents,” Hubler added, “happen way too often when we get pitched into crap like this. Somebody’s got to get their hands dirty, guys – drones are dandy only up to a point, and you passed that point two hours ago.” He tilted his head at Kulich. “You reckon you can do the job?”

“I can do,” Kulich insisted. To Mark he added, “Got own armor, be inside, faster than Major Hubler.”

“He’ll do me,” Hubler decided. “And call me Roark, kid. I quit Fleet, you know. Technically, I’m on the
Harlequin
right now … speaking of which, don’t nobody say word
one
to Asako. She’s sound asleep. With a bit of luck she’ll still be asleep by the time Midani and me get home.”

“All right.” Travers sat back and regarded him with a frown. “You’re going to catch hell for this?”

“I … might.” Hubler only shrugged. “I’ve done this sort of crap before. That price Billy Grant talked about paying, down the line? It’s my price to pay, and I’ll pay it. Fact is, I’m the one that can get this done. Mick?” Vidal was nodding, but Hubler added, “Asako says I’m a moron.”

“Jesus, we’re all morons,” Grant muttered, “or we wouldn’t be here.”

“Or heroes,” Rusch suggested.

“And frequently,” Mark said quietly, “there’s an indiscernibly fine line between foolishness and courage.” He beckoned Hubler and Kulich aft. “We’ll have you back before you’re in the red zone, Roark. Trust me. Michael, Ernst, come and help me get them suited up and get the equipment together. Every minute we sit here looking at the job –”

He did not have to say it. Every minute, the
Ebrezjim
was soaking up more fallout. Travers stood back from the workstations and asked pointedly, “Is it worth asking Lai’a to put some distance between us and the wreck?”

But Dario’s dark head was shaking. “Wouldn’t make enough difference to be worth it – and the further it stands off, the longer it’ll take Roark and Mid to even get into the
Ebrezjim
. They’re going to be counting seconds by the time they’re done.”

“Armor, and thorough decontamination afterward,” Tor said grimly, “not just of them, but of the computer core as well. The AI itself is rad shielded, thank gods. The guys? We do the best we can.” He reached for a combug and slipped it into his ear. “Mark, we’re standing by. I’ll open up Decon 2, bring the drones online. Give us vidfeed from the armor, if you don’t mind, Roark.”

The display transferred from the workstations to the navtank. Not five minutes later, they saw a view of the suiting room, and Travers drew together with Marin, Vidal and Rabelais, watching as the jump bay opened to space.

The feed was from Hubler’s helmet camera. Kulich dove out a second before him, kicking off and augmenting that force with several jets from the thruster pack. Both his hands were full of equipment, and more was loaded into every cleat on the armor. Hubler was similarly loaded. Compressed gases streamed away into the blackness of the void, solidifying in the unspeakable cold and snowing back toward Hubler’s camera. They fogged the field of view for a moment before he was through the little snowstorm and racing after Kulich. Dario’s voice said quietly,