Event Horizon (Hellgate) (71 page)

“Understood,” Lai’a echoed. “Seal hatches at your earliest convenience.”

“Duh,” Grant grumbled, and then, “Roark, Midani, you’re gonna have to hold the load between you – keep it the hell off the deck.”

“Our business, Doc,” Hubler informed him. “You just bloody
be there
with a whole barrel of decontaminant foam … I just took a reading off the surface of this tuxedo I’m wearing, and – handle with fuckin’ tongs!”

“What a coincidence,” Grant said acidly, “I just happen to have several large pairs of tongs. Ten seconds. Standby.”

In the navtank, the angle of view from Hubler’s vidfeed displayed an upside-down wide shot of the habitation module, where a narrow section of the Zunshu armor had slid aside, like the fins of a scaly fish sweeping up and back around its flanks, to give access to the decontamination bay. The cavern of the hangar was no longer expanding – Hubler, Kulich and their prize hung stationary in the tractor fields.

Vidal held the combug to his ear. “Roark?”

“Shut it, the both of you,” Hubler snapped. “Midani?” They hugged the salvage between them, protecting it with their own armor. “Lai’a!” Hubler barked. “Go!”

The Australian was thick in Grant’s voice as he shouted, “Roark – boots on the deck, old son, don’t come in headfirst.”

Tumbling in the cushion of the Arago fields, Hubler and Kulich barely had any control over how they would cross the threshold, and the vidfeed was a crazy carousel of spinning images. Travers took his eyes away, looking at the clock instead.

It showed seven seconds when the hangar doors began to rumble, and two seconds when green indicators showed them locked. A gang of maintenance drones had swooped on Hubler and Kulich before they touched down, and now Travers focused on the data from Grant’s rad counters.

Both armor and salvage were hot enough to constitute a major hazmat threat, but in two minutes of high-pressure hosing the levels began to fall. For the first time in half an hour the Ops room relaxed. Vaurien leaned heavily against the side of the tank and gave Mark a look of rueful amusement.

“That,” he said with stygian humor, “was all about sheer luck.”

“Success sometimes is,” Rusch said with a lifetime’s cynicism.

Rabelais was at the autochef, fetching coffee and donuts. “Look at me, I’m the living proof of it.”

“I know – Lady Luck must be besotted with you buggers,” Grant muttered into the loop. “It’s shaping up like about an hour to get out of here, Richard. They’re surface-hot, but I just jacked into the suits’ data ports. The interior’s good. They got home right on the thin edge of safe.”

“Here’s to luck.” Vidal saluted the navtank in coffee. “An hour before you can get your hands on the computer core, Mahak.”

Mark seemed to force his mind back to the present. “Dario, Tor, you’ll want to set up an Arago cradle to hold the core, and –”

“And configure the heat in the hangar to bring it up to temperature just slowly enough that it doesn’t turn to mush,” Dario finished. “Hey … my job, remember?”

“Cryptocybernetics.” Tor slung both arms around Dario’s shoulders and regarded Mark with a frown. “
Chelemlal
.
”

“It’s ready to play.” Mark gestured at the handy he had been working with while Travers was so intent on Hubler and Kulich, he would hardly have noticed a shipwide alert. “Richard?”

“Go ahead,” Vaurien invited, “and then – Lai’a?”

“The hangar is sealed and the transspace drive is sequencing,” Lai’a reported. “Engines will be available in 30 seconds.”

“
Chelemlal
.
” Mark brushed the handy with one thumb.

The thread of music was so ancient, its form made little sense to modern ears, and the Resalq words were in the old tongue. Even to Marin the litany was pure sound. Travers was aware only of the beauty of it – haunting, lilting, melancholy. He would have recognized it as a memorial even if he had not known the word
chelemlal
.

The Resalq were spiritual people, but not religious, he knew. They outgrew the concept of deity while mankind was still living in caves, and their brains were large enough, complex enough, to hold vestigial memories from previous lives; their knowledge of the serial reincarnation of their species was based in fact, not faith. Travers might have wished the knowledge was applicable to the human species, but it was not. Despite technology, the phenomenon of death was still the deepest mystery humans knew, and anything beyond remained a matter of faith.

His eyes lingered on Marin as they listened to the Resalq memorial, and he knew what he hoped. Curtis’s own eyes were closed, his face rapt as he listened to music and litany – like Vidal, whose Daku spirituality was as fervent as anything the Resalq knew. Travers almost envied them the belief in
something
. The soldier in him longed to believe; the same soldier refused to accept anything he could not touch or taste or smell. One day, he told himself – one day, an epiphany might be waiting for him, as it had ambushed Marin and Vidal.

The memorial was not long. Lai’a had been holding the transspace drive on standby for less than a minute when the recording faded into silence. Mark’s eyes opened; he made an open-handed gesture before face and breast – a gesture repeated by all the Resalq present, and Marin also – before he gave Vaurien a nod.

“Lai’a.” Richard’s voice was soft, still thick with emotion. “Time to go.”

The AI was unmoved by the memorial. “Standby for transspace drive ignition. Temporal horizon transit in 66 minutes.”

The same amount of time as it would take for the decontamination process to set Hubler, Kulich and even Grant at liberty. Travers watched as Vidal gave his hand to Mark; and Mark took it, held it. “Will you drink to the crew of the
Ebrezjim
in Velcastran cognac with me?” Neil offered. “It’s the infidel’s memorial.” He gave Vidal a faint, crooked smile. “After you and Big Jo vanished into the Drift, we held your wake.”

“Leon told me.” Vidal mirrored the smile for a moment; tears sparkled on his lashes, unshed, though he chuckled. “I wish I could’ve been there.”

“At your own wake?” Travers demanded.

“And there is the ultimate paradox.” Mark touched Vidal’s cheek with gentle fingers. “And yes, I’ll drink with the infidel, Neil.”

The crew lounge was quiet as Travers poured hundred year old cognac into nine glasses. Tonio Teniko had disappeared, and Travers was not surprised. He had little regard for anything Resalq. Vaurien and Jazinsky, Dario and Tor, Mark and Vidal, Rusch and Leon, lifted their glasses. Marin took his from Travers’s hand, and looked into the dark amber contents as if he could see the future there as he waited for Mark to speak.

He lifted his own glass and spoke first in the ancient Resalq, and then in the Slingo common across the colonies, though the words were almost certainly a close translation. “Let thy stars be as bright as the eyes of a child, may the light of the ancestors, on whom time has smiled, shine from the otherworld, calm upon thee … fly safe
fore’er
in the skies of the free.”

Quick, hot tears sprang to Travers’s eyes, and he drank. The cognac was fine. The bottle had been behind the bar in the crew lounge on the
Wastrel
for months, stashed in a corner. Travers had not so much hidden it, nor smuggled it, as simply set it aside for an occasion, though he could never have imagined this. All save Vidal drank, and Mick touched the glass to his lips, took a minute drop on his tongue and inhaled the
vapors
.

Marin sank into the deep couch under what would have been a viewport, if this hull had still been a cruiser. Hull plates had been fitted over outside, featureless pearl-gray bulkhead inside; concealed lights brightened the empty area, and Jazinsky tripped a projector to fill the dead space with a montage of drifting images of Deep Sky worlds. Home had never seemed so distant. Travers watched a series of panoramas from Velcastra, Borushek, Jagreth, and when Marin held out his hand, he joined him on the couch.

Ship data scrolled endlessly through a flatscreen by the door: Decon 2 was still busy, but Grant’s prognosis was that Hubler and Kulich had escaped the Infirmary by the breadth of a whisker. The visual feed showed an angle from high up above the inside armordoors. All three hardsuits were currently enveloped in dirty brown gel which had been white five minutes before. Just being there in the hangar with them was enough to contaminate Grant. As the decontaminant gel absorbed radiation it darkened, and when it was saturated to black the drones would sluice it off and apply a fresh cocoon. Eventually the gel would remain white, and when the last cocoon – itself a toxin so corrosive, it would destroy living tissue on contact – was hosed off with a flood of heavy water, Hubler, Kulich and Grant would be free to desuit.

For the moment they were bickering amiably, while the brains of the
Ebrezjim
lay suspended in freefall, still in the cargo net, at a temperature so low, the five-meter cylinder of salvaged
stuff
was sucking enough heat out of the hangar for the walls to begin glistening with a rime of frost. The Sherratts and Tor Sereccio were hashing out last-minute amendments to their preparations for bringing the
Ebrezjim
AI up to viable temperatures. Rusch and Vidal lounged by the ’chef, talking over clan business – a new wing being built on the house in Elstrom, a few rejuvenation options left open to Charles Vidal even at his advanced age, the legal trouble Patrick and Mei Ying had gotten themselves into lately.

Without eavesdropping Travers caught the names – mention of a sport plane, and a vacation home on Cahill Island, in Velcastra’s southern hemisphere. Vaurien and Jazinsky had returned to Ops, and a great deal of Dendra Shemiji background reading was waiting for Travers, but he was still in the crew lounge, nursing a lite beer, when Lai’a said,

“Transit in five minutes. Doctor Mark Sherratt, Colonel Rusch, you expressed an interest in personally taking readings off the horizon.”

Both Mark and Alexis had drifted back to their quarters after the memorial. The crew lounge was quiet. Marin was passing the time with a handy while Judith Fargo played out a hand of solitaire – apparently losing – at the end of the long mess table. She looked up as Lai’a spoke, but she had little interest in the physics of Elarne, or even the multi-dimensional topography.

Travers dropped a hand on Marin’s lean thigh. “I’d like to see this.”

“The temporal horizon, the radiation storm? Oh, yeah.” Marin set aside the handy, pushed up out of the couch and stretched his back. He glanced at the flatscreen, where Hubler, Kulich and Grant had left Decon 2 by now, and the drones were cleaning down the armor for return to the suiting room. “All aboard,” he observed, “and this train’s leaving the station.”

Ops was already busy, and Travers was not surprised to see Vidal, Rabelais and Queneau watching the navtank with grim interest. They were the only humans who had ever seen the horizon and lived to tell of it, and to Travers’s knowledge no Resalq had seen it and lived. Dario, Tor and Kulich hovered beside a flatscreen, shoulder to shoulder, watching every line of data – Lai’a was making history right here, right now.

But only Vidal had ever tried to pilot a driftship through the horizon. Not even Lai’a had done this, and as Travers and Marin joined the gathering of physicists, pilots and engineers Vaurien was saying, “I assume you’ve run this in simulation, Lai’a.”

“Simulations were performed 204 times,” Lai’a assured him.

“Successfully, of course.” Vaurien angled a hard glance at Mark.

“In 24 consecutive simulated transits I was successful. Simulation was discontinued when this aspect of horizon dynamics was thoroughly, and demonstrably understood. Do you wish to review the flight logs?” Lai’a asked mildly.

“Well, now.” Richard turned his back on the tank and regarded Jazinsky and Mark with all due caution. “Do we?”

“Pointless, isn’t it?” Jazinsky looked a little pale, a little tight-lipped, barefoot, in battered white denims and a teeshirt of Richard’s that was two sizes too large. “Either we’re right or we’re wrong,” she said, every word lethally precise. “If we’re right, Lai’a will sail through the horizon on a combination of sheer power and wicked physics. If we’re wrong…”