Event Horizon (Hellgate) (85 page)

“Lai’a,” Vaurien was saying, “has dissected the
Ebrezjim
database for every scrap of reliable navigation data. Enough fragments are salvageable to give us a halfway decent navtank load.”

“For the Zunshu Gate?” Travers heard the catch in his own voice.

“Yes.” Vaurien dropped his head back, worked his neck to and fro, telltale of tension there.

For the first time Travers saw strands of silver among the red hair. Perhaps Richard had been using cosmetic nano to keep them away; perhaps they were new. Travers did not know, and though they were attractive, distinguished, he said nothing of them. Did Richard want to be reminded, in this place, of his mortality? Did Travers?

“You got anything you want me to do?” he asked instead as the group drifted away, leaving the suiting room quiet. Marin and Vidal stayed, sharing a water bottle and talking in murmurs; Leon and Roy were the last working on a suit, in the far corner.

But Vaurien made negative noises. “We’re riding a gravity tide Lai’a is calling The
Onbai’shu
. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds poetic.”

Pleasant surprise ambushed Travers. “I
do
know what it means. It’s from the Jagreth story –
Onbai
means shining, or glittering, and
shu
is a way or a path, a trail. The
Onbai’shu
was the route Jagreth flew to track down his partner, who’d been abducted ... and it took him right to the front gates of a nasty character called
Kes
Matub
.”

“Is that a fact?” Vaurien was as impressed as amused. “You should talk to Vidal about this. He’s become fascinated with all things Resalq … and a little infatuated with Mark, I believe.”

“Infatuated?” Travers was amused. “Well, you take friendship and add infatuation, what do you get? Mick’s found himself a safe anchorage in a storm, and I’m the last one who’d object.”

For some moments Richard studied him mutely. “You’ve changed, Neil,” he said at last. “The kid I used to know was only interested in racing iceboats, and range-testing assault rifles, and flying sportplanes.”

“And getting laid a lot,” Travers added.

“That too.” Now Vaurien allowed a sound of humor.

“I guess I grew up.” Travers was watching Marin and Vidal. “I thought Fleet would broaden my horizons, but in the end all it did was acquaint me with a crewdeck and a pit in the sky that scared us all so spitless, we just wanted to get out.”

“And you did.” Vaurien dropped a large hand on Travers’s shoulder. “We got a lot from the
Ebrezjim
. Less than Mark’s people had wanted, but more than Barb and I expected, if I tell you the truth. Mind you, the last thing any of us anticipated was that the crew killed their own AI. And I can tell you, Lai’a is, as it puts it, alert to the probability of the same kind of attack. Beat that, Neil, and we believe we can handle the rest.”

“Meaning, you like our odds a little better now.”

“Let’s say …” Vaurien paused to listen to his combug. “It’s not quite the
kamikaze
run it seemed to be at first. We’re in with a fighting chance now – which is all any of us ever asked for. Nineteen hours, now, Neil. Red Gate.”

As he spoke Vidal and Marin were on their way out of the jump bay, and Vidal echoed, “Red Gate…?”

“Exploration,” Vaurien said sagely. “The thrill of seeing what’s out there. I could get used to this.”

“What’s Barb say?” Marin wanted to know. “If you’re headed out after the war, and if you’re handfasting, you need to be on the same page.”

“Barb just wants to lie on a beach and drink
piña coladas
till she forgets what day it is. My job,” Vaurien added, “is to find the beach. A beach where Terran bounty hunters are not likely to show up with a picture of me in one hand and a Chiyoda machine pistol in the other. The warrant was issued for me just about the time we shipped out. Dead or alive, same as Harrison. The bastards could show up in the Deep Sky in six months, or ten years, so long as the bounty’s on offer. It’s one monkey you can’t get off your back.”

“You don’t think Chandra Liang and Alec Tarrant and the others can get the warrants cancelled, if they’ve brought the Confederacy to the conference table?” Marin looked from Vaurien to Travers and back.

“Maybe, given long enough. And maybe,” Vaurien said bleakly, “the sanction would be issued covertly, through a security agency on Earth or Mars, by a committee of certified bastards like Colonel Carvalho and Senator Rutherford, who’d like to have my head pickled in a glass barrel … right beside Harrison’s.”

“Well, shit,” Vidal said succinctly. “You’re saying there’s no way back for anyone identified as one of the geniuses who made it all happen. I don’t suppose Bobby Liang’s going to bug out – he can’t, being who he is, what he is. So he’ll live the rest of his life inside a security cordon on StarCity.”

Vaurien only shrugged. “I could be dead wrong. I could also be just plaid dead, and buried in a memorial garden in Elstrom, right between Harrison Shapiro and Bob Liang! I’d rather be living way beyond Earth’s reach, lying on that beach beside Barb while my ships ply between some new Freespacer paradise and the Deep Sky ports … come back occasionally, unpredictably, where these hypothetical agents never know where to find me, on a ship they can’t reach into. The
Wastrel
has been the safest place in the Deep Sky for years now. It probably always will be. But there’s no law,” he said pointedly, “says we have to stay in the Deep Sky.”

“Well … shit, and I said that already, I know,” Vidal whispered.

“When the time comes,” Vaurien offered, “if you want in, give me a call.”

“I, uh, I will.” Vidal puffed out his cheeks. “And I know Ernst and Jo will want in. Lex, I’m not so sure, but –”

“She’s high on the arrest list,” Vaurien reminded him. “Harrison got the intelligence via a drone courier, just before we left.” He gave a low chuckle. “We’re all wanted criminals, with a military firing squad waiting for us if we let the Earthers get their paws on us. And
that
,” he said with steely finality, “won’t be happening.” He gestured at his combug. “I’m wanted in Ops. Later, guys.”

He had returned to the service lift when Vidal added, “And I’m supposed to be wrangling the simulator for Roark and Asako. They’re starting to make it work.”

“They got through without dumping themselves right into Naiobe?” Marin was impressed.

“Once. Let’s see if they can make it twice.” Vidal looked back into the suiting room, where Mark and Leon were still fiddling with Leon’s environment settings while Roy Arlott looked merely bored. The Resalq liked their armor warmer, dryer, the grav-resist a little lower to give it a higher apparent mass. “Mahak, are we still on for later?” Vidal called.

Mark favored him with a smile. “Of course. I’ll come by the hangar as soon as I can get away.” He gave Marin a rueful look. “I’ve let him talk me into taking the transspace simulator ‘for a spin,’ as he puts it. I ought to know better, but I have a little time, before we transit the Red Gate, so – why not?”

“You mean, why should we have all the fun?” Travers snorted. “I don’t think
fun
is quite the right word.” He shot a glance at Vidal. “Well, for some of us, maybe.”

“But then,” Vidal admitted, “I always was weird. Gotta go, guys.”

He was gone with that, and Travers slung one arm across Marin’s shoulders. “You want to watch Hubler and Rodman
not
hang it up?”

“We need to take a good, close look at the nav data Lai’a managed to squeeze out of the
Ebrezjim
,” Marin said quietly. “Worst comes to worst, Neil, you and I could wind up actually flying this thing very soon, in Zunshu space … and if I tell you the truth, the thought scares me to death.”

It made Travers’s blood run so cold, he preferred to block it out of his mind, but Marin was right. Preparation was the other side of the coin of survival. Very quietly, almost surreptitiously, the Sherratts, Vidal, Rabelais and Queneau had already assembled the cabling and physical connectors to couple the simulator to the secondary Weimann and hyper-Weimann control system.

Auxiliary drive control was the ultimate backup, the physical system that would come online if Lai’a failed. Lai’a approved of the backup; it had assisted in the configuration. It had to know the cabling and junction conduit had been assembled to pilot this ship from the flight systems of the simulator, Travers thought, but he knew nothing more. For human pilots to come online, Lai’a would have failed – it might even be erased, the way the
Ebrezjim
’s AI had been terminated. And Lai’a was minutely aware of the possibility.

“I want to load the simulator with the new nav data,” Marin said in the same quiet tone. “I want to fly the Zunshu Gate in simulation, long before we actually get there. I know Mick and Jo will be doing the same thing. For the moment, I’d like to use the big tank in Ops and run the charts backwards and sideways. Yes?”

“Sounds like a world of fun,” Travers said acidly, but was ahead of Marin as they returned to the service lift.

Chapter Fifteen

Lai’a,
Gojin
Drift

Red
. It seemed normal space was suffused with blood streamed from an open wound – the bright, arterial blood that spelled the end for some creature. Travers had seen the color often enough, while company medics scrambled to save lives. From what he saw here, he knew the literal translation – Blood Gate – was more accurate.

The Class 6 event gaped into normal space. Under heavy thrust, Lai’a was driving toward the freefall channel while the navtank display had just shifted from graphical to visual. Travers was looking at the realtime vid feed, and Operations had fallen silent. Only Ernst Rabelais spoke, and then only to murmur a very old profanity which was eerily apt.
Bloody hell
.

The color itself was no illusion. The illusion was in the human and Resalq tendency to interpret the color as a tide, an ocean, of blood. Reality spun, turned inside out and shrugged as Lai’a exited the event – the transspace drive scrammed, ineffective now, and the Weimann engines thrummed into life. Ship data showed all three reactors available, two online and delivering modest power as Lai’a shifted vector with almost unseemly haste.

The sky was misty with nebulosity, the atmosphere of a giant star thrown out by a supernova perhaps only a hundred years before. But another star was suffering its death agonies now, and not long before it would have been something very like the suns of Velcastra and Omaru. The bright, warm G-type star was bloated, crimson. It had the hue of blood, and its light flooded the nebula, creating fields of deep, rich
red
.

“Blood Gate,” Vaurien observed. “Very appropriate. And we’re way too close for comfort Lai’a – proximity.”

“The event opened just less than ten light hours from the perimeter of the red giant,” Lai’a said calmly. “At this distance, the star itself poses no great hazard. The danger is the feeding black hole which plays Naiobe’s role in this region, generating this Drift’s gravity storms. Its orbit has taken it close enough to the red giant for it to capture the star.”

The tank display shifted, and Lai’a switched to synthetic aperture imaging to pare away the nebulosity, afford a glimpse of the black hole. A fist seemed to seize Travers’s heart as he watched one of the last mysteries of the universe played out, lurid, naked, shameless as a citybottom hustler. The black hole was a wicked little thing, smaller than Naiobe though it would be growing rapidly as it ate the red giant, sucked up the nebula before it plunged on into its harem of supergiant stars. The comparatively tiny
thing
seemed to hold a monster on the tail of a short leash. It had teased a tendril of blood-red gas from the dying star, and it would not cease to feed until the bloated old sun was gone.

“The black hole is previously
uncataloged
,” Lai’a was saying. “Doctor Sherratt, I have assumed a vector to escape the
Gojin
Drift by sufficient distance to efficiently analyze this sky. Your priority is to determine, in physical terms, the precise location of this region in relation to the Deep Sky?”

“
Gojin
Drift?” Alexis Rusch echoed. “Did I miss something?”

“No.” Mark seemed to catch himself, drag himself back to work. “For
cataloging
purposes, Lai’a draws on a variety of terms and this one is most apt. The Rabelais Drift and the Orion Drift were obvious labelling choices. Orion 359 had been charted optically, using some of the biggest lenses in the Deep Sky, just nine years before my ships surveyed the region. This one … this one’s so far out, it’s probably been imaged as part of a wide-field plate, but if it was, it’s more than likely occluded by any number of other objects. It wouldn’t even be seen, much less charted. We’re the first from our world to see this, and the name Lai’a has chosen is very apposite indeed. The
gojin
is a snake native to Saraine, hooded like Earth’s cobra, and just this color; and if you notice the
shape
of the river of star-stuff being drawn out of the red giant –”

“A striking cobra.” Vidal whistled. “That’s wicked.”

“Dangerous,” Jazinsky added. “The storms are breaking way too close to the black hole for my liking. Lai’a, could you locate the black hole
before
you transited the gate?”

“With sufficient time to abort,” Lai’a affirmed. “This information was not provided by the
Ebrezjim
database. The
Ebrezjim
astronomers would have possessed it; it would certainly have been destroyed by corruption. Vector analysis demonstrates that
Gojin
, the black hole, is on the outward leg of its orbit. Future gravity storms will form progressively further from the red giant, Beta
Gojin
. In a century, navigation hazard will be minimal. In the meantime, I will drop comm beacons both in the driftway and here in the
Gojin
Drift.”

Vaurien’s head came up at that. “Comm beacons will attract Zunshu attention.”

“Indeed they will,” Mark said bleakly. “And it won’t matter a damn, Richard, one way or the other, will it?”

The fist that had seized Travers’s heart squeezed. If the Zunshu were either forced or seduced into an armistice, their knowledge of beacons here was of no consequence; if they fought and were obliterated, the same … and if Lai’a were erased from the universe –

“Where in the name of anyone’s gods are we?” Vidal whispered. “Lex, you were always the astronomer. I remember the telescope you had, right on the edge of StarCity where every night was A-grade ‘seeing.’ I’d be asleep with the dogs while you were still fiddling with
something
, trying to get an image of a spark in the sky nobody else knew was there.”

She shivered visibly at the memory. “I don’t know, Michael. These are strange skies. I’m not recognizing anything at all … which is weird enough to make the hair stand up on my neck.” She took a long breath. “Lai’a, would you stream your data to Tech 2?”

“Certainly, Colonel,” Lai’a said affably, “but at the moment your efforts will be futile. To this point, I have matched no object in the accessible sky with any object in the astronomical databases of Resalq or humans. I am still waiting for deep scan data; it will be several minutes more before it becomes available.”

She had pulled a chair up to the workstation anyway, and her hands lay clasped by the keypad, knuckles white as bone. “And when you have your deep scan data you’ll triangulate between known pulsars and quasars. I know.”

“A few minutes, Colonel,” Lai’a assured her. “There is no need for you to review the datastream, unless you would be interested in some of the more exotic objects in this immediate region. Four double stars and two triple star systems offer considerable interest. May I draw your attention to the first trinary,
Gojin
254 –”