One's Aspect to the Sun (15 page)

Maja was in her cabin, feigning disinterest, but I expected she and Dr. Ndasa would appear on the bridge by the time the skip drive kicked in.

I tried not to fidget, and I knew Baden was feeling the same way by the sympathetic look he shot me. The two of us really had nothing to do while we waited, and the suspense was killing us. I wasn't surprised when Dr. Ndasa appeared in the archway that led to the bridge.

“May I come up there with the rest of you?” he asked sheepishly, twisting the end of his long braid around one finger. “It's slightly—unnerving, waiting back there and not knowing what's happening.”

“Completely understandable.” I turned in my seat to smile a welcome. “I was planning to call you before we went in to ask if you'd like to come to the bridge. We're still running checks, but you can have a seat at one of the empty stations and make yourself comfortable.”

As I said, I'd been through the Split once before. However, since I was busy at the time trying to subdue an alien—a Lobor pirate who was attempting to strangle me—and listening to Hirin swear because he couldn't leave the controls to help me with the alien in question, I can't tell you what it looks like inside. All I know is what I've heard, that it's not like a normal wormhole. Apparently that's all Hirin noticed about it at the time, since
he
was dividing his attention between piloting the ship and watching his wife fight off an alien pirate. I was looking forward to this time, when I hoped I could let others do all the work and just watch the show.

Rei sat back in her chair and fetched a deep breath. “I think we're ready,” she said. She turned and grinned at me. “This is going to be interesting.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not too interesting, I hope. Just get us safely out the other side and that will be plenty interesting for me, thanks.”

“No problem, Captain,” she said, and snapped off a completely irreverent salute.

“Viss?” I asked.

He nodded. “She's as ready as she's going to be—the ship, I mean. She's in good shape as far as I can tell. I'm going to monitor everything from the engineering console here.” He grinned. “I don't want to be stuck down on the other deck and miss any of the fun.”

“Yuskeya?”

“All ready. All the data we have has been compiled and downloaded into the nav computers and the skip drive compensators.”

Hirin snorted. “The time I piloted the Split,” he said in true cranky-old-man mode, “we arrived in this sector at top speed and fired up the skip field generators on the fly. We had no wormhole data to speak of, mostly rumours, and I had to do everything myself as the rest of the crew was engaged with—another emergency. Rei's a
perfekta
pilot and the ship is in good shape. Let's get going, already!”

“Not much I can say after that.” I smiled. “I hope you're still as lucky as you were back then, old man. Go ahead, Rei. Take us in.”

Rei and Viss busied themselves at their stations and the ship hummed to life. The buzzing whir of the skip drive matter generator soon drowned out the usual comforting throb of the main drive. Once it got going it faded into white noise, but for the first few minutes after it started up it sounded like a hive full of angry giant bees had invaded the ship. You definitely knew that something out-of-the-ordinary was going to happen. It was at this point that passengers usually arrived on the bridge.

Right on cue, Maja appeared and, when Hirin crooked a finger at her, took a skimchair from an empty console and wordlessly slid it over beside him.

We began to move toward the wormhole, the black spot where no stars shone growing even darker as we approached. To outward appearance it looked like any other wormhole.

The difference was obvious as soon as we entered the mouth, however. The tunnel that stretched and curved ahead of us swirled with the usual spangle of colours down one side, but the opposite side was a barely discernible gauzy grey, opaque yet seemingly insubstantial. My head spun with a vertigo that was completely unlike the sometimes-dizzying beauty of other wormholes. This was more like standing on the edge of a steep, crumbling precipice.

“Holding steady on one-hundred-eighty degree skip course,” Rei said, and her voice was the tiniest bit shaky. “Advancing Krasnikov matter generator to full power.”

It was like going over the crest of a snowy hill on a sled, the slightest hesitation and then a quick drop as the ground fell away. We skidded along the wormhole like a skipping rock, one that ricocheted off the sides of a watery half-circle in a smooth defiance of gravity.

“Drives at one hundred percent,” Viss reported. “No problems.”

The colours were beautiful, but I couldn't keep my eyes away from that half-circle of grey that demarcated near-certain death. It looked almost soft, inviting. I wrenched my eyes away from it. My suicidal curiosity was kicking in again, but I had more lives to consider here than just my own.

We hurtled along the wormhole at nearly full speed now, the colours blurring almost painfully. I heard Dr. Ndasa gasp but didn't turn to him.

“Rei? How are you doing?” Her hands skittered over the touchscreen like frenzied spiders, making the numberless tiny adjustments that would keep us away from the deadly grey zone.

“
Okej
.” It sounded like her teeth were clenched. “The ship wants to make the full circle skips. Hard to hold to one-eighty.”

“Should we reduce speed?”

She shook her head. “No, I think it would only make it worse. I don't know how the hole gravity would affect us.”

A tremor shook the
Tane Ikai
, only a small one, but anyone who knew the ship felt it. Viss punched in adjustments. I glanced over and saw that Maja was holding Hirin's hand, her face ghostly in the bright bridge lights. My own fingers dug painfully into the armrests of my chair, and I deliberately disengaged them. We seemed to be swinging closer to the dangerous edges of the coloured walls with every skip, but it might have been my imagination and I didn't want to put any more pressure on Rei.

“Time?” Rei asked. I looked over and saw that her skin, beneath her
pridattii
, had gone very pale.

“Probably halfway through,” Baden said. The muscles were working in the side of his jaw. Inaction at a crucial time was a difficult thing for a man like Baden. He was a lot like Hirin in that respect, I thought with a pang.

“Luta,” Hirin gasped suddenly, and I turned to look at him. His face was ashen, the same grey as the half-wall of the wormhole, and he clutched his chest with one hand and Maja's hand with the other. Maja stared at him, her mouth open.
Heart attacks happen occasionally during skips
. The words appeared with horrible clarity in my mind.

“Hirin!” I dove out of my chair toward him. Dr. Ndasa and Yuskeya moved only seconds behind me.

“Luta?” That was Rei, her voice tight.

“Never mind us!” I yelled. “Keep the ship on course.”

We eased Hirin out of his chair and onto the bridge's cool metal decking, and Dr. Ndasa loosened Hirin's shirt. Maja hadn't said anything, but she still gripped her father's hand. Yuskeya leapt up and staggered against the inexorable forces that pulled at her, heading for the First Aid station.

“His pulse is jagged,” Dr. Ndasa said. The metallic scent of his worry belied the calmness of his voice.

“Feel like . . . can't breathe,” Hirin managed to gasp. “Too tight . . .”

“Dad . . .” Maja croaked.

“It's all right, Hirin.” I took his other hand. It was ice cold. “We're going to help.” I looked at Dr. Ndasa hopefully, but his dark alien eyes were unreadable.

Yuskeya hurtled back onto the bridge and dropped to her knees beside us. I hardly knew what she was doing as she and the doctor worked over Hirin. A datamed. A scanner. A pulse injector for meds. Other implements I couldn't name.

Maja met my eyes for a second, hers dark with fear and something else I didn't want to name. I couldn't let go of Hirin's hand, although the weakness of his grip was frightening.
I must have been crazy to think I could handle this
. Then I looked back down at Hirin, and in his eyes was a look of finality, and love, and regret.
He had been getting better! It isn't fair!

“Luta!” Something was wrong. Rei was shouting.

Then I felt it—the ship was shaking as if we were entering an atmosphere far too fast and at the wrong incline.

“What's wrong?”

“The swing force is too much. I can't hold us to one-eighty!”

“You've got to!”

“Twenty seconds, Rei,” Baden shouted. “Just twenty seconds more!”

“I can't do it! We'll be off the safe side in two more skips at this rate!”

“Viss? Can you do anything?”

He didn't answer me right away. “Viss!”

His hands never stopped moving over the engineering console, but he shook his head. “I'm trying. Nothing's working.”

Hirin whispered something. Yuskeya bent over him. “What?”

“The main drive,” he rasped, a little louder. “Shut it down.”

“We can't shut down the main drive,” Viss said calmly. “The drag would disrupt the skip. I don't know what it would do to the ship.”

“Rei?”

“I don't know.” Her voice was as panicked as I'd ever heard it. “We'd probably break apart.”

“No.” Hirin's voice was stronger, but not much. “The plasma drive's started . . . a resonance flux with the skip drive. That's what's wrong. You have to . . . shut it down. Now.” He tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. “Trust me.”

I released Hirin's hand and stood up, swaying against the warring energies that clawed at the ship. “Viss, do what Hirin says.”

“But Captain—”

“Shut it down, dammit. Now!”

He didn't argue again, and his hand didn't hesitate as he punched the command to shut down the drive. The shaking stilled immediately and the ship shot forward even faster than it had been travelling.

“Hey!” Rei's hands still flew over the board, but I could tell from that one word that she was back in control—both of the ship and of her fear. The arc of the skips lessened perceptibly, and ten seconds later, we shot out of the terminal point of the wormhole into the starry, empty space of the Delta Pavonis System.

“Help me get him to First Aid,” Yuskeya said, wrapping Hirin's arms across his chest so we could carry him.

I was shaking so badly I knew I couldn't support his weight, and I let Baden push me gently aside so he could help. Maja held fast to Hirin's hand, and she hadn't looked at me again. Before I followed them, I laid a hand on Rei's shoulder. She was trembling, too.

“Good work.”

She shook her head. “I almost lost it.”

“Not your fault. You got us through. We're here in one piece.”

“What about Hirin?”

“I don't know. He's still alive, and we're out of the wormhole.”

She shuddered. “If anything—”

“I know. But he wanted to come. Yuskeya and Dr. Ndasa will look after him. He wanted to come.”

“Oh, Luta,” she said, and tears welled up in her golden eyes and flowed over the beautiful dark swirls on her cheeks.

“I know, Rei,” I said, and my own tears came then, too. “I know.”

A week later Hirin was still alive, but barely. He was extremely weak and short of breath, always feeling shaky and tired. Dr. Ndasa ordered complete bed rest, but it was unnecessary—Hirin couldn't have walked the length of himself. Maja nursed him almost ceaselessly, while Yuskeya and Dr. Ndasa took turns caring for his immediate medical needs and trying to figure out what had happened to him. It had been a heart attack of sorts, the result of some strange surge the virus had taken when we entered the Split. But there was no real explanation. Even Dr. Ndasa was, on the whole, mystified.

I kept waiting for Maja's anger at me to explode, but this time it didn't. She wasn't saying much, her eyes burned when she looked at me sometimes, but we weren't fighting. It was eerie. Finally, I mentioned it to Hirin when I took some lunch into his room.

“What's up with Maja?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, struggling to sit up.

“I mean she hasn't tried to bite my head off for taking you through the Split.” I sat on the side of the bed and handed him the bowl. He took it shakily.

“This time,” he told me with a characteristic grin, even though his voice was quavery, “I confess. I interfered.”

The effort of talking exhausted him, though, and he motioned for me to take the bowl again. I filled a spoon with spicy, saffron-coloured broth and held it to his lips.

“You told her not to get mad at me?”

He slurped and nodded.

“Even you haven't been able to manage that little miracle before,” I observed, spooning up some more. “How'd you talk her around this time?”

Hirin swallowed carefully before he answered. “I told her that if I found out you two were fighting,” he said, and paused to draw a deep breath, “it would probably kill me.”

I stared at him, mildly shocked. I'd never known Hirin to resort to any kind of emotional blackmail before.