The Crystal Variation (34 page)

Smart of him, actually. No good could come out of directly interfering with a pilot staring down into that much of a think.

“Same scale?” she asked.

“Indeed.”

And so now it was that there was all this near empty on the left-side of the screen. The arm they rode twisted back into the density of stars like a snake, coiling for a second strike.

Against that she upped the magnification a dozen clicks, and now there were a few smaller clusters yet showing out in the Deeps, and a couple places where stars had escaped from the embrace of others by a nova or supernova which had dashed into the darkness trailing gas, and the arm loomed big and important, like it ought to for folks and suns who spent their lives in it . . .

She upped the magnification again, and now—now they could see why it was called the Rim—that it was an actual rim of gravity and colliding grains of dust and gas. And since this arm was half-again as long as the others, this was the arm that spun itself against the intergalactic medium uncleared by the previous passage of the other arms, and here was the interplay of magnetic fields with the bow wave of light pressure, wild gas, and . . .

“The Uncle . . .” Dulsey’s voice wavered a bit, and ended on a gulp.

For all that, Cantra allowed as how she was doing better than most folks she’d seen when faced with the fact of the Rim, for who expected it to ripple with a glow of purple so deep you’d swear it wasn’t there, and who expected—having learned about years and parsecs and light years and such—to find that there were things so much beyond them that mere billions was a kidstuff toy.

“The Uncle,” Dulsey tried again, “lives—out there?”

“Almost there,” Cantra said cheerfully, and shot a glance to Jela, who gave her his blandest face to look at.

“Now, we’ll see how good those numbers are, Pilot,” she said. “Ready for adventure?”

He smiled for that one and nodded. “Ready.”

TRANSITION WAS QUIET
this time, drop-out smooth and easy.

“Pilot,” Cantra called, “shut down the running lights, the auto-hail, and active radar . . .”

His fingers flickered—
rock
—and she answered, though he hadn’t seen her look his way.

“I know, but we’ll take the first ten ticks as free and clear ‘cause if they ain’t we should be able to slide in there anyway . . .”

“Pilot,” he acknowledged, began to deactivate the systems, adding the dock-ranging equipment, and—

“ . . . and anything else you think we ought to do to be quiet . . .” she said, over a sudden, head-rattling series of thumps, which would be the rocks, of course.

“Good thing sound doesn’t transmit,” he muttered, and Cantra laughed.

“It’ll pass,” she said—and that quick it was done, leaving behind nothing but smooth silence and the sounds of normal ship systems.

“Video!” Cantra called, but he was ahead of her, clicking on the infrared scanners just ahead of the video feed, hand poised above the meteor-repellor shielding switch.

The scanners began registering objects far away enough to be minor concerns; nothing close. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Cantra spun the ship quickly on its axis, pressing Jela’s aching left leg into the webbing.

He grimaced slightly; he hadn’t noticed that complaint come on line, but there it was: transition was starting to affect his aches as much as dirt-side weather could.

A flitting image came to him—a tree, it must have been, as viewed from another, leaning into a prevailing wind.

That would be about right
, he thought,
got my roots set and have to weather things as they come at me
.

That thought was swept away with the blink of light on the board—

Anomaly!

The infra-red scanners were showing multiple changing heat-sources . . .

“More rocks,” he commented.

“I got ‘em too,” came Cantra’s laconic reply, “and if we didn’t, I’d say we was in trouble. If my memory’s at all good, rocks is about all there is out here, ‘cepting the Uncle and his kindred.”

THERE WAS TIME
now for Jela to consider where they were. Cantra had the ship’s brain doing a long-range comparison and analysis of the rock-field, looking for objects that she’d seen once before. Not that she was personally trying to identify this or that bit of stone or metal, but she had the ship trying to match images the former captain had been wise enough to capture and store in deep archives.

The process was time-consuming, and would have brought Jela to the edge of distraction had he not had both a practical and an academic interest in what the edge of forever looked like from the outside.

Where they had come from was not precisely visible now, with threads of dust and gas in the galactic disk obscuring where things had been multi-thousands of years ago and the more immediate pebbles, rocks, and gassed out-chunks of protocomets acting as a dulling screen to both vision and scanners attempting to use line-of-sight.

But around them, other than the thin scatter of what was—on galactic scale—negligible sandy left-overs, there was nothing. At this distance from the core, there were no individual stars to act as beacons, and all the other galaxies were too distant to be seen as anything more than point sources, if they could be seen at all. The galaxy they orbited faded to a distant nebulous smudge . . .

Jela imagined all too vividly what it would be like to be suited up or in a canopied singleship here now, and felt the involuntary, perhaps instinctual shiver. There was no darkness like the dark of emptiness.

CANTRA WAS MUTTERING
again, which Jela knew ought to have worried him, but it mirrored what he would have done had he been sitting in the pilot’s spot with old information and a mission in peril for it.

He’d taken con for a short while as she grabbed a quick break and some tea, returning as renewed to his eyes as if she’d had a three day shore leave.

Now she was back at work, digging among files and archives that only she could access. That she added a running commentary was her choice, and if it helped the pilot think, why then, he’d seen pilots with worse habits.

He glanced at her—not for the first time since transition—wishing that he’d had her match in any of his units. She had an economy of movement, and a wit as well, and for all her complaining there wasn’t a bit of it that was an actual whine.

Too, he admitted, there was an underlying energy in her that was quite pleasing. Perhaps it was the training and background she so vociferously denied, perhaps it was the pheromones . . .

He wiped that thought away, or tried to, for there was no doubt that the night they’d met she’d been on the prowl for more than dinner company. Certainly if things had moved in that direction—and without the interruptions that had come their way—they might have had a good tumble. For his part, as someone willing to appreciate irony, metaphor, strength, energy, and honor . . . he knew he could have found some energy to share.

That this would not have been against orders he knew, for certainly, the troop understood that duty required nurture and recreation. And certainly, one could feel a certain amount of affinity for a pilot of excellent caliber who was also good when it came to hand-to-hand, and had a clear eye and quick understanding with regard to who were enemies.

Hadn’t she stood at his back? Guarded the tree? Was she not now engaged in a rather fine—not to mention out of the way—balancing of accounts in delivering Dulsey to a safe zone? Indeed, Cantra could be counted as comrade in truth . . .

From somewhere, a distant, whispery scratching sound, barely on the edge of perception. Jela started, blinking the momentary abstraction away, and sent a quick glance to the tree . . .

An image built inside his head, of a distant dragon in the sky, drifting away as the breeze brought haze . . .

“Dust,” said Cantra lazily, and the image faded. “Carbon dust, with a bit of extra hydrogen. And that’s a good sign, Pilot. You be ready to sing out when you got something to look at. Kind of amazing that a veil like this can hide the Uncle’s little quarry for so long.”

In the jump-seat, Dulsey stirred, eyes bright.

Cantra laughed, and even her laugh was loaded with accent, as if the weight of piloting had worn through a veneer.

“S’alright girl. Your numbers worked. Likely, though, if you’d have come in piloting yourself you’d have had to beg to be picked up, which is how the Uncle prefers things, I gather. Us now, we’re going to be ringing that door chime on our own. Keep watching.”

And as if Cantra had a cloud-piercing telescope to show her the way, the scans began to register, and video began to show distant objects vaguely outlined against the nebulous presence of the galaxy.

“Straps tight, now,” she said, “each and all of us.”

* * *

HE’D THOUGHT ONCE
before that Cantra flew like a bomber pilot, and now, as the aches built up in his knee and his admiration grew, he was sure of it. He made a mental note to check on the training given to
aelantaza
.

The thing was that—within this strange space—her reactions were absolutely sure, and absolutely perfect. She threw the craft through crevices in the dust, around rocks and coils of rocks, sliding this way and that . . . for in this realm beyond the galaxy, action and reaction held sway, with but a nod and a twitch required to overcome the microgravity of the dust clouds or the trajectory of free-moving rock.

On the screen was the destination, a rather forbidding tumbling conglomeration of dust-stuck rock not even big enough to become a globe under its own gravity. The course to the target was irregular, with projected and suggested approaches appearing on-screen, being selected or deselected, or assigned back-up . . .

Jela watched and sat second, hands and eyes mostly in synch with the real action, though from time to time Cantra’s choices were idiosyncratic at best. In some ways, he was reminded of training games and mock-cockpits, where one could play a ship with abandon . . .

Here though, abandon was not what she was displaying. Here, Cantra was showing honed skill. If she flew it like it was a game, then it was her game, and not his. But then it was her ship, and she the one who had actually been to this unlikely bit of
here
before.

“Pilot,” she said suddenly, “what we’re going to do is to fly formation with this thing for a bit. There’ll be another one around for us to look for, not a lot like it . . .”

And with that, she rolled the ship slightly and slung it around, slowly matching pace with the object—asteroid, dead comet, dustball . . .

Once they had achieved “formation,” Jela saw it was too bright and speckled to be a mere dustball. In fact, it showed signs—

“See there,” Cantra said carefully, her eyes on her screens, “we got a dozen flat surfaces or so here. One of them ought to be mostly red in visible spectrum, assuming we can shine enough of a light on it. It’s been worked a bit, and it’ll be obvious if we got the right rock. That’s gonna be your job, and I’ll tell you when to go to light. Same time, you’re going to bring them guns up full, just in case.”

“Pilot,” he replied, and found the controls for the tracking light. They felt odd to his hands, and he doubted that he had touched anything like them since his long-ago days as a pilot trainee.

What kind of rock could have been “worked a bit” out here? Something else to add to his . . .

The spectralyzer flashed, and the infra-red too. There
was
an anomaly.

“Light it up!” Cantra snapped, but he’d already hit the switch, gotten the range—

They were following the rock formation, its weird slow tumble immensely weirder under the ship’s spotlight. The rock looked like it had been sliced and grooved, as if whole slabs had been taken away. There was a flash of color—greenish—then gray, more gray, and—

“Red!” he said, exultantly.

“Right,” Cantra agreed, lazily. “We got the right rock. Now all we gotta do is sit back and listen real hard. I’m punching the bands up now. Get me a directional on it if you can.”

There was a signal . . . so faint as to barely budge the meter. A chirping sound, in identical sets of three, filled the bridge.

The ship’s computer struggled with the signal for some moments before Jela sang out.

“Got it!” He copied it to the pilot’s screen, and heard her laugh, soft.

“Right,” she said. “I’ll just mosey us along in that direction for a bit. When you get a change in those bird-noises there, Pilot, just put the docking lights, and docking shields, and docking radar on.” She sent a quick glance over her shoulder.

“Dulsey, this is your last chance to change your mind.”

“I wish to be with the Uncle,” the Batcher said firmly.

Cantra sighed, soft, but plain to Jela’s ears, and her fingers formed the sign for
pilot’s choice
. He signaled agreement in return.

“To hear is to obey, then,” Cantra said to Dulsey. She cocked at eye at him and grinned.

“We’re sitting on Uncle’s back porch. We’ll just knock on the door and see if anyone’s to home. Whenever you’re ready, Pilot.”

Twenty-Four

TWENTY-FOUR

Rockhaven

“Shut it down,”
Cantra said quietly.

Acknowledgment from the Uncle’s pile of rocks had finally been received after an annoyingly long—perhaps calculatedly long—wait. Now they sat almost against the rock wall, tied to the haven by two light ship tethers and their own extendable gangtube to one of four observable access ports.

Jela paused with his hands on the board and considered her profile.

“Pilot? No need for all of us to go down. I can stay, if you want it, and keep the home fire burning.”

She turned her head, giving him a steady, serious look, with nothing wild or irritable about it.

“Shut it down, Pilot.”

There wasn’t any arguing with that glance of calm reason, and Jela turned his attention to an orderly shutdown of his board, the while pondering the fact that it was impossible to argue with Cantra when she was unreasonable, and impossible to argue with her when she wasn’t. Convenient. He’d also come to notice that she wasn’t unreasonable nearly as often as she let it seem that she was.