“Could you?” Farragut asked his patterner.
“With a better baby picture, maybe. But to what purpose? You can’t get there in real time. We can’t even travel to the other side of
this
galaxy in reasonable time, let alone voyage to another one.”
Farragut brooded so solemnly that Augustus added, “And if you have any idea about flying this boat through a
kzachin
, you let me out first. I am
not
leaving the galaxy.”
Farragut paced the small confines of the wardroom. “I need to find my Marines before a LEN rocket comes back and hands me my commission in a shoebox.”
“Your Marines are dead, John Farragut.”
“My Swifts have homing instructions. If my people are dead, their Swifts will find their way back, and I’ll bury my dead.”
Augustus gazed round at the vast sea of projected stars, trillions of years deep. “Presupposes they are anywhere they can find their way back from.”
Flight Sergeant Reg Monroe watched her air reservoir dwindle to the point of no return. Swifts did not have air scrubbers like
Merrimack
’s. Swifts were short-range vessels. Even if Reg could figure out which way was back so she could turn that way and go there, she would run out of breathable air before she could reach the
Merrimack
.
Reg had, on sleepless nights, already gone over what she would do if ever stranded in space. She thought she was out of tears, but they welled up one last time as she faced the fact that it was time to do it.
She disconnected her environmental alarm, and poked a hole in her heat exchanger, disconnected her carbon monoxide monitor and the control overrides.
She’d always heard carbon monoxide was odorless, but still she sniffed, expecting to smell
something
.
Did not think this was working. She felt vaguely sickish, her throat sore, probably from all that screaming.
Could not keep her eyes open. There was nothing to take a last look at anyway, she thought, drifting from final consciousness.
Scarcely even heard the proximity alarms blaring imminent collision.
Dak Shepard jinked hard to avoid Alpha Three come bulleting up his tail. “Hey! Reg! Wake up!”
How had Dak known she was sleeping? Dak?
Dak!
Reg forced her eyes open, stuffed an oxygen mask over her face and inhaled huge gulps. Wrapped her hand round the hole in her heat exchanger and fumbled for duct tape.
“Reg, where the hell are you going?”
Crying just to be anywhere, Reg choked. Her viewport was full of stars. Not nearly enough of them, but there were stars and there was Dak.
She taped up the hole in her heat exchanger. Breathed. Breathed. Flushed her cabin of carbon monoxide. Halted her Swift’s wild course and steered back toward the others.
“Dak! You magnificent
baboon
! I have never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice in my life!”
And the other voices filled her headset with beautiful noise. Twitch. Carly. They were all here. Her headphone clamored with relieved chatter and exclamations. And Hazard Sewell barking, “Alpha Flight! Form up! Call in, by the numbers! Alpha Two!”
“Alpha Two, aye.”
“Alpha Three!”
“Alpha Three. I’m gonna throw up. I mean aye.” Breathing. Trying to clear her head.
Heard the rest of them call in. All here. All amazed to have arrived together, when each told of losing direction and going different speeds. Carly Delgado had red-walled her thrusters. Twitch Fuentes had come to a dead stop for several hours. Yet here they all were in a bunch, spat from the maw of the same beast.
They were all here. Here. A place where none of the stars matched anything in their spectral catalog. Their catalog contained billions of star prints. Twitch: “Anybody got a star match yet?”
“Not a one. Where
are
we?”
“Not in Kansas, sir.”
An orange star lay thirty-nine astronomical units off. They set their bearings by that. Called it North, for the lack of any other referent.
Reg, who really needed to restock her air, did a quick survey. “Hazard, we’re inside the solar system of this orange star here. From the planetary spread, I think there could be a planet in the hospitable zone on the far side of it.”
“I’m not wasting time planet hunting,” Hazard sent back. “Alpha Flight, plot a course back to the precise coordinates where you first reentered real space. What are you reading at that point?”
“Nothing. I got serious nothing,” said Reg.
“I got a black hole way in the background,” said Carly. “Nothing at that point.”
“That’s not a black hole in the background,” Hazard cried in sudden realizaton. “That’s the hole we came through and it’s right
there.
”
“I see it, Hazard,” Carly sent back. “I think you’re right. That
is
the hole. It’s closer—a
lot
closer—than the sensors say it is.”
“What the hell are all you looking at?” Dak squawked over the com. “That? That’s a—that’s not there.”
“Alpha Flight, form up. We are going back.”
“
We
are
not!
” Reg shrieked. Her brain shut off. Primal terror controlled this vessel.
“Suck it up, Flight Sergeant Monroe. Fall in.”
Hazard ordered his Flight to lock all their Swifts’ force fields together into a single shell. They had each noticed in transit that reality ended at the perimeter of their force fields. If they joined within a single field, they might not have to go through the return voyage alone.
“Might?
Might?
You don’t know! I
know
I can’t go back there! You don’t know how much I can’t go back in there! You don’t even know if that thing has a
back
to go to!”
“Chica, chica,”
Carly said, in the voice she used to calm snarling dogs.
Hazard reasoned, “There used to be a minefield guarding the other side of the trapdoor we fell down. That means this thing has to go two ways.”
“It does NOT!” Reg shrieked. “It doesn’t have to ANYTHING!
You
go back, Hazard Sewell!
I
am
not
going in there!”
“Flight Sergeant!”
“What!
What?
What you got, Hazard! You got nothing to scare me with! Court-martial? Sounds like heaven, sir! But it ain’t gonna happen ’cause I ain’t going in there. You gonna shoot me? Then shoot me. Just you do it
this
side of that fucking
hole
’cause this elegant hag AIN’T GOING IN! Do you read me, SIR?”
That struck him dumb. Hazard felt he was holding on by his fingernails, lost like no one had ever been lost, and now he’d lost control of his flight. Never could deal with an upset female. Damn whoever let women in the U.S. Fleet Marine Corps.
“Mr. Monroe—”
“No!”
“I got her, sir.” That was Dak. “It’s okay, Hazard, I got her. Reg, honey, come here and dock with me. Get in here. I ain’t doin’ so good myself.” No innuendoes in the invitation. Just fear. “Don’t make me go in there by myself, babe.
Semper fi.
I ain’t gonna make it without you.”
Human need vibrated in his warm muddy voice.
Crying so hard she couldn’t talk, Reg docked with Dak’s Swift, crawled through the emergency coupler and squeezed into the one-man cockpit with Dak—the smelly, clammy, sweet, scared ape. She held onto him tight.
With force fields interlocked, Alpha Flight jumped back into nowhere.
Donner granted Captain Farragut’s request for an audience, but kept him waiting in his audience hall long enough to make it clear who needed whom.
Captain Farragut and Colonel Augustus displaced into the dark. A storm wind blew rain through the palace’s wide, white archways to puddle on the jeweled floor. Outside, rubbery trees tossed wildly, bowing all the way to the ground. The coral plants shrank into hard shells and became spiny brown rocks. Waves in stone-gray rollers crashed at the foot of the terrace walls. Lightning in great purpled trees of fire lanced the furious sky.
Within the Archon’s gloomy audience hall, frosted globes faded up to a soft glow. Farragut had wondered at the globes earlier, wondered what they could be. They looked like lamps, but he’d wondered what possible use the Myriadians would have for artificial lighting in a globular cluster. But of course there were clouds, and probably basements, and he knew there were mines.
The lizard plants strayed off their shelves and huddled over rain puddles blown onto the mosaic floor. They lapped water off the beryl and sapphires, tourmaline and emeralds.
Augustus bided the time studying the walls in the lamplight. “Did you notice this?” He nodded up at the monumental inscription over the Archon’s grand throne.
“I saw it,” said Farragut. “I can’t read it. You didn’t include that script in the language module.”
“Because it’s not Myriadian. It’s Original.”
“Can you translate it?”
“No. I don’t have enough samples of Original.”
“So what pattern do you see?”
“The script is boustrophedon.”
“That’s Greek to me, Augustus.”
“It’s Greek to everyone else, too. Boustrophedon is a Greek word.”
“Then speak English.”
“There is no equivalent English word,” said Augustus. “Boustrophedon means back and forth, as an ox hitched to a plow treads the rows, this way, then that way. The Myriadians have engraved these lines sinistrorsum, then they turned around and wrote back dextrorsum.”
Sinistrorsum? Dextrorsum?
“Are you speaking Greek again, Augustus?”
“Latin. Left to right. Right to left.”
Wind howled through the colonnade, ruffled all the lights. Rain fell in splattered sheets across the precious stones.
Farragut stopped his agitated pacing (sinistrorsum and dextrorsum) to scan the engraved symbols above the Archon’s throne. “I see it.” Certain symbols appeared backward when they appeared in contiguous rows. “What’s it got to do with anything?”
“We were looking for a language match for these folk.”
“Augustus, you expect to find a known language match when we have evidence that these people come from another
galaxy
?”
“I didn’t expect to find it,” said Augustus. “I just found it.”
A lightning flash froze the moment. The air sizzled, left an ozone tang in Farragut’s nostrils. Thunder crashed. The boom rolled out in a rumbling that reached up from the floor and shook his throat.
The Archon chose this moment to make his entrance without greeting. The lizard plants shrank back into their beds.
“What did you bring me?” Donner demanded.
“The
kzachin
,” Farragut countered.
“I already control them,” said the Archon.
“Then tell me where the
kzachin
at the edge of the Myriad leads,” said Farragut.
Donner chose to be coy. Turned his maned back toward his visitors, looking more like a handsome animal than a man from this angle. Still an authoritative figure. “There are so many
kzachin
. I do not know where they all go.”
Farragut glanced aside. Augustus’ slow blink confirmed: Lie.
(“I’m not getting anywhere here, Augustus. Assistance.”)
Augustus produced pen and paper, drew a set of symbols—boustrophedon—and gave it to the captain. (“Ask your buddy what this says.”)
Farragut offered the paper to Donner. “Do you know what this says?”
Donner would not take it from Farragut’s hand. Farragut set the paper down on a polished granite ledge and stepped away from it.
The Archon took his time strolling over to glance at it. Surprise made him pick up the paper and carry it closer to a lamp. His dark eyes flickered back and forth across the symbols, then up to Farragut. “You are missing several lines. And these are cut off.”
“But you can read it,” said Augustus.
“Of course I can read it,” Donner told Farragut, as if Farragut, not Augustus, had asked the question. “This is my name.”
Donner’s forefinger traced a circle around three symbols:
He gave the paper back to Farragut. “I hope you did not touch the actual engraving.”
“Why?”
“It is radioactive.”
“It is inscribed in lead,” said Augustus.
“Then you saw a copy,” said Donner. “What you have there is the inscription from the inner back plate of a reliquary. The plate is solid thorium. The whole reliquary was made of heavy and rare elements. I suspected they would take it apart.” The last part was spoken in an agitated mutter, more to himself, in bitterness.
“They?”
“I sent the reliquary to Origin. A gift. Apparently, they do not hold my gifts in as much regard as they hold the box.”
“What was in it?”
“Things with meaning. The box, the box is merely priceless. There is no thorium on Origin. As your man said, Origin has virtually no elements heavier than iron.”
“You sent the reliquary to Origin,” said Augustus, using a polite
you
spoken to a superior. “Did it get there?”
Donner glanced angrily, one alien to the other. Asked Farragut, indignant, “Does your man mean to tell me the reliquary was stolen?”
