Crystal Soldier (33 page)

Cantra sighed. "Were you going to steal a ship, then? These numbers would've got you killed straight off, if you didn't know—"

"No, Pilot." Dulsey faced her again, chin lifting. "We were a group, before the bankruptcy, and in the group were pilots who had experience . . . "

Cantra lifted a hand, palm up.

"Dulsey, I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't steal a ship, given necessity. I'm thinking Pilot Jela's of the same opinion, is that right, Pilot?"

"That's right," Jela said comfortably.

"I wonder, though—how wide-spread was this attitude in your group? Were you going to depend on stealth, or on surprise?"

Dulsey's face hardened.

"They were depending on accident, coincidence, and rumor. With the application of reasonable energy some time ago, we could have all been gone."

Cantra barely avoided smiling. The girl wasn't a fool. Indeed,
indeed
, she hoped the Uncle was ready.

"I understand," she said, pitching her voice easy and calm. "In which case, I'll put the ship's back-up brain on the problem of a proof for those two sets of coords. In the meantime, since we're all strapped in and well-fed, let's get ourselves out to the Rim."

SHE WAS GOING to transition now? Jela looked to his board, in case he'd missed—but no.

"I've only got two beacons, Pilot," he said, keeping his voice gentle.

She was concentrating on her board, feeding that coord set to the "back-up brain," he supposed—whatever that might mean—and he didn't expect any answer, which would have been more informative than the one he got.

"Have faith, Pilot Jela," she murmured. "Have faith." And as if on-cue in some story-play, the nav-brain twittered, and a third set of coordinates marched across the center screen—Rathil Beacon, that was. They still needed one more, to balance the equation, and insure a safe and uneventful transition.

"Rathil's up," Cantra breathed beside him, and, louder—"Dulsey, strap in."

There was a tickle at the back of his mind, tasting something like a query—but he was too busy grabbing the coords off the screen, doing the math in his head and coming out with nothing good.

"Pilot," he insisted, keeping it gentle, "we're still down a beacon."

She shot him a look out of bright green eyes.

"When you don't got four, you fly on three," she said. "Hang on to your board, Pilot. This might be rough."

Her hands danced across her own board with that light, sure grace he admired so much, and before he could draw a breath or begin to think an answer for the tree—

They hit transition.

And they hit it hard.

RADIAL VELOCITY
, he was thinking.

The math was a soothing balm against the frenetic vibrations the ship and crew were experiencing; a flash image inside his head showed that the tree knew what an earthquake was, and what it might do.

But no, radial velocity was not the whole answer. Part of it was the gravitational effect—a tidal effect almost—with the galaxy edge-on and the ship prying itself into
otherspace
against millions of stars and only the halo of diminishing dark energy a balance at this distance.

Cantra sat the board calmly, hands poised a moment, then stabbing a button, poised again, flipping a toggle—

They were out.

CANTRA LOUNGED AT ease at the board, well aware that both Dulsey and Jela were much surprised.

Jela, for his part, recovered quickly, with a hand signal more to himself than her, Cantra thought—a long, slow
smooooothhh
—his only public comment.

Dulsey, cleared her throat.

"The pilot enjoys an excellent rapport with the ship," she said seriously; "and the ship enjoys excellent numbers!"

Cantra laughed.

"The ship goes where we send it, right? Just I do know some places to take off a bit and some places to add a bit to the equations. Them equations was done for the average ship on an average course somewhere down in the midst of that mess—" She pointed to the representation of the galaxy on the side monitor—"and if you look close, we're about as far as you can get from as much as you want to count of it and still say we're in the thing."

The Rim accent had come up hard all by itself, along with the side-drawl that helped make Rim cant both distinctive and muddy to some of the light-lappers who thrived down to the center of things.
Well, it comes with the territory
, she thought, and didn't fight it.

For effect she centered the galactic image . . . and sure enough, as the image shifted the blue dot representing their position moved way off to the left side of things before disappearing. She'd known that was going to happen, since the arm they were in was the longest of the three arms, and the most twisted. Some folks with a lot of time on their hands figured that
this
arm was what was left of an intergalactic collision somewhere on the far side of time. The truth was that once things got into the billions of years she for the most part lost interest because—as they said out here—her fingernails grew faster than that.

"If you would be so kind to keep the scale but center on our position, Pilot?"

Cantra looked up at Jela's voice, caught the notion that he'd apparently made the request first in finger-talk, and she'd missed it.

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."