Shooting the Rift - eARC (10 page)

Rennau was looking at me as though calculating how much per pound I’d be worth to a Skyhaven pie merchant. “Quick on the uptake, anyway,” he conceded.

Remington grinned. “What did you expect from Jenny Worricker’s nephew?”

The mate shrugged. “Same as from everyone else. More than meets the eye, less than they like to think.”

I thought about that, trying to fillet an insult from it, but not sure it would be worth the effort. It actually sounded quite astute, if you were a congenital cynic. Though perhaps such a reflection just showed I was already further along that particular road than I liked to think.

“So, how long till we make Numarkut?” I asked, already doing the calculation for myself.

Remington looked thoughtful. “Depends how much speed we’ve got on when we shoot the rift,” he said. “Couple of days out to the point here, same on the other side—unless we have to slow down for a customs inspection. Once we lose way, there’s sod all to push against. Took over a week, once.”

Rennau nodded again, sourly. “And we had perishables aboard. Bastard inspector slowed us down to a crawl once he realized there was nothing in the hold worth pilfering.”

“Does that happen a lot?” I asked. Sowerby seemed to be running things from the gravitics room at the moment, which gave us more time to talk than I’d anticipated, and I meant to take full advantage of the opportunity.

“Depends on the system,” Remington said. “Numarkut, they’re all at it. Never find a customs inspector there living the frugal life. On the plus side, it makes them easy to bribe. ’Til they get a better offer.”

“League worlds, it varies,” Rennau chipped in. “Most of their inspectors are strictly by the book. But you’ll find the odd one with his hand out. When you do, they’re worth cultivating. ’Til they get found out and shot.”

“Shot?” I asked, involuntarily, and Remington shook his head.

“Just that one time. Served him right for resisting arrest.”

I nodded, considering this. League law enforcement had a reputation for heavy-handedness, at least according to Commonwealth gossip, and I found it all too easy to believe a corrupt official would be summarily executed.

“What about the Commonwealth?” I asked, hoping my own people would turn out to be relative paragons.

“Pain in the arse,” Remington told me. “Want to check the manifest three times before they’ll even come aboard. Then they poke about everywhere, expect to be fed and given tea, and complain incessantly about wasting their time. After which, if they can’t find anything actually wrong, they’ll make up a new regulation they can ‘fine’ you for infringing anyway.”

“Does that happen often?” I asked, trying not to sound shocked.

“Often enough,” Remington said, not fooled for a moment. He paused, receiving a message from Sowerby that suddenly dropped into his ‘sphere, and nodded once. “Thanks, Sarah. Whenever you’re ready.” Then he glanced back in my direction. “You’ll enjoy this.”

If I’m honest, enjoy wasn’t quite the word that first sprang to mind as I returned my attention to the visual display floating in the center of my ‘sphere, which had been quietly getting on with the job of piping an image from the outer hull all the time I’d been distracted with conversation. While we’d been talking, the
Stacked Deck
had sailed serenely around the curve of the orbital, and begun her plunge towards the planet below.

Now Avalon appeared a good deal larger, and more ominous, than it had the last time I’d looked. The wisps of cloud, barely perceptible before, seemed thicker and more solid as we drove in towards the day side limb of the planet. I found myself looking for familiar land masses, as though we were expecting to land, but we were moving far too fast for that ever to be an option: unless, by “land” you mean “leave a crater the size of a city block.” I was no expert, but it seemed to me that Sowerby was cutting it a bit fine.

“She’ll be skimming air if she’s not careful,” I said, mildly disconcerted at the realization I’d spoken the thought aloud.

“Not Sarah,” Remington said, then hesitated. “Not much, anyway.”

It
’s
all a question of balance, see?
Rennau added, along with another superfluous diagram. In that, at least, he was right: the closer we got to the planet, the greater the boost to our speed from the slingshot maneuver. On the other hand, the deeper we dipped into the atmosphere, the more velocity would be dissipated as friction.

So far as I could tell, we were slipping just a little bit deeper than we should have been, the first faint wisps of air reaching up like swell on a placid sea to claw at our hull. Temperature readings began to climb, and although they were still a long way from anything approaching dangerous, I felt a faint shiver of apprehension. We began to acquire a visible wake of displaced air, roiling behind us, and a bow wave of condensing vapor, compressed and superheated by the speed of our passage.

“And . . . break!” Sowerby said calmly, her voice slightly attenuated by the node’s vocal processor. Another burst of power to the gravitics, and we were suddenly clear, hurtling away into the void.

“Nicely done,” Remington said, and turned to me. “Having second thoughts?”

“Bit late for that,” I said, with more conviction than I felt, while the world I called home dwindled rapidly in the virtual image. I closed it down: no point watching it diminish into a pinprick, before it vanished altogether in the never-ending night.

“Got that right,” Rennau confirmed, glancing in my direction. He stretched, as though the whole thing had been mildly tedious. “While you’re up here, you can get us some tea.”

CHAPTER TEN

In which I shoot my first rift.

I suppose I’d expected things to settle down a bit now we were on our way, but of course they were no quieter; at least for me. Though there were no crates to manhandle, the
Stacked Deck
was full of systems to check, minor problems to correct, and people needing a gofer
right now
, so there was no shortage of jobs for me to do. In the next couple of days, during which we went very fast through a great deal of nothing, I renewed my acquaintance with the vessel’s darkest and dustiest corners, and absorbed a great deal of information from Sowerby and her assistants about which tools were best to hit which pieces of equipment with. I even found myself redistributing the grime on the deck plates of the lower hold level with a broom on one occasion, an implement I’d only ever seen used before in historical virts.

“I thought we had drones for this kind of thing,” I grumbled, half-seriously. Clio, who was perched on the catwalk above me, legs swinging, as she applied a molecular bonder to a handrail that had cracked when Lena leaned against it, grinned down at me.

“And what happens if the power goes off?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Life support fails, we all suffocate or freeze, no one gives a stuff about sweeping the decks.”

“Well, there’s that,” she agreed cheerfully. “But the less you rely on the tech, the less there is to go wrong.”

“Says the woman who lives on a starship,” I said.

“I never said you shouldn’t use it.” She tested the handrail by swinging from it, and I found myself edging across to stand beneath her. She seemed to know what she was doing, but it was still a good fifteen feet from the catwalk to the deck plates, and I’d tripped often enough while lugging crates about to know just how hard they were. “Just don’t rely on anything you don’t need to.”

“Like you’re not relying on that bonder to have worked, so you don’t break your neck?” I asked, and she grinned again.

“Exactly. If I didn’t know damn well it had worked, I’d never—eek!” She dropped abruptly, and I leapt forward, arms outstretched. One of her hands caught the edge of the catwalk, and she hung there for a moment, looking down at me—then burst out laughing. “Oh, your face. You should see it from this side.” She let go, did a neat back flip, and landed on the deck plates next to me, flexing her knees to absorb the impact.

“Very funny,” I said, trying to hide how impressed I was. I’d seen sloppier displays in gymnastics competitions. “You didn’t tell me you were an athlete too.”

“That’s cos I’m not,” she said, although her face seemed to go a little pinker—probably as a result of the exertion. “I just picked up a few things scrambling round the holds.”

“So long as you put them back afterwards,” I joked, and she tilted her head, looking at me in the appraising manner I’d quickly come to associate with my new shipmates.

“Suppose I find something I don’t want to put back?” she asked.

“Then don’t get caught, I suppose,” I said, feeling faintly surprised. One thing I’d learned since coming aboard was that, despite the popular cynicism, Guilders were quite genuine in regarding an agreement of any kind as completely binding: I’d heard several stories of crippled ships with cargoes of food whose crews had eked out their rations to the point of starvation before even considering breaking open a hold. The idea of any Guilder, let alone Clio, entertaining the notion of casual pilfering, even in jest, was hard to get my head around.

“I never do,” she said, watching my face intently for a reaction. Whatever she saw there seemed to be the wrong thing, however, because she turned away suddenly, heading for the staircase. She paused, and glanced back, with her foot on the lowest tread. “You’ve missed a bit in the corner.”

“Right,” I said, but when I went to check it looked fine to me.

As I’d hoped, but never really expected, Remington called me back to the bridge to observe the rift transit. He was just as casual about his reasons as before, saying only that I might find it interesting, but I took it as a hopeful sign that I’d done well enough by now for him to be seriously considering giving me the apprenticeship: after all, if he was planning to leave me behind on Numarkut, I’d never have reason to know what shooting the rift involved.

“Don’t say or do anything,” Rennau instructed, as I arrived on the bridge, and slipped into the seat I’d occupied before. There was an air of tension about him which hadn’t been there during the undocking maneuver a couple of days earlier, and no sign of the suppressed affability I thought I might have detected in him then. “If we screw this up, we’re all dead.”

“Don’t worry.” Remington smiled at me, in a way which wasn’t quite as reassuring as he clearly hoped. “He always says that. Just so the first thing he can say to me in heaven is ‘I told you so.’”

“What makes you think either of us’ll end up there?” Rennau said.

“I’m an optimist.” Remington shrugged. “God likes those. We make Him laugh.”

I meshed in, telling myself there was nothing to worry about, it was just banter between old—well, not friends, exactly, but people who’d known and trusted each other for a very long time. Statistically, the chances of anything going wrong while shooting a rift in a well-maintained ship with a competent crew were vanishingly small: but I couldn’t shake the little voice in my head which kept insisting that, in a volume of space the size of the Human Sphere, in which millions of vessels were popping in and out of thousands of rifts every day of the year, it was virtually certain that sooner or later something, somewhere, would go catastrophically wrong. And although the really bad stuff only ever happens to other people, so far as everyone else was concerned, we were the other people. Right?

Time to be thinking about something else. I concentrated on the data blizzarding through the boards and into my ‘sphere, half expecting snide comments and simplified diagrams from Rennau to accompany it as before, but he was too intent on whatever he was doing to bother with me. So I just watched the raw data swirling around the system, and interpreted it for myself as best I could.

According to the instruments, if I was reading them right, the space around us was riven with fractures, thousands upon thousands of them, radiating out from the central star in multiple dimensions. Which, for some reason, suddenly reminded me of my kindergarten teacher, Mister Plumridge, dropping a couple of ball bearings onto a sheet of glass to demonstrate the principle, pointing out how the resulting cracks radiated in all directions, and a few of them intersected. I hadn’t given him a thought in years, but his earnest, faintly equine face, and soft, diffident voice suddenly came back to me as clearly as if we’d last spoken only a few days before. “Large masses, like stars, create stress fractures in space,” he’d said, tracing one of the largest with the tip of his index finger. “Millions of them. But luckily for us, a few of them reach far enough to join up with a crack made by another. That makes a rift a starship can travel down.” So far as I knew he’d never even left the province, let alone Avalon, but his simple explanation of the principles of interstellar travel had stayed with me ever since.

There was a lot more to it than that, of course, which I’d only really begun to appreciate when I’d moved on to school, and begun messing about with basic gravitational theory—until Mother had decreed that particular subject superfluous to the education of a gentleman, and its immediate replacement with ballroom dancing. Which hadn’t stopped me from reading up on the subject in my own time, to the point where I knew enough to seriously consider taking it as a minor at Summerhall: until she’d stepped in again, put her foot down once more, and consigned me to the tedium of estate management. Anyhow, I felt I understood enough of the theory to follow what was going on around me, even if I couldn’t have done anything useful to help.

Basically, to shoot the rift, we had to do two things. Find the right fracture, out of the millions riddling the space-time continuum around us, then increase the ship’s mass with the internal gravitics until it broke through. Both of which were a little easier than they sounded.

Systems as long-settled as the Avalonian one had got all their fractures logged and sounded generations ago; a job which began as soon as a new route was discovered to a previously unvisited system, and which usually took decades of painstaking probing with graviton beams to complete (although every now and then a surveyor would luck into a previously unsuspected link with an inhabited system, and become very rich indeed.) All we had to do to find the right one was follow the beacon the nearby customs post maintained, until our own soundings found a fracture which didn’t return an echo from a closed end.

The real trick was to increase the ship’s mass fast enough to break through at precisely the right time—and into the right fracture. Get it wrong, and you’d bounce off the dead end, sustaining massive systems and structural damage if you were lucky; or being spat back out as a cloud of debris if you weren’t. Fail to get the gravity bubble even enough around the ship’s hull and you’d tear it open before you even got into the rift. And if the internal field wasn’t strong enough to push back, you’d simply implode.

All of a sudden, looked at like that, it seemed a miracle that any ships ever got through a rift unscathed, and it didn’t seem nearly so surprising that the
Stacked Deck
’s bridge crew seemed a little nervous, despite having shot hundreds of rifts in their time. (I have to admit, even now, after too many transits to count, I still feel a little dry-mouthed every time we go through one.)

To distract myself I called up the visual feed I’d been looking at during our departure from Skyhaven, earning a brief snort of derision from Rennau, who thereby let slip that he hadn’t been ignoring me entirely. For which reaction, in all fairness, I could hardly blame him—it wasn’t as though there was actually anything to see. One of the dots in the starfield might possibly have been the customs post, or a picket ship guarding the system from a potential League invasion, but other than that, nothing but the face of infinity, which, to be honest, isn’t all that interesting after the first few minutes—or even before. I suppose I could have magnified the image, or overlaid it with the sensor returns, to try and identify the system defense assets, but in all honesty I simply couldn’t see the point.

So I returned my attention to the graviton soundings, which rippled around and through mundane three-dimensional space in a virtual display of multidimensional fractals, reminding me in passing of the patterns in the datasphere I’d found so hypnotic in Aunt Jenny’s apartment back on Skyhaven.

There. That return was different, a bottomless well into which our probing beam disappeared without an echo.

“Locked on,” Sowerby reported, working from the power plant as before, her datastream suddenly spurting with interlocking algorithms. Power readings began to climb, our mass increasing as she fed more energy into the gravitics, carefully balancing the field around our hull. She was good, I had to admit, making minute manual corrections even faster than the automated systems a lesser engineer would have relied on.

According to the soundings we were running parallel to the rift by now, at least in the three dimensions of it relating directly to the universe we normally inhabited, and I found myself tensing involuntarily. But we remained in the physical galaxy, despite the gravitational field around us now being dense enough to warp the light from the stars into a dazzling halo.

Is something wrong?
I sent to Clio, who I’d sensed, along with most of the off duty crew, meshed in on the fringes of the node, following the datastreams. She’d seemed a little off-hand with me for the hour or two following our conversation in the hold, but she was still the closest thing I’d found to a friend aboard, so she seemed the best person to ask.

There would be if we went now
, she replied, with a brief image of an amused face. A cluster of incoming datanomes from the sounding telemetry suddenly highlighted.
That’s a bow wave
.

Abruptly another ship, a gleaming metal sphere essentially identical to our own, popped into existence a couple of miles away, heading in towards Avalon at an impressive turn of speed. The
Repent at Leisure
, a Guild courier boat, according to its ident, laden with mail from Numarkut. I couldn’t suppress a shudder. If we’d entered the rift a moment earlier, there would have been no survivors from either vessel.

“Clear,” Sowerby reported, and the power levels in the gravitic system almost doubled in an instant. I felt a brief moment of disorientation, as though I’d trodden on a top step that wasn’t really there, then the gravitics abruptly shut down—save for the internal emitters, which kept us from floating out of our seats every time we stood up.

For a second or two I felt a flash of panic, wondering what had gone wrong, before realizing that the stars in the visual display had shifted a couple of degrees.

“So, you’ve shot your first rift,” Remington said. “How do you feel?”

I thought about that, but only one honest answer came to mind.

“Hungry,” I admitted, disengaging from the torrent of information still cascading through the
Stacked Deck
’s central datanode.

“Good.” Rennau glanced up from the board he was manning, his unfocussed eyes giving away the fact that he was still deeply meshed in. Nevertheless, they found me instantly. “You can do the galley run again. Tea and a sandwich.” He turned to Remington. “Anything for you, Skip?”

The skipper shrugged. “The same, I guess. How long have we got till the pirates come aboard?”