Time Past (23 page)

The surface had prickled like an electric shock, but that was not what surprised me; with the physical contact came another kind of touch. I’d felt something travel up my arm, dissipate, then stroke the inside of my head. Not an invasive voice like the Seouras or the dreamlike state of Henoit’s presence. It was more a question:

Hello? Are you ready?

“What the...” Murdoch swore as the floor bucked upward and deposited us in a huddle against the wall where the control panel pulsed.

“I think it’s activated.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder. I pushed him off me and found that the floor was now a wall and the hatch had disappeared. The band of indentations had flattened down and out from the wall to form an obvious consolelike surface at a little less than waist height.

We couldn’t hear anything from outside; the hum settled into an uneven murmur that reminded me of a cat’s purring. The surface beneath us vibrated finely.

Murdoch stood up gingerly and patted the wall. “Where’s the hatch?”

We both sprawled headlong as the cabin lurched again.

“What the hell is this thing?” He held my elbow as I got to my knees in front of the “console.”

My handprint now glowed by my face. “Put your hand here.”

“Here?” The glow disappeared under his wide palm.

“Do you feel anything?”

“Sort of a buzz. Look, we don’t have time to play...Oh.” He’d realized the incongruity of a human handprint on an Invidi ship.

“It appeared when I touched the console a second ago.” Now that I looked properly, the pattern of indentations on the console seemed familiar. The rhythm of lights was regular, small blue ones intermingled with larger orange flashes. I’d seen flashes like that on a console somewhere, but not recently. It wasn’t a good sign, I seemed to remember.

“Stabilize internal inertial compensation,” I said loudly. Nothing changed.

“No audio,” said Murdoch. “Aren’t these ships supposed to be customized to the pilots?”

“They are in our time, but these are a century older. We wouldn’t get inside an Invidi ship in our time, because they only open to the owner. Maybe Invidi cloning techniques aren’t so advanced at this stage.”

“Is that what they do?” Murdoch looked faintly ill. “I thought they just put character markers in the ship’s interface.”

I shook my head. “As far as I know, they start with the same basic genetic material as themselves. You know, like we’re closer genetically to an Earth tree than we are to any alien humanoid.”

I put my hand on the palm print and shut my eyes, resisting the urge to jerk it away from the initial shock and tingle. Think nice thoughts. Hello, I’m here and I want to go home.

Nothing happened, and I wondered if the first time had been a mistake.

“When you said let’s steal an Invidi ship and go home, I did assume you’d been inside one before,” said Murdoch. “You must have found out something in all those years of tinkering. Didn’t
Calypso
give you a hint?”

The indentations on the panel re-formed themselves in my mind and I saw that the raised parts between them were what mattered. A seemingly random scattering of triangles. I traced them with my fingers. The orange flashes grew stronger and came closer together. Thruster control, I thought. We want to go up now.

“They’re probably surrounding us,” said Murdoch.

A door opened in my mind and an avalanche of sensations and information in unfamiliar forms swept over me irresistibly and I felt myself drowning but couldn’t do anything to stop it…

Then I was gasping and coughing on the floor of the cabin. Murdoch sat back on his heels, chest heaving. He grabbed my wrist and held his thumb over the pulse.

“This might be... more difficult than... I thought,” I panted, still dazed from an overload of the incredible. For a moment I’d felt... I didn’t know what I’d felt. “What’s wrong with you?”

He stared. “I just gave you mouth to mouth. You choked and stopped breathing for Chrissakes.”

“Oh.” My lips did feel numb. “Thank you.”

I tried to gather my thoughts, but normal associations wouldn’t come. Everything that was me, Halley, floated somewhere just out of reach, and the only thing grounding me was my attachment to the ship. “It’s... some kind of mental link. Helps us use it.” I retrieved my wrist from his grip and got shakily to my knees.

“Bloody hell.” Murdoch leaned back and rubbed his face in despair. “We haven’t got time for this. The army’ll be swarming all over the place out there.”

“I don’t know...” I stood up carefully—for a moment I thought we’d begun to lose gravity, but then realized I was tilting sideways as I stood. The triangular pattern and the lights, where had I seen them before? I’d asked the ship for thruster control.

“We might have left the ground. Maybe the atmosphere, too.”

“What?” He scrambled to his feet and stared at the panel with me. “How do you know?”

“A feeling. When I was, er, connected. And I also have the feeling this is Serat’s ship.”

“Shit.” He stared at nothing for a moment, then began to prowl around the space, touching the walls and snatching his hands away as if worried by what he might set off. “I wish we had a viewscreen.”

“Invidi mightn’t use viewscreens. Plenty of species aren’t as visual as we are.” I stroked the edges of the more obvious triangles. It seemed to be the right thing to do, but I couldn’t think why.
Edges give you the basic controls,
said a voice inside me,
don’t you remember?

Part of the panel glowed in a new pattern. It was like looking at the bones and veins in your own hand held up to a strong light. Little azure pulses of synaptic energy zipped past.

Viewscreen, viewscreen...
Up there, on the right-hand side. Leave your hand on the raised section, it will sense you’re there.
The voice was that of Jon Heggit, my second in command when I’d been head of the Jocasta reconstruction project. I could hear his husky, spooky voice as he leaned over my shoulder and told me what he’d found in one of the completed center rooms. A Tor control panel. One that worked.

We’ve worked out a couple hundred basic interface commands. Amazing stuff. It learns so quickly what we want.
His enthusiasm led him to ignore one of the precautions we’d evolved for dealing with Tor systems—always assume there was a booby trap. And he died.

“Did you do that?” Murdoch stared at an oblong window filled with stars. “You were right, we did leave the atmosphere. Looks like we’ve left orbit, too.” He stomped on the deck. “Gravity field is on.” When I didn’t reply, “Something wrong?”

“Bill, this isn’t an Invidi ship.”

“Whaddaya mean, it’s not an Invidi ship? You said it’s Serat’s ship... No sign of them following us, is there?”

I touched another couple of triangles, cautiously now. “I don’t think so.”

“What kind of ship is it, then?”

“It looks like a Tor console.”

“Must be a mistake,” he said flatly. “The Invidi were at war with the Tor for years. That’s how Earth got Jocasta, when the Tor lost.”

“I know that. But I worked on the early stages of Jo-casta, remember? I know what Tor interfaces looked like. And they looked pretty much like this. This,”—I waved my hand over the console in front of us—“responds like a Tor interface would. That’s how I got your viewscreen.”

“What about this mental link thing, then?” He frowned. “Nobody ever mentioned that about Tor systems.”

“No. But sometimes we wondered. Sometimes when we tried to outsmart a trap, it would seem like the system knew what we were thinking. We lost so many people in those first months.”

He stared at me for a moment, then ran his hand over his head helplessly. “Last time we were in a Tor ship, it was holding the Seouras hostage and tried to kill us both.”

“That was different.”

“You hope.”

“It’s An Serat’s ship, Bill, I can feel it. So maybe he’s modified Tor technology for some reason. Maybe this is a special model.”

“Then he’s really going to be pissed off to have to wait for a century to get it back. That is where you’re heading, isn’t it?” he added. “To the jump point?”

“Yes, but I can’t give such specific directions through this console. And I don’t know how to activate the jump drive. Flatspace engines are no problem—I think. But to find the drive connection is another matter. I have to try the link again.”

He swallowed. “Why don’t I give it a try?”

“You did, nothing happened...” The panel tingled under my fingers. Something touched the edges of my mind. Inquisitive, interested.

Murdoch closed his hand over mine, lifting it above the panel.

“Wait. What am I supposed to do if you...” His fingers traced a circle on the inside of my wrist. “Dying’s not good for you.”

He had a point. A sore band was still tight around my chest and tiny bright dots danced around the cabin when I moved my head too fast.

“Watch me, then. See if we can talk while I’m doing it. If it looks like it’s too much, break the link.”

He frowned with frustration but we had no other choice; we had to know how to tell the ship where to go. And quickly, too, before the Invidi either followed us or asked their mothership to intercept us.

Besides, I’d been waiting to get inside an Invidi ship since my first days in the Engineering Corps, more than half my life. And this was as far inside an Invidi ship as anyone could possibly get. At least, a semi-Invidi ship.

I readied my hand over the panel.

Murdoch nodded.

This time no flood of information overwhelmed me, merely a slow trickle of images and concepts. I was conscious of Murdoch’s presence through a thick haze. He was speaking and his hand shook my shoulder. I felt the movement, but not his touch.

“... hear me?”

My mouth felt clumsy and far away. “I can hear you.”

“Where are we?”

The moment I heard his words I knew the answer.

“We’re waiting. Between where we were and where we want to go.” Nothing as flat as coordinates; I “knew” our exact position in the solar system right down to the chemical composition of the dust outside the ship and the tingle of radiation against its skin.

Murdoch’s voice an insistent buzz. “Can we get home?”

Home. Home was Jocasta. The time—after Murdoch left.

The ship understood immediately. It was as easy as thinking where we wanted to go.

Eighteen

M
aybe not that easy.

It hurt. What began as an ache behind my eyes grew and grew until I had to talk to keep concentrating. Half the time talking to myself, or the ship, the rest of the time to Murdoch. The ship didn’t mind, but Murdoch got edgier and edgier.

“It feels like we’ve been in here about an hour.” He fiddled nervously with the viewscreen controls and brought up a succession of images from outside the ship. Four views showed only dark space broken by a few points of light. Another was filled with bright gases. “I hope this thing has decent radiation shielding.”

“It must. The Invidi have been in space long enough to think of something as elementary as that.” I rubbed my neck where the Seouras implant felt tight. It felt like the pain was centered there.

“I meant, shouldn’t we be at the jump point soon? Judging from what I can see of our position.”

I nodded and pointed at the navigational display on the surface of the console where it curved up to meet the wall. At least, I hoped it was a navigational display.

“We’re nearly there.” My head throbbed as I leaned over to check on one of the lights.

“At the jump point?” He peered into the display, too. “That’s the jump point? The yellow curly thing?”

“I think so. Not quite 3-D, is it?”

He blinked. “3-D for differently structured eyes. If the Invidi have eyes. Do they?”

“Depends on which expert you ask...” I rubbed the implant again. “Ow.”

“What?”

“The blasted thing’s giving me a headache.”

“It’s probably not used to humans.”

“I bet it isn’t.”

“You’re probably giving it a bigger headache.”

“Thanks a lot.”

He rubbed the viewscreen controls but the views didn’t change. “Can’t we see the point on the viewscreen?”

“It won’t show unless we’re right on top of it,” I said.

“But in EarthFleet ships they show you this kind of glowing ball as the ship approaches a point.” He curled his fingertips together.

“They do?” I would have been more interested if my head didn’t hurt so much. “I was never on an EarthFleet ship when we jumped.” EarthFleet ships went through jumps docked to ConFleet ships. I’d always been in engine rooms of ConFleet ships. “They must show you a holo or something. All we really see is...”

I checked our position, then leaned up to point at one of the screens. “You won’t see anything until the drive kicks in. But it’ll be about here.”

Change now, I said mentally to the ship. The enabling connection—the “gate”—should open to the jump drive engines, if I’d understood the ship. Normally, jump-capable ships had flatspace thrusters of a particular configuration that contained this connection. In our time, the gate could be installed only by Central-registered stations and activated only by registered individuals, who were members of the Four. I just hoped this had not been the case in the time An Serat built this ship.

Something’s wrong. We should be seeing a dot like a star rush toward us.

“Aren’t we nearly at the coordinates?” said Murdoch, staring at the navigational display.

“Nearly,” I said. We’re there and nothing’s happening. I pushed my hand down onto the console. The edges of the controls dug into my fingers as I tried to find order in the endless jumble of images and commands that overflowed my mind.

Jump drive. We need it now if we’re to go back to Jo-casta. Jocasta in 2122, at the other “end” of the jump point. Please activate the jump drive now.

Without looking at the display I knew we’d gone too far. I felt myself slump in disappointment, at the same time as Murdoch’s exclamation jerked me back.

“There it is!” He grinned at me, his finger pointing at a yellow dot that grew brighter, glowing and growing until it took up half the screen. The ship must have enabled the drive at the last second.