Текст книги "Well of Souls"

Автор книги: Ilsa J. Bick

Соавторы: Ilsa J. Bick
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

Chapter 15

Bat-Levi’s day hadn’t started well. She’d tumbled into bed at 0200, tumbled out at 0530, and gulped sour replicator coffee before dashing off to meet Joshua at the slip where the Lionwas docked. And now the generator was acting up, and her nose itched. Absently, Bat-Levi brought up her left hand to give her nose a good scratch and was rewarded with the solid thud of her gloved hand colliding with her helmet. She cursed, silently. If Joshua weren’t in such a hurry to get underway, she wouldn’t be in this pickle. She’d never gotten used to EVAs, even though they were required at the Academy because, dollars to doughnuts, put her in a tin can, turn on the air, and she was guaranteed to have to scratch something,every single time.

Bat-Levi blew out, her hair fluttering away from her forehead, but an errant strand glued itself to her sweaty cheek. She wiggled her mouth, trying to dislodge it. Instead, she only succeeded in getting the hair lodged under her tongue. Damn.She tried spitting out. The hair stayed put. Her own fault: She’d been in such a rush she hadn’t secured her hair before ducking into her suit. And she was practically drowning in sweat. She was always so damned hot in her suit, no matter how low she cranked the temp. She made some pfft-pfftspitting sounds.

“What’s that?” Joshua’s voice was tinny inside her helmet. “What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing.” A finger of sweat crawled down Bat-Levi’s back. Hair plastered her tongue. “I’m fine.”

“You sound grumpy.”

“Well, I am grumpy,” she said, talking around hair. She gave up trying to spit it out. “You and your stupid generator.”

“Hey, this is your baby, too.”

“Mybaby.” In vacuum and weightless—and thank goodness for that, because among the many other things she hated about EVAs was how robotic the suits made her feel—Bat-Levi grabbed a handhold and pulled herself over to the panel behind which lay the influx particle siphon of their emissions generator. “I have news for you, Jock-o. While you’ve been hatching your latest scheme, I’ve been sweating it out at the Academy. You didn’t even come to my graduation.”

“I was busy.” Bat-Levi heard the blip-bleep-blatof controls being keyed in. Joshua was at the helm of their ship, the Lion,while she went below deck, suited up, and cracked the magnetic airlock and hatch of a vacuum containment pod bolted to the ship’s belly. “Besides, I knew I’d see you sooner or later.” More bleats. “Anyway, what could be better than spending time with your baby brother, huh?”

“Baby brother, my eye. By a whole two minutes, Jock-o.”

“Hey, two minutes can be an eternity, like now.Are you going to get in behind that panel and tweak that intermix ratio, or are we going to hang out here all day, watching Starbase 32 doing a nice pirouette, way out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Coming,” said Bat-Levi. Joshua didn’t know about Devlin Connolly, and so he couldn’t know that she’d given up a week’s leave on Pacifica with Dev to work with Joshua. But Joshua was the one going full bore after the Cochrane Medal. Joshua had drawn up the specs for a self-replicating nanoparticle emissions generator. The theory was hers, using vacuum energy for fuel. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implied that even under conditions where all sources of energy—whether from matter, heat, or light—were removed, random electromagnetic oscillations remained. The most straightforward example of vacuum energy was the Casimir effect. Two metal plates, in close enough proximity, would come together because, as the plates blocked light energy from getting in between, vacuum energy pushed the plates together. Bat-Levi reasoned that if this negative energy, a limitless power source, could be harnessed into an electromagnetic bottle, it could substitute for the present-day warp drives. The energy to power the ship would come from space itself.)

Joshua made the intuitive leap his twin sister hadn’t: If energy could be removed from space, could this same process open up fissures in space itself, creating gateways to other dimensional spacetime membranes and allow the ship to jump through the openings, like traversing wormholes?

So their generator: a Casimir sink, on a much larger scale. The generator itself was housed in the vacuum pod in an attempt to keep the ambient conditions as close to the vacuum of space as possible (though not as cold). The glitch was that they still had to use present-day technology simply to move the ship around and to power the initial conversion reaction necessary to siphon away vacuum energy. Hence, the problem: The Lionwas equipped with a warp drive, and the tricky part was keeping the intermix ratio of deuterons and antideuterons stable in the face of an influx of additional vacuum energy.

Bat-Levi manipulated a set of Kelly bolts securing a metal panel over the injectors that controlled the nanoparticle plasma stream. The panel floated free, and she peered inside. The plasma was a dark cobalt blue and flowed like liquid, the way fire behaves in weightlessness.

Joshua’s voice came again. “Well?”

“Hang on,” said Bat-Levi. An array of prismatic grids, arranged in two series, deflected the plasma stream, funneling errant particles back toward their central nodal injector point. Each grid functioned independently, and she saw now that one wasn’t self-correcting quickly enough, creating uncontrolled power surges. Bat-Levi pulled a prismatic spanner from her waist and fiddled with the grid’s alignment. “How’s that?”

“Not good enough. I’m still reading a five percent flux in the energy dispersal pattern. That just won’t cut it, Darya. You know we’ve got to maintain an even pattern of energy dispersion, or else we’ll rip out chunks of subspace.”

“Heck.” Bat-Levi recalibrated her spanner and tried again. “Jock-o, have you ever considered giving this a little more time? The last simulator run, the generator did that little runaway surge, and this grid is just not cutting it.”

“Yeah, but only for three-point-four-seven seconds.”

“Yeah,and plenty long enough for our port nacelle to linearly accelerate twice as fast as the one to starboard.”

“And I got it back under control. I know; I’m hearing you.”

“And?” Bat-Levi paused, a Kelly bolt between her fingers.

“AndI don’t want to wait. Darya, you’re shipping out on the Wheedonin two weeks. We won’t get another chance, not unless you stay put.”

Bat-Levi shook her head then realized Joshua couldn’t see her. “Sorry, Jock-o, I’m not putting off my vacation, even for you.”

“You have something better to do?”

Yes.Bat-Levi felt a twinge of guilt. “Let’s just say that I have other plans. Look,” she talked at the canopy over the pod, a habit she noticed all people in suits had: talking up into thin air, “you can do this without me, Jock-o. We’ll play around with the ship today, but if it’s not optimal, then you put it off. Run the test flight when she reads steady across the board.”

“No. You’re part of this, Darya. I want you with me.”

Bat-Levi decided not to argue. She checked the ratio of the influx of nanoparticles across the series of prismatic grids. The ratio fluctuated—enough so that Bat-Levi knew she’d have to make manual adjustments along the way. Not good. Maybe she should play with this longer, and to hell with Joshua’s impatience. But she was cooking in this damn suit, and she knew she couldn’t make the thing perfect.

Working as quickly as her gloved fingers allowed, Bat-Levi bolted the panel back into place. Then she clambered into a small airlock, waited for the lock to repressurize, and scrambled out of the vacuum pod. Battening down the magnetic hatch located amidships, she keyed in her coded combination, waited for the iris to constrict and seal. Then she popped her top. There was an audible hiss, then the relatively cool, dry air of the shuttle hit her face, and she blew out a great breath of relief. Then she pulled the hair out of her mouth and gave her nose a good scratch.

She spared a peak at the generator through a portal adjacent to the magnetically sealed hatch. All the generator’s indicators were green; the flow of nanoparticles appeared stable.

After she peeled out of her suit and stowed it next to Joshua’s, she pattered up the gangway amidships to the upper deck. Joshua’s back hunched over the shuttle’s main control console. Bat-Levi squeezed her way forward to an auxiliary monitoring station. The Lionwas a modified four-passenger shuttle, twelve meters stem to stern and six meters at its beam. With all that extra equipment crammed onto the main deck, the fit was tight.

Joshua looked over as she dropped into her seat. “Ask you something?”

Bat-Levi brought the readings on the nanoparticle emissions generator on-line. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the stability of the particle stream. That damn burp…She fiddled with an injector aperture and changed the collision angle by a tenth of a nanometer. “Fire away. What’s on your mind?”

“You.”

Bat-Levi didn’t look up from her readings. By God, this generator was fickle. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You met someone.” Not a question.

That got her attention. She looked up and swiveled around to face him. For some reason, she felt a wave of embarrassment, as if her twin brother had caught her in a lie. She and Joshua were more than two peas in a pod; her father joked that they were probably as close to being telepaths as nontelepaths got. Yet, close as they were, she hadn’t told Joshua about Devlin. She wasn’t sure why. Privacy, maybe: Her love life was none of her brother’s concern. But the truth was that she felt, vaguely, like she was betraying Joshua.

Bat-Levi looked into the face she knew almost better than her own. “Yes.”

Joshua gave a contemplative nod. “I thought so. You haven’t been all here, you know? You’ve been a million kilometers away ever since you showed up two days ago.”

Bat-Levi felt heat in her cheeks. “I hadn’t imagined it was that noticeable.”

“I know you, kiddo. So what’s his name?”

“Devlin Connolly.” Just saying the name caused a little tingle of excitement—and longing—to course through her. “Same year as me. He’s shipping out on the Kallman.We’d planned to take a week together before then.”

“I figured. There’s something,” Joshua stirred the air between them with one hand, “in the middle.”

“I was planning on telling you.”

“Darya,” said Joshua, his face serious. His hair was even darker than hers and very curly. He finger-combed a handful back from his high, smooth forehead. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

“Well, we don’t usually keep secrets, and…”

Joshua eyed her askance. “Speak for yourself. There are some pretty nice women I met at the Cochrane.”

“Really?” Bat-Levi’s curiosity was piqued. She wondered what her parents, dynamic propulsions experts on the Cochrane’s faculty, thought about Joshua’s paramours. “What did Mom and Dad…?”

“I don’t share everything. So, do you love him?”

“I think so.” Bat-Levi nodded, relieved to tell someone. “Yes.”

Joshua reached over and covered her right hand with his left. “It’s okay, Darya. Really. It’s good you met someone.”

“Yeah?” Bat-Levi felt like crying. “You’ll probably hate him.”

“Probably. Actually, it’s more likely Mom will. You know what she thinks about Starfleet…” Joshua caught himself, gave a rueful grin. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Bat-Levi swiped the wet from her eyes. “And it’s not as if there aren’t problems. You know, being posted to different ships, trying to coordinate leaves.” An Academy truism: Most relationships didn’t survive longer than the first six months after graduation. Bat-Levi wondered if other couples believed they would be the exceptions. She knew that she and Devlin did.

“I can imagine.” Joshua gave her fingers a squeeze. “Well, we pull this off, not only won’t Mom and Dad have anythingto complain about, we’ll get the Cochrane, and you’llhave to beat the offers down with a stick.”

“We’ll see,” said Bat-Levi. “Don’t jinx it.”

“Fair enough.” He squeezed her hand one final time. “Time to put on a show for the folks on 32, then let you catch up with your boyfriend.”

“Some show.” Bat-Levi gave a shaky laugh. She waved her hand in the general direction of Starbase 32. Squares of yellow light studded the windows of the blue and gray station, and the shape always reminded her of a slowly spinning child’s top. Starbase 32 hung, by itself, on the fringes of the Federation. The nearest inhabited planet was thirty light-years away. “This region of space is just about as deserted as you can get.”

Joshua pulled up their preflight checklist. “Well, that way, if the generator fails, we won’t take out so many planets at the same time now, will we?”

“That’s not funny, Jock-o.” Because if we don’t do this right, half the ship gets sucked into an interphasic whirlpool.Bat-Levi’s gaze strayed back to the prismatic grid flow indicator on her console. The flow had stabilized, and there were no further indications of trouble. Still, she wished Joshua would run just a few more simulations. That damn flow neverhas settled down.She checked the power couplings on their nacelles and, in an afterthought, the explosive bolts to the nacelles. Just in case.

She stole a peek at her younger brother and saw, with a sudden bittersweet pang, how much more grown-up he seemed. Funny, how she’d left for the Academy and he’d been just a boy. Now they were both breaking out, finding their way in the universe—and probably away from each other.

Her thoughts floated to Devlin Connolly, only this time she felt a little sad. Like she was acknowledging the death of something. Later, she would know: a prophetic thought.

The generator had been online for a half hour into the test flight when Bat-Levi said, “I don’t like the looks of this.”

“Mmmm?”

“The transdimensional rift off the port quarter doesn’t seem stable. Here,” she funneled the information to his control display. “Take a look.”

Her auxiliary console was to Joshua’s left and behind, so she couldn’t get a good look at his face as he bent over the readings. “That doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “The variance in rift integrity isn’t even statistically significant. The simulation proved a tiny variance isn’t important.”

But just how tiny is tiny?“Look, if this were an antimatterinjector, you wouldn’t tolerate a variance of even a…no, don’t shake your head at me, Joshua. Listen, no machine is perfect, and that includes our generator. Now, this thing is taking more vacuum energy from port than starboard. We both know that the dimensional rifts mustbe bilateral and equal. Otherwise, we’ll create an imbalance in the ambient vacuum energy and…”

“And create an energy sink that will theoretically collapse adjacent dimensional branes in a cascade,” said Joshua, his tone a caricature of a displeased schoolteacher, “thereby causing an imbalance in linear acceleration over different areas of the ship. Darya, I designed the simulations, remember?”

“I’m just saying.”

“I hear you.” Turning aside, Joshua shook his head. “Honestly, you’re in Starfleet? Didn’t one of your heroes once say that risk was your business?”

“James Kirk. He was right. He took risks. But he wasn’t stupid.”

“Neither am I.” Joshua’s hands moved over his controls. “I’m going to open up a jump-point. Hang on.”

Facing forward and staring out at the winking docking lights of Starbase 32, Bat-Levi braced herself. What would crossing the threshold of a jump-point feel like? Bat-Levi didn’t know. She’d never been through an actual wormhole, though they’d done simulator runs of gravimetric distortions to warp bubbles caused by an intermix imbalance. Then the effect had been as violent as it was spectacular: a sensation of tripping and the ship lurching then careening through space, out of control. Now she expected the same. Maybe something just as violent, like being thrown from her seat, or a jolt, a quiver running through the ship and shivering up her legs. Something.

Only there was nothing. One moment, she was staring at the gray and blue top that was Starbase 32. The next, she wasn’t.

Space crinkled. Not a fold exactly, but the stars suddenly puckered into a cone. There was not the usual smearing of stars into rainbows that she associated with warp drive. The stars simply glimmered, winked. Flashed off. She felt a slight jerk, but the feeling was more internal than external, as if her body had pushed through a pane of clear, semi-liquid gelatin. And then Starbase 32 was gone. So were the stars.

“Joshua?” Bat-Levi had to say his name twice because her throat was so dry. “Where?”

Her brother’s body was still as death. “We’re inside.”

“Inside,” she said the word as if she didn’t understand it. This hadn’t been on the simulations. “You mean, inside a rift?”

Joshua pulled his face around, his eyes bright with excitement. “We’re inside a jump tunnel.”

My God.“Are we moving?”

“The computer says so. How’s our influx?”

“Vacuum energy influx is constant,” said Bat-Levi, grateful for something to do. “So is our jump bubble. But where are we…?”

“Going? Haven’t a clue. I programmed in a five second jump, so we ought to be coming out soon.”

“But the stars,” Bat-Levi began, and then her eyes widened. “Joshua.”

Joshua’s head snapped forward. The stars were back. Starbase 32 wasn’t.

Bat-Levi released a breath she hadn’t known she held. “Where are we?”

“Computer says…” Jason’s fingers scurried over his console. “Computer says that we’re twelve-point-five-seven parsecs distant from our previous position.”

“Oh, my God,” said Bat-Levi. Her eyes darted to her instruments. The generator flux was reading steady, the dimensional rift bubble over the ship stable. “That was it?”

Joshua was laughing now. “You were expecting something else?”

“Well, yes,”she said, but she was smiling. “You did it, Jock-o.”

“Yeah,” said Joshua, finger-combing his hair again and again, “yeah. We did.” He let out a sudden whoop. “By God, Darya! By God!”

They grinned at one another like maniacs for a full thirty seconds before Bat-Levi said, “Hey, can you get us back?”

“Hey,” said Joshua, still smiling as he plotted their return and re-initiated, “after that, a piece of cake. A piece of…”

Suddenly, the ship lurched, as if some huge foot had kicked them from behind. Bat-Levi slammed forward, her hand shooting out to keep her face from smacking into her console. Her gaze raked over her controls. “Joshua, the pod’s magnetic containment field…”

“It’s breaking down. I see it.” Joshua’s fingers flew over his command console. “Hang on, hang on. Shutting down.”

Damn, I didn’t check the field; I didn’t double-check it!Bat-Levi felt another lurch. Heard a low groan of metal and then the computer chattering a warning about hull structural integrity. “I read pockets of subspace opening up, Joshua! Off the port quarter, same place I picked up that instability before! And now there’s a second pocket, off the starboard bow!”

“We’re not shutting down. I’m taking the computer off-line, switching to manual…negative. Generator’s still on-line. Damn it, the intake’s frozen!”

“Now abeam to starboard, another pocket,” said Bat-Levi, her voice shrill.

A split-second later, the computer chimed in. “Warning: subspace variance at point-seven…”

“Shut up!” Bat-Levi jabbed the audio off. “Joshua, that pocket’s increasing in size exponentially! And there are two more, one off the starboard quarter, one dead astern!”

“I see them, I see them. It’s an energy surge in the particle stream, siphoning off vacuum energy at unequal rates. That means adjacent branes are collapsing, because of electromagnetic pressure on the opposite side of the energy sink. Darya,” Joshua spared her a quick glance, “are you sureyou adjusted those grids?”

“Yes, yes, of course, I’m sure!” She’d told him, she’d toldhim. “I did the best I could. I told you, they weren’t stable, and I’ve been twiddling with them…”

She broke off. Get a hold of yourself.She had to think. They didn’t have much time. The ship yawed drunkenly, and her seat spun around, almost throwing her to the deck. She heard a long, low grinding sound and knew that stress on the hull was increasing.

Think.Bat-Levi’s brain clicked into overdrive. As more pockets of subspace opened around the ship, the ship itself would continue to linearly accelerate, but at different rates and in different directions. Just like a starship that had lost one or both of its nacelles: Parts of the ship would travel at different rates, with pieces of the ship slipping past others, or going off in entirely new directions.

If they couldn’t shut down the generator, they would break apart.

On a starship, in a runaway, there was only one option. Jettison the core and worry about how you got home later.

The Lionshuddered. Spun to port. An alarm sounded; their inertial dampers were failing.

“Joshua, we have to blow the pod,” she said urgently, trying not to think what a sudden explosive influx of energy would do to the surrounding spacetime. “We haveto!”

“Darya, I know, I know, but…”

The blood iced in her veins as she read his look. “Oh, no.” Quickly, she scanned her readouts. “Oh, no, no, no, no…”

“The explosive bolts are frozen,” said Joshua. His face was white as salt. “No way to blow them automatically.”

The ship rocked as if slapped by a giant hand. Bat-Levi thought fast. There were pockets of subspace opening all around them, which meant that the generator was still siphoning vacuum energy. If she could just get a stable jump-point, re-initialize the computer and have it reverse course and get back, or closerto Starbase 32, they could abandon ship.

Her fingers were a blur over her console. “I’m re-routing auxiliary power to the generator.”

“Darya, no! You’re going to increase…”

“Don’t you see? It’s the only way,” she said, not bothering to turn around. She punched in their return coordinates. “If I just reopen a jump point where we had before…”

There was high metallic scream. A sensation of something ripping apart, like a piece of cloth pulled in opposite directions at its weakest point. “There goes the hull, there goes the hull!” Joshua shouted.

“Hang on, hang on!” Bat-Levi grabbed her console with both hands. “Jump point opening… now!”

This time, she saw it: a jagged hole in space that dilated, gaped like a huge mouth…and then sucked them in.

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She tried taking a breath and couldn’t. Her chest felt as if she were flattening, elongating; her heart slowing, her limbs spooling out like long threads…

Passing through a dimensional shift.Her brain was sluggish, ticking through the problem like the old gears of a grandfather’s clock. The ship must be caught in different dimensions; that was why her body felt like putty, and was this what it felt like to exist in a two-dimensional plane…?

And then it was as if her mind, held in place by some invisible tether, snapped back into her body. She was aware that her lungs burned, and she inhaled a lungful of air and let it out in a moan.

The ship groaned with her. In an instant, she knew. The generator was still engaged. A shrill alarm undulated through the shuttle, and the emergency lights had turned burnt amber, dying her skin muddy orange. They were functioning on auxiliary power only, but the ship was still bucking and heaving. She realized then that she was sprawled on the deck, and her chin ached, and when she brought her hand, her fingers came away red with her blood.

“Joshua,” she choked, spat out a gob of blood-tinged saliva. Her mouth tasted like warm salt. She propped herself up on her arms. “Joshua?”

He wasn’t in his pilot’s chair. Bat-Levi clawed her way over to the command console and hauled herself upright.

Starbase 32 was there, dead ahead.

She brought her fist down on the companel. “Starbase 32, Starbase 32, request emergency beam-out! I repeat, request emergency beam-out! We have a runaway! Starbase 32, do you copy?”

There was a sizzle of static, a sputter, and then Bat-Levi caught fragments of words: …n’t…good lock…gravi…distor…evacuate…Then a wash of interference.

Starbase 32 couldn’t get a lock. The shuttle staggered, and Bat-Levi grabbed hold of the command console to keep from hurtling to the deck. They had to get out, she and Joshua had to evacuate, they had to get out!

Bat-Levi spun on her heel. “Joshua, we have to go, now!Josh…!”

Her voice died in her throat. The hatch to below-decks was open.

No!No! He’s trying to take the generator offline…

“But there’s no time,” she whispered, and then she was shouting again, to no one, “there’s no time, no time…!

Somehow she stumbled below deck. Her eyes flicked to the rack where they stowed their environmental suits. Her stomach bottomed out. Joshua’s was missing.

He’s in the pod.Bat-Levi’s mind raced. He’s in thepod. She had to stop him. She’d drag him out by force; she’d knock him unconscious, if she had to, but she had to stop him before the ship broke apart. Grabbing her own suit, Bat-Levi dashed to the magnetically sealed hatch that led to the pod. Through the portal alongside, she could see Joshua’s suited figured hovering over the generator.

“Joshua!” she screamed, bringing her fist down on the portal, even though she knew the sound wouldn’t carry in vacuum. Maybe the movement would get his attention. “Joshua, stop!”

Joshua didn’t look up. Quickly, she pulled on her suit. Kneeling, with her helmet tucked under her left arm, she keyed in her combination to open the magnetic lock.

But nothing happened. She punched in the code again. Her eye caught movement, and she watched as Joshua glided away from the generator and then Bat-Levi understood. They hadn’t been able to blow the pod free because the explosive bolts had frozen. So Joshua was arming them himself. Joshua was going to blow the pod clear… from the inside.

“No, no!”Bat-Levi screamed. She brought her fists down again and again, hammering on the portal. “Joshua, no, stop, stop!”

Whether it was the vibration, or some premonition, Joshua looked up. She saw the horror on his face through his faceplate, and then he waved his hand the way a person does when he wants you to go away, and she saw his mouth moving, the words he was shouting: No, no, Darya, go back, get out, getaway!

“Damnyou!” Bat-Levi clawed her way to a computer com. She punched the audio to life, and the computer, silent for so long, urped, “…ull breach imminent in twenty-five-point-nine seconds. Recommend immediate emergency evacua….”

“Computer!” Bat-Levi shouted. “Magnetic seal to vacuum pod, emergency override!”

“Emergency override command acknowledged. Magnetic hatch disengaged.”

At her feet, the hatch began to dilate. Bat-Levi jumped down into the airlock, her fingers flying over the controls. As she jammed her helmet over her head and toggled the seals shut, she heard two things. One was that maddeningly calm voice of the computer telling her that the explosive bolts to the vacuum pod were engaged, and they had three seconds to detonation.

The other was her brother’s anguished scream: “No, Darya, no!”

And then the bolts ignited. And blew.

Bat-Levi was awareof the light more than she actually sawit: a white-hot flare that seared her retinas. Then she was aware of her body impacting something solid, and her brain exploded with pain. There was a sensation of being flung back and of something—the ship, or maybe it was the pod—blowing free, disintegrating into a halo of debris. Bat-Levi was standing, and then, suddenly, she wasn’t standing on anything anymore, because the airlock was gone and she was standing on empty space and the stars spread like diamonds beneath her feet and then the strange shape of Starbase 32, upended like a child’s top, wheeled in her vision.

And then she saw nothing. Felt nothing. Because there was nothing left.