Of course, I do hope that after the Unworthy Pupils take his DNA, they’ll free him before leaving the Milky Way, hurting only his ego. And I hope he’ll forgive us someday for leaving him behind. Me, Amaya, all of us.
And if not, screw him! He deserved it, the bastard.
So we’re finally making the leap—and once more I realize how right people are to say you should always stay awake during a hyperjump. It seems that the hyperengine, or rather the Qhigarian hive mind, can do serious side damage to the sleeping psyche among sentient species.
Though it’s not like I could help falling asleep after all that commotion, what with Gisela taking more than an hour to find a workable series of hyperjumps to get us where we wanted to go.
It really isn’t her fault; with nearly 90 percent of these troublemaking Unworthy Pupils gathered at a single spot in the galaxy, it’s incredibly difficult to make hyperspace leaps (or rather, teleportations). And they’re harder to bear, too. Well, pretty soon we’ll miss them, I bet. At least the Qhigarians were polite enough to transport us here, as a kind of farewell gift. Wherever here is…
Is this the last hyperjump? Could we already be at Lambda Trianguli?
I glance at the clock in the greenhouse. An hour and twenty-two minutes… It’s been nearly two hours since we left the conglomeration of Qhigarian worldships, and we’ve only managed to complete three jumps. There were 20,181 ships when we left; I don’t think we have much time to continue our search. Unless the Alien Drifters were just lying to us again about how hyperjumping really works.
Qhigarian assholes. Smart of them to take off. I almost feel like hunting them down all over the Metagalaxy, once we get the extragalactic hyperengine. And if we ever get our hands on them…
Even after hearing their confession myself, it’s hard to believe they had everybody fooled for so many thousands of years. Why would they lie like that? Were they afraid of being enslaved if they admitted that their telepathic colonial supermind was the real hyperengine, and that the Taraplin Wise Creators never existed? Were they really all one species? Did they come from a planet like everyone else, and were they jealously guarding the secret? Or did they evolve on their ships, or perhaps come from another galaxy? If they’re telepathic, why are they so obsessed with languages?
So many questions, and maybe we’ll never learn any of the answers. Though I have a feeling that the paths of those Unworthy Pupils and humanity will cross again someday. The cosmos is big, but not infinite.
Or at least let me believe it isn’t. The human mind can’t handle infinity. At least, not mine, not now.
Right now, of course, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
I run to the sensor room and arrive, panting, in time to hear Amaya say, “… Trianguli. Red dwarf, six planets, asteroid belt. The hypergraph shows only one ship entering—none leaving. No need to be exact; we’re lucky the hypergraph still works at all,” she reports, unfazed. “But there’s also a strange energy signal”—now her voice shakes, as if she’s afraid we’ve been fooled again. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I think…” We all tense up around her. “Let’s have a look through the gammatelescope. Ah. Good news: there’s an identity beacon from one of our own on the scanner. The entering ship is human.”
“Shit,” Captain Berenguer enunciates clearly. Always so polite.
So the other guys the Qhigarians sold the information to were human. And obviously they beat us here. Well, Aliens would have been worse. Is it the Germans? The Japanese?
“The ship is ours,” Amaya confirms, greatly relieved, after checking the signal. “From Nu Barsa, I mean. The Miquel Servet.”
Just my luck. Did it have to be the hyperjump cruiser that my Nerys serves on as condomnaut?
I look at Captain Berenguer, who furrows his brow in thought. This is getting tricky. The good thing is, our competition is a human ship, and Catalan, too. The bad thing, it’s a whole cruiser, not a mere corvette or even a frigate like the Gaudí.
If things escalate to an armed confrontation (hopefully not), we obviously won’t stand a chance against the Servet and its capacity of forty-eight thousand tons. Even though it’s one of the oldest ships in the Nu Barsa fleet, as a hyperjump cruiser it’ll have thirty to forty crew members and, worse, much more powerful, longer-range weapons than our light frigate does.
And if the extragalactics evolved in an aquatic environment, I can’t think of anyone better than Nerys to make Contact with them.
“Our guys are in orbit around the second planet in the system, which has roughly the same dimensions as Earth… and two satellites, smaller than the moon,” Amaya continues, interpreting the data from her instruments. “It has an oxygen atmosphere, water vapor clouds, and… ” She gulps. “There’s another object in the same orbit, a few dozen kilometers away. It isn’t sending out any identification beacons. I can’t tell if it’s a ship or a natural formation. I’m going to visual.”
The hologram that pops up in front of us clearly shows the profile—small, because of the distance—of the Servet, an ungainly T shape. A hyperjump cruiser doesn’t need to have an aerodynamic hull. It can carry enough auxiliary vehicles on board that it’ll never have to risk entry into any planet’s atmosphere.
But we aren’t looking at the large Catalan ship; we’ve seen it before. We only have eyes for what’s in the foreground: a sort of whitish cloud, fluctuating and vague, that makes spots dance before your eyes whenever you try to focus on it.
It definitely can’t be a natural formation. A cloud moving through space? But it doesn’t look like any ship we’ve ever seen, either.
We stand there, stunned, jaws dropped, paralyzed, for a very long couple of seconds.
And then we start jumping around, shouting and whistling. We hug each other. Amaya kisses me on the mouth. Gisela kisses Captain Berenguer. Pau and Rómulo hug as if to break each other’s ribs. Nuria recites what I think is an Our Father in Catalan. Manu recites something that sounds like poetry, also in Catalan.
For sure. We found the extragalactics!
Who cares if we got here second, if we’re in the right place at the right time? The guys in front don’t have too big a lead if the guys in back run fast and catch up, as we used to say in Rubble City. Maybe the Servet got here first, but if the extragalactics don’t have an aquatic environment we might still have a shot. And if not, better a small share of glory than none at all, right?
“What are the dimensions of that… thing?” Captain Berenguer asks, trying to sound indifferent.
“Dimensions, right. Just a sec.” Equally excited, Amaya stops, checks her magic sensors, then clicks her tongue with incredulity. “They vary: from two to four kilometers long. Form isn’t stable, either; it shifts like an amoeba. Its energy emissions are beyond strange. And the weirdest thing is, according to the gravimeter, its mass and density vary, and some very odd perturbations are showing up on the hypergraph. Which, by the way, I notice is losing power so fast, I doubt it will keep working for more than another few minutes.”
“Pure energy? Bioship?” the captain asks, thinking that brevity will hide his excitement.
Amaya, always so certain, again hesitates. “I’m not sure. It’s pretty much transparent to my sensors. I’d bet it’s made of matter, but these cyclical energy variations… I’d say they’re metabolic, judging by the biometer readings. It might be… breathing.”
“Breathing, in space? A living being? That size?” I almost choke, thinking of the Continentines, whole cubic kilometers of cytoplasm. But even they needed a ship in order to venture into deep space. And they couldn’t breathe in the interplanetary vacuum.