“Earplugs,” Krieger told him, “to nullify a sonic baton’s effects. They’re very illegal. I could send you to jail for this, Delagarza.”
It was true. After all, only security personnel and enforcers used sonic batons. Why would a good citizen, with nothing to fear, need to protect himself against them?
Delagarza shrugged. “You want to go into Taiga, you wear these,” Delagarza said. “Otherwise, you’ll wake up in a capsule-motel hooked up to a serum drip with your kidneys missing.”
“Why did you need me for this?” asked Cooke, glancing at Delagarza and Krieger. No one bothered to answer him.
Delagarza’s excuse had been that he was teaching Cooke how to profit and survive in Alwinter. It was true, but the main reason was that three people were less an interesting target than a man and woman.
“They wouldn’t dare mess with an enforcer,” Krieger said.
“Startown,” Delagarza reminded her, “and you aren’t going as an enforcer. When asked, you say you’re a security officer or shit will hit the life-support ventilator.”
They put the earplugs on.
Delagarza did the same with his own and waited a second for the devices’ ‘ware to connect to his wristband. The world muted itself during that second and then went back to normal.
“Very well,” he told them, “follow me.”
He led them to an alley between a sex shop and a foreclosed bar. The alley was a dead end, covered in litter and various fluids. Delagarza nodded a greeting at a homeless man who stared at him with dead eyes from a corner, reached the middle of the alley, and stopped.
“Has he gone insane?” Krieger asked Cooke, somewhere behind Delagarza.
“Believe me, this is normal with him. He’s always going into these random places that no one else knows about, and he knows all these people—”
“This is a dead end,” Krieger interrupted him.
Delagarza ignored them and reached the sewer hatch at the ground. All the sewer hatches in Alwinter were welded shut, with very, very few exceptions that the colony’s government had no knowledge about.
He pulled at the rusty metal and lifted it without effort, assisted by hidden servos inside the floor next to the hatch.
Krieger and Cooke’s conversation died. Delagarza turned to them with a smug smile in his face.
“Welcome,” he said, “to Taiga Town.”
From the darkness of the hole came faint bass-boosted vibrations of music.
8
CHAPTER EIGHT
CLARKE
Since the dawn of spacefaring civilization, sailors could count on two constants during each faster than light trip. The first was: everything outside the ship kills you even faster than the vacuum of space. The ring will kill you, Hawking’s radiation will kill you, the crunch of space-time past the Drive’s protection will kill you so hard that, according to some physicists, you’d be dead before deciding to leave the ship. This hypothesis, currently, remains solely in the realm of speculation.
Most sailors wised up to the deadliness of FTL real quick and focused their efforts on making sure the mechanical barriers that protected the ship’s population from certain and instant death functioned correctly.
Other sailors, usually new and wide-eyed, wondered what the ship would look like if observed from outside. This was the second constant of space travel.
“Wonder what the ship would look like if I were standing outside,” said the contractor sitting next to Clarke. They were at the mess hall, sharing the table with four other men and women with varying degrees of experience with FTL. All sailors were strapped to their chairs and had their military ration trays magnetized to the tables.
“Would look like nothing, you’d be dead before you decided to jump out of the airlock,” said Gutierrez, a man with ten round trips under his belt.
Clarke took a bite out of his sandwich and listened to a conversation he had witnessed a hundred times before unfold. While he did so, he set the sandwich beside his head. The piece of food spun lazily in the air.
“That’s just a hypothesis, Gutierrez, hasn’t been proven,” said Lambert, a woman with seven years of trips under her belt, but with a soft side for wide-eyed idealism.
“Because no one’s been stupid enough to try it,” Gutierrez said, his mouth full of MRS cooked beans. “Besides, the way it works, you wouldn’t see anyone jumping out the airlock, they’d just fall dead at a random time. People do die for no reason during a trip. It’s rare, but it happens.”
“Obviously I don’t wanna jump out an airlock and see,” said the first contractor, “I know that shit would kill me. Just…hypothetically, alright? I’m curious.”
What’s your name? Clarke thought, making an effort to remember. Remembering a name used to come naturally to him before. Nowadays, faces and names tended to mesh together.
Mann something, he decided. Jules Mann.
“Well,” Clarke asked Mann, “is the person standing outside the ring or inside?”
“It changes things?”
“Outside, it would look not entirely unlike a black hole,” Clarke explained, “only moving at fuck-your-soul speed, so more like a black…canyon…thing, expanding beyond what your eyes could see. Space would look all swirly around its edges.”
Clarke even made a swirly gesture with his hands to illustrate his point.
“Dear Reiner, we have a poet on board,” Lambert said as she pretended to faint. “Had I known, I’d have sped up my divorce.”
“Leave the old timer alone,” Gutierrez said, flashing Clarke a grin. “At his age, stims will make his heart freeze with any strong emotion.”
He made an obscene gesture with his hand to illustrate his point.
Clarke laughed and said, “Ask your mother how healthy I am, I was just with her last time I was in port.”
After the hollering had died, Clarke returned to Mann’s question:
“From inside the energy-density ring, it’d depend on your position. In front of the ship, you’d see a soft white glow,” Clarke explained. He omitted the part where the ship would atomize the asshole standing in front of a ship. The way the ring worked, the ship kept the velocity it had before the Alcubierre Drive activated. For a commercial vessel, it meant about five percent the speed of light (.05c), and double that for military vessels at cruise speed.
“What about…behind it?” asked Mann.
“Ah, nothing,” Clarke said.
“Nothing?” Mann looked disappointed. “Black, then. Like normal space.”
“Oh, no,” said Gutierrez, with a grin. “You haven’t seen anything like that black, before.”
Mann raised an eyebrow. Clarke finished his sandwich and explained:
“Inside the ring, we’re moving at ‘normal’ speeds. Outside, we’re crossing space at several times the speed of light. Stand behind the ship, look at it, you’d see the ship’s afterimage. Look outside the ring, and you’d see nothing,” Clarke said, “because we’re outrunning light itself. No stars, not a thing. There’s no place in space as black as the black you’d see.”
Mann blinked. “Is that bad?”
“Imagine what it does to a person,” Gutierrez told him. “We evolved as a species to fear the dark, because of the dangers that lurk there. Absolute darkness represents absolute fear.”
“Really?” Mann hunched over the table, towards Gutierrez, his eyes wide. The rest of the table exchanged knowing glances and hid their smirks.
“There’s a reason the lower part of a ship lacks cameras,” Gutierrez went on, lowering his voice to a whisper. “In the beginning, during Earth’s first attempts at Alcubierre travel, spaceships had windows. Men could glance at the unfathomable dark. What they saw drove many insane. The surviving crew had to kill them to stop them when they tried to blow the reactors.”