*
The tapping was in the walls, all around him. He was in a shipboard compartment; he wasn’t sure for a moment which ship. What’s happening to me? Turning, he realized he was in an engineering section, and it didn’t look like the Kyber ship. He was surrounded by panels of controls, and the hulking shapes of enormous coils that hadn’t changed much in a hundred years, just enough to notice.
He was inside Impris’s fluxfield reactor, in one of the interstitial spaces… and he wasn’t wearing a shielded suit…
His vision was blurring, knees buckling; he couldn’t last here for long…
In the briefing room, Deutsch felt a sudden dizziness; in the same instant, his inner monitors told him that the connection to Phoenix had been lost again. He wondered where Legroeder was; had he made it back to the Kyber ship?
A com unit was chirping somewhere in the room, a voice rasping something about the other ship having flickered out again, and the connector tube…
Deutsch leaned forward and shouted, “Was Rigger Legroeder in that connector when it went out?”
“Gone, they’re just gone…”
The Flux was pulling at him as he tumbled. He was back in the connecting tube. Legroeder lunged for a handhold and missed, then finally grabbed another. What the hell was happening? Thank God that reactor had been at low power, or he’d have been fried.
He fought his way toward the hatch—then stopped. Wrong way. Damn. Turn around. The Flux tore at his eyes, a living, devouring thing. Had the fluxfield lines caught him, pulled him into a quantum fluctuation? His heart was pounding; he could feel the sweat as he struggled, hand over hand, down the tube toward Phoenix. The coils of the Flux were wrapped around the tube like a cosmic boa constrictor, squeezing. He gave a last mighty shove from a handhold, and crashed into the Phoenix hatch.
It was closed. He grunted, terror crawling up his neck as he groped for the switch.
What if it didn’t open?
What if the ship blinked away again?
He choked back a scream—suddenly realizing he might trigger the unthinkable with his own emotions. He was a rigger… he was a rigger… damn it, think like a rigger…
He pounded on the hatch switch. Open, for God’s sake—open!
The hatch slid open, and he tumbled into the airlock. He slapped clumsily at the inner switch, and the hatch slammed shut. He clung, gasping, to a handhold, hanging by his arms. Finally, as the inner hatch opened, he sank to his knees. Gravity had never felt so good.
His heart was still hammering as he stumbled onto the bridge. Palagren and Cantha were hunched over one of the computers. “That was fast,” Palagren said, looking up—and then his eyes narrowed as he registered the strain on Legroeder’s face. “Are you all right?”
“You look like hell,” said Captain Glenswarg. “Where’s Deutsch?”
Legroeder struggled to catch his breath. “He stayed. He wants to work with the Impris riggers, and try to fly it out with them. With us.”
Palagren’s gaze was dark. “That could be risky.”
“But can we do it?” asked Glenswarg.
“Captain—”
“Our orders,” said Glenswarg, “are to bring Impris out if we can. We want the ship, not just the people. We need every bit of information we can get from her.” He glanced at Legroeder.
“That’s right,” Legroeder gulped. “And from what Captain Friedman says, even if we tried to get all of her passengers over here, we probably couldn’t.” He explained.
“Well,” said Palagren, “it’s an open question: Can we fly the two ships out in formation? Or once we power up the two fluxfield generators, will the interaction between them and the quantum fluctuation throw the whole thing out of control?”
Legroeder remembered all too clearly what had just happened to him in the connecting tube. “First tell me how we’re going to get one ship out.”
“Ah.” Palagren scratched the base of his neck-sail. “We have developed a plan, Cantha and I. It will not be easy, and it involves a degree of risk.”
“Which is—?”
“On the one hand, that we lodge ourselves permanently in the underflux; on the other, that we disappear in a spray of neutrinos.”
“Oh.”
Palagren swung back to the console. “Here, let me show you what we have in mind. We have been looking at this business of the dreams, and we’ve found evidence of a physical feature that correlates with it…”
What the Narseil had found, from a careful mapping of the Flux lines of force, was an indication of what they called a deep quantum flaw, a fracture not just in local space as they had thought before, but in the primordial fabric of spacetime itself, situated beneath even the present level of the Deep Flux. Though they could not say much about its size or extent, they believed it was the source of the fluctuations that had drawn Impris and Phoenix into this trap in the underflux. It was entirely possible that similar flaws were the bane of other ships lost in the Deep Flux, as well.
The influence of the flaw could be felt well beyond its actual location. This, Cantha believed, could explain the dreams of the riggers. They, of all the souls on the two ships, were the ones whose psyches were most directly exposed to the Flux. It was no coincidence that they shared the fears about, and possibly a subconscious awareness of, a great monster lurking deep within the Flux. “There really is a monster there,” Cantha said. “That’s why you’re feeling it.”
“In order to get out,” said Palagren, “we must locate the quantum flaw. The opening that brought us into the Deep Flux does not appear to offer an exit. To find another way, we must seek the point of origin of the openings…”
Legroeder listened in sober silence. The Narseil plan was audacious—and not a little desperate. They would try to make the ships sink deeper still—by suppressing even further the action of the nets, by bringing them to a state of controlled, meditative stillness. They hoped to accomplish two things: one, to reduce the dangerous interactions between the two ships’ fluxfields; and two, to allow the natural eddies and ripples to draw the ships down into the lowest layers of the Deep Flux. There, they hoped, they would find not just a clearer view of the underlying quantum flaw, but also a pathway out.
“There are no guarantees,” Palagren noted.
Legroeder remembered the Narseil’s warning about vanishing in a spray of neutrinos. But he couldn’t think of a better idea. And remaining where they were was unthinkable.
Captain Glenswarg was already persuaded; Captain Friedman was a little tougher to sell on the proposal. By the time they reached him by com, on the Impris bridge, there had already been one more time dislocation aboard Impris. “How do we know it won’t make matters worse?” Friedman asked.
Before Legroeder could answer, Deutsch, on the other bridge with Friedman, pointed out that they were already on a nonstop course toward chaos; and surely it was better to try even a risky course of action than none at all. Before he could finish talking, Jamal stepped into view. His eyes were wide as he said, “You’re going to deliberately take us toward that thing that we’ve been dreaming about?” Turning, he gesticulated toward Poppy, who was standing still as a statue, fear frozen on his face.