“Well, did something happen?” he called after Jeremy, thinking because it had been so short a time, they must have aborted the run…But things had changed. He felt his face—the little trace of beard, dead skin that rolled off under his fingers. His clothes were disgusting. Like month-old laundry. The smell was him .
“We’re at Tripoint,” Jeremy called back from inside the shower. “Drink the juice! You’ll be sorry if you don’t! We’re going to be blowing V in a bit. Don’t panic if the ship sort of goes away. It just does that. It’s kind of wild. About two, three times.”
He had three packets of the stuff. He drained the first. There was a terrible moment of giddiness, where the deck seemed to dissolve under him and the walls went nowhere. He was utterly disoriented, and slumped down on the bed until the feeling went away.
“That was the first,” Jeremy called out. “Damn, that was hard!”
“First what?” He felt sick at his stomach.
“K-dump,” Jeremy yelled back. There was the sound of the shower. “Braking, hyperspace style. We don’t go up all the way, we just kind of brush it. Slows us down.”
He knew something about hyperspace. He’d never imagined feeling it. They’d just touched the hyperspace interface. He felt shaky and ripped open another juice, so thirsty his mouth felt dusty.
Things tasted too sweet, and too sour. The green walls had a flavor. The smell had a color, and not a pretty one.
Most of all, the dreadful thing had happened, he was no longer at Pell, he was out of reach of home, and the only thing he could think of was a desperate need for liquid and what taste told him was in that liquid. He ripped open another drink packet. He sat there sipping mineral-reinforced juice until Jeremy came out to look for a change of clothes.
The intercom came on. What sounded like a mechanical voice called their names, and Vince’s and Linda’s, and said, “ Galley duty .”
“Shower’s yours,” Jeremy said. “We’ve got galley this round. All those pots and pans. Lucky us. But it’s not bad. Rise and shine.”
He felt like hell. And they were going to be working. The rebel part of him said ignore it, lie here, make them come get him. But it was better than lying in a bunk thinking. He stripped off and went to the shower, and was in the middle of a steamy, lung-hydrating deluge when the siren sounded.
“ Takehold !” Jeremy screamed from outside. “Stay put! Damn, what’s he doing up there?”
He didn’t know what to do or which wall to brace himself against. The world dissolved and reformed. The water hit him, boiling hot. Or the world had come back. He leaned against the shower wall hoping to drown and not to be blown to atoms. Shaking head to foot.
“You all right?” Jeremy yelled.
“ The emergency has ended. ” a calm voice said on the intercom. “ The ship is stable. That was a reposition on receipt of an unidentified, now ID’ed as Union military Amity. All clear. Request roll call and safety check .”
“Well, damn all, what are they doing here?” Jeremy said from outside the door. “Bridge wants us to call in. You all right, Fletcher?”
“Fine,” he said He stood there while the fans dried him off and he shook and shivered in the warm air. He managed to ask, meekly, “Is something wrong?”
“Must be all right,” Jeremy said through the door, “Helm must’ve not liked the look of things. But we got our all clear. We can move about”
Move about? He was in the God-help-him shower . “Do we do that a lot?”
“Pretty rare we see anybody,” Jeremy said “It’s empty out here. We didn’t nearly hit her, understand. We just, if we see anybody, we change V. In case they, you know, aren’t up to any good. In case they fired. That is a Union carrier out there.”
“So?”
“So this is sort of Alliance territory. They can come here, just kind of nosing around, but that’s one big ship out there. Usually they’d send just a cruiser to look around. That’s a whole damn command center.”
“Friendly?”
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s pretty wild. Helm must’ve forgot we were hauling.”
He opened the shower door and felt the chill outside. He dressed in clean coveralls, trying to conceal the shakes he was suffering, He’d dropped weight, he’d noticed that when he’d been in the shower. He felt hollow inside, and wanted another fruit juice, but they were out.
“So are we still likely for a takehold?” he asked Jeremy. “Can we go down to the galley, or are we stuck here?”
“We’re supposed to be on the new Old Rules,” Jeremy said, “whatever that means. That everything’s supposed to be looser and if we get a takehold it’s not a takehold like they’re going to be shooting. Not unless they say ‘red.’ Then it’s serious and we’re back on the old New Rules. But I guess the old New Rules still apply on the bridge all the time. Damn, that was a stop! I bet they rearranged the galley good and proper. Cook’s going to be cussing the air blue.”
They were crazy. The whole ship and its company was crazy, and he was still shaking.
“But I guess it’s all right to go,” Jeremy said, “You ready? Guess they’re not going to shoot.”
Chapter 10
Pure nerves, JR discovered when he reported in on the bridge. Nobody blamed Helm. Their pilot had made a precautionary move when he picked up a carrier’s large presence in the local buoy information, maintaining V .
Then a fast drop to non-combatant stance, all before the rest of them knew anything was going on and before the carrier’s advanced, fire-linked systems could read and confirm their ID off stored files. The deep spacetime punch and quick relocation of their larger than average mass could, unhappily, have given them a warlike, carrierlike, appearance—a paradoxical faster-than-light presence that would propagate through the spacetime sheet in the same way a pin-drop could make itself heard in a still room.
But they weren’t, in that instant, helpless and spotted in the fire-path of the carrier’s hair-triggered defense systems. For one thing, in the hand of cards that Old Man Inertia dealt, an entering ship always had the ace if they had a pilot who knew how to use it. The entering ship could fire downslope if they chose; reposition if they chose. If they hadn’t been willing to meet the carrier, they’d have gone silent and unlocatable somewhere along a track dictated only by physics and the local mass—a track that carrier could calculate, but not soon enough or precisely enough, on a ship that still carried enough V to jump out again on the Viking heading. And fire as they did so.
That rapid stutter of presence they’d made, however, was delay enough to let their systems determine that the presence in the jump-point was Union, not Mazianni, and their subsequent stop let the carrier find out the same about them, since they’d been lawfully using their ID when they came in.
It was still a jittery feeling, a once-enemy dreadnought in possession of the Tripoint system and themselves in its crosshairs. By what JR detected on the displays, the carrier didn’t look at all to be in transit of the jump-point. It was low-energy on a vector that said it had come from Viking, but it wasn’t proceeding. It was just sitting. Looking around. Logging traffic.
Prowling the edges of Alliance territory it wasn’t supposed to visit… except on specific invitation of Pell, which he didn’t think it had.
Mallory’s invitation, however, in the deep uncertainties of this post-War period, might be the answer. The carrier was possibly—possibly—moving out of its territory in order to back up Mallory in Earth space after they’d left Mallory unattended. That would imply Finity ’s decision had been made many months earlier than he thought it had—but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been caught ignorant of Finity ’s high-level operations.