Lodovik Trema in appearance was forty or forty-five, stout but not corpulent, with a pleasantly ugly face and great strong sausage-fingered hands. One eye seemed fixed skyward, and his large lips turned down as if he were perpetually inclined toward pessimism or at best bland neutrality. Where he had hair, he wore it in a short, even cut; his forehead was high and innocent of wrinkles, which gave his face a younger aspect belied by the lines around his mouth and eyes.
Though Lodovik represented the highest Imperial authority, he had come to be well liked by the captain and crew; his dry statements of purpose or fact seemed to conceal a gentle and observant wit, and he never said too much, though sometimes he could be accused of saying too little.
Outside the ship’s hull, the geometric fistula of hyperspace through which the ship navigated during its Jumps was beyond complete visualization, even for the ship’s computers. Both humans and machines, slaves of status space-time, simply bided their personal times until the pre-set emergence.
Lodovik had always preferred the quicker-though sometimes no less harrowing-networks of wormholes, but those connections had been neglected dangerously, and in the past few decades many had collapsed like unshored subway tunnels, in some cases sucking in transit stations and waiting passengers…They were seldom used now.
Captain Kartas Tolk entered the lounge and stood for a moment behind Lodovik’s seat. The rest of the crew busily tended the machines that watched the machines that kept the ship whole during the Jumps.
Tolk was tall, his head capped by woolly white-blond hair, with ashy brown skin and a patrician air not uncommon for native-born Sarossans. Lodovik glanced over his shoulder and nodded a greeting. “Two more hours, after our last Jump,” Captain Tolk said. “We should be on schedule.”
“Good,” said Lodovik. “I’m eager to get to work. Where will we land?”
“At Sarossa Major, the capital. That’s where the records you seek are stored. Then, as ordered, we remove as many favored families on the Emperor’s list as we can. The ship will be very crowded.”
“I can imagine.”
“We have perhaps seven days before the shock front hits the outskirts of the system. Then, only eight hours before it engulfs Sarossa.”
“Too close for comfort.”
“The close shave of Imperial incompetence and misdirection,” Tolk said, with no attempt to conceal his bitterness. “Imperial scientists knew that the Kale’s star was coring two years ago.”
“The information provided by Sarossan scientists was far from accurate,” Lodovik said.
Tolk shrugged; no sense denying it. Blame enough for all to share. Kale’s star had gone supernova last year; its explosion had been observed by telepresence nine months later, and in the time since…Much politicking, reallocation of scant resources, then, this pitifully inadequate mission.
The captain had the misfortune of being sent to watch his planet die, saving little but Imperial records and a few privileged families.
“In the best days,” Tolk said, “the Imperial Navy could have constructed shields to save at least a third of the planet’s population. We could have marshaled fleets of immigration ships to evacuate millions, even billions…Sufficient to rebuild, to keep a world’s character intact. A glorious world, if I may say so, even now.”
“So I’ve heard,” Lodovik said softly. “We will do our best, dear Captain, though that can be only a dry and hollow satisfaction.”
Tolk’s lips twisted. “I do not blame you, personally,” he said. “You have been sympathetic and honest and, above all, efficient. Quite different from the usual in the Commission offices. The crew regards you as a friend among scoundrels.”
Lodovik shook his head in warning. “Even simple complaints against the Empire can be dangerous,” he said. “Best not to trust me too much.”
The ship shuddered slightly and a small bell rang in the room. Tolk closed his eyes and gripped the back of the chair automatically. Lodovik simply faced forward.
“The last Jump,” the captain said. He looked at Lodovik. “I trust you well enough, councilor, but I trust my skills more. Neither the Emperor nor Linge Chen can afford to lose men of my qualifications. I still know how to repair parts of our drives should they fail. Few captains on any ship can boast of that now.”
Lodovik nodded; simple truth, but not very good armor. “The craft of best using and not abusing essential human resources may also be a lost art, Captain. Fair warning.”
Tolk made a wry face. “Point taken.” He turned to leave, then heard something unusual. He glanced over his shoulder at Lodovik. “Did you feel something?”
The ship suddenly vibrated again, this time with a high-pitched tensile grind that set their teeth on edge. Lodovik frowned. “I felt that. What was it?”
The captain cocked his head, listening to a remote voice buzzing in his ear. “Some instability, an irregularity in the last Jump,” he said. “Not unknown as we draw close to a stellar mass. Perhaps you should return to your cabin.”
Lodovik shut down the lounge projectors and rose. He smiled at Captain Tolk and clapped him on the shoulder. “Of any in the Emperor’s service, I would be most willing to entrust you to steer us through the shoals. I need to study our options now anyway. Triage, Captain Tolk. Maximization of what we can take with us, compared to what can be stored in underground vaults.”
Tolk’s face darkened, and he lowered his eyes. “My own family library, at Alos Quad, is-”
The ship’s alarms blared like huge animals in pain. Tolk raised his arms in instinctive self-protection, covering his face
Lodovik dropped to the floor and doubled himself up with amazing dexterity
The ship spun like a top in a fractional dimension it was never meant to navigate
And with a sickening blur of distressed momenta and a sound like a dying behemoth, it made an unscheduled and asymmetric Jump.
The ship reappeared in the empty vastness of status geometry-normal, unstretched space. Ship’s gravity failed simultaneously.
Tolk floated a few centimeters above the floor. Lodovik uncurled and grabbed for an arm of the couch he had occupied just a few moments before. “We’re out of hyperspace,” he said.
“No question,” Tolk said. “But in the name of procreation, where?”
Lodovik knew in an instant what the captain could not. They were being flooded with an interstellar tidal wave of neutrinos. He had never, in his centuries of existence, experienced such an onslaught. To the intricate and super sensitive pathways of his positronic brain, the neutrinos felt like a thin cloud of buzzing insects; yet they passed through the ship and its human crew like so many bits of nothing. A single neutrino, the most elusive of particles, could slip through a light-year of solid lead without being blocked. Very rarely indeed did they react with matter. Within the heart of the Kale’s supernova, however, immense quantities of matter had been compressed into neutronium, producing a neutrino for every proton, more than enough to blow away the outer shells just a year before.
“We’re in the shock front,” Lodovik said.
“How do you know?” Tolk asked.
“Neutrino flux.”
“How-” The captain’s skin grayed, its ashen sheen growing even more prominent. “You’re assuming, of course. It’s a logical assumption.”