They were looking at energy surges and hot spots, and the only things that came to Randi Queson’s mind were a Christmas display and some sort of ancient artillery battle.
“We’re supposed to go in there?” she asked, incredulous. It didn’t appear that there was enough room to do it without getting potted by one or another of those flares.
“Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Cross assured her. “I’ve been on ships that went all through this area, and hundreds of ships come through the genholes here all the time. Things are a lot farther apart than they look. We’re looking at several parsecs of space here. No, getting in the way of one of those isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that the next thing we have to do is fly into one.”
“You can sure see why nobody’s found this thing,” Sark noted. “I don’t think you’d get far with trial and error.”
“Maybe not,” An Li responded. “One of them keeps winking on and off in the same space for generations.”
“It is not as easy as all that,” the captain’s voice came in. “No wild hole is all that consistent in where it emerges. It could emerge almost anywhere in this field, and the only thing you’d notice was that it lasted a bit longer than most—several seconds, in fact. But once I get the pattern, it becomes predictable. When we get one flash that holds for precisely the same length of time and repeats a location or a series of locations according to the pattern fed into my memory banks, then we will be able to go right through. I will have to match speed, trajectory, and a lot more, but the figures I have will allow me, with the observations, to know which one is the one and only gateway to the Three Kings.”
“Um, out of curiosity, what would happen if you picked the wrong one?” Queson asked anybody else in the C&C.
“Simple. You either go the wrong place if you make it through,” Cross responded, “or, more likely, you wind up in an uncontrolled vortex that sucks you in and instantly compresses you to the size of a pinhead. Gives you a whole new respect for the ones who set up the first genholes, don’t it?”
“They were mostly robots,” Jerry Nagel told her. “Very few lives were risked in that kind of operation. Robots made the tries, drew the energy needed to keep the things open and stable long enough to get the genhole anchor on one end, then—if the robot inside made it through—it retained enough of a linkage to allow another anchor to go through the hole and shore up the other end. Even when they had it down cold, they ran robotic ship after robotic ship through until they were sure it was safe.”
“That isn’t correct, Jerry,” the captain commented. “First a scout went through, a cybership like me, only designed specifically for the job of threading the wormhole needle. It was the scout that provided the anchor on the other end and used it to transmit data back. The Three Kings, of course, are an exception. Somehow most of the report got back, but there was no anchor, and, thus, nobody knew which of these was the right one.”
“Somebody knew,” Randi Queson pointed out.
“What? What do you mean?” the captain asked.
“We have the information. We got it from somebody else who had it, and they got it from somebody else who had it and so on. No, that information got back here, somehow. It just never got into the public record. I bet if you really worked on the problem enough you’d discover that somebody got greedy, that that somebody truncated or erased part of that report after they’d copied it. They went for the Kings themselves, and vanished just like everybody else, and now they’re pretty well lost to history. But they knew. This doesn’t have to be an alien plot. Just some good old-fashioned greed and corruption, I’d wager.”
“Interesting idea,” Nagel said. “If not, that description sure covers people like Sanders and us, doesn’t it? I guess all us greedy, corrupt skunks get attracted to things like that.”
“Kind of ironic, though,” Randi noted.
“Huh? Why?” Nagel responded.
“Discovered by a monk who named them for the three rich and powerful men who brought gifts to the Christ child, then turned almost immediately into an object of greed and a source of death.”
“Well, that’s what people have always done to religion. Why stop with this?” An Li said cynically. “Cap, when do we go through? You found it yet?”
“I have it, yes,” she replied. “But it will be a very difficult maneuver to enter it at just the right time and angle so that I can avoid damaging the ship. You do seem exceptionally eager to get on with this, though, which could very easily be the last thing any of us does.”
“Beats being bored, Cap,” Sark commented. “Nobody lives forever.”
“I dunno,” Jerry Nagel said. “I always thought an exception would be made for me.”
“Very well,” the captain replied. “I think you all should strap in for this one. It will make things much easier for me. Once you do that, I think we might be able to do this in another twenty minutes.”
Randi Queson exhaled loudly. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said.
VIII: THE THREE KINGS
“Get out of here and hang on, you little creep!”
Eyegor didn’t seem to have real feelings but it was apologetic. “I am sorry, but I have nothing else to photograph at the moment.”
“Well, go photograph the C&C board or something!” Randi Queson snapped. “Just not me, not here, not now! Understand?”
“Yes, I believe I understand. You are—”
“Get the hell out of here before I smash you! Now!”
“Oh, well, if it’s that way…” Eyegor responded, but it floated away and outside the room.
Go piss off An Li, she thought with a wicked smile on her face.
They were all in their cabins, lying down and strapped into their bunks, waiting for the big bang that would tell them they were in a wild hole. It might well be instant death, or at least a quick death, or it might be nothing at all, but if they were to live through it, nobody wanted to be the one with the broken arm or gashed forehead because they didn’t heed the captain’s cautions.
No human pilot could do what the captain was doing now. It could only be done by a pure machine or a hybrid like the captain and the Stanley. At velocities approaching a third of light speed for short bursts, with no real margin for error, and with a target that had to be hit dead center even though it wasn’t there yet, this was one hell of a tricky maneuver. Any mistake, whether in calculations on where and when the wild hole they wanted would appear, or in just when to start for it or precisely how much thrust was sufficient, meant they were either doomed to fail or they were burnt toast.
This was what the captain was designed for, what she gained from her sacrifice of her humanity.
The calculations came through as simply as a grade school addition, and she didn’t even consciously think of doing them and putting them into action. She had done three trial runs and had completed full diagnostics on the hardware involved, and now she was ready.
It was almost certainly best that none of the people within the ship could see what was really going on, for nobody without the captain’s massive calculating abilities and tremendous database of information would believe that this was anything more than idiocy.
The ship came around, sighted on a trajectory so precise that the margin of error was under one millimeter over the vibration of the ship at full thrust. The engines roared into life, shuddering as they did so and causing a massive series of subsonic vibrations that went through the entire ship and all within it, and then it was off at increasing speed, on that precise line to a point in space where there was most assuredly nothing at all.