Annoyingly, one figure still bounced around the hull’s interior. The body was difficult to focus on, almost too quick to see at all.
“Declarant,” another male voice said, “I don’t feel too well right now.”
“I’m sure none of us do,” Bruno agreed. “Who is that? Wenders Rodenbeck?”
“The man himself,” Rodenbeck’s voice agreed.
“Is that you bouncing around?”
“That’s right. My hands’ve gone numb; I can’t seem to make the fingers work. I feel sort of poisoned, if that makes sense to you.”
Bruno’s face threw itself into an inertialess frown. “Seriously ill, hmm?”
“Seriously,” Rodenbeck agreed, in steady but frightened tones. “Whatever’s… happening to us in here, I think it must be very unhealthy. Getting out of this seems like a pretty necessary thing, if you don’t mind me saying.”
Bruno, fearing Rodenbeck had suffered some sort of inertialess whiplash injury to his neck, suppressed the urge to nod. “I quite agree. Try not to move, sir. Your symptoms are troubling, and without knowing their cause, there’s no telling whether you could exacerbate them, or indeed, whether the rest of us could be similarly affected. But haste will likely make things worse. Can you remain calm for a few minutes?”
“De Towaji is right,” Shiao said. “We don’t even know what sort of weapon was used against us back there. Explosive projectiles of some sort?”
“There were no projectiles,” Bruno said. “Just bursts of energy.”
“Energy doesn’t just appear,” Deliah objected.
“Indeed. It’s puzzling. Perhaps Marlon was locally inverting the photon states of the zero-point field? That would create energetic bursts, but they’d be short-lived, and since this would also carve equivalent holes in the vacuum, which the energy would immediately rush back in to fill, the net release would still be zero. I suppose that is consistent with what we’ve observed.”
Then came Muddy’s voice, only slightly whiny. “Pulsed gravity lasers, if they were crossed, should create brief p-peaks of intense gravitation. Potentially, eight crossed beams could create the equivalent of a collapsium lattice, for picosecond intervals.”
“Ah. Clever thought.”
Shiao made an optimistic grunt. “It’s not dangerous, then? It’s a trick, an illusion?”
“Oh,” Bruno said, “I don’t know about that. The net energy of a knife is also zero. Better a knife than a bomb, I’ll wager, but finding ourselves in the middle of such an inversion would almost certainly be harmful.”
“Fatal?”
Bruno’s inertialess shrug nearly dislocated both shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Captain. I’m speculating enough as it is. It would get inside our superreflectors, I’m sure. It would appear inside, without having to penetrate. But he would have to score the hit on us, first, and that appears difficult. For whatever reason, the timing and position of the flashes don’t appear to be precisely controllable.”
Shiao persisted. “Why would he use such an ineffective weapon? Because this ship is too nimble? Too difficult to target with a nasen beam?”
“He does seem to have a lot of devices at his disposal,” Muddy agreed. “At least one nasen projector, probably eight or more gravity lasers, and oblivion knows how many’s-s-standard EM grapples, to pull the Iscog and the Ring Collapsiter apart as he has. The energy he’s expended in the past five minutes would fill a battery twice as large as this ship. How much has he expended in the past week”? The past three weeks?”
“We should be looking for a very large ship, then?” asked Shiao.
“Or a base,” Muddy said. “He’s a deeply private man, fond of’s-s-secret facilities buried in rock. And if he is using gravity lasers in the way I’ve imagined, there would need to be two banks of four, spaced a considerable distance apart. Look for a good-sized asteroid whose sunward face is c-covered in wellstone energy converters. Dead black.”
With great effort and concentration, Bruno fought inertia-lessness to lean as far forward as his straps would allow, and peered at the translucence of the control panel. He knew exactly where the trajectory display should be located, so it wasn’t hard to train his eyes on that spot. It was hard to make anything out there, though. Were those the edges of the plaque? The dashed and dotted lines upon it? He tried to remember where the planets had been, when they’d last seen a glimpse of…
“Mercury,” he said. “It’s close enough—the radio time-lags match. It’s certainly big enough. And I can’t imagine a larger, emptier source of concealment.”
“Or a better source of raw materials,” Muddy agreed. “Mercury, yes.”
“I really don’t feel well,” Rodenbeck complained, in a weaker voice than before. “My limbs have gone entirely numb.”
“All right,” Bruno said, with an accidental and quite sickening nod. “Ship? Why have we stopped?”
“I stopped us,” the ship replied. “The tunnel ahead of us bends too sharply to admit my outer hull.”
“Hmm. You used backup thrusters to do this?”
“Yes. I’m also currently using them to maintain attitude and position. It’s difficult, sir—required thrust is very low to effect a velocity change, but the counterpulse required to damp it is itself a function of position and velocity. The resulting control space has no closed-form solutions.”
“So you’re improvising.”
“Correct, sir. Fuel consumption has stabilized, but remains disconcertingly rapid.”
Rapid? That wasn’t a good thing. “Estimated time of depletion?”
“Two minutes, twenty-four seconds, sir.”
“Oh, dear. Is there enough fuel to back us out of here safely?”
“Negative, sir.”
“Blast. Use some imagination, you! Bring matters like this to my attention before they become irrevocable!”
“I am extremely taxed,” the ship said in its own defense.
Bruno sighed. “All right, then, turn around and pull us out with the grapples; without a fuel supply we’re in more danger in here than we are outside.”
“Acknowledged, sir.”
There was no sense of movement, but the jittering lattice of pinpoints outside the hull began—slowly and jerkily—to rotate.
With a yelp of surprise, Wenders Rodenbeck settled at once to the deck beside Bruno’s couch and remained there.
“Ah, good. You’ve managed to grab hold,” Bruno said, looking down approvingly.
“Actually, friend, I appear to be stuck.” Rodenbeck’s voice was alarmed.
“Stuck?”
“It feels… like gravity. Pretty much exactly like gravity.”
Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness! “Ship, cease rotation!”
But it was too late. The walls hummed with activity, oxygen atoms accelerating near-inertialessly and being expelled at velocities that probably exceeded the vacuum speed of light. But the rotation continued—even began, ponderously, to accelerate.
“I don’t understand,” Deliah van Skeltering protested. “The gravity inside a cylinder should cancel to zero, regardless of position or orientation.”
“A continuous cylinder of infinite length,” Bruno corrected. “Ours is kinked and twisted, and composed of discrete masses, and filled with a Casimir supervacuum that dulls momentum! I’m a fool. Hold on, Wenders, I’ll fish you up.”
“No!” Muddy shrieked. “I forbid it, sir! Keep your hands where they are!”