Guardian of Night (27 page)

Leher saluted. “Captain,” he called out—although the man was barely three paces away. You felt every step was a great distance in such a space.

Coalbridge smiled and sauntered over to Leher. He placed a hand on Leher’s shoulder and gave him a quick pat. Leher didn’t feel reassured. He felt nauseous.

“The bridge can be a little visually overwhelming at first. But are you adjusting all right to everything else?” Coalbridge asked. “How’s V-CRYPT shaping up? I’m really looking forward to seeing what you’ve got going over there.”

“We’ll be up and running by the end of third watch today,” Leher said. “Captain, I could just as easily have geisted myself up here in the chroma and stayed at my desk.”

Coalbridge shook his head. “No, I need you here. Got a bit of a job for you, Lieutenant Commander.”

Leher cocked his head. “Job?”

“In a second,” said Coalbridge. “I just realized that I do want to show you something, while you’re here.” Coalbridge turned away from him and beckoned Leher to follow him toward the edge of the bridge platform. “You’ve given up calling this magnificent vessel a ‘ship,’ I hope?”

“Don’t want my teeth knocked out,” Leher said, reluctantly following after the captain.

Coalbridge smiled. “Yeah, ‘the positive reinforcement of space-based service,’ we call it.” He neared the edge of the platform, beckoned Leher over. Leher hesitated, then slowly inched his way to stand just beside and behind Coalbridge.

Beyond lay the abyss.

Coalbridge noted him standing back and chuckled. “Watch this.”

Suddenly Coalbridge bunched his legs and launched himself
off the platform
. Leher let out a whimper of shock and concern.

Coalbridge jumped with great force, and his feet did actually clear the edge of the bridge platform. But then it was as if Coalbridge ran into an invisible, flexible wall. His springing body slowed, and then the invisible barrier pushed back against him. His forward momentum ceased, reversed itself, and he was deposited back on the deck with as much force as he’d leapt from it.

“See?” Coalbridge said. “Strong nuclear force in play. You can’t fall off or out, Griff.”

Leher nodded, still pale-faced and shocked at the very possibility of leaping off into the void. That Coalbridge would have done such a thing, even in jest—it was too much.

“What if there’s an equipment failure?” Leher asked.

“If the Q fails, then the atmospheric bottle fails and we’re all dead anyway,” Coalbridge replied. “Well, fairly soon. In any case, it’s never the drop that kills you. There’ll be the breathing thing, or lack thereof. The exploding blood vessels. And—here’s something they don’t usually tell you—your fingernails and toenails pop off, strip themselves free. Something about cuticle fluid.”

“Interesting,” said Leher, examining his own fingernails. Ragged. He’d been biting them again. Probably since the day he’d been slung into space by the Skyhook. He quickly tugged his beard. Still okay. Two-day trim.

Postcard.

Soon.

“I’m sorry, Griff, not trying to disconcert you,” Coalbridge said. “I just find this place so much fun. It’s hard for me to imagine . . . Anyway, let’s get to work.” He turned to a geist who was hovering nearby. “XO, would you key Lieutenant Commander Leher into full bridge chroma overlay?”

It took a moment for Leher to recognize DAFNE. She had a subtly different appearance here on the bridge. Taller, for one.

To match Coalbridge at eye level, Leher realized.
She’s shorter down in V-CRYPT to match me.

She was also more vibrantly present. There were brighter colors mixed in with the usual geist blue-green. He’d noticed that she normally adopted Caucasian features, but for the first time, Leher noticed that DAFNE had blond hair and blue eyes—at least at the moment.

The bridge crunch must be an incredible computing matrix to allow such a chroma representation,
Leher thought.
And my own salt has to be double-clocking it to project her like this. I was right. The place is haunted.

“BCO keyed,” said DAFNE.

Suddenly, Leher was surrounded not merely by bustling humans and geists. He now saw the instruments on which they worked. And in the air about them, hanging just above head level in an enormous circular crown, was a ring of displays—maps and readouts detailing mostly what Leher assumed was everything in the vicinity analyzed in all its thermal, chromatic, and gravitational glory.

Coalbridge raised a hand, grasped a display as if it were a computer window—which it basically was—and pulled it down in front of himself and Leher. He pointed to a scintillating crystal in the midst of a three-dimensional display.

“Here we are,” said Coalbridge. “And about two light-years over here—”

He touched a shining node nearby, and the space beside it lit up with information. A group of smaller lights began circling the shining central node.

“—is the 82 Eridani system. Five large orbitals. Four rocky, one gas giant at about Neptune distance.” Coalbridge took his finger away, and the 82 Eridani system representation collapsed back into a shining point. He drew a line from that point—his finger leaving a faint sparkling trace to an area enclosed in a red-bordered square. The crystal-vessel was at this moment slowly moving into the area defined by the box. “We think the MBD we’re tracking originated in this sector.”

“You mean the
Chief Seattle
messenger bottle?”

“No, the second one. The drone from the lifepod,” Coalbridge said.

Across the bridge, an exper looked up from a display she had been bent over. “Got it, sir. Beta signature confirmed.”

Coalbridge nodded in her direction. “Thank you, COM,” he said. “Anything else in the vicinity?”

“Nothing conditioning the beta but us and the target, sir.”

Coalbridge nodded and turned to a geist, a male representation, nearby. “NAV, take us there and drop us into N on the XO’s command.”

“Aye, Captain,” said the geist. The geist didn’t move a virtual muscle, but Leher noticed the position of the crystalline vessel on the display he’d been watching with Coalbridge begin to modify its direction.

Coalbridge looked to DAFNE. “XO, you’ve got the bridge.”

Was that the faintest flicker of a pride on DAFNE’s representational visage?

“Aye, sir,” she replied.

Coalbridge tapped Leher on the shoulder. “So, what do you say, Griff? Let’s go reel in that sceeve I promised you.”

*
 
*
 
*

The excursion craft, called STAVE 1, moved away from the
Humphreys
at a rapid,
extremely
perceptible clip. They were in N-space now, and except for the Q-generated pseudogravity in the deck, Leher’s inner ear had returned to its customary Newtonian frame of references.

Coalbridge had assigned himself as pilot, to the obvious chagrin of his two shuttle specialists. But if he’d sent along a specialist petty officer, he’d have had to include a marine with sceeve combat experience in the contingent. Then if there was an emergency evac required and they needed to ferry any survivors back to the
Humphreys,
the craft might become too crowded.

It all sounded more like rationalization than justification to Leher, but he let it pass. Coalbridge obviously knew what he was doing when it came to piloting the small craft. Their takeoff had been smooth as silk. They accelerated away from the main vessel via twin antimatter-reaction rockets hitched forward on two long gimbaled shafts like horses pulling a carriage. This made it possible to look back at the receding mass of the
Humphreys
behind them.

She was not a cracked diamond, Leher decided. Not at this middle distance. More like an island. A glowing oasis in the stars with a curving, crooked coastline complicated with spits, shoals, jetties curling outward from the island edge in beautiful twists and spirals.

But it was a three-dimensional island. You could look into it and notice the same
sorts
of patterns, but never exactly the same—all repeating on a smaller level.

She was beautiful, he had to admit. Crafted like complex Tiffany glass or a Faberge egg. She was—

“A Mandelbrot set,” Leher said. “That’s what she looks like.”

“That’s about right,” Coalbridge replied. He was smiling at his own vessel, his delight infectious.
Almost infectious,
Leher corrected himself.
This is still space. And I’d still rather be at home in my nice, safe office. Still . . . just look at what we’ve wrought.
“A double system,” Coalbridge continued. “She’s formed from a strong-force generator working off about ten thousand superconducting quantum-interference devices. That’s the way all Q works. We take quantum properties and magnify the effects to macroscopic size via the SQUIDs. So her hull is a strong-force ramp-up. The Q-drives are photon-based. They use vacuum-generated virtual particles and strange-quark Aspect mirrors to split the froth. We can actually cut the fabric of the universe into slices that are smaller than what can naturally occur. Smaller than particles. Smaller than quarks. Graviton small. We shoot entangled photons. One has to spark across our tiny speck of froth faster than the speed of light to match up with the observational changes of the other. So we take that FTL travel and ramp it up through a SQUID and, voila, you’ve got faster-than-light travel. About nine hundred
c
going all out, as a matter of fact.”

“But her appearance. Why does she take this particular shape?” said Leher.

“Strong force has a quadratic transformation on it, so that’s what gives her the Mandelbrot appearance. Every time we reconfigure her, she looks a little different, but basically a Mandelbrot or other fractal set is what you get.”

“How big
is
she?”

“In present configuration, she’s a half mile from stem to stern at her longest and widest. She’s got a quarter-mile cross section, and a million and two-ton displacement,” Coalbridge answered without hesitation. He certainly knew his vessel. “See that?” Coalbridge pointed to the central mass of the spacecraft. “The core is in the main element there. And those bolus-shaped bodies around the outside—”

These—distended spheres and elliptical eggs—twinkled as Coalbridge spoke. They looked just as complicated as the main craft, like smaller, similarly shaped “pods” attached to the body of the vessel.

“—each of them has a separate Q-drive inside and N-based reaction rockets. That’s where we put the deliverable weapons.”

“Nukes, antimatter torpedoes, and kinetics.”

“That’s right,” said Coalbridge. “And don’t forget the laser cannons.”

Gazing out at the loveliness of the craft from this angle, Leher’s gut finally began to unclench. He could feel the heated flush of the flight-or-fight response leaving his skin, returning the tops of his hands to a normal tone. He looked back out at the
Humphreys.

Twelve short years ago, the most complex vehicle in existence had been the international space station or maybe an aircraft carrier. The technological distance between this vessel and a carrier seemed to Leher to be greater than the distance between the same aircraft carrier and a dugout canoe.

Coalbridge touched an invisible switch or board or something in the chroma and the STAVE rockets turned on their gimbals and reversed themselves, braking. Then the rockets cut out. Stillness. Leher gazed around. At what looked like a football field’s distance, the other craft, the
Chief Seattle
lifepod, drifted.

Using more N-based low tech—grappling hooks, a crunch-strong net—they hauled the thing in. Coalbridge was clearly having an immense amount of fun deploying his rescue and tug tools.

“Finally using some of that interminable training,” he said as Leher, clueless, looked on.

They brought the lifepod to DOCK, the largest room Leher had seen on the
Humphreys,
about the size of a couple of suburban garages. With the pseudogravity cut off, the lifepod drifted easily into position. Then DAFNE—or whatever persona was in charge of such things—slowly reapplied the notion of a floor to the craft. As soon as pseudogravity was reestablished, a group of twenty burly marines stormed into DOCK and formed a circle around STAVE 1 and the lifepod.

After a moment, the geist of one of the marines—a sergeant major that Leher could see in physical form through the STAVE 1 walls—appeared beside Coalbridge. “Lifepod bottled to vacuum. Atmosphere reestablished, Captain.”

Leher’s Xeno chief petty officer, Branton, entered the DOCK, rolling along on a handtruck a canister with sceeve atmospheric mix that Leher had ordered prepared. He stopped on the outside of the ring of marines and waited, trying to get a glimpse past their shoulders.

Leher mumbled that he’d like to speak with his petty officer and immediately had the double perception of being inside STAVE 1 and standing beside the chief in geist form. Watching a scene from geist perspective was much like a negative reversal of seeing a geist yourself. You, the geist, looked real and in full color (should you chance to look down at yourself), but the world you were “visiting” in the chroma took on blue-green monochromatic tones. “Nothing to see but a lifepod at the moment, Chief Branton,” Leher said. “Stand by and we’ll be out shortly.”

“Yes, sir,” Branton replied.

Leher’s perception collapsed back down to his true physical location inside the excursion craft.

“Ready?” said Coalbridge. Leher nodded, and STAVE 1’s door bubbled open. He and Coalbridge stepped out into DOCK.

Unlike the
Humphreys
and STAVE 1, the lifepod was a windowless metal sphere. It was illuminated from the ceiling by a hard spotlight and shone like a copper-hued ball bearing.

“Degaussing complete,” intoned a nearby geist representing in an Exper First Class uniform. “Four minutes to ambient equilibrium.”

Leher and Coalbridge stood staring at the thing.

“Well, this is annoying,” Leher said.

“The cold equations,” said Coalbridge.

“Literally.”

They stared some more.

“Ambient equilibrium reached,” the geist finally pronounced. “Scans complete and no threat detected. Internal pod atmosphere nitrogen based with heliox components, five thousand parts per million.”