CHAPTER 7
“Recommence countdown.” Maria’s voice came soberly from the intercom. Ubu frowned at a red light—the trunk airlock outer hatch was still open—but started the countdown anyway. The lock could be closed later from the systems board.
A few minutes later Beautiful Maria drifted down the ladder, then came into the cage and strapped herself into the shooter’s seat. Ubu glanced at her. Her face was colorless.
“You okay?”
“Had a fight with Kit.”
“Sorry.” Ubu restrained a grin.
“I wish I hadn’t lied to him.”
Ubu shrugged. “It was necessary.” He frowned at her. “You rather I boss the shoot?”
Maria shook her head. “I’ll be all right.”
“Okay.” Ubu turned back to his panel. His initial course was plotted and loaded in the computer; the hydraulic pumps were up and online; he gimbaled the main engine and smiled as more green lights blinked on.
Maria was silent. Ubu looked at her. “You sure it’s okay?”
“I really like him.”
Ubu reluctantly thought about this for a moment. “He’s all right,” he said.
“I wish things were different.”
There was nothing to say to that. Ubu turned back to his board. “Three minutes,” he said.
*
Kit stared for a long, appalling moment into Marco’s deep eyes. Marco was wearing only a g-string. Skin draped his ancient bones in grey folds. He said nothing.
“I was outside,” Kit said.
Marco waited a moment before speaking. “I can see that. I heard the lock cycle and wondered.”
“I just went out for a while.”
There was another silence. Kit wondered whether or not to leave the lock. Marco dropped his eyes to the floor of the lock. “You went out,” he said. “With three vac suits.”
Kit took a breath. Panic throbbed in his chest. “The other two were here before,” Kit said. “I mean, I left them here. When I was here before.”
Marco looked at him steadily. Kit’s words trailed away. Kit bent to gather up the vac suits.
“Come here, boy. Leave the suits.” Marco’s voice was soft. Kit let the suits fall to the floor and stepped out of the airlock.
Marco stepped close to Kit, put a hand on Kit’s shoulder. Kit tried not to flinch from the contact. There was a cold smile on Marco’s unshaven face.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you that I don’t believe you. You know that.” Marco leaned closer. His breath touched Kit’s cheek. His words were calm, measured. “I have limited energy, boy. I don’t want to waste any of it turning your life into shit, though I will if I have to. All I want to know is where you’ve been, and who was with you. Understand?”
Fear fluttered in Kit’s limbs. He licked his lips. “I was out with some girls,” he said.
“What are their names? Where are they from?”
“Tourists. They wanted to go out in the vacuum. One of them sort of panicked when she got into freefall and I had to take her into one of the station airlocks. I was just taking the suits back.”
“Fine.” Kit’s heart beat time to another long moment of silence. “That doesn’t answer my question. What are their names? And if I wanted to talk to them, where would I look?”
“I don’t know where they’re staying. Some hotel, I guess.”
“I don’t believe you.” Marco stepped forward, his face within inches of Kit’s. His eyes were rimmed in red. “You were with Pasco’s Maria and her brother, weren’t you?” Spittle touched Kit’s upper lip.
Even though they stood in light gravity, Marco’s arm on Kit’s shoulder seemed to weigh tons. There was a bright pain behind Kit’s eyes. At least, he thought, Marco never lied to me. Never told me he was something he wasn’t.
Stumbling over his words, Kit told the man what he wanted to know.
*
“Hatch sealed. Pressurization test complete.” Flame drew burning paths along Ubu’s nerves. He recited the checklist purely as a way of keeping himself calm. “Personnel tube withdrawn. Pressurization test complete.” He reached to the one red light remaining on the board and closed the outer lock hatch that Kit had left open. “Trunk lock closed. Pressurization test complete.”
His bare feet kicked out at the floor, moved his tracked couch to the pilot’s station. Ubu could feel sweat trickling slowly down his nape. Now was the moment. He held the countdown at minus ten seconds, toggled the comm unit, and aimed an antenna at the Angelica’s control station.
“Angelica Control, this is Biagra Salvage personnel aboard singularity ship Runaway, cargo bay C-15. Request permission to undock from the hub for the purpose of testing ship maneuvering systems. Over.”
There was a moment’s pause. Angelica’s voice, when it came, was young, hesitant, and female.
“Angel Control to Runaway. Identify self again, please.”
Ubu took a deep breath. “Jock’s Castro of Biagra Salvage. We are evaluating ship systems at the request of shipowners OttoBanque.”
Jock’s Castro was a real person, Biagra Salvage a small division of Biagra-Exeter. A small amount of research in the Angelica directory had provided the necessary information.
There was another pause. Ubu blinked sweat from his eyes.
“Angel to Runaway. Is your flight plan on file?”
Ubu only realized he’d been holding his breath when he let it out and discovered that taking another breath felt wonderful. He grinned. Angelica Control had apparently concluded that she was in fact talking to Jock’s Castro.
“Filing plan now, Angel Control.” He touched a control that transmitted his phony plan. “The plan’s filed, Angel Control.”
“Angel to Runaway. Do you need shifting to Station COM?” The Center of Mass was where Runaway could be launched without the added complication of compensating for the station’s rotation.
“Negative, Angel Control. We can launch from Station C-15.”
There was another pause. “Plan evaluation positive, Runaway. Permission granted for station departure and independent scheduled maneuvers.”
Ubu restrained an urge to laugh. “Thank you, Angel Control. Departure in ten seconds.”
He touched the countdown toggle. In the corner of one eye, a holographic -10 became a holographic -9, then a holographic -8.
Station power coupling disengaged. -7. -6.
Electromagnets released Angel’s ferrous docking strips. -5. -4.
Bolts shot back from Runaway’s docking module. Runaway floated free in the docking bay. -3. -2.
Ubu pictured the guard sitting in front of the armored station doors, reading her magazine, unaware that the ship just behind the doors was leaving without her.
-1. 0.
Maneuvering jets hissed gently. Ubu felt a gentle tug on his harness straps as the station’s rotation threw the ship on a looping path into space. The command cage swung lightly on its gimbals. Runaway was free.
*
“No percentage in it. OttoBanque’s gratitude is limited. AIs aren’t programmed to say thanks.”
Kit watched as Marco put the neurojuice inhaler to each nostril and pressed the trigger. Marco sniffed and swiped at his nose with the back of a knotty forefinger. He took a bulb of grapefruit juice from the folding galley table and sipped at it.
“They might offer a reward after the ship’s stolen. You don’t know where Pasco’s Ubu is going, do you?”
Kit shook his head. Marco hadn’t even bothered to look at him when he asked his question. Kit felt empty, drained of weight and substance, and numbly wondered why he wasn’t floating randomly across Abrazo’s galley like a Brownian particle.
Marco toyed with his inhaler, thinking hard. “No glory, no money. Shit. I don’t give a damn if Ubu wants to go over the Edge. He won’t survive, but it’s none of my fucking business.” His eyes turned to Kit, and Kit’s nerves turned cold.
“You got off cheap, boy,” Marco said. “You learned something, and it didn’t cost the family a thing.”
“Yes, bossrider.”
“People are going to want to use you, Kit.” Patiently. “They’re going to take a profit percentage from every weakness you’ve got. Got that?”
“Yes, bossrider.”
“You know how you got used?”
“Yes, bossrider.”
Marco gave Kit a slow smile. “Tell me.”
Kit felt very alone standing on the cool tile of the galley floor. “I—” he started, then faded. Marco’s smile turned to stone.
“Pasco’s Maria got you to break the law for her. You put yourself in danger without even thinking about it, and that’s because you thought that she gave a damn about you just because she let you fuck yourself blind. Have I got that right?”
Kit closed his eyes. Warm fires burned brightly behind his lids. “Yes, bossrider.” It might well be true. He thought there might be more to it, but he really couldn’t tell any more and Marco’s version of events might be correct as far as things went. He just wanted the night to end.
“I’ve already given you all the shit jobs on the ship,” Marco said. His tone was conversational. “So there’s not much more I can inflict on you to show you how you shouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. So we’ll just have you do the shit jobs for a longer period of time, right?”
Kit opened his eyes. He realized he was swaying back and forth as he stood. “Fine, bossrider,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Yes, bossrider.”
Kit moved numbly to his rack, fell slowly toward it, touched once, bounced, settled again. He thought about Maria and wondered if she and Ubu were making their escape. All his anger was gone, burned away by Marco’s venom. The yearning and the sense of his own incompleteness remained.
He wished he was on the Runaway. Leaving everything behind, looking for something new.
*
Ubu looked at the radar and transponder displays. No ships nearby, no one within range to be cooked by the particle torch.
“Ten seconds to torch ignition. Mark.”
Ubu triggered the countdown. Another set of holographic numbers began flashing. Nozzles gimbaled to a new attitude. Matter poured into the singularity, creating huge energies confined only by the magnetic fields.
The fields transformed, allowing plasma to pour through the engine nozzles. A deep hum moved through the frame of the ship. Ubu felt it in his bones. Acceleration built gently, the ship’s enormous mass moving not to a sudden kick but to a slowly building impetus. The control cage swung on its gimbals, reorienting to the direction of thrust.
The flight plan he’d filed with Angelica Control featured this burn, a turn around Angelica’s largest moon followed by a deceleration and a return to Angel Station. Ubu planned instead to use the moon to slingshot him toward deep space, then make the first shoot as soon as he was a safe distance away from Angelica’s mass. If he kept the moon between himself and Angelica, Control might not even notice the deviation from the flight plan until its remote sensors on the far side of the moon picked up the burst of radiation from the singularity shot.
Acceleration built, climbing past one gee. Maxim growled deep in his throat and crouched uneasily on Ubu’s stomach, his ears flattening. Ubu looked at Beautiful Maria. She lay on the shooter’s couch with her eyes closed, the stimulus antennae forming a delicate lattice about her head. He could see her eyes moving under the lids: she was monitoring the ship’s progress through the stim antennae.
“You okay?” he said.
“Just resting.”
“Got your shoot planned?”
The corners of her mouth turned up in a strained smile. “Easiest I’ve ever conned. We’re not going anywhere in particular, right?”
Ubu grinned. “I guess not.”
“We’re just going Out. I’ll shoot us as far as I can, then we can figure out where we are once we get there.”
“Right.”
Ubu turned back to his board. Two gravities sat on his chest. Runaway was still accelerating. He almost missed Maria’s words.
“I wish we hadn’t lied to him.”
Ubu frowned at his control board. “We did what we had to do.”
Her voice was weary. “That’s all Marco’s ever done. What he had to do. How does that make us any better?”
Anger twisted in Ubu. “We’re not Marco, Maria.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re not.” Insistently.
“What about Colette?”
He had no answer to that.
Two and a half gees. Maxim’s weight bored into Ubu’s stomach. The cat was ship-bred and knew better than to try to move now.
“Don’t talk about it, then,” said Ubu.
Sadness pooled in Maria’s heart. Spacetime analogs moved slowly in her head. Projected onto her optical centers was the Angelica System as an electron might perceive it, a pattern of cold gravity sinks locked in their courses, bright magnetic streams, thermal configurations moving and flaring on Angelica itself. The vision, anticipating the Now, failed to divert her.
She had used Kit, taken advantage of his trust and friendship, and hadn’t even realized she was doing it. It had all seemed so natural.
The moon swung past, a cold well in spacetime speckled with low-intensity radio emissions from mining sites. Maria floated free in her harness as the torch cut out for a few seconds while the nozzles realigned; her heart beat madly and she took a few fast, unburdened breaths. Then she was pushed back into her couch again as the control cage swung and the ship began to accelerate on its new course, keeping the moon between itself and Angelica Station. Runaway was riding on the lip of the moon’s gravity well.
Matter poured into the ship’s singularity. Radiant brightness flared on the edge of its terrible gravity, its tides constrained by magnetic fields. The ship was poised a hair’s breadth from annihilation. Shooters learned early to take full advantage of the breadth of that hair.
Beautiful Maria thought about Kit. Gravity sat on her chest like sorrow.
“Maria. A problem.”
She opened her eyes, turned them toward Ubu. The control station superimposed itself on her view of the electron world.
“Angel Control has figured out something’s wrong. I’m getting queries.”
“You didn’t come around the moon as scheduled.”
“The controller must have been suspicious. Why’s she even paying attention to us?”
“Tell her you’ll respond in a minute. You’ve got attitude control problems. You’re trying to overcome them with a forced acceleration.”
“Right. Good idea. Tell me how soon you can shoot.”
Maria returned her attention to the stim analog. Massive bodies too close to a shoot complicated the equations and made the result problematical; there was also the problem of the burst of radiation that accompanied a shoot, and which could bum anyone too close to Runaway’s exit from the real.
“No,” Ubu was saying, “I do not wish to declare an emergency. We’ll be back to you, Angel Control.”
Approaches to the shoot spun out in Maria’s mind. The mining sites on the moon were only lightly shielded against radiation and there were even more lightly armored spacecraft hopping around. Patterns and trajectories blazed across the display, the minimum safety distance displayed as an ever-moving green globe centered on Runaway.
“At this acceleration we’ve got four minutes to shoot,” Maria said. With a push of her mind she began the countdown.
“Jesus Rice. I don’t believe this. She’s ordering us to shut down the torch and stand by for the Navy cutter.”
“We’ll be in another Now before the Navy even gets their captain out of bed.”
Ubu’s annoyance was unalloyed. “What if they shoot a missile at us? They’ll make us pay for it.”
Maria laughed. “We’re gonna be able to buy Angel Station when we get back, right? That’s the plan, right?”
“Why don’t they leave us alone?”
“Strap in and give me the shoot.”
Maria opened her eyes just in time to see Ubu turn off the radio with a stab from one finger. “There,” he said. “Shut the femme licebag up.”
“Stop being so agitated. We’ve got away with it, okay?”
“Yeah!” Grudgingly. “Okay.” He touched another control. “The command’s yours.”
Another level of awareness flooded Beautiful Maria’s perceptions. She felt the power of the torch, the matter seared by its near-escape from the black hole at Runaway’s heart.
The singularity burned in Maria’s thoughts, its dark weight poised in magnetic harness. Ever-changing calculations sped through the jump computer at speeds too rapid for Maria to comprehend. Displays flickered, making minor changes in course and trajectory. Maria couldn’t affect things at this level: her business would begin after the countdown ended.
Runaway crossed the safety line: no one nearby was going to get fried during the shoot. Seconds were left in the countdown.
The torch died. Maria drifted free in her harness. Warning lights were blinking; a soft tone poured from speakers.
The countdown ended. The powerful magnetic fields that confined the singularity opened a small but carefully calculated pathway.
Within the merest fragment of a second, the black hole that lived at the heart of the ship devoured Runaway and all in her.
*
Maria was in the Now.
The ship itself had vanished from her vision. She accelerated down the center of a crying radiant tunnel, poured down tightly confined magnetic fields onto the surface of a lightless sun. Above her, the universe spun past in accelerating brightness, its white light become shattering rainbows. The keen of dying matter sounded in her ears.
The Now was actually advanced in time, a jump up the T axis. The shoot computer was composed of row upon row of macroatoms, each transferring data faster than light, each a step ahead in time. Maria was experiencing Runaway’s dive into the singularity before it actually happened, while there was still time to alter the pattern.
Falling into the star, the ship was— would be— accelerated to relativistic speeds: the insignificant fraction of a picosecond in which the magnetic bonds of Runaway’s singularity were loosed and the ship devoured was experienced by Maria as the better part of an hour.
It was an hour in which she was very busy. On this microlevel of existence, the constitution of the singularity was not uniform— flares burst forth from the singularity’s null heart, scattering radiation, only to be swallowed by gravity and buffered by magnetic walls. Tidal eddies created wide variation in gravitation and velocity. All of this was reflected in wild uncertainty in the outcome of the shoot: ships could end a shot hundreds of thousands of miles— light-years even— from the plotted destination.
The taste of the Now on her tongue, Maria rode the ship into the eye of the gravitational storm, fought to overcome the random elements introduced into the shoot by the star’s variation. It was like riding the pinball in a game of blackhole, with the payoff expressed in distance crossed rather than cash won. Runaway lurched, staggering in a confused cross-chop of gravity waves, and Maria altered the configuration of the magnetic bottle by a push of her mind, compensating for the star’s variation.
Now...
She sensed a change ahead, a fluctuation in the singularity’s mass: she cut a slightly wider orbit, accelerating, and when the fluctuation came it served only to draw Runaway back onto its optimal course. Navigation aids burned their configurations into her senses. A flare patterned her belly with radiation, was compensated for by an alteration in the magnetic bottle. Her awareness skimmed closer to the singularity. Her fingers were outstretched to touch stinging bands of radiation. Magnetic storms howled in her throat. Relativistic effects increased.
Now...
Electron awareness poured into her body. She was dealing with events on the quantum level now, and her talents leaped into play, glitches pouring from her without conscious volition—she inhibited the probability of a flare warping the magnetic bottle, let it burst out behind so that its force would increase Runaway’s acceleration. No other shooter in existence could do this: no one else operated at this level. Her navigational aids lagged behind reality, unable to comprehend events on this scale; she worked from instinct alone, distorting gravity waves, dampening mutability, fighting tooth and claw against the furious, unforgiving mathematics of the singularity... animal noises grated from her throat as she ripped at the fabric of quantum existence, fought to the last moment in order to keep from being overwhelmed by sensation, by gravity.
The battle was lost before she began it. When gravity finally overcame her, when the singularity finally swallowed her awareness in its coils, she gave a cry of defiance before throwing wide her arms and embracing the annihilation of her senses, her being... Whitehole.
The universe leaped intact into Maria’s mind. Expanding from the singularity, a radio cry burned outward toward dull stars that sat in their distant wells.
Runaway had leaped from the Angelica System and was drifting in deep space, light-years from any pursuit.