In all his years of piloting small starships, Quinn had never heard anything like the din surrounding him as the Dulcinea hurtled in a mad spiral through the wormhole. The ship’s hull moaned like an angry ghost, her engines screamed like frightened children, and her consoles crackled and spat sparks every which way.
Despite his best efforts to control the ship’s wild pitching and rolling, it grazed the blinding, blue-white swirl of the wormhole’s membrane and then caromed off, its movement made even more erratic by the fleeting impact.
A hiccup in the inertial dampers or artificial gravity (or some other system Quinn always took for granted until it was gone) knocked Bridy on her ass. Clawing her way up from the deck, she growled, “Dammit! Keep her steady!”
He glared at her. “Great idea, sweetheart! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Watch our yaw!”
Quinn keyed compensating maneuvers into the helm faster than he’d ever done before, but the ship reacted like a turtle slogging through mud. No matter how hard Quinn tried to get ahead of the wormhole’s horrendous gravitational distortions, he remained fractions of a second too slow to prevent the worst from coming to pass. He grabbed his armrests. “Hang on!”
Dulcinea careened off the side of the wormhole’s throat. A screech of stressed metal was drowned out by a deafening boom of collision. Overhead lights and console displays stuttered and went dark, leaving the cockpit illuminated by the spectral blue radiance of the wormhole.
Bridy stretched past Quinn to reach the copilot’s console, her movements strobed by the wormhole’s flickering light. Then she patched in the ship’s auxiliary power, restoring the lights and most of the controls. “Mains are fried,” she shouted over the howling chaos. “Losing antimatter containment!”
Dead ahead, the terminus of the wormhole was little more than a pinprick of white light at the end of a churning maelstrom. “Just give me a few more seconds!”
“We won’t make it!” She armed the fuel-pod-ejection trigger.
“Don’t! We’re almost clear!” Space-time distortions rocked the ship as the wormhole’s far mouth spun open, spat it out, and sent it tumbling madly into a firestorm. All Quinn could see outside the cockpit was half-molten rocky debris, glowing-hot clouds of ionized gas, and multihued flashes of lightning.
Every gauge in the cockpit redlined. “Containment’s failing,” Bridy said as she ejected the ship’s antimatter supply.
“All power to shields!”
“Patching in reserves.”
The universe flared white, and then a thunderclap pummeled Quinn like a sonic hammer. All around him, the ship’s onboard systems let out sad, whimpering noises before expiring with a slowly fading hum. At least the helm’s still responding, Quinn consoled himself—before it, too, began deteriorating. Coaxing every bit of performance possible from his wounded vessel, he guided it through a passage between two quarters of a shattered planet whose scattered chunks were gradually being pulled away from one another. Dulcinea trembled as boulder-sized hunks of rock and ice were deflected by its navigational force field.
Without taking his eyes off their perilous environment, Quinn said to Bridy, “I need a damage report, a-sap.”
“On it.” She got up and moved from one cockpit console to another. “Warp drive’s down. We’ve got a few minutes before the impulse coil fails. Life support’s barely there. And we lost the subspace antenna.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about the cargo?”
“It’s fine.”
“All right, then. We just need to find a place to set down and patch this ol’ girl back together.” Outside, the haze of radiant dust began to dim. “We’re almost out of this soup. See if you can get the sensors running and find us a planet—preferably one with a breathable atmosphere.”
Bridy was staring slackjawed into space. “Uh, Quinn . . . ?”
“What?”
“Look.”
He followed her gaze. “I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.”
When he turned his attention back to the view outside the ship, he understood. Then his jaw dropped half open in shock. “There are no stars.” Beholding the empty heavens with dread, he muttered, “Where the hell are we?”
Bridy looked perplexed. “No idea. We might be so far from the center of the universe that none of its light has reached here yet, or we might be in a pocket universe branched off from our own.”
“A universe with no stars? Eternal darkness? I’m not what you’d call a believer, but are you sure we didn’t die and go to hell?”
“No, I’m not.” Bridy perked up as she pointed at the sensor display. “Hang on, correction: There is one star—a white dwarf, temperature ninety-seven hundred Kelvin. Bearing one-seven-seven mark one-five-oh, distance one hundred eight-point-six million kilometers.” She cast a fearful glance at Quinn. “And it has one planet, orbiting at a distance of five-point-two-four million kilometers, right in the middle of the habitable zone. Atmosphere is M-Class nitrogen-oxygen.” Then she called up another screen of data, which showed a familiar energy waveform. “It’s the Jinoteur Pattern. And guess where it’s coming from.”
Quinn swallowed, only to find it difficult because his mouth had gone dry. “What do you wanna bet that ain’t a coincidence?”
“You know we have to go down there. We need to track this to its source.”
“Dammit, I knew you’d say that. Not that we have much choice. We need to get this busted bird planetside on the double.” He sighed, then plotted a heading to the signal’s point of origin. “It’s gonna be a rough landing, honey. You’d better make sure everything’s still tied down and shut tight.”
Bridy got up, took one step aft, then stopped. “I’ve seen you botch normal landings when the ship wasn’t fried. Are you sure you can do this?”
“Positive.”
“Without getting us killed, I mean.”
“Ask me again in thirty minutes.”
Twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds later, Bridy was too busy hyperventilating to ask Quinn much of anything.
Turbulence buffeted the Dulcinea as it arrowed through the upper atmosphere of the white dwarf’s solitary, tiny planet. Critical failures cascaded through the ship’s major systems, leaving only maneuvering thrusters and the primary sensors functioning for what promised to be a brutal planetfall.
Quinn shouted over the roar of wind and engines, “How’s the signal?”
“Five by five.” Bridy checked its origin against the ship’s heading. “Dead ahead, range nine hundred sixty kilometers.”
“Right.” He started flipping toggles on the helm. “Braking thrusters in ten seconds.” The ship pierced a thick layer of cloud cover and then leveled out above a desolate, arctic plain. Massive peaks of jagged black stone made Bridy think of daggers thrust up by a giant’s hand through the planet’s snowy surface. Studying the wild landscape, Quinn frowned. “Not many good places to land.”
“I’ll watch the ground, you watch the instruments.”
“I would if they still worked.” He slammed his palm against the console in front of him, but his attempt at percussive maintenance seemed to have no effect. “How’s the ground looking?”
“A lot closer than it did five seconds ago.”
He primed the braking thrusters. “Hold on to your ass.”
The engines boomed, and the rapid deceleration threw them forward. Bridy winced as her seat’s safety harness straps dug into her chest. Outside the cockpit the landscape spun, black rock and white ice melting into a gray blur.
Bridy pointed at a fleeting image of level ground. “There!”
“Too far!” Quinn fought with the ship’s controls to little apparent effect. “Main thruster’s gone! We got five seconds to set down before we fall down!”
“Starboard! Get the nose up!”
She grabbed the console white-knuckle tight.
Quinn pulled the ship through a hard turn that arrested most of its forward momentum. Dulcinea’s landing thrusters sputtered erratically as Quinn guided it to a mountainside ledge barely as wide as the ship itself. All at once the engines cut off, and the ship dropped the last half meter onto a deep bed of ice-crusted snow. The thud of impact reverberated and then stopped—enabling Bridy to hear a low, dangerous rumbling from high overhead. She and Quinn looked up in unison through the top of the cockpit’s canopy at the snow-capped peak looming over their precarious perch. They waited for several seconds, neither speaking nor breathing, while waiting to see whether the mountain would welcome the Dulcinea by burying it. Then the distant tremor faded, leaving only the faint creaking of the ship’s overtaxed hull as it settled into its new resting place.
Their wide-open eyes remained fixed on the mountaintop.
Bridy’s voice was barely a whisper. “So . . . that happened.”
Quinn rose from his chair and trod cautiously aft. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a short nervous breakdown.”