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Chapter Seven

THE spike leading to the observation chamber was even narrower than it looked from the outside. Jeff, squirming up the ladder of a narrow chimney barely two feet wide, thought of the stories he had read as a child. Growing up in a Kopal household, many of those tales had been of old Earth navy days; of voyages to unknown lands, of cannibals and mutinies and floggings and keelhaulings, of pirates and treasure troves and hanging in chains.

Those times were long gone; but what he was doing now must surely be little different in spirit from the old crewman punished for some trifling offense. This was the equivalent of being sent to the crow's nest or crosstrees at the top of a mast, to hang and hover there as long as the captain chose to leave him.

At least there would be no gale-force winds to tear at him, no days of pitiless sun glare or of snow and hail to freeze his body.

The little observation room, when he finally inched his way out to it, was not designed for comfort. He gulped and shivered as he poked his head through the entry hatch. Maybe wind and driving rain would not be so bad. Seen from inside, the wall of the nacelle that he was entering was perfectly transparent. He seemed to be facing open space, with nothing between him and the great luminous shroud of the Messina Dust Cloud. Below him as he scrambled through the hatch lay the rounded front of the Aurora, the expanding eldritch glow of its drive barely visible behind the curved bulk of the hull.

He had to stand up and grope with his fingers to find the bubble of the nacelle's wall. He learned that he was in a spherical chamber only five feet high, so he could never fully stand up. When he closed the hatch through which he had entered, a fold-out chair on top of it allowed him to sit down. The chair could be rotated, to give a view in any direction. He could also pull up a rudimentary control panel, with access to the ship's knowledge bank and communications system. And that was all. There was nothing to eat, nothing to drink. If he needed to use a bathroom, he was out of luck.

Jeff sat down and turned the chair so that he was staring straight up, in the Aurora's direction of travel. Nothing was supposed to happen for the next few hours, and he could certainly use some time to think. He was accustomed to the idea that a member of the Kopal family was regarded as someone special, from whom a superior level of performance was expected. That, to someone incapable of outstanding performance, was bad enough. It was even worse to learn that many people were going to hate him, not for anything he had done, but simply because he was a member of those privileged Kopals.

Why had he been sent out to the Messina Dust Cloud, working for Border Command? It had seemed straightforward enough when it first happened, a technique to make sure that he was far from home where his mediocre performance and lack of courage could not embarrass the rest of the family.

Mercy Hooglich had put her fat finger on an obvious problem with that explanation. He had to agree with her; Uncle Giles would do anything he could to show Myron's superiority to Jeff. That should have meant assignment to Central Command for both of them. So there had to be some other explanation of why he was here—and also, according to Hooglich, a reason why the Aurora, lightly armed and with a minimum crew, had been set the impossible task of persuading the people of the Cyborg Territory to surrender. Were the two things related? He couldn't see how. And what did Hooglich mean, when she spoke of the Anadem field? Although he had spent endless hours browsing the science banks—"Utter wa-a-aste of time," Aunt Willow had sniffed—he had never come across it.

He keyed a query into the science knowledge bank and listened to the quiet reply. "No direct entry. Cross-reference to speculation bank?"

"Yes."

"Level?"

Jeff wasn't quite sure what that meant. "Elementary?"

"Cross-reference performed. From the speculation bank, elementary level: the existence of the Anadem field has never been confirmed. The possibility of such a field was proposed in a series of theoretical papers by S. Macafee. According to Macafee's calculations, the Anadem field would permit a modification of space-time, of such a nature that local inertial nullification would be achieved in the vicinity."

So much for the elementary level.

"Does that mean that if you were on a ship using an Anadem field, you would not feel any acceleration?"

"If you were in the correct location, that would be true. The Anadem field, if one existed, would be a displacement field. Some parts of the ship, close to the field, would feel the effects of acceleration much diminished. Other parts, however, would experience an augmented acceleration."

Jeff could sort of visualize what was being said. It was as though you had the power to move the acceleration forces, so that instead of feeling them where people were located, they would be effective only in places where machines and equipment were found.

"Why is this only considered speculation? Do other people question the results?"

"Sol system experts claim that the analysis by S. Macafee is obscure, and some of the base assumptions are questionable. However, others claim that devices employing the Anadem field already are in use."

That answer was oddly stated. Sol system experts. Why not just "experts"?

"Who and where is Macafee?"

"No information is available on the background and training of S. Macafee. A possible location is currently listed as the Confluence Center."

"I never heard of that. Where is it?"

"The Confluence Center is located within the Messina Dust Cloud. Coordinates are as follows . . . ."

Jeff ignored the long strings of digits that came over the communication link. He had at least a partial answer to the sudden change in Mercy Hooglich. The navy grapevine must associate the rumored Anadem field with the Messina Dust Cloud. That meant Cyborg Territory, the target of the current mission. In Hooglich's mind the Aurora's mission, and even Jeff's own presence, were linked in some way with the Anadem field.

How?

Jeff stared at the lilac and purple nimbus of the cloud. Somewhere, somewhere out there within the unknown depths, lay a place known as the Confluence Center. Somewhere within that Confluence Center sat S. Macafee—man or woman, or even cyborg. Nothing had been said about that.

And somehow, in a way that Jeff could not begin to imagine, Mercy Hooglich thought that their mission, Macafee, and the Anadem field might be linked.

Jeff realized that he was no longer staring vaguely at the expanse of the cloud. His eye was drawn, again and again, to a single pinwheel of darkness.

"Directly ahead. Is that the Lizard Reef?"

"The Lizard Reef is not directly ahead. Our trajectory will actually take us clear of it. However, the object that you refer to is the Lizard Reef."

"Why does it look that way? It's like a whirlpool."

"In the middle of every reef lies a ring vortex. That is a dense ring of dust and gas, rotating in on itself. The vortex stability is maintained by an electromagnetic field. What is observed is not the field itself, but the cloud of dust around it. The middle of the vortex forms a hole in the middle of the ring."

Jeff could see it, now that he knew what to look for. A hole of utter darkness lay like the pupil of an eye at the exact center of the swirl.

"If a ship passes through the exact center, there will be a big change in speed but no ill effects. The danger of a reef comes in an inaccurate passage through the eye. A ship that goes through even slightly off-center is torn apart."

The pinwheel seemed remote, decorative, and harmless against its background of the great dust currents of the Messina Cloud. It would be easy, in ignorance, to stray too close. Jeff checked the Aurora's course vector from the ship's database and confirmed that they would pass comfortably clear of the heading listed for the Lizard Reef.

He glanced up again, reassured—and saw not one but two swirls of darkness in the sky ahead. The second one had appeared in the minute or so while he had been checking the ship's course vector. And the new one seemed to be moving.

Could a reef do that? Or was it some illusion, an effect of the Aurora's own motion?

He looked more closely at the second dark patch. It no longer matched the Lizard Reef in appearance. Now it was surrounded by a silver glitter, tiny sparkles that dotted the near vacuum of the Messina Dust Cloud with a million flecks of light. As he watched, those dots of light dwindled and faded, to leave behind emptiness of a curious clarity.

An octagonal shape appeared where the sparks had been. Around its perimeter sat eight ragged blue-white tendrils, pointing outward and thinning gradually to invisibility. Next to the tendrils the pattern of background stars was compressed and distorted, as though the object was imposing its own eightfold symmetry on space itself. As he watched, the shape increased its size. It was moving to lie directly ahead of the Aurora.

Jeff caught his breath. He switched the communications link to connect him with the bridge of the Aurora.

"Captain Dufferin." He hardly recognized his own voice, it was so hoarse and nervous. "This is Ensign Kopal."

"Kopal! Didn't I give you direct orders not to—"

"Captain, we are about to suffer a space sounder encounter." Jeff's voice cracked on the last word, and he had to swallow before he could go on. "It's almost directly ahead of us. And it's getting closer—fast."

 

Myron would have done it exactly right: Observe with a clear eye and a calm head, while at the same time comparing what he saw with what he had learned about space sounders.

Jeff knew all that, but it made no difference. He was not Myron. Nervousness mixed with enormous excitement was turning his head into a gigantic stew pot where facts and fancies clashed in a bubbling maelstrom of ideas. It didn't help that he could hear Captain Dufferin shouting orders over the communication channel, his voice so high in pitch that Squeaky was the only possible nickname. The captain must have picked up the image of the sounder on his observation screens, and obviously he didn't like what he saw.

That was all right. Neither did Jeff. Space sounders were supposed to be found only in the neighborhood of reefs, but the Lizard Reef was far ahead and here was a sounder, out in open space and closing in on the Aurora. The sounders were known to have some strange attraction for the gemstones known as Cauthen starfires, but unless a ship had a starfire on board the sounders were supposed to be harmless. The Aurora had no starfire on board—but there was no doubt that the sounder's attention was on the ship.

The distance between the two was closing steadily. From his position Jeff had a view of the sounder's long, tapering body, kilometers of near-perfect blackness occulting the pale glow of the Messina Dust Cloud. The octagonal shape at the front had become a great maw, surrounded by its eight blue-white tendrils. According to navy files, that maw could stretch wide enough to engulf a full battle cruiser—a ship fifty times the size of the Aurora. There were stories of vessels swallowed whole, their crews carried off to nowhere so fast that the final desperate messages were redshifted to a small fraction of their original signal frequencies. They were traveling at some large fraction of light speed—and still alive, not crushed by the monstrous and near-instantaneous acceleration. No Sol scientist had any explanation as to how that could happen.

The sounder filled a quarter of the sky ahead when the captain's next scream reached the observation bubble. It sounded to Jeff as though he was calling, "Emergency stations! Emergency stations!" but his voice was overlaid with a scream of interference, a deafening shreep-shreep-shreep that set teeth on edge. It was the call of the sounder itself, filling space with high-energy radio signals. Against that background, Jeff could hardly hear Dufferin's frantic instructions.

The emergency stations were amidships, in the main body of the ship where the pinnace was located. It was tiny compared with the main ship, but if the Aurora ever had to be abandoned the pinnace had the power and supplies to carry the crew to safety.

He stood up to stow the folding seat away, so that he would be able to lift the hatch and start back along the narrow shaft that led to the main hull. His hand was on the seat back when the Aurora's drive went without warning from low to high power. Instead of the light acceleration of easy cruising, the ship surged forward.

Even if he had been ready, Jeff would have had trouble remaining on his feet. He fell forward over the folding chair. It collapsed under his weight, sending him crashing to the floor of the bubble. He landed hard on his arms and chest, barely able to protect his face with his hands. Lying unable to move, he both felt and saw the long column that supported the observation bubble flex and whip under the sudden force of the drive. The floor of the nacelle resonated beneath his chest with the deep, groaning note of a gigantic organ pipe.

He rolled over, braced himself on his hands, and struggled to his knees. He had to get back to the main hull. If anywhere at all was safe, that would be it. Even if the sounder swallowed up the Aurora, the crew might still escape in the pinnace.

New shouts and screams were coming over the communication channel, Dufferin's high-pitched cries mingled now with some deeper bellow. It sounded as though a furious argument were going on below. The shreep-shreep-shreep of sounder interference became louder. Jeff looked out, away from the ship. The Aurora's evasive action, far from losing the sounder, had brought it closer. The black maw seemed only meters away, spanning the sky.

He paused for a moment, imagining he saw a spark of iridescence deep within the mouth's dark cavity. Could that be a Cauthen starfire, the fabulous gem that had sparked the original exploration and development of the Messina Dust Cloud? If so, he might be the first living person who had ever seen one, inside a sounder.

His sanity returned. There'd be time to think about historic firsts only if you remained a living person. Get back to the main hull!

He pushed aside the shattered chair and struggled to lift the hatch. The little plate seemed to weigh a ton. Before he could move it, another sharp pulse of force came from the Aurora's drive. The spike holding the observation nacelle curved through thirty degrees, sending Jeff rolling around the curved floor of the bubble. Moments later, the drive cut back to such a gentle thrust that he was almost floating.

As he rose to his feet Jeff had his second attack of sanity. The sounds coming through the communications link suggested total chaos in the control room. Dufferin must have been trying anything he could think of, blindly, to escape the sounder. And as long as the Aurora veered and darted erratically, in random directions and with variable thrust, Jeff would never be able to make his way through the narrow shaft to the main hull. He would be all right on the ladder now, with the drive throttled back almost to nothing. But how long would that last? Another pulse of two or three Gs, like the one they had just experienced, and his grip would tear free. He would accelerate helplessly down the twenty-meter drop. At three Gs, a fall of one tenth of that distance could be deadly.

He was stuck in the observation nacelle. His only possible escape route was too dangerous to use. That realization forced a decision: If he could do nothing, he would do nothing. It calmed Jeff completely. He rolled onto his back, cushioned the back of his head on his hands, and stared up at the blind face of the sounder. It had so grown in size that he felt he could reach out through the transparent wall of the bubble and touch one of the floating blue-white tentacles.

That was an illusion, he knew, an effect created by the sounder's immense size and the lack of anything to provide a scale of distance. The sounder was still probably a hundred meters away. The maw was opening wider, as though preparing to ingest the ship. It was impossible to believe that the object he was looking at was not a sentient creature, well aware of the presence of the Aurora.

Both ship and space sounder had turned during their past few seconds of violent maneuvers. The observation bubble now pointed not toward the glowing face of the Messina Dust Cloud, but to an expanse of open starry sky. Jeff could see an octagonal pattern of distortion imposed on that background. Far too many stars were visible, as though space near the sounder had been drawn in and compressed by its presence.

He tried to estimate the rate at which the maw was increasing in apparent size. Unless something changed, the Aurora—or at least its observation bubble, which was the part that most concerned him—would be within that dark mouth in less than thirty seconds.

The knowledge that you were about to die was supposed to calm you. It didn't work that way at all. Jeff, gazing down the maw, felt an all-over terror. He didn't want to die. His pulse was pounding faster and faster, his guts were knotted with the fear of imminent pain and death.

The blow, when it came, felt as though his heart was smashing out of his chest. A terrible, overwhelming force crushed him, molding his body to the rounded contours of the little chamber. In navy centrifuge tests he had endured as much as seven Gs. This was nine G, ten G, what? More, far more, than anything he had ever experienced. Part of the broken chair was digging deep into his shoulder, but he could not change his position by a millimeter.

His eyes would not move in his head. He saw only a shrinking and darkening circle, straight in front of him. The maw was near the center, and he stared at it. It was coming closer—fast—but at the same time it was sliding to one side. The observation nacelle filled with the writhing glow of one of the blue-white tentacles, then suddenly that ribbon of light was also moving past. Jeff saw the broad side of the sounder, like a wall of darkness speeding by. There came a crackle of discharge, as sheets of pink lightning enveloped the Aurora and pulsed within the interior of the bubble. The electronic shreep-shreep-shreep of the sounder rose to a new maximum.

The Aurora leapt forward as though goaded by the energy pumped into it. Jeff had not believed that the acceleration could possibly increase again. But it did. The new force that pushed him to the unforgiving floor went beyond intolerable. He no longer cared what happened to him. He just wanted it to stop.

It didn't stop, and it didn't stop, and it didn't stop.

And then at last, as the world darkened and he slid into unconsciousness, it did.

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