Into the Maelstrom Read online

  “How big a specimen do you need?” Helena asked.

  “What? Just a few micrograms would do.”

  “Very well, I’ll harmonize the field of a small jolly boat to pass through the ship’s fields. The boat can phase out for the few seconds necessary to recover your sample without endangering the whole ship. Magnetic tidal effects are limited on such a low mass object. It will also present a smaller target to incoming rocks. I won’t risk trying to bring the jolly back in through the ship’s field as the harmonization will drift out of phase within minutes. We will rendezvous and recover the boat from a quiet area beyond the debris field. Is that satisfactory?”

  “I suppose so, seems a lot of stuff and nonsense to me, usual bureaucratic ineptitude, typical of the military—”

  She cut the link while Finkletop was still blathering and gave the necessary orders.

  The Reggie Kray’s field shimmered metallic green when the jolly boat passed through. The phase harmonization with the boat’s field was less than perfect. That observation caused Helena little surprise. No human procedure in the history of the universe had ever achieved perfection. She saw no reason to assume that this was about to change any time soon for her benefit.

  Finkletop insisted on supervising the sampling personally. Helena had been equally insistent that a naval rating coxswain the small craft, not one of the academics. She watched the boat’s progress on a holographic screen. Once clear, the boat adjusted its heading and moved to match speeds with a debris pile. It stopped while the coxswain waited for a signal from the ship indicating he could dephase safely. Well, not safely perhaps but at least without facing instant destruction. Safety is one of those irregular nouns.

  Communication was impossible over any distance through the Continuum. Anything not protected by a field rapidly decayed or was ejected into realspace. At short range lasers could exchange narrow bandwidth data. Small open frame crews often resorted to hand gestures and flashing lights.

  The ship’s information analyzers tracked and predicted the immediate debris field. An icon indicated a break in the debris bombardment. It was now or never. She sent confirmation to the jolly boat.

  The boat’s field flicked off and it drifted towards the debris. Steering thrusters fired to brake the craft alongside a stream of gravel and match velocities. A mechanical arm extended and took a sample. Sparkles ran along the arm where microscopic dust moving at a high relative speed struck the ceramic surface.

  The arm had almost withdrawn when the jolly boat shuddered. Its hull flexed under the impact of particles larger than microscopic dust. A ceramic plate peeled off and spun away. Jets of escaping air distilled into arches of silver crystals that fanned out in the magnetar’s strong tidal gravitational and magnetic fields like a celestial peacock’s tail.

  Helena swore.

  The jolly boat should have been safe enough in realspace for that short period of time. The ship’s autos predicted a ninety-five per cent chance of success. She should have anticipated that the unlikeliest disaster would happen at the first opportunity. The gods of probability delighted in shitting on mankind’s collective head from a great height.

  She crossed metaphorical fingers and waited for the jolly boat’s field to reform. Survival suits would protect the crew for a while. She counted slowly to three but it never happened. The boat’s field generator must be knocked out. The gods were piling improbability upon improbability today. They probably didn’t like Finkletop any more than she did but why stick the boot in on her watch?

  The boat’s crew were in the deepest possible fertilizer. It was only a matter of time before a bigger impact smeared them like raspberry jam across a slice of toast.

  “Close and try to enclose the jolly boat in our Continuum field,” Helena ordered. “Finkletop you feckin’ lunatic,” she added under her breath.

  The Reggie Kray’s pilot swung the ship around as if it was a one-man frame and accelerated smoothly. They reached the boat just as its field unexpectedly flicked back on. The two energy bubbles interacted dynamically in a sharp release of violet lightning. The boat couldn’t penetrate the ship’s field because its field had drifted out of phase during the off-on transition. The debris strike probably hadn’t helped either.

  The ship pushed the smaller vessel with its field like a ball on the edge of an avalanche.

  “All halt,” Helena said, trying to keep her voice calm.

  Then something happened, something unfathomable, something she had never witnessed before in all her years in the navy.

  The boat imploded soundlessly leaving nothing but a black stain. Helena had the impression of spreading darkness. A dark spear thrust into the Reggie Kray, collapsing its field like a pin going into a balloon. The ship rang like a bell struck by a hammer. That’s not possible, Helena thought, we’re only semi-phased. Nothing that powerful can penetrate our field. A deep chill froze her bones and the lights went out.

  Helena felt cold. Her throat hurt like hell. Water vapor condensed from her breath. It hung in the air like a superior’s admonishment. Only the glow from instruments leaking across the cabin broke the darkness. To top it all she had one hell of a headache.

  “Status?” she asked.

  Well, she tried to ask but what came out was a croak.

  “Fusion motors decoupled. Trying to get them back on line before our batteries fail,” said a voice.

  Helena located the source of said voice. Seckon, the engineering officer, stood against a console stabbing down at a screen with both forefingers. The rating who should have operated it was on the floor. Blood matted his hair. He stared at Helena with open sightless eyes. An icicle of frozen saliva hung from his lips. The poor bastard had frozen to death, making her wonder how long she’d been out.

  What was the engineering officer doing on her bridge? What was she doing on the deck? Unanswered questions orbited around her mind. Nothing made any sense.

  She pulled herself upright using her chair as a crutch. She realized she had missed some important piece of information. What had Seckon said? The motors were out, that was it. The emergency power must be on or she would be floating under zero gravity.

  A loud crack sounded and the deck twanged like the skin on a kettle drum. Helena gripped her command chair tightly. Oh God the motors were out. That meant the field was down and they were still in the debris stream.

  The lights snapped on. The ship suddenly hummed with that faint background vibration that was so normal a part of her life that she never usually noticed it at all.

  “Getting there, ma’am, field on,” Seckon said triumphantly.

  “Good man.”

  Helena sat down and activated her chair. The navigation hologram sprang to life. She switched to damage status, causing it to light up with red and orange icons like New Year decorations in a shopping arcade. Her ship was a bloody mess but what struck her as odd was the temperature. Parts of the ship were well below freezing. She boosted power to environmental control to start hot air circulating.

  “That’s not right,” said Seckon, frowning.

  “Which of our many failed systems do you mean?” Helena asked.

  “The heat sinks, ma’am. They’re . . . well, have a look yourself.”

  Helena triggered the necessary controls and did a double take.

  “My screen says they’re empty, stone cold empty,” she said.

  “Mine too,” replied the engineering officer. “But they can’t be. The monitoring system must be faulty.”

  “Great. Any sign of the jolly boat?”

  “Haven’t looked, I was too busy starting the motors.”

  Helena activated a scan. Scanning while semi-phased was inefficient but the boat should be close enough to detect. There was no sign of it at all, not even wreckage from the hull registering. She couldn’t tarry as for all she knew the heat sinks could fail at any moment. She consulted her navigation charts then pressed the icon for wideband communication.

  “All crew, this is
the captain. We have sustained considerable damage but essential systems are functioning.”

  Helena crossed her fingers at that point, for real not metaphorically. She had no idea what state the ship was really in or how long anything would function. She couldn’t trust her instruments so she was blind, but it didn’t hurt to boost the crew’s morale. If something vital failed then they were all dead anyway and her people’s morale would cease to be a concern.

  “We passed a habitable world some two hours normal sailing time away and I propose to head for it. We’ll be traveling slowly so as not to test anything to destruction but we should make landfall in just over three hours. Captain out.”

  She looked around the bridge for the pilot. He sat up and was noisily sick on the deck. Helena sighed.

  “Please stay on the bridge, Mr. Seckon,” she said to the engineering officer. “It looks as if I will be conning the ship personally and I would like you to nurse the motors for me.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  Helena found a small river on her landing approach. It was bordered by trees restricted to within a few meters of the water so she set the ship down on nearby scrubland nearby, not wishing to push her luck with the strained hull by trying for the tree-lined bank. That meant extra work for the crew in rigging a hose to the river but she was in no great hurry. She wanted every system thoroughly tested before they began the long voyage home.

  The Reggie Kray supported its bulk on proactive self-levelling landing struts that balanced the stresses affecting the hull. Most ships dispensed with such expensive technology but most ships landed only on perfectly flat reinforced starport pads or on the water. A research ship needed to be able to land on any vaguely flat surface so it devoted valuable carrying capacity to rough terrain landing gear.

  Helena observed the semi-desert terrain with a disinterested eye despite its forlorn beauty. She had stood on so many alien worlds that the novelty had long passed off—seen one wilderness, seen them all. She barely even noticed the change in smell from the tang of the sterile filtered ship’s air to the mix of organic aromas associated with a living ecosystem. She disregarded the subtly different spectrum of the sun overhead from the Brasilian standard light used on the ship.

  She walked around the vessel to check the hull. It was extremely unlikely that she would spot anything not already revealed by whatever instruments were functioning. Nevertheless, a flight check was traditional and would reassure the crew.

  What was left of the crew, she corrected herself bitterly. Out of fourteen naval personal she had lost two in the jolly boat and had four more casualties on the ship. Three of those lay in induced comas in sick bay until they reached civilization or what passed for it this side of the Bight. She doubted if more than two would ever be revived even with proper hospitalization. Not even modern medicine could do much with the burst cells of a frozen brain. The fourth was already dead.

  The research team was harder hit as the B Hull had been closer to the jolly boat. Only Flipper Wallace and a young male technician survived. Flipper wisely kept out of Helena’s path but the technician was a practical sort who made himself useful to the shorthanded crew.

  Her datapad chimed where it was hung off her belt.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’ve rigged hoses into the river and are ready to start pumping, Captain,” said the mate.

  “Very good, carry on.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  Helena backed up so she had a better view of her ship’s dorsal vents. The blue-white sun shone brightly, causing her to shade her eyes when she looked up. She should have brought a sun shield. She should have done many things including not letting Finkletop goad her into crazy plans.

  The heat vents opened. She waited for the white rush of condensing steam from the water flushing out the heat sinks. She waited but nothing happened.

  After a few seconds she touched her datapad.

  “What the hell’s going on, Seckon? Why aren’t the pumps working?”

  Seckon was at his station in Engineering.

  “They’re working fine. The water’s running straight through.”

  “Hold on.”

  Helena ran back to the ship and peered underneath. River water gushed from vents under the A hull and trickled across the dry yellow soil.

  “It seems the instruments were quite accurate when they indicated that the heat sinks are cool. We can leave any time you order,” Seckon said.

  “But that’s not possible,” Helena replied. “Heat doesn’t just disappear.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  Helena could almost hear the shrug from her engineering officer.

  “Find that bloody girl and send her to me—now.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Seckon did not need to ask which girl. Whatever he did to insert a squib up Flipper’s arse clearly worked. She shot out of the ship and scuttled over to Helena, moving at a faster speed than she had hitherto employed since she came aboard.

  “You asked to see me, Ms. Frisco?” asked Flipper

  “No, I didn’t ask to see you. I summoned you,” Helena snarled in reply. “What the hell has Finkletop done to my ship?”

  “The professor doesn’t like me talking about our work,” she said evasively. “He has enemies and rivals.”

  “Finkletop is dead so all his problems are over. Yours are just beginning if I don’t get some answers. You address me as Captain or ma’am. As I have co-opted you into my crew you are subject to naval discipline up to and including summary execution for mutiny. Am I making myself clear?”

  Helena glared at the girl so hard that she backed up a step. Actually, Helena was not up enough on military law to know if that interpretation was correct but she rightly assumed that Flipper knew even less about military law than did she.

  “Um, yes,” Flipper said, flashing frightened eyes.

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Helena said, remorselessly rubbing the girl’s nose in her new pecking order.

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “So explain that explosion to me.”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  “Indulge me, speculate wildly.”

  “Do you know anything about the professor’s work?”

  “No, carry on.”

  “Well he was working on subatomic physics.”

  “What?” Helena was astonished. “I don’t claim to be up on the latest thinking but that surely went out with bows and arrows. The ancients explored that cul-de-sac pretty thoroughly and a fat lot of good it did them. They ended up with more fairy stories than a children’s nursery book. I mean, we’re talking bloody quantum bloody mechanicals or some such.”

  “Quantum mechanics,” Flipper said didactically.

  Helena raised an eyebrow, which was all it took for Flipper to take the hint and hurriedly proceed with her explanation.

  “It’s true that the ancients had the weirdest superstitions about the natural world but they also carried out a number of empirical experiments with interesting results. They had these high speed accelerators that they used to smash atoms apart.”

  “Is this going somewhere?”

  “Well, you know that the heavier an element is the more likely it is to decay?”

  “Yes, so what? The heavier elements are radioactive so completely useless and bloody dangerous.”

  Flipper became more animated and confident now she was on home territory. She waved her hands to illustrate her description.

  “The ancients found they could make small quantities of artificial heavy elements by smashing lighter ones together. The products were ridiculously unstable, decaying in microseconds. However, the ancients’ mathematics predicted an island of stability where stable ultraheavy elements could exist around element 126, unbihexium. They never had the technology, though, to reach this island.”

  “Go on,” Helena said, becoming intrigued despite herself.

  “Their theoretical understanding of what was g
oing on involved superstition about magic subatomic particles called neutrons and protons that behaved as waves. In their system unbihexium was the 126th element because it had one hundred and twenty-six protons arranged in what they called a closed proton shell and around one hundred and ninety neutrons in a closed neutron shell. Nonsense of course.”

  Flipper paused and gazed unseeing at the ground, no doubt pondering how stupid were ancient people or indeed was anyone over the age of twenty-five. Helena tapped her foot. The action startled the student back into the real world.

  “But their mathematics was sound if used simply as a descriptive empirical construct. The professor tried to interest academia in building a modern more powerful version of the ancients’ accelerators to see if we could manufacture these stable heavy elements. The grant committees balked at the cost.”

  Flipper’s expression of contempt no doubt reflected her late professor’s opinion of nitpicking milksops who whined about money when knowledge was at stake. Actually, Helena sympathized with that view to some degree. The naval budget was always being squeezed to the detriment of The Service.

  “How much would it have cost?” Helena asked.

  “About half a million crowns not counting the cost of hollowing out a mountain.”

  Helena’s sympathy evaporated.

  “I can see why the proposal generated resistance,” she said dryly. “This is all very interesting but get to the point.”

  “Neutron stars,” Flipper said, as if that was supposed to explain something.

  “What?”

  “It’s all about neutron stars. You know they’re formed by exploding white dwarfs or collapsing massive stars?”

  Helena nodded.

  “The professor predicted that if a binary supernova—”

  “A death star like the one that caused the Ordovician extinction on Old Earth?”