Heaven's Reach

Hyperspace

EVERYTHING UNRAVELED AFTER THE GREAT RUPTURE. all the wonderful structure — the many-layered textures of spacetime — began coming apart.

Wer’Q’quinn’s experts had warned Harry. Recoil effects would be far worse in Galaxy Four, when all its ancient links to other spirals snapped and most transfer points collapsed. Additionally, all the known levels of hyperspace — A through E — would come more or less unfastened, like skins sloughing off a snake, and largely go their own way.

Not only have I lost any hope of going home, he thought during the wild ride that followed. We may all be stuck forever in some pathetic corner of a single spiral arm. Perhaps even a solar system!

That assumed they even made it safely back to normal space.

Harry’s station shuddered and moaned. All the louvered blinds rattled in their frames, while unnerving cracks began working their way through the thick crystal panes. Just outside, a maze of transfer threads churned like tormented worms, whipping in terminal agony, Spaciogeometric links, robbed of their moorings, now snapped violently, slicing and shredding each other to bits.

This seemed a frightfully bad time to try evading the speed of light with shortcuts that had been routine for aeons. Cheating Einstein had become a perilous felony.

It might have been safer simply to drop to normal space and ride out the aftershocks near some star with a habitable fallow planet. Worst case — if FTL travel became impossible — at least they might have a place to land. But Kaa would have none of that. Almost from the moment they dropped out of E Space, the dolphin took over control, ditching the now useless corvette, and sent Harry’s station careening through a nearby transfer point — a dying maelstrom — desperately scouring for a route to the one place he called home.

Harry had never seen piloting so brilliant — or half so mad. His stubby station was hardly a sport-skimmer, yet Kaa threw the vessel into swooping turns, hopping among the radiant threads like some doped-up gibbon, brachiating through a burning forest, throwing its weight from one flaming vine to the next. Kaa’s tail repeatedly slapped the flotation pad. The dolphin’s eyes were sunken and glazed while floods of information poured through his neural tap. A ratchet of sonar clicks sprayed from the high-domed skull, sometimes merging to form individual words.

Peepoe was one Harry heard often. Having done his duty for Streaker and Earth, Kaa had just one priority — to reach his beloved.

Harry sympathized. I just wish he asked me before taking us on this insane ride!

No one dared break Kaa’s concentration. Even Rety kept silent, nervously stroking her little urrish husband. Kiwei Ha’aoulin crouched, muttering to herself in a Synthian dialect, perhaps wishing she had listened to the inner voice of caution rather than greed.

Only Dwer seemed indifferent to fear. The young hunter braced his back against the control console, and one foot on a nearby window, leaving both hands free to polish his bow while a Gordian knot of cosmic strings unraveled spectacularly outside.

Well, I guess anything can seem anticlimactic, Harry thought. After watching a whole chain of supernovas go off at once — and having the Path seize you like some agonized monster — one might get jaded with something as mundane as a conflagration in hyperspace.

Kaa pealed a yammering cry, sending the station plunging toward a huge thread whose loose end lashed, shuddering and spraying torrents of horrid sparks! Rety shouted. Vertigo roiled Harry’s guts, threatening to void his bowels. He covered his eyes, bracing for impact …

… and swayed when nothing happened.

Not even a vibration. Around him stirred only a low chucker of engines, gently turning over.

Both fearful and curious, Harry lowered his hands.

Stars shone, beyond the pitted glass. Patterns of soft lights. Stable. Permanent.

Well, almost. One patch twinkled oddly, as a wave of warped metric rippled past. Tapering chaos disturbances, still causing the vacuum to shiver. Still, how much better this seemed than that awful pit of sparking serpents!

Behind the station, receding rapidly, lay the transfer point they had just exited, marked by flashing red symbols.

DO NOT ENTER, blazoned one computer-generated icon.

NEXUS TERMINALLY DISRUPTED.

CONDITIONS LETHAL WITHIN.

I can believe that, Harry thought, vowing to embrace Kaa, the first chance he got … and to shoot the pilot if he tried to enter another t-point like that one.

In the opposite direction, growing ever larger, stood the red disk of a giant star.

“Izmunuti?” Harry guessed.

Kaa was still chattering to himself. But Dwer gave an emphatic nod.

“I’d know it anywhere. Though the storms seem to’ve settled since the last time we passed this way.”

Rety reacted badly to this news.

“No!” Her fists clenched toward Harry. “You promised I wouldn’t have to go back! Turn this ship around. Take me back to civilization!”

“I don’t think you grasp the problem,” he replied. “At this rate, we’d be lucky to reach any habitable world. Clearly, the nearest one is—”

The young woman covered her ears. “I won’t listen. I won’t!”

He looked to Dwer, who shrugged. Rety’s aggrieved rejection of reality reminded Harry of a race called episiarchs, clients of the mighty Tandu, who could somehow use psi — plus sheer force of ego — to change small portions of the universe around them, transforming nearby conditions more to their liking. Some savants theorized that all it took was a strong enough will, plus a high opinion of yourself. If so, Rety might hurl them megaparsecs from this place, so desperate was she not to see the world of her birth.

Kaa lifted his bottle-nosed head. The pilot’s black eye cleared as he made an announcement. “We c-can’t stay here. Jijo is still over a light-year away. That’ll take at least a dozen jumps through A Space. Or fifffty … if we use Level B.”

Harry recalled predictions made by the Kazzkark Navigation staff — that the rupture would make all hyperlevels much harder to use. In Galaxy Four, they might detach completely and flutter away, leaving behind the glittering blackness of normal space, an Einsteinian cosmos, where cause and effect were ruled strictly by the crawling speed of light.

But that peeling transition would not come instantly. Perhaps the rapid layers could still be used, for a while at least.

“Try B Space,” he suggested. “I have a hunch we may need to drop out quickly and often along the way.”

Kaa tossed his great head.

“Okay. It’s your ship-p. B Space it issss.…”

With that hiss of finality, the pilot turned his attention back through the neural tap, to a realm where his uncanny cetacean knack might be their only hope.

Harry felt the station power up for the first jump.

I’d pray, he thought. If creation itself weren’t already moaning in pain.

Almost from the start, they saw disturbing signs of ruin — debris of numerous space vessels, wrecked as they had tried following exactly the same course, flicker-jumping from Izmunuti toward Jijo.

“Some folks passed this way before us,” Dwer commented.

“And quite recently, by all appearances.” Kiwei’s voice was awed. “It seems that an entire fleet of large vessels came through. They must have been caught in hyperspace when the Rupture struck.”

The results were devastating. As Izmunuti fell away behind them, and Jijo’s sun grew steadily brighter, Harry’s instruments showed appalling remnants of a shattered armada, some of the hulks still glowing from fiery dismemberment.

“I make out at least two basic ship types,” he diagnosed, peering into the analytical scope. “One of ’em might be Jophur. The other … I can’t tell.”

In fact, it was hard to get a fix on anything, because their own vessel kept heaving and shuddering. Kaa yanked the station back into normal space whenever his fey instincts told him that a new chaos wave was coming, or when a flapping crease in B Level threatened to fold over itself and smash anything caught between.

Crossing this unstable zone of hyperreality — a rather short span by earlier standards — became a treacherous series of mad sprints that got worse, dura by dura. Each flicker seemed to take greater concentration than the last, demanding more from the gasping engines. And yet, there could be no pause for rest. It was essential to reenter hyperspace as soon as possible, for at any moment B Level might detach completely, leaving them stranded, many light months from any refuge. Food and air would give out long before Harry’s small group might traverse such a vast distance of flat metric.

Too bad we Earthlings never pursued our early knack at impulse rocketry, after making contact with the Civilization of Five Galaxies. It seemed the most ridiculous of all wolfling technologies, to make ships capable of brute-force acceleration toward lightspeed. With so many cheap shortcuts available from the Great Library, who needed such a tool kit of outlandishly extravagant tricks?

The answer was apparent.

We do. Anyone who wants to travel around Galaxy Four may need them, from now till the end of time.

At least there were clear signs of progress. Each jump brought them visibly closer to that warm, sturdy sun. Yet, the tense moments passed with aching slowness, as they followed a rubble-strewn trail of devastated star-craft.

“I guess that Jophur battleship must have got word to their headquarters, while it was off chasing Streaker,” Dwer concluded. “Their reinforcements arrived at the worst moment, just in time to be smashed by the Rupture.”

“We should rejoice,” mused Kiwei. “I have no wish to live in a Jophur satrapy.”

“Hmph,” Harry commented. “That assumes all of their fleet was caught in hyperspace during the worst of it. For all we know, a whole squadron may have made it safely. They could be waiting for us at Jijo.”

It was a dismal prospect — to have endured so much, only to face capture at the end by humorless stacks of uncompromising sap-rings.

“Well,” Dwer said, after a few more edgy jumps, when the yellow star was already looking quite sunlike. “We won’t have long to wait now.”

He pressed close to the forwardmost window, as eager to spy Jijo as Rety was to evade the verdict of destiny.