Spinneret

Chapter 32

"So why haven't we shifted?" Perez demanded.

"Keep your RAM cool," Meredith shot back over his shoulder, trying to hold his own fears in check. "Well?" he added as Carmen blanked the screen and leaned back in her chair.

She waved her hands helplessly. "Every diagnostic I can find says nothing's wrong," she said. "The course we're on seems deliberate, as opposed to being random, so I can only conclude the boat knows what it's doing. Or at least thinks it does."

"Great." Meredith pondered. "You said the computer indicated four days to Spinnerhome?"

"Spinner days, yes. About a hundred twenty hours total."

"Does our course indicate anything that far ahead that could be our destination? A

larger preprogrammed ship, say, that has the necessary star drive?"

Carmen shook her head. "There's no way to tell at this range."

"This is ridiculous," Perez snorted. "Something's obviously gone wrong. Let's give up and go back to Astra."

"I don't think that would be a good idea," Meredith said.

"There's a repulser flare moving on what looks like an interception course off our starboard side."

"What?" Perez moved to the side viewport to look. "Who is it?"

"Does it matter? Whoever it is would probably be willing to risk even a Spinneret cable embargo in exchange for this one ship."

"But how did they spot us? Carmen—you said we were using a gravity drive of some sort, right? So we're not putting out a flare of our own—"

"Msuya will have been watching from the UN ship," Loretta put in quietly. "He knew about the lifeboat."

Carmen twisted around. "He what? How could he?"

"Because she told him," Meredith said calmly. "Don't look so surprised; it's been obvious ever since Dunlop's coup attempt that Dr. Williams and her friends were spies planted on us."

"But the Ctencri … " Perez trailed off as cold anger replaced the shock on his face. "Damn them. They probably went straight to Saleh with my letters." He turned to Loretta. "So they hired you to come here and learn the Spinner language for them."

"They pressured me into doing it," she corrected tiredly. "And now they have my two children. That's the pressure Msuya's been using on me lately."

Perez snorted, looking back at Meredith. "You seem remarkably phlegmatic about all this. If you knew she was a spy, why did you let her aboard?"

"What choice was there?" Meredith countered. There were other reasons, but if the UN ship had a chance of overtaking them, he'd best keep his hole card private.

"We needed her to decipher the controls, and we'll probably need her at Spinnerhome even more."

"If it helps, I don't really want Msuya to win out here," Loretta said. She looked at Hafner."Especially after … what he tried to do through Major Dunlop. If I'd known he was going to use violence … "

"Well, he hasn't won anything yet," Meredith told her. "Why don't you come up here and double-check Carmen's translations, make sure we're not missing some warning light or something."

Loretta nodded and moved to the control board. Meredith took one last look at the distant repulser flare and walked over to Hafner."You're very quiet, Doctor," he said, sitting down next to him. "Still mad at me for shanghaiing you like this?"

Hafner smiled. "All you had to do was ask, you know—I wouldn't have missed seeing Spinnerhome for the world. No, actually, I was just sitting here trying to figure out what kind of star drive can take us anywhere from a dozen light-years to several hundred in the same few days."

Meredith frowned. "Is that the scale Carmen's nav map shows?"

"I don't see it making sense any other way. What we've got here, it seems to me, is that old standby of science fiction, the instantaneous-jump drive."

"Um." Meredith chewed on his lower lip. "Then the five or six days between planets is just the insystem travel time between port and … what?"

"A safe distance from large masses, perhaps, or a low dust density," Hafner suggested. "Hard to tell what they came up with. The immediate question, then, is whether Msuya will see anything we don't want him to see when we go."

"Before that comes the question of his capturing us," Meredith said dryly.

"Won't he run out of fuel first? A couple-three days of constant acceleration—"

"Won't bother him. The Rooshrike gave me the specs to Ctencri courier ships a few months back; it turns out they're designed for long-range insystem work as well as interstellar."

"Oh." Hafner pursed his lips. "I don't suppose we're armed or anything."

"I doubt it. Maybe Carmen can program a little more speed for us." He stood up, paused as Hafner touched his arm.

"Did you know Msuya could follow us?" the scientist asked quietly. "In other words, do you have a plan?"

"Afraid not," Meredith shook his head. "I thought he'd see us emerge from Olympus, but I expected to be long gone into hyperspace before he could do anything about it. We'll just have to hope it takes him long enough to figure out how to perform deep-space piracy for us to reach our jump point."

"If not, we break out the cutlasses?"

Meredith gave him a reassuring smile and moved off.

"You're just making this harder on yourselves," Msuya growled, the distortions caused by the Spinner speaker not quite masking the other's rage. "You obviously can't control your ship well enough to escape, and it's clear your star drive's broken. I assure you I'm quite willing to disable you if I have to."

"If you really wanted to shoot us down, you could have done so anytime in the past eight hours," Meredith reminded him. Their talk had been going on sporadically for nearly that long now, and he, for one, was getting sick of hashing over the same territory. But as long as Msuya was reluctant to damage his prize—and as long as the odd gravitational effects from the lifeboat's drive continued to make a boarding dangerous for both ships—the impasse was a remarkably stable entity. "As I've said before, if you can't offer suitable guarantees for our safety, we'd just as soon go down with the ship."

"You talk very casually of throwing your lives away," the UN official spat out.

He, apparently, was getting impatient as well. "Let me tell you a secret: sacrificing yourselves will no longer protect the Spinneret's secrets. We—/—know everything you do about the operation of your precious machine."

"Yes, Dr. Williams has been telling us about your little spy network. Not a particularly clever setup, you know—I'm sure the CIA or KGB could have designed something better for you."

There was a moment of silence, and in the gap Carmen snapped her fingers twice.

Meredith looked at her; she pointed urgently to his seat belts and then to the screen. Against the navigation grid had appeared two spots that flickered back and forth from red to orange; directly between them sat the Lorraine-cross course indicator. Meredith raised his eyebrows questioningly, got an uneasy shrug in return, and began strapping in.

"So you know about that, do you?" Msuya said at last. "Well, it'll do you no good.

Arrest them—execute them if it makes you feel any better—but understand that all I need to control the Spinneret is already in my hands."

In front of Meredith, the viewport opaqued. "This must be it," Carmen muttered tightly.

"Good-bye, Msuya," Meredith said. "We'll look for you when we get back."

"Meredith—!"

From somewhere aft came a shriek like a parrot being smothered in cotton; an instant later Msuya's voice was cut off as a brief wave of vertigo threatened to turn Meredith's stomach. The nausea subsided … and when the viewports cleared again a dull red sun the size of a basketball sat directly in their path.

"Well," Meredith said, letting out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "I think we're here."

"Wherever 'here' is," Perez said, climbing stiffly out of his seat and coming forward to peer over Carmen's shoulder. "What was that scream just before the gravity jumped? It sounded like we were losing the whole tail section."

"I don't know." Carmen indicated a readout. "But the local-grav indicator went crazy right then."

"How crazy?" Hafner asked. "Like we'd skimmed the edge of a small black hole?"

"Is that what those two spots on the screen were?" Carmen asked.

"Two?" Hafner frowned.

"Wait a minute," Perez growled. "Are you saying we just flew through a black hole?"

"The course marker went between the two spots," Meredith told him, "so we probably didn't hit either one. Though why we had to get even that close, I don't know."

"Possibly the high gravity gradient's needed to trigger their star drive mechanism,"

Hafner suggested thoughtfully. "And if that's true, it would explain why there are so few jump points listed on the boat's map."

"It does?" Carmen frowned. " … Oh. There aren't going to be many systems with even a single black hole nearby, let alone a pair. So Astra was picked for the Spinneret for no better reason than its accessibility?"

"With maybe a minor point being its proximity to an asteroid belt. They may have brought down some of the bigger asteroids themselves." Hafner craned his head to see out the viewport. "Any idea where Spinnerhome is out there?"

"It doesn't show on the displays yet. But the boat seems to know where it's going."

"Then it may be confused," Perez said softly. "This isn't the Spinners' system."

Meredith spun to look at him. "What?"

Perez gestured toward the viewport. "The sun in the cavern is yellow."

For a long minute there was dead silence in the room. "Maybe it's a double star system," Loretta offered at last. "With a yellow star behind, where we can't see it."

"In that case we should be veering to go around the red one," Perez pointed out.

"Maybe we will, once we build up more speed," Carmen said.

"Maybe," Perez said darkly. "Maybe not."

Meredith broke the silence that followed. "There's no point in worrying about it now. We're all dog-tired; let's go aft and find somewhere to sleep. In a few hours we'll have a better idea what the boat's got in mind."

The main passenger section consisted of three airline-type cabins, each with twenty tall, thin chairs that flattened out into beds. By unspoken agreement they all stayed together, stretching out in the five beds closest to the forward door. One by one, with little conversation, they went to sleep.

Meredith was the first to wake, six hours later, and when he padded to the control room he found Carmen's hunch had been correct. The red sun, noticeably larger, was now sitting off their port bow, while the screen indicated a course that would come perilously close to the edge but clearly miss it. Bringing forward one of the supply boxes, he improvised a table and was setting out five field-ration breakfasts when the others drifted in.

"So Dr. Williams was right after all," Perez said grudgingly after surveying the situation. "Any sign of the other sun yet?"

"Not that I could see," Meredith said, waving Loretta to the seat beside him. He didn't blame the others for being cool toward her, but it was about time to put a stop to that nonsense. He was opening his mouth to do so when Perez suddenly yelped.

"Hey! What was that?"

"What?" Carmen asked, joining him.

"A flash of yellow near the middle of the sun," he said, pointing. "Just for a second."

"A solar flare?" Meredith ventured.

"Doesn't sound like it," Hafner grunted, struggling to get out of his seat. Loretta moved to help him. "Flares are hot spots, all right, but a yellow burst from a red sun seems pretty excessive. Whereabouts was it?"

"A little below the center—there! There goes another one!"

This one lasted several seconds before winking out as abruptly as it had appeared.

"That is damned odd," Meredith agreed uneasily. "Carmen, is there some way you can get spectrum or intensity data on those?"

Carmen was peering at the translator screen. "I don't know. I don't remember seeing anything tike that in the manual. Of course, I wasn't looking for it either."

"Dr. Williams, help her," Meredith ordered. "The rest of you keep an eye on the sun."

They counted twelve more of the brief flashes before Carmen and Loretta found a spectrometer program for the boat's sensors. It was, unfortunately, useless for their purposes, lacking any fine-directional capability.

"Could there be a ring of asteroids grazing the surface?" Perez suggested. "Maybe the flares occur when one of them impacts."

"They're still too short-lived for that," Hafner shook his head. "Besides, there's no real 'surface' to a star; just a steadily thinning atmosphere."

"Sure there's a surface," Perez retorted. "I can see it."

"You what?"

"Sure. Watch the edge—the stars disappear right behind it."

Closing one eye, Meredith held his hand up to cut out as much of the sun's glare as he could. Sure enough, the stars disappeared behind the edge with no preliminary dimming that he could detect. Shifting his gaze, he found himself looking into Hafner's eyes. "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" the geologist asked carefully.

Meredith's mouth felt a little dry. "It's impossible," he said. "The size alone—no, it can't possibly be."

"What can't be?" Carmen demanded.

Hafner waved at the viewport. "That's not a star," he said quietly. "It's a gigantic artifact. A sphere, enclosing the Spinner sun … and probably Spinnerhome, as well."