Polaris (33 page)

Alex settled in for the evening, reading more about Madeleine English. “She left no avatar,” he said, tapping the display. “She was an ordinary pilot with an adequate work record.”

“
Adequate
is about the best you can do,” I told him. “It means you always got where you were going with a minimum of fuss, and you never lost either people or cargo.”

She'd been running missions for Survey six years by then. Her biographers—there were four—noted that she'd had several lovers, including the best-selling novelist Bruno Shaefer. She'd been born in Kakatar and shown an early interest in spacecraft. Her father was quoted as saying somewhere that it was her love for the superluminals, and the intervention of Garth Urquhart, that saved her. “Otherwise,” he commented, apparently not entirely kidding, “it would have been, for her, a life of crime.”

She'd piloted the T17 Nighthawk against the Mutes and qualified for superluminals at twenty-three. That wasn't the record for youngest certification, but it was close.

There were pictures of her in uniform, in evening gowns, in workout gear. (She'd apparently been a fitness nut.) There were pictures of her at the beach, at various monuments, at Niagara Falls, at Grand London Square, at the Tower of Inkata, at the Great Wall. Here she was in cap and gown. There, in the cockpit of her T17. She stood with various groups of her passengers after she'd joined Survey. There were pictures of her with Urquhart, with Bruno Shaefer beside a publicity still for one of Shaefer's books, and with Jess Taliaferro at a banquet somewhere.

She'd never married.

Usually, when people talked about the
Polaris,
they talked about the Six, Dunninger and Mendoza, Urquhart, Boland, White, and Klassner. But I suspected, when they thought about it, they fixated on Maddy. Of them all, she was the one who came away seeming unfulfilled.

“What do you think about her?” Alex asked.

That was easy. “She was okay. Apparently Survey thought so, too. They trusted her with six of the most celebrated people in the Confederacy.”

Alex was looking at the picture of her in uniform. Blonde hair cut short, startling blue eyes, lots of intensity. “She took out a Mute destroyer,” I said. “Riding a fighter.”

“I know.” Alex shook his head. “I don't think I'd want to fool around with her.”

“Depends what you mean.”

He sighed. “Women are all alike,” he said. “You think we're all obsessed.”

“Who? Me?” We were still almost eight hours from jump. And we were figuring four and a half days from home. We sat and talked for a bit, then I decided I'd had enough for the day. I took the reader to bed, but I was asleep fifteen minutes after I crawled in.

I'm not sure what woke me. Usually, if there's any kind of problem, Belle won't hesitate to let me know. The result is that the pilot of a
superluminal can sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that the helmsman will not doze on duty. But Belle hadn't spoken; nevertheless, I lay staring up at the overhead, listening to the silence, knowing something had happened.

Then I became aware of the engines. They were becoming audible. And changing tone. The way they did when running through the last moments before making a jump.

AIs do not make jumps on their own. I twisted my head and looked at the time. We were back on ship time, which was Andiquar time. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon, but the middle of the night to me. And two hours before we were scheduled to transit.

“Belle,” I said, “what's going on?”

“I don't know, Chase.”
She appeared at the foot of my bed. In her
Belle-Marie
work uniform.

“Belay the jump.”

“I don't seem to have control over the displacement unit.”
She meant the quantum engines, which were continuing to rev up. We hadn't had time to take on enough of a charge to get to Rimway, but that wouldn't prevent us from leaving the immediate area and going
somewhere.
It just limited the options.

“Try again, Belle. Belay the jump.”

“I'm sorry, but I'm unable to do so, Chase.”

I was out of the sack by then, charging into the passageway. I banged on Alex's door and barged into his compartment. It took a moment to get him awake.

“Jump coming,” I said. “Heads up.”

“What?” He rolled over and tried to look at the time. “Why the short warning? Isn't it too early?”

You could feel the pressure building in the bulkheads. “Get hold of something!” I told him. Then the lights dimmed. Quantum jumps are accompanied by a sense of sudden acceleration, only a few seconds long, but enough to do some serious damage if you're caught unawares. I heard Alex yelp, while I was thrown back against a cabinet. I saw stars and felt the customary tingling that accompanies passage between distant points.

The lights came back up, full.

Alex had been tossed out of bed. He got to his feet with a surge of intemperate remarks and demanded to know what we were doing.

“I don't know yet,” I told him. “You okay?”

“Don't worry about me,” he said. “The bone'll set in a few days.”

I scrambled onto the bridge. “What happened, Belle?”

“I'm not sure, Chase,”
she said.
“The clock seemed to be running fast.”

“And you weren't aware of it?”

“I don't monitor the timers, Chase. There's never been a need to.”

Alex appeared at the hatch.

“Okay, Belle,” I said. “I want to know precisely what's going on. And while you're trying to figure it out, let's open up and see where we are.”

Somewhere, thrusters fired. The ship moved. Began to rotate. I grabbed hold of the side of my chair. Alex was thrown off-balance, staggered across the bridge, and finally went down in a heap. “Belle,” I said, “
what
are you doing?”

There were more bursts. The prow was rising, and we were swinging toward starboard.

“Belle?”

“I don't know,”
the AI said.
“This is really quite extraordinary.”

Alex got to the right-hand seat and belted in. He threw a desperate look at me.

“Belle,” I said, “open up. Let's get a look at the neighborhood.”

Still nothing.

“Okay, how about the monitors then?” I was striving to keep my voice level. Don't alarm the passengers. Never sound as if you've lost control of events. “Let's see what the telescopes have.”

The screens remained blank.

“Belle. Give us the feed from the scopes.” I dropped into my chair and belted down.

“There's a break in the alignment, Chase.”
Her voice was flat. Detached.
“I can't get a picture.”

“Where?”

“Main relay.”

“Damn you, Belle,” I said, “what's Walt Chambers's real name?” Walt Chambers was a client we'd carried a couple of years earlier while
he was researching ruins on Baklava. He'd been with a group of academics, and his name was Harbach Edward Chambers. But he didn't like
Harbach.
He looked a lot like Walter Strong, the old horn player. He'd claimed the name
Walt
during adolescence, and it stuck. He'd traveled with us, and Belle knew him.

“Searching,”
she said.

“Search, hell.” I opened the data flow panel. System status seemed normal. “Belle,” I said, “take yourself off-line.”

The main engines fired a short burst, then shut down. There followed a series of volleys from the attitude thrusters. Up, down, port, and back to center. We were aligning ourselves on a new course.

“I'm sorry, Chase. I don't seem to be able to do that.”

“Hey,” said Alex, “what's going on?”

“I'm working on it.” The port thrusters fired. “She's changing our heading.”

“Why?”

“Damn it, Alex, how do I know?”

I was suddenly aware I was floating. My hair drifted up, and I was rising against the seat belts. The ship's rotational motion stopped, and the main engines came back on. We began to accelerate. At maximum thrust.

“Gravity's off,” Alex said. “You okay?”

“I'm fine.” I tried to take Belle off-line, but nothing happened.

“You're giving us a hell of a ride, Chase.”

“It's not me.” The engines shut down again and the gee forces went away. The ship became dead quiet, and a series of status lamps began to blink. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “I don't believe it.”

“What's wrong?”

“Belle's dumping our fuel.”

“My God,” he said. “All of it?”

I tried again to wrestle control away from her. The fuel status lamp went to amber, then to red, then to bright scarlet.

I released my harness and got over to the maintenance panel.

“What are you going to do?” Alex demanded.

“For a start, we're going to disable her.” I opened the panel.

“I'm sorry, Chase,”
said Belle.
“Nothing personal.”

Yeah. Right. It didn't even
sound
like Belle anymore. And what chilled me most was that I detected a sense of genuine regret. I twisted the handle, punched her buttons, and her lights went out. “Good-bye,” I said.

“She gone?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to her?” Alex asked. “Are we okay?”

“It wasn't Belle,” I said. “Hang on, I'm going to restore gravity.”

“Good,” said Alex. “If you could make it quick—”

“I'm working as fast as I can.” Artificial gravity is normally controlled by the AI. To reset it, I had to switch over to manual, and punch in more numbers. Our weight flowed back.

Alex sat quietly, looking stunned. “What's our situation?” he asked, finally.

“Can't be good. We're adrift in a hot area.”

“Hot?”

“There's a lot of radiation out there. Let's get a look.” Despite Belle's claims, the telescopes worked fine. They aren't designed to be operated manually, though. I had to turn each on individually, then aim it. There were six of them, so it took a while. I routed the feed into the displays. One by one, the pictures came on.

The
Belle-Marie
was in the middle of a light show.

Two bright blue lights slashed across the monitors. It was a saber dance, and the sabers were long, twisted beams of light. “What the hell is it?” asked Alex.

It was the sort of effect an ancient lighthouse might have caused had the lamp been bouncing around inside and spinning wildly.

The lamp itself appeared to be a blue star.

Alex was watching me, reading my face. “So what is it?”

“Ramses.”

“The pulsar?”

“Yes. Has to be.” I was pressing my earphones, listening to it. I put it on the speaker, and the bridge filled with a sound like waves of ice and sleet rattling against the hull.

“Doesn't sound good,” he said.

“We're headed directly into the lights.”

“What happens when we get there?”

“We'll fry. If we're still alive at that point. Radiation's already going up.”

He didn't take that real well. There was some profanity, which was rare for him. And then he told me in a cool level voice that we needed to do something.

I was in a state of near shock myself. “I don't believe this,” I said. “Leave the damned ship under the supervision of nitwits, and this is what happens.” Someone had re-programmed or replaced Belle. Probably the latter.

His eyes were wide, and there was something accusing in that stare. How could you let this happen?

We were getting more warning lights. External radiation levels were increasing. I was checking time in flight, the range from Sacracour to Ramses, the status the quantum engines would have attained before transition. It
was
Ramses. No doubt. A collapsed star. Or maybe the burned-out remains of a supernova. I wasn't really up on my celestial physics. In any case, I knew it was a beast we wanted to stay well away from.

The beams flicked past, moving so quickly they constituted a blur. I froze one of them. “It's mostly a slug of gamma rays and photons.”

“Can we get clear?”

It was a cosmic meat slicer, and we were headed into it with no power and no way to change course. “We have no engines,” I said.

“How long?”

“Seven hours. Give or take.”

“What about the jump engines? Can't we jump out of here?”

“They're useless without the mains.” I switched on the hyperlight transmitter. “Arapol, this is the
Belle-Marie.
Code White. We are adrift near Ramses. Heavy radiation. Request immediate assistance. I say again: Code White.” I added our coordinates, set the message to repeat, and began transmitting.