Renegade (17 page)

L
isbeth woke
to the sensation that she was falling. Because she
was
falling, or at least gravity was tossing her out toward the bed netting, and her heart hammered in panic as she grabbed at the net. And then lay there, staring at the bottom of Major Thakur’s bunk above. She wrestled with the unfamiliar uplink network for a moment before finally finding the time. It was 1649, she’d been asleep barely an hour, and didn’t feel very rested. It was hard to rest when your subconscious expected gravity to smack you into the ceiling at any moment. And the net wasn’t much comfort, because gravity really
was
that changeable out here, just a side-effect phenomenon of distance plus velocity plus occasional shifts in trajectory.

She lay in her bunk trying to visualise what lay about her — the incredible distances, the speeds at which they were currently crossing them, tiny by what
Phoenix
was capable of with jump engines engaged but still astronomical enough. If Scan missed one of those rocks, she wondered, would they even feel the impact? Or would a strike at many tens of thousands of kilometres an hour destroy the ship so quickly that the nervous system would be incinerated before it had time to even register what had happened?

How many men and women had that happened to, out here, over the decades? How many had been there one moment, living, talking, reading, laughing. Then the next second, gone, without even an explanation or warning? If you were going to die, surely you deserved some kind of explanation of what killed you? Some realisation that you were actually dead? She imagined souls, frozen out here in some dark limbo of perpetual astonishment.

Gargh! She couldn’t lie in bed and think about such things, she’d go insane. She managed an uplink to the room display, and the wall above the small table lit with several options. She picked Scan, and it showed the nearest planetary system in relation to them — another half-hour’s light away, a massive gas giant with many moons and lots of insystem traffic. In between, lots and lots of rocks and ice… and that was just the tiny fraction Scan could actually see. Anything could be hidden in there. With a lot of the pursuing Fleet ships now scattering ahead and running silent, anything could be.

“
Attention all hands, this is the LC.
” It was her brother’s voice on the intercom. “
Attention all hands, this is the LC. Scan has spotted a nice big rock not too far off our path, it should make a decent hiding spot for us, it appears to have a good metallic signature, should confuse our signal, and isn’t tumbling so we can get real close. To rendezvous with it we’ll need to proceed with a one-G burn for the next two hours and seventeen minutes. We are currently at burn-minus-five minutes, I repeat, at burn-minus-five minutes. All hands prepare for a one-G burn. LC out.
”

An alarm sounded, high and wavering up and down, like some mournful animal’s howl, and the room lights began to flash in time. Lisbeth lay where she was, clutching her bednet with her heart thumping in rising panic. Her uplink visual flashed, an incoming call, and she opened it…

“
Lis, it’s me
,” said Erik in her inner ear. “
Where are you currently?
”

Before she could answer, another call overrode without her even inviting it… “
Hi Lisbeth,
” said Major Thakur. “
LC you’re busy, you go do your job. I said I’d look out for Lisbeth and I will.”

A small pause. “
Okay Lis? Just listen to the Major, this is very basic, nothing to worry about.
” His call disconnected.

“
Lisbeth?
” said Thakur.

“I’m here.”

“
Okay, all that this means is that the wall opposite the door is about to become the floor. Are you in bed?
”

“Yes.”

“
So, first you disengage the bednet, then you sit on the bed with your back to the wall. Once you’re out, put the bednet back on so the sheets don’t go everywhere. That’s it. You’ll notice that all the thrust-ward walls on the ship have green lines where they join the ceiling.
” Lisbeth looked, and sure enough, a green stripe ran from wall to wall. She unhooked the bednet, fingers fumbling on the locks, and let it wind across on its own power. “
That’s so you know which way gravity will go when we burn. Always remember which wall has the green stripe — we call it the G-wall.
”

As she scrambled to sit on the bed end, Lisbeth recalled a documentary she’d once watched where spacers had called it the ‘K-wall’, because it was the one that killed you. “Okay, I’m sitting with my back to the wall.” And remembered to pull the bednet back across, and climbed on it to hook it in.

“
Right, as soon as we thrust, the crew cylinder will stop rotating. You wait ten seconds, then the all-clear will sound, and you can move around. Obviously all the things that require cylinder rotation to work, won’t. So the toilets, showers, etcetera. Everything else, well, you’ll discover that spacers learn to improvise. Any questions?”

“No.” Her heart was still pounding, but she felt a little better. “No, I’m fine. Thank you Major.”

“
If you need any help, hit your personal com call and someone close-by will come to you. See you soon.”

It was slightly ridiculous to have one of the war’s greatest heroes personally waiting on her, Lisbeth thought. She didn’t think Major Thakur was the kind of person who’d respect the civilian notions of privilege that came with having a last name like Debogande. But then again, the Major was a marine, and however important, she didn’t have nearly as much to do on a ship as a spacer did. Being a Debogande didn’t make her unique on this ship — being a civilian did, and the marines would look out for any civilian the same way, Debogande or not. The fact that it was the Major looking out for her was probably due to the fact that she was the current ship commander’s sister, and letting her mix with lower-ranked crew could be a violation of the command hierarchy. If the Debogande family had had no money or big name, she’d have been treated the same by virtue of Erik’s rank.

At one minute the com started a ten second countdown. At ten seconds the count was for every second. Then a thunder that rumbled through the walls, floor and bed, and a shove from behind. Blankets slid upon the bed, and the groan and squeal of various things shifting weight about the room. It felt as though the room were being tipped upon its end, like some giant had come along, grabbed the nose-end of the ship and pointed it to the sky.

Now she was flat on her back. It was the oddest thing, but not quite as scary as she’d imagined. The wall, as Major Thakur had said, was now the floor, and she was lying on her back with her feet up in the air. The ship sounded different, the white noise of cylinder rotation that became so omnipresent that she’d gotten used to it, had now disappeared. In its place was a low, rumbling thunder, and the metallic rattle and squeal of separate parts vibrating against each other.

Lisbeth sat up carefully, and the speakers announced the all-clear. It took a while to convince her brain that this new orientation was not about to violently revert, dropping her face-forward on the once-floor that was now the wall. Her bunk bed was now vertical before her, sheets fallen in a heap within the bednet. Carefully she stood up. If thrust suddenly stopped, she reminded herself, she wouldn’t fall — she’d be weightless. Even that previous ‘normal’ gravity had only been the function of the rotating crew cylinder. Without it, everything floated.

The wall screen above the table was now at her feet. And the table rim, she saw, had a thick edge that now doubled as a seat, as the twin chairs were of course bolted to the ‘floor’, now beside her. She sat on the table rim, and contemplated the door. It was far above her. How odd, the room had seemed tiny when that wall had been the wall. Now that it was the ceiling, the door looked like the mouth of a well she’d fallen into, and was now trapped at the bottom of. And yet the Major had said that once thrust had begun, she’d be free to move around. How the hell?

Then she noticed that the rim of the top bunk had rungs on it, like a ladder. She hadn’t noticed that before, and if she had, wouldn’t have guessed why. Now it was obvious. Sitting trapped in here, without even a bed to rest on, seemed like a horrid way to spend two hours and seventeen minutes. Besides, this wasn’t quite as disorientating as she’d feared… and fear itself, she was becoming quite sick and tired of. Fear was debilitating, and she hated it — the thudding heart, the endless, breathless tension. She recalled what Major Thakur had said, that those who feared most often failed on the climb, or died. Fear was sometimes useful, but when the thing you feared was present in everything around you, and prevented you from dealing with your situation practically, it became a pointless distraction.

And what had the Major said? Gain self-knowledge? Start today? If she asked Erik for permission to wander, he’d say no, and she’d be stuck here. And she hated to bother the Major again with her weakling, civilian requests. She was a grown woman, she could go for a walk if she wished. And so she put her hands on the bunk ladder, and climbed.

Atop the bunk, she could reach the door quite easily. The door did not open immediately, and a beeping alarm sounded in the corridor outside. Then it opened, very slowly. When it stopped, Lisbeth grabbed the rim and walked her feet up to the end of the bunk. That got her shoulders out the door, and…

“Ware!” came a call as some legs passed her, and jumped the door she’d opened. That had been why the alarm in the corridor — the doors now became trapdoors into which people could fall. She heaved herself up quite easily, and scrambled over the edge.

The corridor looked different, floor on one side, ceiling on the other. She followed the spacer who’d passed, and saw her jumping the doors at her feet whether they were open or not. That seemed like a good idea, and Lisbeth copied. Most insystem freighters did not have this problem, of course, as they were designed so that ‘aft’ thrust was the floor, in a vertical stack. Without jump engines, they’d accelerate at 1-G toward their destination, then turn over at halfway and decelerate at 1-G all the way in. Jump engines made it possible to gain or lose enormous velocity instantly, and so most insystem travel for FTL ships was coasting without thrust, with gravity from cylinder rotation only.

The fear returned when she reached the first trunk corridor. It ran a good portion of the crew cylinder from fore to aft, and now as she approached the corner, the once-innocuous passage yawned at her feet with a sheer, endless drop. Traction lines she’d not seen before had appeared, and now ran up and down the shaft, one line heading up, the other down. Spacers rode it up and down, standing on the little footrests, clipped to the rope with their harness. The woman Lisbeth had been following took a little wand from a pocket and extended it to the length of her arm. Then she took her harness clip, unhitched it and mounted it on the extended wand. A fast clip to the upward rope, then it caught on the next empty handhold. The woman stepped off as her harness pulled tight, and swung to the rope, put her feet in, and rode it up.

That simple huh? Lisbeth watched in amazement as someone else got off at her level, and using the wand to clip the harness to another rope line that extended into the corridor from above — that must have also popped out automatically when the thrust kicked in, Lisbeth thought. She hadn’t noticed it before. They didn’t even stop the rope, just hooked, jumped and swung into the corridor mouth like some tree swinging primate.

Lisbeth didn’t particularly want to do that, she was sure she’d miss her level or lose her nerve… or worse, jump without attaching properly, and fall. But she recalled more documentary footage of people getting off when these ropelines touched the bottom. Surely she could manage that?

She searched several pockets and found the wand-thing. Extended it, and found how it attached to the harness hook — she
was
an engineering graduate after all, she told herself firmly. And she knew how to rock climb and use safety harnesses, there were plenty of engineering tasks that required it. Then she waited until a clear foothold appeared on the down-rope, reached with her clip with hands that only shook a little… waited until the footrests passed and clipped just above them. The clip snapped immediately shut, and her triumph lasted a split second until the descending handholds caught the clip, and she realised her harness was about to yank her over the edge.

She managed not to scream, and jumped. And fell, yanked tight on the harness and swung into the rope, spinning around in dangling confusion, the rope hitting her face and burning her hand as she flailed at it. And grabbed, heart hammering, and scrambled to find the footrest with her feet… and got on. She hung there, gazing about as the corridor walls rose past her…

“Ware!” called a voice from below, and the next person rising past her fended off as her feet nearly kicked him in the head.

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” But he was past and going up, and someone waiting on the next corridor down to get on was looking at her oddly. She’d done it, she realised with elation. Only now the corridor was doglegged forty-five degrees sideways, and the ropeline simply dragged at the corners — she saw someone coming up below having to walk up the wall to get around without banging the corner. Here on the outer side of the dogleg was a big elastic net sticking halfway out into the corridor. To catch falling spacers, she realised.

She pushed around the outer edge, thankful the rope handholds were offset so that descending and ascending spacers wouldn’t hit that corner at the same time, squeezed past another rising, then hit the next dogleg corner with her butt as the corridor straightened out again. That corner was cushioned, and opposing it on the far wall was another big elastic net. So any falling spacer who missed the first net would hit this corner, obviously, and bounce across to land in that net. Theoretically. She wondered how many who did so didn’t survive it. In a 10-G push, a five meter fall was like fifty meters at 1-G. Even a two meter fall would probably crush you like an egg. What was left after a tumble down this corridor at 10-G, she didn’t want to think about.