“What’s up?” I said. “Where are we?”
“Where do you think?” the man said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was impressed by that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days. It was years since I’d seen anyone who had the same dedication to the art.
“I’m really hoping you’re not going to tell me we’re still stuck in Arkangel system,” I said.
“No, you made it through the gate.”
“And?”
“There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn’t pop out of the right aperture.”
“Oh, Christ.” I took off my bib cap. “It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows how these things happen? All we know is you aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Right. And where is ‘here’?”
“Saumlaki Station. Schedar sector.”
He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a day.
He might have been losing interest. I wasn’t.
I’d never heard of Saumlaki Station, but I’d certainly heard of Schedar sector. Schedar was a K supergiant out toward the edge of the Local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational sectors across the whole Bubble.
Did I mention the Bubble already?
YOU KNOW HOW the Milky Way Galaxy looks; you’ve seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer simulations. A bright central bulge at the galactic core, with lazily curved spiral arms flung out from that hub, each arm composed of hundreds of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs to the hottest supergiants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction.
Now zoom in on one arm of the Milky Way. There’s the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from the centre of the galaxy. Lanes and folds of dust swaddle the sun out to distances of tens of thousands of light-years. Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the dust, a bubble in which the density is about a twentieth of its average value.
That’s the Local Bubble. It’s as if God blew a hole in the dust just for us.
Except, of course, it wasn’t God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.
Look further out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even superdense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi dark clouds, or the Aquila Rift itself.
Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the furthest point in the galaxy we’ve ever travelled to. It’s not a question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn’t a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn’t reach any further. Most destinations—including most of those on the Blue Goose’s itinerary—didn’t even get you beyond the Local Bubble.
For us, it didn’t matter. There’s still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth. But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth.
Again: not good.
“I know this is a shock for you,” another voice said. “But it’s not as bad as you think it is.”
I LOOKED AT the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called ‘elfin’, with slanted, ash-gray eyes and a bob of shoulder-length, chrome-white hair.
The face achingly familiar.
“It isn’t?”
“I wouldn’t say so, Thom.” She smiled. “After all, it’s given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn’t it?”
“Greta?” I asked, disbelievingly.
She nodded. “For my sins.”
“My God. It is you, isn’t it?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me. Especially after all this time.”
“You didn’t have much trouble recognizing me.”
“I didn’t have to. The moment you popped out we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don’t worry. It’s not like you’ve changed all that much.”
“Well, you haven’t either,” I said.
It wasn’t quite true. But who honestly wants to hear that they look about ten years older than the last time you saw them, even if they still don’t look all that bad with it? I thought about how she had looked naked, memories that I’d kept buried for a decade spooling into daylight. It shamed me that they were still so vivid, as if some furtive part of my subconscious had been secretly hoarding them through years of marriage and fidelity.
Greta half-smiled. It was as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.
“You were never a good liar, Thom.”
“Yeah. Guess I need some practice.”
There was an awkward silence. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. While we hesitated the others floated around us, saying nothing.
“Well,” I said. “Who’d have guessed we’d end up meeting like this?”
Greta nodded and offered the palms of her hands in a kind of apology.
“I’m just sorry we aren’t meeting under better circumstances,” she said. “But if it’s any consolation, what happened wasn’t at all your fault. We checked your syntax, and there wasn’t a mistake. It’s just that now and then the system throws a glitch.”
“Funny how no one likes to talk about that very much,” I said.
“Could have been worse, Thom. I remember what you used to tell me about space travel.”
“Yeah? Which particular pearl of wisdom would that have been?”
“If you’re in a position to moan about a situation, you’ve no right to be moaning.”
“Christ. Did I actually say that?”
“Mm. And I bet you’re regretting it now. But look, it really isn’t that bad. You’re only twenty days off-schedule.” Greta nodded toward the man who had the bad teeth. “Kolding says you’ll only need a day of damage repair before you can move off again, and then another twenty, twenty-five days before you reach your destination, depending on routing patterns. That’s less than six weeks. So you lose the bonus on this one. Big deal. You’re all in good shape, and your ship only needs a little work. Why don’t you just bite the bullet and sign the repair paperwork?”
“I’m not looking forward to another twenty days in the surge tank. There’s something else, as well.”
“Which is?”
I was about to tell her about Katerina, how she’d have been expecting me back already.
Instead I said: “I’m worried about the others. Suzy and Ray. They’ve got families expecting them. They’ll be worried.”
“I understand,” Greta said. “Suzy and Ray. They’re still asleep, aren’t they? Still in their surge tanks?”
“Yes,” I said, guardedly.
“Keep them that way until you’re on your way.” Greta smiled. “There’s no sense worrying them about their families, either. It’s kinder.”
“If you say so.”
“Trust me on this one, Thom. This isn’t the first time I’ve handled this kind of situation. Doubt it’ll be the last, either.”
I STAYED IN a hotel overnight, in another part of Saumlaki. The hotel was an echoing, multilevel prefab structure, sunk deep into bedrock. It must have had a capacity for hundreds of guests, but at the moment only a handful of the rooms seemed to be occupied. I slept fitfully and got up early. In the atrium, I saw a bib-capped worker in rubber gloves removing diseased carp from a small ornamental pond. Watching him pick out the ailing, metallic-orange fish, I had a flash of déjà vu. What was it about dismal hotels and dying carp?