“I’m not sure mine is broken.” I took the cloth away from my face. “Could be it’s just bruised.”
“Kiernan did it to you?”
“No. I did it to myself.”
“It takes all sorts.” Jim Swift tried to open his right eye, and failed. The whole area from his nose to his right ear was red and swollen. But his brain was working all right, because he pointed to a wall display showing the Godspeed ship, where the shimmering rings on the corkscrew were brighter than ever. “The Drive has been primed. Who’s doing that?”
“The crew of the Cuchulain. Or what used to be the crew of the Cuchulain. Now I guess we’re that.”
Jim was going to hear the bad news sometime, it might as well be now. I started to give him a summary of what had been happening, from Danny Shaker’s arrival on the bridge with Tom Toole to their final departure. I omitted their claim that Jim had started the fight that broke his nose, and I didn’t mention Shaker’s attempts to recruit me to his new command.
Before I was finished Jim interrupted. He glared around the control room with his Cyclops’s stare. “Fly this heap to Erin? Never. Duncan said the engines are good for one or two more short runs, and that’s it. Unless he can do one of his magic fixes.”
I hadn’t yet got to Duncan’s change of allegiance. After I explained that, Jim moved over to stand behind the pilot’s chair. This time he held the towel over his whole face. “That’s it, then. Marooned in the middle of nowhere. Can you fly the Cuchulain?”
“I know how to do it. But I don’t know how far we’d get with the engines the way they are.”
“Anything’s better than nothing.” Swift peered out from behind his towel and pointed a finger at the display. “Take us away from that. Do it now.”
He was indicating the Godspeed ship. Bright rings of light were flickering faster and faster along the twisted spiral.
“Come on, Jay,” he said, when I hesitated. “Get a move on. Can’t you see the priming is almost done? The release could come any moment now. Someone on that ship is crazy. I tried to warn them, but they’re preparing for a jump at full power.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but the urgency of his tone got through to me. I moved to the pilot’s chair and performed the steps to activate the drive of the Cuchulain. We were soon ready to fly. Then I hesitated. Would the engines function as I turned them on, or would they blow apart?
I was still dithering when Eileen Xavier and Mel appeared on the bridge.
“What’s—” Doctor Eileen began.
“Not now.” Jim Swift interrupted her. “First we move, then we talk. Jay?”
“Ready.” Or as ready as I would ever be.
“Then do it.”
I performed the final sequence. The Cuchulain came alive, with a dreadful groan and rumble of off-balance engines. I urged the ship on, trying to move it through space by sheer willpower.
The vibration grew. The smart sensors showed engine stresses beyond the danger level. I sat with my finger on the cutoff key. “We can’t—”
“A few more seconds, Jay.” Jim Swift was staring at the display showing the Godspeed ship. It was visibly smaller on the screen. But our whole ship was shaking so violently that everything blurred.
“That’s all we can take!” I stabbed at the key, and the vibration ended.
“Let’s hope it will do.” Jim Swift was muttering to himself, not to me. “It will have to do.”
“Do what?” Mel asked. But no one answered.
Nothing seemed to have changed on the Godspeed ship. If anything, the dancing rings of light were a little less brilliant.
“Radiated power peak’s shifting into the ultraviolet.” Jim Swift had forgotten his black eye and broken nose. “Any second now. It’s praying time. And I’m an atheist.”
As he spoke, all the rings of light along the corkscrew vanished. The Godspeed ship hung dark and motionless in space, not a light showing.
Jim Swift gasped, while Doctor Eileen sighed. “So it doesn’t work after all,” she said. “All our efforts, and for nothing.”
I stared at the ship on the screen and thought about Danny Shaker. He and his crew were marooned now, just like the rest of us. He would find a way to get us all home. In spite of everything, I had strange confidence in him.
“Look at the star field,” Mel said suddenly. “Should it be doing that?”
The Godspeed ship was not moving. But around it, like bright points on some great wheel, the whole backdrop of stars was turning. As we watched, the rotating pattern began to shrink in toward the central axis, to where the ship sat like the quiet eye of a giant whirlpool.
“Inertial frame dragging,” Jim Swift said. “And strong space-time curvature. If that effect keeps increasing—”
It did not. The star field blinked back to normal. And in that instant the Godspeed ship was gone. It did not accelerate away, out of our field of view. It did not move, or flicker, or fade. It vanished.
“The Godspeed Drive,” Jim Swift said softly. “I’ve waited all my adult life to see that. But I was wrong about one thing. I was afraid that tapping the vacuum energy would have a permanent effect on space-time structure. Apparently it does not. There’s been enough time since the Isolation for an adjustment to take place. We can have—”
I never did learn what we could have, because at that moment Mel screamed and every display in the control room blazed with light. A multicolor pinwheel flared into existence at the place where the Godspeed ship had stood. It grew, in size and intensity, until it filled the screens. Automatic dimmers came into operation, but the intensity of light grew faster than they could adjust. The screens went into overload and darkened in unison.
A moment later, all the lights on the bridge of the Cuchulain went out. I waited in shivering darkness, and felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. Through me. Some force was passing within my body, squeezing and wrenching and twisting and pulling. A moment earlier I had been in free-fall. Now I was hanging in a gravity field that changed direction every split second—up was over my head, then under my feet, now off to one side or another. All around me, loose furnishings flew away to clatter against the walls of the control room. The struts and hull plates of the Cuchulain groaned and whined under intolerable pressures.
If it was terrifying for me, it may have been worse for Jim Swift. I had no idea what was happening, while he knew in detail. And when things finally settled down, my own relief was all personal—it simply meant the end of an awful, head-spinning vertigo.
The control room remained dark, until one by one the overloaded displays crept back into operation. The bridge became lit by faint starlight, enough for me to make out the shapes of the other three people in the room. Mel was clinging white-knuckle tight to Eileen Xavier, while Jim Swift floated upside-down near them.
“What in God’s name was that?” It was Doctor Eileen, sounding as queasy as I felt. There is no way of describing what it is like to have some unknown force manipulating the inside of your body.
“Call it space-time’s revenge.” Jim Swift reached out and grabbed the cabin wall, slowly turning himself until he was the same way up as the rest of us. “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s what I tried to warn them about—and no one would listen.”
“You mean that every time anyone ever used the Godspeed Drive, a region of space near it was affected like that?” I said.
“No, I don’t think so. That’s what happens now, and has ever since the Isolation. But once it wasn’t so. This means that the Godspeed Drive can’t be used. Maybe can’t be used ever again.”