It was a fifty-minute run up to the orbital dock, where we got our departure time (which would be four hours later), boarded the Belle-Marie, unloaded the bags, showered, and went back to the concourse for dinner.
We ate too much and finished off with a couple of drinks. By then it was almost time to go. We returned to the ship, and I went onto the bridge to do my preflight. I can’t tell you that I actually saw a problem, but Belle seemed to be slow posting the status for some of the systems. I wasn’t sure whether it was my imagination at work.
But I asked her if anything was wrong.
“No, Chase,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Well, okay. The numbers all checked out, and I informed operations that we were ready to leave. “At your discretion,” as the line goes.
They told me to stand by. There’d been a delay of some sort getting a freighter loaded. “You’ll be a few minutes late,” they said.
I went back and talked to Alex. I don’t remember what about. He was distracted, and I knew he was thinking about Shawn Walker and the Peronovski. We waited a half hour before Ops cleared us for departure.
“Lock down, Alex,” I told him. Moments later the green light came on, signaling he was secure. “Okay, Belle,” I said. “Let’s head out.”
I always enjoy casting off the umbilicals and getting under way. Don’t ask me why.
It’s not as if I’m anxious to get to the next port, but I like the feeling of leaving things behind. First it’s the station, then the blue globe of the world itself starts getting smaller. And eventually even the sun winks out. I tied the engines into the quantum generator so it would begin charging. We’d need nine hours to store sufficient energy to make the jump to Rimway.
Quantum technology had taken the tedium out of long-range flight. But it had also eliminated most of the romance. It was all very simple now. And almost too quick. You wanted to go from Rimway to East Boston, you ate a couple of meals, watched a VR, maybe napped a bit, and when the lamps came on indicating the system was sufficiently charged, you pressed a button. And there you were. You needed a few days after you got to the target system to make your approach. But basically, it was an eyeblink. The range was limited only by the strength of the charge you could pack into the system.
People had once complained that the Armstrong engines, with their ability to tunnel through linear space, had resulted in our losing track of how truly big the Orion Arm was. And how far from home the Veiled Lady really was. Now, you were in and out. Virtually teleported, with no sense of having gone anywhere. Distance, range, deep space, the light-year, had all gone away. And as it always seems to be with progress, you pay a price. The price might be in reduced safety, or in social dislocations, or, as was the case with the quantum drive, in losing touch with reality.
I turned the conn over to Belle and wandered back into the common room with Alex. That’s a joke, really. Belle did pretty much everything in flight. I was there in case of emergency.
I wasn’t looking forward to going home. It had been nice to be away from Rimway and feel safe again. Given my way, I’d have opted for an old-fashioned long flight this time. I felt secure inside the metal cocoon. I’d even have considered staying on at Sacracour, despite the blizzards and the quakes and the yohos. At least you could see the yohos coming.
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 biographersthere 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.