Relax, sure—if you could. But Josh was not doing fine at all.
Something was terribly wrong. It was not the nausea that he had briefly experienced when first entering free fall, but something much worse. As the Cerberus passed into the node, Josh felt his whole body begin to rotate in one direction, while the inside of his head went in another. It made no difference if his eyes were open or closed. The interior of the node was a rainbow glow, and it seemed to turn in a hundred ways at once. He was riding a giant multicolored whirligig, that every few seconds chose to vanish and reassemble itself, and then turn all the different parts of him in multiple different directions.
Worst of all, his whole body trembled and shook under an internal force that seemed to have nothing to do with anything outside it. He opened his mouth to scream. In that same moment, the ability to scream was lost. A final spin took him off in a direction where there were no directions.
Josh was twisted out of space itself; and in that ultimate nowhere blackness, he felt nothing at all.
Josh awoke, wondering how long he had been unconscious. According to the preflight briefing, if he did black out it should be for no more than a fraction of a second. But it felt like he had been unconscious for ages.
He opened his eyes. The multicolored glimmer of the node interior was gone. In its place a diffuse blue glow filled a third of the sky.
“All right.” Bothwell Gage on the address system spoke as though nothing had happened. “I told you that we would be fine, and we are. We have completed the first node transition. The sensors need a couple of minutes to recalibrate, then we will make our jump to Solferino. That will give you a chance to examine the structure of the Messina Dust Cloud. The physicists back Sol-side claim to understand where it came from and what it’s all about, but if you ask me”—he laughed, but it was more like a giggle—“if you ask me, they’re in a cloud themselves. However, you won’t see anything like this again for a long time, so I suggest that you look and enjoy.”
The great blue and purple haze of the Cloud was shot through with streaks and swirls of brighter colors, greens and yellows and glowing crimsons. Josh could see that those rainbow lines and curves defined currents and whirlpools, which taken together provided the outline for a set of broader patterns. Those had to be the sluggish space rivers of dust and gas described in the online documentation that he had studied back at Burnt Willow Farm. In those broad rivers you’d find invisible pockets of stable transuranic elements, carried around some unseen center.
“Found only in the Cloud,” Gage answered a question from Amethyst, one of the Karpov sisters. “And enormously valuable. Unimine ships have looked for stable transuranics in a thousand other places, so far without success. Anyone who does find those elements outside the Messina Dust Cloud is assured of a great fortune. Cloud collection is slow, laborious, and expensive.”
And elsewhere in the Cloud, Josh hoped not too close, were the cloud reefs. In those regions of intense electric and gravity fields, something very strange happened to space-time. The Unimine rakehells explored them, because that’s where you were most likely to find shwarzgeld and starfires. But there you would also find space sounders, about which the documentation said nothing—except that they were dangerous.
No one knew if a sounder should be thought of as living or nonliving. Rakehells had a habit of disappearing near reefs and sounders, without so much as a call for help. And sounders were supposed to be able to pop out of nowhere, at any time.
Josh scanned the Cloud, wondering how you knew when a space sounder was on the way. Suddenly he was quite willing to head back into the gut-wrenching interior of the node.
“Velocity match six meters a second.” The voice of the control computer of the Cerberus began again. “Zero relative rotation. Distance thirty meters—ship fields off, radio blackout commences—two meters a second, beyond abort option. Node entry beginning.”
This time the shock was not so great. Josh, as his insides were knotted into complex shapes that felt as though they could never be unraveled, had one final thought: life on Solferino would certainly be hard, it might even be horrible; but you didn’t encounter the word danger, over and over again, as you did whenever Unimine activities were mentioned.
Anything would be better than working for Unimine, burrowing kilometers deep into naked rock, plumbing oceans of molten iron, or chasing space sounders through the dark unfathomed reefs of the Messina Dust Cloud. Compared with that, Solferino was going to be Funland.
The first solar system network node had been established in the Asteroid Belt, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth. The official reason had been caution: The nodes and the network were an unknown quantity, and danger to Earth must be avoided at all costs.
The true reason, according to Bothwell Gage, was very different: Intense lobbying pressure had come from established transportation companies. They feared their business would be eroded or destroyed by instantaneous travel from node to node.
That worry should have been nonexistent in other stellar systems, or within the Messina Dust Cloud. But rules were hard to change, and habits hard to break. The Solferino node could have been conveniently placed in low orbit about the planet. Instead, the Cerberus was forced to make a boring three-day trip from the node to Solferino. It seemed forever until the Cerberus computer announced that rendezvous had been achieved, and passenger transfer would take place to a vehicle able to descend to the surface of Solferino.
That news apparently revived even the Lasker brothers. At any rate, they were well enough to jostle Dawn and Josh out of the way as they all entered the single-stage landing orbiter. Josh pushed right back. It didn’t take a genius to guess that there was trouble ahead, but he wasn’t going to be shoved around by anybody. He was pleased to see Sapphire, the oldest of the Karpov sisters, give Sig Lasker a vicious elbow in the ribs in the doorway.
“Boys and girls, if you please, let us have a little decorum.” Gage had noticed what was happening. “Let me remind you that you are not in the Pool now. Save your energy for the surprises you may encounter on Solferino.”
Boys and girls. Josh could guess how Sig Lasker, with his starting beard and powerful build, must be reacting to that. Bothwell Gage seemed to think he was dealing with seven-year-olds. Unfortunately, all of them had no choice but to deal with him. The man knew what Solferino had in store for them. They did not. Josh was aware of his own ignorance, although he had picked up all he could in the scattered briefings that began the day after Uncle Ryan and Aunt Stacy had signed the papers on his and Dawn’s behalf. What had Stacy said or done to persuade her husband that it was all right for Dawn to go with Josh? Josh would like to have been in on that conversation.
As for surprises, you could start with the color of the planet. Josh stared out of the window as he and Dawn, last of the trainees to be shepherded out of the Cerberus by Bothwell Gage, settled into their padded seats and waited for the lander to ease away from the main ship. Earth from orbit had been a cloudy ball of blues and grays. Solferino had plenty of white clouds, too, but the ground beneath was a mottled mess of pastel pinks, ugly purples, and random yellow smudges.
“Well, look your fill.” Bothwell Gage knew they were all gazing out of the ports. “We are on our way. You will be down there in half an hour. Are there any questions?”