“Navigator, I have a serious question for you.”
“I am listening, Captain.” Puck’s virtual image nodded.
“Please leave out the formalities. I’d like a heart-to-heart.”
Generalov looked aside in embarrassment. And said after a pause:
“I am sorry about my outburst. But… I really don’t care for clones.”
“We all have somebody we don’t care for, Puck. Some people don’t like naturals, some don’t like the Others. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.”
“I see,” Puck nodded. “It’s about the route?”
“Yes. I believe that coincidences happen. But everything has a limit. You already plotted this route once today.”
“I was practicing.”
“And you just happened to choose this exact route? Quicksilver Pit-Zodiac-Edem?”
“Yes!”
“Puck, that’s impossible.”
“What are you trying to say, Alex?” Generalov certainly enjoyed being informal. “Are you suggesting that I actually knew about our route beforehand?”
“Of course.”
The navigator burst out laughing.
“You overestimate me. I really was just practicing. The whole crew was practicing, and so was I. You can suspect whatever you want, but I really did choose that route entirely by chance!”
“Puck, that’s impossible. If you’re telling me the truth—can you see why I have my doubts?”
Generalov lapsed into thought.
“I do understand, Captain. I was also really surprised. I was plotting a course… let me see… well, I picked Edem because of our lovely bodyguard.”
“Okay, I suppose that’s plausible. But using Zodiac as an intermediary point? How do you explain that?”
For a moment, Puck’s image got blurry—he must have been calculating all the possibilities. Alex could almost feel the ship’s computer strain to handle the extra burden.
“I have to agree with you,” reluctantly admitted Generalov. “It’s a really good route, Quicksilver Pit-Zodiac-Edem, but there are five more alternatives. None are better than any others—all are within random probability parameters. All I can tell you is that I really did choose this particular one by pure chance.”
“Puck, tell me: before you went into the navigation module, had anyone even mentioned Zodiac in your presence?”
A short hesitation.
“No.”
One minute to take-off.
Alex nodded. He had a lingering, unpleasant sensation—the feeling of having missed something.
“All right, Puck. Let’s get back to work.” He cut off the private connection and concentrated on the ship. Flight control had already given the last corrections for the take-off corridor. The ship’s reactor was slowly increasing its power output, releasing energy to be accumulated and used up by the ship. Lourier’s job was to supply a lot of power, but also not to supply too much.
“Countdown.”
Morrison had already plotted the graceful curve of the take-off trajectory and was waiting with tense anticipation. Alex understood his hopes… he knew the feeling. But he could not let the co-pilot perform his own very first take-off.
“Ten.”
He reached for the tense green spiral and whispered:
“Sorry…”
The spiral moved off to one side, giving Alex full access to the piloting gear.
“Nine.”
The membranes of the plasma thrusters opened.
“Eight.”
The grid of the gravitational engine opened. Of course, no one was planning to take off riding a graviray, which would damage the old launch pad. But for the improbable eventuality of plasma-engine failure, the ship had to have an emergency option.
“Seven.”
Alex’s consciousness reached out to touch each member of his crew, ever so lightly, a brief, reassuring, and grateful contact.
“Six.”
The gluon reactor started pulsing, boosting the energy output. Paul had a wonderful sense of timing….
“Five.”
Alex turned on the engines.
The ship smoothly leaned on its tail, not leaving the surface yet, but standing on its hind supports alone. Gravity compensation worked perfectly, so there was no change in the gravity vector within the ship itself.
“Four.”
A firestorm burst out around the vessel.
“Three.”
The ship quivered, leaving the surface.
“Two.”
They were already standing “in the pillar.” The ship still looked chained to the planet to an outside observer, when really it had already broken free.
“One.”
The energy flooded into the engines, throwing them into full-power mode.
“Zero. Take-off.”
And they were airborne. The ship was piercing the sky with a swift thrust, no longer bound by gravity, or any orders from flight control, or laws of Quicksilver Pit. Somewhere below them were the dirty and malodorous capital, the honorable president San Li, the smog-blackened sky, speshes and naturals, astronauts and planet-dwellers, humans and Others.
Only the ship remained, and the seven humans and two Others aboard it, and the invisible route charted among the stars.
The parting clouds dabbed the ship’s body. The city below them diffused into a murky, glowing blot. It even looked rather pretty from the dark distance…. At sixteen thousand feet, Alex switched over to the graviray and the vessel gave a slight jolt. Darn it! Botched a smooth transition.
“Nice transition, Captain,” said Morrison, as if to calm him down; a slight jolt when switching to another set of engines was almost inevitable. But at the same time, Morrison was reminding him, “I noticed.”
Alex grinned, increasing the traction. Glanced at an Otter coming in for landing through the adjacent corridor. The narrow cone of the gravity engine’s thrusting field trailed behind the ship, and the computer traced an alarming red around its outer edges. The cone presented little danger to any ship that might sideswipe it. At the very worst, there might be minor damage to the skin plating, which would regenerate overnight. And the unwritten laws of the pilots’ fraternity would most probably prevent any official involvement. What’s more, they were well within their own take-off corridor, so it had to be the mistake of the tanker’s pilot. But to allow this kind of situation was considered bad form.
“Co-pilot, that Otter is getting into our tail. Track them.”
Xang started murmuring something at the clowns piloting the tanker. Concentrating on his own tasks, Alex paid no more attention to him.
Mirror was as light as a feather in comparison to the heavy, multi-ton vessels he had piloted for the last few years. Alex couldn’t help remembering an old book that described the ecstasy of a boy who kicked off his heavy winter boots and put on a pair of light summer shoes. Now he was feeling something very much like it.
A lightness. The universe had become not just the place where he lived, but a home he knew and loved, small and cozy, where everything was close to everything else and where he knew every little corner. Even the ship’s responses to his orders were not just precise executions of his commands, but happy continuations of his thoughts. Not a servant, but a friend. Not a machine, but a beloved.
He had experienced this kind of thing a long time ago, before his metamorphosis, when he was still an almost-ordinary kid. He would leave the house with his posse, stay out till late. Sometimes they’d be gone for several days, traveling into the thick northern forests and as far as the Baltic Sea, where they would lie on the jagged cliffs and look down from on high, through the clear water, onto the ruins of ancient cities that hadn’t survived the first ecological storm. “The gang” were five friends. Alex himself. The dark-skinned, redheaded David, who emigrated to New Jerusalem at the age of fourteen, right after his metamorphosis. Builder-speshes were in great demand there. Fam Hoh… poor Fam, he was also a spesh, a fighter-spesh. He died at fifteen, barely out of the academy, taking part in a peacekeeping mission in the Martian Free Cities. He was shot down over the desert, far from the terraformer towers, had to walk back for twenty-four hours, but died, of dehydration, hypothermia, and oxygen starvation. Gene was the only natural in their whole gang, so he was always the butt of their cruel childish jokes, and at the same time the object of their clumsy sympathy… he wanted to become a psychologist. Maybe he did, who knows…. And then there was Nadia, his devoted girlfriend, his first lover, his best friend… She was now a well-known and successful doctor-spesh. But back then, she seemed to have two separate and unrelated lives. When she was with the rest of the gang, she was a fighter daredevil, their total buddy, with whom you could share a heart-to-heart talk and have a smooch or two in a dark little corner. But at home she was always a perfect, sweet, reserved, well-behaved girl…