Alex was always the leader, though no one ever chose or appointed him as such. No one felt any need to, really, or even thought that he was the chief of their little gang. If anyone ever even mentioned that he was in charge, the rest would have laughed at such a preposterous idea. Nevertheless, that was the way it was. His crazy ideas became their common plans, and his pranks turned into group endeavors. If he was in a good mood, everyone shared his joy. That was the way it was till the very day of his metamorphosis. Even Nadia, who had had her transformation earlier, she still kept following him. When did it all change? Probably right after his metamorphosis. He didn’t leave right away. He had to wait till the next admission period at the pilot academy. They kept horsing around, just like before, shaking up the entire tiny town of Izborg… except that Alex stopped being the leader. And no new leader emerged.
Maybe the reason was that a pilot-spesh should never show too much initiative?
But now it all came back, because a captain was responsible for making decisions for everyone.
He was feeling that connection again. A oneness with all those around him. And this connection was strengthened not by orders or contractual formalities, or rules, or ranks, or by the crew’s love for him… It was something else, elusive and unutterable. Something that had helped him lead all of them—the smart boy David (a hut David had built at the age of seven lasted till the gang came of age), the pugnacious Fam (who was always careful, as any spesh should be, to match his strength to his opponent’s), the inhibited, shy boy-natural Gene (Alex really hoped his dream had come true), and Nadia, with her biting sense of humor…
His crew had turned out to be a good one, after all. Despite all the quirks and problems. The navigator continuously posted alternative routes, the co-pilot controlled the ship well, the engineer made available just the right amount of energy for any given moment. And the battle stations scoured the space around the ship for possible targets, even though the orbits around Quicksilver Pit were considered absolutely safe.
They reached orbit and almost immediately started their acceleration toward the mouth of the hyper-channel. Alex gave all the piloting over to Morrison and called up a detailed chart of the channel.
The channel turned out to be not just old, but ancient. Now, in his state of confluence with the ship’s memory blocks, Alex had access to its entire history. The channel had been cut from the Moon station during the second colonization wave. These days, there was a museum in place of the Moon station, and most of the worlds colonized back then were in a state of decay—either utterly abandoned or barely scraping by. Quicksilver Pit seemed lucky by comparison.
Alex practiced the channel entry several times with a time-dilation computer program. There were six possible trajectories that would fit within the assigned time interval and take Mirror towards Gamma Snakebearer and then to Zodiac. Alex chose the trajectory that would give them the most temporal advantage, and he went through it several times.
All was well. They would dive into the channel behind a couple of heavy trucks, keeping all the required distances. There would be another vessel right behind them, a mercury tanker, not too large, but loaded to the gills and possessed of immense inertia. Of course, mercury tanker pilots went through this channel so often that they could probably do it with their eyes closed.
Alex folded the virtual chart and moved Morrison off piloting with a gentle push. They were approaching the mouth of the channel, and there were three minutes remaining before it would be their turn to jump in.
The mouth of the channel glittered among the stars like a giant piece of the lightest fabric, lit from within, floating through the darkness of space. The entrance was the shape of an irregular trapezoid, curving and bending every second, changing its size and its angles—although from the point of view of six-dimensional geometry, it was actually a perfect circle.
“Mirror, you are now allowed to enter the channel’s waiting zone.”
That was the voice of a guard station called Stationary Channel. Twelve battle stations guarded the entrance. Most of them were real battle stations, built for that purpose at the shipyards, but several were just old, converted battleships. Still, it would have been unwise to reproach Quicksilver Pit’s president for being tightfisted. The modern stations could hardly have been more powerful than an old battleship, even one with its main engines gone and its planetary weapons off.
“Understood. We’re getting in line.” Alex ran his virtual chart one more time. Two large Burbot tankers were approaching the channel exactly on schedule. The first one’s rounded nose touched the surface of the gossamer sheet trembling amidst the emptiness of space. Then the ship quivered, rippled, and vanished. In exactly eight seconds, the second ship followed. The trucker pilots were probably not aces, but they were well coordinated with each other. Alex quickly looked at every one of his crew—all were there, doing their job, and the situation was under control.
“All right, kids, we’re about to jump….” As if confirming his thoughts, one of the bases reported:
“Mirror, you’re cleared for entry into the channel.”
Alex moved the ship forward slowly—a quick entry into the channel could lead them out to a random point in the transport grid or even cause the ship’s destruction. He had one trajectory to lead the ship out to Zodiac.
Hyper-channels were very strange things. To be precise, there was only one hyper-channel in the universe; more simply would not fit. But that was an idea from six-dimensional geometry, a field in which fewer than a hundred scientists were experts. For practical piloting, all you had to know was that every channel would lead the ship to this or that exit point, depending on the trajectory of the entry and the phase of the pulse. And there could be no more than thirty-six such exit points… again, no one knew why. Each channel had been made at random—although, with the relative probability of sixty-six point three (recurring decimal) percent, they seemed to appear near massive gravitational anomalies. Stars, for instance. Also, the channels couldn’t be closer to each other than one light year, although this factoid was still not fully confirmed by science. In addition, no one could know where a new, freshly made hyper-channel might lead. Only the probable distance could be measured, with a large margin of error.
The entire history of human galactic colonization was a chain of random coincidences. Olympus had been Earth’s first colony, a cold and unfriendly little world, but somehow considered almost a paradise back in the mid-twenty-first century. After that, the channel stations went to work at full capacity, poking holes all over the universe, and more and more new worlds appeared. The magnificent Edem, a splendid and rich planet, flourishing in the blue light of the Spike, had been colonized a very long time ago, despite its huge distance from Earth. But Alpha Centauri, long a candidate for the first interstellar flight, was not reached until very recently, only some fifteen years before. Well, it was for the best, anyway. It turned out to have no promising planets.