A near-hysterical Brandon nodded feverishly.
So slowly it was a taunt, Ollie pulled the napkin out of Brandon’s mouth.
‘Docklands!’ Brandon yelled. ‘Karno’s in Docklands. Royal Victoria Docks, the Icona apartment block. Third floor. I promise! He never leaves any more, not since Blitz2 started. He’ll be there.’
‘Cheers, fella,’ Ollie said, and stuffed the napkin back in. He retrieved the synth slugs and dropped them back in the case. He grinned cheerfully at a weeping Mensi and walked out through the front door. He managed to take five steps along the drive before he doubled over and threw up onto the gravel.
Delta Pavonis
9th December 2206
Eight AUs beyond the star’s outer cometary belt, the rim of the circular portal glowed a rich cobalt blue as it expanded out to fifty metres in diameter. An Olyix mid-level transport ship flew out of the opening – a truncated cone sixty metres long and thirty wide, its fuselage a dark burgundy colour that absorbed what little light there was. Thin purple ion plumes gusted out of gill-like vents near the rear, and it began to accelerate at a steady one point three gees.
‘Gravitonic drive at seventy per cent,’ Jessika Mye announced cheerfully.
Sitting opposite her in the pearl-grey virtual chamber that was the Avenging Heretic’s bridge, Callum saw her lips twitch in amusement. He wondered just how much of that was real. The nervecapture routine could be adjusted for reaction sensitivity, either toning down or emphasizing every expression and tic the emotional state produced. Like Alik and Yuri, Callum couldn’t be arsed with it; faffing about with crap like that was just a higher-resolution version of choosing an expresme icon for solnet comms. He’d stopped doing that when he was fifteen.
Same with the bridge, which was as basic as you could get. Five consoles with wraparound screens, and flight controls so simple they could have come from the late twentieth century. They didn’t exist, of course; this virtual was being fed into his brain via a cortical interface. Soćko had designed it for them, warning it was dangerous. If the Olyix ever gained access to the Avenging Heretic’s network, the onemind could subvert their minds with a neurovirus.
‘So we’d better not get caught,’ Alik had replied levelly at the planning meeting; that had been eighteen months ago.
Callum watched the data on his console screen, the colourful wave motions of graphs and icons similar to a tarsus lens splash. When he focused on them, the rest of the bridge drifted away, leaving him at the centre of pure information. Space this far out from Delta Pavonis was relatively clear, confirmed by the minimal impacts against the protective distortion field around the ship. Mass sensors confirmed there was nothing other than hydrogen atoms and a few grains of carbon within a thousand kilometres of the hull. Power flow from the fusion generators into the systems seemed to be okay, and the network was glitch free.
‘Who’s first?’ Jessika asked.
The information fell back into the console screen, and Callum was looking around at the other four chairs. They were laid out in a simple pentagon, with Kandara on his right, then Jessika, Alik and Yuri. All of them had spent the last year training for the flight, trying to get their heads around the gravitonic drive and wormhole theory. Their collective age didn’t help; new concepts didn’t sit well in old brain cells. But slowly they’d come to control the simulations without screwing up too badly.
‘I’ll go,’ Callum said.
Alik laughed. ‘You owe me fifty,’ he told Yuri.
Yuri looked glum.
‘What?’ Callum asked.
‘Mr Save-the-world-twice-before-lunch,’ Alik gloated. ‘Of course you’d want to fly this fucker. Feel the glory again.’
‘Hey, I was in emergency detox for eight years, a century ago. I gave up my adrenalin junkie days when I left. I want to get this right because we have to. And I didn’t hear you two pussies racing to volunteer.’
Kandara rolled her eyes. ‘Boys, boys.’
Callum didn’t think her nervecapture routine was turned up, either.
‘Take it, Callum,’ Jessika said. She and Kandara exchanged a smirk.
The control columns on Callum’s console went active. He placed his hands on them. It was a strange feeling. He wasn’t holding the ergonomic handles, which was the vision being fed into his mind. Instead his nerves sensed patterns like slow-moving currents of water. The screen’s information closed in on him again, and he shifted the patterns, perceiving the gravitonic drive’s energies reformatting. The Avenging Heretic’s vector altered. Navigational data expanded, and he started plotting a new course, shifting a shoal of cursors by thought alone. Is my visual focus doing that?
Reassigning his perception and responses to integrate with the ship’s network was still a work in progress. Jessika had said that eventually they wouldn’t even need the bridge simulacrum; control would be an autonomic thought. Callum considered she might have been a bit generous in her assessment of how adaptive they were.
The variable portal they’d come through was now three thousand kilometres behind them. Eighteen thousand kilometres away, a dark rubble pile asteroid was tumbling along its lonely orbit. Acceleration vectors materialized in the navigation data, and Callum began to shape the drive patterns to match them, putting the ship on a course that would end in a rendezvous.
‘Nicely done,’ Yuri said.
The Avenging Heretic accelerated to two point two gees. There were some fluctuations in the thrust, which Callum did his best to get under control. His manipulation of the patterns wasn’t as proficient as he’d have liked.
‘Don’t overcompensate,’ Jessika said. ‘Keep the alterations smaller and smoother. The routines are adaptive; they’ll learn your style.’
Callum did his best to quash an instinctive defensiveness; she was advising, not criticizing. The oscillations in the drive levelled out.
They took it in turns to fly the Avenging Heretic: Yuri decelerating for rendezvous; Kandara manoeuvring around the frozen asteroid; Alik taking them back to the portal. Callum felt Alik had a way to go before he was as proficient as the others but didn’t say anything.
Jessika brought them back through the portal and onto the cradle in Kruse Station. Atmosphere began to vent back into the big chamber.
Callum looked around the bridge, and suddenly the effort of de-tanking was depressing. ‘We could just stay here until the next test flight.’
‘No way,’ Kandara said. ‘We’re going to be spending a long time in these tanks. And I, for one, am not adding to that.’ Her image imploded in a silent cloud of pixels.
‘The design crew needs to run analysis on the tanks,’ Jessika said. ‘This is the first time they’ve been used on an actual flight. Simulation runs can only tell us so much.’ She shrugged and vanished.
Yuri’s grin was so wide he must have had his nervecapture routine turned up to eleven.
‘Disengage the suspension tank,’ Callum told Apollo, his altme. The neural interface routines were now good enough to read his vocalization impulses directly. Besides, he couldn’t use his voice peripheral – not with an oxygen nozzle filling his mouth.
Feeling seeped back into his brain, along with the thick, gurgling sound of fluid draining out of the suspension tank. The frame holding him juddered slightly, and then there was a solid floor under his feet. A long strip of green and amber medical icons splashed across his tarsus lens, and he blinked his eyes open.