Eclipse Read online

  In this vacuum of usable information about Earth’s loss, crazy ideas thrived. In the end there were three categories of unlikely theory to explain what had happened: it had been aliens (except we’d never encountered any aliens or detected any signs of aliens anywhere); it had been rogue human scientists doing dodgy research that somehow got out of control and consumed the planet (this was more likely); or it had been God (who, after all, moved in mysterious ways).

  Maybe, since I was interested in questions about God, I should have entered the clergy. On the other hand, ­perhaps it was one reason why I wanted to enter the ­Service. Maybe I could find answers to my questions out in the dark.

  Kestrel marked the beginning of a new uncertainty in human space. A lot of people took it as a sign, a terrible portent of an impatient God’s irritation. Decades later, that initial wave of anxiety and fear stemming from Kestrel had ramified across human space to the point where we were seeing conflicts of ideologies and faith blown out to planetary scale. Death begat death, revenge begat ­revenge. One person’s interpretation of what was happening collided with her neighbor’s. Visions of God warred in a crucible of righteous hate. Holy wars, jihads, genocidal spasms, mass suicides — the news was full of these things, day after day. There was talk of the end of life as we knew it, perhaps even the end of the human race itself.

  Which made me think of Mom, out there, in one of the Muslim towns of New Jerusalem. The last newsfeed from there I had seen showed rifts developing between orthodox and ultra-orthodox Shi’ite Muslims, among others. Only “true” Muslims would survive what was coming, they were saying. It was the same in the Jewish towns there, and with the Coptics and others. Everyone had a dream of truth, but some dreams were said to be truer than others. It was hard to bear the thought of my mother, whoever and whatever she was now, caught in the midst of this. The real truth dawned on me that wherever in human space she was, she could get caught in the growing chaos.

  But she had made her choice.

  “It’s the Kestrel thing, isn’t it?” I said, coming back to the present. “That’s where it started.”

  Janning looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “Yes, and no. Most of the crap flying around out there now is ancient crap, baggage we brought with us from Earth, stuff that was old even then. Now we just have the old misery spread out on a larger canvas, but with a pile of new crap, too, just for variety.” He flashed a rueful, mirthless smile. “What Kestrel did was catalyze things. It came along at the wrong time, or maybe the right time. It scared us, the way thunderstorms used to scare ancient humans into dreaming up petty gods to explain everything.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Listen to me talking shit, eh! Jesus!” He had a good laugh at himself. “Anyway, it could all be academic pretty soon, what with those mad bastards the Asiatics rattling their swords and whatnot!” He scratched his ear and grinned at me, exposing a small gap between his two front teeth. “Tell you what, I’ll quite frankly be glad to get out into the dark again, sniff around the unexplored stuff. All these goddamn zealots and fanatics, they can have it all to themselves. Christ it gives me an ulcer just thinking about the bloody bastards!”

  I decided I liked Janning. I could talk to him, unlike my conversation with Captain Rudyard, where talking seemed like something one had to endure. “Mr. Janning, I just came from talking to the captain.”

  He grinned at me. “That must have been fun for you!”

  “I thought it might be just me, but he seemed kind of…” I frowned, wondering how to put it.

  “Forced?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “He’s okay — doesn’t shove too many guys out the airlock.”

  I paused, feeling a sudden chill. “Pardon me?”

  “Did he tell you about his discretion as captain?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “That comes down to summary execution of anybody who breaks regs in a particularly spectacular fashion. Following a court-martial, of course, just for form.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  His smile faded and for a moment I was certain he was going to tell me he was kidding, but he said, “Afraid so. If you do nothing else on this ship during your stay with us, don’t, and I mean don’t, piss off the captain.”

  I was sure I wasn’t hearing this right. “He can’t just kill people for breaking regs. That’s why we have a Brig, and the Standard Code of Military Justice, and all that.”

  “Ah, but we are different. We go out beyond the ­borders of known space. In a way it puts us beyond the improving influence of human civilization, beyond the very pale, if you like. It’s a different world out there. Not so jolly decent and sporting as life at the Academy, wot.” He put on a toffee-nosed accent when referring to the Academy, then grew serious again. “It does things to some people, being out there.”

  “I see,” I said, not seeing anything other than confusion. I suddenly didn’t know what to say or think.

  “So, Mr. Dunne,” he said, breaking the uneasy silence.

  “Uh, yes, sir?”

  Janning grinned, slapped his thigh. “How are you at tracking hypertubes?”

  “You have access to my Academy results, don’t you?”

  He nodded, tapped his forehead. “I certainly do, but numbers and tutor assessments don’t mean a lot. They don’t give much idea of your intuitive grasp of how spacetime works, your feel for the granularity of the quantum foam.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, as if feeling expensive fabric. “It’s got a distinct texture, you know. When you’ve had a lot of experience, you can sort of feel it as you go through the tubes. It’s the damnedest, most amazing thing.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, not knowing what to say about this. But I pressed ahead with an embarrassing matter. “Sir, I freely admit I didn’t do stunningly well at the Academy, but—”

  He jumped on this remark, cutting me off. He looked like a big cat pouncing on a particularly stupid mouse. “Aha, mistake number one! It had to happen sometime, and we might as well get it out of the way now. Feel better now you’ve done it and it’s over? Mistake number two doesn’t feel so bad. You’ve now screwed up once, the perfect record is already history, so you can relax a bit.” He grinned, looking a bit crazy.

  “Sir?”

  Janning rolled his eyes. “Mr. Dunne, relax! I’m just trying to not be terribly pompous and officious, the way the helm team leader on my first assignment was. That guy was a sincere asshole, no mistake. William Do-It-Again Strickland. God, what a swine. I kept wondering why nobody had noticed how a huge bloody starship had been jammed up his fundamental orifice!”

  I laughed and smiled. He went on.

  “Your mistake, Dunne, was you said ‘I didn’t do stunningly well at the Academy, but.’ It was the but that did you in. You don’t say that word on this ship. If you didn’t do so well, that’s fine — we can work on that, and you will be working on it very hard until you can track and steer through tubes in your sleep. Just don’t say but. Putting that but on the end makes you look like a suck-up, and I don’t want that in my staff. I’d rather hear the unvarnished truth.”

  “But I—” I winced as I heard it come out of my mouth.

  Janning made a loud buzzer noise. “You lose, Mr. Dunne.” He grinned. “You were going to say you were taught all this crap at the Academy about being all jolly and decent, weren’t you?” I had to admit that the Academy faculty did like to affect a certain very Anglo culture that felt rather jaunty and amusing, but this swiftly turned to terrifying fury if you screwed up and the punishment details were given out.

  “I wouldn’t have put it quite like that. They said the way to get by was to defer to one’s superior officers.”

  Janning shook his head. “Wrong. My number one rule is that most of what you learn at the Academy is bullshi
t and obsolete by the time you get in your first ship. Technology moves too damn fast for those guys to keep ­current. Plus, they don’t have the budget to give cadets sufficient space duty experience, so when green kids like you turn up for your deployments, you’re too scared and intimidated to think for yourself, which is the one skill you absolutely need. The chain of command is important, yes. But if you receive a stupid order, it doesn’t matter who said it. Stupid orders can get you killed, or your whole bloody ship destroyed.”

  “Even if the captain issues a direct order, and it’s ­stupid, I should stop and question it in front of him? I’d be atomized!”

  Janning said, “Dunne, officers don’t get more intelligent as they get promoted. They have more experience and often better judgment. But in this Service promotions often come through whom you know, not what you know. Just because you’re a fresh graduate doesn’t mean your ideas are necessarily worse than the captain’s. So think! Use the brain in there, don’t just be an order-following zombie.”

  I stood there in silence for a long while, my mind in turmoil. I was sworn to defend the Community and its founding treaties, but I was also sworn to obey the orders of my superior officers. The chain of command, cadets are told, is not there for the amusement of senior officers, it is a tool that saves lives and regulates existence. If someone gives you an order, you are sworn to follow it, or face dire consequences. But here was Janning, telling me something that seemed, in a word, subversive. “This is … it’s impossible to … I can’t just…”

  Janning nodded. “The Academy?”

  “Yes, sir. I spent four years having every bit of independent thought, every bit of initiative, all of it beaten out of me, literally beaten out of me sometimes. They, they…” I couldn’t say it. The things the senior cadets, the instructors, at the Academy got away with, appalling things, things that would count as torture and human rights abuse in any other context, all to make sure cadets understood about being part of the group. The denial of individuality and the destruction of personal identity were key parts of Academy life. I heard again and again that it was necessary to make us part of the team, and in turn part of a crew.

  You mustn’t rock the boat.

  Janning looked at me, with sad eyes. “I know, James.”

  Suddenly I felt like I was falling apart. Feelings I had crushed to dust a long time ago were threatening to spring to life, but I fought them back, like a good cadet. A strong cadet. Emotions were dangerous. I had fought them back before, and would again, certain nothing could touch my core. Not those bastards, not anybody.

  But this guy Janning, showing me a shred of decency and maybe even a kind of friendship, he got to me. He threatened my core. I took a lot of deep breaths.

  “Mr. Janning, when do I start my training?”

  Four

  Eclipse left the station at 1330 hours and departed Ganymede Space. Janning allowed me to observe the helm cloud in action. It was like standing at the back of the room, watching the others sitting around a circular table having a meeting, but with each person present conjuring shapes and images in striking colors from the plethora of sensor and system information feeding into their heads. Janning sat at the head of this table, supervising and guiding, as his officers responded to Captain Rudyard’s commands from the bridge cloud.

  As we cleared Jovian Space and the magnetospheric ­interference from Ganymede and Jupiter, the captain, who appeared to sit right behind Janning, gave the orders for hypertube location and transition.

  I saw Helm Officer Kyne check the local hypertube weather feed. She quickly located a promising tube entry point — they showed up as flaws of negative mass in the structure of space-time — and steered the ship towards it. Once Kyne had the ship aligned for entry, Captain Rudyard sent the ­order for tube entry. Kyne slipped us into the tube at 1403 hours. Her effortless control impressed the hell out of me. There were several other possible flaws, but she picked this one. No protracted pondering or studying of the data; she just picked the right point from the display and tossed the ship through it like a paper glider.

  Inside the tube, Kyne deployed the ship’s tube grapple fields and began manipulating the tube’s hyperdimensional structure to her will. The interior topology of a hypertube is typically a knot or loop in many dimensions; and it took great skill to fight the curvature and make the tube deposit your ship where you wanted to go. It often took several tube rides to reach one’s destination, but Kyne steered us without visible effort or strain.

  “Tube egress in five, four…” She counted down. Nobody looked as tense as I felt. Suppose the modeling of the tube’s topology had been flawed and Kyne had programmed slightly incorrect information into the grapple-drivers — we could wind up deep inside a star. These things happened. It was why several people on the helm team worked through the same datasets individually, and made sure most of them agreed on their findings. Also, I had never done this outside of a simulator, and it was a completely different situation when you could see graphic depictions of the knotty hypertwists conjured before you in a false-color mathematical horror, like something alive. We’re trying to travel through that? There was talk that such representations were only shadows of shadows, that even augmented human brains could not deal with the spatial and geometric conundrums represented by these tangled paths between distant points. But only once I got to the Academy did I begin to understand this. Why in hell had I chosen helm as my career specialization? Had I been drunk that day?

  I think, as I now look back, I chose it because it was about the hardest thing I could pick with my marks. I was never one to take the easy way out.

  “Now!” Kyne said, not raising her low voice. Eclipse exited the tube back into real space. We’d been in the tube just 19 minutes, a short ride as tube travel went.

  Another officer named Marsden, reported our new ­position in galactic coordinates — we had managed to miss the local stars. I breathed again. We were about seventy lightyears from Ganymede, above the galactic plane. Ship’s time was 1422 hours.

  Unexplored space. I had never felt so alone. So cold.

  Mapping, Astronomy, and Planetary Science teams set to work charting and studying phenomena within the cubic lightyear volume around us. The ship dispersed clouds of tiny remote full-spectrum sensorbots that shot off at ­relativistic velocities in all directions.

  Captain Rudyard congratulated Mr. Janning and his people for an excellent tube selection. It wasn’t every day a ship found such a long tube, or one stable enough to allow for extended topological manipulation. He said it like he was talking about an excellent choice of wine with ­dinner. Janning nodded, and through the cloud interface, executed a minimal bow.

  As tense as I had ever felt lying curled up in a simulator egg on Deck A, watching Kyne work her practiced magic with the blinding flood of data and transmuting it into information she used to move the ship across the galaxy in a matter of a few minutes, I nonetheless felt a sense of wanting it to have been more exciting. I was filled with a kind of disappointment that bridge operations weren’t more dramatic, fraught with frowning, glaring, snapping-order tension. Somehow, watching it all unfold was rather dull and businesslike. Information flowed the way it should; the ship responded like a vessel a fifth her size; we moved.

  Then again, I thought, I probably wouldn’t want things to get all tense, just for the sake of entertainment. My ­limited exposure to helm simulations had already demonstrated that.

  I unplugged from the cloud and began my program of bridging studies, learning how to do the impossible and make it look dull and routine.

  At 1930 hours I was allowed to quit for the day. I cracked the hatch on the sim egg, one of many in a room full of such eggs, and climbed out into the simulation control room. The room was lit with a dull red glow and I im­mediately noticed the sweet tinge of ship processed air. ­Although the egg’s environment p
rocessors were good, the air outside the egg’s stuffy confines was a welcome relief. My legs weren’t as stiff as I expected; the smartchair in the egg had been busy massaging my muscles all ­afternoon. I checked in with Simulations Training Officer Hinz, who said only that I had done okay for a newbie, and I headed to the Officer’s Mess on Deck E. Walking along, riding lifts, still trying to get my saluting right, it occurred to me that while I felt drained and tired from the effort of my sim work, I couldn’t remember a damn thing that I had done. My hands felt a little twitchy, and images of diagrams and half-memories of equations flashed back and forth in the back of my mind, but that was all.

  I found Sorcha in the Officer’s Mess, sitting alone next to a wall covered in fixed displays showing high-res views of local space in various wavelengths. I got my dinner, the infamous “space chunder,” some kind of bland casserole with lumps that might have been beef, and thin gravy with tasteless vegetables. I threaded my way between the backs of chairs, and dodged pointy elbows, to join Sorcha.

  The Mess was a cavernous space for a ship, fully ten meters across, with room for perhaps fifty crew to eat at any given time. Right now, the place was packed with people on the late dinner shift. They were wiping vatbread across their plates, soaking up the last of their gravy, and chatting with each other in loud, convivial voices. In stark contrast, Sorcha sat to one side, looking at the displays and yawning, her own food untouched. She radiated a strong aura of “piss off!” that, from a newbie on the crew, probably seemed laughable to the more experienced hands.

  “The food here can’t be that bad!” I said with a smile, hoping to lighten her mood.

  She turned to look at me. I thought she looked tired, but she managed a weak smile.