For Love and Glory

XX

A hyperbeam bypassed light years, carrying the findings made aboard Dagmar. Lissa wished she could talk with her father when they were done, but haste forbade. The instruments gathered information at rates hugely greater than the transmitter could send it. Conveying all they had took several irrecoverable hours. For the same reason, the expedition would dispatch nothing but the new data from each stop along its course henceforward—and nothing whatsoever, once it was close to the black holes, until it was outward bound again.

Esker spent the waiting period in the electronics shop. Lissa supposed he tinkered with something in hopes that it would ease his tension and… unhappiness? Or did the magnificence ahead of him drive out mortal wishes?

Noel monitored the reporting. Valen studied the facts, with Tessa and Elif on hand to answer questions. In the saloon, Lissa and Orichalc played round upon round of Integer until, at length, they fell into conversation. It turned to private hopes, fears, loves. You could confide to a sympathetic alien what you could not to any of your own species. “I look forward to your Freydis colony,” Lissa said finally, sincerely.

The summons resounded. Crew took their posts. Countdown. Jump. A light-year from their destination, they poised.

Words reached Lissa in her globe as if from across an equal gulf. She had instantly established that no other vessel was in the neighborhood. Absurd to imagine that any would be, those few score motes strewn through the abyss. Why, for starters, consider that the light-year is a human unit, a memory of Old Earth like the standard year and day, the meter, the gram, the gee. Nobody else uses them.… The view was, as always, glorious with stars. One outshone all the rest, a dazzling brilliance. Wonderstruck, she asked what that might be. The ship replied that it was a type B giant, about four and a half parsecs off, passing through this vicinity at this time. She dropped it out of sight and mind as she set the console viewscreen to the predicted coordinates of the search object. Her fingers trembled a little. She turned up the optics.

The breath caught in her throat. Magnified, amplified, two comets flamed before her. From their shining brows, flattened blue-white manes streamed toward each other, shading through fierce gold to a red like newly spilled blood. Where they met, they roiled, and she imagined the turbulence within, great waves and tides, lightning-like discharges, atoms ripped into plasma, roaring to their doom.

The gas was thin, she knew; on Asborg it would have seemed well-nigh a vacuum. But the totality was monstrous, drawn out of the interstellar medium as the black holes hurtled through, spinning down into them with a blaze of radiation. And now, when they had drawn close, their pulls coacted to redouble that infall. The accretion discs had just begun to interact. The shock was mostly generating visible light. Later it would shift—it had shifted—toward X-rays, harder and harder.

“Next jump,” Esker called.

“Already?” Valen asked.

The reply screeched. “Chaos take you, we haven’t got a second to waste! Nothing registers here that we can’t account for in principle. I’ve programmed everything for maximum data input and processing. Make use of it, you clotbrain!”

Hoy, that’s far too strong, Esker, thought Lissa, half dismayed. Gerward has every right to put you in confinement. Are you off your beam? Now, in these last, supreme days?

Relief washed through her when Valen rapped, “Watch your language. The next offense, I will penalize.”

She had a sense of deliverance when she heard his grudging “Sorry,… Captain. May we proceed?”

Dagmar knew how she was to approach. “Ten,” she sang. Valen must have given her a signal, not quite trusting himself to speak. “Nine. Eight. Seven—

At half a light-year, the comets burned naked-eye bright. Optics showed a diamond pattern in the shock front, and intricate strands that looped around as if seeking forward to the hungry furnaces of the comas. Elif ‘s voice was full of awe and puzzlement: “Sir, that looks almighty strange, doesn’t it? I can’t think how you’d get curvatures like that in the gas, at this stage of things.”

“Nor can I,” Esker admitted eagerly. Rapture had eclipsed wrath. “The cosmos is running an experiment like none we’ve ever seen before or likely ever will again. I’d guess that mutual attraction is—was—appreciably distorting the event horizons. That’d be bound to affect magnetic fields and charge distributions. But we need more information.”

Not that it would soon reveal the truth, Lissa realized. Understanding must wait upon months or years of analysis, hypothesis, tests in laboratories and observatory ships and brains, back at Asborg and no doubt elsewhere. The task here set Esker’s genius was to decide what sorts of data, out of the impossibly many his team might try for, would likely bear such fruit. “The polarizing synchrometer should—” The conversation over the intercom went out of Lissa’s reach.

She tuned it low and made a direct connection with Orichalc in the saloon. Her yearning was for Valen’s words, since she could not have his presence. The skipper shouldn’t be distracted, though, nor should the others be given grounds to suspect he was. Besides, she felt sorry for the Susaian, become functionless, restricted to whatever view Dagmar got a chance to project on a rec screen for him.

“How’re you doing?” she inquired softly.

“We fare among splendors,” she heard. “Is this not worth an island?”

“Yes, oh, yes.” A thought she had not wanted to think pushed to the forefront. “Will your—will the Dominator ships really let us carry it home?”

“We have considered this, before, honored one. The vessels on which I served were unarmed. The Dominators have no cause to expect us. The fleet come for the climax may include a few naval units of models suitable for rescue and salvage operations, should those prove necessary; but they are probably not formidable.”

“I know. I remember. However, it’s occurred to me—it didn’t before, because on Asborg we don’t think that way—in a number of human societies, the military would insist on having a big presence, if only for the prestige.”

“They do not think like that in the Confederacy either, honored one. There is no distinction between organizations serving the Dominance; they are simply specialized branches of the same growth. This means that commanders can act decisively, without having to consult high officials first. You see, their intelligence and emotional stability have been verified beforehand. I warned your father that I do not know what the doctrine is with respect to preserving this secret. But I doubt that orders read ‘at all costs.’ Additional combat vessels will scarcely be sent from afar, under any but desperate circumstances. That would mean leakage of the truth, from crewfolk not predisciplined to closeness about it. Besides, the Confederacy is as desirous of maintaining stability as any other nation is.” Orichalc hesitated. “I do counsel that we avoid undue provocation.”

“Well, you can advise the captain. Can’t you?”

“I can try. Perhaps I shall bring you into conference, if possible. Your rapport with both him and me may enable you to make ourselves clear to one another.”

It thrilled in her. “I can’t imagine any better service. Thank you, old dear, thank you.”

Jump went the ship in a while. And again, presently, jump. And hour after hour, jump, to a different point of view, to a new distance, but always nearer, jump, jump, jump.