Tad Williams - A Stark And Wormy Knight

“Couldn’t do it, sir. Regs don’t allow it.”

“All right. How about something else, then? You could call me something amusing, like ‘Mr. B’…”

I almost made a horrified face, but Chief Purser always says letting someone know you’re upset is just as rude as telling them out loud. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep calling you Mr. Balcescu, sir. It’s easier for me.”

“All right, then, Mr. Jatt. So why is Rainwater Hub such a serious business?”

I did my best to explain. To be honest, I don’t understand all the politics and history myself — that’s not our job. Like we rocket-jocks always say, we just fly ‘em. But here’s what I know.

When Balcescu said he went all the way out to Brightman’s Star and there was no fuss about wormhole transfers, he was right, but that’s because he’d left from the Libra system and his whole trip had been through Confederation space. All those Visser rings he went through were “CO amp;O” as we say — Confederation Owned and Operated. But when he hopped on the Lak’ to join us on our run from the Brightman system to Col Hydrae, well, that trip requires one jump through non-Confederation space — the one we were about to make.

Not only that, but for some reason not even Doc Swainsea can explain so I can understand, the Visser ring here at Rainwater is hinky, or rather the wormhole itself is. Sometimes it takes a little while until the conditions are right, so the ships sort of line up and wait — all kinds of ships, the most you’ll ever see in one place, Confederation, X-Malkin, Blessed Union, ordinary Rim traders, terraform scouts out of Covenant, you name it. They call it the Waterhole because most of the time everybody just…shares. Even enemies. Nobody wants to shut down the hub when it means you could wind up with an entire fleet stranded on this side of the galaxy. So there’s a truce. It’s a shaky one, sometimes. Captain Watanabe told us once in the early days the Confederation tried to arrest a Covenant jumbo at another hub, Persakis out near Zeta Ophiuchus — the Convenant had been breaking an embargo on the Malkinates. Persakis was shut down for most of a year and it took twenty more for everyone to recover from that, so now everybody agrees there’s no hostilities inside a hub safety zone — like predators and prey sharing a waterhole on the savannah. Once you get there, it’s sanctuary. It’s… Casablanca.

I mentioned I like old Earth movies, didn’t I?

After I’d explained, Balcescu asked me a bunch more questions about how long we’d have to wait at Rainwater Hub and who else was waiting with us. For a guy who’d traveled to about fifteen or twenty different worlds, I have to say he didn’t know much about politics or Confederation ships, but I did my best to bring him up to speed. When he ran out of things to ask, he thanked me, patted me on the head, then walked back to the view-deck. Yeah, patted me on the head. I guess nobody told him that any member of a Confederation crew can break a man’s arm using only one finger and thumb. He was lucky I had things to do.

The weird stuff started happening as we entered the zone. Captain Watanabe and Ship’s Navigator Chinh-Herrera were on the com with Rainwater Hub Command when things started to get scratchy. At first they thought it was just magnetar activity, because there’s a big one pretty close by — it’s one of the things that makes Rainwater kind of unstable. The bridge lost Hub Command but they managed to latch onto another signal — com from one of Rainwater’s own lighters — and so they saw the whole thing on visual, through a storm of interference. Chinh-Herrera showed it to me afterward so I’ve seen it myself. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t.

First there was the huge alien ship, although even after several views it takes a while to realize it is a ship. Shaped more like a jellyfish or an amoeba, all curves and transparencies, and not particularly symmetrical. In another circumstance you might even call it beautiful — but not when it’s appearing out of a wormhole where it’s not supposed to be. The Visser ring wasn’t supposed to open for another several hours, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to open to let something out.

Then that… thing appeared. The angry thing.

It was some kind of volumetric display — but what kind, even Doc Swainsea couldn’t guess — a three-dimensional projected image, but what it looked like was some kind of furious god, a creature the size of small planet, rippling and burning in the silence of space. It just barely looked like a living creature — it had arms, that’s all you could tell for certain, and some kind of glow around the face that might have been eyes. Its voice, or the voice of the alien ship projecting it, thundered into every com of every ship within half a unit of Rainwater Hub. Nobody could understand it, of course — not then — it was just a deafening, scraping roar with bits along the edges that barked and twittered. “Like a circus dumped into a meat grinder, audience and all,” Chinh-Herrera said. I had to cover my ears when he played it for me.

If it had stopped there it would have been weird and frightening enough, but right after the monstrous thing went quiet some kind of weapon fired from inside it — from the ship itself, cloaked behind the volumetric display. It wasn’t a beam so much as a ripple — at the time you couldn’t even see it, but when we played it back you could see the moment of distortion across the star field where it passed — and the nearest ship to the Visser ring, a Malkinate heavy freighter, flew apart. It happened just as fast as that — a flare of white light and then the freighter was gone, leaving nothing but debris too small to see on the lighter’s com feed. Thirteen hundred men dead. Maybe they were X-Malkins and they didn’t believe what we believe, but they were still shipmen like us. How did it feel to have their ship, their home, just disappear into fragments around them? To be suddenly thrown into the freezing black empty?

A few seconds later, as if to show that it wasn’t an accident, the god-thing roared again and convulsed and another ship was destroyed, one of Rainwater’s lighters. This one must have had some kind of inflammable cargo because it went up like a giant magnesium flare, a ball of white fire burning away until nothing was left but floating embers.

This was too much, of course — proof of hostile intent — and a flight of wasps was scrambled from Rainwater Station and sent after the jellyfish ship. Maybe the aliens were surprised by how quickly we fought back, or maybe they were just done with their giant hologram: in either case, it disappeared as the wasp flight swept in. A moment later the wasps were in range and began to fire on the intruder, but their pulses only sputtered and flashed against the outside skin of the jellyfish ship. A moment later every one of the wasps abruptly turned into a handful of sparks flung out in all directions like spinning Catherine wheels — an entire flight gone.

After that, everybody fell back, as you can imagine. “Ran like hell” might be a better way to put it. The Confederation ships met up in orbit around the nearest planet, several units away from Rainwater, and the officers began burning up the com lines, as you can imagine. Nobody’d seen anything like the jellyfish before, or recognized whatever it was on that volumetric or how it was done. We accessed some of the Hub drones so we could keep a watch on Rainwater. The alien ship was still sitting there, although the Visser ring behind it had closed again. There were moments when the angry-god display flickered back into life, as if it was waking up to have a look around, and other moments when crackling lines of force like blue and orange lightning arced back and forth between the jellyfish and the ring, but none of this told anyone a thing about what was really going on.