Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Some of the chasers were good, but Woodward was convinced that his crew was better. Still, it took almost three days before they slowed and then came to a dead stop near one particularly complex junction of gates to get their bearings and also to wait.

The occasional ship would emerge from one and go into another, but none of them seemed to pause or even slow down. They had finally shaken the last of the tails.

Now it would take them another three days just to get to the jumping off spot. If anybody out there was clever enough to have guessed that, well, maybe they deserved to come along and see if they could ride the serpent.

They all stared at the forward screen which showed a fairly dim and distant starfield and not much else.

“Show spacial abnormalities,” the captain instructed.

Suddenly a good three dozen objects of varying size and intensity flared to life, all in constant motion, none a consistent shape, and all radiating enormous energy. It really wasn’t an unusual number of such things for this sort of area, but it was unnerving nonetheless to think of putting the ship, and themselves, into and perhaps through one of them.

“That’s the one in the data, second from the far left,” the captain told Woodward and the others sitting there at the monitoring and communications stations.

Invisible to the naked eye, the wormhole seemed to shimmer and twist, elongate and then snap back to nearly round, only to go off in what might be called a twisted frown, and so on. Woodward had to stare at the thing and felt some trepidation in spite of all his comments. How can you center something this size in that ? he wondered to himself. For that matter, what made them be there at all? A natural wormhole was a transitory affair; it formed for fractions of a second, then was gone unless forced open and locked that way until a ship went through. It was within the capabilities of all modern interstellar craft to do that; this had been the key to the stars in the first place. Once through, the equations said that the trip would be near instantaneous, but for reasons still not fully understood it was not. Still, the hole to the Three Kings, never stabilized and locked down, simply should not be there. It should not be reappearing over a three parsec region in a varying but not quite random order. Something very big and very powerful was powering that thing.

He suddenly thought of that key simulation, the one that would have given the key to erasing whole areas of space-time, that had forced him out of his old work and into this, and he wondered. Sapenza, did you give me the right one? Or did you cook the books for revenge?

It was too late for that now, he told himself. They had to trust the figures. They seemed to hold up, anyway. It was either that or slink back into port and disband. He wasn’t going to do that, so there was really little choice.

“Proceed, Captain. Take us in,” he told the ship’s commander.

Lining up would be slow, careful, precise, with the computers checking and double checking and awaiting a final command that could only be given by the human captain. Once that command was given, though, it was entirely out of his or Woodward’s or anybody else’s hands but God’s. The commitment would be total, and at a speed as fast as the old Mountain could give them.

“Put forward screen throughout the ship,” the captain ordered, allowing those in their quarters, in the ward room, and on duty stations to see what was going on. What was most important wasn’t the visual but the small figure down in the lower right that began “OPT” and then gave a percentage. The navigational computers were trying out every single approach while calculating and trying to predict the shape and size of the wormhole from moment to moment. When they got it as close to “optimal,” or one hundred percent, as they thought they could, then they would commit. From that point, no human would have any control until they emerged at the other end.

If they emerged at the other end.

“Riding the serpent,” they called it, after going through the long, writhing, snakelike tunnel through space-time. Woodward thought about that for a moment. The serpent, the source of evil, of original sin, expelled from Eden. It was somewhat ironic.

The optimization rate had reached as high as eighty-one percent twice, but never above that. It wasn’t comforting to think about the odds, even if in their favor, since you had no room for error, no allowance for mistakes. Eighty-one percent you live, nineteen percent you die. With a controlled genhole the percentage was always just a hundred thousandth of a point below one hundred.

The captain shook his head. “I’ve seen and been through about this bad, but it’s going to be hairy, sir!”

“Well, we knew that.”

And now the captain gave his last order to the computers. He sat down in the command chair, leaned back, and said, “Commit at best possible point.”

There was a pregnant pause when it seemed as if all was silent and the only sound throughout the whole ship was the collective heartbeats of the almost nine hundred still aboard, and then the screen said, “OPT 83.”

People were suddenly slammed back into their seats or found things rolling away or crashing against bulkheads. The increasing roar of the great engines made the whole ship shake.

Before anybody could react further, the writhing, gyrating oval suddenly grew to immense proportions and then vanished.

There was a massive bang! as if something very large and vital had exploded all around them, but they were still there, and the vibration, if anything, was getting worse. Woodward felt his left pant leg get wet. Startled, he looked down and saw that the half a cup of coffee he’d left in his mug had vibrated up and out and all over him.

On the screen was nothing particularly intelligible. It looked gray and black and white and lumpy and irregular and it went on and on. What was unnerving about it was its apparent undulation; genholes were round and very stiff.

“Damage control, report,” the captain said, still looking at the screen and the readouts.

“Minor breakage, and a few bruises and possible broken bones from people who don’t listen to the briefings, nothing more,” a woman’s voice responded over the ship’s intercom. “Recommend lifelines with clips for the duration, belts when seated or sleeping, and covered food and beverages. Full tie-down.”

“Agreed. What was that bang?”

“Unknown. Doesn’t show up on any of our status boards, sir. It may be that it was a last second correction just as we entered.”

Or it could have been us striking the hole wall, thought not only the captain but just about everybody who knew how these things worked. So far power and shields were holding up at close to perfect, but even a slight tap could take a toll later on as they would have to put out at near maximum power for days.

“Captain? Nav desk,” another woman, this one on the bridge, called over to him.

“Yes?”

“I have another object following us keeping regular distance. It might be another ship.”

“Put it on my screen.”

The data from inside a wild hole wasn’t reliable enough to tell much, but there definitely did seem to be an object there, matching them move for move. Either another, smaller ship, or…

Or debris knocked off our engines, the captain thought nervously. Still, it felt like a ship. Maybe they hadn’t quite shaken off everybody.

“I wouldn’t be all that upset right now, Captain,” Woodward told him. “Even if one of the leeches did manage to fool us and come along, they’ve got a pretty miserable ride, and there’s nothing much we can do about them until we all get to the other side anyway, is there?”