Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

He wished he could plug into that gathering once they’d injected, but to do that he’d have to be inside. He could communicate with them in real space, but inside a wormhole, whether natural or created, you were strictly incommunicado.

Commander Park elected not to hold them up anymore. In the little time he could finagle, there didn’t seem to be anything more he could do that he hadn’t already done anyway. At twenty hundred hours, the Odysseus gave a shudder and came to life like some great prehistoric star beast suddenly waking up and needing to prowl. Automated pilot programs handled all the undocking and everything up to and including injection. The ship’s on-board computers and even her live captain were basically redundancies, just as Eugene Harker, in his much smaller environment, was.

The great ship quickly picked up speed. First the space dock and then the entire planet began to rapidly recede with little or no sensation inside or out. Harker was still conscious and still thinking about whether or not he was committing the stupidest act of suicide in recent memory. It took the form of a dialogue, only he was the only one speaking…

Okay, so why wasn’t this a job for a good bioengineered robot? he asked, trying to convince himself that he was in fact useful.

Because, if there are Titans involved, not even the old lady’s lower parts would work, let alone any form of robot, no matter how much of it was quasi-organic. If it was a machine, they’d eat it.

So what are you right now but a lump of biological material lying inside a big machine? Some help you’ll be if the Titans show up!

Maybe. Just maybe. We’ll see…

The ship continued to accelerate and steered itself for a large structure floating in space, one of three in the area. These looked like giant squares, kilometers high and wide but only a hundred meters thick, and within them was a void that could not be described. Even a vacuum was something. How does one describe nothing? Many had tried, none had succeeded, but even those who saw it regularly tended to feel as if there was a total wrongness there, that even “empty” had to have some meaning.

The genhole was connected, through a kind of warp in space, a folding of space-time, with another at a predetermined point. You couldn’t just go faster than light in a practical sense—even if you weren’t quite doing it in a literal sense—and come out where you pleased. Each “hole” was still a sort of tube that needed another end. That was how Harker and Park and the rest knew where the ship was going, at least initially. They had to file plans so that ships were not crashing as they emerged from one or another, and, of course, it was a good way for the Navy to know just where everybody was heading. Of course, that assumed that all of them were charted, that all of them were legal, and that those which had been in areas no longer on the service lanes had been deactivated. In no case were these assumptions valid, of course, particularly not in this day and age.

The spokes along each segment of the Odysseus now hummed to life, and blanketed the entire outer hull with an energy shield. Fortunately, as it was supposed to, that energy shield considered Gene Harker a part of the hull and blanketed him as well.

The tip of the forward spokes now activated, throwing energy beams that struck the surface of the genhole. At this point the ship pitched slowly, until the twelve radiated lines on the ends of the spokes hit the precise spots of a similar grid just inside the genhole itself. At that point, ship and hole were locked on. There was a sudden heavy burst of power and the ship aimed right for the nothing in the middle. Perfectly aligned and oriented, it struck the outer surface.

Watching this from a side angle was something technicians always loved, no matter how many times they’d seen it. A huge, elongated modular ship crashed headlong into a block only a hundred meters thick and kept going until it was apparently consumed: it was always an awesome sight.

Just before injection, Gene Harker’s suit decided it was time to put him to sleep.

Even so, he was awake and aware when injection actually arrived, and he felt it: a weird, bizarre feeling that combined a crackling heat and the deepest cold all at once, and sent a roar with the sound of a cyclone’s winds through his unhearing ears. It was probably the drug and the fears and imagination of his mind, but he could never be sure.

Father Chicanis felt a bit more free than he had in some time. Admiral Krill noted that there were still some of Park’s bugs crawling around, but they could hardly transmit and they didn’t have much data storage abilities. And, since they weren’t coming home for some time, it didn’t matter if there were all sorts of recording devices on the hull. Let them be there, for all the information they could transmit back in the same year it might do anybody any good.

“You all know that Madame Sotoropolis and I are from Helena,” he began, “and that this is about returning to our world. But it is not precisely about that, because merely returning, this late, would do little good. It is almost certain that everyone we remember and love down there is dead, and perhaps their children as well. We can only pray that some survive. You cannot believe the tragedy of this.”

Colonel N’Gana thought that it was nice that the really rich folks got out to mourn the rest, but he said nothing. The mere fact that the very rich and powerful thought they were moral and proper human beings was why they always acted so insufferably that they inevitably caused themselves to be hated and occasionally overthrown. He was not, however, one of those particularly moved by all this Greek tragedy.

“We have been aware for some time that certain elements, apparently criminal, mostly from the services of previously conquered worlds and thus now off the registries, have been eking out a clandestine existence in conquered areas of space,” the priest went on. “They live on their ships, they stay out of the way of the Titans, and they establish nothing near them that would attract attention. What they need to survive and cannot get from whatever they can mine or process, they have been known to steal. It pains me to have to deal with these sorts of people, but there is a greater moral good at work here, I feel certain, and they are at least understandable.”

“How do they get around out there?” Takamura asked him. “I mean, we saw the gate for that world implode as the power was drained.”

“True, that happens, but not all gates from the conquered areas are deactivated, nor those in the path of the invaders,” Chicanis told them. “And, frankly, they have been able to deploy or make some of their own for smaller vessels. We will be into that network in a few days as we switch back and forth until we reach an outer point where there is, well, an extra genhole in a place too close to the Titans to be still used. At that point we will switch to their control, and the pirates or freebooters or whatever you wish to call them will control the navigation. The one we will be meeting, as you know, calls himself the Flying Dutchman. Most of them use quaint, sometimes antique names to disguise themselves or perhaps even characterize themselves. We have been waiting for the Dutchman’s signal, and now we are going to meet him inside the territory he controls.”

“Goodness! Do you mean inside conquered territory?” Katarina Socolov found that news unsettling.

“Yes, and no. Space is very big, and the one advantage we have, the same advantage they have, is that the Titans simply don’t care about us. We are irrelevant to them unless we make ourselves intrusive. They will not go hunting for us. They want our worlds, for whatever purpose.”