Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“I dunno,” Jerry Nagel said. “I always thought an exception would be made for me.”

“Very well,” the captain replied. “I think you all should strap in for this one. It will make things much easier for me. Once you do that, I think we might be able to do this in another twenty minutes.”

Randi Queson exhaled loudly. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said.

“Get out of here and hang on, you little creep!”

Eyegor didn’t seem to have real feelings but it was apologetic. “I am sorry, but I have nothing else to photograph at the moment.”

“Well, go photograph the C&C board or something!” Randi Queson snapped. “Just not me, not here, not now! Understand?”

“Yes, I believe I understand. You are—”

“ Get the hell out of here before I smash you! Now! ”

“Oh, well, if it’s that way…” Eyegor responded, but it floated away and outside the room.

Go piss off An Li, she thought with a wicked smile on her face.

They were all in their cabins, lying down and strapped into their bunks, waiting for the big bang that would tell them they were in a wild hole. It might well be instant death, or at least a quick death, or it might be nothing at all, but if they were to live through it, nobody wanted to be the one with the broken arm or gashed forehead because they didn’t heed the captain’s cautions.

No human pilot could do what the captain was doing now. It could only be done by a pure machine or a hybrid like the captain and the Stanley . At velocities approaching a third of light speed for short bursts, with no real margin for error, and with a target that had to be hit dead center even though it wasn’t there yet, this was one hell of a tricky maneuver. Any mistake, whether in calculations on where and when the wild hole they wanted would appear, or in just when to start for it or precisely how much thrust was sufficient, meant they were either doomed to fail or they were burnt toast.

This was what the captain was designed for, what she gained from her sacrifice of her humanity.

The calculations came through as simply as a grade school addition, and she didn’t even consciously think of doing them and putting them into action. She had done three trial runs and had completed full diagnostics on the hardware involved, and now she was ready.

It was almost certainly best that none of the people within the ship could see what was really going on, for nobody without the captain’s massive calculating abilities and tremendous database of information would believe that this was anything more than idiocy.

The ship came around, sighted on a trajectory so precise that the margin of error was under one millimeter over the vibration of the ship at full thrust. The engines roared into life, shuddering as they did so and causing a massive series of subsonic vibrations that went through the entire ship and all within it, and then it was off at increasing speed, on that precise line to a point in space where there was most assuredly nothing at all.

Although cushioned in artificial gravity and a stable internal environment, they could all slightly feel what was going on, and for the longest time nobody breathed.

At just the precise vanishing point of the original trajectory, and just as the ship reached the mathematical point it had represented, a hole opened up, a hole in space and time. It had no elegant look, no sense of symmetry, nor did it give off the sensation of brute force, although it certainly had that. It looked in fact like a ghostly, twisting plasma of something indefinable, some sort of plasma that was unlike anything in the known universe, and which throbbed and swirled.

The captain took her best data and punched right into the center of the throbbing mass, which slowly enveloped the ship. At that moment the ship seemed to sway in all directions at once, and it took some fast experimenting to keep it solid, as it now appeared to be riding dead center through a ghostly translucent tube.

Most instrumentation was now useless, but enough was known about the energy properties of a wormhole to allow at least a calculation of the amount of subjective time they would be inside and during which the captain would have to be constantly in control.

There was no need to add power now, beyond positioning; the hole simply ignored things like thrust and mass and did its own things according to its own dimly understood extra-universe rules.

The main engines cut off and the internal buffered living environment stabilized. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet and even more disconcertingly still.

An Li unbuckled herself from her bed, sat up, opened a small box on a nightstand near it and removed a Styngan cigarette and an elegant lighter with a stylized rat embossed on its side. She pressed the stud, and the top element glowed. She brought it up to the cigarette.

For some reason, it took her several tries before her hand would obey enough to get the heat where she wanted it to go.

She finally got the thing lit, but just sat there, staring at the blank bulkhead, barely puffing on it, allowing her nerve to come back and her heart to slow down.

Everybody, she thought, needed at least one bad habit, if only for moments like these.

And there would be several days more to go with things probably getting worse for everybody. Days and days with nothing to do, but also nothing more to learn. They didn’t have anything new, no data on what was at the other end. But it was going to be bedlam and constant tension and work once they broke out, from the very moment they broke out, assuming all went well.

And she was right. By the time they got the warning that it was only a matter of hours left, they were through all the diversions and all the drugs and cyber entertainment aboard and were starting at each other’s throats. That, though, would change the moment things started to happen. It was already happening as they began to think of the job ahead.

The captain, though, was quite pleased. “We managed to get in, we’ve had no incidents, and we’re in excellent condition,” she assured them. “I was afraid that others would try following us in; that’s a good way to destabilize the interior of a wild hole and cause all sorts of nastiness. We had a few followers, early on, but if anyone was present to tell our course, speed, and match us going in, it wasn’t clear on any of my sensors.”

“Do they really need that?” Randi Queson asked her. “I mean, if they have a surveyor unit in the area and just register us—course, speed, which hole—they don’t have to risk any destabilization or detection, do they?”

“Perhaps not, but it’s not that easy. Without the data Sanders had downloaded into me, I do not see how they could determine the pattern and pick the correct hole and appearance with sufficient time to get through. And if we get back, we’re going to own the destination.”

“Do you think you can hold us together on the way out?” Lucky Cross asked her. “I always suspected that it was that that tore ships apart. Got to be a fuckin’ monster to keep a hole like that re-forming over and over. Those forces and the inevitable debris field have got to be Hell itself.”

“Who can answer that sort of hypothetical?” the captain mused. “I don’t know. I think so. The ships that returned as beaten-up wrecks appeared to be victims of the wormhole itself, and the one that didn’t showed no apparent outward damage, although its data banks were fried. If that happens to me, then you will have to take it through. I am confident that this ship can do it, with or without me, if need be. In the meantime, I’m going to ask that you be strapped into the emergency bridge in the C&C while we emerge, just in case, and that everyone else be firmly fixed in their bunks. I will transfer holograms of the C&C board to every cabin so that you can see what we see and are facing. If we get clear, I will unlock and extend the visual camera, which has so far been useless to us. Fair enough.”