Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

In summary, the Mood Indigo was a mess. Bony had primed the five undamaged engines, but the whole ship needed a major overhaul. Back in the solar system it would have been declared a total loss.

Chan was calling for a more detailed summary of engine balance problems when Liddy, over to his left, said quietly, “Something took off. A big something.”

Chan glanced instinctively to the displays. He cursed to himself as he realized that the ones he needed were all out of action. He stood up and moved quickly to Liddy’s side. A Malacostracan vessel — one of the two big ones, labeled by Dag Korin as mother ships — floated in the sky to the northwest.

He asked Liddy, “Is it coming this way?”

“I don’t think so.” She was tracking the ship closely, using her hand on the glass of the port to measure relative motion. “If it keeps going the way it started, it will pass well north of us. I think it’s heading west.”

“To sea,” Chan said. “Toward the Link.” He hurried back to the controls. One of the imaging sensors in the seaward direction was still working. It showed a flickering yellow glow on the horizon. “Bony?”

“Here.”

“We don’t have an hour. Stop whatever you’re doing. We’re lifting off. Now.”

“Three more minutes—”

“ NOW! Everybody, brace for takeoff.”

Chan applied power to the five working engines. He did it gingerly, aware that they were not balanced, and he flinched at the creak and groan of the flexing hull. The ship had not been designed to fly with lopsided thrust. It was vibrating all over — and they had not left the ground.

All or nothing. “Hold tight!” Chan stopped breathing and went to three-quarter power. The Mood Indigo lifted, tilted, and began to swoop sideways. The computer caught the imbalance with its inertial guidance system and applied the correction in milliseconds. The ship wobbled, straightened, and lifted again. Chan applied lateral thrust. He had to take them west, toward the sea. They must parallel the course of the Malacostracan ship, then angle in toward it once it was well away from land.

How close dare he come? Too far, and they might miss the opportunity. Too close, and they would be noticed.

“Another Mallie ship.” Danny Casement was stationed at another port, facing east. “One of the smaller ones. It’s coming this way.”

Another decision had been made for Chan. He increased power again. The Mood Indigo groaned, shivered, and went racing west.

“Elke?”

“Ready.” She sat poised over the copilot controls. “I’ve already entered the sequence. Say when.”

The big Malacostracan ship showed as a fleck of light in the imaging sensor. It was moving faster, beyond the shoreline now and skimming along just a couple of hundred meters above the glittering surface. Beyond it, maybe five kilometers away, the line that separated sea and sky was starting to blur and deform into a fuzzy-edged disk.

“Link opening,” Elke said in a shaky voice. “Sequence complete. Your action.”

Chan accelerated, narrowing the distance between the Mood Indigo and the Malacostracan ship. Timing was the key. What happened if you tried to pass through a Link that was still forming, or beginning to close? No human or Stellar Group member had ever done such a thing. Or better say, no one had done it and survived to talk about it.

The disk ahead formed an exact semicircle on the surface of the sea. The Malacostracan ship was racing toward its geometrical center. The Mood Indigo was close enough for Chan to make out pincer-like grapples on the tri-lobed hull.

“The ship behind is closing on us,” Danny said in a neutral voice. “It’s also changing profile. I don’t like the look of it. I suggest that this might be a very good time to hurry.”

“Completing transfer sequence,” Chan said. Too soon? But he had no choice. And the Malacostracan ship ahead was arrowing into the glowing heart of the circle. At the moment of entry the Link flared and dissolved into fringes of multicolored light.

The Mood Indigo plunged forward into the swirl of the rainbow. Chan felt the first hint of a familiar but always-unfamiliar moment of nausea and vertigo. His body turned inside out, turned upside down, inverted to become its own mirror image.

The ship was beginning its Link transfer. Chan and his team were escaping their pursuers, departing Limbo, leaving this universe. And they would come out — where?

In the final moment, a new form of energy swept through the Mood Indigo . The control board in front of Chan went dark. The lights went out. Blind and dead , he thought. We’re dead and blind . The crippled ship vanished into the multiverse.

Stars.

There were stars again, glittering hard-edged points of brilliance in a black sky.

They shone in through every port in their thousands. And nothing inside the Mood Indigo competed with their remote luminance; because every form of internal power, including lighting, had failed. The inside of a ship should never be silent. Now this one lacked even the purr of air circulators.

“It happened in the final split-second,” Bony said. He was over at the main systems panel, flipping switches and examining displays. “Dead, dead, dead. Not a thing’s working.” He turned on the tiny lamp on his suit helmet. “No wonder, every level is down to zero. But we were lucky. The other ship hit us just as we were going into the Link. It sucked us dry, but it didn’t have time to dump in resonant energy. A few seconds more and we’d have been blown apart.”

“Can you do anything about it?” Chan was still adjusting to the idea that they were alive — not just alive, but in a universe showing familiar constellations. The Link exit point must be within a lightyear of Sol. Without any form of power, though, they could not signal for help. And without help their survival might not continue for long.

“Oh, I can fix it,” Bony said. “We still have generator capacity, and lots of fuel. A few replacement parts here, a little bypass work there. I’ll do lights and air first. Everything else will come back on-line in a few hours and we can tell people where we are. One thing about Friday Indigo, he bought only the best.”

Bony spoke confidently, but Chan noticed a curious chill in his voice. He glanced around the cabin. It was hard to make out the faces behind the visors, but everyone was unnaturally quiet. They were not babbling like a group which had just escaped death by the narrowest of margins. Deb would not even look in his direction. Only Elke Siry was her usual self — and the Angel, of course, remained unreadable at the best of times.

“Are you feeling all right?” Chan said. “Was anyone hurt during the transition?”

Shaking heads. But still the coldness, and a long perplexing silence, until at last Tully O’Toole said, “ We may all be feeling fine, but we left Chris and Tarb behind.”

Danny Casement added at once, “Not just Chrissie and Tarbush, either. What about Dag Korin, and Vow-of-Silence, and Eager Seeker? I know they weren’t members of our original team, but we shouldn’t have deserted them to the Malacostracans.”

“Not even Friday Indigo,” Bony added. “I admit I hated him, because of the way he treated Liddy. And I know that the Angel says there’s some sort of Mallie inside him, so he isn’t human any more. But we shouldn’t have left him with them. It was wrong.”

“And if we had saved him from them,” Liddy said, “maybe something could have been done to help him.”

“That may well be so.” Gressel spoke up unexpectedly. Unlike anyone else on board, the Angel sounded positively cheerful. “Most of Friday Indigo’s original brain still exists. Possibly it can be restored to permit independent thought. To the extent, of course, that any human is capable of such. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear .”