Lawrence Watt-Evans - Out of This World

“Oh,” Pel said.

The whole thing sounded crazy. That bit about making the space an object occupied collapse sounded a little like black hole theory, but the rest of the explanation didn’t, and how would creating a miniature black hole result in anti- gravity? That didn’t make any sense.

It was clear that he had come upon this other universe’s version of quantum physics, and that he wasn’t going to make sense of it any time soon. He wandered off, baffled.

The navigator had at least answered him with more than monosyllables, however, so he drifted back an hour or two later and hovered nearby, trying to think of something intelligent to ask.

He was still working on the phrasing of a question about telling one star from another when the spectra had shifted when the navigator said, “Shit.”

This was almost the first time Pel had heard any citizen of the Galactic Empire use foul language. He blinked in surprise.

The navigator adjusted something and stared into the eyepiece, then repeated, somewhat louder, “Shit!”

“What is it?” Pel asked.

The navigator didn’t answer; instead he turned and pushed Pel aside as he reached for a button and pushed it hard. A bell chimed somewhere.

That done, the crewman looked at Pel as if only now discovering his presence.

“You’d better get to your cabin,” he said. “And lock the door. And if you have any weapons, get them.”

“Why?” Pel asked. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” the navigator said, “not for sure, but we’re slowing down. It looks like something’s got a gravity beam on us.”

“A gravity beam?” Pel was getting tired of feeling stupid and lost and asking dumb questions, but he couldn’t help himself. “What’s that mean?”

“It means someone’s slowing us down and pulling us in.”

Pel blinked. “It does?”

The navigator made a disgusted noise and pushed the button again. “Yes, it does,” he said.

“How does that work, though?”

“Where the hell are they?” the navigator asked, not speaking to Pel.

“Who?”

“The captain. It works… well, I told you we spit out a stream of gravitons from our main drive, right?”

Pel nodded.

“Well, you can spot that beam pretty easily, and track where it came from, and then if you fire a faster, more powerful beam back along the same line, it cancels out our main drive-and in fact…”

A buzzer sounded, and a distant, dull thump reverberated through the flooring beneath Pel’s feet. He felt suddenly lighter; his gorge rose in his throat, and his ears hurt.

“ Damn! ” the crewman said. “In fact, it can blow out the drive completely, which it just did, and then we’re just coasting until we can get it running again, and that gravity beam can reel us in like a fish on a line.”

Pel started to say something, and almost choked; the crewman glanced up and asked, “Feeling light-headed?”

Pel nodded.

“With the drive blown we don’t even have the full on-board gravity,” the man explained. “We’re on emergency power. Most ships don’t even have this sort of back-up, but the Princess is top of the line-on an ordinary ship you’d be drifting a foot off the floor right about now. And those bastards would probably like that just fine; we’d be even more helpless.”

“But why?” Pel asked, with his composure back but still utterly baffled, more confused than worried. “Who would want to do that?”

“Pirates,” the navigator said.

And then the alarms went off, and an officer chased Pel out of the room.

* * * *

Prossie had been asleep, afloat in the pleasant current of dreams, both her own and others she soaked up from her surroundings. She had picked up some wonderful imagery from somewhere nearby, from one of the non-telepaths aboard Emerald Princess , and had tangled it into the warm, comforting network of her own family. A faint touch of the pain and hurt and heat and worry from the forward storage locker had wormed its way into her sleeping thoughts, but so far it was just a little background noise, and had not turned the dreams into nightmares.

Then the alarm bell sounded, and she snapped awake, as much from the psychic shock of a score of other minds being startled as from the actual physical sound.

She felt the disciplined worry of the crew, the confusion of passengers, but the rule was “Don’t snoop,” so she didn’t snoop. She called Captain Cahn for orders.

He didn’t know what was going on, and latched onto her light contact.

“Find out,” he told her.

She thought a question.

“Just find out,” he replied. “No rules to get in the way until we know.”

She dropped the contact and reached out elsewhere. She found Captain Gifford, found the navigator-

And woke up Carrie, back at Base One, with her mental shout. Captain Cahn heard it, too.

Then she stopped worrying about anybody else for the next few minutes, as she found her uniform and began carefully searching for anything else that would mark her for what she was, an Imperial telepath. She had to hide it all, or better still, destroy it; had to remove all the evidence.

Because everybody knew what rebels and pirates and anyone else who feared the Empire did to telepaths. No outlaw could risk, even for a moment, having someone around who could relay their very thoughts to the Imperial military.

If the pirates reached Emerald Princess and spotted her for a telepath, killing her would be the first thing they did.

They wouldn’t even take the time to rape her first.

* * * *

Pel stood in the passageway, dazed, for several minutes, watching crewmen hurrying back and forth, most of them looking worried and determined and purposeful. A few looked angry, or frightened, or as dazed as Pel, instead. He kept himself pressed flat against one wall, out of the way.

After a time it occurred to him that there were probably better places to be. The navigator had told him to go to his cabin; that sounded like a good idea.

Pirates-had the man been serious?

Something was obviously wrong, and the navigator certainly hadn’t sounded as if he were joking, but pirates?

Space pirates?

That sounded so silly , like something out of a low-budget, straight-to-video movie, that Pel found it hard to believe it could be serious. Pirates ?

Pirates were a childhood game, something out of kids’ adventure stories or old films. They were an absurd anachronism, a word that brought an image of peglegs and parrots and that ridiculous accent. Captain Hook and Errol Flynn and “Arr, me buckos”-those were pirates.

Pel smiled uneasily as he began inching toward his cabin, still keeping his back to the wall and staying out of the way of oncoming traffic in either direction. Pirates?

Ted wouldn’t believe in any pirates- but then, he didn’t believe in any of this. Raven and the rest from that world probably wouldn’t have any trouble with the concept, though, and Rachel might think it was exciting-or scary.

And he didn’t know about the other Earth people, Nancy and Amy and Susan…

Susan.

Susan Nguyen.

Pel grimaced. She probably wouldn’t think there was anything funny or unbelievable about pirates at all. Pel had no idea how she had gotten to the U.S.-she might even be native-born, really-but she was obviously Vietnamese by ancestry, and plenty of Vietnamese refugees knew first-hand that pirates weren’t just something out of old adventure stories.

And Pel and his family were refugees now, like those boat people…

Suddenly Pel didn’t see anything particularly amusing about the idea of space pirates any more. He picked up his pace.