Sergei Lukyanenko - The Genome

They reached orbit and almost immediately started their acceleration toward the mouth of the hyper-channel. Alex gave all the piloting over to Morrison and called up a detailed chart of the channel.

The channel turned out to be not just old, but ancient. Now, in his state of confluence with the ship’s memory blocks, Alex had access to its entire history. The channel had been cut from the Moon station during the second colonization wave. These days, there was a museum in place of the Moon station, and most of the worlds colonized back then were in a state of decay—either utterly abandoned or barely scraping by. Quicksilver Pit seemed lucky by comparison.

Alex practiced the channel entry several times with a time-dilation computer program. There were six possible trajectories that would fit within the assigned time interval and take Mirror towards Gamma Snakebearer and then to Zodiac. Alex chose the trajectory that would give them the most temporal advantage, and he went through it several times.

All was well. They would dive into the channel behind a couple of heavy trucks, keeping all the required distances. There would be another vessel right behind them, a mercury tanker, not too large, but loaded to the gills and possessed of immense inertia. Of course, mercury tanker pilots went through this channel so often that they could probably do it with their eyes closed.

Alex folded the virtual chart and moved Morrison off piloting with a gentle push. They were approaching the mouth of the channel, and there were three minutes remaining before it would be their turn to jump in.

The mouth of the channel glittered among the stars like a giant piece of the lightest fabric, lit from within, floating through the darkness of space. The entrance was the shape of an irregular trapezoid, curving and bending every second, changing its size and its angles—although from the point of view of six-dimensional geometry, it was actually a perfect circle.

“ Mirror , you are now allowed to enter the channel’s waiting zone.”

That was the voice of a guard station called Stationary Channel. Twelve battle stations guarded the entrance. Most of them were real battle stations, built for that purpose at the shipyards, but several were just old, converted battleships. Still, it would have been unwise to reproach Quicksilver Pit’s president for being tightfisted. The modern stations could hardly have been more powerful than an old battleship, even one with its main engines gone and its planetary weapons off.

“Understood. We’re getting in line.” Alex ran his virtual chart one more time. Two large Burbot tankers were approaching the channel exactly on schedule. The first one’s rounded nose touched the surface of the gossamer sheet trembling amidst the emptiness of space. Then the ship quivered, rippled, and vanished. In exactly eight seconds, the second ship followed. The trucker pilots were probably not aces, but they were well coordinated with each other. Alex quickly looked at every one of his crew—all were there, doing their job, and the situation was under control.

“All right, kids, we’re about to jump….” As if confirming his thoughts, one of the bases reported:

“ Mirror , you’re cleared for entry into the channel.”

Alex moved the ship forward slowly—a quick entry into the channel could lead them out to a random point in the transport grid or even cause the ship’s destruction. He had one trajectory to lead the ship out to Zodiac.

Hyper-channels were very strange things. To be precise, there was only one hyper-channel in the universe; more simply would not fit. But that was an idea from six-dimensional geometry, a field in which fewer than a hundred scientists were experts. For practical piloting, all you had to know was that every channel would lead the ship to this or that exit point, depending on the trajectory of the entry and the phase of the pulse. And there could be no more than thirty-six such exit points… again, no one knew why. Each channel had been made at random—although, with the relative probability of sixty-six point three (recurring decimal) percent, they seemed to appear near massive gravitational anomalies. Stars, for instance. Also, the channels couldn’t be closer to each other than one light year, although this factoid was still not fully confirmed by science. In addition, no one could know where a new, freshly made hyper-channel might lead. Only the probable distance could be measured, with a large margin of error.

The entire history of human galactic colonization was a chain of random coincidences. Olympus had been Earth’s first colony, a cold and unfriendly little world, but somehow considered almost a paradise back in the mid-twenty-first century. After that, the channel stations went to work at full capacity, poking holes all over the universe, and more and more new worlds appeared. The magnificent Edem, a splendid and rich planet, flourishing in the blue light of the Spike, had been colonized a very long time ago, despite its huge distance from Earth. But Alpha Centauri, long a candidate for the first interstellar flight, was not reached until very recently, only some fifteen years before. Well, it was for the best, anyway. It turned out to have no promising planets.

Most ships had their own hyper-engines, allowing them to traverse several light years at a time. But this capability had absolutely no commercial value at all. The heavier the ship, the more energy devoured in a direct hyper-jump. Mirror ’s mass was actually at the upper limit for a ship with its own hyper-engine. Courier ships, leisure boats, scouting vessels—and that was about it, no other kinds in that class.

His thoughts rushed by at a speed possible only when he was connected to the computer. Alex was taking the ship along the axis visible only to pilots, mechanically noticing what was going on all around, while thinking about channel peculiarities. Quicksilver Pit, for instance, had a rather shoddy channel. Only five of its entry trajectories led to other planets of the Human Empire. All the rest led out to derelict exits, some in the middle of totally empty interstellar space, or near stars which had no planetary systems, or planets utterly unsuitable for life… or orbiting stars that belonged to alien races.

In most cases, the race that mined out a channel to a star would be its owner. But there were two alien races that never used hyper-channels at all, preferring other methods of interstellar communication. And there had been cases when a planet turned out to be so attractive that the Others colonized it without using any hyper-channels. For example, one of the exits from Quicksilver Pit’s channel led out to a planet inhabited by Cepheideans, a strange race almost as humanoid as the Zzygou and, at the same time, engaged in an eternal war with the Zzygou Swarm…

“Morrison!” Alex couldn’t quite say what had put him on guard. Everything was within the norm… for the time being. But what was that tanker doing?

The tanker was not going anywhere yet, just turning around, working out its trajectory—its orientation engine nozzles were blinking.

Its future trajectory, however, cut right across the path of Mirror .

“Tanker MT-28, tanker MT-28.” Morrison had also noticed what was about to happen. “Your present course is dangerous! Over!”

No reply.

There was no cause to panic just yet… but Alex unwrapped a trajectory forecast chart anyway. The two ships’ velocity, mass, and direction.

He froze.

If that moron attempted to turn on the engines at full force, a collision would be imminent. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe—their force fields and gravity compensation would absorb most of the blow. But it would mean that Mirror would enter the hyper-channel at an uncharted angle… and… A web of trajectories flashed and vanished in front of him, leaving only one track. The track that would lead to the Cepheideans’ sector.