Legacy (13 page)

When it came, the scanner's audible alarm signal was all too much like the tolling of a bell.

"Well," Saefal said unnecessarily, "they transited." He stared at the holo tank, the red Korvaash blip reflecting off his wet brow in the semidarkness. "At least I don't see any missiles."

"No." Sarnac's voice was low, as if wary of shattering the brittle quiet. "As I said, they shot their wad back in the Lugh system. They'll have to get within beam weapon range of us." He did not add that the instant that happened would be the instant of their deaths.

Saefal's expression became, if possible, even more intense. "This ship is designed for comfort and endurance, not speed. I suppose this . . .
Gorgon
class can overhaul us eventually?"

"Yeah. Remember, that's a
big
brute—they've got a lot of tonnage to push, but they also have powerful drives and lots of tankage for reaction mass. And they've had plenty of time to tank up, skulking around that gas giant. Oh, it'll take them time to catch us. In fact," he added with a wry smile, "I calculate that they won't do it until the system just before New Laurentia."

"But,"—Rael spoke hesitantly as she ventured onto unfamiliar ground—"why can't we simply use our continuous-displacement drive and leave them far behind?"

Saefal gave her a sharp glance, then softened, and carefully explained what was, to him, elementary. "There is a radius around each sun called the mass limit—it varies depending on the strength of the sun's gravity—within which the continuous-displacement drive won't function. And in the case of most stars, including all those on our route, displacement points occur within this limit. So, travelling between displacement points within systems, we're never going to be in a region where we can engage the drive."

"But," she persisted, "couldn't we change course and . . . ?"

"No," Saefal shook his head. "Our reaction mass is sufficient to get us to this New Laurentia system the direct, economical way, but with nothing to spare for unplanned maneuvering or acceleration. And where would we go on continuous-displacement drive? We've no notion of where the stars of the Solar Union are located in realspace."

"Neither do I," Sarnac admitted. "I wouldn't even if I were a trained astrogator. We've never needed to know. For us, interstellar travel simply means following the displacement chains."

"So," Saefal went on remorselessly, "all we can do is continue along our planned course and hope for a stroke of good luck—or, rather, of bad luck for them."

The two blips continued to crawl across the tank.

* * *

Sarnac stood unsteadily for a moment after his cabin door slid shut behind him, in a twilight state beyond fatigue, before toppling forward into his bunk.

They had managed a little rest while they proceeded toward their second transit. But afterwards, when they lay in yet another new sky, had come the stress-fraught ritual on the bridge—waiting in silence for the Korvaash ship's appearance. When the sensors had announced that their nemesis had transited on schedule, the pervading fog of doom had seemed even thicker than before. At least this time they hadn't had to wait quite as long for his arrival.

That's got to be some kind of new record for putting the best possible face on things.
Even thinking was an effort.
One more time and I'm gonna smash that audio signal.
His mind wandered on in a kind of exhausted petulance. Sleep began to enfold him.

The door chimed for admittance. He rolled over with a groan and said, "Enter." The computer, told to obey his voice when it spoke to this door, now slid it aside. Against the lighted corridor beyond, he recognized Tiraena's silhouetted figure. She stepped into the cabin with uncharacteristic stiffness, and the door closed.

"We're not going to get away, are we?"

So much for small talk.
Sarnac raised himself on one elbow and tried to sound nonchalant. "Oh, we can't really say that. We've got two more transits before they can catch us. That's two chances for them to blow it and miss a transit—in which case we'd be home free."

"But how likely is that?" Her voice was calm, but her body was still held rigidly.

"Well, you know how crude their instrumentation is. . . ."

"But how sophisticated does it have to be when we're transiting each displacement point ahead of them, showing them the exact coordinates and angle of insertion?" She shook her head, and he thought he saw an odd little smile in the gloom. "No, all they have to do is follow us. And we can't even run away from them!"

This was the true essence of the hell they were in.
Norlaev
could have piled on acceleration, pulled ahead of her pursuer—and run out of reaction mass short of her goal. The same applied to any evasive maneuverings in the systems through which they were passing. They could only proceed on schedule, with death gradually closing the range astern.

She stirred in the semidarkness, and this time he was certain that he could make out a smile. "We Raehaniv used to be masters of self-deception, before the Korvaash occupation. But generations since have swung the other way. Looking the truth squarely in the face has become almost a fetish with us."

"But you're not entirely Raehaniv, you know. What about the part that's Terran?"

"My great-grandfather fled from a world that was throwing rationality to the winds as it slid backward into a new dark age. The Terran exiles' influence had a lot to do with the new outlook."

"So now you don't bullshit yourselves. But you don't seem to be the fatalistic type either."

"No. We'll fight our doom for as long as we can. But we don't, as you say, bullshit ourselves about it. And when it becomes unavoidable, we recognize that our time is limited, and we treasure whatever comfort we can give each other."

She drew a breath, then reached up and touched a spot above her left breast. Her shipsuit fell open along a diagonal seam and hung loosely about her now-relaxed body in the shadows.

Sarnac realized that he wasn't as exhausted as he had thought.

It was depressingly soon after their next transit when the Korvaash battlecruiser appeared behind them at the displacement point, producing a mournful noise from the grav scanner and a crimson blip that was now noticeably closer to their green one in the tank.

Saefal stared fixedly at the tank, and his abstracted expression could only partly be accounted for by his direct neural linkage with the ship. Sarnac understood.
Norlaev
might not exactly be a capital ship, but Saefal was her captain, responsible for the safe arrival of his passengers, and he was failing. His lack of fault for the failure was immaterial, for his was a responsibility that admitted of neither excuse nor mitigation.

He disengaged his linkage cable and turned slowly toward the others. "Well, there's no longer any room for error in the calculations. They won't catch us in this system, but if they manage the next transit on schedule they'll come up to beam-weapons range in the system after this, before we can transit from there to New Laurentia." He stopped, awkward with the silence into which his words had dropped, but unable to continue. What more can you say to people after pronouncing their death sentence?

It hasn't registered yet
, Sarnac knew.
It's too unreal. Standing here in the silent, comfort-controlled perfection of this ship's life-support system only a few feet from vacuum, while our doom approaches.

He tried to speak, then cleared his throat and tried again. "Look, this is normally not my style, but . . . well, maybe when they catch us we could make a show of surrendering and then, assuming that they accept, wait for them to get close, and then blow up this ship, taking them with us." He felt almost embarrassed, for it was
definitely
not his style—it was like something out of bad VR adventure. But it was all he had to offer.

Saefal gave him an annoyed glance. "Don't be ridiculous! The
Taelarn
-class isn't intended to be blown up. It might be possible if this was a warship. But all we've got is the powerplant—and fusion power generators are so designed that it's
impossible
for them to detonate. I can't imagine there's any way to do it. Of course," he continued thoughtfully, "the Korvaasha don't have tractor beams, any more than your people do. Maybe we could try . . ." He trailed to a miserable halt. "Now I'm the one being ridiculous. At our first attempt to make a ramming run, they could obliterate us with their beam weapons. No, we can't hope to hurt them. And our only hope of survival is to surrender."

"Knowing the Korvaasha," Tiraena said stonily, "that offers only short-term survival, probably under conditions to which a quick, clean death would be preferable."

No one had anything to add. Sarnac's eyes strayed from the tank to the viewport and the stars in the familiar configurations he remembered from the trip out, seemingly more than a lifetime ago. He looked ahead at the primary star, still a remote blue flame with its white dwarf companion invisible. Then his gaze swung to the little yellow-white star in Cygnus, and he reflected on the irony. So near and yet so far away. . . .

Hey! Wait a minute!

After a time, he became aware of Tiraena's concerned voice, as if from a great distance. "Bob, what is it? You look as though . . ."

"Jesus H. Christ!" he exploded. "Do you realize where we
are
? What system this is? But no, of course you don't." He forced himself to stop babbling and sprang to the viewport, pointing theatrically at the primary star. "This is
Sirius
!"

"Well, of course, Bob." Tiraena wore the same puzzled look as the others. "We all know this is serious. Desperate, in fact."

"No, no, no! Sirius is the name of this system's star! We identified it on our way out from Sol—which is
there
!" His pointing finger swung toward Cygnus and the yellow-white star.

Saefal sailed out of his command chair. "What . . . I mean . . . are you saying that Sol is within naked-eye distance of this star?"

"Sure. Why do you think we have a name for Sirius? We've been looking at it throughout all our history!" He took a deep breath. "The Capella Chain doubles back on itself in realspace, which you must know occasionally happens. We're still five displacement transits from Sol—but there it sits, eight-point-six Terran light-years away, as the photon flies!"

"But," Rael spluttered, "you've been aware all along that this displacement chain we're following passes through this system. . . ."

". . . So why didn't you tell us?" Taeronn finished for her, glaring at Sarnac.

"Well, to be honest, I just didn't make the connection. I mean, to us of the Solar Union the displacement network defines the only stellar interrelationships that count. The realspace arrangement of the stars is just a matter of pretty lights in the sky! The fact that this displacement chain comes so close to Sol in realspace was interesting but irrelevant. It's been a long time since I've even thought of it. Sol might as well be in the Andromeda Galaxy for all we could reach it from Sirius, not having your continuous-displacement drive."

"But we
do
have it!" Saefal looked like exactly what he was: a man who had been shown a road out of hell. He flung himself back into the command chair, reinserted the linkage cable and became one with the ship. Almost immediately, the stars began to crawl across the viewport as
Norlaev
reoriented herself. Grav generators compensated smoothly but could not prevent a thrumming from running through the soles of their feet as the torch drive began to push them outward, accelerating to reach the mass limit in the minimum possible time with all restraints of reaction-mass conservation removed.

A bit of time passed before the red blip began to change course in the tank.

"They must be shitting in their pants, or whatever Korvaasha do," Sarnac chortled.

"They must think we've lost our minds," Taeronn breathed. "Now that we've changed course, it's no longer a stern chase. Look, they're coming into an intercept course, based on our present vector. They must calculate that they can overhaul us before we'll be able to reach wherever it is we're going."

"Which they must think is another displacement point in the outer reaches of this system," Saefal said in the abstracted way of one linked directly with a very complex computer. "When we pass the mass limit, they'll
really
shit in their pants," he added, getting into the spirit of the thing with the help of the translation program.

"And by then," Tiraena put in, sliding an arm around Sarnac's waist and squeezing, "it will be too late. They'll be stranded in this system, surveying for displacement points."

"With any luck, the
thrufarn's
ships will arrive here while they're doing it," Sarnac added happily, returning Tiraena's hug and watching the yellow-white star in the viewport.

Sol was not visibly brighter when they passed the mass limit, but Sirius was little more than a very bright blue star in the view-aft.

Saefal cut the drive. It must have been final proof to their pursuers that they had lost their sanity. He used gyros to point the free-falling
Norlaev
toward the bright star in Cygnus. Then he gave a command, and the impossible—as defined by Sarnac's civilization—began to happen.

There was no physical sensation, and no apparent change in the outside universe. But in the view-aft, Sirius was receding from them at a rate of many times lightspeed, with no Doppler effects.

Sarnac had been told many times what to expect under continuous-displacement drive. There was no Doppler shift because there was no real velocity beyond what
Norlaev
had already built up. Instead, a series of gravitational pulses—akin to the effect that allowed displacement point transit, but far more intense—caused her to make a succession of effectively instantaneous transpositions of a few hundred meters each, without crossing the intervening distance. Given titanic amounts of power, the process could be repeated millions of times per second, and light could be outpaced. In effect, they existed in normal space at a certain "frequency." Any nearby objects would have been subject to mind-shaking visual distortions—but there were no such objects. There were only the distant stars, still in the same relative positions each time
Norlaev
popped back into the universe.