Resolution (40 page)

The vessel manages to loose a buoy into realspace, broadcasting its endlessly repeated message.

** MAYDAY, MAYDAY. Pilot Dart Mulligan requesting aid ..
.
MAYDAY, MAYDAY.
**

In mu-space, the pattern brings all its attention to bear.

‘It was his maiden voyage.’ Chalou shook his head. ‘His only voyage. And yet, he will always be remembered.’

I
ought to leave.

Dirk tensed his legs, ready to stand; but something kept him in place, to hear more of a tale garnered only in fragments from his mother.

They lead her in darkness - only the cool air, with a hinted scent of distant mesquite, tells her that this is true night, not just the endless dark: it is a full day since they removed her eyes - to a waiting TDV. A short drive, breeze tugging at her hair, takes her across the runway.

Then strong hands guide her to a lift-chair, and she is hoisted up, then lowered through the dorsal opening, into her vessel’s control cabin. Fibres click into her eye sockets. A faint mist of mathematical spaces, of shadowy geometries, lies just beyond sight.

It takes two more days of lying there, while the diagnostics run and technicians adjust and monitor, before phase-spaces billow in her awareness, and someone touches her shoulder.

‘Ready to fly, ma’am.’

‘All that wheeling and dealing at UNSA.’ An ironic smile creases Chalou’s hard face. ‘Not to mention blackmail. Karyn got what she wanted: a ship, and the means to extricate her trapped lover, or so everyone thought.’

‘Merde.’
Dirk had not meant to interrupt.

‘Exactement.
She was already pregnant when the cortical rewiring commenced. The medics should not have performed the viral insertion ... unless someone had ordered them to. Now, we’ll never know for sure.’

‘But Grandmother knew she was pregnant when she entered mu-space.’

Chalou’s voice was grave.

‘Yes, my young friend. That much is certainly true.’

Scarlet-analogue flashes across Karyn’s non-vision as proximity sensors blare:
Destination achieved
. In golden mu-space, his ship still shines bronze.

++
COME IN, DART. COME IN. ++

Bronze, impaled by fractally branching tendrils of scarlet and purple lightning: they coruscate across the hull’s event membrane, beginning to bore through.

## KARYN? IS THAT YOU, BABE? ##

++ DART! ++

If she had eyes, she would have wept.

Karyn has hurtled through mu-space as fast as possible ...from Dart’s point of view. In the counterintuitive relativity of fractal spacetime, her voyage has lasted thirty-three subjective weeks.

There is a stirring in her womb.

## I DON’T WANT YOU HERE. ##

++ TOUGH. I’VE COME A LONG WAY. ++

She brings her enhanced field generators online. The event membrane shivers.

Black light pulses across their conjoined vessels: the tiny silver form of Karyn’s ship, the massive bronze of Dart’s. The ships bond, interface. It will need both their efforts to throw off the energy pattern.

## JESUS CHRIST! ##

Inside her Pilot’s cocoon, Karyn laughs.

The infoflow has been fast and deep; he has seen all her internal status-fields. He knows she is pregnant.

## YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME. ##

Scarlet tendrils brighten, tighten around both hulls. Questing: not blindly, but algorithmically driven. Shifting frequencies, searching for pseudo-quantum tunnelling across the event-membrane barrier.

## IT’S NOT GOING TO LET ME GO. ##

Boring deeper.

++ THE HELL IT ISN’T. ++

Lightning gathering, tendrils flaring with energy.

## KARYN. YOU HAVE TO LET GO. ##

++ NO CHANCE. ++

Glowing figures, highlighted: Dart pinpoints the intensity manifolds and sends the data back to her. Intensifying... A contraction ripples through her.

## KARYN. ARE YOU ALL RIGHT? ##

Their ships are
very
closely interfaced: he senses everything.

++ TOO EARLY, DAMN IT. IT’S TOO EARLY! ++

Op-codes stream through her input buffers. What do they
—
?

Dart has control.

## I LOVE YOU, KARYN. ##

Waves oscillate across the black field.

++
DART, NO. I— I LOVE YOU, TOO. ++

Datastreams freeze.

Event membranes pull apart.

## LOOK AFTER OUR DAUGHTER. I— ##

Separation.

Dart’s vessel explodes into a million fragments. As Karyn triggers reinsertion she glimpses a cloud of sparkling bronze motes, and then it is gone.

Black cold realspace slams into being.

Orla took hold of Dirk’s hand, then glared up at Chalou, at McLean, as though daring them to say she should not touch him.

‘It was a long time ago,’ said Dirk.

But he continued to clasp her hand.

Realspace. Drifting.

Too soon.
The baby should have waited.

Her ship’s systems were never designed to help a pregnant woman give birth. Sensors trained on her swollen womb, where the baby is pushing her organs away from their ordinary location, reveal the problem: Karyn’s daughter-to-be is sideways on to the cervical opening, and no amount of painful muscular pushing will allow a normal birth.

With Karyn’s mind raving from pain, it is impossible for her to track her position among the stars, or to decide how many light-years she might be from the nearest surgeon capable of delivering by Caesarean section.

Crisis...

There is only one thing which comes to mind, and then it is happening. Internal robot arms pull cocooning material back from Karyn‘s abdomen, and then she screams as the lasers bite through skin and muscle, an explosion of heat and pain.