The Passenger Ch. 09

It was good to be in space again.

The past few days had been busy, but also quite productive. Por had reduced he strength of his concoction (simply by diluting it, I suspected, although I didn't ask) so that it would serve its purpose without turning Anne into a gang rape waiting to happen. He had also given me a potent libido suppressant to make sure I could continue to function while Anne's pheromones were doing what they do best.

Raz had been quite interested when we suggested the possibility of a product for the human market. In fact, he'd insisted that if we could help him to make it work, we should become partners in the new venture. I liked that idea, but it would be quite a while before we'd all become rich, if we ever got there at all. Meanwhile we had borrowed from Raz against our future fortunes, since we didn't have any cargo for Radix to pay for fuel and all that. Instead the Slowboat's hold was filled with a variety of beautiful and fragrant Gawrran wood panels, because arriving on Radix with a huge and ancient air purifier as our only cargo would attract the suspicion of the port authorities. If we managed to sell that, we could repay him at least in part, but he was doing us a big favor and we knew it. Interplanetary trade doesn't work on consignment, ever.

In order to speed up product development, Por had given us a set of monitors: the coin sized disks we had used earlier in his little lab. We would use those to record the effects his compound had on us both. Upon our return to Gawrr he expected to be able to use the data for purposes of further developing Raz' next cash cow. With that in mind he had suggested that we should experiment with his compound frequently during our time on board. As if we needed to be told.

So Anne and I happily threw ourselves into the arduous task of fucking each other silly, as often as we could. We told each other that it was for science and for the common good, and we had a lot of fun. And maybe it was the risks that awaited us at the end of this particular trip that heightened our ardor. If we were ever going to go back to any kind of normal life without looking over our shoulders all the time, Deke Ryder simply had to be dealt with. But if what Pete had said was correct, Deke was not merely a cargo broker but in reality headed Vergence Sigma's illicit AI programs. There was no way for us to know what to expect once we returned to Radix to snare him. So what we were about to do was not without a certain amount of danger. Maybe that added a little spice to our... research. Whatever the case may be, we had a lot of sex in a lot of different ways. Not that that was really anything new for us, of course.

Although... 'Fucking each other silly' is not really the right term. Somehow our lovemaking continued to deepen. It was more than just familiarity and trust and our ever-increasing intimate knowledge of what made the other feel good. I suppose the best way I can put it is that it was becoming as much a joining of souls as a joining of bodies. And if that sounds too airy-fairy for you, well, that's just too damn bad, because this is the best way I can describe it. Deal with it.

Once, after a particular intense bout of lovemaking with what might have been the most intense mutual orgasms we'd had so far, I thought about it, while I held Anne as she slept in my arms. Suddenly I felt Lisa's smile in the back of my mind. She didn't say anything. She just smiled, like she always did when she knew the answers to the things that baffled me but had decided to let me rather find out for myself.

There was one change to our previous shipboard routine. Although we got plenty of exercise in bed, I started working out regularly again. I hadn't done a lot of really strenuous things lately, and if you combine that sort of lifestyle with several weeks in hyperspace on a regular basis, eventually you will lose muscle tone and gain a lot of flab.

Anne joined me in the gym. I don't think she really needed it the way I did, but I didn't ask.

I call the Slowboat's exercise faculties a gym, but that's name is just a little grandiose for a cubicle only big enough for a treadmill and a multi-mode muscle exerciser. Still, it works. We could both use it at the same time; one of us jogging along on the treadmill, the other on the exerciser, pushing and pulling bars against appropriate amounts of resistance in a variety of configurations. We spent some time setting it up with a second exercise profile for Anne. She turned out to be surprisingly strong. We started with the default profile for female users, but soon she increased the resistance and the number of repetitions until she felt they were right for her.

There was just one small problem: Anne preferred to work out in the nude.

"Exercise makes me sweat, Harvey," she said reasonably. "And the first thing you do after you work out is to undress and take a shower. I'm simply halfway there already."

Which sounded fine in theory, but the distraction proved challenging for me. It takes a certain amount of coordination to stay on a treadmill and jog like you would on a stationary surface, especially when you speed things up a little. Seeing Anne, naked, doing all sorts of thigh and butt tightening things on the exerciser proved my undoing more than once.

The other way around was not much better, either. Even a slow jog on the treadmill made Anne's breasts move in all sorts of fascinating ways, and I simply couldn't keep my eyes off her. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, many times and at great length, Anne's breasts are beautifully shaped, high, firm and full, without sagging so much as an inch. But that doesn't mean they don't move and bounce and jiggle along with the rest of her.And then there was that glorious butt of hers, wiggling as she jogged, and the way her lovely buns moved with each step she took...

Predictably, this didn't fail to have its effect on me, and she didn't fail to notice. The fact that the exerciser is designed to support the human body in an almost endless variety of positions wasn't lost on her, either, and she found some new and very interesting ways to use it.

So working out became both more challenging and more fun than it had ever been. Eventually we did settle down into something resembling a proper training regime, and whenever we managed to get through a workout without the various distractions getting the better of us, we would reward ourselves, and each other, with more intimate exercise afterward. By then we would definitely be in the mood for it anyway, and Por's little monitor discs must have racked up quite a bit of data during our post-exercise exercise sessions. The toned down version of his compound still had the desired effect, in that it completely focused my attention on Anne to the exclusion of most other things, and it definitely did good things for my stamina.

And so, as luck would have it, we were both deeply asleep, having exhausted each other in the best possible way, when disaster struck.

* * *

Space, as I have already explained, is essentially a hostile place. Left to its own devices it can kill you in the blink of an eye. Heat, cold, vacuum, radiation, random bits of matter or simply the incomprehensible vastness of it are only a few of the things that will try to kill you. In fact, there is no limit to the number of ways in which things can go from worse to terrible in the blink of an eye (or whatever type of visual receptor you happen to have.) The only way you manage to survive in space is to depend on artificial means: a pressurized radiation shield around you; a life support system to keep you breathing, eating and excreting; a drive to get you to a place of safety before your means of life support run out. This is generally known as a ship.

On the other hand: life on most developed planets is not much safer these days, if you stop to think about it. Power supplies, water supplies, waste management systems, transportation infrastructures, food production and what not are all-pervasive in industrial cultures. If these were to fail for even a few hours, the result would be chaos and people would start to die pretty darn quickly.

So in space you take your precautions: you check everything on a daily basis. You run tests all the time and you maintain everything as if your life depends on it, because it does. But once you've done that, you have to stop worrying. There's nothing else you can do in any case. And, in all fairness, the statistic probability of dying in space is not much higher than dying dirtside, although that is in no small measure due to the rigorous discipline that spacers develop in caring for their ships.

Therefore, having done what we could, we were sleeping soundly and deeply, Anne's body warm and soft against mine and the dried juices of our lovemaking still on our skins, when things went completely sideways from one moment to the next.

The reversal from hyperspace to realspace is an unsettling feeling at the best of times, even when you expect it. It feels like space turns itself inside out around you, squeezes you until you've become infinitely small, then spins you around for a moment that lasts an eternity before it spits you out at an impossible angle just for good measure. Being yanked from a deep sleep that way is infinitely worse. So the realization what happened, the adrenalin rush, the icy fist squeezing my stomach and the cold detachment of crisis management mode all hit me one after the other, and I was up before I was fully awake.

"What...?" Anne began, her voice still thick with sleep.

"I don't know," I said curtly, already on my way to the cockpit. "Get dressed. Get me some coveralls as well."

Still naked, I sat down in the pilot's seat to find out how screwed we were. The view of stars against the deepest black of space staring at me through the viewport told me all I needed to know. All but one thing: the status of the hyperdrive. The computer screen was lit up in green, yellow and red, and it took me a few moment to get the full picture. It wasn't quite as bad as it could possibly get, but it was close.

Hyperdrive failure in the middle of nowhere is just about as bad as it gets. Given a choice, most pilots including myself would choose explosive decompression over hyperdrive failure. Better to go quickly than slowly, if you ask me. But nobody had asked me.

Anne handed me a pair of coveralls which I put down on the floor beside me, and she held out a steaming mug of the high-caffeine emergency jumpstart juice that I have programmed into the autokitchen for occasions just as this one. I flashed her a grateful smile, took a sip, and continued to assess the disaster that had hit us.

Hyperdrives can't function within a gravity well. The reasons are complicated and require mind-twisting mathematics to explain, but the upshot of it is that you can't enter hyperspace or stay in hyperspace unless you're well clear of any gravity well. That's one of the two reasons why you burn a fortune in fuel boosting through realspace before you can enter hyperspace: to get yourself out of the gravity well that is created by the primary of the system that you're trying to leave or enter. The other reason is that you need a certain amount of velocity to increase your relativistic mass, but that's a different matter. The long and the short of it is that when you're too near a mass big enough to create a gravity well larger than a pothole, hyperspace will be closed to you.

Which, in turn, means that if your hyperspatial path takes you too close to a heavy mass (such as a star) that mass will pull you out of hyperspace. And while any large mass will pull a ship out of hyperspace, a really heavy mass such as a black hole, or a star heavy enough to go supernova, will drop it out of space entirely. That's "space", not just "hyperspace". Your ship simply disappears. Where it goes when it does that has been the subject of several theories, not a few religious debates and many heated arguments, but nobody really knows. Which is why hyperspatial paths are calculated extremely carefully, so as to steer well clear from such masses at all times.

While that sounds good in theory, the problem is that not all masses are charted. Sure, stars and planets are, and major black holes are rare enough so that their position, rotation and gravity well radius are all well known, but there is another class of mass that is far more elusive. These masses are known as quantum black holes.

Quantum black holes have been a scientific bone of contention for many centuries. Some theories said they couldn't exist, others said they had to, but no-one could agree on what they would be like, exactly. It wasn't until ships started to get lost that some quantum black holes were actually found.

A quantum black hole is a star-sized mass with a circumference on the order of a few inches. The size of a black hole, any black hole, is always expressed as its circumference, because its diameter is either zero or infinite, depending on what school of mathematics you worship. But for reasons of visualization you might as well think of it as something that is as heavy as a star, while its size is something between that of a dust particle and that of a marble.

Among space pilots they're generally known as "demon holes" or "hell holes."

Given their tiny size, quantum black holes are almost impossible to detect, except by the effect they have on the surrounding space and the things in it. There is one known quantum black hole, for example, that has attracted several large chunks of matter that are now in orbit around it, creating a rudimentary star system. But most of them are usually known only by their tendency to make ships drop out of hyperspace.

Of course our intrisic velocity in realspace had been high enough to escape the gravity well of the Gawrr system when we entered hyperspace. And, because that's how the math works out, we had retained that velocity when the uncharted mass pulled us out of hyperspace. That meant that we could enter hyperspace again, using that same intrinsic velocity, as soon as we'd cleared the uncharted gravity well on our momentum.

Unfortunately there are two problems with that. One is that any mass heavy enough to precipitate you back into realspace is also heavy enough to change your course through realspace. In other words, you won't keep going in a straight line, but you will swing around the center of gravity in a hyperbolic obit and emerge from the gravity well in a completely different direction. The other problem is that you'll need to calculate a new hyperspace jump solution, based on where in realspace you are and in which direction you're going once you've cleared the uncharted mass.

Like most commercial ships, the Slowboat is not equipped with a computer powerful enough to calculate hyperspace jump solutions. It has the usual basic navigation computer which runs the life support system, the drive section and the power section as well, but that's it. Like just about any other tramp freighter in existence, it depends on space port computers for jump solutions. But in the middle of nowhere that can be a little difficult.

Which meant we were screwed twelve ways from tomorrow.

"The good news is that the hyperdrive hasn't failed," I said. "Which means we're only ninety-nine percent screwed. We've been pulled out of hyperspace by an uncharted hypermass."

"I... see," was all she said.

Either she hadn't understood a word, or she'd understood all of it, including the implications.

"You do?"

She nodded. And I suddenly remembered that docking simulation she'd been playing with, on the Starman's Pride, that night we'd spent on Manaka. That very advanced docking simulation that she should never have been able to do anything with, but that she'd somehow managed like a seasoned professional.

I had a feeling she understood our predicament exactly.

She gazed out of the viewport, looking thoughtfully at the emptiness in front of us. None of the stars was visibly nearer than any of the others. Our chances of reaching any of them at sublight speed were zero.

Neither of us spoke. I knew the computer would be as busy as ever right now, keeping track of our exact course and speed from the moment we'd dropped out of hyperspace, and working out our exact position based on the time spent in hyperspace and on various star sightings. It would take a few hours, but then we would at least know exactly where we were and where we were going. Not that it would make any difference, of course.

"So," she said slowly, after a long while. "What's next?"

I looked at her, slowly shook my head.

"I don't know."

She looked at me for a long moment, and there was something in her gaze that I couldn't quite make sense of.

"Do we have any options at all?" she asked.

"Only one," I said. "The computer will eventually work out our exact position and heading, but it can't calculate a hyperspace jump solution from here. So the only thing we can do is to jump blind."

"Blind?"

"Yes. We simply switch on the hyperdrive and hope for the best."

"And what happens when we do that?"

I shrugged.

"Three possibilities that I know of," I said. "One, we eventually get close to a star heavy enough to precipitate us back into realspace. If the system is inhabited we can land there and we'll be fine. Problem is, we have to decelerate first and we've only got enough fuel to do that once, so if the system isn't inhabited we're stranded, and eventually we die. Two, we get close to a star or black hole heavy enough to make the ship disappear entirely. Not sure where we'll end up if that happens, but I doubt we'll live to find out. Three, we keep going on our momentum in realspace until our life support runs out."

She sighed, and the look on her face was a complicated mixture of reluctance, resolve and something else, something I couldn't name.

"Or..." she said slowly. "Or we work out a new hyperspace jump solution," she said.

"If the computer was even remotely capable of that, we'd be doing that right now. But it isn't. It doesn't have the capacity to handle anything that complex, not in a million years.

She sighed.

"I didn't mean we'd use the computer," she said.

"What else would we use?"

She tried to smile, but it never reached her eyes.

"Give me some time," she said. "I'll see what I can come up with."

"Anne, there's no way..."

"There may be," she said curtly as she got up and walked aft.

"Like what?"

She didn't reply.

Usually I'd have discussed that line of thought with her, but I was not in a normal frame of mind right then. I'm all for refusing to give up, but the idea that we might be able work out a jump solution somehow by flipping a coin, using Tennessee windage or working it out on the back of a napkin, or whatever she thought we could do, was ludicrous. But I said nothing. The longer she thought we still had options, the better she would be able to cope. Or not, but it was the best I could think of.

I climbed into my flight suit. After about half an hour the computer sounded its usual beep, and our position, heading and speed appeared on the screen. Not that it helped. We were in the middle of a region known as Morgason's Void, and the nearest habitable world was so far away that we might as well have been out of the galaxy entirely. A moment later the computer added an estimated time of arrival at any known inhabited system: infinite.

Translation: we were completely and utterly screwed.

I sighed and got out of the pilot's seat. We'd have to take a decision sooner or later. Not that it was much of a choice: jumping blind was really our only option. Jumping blind is such a bad idea that it's considered almost suicidal, but for us the only alternative was to give up, stay here and wait for the end. Without any breakdowns we should be able to survive for several years until the inevitable happened, but it made jumping blind look a whole lot less bad, and I knew what I'd choose. I didn't have much doubt about how Anne would vote, either. Still, we didn't have to decide just yet.