It had been a struggle for Adam to convince Banu Delecta to fake his stasis settings, but she had finally agreed. He had not been convinced by Saqr’s blithe certainty about the pathways in the Dark Between the Stars, and he wanted to be ready if they were attacked, though in a ship with no weapons he doubted there was much he could do except watch them die. He opened his stasis chamber and stepped out as soon as he was sure Saqr was in hers, naked but for his dhoti and his small Icon tablet, and padded through the ship’s silent hallways to the bridge.
He was built not to feel the fear of the Dark Between the Stars, but sitting on the bridge watching the ship enter the Portal he still felt the moment when space and time tore apart, like a strange tide of anger and desolation flowing over him. The viewscreen turned momentarily dark and he felt movement behind him, a phantom of a fear he had shed in the design stage, but he did not react and turn to face the lurker he knew was not real. Instead he watched, engrossed, as the Dark Between the Stars formed in the viewing screen, a strange pitch-black emptiness in which occasional ribbons of colour or texture moved, more like the deep ocean than space. He heard faint, sinister whisperings and observed remotely as primal emotions passed by his calm, Draconite-altered mind: fear, disgust, the urgent need to hide, a corrupted kind of lust that he recognized as inhuman. He allowed them to pass him by, not to touch him. He needed to know if something real lurked in the Dark out there, not be alarmed by phantasms of his own baser nature.
For normal people traveling through the Dark Between the Stars was a terrifying, potentially fatal experience. Some people descended into complete, gibbering insanity the moment they entered the Portal, their minds wrecked by their very first contact with its sinister dimensions. Others slid into more subtle manias, and would wander their ship in paranoid or euphoric delusions, jumping at shadows or seeking comfort in other passengers and sometimes in the weapons of the armoury. The worst of these manias drove people to take over piloting the ship, diverting it from its pre-calculated course into wild, careening paths through the unknown, or attempting to destroy the vessel entirely. The Dark did not welcome its human intruders, and if the ship survived such a diversion it would eventually be spat out through a random Portal, the enigmatic semi-conscious organism of the Dark rejecting it like a body slowly forcing a splinter to the surface of its skin. There was no guarantee then that the ship would emerge at a place with which its crew were familiar, because the Portal Builders had been a galactic civilization, and their Portals were still scattered far across the stars. There were other lost Horizons beyond the Third, and to emerge in them could be fatal in myriad different, awful ways. Those of the ship’s crew who had not been driven insensate by the long, confused passage through the Dark would emerge hungry, weary and confused into a solar system they did not know, desperate for the basic resources their vessel needed and a course back to a civilization they knew. This was why stasis holds were developed, after the initial early disasters in Portal travel, and why only the most desperate of crews ever attempted a journey through the Dark Between the Stars without cryosleep. There were rumours, of course, stories of ships crews that hardened themselves against the Dark and traveled through it awake, their insanities somehow held in check by their own iron will, or drugs, or religious fervour; perhaps one of these crews had lain in wait for the Zafirah and destroyed it while its crew slumbered. If they were out there waiting, Adam wanted to meet them. When he escaped from containment in the Draconite healing facility he had seen others of his kind. Perhaps there were enough successful experiments from whatever program had spawned him to crew a ship and mount a deadly expedition in the Dark. Or perhaps someone else had discovered the same technology, another Faction or a strange religious cult that had found a way to conquer the primeval fear of the Dark. If they were waiting for the Beast of Burden in these shadows, he would at least know. And if he could, he would kill them.
But there was nothing, no one out there in the empty insanity of the void. After an hour, two hours of watching the swirling darkness he decided that yes, they were safe, nobody was going to ambush them out here in the strange lanes through this dimension of sadness. Then he began to wonder, as time passed, whether something else had gone wrong. Had Saqr’s astrogation failed them? Typically a journey like theirs should take only an hour or two, hopping between two relatively close and well-traveled star systems. But the calculations made by pilots were complicated, and known to go awry. No one knew exactly what The Dark Between the Stars was, but to the extent of the Academy’s physicists’ understanding it was seen as a kind of sub-dimensional substrate to the Minkowskian universe within which humanity was constrained. The Portals granted entry to that subspace, which shortened the distance between points in real space by orders of magnitude, and allowed ships to break the speed of light. But doing so required complex calculations that were not fully understood, a strange mixture of basic ship piloting, classic astrophysics, and the mind-bending dilations of space and time that occurred in the substrate of the Dark, generally and only partially jokingly referred to as Iconic transforms. These required a mixture of intuition and heterodox mathematics, aided by the ship’s computer but also, strangely, by prayer to the Icons before entering the Portal. Saqr had had little time to do her calculations and the Beast of Burden lacked a shrine of any kind, so their prayers had been limited to the briefest of gestures to their own Icons, and the hopeful grip of its image as they entered their stasis chambers. Had it been enough? Were they trapped out here, until the Dark saw fit to eject them?
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No matter. The crew slept, safe in their stasis, and nothing but Adam stalked the ship’s empty corridors. Satisfied that they would not be ambushed, he returned to his stasis chamber and lay within it, waiting idly for the journey to end. He could not put himself into stasis, so he needed to be here to mimic the act of waking for the benefit of his new comrades.
He did not have to wait long. After another hour or so the first dim lights of the waking process flickered to a low glow, and outside the stasis hold the hallway lights came on. He waited until he heard the first sounds of the stasis chambers venting gasses, and Dr. Delecta’s chamber next to his beginning to slide open. As ship’s doctor she would always be the first to wake, and she knew his secret, so he slid out of his chamber to sit ready for her emergence. The others followed, rising slow and groggy from their stasis, this time not in an emergency decanting. He and Dr. Delecta greeted them, checked their vitals, helped them up, handed around rehydration gelpacks to help with the transition. They gathered in the vestibule of the stasis hold, grunting greetings to each other as they shook off the sluggishness of stasis, and together headed for the Bridge.
The bridge was quiet and dark, the instrument panels showing lines of reassuring green LEDs and the viewscreen dull and lifeless. As Olivia took up her position at the engineer’s panel and Saqr sat at the pilot’s seat the rest of them gathered around her, watching as the control panel came to life. Myriad green and orange lights began to pulse over small panels showing star maps, planetary orbits, reports on the many moving objects that characterized the inner reaches of every system in the Horizon. The main viewscreen blinked to life at the bow of the bridge, showing an outline and schematic of their stolen ship alongside a scrolling series of condition reports. “Everything’s stable,” Olivia told them as they watched the terse series of numbers and components sliding up the screen, and they all relaxed with the realization that the jump had been successful. No damage, no strange visitors, no disruption to the integrity of their little vessel.
“Well done, Saqr,” Al Hamra commended her, patting her on the shoulder companionably as she changed the viewscreen from damage reports to visual. Their ship drifted comfortably in the vast emptiness of space, and on the screen they saw the glittering white outline of a Portal station in the far distance. It moved slowly across the viewscreen as the camera view panned across the system, a yellow sun moving into view beyond it. No ships passed in front of them, and a small inset sensor display on the viewscreen showed nothing in range except the Portal station itself. “Looks peaceful,” Al Hamra said as they took in the vista of Portal, sun and stars, and suddenly drew a sharp breath as a second, smaller yellow sun crept into view from the right-hand edge of the screen.
“That’s …” someone gasped, as they recognized the second sun.
“There are two?” Someone else asked.
“We misjumped,” Saqr told them finally, as the binary star system resolved itself fully in the screen. “This isn’t Kua.”
