The Fenris Device - Brian Stableford, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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Brian Stableford
The Fenris Device
1
I'm a spaceman. I like space. I like flying space, and I know every trick that makes it
easier, every trick which enables me to cope with the eccentricities of space better
than the next man. I feel at home in deep space and I can handle virtually anything
which deep space is disposed to throw at me. Handling the
Hooded Swan
in deep
space was a joy and a privilege.
But the
Hooded Swan,
so its architect declared, was a good deal more versatile
than an honest spaceship. It was not his purpose, he said, to use the
Swan
merely as a
means of transporting him from point A to point B—a job which could be done
almost as well by any common-or-garden p-shifter. He had always intended that the
Hooded Swan
should do things which no other ship in existence was capable of doing.
That was why he had hired me. Well, things hadn't worked out quite as he'd planned,
because he was a very busy man, and he'd found other employment for both the
Swan
and myself which was (he said) not very demanding.
And so, he said, when the opportunity arose to further his fondest dreams
and—at one and the same time—to use the
Hooded Swan
in an environment for
which no other spaceship in the galaxy was fitted, he was highly delighted.
I was not. Quite the reverse, in fact.
I hate atmosphere. While recognising that certain kinds of atmosphere are not
only useful but highly desirable in that they are necessary to life—specifically my
life—I feel that atmosphere is no place for a self-respecting spaceman to be piloting a
self-respecting spacecraft.
And when "atmosphere" is a euphemism for a cloud-filled, storm-torn inferno
such as one finds on a world like Leucifer V, then I feel absolutely justified in feeling
nothing less than hatred for it.
I don't doubt that the
Swan
was equipped to deal with it. Charlot certainly
didn't doubt it, because he was on board, peering over my shoulder, and he was
presumably a better judge than I of
theoretical
capabilities. I'm a practical man, and
I'm ready enough to admit that it was I, not the ship, who was inadequate to the task.
But Charlot didn't accept excuses of that kind. Charlot was a man who believed in
theoretical capabilities. He made no concessions to human weakness.
I dipped into the atmosphere feeling very much like the proverbial snowflake
in hell. I was travelling at mere thousands of kph, and slowing still, preparing to use
the wings to get lift. I would get the lift anyway, and I figured it was far better to try
to use it—absorb it into my system—than to fight it with the cannons and the flux. I
wished that I could screw my ship-body up into a tight sphere, fall like a cannonball
through a couple of thousand kilometres of atmosphere, and then miraculously unfurl
and take instant control of myself just above the ground. But the ground was a
difficult thing to find on Leucifer V. It hid beneath a cloak of tidal, flying dust,
whipped up by perpetual blizzards. Even if I were capable of masquerading as a
falling stone, there could be no easy way down. I couldn't "unfurl" in conditions like
that—I'd be ripped apart. No, I had to go down slowly, with my wings spread and my
effective mass denatured as far as I dared, pretending to be an autumn leaf rather than
a creature of steel and flesh.
As the atmosphere closed in around me my ship-senses gave me a sudden,
irrational claustrophobia, a sensation of drowning, of being smothered by soft cloth. I
shook it off.
I drifted on a long decaying arc, just accepting the effects of the thickening air
into the balanced flux-cycle. I filled the cortex of the driver with as much power as it
would hold, knowing that I would need all I could get. Slowly, I began to drain the
shields. At the kind of velocity I was making now they'd be far more of a hindrance
than a help. No matter how streamlined a ship is, even a ship with a manipulable skin
like the
Swan,
there is absolutely no way of evening out matter-scarring in the shields.
And down below I'd have far too much on my plate to want to bother with eddy
currents in the shields. If a seized shield immobilised one of my limbs for even a
second it could be fatal. On the other hand, as I stripped the shields I became more
and more aware of the atmosphere tearing at my skin, burning me, pecking and
clawing at me. The farther I went down, the sharper the blades that would cut at me. I
knew I was going to bleed, ship-body and cradle-body both, and I was going to hurt
and hurt bad.
"Ready," I said to Eve. She was standing beside me, with the medical kit
ready. We'd already worked out the sorts of shots I was liable to need, and a code by
which I could call for them. She had to needle the first shot into me—I wasn't rigged
for an intravenous feed because I didn't want equipment attached to me blurring the
sensations I was getting from the outer skin. Painful those sensations might be, but on
my correct reading of them and compensating for them would depend the life of the
ship.
"Johnny," I said, as we dropped deeper and deeper.
"Waiting," he said. "Nothing yet."
I had to keep the relaxation web over .9 in order to keep our effective mass as
close to zero as was desirable, and when the web is so tight the deration system is at
its most sensitive. An imbalance of any kind at the discharge points would cause the
flux to bleed. Some bleeding would be virtually inevitable, but we would have to keep
the loss under control. And "we" meant not just me, but Johnny too. This was going to
be tough for him—by far and away his toughest yet.
How are you? I asked the wind.
—All set, he told me.
There were long seconds of silence while nothing happened. I continued to
thin out the shields with careful slowness, feeling like a striptease dancer at rehearsal.
There was an awkward phase when the sensation of the air molecules flickering over
my skin was like an itch or an insistent tickle, But I knew that of old, and it didn't
bother me. We were through the phase quickly, and I began to feel the steady,
prickling pressure build up. I've never worn a hair shirt, but I imagine it might be
something like that. The deeper we went the heavier the pressure, but that wasn't the
worst of it. As we plunged deeper and deeper, the turbulence began to build up around
us. The
Swan
was designed to compensate for turbulence— she had wings like a bird,
nerves and motors which could make all kinds of changes in her outer skin to give her
total dynamic streamlining. But nothing's perfect, and there was always something I
couldn't cancel. It was like groping fingers sliding over me, sometimes light,
sometimes clumsy.
Inside the control room, everything was steady as a rock. It all looked easy
from the back seat, and the time that dragged by made things worse, not better, for the
people watching me. They had no way of understanding, no way of feeling what I was
feeling, no way of sensing the disaster that was lurking in the corners of my eyes. For
them, it was just like grooving in total vacuum, save that I was radiating tension and
concentration.
As the shields faded into gossamer, the whole subsurface came alive and alert.
"Give me the second now," I said, amazed by the calmness of my voice.
I felt the anaesthetic slide home into my arm, and almost automatically my
brain began to count off the seconds to de-sensitivity.
The relief seemed to last for only a few seconds. The insistence of the
atmosphere overrode the numbing effect and the subsurface still felt sore and reactive.
—Don't take any more, warned the wind, or I'll lose my control.
OK, I said, soothing him.
I had no intention of knocking either of us out.
Within a couple of minutes more, we began to find clouds, and things were
suddenly dramatically changed.
"Here we go," I said, aiming the comment at Johnny.
The pain took me across the back, first, like a muscle cramp. We were slow
now—no more than a few hundred kph, but the slower we went the harder it was to
balance the flux to the nth decimal. The web felt virtually non-existent, and the whole
drive-unit felt like putty inside me. I felt half dead, and yet I had to move with the
grace of an eagle and the delicacy of a hummingbird. I felt the anaesthetic that was
calming my body begin to swim up around my brain.
"Stim," I said.
The needle slid home again. I knew—and so did Eve—that hyping up on the
drugs at the rate I was doing could only have a bad effect in the end, but I had to buy
all the temporary help I could, and if I suffered tomorrow ... well, at least I was alive
to suffer. I don't like being shot up any more than the next man, but I'm not proud. I
don't court disaster. No doubt, in the final analysis, it would take years off my life, but
when you weigh the odds...
"Watch it," said Johnny.
He didn't need to. I could feel the flux slipping like sand between my fingers. I
could feel the danger floating up around me, like a wave of nausea. I felt my face
muscles contract as I wrestled with the controls. I could feel Johnny's hands
somewhere inside me, working away at the driver, milking the cortex, using his hands
and his delicate touch as he'd never been called upon to do in his life. The flux cycled.
We didn't bleed. We had her under control.
And still we went down, angling deep into the atmosphere of Leucifer V, the
world the Gallacellans called Mormyr, and still the drop seemed limitless, and the
sensors could pick up nothing down below but an abyss filled with storms. I took
thrust out of the drivers, feeding it through the flux and into the cortex, restoring the
reserve and reducing our forward impulse so that we fell steeper and steeper. Still I
felt sore, but the pain was under control. The drugs and the wind between them were
keeping me up to the job. So far, so good.
But it could only get worse.
The double sensation began to trouble me. I could feel the ghosts of Eve and
Titus Charlot hovering over me in the atmosphere of the planet, like demons
following the ship on its descent, watching her like hawks, urging her on faster... to
her doom?
I felt the flux struggling. It really was
trying
to stay with me, to help me, but it
was being scourged by the winds and the vapours that were howling around the ship. I
could feel the
Swan
giving me all she could, trying her level best to do it on her own,
without the pilot inheriting her suffering and her peril. I poured myself into the bird's
synapses, we merged totally, and I was embodied in the flux that held strong against
the torture, sheltered neither by the shields nor by the relaxation web to any degree. It
was like a spider walking through the chambers of my heart, like centipedes moving
in my bloodstream, like a great fireworm writhing slowly in my gut. I felt myself be-
gin to open up inside, ever so slowly, ever so gently, without pain, without the
raggedness of tearing, and I felt myself begin to spill out within myself.
And lower and lower we came, into the clouds of black dust and ice, into the
rage of the storm which whirled and stabbed at us. I was bleeding. I was losing flux. I
could feel Johnny working away, with all the speed he could muster, all the fineness
of feeling. He had the touch, there was no doubt. He was good, but he wasn't good
enough. I opened up wider and wider inside myself, and I bled.
The sensors told me at last that there was a down to go to, that there was a
bottom to the gravity pit, that there was a haven if only I could reach it, but it was too
late. Johnny was losing and Johnny was panicking. I could feel it rising inside him as
it flooded into the movements of his fingers that were inside me. I could feel the flux
giving way to his hysteria and the mad insistency of the storm.
I could feel myself—and it was almost with surprise that I did so—being racked with
hideous,
squeezing
pain, and I knew that there was nothing I could do but run. I tried
to cry out, hoping that even a wordless cry might stabilise Johnny, might tell Eve that
I needed another boost, might even tell Charlot that what he wanted me to do simply
could not be done. But I could manage no cry. My jaw was locked, and the only one
who knew was the wind, locked inside with me, in rigid agony.
The last vestiges of power were flooding from the cortex into the deration
system. The flux was jammed. I discharged the cannons to shock the whole unit into
some imitation of life, and I blasted power through the nerve-net of the ship. With a
single convulsive manoeuvre— something no bird, no spaceship, no other thing in the
galaxy except the
Hooded Swan
and I could have done—I began to throw a surge of
strength into the web.
The flux stirred, and with it Johnny. We fought, all of us—
Swan,
Johnny, the
wind, and I—and we found enough to turn us, enough to give us the power to jump.
Just enough to run away. Full flight, in full terror. From somewhere, we managed to
make some kind of a syndrome, and we were up and away as the flux fed on herself.
The pain really took me then as we went up. No shield at all, nothing to
protect me. I felt as though I were burning alive, my skin blistering and bubbling and
turning to black, cold dust on my bones.
But the
Swan
was equal even to that. Johnny built the syndrome—Johnny and
the wind—and they found power for the driver, power for the cannons, and—at last—
power for the shields. Up and up we soared, and I realised that we were all of us alive,
and would stay that way.
I managed sound... I think it was the word "Go."
And go we did. We climbed in seconds what it had taken us long minutes to
fall. We cleared, we found space again. Still I was rigid in the cradle, my body and
my agony dissipated throughout the ship, still fighting for every last vestige of power
the syndrome could provide. All of us, we were united in those dragging seconds, all
in a single purpose.
And we made it.
By the time we found space, I was absolutely helpless in the cradle, with no
more involvement with my tiny, human self than an unborn child. Even as we headed
deep into the system-vacuum, I had only one sensation that I could relate to my bodily
self alone, rather than to my total, participant ship-self, and that was a sensation of
leakage. My bladder had emptied, and there was blood running from both corners of
my mouth to mingle with my tears.
Eve was mopping me up. As consciousness returned to its habitual mode of
residence, I could feel her wet cloth stroking back and forth across my face. I could
hear Charlot breathing.
There were long minutes of waiting, when nobody dared say a word. Not to
anyone, about anything. The two Gallacellans who waited in the rear of the control
room were absolutely impassive, waiting. Nick delArco had nothing to say.
Inevitably, it was Charlot who broke the silence. "Less than a hundred
meters," he said. That was all. Just:
Less than a hundred meters.
No sympathy, no un-
derstanding. All he was interested in was how close we had come before we had
failed. He
knew
that if we could get down to the last kilometre—to one-tenth of the
last kilometre—then it was
theoretically
possible for us to have gone the whole way.
He just didn't see the blood that was coming out of me. All he saw was that we had
come within seconds of victory, and had failed. "It's impossible," I said. "It can't be
done."
"You were there," he said. "You were there but for a matter of meters."
"It makes no difference," I said. "A meter or a parsec. Those last hundred
meters were the worst of all. Nothing could live in that. Nothing. There's no way
down through those last hundred meters. No way."
"You had power left," he said. "Power to run away."
"And if I'd used that power to go down?" I said, my voice hoarse as the flow
of the argument matched the flow of feeling coming back into my body—and with the
feeling, renewed pain. "What would I have used to come away?" I finished.
"Once we were down ..." he began.
"And what if we ran out with ten meters still to go?" I interrupted. "Or ten
centimetres? All we had to do was roll over ... and we'd be down forever."
"It was my fault," Johnny's voice came over the circuit. "It was my fault. If I
could have held the flux just a few seconds ... I lost her. It wasn't Grainger's fault...."
Of all the help I'd never needed ...
"Is that true?" said Charlot.
"Nobody could have held it," I said. "Nobody. Johnny was brilliant. Nobody
could have done more. Not Rothgar, not Jesus Christ. Nobody human can land a ship
on that world. It just cannot be done."
"I could have done it," said Johnny, his voice sounding like the knell of doom.
"If only ..."
"Will you shut your bloody mouth!"
I howled at him. "You want to go down
there again? Don't be a fool. You did your best. Your ultimate best. There's no more
that could be done. It's impossible. There's no point in whining, now or ever. You
have to realise that there are some things that just can't be done."
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