Aylis, at this moment.
"Will you be alright?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered in a tiny voice.
She looked at his neck again, frowned at the marks that would become ugly bruises. "I must go to the bridge, Sammy. I'll take you with me. Can you breathe freely? Can you turn your head both ways?"
He turned his head painfully. She looked at him worriedly and squeezed his shoulders. She picked him up carefully and he clung to her tightly. He was a little too big to carry. He was heavier than when he was starving in Africa. He also had the regenerator prosthetic now adding to his mass, but she didn't want him to walk, she wanted to hold him.
"Will Captain Direk die?" He whispered the question.
"I don't think so, Sammy."
They transmatted to a node at the bridge. They emerged into a darkened room full of patches of colored light and quiet conversations. Horss moved from station to station, touching controls and giving directions to the officers. He came to the admiral as soon as he was able.
"Status?" she requested.
"Admiral!" Horss greeted her with more than military etiquette. He patted Sammy's back. "All necessary systems active but the vision sphere. We're blind. Evasion course plotted out to fifty parsecs. We're blocked from exiting dry-dock by the carrier Honor. We caught a glimpse of them optically before we ramped up the duty cycle on the envelope."
"What other ships are maneuvering against us?"
"At least one more carrier and the Eclipse. I estimate twenty minutes before the Honor has help, based on past experience with the traffic flow around this rock."
"Get us out of here now, Jon!"
"We're already moving. Blind reckoning. Admiral Khalanov has taught me a new lesson in the physics of starships. We're about to try something I know isn't taught at the Academy."
"Can we reconstruct an estimated view based on blind reckoning?" Zakiya asked, glancing up at the featureless hemisphere of the ceiling.
"Freddy is working on it. Excuse me, I need to help the helmsman."
Zakiya moved over to stand beside Iggy at an engineering console. Sammy still wrapped his arms and legs around her, but his head moved a little, as if he was looking at things behind her.
"Sammy!" Iggy greeted, glancing behind him, then quickly returning his attention to his data. "You got him back! Where is Direk? I need him! What is that I smell? Blood?"
"He was seriously injured," Zakiya replied. A muffled explosion had occurred as they jumped into the gate. Direk had collapsed in the hospital immediately after the gate deposited them back in the ship. He had fallen against her and Sammy, blood spurting from his chest, even though the knife had struck him in the back. She had held both Direk and Sammy and screamed for help. She was still covered in his blood, as was Sammy. She was shocked at how terrible Direk appeared. "I don't think you'll have his help for many days, Iggy." She hugged Sammy a little tighter, fearful of how the violence must have affected him. She hugged herself, still shocked by the encounter with real aliens.
"I'm very distressed by this!" Khalanov declared. "I have a completely changed opinion of Direk! He was injured rescuing you from Etrhnk? I'm in awe of him! You realize that he knows the secret of teleportation? Did he make you jump upward?"
"Yes."
"I want to know why! He wouldn't tell me, said it would scare me!"
Zakiya knew why it would scare Iggy. Direk's gate was aimed to avoid intersecting the deck beneath their feet. If they did not jump upward into the sphere of the gate's zone of matter exchange, their lower legs would be cut off. "What are you doing to help us get away?" she asked, shivering at the idea of missing the timing of jumping into the sphere of a gate.
"I'm detuning the drive envelope," Iggy replied. "This allows random electrodynamic forces into the envelope. We're a much larger vessel than a carrier, increasing the difference of energy potential. When we get close to the Honor our dirty envelope will corrupt their clean envelope. Then we'll have electricity!"
"In my younger days we didn't have such clean envelopes," Zakiya said, receiving a glimpse of ancient memories, "and it was a possible tactic when one ship was bigger."
"You're referring to Deep Space?"
"No. Before that. Smugglers and merchant ships. My aunt and I smuggled Earth flora and fauna before I joined Deep Space. We would drain the envelope of a competitor, if we could get close enough."
"To what advantage?"
"To very little advantage, actually. My aunt was just a mean person who didn't look kindly upon aggressive competition."
"Look!" Sammy said hoarsely, twisting in Zakiya's arms.
The white hemisphere of the ceiling and much of the deck disappeared, as an image of exterior reality formed. The bridge crew and their work stations now seemed to float above a dark mass like the rough surface of a small asteroid. Brilliant light flooded the dry-dock cavern of Navy Shipyards. All around them the dry-dock's natural rock wall was honeycombed with service accesses, littered with retracted construction platforms, and decorated with parked service vehicles, everything winking and glowing with lights and reflectors and colorful signage. The bridge of the Freedom was an illusion of a transparent bubble, and the dark mass below or beside it was an exterior image of the Freedom. In reality, the bridge was located in the center of the ship. The surrounding image was further altered to remove the optical incoherence of the drive envelope: a hole in space that was blacker than black, except that light flowed around it, unable to touch it, creating a contradiction in visual sensations.
The bridge appeared to fly forward, as though it was a separate transparent spacecraft. "Don't be afraid!" Zakiya urged Sammy as she resisted the urge herself to anticipate momentum changes keyed to the visual clues. "We're not really moving. It's just an image."
Beyond the curved horizon of the Freedom lay a mouth onto raw space, a vast open door that framed a scatter of stars and nearer objects. The dimly-reflective and impact-shielded disk of the starship Honor dominated the scene framed in the space door: a carrier containing a thousand smaller craft and a crew of two thousand. However, the carrier’s size would dwindle in comparison, if one could see it next to the Freedom, whose immensity all but filled the vast asteroid cavern of the Navy dry-dock. This was not the ship's birthplace. It had been constructed at an external site and was brought into the Headquarters docks mainly for ceremonial reasons, unless Etrhnk had planned for what was now happening and intended to trap it there.
"This looks too good to be a dead-reckoning reconstruction, Freddy," Horss commented.
"I'm taking snapshots through the heading notch, Captain," Freddy replied.
"How are you getting enough data, when we're dancing the heading notch so rapidly? Never mind, as long as it works! Something else to learn, after thinking I knew everything! They just pulled on their drive envelope." Horss addressed Khalanov. "Ready when you are, Admiral."
Brilliant light flashed as a bolt of lightning arced through the opening of the space door and stabbed onto the hull of the Honor, connecting the two ships with a jagged river of power that seemed to dance menacingly close beneath the feet of the bridge crew. The blinding glare had flooded the bridge in the instant before the image system adjusted its luminance level.
"Got them!" Iggy declared with clenched fist. "We'll drain their accumulators, maybe blow a few of their emitter circuits. Did you feel the ship twitch? There is a gravity component in the connection between the two ships! The drives compensated automatically, or else we would have collided with them instantly."
"Why is the space door staying open for us?" Zakiya asked.
"Probably indecision," Iggy answered. "Dry-dock was still pressurized this far ahead of our departure time. They opened the door to rapidly vent dry-dock when our drive envelope began compressing the air. The venting helped our lightning bolt reach the Honor. It may not stay open much longer. Also, we can't go through the opening with the drive field on. Or at least I don’t think we should. I need Direk’s opinion on that."
/>
Freddy hailed Zakiya by shiplink. She turned around with Sammy to see where he was: forward of - and facing - the captain's chair. "Someone is trying to push a data link through our envelope, Admiral," Freddy said. "It appears to be a simple communications channel. The address packet requests your personal response. The caller is Admiral Etrhnk. I can quarantine it for a short period."
"Go ahead." Zakiya almost felt obliged to talk to him, her opinion of him further scrambled by the dramatic appearance of members of a truly nonhuman race. She saw Etrhnk's low-resolution image in her right eye.
"Did you find your purpose?" he asked.
"I'm going to find my husband," she answered.
Etrhnk raised an eyebrow in surprise, then the link ceased.
Nonhumans, she pondered, beautiful golden beings! As far as she knew, only the crew of the Frontier ever encountered living nonhumans, remnants of a precursor race. Now she had met two more alien species - the golden people and the gatekeeper - and heard of at least one other in Oz, something called a Fesn. She wondered if the golden ones were the other alien race of which Percival had spoken but had not described. The person she once was - primarily an anthropologist - was ecstatic at such a discovery, and also worried. These golden aliens seemed to mimic human culture - and to mimic some of the wrong parts of human culture.
As the blue-white stream of electrons danced between the two ships, Iggy's fingers