A miracle, considering. There was plenty of power, so we rigged better air conditioners. Bit of hard work, that, in the stifling heat. Trouble was, where to dump the excess heat? Refrigerators don’t abolish heat, they just move it.
We finally resorted to using some of the mech weapons. Lasers, they were, but they looked more like monstrous sewer pipes. Immense, corpulent gadgets.
Trick about lasers is, they radiate better than anything natural. Higher brightness temperature, in the jargon. To lose energy to your surroundings, you must have something hotter than they are. Lasers could do that. So we dumped the excess heat of deceleration into convertors. And then into the drivers of the lasers themselves. The ship started projecting beams of cutting power, shedding our energy.
Which made us even more conspicuous. And terrified. Was our ship reporting to its superiors that it had vermin aboard? We adventurers felt pretty damned small.
We slowed hard—one and a half Earth gravities. Dicey. It was very much like being permanently obese, without any of the pleasure of having gotten that way. We arranged supply vats and made pools of water. Floated there for days, just to escape the weight.
Finally the view cleared. The fusion drive worked up to higher energies as we slowed. It became transparent in the optical, so we could see through the plume. First in the reds—odd vision, that.
We could clearly make out death, a whole great wall of it. Making haste toward us.
As for what it was like . . .
THREE
Church Mice
Like trying to take a drink out of a bloody fire hose,” Nigel said.
“What is?” Nikka was still thin and pale but her black eyes glinted like living marbles, with amused intelligence.
“Processing this damned data.” Nigel craned his neck to take in the full wall. Its glittering mica surfaces were canted at angles just out of true, in mysterious mech fashion.
On these faces played different views around their ship. Gaudy sprays of ionized gas. Molecular clouds, inky-black at the core while fires played at their ravaged skins. Stars brimming full, scorching the billows of angry gas that muffled them.
And directly ahead, a wall of furious mass boiling out from the True Center of the galaxy. Headed toward them.
“Like a supernova remnant,” Nikka said from her console. She insisted on working. Her Japanese heritage, she said, constant addiction to the harness. When you love a woman, Nigel realized, you take the obsessions along with the rest. Much as she had with him. And in his opinion, she had gotten the worst of the deal. He was not getting easier to live with.
Nigel frowned. “Looks like the hand of God about to swat a fly.”
“Now there’s a theory that hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Seems likely. Going pretty fast, that stuff is.”
“The Dopplers show plenty of hydrogen moving at around four hundred twenty kilometers per second,” she read off crisply.
“Hard to see why God would bother to swat us.” Shock waves played like burnt-gold filigrees all across the face of the outrushing wall.
Nikka chuckled. “You take even astrophysics personally.”
“And why not? Makes it easier to remember the jargon.”
“Egomania, perhaps?”
“Probably. Still, there’s plenty else for God to go after around here. We’re pretty dull in comparison.”
“Elephant rolling over in its sleep, then,” Nikka said.
Her laconic logic had always amused him. How could he not love a woman who could be more clipped and wry than he? “Ummm?”
“In old Kyoto days, my father told us a story about a man who thought he would be safe from the storm if he slept next to an elephant. For shelter.”
“I see. Just because the big survive—”
“Wait, here are the parallax readings.” She was all business again.
Nigel studied the strange, tilted facets of the wall display. He had never seen the purpose of angling them so. Fresnel mirrors, he recalled. An old lab experiment, one he had done on a cold winter morning in lab at Cambridge. Creaky equipment, ancient clamps and lenses from mid-nineteenth century. He had done it in jig time, then packed it in for some tea and billiards.
But he could still recall how it worked. Canting planes slightly askew, so that light reflected back and forth. That formed interference wedges. Retained the phase information in the light waves. Clever. Somehow the mechs had started up this classic effect into a dazzling many-visioned optical smorgasbord.
And in one of the oblong panels he now saw a rapidly swelling nodule, coal-black and lumpy. Furnace-red brilliance danced behind it.
“That front is closer than I thought,” Nikka said. “Only a few hours away.”
“It’ll crack us for sure,” Nigel said.
She nodded. “We can’t boost to that speed. We’ve barely slowed to local zero.”
In the steepening potentials near True Center, masses following gravity’s gavotte swung at enormous speeds. “Local zero” just meant the orbital speed of this region. It was safer, they figured, to keep close to that speed while they tried to understand the fireworks further in. Church mice venture under the dinner table at their own peril, especially if the diners are wearing hobnail boots.
“We can’t run,” Nigel said, eyeing the panels. “So we hide.”
She followed his scrutiny. “Among this debris?”
“Had my eye on that blob over there.” An asteroid-sized rock.
