Star Road Page 6

  The simple fact was, it did work.

  Why? Scientists were working on the physics.

  As to who designed and built this system in the first place?

  Not a damn clue.

  Leave that to the Seekers and all the other crackpots, like the people who claimed the Star Road was God’s nervous system.

  Now there’s a thought.

  Annie touched the intercom button.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on the entrance ramp and coming up to our escape velocity. Might be a bit bumpy with those ‘wheels’ digging in. Like a roller coaster, if you remember what those are. If you look ahead, where you see ... nothing. That’s the portal. As I like to say, ‘seeing is not believing.’ For this trip, you just gotta believe—and hold on. If you have any concerns, don’t hesitate to contact us.”

  She flicked the switch off. And smiled.

  Jordan didn’t turn to her, but he spoke: “That’s supposed to reassure them?”

  “Might as well make sure they get as much fun from their trip as they can—especially if it’s their first.”

  The control panel dials glowed and flashed with colors that tinted the cabin with faint, pulsing waves. The SRV rocketed on the ramp, its metallic wheels not really touching the Road’s surface but still making the vehicle feel like it was going to shake itself apart.

  Annie hit more switches, slight adjustments, centering the SRV.

  And where a holoscreen had showed only empty space dotted with stars, there now appeared a shimmering, multicolored ring—a hole, with a deep, starless blackness at its center. Swirls of bright rainbow colors ringed the outer edges, getting bigger and brighter by the second.

  The imaging sensors intensified their readings on the Portal.

  All the screens confirmed the SRV’s speed and trajectory.

  “Looking good,” Annie said, not expecting a reply from Jordan.

  To anyone watching from down below on the planetoid, it would appear that the vehicle was about to go flying off the ramp and careening over the horizon.

  Amazing sight to see.

  She held the controls in both hands now, trusting the computers to adjust for any fluctuations. Some SRV captains still called it “the helm” but that sounded way too military and old-school for Annie.

  For her, it was simply “the wheel,” and she held it tight.

  The SRV rolled on nicely, at the crest of the ramp, leveling off, heading straight now.

  Once she was through the portal, she’d really start to earn her pay.

  Things could get weird in a nanosecond once they were through.

  They had long since passed any “stop” or “turn back” position. No more exit ramps.

  Still, she asked Jordan: “Everything okay on your readouts?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Good.”

  Exiting ... amazing... She had done this too many times to be scared or even unnerved, but still—the experience never lost its power.

  Through the cockpit window, nothing ahead. But the vid screen showed the swirling circle of colors with its rapidly decreasing dark center.

  What kind of reality is this? Annie asked herself as she shifted her gaze back and forth between the nothingness she saw ahead of her and the quantum fluctuations the nav-screens indicated were lying straight ahead.

  She held the steering wheel tightly.

  The SRV shaking wildly now, but the sensation odder than that.

  She felt a disturbance on a molecular level. A primal, disturbing feeling.

  If any of her passengers—or her, for that matter—was going to get roadsick, now would be the time.

  In her mind, she counted down.

  Ten ... nine... eight...

  It seemed like the right thing to do.

  Seven ... six...

  ~ * ~

  Rodriguez grabbed the arms of his seat although the criss-cross straps made any movement difficult.

  He told himself he wasn’t really scared just ... uncomfortable.

  Doing this was all new to him, and he had no one to talk to express what he was really doing.

  Not good at secrets, he acknowledged.

  And there was this: How much did he really know about what had happened on Omega Nine?

  How much had they told him—and how much would he have to find out?

  Most important—how much didn’t they tell him?

  Pressed back into his seat, he took a shallow breath and looked at his porthole.

  It’s all normal. Everything’s fine, he thought, feeling the SRV pick up even more speed.

  And for God’s sake, don’t get roadsick, he told himself when a wave of salty nausea swept though his stomach.

  The air in the SRV suddenly seemed too thin to breathe.

  Rodriguez told himself he couldn’t actually feel the atoms in his body rearranging themselves as the SRV shot up the ramp that seemingly ended in a wall of nothingness.

  He tried not to think about the disastrous fall to the rocky desolate landscape of the planetoid below that was seconds away.

  Next time, stay home, he vowed as he closed his eyes and tried to settle in his seat. Next time, send someone else.

  ~ * ~

  Annie checked a screen to her right, which showed the terminal’s air locks shutting behind the SRV.

  There was no turning back now, and—at this speed—no stopping.

  She pulled back on the wheel and felt the SRV pick up even more speed. The alloy wheels on the ramp surface made the vehicle shimmy like it might shake itself apart.

  Some of the first-time passengers might not be enjoying this part, sitting helplessly in a vehicle that was screaming up a ramp that looked like it ended in nothing but a solid, black wall.

  Stomachs must be lurching, to be sure. Vision distorted. The dimensions of the cabin shifting, twisting.

  It only lasted for a short while, but with the space-time distortions, it felt like forever.

  She hoped people remembered to use the bags in the pouches on the seat back in front of them if they needed to.

  She turned to Jordan.

  “Still okay on your end?”

  “I’d tell you if it wasn’t.”

  Less than a minute away.

  Annie’s hands tightened on the wheel.

  She thought: This... never gets old.

  No way in hell...

  ~ * ~

  Sinjira moved her head from side to side, taking in the vastness of space on either side of the SRV. It was difficult to get a clear view of what was ahead, but that might be because the physics of Road travel were warping space, time, and gravity—at least, that’s how she understood it.

  Hers wasn’t the first chip documenting a Road trip. Not by a long shot.

  But with their destination the farthest outpost of Omega Nine—where along the way anything was possible—she wanted it to be the absolute best.

  She wanted it to be—real.

  When a chip was so good, that was the only word you could use. Not amazing, not fantastic. Real.

  She leaned against the window so she caught a view of the ramp ahead. It ended abruptly, and she suddenly identified with that crazy-ass Seeker back there.

  Accept it.

  It’s out of your control.

  She kept her gaze fixed on the edge of the ramp, eager for what was going to happen next.

  Even if she wasn’t ready.

  No one ever is their first time.

  ~ * ~

  On the screen just below Annie’s wheel, the clear image of the portal swirled like the storms on Jupiter or the mammoth flaring sunspots on the Earth’s sun, changing colors, shape, pulsing as if a living, breathing thing.

  Who knows?

  Maybe it is.

  The trickiest part of her job was about to happen.

  On the screen, the SRV’s nose entered the portal. For a timeless moment, the SRV seemed to stretch
out to an infinite length. Straight ahead, through the cockpit window, the SRV headed—seemingly—into absolutely nothing.

  Even the most seasoned captain couldn’t help but be rocked by the feel and experience of this distortion of length, width, height, depth, and time.

  A single moment that one poet described as a “fall into the dark backward.”

  It’ll pass, Annie told herself as she watched her hands—looking strangely disconnected from her—run over the controls.

  And then: speed.

  It was as if the vehicle hit something that sent it rocketing even faster. There was no concussive sound. No display of light. And—thankfully—the rattling and the dimensional distortion stopped, as if the SRV was flying through space, which it was perfectly capable of doing.

  Except it wasn’t flying.

  It had entered the Road.

  And one look out the window gave an indication of how fast they were going. Long distended streaks of light flashed by. Amazing arrays of color suddenly appeared and winked out before the eye could fix, much less identify them.

  Despite the sudden sensation of increased speed, it certainly didn’t match what Annie or any of her passengers could see outside. Ahead, through the cockpit window, stars approached and flashed by, receding like strands of diamonds leaving spiraling contrails.

  Whole systems—galaxies, even—shifted, spiraling in ways that would take thousands, if not millions, of years at anything approaching normal traveling speed.

  Here, it all happened between breaths.

  And below the vehicle was the Road itself.

  A shimmering, multicolored ribbon, amazingly translucent and solid, distorting and warping everything as it stretched out ahead, curving, looping, circling as if laid out over hummocks, or perhaps dodging outcrops of rock of some landscape—only this landscape was the galaxy, if not the entire universe.

  What was the Road actually navigating past?

  What unseen cosmic forces did it cross or bend or ignore?

  Maybe—crazy thought—it was alive, and it reacted to the ebb and flow of some ancient dance of space and time.

  Was it, in fact, the “event horizon” that ringed black holes?

  Annie smiled at her thoughts.

  Outside of my pay bracket to figure that one out.

  If Earth’s best scientists didn’t have a clue, what were her ideas worth?

  Still—that was the thing about the Star Road—it made people wonder.

  Even Jordan.

  No matter who experienced it, who traveled it, they experienced: wonder, amazement, curiosity, passion.

  And for some—more than the Road Authority would ever admit—fear.

  “Nice entry,” Jordan said, his expression flat... unreadable as things returned to normal.

  “Thanks. Thought it was pretty smooth myself...”

  The crossover between the SRV hitting the Road after speeding up on the human-made ramp could be jarring. Especially with an inexperienced pilot. More than a few early tests sent vehicles flying off the Road, stranding them and their crew ... who knew where?

  Dead?

  Alive?

  In this universe ... or some other dimension?

  Ultimately, it didn’t matter. They were never heard from again.

  A screen centered above and between Annie and Jordan showed their relative position to the nearest star systems.

  Still days away from having Omega Nine pop up—the end of the line for this trip.

  But not the end of the Road.

  ~ * ~

  Now, Annie could breathe.

  Things were quiet now. She could just settle in, think about the trip ahead.

  Their path well traveled, fully mapped.

  That was important. The Road Authority estimated it had mapped a small section of what could very well be an infinite system connecting not only stars but galaxies.

  Since the early days, they had explored a mere fraction of the Road using materials and machines unearthed on Pluto as models.

  They used the ramp left by the Builders.

  But who were they? The Builders?

  And were they still out there?

  More mysteries, and without more of the map, Omega Nine was the farthest point humans had gone.

  And plenty far enough for me, Annie thought, considering it was more than halfway across the galaxy in a star-impoverished area of the Milky Way spiral arm scientists described as being “outside the Goldilocks Zone.”

  “Okay—going to check on the passengers.”

  “I’ve got the helm.”

  Annie smiled at his use of the word “helm” as she got up. She was still smiling as she unlocked the cockpit door and headed down the stairway to the passengers’ cabin.

  ~ * ~

  TWO

  ON THE ROAD

  ~ * ~

  7

  SOMETHING AHEAD

  Annie walked down the narrow aisle. Most of the passengers were still staring outside at the dizzying display. At first, they didn’t notice her.

  Then Bill Nahara—the company man—looked up.

  She had to wonder again: What the hell is he doing here?

  Had to be some official Road Authority business.

  Checking up on me ... or Jordan ... or one of the far system stations?

  It’s like he’s some kind of spy.

  In a small group and the tight confines of the SRV, that made her a tad suspicious—and uneasy.

  McGowan was leaning back with his eyes shut. Could he really have done so many Road trips that he was already napping? Bored?

  A wonder of the universe, and you doze off?

  Then again, she knew that colony miners saw lots of strange things. Like ice planets with entire ecosystems simmering in the geothermal heat below a half-mile-thick frozen mantle. Or caves where new alloys and metals were discovered that seemed to share some qualities of organic material, responding to heat, light... or even touch.

  Miners got used to “weird” pretty quickly.

  Not a bad job even if some—maybe most—miners didn’t make it back, no matter how strong an excavation suit they wore.

  The pay—fantastic.

  She cleared her throat.

  “Just wanted to check to see how you’re all doing down here?”

  A few people turned to her quickly, nodding. The Seeker at the back— Corso—remained with her head bowed. McGowan opened his eyes to slits and grunted something unintelligible.

  “No one feeling any roadsickness?”

  Shakes of heads and mumbles all around.

  Everyone’s fine here. Thanks for stretching out the molecules in my body until they snapped back like rubber bands.

  But Annie had to make sure. She studied each of them, looking for any indication of physical or psychological distress. The portal left even experienced passengers disoriented, and recovery time varied. Annie had one guy snap a year ago, who totally bugged out, wanting off the SRV in the middle of who-knew-where in space.

  They’d had to collar him until he settled down.

  But this group looked good.

  “Okay, then. And we’re up here in the cockpit if—”

  She was still looking from passenger to passenger.

  Good. No signs of anyone looking edgy except for Dr. Rodriguez. But he’d looked wide-eyed even before he boarded the SRV.

  “—if you need help with anything, your CLs will work now. Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “I’m about to run the authority’s official message—standard PR stuff. So if everyone’s okay...”

  ~ * ~

  “How are they?”

  Jordan hadn’t been with her when she’d had a passenger “malfunction.” Everyone working for the authority had heard about it, though. Everyone knew psych screenings were good.