The Lani People by Jesse F. Bone (freenovel24 txt) 📗

“I’m frightened,” Copper said, twisting uncomfortably in the shock chair beside Kennon’s.

“After you have been so brave?” Kennon asked. “That’s nonsense. It’s just nervous reaction. Now web in like I showed you. It’s time for blast-off. We don’t dare wait much longer.”

“All right—but I have a feeling that this isn’t right. Something is going to go wrong.”

“I hope you don’t have precognition.” Kennon smiled. “I’ve checked everything. The ship is as good as she’ll ever be. There’s nothing more that we can do.”

“There’s one consolation,” Copper said wanly. “At we’ll die together.”

“There’s a better chance that we’ll live together.”

“I hope so.”

“Ready?” Kennon asked.

She nodded.

He flipped the switches that would send the fuel rods into the reactor. Below them a soft, barely audible whine ascended the sonic scale to a point of irritating inaudibility. Kennon smiled. The spindizzy was functioning properly. He flipped a second bank of switches and a dull roar came from the buried stem. Ashes and pumice heated to incandescence were blown through the air. Molten drops of radioactive lava skittered across the durilium hull as Kennon advanced the power. The whole stem of the ship was immersed in a seething lake of bolling rock as the Egg lifted slowly with ponderous dignity into the night sky.

“Hang on!” Kennon said. “I’m going to hyper.” His hand moved a red lever and the Egg shimmered and vanished with a peculiar wrenching motion into an impossible direction that the mind could not grasp. And the interceptor missile from Otpen One nosed through the space the Egg had occupied.

* * *

“We made it!” Kennon said, looking across the writhing semifluid control board, shifting oddly in the harsh yellow monochromatic light that pervaded the cabin. The screens were leaking like sieves, but they were holding well enough to keep Cth yellow from being anything more than an annoyance. He glanced over at Copper, a fantastically elongated Copper who looked like a madman’s dream of chaos.

And Copper screamed! The sound echoed and re-echoed, dying away with a lingering discordant reverberation that made his skin tingle.

“Copper! It’s all right! It’s all right! Stop it!”

Copper screamed again and her elongated figure suddenly foreshortened and collapsed into a small writhing ball from which two small pink hands emerged clutching at a gelid mass of air that flowed sluggishly around them.

And Kennon knew what he had forgotten! Hyperspace with leaky screens was nothing to inflict upon an unprepared mind. It is one thing to endure partial exposure after months of training, with experienced medics standing by to help you through the shock phase, but quite another to be thrust from a safe and sheltered existence into the mind shattering distortions of the Cth continuum.

The Egg was old. Her screens, never good at best, were hardly more than filters. Through the hull, through the drive lattice, the viciously distorted Cth environment seeped into the ship turning prosaic shapes of controls and instruments into writhing masses of obscene horror that sent extensions wiggling off into nothingness at eye-aching angles. A spaceman could take this—knowing it wasn’t real—but a tyro could not.

Copper collapsed. Her mind, assaulted by sensations no untrained person should experience, went into shock. But she wasn’t granted the mercy of unconsciousness. Terrified by a pseudo reality that surpassed her wildest nightmares, she stared wide-eyed at the control room and the thing that had been Kennon. She screamed until her throat was raw, until the monster beside her touched her with Kennon’s hands. Then, mercifully, she felt a stinging in her arm and all sensation ceased.

Kennon stared glumly at the controls. Fleming alone knew how many objective years were passing outside as they hurtled through four-space. Subjectively it would only be hours aboard the Egg, but a decade—or maybe a century—might pass outside this mad universe where neither time nor speed had meaning. The old ships didn’t have temporal compensators, nor could they travel through upper bands of Cth where subjective and objective time were more nearly equal. They were trapped in a semi-stasis of time as the ship fled on through the distorted monochromatic regions that bypassed normal space.

The Egg slipped smoothly out of the hyper jump, back into the normal universe. Beta floated above them, the blue shield of her atmosphere shining softly in the light of Beta’s sun.

“Couldn’t hit it that good again in a hundred tries,” Kennon gloated. “Halfway across the galaxy—and right on the nose.” He looked at the shock chair beside him. Copper was curled into a tight ball inside the confining safety web, knees drawn up, back bent, head down—arms