Second Contact (Okal Rel Saga #1)

Chapter 15.3 - Follow Me

When Ann's heart had climbed back down out of her mouth they were still too close to Vanilla Rose to risk reality skimming, although for the first time in her life Ann wondered if the prospect of taking out the station might be worth it. But mass murder still wasn't her style. The thought alone made her feel creepy. It was exactly what her pilot's training and psych-screening strove to ensure was something she'd never be capable of. Ever. The great sin nothing could excuse.

"I hate this part," Von complained about the zero-G conditions.

Ann ignored his sulky tone. "Did H'Reth know you killed Jarl?"

"No," he said. "He thought you did."

"Why me?" she asked.

"I told him that you were a Vrellish highborn, despite being Reetion — a hybrid from the first time we made contact. I thought that might help if you were captured again, that he would respect you more."

Ann remembered H'Reth running away from her and chuckled. "A Vrellish woman, huh?"

"You act like one," Von defended his lie.

"So you've said," remembered Ann.

"I really hate being weightless!" Von complained. "I'm going to start cat clawing."

"Cat clawing? What's cat—" Ann began.

She stopped at the first touch of skim transition, alarmed by their proximity to the station. But they weren't under skim. They just dipped and accelerated in real space on the strength of the energy they sucked. It wasn't scary once she grasped what was going on, except that repeated start-and-stop skim transitions were not her idea of fun. She was just getting used to that, when the skin of their rel-fighter dissolved into a vista of stars.

Ann screamed and shut her eyes. Von's body clenched beneath hers.

"What is it?" He abandoned the controls with one hand to feel her for an injury. "Shimmer hit?" he asked in alarm.

Ann caught his questing hand and held on, daring to open her eyes again. She could still breathe, so she couldn't really be exposed to vacuum, but the naked stars were still all that she saw.

"The hull," she said, and swallowed. "It's gone!"

"Oh..." He sounded unsure what to make of that remark. "You mean the nav display?" He guessed. "It's the nervecloth."

Ann tried to concentrate on breathing but it was hard to believe the air in her lungs wasn't getting thin and cold.

"Oh," said Ann. "Right. No problem."

Reetion pilots navigated using psychologically manageable models mediated by the ship's persona. If anything, flying a Reetion ship induced claustrophobia. This view was magnificent — and terrible.

"Riding magic horses flying through vacuum," Ann whispered, remembering First Contact legends. "Bare to space, fighting each other with flashing swords."

Von said, "Pardon?"

"Something everyone thought First Contact observers had got wrong," Ann explained.

"We're clear now," he warned.

The transition to reality skimming was not the shock it usually was. If they had really been astride a vacuum-treading stallion, it would have been like leaping from a walk to a gallop. The stars began to shift position with nearest ones turning red or blue. What Ann recalled of Paradise Reach constellations suggested the blue ones were getting closer while the red ones were receding. She blinked a couple of times, wondering if she was imagining the colors because she knew Doppler shift shortened the wavelength of an approaching light source and lengthened the wavelength of a receding one. But a rel-ship skipped the space between manifestations and behaved like an ordinary object during each brief, in-phase period, which meant any virtual Doppler shift effect would have to be calculated based on a series of in-phase measurements, instantly made and knitted together, in the same way as a pilot's subjective experience of rel-skimming. Not even an arbiter could deliver mixed-state telemetry as good.