Staring out the lounge viewport at the emptiness of flat-space, her face made up with a dusting of cold starlight, Gina didn't bother to acknowledge The Capt'n coming up to stand beside her.
"Doesn't look very anomalous does it?" he observed.
"That's because the Anomaly is in hyperspace, you old gimp." Gina knew that he knew this. She was just feeling grumpy.
The Capt'n sighed. "So where's his nibs?"
Gina's gaze held for a moment, then faltered. Relenting, she answered. "On the bridge. He's plugged in."
"Really? You persuaded him then." He grinned. "Always knew you would."
Gina showed no pleasure in the compliment. "He agreed to look, that's all."
Time passed. Gina left the viewport and paced about the room. The Capt'n went to mix a drink, changed his mind when he saw the expression on her face.
More time passed. Ernest appeared.
Ernest knew it wouldn't be the same as being really out there. It would be like one of those virtual reality playbacks of a recorded scene – transforming you into a ghost, able to move about the scene at will, to view it from every possible angle, just not to influence the prerecorded events in any way.
This small technical quibble was all that separated the act from something he had vowed never to do again. Would the experience be like a vaccine, he wondered? An attenuated pathogen that would strengthen his resistance were he to encounter the real thing? Or would it have the opposite effect – a light beer to an alcoholic, the smallest taint of alcohol enough to reanimate that old addiction? Damn The Capt'n and his schemes.
Their first act on arrival had been to fire a series of probes into the Anomaly. Called skipping stones, these were little more than a transmitter atop a stripped-down drive, flitting in and out of flat space, sending back signals as they went. How long they lasted was pure random chance. Driven by automatics as they were, their inevitable fate was to end up smeared across the void when a turbulent patch of hyperspace caused the probe's constituent atoms to fall back into the real in a different order to which they left it. Of the ten stones they launched, the luckiest made it eight whole light-days before succumbing, requiring the ship to park up and wait for the eight days it took for this final silence to crawl back to its mothership at pedestrian light speed. With all the sensor logs now in, Ernest had been able to reconstruct a picture of the regions of hyperspace through which the probes had passed. That done, all that remained was to don his headset, enter the construct, and discover what it had to tell him.
He'd had to negotiate with his own anger to do this. To go back in after all this time was a risk, and therefore a concession. But he had to know the truth – that's how he'd put it to himself. The Capt'n was a phony, but the Anomaly might well be for real. His position would become so much easier, he'd reasoned, if he knew for sure that the whole thing was just another of The Capt'n's scams. Without the Anomaly it was game over. The only other motivation was plunder; he wasn't interested in that. He'd simply refuse to cooperate.
And if it's real? his anger had responded. To this he had no answer. Just an inward shrug. A case to be dealt with when and if it arose.
So in he dived.
The act of navigating a ship is an out-of-body experience. You expand into the space around you, become part of it all, the better to ride its bucks and bumps. Much the same was true of this simulated reconstruction. When Ernest engaged his neural implants, he left the physical realm behind him, plunged into that strange sea that was hyperspace, tested its waters and its weather.
The implication for his still fragile attachment to his borrowed body was a complication he had failed to foresee. Emerging from the navigation trance, removing the headset and tottering to his feet, Ernest felt a renewed dislocation. True, his physical coordination was less impaired than it had been when he'd awoken that first time in an unfamiliar cabin; but once more it felt as if he were not so much inhabiting this body as piloting it.
Or rather, it was more like autopilot. Ernest stowed the headset in its cubby hole and then proceeded through to the saloon. His body knew where it was going. It stopped at the doorway, allowing him to observe with detachment as Gina and The Capt'n turned to face him.
Then he began speaking. His focus was on The Capt'n. "You asked me to review the probe data. I did. You want me to tell you the Anomaly is still there. But why should that matter to me?"
"Misery ..."
Ernest silenced him with a glare. His attention shifted to Gina. "You intend to go in regardless. The pair of you. Anomaly or no Anomaly, you want to go to the source – in the hope you might find whatever it is you are looking for. Treasure in his case. In yours – what? Academic glory?" His words were building momentum; he gave her no time to respond. "Space-time is fractal. That's how a drive system works. Ordinary flat-space – it's like a coastline: zoom in and the distance between two points becomes longer the closer you look, the more you include the small-scale wiggles in your measurement, the greater the length you have to trace out. Zoom out and the opposite happens. Look at space from a different angle and it stretches, leaving less distance between here and there, less time consumed in the journey." Something odd was happening to him. The more he spoke, the more he felt a compulsion to speak, to keep on speaking. As his conscious sense of connection with his body had loosened, so a deeper link had taken its place. His lips demanded words to speak, something within him supplied whatever it could. A decade of anger – topped off by the past week of fury – was coming hissing out of him like a kettle. Not as rant or bluster; he literally didn't have it in him. But whatever words he did have, his two captors were going to sit and they were going to listen. Until their ears bled if need be. They needed him more than he needed them.
He continued to direct his words at Gina. "Perhaps the same is true of human beings? Were I to look closely enough at your motives for all this, I would see nothing more than another deeper set of motivations, and so on, ad infinitum. Each level making no more sense to me than the ones above it. I've been trying to understand what you are doing here, why you would consent to participate in such a scam. Wondering if there was some redeeming circumstance that warranted forgiveness for my abduction. But if understanding is beyond me, then why bother. Better just to judge you on your actions."
He paused now, more to catch his breath than to provide her with space to respond.
She spoke softly. "Ernest? Out there – what did you see?" The Capt'n was busy staring at his shoes.
Ernest did nothing to acknowledge her question. "Hyperspace isn't tame. When we power up the drive, stretch realspace, you'd think the excess might just squeeze out smoothly, like toothpaste from a tube. And you know what? Some places it does. Here on the trade routes hyperspace is so flat a cybernetic navigator will do my job for me. But stray from the safety of those lanes ..." He let the sentence hang. Turned about, refilled his lungs, began to pace. If these were the only words he had, they would just have to serve. Again Gina made as if to speak. He spoke over her, compelling her to silence. "And you know what? Nobody knows why. What makes one bit of empty space ooze like soft foam while another comes out all spiky and bent, all turbulence and confusion? We just don't know. We've figured out how to exploit it – not how to control it, even less to understand why it takes the form it does. And you thought you could control me? By placing this temptation in front of me?"
He paused again for breath. His audience made no attempt to interrupt.
"Some say it's because there is no reason – that wildness is built into the fabric of the universe." It was almost like being back in the navigation trance. His conscious self having ceded control to some deeper instinct. "Yet now we have this Anomaly of yours. Yes, it is still out there. And yes, you are right that it is very, very different to anything I have encountered before. Still wild, yet shaped somehow, a pattern underlying the chaos. Suggesting, just maybe, that this topography can be manipulated, if only we knew how. Perhaps the contours of galactic hyperspace do have an explanation after all." Ernest abruptly halted. The trance lifted for a moment and he focused on Gina. "Those things we talked about – about your work. It made me wonder. Everyone's been thinking physics, but perhaps it's been politics all along. Or rather, history. Maybe the universe is not wild at all, only the people in it. Could an ancient race have discovered the secret? Made space the way it is for their own convenience and protection? Made the Anomaly as a wall? Protection from each other, I don't doubt."
"Did you see something?"
This time he acknowledged her words. A momentary glance before he looked away. "I did what you asked. I went over the traces from the skipping stones."
"And?" prompted Gina. "What did they tell you?"
"They told me you're right. This is an anomaly. The structure of hyperspace in there is different somehow. Still chaotic – even more so than usual – yet chaotic in a different way. With study, there must be clues there to be found."
The Capt'n looked up at last. "Yes, yes. By all means let the egg heads at it. But that could take decades. What we need to know is – is there a way in? Now?"
Their second act on arrival had been to lay out a long-baseline sensor array. When not being used to collect responses from the skipping stones, it had been directed toward the system at the heart of the Anomaly. Six light years away from their current point of closest approach, long catalogued as of no particular interest, its only distinguishing feature was its location in the center of this seemingly intractable barrier. The array observations contained nothing that explicitly contradicted this anonymity – but there in the spectrum, mixed up with the noise and the margin of error, there was a suggestion ...
Ernest looked at his employer as if considering violence. "I won't say it's impossible. It's dangerous, for sure. But perhaps it could be done. But one thing I do know. I'm never going in on your terms."
The Capt'n rose to his feet. Approaching Ernest, he opened his mouth as if to speak. Then stopped. His phone rang.
"Huh?" He pulled the device from his pocket, his look of surprise in no way diminished by what he saw on its screen. "Sorry, I better take this. Seems we have some visitors."