Flight 404 by Simon Petrie

Author:Simon Petrie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon Petrie
Published: 2018-06-11T03:00:00+00:00

three

‘I don’t see why you’re complaining. You’ve taken plenty of pot shots at us , over the years.’

*

A recent bump in the price of In-113, suggesting an unusual purchasing pattern. A delay in the reporting of profits for Borken’s Eps Eri subsidiary. Wlodek – who, to a large extent, is Borken at Eps Eri – not where he claims to be, and desperate to gain control of an altspace-capable vessel…

Why do I get the feeling these things are connected?

It’s Daycycle Eight. I’m infusing the latest mind-pool updates. With the news from the Cumulus, that the Bougainvillaea has categorically not reached HIP 56948, there’s been a spike in media speculation on the missing ship. And something jars. Such a bland detail that at first I don’t notice… but it’s there.

‘It’s unthinkable,’ runs the quote from a local pundit, ‘that a bee-three-enn-gamma intersystem passenger carrier would just… I mean, the idea that it’s somehow made some kind of accidental and unforeseen retransition into altspace, it goes against everything we know about the physics of the process, the failsafes that are engineered in. I mean, the layers of safeguard which would need to be circumvented, it’s completely… I really cannot countenance that as an explanation. As to where the Bougainvillaea is now, I’ve no idea. But I can tell you where it’s not, and that’s altspace.’

Then, from my crash-couch berth, I query Peregrinator’s archive, and the doubt hits.

We are now a mere half a light-minute – ten million kilometres or so – from the edge of the increasingly ill-defined search zone, and continuing to pile on the g forces in deceleration.The Wlodek singleship is still – amazingly – in pursuit, and managing to match our deceleration profile for a rendezvous within the next half a daycycle. And while the singleship’s trajectory yet remains potentially ballistic, there are other obvious concerns as it approaches. A plasma drive plume can inflict a lot of damage on a vessel, from a considerable distance.

There has been no further contact from “Wlodek”. Which, hopefully, means that the override has been disabled. But I still have a threat to neutralise.

*

It must be closer to thirty years than twenty, since I last saw Xan.

‘If there was anyone I did it for,’ I say, ‘other than of course for myself, that person would be you.’

“Xan” doesn’t respond initially, and I wonder if I have finally struck something that lies beyond K@rine’s ability to emulate. It might, of course, merely be that I haven’t provided enough information on Xan, who was only fourteen or fifteen when her family moved from the small coastal settlement of Medina, where I had spent my entire life up until that point, to the major town of Beacon several hundreds of kilometres inland. It capped what, for me, had been a tumultuous year, and preceded a couple of utterly miserable ones. Xan had been, I suppose, my first – chaste – love, a realisation I came to at around the same time that I understood that I was in the wrong body…

‘You may tell yourself that,’ “Xan” says at last.

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