Free Engineman by Eric Brown

against it, fetched a beer from the kitchen and collapsed on a battered foam-form in the shuttered, darkened lounge. The only light, a comforting orange glow, issued from a long tank on the mantelshelf: within it, the miniaturised sun of Antares rose over a panorama of sand and a silver-domed city. The floor was littered with cushions, discs and old papers. Mirren lodged his feet on the coffee table and drank his beer. He took the pix of Hunter from inside his jacket and stared at the terrible yin-yang of his face, considering what the off-worlder might be selling... He reached for the cord attached to the vidscreen and was lowering it on its angle-poise boom from the ceiling when the base of his skull seemed to explode and a fiery irritation shot up his extended arm. The periphery of his vision shattered, and he could make out only a circular patch of clarity straight ahead, like a bullet hole in glass.
    He was about to undergo an attack - his headache all morning had warned him, and he should have been ready for it - but he knew that there was nothing he could have done to prepare himself for the wrenching dislocation.
    Hunter's photograph slipped from his fingers. He flashbacked-
     
    And found himself once again aboard the Perseus Bound .
    He was sitting on the slide-bed of the flux-tank, arms stanchioned beside him, head bent forward so that Dan Leferve could adjust his occipital console. He felt a sense of anticipation that he was about to flux, and at the same time a terrible pre-emptive sense of loss that this would be his last push.
    Christiana Olafson sprawled in the lounger before the viewscreen which looked out upon the nada -continuum, blitzed from her stint in the tank. Jan Elliott, the pale, ginger-haired Irish Enginewoman stood watching his en-tankment, biting her lip worriedly. She'd spent the entire voyage so far in the engine-room, as if unable on her last flight to tear herself away from the centre of operations. Caspar Fekete, outwardly blasé about the whole issue of the closedown, stood beside the tank and called out the sequencing countdown to Dan.
    Mirren felt the jacks slip into his skull one by one.
    " Grant him smooth union," Elliott was babbling, " With the majesty of the Sublime, the Infinite ." Although he allowed the believers in his team to conduct religious rituals before their own en-tankment, he forbade such nonsense before he fluxed.
    Despite the distant feeling creeping over him, he lifted a warning finger. "Shut it, Elliott, okay?"
    She looked away, her words faltering.
    The final jack slipped home.
    Fekete slapped him on the back. "Have a good mind-trip, sir!" He pulled a face at Elliott.
    Mirren lay on the bed as it entered the tank, glad to be leaving behind the petty banter of his team. Darkness enclosed him. He heard nothing. Within seconds he was no longer aware of his body. His last sense of all, the awareness of himself, his identity, would remain with him, but reduced, modulated, like the feeble consciousness of some primal animal.
    He had the sensation of hovering on the edge of some infinite vastness, a pool of immanence which would bathe him in glory. Then, in the second that he fluxed, he was one with the vastness, and his soul, or rather his mind, was flooded with rapture.
    What was happening to him had two explanations, one religious and the other secular. If the Disciples were to be believed, then his soul was briefly conjoined with the ultimate reality, the source of all things, which underpinned the everyday, physical world. It was this union, or rather being wrenched from it, that brought about the Enginemen's sense of craving, the desire for reunion... The secular, scientific explanation, which Mirren subscribed to, was that upon neurological union with null-space, or the nada -continuum, the only part of the human brain able to function in such a void, the pineal gland, bloomed and activated and produced the power to push the bigship through the medium which