Free Event Horizon (Hellgate) by Mel Keegan Page B

Travers’s shuttered face. “You did some damned good work, Mick.”
    “Not bad for a cripple.” Vidal glared at the food he had half eaten, a soft roll stuffed with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.
    “You’re not a cripple,” Travers argued. “Not anymore. Not unless you decide that’s what you want to be – and Curtis is right. You did good work on Tactical.”
    “Just trying to be useful.” Vidal swiped up the food and began to eat, though it was clear he was not hungry.
    On the other side of the tank, Richard Vaurien was cradling a mug between both hands and frowning into the threedee display. As Travers headed for the autochef, Marin circuited the tank and considered the visual from Vaurien’s perspective. Richard touched his shoulder briefly and gestured with the mug.
    “Welcome back to the land of the living. You’ll have to teach me that trick one day.”
    “ Semcaram, and it’s not a trick… what the hell is this ?” Marin could not make any sense of the display. “Is it a real object or just a sensor echo?”
    “It’s almost a philosophical question.” Jazinsky was at one of the flatscreens, a workstation opposite the tank, running a series of analyzes . “It appeared out of the Drift noise about ten minutes ago, and it’s still beating the hell out of me. Mark might recognize it –”
    “But Mark ain’t here.” Vidal stood and stretched. He was still wearing the same kind of clothing Marin had chosen for him, a loose tunic over black pants and a sash around the hips, but there was more substance inside the garments, Marin was sure. He dusted off his hands, still chewing as he joined Jazinsky and peered at the flatscreen. “Is this the pingback from active imaging?”
    “Yeah. But the pingback from what ? A sensor echo?” She reconfigured the instruments. “Let me try something else. This is like … like trying to use a mirror to see something that’s directly behind your own head, but the damn’ thing moves with you, so you never get a clear look at it.”
    “It’s like …” Vidal rubbed his face and looked again. “It’s familiar from somewhere, but I can’t remember. Neil, have a look at this.”
    Travers was on his way back from the ’chef with a mug in either hand. He passed one to Marin and they shouldered in beside Vidal and Jazinsky. And Vidal was right, Marin thought. Something about the odd data was familiar.
    But it was Gillian Perlman who nailed it. She had flown the Bravo gunship for over three years, the insane years when the crew had referred to the ship as a flying asylum. Those were the years when the Intrepid chased the phenomena that clustered around the sites of the big gravity storms, and too often gunships were caught, torn apart, like Eddie Kwei’s flight. Memories of the demise of Echo Company, the death of the Intrepid , still troubled Marin’s dreams, and Perlman was right.
    “A Hellgate ghost,” she said slowly. “They used to tell us they were wreckers, Freespacers using some kind of cloaking, or jamming our imaging gear, and we’d go out there and play tag with objects that vanished, or else led us into deep, dark water where we’d get squashed like tin cans. Neil?”
    “She’s right.” Travers glanced from Marin to Vidal and back. “Neither of you two ever drew this assignment, but we were in Hellgate for way too long, pushing our luck, chasing – well, things a lot like this.”
    Jazinsky’s eyes were bright and hard as polished gimlets. “I’ve worked in the Drift almost as long – long enough to have seen my share of Hellgate ghosts.”
    “And this is different?” Marin drank the coffee without tasting it. “How different?”
    “For one thing, it’s starting to exit the Drift now,” Jazinsky mused. “It’s crossing the boundary line and it’s still holding a specific trajectory. For another thing, we’ve been tracking it for more than ten minutes.” She looked up at Perlman. “You chased enough of these, Gill.