Free Transvergence by Charles Sheffield Page B

monster, more like a whole world than a standard interstellar ship. Unfortunately, its appetite for power matched its huge size.

    Darya sat in one of the information niches off the main control room, her eyes fixed on two of several hundred displays.

    The first showed the total available energy in the vessel's central storage units.

    Down, down, down.

    Even when nothing seemed to be happening, the routine operation and maintenance of the ship sent the stored power creeping toward zero.

    But normal operation was nothing compared to the power demands of a Bose Transition. For something as massive as the Erebus , each transition guzzled energy. They had been through one jump already. Darya had watched in horror as the transition was initiated and the onboard power readout flickered to half its value.

    Now they were sucking in energy from the external Bose Network, in preparation for another transition. And that energy supply was far from free. Darya switched her attention to the second readout, one specially programmed to show finance , not engineering. It displayed Darya's total credit—and it was swooping down as fast as the onboard power of the Erebus went up. Three or four jumps like the last one, and she would be as flat broke as the rest of the group.

    She brooded over the falling readout. It was a pretty desperate situation, when a poor professor at a research institute turned out to be the richest person on board. If she had been of a more paranoid turn of mind, she might have suspected that she had been invited along on this trip mainly to bankroll it. Julian Graves had used all his credit to buy the Erebus . E.C. Tally was a computer, albeit an embodied one, and owned nothing. J'merlia and Kallik had been penniless slaves, while Hans Rebka came from the Phemus Circle, the most miserably poor region of the whole spiral arm. The exception should have been Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial; but although they talked about their wealth, every bit of it was on Nenda's ship, the Have-It-All , inaccessible on far-off Glister. At the moment they were as poor as everyone else.

    Darya glanced across to the main control console, where Louis Nenda was all set to take them into their second jump. They were just one Bose Transition away from the region of the Torvil Anfract; one jump would leave them with comfortably enough power for the return journey.

    Except that they were not going to make the jump! Louis Nenda had been adamant.

    "Not with me on board, you don't." He glared around the circle. "Sure, we been through a lot together, and sure, we always muddle through. That don't mean we take chances with this one. This is the Anfract . It's dangerous , not some rinky-dink ratbag planet like Quake or Opal."

    Which came close to killing all of us, Darya thought. But she did not speak, because Julian Graves was slapping his hands on his knees in frustration.

    "But we have to go into the Anfract. You heard E.C. Tally's analysis, and I thought you were in agreement with it. There is an excellent chance that the Zardalu cladeworld is hidden within the Torvil Anfract, with living Zardalu upon it."

    "I know all that. All I'm saying is we don't go charging in. People have been pokin' around the Anfract for thousands of years—an' most who went in never came out. We need help ."

    "What sort of help?"

    "We need an expert. A pilot. Somebody who's been around this part of the arm for a long time and knows it like the back of his chelicera."

    "Do you have a candidate?"

    "Sure I got one. Why'd you think I'm talking? His name's Dulcimer—an' I'm warning you now, he's a Chism Polypheme. But he knows the arm cold, and he probably needs work. If we want him, we have to go looking. One thing for sure, you won't find him around the Anfract."

    "Where will we find him?" Darya had not understood Nenda's warning about Chism Polyphemes, but figured they'd better take one problem at a time.

    "Unless he's changed, he'll be sittin' around and