“JESUS SUFFERING FUCK!” Caused Roger to sit bolt upright in his sparse bunk from a deep and satisfying sleep. By the time “ROGER!” came, he had already swung his feet to the bare metal floor, panic beginning to replace the shaggy remains of sleep. The voice didn’t have far to travel, the bunk residing no more than twenty paces from where it issued.
“ROGER!” This one seemed to vibrate the composite steel and carbon walls around him, which made sense when he exited the tiny compartment, as Ian’s head was now glaring down the length of the short corridor at him – in mid breath for another go.
“What?” He was too frightened to be annoyed.
Instead of finishing his now complete breath with another bellow, Ian, with a jerk of his chin, invited Roger to join him down the short walk to what by convention was called ‘the bridge’ but what was, in fact, merely a nice place to sit while the computer and the drive made all the real decisions.
Roger slid into the only other chair and asked again. “What?”
“What did I tell you about these Kruder and Dorfmeister engines?”
“What?” Roger asked, now very afraid indeed.
“If you say ‘What’ one more time, I’m going to stab you in the neck with a pencil. What did I tell you about these K&D drives?” What Ian’s voice lost in decibals, it gained proportionally in menace.
Roger caught himself just before the
fatal what escaped his lips – instead he swallowed, took a moment,
and said with too much hope, “Make sure and blow the baffles every
fourth transition?”
“YES!” Ian screamed in his face, a mere
two feet away. “And did you in fact blow said baffles? Don’t bother
answering, I’m looking at the truth in the maintenance log. Care to
guess what that means?”
“Oh shit.” Roger said.
“JESUS SUFFERING FUCK!” Ian repeated.
********
It was precisely the moment when crown met brow that the big blue bubble appeared. The recently crowned read surprise on the priest’s face and for a fleeting moment thought his reign might be the shortest ever, until he spun shoulders around to see what everyone was slack jawed about. Then he did something very unkingly when his jaw went slack as well.
The bubble was big, taking up the space between the bottom stair of the throne and at least twenty feet behind; it met the stone floor at the equator, forming a smooth, inscrutable dome at least that high. It also gave off a dim blue glow. The silence throughout the court was equally smooth and inscrutable. And could not last.
Somewhere in the crowd a low mewling
escalated into a moan and two hundred people rushed to leave at once.
King Niall unsheathed the ceremonial sword at his side and used the
voice he’d developed on so many fields of battle – one meant to
carry and be obeyed.
“Hold!” He shouted. “Hold and have
courage!” The crowd ignored him but they met barred doors at exits
and guards with swords, certainly not ceremonial, drawn. The initial
rush slowed and in doing so caused those behind them to turn and look
for other exits. Niall saw his moment and acted.
“We do not
know if there is anything to fear! Hold and have courage! I did not
see this thing appear. Who saw? Who witnessed it’s appearance?
Speak!” Niall strode halfway down the stairs, but not before
exchanging his useless sword for a very functional one with the
nearest soldier. “Who saw?”
One man, a cousin of one of the nine if Niall was right, called out, “We all did.”
“One moment it was just there.” Said another.
“It appeared from nowhere!”
Then it was two hundred voices all speaking at once.
“SILENCE!” Niall bellowed. The hall grew very still. The king, sword in hand, approached the big blue bubble. “Are you from heaven or from hell?” He asked in his voice meant to carry. The bubble gave no reply. “Well then, let’s see what steel can do.” With a swing that started somewhere from the pastures outside the castle walls, King Niall struck the big blue bubble.
Almost no one was more surprised than he when the bubble burst.
*******
“See this dial Roger? This one here. The one resting at zero. It says there is no home to go to. Nowhere to land.” Ian had decided to move swiftly past fear and directly into anger. Roger wasn’t there yet. Roger was seriously considering voiding his bowels. The idea of eternity trapped in a nonrelativistic void between dimensions with a pissed off Ian was not the hell he was raised to believe.
“What do we do? What do we do?” Roger babbled.
“We wouldnt be worrying about that if you’d done your damn job.” Ian said. It was then that Roger decided Ian might be on to something.
“I was perfectly happy making the regular runs at scale! I said we shouldn’t bypass the default settings! I told you we shouldn’t fuck with it!”
“Look. I have an idea.” Ian said. Roger closed his mouth with a snap and sat back in his seat with his arms crossed.
“Are you going to stab me in the neck with a pencil if I say what?” Roger asked.
Ian rolled his eyes and snorted. “I reserve the right to put us both out of our misery if we don’t fix this. But we’re going to fix it. We have to.”
“What do we do?” Roger asked.
“The only thing we can do, get the computer to chew on the last transition log and compare it with the four we made before that. Go from there.” Ian said.
Roger chewed on his lower lip and his eyebrows scrunched together before he said, “Do you know the odds…”
“If you make me quote that fucking movie I am going to find something more interesting than a pencil.” Ian said.
“I love you.” Roger said.
Ian shook his head. “Asshole.”
End of Part One