Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(39)

“Hawk,” I said, and I wondered if I was commiserating with him, or attempting to refocus his attention on what was happening now.

The thrust increased. We were plastered to the couches. I couldn’t move a muscle. Even words, now, were beyond me. Every breath was a gargantuan labour.

Maddie cried out. I saw her concern: the light which hung above us, penetrating our frontal lobes, intensified, brightened, became painful.

I wondered, then, what trap I had lured my friends into. Hawk yelled, “This is it!”

It was as if the pent up pressure in the Mantis, which had been building for minutes, was suddenly released and we sprang forward at terrible speed—forward into the blinding intensity of the Golden Column.

I cried out, instinctively trying to raise my arms to protect myself from the impact I knew was about to happen.

But the impact never came.

When I opened my eyes, I saw only gold, and my body, my very being, was suffused by such a warmth and sense of well-being that I found it hard to fight back the tears.

“What happened?” Maddie said in a tremulous voice.

Matt responded, hushed with awe. “We’re inside the Golden Column…”

I looked though the sidescreens, the rear screen. All around us was gold.

That lasted for approximately ten seconds.

Then we emerged from the light, and the warmth and well-being dropped from us—as if we had been banished from Heaven—and I strained to peer into the sunlight flooding through the screen.

Of one thing I was certain. We were no longer on the green and mountainous world of Chalcedony.

“Where the hell…?” Matt said.

A desert stretched out before us, barren and rocky and seemingly lifeless. In the distance, stark against the deep blue sky, I made out oddly familiar mountains. I had seen them somewhere before, in my childhood.

Beside me, Hawk’s suspension cradle was shaking. Our pilot was laughing.

“Hawk?” I said.

“Do you know where we are?” he cried.

“God knows,” Matt said. “Looks like some alien world to me…” “Alien?” Hawk responded. “And where were you born, Matt?

‘Frisco? Well, we’re not a thousand kilometres away.”

I looked at him. “The Nevada desert?” I whispered. Hawk looked at me through eyes filmed with tears. “Not a stone’s throw from the old Nevada spaceport,” he said, “where thirty years ago I killed ninety-five innocent tourists.” Maddie said, “But how?”

In the silence that followed her question, Hawk took us down and eased the ship down near the desert floor. As we were hovering, he turned the ship on its axis and said, “Just as I thought…”

We stared at him, and then through the viewscreen at what was revealed.

Standing before us, rising for kilometres into the clear blue Nevada sky, was an exact replica of the Golden Column we had left behind.

The voice in my head whispered something, and I relayed the information to my friends. “The Gift of the Yall,” I said.

The ship hovered, turned until it was facing the Column. I reached out to Matt and gripped his hand. Beyond him, I saw Maddie reach out too…

“Maddie!” I said.

Tears filled her eyes, streaming down her cheeks.

As Hawk powered up the ship and we accelerated towards the miraculous light of the Golden Column, Maddie’s hand made contact with Matt’s.





CODA



Three months later I’m sitting in the shadow of the Mantis, enjoying a beer and staring out over the silver waters of the bay. I’ve had a hundred or more offers to buy the ship, but I’ve refused them all. The Mantis is more valuable to me than anything money can buy—not so much for what it represents, but for the life it allows a certain person to lead, which I’ll come to later. I’ve given the Mantis another coat of paint, in a vain attempt to disguise it from the ship which made Expansion-wide news three months ago. Visitors still come to Magenta Bay, hoping to see the fabled starship and talk to David Conway, the Opener of the Way, about his discovery of the Yall ship and the subsequent flight into the Golden Column—but I tell them that Conway no longer lives around here, and recently the stream of sightseers has slowed to a trickle.

I spend my time contemplating the past, enjoying the occasional drink in the fighting Jackeral with my friends. Every day I make it a habit to go for a long swim across the bay—weather permitting, of course.

I’m a happy man, these days—and these nights too. The Yall ghost was as good as its word. For the past three months I’ve been spared the nightmares.

Hawk comes to visit us about once a month. He sub-let his scrapyard, bought a ship with the money he made from selling his story, and started a tour company with Kee, taking tourists through the Golden Column on a reprise of the famous Nevada run. From time to time he takes his crate further afield, and when he comes back to Magenta he regales us with tales of his exploratory flights to far, uncharted stars.

The scientists are still trying to work out how the Golden Columns work. Quite simply, any space vessel can enter a column and emerge at the destination entered into its computer core, whether that destination is within the same solar system, or thousands of light years distant. By some mysterious method—the scientists say that it is not unrelated to the physics behind the Telemass process—the ship is flung through space and brings with it the essence of the Column through which it passed, effectively establishing a gateway at its destination through which other ships can access the universe…