Alternate Realities by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

sent for breakfast.”
    “I got the call. She takes what she can. Here.” I put a hot roll into his hand and he ate that while I finished stacking the other carrier for the crew. I gave Dela and Griffin’s carrier to Lance.
    “I’ll go,” Vivien said, swallowing down her milk. She dried her hands, wiped possible wrinkles from her clothing. “I’ll go with you.”
    Lance nodded, the carrier in one hand. He left, and Vivien went with her arm locked in his ... up where Dela was. I might have gone. I might be where there was Dela to make sense of things. But I remembered the other carrier and Lynette, the whole crew up there, and then I realized what Vivien had done, leaving the work all to me.
    I picked it up, grabbed another roll for myself and carried the box to the lift, rode it up, swallowing a mouthful of the roll and trying to keep my stomach down as well.
    They were anxious for the food when I arrived, shadow-eyed and miserable. Percivale came and took the carrier from me and passed it round, looked puzzled at me when there were not enough. “I had a roll down below,” I said, settling on a counter edge, still chewing the last of it and knowing it must sound as if I had fed myself first of all. “While it was in the oven.”
    They said nothing, but peeled back the covers and drank out of cups that shook in their hands ... working harder than the rest of us and using up their reserves far faster, I thought, wishing I could have hurried it. As for me, I could go now to my lady, find what comfort there was now in her—but that was none, I thought. The screens all looked full of the same bad news. “Where are we?” I asked, after lingering there a moment, after they had at least had a chance to get a few swallows of the food down. “What’s happening? Can you tell anything?” I thought—if there was any hope, I would like to take it to Dela. But they would have done that: they would have called her at once, if there were.
    “We’re nowhere,” Lynette said sourly.
    “But moving,” said Modred.
    The idea made me queasy. “Where?”
    Modred waved a hand at the screen nearest Percy. It showed nothing I could read, but there were a lot of numbers ticking along on it.
    “We’ve tried the engines,” said Gawain. “We’re moving, but we don’t get anything. You understand? We’ve tried to affect our movement, but what works in realspace won’t work here at all, wherever here is. We’ve tried the jump field and it won’t generate. We don’t know whether there’s something the matter with the vanes or whether we just can’t generate a field while we’re in this space. Nothing works. We’re without motive power. No one’s ever been here before. No one knows the rules. Jumpships only skim this place. We’re in it.”
    I nodded, sick at my stomach, having gotten the bad news I had bargained for.
    “But there’s something out there,” Percivale said. “That—” He indicated the same screen Modred had. “That’s a reading coming in, relative motion; and it’s getting stronger.”
    I thought of black holes and other disquieting things, all impossible considering the fact that we were still alive and functioning, and kept arguing with myself that we had been safe where nothing like this should have happened, in the trafficked vicinity of a very normal star—which might or might not be normal now, the nasty thought kept recurring. And what about all the rest of the traffic which had been out there with us when we went popping unexpectedly into jump, presumably with some kind of field involved, which could tear ships apart and disrupt all kinds of material existence. Like planets. Like stars. If it were big enough.
    “How—fast—are we moving?” I asked.
    “Can’t get any meaningful referents. None. Something’s there, in relation to which we’re moving, but the numbers jump crazily. The size of it, whether the thing we’re picking up is even solid in any sense ... or just some ghost