until he sprang an emergency on her, then she panicked and failed miserably. He coached her until she learnt to control her panic a little better, encouraging her with lavish praise. He was a good teacher, motivating her when she wanted to give up, until her skills improved sufficiently to satisfy him. When at last he allowed her to leave the simulator, she was tired and shaky.
The worst part was linking her cyber implant with the ship's neural net and being bombarded with masses of information whilst in the grey no-place of the net. The scout ship normally had a crew of two, so they could fly it in shifts, but she would have no such luxury. Tallyn wanted her to sleep before she left, but a sense of urgency consumed her, and she only ate a hurried meal before insisting on going to the spaceport. Tallyn seemed to admire her resolve, but she was certain that if she delayed she would lose her nerve and not go at all.
The scout ship parked on the spaceport apron was a tiny, ovoid silver craft bristling with sensor arrays and one energy weapon. They climbed into the cramped interior, bumping into each other and equipment that had been fitted in the most inconvenient places. While Rayne and Rawn watched, Tallyn lay down on the pilot's couch and hooked himself into the ship's neural net, inputting the co-ordinates and instructions it would need to leave the atmosphere and fly to the Cerebilus Moons, then return.
Tallyn could have assigned the task to another pilot, and Rayne was flattered that he did it himself. Curious spaceport personnel watched from the hatchway, amazed at the breach of regulations that was being perpetrated with the council's approval. Such acts were unknown to Atlanteans, and the ground crew was horrified and fascinated. When at last Tallyn was satisfied, he turned to her, his expression schooled to hide the anxiety she sensed.
'Once out of the atmosphere,' he said, 'you must hook yourself into the neural net. The ship will follow its programme and fly to the Cerebilus Moons, but you must be alert for any problems. The repellers will deflect debris and asteroids, space junk and such, but there are other things, like space storms, which will endanger your link with the Net, or void fields, which may pull you off course. The neural net can be re-initiated if that happens, and will then compensate for the mistake, but you must be there to do it. If you're not linked to the ship, you won't even know it's happened. If all else fails, terminate the Net link and activate the distress beacon. We'll come and pick you up. Also, if you need any other instructions, you can call me on the space line.'
She nodded, her stomach a cold knot. 'How long is the flight going to be?'
'About four hours. It's a long way.'
Rayne nodded again, avoiding his intense scrutiny, which searched her face for signs of excessive stress. She forced a smile and glanced at Rawn. 'Well, let's get this show on the road then.'
Tallyn said, 'You should have been trained for this. We should have realised this might happen. When you get back, I'll put you both on a course.'
'Well, nothing like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted,' she quipped, which earned her a stern glance.
Rawn hugged her, then Tallyn touched a crystal and they left the ship. The hatch closed with a hiss and clunk, sealing her in the tiny craft. She sank into a luxuriously padded acceleration couch as gravity increased, but it did not grow uncomfortable as the scout floated up on its antigravity, then switched to repellers. The scout had inertial compensators, but they were only powerful enough to reduce the effects of inertia. Since pilots were strapped into their couches and the ship had no other crew, larger ones were deemed unnecessary.
The ship lacked any luxuries apart from the two comfortable pilot couches, and made alarming noises. The simulator had not clunked and groaned, hummed and whined like this ship did. She lay back and forced herself to relax, closing her eyes to block out the plethora of winking lights around her, few of which she knew anything about. The ship was trusted to fly itself, and Tallyn had assured her that it was a new, advanced craft, unlikely to malfunction.
With its powerful repellers, the chances of her having an accident were slim – repellers were inclined to make ships as slippery as eels. However, she pondered as she drifted up through Atlan's atmosphere, there were a number of things that could go wrong. Any damage to the Net link could result in the ship's stores of energy being depleted, which would cause all its systems, including the repellers, to fail. In that event, the chances of its surviving for long were not good, even if her air did not run out before a piece of space junk punched a hole in the hull.
When she opened her eyes again, Atlan's milky orb was a pearl on the main screen and Net energy crawled over the hull. The screen winked off, and she inserted her hand into the sensor slot beside the seat. Instantly the grey no-place of the ship's neural net swallowed her senses, and the data bombardment began. Most of it was incomprehensible, a mass of scrolling black figures, but Tallyn had told her to ignore those and concentrate only on the other colours when they appeared. A statement in green flicked past, telling her the link was successful and the ship was in super light. A column of white figures counted her increasing speed, and a line of orange letters listed her co-ordinates.
A window filled with blue lines opened, displaying the stars and planets they passed. A flashing red dot whizzed past, warning her of a passing ship on a parallel course, heading for Atlan. A yellow diagram identified a nearby planetary system, and a mauve overlay plotted the commercial space lanes. The daunting stream of data was exhausting, and her mind seemed to grow hot as she strived to digest it all and make sense of it. Fortunately, nothing seemed to require her undivided attention, for there was so much to take in.
Rayne watched the data scroll, whiz, flash and flicker through her brain, numbed by it all. The energy conduits' soft hum was the only sound, and, if she opened her eyes, the consoles' flashing lights illuminated the bridge in a flickering glow that mixed horribly with the data in her brain. According to the neural net, they hurtled through space at fifteen times the speed of light, flashing past solar systems in the blink of an eye.
Lost in the data stream, she waited as the hours passed and she drew closer to her destination and whatever lay in store for her. The scout would travel the sixty point four light years through clouds of gas that were unborn suns, past quasars and asteroids, pulsars and glowing nebulas of fluorescent gas.
A flashing orange statement caught her attention in the midst of the chaotic data. The ship was decelerating, and she noticed a lot of the other figures changed as her speed decreased. The figures rolled back, hurrying towards zero, the programmed destination and her current co-ordinates growing closer and closer to matching. The dizzying dance of words and figures took on a final frenzy, then the numbers froze in their correct results and the neural net announced its termination of the Net link. Rayne pulled her hand out of the sensor slot and sat up with a gasp, almost falling off the couch as her brain emptied and the grey walls spun.
Gulping burning bile, she raised a trembling hand to wipe the cold sweat from her brow. Four hours linked to the neural net was more than she could stand easily. The gush of information had disorientated her, and she fought to push aside the ghostly after-images of scrolling numbers and whizzing data. No wonder ships' crews rotated so regularly. Four hours was a long shift, even for an experienced pilot. For her, it had been pure torture.
Rayne tottered to a refreshment dispenser and ordered a strong drink, which she gulped down. Braced, she went back to the couch and gazed at the main screen. The Cerebilus Moons were a strange collection of planetoids orbiting each other in a destructive, collapsing sunless system. They were called moons because of their size and orbits, which appeared to indicate that the planet they had once orbited had vanished, leaving the moons, like lost sheep, to endlessly wander through their diminishing circles until they crashed into each other. Of the eighteen original planetoids, only eleven remained amid a spreading debris field.
Closing her eyes, she wondered if she would be able to get some badly needed sleep. Her ordeal with the neural net had exhausted her, and her eyelids were leaden.
'Welcome, Golden Child.'
Rayne sat bolt upright with a gasp, her eyes scanning the main screen. Thrusting her hand into the sensor slot, she closed her eyes as the data washed through her mind again. The ship was close, in fact, a red proximity warning flashed. Jerking her hand out again, she stared at the main screen.
'I… What do you want?'
'To show you something. You must prepare for your meeting with the one who comes.'
'Who's that?'
'I will show you. I will take you to a world that has known one before.'
She shook her head. 'No, I can't. I don't know how to fly this ship.'
'Then I shall.'
'Wait!' She jumped up, then grabbed a bulkhead as the moons whirled on the screen. Her gravity remained steady, but the screen gave the sensation of spinning, and she looked away. 'Wait! I can't leave here. This ship is
