Safe House

“Flight, yes. Not fighting, though.”

“Control sequencing unchanged, then.”

“That’s right.”

“Next order.”

“On hold.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A sudden squeak came from Laurent as he was heading around from the other side of the fighter. “Suit too tight?” Maj said.

“Uh, no, it just surprised me.”

She restrained herself from shaking her head and commenting on how much his home system plainly left to be desired. Costuming — changing body covering or, for that matter, body shape — was one of the most basic virtual utilities. If they won’t even let people dress up the way they want to—! “Well, no more serious surprises,” she said. “Come on, let’s get up into the cockpit. We’ve got a short jump to make before we take the long one.”

He hurried along beside here. “Where is this? I mean, where are we supposed to be?”

“It’s a hangar facility on Amrit, the third moon of the gas giant Dolorosa,” Maj said. “I don’t know how much that helps you. Come on, get in. The aft ladder is on the other side — walk underneath.”

She clambered up into the cockpit. “Let me know if that seat suits you,” she said. “The program should have fixed it.”

There was some clunking and bumping as Laurent wriggled himself into the number-two seat behind her. “It — is snug,” he said.

“Partly for protection against those high-G turns,” she said. “You’ll be glad of it later. Helmet,” she said.

Maj’s helmet appeared, a perfectly transparent dome that faired into her suit apparently seamlessly. It was solid plex. Maj knew other players who trusted the new force field helmets, but herself, she preferred something that didn’t need a power source, no matter how “guaranteed” the power sources were.

“But this is, well, virtual,” Laurent said, sounding a little dubious. “Do we really need these?”

Maj laughed. “You breathe a little vacuum, and you’ll find out whether you need it or not.”

“But we couldn’t really suffocate, or—”

“Yes, I know, it’s a game, but isn’t it more fun to play a game and pretend it’s not a game?” Maj said. “You ready? We should get going. Got yourself strapped in?”

It was the usual five-point harness, and as usual took a little doing for him to get all fastened in the first time. When Laurent was helmeted and secure, Maj said, “Hangar control…”

“Working,” said a drier, tinnier voice than the game controller’s.

“Evacuate the hangar.”

She powered up the Arbalest’s Morgenroth drivers while the air hissed out of the place. “I should warn you,” Maj said. “The game designer has built high-G resistance into the human stress parameters. Some of the things we may do later can look pretty scary. And don’t freak out if you see me doing something that can normally break a ship like this in two. It won’t. It’ll just look like it will.”

“Oh, well, then, I am reassured,” Laurent said. Maj was tempted to burst out laughing at his tone of voice, which suggested that reassurance was thinner on the ground in his mental environment than he would have liked.

“Hangar evacuated,” said the hangar control voice.

“Okay,” Maj said. “Here we go.”

She cut in the vectored locals and pushed the Arbalest up. The scream of the engines was perfectly audible. Looking in the mirrored canopy above her, Maj could see Laurent’s eyebrows go up, but he made no comment. “Crack the ceiling,” she told the hangar.

The center sections of the ceiling started to roll away from the centerline, with a last hiss as a little pressure equalization happened. Outside was not a perfect vacuum by any means. Amrit was a large enough moon to have kept some of the heavier gases, and as Maj eased in the locals they bobbed up into a cloud of them, above which some light source was dimly visible, like the moon above cloud.

“You wouldn’t like it out there,” Maj said to Laurent. “There’s a lot of swept-up methane in the atmosphere. Amrit is a ‘shepherd moon.’ Another good reason for a helmet, if something should go wrong with the ship. The stuff gets full of organic compounds after a while…and the stink! You wouldn’t want to know….”

“I can do without stink,” Laurent said, looking up and around with interest.

“Good. Here we go…”

She took the Arbalest straight up into the cloudy silvery dimness. Toward the zenith, that silveriness started to get stronger. “The moon?” Laurent said.

“Not quite…”

They burst up out of the cloud. Twelve degrees down from the zenith hung the source of the light. Laurent took a long, sudden breath and did not let it out.

Hanging there above the curve of Amrit’s atmosphere was the Cluster, in unimpeded view…and it was a view worth seeing. NGC 2057 was one of the so-called “Guardian Angel” globular star clusters soaring above and below the plane of the Milky Way galaxy — a gigantic spherical array of stars, radiating out like an explosion of multicolored jewels from a core where the stars were clustered together almost too tightly to make them out as separate entities. Many of them, too, were short-period variables, so that they visibly swelled and shrank as you looked at them, like live things breathing, burning sedately in blinding fire.

“This is the Seraphim Cluster,” Maj said. “A long time ago a very old, very wise species lived here — the Danir. They had science beyond anything we know…and they fought terrible wars with another species also native to the Cluster, an evil species that we know little about. They’re all gone, now. But an explorer found the Daniri science, and the living machines that were maintaining it, on the Heartworld of the cluster. The machines told the explorer to find others like him, the outcasts, the curious, the people who couldn’t leave well enough alone…the people who believed in standing up for the defenseless and trying to stop the bad things that happened all around them. They would be equipped with weapons that would make them invincible…if they used them properly. They would descend from the Cluster into the Galaxy with their new weapons and become the defenders of the right, facing down crime and evil wherever they found it. They would be hunted down by both the evildoers and by those who didn’t understand their mission…but if they persevered, they would triumph. They would become the Cluster Rangers.” She grinned at him. “Or we would. Some of us.”

“You mean, you pretend to be—”

Maj laughed softly, glanced up in the cockpit mirror. “While you’re in it, ‘pretending’ doesn’t describe it at all.” she said. “Your part of the Net isn’t very virtual, is it?”

Laurent’s look was wry. “I think,” he said, “the government doesn’t like the idea of people escaping from reality.”

Maj thought briefly of an ancient recorded interview she had seen with a writer who lived in the middle of the last century. What kind of people do you think are most concerned about other people escaping from reality? he had said. The jailers…She made a face.

“Typical. But look.”

They had been making steady progress up and away from the cloudtops of Amrit as Maj talked. Now they were making for the terminator; and the light of Dolorosa’s primary, red-golden Hekse, started to grow behind the edges of the atmosphere, lines of blue-dominated spectrum showing there, growing brighter all the time. Maj smiled slightly, and kicked the drivers in, making for the light at increased speed. All around them, a faint soft shrilling was audible, almost musical, like tiny bells being rung at a great distance — a shivering, shining sound. But then they came over the edge, over the terminator, up into the light…

…and space was full of the sound. The system’s primary hung there, blazing, shining on the ship and on Amrit and on the huge peach-and-brick-banded curvature of Dolorosa, hanging at one o’clock; and the sound of the sun smote them full on, a huge profound booming sound, like a gong struck, but sounding many notes at once, all shivering, like the sound of the stars far away. It was of course the same sound, only made bearable here by immense distance — starsong, the game designer’s idea of the music of the spheres. Beyond the sun, and producing not that huge boom, but rather a much more tenuous, silvery sound, lay the galaxy. Much of it was