Then he felt . . .
He stood up, spilling his tray, unable to form words. He could feel the universe skewing sideways, the underlying layer of unspace shifting, even as real space stayed still. Everyone else was staring at him. Kris was at his elbow, calling for a medical kit. Possibly she thought he was having a stroke.
‘Beds, everyone!’ he got out. ‘Suspension! Beds! Now!’ For a moment he couldn’t get his body to work, then he was rushing towards the command capsule, sandals skidding as he ran.
‘Idris, what?’ They weren’t taking him seriously, because another impossible thing was happening and he couldn’t articulate it properly. Even as he hurtled headlong into the pilot’s station the proximity alarm went off and another ship was right there. No, the other ship. The Broken Harvest, with its hungry predator’s mind at the helm. The Ogdru had tracked them, tracked him. They’d followed his trail through unspace.
This time, wise to it, he could actually see them building the unspace net beneath real space, trying to box him in. He had no time.
‘Get to your beds!’ he hollered into the comms. ‘Whatever happens, get to your beds!’ And he had the engines charging up, killing every safety and failsafe there was, to plunge the Vulture into the abyss before the trap could close on them.
They fell away from the real, and he felt the Ogdru’s anger. No, not anger – it was enjoying this. The chase was something it lived for, buried deep in its species’ evolutionary history. One more reason never to meet an Ogdru. It would be after him as swiftly as the technology that encased it allowed. He imagined it straining at the leash that was the Harvest’s technical specs.
Somewhere, the Vulture God would be in chaos, every member of the crew alone and plunged into the nightmare of unspace. They’d be stumbling for their couches, feeling the yawning hunger of the place just beyond each wall, behind every door, at every shoulder. He hoped they’d just focus, get themselves bedded down and in suspension. As if they were children – and pulling the covers over their heads meant the monster couldn’t get them.
He had no covers. Whatever monster was out there could absolutely get him.
He had dropped into unspace with no course, but it wasn’t the first time. He found another deep void point and let the ship fall towards it through a series of incremental calculations. He was bargaining with the devil to take them from here to there, shortcutting twenty light years in a matter of minutes. The headache was back and his stomach was trying to return everything he’d eaten, with a side order of acid reflux, but he fought it down. Nothing I’ve not felt before.
But the Ogdru was breathing down his neck, if it even breathed. He could imagine the questing dart of its head as it sought his trail. In its mind it swam an endless ocean, navigating rip tides that translated into working the Broken Harvest’s gravitic drives. The complex maths that challenged Idris’s conscious mind was effortless instinct to this creature. He’d always thought he was at home in unspace, but he saw he was a clumsy intruder.
They roared out of unspace together, and Idris jumped immediately – borrowing energy from the interstice between real and real. Then the Vulture was falling away again, and again, and again . . . making a series of short jumps from space to space, zigzagging back and forth within the cube of a single light year. In, out, back, forth. Each transition frayed Idris’s nerves a little more. His hands were shaking at the controls. This wasn’t how you did space travel. This was how you drove yourself mad. There were now too many maps of the universe, real and unreal, overlaying one another inside his mind. He heard the Ogdru. In his head it was like angry whalesong, a deep, long cry dripping with murder. Idris slung them into real space again.
There was a planet there, a star, a whole system. He had a sight of pale ice, of blue about the equator, browns and greens. He caught a buzz of electromagnetism that could have been natural or artificial. He had no time to analyse it because he had to drop again, hands weaving a new course at random, far away across the galaxy from this unknown sun and its unknown world. Maybe he could find it again, maybe not.
They skidded into unspace once more, spiralling away like a bird with a clipped wing. He was losing track of how many jumps he’d made. He was . . .
Lost.
His mind went completely blank. He was lost. He didn’t know where he was. And he always knew where he was. That was the thing about unspace. It was connected to points in real space. That was the essence of it. That was what people used it for.