Tuesday's Short - Lord of the Vortex

This week’s short story takes us from an Australian-set urban-fantasy tale of dinosaurs and discovery to the science-fiction tale of a starship's pilot and crew crashing into another dimension. Welcome to Lord of the Vortex, which remains one of my favourite tales from all the tales I've told. 
Vortex travel—you don’t ask, and I won’t screw up the explanation; closest thing I can get to it is that I pilot a transdimensional skipping stone through the edge of a vortex from one point in space to another, and it gets you where you want to be. Well, most of the time. Just not this time. This time, we’re crashing, and I don’t know where we are.Lord of the Vortex


The vortex spun out of control. We could feel the tethers slipping away. Hell, we could seethe tethers breaking free on the monitors—and there was sweet nothing we could do to stop it.

“But we’re not ready,” Sophie wailed. “We could end up anywhere!”
“Shut up, and hit the klaxon!” Rory shouted back.
Seconds later, the klaxon sounded, and people hurried for their pods. Those too far away to make their pods, or the emergency pods scattered around the ship, found somewhere to brace. I wasn’t even sure if the storm panels would slide into place in time, not sure how much of the hull would remain intact if they didn’t, tried to ignore the spiralling fear, and give us the smoothest ride in that I could.
“Pull out!” Rory screamed, and I didn’t bother to dignify that with a response. I didn’t even roll my eyes. The ship was going down the minute those tethers released, and a snowball in Hell had a better chance of surviving, than I did of stopping it. Best I could hope for was to stabilise the spin, and slow the forward momentum… and that was only if I could get the ship going forward. Couldn’t expect much more, when vortex travel got out of hand.
Vortex travel? You wanna ask me this, now? Fine, my hands move quicker if my brain doesn’t chip in, anyway—and it’ll help me keep my mind off the fact I’m crashing… for the first time ever.
Vortex travel was invented when we discovered we could tether a ship to a point in a space vortex and use the spin to generate enough energy to punch through the vortex to another fixed point. Of course, we have to do it just right, or we could punch into another dimension, instead of skimming across the surface and out the other ‘side’ to another point in our space. And by dimension, I’m not talking space, time and that stuff; I’m talking parallel universes. It makes for a shorter trip than taking the long way round.
How do we manage it? Well, that takes more math than I’ve ever had. Let’s just say there was this famous astrophysicist in the fifty-first century, who tried to prove that other dimensions in space travel could be used to save on travel time for colony ships, and let’s just say that he thought vortices in space could provide a door to other dimensions, and then let’s just say the crazy son succeeded beyond all expectations, and leave it at that.
Vortex travel works, the ship’s computer calculates the jump faster than the implant inside my head, and there hasn’t been a vortex travel incident in over fifty years. Looks like we’re about to be the first.
As to not being sucked in? Well, that was an impossibility, given the whole tether and dimensional shift set-up was designed to do exactly that—pull the ship through the vortex, using the momentum to slide it across the skin of the other dimension to reappear in our own dimension at another point. It was a bit like skipping a stone, or flying a skipping stone, or whatever. Heaven knows what was going to happen now the tethers had lost their grip early.
I pushed a connection between the computer in my head and the ship’s mainframe, told the ship to ride my synapses, and make what corrections it could. Light flared inside my skull, and I lost contact with the world around me. When I came round, again, we were somewhere else.
“What do you mean we slit the dimensional envelope?” I croaked, when the computer woke me up.
“You have an incoming message,” it said, and I opened my eyes, trying to focus on my computer terminal.
“Unidentified craft. You will relinquish your controls. Unidentified craft, you will relinquish your controls. Unidenti…”
“All right,” I managed, and my voice rasped like I’d been chewing on scrap metal. “Computer, grant access to outside control.”
The computer hesitated. I felt it going through its responses like an echo in my head, noted the angle the ship was coming in on, could feel my brain quivering on the edge of darkness, as I tried to regain control.
“Computer! The ship must survive.” I know; it’s not the standard phrasing, but, honestly, my brain was mush, and I couldn’t have found the right phrasing to save myself… which is essentially what I was trying to do.
“Computer!”
“Verified.”
At least one of us was sounding unruffled. I wanted to cuss the computer out, but knew it wouldn’t make an ounce of difference. Silicon and precious metal had yet to develop emotion, and the systems linked to vortex transportation weren’t allowed to be AIs.
Apparently the proximity to that amount of energy did terrible things to an AI, which led to terrible things being done to the people inside the ship the AI was piloting. I knew the instant control was transferred, because I’d been too addled to disconnect my mind from the control system. The incoming system did that for me, knocking me to one side with a brutal speed and efficiency I’d later come to appreciate, kind of.
Losing the connection to the ship meant I became aware of a whole lot of other stuff, like the fact every command post inside the control centre had activated the survival pods built into the seats. Mine enclosed me tight enough to immobilise, which is what it was designed to do. I read what state the ship was in from the instruments in front of me, and tried to control the panic—we were crashing, and we were crashing bad.
“You wanna live forever?” I whispered, echoing the voices of a thousand marine sergeants on my father’s side, horrified beyond belief when someone responded.
“No. Do you?”
It took me a minute to work out that the voice was coming through the comms unit, and not being dropped directly into my skull. That was a relief.
“Not really,” I said, thinking about it, “but a little bit longer would be nice.”
“Then the lady’s wish is my command.”
“Sure. I bet you say that to all the girls.” It was out before I could stop it, and I blushed red to the roots of my hair. Fortunately, there was no one there to see me.
My unknown contact laughed.
“Not all, and not usually to those I haven’t seen in the flesh, so to speak.”
I was still pondering that statement when he spoke again.
“Your ship. It’s not a build we recognise.”
“It’s one of the newer models.”
“Newer models of what?”
“Tether ships.”
“Tether ships?”
“Vortex transports.”
“Ah…”
There was a wealth of understanding in that single aspiration, and I suddenly felt afraid.
“Where are we?”
“What went wrong?”
“The tethers slipped, broke free early. Where…”
“Your ship’s computer was quite correct. You’ve split the dimensional membrane, fallen inside the vortex.”
The meaning hit me like a hand twisting in my gut.
“You’re saying we’ve fallen into another dimension,” I whispered.
I kicked against the sides of the pod, wanting to open it up, wanting to get out of it, and do something… wanting desperately to run away. My contact didn’t help.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Something in his voice.
“You mean it’s not?”
“Of course, not. It’s just unprecedented, is all.”
The ship shuddered.
“Oops.”
“What do you mean oops?” I asked, and then a second jolt ran through the ship, hard enough to shake the pod a second time.
“What do you mean oops?” I repeated, when only silence replied.
The silence remained, but I stopped worrying about it, when the comms went to static and then cut out completely. I stopped worrying, and moved into sheer mind-numbing terror, when the pod started to vibrate, and then to shake, and then went into a spinning freefall that only signified one thing—the ship had hit, and was breaking apart. I didn’t even want to think about the sort of tumbling that would result in emergency pods tearing free of titanium mounts. I didn’t want to think of what was happening to the other pods… or the people who’d only had time to brace. They were gonna be toast.
I felt the computer link snap inside my head, felt it like a plug being pulled, was hit by a data download seconds before.
“Hell’s bells!” I screamed, feeling the data fill the implant’s memory, and start to spill out into my head. I tried to direct it into the pod’s memory, knew it wouldn’t fit, and screamed again. It was the last sound I made for quite some time. I woke to a gentle, somewhat familiar, voice.
“Hey, you in there? Hellooo, pretty lady, are you there?”
Pretty lady? That voice was kinda familiar, although, this time I was hearing it inside my head, instead of through my ears. Something about that struck me as odd, not right, maybe even not good. I licked my lips… I tried to lick my lips, couldn’t find a tongue. No lips, either.
“Don’t try to speak, yet.” That voice was very distracting.
Why couldn’t I lick my lips?
“Do you remember the crash?”
I tried to nod, couldn’t feel my head. Panic unfurled in my chest.
“Easy, there. You’re going to be okay.” He was trying hard to reassure me, but I could see the deep pain in his eyes, the lines in his face.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, and then gasped; my voice was not my own.
He reached toward me, touched the panel above—above?—my face, tucked his head to his chest, drew a shaky breath. Another voice intruded, footsteps shook my insides.
“My lord?”
I watched as he turned his head, caught the movement, as he raised his hand and quickly wiped his eyes, then wiped more carefully before turning fully to face the newcomer. I could feel his footsteps, too.
“Davaral.” It was a name, an acknowledgement of the other’s presence.
“My lord…” The other man came into view, glanced across at me, looked more carefully at his lord.
“She’ll fly.”
Davaral glanced towards me, once again.
“Are you sure? You’ve told her already?”
Told her? I wondered what I needed to be told, assumed I was the only ‘her’ in the room.
His lordship shook his head.
“You haven’ttold her? Then how do you know she’ll cope, let alone fly?”
I decided I didn’t like him very much. I’d survived the crash; of course, I’d cope.
“I’ll fly,” I said, and again my voice sounded wrong.
Both men looked up, startled, glancing around them as though trying to work out where the voice was coming from. I continued.
“Get me to a ship, and I’ll fly.”
Davaral looked startled, then horrified.
“My lord, you haveto tell her.”
His lordship stared him down.
“She held a ship together through a botched vortex transit, held it mostly together through the crash. She’ll cope and she’ll fly.
There! That should tell him. But Davaral merely glared at both of us, and made a motion with his finger that was just short of an order telling his lordship to turn around, and talk to me. With a sigh, his lordship turned away from Davaral, and placed both hands on the surface either side of my head.
“Do you know where you are?” he asked.
“I… I’m in another dimension,” I said, and scrambled for a memory that was reluctant to surface. “I… we crashed.”
I glanced around, tried to turn my head. No head. I couldn’t feel my head. The panic spread into my stomach, and out along my limbs. I trembled, and the deck beneath their feet shuddered.
“You’ve hooked her in, already?” Davaral was afraid. He was whispering, as though that could stop me from hearing. I thought the sensors in the pod were very good, because he was standing five feet away.
Med pods usually don’t pick up that far; it’s supposed to ensure the patient doesn’t overhear anything about their condition, before the medics break it to them. Odd how much was similar in this dimension.
“She thinks she’s in a med-pod, by all the stars! My lord, you have to tell her!”
I searched for the pod’s controls, found something that reminded me of sight, hooked in. When I saw the outside of the ship, I swallowed—I tried to swallow, couldn’t find my throat. I wanted to reach up and try to open the pod from the inside, couldn’t find my hands. I couldn’t feel my arms, my legs.
I tried for another connection, saw the entry bay, the cargo bay, the captain’s cabin, one of the crew cabins—well, that made me pause. I wondered if Davaral and his lordship knew those two had already come aboard. I looked again, knew I was blushing, but could not feel any heat across my skin. I returned to the console, and looked up at the man who’d woken me.
“My lord?”
He had been looking at Davaral. Now, he turned to me. I kept going, ignoring the weird echoes in my voice.
“I was in a crash. What is wrong with me?”
I saw his throat work as he swallowed, saw the way his hand moved as he opened his mouth to say something, and then thought better of it. When he did speak, I knew he was lying.
“There’s nothing wrong with you…”
“Yeah, there is. I can’t feel my head, my hands, my legs, my arms. I can’t lick my lips, or feel my throat. And I can see…” I remembered the scene in the crew cabin, diverted myself from reality. “Did you know you had two crewmen aboard, already? That they’re, they’re cavorting in the third cabin aft?”
“Dvorash and Samil,” Davaral said, like it wasn’t a surprise.
I remembered something of the breathless whispers that passed between the two, inadvertently tapped into the audio circuit in the cabin and channelled it through—and just as hastily switch it off. Davaral snorted, and turned away, but I was starting to get the hang of this visual thing, and I went to another cam, just in time to see him trying to contain his laughter, just in time to see the laughter die, and sudden pain appear in his eyes.
“Tell her,” he said, his voice harsh with emotion.
“Tell me what?” I asked. “That you’ve patched me into the ship’s sensors by mistake?”
I stopped as I realised something else.
“Which ship is this anyway? I thought we were crashing into a planet.”
This time, his lordship spoke, before I could say anything else.
“You were. You did. You did crash into a planet. I tried to bring you in gentle, but I didn’t know the ship, couldn’t stop the spin. You broke apart.”
“The computer downloaded into my skull,” I said, remembering. “I tried to push it into the pod, but there was no room.”
I stopped, exploring my memory, and I found the old ship, neatly filed and stored. I found new files as well. Some were labelled as memories, and some were instruction manuals. There were circuit maps, and I could identify the visual and audio wiring in the ship. I also found the security protocols, as well as how much fuel was in my tanks, the balance of the on-board life-support systems and the manual advising what it should be. These all seemed to be hardwired into my head.
His lordship was speaking again.
“I know. We salvaged as much of the data as we could, and…”
“You downloaded my head into a ship!” I said, and heard startled shouts from inside and out, found out which circuits to cut so I wasn’t broadcasting quite so broadly, and whispered, “Why?”
Again, I watched the emotion play across his face, saw him swallow down what could only be regret.
“Because we couldn’t save your body,” he managed, and the ragged sob lurching out of his throat caught us all by surprise.
Davaral was by his side in an instant, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, hugging him close, and glaring at me like it was my fault. It wasn’t his glare that silenced me, though; it was the new and sudden knowledge that I was a spaceship, that my body was dead, while I, somehow, lived on. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to cry, then wondered if I could. Along the way, I discovered I could make the sound.
There was something to be said for the speed of thought and computer processing. I shut the audio down and let myself weep in private, all the while watching his lordship get himself under control. When he shrugged Davaral away, I was waiting.
“We did all we could,” he said.
If I’d had a face, I’d have been glaring at him—and it would have been a better glare than the one Davaral gave me. I channelled what I was feeling into my voice, instead, not entirely surprised when the speakers gave me exactly the tone I wanted.
“But I’m still dead.”
“Your body is dead, but your mind…” He sighed. “We managed to save that. And your personality, too, I see.”
He had no right to sound that relieved.
“I’m going to need time to process this,” I said, and shut down.
I guess I was better integrated than I thought, because I woke up not wanting to scream. Somewhere in my little computer close out, I’d latched onto the idea that I could still fly—that, actually, I could fly better now, because it really was what I was built for. There were even star charts in the files—a whole two dimensions worth—but that wasn’t the first question I asked when I surfaced.
“How many survived?”
They were still on the quarter deck, the control centre, whatever, and both looked very relieved to hear me.
“You’re back!” his lordship said.
“Good! Now opened the thrice-damned door!” Davaral snarled.
I couldn’t help it; I giggled. That only seemed to worsen Davaral’s mood, but this time the glare was reserved for his lordship.
“I’ll go check on Dvorash and Samil,” he said. “You set her straight.”
Yeah, like that was going to happen. I ran through pre-flight like a pro. Looked like my physical transition wasn’t the only thing that had been assimilated. Davaral stopped mid-way across the control centre.
“Don’t you dare!” he muttered, and then turned to his lordship. “You tell her she can’t.”
Now, his lordship started to smile, his mood reflecting the sudden elation I was feeling.
“Well, youwanted her to fly,” he said.
“Yes, but not now. Please tell her to cool her jets.”
I cooled them, before his lordship could ask.
It wasn’t hard. I had questions, things I wanted to know.
“Survivors?”
Turned out I really didn’t want to know. From the control centre, I wasn’t the only one to ended up as a ship, but I was one of the ones who made it through the transition quickly and completely.
We lost Jedda; she’d had children, couldn’t get her head around never being able to hold them again. They’d had to wipe the mainframe to stop her detonating the ship and the rest of us with her. None of the full-bodied survivors had been able to talk her down. Not even her littlest wrapping her arms around the console and telling her how much she was loved had been enough to bring her back.
“I’m sorry,” his lordship said, and the tears on his face matched the ones running through my circuits.
Of the remaining starship transformations, we could still lose a half dozen.
“Not everyone can take the shift,” his lordship explained. “It’s partly because they were adults, partly because they’re human, partly because they haven’t had the conditioning, but mostly because it’s too big a shift. It’s the same in this dimension. We usually don’t try this on anyone not conditioned to it… but…”
“But?” I pushed.
“But we felt we had to try something. Your crash was the biggest we’d seen…”
“And you felt responsible,” I finished. “Why?”
“Because he was stupid enough to interfere with the pilot when she was trying to stabilise her craft,” Davaral’s voice broke in; the man had obviously returned from seeing to Samil and Dvorash. “Not that it would have made a single jot of difference. You were going in, and that was that.”
“And I hadn’t a hope in Hades of stabilising the ship,” I added, when his lordship looked about to argue. “I couldn’t even stop the spin. I thought you had.”
“Almost,” his lordship acknowledged, “but then you lost an engine, and a stabiliser, and the ship you were in was never designed to fly in atmosphere, was it?”
“No,” I said. “Tell me about the survivors.”
So, they did. We’d lost everyone outside a pod, but those in the main pods had pulled through. The command deck had been a write-off, but I would be flying in a squadron with many of them. Only the captain was walking out of this one on two legs.
“We need to take you back,” his lordship said.
“Through the vortex?” I asked. “Is that possible?”
He just gave me a look, and I realised I already knew the answer. Of course it was possible. Humanity had been trespassing for over six hundred and fifty-nine years.
“We didn’t know how to approach you,” his lordship said. “Technically, you were just sliding across our borders.”
Davaral gave another derogatory snort.
“They were violating our territory every time they tethered, let alone when they passed through the outer rim.”
“But it wasthe outer rim,” his lordship said. “We’ve negotiated passage through that before.”
Davaral turned to me.
“Truth was, the politiciansdidn’t want to let you humans know we existed without having a bit of leverage to ensure peaceful negotiations.”
I thought on the crash, on the way these beings had saved everyone they could.
“Well, they have that, now,” I said, and then another thought crossed my mind.
“What of your survivors? Was anyone hurt when we came down?” The thought was painful, but it had to be faced.
“It was one of the reasons I failed to stop the spin,” his lordship replied. “I had to get you over land that wasn’t populated.”
“You should have put them into the sea,” Davaral muttered, and his lordship gave him a look that told me just how old that argument was.
“So we killed no-one?” I asked, and his lordship shook his head.
“No, I spared you that, at least. and, yes, Davaral,” he snapped, turning his head to the older man, “I know it was another bargaining chip I lost, but it was worth every life I saved.”
The older man met his gaze and nodded. I caught the faintest flicker of a smile, and then Davaral spoke.
“Good, then. I’ll remind you that you said that next time you start moaning about how many human lives you didn’t save. I’m sure yourpeople appreciate the difference.”
His lordship hung his head, drawing a breath, as if about to renew an old argument, but Davaral wasn’t finished.
“And I should not have to remind you that, as a lord, you do not have the luxury of putting anything over your people’s safety. It is the law of the vortex, and you are tied to it.”
His lordship let his breath out in a sigh, and leant on the console, as though wearied beyond all patience. When he replied, exhaustion had threaded itself into his voice.
“I know, Davaral. I know.”
Seeing he had the advantage, Davaral didn’t hold back. He turned to me.
“Lady Ship,” he said. “My lordship must rest, if he is to carry the negotiations to your people—and you have charts to become familiar with.”
It was as close to an order as he’d yet given me, and the first time he’d addressed me directly. I dimmed the lights briefly to acknowledge him, and he closed the gap between himself and his lordship.
“Come, my lord. You need to sleep. She will make the shift, and, yes,” he added, shooting me a sly glance as he guided his lordship from the control centre, “I believe she willfly.”
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Lord of the Vortex is available as a stand-alone short story at the following links: books2read.com/u/m2Xrv7.
You can also find Kristine Kathryn Rusch's latest free short story over on her blog: kriswrites.com. Why don't you go and check it out?