The Charitable View reported that the Sleeper Service was still proceeding as could be expected.
The situation, it appeared, was in hand.
The Yawning Angel reviewed its own actions so far, and found them exemplary. This was all very vexing, but it was responding well, playing it by the book where possible and extemporising sensibly but with all due urgency where it had to. Good, good. It could well come out of this shining.
Three hours, twenty-six minutes and seventeen seconds after setting off, the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service reached its nominal Terminal Acceleration Point. This was where it ought to stop gaining speed, plump for one of the two hyperspatial volumes and just cruise along at a nice steady velocity.
It didn’t. Instead it accelerated harder; that .54 figure zoomed quickly to .72, the Plate class’s normal design maximum.
The Charitable View communicated this turn of events back to the Yawning Angel, which went into shock for about a millisecond.
It rechecked all its in-system ships, drones, sensors and external reports. There was no sign that the Sleeper Service had dumped its extra mass anywhere within range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors.
Yet it was behaving as though it had. Where had it done it? Could it have secretly built longer-range Displacers? (No; half its mass would have been required to construct a Displacer capable of dumping so much volume beyond the range of the Yawning Angel’s sensors, and that included all the extra mass it had taken on board over the years in the form of the extraneous environments in the first place… though – now that it was thinking in such outrageous terms – there was another, associated possibility that just might… but no; that couldn’t be. There had been no intelligence, no hint… no, it didn’t even want to think about that…)
The Yawning Angel rescheduled everything it had already arranged in a flurry of re-drafted apologies, pleas for understanding and truncated journeys. It halved the departure warning time it had given. Thirty-three minutes to departure, now. The situation, it tried to explain to everybody, was becoming more urgent.
The Sleeper Service’s acceleration figures remained steady at their design maxima for another twenty minutes, though the Charitable View – keeping a careful watch on every aspect of the GSV’s performance from its station a few real-space light days behind – reported some odd events at the junctions of the Sleeper Service’s traction fields with the energy grid.
By now the Yawning Angel was existing in a state of quiveringly ghastly tension; it was thinking at maximum capacity, worrying at full speed, suddenly and appallingly aware how long things took to happen; a human in the same state would have been clutching a churning stomach, tearing their hair out and gibbering incoherently.
Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Ships, even ships; they were restricted to speeds below the speed of sound in the bubble of air around the ship and the docks it was joined to. It reviewed how practicable it would be to just let the air go and move everything in vacuum. It made sense. Thankfully, it had already shifted all vulnerable pleasure craft out of the way and sealed and secured its unconnected hull apertures. It told the Hub what it was doing; the Hub objected because it was losing some of its air. The GSV dumped the air anyway. Everything started moving a little faster. The Hub screamed in protest but it ignored it.
Calm; calm; it had to remain calm. Stay focused, keep the most important objectives in mind.
A wave of what would have been nausea in a human swept through the Yawning Angel’s Mind as a signal came in from the Charitable View. Now what?
Whatever it might have feared, this was worse.
The Sleeper Service’s acceleration factor had started to increase. Almost at the same time, it had exceeded its normal maximum sustainable velocity.
Fascinated, appalled, terrified, the Yawning Angel listened to a running commentary on the other GSV’s progress from its increasingly distant child, even as it started the sequence of actions and commands that would lead to its own near-instant departure. Twelve minutes early, but that couldn’t be helped, and if people were pissed off, too bad.
Still increasing. Time to go. Disconnect. There.
The Charitable View signalled that the Sleeper Service’s outermost field extent had shrunk to within a kilometre of naked-hull minima.
The Yawning Angel dropped away from the orbital, twisting and aiming and punching away into hyperspace only a few kilometres away from the world’s undersurface, ignoring incandescent howls of protest from the Hub over such impolite and feasibly dangerous behaviour and the astonished – but slow, so slow – yelps from people who an instant earlier had been walking down a transit corridor towards a welcoming foyer in the GSV and now found themselves bumping into emergency seal-fields and staring at nothing but blackness and stars.
The superlifter’s continuous report went on: the Sleeper Service’s acceleration kept on increasing slowly but steadily, then it paused, dropping to zero; the craft’s velocity remained constant. Could that be it? It was still catchable. Panic over?
Then the fleeing ship’s velocity increased again; as did its rate of acceleration. Impossible!
The horrific thought which had briefly crossed the Yawning Angel’s mind moments earlier settled down to stay with all the gruesome deliberation of a self-invited house guest.
It did the arithmetic.
Take a Plate class GSV’s locomotive power output per cubic kilometre of engine. Add on sixteen cubic klicks of extra drive at that push-per-cube value… make that thirty-two at a time… and it matched the step in the Sleeper Service’s acceleration it had just witnessed. General bays. Great grief, it had filled its General bays with engine.
The Charitable View reported another smooth increase in the Sleeper Service’s rate of progress leading to another step, another pause. It was increasing its own acceleration to match.
The Yawning Angel sped after the two of them, already fearing the worst. Do the sums, do the sums. The Sleeper Service had filled at least four of its General bays with extra engine, bringing-them on line two at a time, balancing the additional impetus…
Another increase.
Six. Probably all eight, then. What about the engineering space behind? Had that gone too?
Sums, sums. How much mass had there been aboard the damn thing? Water; gas-giant atmosphere, highly pressurised. About four thousand cubic kilometres of water alone; four gigatonnes. Compress it, alter it, transmute it, convert it into the ultra dense exotic materials that comprised an engine capable of reaching out and down to the energy grid that underlay the universe and pushing against it… ample, ample, more than enough. It would take months, even years to build that sort of extra engine capacity… or only days, if you’d spent, say, the last few decades preparing the ground.
Dear holy shit, if it was all engine even the superlifter wouldn’t be able to keep up with it. The average Plate class could sustain about one hundred and four kilolights more or less indefinitely; a good Range class, which was what the Yawning Angel had always been proud to count itself as, could easily beat that by forty kilolights. A Cliff class superlifter was ninety per cent engine; faster even than a Rapid Offensive Unit in short bursts. The Charitable View could hit two-twenty-one flat out, but that was only supposed to be for an hour or two at a time; that was chase speed, catch-up speed, not something it could maintain for long.
The figure the Yawning Angel was looking at was the thick end of two-thirty-three, if the Sleeper Service’s engineering space had been packed with engine too.
The Charitable View’s tone had already turned from one of amusement to amazement, then bewilderment. Now it was plain peevish. The Sleeper Service was topping the two-fifteen mark and showing no signs of slowing down. The superlifter would have to break away within minutes if it didn’t top-out soon. It asked for instructions.
The Yawning Angel, still accelerating for all its worth, determined to track and follow for as long as it could or until it was asked to give up the chase, told its offspring craft not to exceed its design parameters, not to risk damage.
The Sleeper Service went on accelerating. The superlifter Charitable View gave up the chase at two-twenty. It settled back to a less frenetic two hundred, dropping back all the time; even so it was still not a speed it could maintain for more than a few hours.
The Yawning Angel topped out at one forty-six.
The Sleeper Service finally hit cruise at around two-thirty-three and a half, disappearing ahead into the depths of galactic space. The superlifter reported this but sounded like it couldn’t believe it.