He was speaking to the Klimovs, but he suspected half the crew was listening to his exposition. The riggers had come aboard after they retracted the antennas and stowed the sails, and so long as the Sissie was orbiting the Power Room technicians had nothing to do but watch gauges which didn’t flicker more than an eyelash from a flat response.
“—the jungle is unbroken,” Daniel continued, sliding to another portion of the main image. “When we scan for magnetic anomalies, however, we get this.”
He cut in a cylindrical overlay which a ragged shadow spraying out to one long side where a crash had thrown debris. As with the optical image, the software had sharpened this considerably, though in a fashion that only an expert would recognize.
“Uncle Stacey—Commander Bergen, that is,” Daniel continued, “noted this wreckage in his log, but he didn’t bother to explore it. His orders were to chart a course through the cul-de-sac in which Morzanga lies, and from the anomaly’s dimensions he assumed that the ship had been a Commonwealth vessel. They’re known to trade in the region occasionally, and no doubt to raid as well.”
Daniel cleared his throat. “Now, the chances are that the wreck is a Commonwealth ship,” he said. “But it might just possibly be the yacht on which your John Tsetzes escaped. There’s no way to tell without examining it on the ground, but that should be easy enough to accomplish.”
“What do you mean by ‘cul-de-sac’?” Valentina asked. “Space is space, not so?”
From the first the Klimovna had been the one to take an interest in the working of the ship. Her husband was good enough company, but he spent his time either drinking alone or playing cards for rice grains with Hogg. To Daniel’s amazement, Hogg barely held his own. According to him, the Count’s real edge came from equipment that allowed him to deceive sharpers who cheated with electronic aids. By spoofing their hardware, Klimov’s natural skill allowed him to clean them out when they bet on what they thought was a sure thing.
“No, madam,” Daniel said. The miniature of the Klimovna’s face at the top of his display frowned at the formality, but her question had put him unconsciously into lecture mode. “If it were, we wouldn’t be able to travel between stars. Each bubble universe within the Matrix has different physical constants; the only universal constant is the pressure of Casimir radiation which we use to drive our vessel. By entering bubbles where time and space vary in known fashions, we’re able to adjust our position relative to objects in the sidereal universe when we return to it.”
“Yes, Dannie,” Valentina said with a hint of fraying patience. “But what has that to do with culs-de-sac or whatever? Does your Matrix have walls in it?”
A ghost image of Adele frowning flashed onto Daniel’s display. She didn’t speak, but her stern visage warned him to remember who he was speaking to. Not even his signals officer should’ve been able to crash the barriers onto the command console. In all likelihood, no other signals officer could have.
Daniel grinned, a conscious expression but an honest one as well. Imagine her warning him to show proper deference. And being right, of course, a fine example of “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Aloud Daniel continued, “There’s no brick wall, no, but there are locations in the sidereal universe where the energy levels of the interpenetrating bubbles are so high that the gradients would damage or destroy a ship which tried to enter them. This arm of the galaxy is such a location, a cul-de-sac.”
He grinned more broadly, glad as he always was to be able to brag about Uncle Stacey’s skill. “Now in fact Commander Bergen did find a way through the bottom of the sack, so to speak, but it was a wormhole that very few astrogators could conn even with the benefit of his logs. As a practical matter, traffic to Morzanga would have to come by way of Tegeli at the mouth of the sack. I doubt there’s more than a ship or two in a generation.”
“John Tsetzes was a space captain himself before he and his mercenaries hired themselves to our planet, then seized the government,” Count Klimov said. “A tyrant and a thief, but a great captain. Perhaps he found the passage out the other way before your Commander Bergen did, eh?”