Rockets and Ray Guns - An Anthology of Sci-fi short stories

Part 3

Remembering how the transition had knocked him out last time, Blaine hurriedly took a chair as soon as Thaddeus left. Just in time: as he settled, a klaxon sounded.

"All hands, prepare for a dark gateway transition!" The captain ordered over the intercom. "Threshold in five, four, three, two, one, ... contact!"

The ship shuddered as it touched the fluidic substance within the gateway's vast maw. Then the conversion began.

It appeared on the observation deck as a surge of shimmering energy that washed over every surface almost faster than Blaine could follow. Then, as he watched with astonished eyes, anything that sparkled with the surge's residual energy, including himself, began to dissolve into glowing mist.

"Wait!" Blaine cried, suddenly alarmed. This dissolving thing wasn't how it went the first time!

"I'm not ready-" he began. Then everything was gone in a wash of ebony.

When his senses cleared, Blaine found his awareness again floating in the space between the stars, their quiet songs once more touching his mind. This time, however, they also spoke words.

At first he couldn't understand the reedy whispers, the words belonging to a language he was unfamiliar with. But, as he focused on them, they gradually became English.

- Poor little thing, - one whisper said. - So lost and alone. -

- Why do you not burn, little star? - another whisper asked. - Why so cold and dark? -

- Cold and dark, but brave to travel the void without a guide, - a third voice said.

Head swimming, Blaine tried to wrap his mind around the fact that he was listening to the stars talking. And not just talking; they were addressing him!

The question came before he could stop it.

- How are you talking? - he blurted into that place his mind had gone.

- Ah, the dark little star sings! - one of the voices declared with delight.

- We talk because we have voices,- another stated as if it were the most obvious thing.

- But why do you talk to me? - Blaine pressed.

- We talk to you, little star, because you can listen, - the first voice replied, again as if it were obvious.

- But I'm nobody, a nothing. I'm just a synthetic, ... - Blaine began to protest. Only to be inundated by yet another spiral of color and motion.

Before his senses were overwhelmed on his way back to integration, Blaine heard the voices speaking once more.

- You are the furthest thing from nothing, little star, - the one voice said.

- You are a starsinger, - another declared.

As those words echoed through his psyche, Blaine could see for the briefest of moments, graceful shapes push themselves free of the multicolored maelstrom that was washing over his senses, glowing with ruddy light. Then it was all gone and he was back on the deck, groaning.

"Transition complete," the captain's voice said over the intercom. "Medical personnel, begin a ship-wide sweep for crew members that sustained trauma during the transition. Science crew, to your duty stations."

Flopping over onto his back, Blaine stared the observation deck's ceiling for a long moment, trying to will strength back into his body even as the chaos in his mind continued to rage.

The voices had called him a starsinger. If those voices weren't some artifact of the transition process, or part of his imagination, the term could be something significant. But what did it mean?

Then he was scrambling to find something to hold on to as the Summer Twilight banked hard to the left. Grabbing a bolted down chair by the leg, he looked out the window in time to see the stars get blocked out by a dark dust cloud.

The captain must've left her intercom button down because Blaine could hear anxious talking over it as the ship continued to randomly twist back and forth.

", ... some sort of large body, just beyond this cloud," one was saying. "It must be in play with a second body, like a moon. I'm picking up all sorts of gravitational eddying out there."

"Drop a beacon to mark the gate's location," the captain ordered. "I don't want to lose it in this cloud. Engineering! Where the hell are my main sublights? We're getting pulled all over the place by these eddies!"

"Working on it, captain," a much fainter voice reported. "Five minutes max before they're back online."

"Damn it," she hissed. "Nav, you got that bearing yet?"

"No, ma'am," came the reply. "None of these stars are in our database. We are way off the beaten track out here."

"Then getting that gate turned back on is our only way home," she declared. "What? Don't tell me I forgot to, ...?"

Then the intercom went dead, leaving Blaine staring out the window as his mind churned with what he had overheard.