Linesman by S. K. Dunstall Page B

noone really knew what lines seven and eight did. Maybe this was where they found out.
    No one knew where the lines had come from. They weren’t human, that was for sure. All anyone knew from the history tapes was that the derelict ship they had been found on had changed ownership at least three times before it had arrived at the scrap heap at Chamberley, where a trader named Havortian had used his last credits to purchase it to repair damage to his own ship caused by a collision with an asteroid.
    Havortian had a time-sensitive load and no money for real repairs, so instead of melting the ship down and using the metal to create a new outer hull for himself, he’d welded the newly purchased body onto his own cargo hold, made it airtight, and left to finish his job.
    The weld was cheap and poorly done. A third of the way into the trip, the Havortians started to leak air. There was nowhere close enough to land before their air ran out. They were going to die.
    According to legend, Havortian’s nine-year-old daughter—a strange, solitary creature by most accounts—was able to communicate with the lines. When they knew they were doomed, Gila Havortian went around the ship saying good-bye to everything. She said good-bye to the lines, too, then had to explain why. The lines had asked her why the ship didn’t just go through the void.
    The linesmen and scientists laughed at the legend, of course, and said it didn’t happen like that, but it was a nice story.
    Ean believed it. Gila Havortian would have been untrained. Maybe she “heard” the lines, too. Maybe she even sang to them. He could well believe they communicated back to her.
    Havortian became a rich man. His ship traveled the known sectors, taking days where other ships took years. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a good businessman. The massive Chamberley Co-Op—which was prepared to use semilawful means to get what it wanted—soon took over his ship. Chamberley Co-Op spent money and resources trying to reproduce line technology. They replicated the mighty Bose engine they found with the lines within ten years, but it was just an engine without lines to control it. It was also slow, traveling at 0.1c in normal space. By then there were faster sublight ships.
    That’s where it would have stayed if Gila Havortian hadn’t been obsessed with the lines. Only scientists were allowed near the lines, so she became a scientist. Only people who had been born on Chamberley were allowed to work at the Co-Op, so she faked birth records. She was known to have blackmailed at least three people who found out who she was, and it was rumored she had murdered another, but that was only rumor.
    Gila Havortian bribed or blackmailed her way to become head of the laboratory. When she was placed in charge, she sacked all the staff and brought in her own carefully chosen set of new people. Physicists, mathematicians, chemists, geneticists, and xenobiologists.
    She told them she wanted something replicated. She didn’t tell them what. She didn’t tell them how.
    While her scientists were working on the lines, Gila Havortian plotted the destruction of the Co-Op in revenge for what it had done to her father.
    She was fifty-nine years old when her lab worked out how to reproduce the lines. Havortian then set in place the destruction she’d planned and took herself, her scientists, and the lines and jumped to Redmond, where they set up the first line factory.
    It opened the way to the stars. Humans spread out across the galaxy in a massive population explosion that was still under way five hundred years later.
    In all that time, they had never met another intelligent species. Or a functioning alien ship. This ship was the first.
    â€œImagine a defense system like that,” Admiral Katida said. “Can you outrun it?”
    The captain seemed to be the technical expert. “Everyone has a jump ready. At one hundred kilometers, we have