by Bob Mauldin
The tension heightened as nothing further happened for several minutes. The young lieutenant returned with an armful of clothes and said, “I hope this will do, Doctor. You said warm, and this is what I could find.”
Simon’s thank you was aborted when a sound like hydraulic brakes bleeding down sounded in the room, accompanied by a three-tone descending chime. Immediately following the third repetition of the chime, the transparent cover slid back into the wall as if it had never been, the endcap dropping down into a recess at the end of the table. The four people in the room watched, fascinated, as Kitty took an extra-large breath, opened her eyes, and stared blankly at the ceiling for several seconds as if getting a feeling for her surroundings. Comprehension dawned on her face, and before anyone could speak, she asked no one in particular, “Why am I still alive? I don’t want to be alive. I don’t have any reason to even be alive with Simon dead.”
Simon moved to her side and said, “Kittyn, I’m not dead.” Reaching out, he slowly pulled her hands from her face and said, “Honey, look at me. I’m alive, and so are you. Come on. Let’s go to our quarters. I’ll explain how I made it, and we’ll try to figure out how you did it. Truth is, dear, we should both be dead, but we’re not.”
Eyes squeezed tightly shut, Kitty refused to look in the direction of the familiar voice. “Look at me, darling. I’m alive,” Simon reiterated. “Come on, let’s get some clothes on you. People are gonna talk enough as it is.” He pulled on her arms until she came to a sitting position, bits of sparkling goo dripping from her arms and hair, which was now no longer a golden blonde but rather the purest white. Simon’s eyes wandered lower and noticed that the same condition applied there as well.
He looked back up in time to get slapped in the face. “How could you do that to me, you bastard!” In the next breath, his wife, miraculously delivered to him whole and apparently healthy, went on long enough to become embarrassing to the viewers.
Stafa said, “Uh, folks, I’ve got a ship to run. Welcome back, Captain Kitty. We all missed you. I’ll stop by to see you as soon as you’re up to having visitors. Lieutenant, it looks like we won’t be needing an officer on duty here anymore. Let’s move.” Junior officer in tow, Captain Morgan left the sick bay, already planning the calls he needed to make.
The Hawkes spent the next two days alone in their quarters, having meals sent in. “That’s one of the prerogatives of rank, my dear,” Simon told Kitty, enduring constant interruptions by the doctor and fending off calls from friends and well-wishers.
“When we’re ready, we’ll come out. Until then, thanks for your thoughts, one and all,” Simon said in a curt but heartfelt message to everyone who tried to get past the security team detailed to prevent just such occurrences.
Kitty sat on the edge of the bed, an apple in her hand a pensive look on her face.
“What’s up, love?” Simon asked. He hadn’t let her out of his sight except for bare necessities for the entire two days, and overall, he was happy with her recovery, but there was something troubling her. Sooner or later, it was going to have to come out, but he wasn’t sure he was the one to deal with whatever it was.
“Simon, if I tell you, you’re going to think I’m nuts, and then it’ll be a different kind of doctor. I don’t think I could endure that,” Kitty said mournfully. “I know we’ve never kept anything from each other, but this is so... weird.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “I’m not sure I believe it myself except for this,” she said, twitching her hand through the snow-white hair falling past the small of her back.
“Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it, hon,” Simon said, sitting down beside her. “Look at what we’ve managed to survive already. Both of us have been all but dead, and here we sit.”
“Yeah, but this...” Kitty looked at her husband sitting beside her and felt the confusion and frustration welling up in him. “Look, if I tell you, you’ve got to promise me that it goes no further than the two of us for now.” When she saw the expression his face, she slapped his thigh. “I’m serious, Simon! No telling anybody! Not Gayle, not the doctor, nobody! Promise me.”
“Okay,” he agreed finally. “Nobody. I promise.”
“On our wedding vows, Simon, you promise, or I won’t say another word about it,” Kitty warned.
“On our vows? Are you serious?” At her look, he said, “All right, on our vows. Now what is it?”
“When the ship took over for the doctor, it thought I was going to die. And I would have, I’m sure, without more attention than he could give. The computer, or whatever, didn’t know that he planned to send me downside for more treatment, so it sorta took charge. It’s something in its primary orders, I think. Anyway, it raided Earth’s database for information on the human body and started repairs. As we know, the Builders are way ahead of us in that department. It programmed itself to do what was necessary to fix my injuries, mostly regeneration of things and slow growth of broken bones and things.”
“How do you know all this?” Simon asked. “I’m not doubting you, but it seems kind of fantastic, you must admit.”
“No more fantastic than the reality of this damned ship!” Kitty retorted. “Just listen. I don’t know how I know, I just do. But that’s not all. It’s enough, but not all.” Her voice died and she looked at her lap long enough to start Simon worrying again, but before he could speak, Kitty went on. “I think the computer put the information in my mind somehow. And there’s more. One more thing, and this is the part you better not tell. Not for a while, Simon. It has to be a secret. The computer re-sequenced my DNA. It looked at it, decided that some things needed to be ‘fixed,’ and went ahead and did it. We knew the Builders could clone things, but we didn’t take it any further than that. They can actually affect some things on a molecular level. And this is just the byproduct of the computer ‘fixing’ me,” she said, waving a handful of hair in Simon’s face.
A chill ran down Simon’s spine. “What else did it fix?”
“Apparently the computer decided that getting old isn’t normal, so it increased my lifespan by doing something to my DNA that prohibits aging. It can’t stop the process, but it can certainly slow it down drastically.”
“The computer told you all this while you were... being repaired?” Simon asked carefully.
“It didn’t tell me so much as put the information there, Simon. It’s not like we talked or anything. I had a lot of weird dreams, and most of ‘em I can’t remember, but this is no dream.”
“Okay, so how long will you live?”
“I’m not exactly certain, but something around three times the usual for humans. Like about three hundred years.”
Lucy shut off her comm unit and laid it on her desk with a feeling of wonderment. Her flight back to New Mexico had gone as well as the trip out, and she was still shaking her head every time she thought about it.
It seemed as if the fates had conspired to give her only one day of relief at a time. Shortly after walking into her office, Communications sent word that Dan Baylor had commandeered the McCaffrey to come to Earth.
Lucy met him at the landing field when his shuttle touched down. “We were just finishing up the torpedo upgrades when the news came in,” he said as her skimmer carried them back to headquarters. He looked around at the ex-military base as Lucy followed the roads back to the parking area. “I sure didn’t expect to see a sight like this again,” he said, “at least not as a ‘ranking officer.’ It’s almost spooky.”
The two officers stepped over the low sides of the grounded skimmer and walked into the main building. Four secretaries were seated around the large outer room, each one handling the next-to-last daily interview for recruit hopefuls, so their trip across the foyer and through the door marked “Communications, Authorized Personnel Only,” went almost completely unnoticed.
“I wasn’t about to trust this to the comm system since we don’t know anything about what these... invaders have in the way of communi
cations systems of their own or whether or not they can decipher our language.”
She opened the packet he laid down on her desk and started to read. A chill started at the base of her skull and traveled down her spine. There’d been an incursion into human space that was apparently still going on. The kicker was the percentages the computer assigned to the probability that it was the same type of ship that had attacked Orion, not to mention the possibility that it was the same ship!
“Communications, this is Captain Grimes,” she said into her comm. “Raise the Heinlein, the Niven, and the Clarke. I want to know exactly where each one is at this moment. Mark it ‘urgent, top priority,’ and get back to me as each ship reports in.” She stood up and walked to the door. “Let’s get to the chart room. I want to get these coordinates into the computer and see what we can do to isolate this fucker.” The two officers walked across the outer office, and just before leaving the room, Lucy turned to Diana. “Bad news—we’ve got company in-system, probably the same bunch that jumped us before. Captain Baylor and I are going to the chart room to see what we can do about it. Route all calls there as they come in, will you? And get word out to the Galileo and all bases to go on full alert. I don’t want a repeat of Orion.”
As Lucy started out, Diana asked, “Could you do with a bit of good news, Lucy? I really think this would be a good time to hear it.”
Hand on the doorknob, Lucy said, “Give. And I sure hope it’s something that can help us right now.”
“Well, I don’t see it being a help in this particular case, but word just came in from Captain Morgan on the Galileo that Kitty is awake and apparently sane and healthy. She slapped the shit out of Simon for ‘dying,’ then hugged him. The two are recuperating in their quarters.”
Stunned by the revelation, Lucy could only stand there holding the knob until she felt the world start to spin again. Dan Baylor’s hand on her elbow brought her back to herself and the situation at hand. Kitty, awake! After ten months! Lucy felt a weight lift from her shoulders that she hadn’t known was there until it disappeared. She hadn’t even thought of her friend in over a week, and her relief at the news was immense. Still, the state of affairs as they stood pushed that relief to the side.
“Send word to Simon and Kitty telling them how happy we are that she’s back and that I’ll get in touch personally as soon as this mess is straightened out.”
The chart room was just down the hall from Lucy’s office and, in fact, had no real paper charts in it at all. The computer—a duplicate of the one aboard the Galileo, the bases, ships, and the other two embassies—projected a three-dimensional hologram of space surrounding Earth’s sun. As data was added, the “picture” grew in complexity and could be rotated in any axis, or one could walk around or even through the display and view it from another angle entirely. Dan Baylor walked over to the controls and, with several stops to consult his hard copy, began inputting data.
“Right now,” he said as he gave the keyboard a final tap, “I’ve got the last reported positions of all three ships not in orbit and their courses plotted in green. The bogey is shown in a solid red line before he cut his drives and went dark, and the red dotted line is the projected course if it doesn’t change. It will pass by Libra and come within a few million miles of Earth on its way back out of the solar system. Judging by its signature, we feel it’s not capable of interstellar travel because of its size. We could very well be wrong, of course, but we can only go on what we know of our own ships and technology. This is all just best guess.”
Lucy studied the holodisplay. “You said you’d just finished upgrading the McCaffrey. How about the other three?”
“The Niven needs her upgrades, but she’s carrying a full complement of the high-yield antimatter torpedoes. If we can box the bogey in, the three of them should be able to handle the problem easily. Of course, we don’t know what other weapons they could have, so we might get our butts kicked. But three against one?” Captain Baylor shrugged. “This reminds me of street fighting when I was a kid. You never knew what the other guy had until you started fighting. Did he know karate? Was he packing? You just toughed it out until the answers came in. Sometimes you won; sometimes you didn’t.”
“That makes the odds fifty-fifty, and I don’t like ‘em at all.”
Dan sat at the computer desk, slowly rotating the display. “Well, it may not be as bad as all that,” he said. “Remember, this is all hypothesis, but we think that these guys,” he said, waving at the glowing display, “are the enemies of the Builders. If that’s true, they probably think we’re allied with them since we’re using their technology. They will probably think we have the same type of weapons and tactics used by the Builders and will react accordingly. And even though the weapons types are the same, we’ve done some major upgrading, as you know. Ships have shields unknown to the Builders, lasers are much stronger, and our torps are the real kicker. We’ve made ‘em smaller so we can carry more, and they have antimatter warheads. The Builders didn’t have that capability built into theirs. Also, we’ve tapped the antimatter engines to increase propulsion. Our torps can accelerate to almost light speed in a fraction of the time that the old-style torpedoes could get up to half of that. Oh, and here’s another item for the ‘new weapons’ department. R&D says that our capture fields can be focused a lot tighter than we’ve been able to get them down to before now. It’s thanks in part to our use of miniaturization.”
Lucy looked away from the display slowly rotating in midair. “That means what to us, Dan?”
“Tractor beams! One of our ships can lock onto something smaller than itself and pull it into range. Then, its lasers can cut it to ribbons. Or lock on and hit the brakes, so to speak, keeping it from jumping out of our territory until we’re ready to let it go, if ever. And the other side of the coin is that reversing the polarity of the fields will create a ‘pressor’ beam. Using both at once will be like taking a wet dishrag and wringing the water out of it. Messy but effective when it comes to combat. The drawback to that one is that it brings you into range of whatever the enemy has to deliver to you. Calculated risks, I grant you, but that’s what we’ve been taking for the last four years now. You know, it was my intention to quit after we got Orion up and running, but I just couldn’t resist the challenges. I don’t see how any engineer could. Anyway, that’s the situation as it stands now. The bogey should be crossing the orbit of Saturn soon, so if all goes well, and it seldom does, it should continue to follow an unpowered trajectory at the same speed it was traveling when it went dark. Then, in two days, it should be about here,” he said, indicating a position about two million miles short of Libra.
“Awful close to the base,” Lucy noted, “but to me it looks like the best place to intercept. Plus, Libra has several dozen Mambas stockpiled, doesn’t it? And I’ll just bet there are enough qualified pilots to put them in space at the same time, right?”
“You read my mind,” Dan said with a small salute and a large grin. “I don’t know if these alien bastards have an alien equivalent, but they’re about to stir up a hornet’s nest.”
Signals flashed back and forth between Earth and the Alliance fleet, detailing all the information Captain Baylor had brought. Ships began shifting positions to intercept a vessel that was running silent, which meant that all scans were on full, giving away the fact that Alliance forces knew about the intruder.
The McCaffrey sat in stationary orbit above Zurich while Marsha Kane paced her command deck in frustrated circles. “Another ship would increase our chances of catching the son of a bitch, Lucy,” she insisted when she finally got Lucy to answer her calls. “Plus, we’ve already got combat experience. You should maximize your resources.”
“As Captain Baylor pointed out to me, Marsha, everything we do here comes under the heading of calculated risks. I want a ship in orbit in the event that there’s something out there we haven’t detected yet. I can’t let Earth go without any defenses at all. Ju
st call it the luck of the draw that you’re here and the action is out there. Besides, two of the three others were involved with the action in the belt in one way or another. And we’ve got all those Mambas at Libra for backup. Our visitor won’t get far with his scheme or his data. It’s what comes later that worries me. Will we be left alone? Or is whoever sent this expedition using it to judge our strengths and responses? I know it’s hard, Marsha, but you’ve got to sit this one out. Keep your sensors on full though. I’m putting you in charge of the defense of the entire inner system.”
With that sobering thought in mind, the two women chatted about goings-on in the fleet and especially about Kitty’s recovery. “Did you hear that whatever happened to her caused her hair to turn white?” Marsha asked. “God, but that is going to take some getting used to.”
“True,” Lucy responded. “Word has it that whatever the process is that she went through, it not only regenerated tissues in a manner we have no way of reproducing on Earth, but it seems to have reversed her aging process somewhat. Simon swears she looks at least ten years younger. Of course, she had ten months of beauty sleep,” she quipped.
Changing to more serious topics, she said, “Captain Morgan estimates that construction is just a bit ahead of schedule and the Galileo will return to Earth orbit in just over a month before going out to Vesta. I intend to start bringing in recruits from both other embassies immediately. I want to get that last ship crewed and out of orbit before we get another batch in. As soon as this intruder is dealt with, I’ll be bringing each ship in one at a time and transferring some of each experienced crew to the new ship. That will give us a cadre of trained personnel. Then, I’ll fill out the crew with the latest batch of newbies. As it stands now, I have one ship ready to go, but all of the crew are new except the command staff. I’m not exempting the McCaffrey, either. Just a friendly warning so you won’t get caught by surprise. You’re gonna lose a few people after we settle this SOB’s hash. The newbies you get will have more than a little training, though, so it won’t be too bad. I think they’ll integrate well.”