Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “Set up the vacuum cleaner first,” she told him automatically, only a little bit of her mind concentrating on the job at hand, “I’d like to keep the cabin clean, if possible.”

  “My sentiments exactly, boss.” Hardly a surprise, since nobody wanted to breathe air scattered with floating globs of weightless vomit. “Will comply.”

  Nicole sensed movement to the side, and looked around to see Hana motion Raqella out of the co-pilot’s seat. She took his place, strapping herself in with enough slack so that she could face Nicole. She held out a communications patch cord, one end already plugged into her own suit. Nicole did the same, guaranteeing them a private line.

  “You okay?” Hana asked.

  “I guess I keep forgetting how good I am at this.”

  “Ben Ciari said you had that knack. He also said you were one of the best.”

  “It’s not a skill I’m proud of.”

  “It’s saved our lives, Nicole, more than once.”

  She twisted to look at her friend. “I didn’t join the Air Force—or become an astronaut—to kill people.”

  Hana shrugged. “Sometimes, Ace, desire and destiny, they don’t always match up the way we like.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She’s tired from her run, and a full belly takes the edge off her concentration. There are some flat rocks along the shore, an inviting perch to bask in the glorious sun, watching its light sparkle off the nearest pool and off the skin of the glittery shapes swimming within it. She doesn’t mean to doze but also doesn’t believe there’s anything at hand to threaten her.

  They were met at the reception hatch (still archaically called the “gangway”) by a distressingly young-looking—and, Nicole had to confess, even though she hated the term, fresh-faced—Lieutenant, Junior Grade.

  “Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Constitution, ladies and gentlemen,” he said proudly as she returned his salute.

  He was brand-new, the ship itself was brand-new, they were of a piece.

  As he motioned them toward the exit, Nicole couldn’t resist a backward glance over her shoulder to reassure herself that the Swiftstar was in good hands. The plane had already been shackled onto a tow truck and, while she watched, was started on its short journey off the ramp and towards the hangar bay. She frowned at the sight of scorch marks along the upper fuselage, where the skin had taken too much heat while they were inverted. Their own survival hadn’t been guaranteed during the flight, by any means; their safety margins measured in a handful of seconds. She wondered if the hull panels would have to be replaced and made a mental note to swing by for a chat with the maintenance chief.

  She couldn’t help a reflexive bounce on the balls of her feet before falling into step behind the Lieutenant, a tiny little stretch to ease the kinks in her muscles as they found themselves once more in gravity. She wanted to roll her back as well; she could already feel a tightening between her shoulder blades as her body belatedly protested the treatment she’d subjected it to during the dogfight, but couldn’t think of a discreet way of managing it.

  He was giving them the Cook’s Tour along the way, pointing out first thing a clear display plate mounted shoulder high on the wall beside the doorway. A spoken request presented a schematic of the giant starship, showing this specific location—in relation to the immediate neighborhood and the ship as a whole—and then directions to any requested destination. The plates were as ubiquitous as they were evidently essential; if the Lieutenant was to be believed, even experienced crew personnel occasionally found themselves lost as they tried to navigate the three-dimensional maze that comprised the starship’s innards. Small wonder. Big as the Constitution appeared on the outside, that was no comparison to the almost inconceivable amount of usable space within.

  Imagine a ball, a gleaming man-made sphere better than a mile in diameter. Not a perfect circle of course, the globe was faceted—shaped and flattened—in all manner of places to accommodate sensor and tracking arrays, launch and recovery platforms, access hatches of every dimension. The Shell—the primary hull—served as shielding; a hundred meters thick to begin with, it was comprised of reinforced steel bonded to asteroidal rock, to form an extraordinarily resilient amalgam, proof against both physical impacts and most significant wavelengths of radiation.

  Within was a world.

  Level upon spherical level, descending to the heart of the spacecraft, its Baumier Core, the Constitution represented the grand experiment in starship design philosophy, the ultimate expression of the doctrine that said “bigger was better.” Previous classes of spacecraft had been mission specific: exploratory vessels, combat units, transports, what have you. The Constitution was intended as a jack-of-all-those-trades, plus quite a few more—capable of breaking new trails, fighting battles along the way, founding settlements and then supplying them with sufficient means to give them a decent shot at survival. To that end, the intent was to mix its complement of actual crew with dependents to a degree never before attempted by NASA or any of the military services. Which created, ultimately, a fair-sized traveling town in space, with all the benefits of a community-based environment, and all the attendant liabilities.

  The first indication of that came when they emerged into one of the main transit corridors to find a couple of young teenagers scrubbing glumly and purposefully away—under the supervision of an appropriately stern Proctor—at a wall they’d evidently “tagged” with spray paint. Nicole and Hana only gave the scene a cursory glance, however; they were more taken aback—to the extent that they both forced themselves to take a long and deliberate pause—by the sight of the road ahead, and behind, curving down and away from them.

  “Takes a little getting used to,” the Lieutenant said so smugly that Nicole was certain he must have been equally freaked himself the first time he turned this particular corner.

  Circular floors in and of themselves were no problem for spacers. The arc of Sutherland’s torus was far more extreme, as was the carousel of any standard In-System spacecraft; the critical difference came in orientation. On Earth, the sheer bulk of the planet prevented a body from seeing the surface curvature from ground level; to get a decent sense of it required an altitude of better than twenty kilometers. Here, it was disconcertingly evident.

  In the artificial environment Nicole was used to, a semblance of gravity was created by rotating a ring about a central hub; the speed of that rotation determined the outwards inertial force with which a body was pushed against the deck. Ideally, one G. In effect, you were standing on what might normally be considered the ceiling, which curved upward along the line of rotation. Not so on the starship.

  As an operational by-product, the Baumier Drive generated a gravity field all its own, to the extent that designers felt challenged from the start to determine the best means of incorporating that feature into their creations.

  Until the Halyan’t’a came along, the Constitution globe configuration had seemed like the ideal solution.

  They’d come aboard just above the ship’s “equator,” and once they’d made their way to a mainline slidewalk, the Lieutenant led them north, towards what he referred to—being Navy—as the “Bridge.” Primary Command was at what had been arbitrarily designated the top of the starship—its own equivalent of the North Pole—with an identical backup installation (SecCom, Secondary Command) at the opposite end.

  A quartet of armed Marines stood watch at the main entrance, and carefully checked Nicole’s and Hana’s IDs—CardEx, plus hand and retina prints, the entire ritual—before passing them through.

  It was surprising to Nicole how prosaic everything looked, just like any Main Mission complex on the Moon or Earth itself. In the center of the room were a half-dozen circular step platforms, three meters deep, rising in layers like a cake. Each tier was ringed with consoles, and at the apex of the modest pyramid was a thronelike dais with a high-backed chair and console all its own. On the level immediately below were arrayed four subordinate
command stations, each at what Nicole assumed were the cardinal points of the compass.

  Dominating the room, in every sense of the word, was an enormous video display, that swept all the way up in a perfect hemisphere from the deck to the peak of the ceiling overhead. At the moment, it projected the view directly outside, the complete one-hundred-eighty-degree sweep that might be visible were one looking outward from the surface—which, Nicole had to remind herself, was the other side of the Shell. The Earth floated majestically in the moderate foreground—still better than a hundred fifty thousand klicks distant—with the celestial starscape beyond.

  She couldn’t help herself. The sight took her breath away.

  “Wow!” Hana breathed.

  “Right up there with the real thing,” nodded Nicole.

  “Actually,” Ramsey Sheridan said, making both women start at the sound of his voice, since he’d come up unnoticed behind them, “the technology comes out of a joint venture with Hollywood.”

  “We’re suitably impressed,” Hana said, absent her usual tone of jaded irony.

  “You should see it from the Throne,” Ramsey indicated the Command Console and its attendant chair, “complete with a dedicated holographic HUD.”

  Nicole didn’t say anything. Ever since she was a kid, she’d devoured all there was to consume about the space program, and most especially starships. It was a hunger that had only sharpened after she’d joined the Air Force. She’d studied them in every way possible—books, videos, sessions in Virtual Reality—but none compared to the actuality of being here, even if only for a visit.

  “I believe, Captain Shea,” Sheridan continued, with a smile to voice and face that belied the formality of his phrasing, “you’ve already made the acquaintance of the Constitution’s Commanding Officer.” A new figure stepped down off the bottom platform and more clearly into view, as Nicole automatically straightened to attention. “Nicole Shea, may I present Captain William Hobby, United States Navy.”

  “Sir,” she said, taking frantic refuge in the proprieties.

  He took his cue from her and returned her salute in kind, as crisply as if they’d both been on the Annapolis parade ground, and then gave way to a smile that matched Sheridan’s. He held out his hand.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain. And you as well, Dr. Murai.”

  He indicated a nearby doorway.

  “If you’ll both follow me, we’ll get this show on the proverbial road.”

  The two women exchanged a quick look of puzzlement as they made their way past another couple of sentries and into a two-room suite that functioned as the Captain’s Alert Facility—so he’d have somewhere to catch some sack time while remaining immediately accessible in any emergency.

  Judith Canfield was waiting.

  The General waved them all to seats around the circular table. There was a Marine officer by the door. At a nod from her, he stepped smartly over the threshold and cycled the hatch shut. A status light on the display plane embedded in the table told Canfield that the room was secure against both intruders and eavesdroppers.

  As the two women settled into their chairs, one of the walls blinked to life with a myriad of displays that mixed multiple video records of the Swiftstar dogfight with schematic telemetry.

  “I guess we weren’t as out of touch as we thought,” Hana commented.

  “Totally, as a matter of fact,” said Canfield. “Whatever the hostiles used to take you off the air was entirely too successful, so much so that we still haven’t been able to isolate the cause.”

  “Hana hypothesized a virus, designed to disable the communications software,” Nicole said.

  “We’re leaning in that direction ourselves,” Canfield agreed, “but the bloody thing hasn’t left a footprint we can tag.”

  Nicole felt the tap of a fingertip faintly against one of her hands where it rested on the table, flicked her eyes sideways to be met by Hana’s. Her friend mouthed the word “Cobri,” but Nicole only shrugged, accepting the judgment without agreeing with it.

  On the main screen, the display had cycled back to the beginning of the dogfight. Sheridan and Bill Hobby stood close by, Ramsey echoing the maneuvers on the screen with his hands, Hobby shaking his head as they watched the Swiftstar roll over onto its back.

  “My heart liked to stop when I saw that live, Ms. Shea,” Hobby said.

  “Mine, too,” Hana deadpanned, prompting an appreciative chuckle from the Captain.

  “Ah, Nicole,” sighed Sheridan with exaggerated patience, “what is it with you and new toys? The minute we put you in the air, somebody tries to blow you to bits.”

  “Is that a serious question, Colonel?”

  “Let’s hope not,” interrupted Canfield, calling the meeting to order in no uncertain terms, “since the Constitution is a considerably more valuable asset than all of Captain Shea’s previous assigned vehicles combined.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Nicole asked, feeling an absurd sense of déjà vu, to the moment—years gone now—when she sat in the Oak Room, the best restaurant on Luna, listening to Canfield tell her she was getting her first Ride.

  Canfield slid two packets along the table, one for Hana, the other for Nicole.

  “Effective immediately,” the General continued, “you are both assigned to the crew of the United States StarShip Constitution for the duration of its current mission tour.”

  “Why?” Nicole asked, before she could stop herself.

  “A number of reasons,” was Canfield’s reply, as though the question had come from a peer and not a substantially junior officer. “For one, to get you ‘out of town.’ ” She tapped commands into her computer pad and a window opened in the main display, presenting an overhead still photograph of the pursuit craft that had flamed in the atmosphere.

  “Nobody on my staff, nobody we’ve queried among the various spookshows, nobody on the Hal embassy, has ever seen anything like that.”

  “Forgive me, General,” Hana interjected, “but not a chance.”

  “Quite so. Somebody’s lying. My people, I think I can vouch for, although nothing is absolutely certain in life, least of all loyalty. Can’t say the same for any of the Terrestrial intelligence services or, for that matter, the Hal. Clearly, though, we’re up against an opposition with considerable resources—both of material and information and, I suspect to no small measure, influence.

  “Those ships didn’t just magically pop into being. They had to be designed and built, pilots had to be trained, the intercept had to be rehearsed. To do all that and maintain absolute secrecy betokens a force to be reckoned with. Dedicated, it appears, to driving a wedge between humanity and the Hal.”

  “Is that possible?” Sheridan asked.

  “Yes.” Canfield paused a moment to let the implications sink in, then continued. “Nicole, for various reasons, serves as a flashpoint for these anti-Hal sympathizers. I for one would prefer to see her taken off the bull’s-eye for a while. Also, that dovetails neatly with our need for ongoing trials on the Swiftstar. Nicole is Project Manager, it’s only logical she oversee the field evaluations.

  “And there’s a third reason—in my estimation, a compelling one—which you, Bill, as Commanding Officer, need to know.” Hobby didn’t move much in his chair—to the casual eye he looked as relaxed as ever—but Nicole sensed the line of tension along his body as he came fully alert.

  “It was recently brought to my attention”—and Nicole couldn’t help but think of their conversation on her boat—“that none of the surviving personnel of the Wanderer flight crew—save for Marshal Ciari—have been posted to interstellar duty, even though all three are eminently qualified and Dr. Murai for one has repeatedly requested it. Dr. Zhimyanov chooses to stay close to home for personal reasons. Captain Shea and Dr. Murai were removed from the assignment pool, by Executive order.”

  “Does the White House know you’re doing this?” Ramsey asked.

  Canfield slid another, thicker envelope across the table to Hobby
.

  “That’s a complete dossier of my observations, assessments, assumptions, conclusions,“ she said. ”To be opened once you’ve cleared the system. Quite frankly, I’m not at all sure what the Hell is going on; this is sort of an ad hoc attempt to shake the tree a little and find out.

  “The coalition—the consensus—in support of the Alliance is very fragile, on both sides. It’s early days in our relationship, yet because of the nature of the times and our technology we’re rushing headlong into a future we have to take substantially on faith.

  “Make no mistake, I believe in the Alliance. Like President Russell, I want it to succeed with all my heart; I think that’s imperative for the survival and prosperity of both worlds. But I am also, and foremost, a serving flag officer in the United States Air Force, sworn to preserve and defend my homeland—and by extension my homeworld—if need be with my life. I want to know what’s out there, Bill, good and bad. We know what the Hal have committed to Treaty. I want you—and Nicole and Hana—to tell me what’s in their hearts.”

  “So we’ll have Hal among the crew as well,” Hobby said flatly, making no bones about how little he liked the idea.

  “Ch’ghan and Raqella are integral to the Swifistar project,” Canfield countered, brooking no argument, “we haven’t even a prayer of answers—to a whole host of questions—without them.”

  “Your people, Ms. Shea,” Hobby told Nicole, “your responsibility.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Won’t this be fun,” Hana muttered under her breath, for Nicole’s ears only.

  “You’ll love every minute,” was the equally muted retort. But Nicole’s mind wasn’t on the exchange. She was staring across the table at the main display, still running the intercept on a perpetual loop, her eyes on the surviving plane as it corkscrewed back to the safety of the deep atmosphere, fading from sight with disturbing speed despite the best efforts of the high-resolution scanners to keep it in frame.