Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  “Your first night on a new world. It must’ve been grand.”

  Nicole cocked an eyebrow, to question the abrupt change of subject. “Aren’t we the traveling woman,” she said. “Been this way before, have you?”

  “Is that a joke? I’m so jazzed, I could fly without wings. I was just thinking, is all, that this is something you’ve been working towards your whole adult life.”

  “What’s the old saying,” Nicole said before she could stop herself, “‘be careful what you wish for’?”

  “I’ve done all this, Shea-Pilot,” Raqella called out from the boarding platform overhead.

  “Good for you,” Nicole muttered, though she knew the Hal would hear her, “but she’s still my plane.” Nicole was grateful for the interruption; she suspected Jenny felt otherwise.

  “If you do not trust me to fly—!” He bridled, but she cut him off by striding to the base of the stairs and plugging her Pad into an I/O data port. A touch of the main menu called up the plane’s status display, which told her that Raqella had been on-site since before sunrise; the preflight was complete, all systems checked out.

  “He’s very good,” Jenny said. “A natural pilot, the instructors said in class.”

  “Yup,” was Nicole’s sole response as she handed Jenny the mug and climbed the stairs. He looked none the worse for his late night, and Nicole wondered sourly if he’d been to sleep at all.

  “Mission profile?”

  “Logged and loaded,” he replied, properly professional. “Rendezvous with Constitution, return with one passenger module, two cargo. Total trip time projected at eleven hours. I can do it in less,” he added.

  “I’m sure. But we’re not out to set any turnaround records.”

  “Or is it perhaps that you don’t want anyone setting them but you.”

  She didn’t rise to the bait; she went on as though he hadn’t spoken. “Eleven hours brings you back in pretty near full daylight. I don’t want a night approach, not yet, and I don’t want a dusk approach at all. If processing looks like it’ll take you past the operational window, you can come back in the morning; we’ll adjust the rest of the schedule accordingly.”

  “A needless concern, Shea-Pilot. It won’t happen.”

  “Fine. And you have your orders if it does.”

  “I never thought of you as being so cautious.”

  “Live and learn, hotshot. Have a good flight.”

  Jenny put her finger on his attitude as they drove across the field towards the terminal complex: “He doesn’t like you much, does he?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Not the way he acted in class. To hear him talk, you were a step removed from deity. And besides, however he feels about you as a human, doesn’t your status as a Hal demand his respect?”

  “How much do you know about that?”

  “There isn’t much to know, actually. The odd magazine article—scholarly or scandalous—either way, depressingly superficial. All the books about the Contact and the Alliance are from our perspective; there’s almost nothing in the public media about the Hal through their eyes. And the diplomatic evaluations, from our legation on s’N’dare, are still mostly classified.”

  “They’re not that helpful, either.”

  “You’ve read them?”

  “Gone them one better.”

  Jenny nodded understanding. “Your letters from Marshal Ciari.”

  “Thanks to his exposure to their Speaker virus, he has a unique insight into their culture. The primary effect was only temporary, the Hal flushed the bug out of his system as soon as we were safely rescued, but there are residual resonances. A widened perception.”

  “But that’s not enough, is it?”

  Nicole shook her head. “He’s been sounding more and more frustrated. He said it’s like looking through a pair of binoculars. The image is crisp and clear, but ultimately it’s limited. You see only what the field of vision allows. For all the good it does you, what lies beyond might as well not even exist.”

  She made a face as they pulled up to the terminal. “I asked General Canfield to send him our flight schedule, I was sort of hoping there’d be a Courier waiting, with his latest letters.”

  “There was a Courier in orbit.”

  Couriers were small, unmanned, overpowered mail ships—lots of engine, lots of shielding, state-of-the-art guidance systems—capable of surviving stresses the much larger star-ships couldn’t. One more set of links in the growing communications chain that bound the worlds together.

  “But it’s outbound, I’m afraid,” Jenny continued, “this morning, for s’N’dare.”

  “Wish I’d known, damn it, I could’ve sent Ben a letter of my own. Maybe there’s still time—!”

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t, as Nicole discovered upon entering the Flight Control Center at the Tower; the Courier had launched while she slept.

  “We’ll be here for near another fortnight yet,” Jenny said hopefully. “There’s plenty of time for something to turn up.”

  “True. And if not here, there’s always Nieuwhome or Tiburon.”

  She caught sight of Amy, holding court across the room.

  “That probably explains everything,” she chuckled, with a jut of the chin in the young woman’s general direction.

  Jenny didn’t get the reference, and said so.

  “Why Raqella’s so pissy. Probably comes of hanging about with Amelia. Last night, I sort of tripped over the pair of them canoodling out behind some dunes.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I’ve a feeling it may be early days yet for any interspecies romance—but try telling them!”

  “Oh, dear!”

  “Too prudish, was I?”

  “Were you?”

  Nicole gave it some thought, and finally shook her head, waving a greeting to Ch’ghan as she took a seat at her own dedicated console.

  “It wasn’t right,” she said, “but I think that has more to do with his choice of partner than the act itself.”

  “I get the impression that feeling’s mutual.”

  “Hmnh?”

  “They really don’t like you, the Cobris I mean.”

  “We’ve had our differences.” Her tone signaled an end to that topic of conversation; Jenny obligingly took the hint. “Any news on Lamplighter!”

  “Hana’s taken herself off the planetary passenger rotation, if that’s any indication.”

  “Only that she’s working. Which I suppose is good. When she gets going full bore, she tends to lose track of externals. I should probably send you up with Raqella, to make sure she eats.”

  “I’d rather stay with you.”

  “My shadow regardless, eh? All right then, we’ll pass word on to Ramsey; he should love playing baby-sitter. Send him an encrypted message, cc’d to Hana’s buffer.”

  Movement caught Nicole’s attention, and she glanced up automatically to behold Amy sauntering past—as always, as though she owned the place. As always, with fairly good reason. People may hate her guts, but they were always unfailingly polite, Nicole being one of the rare exceptions. Amy’s father—Emmanuel, patriarch and founder of the empire—professed that was one of the things he respected most about Nicole, that she appeared utterly unimpressed by Cobri wealth and power. But she knew that was a sham. The only thing the Cobris respected was themselves; in actuality, they liked subservience. They tolerated her defiance because they had no choice, the cost of any response was too high. Emmanuel, being the family template, merely accepted that reality with somewhat better grace than his daughter.

  Who offered a smile that was mostly sneer as she went by, and a morning greeting.

  “Howdy-howdy,” she said, “waryk sk’nai!”

  She must have practiced, the pronunciation was almost a match for Raqella’s and Nicole knew Amy didn’t have that great an ear for the language. Nicole had been expecting something like this, so it was no problem letting the barb slide; Ch’ghan’s reaction was something a
ltogether different. He swiveled in his seat as though someone had yanked him on a chain and while he kept his standard poker face, the sudden tension to his body told Nicole eloquently how shocked and upset he was. Out of nowhere came a flashback to early days on the ocean, she and some neighbor kids out for a day sail, when one of them mouthed off with a major-league profanity. None of the children had the slightest idea what the word meant, it was simply something they’d heard the grown-ups use. Nicole’s mom was at the helm and she wasn’t amused, as she gathered the youngsters into the cabin and explained that certain expressions were totally and absolutely inappropriate.

  Then she went back on deck and nailed the crew—including Nicole’s father—for setting bad examples.

  Ch’ghan turned back to his own console and a telltale on Nicole’s indicated he’d opened a secure channel to the Swiftstar, one even Nicole couldn’t monitor. He spoke briefly, emphatically, and appeared no less angry when he signed off.

  Nicole leaned over his shoulder, ostensibly on business, to keep this exchange private as well.

  “So,” she asked, “what’s it mean?”

  “A gutter expression, nothing more. Raqella will have better manners in future.”

  And that ended the discussion.

  “There’s an interesting theory making the rounds, about the Hal, y’know,” said Jenny.

  “Which is.” Nicole was listening but her eyes never left Ch’ghan, who seemed totally absorbed in his own responsibilities. She used binoculars to monitor the Swiftstar’s, progress as the spaceplane rolled smoothly along the ramp towards the end of the active runway, then called up current crew medical stats on her Pad. Raqella was within nominal specs but was just as clearly not a happy camper. She held up a hand to silence Jenny and opened a ComLink channel of her own.

  “NASA zero-one,” she said quietly, using the Swift’s official designation; it was called “Sundowner” only when she was aboard and in command. The Link was audio only; in full pressure suit, strapped tight into his seat, with his helmet visor hiding his face, there really wasn’t much Raqella’s picture could tell her.

  “Yes, Shea-Pilot.”

  “How you doin’?”

  “Obviously not well enough, else you would not be calling.”

  “I’m more interested in your evaluation, as Flight Commander.”

  “I am fine.”

  “Ch’ghan’s your Controller, is that a problem?”

  “No.”

  That, she knew, was as good as she was going to get from him. And a lot more than from Ch’ghan.

  “Whatever’s going on,” she said, “it stays off my flight deck.”

  “Understood. Neither proficiency nor performance will be impaired in the slightest. If there is nothing more, Shea-Pilot”—there was, but she knew better than to press the point—“I will be on my way.”

  She watched the plane pivot at the end of the runway, the height of the landing gear giving the aircraft a deceptively delicate appearance. In less than a minute, it was lost to sight, even at the most extreme magnification of the monitor cameras, forcing her to follow its progress on a radar display.

  That was when she finally turned her attention back to Jenny.

  “You were saying?” she apologized.

  “It was Marshal Ciari, started folks thinking along these lines, actually. Did you know that what we call Standard Hal translates remarkably well into English?”

  “Try speaking it sometime.”

  “I have. I can’t imagine how you manage an’ still find yourself with a functional voice box. The sounds may be difficult to the extreme, but the linguistic structure itself meshes quite easily.”

  “So?”

  “Doesn’t work anywhere near as well if you try a straight translation to or from any other Terrestrial language—not French, nor Spanish nor Japanese nor Chinese, not German, not Russian. The dynamics quickly become so unwieldy that there’s no real point in even making the attempt. Far simpler to translate into English and then to Hal, and vice versa. I’m not speaking simply about the words, mind you, but the thought processes behind them. Every aspect of the Hal language appears designed to interface with a specific Terrestrial counterpart.”

  “Makes sense, from a First Contact point of view. They were reaching out to us, remember; they knew we were here.”

  “But it also makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what we may be missing?”

  “Ben’s binocular analogy, you mean?”

  “Standard Hal’s very polite; even its profanity has an appropriate English analog. Yet here’s Raqella using a term so offensive it gets Ch’ghan visibly outraged. And though you’re fluent in their language, even you haven’t a hint as to its meaning.”

  “Terriffic,” was all Nicole could find to say.

  Starships kept a standard calendar, based on Earth’s seasons, as a benchmark frame of reference—all too necessary, given the vagaries of outworld orbits—and the American elements of Constitution’s crew celebrated Thanksgiving during the transit to Nieuwhome. That visit was less than a week—they spent more time in the approach and departure phases than in actual planetary orbit—which suited all concerned. The settlers here, in this most populous of the existing colonies, were primarily Afrikaners, intent on establishing a homogeneously gene-pure society free of the elements that had overwhelmed their homeland back on Earth. They had the strictest immigration policies in human space, and—depressingly, Nicole thought—the longest waiting list of applicants.

  She never saw the surface, save from a distance; none of the crew did. The closest they came was the Terminal Station that had been built at one of the planet’s LaGrange points, half a million kilometers out, where it orbited the world like a natural moon. The staff was unfailingly polite, professional to the core, and made not the slightest attempt to hide how unwelcome they felt the starship’s presence was. And unnecessary. Nieuwhome had two starships in service, one dedicated transport, one combat vessel, with another warship on order. It was abundantly clear that they considered this just the beginning. Whatever the future held, they were committed to surviving it on their own.

  Tiburon, their third stop, was something different. Lush, where Faraway was Spartan; teeming with life, where the other world was bare. Much of the planet was jungle and explorers had come to discover—the hard way, of course—as well stocked with predators as prey. The surface stations were constructed like forts and more and more the fieldwork was being relegated to remote probes, directed from orbit. The test program planned here for the Swiftstar was significantly less extensive than had been the case on Faraway. Partly because there wasn’t so much for it to do dirtside; mostly, though, to reduce the risk to the single prototype and its crew.

  Which, Nicole suspected, meant primarily her.

  The treat for the colonists was that the starship’s arrival coincided with Christmas, and plans had been under way since before they departed Earth to make the visit appropriately special.

  The ship had its own theater—listed on the original design specs as a secondary cargo bay until Hobby and his shakedown crew executed some modifications of their own to create a fairly impressive space that served equally and easily the demands of drama, dance, and concert. A casting call was posted for the crew’s presentation of Handel’s Messiah, but Nicole found to her chagrin that her voice wasn’t quite good enough; no matter, it was loads more fun bellowing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the audience than from onstage.

  As part of their own contribution to the festivities, she and Jenny put together a set of Celtic songs, Jenny pulling lead vocals with a rich contralto while Nicole provided accompaniment on a borrowed guitar. They’d wanted Hana to join them but the one time they raised the point her response was so blunt and unequivocal that neither felt foolhardy enough to try again. They offered help with her work, and that response was even nastier.

  Amy was keeping a very low profile as well, as Hana put increasing demands on her time, calling the young woman
whenever there was need, regardless of the day or hour, and not giving a damn if the circumstances proved somewhat inconvenient. Which happened on occasion, because Amy was playing the field with the ship’s bachelors, enjoying as much of their company as she could manage. Good times were had by all, but she never dated the same man twice. Nicole couldn’t help wondering how Raqella felt about that.

  Nicole busied herself in work of her own, as the Hal’s attempt to mate a warp module to the Swiftstar moved in swift progression from theoretical to actual. The three of them were civil, but whatever warmth there had been between them had cooled like a dying star.

  Constitution was inbound to Tiburon, just past Transition down to Normal Space, the night of the Christmas concert. Nicole dressed with Hana’s flair—almost in deliberate defiance of their argument weeks ago—and drew more than her share of raised eyebrows and admiring glances as a consequence. Strangely, she hardly seemed to notice and even less to care. Almost as though the person being complimented wasn’t really her.

  The first act closed with the “Hallelujah” but so much raw energy and good cheer was generated that nobody wanted to leave; the audience stood and clapped and cheered through a half-dozen curtain calls until at last the few cast members left onstage began an impromptu a cappella encore. The orchestra members left in the pit picked up the cue, almost as though this was a jam session, their enthusiasm quickly bringing choristers and musicians back onstage. It was a mess and it was glorious and when the doors finally opened, the lobby resounded with laughter and good cheer.

  Tom Pasqua pressed a glass into Nicole’s hand and she drained it in a few hearty swallows before realizing it was champagne. She hadn’t eaten and the alcohol went straight to brain and nervous system, throwing her a tad off-balance and the room about her just as much out of focus. She couldn’t help a giggle of surprise. She wasn’t that easy a drunk; she knew she could cast aside the effects simply by focusing her concentration, but she didn’t want to. It was a lovely evening and hours at least since she’d thought of anything unpleasant; she wanted the mood to last.

  Even as she made the wish, she saw Jenny’s glance shift past her shoulder and sensed before she looked around that it was Hana.