Emprise

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Charan had chosen a phrase which would serve as both a cynical remembrance and a cautionary reminder. fool’s mate. meetpoint enabled, the OS replied as it reached deep into the ship’s autonomic systems to alter how they functioned. For the most part, the changes were anticipatory, readying new powers for when they might be needed.

  In the case of communications, the change was immediate; meetpoint created a partition in memory and began to redirect into it all transmissions intended for Unity. Like its approaching counterpart, Pride of Earth abruptly fell mute, though the homeworld would not know it for nearly a year and Charan’s companions would not know it unless and until he chose to tell them.

  His tools for the task ahead in place, Charan then hastened to the bridge.

  At first glance, he saw nothing but the now-familiar redshifted starfield astern displayed on the bridge window. But by following the rapt gaze of Joanna and the hard stare of Wenyuan, he was able to spot a small blurred disc among the pinpoint stars. Joanna seemed to be trying to will it into greater revelations; Wenyuan seemed to be wishing it out of existence.

  “Range?” Charan asked.

  “Two point eight light-hours,” said Rankin, who was hunched over the telescanner controls. “About the distance from the Sun to Uranus.”

  “Nice work,” Charan said appreciatively.

  Rankin shook his head. “I didn’t seriously expect to see it until late tomorrow. But it stands out against the infrared background like a candle in a snowstorm.”

  “How big is it?” Charan asked with growing alarm.

  “Can’t tell until it’s closer,” Rankin said softly. “It’s less massive than the Jupiter star, but that’s no comfort. It could be very big. It’s certainly ten times the size of Pride of Earth.”

  “When you cannot fight, the size of your enemy hardly matters,” Wenyuan said dourly. Charan rubbed his eyes. “I wonder why they haven’t answered our beacon.”

  Wenyuan ticked off answers on his fingers. “They aren’t receiving it—they didn’t understand it—they aren’t equipped to answer—they prefer not to answer. Take you choice.”

  “We’re still transmitting our message?”

  “Yes,” said Rankin.

  “I don’t doubt they received and understood it,” Charan said grimly. “And we know they are capable of responding.”

  “Yes,” agreed Wenyuan. “They have chosen to keep us ignorant. The question is why.”

  With the Sender ship still moving significantly faster than the accelerating Pride of Earth, its image grew steadily in size and detail. As the ship’s profile became more defined, it became more puzzling. The forward end appeared to be little more than a blunt, featureless disc; presently concentric rings and radial seams were visible on it, as well as an unidentifiable feature at its exact center.

  Of the rest of the ship they could see little, in part because of its near head-on approach and in part because the disk was of greater diameter and masked the rest. Only in the last thirty hours before meetpoint, as the two ships closed and the angle of view changed with what seemed excruciating slowness, could they grasp the visitor’s true shape and dimensions.

  Each drew the same conclusion, independently but inevitably: the Sender ship was a colossus.

  The bow disc was nearly one hundred metres in diameter. Pride of Earth’s full length would span but a third of its face. Behind the disc the ship stretched for more than four hundred metres, rivaling the largest ships which had ever cruised Earth’s oceans. In its many-compartmented superstructure the alien vessel was more capacious than all of humankind’s spacecraft, from Vostok I through Pride of Earth, combined.

  Joanna was unsurprised by the size of her Creator’s chariot. On the contrary, she found its scale a confirmation of her beliefs and was buoyant over the nearness of her Lord—a bare ten million miles, less than a light-minute physically, far less than that emotionally.

  Nor did she concern herself with the host’s radio silence, placing her trust instead in the two-hour, twelve-language prayer of greeting she had memorized before departure. The sight of her tethered in mid-air before the mod E terminal window, chanting with head bowed, fast became a familiar one.

  But to the others the Sender ship was a presence both ominously large and uncomfortably close. Rankin reacted as though the ship was a slap at all of Earth science’s achievements, and, quite unaware of it, spent considerable mental energy trying to escape the feelings of inferiority that the sight of it brought to him.

  “SPS One is much larger, of course,” he said aloud in one early sally.

  “SPS One is a kite,” Wenyuan said derisively. “That”—he pointed to the screen—“that is a dreadnought.”

  Chastened, Rankin did not even give voice to a fleeting thought that Pride of Earth was the faster and more nimble ship. He did not know that it was true, and if it were, he was not convinced it mattered.

  But a few hours later, Rankin made a more encouraging discovery. He had busied himself on the bridge, studying the Sender ship’s structure as closely as the telescanner would permit, trying to identify what type of propulsion it employed. The irregular hull offered no clue, and he kept coming back to the enormous bow disc, isolated from the rest of the ship by five massive cylinders in a circle—

  “Orion!” he exclaimed suddenly.

  Charan looked up. “What?”

  “Dyson’s Orion. Oh, not his design, but the same idea. That’s why it showed up at the distance it did. The disc must be filthy with radioactive debris.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “A nuclear-pulse starship. It accelerates by exploding small nuclear devices against a pusher plate. Very crude, but the numbers always looked promising. There’s the proof of it, out there. That’s the pusher plate out front, with an aperture for delivering the fuel pellets at the center. They’re flying backward, either for protection against micrometeoroids or in preparation for deceleration.”

  “And those columns behind the disc—”

  “Transfer the impulse smoothly to the ship.”

  “Were the numbers promising enough to allow a .15g acceleration?”

  “Easily.” He shook his head. “It’s a real brute-force approach, but yes, it’s capable.” Rankin looked happy. “Could a ‘brute-force’ starship reach these velocities?” Rankin’s face fell, and he reached for a calc pad. “Only if they were capable of engineering a much more efficient design than Dyson was,” he admitted reluctantly. From that point on, faced with a choice between admitting his own error or human inferiority, Rankin lapsed into inconclusive ambivalence.

  Wenyuan was a man without purpose, shaken thoroughly by having been forced to admit to the inadmissible. The Senders were not a Consortium faction, they were real—and, to judge by their vessel, unimaginably powerful. Wenyuan was emotionally disabled by having at last come up against a force which he could by no twist of calculation imagine overwhelming, a situation he felt powerless to manipulate.

  As a consequence, he prowled the ship restlessly, as though mere random motion might bring him in contact with some outlet for his frustration. And he plagued the others with questions, as though hopeful that some unrevealed fact could reverse his grim appraisal.

  For Charan, the realization was dawning that he had agreed to this final request from his father without truly grasping the dimensions of the task. He had treated it as a time-consuming errand, rather than the consummate individual challenge it now promised to be.

  Earth and any support the Consortium might represent were now very remote, and it finally bore in on Charan that, no matter how prescient and detailed their instructions might be, it fell to his ship alone, and to him alone aboard it, to carry out those instructions. But when he looked at the Sender ship, he wondered how anyone who had not seen it could hope to anticipate the manner and motives of its builders.

  From the moment the Sender beacon fell silent, the same sophisticated receiver that had been dedicated to listening t
o it listened instead for its resumption. The receiver took its input from a directional antenna pointed at the Sender ship’s presumed position and directed the signal to a pattern recognition routine in the computer regulating ship communications.

  For more than two weeks it had scanned the spectrum without once detecting an emission coherent enough to warrant even a false alarm. As the days passed its failure to do so drew the curiosity of and then the concern of Charan, who probed its workings for possible faults. There were none; it was simply that, save for the fading echo of the big bang and the murmurs of distant suns, the ether was silent. There was nothing to detect.

  But three hours from meetpoint, an influx of radio energy tickled the receiver into life. The computer studied the string of bits passed to it and pronounced it interesting. A moment later alarms sounded on the bridge, where Charan and Rankin were listlessly playing chess, and throughout the ship.

  “Here we go,” said Rankin, galvanized out of his ennui. “It’s the recognition pattern we asked them to use.” He bent forward over the com display, his brow furrowed in concentration. “But there’re two parallel signals, and they’re way up the spectrum from their beacon—VHF band. One’s using frequency modulation—but I’ve never seen—”

  He stopped short and cocked his head at an angle. “It’s a bloody telly broadcast, with an FM subcarrier.”

  Wenyuan appeared in the pas sway at that moment. “From the Senders?”

  “Yes. Where’s Joanna?”

  “Communing. What are they saying? Why aren’t you listening to it?” he demanded.

  “About twenty more seconds on the recognition pattern, then it’ll start. You won’t know what it means until the computer tells us, though,” Rankin said. “I can’t believe they’re sending broadcast video. I don’t think there’s any way we can look at it. No one ever thought—”

  “I don’t care,” Wenyuan snapped. ‘Turn on the damn speaker.” At that moment the speaker hissed to life as the communications routine noted the beginning of the message.

  Greetings, rocket ship Pride of Earth.

  The hair on the back of Charan’s neck stood erect. Wenyuan shivered as though suddenly chilled. Rankin gaped, mouth half-open. In mod E, Joanna pressed her eyes closed and hugged herself fiercely.

  We of the Jiadur are made happy by your presence and your welcome, We are grateful for your companionship.

  “By the Chairman’s book—” breathed Wenyuan. “Of course! They’re trying to answer the way they first heard from us,” Charan said, leaning forward.

  They fell silent as the message continued: Our long journey has been with one purpose, to end at long last all fences between us. We have grown old with waiting and beg an end to waiting.

  We ask for,a meeting between us so that homage may be paid to the Founders and all that has been held in trust may be reclaimed.

  We await your consent.

  The subsequent conversation on the bridge was energetic and disjointed. “An evaluation on that voice?” Charan asked. “Someone get Joanna in here.”

  “Artificially generated, of course. Possibly reedited from recordings of our broadcasts to them,” Rankin offered.

  “The language is passable English broadcast standard, like the original beacon,” said Wenyuan. “The use of ‘rocket ship’ would seem to date it to the 1950’s.”

  “They said nothing about our offer of the com unit,” noted Rankin.

  Wenyuan scowled. “You heard what they want.”

  “How did you take ‘of the Jiadur’—as a reference to their ship or their species?” Rankin asked Charan.

  “Species,” Charan said. “But we can ask. Or can we?”

  “FM’s no problem. But until they take the com unit, there’ll be no video. All our video downlinks are digital,” said Rankin. “We can always use the beacon frequencies again.”

  Charan shook his head. “Let’s show them that we’re flexible. They chose this mode for some reason. And I want to know if their voice analyzer is as good as their voice synthesizer.”

  “What do we answer them, not how, that’s my concern,” Wenyuan said. “Who are the Founders? Who is holding what in trust?”

  “It almost sounds like something Joanna’s heavenly host might say—the Creator, the Founders, the meaning is close,” Rankin mused. “Earth held in trust—isn’t there something in Genesis?”

  “I wouldn’t know. We’ll reply per mission protocol,” Charan replied. “We’ll try to get them to hold station with us. Am I ready here?” he asked Rankin, gesturing at the com controls.

  Rankin nodded.

  “No good reason to wait,” Charan said, positioning the headset mike. He closed his eyes briefly, took a deep breath, and began:

  “This is Commander Tilak Charan of the starship Pride of Earth. We received the audio portion of your message clearly on this frequency. But we are not equipped to process your video signal or respond with our own. Please know that any information you sent in that manner was not received. We repeat our offer of a complete communications unit to facilitate the exchange of information between us.

  “In your next transmission, we would like you to tell us the name of your vessel, the name by which you refer to your homeworld, and the name by which you yourself are known.”

  “Why not where they’re from?” Wenyuan asked under his breath. “What name or coordinate system would they use to tell us?” Rankin said scornfully. “That’ll have to wait.”

  Charan continued, “We are willing to arrange meetings between representatives of our two species. I myself will come to your ship if you will agree to reduce its velocity to one part in one hundred of the present magnitude.

  “We await your reply.”

  Rankin switched off the transmitter. “It’ll be two minutes at minimum, a minute’s lag either way.”

  Wenyuan shook his head. “Much more. They will have to analyze the message and be certain they understand it, particularly phrases like ‘one part in a hundred.’ Then they will have to decide what they want to tell us. Please, Commander—do not base too many assumptions on their answers. They are as likely to tell us a self-serving lie as the truth.”

  “It’s nice to be able to count on you for a refreshing breath of cynicism, Major,” Rankin said wryly.

  “Expecting the best is a way to die young.” Wenyuan took note of Joanna’s appearance at the passway. “You have given up your foolishness at last?” he asked acidly. “Or do you worship the god of steel and the forge?”

  Joanna pulled herself into the compartment and dangled lightly from a ceiling handhold. “That ship is only the vanguard of the heavenly host. The Gentle King has no wish to frighten us and sends this messenger in a form we can accept and with a voice we find familiar,” she said.

  Wenyuan’s own misgivings had made him combative. “I have to admire a faith flexible enough to adapt to any set of facts.”

  “He has spoken to me directly in many of the languages of men and in the language of heaven.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “The message is the same in all languages. To those who are One in the Spirit he says, Do not be afraid. The Redeemer is near.” Her voice had a tremor which could have been uncertainty or anticipation.

  Rankin interrupted the debate. “Answer coming back!”

  Commander Charan of the Pride of Earth. This one is Ryuka of the Jiadur, curator of the keep of Journa. No change in the Jiadur’s destiny is possible. What was planned must be.

  “How the hell are they generating that so fast?” fumed Rankin.

  It is not necessary nor would it be fitting for the Commander Charan to risk the dangers of crossing between our two ships. What is a burden for you will be an honor for this one.

  “What danger is he talking about?” wondered Charan.

  “Look! Something’s happening!”

  Joanna’s exclamation drew their eyes upward toward the bridge window. On the top and bottom of the main hull, directly behi
nd the five massive pistons of the pulse drive, were two arrowhead-shaped projections perhaps fifteen metres in length. To everyone’s eye, they had appeared to be an integral part of the vessel, one of the many spots where some unknown interior function had been allowed to dictate exterior form.

  Now, one of the projections had separated from the main hull, revealing itself as an independent vehicle. Even as they watched, the tiny ship slowly rotated so the pointed end faced toward Pride of Earth. A yellow-white glow appeared as a halo around the blunt tail.

  “There is your space fighter, Commander Charan,” Wenyuan said grimly.

  “No,” said Charan. “The shape misleads you. The Jiadur could never land on Earth. Its crew would need a way around that limitation. I would wager you’re looking at a Journan shuttle—a ship designed for the 12 kps and below regime. And here it is being used as a transfer vehicle at more than half the speed of light. That’s the danger he meant. At this velocity, a grain of dust hardly large enough to irritate the eye would pack the power of a small atomic bomb. He must want this meeting very badly.”

  “You can’t allow an alien aboard,” Wenyuan said sharply.

  “Allow it? I intend to help it.”

  “That is an unacceptable risk.”

  “The time for objections was during intercept planning a year ago. Now we have a mission protocol to follow.”

  “We are also expected to exercise judgment.” With each exchange, the tenor of each man’s voice became more belligerent.

  “I heard no protest when I offered to go aboard the Jiadur.”

  “The situations are not equivalent. Allowing it aboard could risk this ship.”

  “Which is why mod E is not connected directly to either of the other habitable mods, and why the hatch to the drive core can only be locked from the drive core side—outside the mod. The visitor will be isolated.”

  Wenyuan unstrapped his seat restraints. “I would like reassurance that those locks will function as required.”

  “I’ll be happy to demonstrate them for you,” Charan said, pushing off toward the passway. Joanna moved aside to let them pass.