There was a long pause before the voice responded, “Negative. The problem is not that bad. I will begin maneuvers to return to parking orbit immediately.”
“Good day to you, sir,” Pendergast said before switching off. “Well,” he thought, “that’s about all the excitement I can expect this watch.” He reminded himself of a time he had been on watch in the New Eden system when things had gotten much too exciting.
Just for fun, he used one of the big ultraviolet lasers to paint the light sail. The target was so frinking large at this close range that the picture took nearly thirty seconds to build on the screen. The sail, he noted, was the usual spinning disk with outrigger panels to aid in tilting the axis of rotation. Emanating from the sail were the fixed rigging and the control shrouds used in maneuvering, all of which were too thin to be seen against the blackness of space. Even to the laser display, it looked as though the tiny pod was suspended by magic from the vast dish shaped sail.
He ordered the computer to zoom in on the pod and waited while it did its work. The yacht’s life pod was little more than a formless splotch on the screen. He was about to return to the normal watch screen when he noticed a tiny speck separated from the pod by a few millimeters of blackness.
“Computer,” he commanded. “What is the speck of light at¾” He reeled off the coordinates without bothering to mark the spot with his cursor.
“Object is too small to identify,” came the musical reply. “It separated from the pod four minutes ago.”
“Do you still have it in sight?”
“Negative. It is not visible with normal wavelengths.”
“What do you think, Chief?” Pendergast asked Newman, who was now more interested in the ensign’s screen than he was in listening to the work party.
“Hit it with another scan.”
Pendergast ordered another laser sweep of the light sail. Suddenly, his screen was yelling at him and flashing alternate red and white.
“Warning! Object is under power. Repeat. Object is not in ballistic flight. Possible hostile intent. Warning! ...”
For the second time in his young career, Niles Pendergast found himself in the unenviable position of calling the captain and telling him that something bad was happening.
#
Harlan Frees’s reflexes took over the moment the General Quarters alarm began to beep in his earphones. His crew of vacuum stevedores had just maneuvered the bulky fusion generator into position next to the stardrive generator, but had not yet started the long, slow descent to the hard point on the hull.
To the six spacers arrayed in a circle around the generator, he ordered. “Stand by to jettison! On the count of three. One, two, three, jettison!”
At the “Stand By” order, the six shifted their grips on the half-sphere. Twelve gloved hands moved under the outer rim of the generator, palms forward and up, as twelve knee joints flexed to prepare to lift. At the end of Frees’s count, all six put their backs into shoving the generator straight into the black sky. The velocity imparted was not great, but the big mass rose perceptibly as it began its journey away from the starship. Frees didn’t care where it went so long as Magellan had room to maneuver if needed.
“Haskens, Baker, get Ms. Dresser back to the airlock. Double time!”
The two spacers grabbed the surprised stardrive expert by the harness and jerked her off her feet. Using their free hands, they pulled themselves along the safety lines leading back to the lock. Frees chinned the control that would put him on the ship’s main command circuit.
“Frees, on the hull with six spacers and Ms. Dresser. I have her and two men headed in, awaiting orders.”
“Where’s that generator, Lieutenant?” the duty officer asked.
“On its way to infinity, sir. It will clear the danger zone in another thirty seconds.”
“Very well, stand by for orders.”
A moment later, the captain’s voice crackled on the circuit. “Frees, what is your consumable state?”
“We’ve oxygen for another four hours, Captain. Everything else is topped off.”
“There’s an object coming in from that solar yacht below us. Flight profile indicates a visitor in a vacuum suit, although we have yet to confirm that. The object does not show a locator beacon. I repeat, no beacon! I want you and a couple of your men to hook on maneuvering packs and go out to meet whatever it is. Understood?”
“Aye aye, Captain.” Frees switched to his local frequency. “Donner, Kurtzkov, you are with me. You other two get on packs and see if you can stabilize that damned reactor before it floats out of sight. Move it!”
#
Mark Rykand was more frightened than he had ever been in his entire life. He remembered the night he had thought up this scheme. He had been half smashed and feeling mad at the world. That was the only combination he could imagine that would cause him to consider such a damn fool stunt. He remembered how confidently he had assured Gunter Perlman that he could reach Magellan on his own, or failing that, merely call the station for someone to come pick him up. No problem, right? Somehow, the original picture of himself in a vacuum suit, sailing confidently toward a ship and station too small to see, had not included the heart that was now pounding in his ears and the adrenaline that saturated his blood. If only he hadn’t been so damned persuasive¾
Where he had made his mistake, he decided, had been the next morning when he had not phoned Gunter, and called the whole thing off. Instead, he had placed a call to Sam Wheeling and explained his need. Wheeling, in turn, had recommended a local vacuum supply company where he could purchase the necessary equipment, and a local mechanic who would do the suit modifications he needed. The reason for not having the manufacturer modify the suit was simple. The mods in question were illegal.
The vacuum supply company had been more than happy to sell him their top-of-the-line vacsuit, maneuvering pack, extra oxygen tanks, power supply, sensors, and the navigation system required for long jaunts orbit-to-orbit. The difficulty had come when Mark realized that the entire ensemble massed more than a hundred kilos under Earth gravity and was ill suited to the sport runabout he was driving. Eventually the suit occupied the passenger seat, looking like an oversize gorilla as it sat there with the top down. Maneuvering pack and extra oxygen tanks had filled the rear seat to overflowing. Even strapped in, the suit tended to flop onto the driver during a right turn. The first time it happened, Mark nearly lost control of his car.
The next step had been more ticklish. Mark drove to the small shop the freelance mechanic operated out of his garage and after twenty minutes spent feeling the man out, had contracted to have his suit modified to his specifications. The first mod involved spraying the exterior with a non-reflective black coating that absorbed radar waves. The second involved a software change to the suit’s three computers. A vacuum suit’s locator beacon was supposed to operate as long as the electrical system was energized, and for up to a month thereafter on battery. The change in system software allowed Mark to turn off his beacon merely by speaking a password aloud.
While the mechanic was working on his suit, Mark made sure that Gunter remembered agreeing to let him use Gossamer Gnat. Gunter had been as reluctant to take part in the scheme sober, as he had been drunk. Mark reminded him that he had been planning for months to try out the Gnat’s new three-micron sail, and that he could now do so without paying the usual tug charges. Solar sailing was the most expensive hobby ever invented by human beings, and as such, was a strain on the finances of even someone as rich as Gunter Perlman. The thought that he could defray the cost of what was essentially a training cruise finally overcame his caution. As J.P. Morgan had once said about ocean yachts, if you had to ask the price, you could not afford one.
All this passed through Mark’s mind as he hung suspended in space with nothing but the universe to keep him company. His voice sounded especially thin as he ordered the computer to display his orbital path on the suit’s head-up display. Soon he was staring dow
n a ghostly hollow tube that receded into the distance as he closed on Magellan at three hundred kilometers per hour. He noted that he was sailing along very close to one wall of the spectral highway and pondered whether he should adjust his path or compute a new one based on his current position.
According to his guidance computer, he had another forty minutes before he could start decelerating, with another twenty minutes or so before he had to make a decision. If being slightly left of orbit was his only problem, he decided, he would light candles for whatever god looked after spaceborne novices.
One thing he did not have to worry about was interception by those aboard the station. With his beacon switched off and the black, radar absorbing coating on his suit, he was confident that the starship would not be able to detect him until he closed to practically spitting distance.
Thus, it was a shock when the same voice he had heard talking to Gossamer Gnat echoed in his ears. “You in the vacsuit! You are in restricted space. Retard your velocity and prepare for pickup! This is an official order. Retard your velocity. We have people on their way to intercept you!”
Chapter Eleven
There is that instant of total panic when you look up to discover the girl’s father standing in the doorway, or that first flash of a red light in your rear view mirror, or the step that isn’t there. Mark felt all of these and more at the sudden hail from the ship hidden somewhere in the infinite blackness. The panic quickly gave way to a flash of anger.
He had been swindled! Instead of switching off his beacon (something reputed to be impossible short of destroying it), that damned mechanic must have gone into the program and inserted a few lines of code that returned a beacon off response whenever the password was spoken. Such swindles were common among itinerant unlicensed programmers. Why go to the trouble of debugging a program containing a few million lines of code when a quick cosmetic change to the user interface would serve long enough to be paid?
What if he had not been swindled? What if the mechanic had done precisely what he had been contracted to do? Were the starship’s sensors good enough that they could track him without the aid of the beacon? If they were, what sort of sensors were they using? The first thing he needed to do, he decided, was determine whether he was shining like a star in the radio frequencies.
“Computer.”
“Ready,” the clear contralto voice answered in his earphones.
“Run a diagnostic. Report status of locator beacon.”
“Running,” came the reply. Mark sweated out the next two minutes. The diagnostic program was as inflexible as a graphite I-beam, and therefore, nearly impossible to fool. Whatever the mechanic had done to his suit, the diagnostic could not have been affected ... could it? He waited through the checks of the environmental control, communications, and navigation systems. The answer came after what seemed an eternity. “Beacon is inoperative.”
“Radio check.”
“Radio is turned off.”
“Status of any system that might radiate energy to space.”
“Thermal control is operating nominally. All other energy rejection systems are disabled.”
Mark frowned. Thermal control! Were they tracking him by his infrared emissions? If so, there was not much he could do about it. So long as he was alive, he would show up as a spot of radiance on any infrared detector.
What was the likelihood that they had him in the focus of an infrared telescope? If that was how they had spotted him, then they were operating under a major handicap. For, as his old astronomy teacher had often lamented, telescopes suffer from an inability to directly measure the range of an object under observation. Ever since Copernicus’s time, astronomers have known the angular position of every star visible to the naked eye to within a few fractions of an arc second. Yet, despite the accuracy of their angular measurements, they have been lucky to guess the distance of all but the closest stars to within a dozen light-years. In fact, only with the advent of star travel had humanity managed a sufficiently long baseline to triangulate the stars directly. As for the more remote galaxies, their distances were still largely only informed guesses.
If the watchers aboard Magellan had him in the crosshairs of an infrared telescope, they would not be able to estimate his range closer than a few kilometers. Any interception in space is a complex problem in vector analysis. Without range information, it was unlikely his pursuers would be able to catch him.
What else could they be using to track him? It could not be laser radar. The coating of his suit absorbed more than 99.9% of the light that fell on it. A laser beam should not reflect sufficiently to give a readable return. The same for any other kind of radar. All light or merely that small bit of the electromagnetic spectrum that people can see? The thought struck like a fist in the stomach. What about the ultraviolet wavelengths? Was his suit black in the ultraviolet spectrum? He kicked himself for a fool for not having checked the possibility when he had tested the suit.
Whatever detector they were using, he was faced with the problem of spoofing it until he could get close enough to make a straight run at the ship. The problem with being suspended in space was that one is as naked as a fly on a wall with no place to hide. Or was there?
He called up the long-range display on his faceplate. The view was not real time. It had been downloaded to his suit from Gossamer Gnat the moment before he stepped out of the airlock. So long as Magellan did not move, the view ought to serve his purposes.
The survey ship was lying beside the PoleStar Habitat while another ship, an interorbit freighter, hovered some distance away. To one side of his orbital path and two-thirds the distance to the starship lay the PoleStar reflector. Gunter Perlman had warned him several times of the danger the big mirror presented. Although Mark’s speed was minuscule compared to orbital velocity, it was still fast enough to turn him into bloody pulp if he hit the reflector. Gunter had hoped to close to a position where Mark could give it a wide berth. The warning from Magellan had cut short that effort. As it now stood, Mark would barely miss the big mirror.
The map display defaulted to what is known colloquially as Godview – high overhead at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Mark commanded the map to rotate in model space to align the viewpoint with his own current position. The display showed him what things would look like if only he possessed the vision of an exceptionally keen-eyed eagle. The habitat and two ships were tiny pinpoints in the distance with the ghostly glowing mirror nearly occulting them.
Nearly occulting them...!
Mark smiled as he savagely twisted the backpack controller in his right hand and began boosting perpendicular to his flight path. Regardless of what they were using to track him, he doubted it could see through the PoleStar reflector. So long as he kept the mirror between himself and Magellan, his pursuers would be blind.
#
Harlan Frees scanned the display being relayed from the long-range sensors aboard the ship and demanded, “Where is he, Control?”
“We’ve lost him,” came the squeaky reply from Niles Pendergast.
“What do you mean ‘you’ve lost him?’”
“He was there one minute and gone the next.”
“He can’t have just disappeared.”
Even as he said it, Frees had to admit that the quarry had indeed disappeared. The icons denoting Magellan, PoleStar, and the freighter were all there, as were he, Donner, and Kurtzkov. He could even see the beacons of the two spacers he had ordered to stabilize the fusion generator. Of the quarry, however, there was no sign.
“Full display, radius 100 kilometers,” he ordered. The ghostly lines in front of him changed as the computer showed him a view of circumambient space from somewhere near Polaris. The ships and habitat shrank until they were one symbol. At this scale, only the PoleStar reflector was large enough to show as other than a point. The reflector was a small dish-shape with a pink fan radiating out behind it. The pink zone showed the cone of shadow, the region of space blocked from Ma
gellan’s view by the body of the big mirror. The last known position of the intruder, he noted, was on the edge of the zone.
“He has slipped behind the reflector!” Frees reported to control. “Kurtzkov, Donner, jet for the mirror! Kurt, you take the zenith point, Donner, you take four o’clock, and I will take eight. We will hover out of sight until he passes back into view of the ship. Then we’ll nail the bastard from behind!”
The spacers acknowledged their orders. Brief sparks of control jets flashed above and to the side of Harlan Frees as the other two changed their vectors to intersect the mirror. He did likewise and soon the giant construct was swelling at a perceptibly faster rate. Speed is deceptive in vacuum where there is no way to judge size or distance. However, there is a point where very large objects in microgravity cease to be “out” and suddenly become “down.” It is a psychological quirk of the human eye and brain brought about by millions of years of evolution at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. Frees was still a kilometer from the reflector when the vertigo struck him. When the dizziness passed, the universe had rotated through ninety degrees. Frees found himself descending toward a vast plain lit by Luna glow and starlight. From this angle, the mirror was an oversize tambourine filled with a honeycomb of support trusses.
With his suit radar taking continuous range readings, Frees switched to automatic and let his computer worry about halting his flight. His suit jets burped automatically and the thin reflective film that made up the big mirror began to flap in the invisible wind. He quickly switched back to manual and dialed his thrusters down to minimum power. The rippling continued, but much less violently. Despite his care, the disturbances radiated outward like waves in a pond and soon the whole mirror was shaking.
“Watch your exhaust,” he warned the two others. “Gentle, continuous thrust!”
Frees came to a halt with his boots nearly touching the supporting trusswork of the reflector. After rotating about both spin and yaw axes, he jetted toward the edge of the structure to await the intruder’s arrival.
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