Back in the Tau Ceti system, before they made the change, Kolya had flatly refused to go back inside. He had been out here during their first transition. He wanted to see it again. Infinity was curious about it, too; he had been underground, looking at the damage, seeking the source of the water leaks, and finding Griffith zipped up, helpless, in a survival pouch. Neither one of them had seen anything of that journey.
It was foolish, even dangerous, to remain perched outside on the starship’s skin during an experimental flight. But if something catastrophic happened to Starfarer, it probably would be no safer inside. So Infinity and Esther remained outside with Kolya, and watched transition unprotected.
“So,” Esther said, “what do you see?”
They tried to describe to each other what they saw. They could not make their perceptions match; they could not even make them touch at occasional points. Either they were seeing two entirely different things, or they were using two entirely different ways to try to describe them. It was as if they were communicating in different, mutually incomprehensible, languages, languages evolved from different roots.
In frustration, Infinity raised his head and stared into the missile crater. The slugs had come out of their nooks; they nearly covered the irregularly concave surface of the damaged area, seeking out the spaces that should be solid, filling them in around the open places that should carry water, nutrients, information. One slug crawled across the skin, leaving behind an opalescent trail of optical fibers.
Infinity squeezed his eyes closed, looked down, and opened them again.
Transition was gone.
Normal space spread out around him, and the new star system lay clearly in view, Sirius A bright, intense, gilded and damped by the gold shielding of Infinity’s faceplate; Sirius B dim and distant.
A few more degrees of spin took Sirius A out of sight.
Infinity started at Esther’s yelp of astonishment.
A graceful blue crescent blinked into existence, accompanied by a wash of light.
“Did you see that?” Esther exclaimed. “It just appeared!”
“A trick of the starlight...” Kolya said.
“It must be an optical illusion,” Infinity said. “It was there and we just didn’t see it.”
Infinity admired the planet for a moment, but abruptly, as he adjusted to the return to normal space, as his eyes acclimated to the light, he made out what he was looking at. He drew in his breath, shocked and stunned.
What lay in orbit behind Starfarer was a small blue planet, illuminated on one limb, three quarters full and one quarter dark.
It moved fast. Faster than the starship.
It was heading straight for Starfarer.
o0o
Starfarer plunged through space.
The planet rushed toward the starship from behind.
J.D. flinched back in her couch. Satoshi caught his breath. Victoria muttered a short, sharp oath. Stephen Thomas, uncharacteristically, said nothing. He lay easy and relaxed within his safety straps, watching.
“Where did it come from?” Satoshi exclaimed.
Distances and sizes are impossible to estimate in space, J.D. thought desperately. That thing must be large, and far away. It must be.
All Chi’s warning reactions began to scream.
“We know!” Victoria said.
The sounds stopped.
Zev let himself free of his couch and drifted to the window to cup his hands around his face and look out at the strange little world.
A holographic chart showed the sphere to be only a few tens of kilometers in diameter. But it was bigger than Starfarer, and its entire bulk would crash into the starship.
The stellar sail untwisted, grand, majestic, and slow. J.D. knew — without doing the math, she knew — that the sail could not deploy fast enough, could not change the starship’s course radically enough, to avoid the crash.
A blue haze rimmed the illuminated arc of the worldlet, and clouds glowed white in starlight. But clouds were impossible: the planetoid was surely too small to have a permanent atmosphere.
Perhaps it had volcanoes; perhaps one had erupted so recently that the gas and particles had not yet escaped its gravity to fly off into space.
“Not enough time,” Victoria said. “Not enough delta-v.”
“What is that thing?” Satoshi asked, fascinated despite the fact that it was going to kill them. “What the hell is it?”
Iphigenie appeared, in image, among them.
“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “Even if I were in the web. I can’t move the ship fast enough. I’m sorry. If the sail were powerful enough to move us that fast, Starfarer would disintegrate under the force.”
“I know,” Victoria said. “I’m sorry, too, Jenny.”
“That’s no natural object,” Satoshi said.
A chaotic mass of information roiled in front of him; he picked bits out, brought them forward, and inspected them, let them fade back into the confusion.
“It’s no bigger than a medium-sized asteroid, but it’s got an atmosphere. Oxygen, water, land —”
“We should have gone home,” Gerald said from his liaison post. “As I told you. I hope you’re satisfied!”
“I’m just delighted,” Victoria snarled. “And your last words can be ‘I told you so’!”
“Victoria, is the Chi ready to take off?” Professor Thanthavong asked.
“We can’t —”
“If you crash, too —”
“ — we go clean,” Stephen Thomas said.
“We have time. A few minutes to get everyone into the Chi or the transport or at least into suits or survival pouches. Afterwards, there may be enough of the starship to salvage...”
“I...”
J.D. felt a visceral reaction against taking off with the Chi, leaving Starfarer behind. When the starship crashed, there would be nothing left of it, only the people in the Chi and in the transport — could everyone on board fit inside the two small ships? She doubted it. The transport had been over-full when Starfarer dragged it into transition, with several hundred people remaining on the starship.
“It isn’t going to work,” Victoria said.
“We’ve got to try!” Thanthavong said. “Are you a survivor, or not? I thought you were!”
“Not like this,” Stephen Thomas said, very softly.
“We are all trying not to panic, Victoria,” Thanthavong said. “Don’t make it harder.”
“All right,” Victoria said. There was no life or hope in her voice. “We’ll get as many people on board as we possibly can.”
It doesn’t matter what we do now, J.D. thought. It doesn’t matter a bit.
She opened her safety straps and floated over to Zev’s side.
“It’s pretty,” Zev said. “It looks like it has seas.”
“It does have seas,” Satoshi said. “It has air. It has a very strong magnetic field, and the gravity of a small planet.”
“What!” Victoria exclaimed.
“We’re broadcasting our greeting, aren’t we?” J.D. said, turning back toward her colleagues with a sudden twinge of hope. “If the alien ship is still in this system, maybe it will hear us. Maybe the alien people will understand that we’re in trouble. Maybe they’ll come help us.”
“We’re broadcasting what we agreed on. Our introduction, and a copy of their maze.”
“But we’ve had no reply,” J.D. said sadly.
“No reply. And there’s no sign of the alien ship.”
“It’s moving,” Zev said.
J.D. joined Zev. She put her arm around him. His fur felt soft and sleek and warm. He snuggled close.
“Of course it is, Zev,” she said.
“It’s moving away.”
“It just —”
She stopped. The planetoid appeared to be curving in its course, moving aside from collision.
“What’s going on?” J.D. said. She touched Arachne and got back a reply that confirmed what Zev ha
d perceived. As the alien contact team and everyone aboard the starship watched, amazed, the planetoid accelerated. A gradual motion drew it aside from Starfarer. In complete astonishment, J.D. watched it as it moved away, slowed, and paced the starship. Messages flashed back and forth between Starfarer, Arachne, and the Chi, letting people know that they were not going to die today. At least not in the next few minutes.
o0o
Before the spin on the cylinder had pulled Infinity and Esther and Kolya out of sight of the planet, Infinity was clambering across the inspection net to the airlock, his colleagues close behind. They hurried toward the airlock, not because they had any illusions about being safer inside. Outside, they were helpless. Inside, they might be able to do some good.
Infinity hooked in with Arachne, hoping for information that would negate his fears. Instead, he received confirmation of them. The planetoid plunged toward the starship.
The airlock cycled. Infinity faced the others. Kolya and Esther looked as shocked as he felt.
They did not speak. There was nothing to say. This was the one possibility that might, in the normal progress of their voyage, destroy the ship. During the blind moment between transition and normal space-time, Starfarer could crash into an asteroid.
But it wasn’t supposed to happen, Infinity thought. We knew there’s a vanishingly small chance that it could. But nobody thought it ever would...
And that’s the weirdest-looking asteroid...
They heard Thanthavong’s plans for the Chi and the transport; they heard Victoria’s reluctant acquiescence.
“But where am I supposed to fly it?” Esther said. “Earth-type planets orbiting Sirius? No way.”
And by the time the airlock door opened, the emergency had ended.
Infinity’s hands shook with the rush and sudden ebb of adrenaline. He took off his helmet, shook his hair free, opened his suit, and let it collapse on the floor.
Esther flung herself between Infinity and Kolya, catching one man in each arm, hugging them close. Infinity, in his turn, held her gratefully and put his free arm around Kolya. He thought the cosmonaut was going to pull away; instead, he put his arms around his younger colleagues and embraced them, looming over them.
“I have never been so scared in my whole life,” Esther said. “I thought the missile carrier was scary! That was nothing.”
“Yeah,” Infinity said. That was about all he could get out.
“I would not like to repeat the experience,” Kolya said.
They broke apart self-consciously. Kolya and Esther did not meet each other’s eyes. They were from completely different backgrounds and cultures, but each was a pilot. Pilots were supposed to take every emergency calmly, and coolly, and never reveal their fear. Not even afterwards.
“Strange...” Kolya said. “When I tested fighter planes, when I was the first to use a new spacecraft, I came much closer to death. Seconds from it, instead of minutes. The experiences frightened me. But they were exhilarating. The first thing I wanted to do was fly the plane again. Put the spacecraft through the same routine. Make it work. Get it right. This time it’s different. I don’t feel exhilarated. Only relieved. Grateful.” He shrugged. “Perhaps it’s age.”
“You’ve got control, when you test-fly,” Esther said.
“Yes — ?” Kolya said, not understanding her point.
“It’s the control that gives you the rush. Knowing you were the one who pulled things together. Here, we couldn’t do anything.”
Kolya considered what she had said. “I believe that may be part of it.”
“Everybody was going to die,” Infinity said. “That’s what I was thinking. It wouldn’t have been so bad, if it was only me or a few people. Somehow it felt worse that it was going to be everybody.”
They made their way up through the skin of Starfarer. Infinity switched his attention back and forth between his own surroundings and the incredible miniature planet pacing Starfarer. The ecosystem amazed him and intrigued him. He wondered if he would get a chance to visit it, to talk to the person who designed or directed it. And he wondered if an artificial ecosphere might draw Alzena from her apathy.
o0o
J.D. touched Arachne.
“Professor Thanthavong, is everyone all right?”
“Yes,” Thanthavong said. “And we’re still... trying not to panic.”
“Yes.” She managed a shaky laugh. “I know how that feels.”
Gerald Hemminge interrupted. “You’re supposed to talk through me,” he said. “I am your liaison, after all.”
After a long silence, and at a loss for anything else to say, J.D. answered him.
“I’m sorry, Gerald,” she said. “We’ll try to follow the protocol from now on.”
The blue planetoid hovered nearby.
“You know what it’s doing?” Victoria gestured toward it. “It’s moving to draw Starfarer into orbit.”
“How is it possible, Victoria?” J.D. asked.
“I don’t know.” Victoria sounded stunned. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe we’re all undergoing mass hallucination. We’re seeing it. But I can’t explain it. What’s that thing using for propulsion? What is it?”
“It’s the alien ship,” J.D. said.
All her teammates stared at her.
“That’s the most reasonable explanation, isn’t it? We came here looking for a ship: for whatever the craft was that left the spectral signature. We expected... I don’t know, some kind of mechanical spaceship, a pointy rocketship—”
“A flying saucer,” Satoshi said.
“Or a big cigar-shaped blimp thing.” She spread her hands, making sketches in the air. “But it won’t be anything like that. Why would alien people want to fly around in a tin can? We sure don’t. Starfarer doesn’t look like any classical spaceship.”
“So they’ve replicated a natural environment,” Satoshi said. “And they’ve done it even more accurately than we have.”
“But they were way ahead of us,” Victoria said.
“And now they’re beside us, and when we got here they were behind us.”
“Maybe they stopped off to sightsee,” Satoshi said dryly. “But J.D.’s idea makes a lot of sense.”
“Strange as it is, it’s the simplest explanation I can think of,” J.D. said.
“Then why don’t they answer us!” Victoria exclaimed.
“Let’s go see,” J.D. said.
Victoria gazed thoughtfully at the natural-looking, wholly unnatural object.
“Very well,” she said.
Politely, but more so all their other colleagues would know what they were doing, they informed Gerald Hemminge of their plans.
The Chi pushed free of Starfarer, and accelerated toward the planetoid.
“The conditions down there are Earthlike,” Satoshi said. “The air’s about twenty-two percent oxygen, the rest nitrogen with traces of the usual stuff. Lots of water. Shirtsleeves environment at the middle latitudes, thirty degrees Celsius.”
“Shirtsleeves for you, my dear,” Victoria said. “Sounds like air conditioner weather to me.”
Satoshi smiled, then sobered.
“Where’s the heat coming from?” J.D. said. They were too far from either of the stars in the system to receive much warmth from starlight.
“Underground.”
“Neutronium?” Victoria said.
That made sense to J.D. A chunk of a neutron star, to provide the necessary mass, to create enough gravity to hold the air and the water, to tap for energy. A thick shell of rock and dirt, perhaps even of metal, to absorb extra energy, store it, reradiate it as heat, and protect the inhabitants from the interior radiation. Plants evolved to photosynthesize in the infrared as well as the visual spectrum, when the planetoid left the vicinity of a star.
Results: a mini-planet, no native sun required.
“If you agree, Victoria, I’d like to transmit our regular broadcast toward the...” She waved one hand in the direction of the planetoid, unsur
e what to call it. “The same transmission we’re sending back to Starfarer.”
Victoria shrugged. “No objection. I don’t see how they’d be able to decipher it, without compatible equipment.”
“You’re right,” J.D. said. “Of course. But. Still.”
“Go ahead and try it.”
J.D. made the necessary request. The Chi was still so close to Starfarer that she could work through Arachne. The web behaved normally: as if it could read its users’ minds. Until it finished healing, Arachne was dedicating most of its attention to communications between the starship and its scout, but as far as J.D. could tell, the second crash had left the web with no tangible damage. That did not seem fair.
Feral would have gotten a kick out of this, J.D. thought. He might even have persuaded Victoria to let him come along. She glanced over at Stephen Thomas, wondering what he was thinking. The cut on his forehead had healed, his black eyes had faded. He looked as beautiful, and as calm, and as cold, as a classical marble statue, not permitting himself to react to Feral’s death; not permitting himself to react to anything.
She turned away and squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself not to cry.
“Professor Thanthavong,” Stephen Thomas said, his words abrupt. He had remained calm through the threat of imminent destruction and the shock of their deliverance, but he had not spoken since the emergency ended. He ignored J.D.’s promise about liaison protocol.
“I am here, Stephen Thomas.”
“Did Arachne look at the evidence?” His voice was cold. “Is Blades out of the web yet?”
“He no longer has access to Arachne,” Thanthavong said. “You may ease your mind on that concern.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
“I? Nothing. I did propose that he remain sequestered until we convene a meeting. Then he may, of course, speak in his own defense. He has agreed to my suggestion.”
“When’s the meeting?”
“You and J.D. are the witnesses against him. The meeting can’t take place until you return.”
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 57