Tomorrow’s Heritage

by Juanita Coulson

  On the view screens, Earth floated, achingly beautiful. The Moon was a glowing pearl, a second planetfall, but not his destination. An arrow on the nay monitors marked Goddard Colony’s location, too tiny yet to see, with the naked eye.

  Geosynch HQ was gone now, lost over the visibility horizon, noted only by sensor blips. The blackness closed in. Their ship seemed motionless, suspended between Earth and Moon.

  He and Gib Owens were alone, setting forth across a sea far wider than any planetary waters, soaring up into eternal night, a night in which the Sun never set.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ooooooooo

  New Nightmares for Old

  The call had come in from CNAU Caribbean Rescue. Todd couldn’t remember who had taken it, could barely remember their climbing into the boat, bucketing through gale warnings to reach that lonely jumble of rocks off the Florida Keys. Rescue warned them not to fly. All air traffic was grounded. They tried to stop them from setting out by boat, in fact. No chance of that. The Saunders never hesitated. They went together, as a family, not daring to speak except to exhort the captain to hurry.

  The tropical disturbance had passed by the time they reached the site. It made the emotional devastation that much worse. Todd teetered on a rocky perch, staring in horror at the wreckage smeared down the cliffs and into the surf below. Rescue officers tried to lead him away, telling him and Pat to take their mother back to the boat and wait.

  It was too late. He had seen—so had Jael and Pat and Marietta. The Rescue crew was carrying a litter up from the storm-battered seaside cliffs. The man on the stretcher wasn’t Ward Saunder, though. A black man, terribly hurt. Roy Paige, Ward’s co-pilot and second in command at the lab. Jael stopped the stretched bearers, touched Paige’s bloody forehead, whispered something to him. Something private, personal. The two of them had been together so long, had known Ward an equal length of time. Paige’s tortured reply was a cold blade in Todd’s gut, twisting.

  “Couldn’t . . . went down so fast. Knocked us right outa . . . outa the sky. Couldn’t . . . oh, God, Jael! Tried to hol’ onto him. The water! Tide hit me. Couldn’t . . . I blacked out. He’s . . . he wasn’t there any more. He was already dead, even then, even . . . even then . . .”

  Nightmare, a recurring one. It had returned, unbidden, unwelcome, again and again throughout these eleven years. Roy Paige, reaching out, pleading for forgiveness when he had no need, when he had struggled past all human comprehension to save his friend’s dead body. Jael, dry-eyed, clasping that hand—the only whole limb Paige had left. His legs and right arm were bloody pulp, his head swollen and gory as well. Pat, holding Mari close, weeping with her, his free arm around his brother as Todd’s tears began to fall.

  “He wasn’t there any more . . .”

  Todd jolted to wakefulness, useless alarms jangling along his nerves. He was in the shuttle. All that had happened a long while ago. Old grief. The wound hadn’t healed, and sometimes the memory came back full strength. He forced himself to cairn down, stretching and yawning.

  “Rough day, sir?” Owens asked politely.

  Todd bit off a retort. “Something like that.”

  “Eyeball status in about an hour, docking in two.”

  “Good. Right on schedule, then.” Todd rubbed his eyes. For all the exhilaration he had felt when they launched, this had been a nominal, very boring flight. He and Owens had tended chores, confirmed their ETA with Goddard Traffic Control, and fine-tuned the course. After the initial stress period, they had ditched their helmets and opened some suit seals, getting comfortable. They had taken turns overseeing the comps and screens. They had read, updated the logs, and talked. Todd had steered the conversation onto safe topics. To his relief, Owens didn’t dig for private info. They stuck to flight shoptalk, sports, speculations on which faction would have the most survivors when the controlled-violence arena season was over in Brazil, and gossip about mutual acquaintances along the ComLink, Goddard, and Lunar Base circuits.

  There had been the regular interruptions. Nav sensors pinpointed space junk and lower orbiting objects. Ship idents and sats were already in the comps. There wasn’t a remote danger of collision. Nevertheless, the rules set up during spaceflight’s infancy required that Todd acknowledge each contact and reconfirm his own position.

  Up at L5, duty watch changed at 1800 hours, and the pleasant soprano voice on the com was replaced by a baritone with an Israeli accent. That gave Todd and the young pilot several minutes’ worth of ribald jokes.

  Time had begun to wear, and Todd had dozed off. The nap hadn’t refreshed him, thanks to the nightmare. He stretched again, debating whether or not to take another gray medication. The first dose hadn’t quite overcome acceleration’s demands on his circulatory system. Anyway, when he reached Goddard, he would be due for another gel capsule. He muffled a yawn and compared his watch with the ship’s clocks. ETA 2500, Atlantic Time. Nocturnal watch. He hoped Mari and Kevin were on that rotation currently and wouldn’t have to miss sleep because of his arrival. They had promised they would meet him at docking . . .

  Todd leaned forward against his safety webbing, staring. Shock gave way to disbelief. He tumbled the data, using keys, not trusting his voice to be steady. His fingers flew as he demanded a recompute. The monitors had to be wrong, a glitch somewhere. Scans and multiple backups ran checks in split fractions of seconds. Range numbers—and the blip—took over the screens once more. No mistake.

  Not possible. Todd gaped, bewildered, wanting the evidence to go away. That configuration couldn’t be there. Nobody had seen anything like that since . . . He shoved panic away, breathing evenly. “Gib?” His mouth had suddenly become very dry. He gulped hard and spoke again, loud enough to be heard this time. “Gib? We’ve got problems.”

  “What?” The pilot had a music tape on his private channel, had been tapping his knee in rhythm. Now he darted a glance at Todd’s monitors and gasped. Hastily, he threw the display on his own screens.

  The comps fed continually, and each new datum made matters worse. There was no way to argue the blip out of existence. Something was there, and closing with them frighteningly fast.

  “ASAT?” Todd wondered, than answered himself. “No. That’s more than an anti-satellite device. Lots heavier. Missile? Hasn’t been one of those in orbit since the Space Neutrality Treaty was signed. We’re through with that crazy stuff, knocking each other’s satellites to bits. We have to be. Damn.”

  Todd had a wild urge to laugh hysterically. The situation couldn’t be real. But it was. He had been spacing since his teens. He knew the risks. A few times it had been scary, but he had come through. This particular risk had never come up before, however. Freak equipment failure, maintenance mistakes—explainable problems, part of the package. That blip wasn’t explainable in those terms. Not at all. Whatever it was wouldn’t identify itself, wouldn’t acknowledge anything their nav comps were throwing at it. All the careful programming designed to eliminate collisions in space was useless. The green mark was coming on steadily, uncaring that it was bringing sudden death to the two men riding in the shuttle.

  Owens was on the com. The pilot didn’t seem so young any more. Todd recognized the crisp tone and manner—military. Owens was acting like a combat-trained pilot from a planetside war zone, or like one of the Lunar Base fighters. He boosted the uplink gain to maximum. “GC Traffic, this is SE Shuttle One-Five. Copy Feed. Urgent. Data going to you now.” Owens compressed the signal, giving coordinates and tracking states to Goddard as fast as possible, straining the systems. “Hostile on intercept. Classified A Priority One. ETA impact twenty minutes. Sensors read DE armed. Immediate countereffort needed.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Todd yelled. “Where did you get that classification?”

  “Better suit up full, sir,” Owens said absently, treating Todd as supercargo. “Things may get a bit rough.”

  “Captain, I want to know what you’re doing, and I want to know now.”

 
Todd’s adrenaline-charged demand made Owens give him a second look. “Yes, sir,” he said with considerably more deference. “I’ll explain as soon as I can. Help’s on the way. Right now we’ve got to raise orbit and dodge, if possible.”

  They locked stares. Todd wondered where this help was supposed to come from. Goddard? They were much too far out for the Colony’s regular craft to reach them in time.

  “Okay,” Todd said finally. “Go. But we will talk about this, Captain. Rely on it.”

  Todd grabbed his helmet and jammed it on, snapping the seals shut. Owens was already reprogramming. Orbital maneuvering systems whined up to full power as the corrections sped in. Todd secured his throat and sleeve openings. Inside his protective gear, he began to sweat, then shivered as a chilly wetness snaked along his spine. Owens was trying to complete his resuiting with one hand while he cued the comps manually with the other. Todd reached over to help him and earned a twisted smile in thanks.

  “Brace.”

  The burn smashed Todd into the couch. Pacing himself, he let air out of his lungs as gradually as he could, counting his pulse, attempting to be detached. A long burn. But he wasn’t going to give Owens lectures about fuel expense.

  When the correction was completed, alarm lights flashed, protesting the drain on the reserves. Together, Todd and the pilot peered at the readouts. New figures came up on their position and the bogey’s.

  “My God,” Todd growled, aghast. “It’s altering vector, too. Following us.”

  “Have to try another orbit change.”

  “There isn’t time.” Even as he argued, Todd was working with Owens, frantically pushing another burn into the OMS. There weren’t many options, not if they hoped to evade. “If we could just jam its guidance frequencies . . .”

  “I already tried that,” Owens said.

  “You’re saying we’ve got military counterjam gear on this ship? Who gave you the authority to install it? That makes us fair target! The Neutrality Treaty . . .”

  “Screw the Treaty. Wouldn’t make any difference,” Owens said with tired contempt. “That hostile’s on full FET and DSCS override plus, bombing right through everything we can throw. Come on, come on . . .”

  He was no longer talking to Todd. To whom was he talking? Owens was much too familiar with military hardware for Todd’s taste. He searched his mind for declassified write-ups of satellite killers and counterdeterrents. Leftovers from the Twenties, all of those, when the space wars had nearly wiped out Earth’s communications systems and resource-monitoring satellites as well as every spy orbiter. Old stuff, part of history. Todd had been in his teens. Owens had been in diapers. Ward had coached Todd and taught him as they built ComLink to replace the ruins of that madness in space . . .

  Except a new war in space was rushing at him, and he was about to be one of its victims.

  Why?

  He hated his ignorance and Owens’s secrecy. A modern, directed energy weapon or something even worse was homing in on them.

  He was going to die, and he wouldn’t even know the reason why. That seemed the worst thing about it—not knowing why. They had done everything they could, yet the damned thing was overtaking them, closing fast. In fifteen minutes, he and Gib Owens would be minuscule pieces of flesh and bone, if that much of them survived. They would be strewn along the shuttle’s orbital path, drifting to Goddard and beyond.

  “It’s not after us,” Owens said, glaring at the screens. The bogey was coming up on visual. “We just got in the way. They’ll get here in time, though,” the young pilot added cryptically.

  “Who?”

  Todd hadn’t expected an answer, and he didn’t get one. The scans methodically plotted collision courses. Minutes to kill-distance. The thing didn’t need to impact to wipe them out. If it got near enough, it would kill them when it disintegrated.

  Todd felt a strange, remote sadness. He wished he had Beth Isaacs’ faith in the new mysticism. There was so much he wanted to say and do and learn, a lifetime’s worth and more. The alien messenger. How was it going to be received? What would the alien species be like? Would Dian and the team be able to break down the language and speak directly to the unknown beings out there? The discovery of the ages . . .

  His discovery. And he would never live to see its outcome.

  I’m glad you didn’t come along on this trip, Dian. Finish the job for us, will you . . .?

  He cued the tracking monitors, perversely seeking the latest data, wanting to be informed up to the last second. To Todd’s stunned amazement, new blips appeared and a swarm of new numbers.

  Ships! Coming in on a different vector! Six of them!

  “Right on track!” Owens pounded enthusiastically on the console. The little blips brightened and grew, visuals shaping and defining the fast incoming craft. “Get it! Go! Go!”

  Todd tried to cope. Help. On the way. Gib’s happy yelps confirmed that. But the newcomers bore no idents, didn’t match any configuration in the comps. Sensors read heavy armament, a lot of top-level military hardware, probably classified. The ships hurtled in on a bypassing vector, avoiding the shuttle and heading on intercept with the hostile.

  Then coherent light laced dazzling ribbons across the exterior scans. Todd’s momentary surge of fear faded as he realized the salvo wasn’t targeted for him and Gib, not when they could see the burst edge-on.

  What was it? Something very sophisticated, he was sure. The shuttle’s view screens overloaded and shut down to save the systems. Images solarized as a returning blast of light surged from impact point. Giving up, all the screens went dark.

  Todd counted down from the numbers frozen on the kill-range estimate. Could the ship’s radiation-counter gear handle the wave? The civilian shuttle hadn’t been built with hostilities in mind, but he had no way of knowing how much forbidden military shielding Owens might have installed.

  Useless to worry. The wave would hit them just about . . . now.

  He clutched the restraints, his head bouncing inside the cushioned helmet. The shuttle yawed violently to the right, pitched up, and every alarm went off. Battered by noise and movement, his middle ears rebelled against the tumbling horizon.

  Emergency systems took over, fighting for attitude control. Very gradually, Todd fell back into the couch. His stomach heaved and his ears rang as if echoing the warning claxons. But the sickening motion was steadying out, bit by bit. He willed his internal systems to quiet down, too, glad he had a tough stomach. Todd swallowed hard, trying to relieve the throbbing pressure in his ears.

  The screens were recuperating, also. Rearward visuals revealed a shimmering cloud of metallic substances continuing on the bogey’s vector. Sensors warned that the stuff was nasty, but it was widely scattered. The shields ought to be able to take it.

  Either the unknowns’ weapons had detonated the hostile, or it had been triggered to self-destruct. In any case, it had touched off while it was still out of killing range, thankfully.

  Gingerly, Todd swiveled his head, testing his equilibrium. The shuttle was still a trifle unsteady, but not enough to bring back his nausea. “Gib?” He looked anxiously at Owens when the pilot didn’t respond. Todd wriggled out of his seat harness and hooked a tether to his belt and the overhead anchor as a precaution. He crawled close to Owens’s couch. “Gib? You hurt?”

  The pilot mumbled and stirred slightly. That was reassuring, but Todd warned the man to take it slow, nevertheless. With the systems coming up to capacity, he could plug in the med monitors to assess Owens’s condition. As he waited for the display, he peered closely at the other man, noting a trickle of blood running down the side of Gib’s face. Despite the inner padding, Owens must have cracked his scalp open during that wild tumble from the shock wave.

  The med monitors reported Owens’s vitals were good, but the possibility of head injury and muscle strain existed. Gib fumbled with his helmet, and Todd repeated his earlier warning, pressing the man back in his couch. He opened the helmet faceplate for a
closer look at the wound, fearing the pilot would pull his helmet off, anyway, if he didn’t give him some open air. He was making the younger man as comfortable as he could when the com cut in.

  “Shuttle One-Five, do you read?”

  On the exterior views, Todd saw the newcomers breaking formation. Some headed for the impact point, tracking the hostile’s debris. Others were setting up parallel orbits to the shuttle’s. Todd waited a long minute, then called deliberately, “I read you. Identity?”

  There was a noticeable pause. Then a woman’s voice replied, “GC Defense Unit Three. Do you need assistance, One-Five?”

  Owens grunted and tried to sit up. “. . . ‘m okay . . .”

  “You are not okay.” Owens sighed and submitted with remarkably little fuss. Todd let the mysterious friendlies stew for a while as he checked the readouts. When he went back on com, he made his voice as impersonal as the woman’s. “Unit Three, we can make Goddard without assistance. Ship’s integrity is go. My co-pilot is injured. I want to dock without delay. Request medical personnel meet us. Also notify Mariette Saunder what happened, or put me through . . .”

  “We are under personal com restriction, Shuttle One-Five. We will relay your message.”