Ad Astra

by Jack Campbell

  Francesa gazed up at her. “Why are we leaving? I thought -.”

  “You’re leaving because you were still following the survival rules to the best of your ability. That’s the justification I used. Those who tried to change those rules to benefit themselves, or because they thought themselves better than you, won’t be coming.”

  Francesa was still thinking about that when her father returned with the others, dragging or carrying unconscious bodies with them. “Twenty-one,” her father gasped as he entered, three children in his arms. “There was another child -.”

  Captain Balestra raised that commanding hand, frowning. “Wait.” She paused, as if listening. “The children are small enough. We can take twenty-one. Now, get back from the hatch. The opening, that is.”

  Everyone crowded away, then the walls around the opening flowed together and sealed into a solid surface. Captain Balestra murmured to herself some more, then looked up at the workers around her. “We’re lifting. Don’t worry. You won’t feel it. It’ll take about an hour to reach the Bellegrange. Accommodations will be tight, and food rationed, but we should be okay until we reach port and the Sanctuary people can take charge of you.”

  Francesa’s father laughed. “We’re accustomed to small homes and little food. But hope is something we’ll have to get used to.” He glanced at Francesa, showing surprise at her somber expression. “What’s the matter? Surely you’re not sorry to leave.”

  “No,” Francesa protested. “It’s just . . . what will they be thinking? The Officers and Crew, who were so sure they would be taken up. Instead, they’re the ones left behind.”

  Captain Balestra gave her a grim smile. “You’ve got a good heart to still care about that. I left them what supplies and survival equipment I could spare, and I left them a message to think about. I told them I had an obligation to take those most in need, an obligation they should understand since the writings they revered urged that behavior. I told them those left would have to work hard to survive the coming colder period, but that since they’d proven very good at looking out for their own interests they should be well suited for the task. And I told them that anyone who believes in a powerful divinity who rules them perhaps shouldn’t go around making decisions for that divinity, such as who is worthy and who is not.”

  Francesa nodded slowly, thinking of how hard life would be for those remaining behind. “But they followed the writings. You told us the writings said good things.”

  Balestra nodded as well. “The writings, the survival rules, do say many good things. If the so-called chosen ones had spent more time and effort actually following the letter and spirit of those rules, and less time and effort oppressing those who read the rules differently, I would’ve had a much harder time choosing who to leave.”

  Francesa’s father stared downward. “So, they were judged.”

  “I guess so.” Balestra shrugged. “But then, sooner or later we all are, aren’t we? The important thing to remember is that we never get to judge ourselves. Come on, girl. I want to show you the stars.”

  Author's Note on Odysseus

  The third story I ever sold. At the time I wrote Odysseus, the wreck of the Titanic had been found in the dark, frigid depths of the Atlantic ocean. Like everyone else, I viewed the pictures of the wreck and found them fascinating. But I’m also a sailor, and I couldn’t help thinking of all who had died on that ship, of the many who had gone all the way to the bottom with her. Their bodies were gone, literally dissolved into the waters in which they lay, but still this was their resting place. And then expeditions began recovering items from the wreck, bringing up souvenirs. That just felt wrong to me. The result was Odysseus. A spacecraft faces a physical and a moral dilemma when it stumbles across a legendary wreck. The law says one thing, the desire to profit says another. But just maybe the original crew still has a say in the matter.

  Odysseus

  It was an accident, really, an accident so improbable as to be within a hair's-breadth of impossible. Yet, every individual human life is the sum of similar vast improbabilities, so the accident may have had a certain cosmic inevitability about it. I don't know. I drive ships for a living, and leave Big Questions to the priests, philosophers and physicists.

  My Chief Engineer, Val Steiner, triggered this particular accident. "The primary Umbari Coil's drifted slightly out of alignment. We need to drop out of U-Space long enough to recalibrate."

  I shrugged in reply. As decisions by a ship's Captain go, this was an easy one. "If we gotta, we gotta. How long will it take?"

  "Half-a-day. Maybe."

  "Maybe?" I signaled annoyance with an aggravated frown.

  Steiner just smiled, secure on her pillar as god of the machinery that made my ship work. "If there's no complications."

  "And if there are?"

  "It'll take longer."

  One of my passengers happened to be present, and now he leaned forward, frowning as well, though in a questioning way. "Excuse me, Captain. Why is this a problem? Doesn't your ship have a back-up Coil?"

  I smiled reassuringly back at him. "Sure, Mister Garand. That's the rule. Every ship is required to have two fully functioning Umbari Coils running. That's why we have to recalibrate the primary one. If it drifts far enough out of alignment to fail, or if we can't calibrate it, we just pop in a replacement Coil immediately. No big deal."

  "But we have to drop out of U-space?" Garand didn't seem particularly reassured. "We're not in distress, are we?"

  Val shot him her own confident grin. "Of course not. And once we've recalibrated the primary Coil, we'll be sure we won't be in distress anytime soon. Just a little preventive maintenance, that's all." Garand nodded and left the bridge, still looking somewhat uncertain.

  "Thanks for not mentioning the failure rate of Umbari Coils. That might have scared the passengers," I mockingly praised Val.

  She sketched a sarcastic salute with her right hand in reply. "No problem, Captain. Besides, my Coils don't fail."

  "Sure. That's why we've got two working constantly." I triggered the all-hands circuit to warn we were dropping out of U-space, waited several minutes to give everyone a chance to strap down, then initiated the sequence. The world swam off-balance/inside-out for a moment, then the screens cleared to reveal the black emptiness of interstellar space. A trillion stars stared down coldly, their light magnificent but frightening, like distant fires mocking someone drowning in a sea vacant of everything but the certainty of lonely death.

  Or it should have been vacant. Instead, Victoria Watabayashi, my First Officer, turned to me with an expression of amazement. "I'm picking up a ship's beacon."

  "You're kidding."

  "Nope." Wata adjusted her controls, fingers dancing across the panel as if she were a pianist. "The signal's really strong, boss. We're almost on top of it."

  "Jesus. Another ship in normal space between stars and we dropped out into its lap. What are the odds of that?"

  "Beats me." Wata's fingers played another brief tune. "Strange. I can't ID the beacon. It's not in the current ships' registry."

  "So check every reference we've got. If it's in space, one of those should have it."

  "Doing it now." She smiled. "Got it. Registry is..." Wata's face paled as her smile vanished.

  "What's the matter?" I keyed my own panel to view the readout, then froze in turn. "Odysseus?" I finally whispered.

  "Odysseus," Wata confirmed in a shaky voice.

  #

  My ship's mess deck didn't fit anyone's definition of spacious, but it did encompass barely enough room for my few crew members and even fewer passengers to all gather together. The crew, experienced enough to know such a meeting while underway was extremely unusual, stared at me with a mixture of misgiving and curiosity, while the passengers idly waited in blissful ignorance. "Okay, everybody, we've encountered another ship." My crew's wonderment visibly intensified, in counterpart to the calm acceptance of the news by the passengers. "Not just any ship. It's th
e Odysseus."

  It took a moment for every member of the crew to realize the significance. The reaction was palpable enough for even the passengers to notice this time. One of those passengers, a physician named Ortega, pointed a blunt finger my way. "What does that mean? What is special about this other ship named Odysseus?"

  Val answered before I could. "Odysseus was the first," she advised. "The first manned ship outfitted with a prototype Umbari Coil, the first ship sent off to another star. The same star, as a matter of fact, that we're heading for."

  "I see. Did it reach the star?"

  "No one knew, until now. Odysseus jumped into U-space, and vanished. Nobody has ever known what happened to her, but there's been speculation that she was doomed when her Umbari Coil failed. She only had one."

  "Only one?" Garand wondered. "You confirmed to me earlier that every ship now has to have two. Why did they only have one?"

  "They thought one was enough," Val stated curtly. "They were wrong."

  "The fact that we've found Odysseus," I added, "tends to confirm that theory. We're closing on the derelict, and so far we haven't seen any obvious external damage. It's still on course for its destination, though it won't get there for more than another century yet at the speed it's making in normal space."

  "Derelict?" Doctor Ortega questioned. "This means the crew is dead?"

  "It's been almost two hundred years," Val pointed out. "There's not a ship made which can sustain a closed environment that long, even when everything is working, and Umbari Coils tend to drag other equipment down when they fail. Most likely, the crew's been dead for almost the entire time."

  Silence reigned for a moment, then somebody whispered the word I knew would come up sooner or later: "Salvage."

  "Yeah," I immediately agreed, before a dozen disparate conversations could spring up on their own. "The Odysseus is derelict, long-abandoned. Whoever finds her can claim the ship and everything on her."

  "Christ, Captain, this isn't just any derelict. It's gotta be worth a fortune."

  "Yeah," I agreed again. "A very large fortune. Under salvage law, a portion of that fortune would go to everyone aboard this ship. The question is, what do we do about it?"

  "What do you mean?" a passenger demanded. "If its worth that much money, claim it!"

  "It's not just a hunk of metal," Val replied, her voice deceptively mild. "That is, or was, another ship. A ship whose crew is still aboard, though doubtless long dead. If we board, even just to rig a tow line, it'll be the moral equivalent of digging up gold in a cemetery."

  "That's stating it a little strongly," I suggested. "But that is essentially the question. Do we desecrate the final resting place of some of mankind's greatest heroes, those humans who first reached for the stars?"

  "I'm against it," Cargo Master Walker declared bluntly. "Leave them alone."

  "Are you mad?" Garand blurted. "That derelict is ours for the taking, and worth a fortune to us all!"

  "I don't care." Walker glared around, finally centering his anger on the space somewhere between me and Garand. "My family has been sailors for generations, on the seas of Earth. Let me tell you, there's a hard and fast rule sailors follow. Leave the dead to the sea. No ship, no sailor, ever prospered by disturbing those drowned. It's not right. Let them sleep. I've no wish to awaken their spirits to torment this ship."

  A hush fell across the room, the quiet finally broken by Garand's harsh laughter. "Well, I guess science has spoken! Is anyone going to let rank superstition keep them from fame and fortune?"

  "That's enough," I rebuked Garand, my tone bringing a flush to his face. "Does anyone else object to boarding the Odysseus?"

  "I do," Val announced firmly.

  "You agree with Walker?"

  "No. Yes." Val's mouth worked, then tightened into a thin line. "Those people, the crew of the Odysseus, that's their tomb. They shouldn't be disturbed, not because we fear them, but because we respect them. We owe them that."

  "You said they've been dead a long time," Doctor Ortega observed.

  "Not long enough!" Val shot back, then subsided, embarrassed. "Sorry."

  "No problem," I stated softly. "Who was it?"

  "My great-grandfather. He served in engineering on the Odysseus." Val's eyes, icy with anger, fixed on Garand. "His final resting place deserves to be respected," she repeated.

  Doctor Ortega cleared her throat, then spoke softly. "I understand your concern, as well as that of Mr. Walker, but this is far from the first ship to be found after being lost. There was that ship long ago, on one of Earth's oceans, what was the name? The Titanic. I read once there was considerable debate on whether the wreck should be disturbed or left as a monument, yet eventually some of the remnants were recovered. Is this not the same thing?"

  "No." My flat response drew a raised eyebrow from Ortega. "Wrecks in deep water are different, Doctor. Unless you get to them pretty fast, there aren't any bodies left to desecrate. Everything, flesh and skeleton, disappears pretty quickly in the ocean environment. There weren't any dead left at the site of the Titanic when it was found, except in spirit. But a space wreck leaves everything behind, frozen for effective eternity. We checked the records, and no manned wreck has ever been lost for anything near this long. It's a unique case."

  "Besides which," Val added sharply, "military wrecks have always been labeled national war memorials. People never hauled up pieces of sunken military ships because if they had they would have been tossed into jail."

  "Was Odysseus military?" somebody wondered.

  "It had some military personnel on board," Val confirmed.

  "That's not the same thing," Garand insisted stubbornly.

  "No, it's not." I nodded toward Wata. "Our records indicate Odysseus was officially listed as non-military, a peaceful probe of the stars. If it had been government property, we'd still have to worry about an official claim, but public sentiment of the time was such that it was funded by a quasi-private organization. Legally, Odysseus is private property, and thus liable to salvage. Since the derelict is still in interstellar space, no other private or governmental authority can dispute possession the way they could if Odysseus was in their territory."

  Walker jabbed a finger toward me. "So what do you think, Captain? Your vote is the only one that really counts."

  "True enough. To be honest, I don't think I want to be remembered as a grave robber, but at the same time I know that our contact with the Odysseus has been automatically entered in our ship's official log. I can't tamper with that log, so as soon as we reach port a lot of other people will know where Odysseus can be found. That'll make it just a matter of time until someone else boards her."

  "At least your conscience would be clear," Val stated, with an steely glance toward Garand.

  "But what if there's survivors?" Wata wondered.

  "Survivors?" Every eye shifted away from me and toward Wata.

  "Impossible," Val declared flatly.

  "No, not impossible," Wata insisted. "Very unlikely, but if enough crew sacrificed themselves, if everything went right, there might be. We can't rule it out, that one or two descendants of the original crew might have managed to survive this long. We can't leave, not without checking to see if someone is there."

  "I'm not sure I'd want to find a survivor," Walker suggested with a shudder. "Alone out here all their lives, with all the things they'd have had to do to survive?"

  "They might not be exactly sane," Wata agreed. "But that's not the issue." She turned to me. "Besides, Captain, if we claim Odysseus we can ensure she and her crew's remains are treated properly. True grave robbers might just rip everything apart and sell it to the highest bidders."

  I thought about it for a moment, keenly aware of the eyes fixed on me. "Okay. Wata's right. We do have a responsibility to check out the ship. Beyond that, I reserve the right to leave Odysseus in peace or place a claim and take her in tow."

  Garand glared at me. "I don't think I care for that. What's wrong with a
vote now?"

  "The Captain just voted," Val replied with a wolfish grin, "and that's the law out here, Mister Garand."

  #

  Doctor Ortega struggled with the seals on her suit, finally getting the last one secured. "You ever been on a walk, Doctor?" I asked.

  "No, not in space. I trust that is not too great a problem."

  "It means you have no bad lessons to unlearn," I assured her. "There's only three hard-and-fast rules on a walk out here. Number One, anytime you're outside, make sure you're fastened securely to something. Number Two, always make sure everyone else knows where you are and what you're doing. Number Three, keep your eyes fixed on the Odysseus or our own ship. Don't look away."

  She nodded judiciously. "I understand the reasoning behind the first two rules, but why the third? Are not the stars glorious in interstellar space?"

  "They are," Val replied in a dry tone. "Doc, humans have a well-developed fear of falling. Near a planet, that's not a problem, because there's something big nearby to fall on and that makes our hind-brains happy. Out here, there's nothing, just the one-and-only bottomless pit to fall through until the crack of doom. People lose their minds staring into it, because there's nothing for those minds to hold onto. Keep your eyes on the ships."

  "I will," Ortega promised, paling slightly. She moved toward the airlock hatch, peering at an adjacent view-screen centered on the nearby hull of the Odysseus.

  I took advantage of the doctor's preoccupation to sidle close to my Chief Engineer. "Val, are you sure you want to go?" I asked quietly.

  "My great-grandfather's over there, Captain. Besides, you'll need a good engineer to look at the condition of the ship."

  "It's not the condition of the ship I'm worried about. Look, the crew of the Odysseus were lost in the middle of nowhere. The emptiness out here can eat at healthy minds in working ships, and the people on Odysseus knew rescue was impossible. God only knows what might have happened."