Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Landvoy back on line,” the comms corporal yelled out, unaware of the Aztecs’ return to the field.

  Sainz’s gaze never wavered from the monitors, following the Aztecs from one screen to the next as the Hades swung about hard and began running sawtooth evasion patterns to the north. One of the contaminated cycles wavered from their runs for a few seconds, then straightened out and continued to close with the retreating Union command. The third wove about more erratically, getting worse every second. The high-speed antigrav cycles caught up and fell into a formation with the Hades, except for their stricken companion, who rocketed past and slammed into a rock outcropping. The corrupted body flew on another thirty meters before tumbling to a final rest. The Aztecs and Hades passed within ten meters, but none slowed. It would take a CBR team to recover that body, and there was no time. A new wave of Thunders fell into the area. Though off by a wide margin from any Union vehicle, they argued against any further attempts to delay.

  Daily slammed his fist into his outside thigh repeatedly, not trusting himself to vent fury against the delicate electronics in the Hades. Sainz grabbed the sergeant’s wrist, held it tight. “Not your fault, Sergeant. Bad fortune.”

  Daily tensed against his colonel’s grip for a moment, then eased off. “Yes sir.”

  “I’ve got an arroyo marked out half a kilometer north that can head us back on a westward track,” Major Howard called out from her station, focusing on the Union retreat. “Dillahunty would need to make his move now.”

  The colonel shook his head, stepped to Rebecca Howard’s side, and braced himself over the horizontal monitor. “Romilsky is to the west, damn her. I don’t know how she managed it, but she’s there.” He dropped the volume of his voice. “I knew she was setting up an ambush, but I didn’t give her enough credit.”

  Howard covered one of Sainz’s hands with one of hers. It looked frail and delicate alongside his, though that was more a function of size than any real measure of strength. “Bad fortune,” she said, using the same consolation the colonel had offered Daily. “Sure you don’t want to take a stab in her direction?”

  “One of the first rules of engagement—never let the enemy choose the battlefield.” Sainz shook his head again. “She knows what she’s doing. I won’t underestimate her like this again.”

  Howard gave his hand a light squeeze and returned to the screen. She moved the topographical data to show their path heading north, and Sainz studied the terrain with as much interest and concern as she. They would hit the Kotuy River again when the rise of Tommat Plateau forced them on a sharp jog back to the east. The Tommat was a small break away from the main range of Gory Putorana, and the hard country the two steep rises framed would slow the Union force down considerably.

  “What makes you think it’s clear?” she asked.

  “Major?”

  “The northern route. Romilsky might have us boxed on three sides.”

  Sainz nodded, not in affirmation but acknowledgment of her concerns. “There was a reason she hit us where she did,” he admitted, “giving us an area large enough to maneuver. To think, and decide we didn’t want to butt heads. We know south and west are covered. East means backtracking. She’s herding us north, because that’s the one direction she does not have to guard.” He reached above to one of the vertical monitor screens, tapping the skyline where several of the symbiots flew their missions back and forth into Gory Putorana. “She’s turning us right into that thing’s path.”

  Rebecca Howard paled visibly at running up against the alien creature again. “If that’s what she wants us to do, then why oblige?”

  “Because it’s the one direction where there is a certain amount of uncertainty. We’ll have to drop a rear guard back to monitor the creature and slow it down as necessary, but we might slip free around the upper side of Tommat and make the Oritskanly Tunguska, the Upper Tunguska River.” His voice grabbed a hard edge. “If we move west, we will lose people. The Seventy-first has donated enough lives for today.”

  “That’s bad territory,” she said, tapping a finger over the terrain west of the Irynutsk Nuclear Facility. “More suited for crawlers. And it’s nearly night. We get stuck in there, we’ll be walking home.”

  They get stuck in there, the Seventy-first would never make it out. “It’s our best chance. With any luck we can follow the Oritskanly Tunguska out on its westward run.”

  “And without luck?”

  As always, the Seventy-first’s two senior officers could level with each other. No punches pulled. Sainz spitted her with an even stare, matching her hard expression.

  “Without luck,” he said, “we’re dead.”

  17

  * * *

  T he gray armored skin of the Icarus almost blended with Luna’s natural soil. The large vessel rose from the moon’s surface by dint of raw power, its twin fusion drives blasting back at the barren slopes of Mount Symphonia. Though a delta-wing design built with an eye toward aeronautical lines, the Icarus was not truly intended to fly in atmosphere. The moon made for a good base only because of its light gravity and large areas of barren land where the spacecraft could be landed and properly guarded. It represented a significant investment by the Union—only Tranquillity’s Argus and the Prometheus docked at Station Independence were larger, more advanced vessels.

  Independent vectoring ports beneath the ship helped it achieve lift, and could even manage completely vertical takeoffs and landings, though VTOL ops were hard on the vessel. When it cleared the moon’s low atmospheric roof, those ports were closed off in favor of standard attitude thrusters. The Icarus was free in space, swinging wide around the Earth to begin one of many data collection runs.

  Standing at a plex portal, watching the sky bleed away its pale color and then fade to a pitch-black studded with the few colored lights of planets and fewer stars, Major Williams still felt as if he was returning home. It had been a long time since he’d been in real space. Even if Paul Drake technically commanded the vessel now, the captain was still subject to Williams’s orders with regard to mission parameters. And of course, the scientific labs and various stations in the Icarus were totally within the major’s domain. Twelve people at this station alone, all keying off his direction. All twelve, but one.

  “How long we orbit Terra?” Brygan Nystolov asked from a nearby image-rendering table. He studied and contrasted shots of the Styx Nebula taken from both Sputnik-23 and Station Freedom, ignoring one of the live consoles he could be using for up-to-date information.

  Williams moved to one such console, this one feeding the direct video from the Icarus’s most powerful imaging array. Currently it focused on a blurred Earth and the Siberian heartland of the Neo-Soviet empire. Through atmosphere he would never get the resolution needed to search out the Seventy-first, if they still lived, but he wished for it. And for Brad’s safety. “At least Freedom is finally on station,” he murmured.

  “Until Freedom is on station?” Nystolov asked, looking up from his comparison.

  “Sorry,” Williams said, pulling himself away from the image of Siberia and returning the screen to a wider view of Earth as a whole. “I guess I was talking to myself. Station Freedom has finally come on station over Gory Putorana.” He stumbled a bit over the Russian words, but close enough. “There’s an engagement—at least there was an engagement—happening down there between Union and the empire. They hope to cut through the interference still cloaking much of Earth. My younger brother is part of one of the units.”

  Nystolov’s faced showed more interest at the mention of Brad, maybe even a touch of concern. “I am sorry,” he said, and even sounded as if he meant it. “I hope he makes it through.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. He has a good commander.” Williams shifted uneasily. “Do you . . .” he began, but trailed off.

  “No,” Nystolov answered easily. “I no family on Terra. Mars is my home.” His dark eyes narrowed. “Was my home,” he amended gruffly.

  Randall Wi
lliams had taken to Brygan Vassilyevich rather easily, though much of that was thanks to the other man’s efforts. Brygan wasn’t as moody as other Neo-Soviets Williams had met, though it was hard to compare because most of those had been prisoners. Nor did he seem to suffer from the chip on the shoulder many foreign scientists acquired because Union technology was so advanced.

  The Neo-Soviet was bigger than Williams, but didn’t use it as a way to throw his weight around. He did have a kind of bearlike gruffness, but it seemed more a sign of his seriousness. Williams respected that edge; it was the natural toughness a person needed if he or she was to survive any length of time in space.

  He checked his work crew, found them about their jobs easily enough. “What are you so fascinated by in the Styx Nebula?” the major asked, looking for more insight into his guest’s nature. “I thought you were more interested in planetary exploration.”

  “Da, I prefer to put my feet on what I study. This Maelstrom space is cluttered, compared to before, but it is still vacuum.”

  Williams waved a hand over the enhanced photos. “I don’t see you finding anything in there to study then.” He frowned, not in displeasure but the pique of having discovered another phenomenon he couldn’t begin to explain. “Whatever makes up the Styx, it acts like a volatile substance. Like nothing we ever considered a nebula would be like. We’ve monitored a small planetoid and any number of asteroids hitting it. That ice-blue cosmic gas lights up brilliantly and explodes.”

  He saw the mischief glinting in Brygan’s eyes.

  “I can’t see how a larger mass could exist in there.”

  More amused silence.

  “What did you find?” he asked, suddenly unsure of himself in the face of Brygan’s complete self-confidence.

  Brygan scaled one of the photos around. “You would find it sometime,” he said. Whether that was meant as a gesture of consolation for Williams’s missing it or the reason Brygan had decided to share his find, Williams could not be sure. “There was planetoid in there. Not on scale of Luna, but big. Say, size of Buryat, or your New Jersey.”

  In his enthusiasm, Randall Williams missed the past tense for a moment. He studied the exposure, found the dark shadow of actual mass within Styx’s volatile gasses. “How did I miss that?” he asked, berating himself and impressed that the Neo-Soviet had spotted the landmass. There was no denying the man was observant. Then the Union scientist finally caught up on the other man’s assertion. “Was? It’s gone?” He frowned again. “Destroyed by Styx, eh?” Well, it was like he had said; no matter could exist in there.

  “Nyet. Not destroyed.” Brygan tapped a large thumb on a sheet of photographic negatives. “Sputnik-23 filmed it more than twenty-four hours before your Freedom. Two hours into Freedom’s tape, it disappeared. Not destroyed though. It faded away.”

  Williams began snatching up slides and photos as Brygan indicated them. “How does something just fade away?”

  The Neo-Soviet shrugged. “How did Terra end up here in Maelstrom? Myself, am glad it faded out.”

  The proof was there on the film. Williams sighed in exasperation—scooped by an amateur. “Glad? If it phased away, it might have led to a door back to our own universe.”

  “If it had not, we might never have looked at it twice. At least now is maybe proof that not everything here is permanent.”

  The major conceded Brygan’s point. “Still, too bad we’re too late to see the phase up close, with the Icarus’s instruments.”

  “Try to get in there, Icarus would be cosmic dust,” the Neo-Soviet reminded him. “Not everything should be known. You should not want everything to be known. That is why we learn, sometimes slowly.” Then Brygan glanced away, unsuccessfully hiding a look of concern as if he’d said too much.

  That brought the scientist in Williams up short. He cupped his chin in his right hand, stroking the pointed ends of his sideburns. Was the Neo-Soviet scout trying to warn him, or hitting close to something more relevant to himself? “I would like to learn how to return Earth home,” he said, then sighed, “but I would never want to know for certain that it wasn’t possible, you’re right.” But what more was Brygan trying to say? “So we file this as yet another mystery of the Maelstrom. A list that is growing fairly long in relation to our list of answers.”

  “Eh? How many answers have you found so far?”

  “Well, none yet. But if they’re out there, we’ll find them.” He hoped he sounded more optimistic to the hearing of others.

  “Then where do we go after our passes ’round Terra?” the Neo-Soviet asked. “How many planets inside our range?”

  “Of the Icarus? All of them,” Williams said proudly. “This ship could make it as far as . . .” He trailed off in exasperation. “Damn, that’s one I gave you for free. We should stick to mission parameters, not Union technology.”

  “If it makes you feel better, we know ranges on all your primary vessels. Icarus could technically have made it between stars on a small crew that wouldn’t tax life support.”

  “Yes, that makes me feel better,” Williams said, then realized what that meant, “I think.” Well, the Union knew as much about Neo-Soviet spaceships. “A more politic answer would be to say there are five planets in convenient range. No worse than the jaunt from Earth to Jupiter—maybe Saturn. And that’s currently. With the variation in orbits, those can change rapidly.”

  Williams nodded toward a console displaying a cross section of the Maelstrom that Tycho and Tranquillity had collaborated on, and the two of them moved to it. It showed a supercolossal solar system in orbit around that misshapen, alien sun. From Luna or Earth, this sunlike phenomenon appeared to be roughly globular, like a splash of white paint hanging brilliantly in the sky. As the Union scientists had managed to image it, the Maelstrom’s Eye—Williams’s name for it—was at least six times larger than Sol and twice as distant, and created of some exotic matter rather than the fusing of hydrogen. It reached out into space with thick tendrils, some of which had elongated to reach deep into the Inner Ring. The Central Ring was a mess of planets in close proximity and thick belts of asteroids, still under evaluation for distances and total numbers. Williams gestured to the small portion of the Outer Ring that was confidently mapped out, and with a few deft instructions input, he expanded that region. Earth and Luna. The Styx Nebula. Five other planets and a variety of large asteroids and small planetoids.

  “We’ll orbit and do the initial survey on this world here.” He pointed to an orange dot on the screen. “I don’t expect much as it is a gas giant with no detectable moons. Then it’s on to a rogue asteroid that is passing at an angle to our ecliptic. On our way back, we might survey one of these two worlds that lie close enough along our path.”

  Brygan did not ask the obvious question, about any of the other nearby worlds. Instead he asked, “What is so special about asteroid?” As if he trusted Williams to be ready with a good answer. The major punched up a request on the console which called a computer-enhanced satellite-imaging photograph. “That’s from Sputnik-23,” Brygan said at once, noticing the format marking along the bottom. “That was not included in the material you presented me earlier.”

  Williams shrugged an apology. “We have not made a hard copy of this, because we suspect it contains some very important findings.”

  “Such as?”

  “Sputnik-23 tagged it as high in metal alloys. Also, there is this.” He pulled up another image of the same asteroid, specially enhanced to find patterns in the supermagnified blurs. It showed the cold blue of rock, veined with lighter colors that ran in a network of patterns that suggested—

  “Right angles!” Brygan reached out and traced the boxes. “Nature does not build straight lines and squared angles itself. This is man-made.”

  “It might be a piece from Venus or Mars,” Williams admitted. “Or any number of outposts our nations have seeded over our old solar system.”

  Brygan narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “But you do not thin
k so?”

  “Most of these right angles are complete, as if framing buildings that are still standing. That is a giant rock in space. If it was torn from a Neo-Soviet facility, could the buildings have all survived intact?” He didn’t need an answer. “Those were built on the asteroid to begin with, and that rock does not conform to any known shape of an asteroid cataloged in our old system.”

  The implication hung heavy in the air for several long minutes. “This seems very important. Why not go straight there? Why the stop by this gas giant?” He flicked a nail over the dot as if removing it from existence.

  “The gas giant is on our way. Also, it allows us to approach with more caution. In the Union everything is done efficiently and in order.” He regretted his choice of words at once. It was as if he’d thrown water on the moment of camaraderie the two had enjoyed.

  Brygan nodded slowly, dark eyes clouded as he buried any show of feeling. Suddenly he seemed very Neo-Soviet. “In the empire, we have no resources to waste. We would go and take the objective quickly.”

  It was the first time Brygan Nystolov had separated himself from Williams by nationality. Before, they had both been men of science. Now, because he had forgotten twice in as many minutes that there were still a few military distinctions between the two men, he had wounded a man whose skill he might have need of. To say nothing of a chance that Brygan could still consider a change of allegiance. But they were words that could not be taken back.

  If he had the chance, if Brygan Vassilyevich gave him the chance, he would try to make up for them later.

  18