“That’s not the way it is at all.”
“It is. Open your eyes, Thack. Look at yourself.”
“He meant you, didn’t he? You’re the one he was talking about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Derrel. He said there were others who agreed with him. I didn’t think he meant you. Everybody wants to keep me from going on farther into Ursa Major. Don’t you realize that that only makes me more determined?”
“We’re your oldest and best friends—”
“That’s why I can’t believe you. You wouldn’t do this, unless you’d been influenced by the D’shanna. I may have been wrong about Wenlock. They may still have been there. If we hadn’t left when we did, they might have gotten to me, too. Where did you two go that day? Think about it. Try to remember anything strange that happened—”
Koi bounced angrily out of bed. “That’s just perfect,” she said as she began to pull on her allovers. “You’ve now got anyone who disagrees with you or does anything to interfere with you working for the D’shanna.”
“Amy—it’s not personal. It doesn’t change how I feel about you,” he said pleadingly. “I just can’t let myself be influenced by what you say about the D’shanna and Ursa Major. Not when you could have been influenced by them. It’s my fault, Amy. I wasn’t careful enough about security at Wenlock. I assumed the staff there was on our side, but maybe they weren’t. I don’t know whether they worked through Jankowski, or Dr. Essinger, or both—we don’t know enough of how they work, only the results. This is a whole different kind of contamination problem, and I didn’t think it through.”
Hooking the closures on her clothing as she went, Koi headed for the door. “The only part of that I can agree with is the last—that you haven’t thought it through,” she said tartly.
Thackery looked at her plaintively. “I don’t understand what you want from me. Once you left because you said I was being too selfish. Now I’m doing what you asked and you’re leaving again.”
Koi sighed and regarded him sadly. “You still insist on trying to understand me in terms of Andra and the others. I’m not like them, Thack. I don’t want anything from you. All I ever wanted was for you to be true to your best qualities. And more and more these weeks, you haven’t been.”
But even as Koi left the cabin and headed downship toward deck E and Guerrieri, the end of the mission was beginning.
It began with a dimple, which appeared on the mass detector at the gravigator’s station on the bridge. The dimple was the footprint of an object ahead of them—the space-time distortion caused by its mass, which the detector noted, measured, and reported to its caretaker, Elena Ryttn.
“Mass-touch,” Ryttn said aloud, alerting the others on the bridge. The navcom was already deciding whether the object was small enough to be swept aside by Munin’s bow wave, the protective cocoon created by the AVLO field. If not, the navcom would adjust Munin’s course. No human intervention was required. On any survey ship other than Merritt Thackery’s Munin, no human notice was required.
“Astrography,” Gwen Shinault called across the bridge to another tech. “Verify and identify.”
“Verified,” Nunn answered. “Masses about ten to the twenty-first tonnes—a Mercury-class planetoid. True space velocity—whoa, this can’t be right.”
“What can’t be right?” the exec demanded.
“The damn thing’s pushing two-thirds of the speed of light.”
Shinault was frozen for an instant by her astonishment. Then she shook her head, as one might kick a balky machine, and reached for the shipnet controls. “Commander Thackery to the bridge,” she paged, then crossed the bridge to the communications station. “Can you get anything else?”
“Not while we’re in the craze.”
“Whatever it is, we’ll be right on top of it in about six minutes,” Ryttn announced. “It’s crossing right in front of us—angle to our bow of about thirty-five degrees.”
Thackery appeared at that moment at the top of the climb-way, still bearing the dishevelment of sleep. “What’s up?”
“We’re about to overrun an object of planetary mass with a space velocity of .6c.”
There was only a moment to weigh the options; Munin and the mystery object were moving too quickly for long deliberation. “Navcon, let’s get out of the craze,” Thackery said, settling in at his station.
“We’ll be by her before we regain our senses,” Ryttn warned.
Thackery shook his head. “Maximum braking—fifty-degree slope. Let’s rattle the dishes.”
“But the safety restrictions limit us to thirty degrees—” the tech at the gravigation console protested. “Do it,” Shinault said. “I altered the controller at A-Cyg. We won’t lose the drive.”
The tech’s face was ashen, but he turned back to his console and began the procedure that would bring Munin back into normal space. The astrographer and comtech stared at each other in disbelief, all their doubts about Thackery brought to the forefront. Only Shinault seemed sanguine about stressing Munin’s drive with maximum flux.
“All stations, alert for high-G transition,” Shinault announced over the shipnet. “One minute.”
Throughout Munin, crew members scrambled to find comfortable positions to be in when the nearly doubled gravity induced by the AVLO braking hit. Those who were close enough to do so crawled into their bunks.
“Begin braking,” the gravigator said without enthusiasm, and almost immediately the whine of the inductors jumped an octave. Munin shuddered, a new and unpleasant sensation, and then settled down into a harmonic vibration which would have been strong enough to make limp fingers dance on a countertop, except that the increase in G-force which came with it precluded such gymnastics. Aft, the drive’s dissipators crackled as they bled off the energies racing through the coils of the core.
The noise from the climbway shaft and the shaking went on for nearly five minutes. To Thackery, thinking of their enigmatic quarry, and the bridge crew, thinking of Munin’s ancient drive coils, the time seemed much longer.
Then finally, blessedly, space reappeared. “You can back her off to thirty degrees now,” Thackery said, and the gravigator gratefully complied.
Radar, laser ranging and communication, telescanners, and Kleine transceivers all looked toward the unknown object. The energies they captured carried back confirmation that Thackery’s first instinct had been right.
“Regular profile—no rotation—comes up almost like a ship.” The astrographer stopped, puzzled. “It’s accelerating—very high delta vee. Crossing our bow now. Sweet life, it is a ship!”
“On the window,” Thackery snapped, and the telecamera view came up on the central bridge display. The other ship was a point of light, skimming across the star field a hundred thousand klicks ahead of Munin.
For a moment, Thackery locked his eyes on the dancing, indistinct image as his mind raced. D’shanna—FC—which are you? Then he saw what most of the others had already seen, the only real information which could be gleaned from the display: that the image had the hourglass profile of a survey ship.
“What the hell is another Surveyor doing out here?” Thackery expostulated. “What’s their transponder identification?”
“It’s probably Lynx,” Shinault said. “She could be out here by now.”
“Or it could be Higuchi in Hillary. He may have learned at 16 Herculis what we did at Wenlock.” Thackery made a growling sound deep in his throat. “Goddamnit, if they beat us to Talitha—see if you can figure out where they’re coming from.”
“No transponder identification,” the comtech reported.
That was a puzzling development, since every Service vessel used its Kleine to continually relay position information to the Flight Office.
“With that apparent mass, it has to be running under AVLO drive—which means it has to be one of ours,” Thackery said, and gestured at the screen. “Can’t you give me something better?”
“Not a
t this distance.”
“There’s no hull markings on survey ships anyway,” Shinault reminded them. “About all we could tell is what series she belongs to.”
Thackery nodded. “Navcon, let’s go after her. A thousand klicks isn’t too close.”
“If I can,” said Ryttn.
“What?”
“Her acceleration profile—it’s steeper than an L-series drive. Fifty-seven degrees.”
“Maybe it’s a robot probe, with the AVLO-M,” said a new voice. Thackery twisted in his chair to see Koi emerging from the climbway.
“Amy—I’m glad you’re here.”
“I’d have been here sooner, but it’s a little hard to negotiate the climbway in two G’s.”
“Things have been a little hectic up here.”
“Is that your excuse for risking everyone’s life?”
“The best intercept was to drop down as quickly as possible. If we’d kept to the Flight Office limits we’d have been hours getting back to them. And the way they’re accelerating, we might not have gotten back to them at all. And I wanted to get our scanning capacity back as quickly as possible.”
Koi studied the telecamera view and the superimposed navigational plot. “Can’t we catch it?”
“That may depend on whether it wants to be caught.”
“I have a new delta vee,” Ryttn sang out at that moment. “Her acceleration curve is flattening out.” Koi pursed her lips. “Looks like she wants to be caught.”
As the minutes slipped by, Munin first matched the trajectory of the mystery ship, then began to slowly narrow the gap between them. The two vessels raced on in tandem for more than an hour with Munin shouting entreaties and the other vessel answering with silence.
“Why wouldn’t they be responding?” Thackery wondered aloud. Koi shook her head. “No transponder, no radio, no Kleine—it’s hard to believe they could all be out.”
“Can’t you give us something sharper?” Thackery called across to the comtech.
The comtech threw up his hands. “I can correct for blueshift, but I can’t correct for the smearing of the image, even with computer-guided optics,” he said apologetically. “A survey ship moving at these velocities isn’t exactly the ideal telecamera platform. If you want better resolution, you’ll either have to get much closer or talk them into slowing down.”
“New delta vee,” called Ryttn. “She’s starting to decelerate.”
“Let’s do the same. Bring us up alongside, in parallel,” Thackery directed.
With painful slowness, the telecamera view gained focus and detail. As it did, the bridge crew saw that the ship that grew to fill the display might have been Munin’s twin—the double bell of the field radiators fore and aft, the rounded bulges of lifepods protruding from the hull amidships, the seams of the gig bay.
“Pioneer class,” Shinault muttered.
“No—look at the open gridwork at the lip of the drive radiators,” Koi said. “Pioneer-class Surveyors didn’t have that. That’s a Pathfinder-class ship.”
“There are no other Pathfinders,” Shinault protested. “Munin s the only one.”
Both women were right, so the argument ended there, in impasse. The celestial pas de deux ended with the ships crawling to a stop a mere thousand kilometres apart, their hulls reflecting red starlight from an M-class giant less than half a light-year away.
“Still nothing?” Thackery asked the comtech. “Nothing the whole length of the electromagnetic spectrum,” was the answer. “Not even infrared. She’s stone cold.” At that, Thackery’s expression turned grim. “Gravigation, take us over top of her. Dead amidships, and close.”
As Munin turned toward the other ship and began its deliberate approach, the angle of view changed with painful slowness. The only indicator of their progress was when, by degrees, one set of lifepods disappeared out of view on the lower side, while the second set came into view on the upper side.
Only when Munin drew closer and moved to pass over the motionless vessel did the angle change more and more rapidly, bringing into view the far side of the ship and a sight that sent a chill through everyone who saw it. For the hull of Munin’s companion was torn open from above the bridge to the drive core below D deck, the edges of the aluminum honeycomb skin curled back like paper in a fire. A dark maze of twisted metal was all that remained of the upper decks exposed by the wound. Once that sight impressed itself on the stunned surveyors on Munin, there was no longer any question about their companion’s identity.
“My God,” Ryttn said, rising from her chair on unsteady legs. “It’s Dove!”
Chapter 16
* * *
Summit
For a long minute after Ryttn’s pronouncement, no one spoke. The words froze them in place, staring at the screen as though to force the dissonant evidence to either vanish or harmonize. Ryttn brought folded hands to her mouth as though praying, and her eyes showed the fear they had heard in her voice.
Shinault frowned, and her gaze flashed angry challenge.
Koi’s face was slack with shock, as though her mind were too fully occupied with constructing an explanation to trouble itself to animate her features. Nunn was radiant with wonder, and wore a hint of a foolish, delighted smile. Thackery bit at his lower lip, his heart full, his eyes brimming. Shinault was the first to find her voice. “That’s crazy. Her drive was destroyed—how can she maneuver?”
“We saw her maneuver, therefore the drive wasn’t destroyed,” Koi corrected. “The damage must have been repairable. Communications are still out—”
Then suddenly everyone was talking at once.
“Repairable? Look at her—”
“There’s nothing left of the bridge—”
“The ship can be run from the survey lab—”
“There must still be at least some crew aboard, downship, in the lower decks—”
“No,” Thackery said sharply. “You’re not thinking clearly. We’ve made three crazes since we heard about Dove. It’s been more than fifty years since the accident.”
“Someone has to be aboard,” Ryttn insisted. “Yes,” Thackery said. “Someone. But not a Service crew. Something else.”
Koi stared at him uncomprehendingly, and Thackery answered the stare with a tight smile. “Elena, hold station with Dove, five hundred metres away and facing the damage,” he said, then toggled the shipnet. “Barbrice, to the dress-out compartment, ASAP.”
As the page echoed back up the climbway to the bridge Thackery pushed back the mike wand and stood. A moment later he was gone, the climbway vibrating from descent. He was halfway downship before what he had said penetrated to Koi’s consciousness.
“No!” she cried out in sudden anguish. “No, you can’t!”
Mueller was already in the dress-out compartment when Thackery reached it. “I’m going across to Dove,” he said, opening one of the storage bins. “I’ll need an E-5, helmet camera, light pack, and maneuvering unit.”
“Yes, Commander,” Mueller said, turning away and opening the equipment rack.
By the time Koi arrived with Guerrieri in tow, Thackery had donned the white double-layer E-S suit, and Mueller had the rest of the components laid out and waiting for him.
“Thack, how about letting me go on this one?” Guerrieri asked. “Your skin’s too valuable, hey?”
“No,” Thackery said curtly.
“Thack—you know the EVA Protocols specify pair work.”
“No.”
“Merritt—please,” Koi said. “There’s something very wrong about that ship being here. Don’t go.”
“Did you tell him about Dove?” he asked with a nod toward Guerrieri.
“Yes—”
“Then you’ve forfeited the right to ask that of me.”
Koi’s eyes flashed anger. “Damn it, Thack, this isn’t a schoolyard fight over who makes the rules. Don’t you realize that if something happens over there, there’s nothing we can do to help you?”
“Do
you think it’s an accident that Dove intercepted us, that we’ve been diverted from Talitha? Don’t you realize? It’s me they want. Ever since the Drull warned me about them, they’ve been trying to stop me. They’re waiting for me. I won’t disappoint them.”
With a sudden movement, Koi looked away, as though avoiding the sight of him.
He took his helmet from Mueller, tucked it under his arm, and took a step toward Koi. “I have to do this, Amy,” he said plaintively. “If I don’t, then the last ten years don’t make any sense at all. I have to do it.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Who are you trying to impress this time? Who do you think expects this? Andra, or Sebright, or Z’lin Ton Drull? You don’t owe them—”
“No,” he said softly. “This time, it’s for me.”
When he and Mueller were gone, down into the gig bay to the small personnel airlock, there was silence in the dress-out compartment.
“They have a stronger hold on him than I do,” Koi said finally. “I guess I always knew that.”
“He’ll be all right,” Guerrieri said, touching her arm solicitously. “Sure,” she said bravely. “But would you suit up anyway, and stand by here? In case—” Guerrieri nodded his agreement. “Amy—I don’t understand.”
“What?”
“Why you wanted to stop him. We were wrong, Amy, and he was right. Nothing else can explain why that ship is out there.”
She cast her gaze downward. “Because I’m afraid,” she said softly. “Because I’m afraid he’s right, and because I don’t know what’s waiting for him. Nothing more or less than that.” She hesitated a moment, then headed for the climbway. “I’ll be on the bridge.”
The video from Thackery’s helmet camera shared the bridge display with the output from Munin’s own electronic eyes. From one point of view, Thackery was a solitary white figure growing smaller and smaller as it jetted away; from the other, Dove was a dark, ominous metal corpse looming up ever larger against the backdrop of stars.
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