Stealing Endeavour: Book 1 of the Forever Endeavour, Amen Trilogy

by Martin Tays

  She glanced down, shrugged distractingly, and nodded. “Also…” She added, “I’m a much better dancer.”

  “Wouldn’t doubt that in the least. People keep dragging me off the dance floor and jamming a spoon in my mouth to keep me from swallowing my tongue. Quit changing the subject.” He pointed across the table. “I am a sad, sad little man who just got fired from a sinecure job because he didn’t care to stay sober enough to show up for work. Again. One who can’t get a job on Earth right now for love nor money. Did you know that?”

  Ami looked down, hesitating. She began playing with the fasteners on his grippies as she replied. “Well, actually… yeah. I did.” She glanced up. “I also know why you’re going to Haven.”

  “Oh?” He pulled his foot away. “Stop that. Why?”

  She shifted uncomfortably and began toying instead with her empty coffee cup. “Because an old friend of yours decided you needed another chance.”

  “Rafe.” The reply was barely audible.

  She nodded. “Raphael Deppner. Director of Orbital Operations, Haven.”

  “Yeah. That’s the guy.” He scrubbed his face, hard, then pulled his hands down. he looked anguished. “He was my bunkmate. Did you know that? Lived with that anal-retentive son of a bitch all the way to Alpha Centauri, and now… Jesus. Do you realize how much this sucks?”

  She reached over and put her hand on his. “It’s a job.” She said, softly.

  “Yeah. It’s a job. Director of the ‘Technologies Prioritization Department’. I’m going to run a God damn junkyard. Appropriate, I guess.” He stood, abruptly enough that he literally bounced off the low overhead before his grippies had a chance to grab the deck. “Damn it,” he said, rubbing his head, “I’m sobering up. I hate being sober. Drink?”

  “No.” She shook her head, uncomfortable. “Thank you, no.”

  He paused, looking down at her. “Does it bother you?”

  “Probably.” She glanced up, but wouldn’t meet his eye. “So?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  He ordered his drink (in a glass this time, as God intended). By the time he returned she was scrolling through files on her pcomp. Pretty much no one went anywhere, anymore, without one of the ubiquitous and incredibly powerful little units ― Ami’s was a wrist mounted one of silver chased ebony. She studied a list hovering in midair before her, then stuck her finger into the projection and twisted. It spun around obligingly.

  Ami pointed at the data field. “I was wondering if you knew about this.”

  Moses studied the file. The header read ‘Haven Orbital Shipyard’. Underneath was ‘Technologies Prioritization Inventory’. A long list of obsolete materials, ships, and equipment followed, extending down and seemingly into the table. Despite himself, he was interested.

  “Huh.” Moses said, surprised. “This… this looks like a big chunk of the Exploratory Corp fleet.”

  “It is, I think. Guess no one wants to explore, anymore.”

  He sighed. “I am surrounded by idiots.”

  “We are surrounded by idiots, if you don’t mind.” Ami shook her head. “But that’s not what I was trying to show you. At least, that’s not the main thing. Scroll down… all the way down to the bottom.”

  He stuck a finger into the projection and dragged the image up so he could see the end of the list. The very last listing was ‘Item 413: United Earth Space Services (Exploratory Corps) Vessel EC-01 (UESS Endeavour) ― Surplus to requirements’.

  “Oh. My.” It didn’t quite seem strong enough. “Son of a bitch. She’s there. She’s there.” He looked up, pained. “I had no idea.”

  Ami reached out and killed the display. “Yeah. She’s there.” She idly fingered the surface of her pcomp, following the silver inlay, then looked up. “I wonder what shape she’s in?”

  Moses snorted. “Mothballed for two hundred and, what, fifty years? Pretty bad, I would think.” He stared off into the distance, voice softening. “Poor thing.”

  Ami nodded. “She deserves better.”

  “She deserves better. Yeah.” He looked over sharply at her. “Is it just me, or is that a hidden agenda I smell?”

  She put a hand on her chest. “Agenda? Me? I have no idea what you mean.”

  “I mean that I take it you would like to see her.”

  Ami smiled. No, Ami radiated. “Why Mister Dunn… I thought you’d never ask.”

  Moses sighed.

  ☼

  Arecibo had fallen on hard times. From its original purpose of exploring the ionosphere to SETI research to radio and radar astronomy, the most famous hole in the world had reinvented itself over the centuries. Time, though, had finally caught up with it.

  From a peak of nearly two hundred, the staff had been pared down to two. Ignored, underfunded and understaffed, it had doddered its way to its current job of backup for the backup for the system wide communications network. It was a use of technology comparable to using a formula one race car to deliver milk.

  Sandar Brillerman sat back at her console in Building #1, the control and receiving room for the massive radio telescope, and sighed. She was surrounded by the most remarkable, up to the date equipment available.

  To a generation four times removed from hers.

  Over two hundred years before, back when mankind was aiming for the stars, there had been a massive upgrade to the site’s equipment, to allow for a full scale effort to peel back the curtain surrounding the stars and catch the signals no doubt being broadcast by a myriad of hopeful alien civilizations, waiting with bated breath to contact us. We longed for the brotherhood of the stars.

  But no signal arrived.

  Ever.

  In fact, other than the famous — or infamous, no one was quite sure which — “Wow!” signal of ancient Ohio State fame, there never had been a signal received from anywhere in space that could even remotely be considered artificial. Mankind had begun it with great anticipation. A hundred years later, the project had degenerated to a vague and disjointed search. Nowadays, it was just considered a joke, still talked about only by the nuts who would have been desperately searching for fairies in the nineteenth century, or black helicopters in the twentieth, or one of the legendary ‘ghost chickens’ of the twenty second.

  Sandar was just such a nut.

  It really wasn’t her fault. Born of children of the ‘new flowering’, she was raised with the belief that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans, something only correctable by enlightened visitors from the stars.

  Her parents had moved to Camelot, the marginally habitable planet orbiting Wolf 359, when she was only two. Camelot had become the mecca for the children of this new neo-hippy movement. Her mothers, along with their belief systems, had fit right in. Surrounded there by the cream of the anti-establishment crop she was encouraged to feel her inner essence, to shun materialism, and to be one with the universe and with all things simple and pure.

  Naturally, she rebelled and came to Earth to become a scientist.

  But there still lurked, in the hindmost recesses of her brain, the belief ― the hope ― that someone else was out there.

  Thus it was that, after years of study and decades of drifting, her beliefs, her background and her training had coincided to dump her in the warm, tropical armpit of Puerto Rico monitoring backup transmissions for 3V broadcasts.

  It was never supposed to be this way. But sometimes the worst things happened to the best people so that they can be the right person, in the right place, in the right time.

  Which, in Sandar’s case, meant being right in front of the oncoming train.

  ☼

  “Still looking for bug eyed monsters, I see.”

  Sandar closed her eyes and briefly counted to ten. She then dropped her feet down to the worn decking and turned in her
chair toward the speaker at the door.

  “Mason. How… nice... to see you.”

  Mason Chun entered the control room and walked over to the recording console next to Sandar’s. He was a short, sloppy, dark haired man who for some reason always smelled slightly of fish. Sandar found him to be one of the most annoying people she’d ever met.

  He was also her boss and her only companion, which simply made matters worse.

  Chun reached out and inserted a datatab into the console, humming to himself as he punched the controls for a data dump. After a moment, the console chirped and he pulled the tab, dropping it into his shirt pocket. He then turned to Sandar and spoke.

  “Look. There’s nothing out there. You know that, and I know that. Why don’t you give it up for a bad job and come over to my quarters? We could have a drink or three.” He waggled his eyebrows, a move that he thought made him look rakish and she thought made him look like a hydrocephalic Groucho Marx. “Game?”

  Sandar shook her head. “One, I haven’t finished this sweep, and I promised myself I’d do it before I turned in. Two, even if I were interested in men in general, you’d need a team of horses to drag me specifically into your bed. And three…” She turned to look him up and down. “No.”

  “Oh, now, did I actually proposition you?”

  “Of course not. You’re still sober. But… well, you probably don’t — can’t — recall the last time I came by your quarters. You put away about two thirds of a bottle of vodka, then went to the ‘fresher and came out wearing nothing but a bright red bow in a very private location.” She held her fingers up, a couple of centimeters apart, and continued. “A small bow, I might add.”

  “You wound me.” He clutched his chest dramatically.

  “Nope. You did that yourself when you tripped over the coffee table.”

  Mason reached up and rubbed the side of his head absently. “Oh, yeah. Forgot about that.”

  Sandar leaned back in her chair. She was a thin, compact blond with an intense stare from extraordinarily green eyes. She turned that stare on her companion.

  “Look, Mason, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the attention…” She paused, then shrugged. “Well, actually, I don’t appreciate the attention. I can understand it, though. I suppose. A little. A... very little...”

  “All right...”

  “But we’re stuck here as unnecessary backups to an automated system that is itself redundant. And to relieve my tedium I have one of the most obsolete yet still sophisticated toys in existence available to me for almost fourteen hours a day.” Sandar turned, staring at the displays on her console. Finally, she continued, quietly. “Along with a deep need to pretend I’m useful.”

  “Don’t say that.” Mason replied. “You are useful. Sort of.”

  “No, I’m not. And neither…” She looked back, disdainfully. “Are you.”

  Mason started to speak, then just shook his head and headed for the door.

  Just as he reached it an alarm sounded. It was one Sandar had waited for but never before heard.

  She spun back to her console and rapidly keyed in a series of commands. Around them, the displays, darkened to save power, sprang one by one to life. She turned to the antique hardware based view screen on her right, smacked it once as it flickered, then tabbed through a series of windows. She stared at it for a moment, then shot a hand out to the other side to drag a volume control to maximum.

  Sandar and Mason flinched as the speakers squealed and came to life, lush with interstellar hum. A familiar hum ― one she’d been listening to for years.

  But now over that hum, for the first time in her life, was… something. Something else. A click, almost a snapping sound. And another, and another, all almost a second apart.

  There was about a three second pause, then one click. Sandar was holding her breath without realizing it. Another pause. Then another series of clicks, five in all. Another three second pause, then nine more clicks.

  The sounds stopped. Sandar looked back at Mason. Silence continued. She was almost ready to believe she’d imagined it when three more of the clicks came over the speaker, startling her. Another three second pause, then one click and a pause.

  The pattern continued with a four, then one, then five, and then nine again.

  And another, interminable, pause (it was actually just a shade under fifty one seconds) before the cycle began again.

  Sandar realized she was standing. She also realized she was shaking. She never realized she was crying. She spoke quietly. Reverently. “Mason?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was raspy.

  “Mason…” She turned. “You get it, don’t you?”

  “Pi.” Mason looked up, a stunned expression on his face. “It’s pi.”

  Sandar stepped back from the console, hand over her mouth. She was still staring at the antiquated equipment in wonder when she inadvertently backed into Mason. Sandar spun and planted a kiss on the startled man.“Damn it!” She grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Mason, it’s pi! Do you realize what this means?”

  Mason reached up and touched his lips, grinning a bit crazily. “Do that again.”

  “Not on your life. Damn, you taste like fish, too.” She turned back to the console, repeating her question in a stunned tone of voice. “Do you realize what this means?”

  He looked at the displays, then back to the excited girl in front of him. There was excitement in his eyes, too. At first. But even as she watched the enthusiasm died, replaced by resignation.

  Mason looked down at the floor, then shook his head. “What does it mean? Nothing. That’s what it means.”

  “Bullshit! The…”

  “Nothing.” He continued, overriding her protests. “It’s a broadcast from one of the colonies that’s just now reaching us.” Mason snapped his fingers. “Or one of the old interstellar probes. Wait a minute…” He looked over at her. “What do you mean, I taste like fish?”

  “Sorry… some people like fish.” Sandar turned and pointed at the console. “A probe broadcasting in the hydrogen band?”

  “Okay, then.” Mason shrugged. “It’s a pulsar.”

  She shook her head. “Now you’re just making things up. A pulsar that just happens to pulse pi? Is it just me, or is that a tad unlikely?”

  “So what? No one wants to hear this, you know. No one believes. No one cares.”

  “I care.”

  “Ah, but you’re no one.” Mason’s smile was bitter. “You said so yourself.”

  “I’ve got proof!” Sandar turned and gestured dramatically at the console. As if on cue, the signal faded away to nothing. Normal background noise resumed, the static and hiss of a lonely, lonely universe. She groaned.

  “Really? Where, pray tell?”

  “Here, damn it…” She gestured toward the recording console, then to her own forehead. “And here.” Sandar sat, heavily, staring at the worn floor. Finally, she looked up and pointed toward Mason’s head. “It’s in there too, you know.”

  “Oh, no.” Mason waved his hands, backing away. “You’re not going to get me involved. I heard a brief natural anomaly that quickly stopped. And that’s all I know.”

  “Jesus! You’re an ass, Mason.”

  “I’m an ass who’s going to keep his job.” He turned dismissively, paused, then looked back over his shoulder. “If you’re smart, you’ll keep quiet. Maybe you’ll keep yours, too.”

  “Oh, yeah. God forbid I should be pushed from the pinnacle of success this job represents. No, no, no.” Sandar stood abruptly. “Fuck you, Mason, I’m reporting this.”

  “Suit yourself, then. Oh! And be sure you write when you get work.” He waved airily, turned and walked out.

  “Bastard.” Sandar muttered to his retreating back. She went over to the recording consol
e and stripped off a couple of copies of the brief ‘message’ from the center’s computer. The portion she had managed to record had lasted a little under four minutes.

  One of the copies she put on a datatab, dropping it into her pocket. The other she capsuled and squirted out to the center’s real bosses ― the Global Science Foundation, political descendants of the dish’s original builders ― along with her report.

  Sandar appended a request for an investigation. She didn’t really believe the request was necessary ― for something of this magnitude, an investigation would obviously be mandatory ― but hoped her doing so would induce them to include her in the research team.

  This was real. This was important, more so than anything else currently being done by GSF. This was the reason she had ― the reason anyone had ― become a scientist: to investigate the unknown.

  Sandar patted her breast pocket containing the datatab contentedly, then keyed another playback. She smiled, leaned back and closed her eyes, picturing the immediate response her message would initiate.

  And she was correct. The response from the Foundation came the very next day.

  ☼

  “Wait a minute… who the hell are you?” Sandar was livid.

  Towering over her was a statuesque brunette girl of no more than fifty or so years of age. She had a carryall slung over one shoulder and a chip on the other. She reached past Sandar to slot a datatab into the control room’s console.

  “I told you once, already, but… there, read that. We’ll make it nice and official.” She pointed to the transfer orders on the display. “I’m sitting there at the University, in my office, minding my own god damn business, when I get ordered to the asshole of the Caribbean to take over nursemaid duties on a hole in the ground.”

  “Actually, Puerto Rico is quite…”