by Janet Morris
So what had happened to South could never happen to Reice.
Then why was he so damned nervous? He could jump out of whatever he fell into without losing a beat. That is, he could if nothing unforeseen went wrong.
Off his starboard bow, that weirdass artifact was purplish and hazy. He didn't like that one bit. There were still no guarantees that you wouldn't run into something, sailing the as-yet mysterious seas of spacetime, that nobody'd mapped.
But you didn't run into those things in the shoals of the home system. You didn't.
Almost unconsciously, Reice ran his upstretched hands over his fire controls. If something messed with him—if those kids did, or anything else did, Reice had enough firepower aboard the pursuit craft to hold his own.
But if the problem wasn't a hostile consciousness with a body and a ship, but some inimical force of nature, there wasn't a thing his weaponry could do to help him. You couldn't overpower nature. You had to think your way through it.
So, having put every pulse beam and KKD delivery system and vectored scalar grapple on standby, Reice had nothing else to occupy him. He could only fly over this one-time hole and wait to see if it sucked him up.
Hell of a note.
He kept a running log of his progress, keeping track of everything except his body's reaction to this kind of stress: no need to let the whole of ConSec know the way he was sweating this, if he lived to turn in his report.
Some men would have contacted Spacedock Control and kept up a continual stream of patter with the Emergency Controller, or even called back to Threshold for a conference before flying into . . . whatever this was.
But Reice wasn't going to let anybody know he was even a little bit nervous. He was going to treat this as completely routine and handle it all by his lonesome.
Having that Relic pilot sitting out there watching and recording everything was a lucky break, and one that satisfied the unwritten SOP for the unique: Whenever you were doing something life-threatening that hadn't been done before, you wanted somebody there for backup.
If South hadn't been a Relic, Reice might have kept an open channel to STARBIRD. As things stood, he was feeling almost comradely toward the antique pilot. South wasn't so bad to have around in a crisis. He sure didn't flap like a lot of these wet-behind-the-ears kids would, just because there wasn't a by-the-book way to handle something like this.
And South wasn't arguing with him about procedure and protocol the way anybody else would have: Reice finally admitted to himself that he wasn't calling into a ConSec station because, if he did, he'd get an argument about flying over the spacetime in question.
When you'd seen a set of coordinates turn into a sinkhole, the normal thing to do would be cordon it off and send in drones.
But Reice was betting that the kids had pulled this stunt on purpose, because they'd known he was back here and realized he was going to catch them and whip their spoiled asses (at least verbally) before he dragged them back by their freighter's ears to face discipline.
His rational mind was sure all this was a simple case of a couple of juvenile delinquents with a state-of-the-art spacecraft who'd grown up believing that the rules were for other, less privileged people.
Like father like son, as far as the Cummingses were concerned, for certain. If Reice could overfly the area and prove, right away, that there was no phenomenal problem here to blame the kids' disappearance on, then Cummings, Jr., wouldn't be able to tie everybody up in red tape and stymie any criminal proceedings with cries for massive searches and investigations into the possible culpability of spacedock authorities for ignoring a weakness in the fabric of spacetime out here.
Reice could just hear Richard the Second screaming cover-up. It would cost Threshold thousands of K-notes just to prove that there wasn't some nasty little sinkhole off Spacedock Seven waiting to gobble up unwitting children on joyrides.
So you flew over the spot and, if nothing happened, you'd shut down the argument—and the excuse—beforehand.
Reice wished the ball would quit changing colors like that. Then he'd believe he wasn't just comforting himself while he prepared to commit suicide.
He brought the ball into close focus once again, trying to ignore the fact that he was now entirely within the area that his mapping display defined as part of the recent deformation.
The ball was a plain old ball of silver, nothing special.
And his mapping display put him right in the center of the recent disturbance. He watched that screen again while his palms sweated and the little blip representing Blue Tick crawled steadily across the funnel area, which was described by an overlay of crosshatched topological grid lines bending into a completely blank hole.
Reice was right in the middle of the hole, and his realtime display was reading no-problem: he had a clear readout in all modes and nothing, not a single parameter, was out of whack.
You just sat there with your heart pounding and listened to the tiny sounds of a spacecraft running like clockwork.
And you watched that ball for more purple haze.
Reice didn't know why he'd thought the ball was anything to worry about. It was South's prehistorical hysteria, getting to him. The ball wasn't squat. The ball was just some piece of crap that had come out of a white hole, the way a fin of an old ship might, or an ancient vid monitor might. White holes were nothing more than the sewer conduits of the universe.
Somewhere he'd heard that on old Earth there were big reptiles with huge teeth who lived in sewers because people flushed them down the waste recyclers. But the ball wasn't alive, and it wasn't doing anything in the least bit odd at the moment.
Reice dumped his view of the ball and went back to watching the topographical map. Blue Tick was now traversing the left-hand half of the diagrammatic hole, and nosing back into the spreading cone of the funnel.
Only a little farther, and he'd be able to say that he flew the distance without a single anomaly occurring.
He really wanted to be able to say that.
He brought up another topo scan, this one describing the actual spacetime he was overflying. Lidar mapped the realtime area and sent him back data with which Tick's AI constructed a geometric display of the space around him, just as the ship sensed it.
Space was as calm here as it was around Threshold. There was actually less deformation, because Threshold had a lot more mass than spacedock and more artifically induced gravity as well.
About the time that Reice dumped the map of the hole that wasn't there anymore, South's ship called his.
"Yeah, South. What is it?" Reice wasn't glad to take the call. His voice was squeaky from the tension and he didn't like being bothered when he wanted, most of all, to go to the head and void his bowels, now that he had time to pay attention to his body.
South's transmission quality wasn't great, but it never had been. An antique was an antique. "Want me to boot this log over to you, Lieutenant?" the Relic pilot asked insouciantly.
"When I want you to do something, South, I'll tell you. You hold that log and take it, and the other one of the hole, over to Riva Lowe's office. Tell her I want it to go to Croft and Remson, ASAP. Got that: Croft and Remson?"
"Roger."
Roger?
"Well, get going, South. I don't want to send this stuff through normal channels. And I'm continuing my search. For all I know, that freighter'll pop back out right in front of me and try to get into a normal jump lane now that it thinks it's shaken me."
"Reice," said South's voice. "I'll hand-deliver your data, no sweat. As soon as I finish my mission."
Reice didn't give a fig about South's mission, whatever busywork it was. Riva Lowe had her own agenda where the Relic was concerned, and Reice knew better than to interfere with her where Customs matters were concerned. "Just don't take all week, Captain. Reice, out."
He didn't have the patience for the Relic. He had a freighter to find. If he couldn't find it, he wanted to be able to say he'd done his damnedest.
And he wanted to go to the bathroom. As he got up, his AI burbled and assumed complete control of the Blue Tick.
Reice couldn't ever remember being happier just to be alive. When he got ahold of those kids, he was going to make them wish they'd never been born. But until then, he was going to string out this search as long as he could.
Let the computer jocks back on Threshold try to figure out just what hole the fugitive freighter had accessed. If he were those kids, he'd be looking to get into a normal corridor so that they could jump for one of Daddy's outposts.
Maybe Reice could wangle a trip to five or six of NAMECorp's more exotic holdings. After all, Remson had given him a blank check to find the kids. And once he saw that log, which South had so conveniently provided, Remson was going to give Reice anything he wanted.
Anything at all. Because Reice, by providing Croft's office with that record of an unauthorized spongejump in a populated area, had given Croft the club that the Secretary needed to bludgeon both fathers into submission.
Not even rich, spoiled brats could commit felonies in the home system and get away with it. Not unless there was one hell of a horse-trading session involved.
The fines alone ought to shut both parents' mouths about Threshold's purported security failures. The log South had recorded was going to hit those fathers like cold water in the face.
And all thanks to Reice, who'd had the courage to overfly the spot where the kids disappeared, thus proving that it was the kids' doing, and no natural anomaly.
Now if he could just convince his bowels that everything was all right, he could get on with the business of gloating.
Maybe he could even parlay this into a promotion. Colonel Reice had a nice, substantial ring to it.
CHAPTER 27
Paradise
Rick Cummings braked into the planetary system as hard as he could. It had just suddenly . . . appeared . . . around them, as if the spongehole they'd come out of had dumped them out halfway into a solar system.
And what a solar system! He looked over at Dini, beside him, with a Brow asleep in her lap and her mocket curled up at her feet.
A grin tugged at his lips. If his father could see him now. But Richard couldn't see him. And for the first time in his entire adult life, Rick told himself that it didn't matter what his father thought.
Behind him, one of the other Brows reached up and tugged on his sleeve.
"Up," he whispered, not wanting to wake Dini.
The Brow jumped into his lap, turned around once, and instead of settling down, stood on Rick's thighs as if to look out at the planet that had just come up in his primary viewer.
The Brow stretched, its fingers clutching the console's bumper, and peered out the big viewscreen at the realtime display.
It began to whistle softly and its tail-tip quivered.
"You like this, don't you," he told it softly, and stroked its back. Rick was almost ready to credit Dini's theory that the Brows had done this on purpose.
There didn't seem to be another explanation. He'd half-expected that, if the Brows had done it, the place they'd come out would be their home system.
But the planet in the primary viewer wasn't Olympus.
As a matter of fact, none of these planets looked familiar. So far as Rick Cummings and the freighter's AI could determine, this was a totally unexplored system.
Perhaps a totally uninhabited one, since he hadn't seen any man-made satellites as they came in. He'd asked the AI if there was a planet capable of sustaining human life without auxiliary life-support, and the AI had put up this one, the planet just ahead.
Beyond it was a ringed planet, sort of lavender and with a heavy atmosphere that made it luminous in the light of the distant sun.
This whole misadventure was strange, but not frightening, somehow. They could land on this planet, if they wanted. The freighter was transatmospheric. Maybe they'd honeymoon here, if the AI was right.
The Brow on his lap started lashing its tail furiously.
"What is it, boy?" He stroked the Brow to calm it.
Then Rick looked up at his monitors.
Out of the atmosphere of the planet that the AI had chosen, ships were coming. A swarm of them. Faster than anything he'd ever seen. And they were doing astrobatics as they came.
The ships were spherical. They swarmed and darted together like a flock of seagulls that Cummings had once seen at his father's Earthly beach house.
Rick couldn't imagine why they didn't hit one another, or what kind of power plants they might be using. He didn't see any afterburn. He didn't see any of the reddening glow on the spherical shells which should be there, if you were heating up as you came out of atmosphere the way those ships should be, zipping around like that.
He shooed the Brow off his lap and it hissed. Immediately, it jumped up beside its fellow on Dini's lap.
She woke up. "Rick! What's happening?" Dini knuckled her eyes. The second Brow, disturbed by the one who wanted to look out the viewer, nuzzled her and made that mewling noise of theirs.
"Happening? We're safely out of sponge and I've found us a beautiful planet. Take a look."
No use in scaring her.
He wasn't scared himself, and that was funny. Here was a bunch of ships, headed right for him in a flurry of impossible maneuvers—ships like he'd never seen before, from a planet nobody'd ever visited before, and he wasn't the least bit worried.
The Brow who liked to look at the stars was whistling softly.
Dini said, "Oh, it's beautiful. Look at the colors!"
The planet was beautiful. It was pastel and welcoming.
And the ships coming out of it had a rainbow finish to their hulls.
"I think we're going to have visitors. See, Dini. A welcoming committee."
"Oh. Here," she picked up the second Brow. "You look, too."
From down the corridor, the third Brow came hurtling and bounded onto Rick's headrest.
"Now don't you pull my hair!" he warned it.
But of course, that was exactly what it tried to do.
Then his com system beeped and he realized that the ships were trying to make contact.
He opened up his hailing frequency on wide band and his AI did the rest.
Rick heard "Welcome, travelers" in a whistly voice, and all the Brows suddenly went berserk.
They were jumping around—on his lap, off his lap, on Dini's lap, off Dini's lap, on the console, from there to the couch headrests, and back. And the whole time, they were whistling long, melodic strings and gesticulating with their little black hands.
"Ah—" Rick tried to think of something momentous to say in return. After all, he was making contact with a spacefaring civilization—the first one that humankind had ever met. All the races they'd found had been technologically inferior, wherever humanity had gone. So he continued: "Greetings, from Earth, humanity, and North American Exploration Corporation, who's sponsored this visit." His father would like that.
But he wasn't sure that anyone could hear him, over the clamor of the Brows.
"You have brought our wayward children home, and we thank you," said the voice. "Will you allow us to make you welcome on our world?"
Dini looked at Rick. "Are they Brows? Brows with spaceships?" Her eyes were as big as saucers.
Rick tapped the viewscreen and toggled his AI's attention to the ships. A closeup of one showed him nothing new: a spherical spacegoing vehicle with a rainbow hull. He shrugged and put a finger to his lips; he didn't know if they were Brows or not, but he wasn't going to offend them.
"We'd love to visit with you, before we go on our way."
If only he could get video. But there was no video of his hosts to be had.
"Please let us assist you," whistled the voice. "Your craft must take its landing data from ours."
"Fine," Rick said. Don't rock the boat, so to speak. Dini's hand had found his and she was clutching him tightly. Her mocket was awake and whining softly, huddled in
a corner under the console where the Brows wouldn't careen into it in their agitation.
All of a sudden, before he could tell his AI to prepare to take data from the ships outside, his control panels went crazy: everything went on and off and cycled through its parameters.
He tried to ignore it. He didn't want Dini to worry. He leaned forward and keypadded one of his monitors; at least he could still direct the ship.
What he'd asked for was a view of all four quadrants. He got it. There were sixteen of the spherical ships surrounding his.
Either it was a police escort or an honor guard. He didn't want to dwell on which. He kept telling himself that they'd been very polite, whoever they were.
"Rick," Dini said in a hushed voice. "Look at that."
He looked up to see all three Brows, standing on Dini's console, like three little people with tails, looking out the main viewscreen.
And on that screen, the impossible was being displayed.
The freighter must be swooping at unseemly speeds, down through a pink and lavender atmosphere. Clouds parted before them and Dini grabbed his hand tighter.
"Oh, Rick, it's like a dream."
The city that they saw when the clouds parted was hardly more than a town. There were white, gleaming buildings on hillsides and there were what seemed to be winding trails among gorgeously colored plots of vegetation, some of which looked like magnificent gardens of multicolored hue.
Rick glanced at Dini and she had tears in her eyes. He hoped they weren't tears of fright. Did she understand that this ship couldn't go this fast in atmosphere?
Again, he looked at his readouts. They made absolutely no sense. Physics were being violated here. But the spherical ships around them were doing the same thing.
He could see out the forward viewer that three of the ships were in front of them.