"I appreciate your help, T.C.," Kendric said gently. "What can I do for you today?"
"You know about the radio pulses from the inner planet here, Captain." It was a statement, not a question. The Warrior's antennae had picked up the anomalous signals shortly after the Squadron had entered the Haven system. The pulses were regular, almost like a beacon, but did not seem to use either a frequency or a code typical of TOG. Whatever it was did not seem to be threatening. No radio source could communicate with TOG forces in less than the twenty years necessary for the signal to reach the star system nearest to Haven, assuming there were TOG forces there at all. Haven lay somewhat above the galactic plane, where stars were fewer and inhabited systems more sparsely distributed. Kendric had no fears that the radio source could warn TOG of their presence.
If it wasn't a TOG beacon, what was it? He had given orders for the communications department to keep listening... and to investigate the matter. There was little enough else for them to do, with no duties beyond maintaining communications between the ships of the small fleet.
"Yes, I know about them. I got a request from Munro just this morning. He wants to send a shuttle in close to the giant for a closer listen."
"That's right. And I'd like to go along."
"You, T.C.? Why?"
She made a face. "Call it a need to stretch my legs. Besides, I've heard those signals. I think I'd like a closer listen. And someone has to filter the garbage to tape a clear feed for the ship's computers. That
ought to be done at the source, not back here."
Kendric nodded slowly. She was a logical choice. Her experience at programming computers gave her the skills needed to filter the raw, white noise broadcast by the gas giant itself, as well as store the recorded signal in a form the Gael Warrior s computer would recognize and accept. If it was a beacon of some kind, the Warrior's computers might be able to identify it.
"It could be dangerous," he said.
"I don't think so, Captain. There's been no indication of hostility, and it doesn't sound like any Imperial signal I've ever heard."
He paused, studying her. T.C. had been so remote of late. He knew she had been hurt by their exchange weeks before. Some sinister, deeply hidden part of himself rose far enough into the light to whisper, What if she's 'taking a walk...' like on Grod? She could he depressed, unhappy...
He pushed the thought aside. T.C. had been hurt, not suicidal. Her fortitude, her ability to maintain her strength of will and purpose in the slave camp, had been all that had kept him from giving up. Would it help matters between them if he put his boot down, and ordered her not to go? No. Not with T.C.
"It's certainly all right with me," he said at last, trying to sound casual. "How many are going?"
"We are suggesting a change of plan, Captain. Instead of a shuttle, the boys down in Alpha Bay are converting a two-seater fighter, that TOG Gladius you picked up intact after the last battle."
"Oh, right." They had found the fighter adrift as they'd been searching for Douglass and other lost pilots. Its pilot and weapons officer had both been killed by a relatively minor mass driver projectile hit that had sprayed shrapnel up through the deck under their feet. "So, you'll operate the scanners?"
"That's right. I've already been checked out on all the gear."
Kendric knew it was better to risk two in a captured fighter, than one of the precious cargo shuttles, butJie didn't want to risk T.C. at all. His reason told him this little mission should be safe enough.
"Great," he said, with forced cheerfulness. "When do you want to leave?"
"We figure everything will be ready by 0800 tomorrow."
"I'll wish you good luck then, T.C.. Just be sure you come back."
She smiled, and for an instant, he saw a flash of the T.C. he had first known. "We'll be back." She turned to go.
"Oh, T.C...."
"Captain?"
"Do you have a pilot yet?"
She smiled again. "Yes. Jaime Douglass. He's out of sickbay now and says he's dying to try out a Gladius. I'm not sure if that's reassuring or not."
T.C. went quickly out the door, and he stared after her for a long moment. There was something about all this that he didn't like at all. He couldn't say why, but it was not at all reassuring that Jaime Douglass would be piloting that Gladius.
My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but that it's queerer than we can imagine.
—Saying attributed to J.B.S. Haldane, British biochemist, 20th century Terra, Interregnum Period
The Gladius shuddered as it hit the upper layers of the gas giant's far-flung atmosphere. Jaime eased forward on the control stick, cutting in the maneuvering gravs that brought the little ship's nose down slightly.
"Handles a lot like a Spic" he said through the craft's intraship. "A little sluggish on her turns, but the antigrav is a definite plus."
T.C. sat immediately behind him, swaddled in a pressure suit, helmet, and the webbing of her seat harness. She recognized that Jaime was making conversation for her benefit, and appreciated the fact. Sitting in the second seat of something as small as a two-man fighter left her feeling exposed and vulnerable.
The gas giant, vast and salmon-colored above her head, seemed to engulf heaven and reach to infinity in every direction. Its atmosphere contained storms and swirls and eddies that could swallow whole terrestrial planets. The white streaks and streams, she knew, were high-altitude clouds—probably flakes of ammonia ice—adrift in a hydrogen sea. The red and orange streaks resembled the vast clefts and valleys of a terrestrial landscape, except that these valleys were thousands of kilometers deep and wide, and were made from clouds of strange, molecular compounds accelerated to hyperhurricane speeds by the pressures within that atmosphere. In places, there were streaks of deep blue-violet, regions where the upper cloud layers had parted to reveal clear atmosphere underneath. The gulf beneath the upper layers might be twenty thousand kilometers deep, a vast, unknowable ocean. Tinted orange, red, and yellow by a carbon chemistry involving hydrogen, methane, and ammonia that Humans only vaguely understood, the clouds above the gulf formed whorls and currents where a planet the size of Alba, where a ship the size of the Gael Warrior, even a construct as large as Alba Port, where anything made by Man— would be utterly and absolutely insignificant.
T.C. felt a chill, not of cold, but of wonderment.
The ship lurched again, and once more, Jaime corrected her trim. The atmosphere at this level was painfully thin, bordering on hard vacuum. At the Gladius's velocity, however, there were molecules enough to compress around the ship as a kind of shock wave, felt from time to time as a deep-throated rumble and visible as a faint mistiness forming around the ship's twin pontoons on either side of her cockpit.
"What are you picking up?" Jaime asked.
T.C. checked the readout of the scanner in front of her. "Lots more sound here," she said. "The pulse is still there, but we're picking out some harmonics we couldn't hear before, out in the asteroid belt. It's....it's not noise."
"What do you mean?"
She searched for the proper words. A gas giant such as this one naturally generated intense radio noise, the result of charged particles from the local sun being whipped at high velocities through the planet's intense and far-flung magnetic fields. At certain frequencies, the white noise from this colossal radio broadcaster was deafening, a waterfall of raw power that threatened all communications between the fighter and the Warrior. The radio pulse was something else—measured, powerful, throbbing, ordered...
Her mind shied away from drawing the obvious conclusion. There were plenty of powerful, regular radio sources in the Galaxy. When pulsars were first discovered five thousand years before, scientists had believed for a time that they were intelligently conceived interstellar beacons. They had even been dubbed "LGMs"—short for "Little Green Men."
Though the precision of a pulsar's signal seemed as though it could only be generated through artificial
means, it was explainable through t he mechanics of supernovas, synchrotron radiation, and the extremely rapid rotation of neutron stars within an intense magnetic field. Each i adio pulse was only that, a pulse of noise created when the rotation of the synchrotron radiation source swept it across an observer's line-of-sight. What T.C. was listening to now was subtly different.
"I'd swear there's a code in there, Jaime," she said. "Patterns within patterns."
"Code! Like an Imperial beacon? A watch outpost?" TOG had posted many unmanned monitor stations in out-of-the-way stations to guard against smugglers or alien incursions by reporting their information to some distant military base.
"No. I'm...I'm not even sure it's artificial. But it's as though there's some kind of deep order to those patterns... like layers. There's the throb.. .and a deeper harmonic that seems to be carrying information...and a harmonic of that carrying even more..."
"You lost me, T.C.."
"I lost me. What's that up ahead?"
"Terminator."
Night engulfed the hurtling fighter. It came first with an explosion of glory as the sun set behind them in blazing reds outlined in silver along the rim of the planet, then with a blackness that gradually changed to not-blackness. Overhead, T.C. could still see the clouds, the cliffs and valleys and storms and 10,000-kilometer gulfs, glowing with an eerie phosphorescence of their own.
She brought one hand up to her helmet phones in momentary pain, then touched controls on her panel to cut the gain. "The transmission is more powerful!" T.C. had to yell to be heard. The noise had inserted itself into the Gladius's intraship circuits somehow, threatening to drown out all conversation between the front of the cockpit and the back. Above them, lightning arced in blue-white fury from cloud to cloud across a chasm 8,000 kilometers wide. T.C. gasped. There were unimaginable powers loose within that world...
"My God in heaven..."
Jaime's reverently muttered oath brought her attention forward. There was light ahead.
Light! For a moment, T.C. had the impression of flying high over a vast metropolis at night, a city ablaze enough to illuminate half a continent. What was different here was the whirling motion that transformed a sea of light into a living glory. A moment later, the Gladius was passing over the vortex of the effect, an ocean of radiance, alive with motion and silent power. Silent? Their radio receivers were dead, burned out, and she'd not been aware of it till now.
Around them, light coalesced into vast rods and planes of silent, golden luminescence. The shapes were moving now, sweeping out and around from some point directly above the fighter as it flew, inverted, through the planet's sky. It took T.C. a moment to recognize the pattern. The rods of color were like the spokes of a wheel...and the spokes were rotating. Far off toward the distant horizon, she could make out a Rim, encircling them.
It took a moment longer to realize that the Wheel was following them across the surface of the planet. As fast as they were sweeping through the planet's night sky, the hub of the ghostly, radiant Wheel paced them. Lightning flashed in titanic discharges. Were they random.. .or somehow a part of what was happening among the cloud tops?
This was no natural phenomena, but Intelligence. A part of her mind seemed to be in tune with the now unheard pulsings across the radio frequencies. Rather then hearing it, T.C. felt as though she had somehow, incomprehensibly, become part of it.
There was a shock of recognition, then a joy she had never before experienced, a supreme, exultant, unbridled joy that was also a step removed from her being. She could feel the joy profoundly but experienced, it as though watching its manifestation in another.
The scale was awe-inspiring, beyond anything a Human might conceive. The Wheel of light spanned the combined diameters of many lesser worlds. The detached, scientific part of her mind toyed with the notion that this was, after all, only a natural phenomenon of some kind, a trick of electricity or plasma physics triggered by the passage of their ship through the planet's upper atmosphere.
The Reality of what she saw challenged the thought aborning, smashed it aside. She was seeing Mind, and at a scale and scope and depth that left her breathless. The certainty of that revelation hammered itself into T.C.'s dazed brain. Intelligence! Yet, Intelligence on a scale that she could never hope to comprehend, on a scale so grand that it would forever sunder her kind from the cloud dwellers and their panoply of Light.
"Even our intraship was out, Captain," Jaime said. He and T.C. were in Kendric's office. Both reported themselves well, but it was obvious to Kendric that their experience had affected them almost physically. It was almost as though they had become smaller, or perhaps it was that some part of their consciousness was now turned deeply within.
"We couldn't talk to the ship, and we couldn't talk to each other," T.C. added. "All we could do was...watch."
"But you saw nothing threatening? Nothing hostile?" What does
this mean to our people? Are we in danger?
Jaime shook his head. "No, sir. I had the definite impression that they were...aware of us. But we weren't in danger."
"Were they trying to communicate, do you think?" Kendric had seen the holographic images taped by the Gladius during its pass over the planet. He had seen the lights and the vast, circling, radiant wheel, but there was something lacking in the translation of what they had experienced. Somehow, T.C. and Jaime had been profoundly affected, in ways that went far beyond a glimpse of inexplicable lights in the gas giant's atmosphere. He longed to have shared the experience with them. It was now like a secret they shared, and from which he was eternally shut out.
"Communicate?" Douglass looked puzzled, as though considering the question for the first time. "No, sir, I don't think so. At least, if they were trying to communicate with us, they didn't say much. I had an... an impression of very great...er...happiness. Joy. Wonder. Surprise."
"Surprise?"
"As though they'd discovered...something wonderful. Utterly unexpected. A revelation."
Kendric shook his head. "I don't understand."
"Neither do I."
T.C. looked pensive. "I felt as Jaime did. I'm not...I'm not sure communication is possible between us and them. At least not on any meaningful level. It was as though we were completely insignificant..." She frowned, the expression puckering her forehead. "No, Ken.. .not insignificant. But very, very, very different. I'm not sure we have anything in common at all."
Kendric pondered that thought a moment. "O.K. Well done, both of you. That'll be all for now. Go get some rest." As they turned to go, Kendric added, "Oh, T.C.? Would you stay for a moment?" He studied her as she came back to the opposite side of the desk. Why did she seem so changed? How was she different? "Please, pull up a chair," he said.
"I'm sorry I can't be more precise about what we saw."
"You did better than I would have, thrown into something like that. Besides, you weren't on a scientific expedition. What I need to know more than anything else is whether the... the things you saw are a threat to us, to our ships."
"They aren't, Captain. I'm sure of that much."
"I'll accept that." He hesitated. "T.C....I'm sorry about what happened. I...well, no excuses. I wouldn't have hurt you for the Galaxy."
"I know...Ken. I know that."
"There's something more. Something you should know. I've been thinking hard about what we're going to do now, about where we're going to go."
"Andromeda?"
"No. That's impossible...at least for us." He shook his head. "Damn it, T.C., what I'm trying to say is that it's true I had no right to run roughshod over you at that conference. And on top of it all, you were right all along, and I should have listened to you. I've made my decision. We're going to the Commonwealth."
Kendric had expected some emotion, some reaction to this news— if only because it meant she might be reunited with her brother again.
She nodded and said, "Is that all, sir?" Neither her face or in her voice betrayed any emotion.
"That's good." Her face still impassive, T.C. stood, turned, and walked out.
I've lost her. Kendric's hands curled impotently into fists on the desktop. I've lost her.
Kendric had arrived at his decision after much thought. The idea of fleeing to Andromeda appealed to him, but he was rational enough to see the extraordinary obstacles to such a flight. Though water could be manufactured from ice taken on board as reaction mass, food was another matter entirely.
To carry a few years or more supply for everyone in the waking crew would require several good-size transports. Nor was there any guarantee that once they reached Andromeda, the Squadron would find a world whose a biology could support Human life indefinitely. There were Human colonies throughout the Galaxy that depended utterly on interstellar trade because the local environments were lacking in some essential Human amino acid or protein or vitamin. He remembered hearing once at Grelfhaven that Human life on a number of worlds had become extinct during the great Snow Plague of centuries before, not because of the disease, but because galactic trade was disrupted to the point that many populations had no local and accessible sources of vitamin C, and no way to manufacture it quickly.
Freighters and food could be captured, it was true, but the risks to the community were enormous.
Gael's Bane was the second factor that argued against flight to Andromeda. The younger officers of the fleet—Jaime, for example— had not shown much sign of being disturbed by empty space. It was quite a different matter for many of the older men and officers. Lenard Morganen, for instance, was badly affected...and the lapse when the bridge watch had seen emptiness ahead through the main viewer could have resulted in disaster. What would happen when they jumped into the intergalactic void?
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