The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  His integration console didn't show a single emergency light. His palms were wet. He wiped them on his thighs, his eyes never leaving the integration schematic.

  Maybe this mission was going to work after all. Outrun their bad luck at the beginning, the general from ConSpace Com had said. Maybe they could do that.

  They were out of Threshold's old orbit, he saw when he sneaked a glance at the topological locator on the wall. And gaining speed.

  Threshold hadn't come apart from the start-up. The sealars hadn't blown at ignition. If he ? d dared leave his station, Cummings would have found General Granrud and bought the man a drink. The steady pace of acceleration wasn't fazing the tugs, or towing vehicles, or the Threshold system, badly enough to show on the sensor net.

  So they were all right, for the time being. The next really dangerous moment was a long way off. when they tried to synchronize a jump out of the local space time. If they couldn't manage it, the ride to Pluto over even 7 inch of the intervening spacetime topology was going to take far and away too many years of Richard Cummings' life.

  If they tried and failed to make a cleanly synced jump, some or all of the outboard or modular parts of Threshold were going to be scraped off as they bored their way into a custom-drilled hole from this spacetime to the energy sea beneath. If that happened, it was hard to tell which components of this jury-rigged bucket of wishes and prayers were most likely to survive.

  CHAPTER 27

  Joyride

  Sitting in STARBIRD, alone with Birdy and his thoughts, Joe South watched Threshold pull out of orbit with all the detachment he could muster. Why was he worried about the habitat's survival? Nobody on it, pasttime, nowtime, or soontime, worried much about his. Maybe he should have cast his lot with the Secretariat crowd in their customretrofitted Flying Dutchman, but he didn't think so.

  As far as South was concerned, the home system looked a lot better without Threshold squatting in your path like some medieval castle, complete with a moat of spacedocks around her. If Spacedocks One through Seven had trundled off in Threshold's wake, then the way to Earth would have been clear.

  South hadn't believed a thing he'd heard since he got back, so he hadn't really believed that the spacedocks were going to stay on station between Mars and Jupiter. But they did, a working component of Mickey Croft's Grand Plan to claim More of the Universe for Humankind.

  Humanity's fate wasn't linked to one space habitat full of bureaucrats and luckless service personnel: Mickey Croft was wrong about at least that much. South had gotten real tired of listening to all the highflown talk and overblown expectations of the Threshold media, the propagandists from the Secretariat, and the newly philosophical Ph.D.'s who popped up on every vid show telling the Threshold audience what a great honor was in store for the habitat's population and how they were the Chosen People of the Human Race.

  By the time Threshold started to move out toward the edge of the home solar system, the political bullshit was flying so thick and fast that once the habitat reached Pluto's orbit, you'd be able to tell your designated coordinates by the smell.

  Joe South vowed once and for all to give up on the politics of Threshold: you had to be a native of the UNE culture to play the game or even handicap the players.

  Was Mickey Croft serious, when the Secretary General went on all-station vid and proclaimed the beginning of a New Epoch of interstellar peace, prosperity, and exploration for the United Nations of Earth and its new ally, the Unity Confederacy? The vid speech not only preempted every alternate entertainment or news source, it was beamed at exorbitant cost across the priority A-potential comm network to every UNE outpost, habitat, and monitoring station in the galaxy.

  Since Joe South's psychometric revaluation, he wasn't exactly in the SecGen's confidence. Or much of anybody else's. Any camel-lipped Epsilonian in the Loader Zone of Threshold could make as good a guess as South about the depth of the Secretariat's commitment to the new plan.

  The habitat was on the move, so somebody was committed to at least looking committed. South had been around these political chameleons too long to dream of taking anything they said—most especially anything they blatantly proclaimed—at face value.

  And then there were the rumors. Sling had told him, confidentially, that NAMECorp was building a brand-new Stalk, out at Spacedock Seven, for emplacement right where the old one had been. When South asked the Aftermarketeer how come, Sling said, "Can't leave the home system unguarded, fella. Too many cone-headed beings around, y'know. Or would y' believe the Loader Zone version, which is that all the Loader Zone types, all the subhu-mans and the bioengineered species, are going to be rounded up during the flight and dispatched back here, surreptitiously, and stashed in the new habitat, cause the Secretariat wants to put humanity's best foot forward, and that don't include the dock workers and the nonproductives— like you and me."

  It sounded farfetched to South, but what did he know— really know—about Threshold society? Maybe every word was true and modules were going to start peeling off the moving habitat, destined for reorbit right back at the original coordinates, under the watchful eye of ConSec and ConSpaceCom, the only real authority left at the Spacedock necklace. If it was true, the home system was about to become a social refugee camp under martial law.

  Or was the scuttlebutt around the Stalk more truthful? Had the Secretariat decided to close the door to Earth on the way out, and let ConSec and ConSpaceCom turn out the lights? Had the Secretariat really ordered an all-points alert, upped the readiness status of all ConSec and ConSpaceCom craft to Defensive Condition Three: "destroy on warning"? Drawn a bead on the Unity Embassy and the Ball?

  Could they be that stupid?

  South wasn't waiting around on Threshold to find out. STARBIRD was his first priority—the real reason he'd come back here. Forget the fact that here had decided to move to there, taking him with it. Anyway, no pilot with a rudimentary understanding of space physics wanted to be sitting around helpless in the marginally spaceworthy Threshold as it picked up speed, heading for a spongespace jump it might or might not be able to execute intact.

  Jumping Threshold, its diaphanous web of aftermarket interconnects, and its outriding escort vessels into a custom-punched hole in the universal fabric, was about as safe as South's first experimental flight in STARBIRD had been. Only this time, Joe South wasn't the pilot. South had always been a terrible passenger. You didn't become a test pilot if you wanted to trust your life to somebody else's reflexes and intelligence.

  Threshold looked like a tree infested with gypsy moths when South got STARBIRD clear of the slipbay and brought the habitat up on his monitors to take a look. Bye-bye, folks. Have a nice trip. Don't forget to write.

  He'd miss Riva, certainly. And Sling, sort of. As for the rest ... Well, they were on their way to meet their destiny, with bells on.

  South had met his, longtime past, on an experimental flyby of a planet then designated X-3, a place of lavender skies and sad-eyed aliens, and every lost dream he'd ever had. Sure, maybe the home system wasn't the safest place to be, if shooting broke out or martial law was really about to be declared, but South wasn't planning to make permanent camp at Threshold's old orbit. He had his ship back now, and she was in fine shape, thanks to Sling. In fact, STARBIRD was more competent than he'd ever dreamed a ship could be when he'd first reentered this spacetime, trying to get home to Earth.

  He could try and make it to Earth now. past what was soon going to be a skeleton policing capability here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Once upon a time, making it home to Earth had been the only goal that mattered to South. But Earth was still a restricted area, a preserve of the rich and powerful, a shrine to man's beginnings.

  And Joe South had found out that what he really wanted wasn't on Earth at all. Not anymore. And not even the Unity aliens could help him roll back the clock, even if he thought he could reenter his past and live there, after all he'd learned.

  South crossed his ankles ru
minatively on his console bumper. Sling's retrofitted flat screens and Al-synchronized scalar drives gave STARBIRD all the capability somebody like South should have been able to imagine. Zero-point energy, which was the inexhaustible by-product of the A-potential field's effect, gave STARBIRD infinite range and competence limited only by the amount of electromagnetic force available to the scalar drives to open and maintain a tap into Dirac's energy sea—and the human body's ability to function at high fractions of the speed of light or in notime. The electromagnetic generators on STARBIRD, which powered her new fifth-force field, life support, upgraded astronics and scalar drive units, pumped out eight gigawatts and could pulse up to twice that, as long as her plasma fuel cells held out.

  So he hadn't really been lying when he'd told Riva Lowe he'd catch up with Threshold—when he was done doing what he had to do. She'd known something was fishy, when he'd told her he was off on his long-delayed shake-out cruise. You couldn't lie to someone who'd been where she'd been and learned what she'd learned. Or. at least, he couldn't. The human race was going to have to learn some new tricks if it wanted to keep up its bad old ways once it started intermingling with the Unity.

  He'd gone to see Riva Lowe in her Blue Mid office, but she wasn't there. He found her in a fancy ambassador's suite up in Blue North, in the Secretariat Executive complex. She seemed distant and preoccupied, when he'd said he wasn't going with the habitat.

  She'd looked around her new office, as if to check for eavesdroppers. And then she'd said, "South, whatever it is you're doing, don't get killed, okay?"

  "Okay," he'd replied, because he didn't understand her anymore—not since they'd come back here. She hadn't wanted to come back here at all, into these constrained physical venues with their severe limits and limiting vistas.

  Now he couldn't drag her away. Had she forgotten everything that had happened to them in the Unity? Had it become a dream for her, half-remembered, half-discounted? He'd forgotten more than he remembered, the first time he'd encountered the Unity. He'd been alone, unready, and all he'd wanted was to go back and resume his old life.

  But Riva and he had performed a difficult task, learned too many lessons, and come back to give a full report. So she couldn't have forgotten. The Unity hadn't wanted her to forget all she'd learned, all she'd become. Maybe she had metabolized the memories—found a way to fit them into a four-dimensional framework once she returned. But how could she have forgotten the plasma shuttle, the pain of readjustment? And how could she bear to simply go back to living among these dangerous, deaf and dumb sleepwalkers at the Secretariat?

  He couldn't say any of that. He just watched her as if he were mourning her loss. Maybe he was. He couldn't find her in the storm of their unsynchronized intentions. She was as lost to him as she would be once the habitat went its way, and he went his.

  They'd done so much together. He couldn't just leave her. They'd shared the alltime, they'd shared a mission, they'd found a new way to live. But none of it seemed to matter to her then.

  He knew she'd made a decision to go with the habitat, and he couldn't change her mind. He didn't try. But he didn't want her changing his mind for him, either. He had his own agenda.

  She could feel the nervousness and determination emanating from him, the uncertainty, the doubt. He couldn't hide his feelings. His emotions splashed around her office in the Secretariat like hydrobath waves in an agitated tub. She was a creature of the Secretariat—he'd forgotten that until the Threshold move stopped being theoretical and started being operational.

  Maybe she'd forgotten, too. Or maybe she was as torn as he. But when the Secretary General and his Chief of Staff needed her expertise on the Unity aliens, she responded like an old fire horse.

  Maybe it was better this way. No room in STARBIRD for two. Never had been. Not really. You could shoehorn another person in here, shorttime. But not comfortably. And not longtime. Still, leaving her on that erector set covered with cobwebs and pulled and pushed by space tugs and destroyers, to find her fate with the masses of sleepy folk who didn't understand what was happening to them. ... He felt like he'd deserted her.

  There was no guarantee that human science was going to get that aftermarketed habitat safely through to its new orbit. He'd said that to her.

  "I know," she'd sighed. "If there's trouble, I should be here." Her face was stonily set: she had her orders.

  He knew better than to argue with her. He had his own orders, after a fashion. There was something he'd been wanting to do for a very long time. And this might be his last—his only—chance to do it.

  So he'd left her in the Secretariat and made his way to the Blue Mid slipbay where it had all started—where he'd first met her. He was lots more savvy now about Threshold ways. He was a high-ranking Customs officer, seconded to the Secretariat, and First Secretary to the Ambassador to Unity space. He had clout to spare, in Threshold terms.

  He used it getting a priority slot for departure from Threshold, just as the habitat was attaining cruising speed.

  Out STARBIRD popped into a spacetime only slightly more perturbed than usual. It wasn't any harder than it had to be, leaving Riva and Sling behind.

  He didn't belong to Threshold. They did. End of story.

  The habitat's course had taken it only a bit past the Spacedock necklace.

  He'd come this route once before, long ago in pasttime. On that occasion, he'd left a lot more behind than Threshold. He'd left his century, his culture, his life, and ma his sanity.

  This time, he at least had his equilibrium and all of his soontime promises to keep.

  "Birdy," he said to his AI copilot, "set course for the Unity Embassy."

  This could get tricky if there really were a large number of weapons trained on the embassy and on the Ball. He uncrossed his legs, sat up, leaned forward, and talked to Traffic Control himself.

  "What do you mean, prohibited? How can a vector to Spacedock Seven be a restricted area?" he asked the flat-voiced controller.

  "Commander South, you'll have to talk to my supervisor about that. I'm just following orders."

  So then he had to figure out what strings to pull. Technically, as a Customs official seconded to the Secretariat, he could call Threshold for clearance to pass. Or he could call Reice.

  "Yo, Reice! What's the magic word to get over there to see you at the Ball site? I got to talk to you in person. Some things are unfit for open channels." It always worked before. Tell some official you've got information that's too sensitive to be discussed on an open line, and you don't have your secure unit with you.

  Reice said, "South, old man. I was just thinking about you. How do you propose to get here?"

  "STARBIRD." Reice had been the first human of Threshold he'd ever encountered. Now maybe Reice would be the last. It had a certain symmetry that the Unity Council would have approved.

  "Will that can of outmoded technology get you here— this time—under its own power?"

  Reice remembered that first encounter with a pilot from his distant past, a Relic called Joe South. And Reice was in rare form today. South wished he had a vid connection, but for some reason BLUE TICK was accepting voice transmission only.

  "Look, I can still reach Threshold for a priority vector, if you don't have the juice, Reice." That should be about all the prodding necessary.

  "Shit, don't do that. You want to come back in here, join the party? Give me your ETA, current coordinates, and five minutes to grease the wheels."

  Worked like a charm.

  STARBIRD hummed to attention under him. full of power and speed. Birdy muttered contentedly, executing all of the pass-through checks and vector hand-overs in this overcontrolled traffic lane. They sure didn't want anything getting loose out here, or any uncontrolled excitement.

  The traffic check-points you had to pass by to get into the Spacedock necklace, South soon realized, were artifacts of the UNE's paranoia concerning Unity constructs. Then it hit him like a slap between the eyes: the firepower out
here was enormous. ConSec and ConSpaceCom really were on a destroy-on-warning alert.

  Idiots.

  The only thing these hotdogs would destroy would be themselves, if they showed the poor judgement to open fire on Unity constructs.

  He should have realized that something more than simple distraction had been wrong with Riva Lowe. Maybe he'd been wrong: maybe you could still lie to someone who'd passed through the alltime, touched the notime, and poked their physiologies into eleven-space and lived not to tell about it. He'd known it was too easy, getting away from Riva without the usual spate of prying questions. It was so easy because she didn't want to answer any questions from him.

  Where were her loyalties, anyhow? He was still wearing his plasma-formed boots. She'd been through all that— flown a plasma shuttle, met the Unity Interstitial Council, and she still put humanity first.

  He wasn't sure he did. Not anymore. If the sleeping race called humanity could awake to its potential, it wouldn't be without a few buckets of cold water in its collective face. The bristling armaments deployed around the Unity Embassy and the Ball proved that beyond a doubt.

  "What does the UNE think it's going to do, Reice?" he demanded, as soon as he got STARBIRD parked in a matching orbit next to BLUE TICK and Reice let him on board. "Blast the embassy out of existence? Because it doesn't exist here in the way of ordinary matter. Neither does the Ball. You ought to know that."

  Reice was parked right under the Ball, hanging under her anus in a Ball-stationary orbit.

  "Yeah, I know that. South. Could you just wait until I institute a couple basic security precautions?"

  Reice was a paranoid crazy who'd finally found a situation that suited his preconceptions. He was smiling slightly as his fingers rippled over a secure keypad, and BLUE TICK put up so many cancellation waveforms that South's inner ears buzzed from the harmonic resonances.

  To get Reice to let him come aboard, South had had to goddamned spacewalk. Reice wouldn't even attempt a dock with STARBIRD. Something about being ready, willing, and able to engage the enemy not including a nonstandard mating of locks.