Hunted Earth Omnibus

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Dianne wished to hell she knew how things were going on the little ship. But Hijacker had to maintain radio silence, and she was not large enough to carry the sort of pointing and tracking gear required to keep a comm laser pointed accurately over long range. There was no way to know more than what the screen and the tracking officer could tell her.

  Now came the worst part, the most dangerous part. Hijacker was moving slowly in relation to the massive CORE, but she still needed to match velocities with the behemoth. That meant firing some sort of reaction thruster. Standard fusion rockets were out of the question, of course—they would light up a radar screen like a Christmas tree. But there were other choices besides fusion rockets.

  “She should start braking any time,” said Gerald MacDougal. “I pray to God this works.”

  Hijacker used cold gas rockets—nothing more or less than compressed-air jets. The jets were hideously inefficient and awkward. The engineers had had a devil of a time preventing the tanks of supercompressed air from throwing their own substantial radar shadows. It was a terrible solution. There had to be a better way. No one had found it, though. The best that could be said of the compressed-air rockets was that no one could think of anything less bad.

  But, still, it ought to work. Radar of any sort was going to have trouble detecting rocket thrust that was literally nothing more than cold thin air.

  The tracking officer spoke again, relentlessly calm. “We are showing change-of-rate on Hijacker. She has commenced her braking manoeuvre.”

  And now came the moment of truth. There had been no way to know until now. No way to be sure the CORE could not detect a compressed-air jet until they tried it.

  “Any change in radar emissions?” Gerald asked again.

  “Nothing, sir. Hijacker still braking.”

  “Come on, Hijacker,” Dianne whispered, staring at the screen. Seconds turned to minutes, and the tiny brownish dot crept toward its target, a flea on its way to attack an elephant, moving more and more slowly as its braking manoeuvre continued. Time itself seemed to stretch out, expand.

  Until it moved all too quickly.

  “Change in backscatter pattern!” the tracking officer cried out. “Beam transmission seems unchanged, but we are reading a new interference pattern. I say again, a new backscatter pattern.”

  “What the hell sort of pattern?” Dianne demanded. Backscatter meant that whatever was causing the change was directly between the CORE and the Terra Nova, illuminated from behind as it was detected by the TN’s sensors.

  “Searching archives for pattern match,” the tracking officer said. “Oh my God.” For the first time, the young officer betrayed emotion. Suddenly fear hung heavy in her words. “Dust, ma’am. We… we have a pattern match on a radar beam reflecting off rock dust. And the cloud is expanding.”

  And Dianne’s insides were suddenly nothing more than ice. She knew what was happening, what happened next. There was no way around it. Hijacker’s gas jets had struck the surface of the CORE, dislodged dust that had no business existing on that surface, kicked it up into open space. The CORE’s radar beams were striking that dust—and if the Terra Nova could read the change in the beam, so could the CORE. Hijacker’s designers had considered the danger, and rejected it as minor. After all, this very CORE had been seen undergoing the most violent manoeuvres. Surely the massive accelerations would have dislodged any dust layers long ago.

  But no, they had been mistaken. And the Universe was about to extract its usual penalty for being wrong. The CORE would detect the dust cloud, refocus its radar beams to bear down on Hijacker, and that would be that. If the CORE focused its complete attention on the tiny volume of space that contained Hijacker, there could be no escape.

  There was silence on the bridge. There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Perhaps the tracking officer should have kept up her reports, but silence said more than any words she could offer.

  The CORE started to turn, coming about, bringing its nose to bear on Hijacker. The tiny brownish spot on the screen, the spot that was ten men and women, ten of their friends and lovers and colleagues, the spot that was months of planning and years of hope, hung helpless in the sky.

  And then the CORE moved, crossed the distance between itself and Hijacker in the space of five heartbeats. The brown dot vanished, brushed aside as the CORE swept into the space it had occupied. Light flared in the display, and that was all. The display system’s Artlnt faded out the target circle that had highlighted the ship’s position, and the CORE resumed its previous heading.

  Five hundred thousand kilometres away, there was a cloud of debris, of smashed bodies in torn pressure suits, of crumpled machines and ruined engines. Perhaps not all of them were dead yet, perhaps the gods of luck had been cruel enough to catch one or two of them in their pressure suits, leaving them to survive for a time, beyond all hope, but still breathing, hearts still beating, helpless to do anything but watch the wreckage and the bodies disperse into the black and empty space of the Multisystem. Could there be a lonelier death?

  Captain Dianne Steiger still stared in the direction of the view-screen, but she saw nothing at all. “Nothing is changed,” she said at last, in a voice that was cold and hard. “That CORE is still our best chance. Our only chance. It could be years before another one goes on a trajectory we can follow. We either solve this problem, board that CORE, or give up and die.”

  Gerald MacDougal looked over at her, and she looked back at him. After close to five years aboard ship together, she knew what he would say, how he would say it. She answered the words he did not need to speak.

  “I know, Gerald. They are dead. We will mourn when there is time,” she said. “But if we do not break out of this trap, find a way to get this ship to a planet, we might as well be as dead as Hijacker.”

  She slumped back in her command chair and stared at the terrifying emptiness in the screen, the emptiness where the Hijacker had been. “Find a way,” she said. “Find a solution. We were nearly, nearly, there. Find the solution and give it to the second stealthship, the Highwayman.”

  Captain Dianne Steiger tried not to think about the next crew of ten she was sending out to likely death. But the Terra Nova’s survival, the mission, the people of Earth came first.

  And so she spoke the words. “I want the Highwayman launched toward the CORE within a week.”

  “Dianne—Captain—we can’t!” Gerald MacDougal protested. “We’d just be dooming another crew.”

  “Then give me another choice, Gerald,” she snapped, turning to glare at him with desperate eyes.

  Gerald stared right back at her. “At least let me break radio silence and contact Earth before we launch. It’s a million-to-one shot, but maybe they’ve come up with something. There’s no point in hiding out here anymore—that CORE is sure to have spotted us now. Hijacker was directly between us and the CORE. The CORE must have gotten a radar echo off us as well when it threw that beam onto Hijacker.”

  “Tracking?” Dianne asked, not breaking eye contact with Gerald.

  “Dr. MacDougal is right, Captain,” the tracking officer said. “There was a very strong direct pulse onto the hull. The CORE must have picked up the echo.”

  Dianne knew that there was no realistic hope that Earth had come up with anything. After five years of utter failure, the researchers had all given up or gotten bogged down in blind alleys. She knew that even a brief, tight-beam radio transmission might be enough to spook the CORE, send it to the attack. There was no sense in delay, no rational reason to agree.

  But—but even she was horrified at the idea of trying again. The second stealthship could only have a lower chance of success than the first.

  For the CORE would know to watch for them now.

  To hell with sense and rational reason. “Very well,” she said. “Go ahead and make your contact, Dr. MacDougal.”

  She sighed and stared at the main screen and the brooding bulk of the CORE. After all, what harm could there be
in waiting a day or two before sending a second crew to its certain death?

  chapter 2: Left overs

  “Lucian Dreyfuss was my friend, and I was his. That’s something not a whole lotta people can say.

  “A lot of people will tell you he was a real angry person, and yeah, that’s true. He always had a temper. But I bet no one else can tell you why he was so mad. Because he never thought he was good enough. He always thought he could do better. He was mad at himself. And then, when the Charonians came along, he hated them worse than anyone else. He wasn’t like the rest of us. Back then, right at the beginning, everyone else was too confused by them, or couldn’t believe in them, or couldn’t see that they were. We were scared of them. They made us feel so little and weak that there wasn’t any room left to feel anything more. Not Lucian. They didn’t scare him. They just got him mad…

  “…See, at first, most people wanted to think the Charonian disaster just happened, like an earthquake. An act of God, see? Not Lucian. He could get his mind around the Charonians, understand they were an enemy, not some weird force of nature, way before anyone else.

  “…The last job he did was to go down the Rabbit Hole. That’s what we call the shaft from the Lunar surface down to where the Lunar Wheel is. He went down in a suit, and they sent down a TeleOperator rig with Larry Chao running it to go with him. They were gonna hang some sensors on the Wheel so we could listen in. That part worked out okay, and we got a lot of data. But the… the [expletive] Charonians caught them. Chopped the [expletive] VR suit to ribbons, and just took Lucian. We saw it back on the surface through the VR suit’s video pickups. They grabbed him and ran down the [expletive] tunnel.

  “…I still hear him screaming, sometimes, when I go to bed. They took him, and we never found out what happened to him. That’s the part that keeps my nightmares going. He just vanished off into the nowhere, off into fog and mystery. For my money, a guy who was that much alive deserves a better end than that.”

  —Extracts of transcribed recording, from One Year

  After the Abduction: An Oral History of the Disaster,

  Central City Archives, 2427

  Central City

  The Moon

  THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Marcia MacDougal glanced at her wristaid for at least the dozenth time as the chancellor droned on. She knew that she really shouldn’t do it. She knew it looked bad, that it was a disrespectful thing to do—especially for someone who was on the speaker’s platform. The man was due some respect, after all. Chancellor Daltry had been running Armstrong University forever. But it seemed to Marcia that he had been speaking for about the same period of time.

  Damn it, why couldn’t the man finish? MacDougal wanted the ceremony to end so she could go—but she also knew she had to stay, and see the ceremony out.

  Damnation! She should never have come back here. She should have stayed at the Pole, close to the action, ready to move. But yes, there was business to do back here, and yes, she had to be in the city for the Abduction Day ceremonies. She was, after all, a Conner, to use the slang term for a citizen of the Lunar Republic. Marcia was a refugee from Tycho Purple Penal, and thus an immigrant to the Lunar Republic. Like most immigrants, she took her citizenship seriously. She wanted to be here. It was an honour to be here.

  But how could she have known that they would have picked now, today, to find something at the Pole? A breakthrough, Selby had said.

  At least a possible breakthrough. She hadn’t been willing to say more than that.

  “We mourn today,” Chancellor Daltry said, “for that which is lost in the sense of misplaced, out of reach, and also for that which is lost in the sense of being hopelessly, utterly gone. We mourn for the Earth, but retain every hope and expectation that she lives. But we mourn also the lives lost, the destroyed worlds of the Solar System, the end of our previous way of life. In a sense, we are speaking not only for our dead, but to them, telling them all the things we desperately need for them to hear.”

  Nice old guy, Marcia thought, but does he have to go on and on? She went back to tuning out the words, and applauding when everyone else did. Pretending to listen was enough.

  Marcia had said her own piece toward the beginning of the service. Surely that was all they could expect of her. Maybe not even that much.

  There was no real need for her to remain. Maybe she could sneak off the stage without anyone noticing. But Marcia was a rather striking woman, tall and slender, with smooth perfect skin the color of mahogany. Her eyes were bright and clear, dark brown in color, set in a round, expressive face. She had grown her luxuriant black hair out these last few years, and she wore it in a single thick braid down the middle of her back. Normally, she didn’t mind being the sort of person people looked at, but right now it made it seem unlikely that she would able to thread her way across a stage full of chairs without causing a ruckus. She shifted in her seat, feeling restless—and even that movement was enough to prompt a loud squeak from her chair. No. Face it. She had to sit tight, and that was that.

  At last the chancellor droned to a halt. Marcia applauded as briefly as she decently could, stood with the others, and then made her way off the platform. She slipped out through the edge of the departing crowd and hurried on her way.

  But rush as she might, on this day, Abduction Day, it was impossible not to think on all that had been lost. Marcia looked about the dome as she walked. Central City had suffered tremendous damage in the post-Abduction pulsequakes, and even now, much of it had yet to heal.

  Central City had always been proud of its trees and its gardens, growing tall under the blue stone skies of the domes. Most of the decorative plant life had died during or after the quakes. Some plants were crushed or smashed or uprooted in the quake, but most died because the water-line systems that fed them were wrecked. Repair priority, quite rightly, was given to repairing the water system for the distinctly non-decorative hydroponic gardens that supplied the city with a large fraction of its food and air.

  The city and the people had survived, but all too many of the trees and gardens died of thirst. Most of the gardens had come back and, here and there, a new sapling showed itself, green as life and fresh as hope; but even now, five years on, dead trees were everywhere. The city was cutting them down and replanting as best it could—but it had to move slowly. If it had cut down all the trees and sent them for recycling all at once, the city’s biomass and carbon-cycle balance would have been thrown totally out of whack. The city could not afford the effort and materials needed to do a major biomass rebalance. So the dead trees stayed up, grey skeletons thrusting up toward the sky.

  Everything in the city was like that. Everywhere there were scars that should have healed by now, except that Central City, and its people, were still working on the basic structural repairs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be imported. Earth wasn’t there to ship anything, and the other worlds were far worse off than the Moon. The Moon had effectively been self-sufficient for years—but Earth had always been there as a backstop, as a source of sophisticated spare parts and luxury items. No more.

  Sidewalks were out of true. Windows were cracked. Here and there, the paint on the dome had peeled or chipped, revealing spots of grey-black rock behind the sky blue facade. Buildings were repaired with braces and struts, rather than rebuilt. Everything strong and ugly, and nowhere a hint of grace. People were expected to make do.

  Marcia hurried down a once-moving walkway that had stood still for five years, went down two levels to the nearest transport center. The daily hopper run to the North Pole was going to lift in twenty minutes, and she had to be on it. The survey teams searching through the unbelievably vast corpse of the Lunar Wheel had found something.

  She checked her wristaid for the time again. She could still just make it if she hurried.

  ◊ ◊ ◊

  Marcia MacDougal was not much for false modesty. She knew she was one of the leading experts—no, the leading expert—in Charonian visual la
nguage and symbology. It was fascinating and useful work, but it did have its drawbacks—for instance, travelling via hopper. She was constantly shuttling back and forth between Central City and Dreyfuss Station at the North Pole, and the trip never got any better.

  Lunar travel used to mean leaving your comfortable surroundings, going aboard a cramped, uncomfortable roller to be jounced along on a bad road, or perhaps taking a sub-orbital hopper rocket, cramming yourself into the too-small seats and suffering through the roaring, rattling, crushing-heavy weight of the launch. It meant feeling a bit queasy as the roller hit a bad patch in the road or the hopper cut its engines and made that abrupt lurch into zero gee. It meant the thrill of fear when the roller seemed to come far too close to the edge of a precipice, or when the braking rockets appeared to be something more than a trifle late lighting up. It meant bad food, close quarters, and a distinct sense that time had stood still and you were going to be trapped in an oversized tin can forever. But then you would arrive, and step through the pressure lock, and it would be over, and you would be back in civilisation, with good air and proper food and enough space to stand up and turn around in.

  Nowadays, lunar travel was exactly the same, but the comfortable surroundings at either end had deteriorated quite seriously. If Central City was a bit shabby these days, Dreyfuss Station was positively grim.

  The hopper ride was miserable, made no less so by the fact that safety regulations required everyone to wear a pressure suit during the flight. Marcia had no real quarrel with that rule. She knew as well as anyone exactly what condition the hopper fleet was in, but it did not make the suits any more pleasant to wear. At least you didn’t have to seal your suit, just be able to button up in a hurry. Wearing the thing unsealed was torture enough.