by Allen Steele
3.12.2070 0531Z—PARN Excalibur
From her seat in the cockpit, DeSoto watches as Slick Nick carefully maneuvers the shuttle toward Intrepid’s docking cradle. The frigate looms above them, the shuttle’s wing lights catching the Royal Navy griffin-and-sword crest painted on the airlock. Through a porthole next to the hatch, she catches a glimpse of a crewman silhouetted against the warm light within the ship.
“Two meters…one-point-five…one meters,” Slick Nick says. “Probe contact light…”
There is a soft thud as the docking collars connect, then a sudden jaw as the cradle captures the shuttle. “We’re in,” the pilot says, his hands snapping toggles on his console.
DeSoto gives him a wan smile. Through the comlink, she can hear the mingled voices of her troops. In past operations, there have always been excited shouts, even the occasional war-whoop: the operation is over, and everyone has returned safely. Now there is only a collective, weary mutter. This is a mission whose outcome no one wants to celebrate.
“Roger that, Excalibur. Welcome back.” Kinnard’s voice comes over the comlink. “Before you prepare to disembark, please be advised that we have received new orders from FLTCOM regarding your mission status.”
The voices on the comlink die off as the soldiers in the back of the shuttle hear him. Slick Nick groans softly as he closes his eyes. “And here I was, hoping for a medal,” he says softly.
DeSoto doesn’t look at him as she unbuckles her harness and pushes herself out of her seat. She alone knows what’s going to happen next. “I’m sure your courage will be remembered, Lieutenant,” she says softly.
Kinnard’s voice continues. “In the interests of safety, both your own and our crew, FLTCOM has asked that you be quarantined inside the shuttle for the next six hours.”
Outraged voices over the comlink. “Six hours?” “What the hell are we supposed to do for six hours?” “Hey, man, all I wanna do is get out of this goddamn…”
“I don’t believe this shit,” Simms says. The pilot looks straight ahead, staring at Intrepid as if he sees Kinnard through the fuselage. He doesn’t notice that DeSoto has silently moved above and behind his seat.
“The quarantine period will last while we fly through Saturn’s inner system,” Kinnard is saying. “We’ll release you from the shuttle just before we enter the upper atmosphere for our refueling run. I’m sure you’ll want to witness this, so we’ve reserved the wardroom for you.”
Raising her hands, DeSoto notices that they’re slick with sweat. She holds her breath and wills them to be still, then she reaches down to Simms.
“And although it’s against regulations for liquor to be stowed aboard a Navy vessel, we happen to have a small supply of lunar wine in our stores…”
DeSoto doesn’t hear the rest. “It’s been an honor to serve with you,” she whispers under her breath, then she swiftly wraps her left arm around his neck and grabs his chin with her right hand.
Slick Nick has no time to react before she breaks his neck.
Kinnard keeps talking, telling necessary lies to her team, as she cradles Simms’ head against her chest. She cries softly, feeling his muscles reflexively twitch, his heartbeat gradually subsiding, until at least he is still.
Bravo Squad is still bitching about being cooped up inside Excalibur for another six hours when she finally unstraps the pilot’s body. DeSoto gently places him in her own couch and secures him, and takes another moment to close his sightless eyes. Then she climbs into the left seat and switches the comlink to the same frequency she used on Titan.
“It’s done,” she says.
There is a short pause, then she hears Kinnard. “I’m sorry, Colonel,” he says. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I—”
“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it.” Strangely, she feels no anger, no remorse. She simply feels dead inside. Her eyes flit across the airlock control panel. It fells her that the hatch is secure and cannot be opened by anyone in the aft compartment. Her team is trapped. “I’m keeping my side of the agreement…now you keep yours. Understood?”
“We’ll keep our side of the agreement, I promise.”
Almost a minute goes by—enough time for DeSoto to reflect upon all that has gone before, and all that is yet to come—before the captain’s voice comes over the comlink again, perhaps for the last time.
“Is there anything we can do for you?”
She almost laughs out loud. She’s tempted to tell him that, yes, she would be delighted if he and his goddamn crew of googles would go straight to hell. Instead, she surprises herself with her calm reply.
“Music,” she says. “Classical…I don’t know. Beethoven. Bach. Holst. Glass. Whatever you’ve got, just put it on for me and my crew. Give us something to listen to while we wait.” She swallows. He voice is raw. “Then leave us alone.”
She switches from the secure channel to the main band, where she can hear voices of her teammates. After a few moments, the first movement of Beethoven’s “Fourth Symphony” drifts over the comlink.
DeSoto pushes the seat back into a reclining position, closes her eyes, and begins her final mission.
DATE: 0614Z 12 MAR 70
FM: CHNAVINT CLARKE CO
TO: PRIME MINISTER
SUBJ: KRONOS
CLASS: TS
1. (TS) UPDATE: PRIORITY ONE SCRAMBLED PADSS TRANSMISSION RECEIVED 0535Z MAR 12 FROM PARN VA-145, FRIGATE INTREPID. CAPTAIN KINNARD REPORTS RETURN OF PARN VA-165, SHUTTLE EXCALIBUR, FROM TITAN. ALL MEMBERS OF PAM BRAVO SQUAD REPORTED IN SATISFACTORY CONDITION FOLLOWING PROLONGED EXPOSURE TO POSSIBLE BIOCONTAMINANTS IN HUYGENS BASE. BRAVO SQUAD QUARANTINED WITHIN SHUTTLE.
2. (TS) EMERGENCY MEETING OF FLTCOM, CHNAVINT, AND ROYAL SURGEON HELD AT 0500Z MAR 12. CONCUR WITH ASSESSMENT PROVIDED BY CAPTAIN KINNARD; TITAN CONTAGION PRESENTS CLEAR THREAT TO SAFETY OF INHABITED SOLAR SYSTEM AND PAX SECURITY. APPROPRIATE MEASURES SHOULD BE TAKEN IMMEDIATELY TO PREVENT POSSIBLE SPREAD OF THE CONTAGION.
3. (TS) INTREPID HAS BEEN ORDERED BY FLTCOM TO ELIMINATE ALL POSSIBLE SOURCES OF CONTAMINATION.
4. (TS) UNDER THESE CONDITIONS BRAVO SQUAD CONSIDERED EXPENDABLE.
5. (TS) MAIN AI SYSTEM OF PASS VS-29, ARGOSY HERSHEL EXPLORER, HAS BEEN REPROGRAMMED TO RETURN SHIP VIA AUTOPILOT TO ASTEROID BELT UNDER ESCORT BY INTREPID. UPON ARRIVAL, SURVIVING VS-29 CREW WILL BE REVIVED AND BROUGHT ABOARD VA-145, WHERE THEY WILL REMAIN IN QUARANTINED BIOSTASIS UNTIL INTREPID RETURNS TO HIGHGATE. VS-29 WILL THEN BE SCUTTLED.
6. (TS) AT 1200Z MAR 15 NAVINT WILL LEAK INFORMATION TO NEWS MEDIA FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION, RE: FATE OF TITAN EXPEDITION, INTREPID RESCUE MISSION, BRAVO SQUAD. INFORMATION WILL REPORT ONE HUNDRED PERCENT CASUALTY RATE AMONG THOSE EXPOSED TO LETHAL CONTAGION DISCOVERED ON TITAN. INFORMATION WILL ALSO THAT ALL MEMBERS OF BRAVO SQUAD PERISHED ON TITAN.
7. (TS) RECOMMENDATIONS: HER MAJESTY ISSUE POSTHUMOUS MILITARY COMMENDATIONS FOR ALL MEMBERS OF BRAVO SQUAD AND CIVILIAN COMMENDATIONS OF TITAN EXPEDITION, INCLUDING PENSION FOR SURVIVING FAMILIES. ALSO RECOMMEND THAT HER MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT PLACE TITAN OFF-LIMITS TO ALL FUTURE LANDINGS BY PAX VESSELS (MILITARY, COMMERCIAL, AND/OR SCIENTIFIC) UNTIL MORE KNOWLEDGE OF TITAN CONTAGION IS ACQUIRED.
END
3.12.2070 1340Z—PARN Intrepid
And now here is Saturn—the old god, the guardian time, Kronos—seen not as a distant ringed orb but as a flat, banded plain lying beneath a dark sky. Cumulus thunderheads of off-white ammonium scurry across pale reddish-orange cloudtops which shine faintly from within, as storms of metallic hydrogen and helium perpetually rage in the trackless depths. A planet in constant cyclonic motion: serene from the distance, a spiraling vortex up close.
Intrepid races through the uppermost reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere, its main engine driving toward the cloud band just above the equator. The aerobrake already glows with friction; the angelic figurehead has gained a halo. Behind the shield, hatches along the engine module are already open, ready to scoop the precious helium-3 into the ship’s reserve
tanks.
Within the command deck, crewmembers are strapped into their couches, feeling the mounting acceleration as it gradually pushes them even further into the cushions. Jon Christ-Caswell’s hands are locked onto the helm yoke; beneath the tattoos on the back of his hands, his skin is white with the strain of keeping the ship on course. Behind him, his first-wife Cayenne stares straight ahead; like John, her MINN-linked eyes are filled with electronic hieroglyphs as Intrepid’s AI feeds processed data straight onto their irises.
Everyone else is entranced by the view through the forward windows. Here is the most awesome sight of all: Saturn’s rings as seen from below, rising from the vast horizon as an impossibly huge arch, a gateway to eternity. Massive clouds are dwarfed and insignificant by this seemingly solid structure. Weak sunlight filters through the Cassini division between the B and A rings, but everywhere else the spinning snow, hail, and icebergs of the rings form an immense rainbow that towers above them like the scimitar of the gods.
“Do you see?” Kinnard says softly.
“Yes.” The woman’s voice in his ear is quiet. “I see it…oh my God, I see it…”
Several alternatives had been made available to DeSoto. She could have waited on Titan for the missile that Intrepid sent down to Huygens Base; at ground-zero, she and her team would have instantly, painlessly vanished within the one-megaton nuclear flash that consumed the outpost. Or Intrepid could have destroyed Excalibur with a ship-to-ship missile after the shuttle ascended to orbit; all she would have had to do was close her eyes when the missile homed in on her craft, and death would have come to her as a last moment of panic, nothing more. She might have even done the job herself; after she killed her pilot, she could have opened all the hatches and voided the shuttle, blowing herself and her squad out into space.
She had chosen another option.
Kinnard tries to find the right words, then realizes that anything he might say would be trivial, perhaps even insulting. “Are you ready?” he simply asks.
A short pause. “We’re ready.” A moment passes. “They know, Captain. I’ve told them.”
He shuts his eyes. Unexpected, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. In the end, DeSoto wouldn’t lie to her people, however comforting that lie may be. They had earned the right to be told the truth.
“I understand, Colonel,” he says. “I hope they do, too.”
No reply. The equatorial band moves closer, its pastel swirls and eddies more discernible than they were a few minutes ago. Down there are winds in excess of two thousand kilometers per hour.
Around him, his crew murmurs to one another as they make ready for the lowest point of the dive. He glances over his shoulder at Isidore. The first officer’s hand is poised over a toggle switch on his console. He nods once, his face expressionless. The executioner is ready to drop the trap-door.
“Do it,” DeSoto says.
He doesn’t feel any motion as the docking cradle releases Excalibur, nor does he look up at the multiscreen to watch the shuttle as it falls away from his ship, beginning its long, swift plunge into the maelstrom below. An enunciator rings, signaling the shuttle’s departure, but John quickly silences it.
Kinnard swivels his chair around until he cannot see the windows, deliberately ignoring the last sight of Kronos. From his pocket, he pulls out his copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which he had been reading in his cabin during the long journey from Titan. He opens it to a page he had bookmarked earlier, and silently rereads a passage written by a Persian astronomer in the 11th century.
Up from the Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many Knots unravel’d by the Road;
But not the Knot of Human Death and Fate.
“Let’s go home,” he says to no one in particular.
THE CAPTAIN FUTURE DUET
The Death of Captain Future
The name of Captain Future, the supreme foe of all evil and evildoers, was known to every inhabitant of the Solar System.
That tall, cheerful, red-haired young adventurer of ready laugh and flying fists was the implacable Nemesis of all oppressors and exploiters of the System’s human and planetary races. Combining a gay audacity with an unswervable purposefulness and an unparalleled mastery of science, he had blazed a brilliant trail across the nine worlds in defense of the right.
—Edmond Hamilton; Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1940)
This is the true story of how Captain Future died.
We were crossing the inner belt, coasting toward our scheduled rendezvous with Ceres, when the message was received by the ship’s comlink.
“Rohr…? Rohr, wake up, please.”
The voice coming from the ceiling was tall, dark, and handsome, sampled from one of the old Hercules vids in the captain’s collection. It penetrated the darkness of my quarters on the mid-deck where I lay asleep after standing an eight-hour watch on the bridge.
I turned my head to squint at the computer terminal next to my bunk. Lines of alphanumeric code scrolled down the screen, displaying the routine systems-checks and updates that, as second officer, I was supposed to be monitoring at all times, even when I was off-duty and dead to the world. No red-bordered emergency messages, though; at first glance, everything looked copasetic.
Except the time. It was 0335 Zulu, the middle of the goddamn night.
“Rohr?” The voice was a little louder now. “Mister Furland? Please wake up…”
I groaned and rolled over. “Okay, okay, I’m awake. What’dya want, Brain?”
The Brain. It was bad enough that the ship’s AI sounded like Steve Reeves; it also had to have a stupid name like The Brain. On every vessel on which I had served, crewmembers had given their AIs human names—Rudy, Beth, Kim, George, Stan, Lisa, dubbed after friends or family members or deceased shipmates—or nicknames, either clever or overused: Boswell, Isaac, Slim, Flash, Ramrod, plus the usual Hals and Datas from the nostalgia buffs. I once held down a gig on a lunar tug where the AI was called Fughead—as in Hey, Fughead, gimme the traffic grid for Tycho Station—but no one but a bonehead would give their AI a silly-ass moniker like The Brain.
No one but Captain Future, that is…and I still hadn’t decided whether or not my current boss was a bonehead, or just insane.
“The captain asked me to awaken you,” The Brain said. “He wants you on the bridge at once. He says that it’s urgent.”
I checked the screen again. “I don’t see anything urgent.”
“Captain’s orders, Mr. Furland.” The ceiling fluorescents began to slowly brighten behind their cracked and dusty panes, causing me to squint and clap my hand over my eyes. “If you don’t report to the bridge in ten minutes, you’ll be docked one hour time-lost and a mark will be entered on your union card.”
Threats like that usually don’t faze me—everyone loses a few hours or gains a few marks during a long voyage—but I couldn’t afford a bad service report now. In two more days the TBSA Comet would reach Ceres, where I was scheduled to join up with the Jove Commerce, outbound for Callisto. I had been lucky to get this far, and I didn’t want my next CO to ground me just because of a bad report from my previous captain.
“Okay,” I muttered. “Tell ’em I’m on my way.”
I swung my legs over the side and felt around for where I had dropped my clothes on the deck. I could have used a rinse, a shave, and a nice long meditation in the head, not to mention a mug of coffee and a muffin from the galley, but it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get that.
Music began to float from the walls, an orchestral overture that gradually rose in volume. I paused, my calves halfway into the trouser legs, as the strings soared upward, gathering heroic strength. German opera. Wagner. The Flight of the Valkyries, for God’s sake…
“Cut it out, Brain,” I said.
The music stopped in mid-chord. “The captain thought it would help rouse you.”
“I’m roused.” I stood u
p and pulled my trousers the rest of the way on. In the dim light, I glimpsed a small motion near the corner of my compartment beside the locker; one moment it was there, then it was gone. “There’s a cockroach in here,” I said. “Wanna do something about it?”
“I’m sorry, Rohr. I have tried to disinfect the vessel, but so far I have been unable to locate all the nests. If you’ll leave your cabin door unlocked while you’re gone, I’ll send a drone inside to…”
“Never mind.” I zipped up my pants, pulled on a sweatshirt and looked around for my stikshoes. They were kicked under my bunk; I knelt down on the threadbare carpet and pulled them out. “I’ll take care of it myself.”
The Brain meant nothing by that comment; it was only trying to get rid of another pest which had found its way aboard the Comet before the freighter had departed from LaGrange Four. Cockroaches, fleas, ants, even the occasional mouse; they managed to get into any vessel which regularly rendezvoused with near-Earth spaceports, but I had never been on any ship so infested as the Comet. Yet I wasn’t about to leave my cabin door unlocked. One of the few inviolable union rules I still enjoyed aboard this ship was the ability to seal my cabin, and I didn’t want to give the captain a chance to go poking through my stuff. He was convinced that I was carrying contraband with me to Ceres Station, and even though he was right—two fifths of lunar mash whiskey, a traditional coming-aboard present for my next commanding officer—I didn’t want him pouring good liquor down the sink because of Association regulations no one else bothered to observe.
I pulled on my shoes, fastened a utility belt around my waist and left the cabin, carefully locking the door behind me with my thumbprint. A short, upward-curving corridor took me past the closed doors of two other crew cabins, marked CAPTAIN and FIRST OFFICER. The captain was already on the bridge, and I assumed that Jeri was with him.
A manhole led to the central access shaft and the carousel. Before I went up to the bridge, though, I stopped by the wardroom to fill a squeezebulb with coffee from the pot. The wardroom was a disaster: a dinner tray had been left on the table, discarded food wrappers lay on the floor, and small spider-like robot waded in the galley’s sink, waging solitary battle against the crusty cookware that had been abandoned there. The captain had been here recently; I was surprised that he hadn’t summoned me to clean up after him. At least there was some hot coffee left in the carafe, although judging from its odor and viscosity it was probably at least ten hours old; I toned it down with sugar and half-sour milk from the fridge before I poured it into a squeezebulb.