Starhawk (A Priscilla Hutchins Novel)

by McDevitt, Jack

  “I have not been able to make a determination. The signal, I suspect, is greatly weakened.”

  It made no sense. There wouldn’t be anybody out here. They were light-years from everything.

  While she hesitated, Jake took over. “Benny, can you get a fix on it?”

  “Within limits, yes.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “The nearest star in that direction, Captain, is Capua. But Capua is more than two hundred light-years away. It certainly did not originate there. Moreover, I believe the transmission is a broadcast signal. Not directional.”

  “Okay,” said Jake. “What do you make of it, Priscilla?”

  “No way an artificial radio signal’s going to travel two hundred light-years. Especially a broadcast.”

  “Therefore—?”

  “It’s a distress call. Somebody actually did what we’ve been rehearsing. Broke down and got thrown out into normal space.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “If the signal’s so deteriorated that we can’t read it—”

  “—Yes?—”

  “They’ve been out here a while and are probably beyond help.”

  “Very good, Priscilla. Shall we make that assumption?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “No, sir.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Benny,” said Priscilla, “is the signal still coming in?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Any chance if we sit tight you’d be able to get a clear enough reading to tell us what it says?”

  “Negative.”

  Jake looked at her. “What do we do?”

  “Find the source.”

  * * *

  TO DO THAT, they had to move. Get another angle. “Benny,” she said, “start engines. Prep for a jump. We want a seventy-degree angle on the transmission. Set for eighty million kilometers.”

  “Starting engines, Priscilla.”

  The drive unit would require about forty minutes before they could actually do the transdimensional insertion. So she sat back to wait. “You ever run into anything like this before?” she asked Jake.

  “Once,” he said. “But it was an automated vehicle. No life-and-death issue. I’ve never seen one where there were actually people involved. I hope that’s not the case here.”

  She brought up the signal. They could hear nothing but static. The routine racket produced by stars. With 1 or 2 percent left over from the Big Bang. That always blew her mind. “I wouldn’t want to get stuck out here,” she said.

  “No, Priscilla, me neither.”

  There had been a few ships that had vanished over the years. Vehicles that simply went out somewhere and were never heard from again. It was, she supposed, inevitable. If you were going to travel to seriously remote places, you took your chances.

  * * *

  JUMP TECHNOLOGY WAS notoriously inexact. They jumped three more times to get readings on the signals.

  Benny put a chart on the navigation display. He marked their initial position and drew a line from it indicating the direction from which the transmission had come. He showed their current location.

  Jake brought some coffee back from the dispenser. “You want some?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Sorry it’s taking so long,” said Benny. “It’s difficult to sort everything.”

  “It’s okay, Benny. No hurry.”

  “I think we have it now.”

  Priscilla kept her eyes on the screen. They were able to establish the course and velocity of the radio source during a period of about six weeks during which it had been actively transmitting signals. After that, there was nothing. The system had shut down.

  “Range,” said Benny, “is slightly more than nine light-years. Continue the vector for the balance of the nine years, and the source should presently be—”

  He showed them.

  * * *

  “MAYBE SOMEBODY GOT to them,” said Jake. “Let’s hope.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “You’re the captain, Priscilla. Call it.”

  She wondered momentarily if, despite Jake’s denial, the signal was a plant. Part of the exercise. Maybe they were testing her judgment. “Benny,” she said, “do we have a record of any lost ships nine years ago?”

  “The Forscher,” he said. “It was last reported at Talios in the spring of ’86. Carrying an exobiologist and an actor. Started home and was never heard from again.”

  An actor? Priscilla’s heart rate began to pick up. “Jake, that would be Dave Simmons.” The ultimate action-hero vid star turned explorer. Simmons had turned out to be even bigger than the characters he portrayed. He’d financed scientific missions, founded schools in remote places, once famously challenged the African dictator Kali Anka to have it out man-to-man. Anka had declined and been driven from the country a year later.

  “The exobiologist was Paul Trelawney,” said Benny. Trelawney had won the Cassimir Award the year before. “And, of course, there would also have been a pilot.”

  The ship had sent a movement report when it left Talios. A long search had yielded nothing. “Why would they send a radio transmission?” she asked, before answering her own question: “The hypercomm must have gone down.”

  Jake nodded.

  It was hard to imagine the tall, lantern-jawed Simmons dead. The guy had been the epitome of the leading man, in charge, indestructible, always one step ahead of events. One entertainment commentator had remarked that his loss had “reminded us all of our mortality.”

  “So what are we going to do?” she asked.

  “Make the call, Priscilla.”

  “Okay. We make a report, and then head for Caliban, right? We can’t do anything for the Forscher, so we just give the Wheel what we have and continue the mission.”

  He nodded. “That’s by the book.”

  She read disapproval in his eyes. Maybe another test of her judgment. “Jake, there’s no possibility here of anyone’s life being endangered. So we report what we’ve found and get back to what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  “On the other hand—” he said.

  “On the other hand, what?”

  “We’re close. And our mission isn’t under time constraints. We can go have a look and send back additional details.”

  “Do we really want to do that?” Priscilla was thinking about the shape the Forscher’s captain and passengers would be in after nine years.

  He straightened and looked down at her. “There’s a code, Priscilla. We owe it to them.”

  “Okay.”

  “We don’t leave people adrift out here if we can help it. It doesn’t matter what the book says. We go over to the Forscher and take a look at the situation.”

  * * *

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED in the vicinity of the radio source, they did not find the ship. What they saw instead was a lander. It was a Voltar II, a later model of which rested inside the Copperhead’s own launch bay. “I wonder what happened?” asked Priscilla.

  Jake shrugged and looked at the scattered stars on the display. “It explains why they used a radio.”

  “They had to abandon ship.” The lander didn’t have a hypercomm.

  It looked undamaged. Its registry number, VC112, brightened when the Copperhead’s navigation lights fell on it. Its ports were dark although there was still enough power to cause a flicker in the fore and aft warning lamps as they drew near. Priscilla turned her forward lights on the vehicle.

  The pilot’s seat was occupied.

  Jake climbed out of his harness and opened the storage bin. He took out a set of air tanks, the Flickinger gear, and a jet pack. Then he looked at her.

  She had an obligation to go with him. It shouldn’t have been a problem. She’d done EVAs in trainin
g. But she wasn’t excited about what they were going to find in the shuttle’s cabin. “I’m coming,” she said.

  * * *

  FLICKINGER FIELDS HAD long since replaced the cumbersome pressure suits. The generator provided an electronic shield against the vacuum. A passerby, had there been one, would have seen nothing like the astronauts of an earlier era. Rather, there were only two people wearing blue-and-silver uniforms.

  They crossed to the shuttle and looked in through the ports. Only one body was visible. It was in the pilot’s seat. It appeared in much better condition than Priscilla would have expected after nine years. “The environment,” Jake explained. “In a case like this, you don’t get all the microbes and whatever else is involved in decomposition. A corpse is more likely to look a bit mummified.”

  He opened the hatch, climbed into the air lock, and made room for her. She squeezed in beside him. She noticed he’d brought a laser. “Just in case,” he said. “You’re going aboard a vehicle that has very little power. You wouldn’t want to get trapped in the air lock.” He touched the control pad, and the outer hatch closed. Next, it should have begun to fill with air. But nothing happened.

  “See what I mean?” He used the laser to cut a hole in the inner hatch. There was air pressure inside, and it quickly equalized. Then the hatch opened, and they floated into the cabin.

  They turned on their wrist lamps. Jake went up front. Priscilla sniffed the air, told herself it was no problem, and joined him. She recognized the body immediately.

  “Simmons,” they said simultaneously.

  Priscilla stared. Somehow, even now, he was sprawled beneath the restraints in that easy charge-the-hill manner she knew so well. Good-bye, Dave, she thought. Growing up, she’d loved the guy. “What do you think happened?”

  “We’ll have to wait for somebody to find the Forscher to be sure,” he said. “But whatever the breakdown was, it probably killed Kobayashi and Trelawney.” Fudoki Kobayashi had been the pilot. Jake shook his head. “Poor son of a bitch. Die out here, like this.”

  “I’m surprised he didn’t end it,” said Priscilla. “He could have walked out of the air lock.”

  “I suspect he kept hoping somebody would come. He’d sent out a distress call.”

  “I guess so, Jake. But he must have known nobody would hear it for a long time.”

  “Maybe. But he was an actor. Maybe he didn’t really understand how big it is out here. He got here in a few days. When that happens, you kind of lose the feel for the size of everything. Or maybe he didn’t know it wasn’t a hypercomm. Whatever it was, it doesn’t matter now.”

  Maybe, she thought, he just wasn’t inclined to give up.

  * * *

  SOMETHING HAD BECOME stuck to one of the storage cabinets in the rear of the vehicle. It looked like a notebook. Priscilla removed it, opened it, touched the keypad. Nothing happened. “I think it needs charging.”

  “We’ll take it back with us.”

  “What do we do about Simmons?”

  “We’ll put him in the deep freeze.” He released the restraints and took a last look around. Pulled the body free, which was of course easy in the zero gravity. “Nothing more for us to do here. Let’s go home.”

  They crossed back to the Copperhead, and Priscilla called in the report. Then she connected the notebook to a power source. And began paging through.

  “What’s it say?” asked Jake.

  She frowned at it, scrolled through to the last entries: Whoever reads this: Get to Talios III by the last week of November.

  And, the last line: Guess we bombed.

  Jake leaned down, closer to the screen. “I guess they did.”

  “Get to Talios by November? You think they were running an experiment of some kind?”

  “Whatever,” said Jake. “It’s irrelevant now. That would be November nine years ago.”

  * * *

  “BENNY, SHOW US anything that deals with what happened to the ship.”

  He put it on-screen: Simmons described the moment: He had been enjoying a quiet hour, reading the comic novel Last Man Out, which was not at all the kind of book she’d have expected. The voices of Trelawney and Kobayashi were just barely audible on the bridge. Then, in Simmons’s words, Everything came apart. There was a loud bang, screams, and darkness.

  “Probably a power surge,” Jake said. “It would have knocked everything off-line. Including the AI.”

  When Simmons got to Trelawney and Kobayashi, they were both dead on the bridge. Electrocuted. The backup lights had come on, and, of course, life support had been maintained. But other than that—

  The hypercomm system either didn’t come back online, or Simmons didn’t know how to operate it manually. Normally, all that’s necessary is to give an instruction to the AI, but the AI was down also. Simmons decided his best chance was to use the shuttle radio, send out a distress call in case anybody was nearby, then come back and try to figure out how to work the hypercomm. But he thought the hull would reduce significantly the strength of the radio signal. So he got into the shuttle and launched.

  As if things could not have gotten worse, the launch doors closed behind him and wouldn’t reopen.

  It was hopeless. The last pages were filled with messages left for his two ex-wives, for his kids, and for friends and colleagues. There was no sign of self-pity. Frustration, yes. But if he was frightened, he didn’t leave any of it on the record. Incredibly, he remained the action hero so many had come to admire. Except this time, it didn’t end happily.

  Get to Talios by the last week of November.

  Guess we bombed.

  Benny broke into her thoughts: “I think,” he said, “I’ve discovered what he’s referring to. About November.”

  “And what’s that?” she asked.

  “In the Talios system, they encountered an interstellar vehicle.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t around when they broke down,” said Jake.

  “You misunderstand me, Captain. It doesn’t seem to have been one of ours.”

  * * *

  JAKE AND PRISCILLA sat frozen while Benny explained. “They were on the surface, doing fieldwork, when their AI alerted them that they weren’t alone. She told them there was a spacecraft in the area that did not fit any known configuration. And that it was approaching.”

  “My God,” said Jake.

  “Do you want me to put the pertinent sections on-screen?”

  The vehicle had been considerably larger than the Forscher. It was enormous. Probably three kilometers long, its hull black and smooth. They could see illuminated ports, including an area that had to be the bridge. We ran for the shuttle, Simmons wrote. Ten minutes after we got back inside the ship, they were on the radio. Strange-sounding voices. Not human. Nothing like us. But we responded. We said hello, and I’ll admit I used the friendliest tone I could come up with. They answered. One of them did. Don’t know what it said. Though it wasn’t hard to guess.

  “You know,” said Jake, “there should be a complete record of this on the Forscher. Pictures, the radio transmissions, everything. We’re going to have to find the ship.”

  “That won’t be easy out here,” said Priscilla.

  She kept her eyes on the screen: During the course of the first day, the AIs learned to communicate with each other. Greetings back and forth. The alien vessel was an explorer from a distant place. Trelawney, apparently beside himself with exhilaration, pointed out that Forscher also meant “explorer.”

  They got a quick reply: “There is little to do out here other than explore.”

  The aliens had a sense of humor. And another question: “Would you allow us to visit your home world?”

  Nobody on board the Forscher thought that would be a good idea. There was no way to know the intentions of the visitors. Above our grade level, Simmons commented. They didn’t dare rev
eal Earth’s location.

  The visitors replied: We understand.

  When Trelawney asked where they were from, they also showed reluctance, and would say only that they’d crossed the galaxy. We have come a great distance.

  And the biologist gave the same response. We understand.

  They talked for several days. Simmons and Trelawney both visited the alien vehicle. Apparently, Kobayashi passed on the opportunity. Several of the aliens came aboard the Forscher, after the pilot had arranged a trigger that would overload and blow the drive unit—which was to say everything—if a problem developed. “He doesn’t say what they looked like,” said Priscilla.

  Jake shrugged. “The AI probably has all kinds of pictures. I wonder,” he continued, “if that’s what created the problem going home? Rigging the ship to explode, just in case? When he disconnected, Kobayashi may have overlooked something.”

  “Could you do that to us?” asked Priscilla. “Rig us to explode?”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard.”

  After a week, it ended. The aliens were moving on. But, said Trelawney, we should arrange to meet again. Maybe, given some time, we can get permission to invite you to come to the home system. Though, to be honest, I think that may be unlikely. I suspect there would be political problems. But we have people who would very much want to meet you. It would be a start.

  Simmons quoted one of the aliens: We would like that.

  But how to do it?

  Kobayashi pointed out that two of the planets in the Talios system, the fifth and sixth, would line up in the “near future.” “When they do,” he suggested, “perhaps we could arrange to be here with those who would like to take this farther.”

  * * *

  JAKE WAS GETTING frustrated. “Damn it,” he said. “Are they talking about a few weeks or what?”

  “Apparently the Forscher never reported the incident. Or if they did, it was kept quiet. “

  Benny broke in: “Simmons says that they decided to say nothing until they got home. They had time to do that and come back though he does not say how much time. But he and Trelawney agreed that a hypercomm report would only generate a rejection. That the politicians would want to keep clear of a meeting. Trelawney wanted to be there to fight for the meeting.”