Starhawk (A Priscilla Hutchins Novel)

by McDevitt, Jack

  “Well,” said Priscilla, “it doesn’t matter now. It’s nine years ago. The aliens are long gone. And everybody’s dead on this side.”

  Jake looked up from the screen. “So what do we do, Captain Hutchins?”

  “File a report, hope they can find the Forscher, and get on with our own mission.”

  “You’re not interested in going the rest of the way out to Talios?”

  “Is that what you’re proposing?”

  “Why not?”

  “Jake.” She felt uncomfortable. Priscilla was used to running her life on schedules. “It’ll throw us way behind.”

  “Sure it will. Think anybody will notice?”

  * * *

  TALIOS WAS A class G dwarf, about the same size as Sol, but younger by two billion years. According to the data charts, there were eleven planets in the system. Talios III had life-forms. And that was pretty much the extent of the available information.

  Talios V and VI were where?

  They needed several more days to track them down. Talios V was small and airless, eight hundred million kilometers from the sun, completing an orbit every twelve years. VI was a gas giant with an entourage of forty-some moons and a magnificent set of rings. It was just over twice as far out. “Orbital period thirty-one years,” said Benny. “They were lined up three and a half years ago.”

  “So we’re a little late for the wedding,” said Priscilla.

  Jake’s eyes closed. “Unfortunately, the groom never showed up at all.”

  “Benny, when will V and VI line up again?” asked Priscilla. “Not that it matters.”

  “Sixty-five years and a couple of months.”

  “It’s a pity,” said Jake.

  “You didn’t expect them to wait around, did you?”

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted them to wait around.” It was the first time she’d seen him look uncertain. “Still—Well, let’s go take a look at Talios III.”

  * * *

  THE PLANET FLOATED serenely on the navigation display, but it was hard to believe it harbored life. It did have large blue oceans. White clouds drifted through the skies, and there was snow at the poles. But the continents, the landmasses, looked utterly desolate. No fleck of green appeared anywhere. Nothing moved across its bleak, flat plains.

  “According to the database,” said Benny, “life got started here less than five hundred million years ago.”

  “So it’s still in the oceans,” said Jake.

  “That may be correct, Captain. In any case, you would not be able to detect its presence.”

  “Too small?”

  “Unicellular. It will be a long time before there’s anything down there that would be visible to the naked eye.”

  “I wonder if they’ll ever figure out,” said Priscilla, “why life is so rare.”

  Jake magnified the images. Large brown patches of land. River valleys. Mountain chains cutting across continents. All empty. “Hard to believe. What’ve we looked at now, hundreds of worlds with liquid water and stable suns? And just a handful are alive.”

  “A century ago,” said Priscilla, “they thought that almost any biozone world was likely to produce living things.” She was thinking that this was why the meeting at this world had been so important. With life so rare, and advanced civilizations virtually nonexistent—Damn.

  So close.

  * * *

  THERE WAS NOTHING to look at. From Priscilla’s perspective, they’d wasted time coming here. But she wasn’t going to argue the point with the guy who held her license in his hand. “Jake,” she said, “do you want to go into orbit?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “How long do we plan to stay?”

  “Not long.”

  “Okay. What’s next?”

  “Use your imagination, Priscilla.”

  She laughed and raised her hands in confusion. “I’m not sure what you’re asking me to do, Jake.”

  “Think about the situation. Look at it from the perspective of the aliens.”

  She wanted to point out that aliens would probably not think like people. But she let it go. “How do you mean?”

  “If you were in their place, and you’d come back here for a rendezvous with representatives from another technological species, something everybody knows is very rare, you’d expect them to show up, right?”

  “Yes. Probably.”

  “What would you do if they didn’t?”

  She was thinking of the jilted bride. “They’d never see me again.”

  He laughed. “Assume for a minute you’re rational.”

  “I’m fairly rational.”

  “All right then. Let’s say unemotional. The failure to show up could not have been personal. Maybe the other side is afraid. Or maybe something happened to delay them. What do you do?”

  She exhaled. “I’d leave a note.”

  “Now answer your own question: What next?”

  “Benny,” she said. “Commence search for artificial satellite.”

  “Excellent.” Jake looked pleased. “You’re going to be good at this yet, Priscilla.”

  * * *

  THE SATELLITE FOUND them. “Greetings,” it said. “We are sorry we missed you.”

  Jake took over. “We are, too.”

  “We hope there was no difficulty.”

  “The people you talked to were lost in an accident. On the way home.”

  “That saddens us. Please accept our—” It used an unfamiliar word.

  “Thank you,” said Jake.

  “We wish we could do more.”

  “Are you perhaps still in the area? Is another meeting possible?”

  “Unfortunately, not at this time. We are long gone, and will probably not return in the near future.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “We also have regrets. We waited as long as we could. But there were limitations.”

  “I understand. Perhaps, one day we will meet again.”

  “I’m sure we will. Meantime, know that you have new friends. Farewell.”

  They waited a few moments. Priscilla looked at the planetary images, at the clouds, at the oceans. Listened to the silence. “Do we want to take the satellite on board?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Leave it where it is. Take it home, and they’ll just put it in the Smithsonian. This is where it belongs.” He pointed at the control panel. “Meanwhile, Captain Hutchins, you have a report to file. And some deliveries to make.”

  “Jake,” she said, “Simmons was wrong. He didn’t bomb. He went outside in the shuttle. That made all the difference.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish he’d known—”

  Chapter 2

  “PRISCILLA,” SAID JAKE, “let’s talk about our next assignment. We’ll be heading for Groombridge.”

  Good, she thought. The last stop before they started home. She wondered what the problem, or problems, would be this time. Fuel leak, maybe? Avoiding collision with an asteroid? She was, of course, not informed in advance.

  “We can get rolling when you’re ready,” he said. “Something you might want to think about—”

  “Yes?”

  “How you would handle a runaway engine? I’m giving you fair warning because—”

  It was as far as he got before Benny broke in: “Captain Hutchins, we have an emergency message from Union.” He put it on-screen.

  Copperhead, we have been warned that there may be an explosive device aboard the Gremlin, which is currently en route to Barton’s World at Lalande 21185. We do not have confirmation about the bomb. Nevertheless, until we can be certain, we will assume the threat is real. Proceed immediately to Lalande 21185 and render assistance. Acknowledge.

  Priscilla glanced at Jake, who nodded. “Okay, Benny,”
she said, “set course. Let’s move. Acknowledge and let them know we’re on our way.”

  “Acknowledging message, Priscilla.”

  She checked the numbers. Just getting to the system would require thirty hours. The transmission was already four days old. “Not good,” she said. “How do we help? You know anything about bombs?”

  “I think we’ll settle for an evacuation. Get everybody away from the ship and let the experts deal with it. If it hasn’t gone off already.”

  Priscilla was shaking her head. “What kind of lunatic would put a bomb on an interstellar?”

  Jake sighed. “They’ve been getting threats for a while now.”

  “You mean because of the terraforming?”

  “A lot of people are outraged about Selika.”

  She took a deep breath. “Incredible. Well, whatever the bosses are thinking, this isn’t the best way to respond. They had to know we wouldn’t receive the transmission within a reasonable time frame. Why didn’t they send somebody from the station?”

  “They probably would have,” said Jake, “if they’d had anyone available.”

  * * *

  JAKE LISTENED AS they increased power flow to the engines. “Adjusting course,” said Benny. The Copperhead swung slowly toward Lalande and began to accelerate. He put a graphic of the system on the auxiliary display. He hadn’t been there for several years. Lalande was a red dwarf, about half as massive as Sol, with six known planets. Barton’s was the second, a living world orbiting at a range of one hundred million kilometers.

  Barton’s had an ordinary moon, sterile, airless, cold. There was, however, a second satellite that was not a natural object at all. It was a monument, a four-kilometer-wide ring with a pair of crossbars. The centerpiece, the object that made the monument truly spectacular, was held in place by the crossbars. It was a massive diamond, about a third the size of the ring.

  It was the second of the Grand Monuments to be discovered, an event which, twenty years earlier, had stunned the world. The first of the monuments, of course, had been found on Iapetus. Everyone had assumed that the Iapetus sculpture was unique, a solitary piece of art left thousands of years ago on a remote Saturnian moon for reasons no one could imagine. Whatever its purpose might have been, it had changed the human perspective for all time. And it had required almost a century and a half before we’d learned how wrong we’d been. Since then, twelve more of the monuments, each a unique figure, had been found.

  “You think that’s why the Gremlin was going there?” asked Priscilla. “To see the monument?”

  “I can’t imagine any other reason,” he said.

  “Have you ever seen it? The Lalande Monument?”

  “A long time ago. It’s spectacular.” He put it on the display. The central diamond glittered in the sunlight. “They think it was made out of an asteroid.”

  “When I was about twelve,” Priscilla said, “my class was given a virtual ride around it.”

  “That must have gotten everybody pretty excited.”

  She laughed. “I decided I wanted to go out there one day and touch it.”

  * * *

  THEY SLIPPED INTO transdimensional space, bound for Lalande. All sense of movement stopped, and the cold gray fog enveloped them. They moved through the mist like a ship at sea. Occasionally, when he’d been alone under these conditions, Jake had turned off all the lights. The result was absolute darkness. There was no source of illumination whatever outside. Put the navigation lights on, and you were passing slowly through a constant fog whose density never varied. It was, he thought, as close as you could get to hell in the real world, a place where nothing ever changed, where nothing ever happened.

  * * *

  LIBRARY ENTRY

  One cannot look at the images of these ancient monuments without wondering, why? They are scattered around star systems with a kind of haphazard glee, left in places where, their creators surely knew, no one was ever likely to see them. They are magnificent pieces of art, the silver pyramid orbiting a terrestrial—though lifeless—world in the Sirius system, the black cluster of crystal spheres and cones rising out of the snows at the south pole of Armis V, the great transparent Cube at Arcturus. The sculpted figure, believed to be a self-portrait, on Iapetus.

  Akim Shenoba, in his prizewinning analysis, “Symbiotica,” argues that mental development necessarily implies an appreciation for art, a passion for mathematics, a need to know how one came to exist. The Great Monuments, he thinks, demonstrate an angry reaction, an act of defiance, by a single species against an empty universe. He tells us that their existence implies that minds, wherever they are found, will be similar. That, in the end, there will be no true aliens.

  I respectfully disagree.

  I cannot imagine humans writing symphonies they suspect would never be played. Novels that would never be read. Or wandering around the Orion Arm, leaving titanic sculptures that no one would ever see.

  —Soli Chung, Lost in Time, 2194

  Chapter 3

  THE RIDE TO Lalande 21185 took a long thirty hours. Priscilla got no sleep to speak of and developed a seething anger that the authorities at Union hadn’t told them more. How did they know there was a bomb? How many people were on board the Gremlin? Had they succeeded in warning the pilot?

  “Relax,” Jake told her. “We can’t do anything until we get there. There’s a decent chance it’s all a false alarm anyhow. Consider it part of the certification process. If you get your license, there’ll be other emergencies. Nothing matters more than how you respond when things go wrong.”

  She got the message.

  * * *

  PRISCILLA HAD SPENT the morning reading while Jake watched a romantic comedy with himself in the starring role. Then they decided to do a virtual tour of the pyramids, which evolved into a round of the game That’s My Mummy. They were near the end when Benny froze it and sounded a few notes from “Love in the Dark” to gain their attention. “Captain Hutchins,” he said, “we are five minutes from transiting back into normal space.”

  Priscilla had cornered Jake’s Egyptologist and was about to finish him off. “Give up?” she asked.

  “His prospects aren’t good, are they?” He shrugged, threw up his hands, and switched the system off. They started for the bridge. Tawny, a cat they’d rescued earlier in the flight, appeared from somewhere and began following her. She paused to gather her into her arms. “You guys have really bonded, haven’t you?” said Jake.

  “She likes to keep an eye on me.”

  They took their seats, Priscilla still functioning as pilot. “Two minutes,” said Benny. Jake hoped they’d surface reasonably close to Barton’s World.

  “You ever do a rescue before, Jake?” she asked.

  “Not like this. Pulled a couple of guys out of a ground station once on the Leopard Moon.”

  “Sirius,” she said.

  “Very good.”

  “One minute,” said Benny.

  The Leopard Moon had derived its name from a darkened area that, if one had an active imagination, looked like a leopard. Or maybe a tiger. Take your pick. Its picture had reminded Priscilla of the Horsehead Nebula, which she’d often seen at the Drake Institute, where her father had worked. She’d loved going into one of the observation rooms, where Daddy would switch on the stars and ask what she wanted to see. And she’d tell him and sit there in her chair, apparently afloat in the night, surrounded by the vast shining clouds, the Horsehead and the Eagle and the Flame and the Cat’s Eye, all almost close enough to touch. It was where she’d fallen in love with the sky.

  Tawny was wearing her magnetic booties. Priscilla put her on the deck. She’d have felt more comfortable restraining the animal during maneuvers if she could hold on to her. But it wasn’t really a problem. Tawny was good at reacting to the unexpected.

  “Activating,” said Benny. The
lights dimmed, and everything went briefly out of focus. Then the navigation display showed a starry sky. “Transition complete,” Benny said.

  “Okay. Scan for the Gremlin.”

  “Roger that, Captain.”

  “Also, see if you can locate Barton’s World and put it on the display.”

  They were moving slightly under twenty thousand kilometers per hour, relative to the sun. That seemed to be a standard rate when a ship emerged from Barber space. It didn’t matter how slowly or quickly you were moving when you jumped in; you always came out at approximately the same velocity.

  Jake looked at the mike. She nodded. “Benny,” he said, “let’s try to talk to them. Go to broadcast mode.”

  “Done.”

  He signaled for her to take over.

  “Gremlin,” she said, “this is the Copperhead. Do you read?” They sat for a moment, hoping to get lucky, hoping for a quick response. But except for static, the radio remained silent.

  “I have Barton’s position,” said Benny. “Range is a bit less than 750,000 kilometers.”

  “Not bad,” said Jake. It was probably as close as they could have hoped for.

  The seconds ticked off.

  Jake was saying something about how it would help if they could make the jump system more accurate, but Priscilla was watching the time, not paying attention.

  And they got a reply: “Copperhead, this is the Gremlin. We are in orbit around Barton’s World. Code five. Repeat, code five.” The response had come in at forty-seven seconds.

  “What’s the status of the bomb?” she asked.

  While they waited for the reply, Jake took a deep breath. “We got one break,” he said. “That’s Joshua Miller. He’s the right guy to have in charge.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Priscilla. “Let’s hope we can get him out of there.” The clock counted off the seconds again. The signal crossed to the Gremlin, and the reply started back.

  Benny broke in: “Switching to directional transmission.”