Starhawk (A Priscilla Hutchins Novel)

by McDevitt, Jack

  “It won’t go like this forever, babe. Just stay with it. Eventually, they’ll figure it out.”

  “I don’t really have any complaints, Jake. I don’t guess I’ve made it easy for them.”

  “They mean well, Priscilla. Just try not to alienate them, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  He studied the panel. “You run the check-off yet?”

  “We’re primed and ready to go.”

  The bridge was retro. It looked like something out of an old movie. “Is this thing really safe?” he asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “So do I.” He looked at the time. “We can get started as soon as my bags show up. I probably should have brought them down myself.” Priscilla glanced at the control panel. Then at Jake. “Stay where you are,” he said. “You’re in command. I’m just here as an observer.”

  She smiled. “You’re one of the great men of our time, Jake.”

  He actually blushed. “Whatever, but I don’t guess I’ll be much use if my stuff doesn’t show up soon.”

  She called the terminal, asked about the bags, nodded, and disconnected. “They’re on the way.”

  “You seem to be in a hurry, Priscilla.”

  She laughed. Cleared her throat. “You want the truth, Jake?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to get submerged before Wauken calls in, and they cancel the mission.”

  “Isha Wauken? Is she on the Vincenti?”

  “Yes. You know her?”

  He smiled. “An old girlfriend.”

  * * *

  THEY EASED OUT between the launch doors, turned to their assigned course, and began to accelerate. “By the way,” she said, “I should introduce you to our AI. Her name’s Myra.”

  “Good evening, Captain Loomis,” said the AI.

  “Hello, Myra,” Jake said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “The feeling is reciprocal.” Her seductive tone surprised Priscilla.

  “Does she have a sense of humor?” Jake asked. “Or is that the way she normally talks?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve heard her do that. I think you have a fresh conquest.” She checked the gauges. Then: “How’s it feel to be back?”

  “Better than I’d expected. In fact, sometimes I’m sorry I left.”

  “Jake, may I ask a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did they force you out? I never had the impression you really wanted to leave. You said you did, but—”

  “Well, no, actually I didn’t want to leave. But I wasn’t forced out. At least not by Frank or Patricia.”

  “Then by whom?”

  He looked at her. Felt a surge of regret. “By you, Priscilla.” Her eyes went wide, and she stared at him. “It’s okay. I just—What? I couldn’t face people around here after we lost Joshua.”

  “Jake—”

  “Let’s just let it go, okay?”

  “So why’d you come back?”

  “Because somebody else out there might need help. And they didn’t have anybody else.” And he realized immediately he shouldn’t have said that.

  Priscilla turned a laser gaze on him, but she didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Priscilla. When Frank called, I thought about backing off, but I wasn’t sure they’d have been willing to send you on your own. You’re still new at this, and they don’t want to take any chances of anything more going wrong. They don’t know you the way I do. I mean, you could have gone out there and performed like Captain Brandywine, and they’d still have taken some flak for sending out a relatively inexperienced pilot.”

  She softened. The anger faded. “Well,” she said, “thanks. Especially for getting me included in the deal.”

  “It seemed like the least I could do. Though I wasn’t sure you’d want to go.”

  “Of course I want to go. You think I wanted to sit in that office back there while you went out and did the mission?”

  “I needed to be doing something useful,” he said. “I was tired just sitting on the front porch watching the world go by.”

  * * *

  THE EARTH, OF course, dominated the sky. Fleecy clouds floated over Asia, which was ablaze with city lights.

  “We’ll be making our jump in a few minutes,” said Priscilla.

  Jake checked to be sure his harness was secure. Sometimes the transition could be a bit rough. “Okay,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  She leaned over the mike. “Ops, this is Starhawk. We’re ready to make our jump.”

  “Who?” The guy at the other end sounded startled.

  “Kidding,” she said. “Make that Baumbachner.”

  “Oh. Okay, Baumbachner. Roger that.”

  “Has the Vincenti reported in yet?”

  “Negative. We’ve heard nothing at all.”

  * * *

  SHE MADE HER jump into transdimensional space. “Time to target,” she told Jake, “thirty-three hours.”

  “Who’s on the Vincenti?” he asked. “Other than Isha?”

  Priscilla checked her notes. “Larry Martin and Gunther Hahn, both physicists, and Otto Schreiber, a doctoral candidate from Leipzig University. Martin’s described as a planetologist, whatever that is.”

  “All right.”

  “Making sure we don’t have more people than we can carry back, Jake? Just in case?”

  “No. I don’t think Frank would make that mistake again. I was just wondering if there’d be any more familiar names.”

  “Are there?”

  “No. Just Isha.”

  “How close were you?”

  “It wasn’t much more than a few dinners.”

  * * *

  WHEN PRISCILLA RECEIVED responsibility for the Baumbachner, she took time to update its library. It had originally been not much more than a sparse collection of thrillers and technobooks. Those were still there, of course. But she’d added thousands of titles: novels, biographies, history, science, even some theological tracts. There were movies dating back two and a half centuries. “It doesn’t sound,” Jake said, “as if working for Frank takes much of your time.”

  “The job is pretty much whatever I make it,” she said. “Mostly they want me there in case they need a pilot. And to do tours.”

  “Does Myra play poker?”

  It was a facetious question, of course. Myra was capable of playing all kinds of games, including multiple hands of poker, if need be, and doing it as separate entities. She was also capable of faking enthusiasm.

  Ultimately, they mostly just talked. They watched a couple of movies, and went on a guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History. Priscilla used one of the ship’s imagers and spent hours combing through visuals from its interstellar library, looking for special effects she could plug into her tours back at Union. She recorded spectacular pictures of gas giants poised over mountaintops and dinosaur-like creatures drinking from rivers and explosive bursts erupting from solar surfaces. She played them for Jake, projecting them into the center of the passenger lounge, soliciting his opinion.

  She did a few crossword puzzles while he watched football and baseball games that Myra had located for him, featuring the Pittsburgh teams, of which he was a longtime fan.

  Jake missed the mountain cabin, the wind coming out of the trees, hanging out with the poker players, and having dinner with Alicia. It just seemed that, no matter how he did things, dissatisfaction crept in. There was always something missing.

  * * *

  AFTER ALL THESE years, he was still fascinated by conditions outside the ship when it was submerged. Though they were covering immense distances in an impossibly short time, one could never have guessed that by looking through any of the portals. The Baumbachner seemed to be almost adrift in a dark fog. Nothing else
was visible. They might have been moving at possibly two knots. Certainly no more than that.

  It was a completely different universe out there. He’d read about Barber space, as it was called. But none of the explanations made any sense to him. The physicists talked of multiple dimensions and quantum relativity. And he was pretty sure that, mathematics aside, they didn’t have a grasp of it any more than he did.

  But it didn’t matter. It was there, it worked, and it opened large sections of the Milky Way to exploration. And that, in the end, was all he cared about.

  An hour or so away from Orfano, he sat alone on the bridge, with a book on the auxiliary display. It was a collection of cartoons from Punch. Inevitably, though, his gaze would find the quiet mist outside.

  * * *

  PRISCILLA’S JOURNAL

  If we’re going to do this kind of thing rationally, we’re going to need better communications. I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to reduce the amount of time a signal needs to get from one place to another. I suppose you really can’t complain when a transmission covers almost six light-years in a day. And it would be helpful if we could talk to each other while we’re submerged. Having to wait until we complete the jump before we can find out what’s happening is not convenient. We’ll probably eventually get better technology. And this equipment will wind up in museums.

  —February 5, 2196

  Chapter 37

  JAKE HAD LONG since lost count of the number of flights he’d logged. But this was the first time he’d surfaced in an area with no sun. Well, maybe that was something of an exaggeration. He’d been out to Neptune once. Sol, from there, wasn’t much more than a bright star. But at least you knew it was there. In this case, light-years from everything, he felt—What? The emptiness? The distances?

  “Myra,” said Priscilla. “Any sign of Orfano?”

  “Nothing yet. It may take some time.”

  “All right. Let’s see if maybe we can get lucky and locate the Vincenti. Go to broadcast.”

  “Okay. Ready when you are.”

  “Vincenti, this is Baumbachner. We have just arrived in the area. Do you read?”

  She switched over and listened to the silence.

  “Vincenti, answer up please.”

  Nothing.

  “I’ve got Orfano,” said Myra. “Range is seven hundred thousand kilometers.”

  “That’s not bad,” said Priscilla.

  Jake agreed. “Considering how far we’ve come, that’s about as close as you could hope for.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Myra, “It’s behind us. We’re pulling away from it.”

  “Wonderful,” Priscilla said. “Prepare to do a one-eighty.”

  “It will require two hours to reverse movement.”

  “Okay. Hold on a second, Myra.” She looked over at Jake.

  “No,” he said, “I’m fine. Start braking whenever you’re ready.”

  * * *

  ORFANO WAS SLIGHTLY bigger than Earth, with an equatorial diameter of thirteen thousand kilometers, and a gravity index at 1.1. Reports from the first expedition indicated warmer temperatures than would normally be expected with no sunlight. The experts attributed the condition, probably, to the presence of an iron core warmed by radioactives.

  They were braking again, preparing to enter orbit.

  Jake was at the controls while Priscilla sat quietly in the right-hand seat, looking out at gray clouds and an icy landscape. It was more exotic than any planetary surface she’d seen before. On terrestrial worlds, mountains usually came in clusters, divided by plains and hills. But the clusters were random, and the mountains scattered arbitrarily. Orfano’s mountains and ridges resembled a frozen eruption. They possessed an unsettling symmetry. Long, curving lines of snowcapped peaks and valleys ran parallel to each other, cast in shades and tones of rock that formed circles and triangles. Or maybe not. She found that if she closed her eyes and looked again, the impression went away.

  “I see it, too,” said Jake.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks as if it was landscaped.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m not especially religious, but that place could have been put together by an engineer.”

  When the angle was right, the ice glittered in the starlight, and the ground acquired a kind of pristine beauty. Nature in all its fractious, weathered clarity. “Maybe that’s where you should have your cabin,” she said.

  “It does have a certain charm, Priscilla. But it’s a bit too exotic for my tastes. Myra, any sign of the Vincenti?”

  “Negative, Jake.” The seductive tone was gone. Games were over. “We’re not picking up anything.”

  “Okay. Keep us informed.”

  “Of course.”

  He turned back to Priscilla. “It’s early yet.”

  “What do you think could have happened to them?”

  “Well, we know they’re not simply on the other side of the planet.” They’d been sending out transmissions for hours. “To be honest, I’m not optimistic. But maybe they developed a problem with their comm system. If they couldn’t communicate with anybody, there wouldn’t be much they could do. They weren’t going to go all the way back to fix a transmitter. So they stay on, complete the mission, then go home. They might have done that and already left.”

  “And we have to wait here until they get home, and Frank lets us know everything’s okay?”

  “Priscilla, you’re a licensed pilot. What do you do if your comm system gives out and you have to return to base?”

  She thought about it. “Oh,” she said.

  “So what do you do?”

  “Leave a satellite with a message.”

  “Very good.”

  “I’m embarrassed.”

  You should be. “It’s okay,” he said.

  After her performance with the Gremlin, he was almost relieved to find out she could be just as dumb as anybody else.

  * * *

  “THEY’RE NOT HERE,” Myra said.

  Priscilla looked out at the empty sky. “They must have gone back. And it looks as if I’m not the only one who forgets about satellites.”

  “Or they went down,” said Jake.

  She frowned. “I hope not.”

  Starlight reflected from icy ridges and mountaintops. He could make out a long, jagged canyon near the horizon.

  “So what do we do?” asked Priscilla.

  “We expand the search. We’ll keep looking until we find something or get recalled.”

  “You think Isha would leave without putting out a satellite?”

  “Anybody can screw up. But no, it’s hard to imagine. Myra, set up the scanners for a ground survey.”

  “Okay, Jake.”

  “The Vincenti’s big enough,” he said, “that if it went down, we should be able to find it.”

  * * *

  THEY MOVED OVER a gray mist. The gorges, ridges, and mountains were hazy under the stars. The ground could not properly be described as rugged. It was rather the sort of terrain one might see in a portrait designed to emphasize the beauty of the natural order. Priscilla could not resist expressing her admiration. Meantime, Myra adjusted the angle of each orbit to expand the coverage, but the hours drifted by without result.

  Eventually, they both slept in their chairs while the AI continued to monitor the scanners and scopes. Jake woke periodically only to drift back off, lulled by the murmur of the air vents. Then it was morning on the ship, if not in the world below, and the interior lighting adjusted accordingly. In several areas, the surface appeared to be obscured by storms. Priscilla woke. “Nothing yet?”

  “Negative,” said Jake. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  He released his harness, and Myra’s voice broke the silence. “Object ahead,” she said. “It appears to
be in orbit.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I am not sure.” She put it on-screen. Jake could make out nothing other than that it was tumbling. “It is much too small to be a vehicle.”

  Priscilla was in the pilot’s seat. “Ready when you are, Jake,” she said.

  He belted back down, and she changed course and fired the thrusters. The ship began to accelerate.

  The object grew larger. It had right angles. “It is about the size of a human being,” Myra said.

  Jake stared at it. “Probably just a chunk of ice.”

  “It appears to have four legs,” said Myra.

  It was acquiring definition. “Holy cats,” Priscilla said.

  Jake gaped. It looked like a chair.

  * * *

  BAUMBACHNER LOG

  We have found the Vincenti.

  —Jake Loomis, February 7, 2196

  Chapter 38

  IT WAS THE same type of chair he was sitting in. Maybe slightly different armrests. It was tumbling slowly, and the restraint that would have secured its occupant drifted behind it. The back of the chair looked broken. No. Not broken. Twisted. They stared at it. “How could that have happened?” Priscilla asked.

  The chair was slightly ahead of them, a few kilometers off to port, and at a slightly higher elevation. Priscilla adjusted for altitude, matched velocity, and, a few minutes later, they drew alongside. “I assume we want to recover it?” she said.

  “Yes. Do it.”

  She opened the launch doors. “Myra,” she said, “I’ll need you for this. Take over and get the chair.”

  “Okay, Priscilla. I have it.” They felt a slight change as Myra angled the ship. Then they moved to port again. One of the scopes locked on the chair, and they watched it float into the cargo bay. “Chair is secure,” she said. “Closing up.”

  * * *

  THEY REMAINED ON the bridge for several minutes, scanning the area while the cargo bay repressurized. But there seemed to be nothing else out there. Then they went down below. The chair was afloat near the storage cabinets at the rear of the chamber.

  “You don’t think this is another one of those antiterraforming attacks, do you, Jake?” she asked.