Keep your head. There’s still time. (Why was it easier to give up?)
As best he could, he set out a strip of cable and made a loop at the top about six meters in diameter. He tied it, and then laid a few crosspieces over it and tied them, so that he had a net of sorts. It was hard to work with because it kept drifting away.
When he was satisfied with it, he pulled what remained of the cable, approximately twenty meters, out of the exit and tied the end of it around his waist.
A NET? THERE was a touch of déja`vu in that. It hadn’t been that long since she’d tried to pilot a crippled lander into a net at Deepsix.
The two go-packs she’d used up and discarded had raced well ahead of her by now.
“You’ll have to stay low,” he said. “It’ll only be a few meters off the ground.”
“Okay.”
“Probably tangled. I can’t do anything about that. Get hold when you come in. If you can.”
“Okay.” She raced over the chindi’s rear tubes, and then the rock landscape swept beneath her. She was slowing, but not quickly enough.
“I’ll be on the other end.”
“Why not anchor it? Let me try to land?”
“You’ll take too much of a beating. Do it my way.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Doesn’t much matter at this point.”
Ahead, the landscape opened into a plain. She picked up a few low hills on the right, which straightened into one of the ridges that bracketed the exit hatch. The second ridge appeared moments later. “When you get hold of it, you should pull me off the surface.”
That was correct. As far as it went. But she was going down.
“With luck, we’ll both come away in pretty good shape.”
“How’s your air?”
“Got enough if you don’t miss me.”
She was still moving feetfirst. If she was going to grab a net, she needed to get turned around. Get her feet out of the way. She shut off both go-packs.
“—Should give you three or four seconds before the cable plays out.”
She struggled out of her belly go-pack.
A last row of hills passed beneath her, then she was out over a stretch of smooth rock. And she saw him ahead, about four hundred meters. Saw the net. It was desperately small, a fragile web that hung shapelessly above him.
She threw the go-pack away, down and to the rear. The action caused her to begin to rotate around her center of mass. Bringing her gradually face forward.
“Try to relax your body.”
Yes. Good idea, that last. Clever guy, Tor.
The two ridges were angling in now centering the exit hatch. Tor was standing just off to one side. Trying to hold up the net. Looking ludicrous.
Forty seconds.
The net was getting bigger, but not by much. It wasn’t really a net at all, just a few strands looped together, tangled, and as she raced across that silent landscape he tried again to coax it higher, to spread it out.
Beyond it, the ground was clear until the ridges came together.
Gray rock rippled past. She had drifted off course and blipped the go-pack, using it to correct.
“Hutch.” Brownstein’s voice spoke from far away.
“Busy,” she said.
Tor was down on one knee, watching. Trying to guide her. Keep coming. Stay straight. A little lower.
Then he sat down. Got his shoes clear of the ground.
Another brief burst from the go-pack.
FROM TOR’S POINT of view, it was terrifying. She came over the horizon, headfirst like a meteor, skimming the ground.
The air was getting thick, but it was still breathable. He looked at her and looked at the rock. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Harebrained scheme. I may have killed her, too.
IT WOULD HAVE taken pure luck to hit it dead center, and Hutch could see she was off to one side. But she picked the section she wanted, a brace of netting that floated free and clear of the tangle. She raced across the last thirty meters, concentrating on her target and blocking everything else out of her mind. Except that she was aware of Tor crouched below her, of his face frozen in horror. She snatched at the cable. And kept going.
It went with her. She got both hands into it. Tried to loop it around her arm.
It took longer than she expected, but the line finally jerked tight. Tore at her shoulder. The rise in front of her went up, and she went down and crashed into the rock. On the other shoulder. The world went briefly dark. The air was knocked out of her, or maybe the oxygen tanks shattered. Didn’t know which. The hills were going down again. She’d bounced, and she saw Tor above her. They were both going up, and the hills rushed beneath.
A sharp pain exploded in her side, but she tried to ignore it. Call Tor. “You okay?”
She heard him, heard something, but it wasn’t clear. And her vision was fading.
Damn. She was passing out again.
THE SUDDEN LIFTOFF had broken a couple of his ribs. But he was off the surface, hauled up and thrown down and whipped back up. He lost track of Hutch when he got yanked away, but then he saw her again, below him.
They kept circling each other, the way the Twins did, he guessed. She didn’t look conscious, but she still had hold of the cable, and he knew he had to get to her before she let go.
Carefully, he reeled her in, while they soared out over the rim of broken rock that constituted the chindi’s prow. She was pale, and blood was dribbling out of her mouth, but she seemed to be breathing.
When he touched her, her eyes fluttered open. She smiled but through his own gathering haze he saw that she was hurting.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
She didn’t sound okay. Meanwhile it was getting hard to breathe. “Air,” he said.
She looked startled, nonplussed, apologetic, and pointed to her airtanks. “You’ll have to help.”
He got behind her and released the connection from her harness, then turned so she could remove his own useless tank and plug her unit in. Cool, fresh air rushed in. “Ah,” he said, “the simple joys we take for granted.” And: “Thanks, Hutch.”
She squeezed his arm and smothered a cry of pain, and then assured him that she wasn’t hurt, not really, well, maybe my ribs, a little. I had trouble with them once before. “How about you?”
“Same problem, I think.” Cautiously, he used his cutter to get rid of the loose cable, which floated beside them like a giant tangle of embroidery.
He was suddenly aware that Brownstein was calling from the McCarver. “No casualties,” Tor said. “But we need a pickup.”
Chapter 38
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
— RUDYARD KIPLING, RECESSIONAL, 1897
THE MEDIBOT DIAGNOSED Hutch with a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs, a chipped collarbone, some torn ligaments, and what she came to refer to as a body bruise. Tor suffered more cracked ribs, a broken knee, and lacerations. Both were, despite their injuries, in a jovial mood until the painkillers put them under.
Hutch slept sixteen hours. When she woke she remembered only pieces and bits of the previous few days. “Considering what you’ve been through,” Jennifer told her, “I’m not surprised.”
It was a curious experience: At first she recalled only sharing her air tanks with Tor, but she had no recollection of how she got into that position. Then she remembered juggling the go-packs. Then the rest of the flight over the rocky exterior of the chindi. (“Was it really the chindi?”) Her memory proceeded backward until the giant starship blew out of the snowstorm and made for the oort cloud.
She was ravenous and they fed her fruit and eggs, and assured her that Tor was doing fine but was unavailable at the moment. She did however have a visitor.
Mogambo was in a gray-and-blue McCarver jumpsuit. Ready to go to work. “That was quite a show you put on out there,” he said. “Congratulations.” There was a da
rkness in those gray eyes.
“What’s wrong, Doctor?” she asked.
“Nothing.” But there was, and he was letting her see that there was.
“The go-packs,” she said.
“It’s all right.” He was operating somewhere between magnanimity and a sulk.
“Use the shuttle.” They were chasing that down now. “I brought one go-pack back with me. It’s a little bent, but I’m sure we can repair it.”
“Brownstein says there’s a liability issue. He’s not sure he wants to put us on the chindi in any case.”
“Oh.” Her mind wasn’t clear. “I thought we already settled that.”
“He says he agreed to bring us along. Not to land us on the chindi.”
“I see.”
“He says he won’t do it without your approval.”
“Well.” Hutch kept a straight face. “I can understand his reluctance.”
“There’s no danger.”
“That sounds familiar.”
He backed off and lowered his voice. “How’s your arm?”
“My shoulder,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Good. We were worried about you.”
“Professor, you see what we just went through.”
“Of course.”
“You understand that I’d be reluctant to chance anything like that happening again.”
Tor showed up behind Mogambo, on crutches. “How’s the patient?” he asked.
“I’m fine, Tor. Thanks.”
“How are you, Professor?” he said. “I hear you’re going over to the chindi.”
“We’re still working on it,” he said, not taking his eyes from Hutch.
Tor smirked and looked momentarily as if he were going to say more, but he let it go.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
He nodded, suggesting she was doing the only rational thing. “Thank you, Priscilla,” he said. “I’m in your debt.”
SHE DID THE promised interview with Claymoor that evening. To her dismay, he had used the McCarver’s telescopes to get pictures of her sailing awkwardly above the chindi and of her graceless crash landing. Thump. Bang. Whack.
“You’re not going to use them, I hope,” she protested.
“Hutch, they’re beautiful. You’re beautiful.”
“I look like a wounded pelican.”
“You look incredible. You know what’s going to happen when people see those shots? They’re going to see that you’re an incredibly brave young woman. A woman absolutely without fear.”
“Absolutely without sense,” she grumbled.
“Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. You’re going to become the world’s sweetheart.” He gestured toward the mike clipped to his lapel. “Can we start?”
She nodded.
They were in a VR studio which looked like First and Main on the chindi. They sat in upholstered chairs along the lip of the Ditch, placed so that the audience could look past them down the dark passageways that traveled off in all directions. “I’m seated here with Priscilla Hutchins,” Claymoor said, “where we have a pretty good view of the interior of an alien starship. It’s called the chindi, and I should point out that what you can see is only a very small part of the ship. But before we get to that…” He leaned forward and his brow wrinkled. “Priscilla, they call you Hutch, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do, Henry.”
He smiled at the imager. “Hutch performed an incredible feat earlier today to rescue one of her passengers.”
In fact, despite her reservations, the interview went well. Claymoor asked the usual questions. Had she been frightened? Terrified.
Had she at any time thought she wouldn’t be able to bring it off? It had seemed like a long shot from the start.
Had she been down inside the chindi herself?
What was a chindi, anyhow?
He ran the visual record, and here came Hutch tumbling through the sky. It looked terribly awkward, a crazy woman flying feet first over a slab of asteroid. She tried to explain that the physics of the situation wouldn’t allow her to slice through the sky with her arms spread before her, in the way you’d expect from someone who wanted to look halfway graceful. But Claymoor only smiled pleasantly and ran the shot again, this time in slow motion.
Tor came in as scheduled, pretending he’d just dropped by, and explained how it happened he’d become stranded on the chindi. “Did you think they’d be able to rescue you?”
“I knew with Hutch over here, they’d give it everything they had.”
An hour after they’d concluded, the yacht caught up with its runaway shuttle. Brownstein collected it, informed Hutch that it seemed none the worse for wear, refilled its fuel tanks, and asked what she wanted done about Mogambo.
“You just want to give him trouble,” she said.
“He’s not an easy man to like, Hutch. I thought you’d enjoy having him forced to come to you for another favor.”
“When does he want to go?”
“In the morning.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s okay with me. But get him to sign a paper that if that damned thing takes off again, he’s on his own.”
AS THINGS TURNED out, Mogambo and his people had almost three months to explore the chindi, because that was how long it took before a rescue mission could get boosted up to their speed.
It was a longer time than the McCarver was supposed to be out on its own, and it had more people on board than originally scheduled, so supplies began to run short and they had to go on half rations.
The Academy developed emergency designs for fuel pods and platforms that could be gotten up to a quarter light-speed. The platforms consisted of little more than shells with fusion and Hazeltine propulsion systems. But they had to be hauled out to the Twins, where rocks of appropriate mass were culled from the rings to be used as what were now called Greenwater Objects. The McCarver, nursing damaged engines, needed thirteen stages to descend to standard velocities. By then the Academy’s operational fleet had also recovered the Memphis and the Longworth.
The technique of dropping Greenwater Objects in hyperspace to boost velocity lacked a correspondingly elegant method to shed velocity. Returning from a state of high acceleration consumed substantial time and resources.
As departure neared, Mogambo resisted being taken off the chindi, even though Sylvia Virgil assured him that the Academy would return to the artifact better equipped for a more comprehensive inspection. Had food and water been available, Hutch suspected he might have insisted on waiting.
At least part of his reluctance to leave was generated by his awareness that the costs of a return would be immense. It would, he judged, not happen until a vehicle capable of reaching the necessary velocities on its own had been developed. Furthermore, the Academy’s willingness to invest the necessary sums would be undermined by the fact that a decent sampling of the chindi’s treasures had already been obtained. The Academy, or some other agency, would unquestionably one day return, but he would be an unlikely participant. So there was an emotional scene in the shuttle when Hutch rode over to take him and his colleagues off for the last time. They had by then erected a plaque by the exit hatch, on the outside, informing all and sundry that the chindi had been visited, on this day and year of the Common Era, by Maurice Mogambo and so forth and so on.
They hauled a ton of samples on board the shuttle. Mogambo made a short speech as they pulled away, and, to her amazement, his eyes grew damp. He shook hands solemnly with Teri and Antonio, congratulated them on their work, and took time to thank Hutch. “I know you don’t care much for me,” he said, surprising her because she thought she’d kept her feelings pretty well hidden, “but I’m grateful for everything you’ve done. If I can return the favor, don’t hesitate to ask.”
So, in their various ways, they said farewell to the chindi, climbed aboard the Mac, and Brownstein began the long voyage home by using the fuel they’d gotten from the rescue mission to begin
the process of braking back down to standard velocities. The rescue platform, carrying still more fuel, followed along.
The chindi drew rapidly ahead and vanished. Hutch suspected that, when it arrived off the Venture’s beam in the twenty-fifth century, somebody would be there to welcome it. “But certainly not me,” she told Tor.
BROWNSTEIN PASSED HER a transmission for Mogambo, information copy to Hutch. It was from Virgil. “Got a surprise for you, Maurice,” she said. They were refueling from another pod, at their third stage down. “You’ll recall that we discovered stealth satellites here. Orbiting Earth. Apparently they’re older than we expected.”
She paused, giving them time to reflect on the implications. “They don’t work anymore. We’ve taken a close look at them. They’re designed to shut down if the target world reaches a level of development that would lead to their discovery. But they’ll reactivate if the local radio envelope disappears. Which is to say, if something happens to the civilization they’re watching.
“Nevertheless, they’re part of the network you’ve seen. It is, by the way, a more extensive and complex network than we’d believed. We haven’t begun to map it. The chindi must be at least a quarter-million years old.
“There’s one segment of the transmission, in the attached package, which we thought you’d be especially interested in seeing. We intercepted it in the Mendel system, eleven hundred light-years from Earth, but almost three thousand light-years out on the net.”
“Has Mogambo seen this yet?” Hutch asked Brownstein.
“A few minutes ago. He’s waiting for us in the holotank.”
They crowded in. Tor was munching a sandwich, one of Mogambo’s team was carrying a mint driver. The great man himself was so excited he could barely settle comfortably into a chair. When they were ready Brownstein directed Jennifer to proceed.
The lights dimmed. A desert appeared, scorched by a noonday sun. Sand running on forever. Hutch blinked and shielded her eyes from the sudden glare.
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