Seeker

by Jack McDevitt

  “Talk later,” I said. I finished packing the case and secured it. Alex got into the suit, and I shortened the tether, cut it back to about a meter and a half, and connected it to his belt.

  “Six minutes,” said Belle.

  “Okay,” I told her. “Kill the gravity.”

  She shut it down and I picked up the case. “Let’s go.”

  I opened the airlock and he went inside. I passed the case to him.

  “What do you want me to do with this?”

  “We’re going to use it to save our necks.”

  I closed the hatch, went back to my seat, and buckled in. There was a glow up ahead. “That’s it,” said Belle. “Engines are still firing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Alex, can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Start depressurization.”

  “I already have.”

  “Good. Use the tether to secure yourself to one of the handgrips. We don’t want you going out the door.”

  “Hang on a second.”

  I watched the glow getting brighter. “Come on, Alex.”

  “How’s this thing work?”

  “It’s just a clip.”

  “I think it’s defective.”

  “Just knot it if you have to.”

  “Four minutes.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  “Give it a good yank. Make sure it’s secure.”

  “It’s fine.”

  My instincts were all telling me to hit the brakes. “All right. Air pressure will be zero in another minute.”

  “Okay.”

  “When it is, when the green light on the outer hatch comes on, open it.”

  “All right. I know you’re not about to tell me we’re going to hit it with the artifacts.”

  “How do you like breathing?”

  “It’s still on collision course, Chase,” said Belle.

  “Didn’t we have something else we could have thrown at it?”

  “We could probably have used a sink if we’d had more time.”

  “Two minutes.”

  “Belle, power to the main engines. Let’s be ready to move out.”

  “Pressure’s zero,” said Alex.

  “It is still on collision course,” said Belle.

  “One minute, twenty, Alex.” The tracker was still braking.

  “Opening the outer hatch.”

  The airlock was on the port side. “When you push the case out, try to be gentle. Don’t shove it.”

  “Okay.”

  “We want it, as much as possible, to continue ahead on our present vector.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just lay it out there. Let me know when it’s done.”

  “All right.”

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do it.”

  I heard him grumble. Then: “Okay. It’s gone.”

  “Very good. Don’t try to close the hatch. Just hang on. Turn in ten seconds.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nine, eight . . .”

  The one serious risk was the one Alex had alluded to, that the tracker might guess what I was doing, or possibly even react quickly enough to change its course. But I doubted that was possible. More likely was that I’d cut it too close and would slam into the damned thing on my own.

  “Four, three . . .”

  Its engines were still firing, still trying to decelerate.

  “ . . . Two . . .”

  I fired the port-side thrusters, turning hard to starboard. The tracker’s starboard thrusters fired as it tried to match the move, but it was too late. We soared past, and the case of artifacts caught it right on the nose at a combined velocity close to two thousand kilometers per hour.

  The sky lit up behind us. Alex complained that he couldn’t believe he’d actually done that. Had to have been a better way. Now that there was time to think about it, I realized we might have filled the container with water. But I let it go.

  We did a series of long- and short-range sweeps to assure ourselves nothing else was coming our way.

  NINETEEN

  Orbits, vectors, and intersections. When you understand them rightly, all becomes clear.

  —Korim Maas,

  In the Lab, 1411

  The next order of business was to clean the lenses. It was delicate work and I left it to Alex, who’s the expert. When he was satisfied he’d done the best he could, we showed them to Belle. “What do you think?” he asked her.

  We watched lights playing through them. She commented that, considering their age, they were almost in decent condition.

  “Can you reproduce the images?” asked Alex.

  “I think so. Put one into the reader and let’s see what we have.”

  We retreated to the common room, and I loaded the first lens.

  “That’s good,” said Belle. Lights dimmed. We were looking at a field under a starlit sky. Dark trees crowded in on our left. In the foreground, two people stood by a gate in a wooden fence. A little girl, and a woman who seemed to be her mother. Beyond the gate were a lawn, a tree with a swing, and a house. Beyond the house lay a river.

  Everything was somewhat blurred. “Hang on,” said Belle. “I see the problem.” The picture cleared, and the VR effect took hold. We were standing in the field. On the far side of the river, in the darkness, a ring of light glittered.

  “A city, I think,” said Alex. “Where are we, Belle? Can you tell? Is it Earth?”

  “I don’t know. It could be anywhere.”

  The child was about nine. She wore a blue jumpsuit and a matching bow in her long auburn hair. She was looking directly at us, smiling, waving her hand. The mother’s eyes were also fixed on us. She was dressed in khakis, her head canted, smiling self-consciously, patiently waiting for the picture-taking session to end.

  I could feel rain coming. And the wind whispering in the trees. A yellow glow in a cloud-filled sky suggested the presence of a moon. The girl wanted to run toward us, to embrace us, but I suspected she’d been instructed to pose, and so she did.

  “Okay?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Next, Belle.”

  Same two people. Standing on the front porch of the house. The house looked lived in. The front steps didn’t fit quite right into the porch, and the post light leaned at an angle. The roof had some torn shingles, and one of several large windows needed its frame repaired. This wasn’t the kind of place you used to impress friends. But there were lots of flowering bushes out front. And it looked comfortable.

  The clouds had backed off a bit, and we could see the moon. It was full and bright, a fraction larger than Rimway’s satellite. Light spilled through the windows. The woman was laughing now, more at ease, and seemed to be in the act of reaching down to catch the child in her arms. She was attractive. Her hair was like the child’s, auburn tinged with red. She looked happy, a woman without a care in the world. She wore a white blouse and dark slacks. “I wonder who they are,” Alex said.

  I shrugged. “Maybe she became the captain of the Seeker,” I said.

  “She doesn’t look like somebody who’d be piloting interstellars. She’ll have her hands full with the little girl.”

  “I was talking about the little girl,” I said.

  “It’s not Earth,” said Belle.

  The voice seemed to come out of a patch of trees. “How do you know?” asked Alex

  “It’s not Earth’s moon.”

  Three of the holograms were views of the river. It looked wide and tranquil. The woman appeared in one of them, standing beside a tree, gazing thoughtfully at the opposite bank.

  Two were not recoverable. The other seven had been made in the vicinity of the house, including one with the mother and child standing in an open front door, providing our only real glimpse into the interior. I could make out an armchair and a table with a lamp on it. The girl appeared in each of the seven.

  There were t
wo chairs on the porch, and a table supporting a potted plant. Someone had draped a jacket on the back of one of the chairs. A toy wagon had been left out front on the lawn. And we saw the walkway that connected the house with the gate.

  We went back to the river and looked more closely at the ring of light on the other side. “Can we get closer?” I asked Belle.

  She focused on the ring, then moved rapidly toward it. It expanded, broke into individual lights. The lights looked as if they might be traffic.

  “Okay,” said Alex. “Let’s see the girl’s jumpsuit again. Up close.” The child appeared front and center. Laughing. Pulling at the mother. The jumpsuit had a shoulder patch.

  I recognized it. The suit and the patch. “It’s from the Seeker.”

  “Made especially for kids,” he said. “Probably a souvenir.” He looked up at the sky, but the stars were hidden. “This is Margolia,” he said.

  I’d gone to bed thinking how good it would be to get home again, and I was just drifting off to sleep when Alex knocked at the cabin door. I turned on a lamp, grabbed a robe, and told him to come in.

  He was holding a cup of coffee. “Sorry to bother you, Chase.”

  “It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

  “I just thought of something, and I wanted to run it by you.”

  There was only one chair in the room, so I sat up on the bed and left it for him. “Go ahead,” I said.

  “We’ve been talking about a catastrophe of some kind. That’s the only likely reason they’d have packed all those kids on the Seeker. It was a rescue effort.”

  “Sure. Has to be. The colony ran into something. A virus. Famine. Maybe even aliens.”

  “You’re thinking small, Chase.”

  “Small? Aliens show up and that’s small?”

  “We both know the planetary system here is screwed up, right? I mean, we’ve only been able to find three worlds, and one of them is in a lopsided orbit.”

  “There’s nothing unusual about that, Alex. There are lopsided systems everywhere.”

  “But this is the one where we found the Seeker. That suggests at least the possibility of a connection.”

  “Alex, what are we talking about?”

  “Put the catastrophe on a planetary scale.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe something came through this system and either plowed into the colony world or ejected it.”

  “Or knocked it into the sun. It’s possible. But it seems pretty unlikely.” The chance of a collision was remote. But, if something had come this way—

  His eyes looked distant. “I think the odds are pretty good,” he said, “that’s exactly what happened. They arrived and set up on that pleasant world in the holograms. Built a city. Spread out a bit. Nice little places in the country with porches and swings. They were there long enough for the two ships to get old. The house we saw needed repair. Then they got an event.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Maybe a rogue world passing through. I don’t know. I’m not a planetary scientist. We should have brought that friend of yours along.”

  “Shara.”

  “Yeah. Shara. She might have been able to give us a better idea.”

  “It would explain everything. If they hadn’t maintained the ships, or they’d simply gotten old—”

  “—Neither was reliable. Neither could make it on its own. So they had to cannibalize one to give the other a chance. The plan would have been to send it to get help. Provided there was time. I mean, Earth was what, a year away? And another year back.”

  “The fact that they loaded it up with kids suggests time was short,” I said.

  “Or that they thought they’d solved the Seeker’s problems.”

  He took a deep breath. “I’d like to know what actually happened.”

  “If they got ejected from the system, we won’t find them.”

  “No, I don’t suppose we would.” He tapped his fingertips on the navigation monitor. “Why don’t we run a test? See if we can confirm that this system was really home to the colony world.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “We look for the moon.”

  “The moon?”

  “Sure. Margolia had a moon. We have a picture of it.”

  “Well, maybe we do. But even so, the moon would probably have gotten booted, too.”

  “We don’t know that. In any case, I don’t see that it hurts to look.”

  “Okay,” I said. “If it’s still in the system, it shouldn’t be too hard to locate.” We knew what one side of it looked like. There was a lot of debris floating around, but not many spheres.

  He went up to the bridge. I padded along behind him in bare feet, and we directed Belle to run through the images again.

  The moon was actually visible in three of the holograms. She put them on display one by one. We had only the face of the satellite to work with, but it would be enough. We studied its details, craters here and here. Ridges over there and up toward the pole. Mountain range thus and so. “Are we ready to do a sweep, Belle?” I asked.

  “Say the word.”

  We decided the moon would most likely be in a solar orbit and started our search accordingly.

  We found four candidates the first day, but eliminated them quickly. Alex became engrossed in the effort. He talked with Belle incessantly, quizzing her about where we were looking, whether we were wasting time on one prospect or another, whether she was still following the search parameters that we’d set out for her.

  She started getting irritable. By the beginning of the fourth day, when we were far from the sun and deep in the system with nothing resembling a moon anywhere on the scopes, she lost patience and told us she’d let us know when she had information of interest. “In the meantime,” she added, “we need to be thorough. Even if this doesn’t look like a promising area, we want to eliminate it so we don’t have to come back here later when we start wondering if maybe we missed something.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m annoying the computer,” he told me.

  I’d done extended travel with Alex on numerous occasions, and if you’re going on a long cruise, he’s as good to have along as anybody. He can hold up his end of a conversation. He has a sense of humor. He’s reasonably patient. And usually he knows when to be quiet. Nevertheless, when you put two people into a confined space over a long period of time, with no break, things do tend to get fractious. I’ve seen studies that indicate it’s not so much being limited to seeing the same person day after day as it is the confinement within bulkheads. Put two people on a desert island, with sun, wind, and open sea, and you don’t get the same effect at all.

  So we made full use of the VR capabilities. We went to the theater, attended a concert, sat on the beach with hordes of other people, took our meals in virtual restaurants, went to sporting events and tried to scream along with the crowd. We played in a chess tournament in India, walked along the coast at Sea Gate, watched Parvis Kuney do his comedy act in the Royale, and wandered through the ancient Louvre.

  The problem with all this is that it’s virtual, and as the days pass, you become increasingly aware of that fact. There was nothing constructive to be done. Alex could spend time updating himself on the latest developments in the world of antiquities. I read mysteries. And after a while, it got old.

  As any single female of the correct age will tell you, there’s nothing quite like living with the possibility that on any given day you will meet The Guy. The one who sets your heart racing and whom you know from the beginning you will never forget. Well, okay. I’ve never seen one of those in the flesh, and there are moments when I doubt they really exist. But then an evening with the right sim, watching Choelo Tabor look into the soul of a Chase Kolpath avatar, watching the two of us fall desperately in love while the rain pours down on the cottage roof and the music swells and carries us away—Well, I can tell you that Choelo could have me anytime. But I knew that I wasn’t going to see him, or anyone else for tha
t matter, out here around Boopsilon Delta, or wherever the hell we were.

  We were also beginning to use up our fuel. Short jumps are short, but we were doing a lot of them and they burn just as much fuel as the long-range insertions.

  Eventually we transferred the search to the far side of the sun. By then, the plan was to take a quick look around, see if anything presented itself, then rethink our options.

  Finally, on the ninth day, Belle announced she had spotted something.

  “The moon?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. Another oddly human trait: She loved being in charge of the moment and never hesitated to draw the situation out. “How about that?”

  “What?” demanded Alex. “What do you see?”

  “Another high-albedo object.”

  “Another tracker?” I held my breath.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Another ship?”

  “Possibly.”

  “The Bremerhaven?” I said.

  “I cannot make that determination. Whatever it is, however, it’s nearby.”

  It wasn’t the Bremerhaven. And it wasn’t another visitor. It was a docking facility. It was about a kilometer long, with two enclosed bays for landers, a terminal, something that must have been a storage unit, and a collection of struts, crosspieces, and burst tanks. It was adrift, turning slowly, end over end, trailing spars and broken cables. The bays were open and empty.

  We pulled alongside. Alex was already climbing into his suit. I asked whether we wanted to take a packing container with us.

  “Let’s just go look,” he said. “See what we have.” He was still subdued.

  I picked up a laser, and we made the crossing. There was a possibility the enclosed sections of the station were still holding air pressure, and that turned out to be the case. We went through one of the bays and had to cut our way through a bulkhead. There were no human remains this time. For which I was grateful.

  We moved into a dark passageway, a bit more relaxed than we had been on the Seeker. But we didn’t engage in our usual hunt for artifacts. To be honest, there wasn’t much lying around.

  Nor was there debris floating through the dark. We found an observatory, a maintenance station, and a galley. There were two boarding tubes. Both had been brought inside and retired to their cradles.