by David Geary
"Janet." Drafts swung to face her. "Tell me something?"
"Sure."
"What do you do with your spare time when you aren't chasing cosmic waves?"
A bank of displays on her right were dark. These were the long-range scanners, still looking for anything unusual in the system. The sun, the worlds and moons, comets and rocks and assorted debris had been blanked out. Anything else, anything else at all out of the ordinary, out to the edge of the system, would register.
Fool's errand. What else could you call it?
"I'm not sure anymore," she said. "I'm really not sure."
LOG
Ground team reports they have touched down. We have launched two comsats to ensure round-the-clock communication. We have also orbited a buoy to direct the ship from Nok when it arrives.
I will add that this is the most unusual mission in which I have participated. No one seems to know what we're looking for.
—T. F. Drafts NCA Ashley Tee May 14, 2203
28.
LCO4418-I1D ("Delta"). Saturday, May 14; 1745 GMT.
The ground blizzard hid the surface, burying everything except the taller mesas, which might have been a gray fleet moving across rust-colored seas. The four they had selected were on the westernmost border of the plain, where the ground began to turn mountainous.
Hutch thought that Carson was being influenced by the towers at the corners of the central square in the Oz-construct on Quraqua's moon. When she mentioned it to him, he seemed surprised, but then agreed that she was probably right. "I'd like to do the same thing here," he said. "Make a square by using squares. We're not quite able to do that, but we can get close."
The largest of the four plateaus merged its rear section with a mountain. This was the one which would present the most difficulty, and they therefore chose its summit as the site for their base. Angela had brought the shuttle down through a stiff wind, and laid it cautiously into the orange snow. Hutch was impressed.
This was a big plateau. They would have needed about ten hours to walk around its rim. Locked in the snow storm, they could not see its sizable dimensions, but they knew they had taken on an ambitious job.
"Let's sit tight for tonight," Carson said. "We'll set up in the morning."
Angela pointed toward a crimson smear in the east. "It is morning. But you're right: let's wait 'til the storm blows over. Then this whole project will look reasonable." She smiled drily.
Drafts put the technical manual down when Janet came up onto the bridge. "Anything happening?"
"It's quiet. I think they're all asleep."
"Do we have a reading on the weather?"
"It's bad. I think it's always bad. I'm not sure. My meteorology is weak."
The screens were active. They reflected power drain figures, short- and long-range scans, attitude, orbital configuration. Fuel levels. Life support on both the ship and the shuttle.
Janet was pleased with the way things had turned out. Drafts, despite his hostility to the project, was a congenial companion, armed with a droll sense of humor. The ship was comfortable, and life was easy up here. She couldn't see that the ground assignment was anything but cramped drudgery.
She was about to make some small talk, when he stiffened. Almost immediately, an alert beeped. "Long range," he said.
Two displays brightened. They presented optical and sensor views of a hazy object. Range at twelve A.U.s.
Drafts frowned. "Odd."
Projected diameter: 23,000 km.
"Irregular shape," said Janet.
"We seem to have an extra world." He called up survey records. "Not supposed to be there." He studied the sensor return. "We're not getting much penetration," he said. "It looks like a cloud. Hydrogen and dust. Trace iron, carbon, formaldehyde, and silicate particles."
"So it's a cloud." Janet didn't understand why he looked so puzzled.
"Angela would know more about this than I do, but I don't think clouds come this small. They tend to be a lot bigger."
"What's inside?" asked Janet.
"Don't know. We can't get into it."
He went to mag five and enhanced. It was still a blur.
Delta. Sunday, May 15; 1045 hours.
The winds quit as if a switch had been thrown. The top of the mesa became very still, and they looked out across a crumpled orange wasteland. Angela moved the shuttle out of the snow that had piled up around it, and they got out and began assembling their base.
Within two hours, they erected an RK/107 top-of-the-line
pressurized shelter, which consisted of a triad of interfaced (but fully compartmented) silver and black domes. The snow was wet and heavy and resisted movement, and they were thoroughly tired by the time they collapsed into the unit's compress chairs. Meantime, another storm blew up, and they watched fiery clouds roll overhead. This time, though, it rained. It rained thick, syrupy drops that plopped and blatted against the windows and rolled down like amoebas. Lightning flickered.
Angela sat by a window. "So much for the rare electrical storm."
"By the way," said Carson, "if this is really a gasoline atmosphere, why don't the lightning bolts blow the place up?"
"No oxygen," she said. "If there were oxygen in the mix, we'd get a show."
The shelter was state-of-the-art. They had private apartments, a washroom, a kitchen, an operations center, and a conference room. Polarized windows were set in all outside walls. They had comfortable furniture, music, extensive data banks, decent food. "We could have done worse," said Angela, who, like the others, was accustomed to accommodations produced by the lowest bidder.
She seemed thoughtful. And when Hutch asked what was on her mind, she hesitated. "Not sure," she said. "I'm getting near retirement. In fact, they didn't want me to come out on this one. I think this is my swan song." Her gray eyes brightened. "This is the most interesting mission I've been on." Her gaze turned inward. "Yeah. I haven't seen anything like this before. I hope we find something so I can go out in style."
"Even a dragon?"
"Sure," she said. "Especially a dragon."
"It won't pass very close."
Janet had been idling through Ashley's mission report. The ship had been surveying older stars, mostly middle-aged, stable G-types, prime candidates in the twin searches for habitable worlds and other civilizations. So far, they had nothing to show for their efforts.
The auxiliary screen on her right displayed the cloud. Nothing much had changed. It was somewhat more distinct, a result of enhancement and, to a lesser degree, its decreased range.
"Hey." Drafts stared at his instruments. "I think we've got another one."
"Another what?"
"Another cloud."
Janet slid into the seat beside him. "Where?"
"Extreme long range." He jabbed a finger at the readout. She picked it up on a window. "This one is on the other side of the sun, moving away from us. It's out on the edge of the system."
"Can't we get a better picture?"
"It's too far." He was running a search through the data banks. "But it's also not on the charts." He turned toward her. "Neither of these objects was here when the original survey was made."
"Or they got missed."
"I would have thought that was unlikely. Maybe we better let Angela know."
They had just left the dome, just cycled through the airlock and stepped out into the snow, when Drafts's voice broke into their chatter. "We have a couple of anomalies," he said.
They kept walking, plowing through the snow with difficulty. Carson had begun to wonder whether they should try to make snowshoes. "What kind of anomalies?" he asked.
"Clouds, I think. Two of them."
"Here?" asked Angela, looking into a crystal-clear sky, apparently thinking what Carson thought: that they were talking about something in the atmosphere.
"One at twelve A.U.s, approaching; the other on the far side of the sun. Going the other way. Listen, I'm not sure yet, but I don
't think they're in orbit."
"Clouds, you say?"
"Yeah. Clouds."
"Not possible," she said.
"We'll send you pictures."
"Okay. Yes, do that." She started back inside. "Frank, do you mind?"
"No. Go back and look. We'll see you in the shuttle."
The ATL1600 general-purpose particle beam projector was of the type that had been used to cut shafts in the polar ice packs on Quraqua. It was simple to operate, durable, and effective. The narrow, tightly-focused beam that it generated was capable, even while tied to the shuttle's limited power plant, of slicing the mesas like so much cheese.
On Quraqua, the projectors had been driven by a fusion link with the orbiter. Here, the drain on the shuttle would be considerable, and they could not approach full power. Operations would be limited to seven hours daily. The work would be slow, but they had plenty of time.
The real problem was that the unit was difficult to manage. It had been designed for installation on board a specially fitted CAT. Carson would have to try to aim it from the cargo hold, while the shuttle was in flight. Hutch's mount was really little more than a restraining web to prevent the instrument, or its operator, from falling out. They had one advantage: the half-ton unit weighed only about four hundred pounds in this gravity.
When Angela rejoined them, she was excited. "I don't know whether it has anything to do with what we're looking for, but we've got a couple of very strange beasties out there." She described what the ship had seen. "Terry thinks they're clouds."
"And you don't?"
"No. Clouds would get ripped apart in the gravity fields. They look like clouds, but it couldn't be. They have to be solid bodies. The lopsided appearance will turn out to be an illusion."
"They can't be hydrogen clouds?" asked Hutch.
"No."
"I thought there were a lot of hydrogen clouds."
"There are. But they don't come in this size. These are too small. I can't even imagine how such objects would form." She smiled, and looked pleased. "We'll keep an eye on them." Angela helped them lock down the 1600, and then went up front and took the pilot's seat. "Are we ready?"
They were.
"Okay. I'm going to seal off up here. The thing that I'm worried about is that you two and the sixteen hundred are all going to be concentrated on the starboard side. Don't make any sudden changes of position. And if I ask you to shut down, I want you to do it immediately, and move to the other side. Clear on that?
"If the thing does break loose and fall out, don't try to stop
it. It doesn't weigh nearly as much as it looks, but neither do you. I don't want any dead people."
She wished them luck, and closed off the cockpit. Hutch sat down and made herself comfortable.
They would ride with the outer door open, because the unit's housing stuck out of the vehicle. They fastened tethers to their belts.
Angela engaged her engines, and they lifted off. The shuttle circled the three domes, turned east, and glided out over the plateau. The weather had cleared, and a light wind blew out of the north.
"The plateaus were probably carved by methane glaciers," Angela said. "It would be interesting to know whether this moon has periodic ice ages."
She continued in that vein, while Carson and Hutch endured an uncomfortable ride in back. They looked out at the endless snowscape, watched the edge of the plateau fall away, maybe two hundred meters, and they were cruising over the plain. Carsoa's idea was to do the easy ones first. Get the hang of the equipment.
Hutch wondered if Angela had ever flown before with an open cargo door. It was unlikely, but the woman knew her shuttle. It developed a drag, and a tendency to turn to starboard, but they seemed to be compensating.
The least challenging of the four mesas was on the south. It was already a passable rectangle, except that one side had partially collapsed and left a big hole in the symmetry. They'd have to square that off. For the rest, they wouldn't have to do much more than straighten the corners.
The projector's phase controls were set in a bright yellow teardrop case; its black mirror housing looked like a rifle barrel. There was provision for both automatic and manual operation. Rewriting the programming to factor in the shuttle was simply too time-consuming, so they had opted to go manual. "When in doubt," said Carson, "fly by the seat of your pants."
There was a pair of handgrips, a sight, and a trigger. But the instrument was unwieldy. So they ignored the trigger, and rigged a remote. The plan was that Carson would aim and, on command, Hutch would push the button.
"Coming up on target," said Angela. "Let's do a couple of flybys and see precisely how we want to do this."
Janet was surprised to discover that Harley Costa, whom she knew, had flown the original mission to 4418. At the time they'd met he was en route to Canopus. He was a busy little man who talked too fast, and who could not tolerate anyone who didn't share his passion for astronomy. Janet had taken the time to find out about his specialty, asked the right questions, and they'd become fast friends.
Harley didn't have much use for simple sentences. His energy overflowed ordinary syntax. His ideas sallied out to battle. He trampled (rather than refuted) opposing views, lit off objections with glee, and imposed decisions with crushing finality. Harley never expressed an opinion. He delivered truth. She wondered what sort of person his partner had been, cooped up with him for a year or so.
Reading through the report of his visit to 4418, she could hear his voice. Harley had found things to engage his interest here, as he did everywhere. He found volcanic and seismic activity in unlikely places, and an anomalous magnetic pattern around one of the gas giants. He took a series of measurements of the sun, and entertained himself by calculating the date of its eventual collapse.
They had surveyed the individual worlds, and moved on. Since Bode's Law told them where to look for worlds, they might not have bothered doing an intensive sweep, and it was therefore possible to understand how he might have missed other objects in the system, even objects of planetary dimensions.
Had the two objects been here at that time?
"Okay. Now."
Hutch punched the button, and a ruby beam flowed from the nozzle. Carson could feel the hair on his arms rise. The beam was pencil-thin. It flashed across the landscape, and bit into the ice.
"That's good," said Hutch. And, to Angela: "Ease it around to port just a mite. Okay. Hold it there." Carson knelt behind the unit, aiming it. He tracked vertically down the face of the cliff. A cloud of steam began to form. Ice, snow, and rock fell away. But the cloud grew, and obscured the target.
Carson shut the projector off. "This may take longer than we thought," he said.
The commlink chimed. Channel from Ashley. "Go ahead," said Angela's voice. It was Terry.
"Got some more information for you."
"I'm listening."
"Neither of the two objects is in solar orbit. They are passing through the system. They are not attached to it."
"Are you surel" Angela sounded skeptical.
"Yes, I'm sure. And here's something else for you: they are maintaining parallel courses. And they're moving at almost the same clip."
Carson grinned at Hutch, Maybe we've got the son of a bitch, and the smile widened as they heard Angela inhale the way she might if she were standing in front of an oncoming glidetrain.
Hutch broke in: "The velocity," she said. "What's the velocity?"
"Twenty-eight hundred for the far one and slowing down. Thirty-two and accelerating for the other."
"The speed of the wave," Hutch said hopefully. "They're in the neighborhood of the speed of the wave."
Carson was trying to keep his imagination under control. "Janet, what do you think?"
"Just what you're thinking."
Maybe that was it, that single piece of encouragement from the only other professional archeologist in the area. The old colonel's reserve fell away, and his eyes blazed. "Terry," he sai
d, "how close will they come?"
"To us? One's already past," he said. "The other will get within thirty million klicks. Give or take a few."
"How big did you say it was?"
"It's twenty-three thousand kilometers wide. Sometimes."
"Sometimes?" asked Hutch. "What kind of thing is this?"
"We don't know. It isn't a sphere. We get a lot of different measurements. False readings, maybe. Hard to say."
The steam clung to the cliff wall. "It sounds as if the dragon might really be here," said Hutch.
"Premature," he said. But his expression belied detachment.
"I still think it's a cloud" said Drafts.
"Let's take another look," said Angela softly.
Thirty minutes later, they had piled back into the shelter, and were studying incoming images. The more distant object was little more than a misty star, a blur seen through heavy rain. But its companion was a thundercloud, lit ominously within, a storm on the horizon just after sunset.
"Well," said Angela, as if that single word summed up the inexplicable. "Whatever it is, just the fact that something is there, that anything is there, is significant. The intrusion of an extrasolar object into a planetary system is a rare event. I can't believe it just happened to occur while we're in the area. Since there are two of these things, I'd be willing to bet there are more coming. A lot more."
"Sounds like a wave to me," said Hutch.
"I didn't say that."
"Nevertheless it does."
"Unfortunately," said Janet, "if that's our critter, we're not going to get a very good look at it."
"Why not?" demanded Carson.
"Thirty million klicks is not close."
"I wouldn't worry," said Hutch. "If Angela is right, there'll be another along shortly. I think we ought to finish making our Oz, and see what happens."
On the Ashley, Janet and Drafts took turns monitoring the commlinks.
Unlike most of the hard-science specialists she knew, he had interests outside his chosen field. He had a sense of humor, he knew how to listen, and he encouraged her to talk about things she was interested in. She decided that if her duties required her to be holed up inside a tin can for a year with a single companion, Drafts would be easy to take.