by Steve White
On his last word, the intercom crashed into the Russian anthem—first, for the outgoing CO—and there was no time for a final embrace. The doors slid open and they strode, shoulders aligned, to the podium.
* * *
It was off-watch, and no one disturbed the solitude of the wide-curving corridor outside the engineering spaces, bathed in starlight from the viewport where DiFalco and Aelanni stood, gazing alternately at each other and at the ship that she would, in a few watches, take to Altair.
The journey to the type A giant star was almost eight months' round trip under continuous-displacement drive. (The survey ship was not one of those that was built for speed and little else; she could only manage the equivalent of slightly better than fifty times lightspeed.) That, plus God knew how long surveying that star's vicinity for displacement points. Yeah, Varien, I can tell you put some thought into this.
And it was more than just the time factor. Varien had found the perfect rival for him: new frontiers. She hadn't admitted it, but while she contemplated the separation with genuine bleakness, it was clear that her excitement at journeying to yet another new star was equally genuine. The very qualities that had caused him to recognize in her a kindred spirit made it impossible for her to feel otherwise. Any nascent rebellion she might have felt had been a casualty of this war of emotions.
"I wonder how your father knew?" he wondered aloud.
She gave one of the expressive Raehaniv shrugs that Sergei had always said made him homesick. Which, in turn, reminded him of the Russian and deepened his melancholy. Soon Aelanni would be gone too, and he would be alone with the enterprise he had conceived and must now carry to completion.
Chapter Seven
The American election of 2060 drew closer, and with it Moving Day for Phoenix.
It had been, DiFalco reflected, over a year and a half since Kurganov had departed—a year and a half marked by unprecedented poor planning in the Project. Design change after wasteful design change, bungled components requiring replacements, flawed supplies and equipment . . . astonishing amounts of money pissed away to a rising chorus of protest Earthside. The protests would have been even louder if anyone had known that the "rejected" materials had been taken to a nearby region of the asteroid belt and used to jury-rig devices whose like no one on Earth had ever seen and whose very functions few could have recognized.
The administration had backed them to the hilt through it all, as it continued to hope for a political miracle. It had no choice anyway; it had been identified with the Project from its inception, and couldn't admit a mistake of such magnitude. So the supplies had continued to arrive while the political situation Earthside had continued to crumble. And they were all too aware that their own machinations had hastened the crumbling by discrediting the Project—a realization that posed a morale problem no one had anticipated. (Liz Hadley in particular had come close to an emotional collapse.)
But their morale had merely suffered erosion; that of the Raehaniv had received a hammer blow when one of the picket ships had arrived from Tareil after setting a new speed record for traversing the Lirauva Chain, bringing the news that the home system had fallen even sooner than expected. Raehan had surrendered when the Korvaash fleets had filled her skies and further resistance could only lead to planetary devastation. Certain local authorities had doubted the seriousness of the aliens' threats, on the grounds that dead populations and atomized industrial plant would be no economic asset to the conqueror; they had not lived to regret their miscalculation, and neither had some millions of people under their charge. (The Korvaasha clearly subscribed to the half-a-loaf philosophy.) And the effect of a falling orbital tower on the planetary surface was something no one had wished to contemplate. So Raehan's surviving cities now lived in the threadbare, hungry twilight world of occupation, a bleakness varied only by the occasional mind-numbing horrors inflicted with machinelike emotionlessness by the silent cyborgian giants who stalked their now-shabby streets.
It wasn't unexpected, of course; its very inevitability had originally driven Varien and his followers here on their desperate quest. And it didn't invalidate their plans, which had been predicated from the first on the assumption that no help could be looked for in the Tareil system save from whatever tatters of the Raehaniv space fleet continued to wage a guerrilla resistance in the system's asteroids (and, indeed, some had escaped there, under Arduin's leadership). But none of that helped. For a space of days the Raehaniv had withdrawn into themselves, as was their way in the face of the grief for which they had no acceptable outlet, and the Terrans had spent an embarrassed time—what can you say? Even Varien, knowing nothing of the fate of his son and grandchildren, had seemed inadequate, almost broken.
He had gotten over it eventually, of course, and become his old self. (DiFalco had surprised himself by being relieved.) But then the realization had grown that their estimates of their ability to raise the American and Russian warships to the technological level at which the Raehaniv and the Korvaasha waged war had been too optimistic; if the initial breakthrough into the Tareil system was followed by a long-drawn-out campaign, it was well that they would have access to the resources Varien had secreted in Tareil's asteroid belt, and the help of the free Raehaniv fleet there. So Varien's enthusiasm had been dampened, but never extinguished . . . until now, when he looked across the desk at DiFalco with eyes as empty of life and hope as they had been the day he had learned of the fall of Raehan.
"I fear, Colonel, that I bear heavy tidings," he sighed after lowering himself into the chair. He was acting every day of his age—almost ninety Earth years, DiFalco now knew—and the vitality that Raehaniv medical science could partly but not entirely account for was in abeyance. Under some circumstances, DiFalco would have felt sympathy. Today, he leaned forward and spoke with a self-conscious cruelty normally foreign to his nature.
"Oh? I suppose you mean that there's still no word of any ship returning from Altair."
Varien visibly flinched, as if from a sudden jag of pain. Nuraeniel had returned from Sirius when expected, reporting that binary star's lack of displacement points. But from Aelanni there had been no word. Ample time had passed for her to locate any displacement points Altair possessed, or to satisfy herself that there were none to be found, and return to Sol. Then still more time had passed. And now, with Moving Day less than three months away, there was no question of sending a rescue mission to Altair. Aelanni and her crew were presumed lost.
"No, there is not," Varien said slowly, "although that isn't what I meant." He drew a deep breath, seeming to gather his strength. "Aelanni understood the risks involved, Colonel. She was not . . . is not a soldier, in your sense—we have had none for a long, long time, as I have explained. But she has always had a comparable sense of duty." He paused. Was there the slightest hint of malice in his eyes? "And, if memory serves, she showed no great hesitation about leaving, Colonel!"
A cold anger flared in DiFalco, banishing everything he had started to feel for an old man who had reason to believe both his children were dead. "Yes, there is something soldierly about her, isn't there? She'll follow orders . . . no matter what she thinks of them! No matter how cynical and unworthy she knows their motivations are!"
For a long moment they glared at each other in dead silence. It was a subject they had both shied away from—this was the closest either had ever come to an open acusation. It was Varien who blinked first, and lowered his eyes with a sigh.
"Whatever I did was done for the good of everyone concerned. You can have no conception of the cultural gulf! And Aelanni has led a life that perhaps leaves her unprepared for some things . . . unable to see beyond the glamor of novelty." He stopped with an annoyed look. "But I have permitted myself to be distracted from my original purpose, Colonel! A ship has, in fact, arrived under continuous-displacement drive . . . but from Alpha Centauri!"
DiFalco at once forgot everything but the implications of Varien's news. It went without saying that the Rae
haniv had known about the ship's arrival first; their gravitic technology included grav scanners, capable of realtime detection over interplanetary distances due to gravity's instantaneous propagation. They could detect a ship's emergence from a displacement point—although the scanner, being directional, had to be trained on the displacement point at precisely the right time. And the continuous-displacement drive, with its ongoing series of intense grav pulses, showed up like the proverbial sore thumb. Both were, of course, undetectable by any instrument known to Earth's science. (He recalled, with a flash of amusement, the we-are-alone types in the last century who had made much of the absence of visible Bussard ramjet exhausts in the skies between the stars.)
"Alpha Centauri," he repeated. "So it can only be . . ."
" . . . the remaining picket ship from Tareil," Varien finished for him. "Which was under orders to abandon its station and come here under one and only one set of circumstances. I fear, Colonel, that that ship brings news that transcends our personal concerns—even our concern for Aelanni."
* * *
Naeriy zho'Troilaen was young for a ship captain, but she had aged quickly of late. That was clear as she told her story in the briefing room of Varien's ship. (It still bothered DiFalco that the Raehaniv ships lacked names; the custom had never arisen among them. Wasn't it supposed to be bad luck?)
"The Korvaasha began routine surveying almost as soon as they had settled into their occupation of Raehan. It seems they didn't trust the official records, taking for granted that our government must have been keeping secrets. At any rate, it was sheer chance that one of their ships blundered onto the fourth displacement point. We stepped our power output down to miminal life-support levels and waited them out. After they departed, we powered up and transited—they had no reason to have a grav scanner trained on the displacement point by then. We then," she finished anticlimactically, "proceeded here."
Varien slowly rose and faced the Terrans—most of the original members of the cabal. The Raehaniv in the room already knew, and their expressions made clear their understanding of the implications.
"We are undone," he said in a voice of ash. "The Korvaasha now know of the Lirauva Chain—we must assume that they have already begun to explore it. Our base at Alpha Centauri has been obliterated"—Naeriy nodded in confirmation—"so even when they reach it they will have no certain knowledge that we have been there. But they will, at a minimum, mount a heavy guard on Tareil's fourth warp point, and garrison the systems between Tareil and Alpha Centauri as quickly as they can survey them, merely as a matter of routine procedure." His dark eyes held all of theirs as he spoke the doom of all their hopes. "We can no longer enter the Tareil system from an unsuspected displacement point, which has been the basis of our plans from the beginning. We would have to assault a defended displacement point—hopeless in itself without overwhelming numerical superiority—after fighting our way through several intervening systems." His concentration seemed to waver, and when he resumed it was with a vague bewilderment that, in him, was shocking. "I never dreamed that the Korvaasha would discover the fourth displacement point so soon . . . their instrumentation is so unsophisticated . . . well, they have had centuries of experience in surveying . . . ."
"Wait a minute, Varien," George Traylor interrupted, brow furrowed with thought. "Okay, so we can't follow the, uh, Lirauva Chain to Tareil. But even if we can't do it the easy way, via displacement points, can't we still do it the hard way?"
"What do you mean?" Varien barely sounded interested.
"Well, why can't we take your continuous-displacement drive all the way back to Tareil? I know it's a long way. But we could enter the Tareil system from nowhere near any displacement point!"
"That'd shake 'em up!" Levinson leaned forward, dark eyes snapping.
"Don't be absurd!" All at once, Varien was his old, fortunately inimitable self, and once again DiFalco was surprised at his own relief. " 'A long way' indeed! It is, in point of fact, a thousand of your light-years! At the maximum speed of which most of our ships are capable, that means a journey of . . ."
" . . . almost twenty years. And since we're not talking about real velocity, there's no time dilation effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah." Traylor did not take well to being patronized, which made for problems in dealing with Varien. "But you Raehaniv are way ahead of us in cryogenic suspension; you can actually freeze the metabolism altogether, not just slow it down. Maybe we could spend most of the trip frozen, and man the ships in shifts!"
Varien took a deep breath. "Permit me to elucidate certain facts. First, the suspended-animation techniques to which you refer involve substantial risks. If the subject is to have an acceptable chance of safe revival, an extensive array of equipment is needed. We have very little of such equipment, never having needed it except in rare medical emergencies. Even if it is practical for us to build more of it—as to which I would have to consult with medical experts—such a project would make our departure deadline even more unrealistic than it is already proving to be.
"Secondly, as a practical matter the journey would take far, far more than twenty years. You must understand that the continuous-displacement drive, involving millions of intense gravitic pulses per second, requires enormous amounts of power, even on the standards of our technology. To make the concept workable, I had to develop a special type of fusion reactor, which attains an unprecedented output-to-volume ratio at the expense of fuel efficiency. It consumes hydrogen at a rate which necessitates frequent refueling—most of our ships can only sustain continuous-displacement drive for thirty or forty light years. Fortunately, the refueling requires no special facilities; we can skim hydrogen from the atmospheres of gas-giant planets and process it into useable form, using the same techniques with which we obtain reaction mass for our fusion drives. But it takes time! And we could not proceed in a straight line; we would have to . . . 'leapfrog' is the expression, I believe, from one hopefully planet-bearing star to another."
They were silent. They had all known, in the abstract, what an energy hog the continuous-displacement drive was, but they hadn't thought through the implications. There had been no need to—the drive merely had to get them to Alpha Centauri!
No one even suggested collecting hydrogen from the interstellar medium en route with the electromagnetic ramscoops so beloved of twentieth-century science fiction writers; such a thing was still beyond Earth's engineering capabilities, and the Raehaniv had never developed it. Besides, as Varien was overly given to pointing out, the continuous-displacement drive, with its ongoing series of quantum jumps, imparted no actual velocity beyond what the ship already possessed at the time it engaged the drive. A ramscoop would require near-relativistic velocities.
"Thirdly, we would not even know what star to set our course for." Varien saw the surprise on his Terran listeners' faces. "Oh, you didn't know that? Well, we've never had to locate Tareil in the sky—it's just one of the countless millions of small main-sequence stars roughly a thousand light-years from this one. In fact, that realspace distance, like its approximate bearing, is only an estimate we arrived at using the positions of certain identifiable supergiant stars as seen from here and from Tareil—an intellectual game of no practical value, since we travel between here and there using displacement transitions.
"Finally," Varien continued in a voice whose despair could no longer be masked by annoyance, "the whole idea is fundamentally impractical. It is beyond belief that ships—especially improvised ships using hybrid technology—could endure over twenty years of continuous-displacement flight, stopping and starting thirty or more times, without suffering breakdowns. No engineer would take such a notion seriously." Traylor's expression confirmed it. "No, I fear we must relinquish our hopes and begin to consider what other alternatives are open to us."
DiFalco and the other Terrans sat, stunned. However irritiating Varien could be, he had become more and more their oracle, with his knowledge of things far beyond Earth's horizons. If he had indeed abandone
d hope, then what hope was there? And none of his "other alternatives" could be pleasant ones for them, who had effectively burned whatever bridges were not being burned for them on Earth.
Varien seemed to sense it, for when he spoke it was with an odd gentleness. "You of Earth—no, of RAMP—have committed yourselves to this enterprise on the strength of my promises, my schemes, and my hopes. I fully recognize my responsibility to you, and you may rest assured that whatever plans we Raehaniv make will take that responsibility into account . . . ."
All at once, a computer that had never been taught manners cut in with a stream of Raehaniv that seemed to come from the middle of the air. The effect was electrifying; Varien, suddenly agitated, snapped out a series of queries to which the computer responded in its precise way, while the other Raehaniv sprang to their feet in an incomprehensible babble of excitement. DiFalco cursed himself for not having learned more Raehaniv—there had never been a pressing need, as all the Raehaniv knew English. He had picked up some, of course, but even people like Rosen who were approaching fluency in it were baffled by this rapid-fire exchange.
Varien finished with what was clearly a command to the computer and then turned to the Terrans, switching to English. "Your pardon. The ship's computer, which has had standing orders to maintain gravitic scanner coverage of the appropriate region of space, reports a ship's arrival, under continuous-displacement drive, from the direction of Altair!"