by Steve White
A storm of exclamations and questions followed, but DiFalco heard nothing after Varien's final word.
* * *
"We detected Altair's two displacement points almost immediately after our arrival. So I decided to test out the experimental devices for predicting the realspace direction of a displacement point's terminus."
Aelanni was addressing a briefing room that was full to capacity—predominantly with Raehaniv, but also as many Terrans as could manage to be there for the tale of her adventures. All of them knew, or had been told, that heretofore the only way to find out where you would arrive after transiting an unfamiliar displacement point was to actually do it. Now it was possible to infer the bearing of your destination in advance, and the more experienced Raehaniv space captains were already being heard to mutter that the younger generation had it soft.
"The results for one of the displacement points were inconclusive," she continued. "But the second one provided unambiguous readings: the displacement chain clearly led in the direction of Raehaniv-explored space!
"I therefore decided to take Pathfinder through and confirm these findings." She gave Varien the kind of apologetic/embarrassed/defiant look with which a teenage daughter presents her father with the fait accompli of an unconventional hairstyle that she knows he doesn't like. And, for a fact, Varien didn't like the way the younger Raehaniv were starting to bestow names on their ships in the Terran fashion. His expression showed it as he sat in the front row beside DiFalco, two men united in their mixed emotions.
"Why the hell didn't you come back and report this instead of charging through on your own?" Difalco blurted out. "I . . . we were worried sick! Of all the . . . !" He could not continue. He could only look at her, lovely and strong, a living dark-red flame, eyes gleaming as if with the reflected light of suns they alone had seen. He was absolutely furious with her. And he loved her as he had never loved her before, as he had never imagined it was possible to love anyone.
She smiled at him, but answered in precisely the tone one would use to address a senior officer of an allied power. "I judged that to be an impractical course of action, Colonel. Even if I had returned immediately, and even if another ship could have been dispatched without delay on my arrival, simple arithmetic shows that that ship would barely have been able to go to Altair and return here in time for our scheduled departure date. It would have had no time for any extensive displacement-point exploration. The fact that Pathfinder was already on the scene gave us a priceless opportunity to investigate a highly relevant new datum."
DiFalco had no answer. He and Varien subsided as one, exchanging a rueful glance of shared futility.
"We transited the displacement point," Aelanni resumed, "and emerged in the vicinity of a young type F1iv subgiant"—she used Terran stellar classifications for the benefit of her American and Russian listeners as she indicated a light in the holographic display generated by the ship's computer from data downloaded from Pathfinder—"which proved to be almost three hundred light-years closer to Raehaniv space, and which possessed three displacement points. Using the new instrumentation, we chose the most likely of them, and transited to a red giant/white dwarf binary which seemd no closer to Tareil than the previous star, though at a significantly different bearing from it. This, and the fact that the binary possessed no planetary bodies suitable for refueling caused us to seriously consider turning back. However, we still had enough reaction mass to cross the binary system to its other displacement point."
Varien could no longer contain himself. "And what if the next system had had no gas giant planet from which to obtain more reaction mass? How, pray tell, would you have gotten back?"
"That," she admitted thoughtfully, "might have presented a problem. But," she hurried on before her father could have a stroke, "inasmuch as the vast majority of stars seem to be accompanied by gas giants, the commonest type of planet by far, I deemed the risk to be an acceptable one. At any rate, we transited"—a white light obligingly flashed along the string of pale-blue luminescence indicating the final displacement connection of what was already being called the Altair Chain—"to find ourselves in a G0v system with only the one displacement point. We were able to determine that this system is only ten light-years from Seivra in realspace." As the Raehaniv all began to talk at once, she explained to the Terrans. "Seivra is a system without habitable planets. It has been known to us for some time because it is only one displacement connection from Tareil. In fact, it is separated from Tareil in realspace by little more than one hundred light-years." As they sat absorbing the implications, she continued to the room at large. "What is more, the star has a life-bearing planet. The ecosystem is a rather young one, and the planet is less than comfortable for us . . . but we can live there!"
The hubbub rose in volume, then began to subside as DiFalco stood up and turned to face the crowd. He waited until he had silence.
"I think, people, that what we've just heard knocks our earlier gloom and doom into a cocked hat." Most of the Raehaniv had never heard the expression, but they caught his meaning. "The front door to Tareil may be closed to us now, but Aelanni has given us a way of entering through the back door!"
Varien also rose, and faced the American. "If I understand what you are suggesting, Colonel . . ." He shook his head uncertainly. "Remember, we've already come to the conclusion that we can't be fully ready by our departure date, and that we will therefore need the help of the Raehaniv resistance fleet in the Tareil system. There would be no such help awaiting us in an uninhabited system."
"No, there wouldn't. We'd have to make our own help." DiFalco swung around as he spoke, facing everyone in turn, and his voice gradually rose in volume. "When Moving Day for Phoenix arrives—less than three months from now—that's the end of the Project. We'll have to depart this system. That's the inflexible deadline we've been up against from the beginning. We can depart under continuous-displacement drive then, taking as much of our industrial plant as possible . . . depart for Altair, not for Alpha Centauri! Once we've transited the Altair Chain and established ourselves on this new planet, we'll be able to complete our preparations. Oh, yes, we'll have to do it on our own; we'll be isolated like no other group of human beings, Terran or Raehaniv, has ever been isolated before. But we won't have a rigid deadline to work against! We can take however long the job requires. I say we can do it!" Traylor nodded slowly, and some of his Raehaniv counterparts began to do likewise.
DiFalco turned back to Varien. "Can you suggest any viable alternative?" The question could have been belligerent, but it wasn't; it was asked in a tone that was oddly deferential.
The old Raehaniv gazed at him for a long moment. Then he smiled, and spoke almost inaudibly. "No, I cannot." He sat down, and a few in the room dimly sensed that a change of command had occured, as surely as the one that had accompanied Kurganov's departure, for all that it had required no honor guards or music.
* * *
"I still wish you'd come straight back! The risk . . . !"
Aelanni gave him her impish smile. "And if I had, where would we all be now?"
"Don't confuse the issue with facts!" DiFalco grinned at her like an idiot—he suspected he had been doing that a lot, of late—as she stood in the starlight of the wide viewport outside Liberator's engineering spaces, which had become a special place for them. (Varien had, with much grumbling, granted his crew's petition to name the ship. The name was really Arhaelieth, but English translations were more and more widely used.) On an impulse, he reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead, emphasizing her hairline—it came to the sharp widow's peak that characterized far more Raehaniv than Terrans, one of the little differences of degree that kept popping up whenever one began to forget that the two races had spent at least thirty-two thousand years a light-millennium apart. She flinched slightly at the physical contact that was still less than entirely natural to her, then relaxed, her smile softening.
"I missed you," he said, silently cu
rsing himself for banality.
"And I you." She paused, then continued hesitantly but irrevocably. "I knew what father was up to when he sent me to Altair. And I could understand his reasons, and even share them to some degree, for I was frightened of what was happening. So part of me kept hoping that his plan would work. But it didn't. And that part of me, that frightened part . . . it isn't here anymore. I left it somewhere out beyond Altair."
With utmost gentleness, they came into each other's arms. Through the armorplast, the stars continued to gleam, unnoticed.
Chapter Eight
Moving Day arrived.
Phoenix was, despite everything, ready to move out of its immemorial orbit and swing into the sunward course that would bring it into collision with Mars. Ballistic calculations of incredible sophistication and complexity had been required to assure that the two bodies would arrive at the same place at the same time. Planning of nearly equal subtlety had assured that the relatively few remaining personnel to whom the conspiracy had not been revealed, and they alone, were at the small observation station near Phoenix—as near as would be reasonably safe when the mammoth fusion drive was ignited. They, of course, knew that everyone else was aboard the various ships to observe the event from other vantage points while they handled the ongoing transmission to Earth.
There were, of course, a few exceptions . . . .
* * *
Major Levinson and Sergeant Thompson walked briskly along the curving corridor in Phoenix Prime. On their approach, Corporal Ramirez came to attention at his post outside Computer Central.
"As you were, Corporal," Levinson acknowledged. "Sergeant Thompson and I need access."
"Certainly, sir." Ramirez indicated the retinal scanner beside the hatch.
"You go first, Sergeant," the Space Force major said offhandedly. "I just remembered something I need to check." He set his briefcase on a ledge projecting from the bulkhead and unlocked it with a snap.
"Aye aye, sir." Thompson moved to the scanlock, Ramirez turning to watch him and therefore missing the object that Levinson drew from the briefcase. It consisted of a small box with a pistollike grip and, extending from what seemed to be the front end, a translucent probe surrounded by metallic rings that tapered to smaller and smaller diameters toward the tip. Holding it like the pistol that it resembled in size and overall shape, Levinson aimed it at the corporal's back.
Suddenly, Thompson's face lost all expression, and he crumpled silently to the deck. Ramirez, momentarily paralyzed by the sheer unexpectedness of the sergeant's collapse, began to open his mouth just as Levinson pressed a firing stud, producing no visible effect and only a faint whining sound. But Ramirez fell unconscious, in the odd way things fall under the Coriolis force of a spin habitat.
"Bravo, Sergeant," Levinson said, smiling, as Thompson got to his feet. "An amazing performance—I hope everybody put on as good a show for the people we're leaving behind. The world lost a great actor when you joined the Big Green Machine."
Thompson grunted skeptically. "What's amazing is that." He indicated the major's Raehaniv stunner. "When I was in covert ops, there were times when I would have given my left nut for one!"
Levinson couldn't argue. The thing projected ultrahigh-frequency focused sound that attacked the target's nervous system, resulting in unconsciousness (lasting for hours if the zapping was done at this range) but producing no ill effects beyond a splitting headache on awakening and leaving absolutely no physical trace. He imagined there were crowd-control types who would echo the sergeant's sentiments.
Without further conversation, they carried Ramirez to the airlock where he would join the other non-cleared individuals still in Phoenix Prime. They would awake to find themselves aboard a shuttle, non-functioning save for life support and the emergency transponder that would bring quick rescue from the ships now raptly observing Phoenix. And each of them would have the same memory of passing out in company with whoever was in his or her field of vision. And a mystery would be born, to dwarf that of the Mary Celeste.
* * *
DiFalco listened to the last of the reports and, nodding in satisfaction, signed off. (Communications security was not a problem; all their ships had Raehaniv neutrino-pulse communicators now.) He swiveled his chair around to face Varien and Aelanni.
"Everything appears to be in readiness. I'd better get back to Andy J."
"And I should return to Pathfinder," Aelanni added. DiFalco had hoped they could be side by side at the moment of departure, her clean features and darkly burnished hair silhouetted against the blazing star-fields that seemed her natural and proper backdrop. But they each had their own responsibilities. The Raehaniv lacked, or had forgotten, many of the unwritten laws that enshrined the intangible mystery of command; but they were relearning them, and Pathfinder was Aelanni's ship now, beyond all possibility of argument or evasion.
Varien looked at one of them, and then the other, and smiled faintly. He had long since resigned himself to the inevitable, but DiFalco could never be absolutely sure how much was resignation and how much was secret satisfaction. The old Raehaniv was, after all this time, still awfully hard to figure out. I suppose I'll never really know where I stand, Varien. So I suppose I should stop worrying about it.
Spontaneously, they all turned to the holo tank at the center of Liberator's control room, in which was displayed their fleet—such as it was. Four Washington class cruisers—Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Judith Kramer—and three of their Russian Aleksandr Nevsky class counterparts, led by Boris Yeltsin. A gaggle of interplanetary personnel transports and cargo carriers which, like the military cruisers, had been equipped with Raehaniv fusion drives and continuous-displacement generators. Varien's twelve survey/factory ships (variations on the same basic class as Liberator and Pathfinder) and five fast courier ships. A few thousand Terrans and a few hundred Raehaniv. The bolt they were preparing to hurl at an interstellar empire of unknowable extent and limitless resources.
Aelanni shook her head slowly. "We must be crazy!"
DiFalco smiled crookedly. " 'If we weren't crazy we'd all go insane.' " They both recognized a quote—Varien from his in-depth knowledge of English and Aelanni from her in-depth knowledge of him—and two left eyebrows rose in unison. He smiled more gently and explained. "Jimmy Buffett. A poet of my people. Last century. Seems every generation since his death has rediscovered him." His eyes strayed to the viewscreen, from which the barely visible blue planet of his birth was absent—mercifully so. For his mind had, unwillingly, free-associated from tropical beaches across ocean and steppe to a colder land and a man who would remain there despite a promise DiFalco had meant to keep.
I tried, Seryozha. I even thought I had something worked out, a couple of times. But you were right all along. There was no way. There never was.
Forgive me.
* * *
A small sun flamed into life, seeming to erupt from the asteroid Phoenix—an asteroid which began to move ponderously into a new orbit, which was to be its final one.
The enormous outpouring of gamma radiation from that artificial sun (or, strictly speaking, ongoing series of suns) would have been fatal to any organic observer at close range. But remote cameras transmitted the spectacle to the people of Earth, who watched transfixed, not noticing the departure of an unsuspected fleet of vessels from another region of the asteroid belt.
DiFalco stood on Andy J.'s control room deck, to which he was attached by the serene one gee of Raehaniv artificial gravity, and marvelled at the inventiveness inspired by humankind's quest for comfort.
The Raehaniv vessels were designed with an "aft-equals-down" orientation. The bogus weight supplied by their drives served when they were accelerating—sometimes too much so, when powerful accelerations were called for and the waste plasma of their fusion-powered photon drives was dumped into the exhaust, causing the flames that twentieth-century science fiction illustrators had considered essential to belch forth; the crew
s simply took it. In free fall, the artificial gravity fields operated in the same direction.
But Terran spacecraft were arranged otherwise. In their control rooms and spin habitats, aft meant toward the rear bulkhead—not a great problem for vessels that were usually in free fall. The ships couldn't be rebuilt from scratch, so a way had to be found to make them liveable under conditions of long-term acceleration. The application of fresh Terran perspectives to Raehaniv technology had produced the solution. Now the spin habitats no longer spun; some gravitic generators provided a "down-equals-inboard" orientation for them, while others compensated for whatever acceleration the ship was undergoing. It was a cumbersome, Rube Goldbergish arrangement, which the Raehaniv would never have thought of if they hadn't been faced with the problem of adapting quaint, pre-gravitic designs. But it had started Varien thinking, and now he was working hard on the software for a genuine inertial compensator—the "acceleration damper" that had always eluded him. DiFalco wondered how many more unthought-of possibilities would emerge from the cross-fertilization of Raehaniv and Terran viewpoints.
For now he was content to take advantage of this one, although he and the others who passed for old-timers in the Space Force still found the absence of the familiar sensations of free fall and acceleration unsettling. It was almost comforting when the artificial gravity wavered queasily—not all the bugs were out of the system—as the drive cut off and it shifted to free-fall mode. They had reached the cold outer regions beyond the orbit of Uranus, where the continuous-displacement drive could be engaged without interference from Sol's gravity well.
"Colonel," Loreann zho'Trafviu said quietly from her communications console, "Varien reports that all Raehaniv ships are ready to commence continuous-displacement drive." Every Terran ship had a Raehaniv gravitics technician to intercede in technological realms where Americans and Russians were still newcomers, and Loreann would implement DiFalco's commands. A glance at a status board showed him that the Terran ships were likewise prepared.