by Steve White
“He’s not fleeing from the solar system at all!” blurted Davis.
“No,” said a new voice. “He’s going back to Earth.”
Andrew swung around. “Damn it, Lieutenant Morales, I ordered you to sick bay!”
“The corpsman declared me fit to return to duty, Captain.”
“I’ll just bet he did! You bullied him into it. But now that you’re here, I suppose you may as well stay. And you’re absolutely right. Legislative Assemblyman Valdes is going to resume his career without a break.”
“But he can’t!” protested Rachel. “Not now, after what‘s happened.”
“Why not? Nobody back on Earth knows what’s happened. He’ll reestablish himself in his Valde’ persona, after which it will be his word against ours—and guess who’ll win.”
“But Andy,” Rachel persisted, “it won’t be just our word. We’ll have the med scanners—”
“Come on! Do you really think we’ll get a chance to use them? And even if we did, he’d be able to suppress the results, given the power he’ll be able to bring to bear and the inherent implausibility of our story.” Andrew shook his head. “No. He’ll be back in place and the Kappainu can resume their grand plan. The loss of their base in the Sol system will be inconvenient but not catastrophic.”
“But if Borthru succeeds in wiping out their forces—”
“Even if he does—and we can’t count on it—do you really believe the CNE will listen to Rogovon? Any Rogovon? No, the human race will still be ripe for use as the Kappainu’s dupes!” For an instant, looking at Andrew’s face, Rachel thought he was in physical pain. Then his features cleared, leaving nothing but determination.
“Mister Davis,” he said, “belay my previous order to simply follow that ship. We will pursue and overtake it. We’ve got to stop Valdes from reaching Earth.”
“But Captain,” asked Morales, “how?”
And there was the rub. Unbidden and unwelcome, the dog-and-car joke came back to gibe at Andrew, because now it had become all too relevant.
“I don’t know.” It was something a skipper was never supposed to say, but Andrew found he couldn’t lie to these people, not after what he and they had been through together. “We’ll just have to improvise, and do whatever seems indicated.” He didn’t need to add that that whatever might involve their own deaths. Nor did anyone else bring it up. They simply muttered “Aye, aye, sir,” and turned to their duties. Rachel said nothing.
“I’m sorry you’re caught up in this,” Andrew told her.
“Don’t be. I asked for it. And I couldn’t be going through it with better people.”
But it soon became apparent that they weren’t going to be able to overhaul their quarry. He had too much of a head start, and Davis had been right about the strength of his drive, for he was capable of practically equaling City of Osaka’s sustained acceleration. It was a stern chase that could not succeed.
“What does the computer say, X.O.?” Andrew demanded after a while.
“It says, ‘almost,’ sir,” Morales reported quietly.
“Thank you.” Andrew glared at the nav plot, oblivious to the occasional reports of the battle they had left behind, whose outcome was still in doubt. He focused on his ship’s green icon, as though he could somehow will more speed into it. It was frustrating—no, maddening—to be crawling like this across the Solar system’s mere billions of kilometers in normal space. In overspace, City of Osaka could leap the light-years . . .
Abruptly, it hit him.
“X.O.,” he heard himself saying before the idea was even fully formed, “cut the drive immediately. And prepare for transition into overspace.”
“Sir?” Morales looked up with a blank look that everyone in earshot shared. “But . . . where are we going? I thought we were pursuing Valdes to Earth.”
“We are. Let me finish! We will remain in overspace just long enough to get us to a point as close to Sol as transition can be safely performed. We will then perform a second transition, reentering normal space. This will get us to within roughly an AU of Earth practically instantaneously, leaving Valdes eating our dust!”
The facial expressions were no longer blank. They now covered a spectrum from incredulity to consternation. Andrew understood why. The very characteristics of overspace that made it so useful for traversing the interstellar abysses did not make it amenable to fine-tuning. Even the almost immeasurably brief hop into overspace involved in Broadsword’s capture of City of Osaka had carried them far beyond the outermost confines of the solar system. Now he was proposing such a hop within the system, something no one had ever attempted.
Davis tried to speak a couple of times before succeeding. “Sir, we can’t possibly calculate such a short time in overspace with any preciseness!”
“And,” Morales continued for him, “if we end up making transition back into normal space closer to Sol than the two-AU safety limit—”
“—Our transition engine will be permanently wrecked, with the possibility of some collateral damage to the ship. Yes, I know. I also know that it’s as much as a naval officer’s career is worth to let that happen. But right at the moment that’s not my primary concern. Now carry out your orders!”
“But, Captain,” Morales persisted, and Andrew had to respect her guts, “what if we come out of overspace and find that we’ve overshot Earth? We’d have no hope of killing our velocity and coming back around in any reasonable length of time. The orbital mechanics—”
“That’s precisely why I want you to aim for a spot outside the two AU limit. That at least minimizes the chance that whatever error creeps in will carry us beyond Earth—or so close to Earth that we wouldn‘t be able to kill our residual velocity in time to be captured by it, which would be just as bad. Otherwise, I would have ordered you to try for a transition within the limit, closer to Earth, and to hell with the transition engine. I don’t really expect we’ll be needing it again, whatever happens. Do you?”
“No, sir, probably not,” Morales admitted. “Especially considering that Valdes doesn’t have one in the first place. Which, in turn, means he won’t be able to try this trick himself even if he wants to.”
“This is a bold plan, Captain Roark,” said Reislon. “I just hope it isn’t a reckless one.”
“A human military theoretician named Clausewitz once made a remark to the effect that a plan which succeeds is bold and one which fails is reckless.”
The Lokar gave a smile that Andrew interpreted with some confidence as rueful. “You have me. That is indeed the distinction.”
Andrew turned back to Morales and Davis. “So, without any further argument, can we please get busy and make sure this plan turns out to be one of the bold ones?” He made his absolute best effort at doing pompous indignation. “This is without a doubt the most disrespectful, insubordinate, undisciplined, and generally scurvy crew of pirates in the entire CNEN!”
“Yes, sir!” said Morales, holding a fierce smile tremblingly in check.
“Thank you, sir!” added Davis, his absurdly young face flushed with pride.
They and the rest of the control room crew went to work in a mood resembling exaltation. Davis fed the problem into the computer and reported to Andrew. “It may just barely be possible, sir. There’s just enough time for the transition engine to reset itself between the first and second transitions. This is going to be the shortest overspace trip ever attempted.”
“And what’s the shortest up until now?”
“The one we did in Broadsword, sir.”
“Well, then, we’ll break our own record. And as soon as we’re back in normal space, don’t wait for orders: commence deceleration immediately.”
As the countdown began, Andrew noticed that, without his being aware of it, his left hand and Rachel’s right had found each other and clasped. He looked at her, and judging from her expression, she hadn’t noticed it, either.
“Once again,” he began awkwardly, “I’m sorry—”
Before he could think of a reply, the indescribable gravitational surge took them, pulling them through a hole in the space-time continuum, and the kaleidoscopic tunnel of light began to flow past.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Andrew had never experienced anything like it before. Neither had anyone else in the entire history of interstellar travel.
There was no appreciable pause after the strange pulling-rather-than-pushing sensation of being sucked through a hole in space-time; no time for the utter blackness of overspace to register on their optic nerves. With nauseating abruptness the entire experience reversed itself, and the tunnel of light was flowing forward rather than aft, and then dissolved into the star swarms of normal space . . . and, smaller than seen from Earth but nevertheless inarguably a sun rather than a star, the yellow-white glare of Sol. Dead ahead was a tiny blue dot.
At that instant, from deep belowdecks, there came a sickening noise as metal and crystal ruptured. The ship shuddered, and a smell of acrid smoke invaded the control room. The damage-control klaxon began to whoop.
“Sir,” called Morales, “it’s—”
“—The transition engine,” finished Andrew in a voice as shaken as hers. “I know. But we were prepared to accept the possibility of its destruction.” He ran an eye over various readouts and saw to his relief that all essential systems, including the drive, seemed to have retained their integrity.
Through it all, Davis kept his head and activated the drive, applying a breaking thrust to kill their velocity relative to Earth. So as a final assault on their sensibilities, deceleration pressed them down into their couches.
Andrew looked anxiously at Rachel, even less prepared by experience for this than the rest of them. She appeared somewhat sick, but managed a tremulous smile.
“Are you all right,” he demanded.
“Sure.” Her smile firmed up. “Hey, if you could simulate that for an amusement park ride, people would pay money to do it.”
“Let’s patent it and get rich.” He gave her hand a quick squeeze, then turned to his officers and began receiving reports.
They had come fairly close to their intended distance from Sol of two astronomical units—1.67 AU, to be exact. Coming in as they were, on an Earthward course at almost a seventy-degree angle to the plane of the ecliptic, and given that Earth was currently on their side of Sol on its orbital path, this put them less than one AU from their destination. A quick calculation showed that this gave a reasonably comfortable margin for matching Earth’s orbit, for they hadn’t had time to build up too much velocity before they had made their unprecedented double transition. Andrew ordered the deceleration lessened, and normal weight returned as the ship’s artificial gravity resumed control.
“All right,” Andrew next demanded, “how long will it take us to get to Earth? Just roughly,” he hastened to add. “No decimal places.”
“Given the optimum scenario of maintaining our present velocity as long as possible, with rapid high-G deceleration in the last stages, slightly less than three standard days, sir,” Davis reported crisply.
“And how long will it take Valdes?”
“He’s started from about three AUs inside the orbital radius of Neptune, about twenty-seven AUs from here. Based on his last observed vector, and assuming that he plans to follow the standard procedure of accelerating at one g to the midpoint of a very flat hyperbola and then flipping and decelerating the rest of the way . . . about twenty-four days. Of course, sir, he can render that assumption invalid by increasing his acceleration. If, for example, he maintains one and a half g—”
“From the impression I got of the Kappainu during my captivity,” Rachel cut in, “I don’t think they’re physically capable of that, at least not over the long haul.”
“Still,” Andrew ruminated, “I prefer to err on the side of caution—”
“We’ve all noticed that, sir,” Morales deadpanned. Rachel smothered a laugh.
“—and therefore I’m going to assume that we have a margin of two weeks rather than three,” Andrew continued with a pro forma glare at both women. “That still gives us time to arrange a welcome for him, even though we’re up against the same old problem of not being able to go through regular channels. We’ll have to work covertly.”
“But,” asked Rachel, “won’t our transition from overspace have been observed, this close to Earth?”
“The possibility exists,” Andrew admitted. “But I doubt it. The sensors that can detect it are very specialized, and they’re directional in nature. They have to be looking for the transition in the region where it occurs. And remember, we’re well above the plane of the ecliptic, in a region of space that nobody normally pays attention to, at least in peacetime. That should also help us approach Earth undetected.”
“As should the fact that this ship, while it lacks the full panoply of Kappainu cloaking technology, is very stealthy by any other standards,” Reislon added. “But . . . what do we do when we get there? As you have pointed out, we cannot publicly announce our presence.”
“No, we can’t. So we’re in the same position we were in when we landed on Earth last time. There’s only one person on the planet we know for certain we can trust.”
In the end, they made a more cautious approach to Earth than Davis had projected, partly to further minimize their chances of being detected and partly because the CPO who served as the prize crew’s engineering officer was dourly insistent on babying the drive after the wrenching shakeup it had gotten when the transition engine had self-destructed. It gnawed a little more time away from their head start over Valdes.
It also added to the time Andrew and Rachel were together in the same ship.
They were almost never alone. But there came a time when Andrew stepped into City of Osaka’s tiny observation deck and saw her standing, straight and slender, silhouetted against the star clouds, staring out at the steadily growing blue planet ahead.
Afterward, he was certain he would have yielded to cowardice and slipped back out unnoticed had she not heard him and turned her head. “Oh,” she said. “Hello.”
“Hello.” With no other alternative, he stepped all the way into the almost intimately small space.
For a moment they said nothing. Small talk seemed out of the question. Andrew took the plunge.
“I lied to you,” he said without preamble. “I had my reasons. Maybe not good enough reasons, but I had them. I was trying to play Valdes, who I thought didn’t know how much I knew. And you were there. And after that—”
“I understand why you did it.” Her tone was unreadable.
“No, you don’t, not altogether. There was another reason. I was afraid the truth would hurt you badly. I couldn’t face the thought of that.”
There was a long silence, then she turned back to gaze at the heavens. “Is it true that you were the one who discovered my father’s body?” she asked without looking at him.
“Yes.”
“I won’t ask you how he killed himself. I don’t think I want to know. I don’t think I’m ready for that just yet.”
“Then I won’t tell you. But I will say this: his death was quick—instantaneous, in fact—and therefore practically painless.”
“Was it? Physically, maybe. But I’ve always thought suicide must surely be the most horrible way to die, because of the utter despair that precedes it. It’s beyond my imagination: such unrelieved hopelessness that the basic survival urge switches off. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you see.” She abruptly turned to face him, and her eyes would not let his go. “The Black Wolf Society drove my father to that. Which means the Kappainu did. I want them to hurt.”
“We’ve already hurt them,” Andrew pointed out, recalling the nuclear fireball where the Kappainu space station had been.
“Not enough. I want your promise that they’ll hurt more before this is over.”
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br /> “They’ll hurt. I’ll make them hurt. That’s how I’ll pay the debt I owe you.”
“It is enough.” Her eyes continued to hold his, but the embrace warmed.
For the first time since that impulsive moment just before they had recklessly flung themselves into and out of overspace, their hands found each other. Wordlessly, for no words were required, they turned and left the observation deck to the unfeeling stars.
As Reislon had intimated, City of Osaka was a smugglers’ ship and therefore heavily stealthed. So was her gig, given the uses to which the Black Wolf Society had put it.
They left Davis in acting command of the ship in its trailing orbit and took the gig down. Besides Andrew, it held Rachel, Reislon, Morales and Rory Gallivan, suffering from no worse than a slight limp by grace of Lokaron-derived tissue-regeneration technology, and as insouciant as ever. He acted as pilot, being the most familiar with the gig. Andrew felt a certain déjà vu as they passed the terminator into Earth’s night side and descended over the darkened Rockies.
They were less cautious than last time, when they had felt no special time pressure. Andrew called ahead from high altitude, and instead of finding a secluded mountain meadow, Gallivan landed the gig on the barely adequate level area on the aspen-clothed foot of the familiar mountain, within walking distance of the stone-and-timber house and shielded from view only by the crags above and its own ability to camouflage itself. An elderly but vigorous woman was already on the way out from the house to meet them, carrying a lamp. Spring was now well-advanced and the starry night wasn’t too chilly.
“I somehow knew I’d see you again, Andy,” she said as they embraced. “I was certain of it.”
“I’m glad you were so sure, Mom. There were times when I wasn’t.” Andrew motioned the others forward into the lamplight. “You’ve already met Rachel Arnstein and Reislon’Sygnath. Let me introduce Lieutenant Alana Morales, executive officer of the ship of which I’m currently in command.” Morales simply stared, round-eyed and open-mouthed, at Katy Doyle-Roark. “And this is Rory Gallivan, a . . . er, a civilian consultant.”