Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  It would be another couple of hours before the tugs started pulling the Santa Maria clear of Phobos. First it was essential that the amalgamate fibers be fully tested; later on, during the slow trip to Jupiter, it wouldn't matter too much if one of them broke, but there could be a disaster if one did so in the first few minutes.

  Even the tugs represented something of an achievement for human technology. Their on-board puters would have to make thousands of tiny alterations of trajectory over the next two years as they hauled the spinning Santa Maria to the big gas planet. If one of the puters crashed the other seven would have to compensate immediately; if a second one went down there were going to be difficulties. Those puters were probably a lot more sophisticated than Pinocchio.

  "We have some spare time," said Danny O'Sondheim, by her side.

  "You can stand down now if you wish to, First Officer," said Strider, her eyes flicking between the viewscreen directly in front of her, on which the tugs and the filaments showed up clearly, and the broad vista of the view-window above it, where they didn't. What the window did show was an amazing panoply of stars. More than anything—more, even, than her final shuttle-trip up from Mars to Phobos—this view persuaded Strider that she really was on her way to Tau Ceti II. Some of the stars she recognized—Aldebaran was winking in its angry orange way off to one side, and Sirius was a bright white flame almost directly ahead—but they were in the minority. On a clear night on Earth you could see several thousand stars, and the classical constellations were reasonably easily distinguishable. On a clear night on Mars you could see tens of thousands of other stars, and it was twice as difficult to pick out the constellations. On Phobos, the heaven was a blaze of stars, most of them faint but together adding up to form curtains of light in which the bright stars of the constellations were almost lost.

  "We could both stand down," said O'Sondheim, getting up. "There's nothing for us to do for a while. The Main Computer will monitor the situation as well as we can. Better."

  "Don't you think this is exciting?" said Strider, unable to take her gaze away from screen and window and screen and window and screen and . . .

  "Yes, of course it is," said O'Sondheim. "But we'll need all our wits about us when the tugs start the Santa Maria moving. Much better if we had a few hours of rest and recreation until we're required here again."

  Now Strider did look up at him.

  "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" she said.

  "It depends on what you think I'm suggesting," said O'Sondheim.

  "Oh, right," said Strider, returning her attention to the starfields. "You want to fetch me a sandwich. Yes, please."

  3

  Jupiter: AD2531

  Three years had passed, and most of the personnel aboard the Santa Maria had sorted themselves out somehow. Communication with Earth had been minimal after the first few months.

  The three years had not been without their strains. There is only so long that one can tolerate checking and rechecking systems in the knowledge that none of the commands you are issuing are being executed but are merely being correlated with the actions of other responsive instrumentation. There is only so long that you can sit watching holos during your recreation time, or seeing the same familiar faces. Some, like Lan Yi, lost themselves in music or books, or stared at the starscape outside the windows for hours on end. Some indulged in the mating dance, sleeping around with a diminishing supply of partners: semi-permanent pairings removed some people from the pool of good-timers, but more people gave up because they noticed that folk like Lan Yi were looking a lot less bored than they themselves were. The Main Computer's libraries became in progressively heavier demand. Ball games like tennis were fiendishly difficult aboard the rotating craft, but some stalwarts persevered; there were brief vogues for ping-pong, volleyball and flick-me. All in all, things were boding reasonably well for the potentially hundred-and-ten-year voyage even though the corollary of intelligence and curiosity—the capacity to become bored—might at some stage pose a threat.

  Six months out Strider dictated that rotas of her personnel should assist the agribots in the planting of the remaining fields in the Santa Maria's great central hold. Everyone realized that what she was doing was dictating occupational therapy for all—herself included. No one objected except Danny O'Sondheim, who had felt that it was beneath his dignity as First Officer. Even his objections didn't last long.

  "You've got a splodge of mud on your cheek," said Strider one time they met on the command deck for yet another round of systems checks.

  "Yes, I know," said O'Sondheim. "I thought I'd leave it there."

  She grinned at him. For once, he grinned back.

  There was a tension between Strider and her First Officer that she didn't know how to defuse. He made it obvious time and again that he was sexually interested in her, but at the same time his body language told her that in some obscure way he also despised her—perhaps because she had chosen not to encumber herself with all the technological enhancements which his own body sported. She, on the other hand, found herself profoundly uninterested in him except in a professional sense: it was her duty to ensure that the two of them worked together well as a team—which they had always done—but she couldn't envisage herself ever becoming friends with the man, and the thought of making love with him, with his secondary retinal screens and his thighputer and who knew how much additional augmentational junk clanking around (or so she imagined it) on the bed with them, repelled her entirely. It was odd that, on the very few occasions these days when she felt remotely interested in sex, it was still Pinocchio whom she invited to her cabin: the fake man was more attractive than the augmented one.

  "I'm glad to hear it," she said.

  His smile vanished. "Yeah," he said noncommittally.

  The trip out from Mars to the orbit of Ganymede had taken the ferried Santa Maria the best part of two years. Once they'd arrived there, some of the commands that Strider and O'Sondheim entered into the Main Computer had begun to seem of purpose. The nuclear-pulse drive that would thrust the Santa Maria out of the Solar System depended on the detonation of about 250 small spheres of deuterium and helium-3 every second at the center of the electromagnetic field housed by the hemispherical chamber at the rear of the vessel. Both deuterium—"heavy hydrogen"—and helium-3—"lightweight helium"—are richly present in the atmosphere of Jupiter. For the past few decades bot "miner" drones had been plunging down into the atmosphere of the giant planet and bringing back the elements to store in installations on Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. There was enough there now to fuel several Santa Marias out beyond Neptune's orbit, but even the Santa Maria alone required over one hundred kilotons of the stuff, for both acceleration out of the Sun's system and deceleration into Tau Ceti's. A constant relay of drones was bringing it up from Ganymede's surface to load the fusion drive.

  In theory, the bot drones could have carried out the year-long task entirely on their own, with the aid of the Main Computer. In practice, there had to be constant supervision from the command deck by either Strider and O'Sondheim or their deputies, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson, in case of emergencies.

  So far there hadn't been any serious emergencies, just an occasional malfunction that had been easily overridden, but . . .

  "Oh, shit!" said O'Sondheim.

  Strider looked up at him. Ninety per cent of the fuel was loaded. Her mind had been wandering. The slow rolling of the heavens as the Santa Maria rotated on its longitudinal axis tended to be hypnotic. Her right foot had, without her noticing, eased itself out of the loop beneath her chair. Annoyed with herself, she jammed it back in again. Once they were in deep space the command deck would reconfigure itself. At the moment, though, there was always the risk of floating upwards.

  "What?"

  "One of the drones has gone berserk."

  "Click into the Computer and redirect it."

  "I've just tried that. The drone's puter refuses to respond." O'Sondheim
's voice was beginning to rise.

  Still Strider didn't take it seriously until she looked at the screen in front of her.

  "WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!" the Main Computer was flashing urgently at her. "WE HAVE AN EMERGENCY!!!"

  She instinctively pressed four keys to give her voice-interaction with the Computer.

  "Quick!" she snapped. "Tell!"

  "Drone seven eight three B's guidance puter has crashed completely," said the Main Computer calmly. "The vessel is heading towards the Santa Maria's midships at a rate of seven thousand three hundred and thirty-one kilometers per hour, and will impact within three point six minutes."

  Strider slapped her hand down on the large red button beside her keyboard. Instantly a klaxon began sounding in the main body of the ship. Her personnel would start donning their suits as soon as they heard it—assuming they weren't too far from their suits. She bit her lower lip. Three children had been born during the trip out from the Solar System—the personnel had proved more fecund than expected. She hoped someone would be on hand to suit them up.

  But there was no time to worry about casualties. This was a case of damage limitation.

  "Can't you override?" she said.

  "I've just told you—" began O'Sondheim.

  "No," said the Computer.

  "Can't you move the Santa Maria?"

  "No. Not in time."

  "Then what can you do?"

  There was a silence from the screen.

  Strider thought fast.

  Things hitting her ship . . .

  "Meteor defenses," she yelled at the screen. "How quickly can you get them up and running?"

  She knew the answer. They'd tested out the meteor shields often enough. The chances of being hit by anything serious were minimal here within the Solar System. The chances of being hit by anything outside the Solar System were incalculable—no one had any real idea what might be floating between the stars—but when you were travelling at a substantial fraction of the velocity of light yourself it was wise to take precautions.

  "Four point one seven minutes," confirmed the computer.

  "Switch them on anyway," said Strider.

  She glanced at O'Sondheim. What she could see of his face was paler than she'd ever known a human being's face to be.

  "Unzip one of our shuttles," she said, trying to keep her voice clear of alarm.

  "But—"

  "Just fucking do it!"

  She turned back to her screen.

  "Have you got an accurate location for the berserker?" she said to the Computer. She could have asked the question of the air, but the instinct to face someone while you're speaking to them is almost impossible to break.

  "To within three hundred meters."

  "No better than that?" she demanded. The drones were little over three hundred meters across themselves.

  "I could get it down to one hundred meters, but it would take me one point eight minutes to do so. Estimated time of impact is two point five minutes."

  "Shuttled unzipped," reported O'Sondheim shakily beside her.

  I must not think about those infants. "OK, Computer. What I want you to do over the next fifteen seconds max is progressively download your best figures for the location and trajectory of the berserker into that shuttle. Then I want you to launch it on an intersecting course."

  "You are not permitted wilfully to destroy expensive items of SSIA property—"

  "The Santa Maria's a fuck of a sight more expensive than a shuttle." Human lives are more expensive than either. "You're overridden."

  "Very well. The chances of success are under twenty per cent."

  "Do it."

  "The situation is complicated by the fact that the meteor shields are beginning to deflect the berserker from its original trajectory."

  "Adjust the shuttle's course accordingly."

  "This problem is difficult."

  "You've got about three seconds to solve it."

  A small tremor ran through the Santa Maria as the shuttle blasted off.

  "I hope this is going to bloody work," muttered Strider dourly, repeatedly thumping the surface in front of her with her fist.

  "Meteor shields are now up to fifty per cent strength," said the Computer.

  "That's not very relevant at the moment. How's the shuttle doing?"

  "It appears to be locked on target."

  "Good. Keep it that way."

  For the first time Strider noticed the rate at which her heart was pounding. It was lucky some nearby medbot hadn't come rushing on to the command deck, insisting that she take it easy.

  She looked at O'Sondheim. He was still ashen.

  "Fingers crossed," she said, with assumed optimism.

  "Shouldn't we suit up?" he said.

  "There's no time. Besides, a captain goes down with her ship." It suddenly hit her. She was as terrified as he was, but she'd been too busy to notice it.

  "Progress?" she snapped at the Main Computer.

  "If impact is to be achieved, it will be between fourteen point nine and fifteen point eight seconds from now. The range of values is as wide as this because I am uncertain about the probability of impact indeed being achieved. The meteor deflectors are now at seventy-five per cent strength and rising."

  Fifteen seconds or so. Not a long time to think about being dead. Even the personnel who'd managed to get themselves suited up wouldn't have a great chance. A mass of several thousand tons moving at upwards of seven thousand kilometers per hour would probably break the Santa Maria in two. Depending on where it hit, one or other of the craft might explode. Short-circuiting through the electrics would do untold damage. There were likely to be flash-fires in the few seconds before the Santa Maria's oxygen dissipated: suits were designed to withstand vacuum, not flames. Some of her people might be able to cling on to installations around them long enough for the people on Ganymede to be able to get here in time to save them, but most would be spilled out into space: you don't go hunting for a person floating in space, because space is too big and a person is too small. Anyway, the force of the impact would probably be so great that no one aboard her ship—her ship, dammit—would have a bone in their body left unbroken.

  "Don't blame yourself," said Pinocchio, who had suddenly appeared behind her.

  "Between six point four and six point seven seconds," said the Main Computer. "My accuracy is improving because—"

  "Just tell me to the nearest second!" she screamed at the screen.

  "Four." That was the number of people she was really fond of aboard the Santa Maria: Pinocchio, Lan Yi, Maloron Leander and Umbel Nelson. OK, since she was being honest with herself in what could prove the final few moments of her life: five. Leonie Strider could be added to the list.

  "Three." Which was the number of infants who had been born since the vessel had left Phobos. She had an insane urge to start singing her thoughts out loud, as if they were some kind of nursery rhyme.

  "Two." She didn't have a thought for the number two, so she was glad she hadn't started singing.

  "One." The one thing she had wanted for over twenty years to do was to go starside.

  There was an impossibly long delay. Her crudely improvised guided missile had failed to find its target.

  Then . . .

  A flash of brightness to her left, like the first rising of the Sun in a tropical dawn, appeared in the view-window in front of her. It grew with implausible speed, seemingly becoming even brighter. She shut her eyes tightly, but the light still stabbed through the lids. She put up her hands, but even they didn't seem to give her retinae enough protection.

  "Impact achieved," she heard the Computer say.

  She'd been holding her breath for too long. Now it came rasping painfully out of her.

  "Status of meteor-deflection shields," she croaked, her hands still over her eyes.

  "Ninety point two per cent," the Main Computer replied promptly. "There is a four point one per cent chance that any of the debris from the impact wil
l hit the Santa Maria with sufficient momentum to cause major damage."

  "Keep the shields rising," she said, slowly lowering her hands. It took an extra dose of courage to open her eyes. She discovered that the base of the thumb of her right hand was bleeding, and realized that at some point she must have been pressing her fingernails into it. The brightness in front of her had ebbed almost entirely, but she was still having difficulty seeing things directly: green and purple afterimages were confusing her vision.

  "Techbots are alerted," said the Computer, "in case of atmospheric leakage."

  In case any of those bits of junk out there crack the hull, is what you're too polite to say, thought Strider sourly.

  "Update me," she said wearily to the screen, once she could bring it into focus.

  "Meteor shields are one hundred per cent. They are currently deflecting the next drone, which may also be lost as a result. I am working with its onboard puter to try to calculate a secure trajectory so that it—"

  "About the danger to the Santa Maria," she said.

  "Below one per cent and falling rapidly," said the Main Computer. She could almost have imagined that it sounded aggrieved.

  She let out another great gust of breath.

  "I think we've managed it," she said, looking towards O'Sondheim.

  It took him a couple of seconds to reply.

  "I think you have," he said.

  #

  Marcial Holmberg cornered Strider as she made her way back to her cabin after she and O'Sondheim had finished their tour of duty and handed over to Leander and Nelson. She was tired beyond the limits of exhaustion, and looked jadedly at the short, stout man. She and O'Sondheim should probably have called in the other two to take over as soon as the crisis had been averted, but she'd decided that they should work on: it was better the personnel were encouraged to believe that such things were all in a day's work than that they started to wonder just how close to death they had all been.

  She could tell from the expression on Holmberg's face that her policy had backfired on her.