by Allen Steele
“Another transmission, Captain!” Anne yelled. “Audio, this time . . . and it’s not danui!”
“Patch it through the whole comlink,” Andromeda said. “Tom, get ready to translate.”
A second later, she heard a growling, guttural voice, its tongue laden with vowels; it was somewhat like how she imagined a large dog would sound like if it tried to speak Latin. “That’s arsashi, all right,” D’Anguilo said. “I’ll try to get us a translation, but I bet I know what they’re saying.”
“So do I,” Andromeda said. “Lieutenant, you heard it, too. There’s an arsashi down there who’s righteously pissed off. Get out of there now.”
Dupree came on the line again. “Easier said than done, Captain. If I attempt to turn around now, I’ll probably run into one of the cables. Even if I do a retroburn and back out, there’s a strong chance of collision. The best way to make a safe return is to continue going the way we are now, then turn around once we’re clear of the cables and go back the way we came.”
“He’s right, skipper.” Melpomene had been quiet until then, but apparently she felt compelled to speak up for a fellow pilot. “If I were in his place, that’s what I’d do.”
Andromeda glanced at Jason. The first officer’s face had gone pale. Tight-lipped and tense, he slowly nodded. She darted a look at D’Anguilo. “You got that translation yet?” she demanded.
“Still working on it.” D’Anguilo didn’t look up from his console. “Their language has about twenty or thirty different dialects, though, and . . .”
“Keep on it,” she said. “Reese, continue on course, but turn around as soon as you’re in the clear and get back here ASAP. Anne, send a message . . . in Anglo, I guess.” Tom was too busy to translate it into hjadd or arsashi, and she trusted his language skills more than Anne’s, albeit reluctantly. “In any case, tell whoever it is down there that we’re withdrawing our lander, but we need to make sure that it’ll be able to safely return.”
“Roger that, Montero,” Mark said. “We’ll return as soon as we’re out of the woods.”
The pilot sounded distracted. On the upper-left side of the wallscreen, Andromeda noticed that Sean had turned his camera away from the porthole and was now aiming it between the seats. Mark had both hands on the yoke, and his gaze was fixed on the lidar display just below the middle cockpit window. Apparently Sean had decided that what was happening inside the lander was more interesting than what was going on outside. The camera turned for a second toward Kyra, sitting quietly behind Mark as she stared out the window beside her, before it was directed at the pilot again.
“Sean, point the camera out your window again,” she said.
He didn’t reply, but the view shifted back to the porthole, and once more she saw what was on Reese’s starboard side. The lander was almost clear of the cables; beyond them, she could make out the far side of the hexagon, where three of the biopods came together at their respective nodes to form what looked like little more than a distant line. Aurorae occasionally raced across the cables like miniature blue lightning storms. But it appeared that only the outer half of the hexagon was opaque; the side facing the sun seemed to be translucent, like it was . . .
A startled gasp from Kyra: “Sean, look over here!”
An instant later, Sean himself: “Wow! That’s . . . Wow!”
“What are you . . . ?” This from Sandy LaPointe in the lander’s rearmost seat. “Let me . . . Oh, my freakin’ God . . . !”
“What’s going on?” Andromeda demanded. Although Sean had turned his camera toward the port-side porthole, Kyra blocked the view; very little could be seen through the small window save for a vague silver hump. “Sean, give Kyra the camera so we can . . .”
“Hold on a moment, Montero,” Mark said. “Soon as I turn us around, you’ll be able to see what we’re looking at.”
A couple of seconds went by, then Reese’s bow-angle view shifted to the right as the lander turned to starboard, and Andromeda caught her first glimpse of the image captured by the wing cameras. Her fingers fumbled at her lapboard until they found the controls to expand the image so that it filled the wallscreen. When that happened, everyone on Montero’s bridge cried out in astonishment.
Just past the edge of the cable web, only about twenty or thirty miles away, was the nearest biopod. From the lander’s vantage point, the cylinder was tremendous, so long that its endcaps were lost to sight. But the near side of the biopod wasn’t the featureless grey hulk that they’d seen from orbit; instead, it appeared to be open to space, with only a semicircular curve of reflected sunlight revealing the transparent roof that formed a ceiling above the cylinder’s vast interior.
Beneath that ceiling was another world.
From an altitude of about fifty miles, they looked down upon a winter landscape. Snow-covered plains lay on either side of an icy river that flowed down the middle of the cylinder, fed by narrow estuaries that wound their way through low hills. On both sides of the river, the terrain gradually rose in elevation until it formed the walls of an immense valley a hundred miles wide, which in turn were bordered by the window edges.
The roof was so high above the valley floor that they could see filmy cirrus clouds in the sky above the valley; within the shadows cast by one of those clouds, tiny lights glimmered. A settlement, most likely. Indeed, other signs of habitation could be seen: threadlike roads, tiny motes here and there upon the river that might be boats, a large central dome that didn’t appear to be natural in origin.
An entire habitat, far bigger than anything even remotely like it that humans had ever built. The great crater cities of the Moon would easily fit inside the thing, with plenty of room to spare. And this is just one, Andromeda thought. How many did Tom estimate are here? Over a trillion? She swallowed hard, feeling her heart beat against her chest. This is impossible. How could anyone build anything this big?
A low, awestruck whistle from Rolf. “That’s it,” he muttered. “I give up. I’m retiring. I have no business calling myself an engineer. They . . .”
“Captain, I have the translation.” Along with Rolf’s comment, D’Anguilo’s voice broke the silence of the command deck. “The arsashi say that, if we violate their airspace . . . I guess that means the area above their biopod, if this belongs to them . . . then they are within their rights to . . .” A momentary pause. “I’m not sure of the last word,” he finished, “but I think it means retaliate.”
A chill swept down Andromeda’s back. “Reese, did you get that?”
“Loud and clear, Montero,” Mark said. “I’m . . .”
Suddenly, the images on the wallscreen jiggled violently as if something had struck the lander. “What the hell?” Cayce snapped. “Where did that . . . ?”
“Reese, what’s happening?” Andromeda hunched forward in her seat. “Do you copy?”
A crackling rush of static. On the screen, the images from the lander cameras froze for an instant, then disintegrated into random pixels. When Cayce’s voice returned, it was broken and distorted.
“Mayday, May . . . caught in force . . . or beam of some . . . control compromised, pilot . . .”
“Boosting gain, Captain,” Anne said, “but I’m getting some wicked interference.”
“Try harder. Switch to another band if you have to.” Andromeda glanced over at D’Anguilo. “Send a message . . . any language, just so you make it fast . . . and tell them we’re not hostile and . . .”
“You think I haven’t thought of that?” For the first time, D’Anguilo lost patience with her. “I’ve already tried! Everything I send just gets bounced back . . . !”
“. . . is Reese, do you copy?” Dupree’s voice again. “We’ve been caught by a force beam of . . .”
More static, followed by an uncharacteristic curse from Anne as she struggled to regain contact with the lander. “Reese, this is Montero, do you copy? You’re breaking up. Please repeat. Over.”
Instead of the pilot’s voice, the next thing s
he heard was a harsh electronic squeal, so loud that it caused Andromeda to swear and jerk away her headset. Anne cried out in pain; she stared at her console, then glanced over her shoulder at the captain. “Receiving some kind of transmission,” she said, “but damned if I know what it is. It’s not . . .”
“Never mind that,” Andromeda snapped. The video feed from the Reese was gone; the only thing on the wallscreen was the image from Montero’s own bow cameras. “Can you reach the lander?”
The com officer frantically worked her console. “Negative. Loss of signal from the Reese.”
Andromeda clutched her armrests. For a moment, she found herself on the verge of panic, not understanding what was going on and unable to decide what action to take. Then cold pragmatism snapped her mind back into focus. The survey team was in trouble; it was her responsibility to save them.
“Mel, take us down,” she said.
Melpomene turned to her. “Captain? Excuse me . . . ?”
“You heard me.” Andromeda didn’t look back at the helmsman but instead stared straight ahead at the screen. “Break orbit and follow the lander. Use their last available coordinates to plot a trajectory for rendezvous and retrieval.”
“But . . .”
“Don’t argue. Just do it.” Andromeda knew exactly what she was telling Mel to do: fly the Montero through the web of cables that the smaller ship had barely been able to penetrate. Regardless of the risk of collision, though, or the fact that the arsashi had reacted to the Reese coming too close to a hexagon that they apparently claimed as their own, Andromeda knew that she had little choice.
I can’t abandon Sean, she thought. He’ll never forgive me if I let this happen again . . .
She noticed that her headset was dead. Pulling it back over her head, she listened to the earpiece. The static was gone. She thought for a moment that Anne had managed to squelch it, but then the com officer turned to her again.
“Another text transmission, skipper. In Anglo. It says . . .”
“Damn it!” Melpomene yelled. “My board’s frozen!”
“What?” Ignoring Anne for the moment, Andromeda looked at Mel. “What do you mean, it’s . . . ?”
“I’m getting no helm response.” In frustration, Melpomene stabbed at the touch screens of her navigation console, then reached up to try the same thing with the toggles and buttons of the overhead control panels. “I’m completely locked out, skipper. It’s like someone just pulled the plug or . . .”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Captain.” Anne waved a hand at her own console. “We just received a clear-text signal from Hex.”
Before Andromeda had a chance tell her to do so, Anne put the transmission up on the main screen:
To human starship: navigation of your vessel has been assumed by local traffic control network. Your ship will be automatically maneuvered to the harbor node of a nearby habitat. Please refrain from making any attempt to resume control of your vessel or catastrophic damage may result. Your crew will be allowed to disembark once your ship has reached its destination. Further contact will be made with you at some future time.
A moment later, there was a sudden rumble from Montero’s aft section, and she felt a familiar vibration pass through the soles of her shoes.
“Main engines firing,” Rolf said, gazing at his console. “One-sixth maximum thrust . . . just enough to budge us from our present orbit.”
“Can you . . . ?”
“Scram the reactors?” The chief engineer flipped back the candy-striped cover of the main engines’ emergency shutdown control, flipped the four toggle switches beneath it. “Negative. Same as with the helm, skipper . . . we have no control.”
“Bastards probably sent us a Trojan horse,” Zeus murmured. The chief petty officer’s arms were folded across his chest, his eyes cold as he glared at Hex. “Piggybacked on that last transmission, fed new commands into the comps and AI, then locked us out.”
Andromeda and Anne glanced at each other, and the com officer shrugged and quietly nodded. Zeus’s theory was probably as good an explanation as any.
Andromeda read the message once more. She was tempted to ask where it came from, but the answer was obvious. It was just as pointless to ask why it had taken the danui so long to send a transmission in her own language. The aliens clearly had their own agenda, and the desires of their human visitors were moot at best.
The Montero was being hijacked, and she had no idea what had happened to the Reese. And there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about any of it.
CHAPTER TEN
THE FORCE THAT ATTACKED THE REESE WAS INVISIBLE, UNDETECTABLE, and without apparent source. Nevertheless, it seized the lander like a ghostly hand, pulling the small craft away from its intended course with an intransigent power that defied resistance.
Cayce wasn’t about to surrender without a fight. “Full thrust!” he yelled at Mark. “Give it all you’ve got!” Then he stabbed at the com panel again. “Mayday, mayday! Reese to Montero, do you copy? Please respond, over!”
From his seat behind Cayce, Sean watched as Mark pushed the throttle bar forward. Despite Cayce’s insistence, the pilot wasn’t pushing the main engine to its limits . . . or at least not yet. Perhaps he was deliberately holding back to keep something in reserve. Yet the lander trembled, creaking and shaking as if it were caught in an unseen windstorm.
“Mayday, mayday . . . !”
“Forget it, sir. You’re not getting through.” Unlike Cayce, Mark remained calm. Panic wouldn’t get them anywhere, and shouting only made things worse. “If you want to help, then keep an eye on the engine temperature. I don’t want it to start overheating . . .”
A sudden lurch, and Kyra yelped as her datapad was suddenly wrenched from her hands. Sandy cursed as it sailed past her head, and Sean heard the pad smack against the aft bulkhead. His camera began to slide from his grip, and as he clutched it tight to keep from losing it, he felt his helmet tug at his skinsuit collar.
“What the hell?” He held the sides of his helmet with both hands. “What’s . . .”
“Must be some sort of magnetic beam.” Kyra glanced back to where her pad had crashed into the bulkhead. “Sorry about that, Sandy. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” Sandy’s face was ashen. “Can we go home now?”
“Working on it.” Left hand gripping the yoke, Mark gently inched the throttle forward a notch. Another lurch, then the lander suddenly rolled over. “Damn. It’s dragging us.”
Dragging? Hugging the camera against his chest, Sean looked out the porthole beside him. The lander was no longer above the biopod’s sunward side; instead, he saw that they were being pulled toward the spherical node at its end. A cable was only a hundred or so yards away, so close that he could see Reese’s exhaust plume reflected in the glossy black panel of its solar wing . . . and the luminescent white smear was not going forward but backward.
Mark was right. The beam was hauling them away from the biopod. “I think they want to bring us into that node,” he said. “That might be where . . .”
“I don’t care what you think!” Cayce couldn’t turn his head around enough for Sean to see his face, but he could hear impatience in the lieutenant’s voice . . . and panic. “I just want to get the hell out of here!” He looked at Mark again. “Did you hear what I said? Full power!”
And then, before the pilot could react, the team leader reached forward, grabbed the throttle bar with his left hand, and shoved it all the way forward.
An abrupt surge threw Sean against his seat. The back of his skull connected with the inside of his helmet; despite the padding, he felt a jolt of pain, and fireflies swarmed before his eyes. The blow must have stunned him for a moment, because when the tiny sparks of light finally vanished, he became aware that Kyra was grasping his hand and asking if he was okay. Somehow, he’d lost his camera; it was no longer in his hands.
“You idiot!” From a distance, he heard Mark’s voice; it sounded as if he’d fin
ally lost his cool. “Do you know what you’re . . . Oh, shit, hang on!”
Sean barely had a second to brace his hands against the back of Cayce’s seat before something slammed against the lander’s starboard side. Another painful jolt told him that he’d sprained his left wrist, but at least he’d prevented a second blow to the head. But when he felt a rush of air against his face, and the decompression alarm began to shriek, he knew that minor injuries were the least of his worries.
“Blow-out!” Mark yelled. “Everyone, close your helmets! Now!”
Sean reached for his helmet faceplate. The moment that it snapped shut, the suit automatically activated its internal air system. Cayce might have been a fool, but at least he’d done one smart thing by ordering his team to wear skinsuits during this sortie.
Sean glanced out the porthole again. It was whiskered by dozens of hairline fractures, but Sean caught a glimpse of the cable that the Reese had just hit. Its nearest black panel was ripped lengthwise, and it appeared to be barely hanging on by its rigging. Then the cable disappeared, and the biopod’s sunward side came back into view.
“What . . . ? How . . . ?” Cayce stammered. “Did we hit something?” He apparently had little idea what was going on.
“A cable. We sideswiped it.” Mark hauled at the yoke, struggling to regain control of his craft. “We broke out of that beam, but I think . . .” His voice trailed off as he reached up to hastily snap toggles on the overhead console. “Uh-oh . . . I’m getting nothing from the starboard RCRs.” He glanced back at Sean. “Can you look out there, tell me what you see?”
Sean peered out the window again, craning his neck to see the lander’s aft starboard side. Remarkably, most of the wing was still intact, but its canard had been sheared away, and the outboard spoiler appeared to be warped. He reported the damage to Mark, and the pilot tested the flaps.
“No good,” he muttered. “I’ve got no control over that wing. Landing is going to be tricky.”