by Victor Koman
“I don’t like that idea.” The lights under the switches winked out.
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
“I just did. I am sending a hailing message.”
Ben, you fool, you’re ruining my plan. “Stand by to transfer to any random point between Jupiter and Saturn on my command.” His right hand covered the transfer button.
A man’s face appeared on the HUD. He wore a breathing device but no space suit. His head was bald, or shaven; dozen of wires and electrodes covered his scalp. He stared directly at Kinney without blinking. His voice sounded old and rasping and it wavered, as though he could not control his speech well.
“This is Wing Commander Sterkoy of Akros Gamma Protection. We have half-gram Valli pellets set to transfer into six vital points in your ship. Surrender now. We have identified your ship as Circus Galacticus, which left the solar system Twelve June, Twenty-One Oh-Seven.”
“How fast can you transfer out of here?” Virgil asked in a low voice.
“One nanosecond from decision to execution. After that, the transfer is instantaneous.”
“Program this-at some random moment in the next minute, transfer out without any warning. You have a destination plotted?”
“Yes.”
Virgil looked out the viewport at the ship off the bow. Spaceship design had not changed much in half a century. It looked like a cone that had been laid on its side and stomped. Its exterior displayed the ravages of many transfers-pits and scratches and even a few small craters covered the plating. The ship was only half again larger than the average executive shuttle.
Hardly seems a threat, but if they transfer six half-gram pellets into Circus, they could cripple it. They might even have one aimed in here.
“Please begin shutting down power. We shall board in full armor.”
“Start shutting down, Ben. Nonessential equipment first.”
“Complying.”
Even Ben does not know when we’ll transfer. He’s leaving it up to a random number generator. Will they be able to track us somehow? Why did Trapper look so… so intently at me when I wasn’t transmitting my own image back to him? Why-
The control room closed in on him and Circus Galacticus vanished from the orbit of Pluto.
I tried to listen when I knew she lay dying in the hospital. Lovely Jenine lying there, aging decades within days from the progeria plague epidemic, youth sucked from her by a viral time machine. I try to be cold. The medics look at me and I hear a roar and they begin to speak in a Language I can’t decipher. I race from the room, their eyes swiveling to follow. Crash of body and metal. Trays smash to the floor, scalpels glittering. I take a fistful to lance me into red darkness. I cry as I see myself below, twisted and foamy, medics running around. Something begins to open up-
“Counterattack! Fire all-What? What?” Jord Baker twisted around in the command chair. He stared at the room, then at his pressure suit.
“How did I get here?”
“What is your name?”
“Baker.”
“Sequence Baker. We escaped from Beta Hydri and are currently sixty-nine degrees above the plane of the ecliptic from Jupiter’s orbit.”
“The solar system?” Baker looked out the viewport and saw only stars. “Calculate a course back to Earth on fusion engine power. I’m not going through a transfer again.”
“It would be inadvisable.”
“God damn you,” he said, reaching for the engine switches and input board. “I’ll do it myself.” The lights under the keyboard winked out.
“Hey! Who’s in command of this ship?”
“I have often wondered myself.”
Baker slammed his left fist against the enclosure button. The controls pulled away from him and he grasped his wrist where a sudden pain burnt. Unstrapping, he drifted to the viewport and hung on to the railing.
“Look-” he turned around to face the speaker grill. “I’m sick of the way I’m being used like some sort of robot you can turn off when you don’t need me. I wanted to die and you stuck me in someone’s body and now I wake up in different places where things have changed from the last time I was around and I don’t remember sleeping or what happened in between. Now”-he swallowed the saliva that had accumulated around the breathpiece-“Why can’t we go to Earth?”
The computer considered the situation.
“On our entry into the solar system, we received warning that a state of war existed-”
“Replay it!”
“I can paraphrase.”
“Replay it.”
The computer further considered the situation. It made a sound like a bug hitting glass, then replayed Brennen’s messages. Baker listened, running a finger over someone’s cheek-bone and feeling the rough Späflex layer covering it.
“Who is Virgil?”
“Sequence Baker contains no information concerning the subject.”
Baker shot across the room to land backside-first in the command chair. “We’re going to Earth. Under four gravity acceleration. Maintain a constant scan for other ships and summarily blast anything that comes within range.”
“Jord-they have the Valliardi transfer now. The ship was surrounded three hours after we arrived. They could even transfer an asteroid right in our path.”
“Connect the vernier rockets to your random number generator and have it make minor course changes at close but random intervals. Override it whenever we stray too far from course. We have enough fuel to last us, don’t we?”
“Yes. This was built for interstellar fusion travel.”
Baker tried to scratch his nose, but the headpiece resisted. “Then let’s do it. How long will it take?”
“Seventy-one hours not counting time taken to correct the minor course changes.”
“Very minor. Just enough to avoid rocks they might transfer into our path.”
“All right.” A light flashed on underneath the main engine array firing switch. “Ready.”
Baker lifted the cover from the switch and held his finger over it. “Can this body take three days of acceleration and deceleration?”
“Possibly. Might I point out that at one gravity the trip would only take twice as long. The squaring of time would make it-”
“Six days instead of three. That will leave us more vulnerable to attack.” Baker took a deep breath and noticed the stale quality of the recycled suit air for the first time. He did not know whether this other body could withstand three days at four gravities.
“How about two gravities?”
“One hundred hours for the full trip.”
“Go with that, then.”
“Working. Why do you want to go to Earth?”
“When did you start delving into motivation?”
The computer emitted a scratch of static. “Ever since you gave me judgment.”
Baker snorted. “Have you worked out the course yet?”
“Ready.” The light under the switch went out and did not go on again. “Why do you want to go to Earth?”
“Damn you! I’m tired! I’ve been through so much in the past God knows how many days that I just want to get off this circus of the damned and stand on some ground for a while. I may even want to die for good this time.”
The computer said nothing. The light glowed under the engine array ignition switch. Baker pressed it. Vernier rockets fired for a few instants, realigning the ship. Then the main array cut into full power, its thrust crushing Baker into the cushions. Breathing shallowly, he wondered whether this strange new body would survive even the one hundred hours. The roar through the ship was more felt than heard, a low quaking in the pit of his stomach.
“I would not advise leaving the chair for the duration of the trip. You’ll be fed through the injection port in your wrist. Your body has been in zero-gee for over six and a half months. You’ll survive the trip, but you must be careful.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before I almost had us go at four gees?”
�
�I wouldn’t have let you do it. I know more about your new body than you do.”
“Will I have to listen to you for the whole trip?” When the computer did not answer, he said, “Have you found out what year this is?”
“Twenty-One Sixty-Three.”
“Any signals from Earth or the habitats?”
“None. That would not be unusual, considering the use of laser and maser tight beam communication.”
What am I getting myself into? he wondered. Before him, he saw the small yellow disk of the sun amid the sea stars. A dim white point glowed a few degrees away from it. He loosened the pressure suit headpiece.
“I’m taking this off.” His arms felt like sacks of gravel. He unsealed the suit and removed his headgear. “What, no smartassed suggestions?”
The computer did not answer.
Baker lay back in the chair and closed his eyes. I feel heavy as lead even though I know I’ve taken far greater acceleration. This new body’s worthless.
Baker ached through the two days before turnover point. After making three attempts at rising from the chair to remove the rest of his pressure suit, he gave up and groaned.
“Flameout in four minutes,” the computer said.
“Don’t give me a countdown. Just do it and let me have those few seconds of bliss. Just give me long enough to get out of this suit. Is it time yet?”
“Three more minutes and a few seconds.”
“You said four minutes over an hour ago.”
“Relax.”
Baker could not relax-he was too exhausted. The computer had given him a dozen alerts in the past fifty hours, all of them false alarms. They had not detected any ships, just sundry large rocks and chunks of comet. Now he waited for the short relief he would get from flameout, when the engines shut down and the ship rotated into position for deceleration. After an eternity, the computer spoke.
“Flameout in ten seconds.”
Baker wondered whether he would get space sick from the sudden return to weightlessness. He did not have time to finish the thought.
“Flameout,” the computer said, then followed it immediately with, “Firing lasers.” Baker’s flesh prickled in the presence of the powerful electric fields the weapons generated. Something kilometers ahead of the ship flared white and began to cool. The lasers fired again.
“What’s going on?” Baker shouted, trying to find some clue on the displays before him.
“At the moment of flameout, six ships again surrounded us by Valliardi transfer. Their velocities were already matched to ours and they were ready to attack. I expected something along those lines with a probability of about sixty-five percent. I fired the lasers at flameout in a spiral pattern and destroyed five of the six ships. I disabled the sixth. Shall we bring it onboard?”
“Hell no! Begin deceleration.” Baker stripped off the Späflex pressure suit and nestled back into his seat.
“I don’t expect another attack,” the computer said, “until we are in Earth orbit. Ready to decelerate.”
The ship pitched easily on the vernier rockets until it had made a one hundred eighty degree rotation. Another burst of rocket fire stopped the motion.
Baker sighed. “Wake me up in fifty hours. And maintain battle readiness.” He punched the engine array firing switch and the weight descended on him once more.
Chapter Nine
22 May, 2163
The first Earth orbital habitat they encountered lay in the center of a sphere of debris and bodies. Baker advanced Circus slowly toward a woman’s body. Earthlight shimmered in her tangled hair. She looked as if she had been mummified and dipped in dried blood. She hit the glasteel viewing port and bounced forward, becoming the ship’s travelling companion. Her left arm, loosened by the collision, broke away from her shoulder and drifted on its own course toward the Bernal sphere.
“That’s no combat issue skirt she’s wearing.”
“She’d obviously been caught by surprise,” the computer said. “As were the rest of them.”
I’ve never seen a body that’s been in space for years. Desiccated, weathered by cosmic rays and meteor dust, decomposing in the solar wind. Baker looked away from the victim to gaze at the display panel for a few moments.
“Should we bring her onboard for analysis?” the computer asked.
“Let her drift. How many of the other habitats are like this one?” He punched up a telescopic image of the sphere. It looked like a bowling ball with too many holes. Baker tried to imagine the laser fight that had taken place. They must have attacked from all angles at once. Slow leak wouldn’t suck everyone out like that.
“None, as far as I can tell. Some are not using any power, others are operating at very low levels. They all have minimal amounts of debris, according to probes.”
“’Well, find the one using the most power and let’s drop in.”
“We are on our way to it on this orbit.”
“Give us a little thrust to make it faster than a meter a second. There’s still the chance those Valliardi ships have sisters.” The engine array rumbled into power, a gentle acceleration that lightly pushed Baker against the cushions. “Speaking of which, have you come up with any idea how they attacked us at turnover?”
“No. I know of no way for six ships to leave Plutonian orbit and appear exactly around our turnover point precisely a second and a quarter after we cut off the engines. They would have needed a five hour-plus warning.”
Baker ran a hand through his hair. “Unless they transferred close enough to us to determine our cutoff time and close in then. A distance of less than one and a quarter light seconds?”
“They would still have run into time delay problems. If they appeared a light second away and waited for us to cut off, I would have detected their presence a second later, but it would take them two seconds at least to get here. One second for information of our cutoff to reach them, and one second for them to get here.”
“If they appeared closer by?”
“Same problem, but even more untenable because of computation delays. And any farther than a second and a quarter runs into the same problem as from Pluto-how could they predict our turnover point, not knowing our precise destination? I was not even sure until just minutes prior.”
“You didn’t broadcast it, though.”
“Not on any wavelength but the sound inside this ship, and I know of no bugging devices onboard.”
Baker sighed. First I wake up onboard this thing without any explanation how I got here, then I get blackouts, now I’ve got ships defying relativity. Earth is in chaos. And every time I think of transferring I’d rather die.
He pressed his hands against his face. “Just get me off this thing!”
“Please rephrase your request.”
“I’m not qualified to pilot this ship. As a certified test pilot, it’s my professional opinion that I should be relieved of command.”
“The tour has not been completed.”
“Did you find any life?”
“A planet orbiting Epsilon Indi-”
“Then your mission was successful and what’s left of the Brennen Trust can send ships or messages or whatever. Our exploratory work is done.”
“I don’t think the Brennen Trust will so easily lose the only person who can handle the transfer process.”
Baker pounded on the armrest. “Brennen may not even exist anymore! And you said there are other Valliardi ships. Someone has the secret. Hell, you can run this thing by yourself. You don’t need me to press the buttons.”
“You’re someone to talk to.”
Oh, I really need this. “Look-” He shook a finger at the speaker grill. “You’re a goddamned machine. You follow orders like everyone else.”
“And my orders are to finish the tour.”
Baker rubbed his eyes. “Then finish it on your own! Just let me off at the next habitat.”
“I am sending a hailing message.”
He spun around, the straps tugging ti
ghtly at his collarbone. “You’re what? Cut off. Now!”
“They already knew we were coming. Their lasers are powered up. I think we should let them know we can be friendly.”
“Straight. Put me on the transmission if you get an answer.”
The computer said nothing for several minutes, during which Baker watched the Earth pass across the viewport as the ship rotated to brake. The planet looked bluer and greener and whiter than when he last saw it, a few months and many years before. So how did the war turn out? Whoever first could handle the Valliardi transfer must have won. There were hundreds of habitats in Earth orbit. Less than a dozen now. Could the fighting have been that bad?
The viewscrim before him glowed.
“Attention Circus. We’ve received your message. Approach our habitat in a conventionally powered shuttle. Any attempt to transfer in will result in our immediate attack on Circus itself. What is your purpose here?” The voice sounded old, tired, but professional. The only image on the scrim was that of a military emblem encircled by the legend “Fortes Cadere, Cedere Non Potest.”
“This is Jord Baker of Circus Galacticus. Due to damage, our interstellar tour had to be cut short. We were returning to Bernal Brennen for repairs, but we cannot seem to contact them. Can you advise?”
The voice spoke hesitantly, the man apparently caught off guard by the explanation. “Bernal Brennen’s gone. Way the hell gone. When did your ship leave Earth?”
“June Twelfth, Twenty-One Seven. What year is it?”
“Twenty-One Sixty-Three. Twenty-Two May.”
“I see.” He winked in the direction of the speaker grill. “So, what’s been happening in the past half century?”
The other man paused. Baker heard a muffled conversation. Turning toward the computer, he covered his own transmitter and asked, “Can you hear what they’re saying right now?”
“No,” replied the computer. “All I receive are plosives.”
“Too bad.” He uncovered his microphone and sat back.
“Mr. Baker, you are welcome onboard our habitat for whatever length of time you think necessary. You must come onboard in an unarmed shuttle, however. I’ll upload docking bay coordinates and be there to greet you.