Starfire

by Unknown

Perhaps the tears, pooling weightless in front of his eyes, distorted his vision, for at the lip of the flight deck Spin inexplicably missed his grip; as his arm shot past, the back of his wrist brushed a fire-suppression nozzle—a trivial slip, but for the fact that his expandable steel watch band slipped over the nozzle and entangled itself. Momentarily adrift, he jerked hard but failed to rip himself free. His head slammed against the wall.

  One second before, Robin had set the ignition sequence switches. “Travis, grab him, save him!” she screamed. “He’ll fall!”

  Travis had struggled to get out of his harness, the primitive thoughless part of his brain reacting to the realization that Melinda was not in the ship. As he yanked himself into the corridor, Robin’s plea smashed into his consciousness. He grabbed for Spin’s tumbling body, immediately above him. There was the fragmentary beginning of a thought that he would pull Spin into PROP with him, a thought that was never fully formed and that afterward he did not even remem—

  The white light reached Melinda ahead of the charged particles, well ahead of the heat. The shaft crumpled around her and she never completed her considerations about whether this was a reasonable sacrifice in view of the fact that she had not had time to thoroughly review the altern—

  The white light and the other photons got through the shaft before it sealed. The light seared the cameras that watched the outside of Starfire’s hull, spraying amplified radiation from the monitors inside—

  The white light emerged laterally along the plane of the collision fault. For an instant Everest was circled by a ring of perfect light, whiter than the intense yellow sun that filled a quarter of the sky behind it. The middle of the icy rock dissolved in plasma; its top and bottom parted; the lower half instantly began a long spiral into the sun. The fireball swallowed all—

  A battery of cannons boomed: Starfire’s ignition sequence had kicked in thrusters to offset the instant acceleration—

  The acceleration was only a single Earth gravity, but Travis and Spin happened not to be holding onto anything at the moment it was applied, and they were at the top of a ten-meter shaft which had suddenly become vertical. At that moment Travis was underneath Spin, in the act of grabbing him around the waist with his left arm. Spin’s watch was torn from his wrist. They fell together, four and half meters in the first second, colliding randomly with the walls as they fell. Desperately Travis grabbed for a ladder rung—it wrenched itself out of his grasp. Starfire had already stopped accelerating when they slammed into the bulkhead, side by side. Travis hit feet first.

  On the flight deck, Robin tore at the throat of her uniform, opened it, twisted the chain of the platinum cross in her hand, and yanked it hard. The chain cut her neck. She threw the weightless cross against the wall.

  26

  “…with today’s disclosure that the asteroid apparently disintegrated during its closest approach to the sun. The loss of Starfire and its crew, which for more than a week NASA sources have privately held to be inevitable, has now been publicly admitted. This morning the White House announced that President Purvis will name a commission to inquire into the causes of the disaster. Meanwhile, a number of high-ranking NASA officials have submitted their resignations, among them the agency’s administrator, T. Whitney Rosenthal, and the director of the Johnson Space Center, Taylor Stith. For National Public Video, this is Harriet Richards reporting.

  A crumb of glowing carbon tumbled away from the sun. Inside it there were people.

  Spin was there, stretched in midair in the wardroom, rigged in a shock-absorbing hammock as elaborate as that which restrained Starfire inside its sealed cave. His head and body were taped to rigid splints of aluminum spars; he was medicated and fed through his veins by pressurized tubes; his wastes were removed by other tubes; ribbed, hissing gas bladders, in imitation of peristalsis, continually stimulated his circulation; an oxygen mask rested over his nose and mouth; his unseeing eyes—their pupils oddly dilated, the right slightly wider than the left—stared in the direction of the life-support electronics that monitored the ebb and flow of his life. His back was broken; possibly his skull was fractured. It was, perhaps, a miracle that he remained alive, a miracle of automation.

  Travis and Robin were there, although they had not seen much of each other in three days, not since the centripetal moment when Travis, stunned and disoriented, found Spin flopping beside him at the bottom of the corridor, weirdly limp and insensate, and in the same moment knew fire in his own shoulder and the bite of a crushed ankle, and simultaneously felt his heart crumple under the shock of knowing what had become of Melinda. He would have screamed, but he was an imploded man, unable to expel so much as a call for help without gasping for breath.

  Travis recovered, or seemed to, at once. His ankle and torn shoulder were of little concern so long as the ship remained weightless. Within moments, he and Robin had addressed themselves to the business at hand. Working desperately, they immobilized Spin, diagnosed him, plugged him in. Then Robin patched up Travis. When that emergency work was done, they collapsed in pained and exhausted sleep.

  In the next days they did necessary things, like repairing the cameras, replacing eroded lenses and fried circuitry, and constructing a cradle for Spin that they hoped would protect him from the acceleration still to come—breaking off to sleep only when they had exhausted themselves again. When the necessary things were done they did useful things, like tidying the ship and stowing what would not be needed. Then they did meaningless things, like replacing the instrument package in the shaft below the ship—meaningless because if they survived, the fragment of asteroid they must soon separate themselves from could not. But perhaps they would not survive; perhaps their calculations had been in error and they would miss Mercury: then, at least, the subsequent travels of the smashed asteroid, Melinda’s grave, would be recorded on those mute instruments forever, until someday someone chose to recover them.

  Now Travis was in the wardroom studying Spin, studying the steady pulsing march of the waveforms across the monitors, the rhythmic hiss and sigh of the pumps and bladders. The monitors indicated a steady pulse and respiration, stable blood pressure…

  Only to Spin had flying Starfire been an end in itself. To Travis, Starfire had been a means, a magnificent tool but subordinate to his purpose of re-entering the void. Robin’s stance toward the ship was different, more complex, but he thought it no less operational than his own; Melinda and Linwood had been proud of their vessel, but their pride was uncomplicated, or so it seemed to Travis. Spin, in his great modesty, had not thought of himself as a controller, had not thought of the machine as an instrument of his will or an extension of his power. Indeed, his most exalted moments came when he felt himself an extension of the machine. Spin’s passion for the ship had struck Travis as merely odd at first, but eventually it had come to seem worthy of respect. Far from robbing Spin of humanity, the symbiosis had infused Starfire with soul. Now the ship kept Spin alive. At any place within its massively parallel submicrocircuitry, did it sense its own striving?

  On the flight deck, Robin watched the bright meters and dials and monitors, straining her senses to the rhythm of the ship. One monitor showed Spin’s impassive face. Above it, the big screens were black. As the rock flew on, Robin struggled with loss.

  Her loss had begun before the mission. Since the day she fired him, she had not betrayed a hint of what she felt for Jimmy Giles—not to him, not to her bosses, not to her crew. What she felt was a rip in her side, a stone on her heart, hot sand beneath her eyelids. And guilt at her own relief. Her decisiveness, her laughter, her excitement, her rational calm since the moment she had made the decision—all had been at best a momentary diversion, at worst a disguise, an overlay on the truth. The intensity of her double-edged pain had never abated.

  She knew what the rest of them thought of Jimmy, of course. Linwood had been involved in an ongoing and occasionally acid debate with him; Spin had never taken him very seriously; Melinda had never liked him
at all. He was prissy and self-involved and politically as unsubtle as most men of his rank. No matter. If Jimmy could have disentangled himself from his guilt—not to mention from his wife and children—none of it would have mattered, so she thought. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe the impossibility of loving him made it possible for her to love him. Not anymore. Any possibility of love for him had died on Everest.

  What Robin struggled with now was the possibility of her own life, in the face of loss she could no longer deny. Like a ghost rising from the deep, Melinda’s face appeared on one of the monitors, speaking to her—

  —but it was only Travis, in the wardroom, playing Melinda’s jolly reel. He had played and played it; he kept returning to a scrap of conversation: Melinda at the press conference.

  “…two or three kids someday. Sure. But not until after I’ve got my own command.”

  “Sounds like a busy life,” said a reporter.

  “I’ve got time. I’ve got a head start.”

  And the audience laughed.

  Had she been mostly crushed, Travis wondered, or mostly burned? Or in the best case, simply vaporized? While the ship was so near her the question would haunt him, and perhaps for long after. There was more than the simple loss of her. She posed a question trembling on the brink of an answer, residing there in death, embedded in some form in the rocky matrix. Those who survived her were no less inextricably embedded in the matrices of the repetitive patterns of their lives.

  Three days out from the sun, as the color of the hot rock’s glow was cooling from apricot to mere brick, it suddenly expelled a cloud of fiery rubble. The last of the chemical explosives had gone to blow the cork out of Starfire’s bottle.

  Nursing his strained shoulder and broken ankle, Travis worked beside Robin a long slow time, freeing the ship from its tangle of cables, which snared it and the two of them like the snakes that crushed Laocoon and his sons. When they had cut free of the last of the black cables, Robin returned to the flight deck. Travis stayed outside the ship to talk to her through the floating debris. Verniers puffed again and again. With agonizing slowness the ship eased out through orbiting ice and black gravel. Travis pulled himself into the air lock just as the ship’s black fins sliced into the glowing haze above the horizon of the ruined asteroid.

  “Aim point numbers, please.”

  Travis was in NAVCOM now, peering at Melinda’s computer screen. He sucked a lungful of air. “X plus oh point oh one one seven, Y minus oh point four six one four, Z minus oh point oh three eight five.”

  “Copy X plus oh point oh one one seven, Y minus oh point four six one four, Z minus oh point oh three eight five.”

  “Roger.”

  “Stand by.” Robin pushed the buttons. The maneuvering thrusters spurted, and Starfire translated itself into a minimally different orbit about the sun. Slowly—so slowly their separation would not become evident for hours—the ship and the flake of rock began to part company.

  “Thank you, Travis.”

  He said nothing. The numbers weren’t his.

  Later he joined her on the flight deck. Mercury was visible now on the screens, a bright spark growing brighter against a dazzling field of stars. Soon the planet would resolve itself into a ball as bleak and cratered as the moon.

  Travis let his gaze slip sidelong from the starry screen to peer at Robin. Her clear white skin was luminous in translated starlight, showing a fine network of lines around the eyes and mouth that reminded him that she was, after all, as old as he was, older. The enigma and challenge of her presented itself in light that to him was new.

  She caught him looking. “Hey, cowboy.”

  He forced a grin. “Hey, Cap’n.”

  They looked away, and the silence threatened to stretch into its old intransigence. Neither wanted that to happen. “It was easy for you, Travis,” she said, her voice husky. “What?”

  “It was easy for you to do the right thing.”

  “The right thing?”

  “Save Spin.”

  “Save him!” He was too surprised for anger.

  “Because you wanted to, even without thinking about it. And because I ordered you to.”

  “Without me gettin’ in his way he might’ve done better.”

  “Whenever you’re ready to look at the chip, I’ll prove to you that you saved him. Without you he would have broken his neck.”

  “What’s the point of this?” he said impatiently.

  “You did what you could. I did what I had to.” Her hand went absently to her throat, and finding it bare, went to her brow, to shade her eyes against the stars.

  He was quiet a long time before he said, “No, Robin.” His reply, when it finally came rasping from his throat, surprised him as much as her. “You made the choice, when you’d just as soon we all died. In the face of that you did what was right.” After another pause he continued, with effort. “Robin, people say I’m real good at talkin’ about stuff that doesn’t mean much. Talkin’ people into things, sellin’ ’em things. But why we bother to stay alive…well, maybe I’ve never been too sure myself. You ever feel that way?”

  She studied him. “Do you mean the feeling that my life is a lie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I put a lot of energy into not thinking about that.”

  “But then you find yourself right there staring it in the face. The ones you were supposed to save die on you, or want to kill themselves so you can live. And if you don’t push the button, you’re sayin’ all our lives, theirs too, are lies—or worse, just dirty jokes.”

  “What if that’s the truth?” she whispered. “And I simply lacked the guts to admit it.”

  “I don’t know that it’s not true,” he rasped. “I don’t know one way or the other. I wanted to be dead the second I realized what Melinda did. And right now, if it weren’t for Spin, maybe I still would. Maybe it’s an open question.” He fell silent, worrying the thought. “But I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think it’s open for me anymore. It’s not just Spin; it is her, but it’s more than her. She died for us, who had more life than any of us. It’s not so much that I owe her as…that I can’t see the choice as trivial anymore.”

  Robin heard the thoughts he couldn’t find words for—that he would live and embrace life because it was a gift and not a burden, because it was a gift he had not earned. She wished she could be as accepting. “We’re a fine pair of heroes,” she said wearily.

  “Heroes!” Suddenly he laughed, surprising her—not a cynical laugh but a bubbling up of enjoyment, the revelation that comes with the punch line of a good joke. “Hell, Robin, we’ve been there before. We should know the difference.”

  “The difference?”

  “Between what we know and what they want to think. This time it’s gonna take more guts to play the part than to do the deed.” He smiled. “You up to it?”

  She studied him. “You never let me see this in you, Travis. You never let anybody see it.”

  “I didn’t have anything to show. Until maybe a couple of days ago.”

  She reached out her right hand and stretched across the yawning mouth of the central corridor. “Thanks for showing it now.”

  He leaned across and stretched out his right, the diamonds sparkling on his wrist. “You know something, I still owe you a mai tai.” His voice, stronger now, was still husky. He wondered if it would ever again be clear. “This time I won’t forget.” They shook hands.

  In the screens little Mercury, dense and massive, swelled like a stony balloon. They were diving at its bright limb, rushing at its baked stone with appalling velocity; within seconds they would add another bull’s eye to its splattered surface—

  —then they were soaring mere kilometers above its ragged scarps and ridges, painted in ink on gleaming silver. They plunged into shadow; at that instant lobate fire erupted silently below them, streaking across the gnarled landscape on a track precisely parallel to their own, flooding the darkness with lurid light. All that was l
eft of Everest had impacted with the planet.

  Mercury’s gravity tugged and bent the worldline of Starfire; the starry sky tilted—

  —and they were flying not away from Earth but on a course that in a month’s time would bend across that planet’s bows.

  “T minus ten seconds,” said the ship.

  “I have an all-green board,” said Travis, seated in PROP.

  “Copy.”

  “Three,” said the ship.

  “Two…”

  “One…”

  “Power.”

  “Ignition.”

  The fat red sun was sliding toward the long curve of the dunes; the desultory surf was the color of blood. Jimmy ran toward the sinking sun, jogged along the beach past picnickers packing up their baskets, and fishers stowing their gear, and sunbathers wrapping themselves against the cool of approaching evening.

  He was running against his anger, against his frustration, running to drain the energy he might otherwise have vented on his colleagues and superiors. This morning he’d quite unexpectedly received orders. He’d been promoted—wonderful! He was a full bird colonel now, not a light colonel anymore, which was a bit overdue in fact, at his age—

  —and with the rank came a new job. Jimmy Giles discovered that he wasn’t an astronaut anymore. The Air Force was transferring him to Colorado Springs, to an administrative post at Headquarters Space Command. Effective immediately. Put on your uniform and get out there, space available on the next plane. Wife and minor dependents and household goods to follow.

  So he drove to the Galveston beaches and ran. He couldn’t quite get over the suspicion that they were distancing him as rapidly as they could from the Starfire debacle. Maybe even letting him know it hadn’t been politic to let himself become so visible in the first place…though how was he supposed to have controlled that?

  Suspicion, hell. Don’t ever let anyone tell you Personnel doesn’t read the dailies. Anyway, thanks for the promotion, fellows. Join the Air Force and fly a desk.