by Diane Carey
“How do you know I made a mistake?” Roib cranked around on his swivel-stool, his top three limbs sweeping across several dynascanners, then back again to isolate key readouts. “Look at the mass here, and now look at it here. They’re different!”
“Mass don’t change. Maybe you was dreaming. Do people from your planet, do their eyes actually close when they sleep? Did you glue your eyes open or what? Maybe you slept through that class.”
Roib settled all four of his shoulders. “I didn’t build the instruments. This is what they say. I checked them. I calibrated them. I recalibrated them. They still say this. Here . . . let me point them at you and see if they say ‘thickheaded lox.’ ”
While the crew laughed, Dogan accommodated by blinking his reddened eyes at the numbers on the screens. Sure enough, they read fluctuating density on the moon in the middle.
“Yeh, that’s what it says,” he muttered, unconvinced.
“You see?” Roib squawked. “The quake moon is actually vibrating! The core is supposed to be hollow, yet it’s dense, yet there are quakes, volcanic activity, and plate movement! And the mass keeps changing!”
“It can’t,” Dogan insisted. “None of that fits together. Just get used to being wrong this time. When Gamma Dawn lifts the sensor blackout, we’ll move in close to the moon and prove you’re wrong. Then I can get back in the sack and finish squeezing out Anchorhead’s lungs.”
“Hey, Dogan!” Chuck Lindsay interrupted from nav/tactical station.
Lipping his pipe to the other side of his mouth, Dogan turned. “Yah?”
“Would you please explain to Emil that we can’t move during Gamma Night? Not even ten kilometers so he can see past the second moon? All the time he wants to move a little at a time and I keep saying it’s too dangerous. Tell him he’s gotta just wait.”
“Emil, we ain’t moving. I ain’t taking that kind of a chance, feeling around on thrusters without no sensors in a solar system full of debris and projectiles, asteroids and dust. We been through this before. The only way to move in Gamma Night is by dead reckoning and hope the navigation ain’t even slightly off. It ain’t worth it. There’s nothing out there we can’t look at in an hour, when Gamma Night lifts. You gotta just wait.”
Emil Pashke’s dark brown face braided into a sneer. “I hate neutron stars. If we didn’t have Gamma Night, we coulda been done with this job a year ago. Everything’s twice as long. Ten hours out of every thirty, stuck without sensors, feeling around . . . something that far away screwin’ us out of so many hours . . .” The cartographer went on grumbling into his console, but only the console listened.
Dogan snorted and glanced around. Nobody but Roib was excited about the short-range screens. Outside, not far from where the survey ship hovered, immobile during Gamma Night, the newly claimed Federation planet of Belle Terre hung in space with its butter-yellow sun way beyond it. Out of direct sight were six of the planet’s nine moons. From here, out the “windows,” three of the moons, including the largest one, could be seen standing in a row like chorus girls. The middle one was giving Roib a nervous attack. All the others were too small to get any attention.
Pretty good entertainment, that moon. The whole solar system was littered with moons and projectiles and every kind of junk that provided dangers for a ship trying to set up satellites and markers, trying to map the rich quarry of minerals that were here for the taking. While all the other moons were ordinary rocks running around in space, the moon in the middle bubbled and smoked with some kind of quakes and plate movement, some kind of constant volcanic activity. And it was dense, much heavier than size suggested it ought to be. The funniest part was that the core read hollow.
Now what? Send back a long-range message saying the moon’s mass was changing every once in a while? Hope somebody believed it? No chance to explain themselves? No two-way communication? Yeh, that’d go over.
It couldn’t be hollow. Physics didn’t allow that. Until today, they hadn’t moved in close enough to take serious readings, to find out why a dense body read hollow. Today they were going to get answers, and kill the silly rumors.
Except Roib was over here having a fit over mass changes. No way, no way.
“Gamma Night’s flippin’ the numbers around,” Dogan said. “Gotta be. Pretty soon the blackout’ll lift and we can move in close and pin the data to the mat.”
“Get that pipe away from me,” Roib snapped, waving a tentacle. “It smells worse than the circuits.”
“It ain’t lit.”
“Smells anyway.”
“You’re just mad because the moon ain’t changing.”
“It is changing. The orbit-wobble alone—”
“Squid, there are nine moons.” Pressing one stumpy elbow to the console, Dogan gripped his pipe. “Their orbits could affect each other. They’re shifting all the—”
“I checked that!” Roib’s chicken-egg eyes flared. “None of the others are wobbling! This isn’t my first week, Dogan! I checked—”
In a sharp fit of calm, Roib interrupted himself, put all his limbs on the edge of the console and pushed back out of the way, leaving the board free.
“Check it yourself,” he said.
By now everybody else was watching them. Why not? Nothing else to do till Gamma Dawn.
Dogan adjusted and readjusted the dials on the information coming in from the very limited sensor readings. Before him, a half-dozen screens flickered and struggled.
“Mass and density alternating every couple of minutes . . . Doppler shifts confirm . . . yeh. What I thought. It’s a mutant.” Ragged laughter roared from his throat. “Hey, Wayne, Lindsay, everybody—holy smoke! A mutant moon!”
“Hollow core,” Roib said. “I told you.”
Dogan shrugged. “The data says that. It can’t mean that. Get the difference? Don’t look at me smug like that.”
“I don’t have a smug look.”
“When your snorkel goes up over your top ear, that’s smug. Don’t give me that’s not smug. I know smug.”
Roib, beyond arguing, knew what he saw. “What was it you said about our work’s being dull?”
“I never said no such of a thing.”
“Contact the outpost at Meridian. Tell them. Send them this new information.”
Dogan gave his analyst a couple of moments to be terrified that he wouldn’t do it, then let him off the hook. “Soon as the blackout lifts. But you gotta put your name on this weirditude, cuz I ain’t.”
Roib’s excuse for a smile appeared. “Communiqué from your survey ship, your name goes on it. It’s automatic.”
“You’re a lucky spud.” Turning his compact body again to peer at the unenhanced picture on the main screen, Dogan scanned the shifting clouds and green seas of Belle Terre. Looked a lot like Altus IV, except for the green. Nice landmasses too, a couple of big ones, three small ones, and a spice of islands all over the place.
“Ain’t that a pretty planet?” he commented. “We’all gonna live there someday, once the colony gets rollin’. I’m gonna start a wrestling club. You all gonna work there. Marvin, you can be the timekeeper. Roib’s gonna scalp tickets. He’ll get ’em comin and goin’. Emil’s gonna draw all the posters. Lindsay and Wayne—”
“We wanna be bouncers,” Wayne piped. “I wanna beat up troublemakers. Get some scars. I got no scars to show the dames.”
“I wanna audition the dames!” Grady called out.
Chortling, Marvin scratched his dangly gray mustache. “What’re you gonna be, Dogan?”
“He’s the ref!”
“Ref and proprietor and the guy who auditions the dames!” Dogan crowed.
“Then I get to fit their sarongs,” Grady said.
“Why not?” Wayne pulled a radiation sheet off its clip and drew it around Grady’s chest. “You’ll look good in a sarong!”
As the crew cheered and Grady did a kitten dance across the lower bridge, Dogan proclaimed, “We’re gonna have some times! Parties and prize mat
ches and auditions and a grand opening every Christmas!”
“And picnics?” Roib asked, all his eyes narrowed, making him look like a cartoon butterfly drawn as happy. “In a garden?”
As the other men cheered, Dogan patted the analyst on one of the shoulders. “We’ll do it all, Roob. When the good times come again.”
Together they basked in possibility’s glow, wondering what the future would bring to this brand-new star system with its unusual moon and that habitable planet just out of reach.
The bridge fell quiet and entered a dreamlike condition, no lights or buzzers, the red alert now resting, few systems bothering to work during the blackout, and nobody had much to do. Couldn’t move the ship or study much, no sensor readings to pick at, only yesterday’s data to sift through. If only there were a starting bell and a couple of ugly sweaty meatheads crashing in the middle of the deck, this would be heaven.
Ten seconds later he was bouncing across the lower deck like a medicine ball. All he saw was feet, fingers, and spark sheets. Carpet grazed his cheek. Only the beard saved his chin from a bad rub burn. He landed with his barrel-shaped arms sprawled at his side and his stumpy legs poking up on the platform that had once held the command chair.
He raised his head. “What the hell . . . meteor?”
What happened to his eyes? They stung and didn’t work. Vents began to whir and suck at the gouts of smoke pouring from several system outlets. Couldn’t be good.
“Somebody tell me somethin’,” Dogan demanded. He rolled onto his stomach, put both wide hands under his chest, and shoved. His short body levered up and his head bobbed into a stratum of gray smoke. “Somebody tell me somethin’!”
“Got hit!” Grady’s unbodied voice called.
“By what?”
“Don’t know.”
Crawling up onto the ramp again, Dogan moved around to the middle of the ramp, to a point where he could see every station, now that the smoke was clearing. “Put all the local screens on. Let’s look out there.”
“We’ll only be able to read line of sight,” Wayne pointed out, but they knew that. He always did that when he was nervous, overexplaining what they already knew.
“What’s with the screens?” As the smoke thinned, Dogan cranked around and around, looking for a screen that worked. Every monitor flickered with static or struggled with an indistinguishable mass of color and shapes. None could focus or settle. “Try the direct hoods. Somebody tell me something.”
“I’ve got some feed coming in.” Roib peered at the only screen that showed crowded space, which was the hood of his direct feed. “It’s a ship!”
Short legs spinning, Dogan crossed the ramp and blinked into Roib’s hood, the only clear view of near-space. Outside, not fifty meters away, hung a mustard-colored ship the shape of an old-fashioned house key. About sixty feet, maybe? Not very big. A third the size of the surveyor. Hard to judge, though, just by looking. Sensors were on, but offered crazy distorted numbers. He checked just to check—the other ship was ten feet long, unarmed, the ship was eighty feet long, carrying cannon, four feet long with—nah, no point looking at the sensors. Just use the old eyeballs.
“Holy smoke . . . Whose ship is that? You ever seen that design before? Who makes a ship that color? Makes me want a chili dog . . . You seen that shape before? Anybody?”
No takers.
“Did we have a collision or what?” Dogan pressed on. “When did space get so small that two ships gotta bump?”
“In Gamma Night,” Roib said, “we can’t tell how close we are to other solid objects. Maybe they came in for a look at us and then they didn’t know how close they were.”
“Lindsay, hail ’em. Tell ’em to back the hell off. We’re on a legitimate survey and they’re inside our primary maneuver zone and if they don’t back off I’m gonna have to throw the barrel on ’em. I don’t want to get bumped again. Can you get a reading on it? What kind of a ship is it?”
Roib squinted all his eyes. “I still got Gamma blackout here . . . can’t get clear readings. But it looks like a one- or two-man fighter to me. Maybe one-man. Linds, what do you think?”
“Never seen no fighter like that.”
“Didn’t ask if you recognize it, I asked what you think it is.”
“I don’t know what I think it is.”
“Thank you.”
Dogan stomped across the ramp to the tactical station and tried to pull up a catalogue. “Gimme ship to ship.”
“Okay, go.”
“Hello, this is Captain Dogan, Federation Survey Ship Kensington Taylor. We’ve got a limited survey warrant giving us exclusive territorial license in this star sys—”
A deafening boom ate his words. The ramp under him tipped, then dropped a foot. Dogan dropped to meet it, this time landing on a knee and an elbow. His meaty paws served as perfect platforms and he was back on his feet in an instant.
“Talk!” he ordered.
“They’re shooting at us!” Grady shouted. “They didn’t collide with us—they were shooting!”
“Phasers?”
“Not phasers,” Roib said. “Some kind of troto-glycic energy arch. I can’t trust these readings, but I think he’s armed about ten times better than we are! Dogan, do something! He’s powering for another hit!”
“Clean up!” Dogan bellowed. “Feet on the mat! Gamma Night, no sensors, odds against us! Hot damn, we’re cookin’ now! Full shields up! Battle stations!”
The robe snapped from his shoulders and roiled to the deck as Dogan thumped along the circular ramp. Grady yanked the fight poster down. Behind it was a battlefield tactical display that hadn’t been active in years. Spark blinds and radiation sheets crashed back in the hands of Lindsay and Wayne and splayed to the spark-scorched carpet. The crew scrambled to remember skills they hadn’t used since basic training, to man stations that had been on standby for more than three years.
Another strike from the mystery ship sent the Taylor heaving and layered the deck with a blanket of sparks that poured from the underlying electricals.
“There go the cargo pressurization ducts,” Grady moaned. “Teratogenic supply feed’s ruptured too. He means business.”
“We got electron drain in the containment grid!” Wayne shouted. “I gotta take care of that myself!”
“Go,” Dogan allowed. Wayne disappeared down the emergency chute to the engine room. Dogan held on to Roib’s chair post and shouted over the whine. “Who’s the tactical officer?”
Grady and Roib gawked at him. Lindsay, Marvin, and Pashke gaped at each other.
“Well, I know it’s not me,” Lindsay said. “Emil, wasn’t it supposed to be you?”
“I don’t remember,” Pashke countered. “We never got shot at before. Grady, ain’t it you?”
“I’m the mate!”
“Oh, yeah . . .”
“You sure it’s not you, Linds?”
“I’m the quartermaster. Maybe it’s Marv.”
“Marv’s on the helm,” Dogan interrupted.
Roib swiveled into the discussion while the mustard ship pivoted on his little screen and came around for another strafe. “I think it’s still Snyder.”
“Lot of good that does,” Dogan said. “He died two years ago.”
“He’s been doing a good job,” Grady muttered. “I say we let him keep it.”
“Lindsay, you cleaned the weapons ports last month, didn’t you? You be tactical.”
“Me?” Lindsay’s bony face dropped its color. “You want me to shoot at somebody? I’m an engineer!”
Dogan felt his own features crumple. “Learn fast!”
A new blast scraped the underside of the surveyor, sending the surveyor into a disk-spin. Dogan’s next words, whatever they would’ve been, were licked away by centrifugal force. He got his piglet-shaped fingers around a rail strut and managed to hold on until the thrusters sang and the shrieking autograv system tried to regain stability. In his periphery he saw Marvin fighting with the helm to
take manual control. His face twisted, but ten seconds later the ship stopped free-spinning across space.
“He sure does mean business,” Lindsay choked when he could speak again. “That one smashed our starboard—no, it didn’t . . . yes, it did—thruster’s gone. I was right the first time. I oughta learn to listen to myself.”
“Call Wayne,” Dogan said. “Have him fix it.”
“From inside?”
“Tell him do his best,” Dogan ordered. “Forget the secondary screens. Concentrate on the main screen. I gotta be able to see this bugger if I’m gonna tackle him.”
While Roib and Pashke both scrambled to do that, Grady shouted, “Send a distress signal!”
“It wouldn’t get 3 kilometers in Gamma Night. Why’d you even say things like that when you know better?”
Grady held out an imploring hand and explained, “At least get one ready to send. Then all we have to do is punch a button when the blackout lifts.”
“Mmm, yeah, okay, long as you’re reasonable . . . How do I do it? I never sent one before.”
Roib didn’t turn from his board, but called, “Deep Space Prospecting Emergency Code Sierra-Zero-Sierra and your personal ID clearance.”
“Can you do it for me?”
“Only if you’re dead.”
“Tell ’em I’m dead. I don’t care!”
Roib turned his tennis-ball eyes at Dogan and nearly wept. “Why are they shooting at us? They must want my quake moon! They know I’ve found the wobble and they want credit. I told you the moon was important!”
“I’m gonna get him behind the knees.” Dogan heard his own voice as if from another room. He tried to sound confident. They didn’t buy it. That was a power-packed ship out there. The surveyor was a lamb being circled by a hyena. A distress signal was no more than a formality at this extreme distance. The nearest outpost was months away at warp four. Rescue was a mirage. If they didn’t take care of themselves, nobody else would.
“Grady, we got anything on the starboard thrusters?”
“Not a damn thing.”
“Flood some energy through there anyway.”
“Energy? But we can’t use—”