Deadman Switch

by Timothy Zahn

Woe to those going down to Egypt for help, who put their trust in horses, who rely on the quantity of chariots, and on great strength of cavalrymen …

  Quietly, I slipped out of the bridge, leaving Freitag and the others to their watch. And their confidence.

  It didn’t take the ten hours Eisenstadt had been prepared for. It was, in fact, just under an hour later when the Kharg’s pseudogravity abruptly vanished.

  We had arrived.

  There were no warning sirens, no terse announcements of red alert or whatever as I left the command ready room and floated hurriedly across the small lounge to the bridge proper. Not that that was really surprising; Freitag would hardly have left matters to a last-second scramble for battle stations, any more than he had permitted me to stray farther from the bridge than the nearby ready room. Still, somehow, the silence was more unnerving than the sounds of even a pitched battle would have been. As if the bridge crew—perhaps even the entire ship—had been suddenly killed or disabled … Heart thudding in my ears, senses fully alert, I slid open the bridge door and pulled myself in.

  And, naturally, instantly felt like a fool. Everyone was still alive and well, working quietly at their posts. The overall sense of the room was concentration, underpinned with tension and controlled nervousness, but there was nothing that seemed to indicate imminent danger.

  I took a deep breath, privately embarrassed by my sudden wild imagination … and preoccupied with that, it took me another second to realize that that very lack of danger sense was in itself a signal that something here wasn’t right.

  Calandra was sitting quietly to one side, strapped into a ditto station chair where she could observe without being in the way. Giving the wall a push, I floated over to her. “What’s wrong?” I murmured.

  She shrugged fractionally, her sense uneasy. “There doesn’t seem to be anything out there,” she said.

  I frowned, giving all the displays within eyeshot a quick scan. They meant little to my untrained eye. “Error?” I asked.

  She flicked a glance at Eisenstadt and Zagorin, the latter working on getting into a meditative state—

  I was looking at Zagorin, not any of the displays; but even so my peripheral vision was dazzled by the brilliant flicker of light that flashed across the room. “What—?”

  I was drowned out by the warble of warning sirens. “Radiation attack,” one of the crewers snapped. “Bow-starboard hull registering particle fluxes of—it’s off the scale, sir.” His voice sounded awed and more than a little shaken. “Heavy magnetic flux residue—focused particle beam weapon, almost certainly.”

  “Backtrack it, Kernyov,” Freitag ordered another man. “Pinpoint the source. Costelic, how much got through?”

  The first crewer opened his mouth to speak … paused. “Uh … virtually none, sir,” he said slowly, frowning at his displays in disbelief. “The inner hull sensors are recording just barely above background.”

  “The hull is designed to block radiation, isn’t it?” Eisenstadt asked.

  “Not from particle weapons that go off the scale,” Freitag said tartly. “You got a spectrum profile yet, Costelic?”

  “It’s coming in now, sir.” Costelic paused, his puzzlement growing even deeper. “It … doesn’t appear to have been a beam, sir. The distribution suggests an extremely hot thermal spectrum, almost like residue from a point source.”

  “Some kind of nova or star-collapse remnant, maybe?” Eisenstadt suggested doubtfully. “A wall of radiation, sweeping past might give readings like that.”

  Freitag shook his head, studying Costelic’s readings. “Too sharply defined for that. Kernyov!—where’s that backtrack report?”

  I looked at Kernyov in time to see him wave his hands helplessly. “It doesn’t backtrack, sir,” he said, voice rich with frustration. “I can pull a vector from the particle velocities—it’s vague, but it’s there—but there just isn’t anything in that direction.”

  “What do you mean, isn’t anything?” Freitag demanded. “That radiation came from somewhere.”

  “I know, sir, but there’s nothing larger than a few microns in the indicated direction.”

  Freitag rubbed his fingertips together thoughtfully. “We’re well within Solitaire system’s cometary halo. Anything nearby large enough for a ship to be hiding behind?”

  “I’ve already checked, sir,” was the prompt answer. “There are eight good-sized comets visible on scope, but none of them is even remotely near the radiation vector. Also checked for neutrino emissions that might indicate fission or fusion going on; again, negative.”

  Freitag snorted and turned to Eisenstadt and Zagorin. “I want some answers, Doctor. When’ll she be ready?”

  “Thunderhead?” Eisenstadt asked, peering at Zagorin’s impassive face. There was no response. “Thunderhead?” he repeated, throwing a questioning glance at Calandra and me.

  “Doctor—” Freitag began.

  “It’s not Zagorin, Commodore,” Calandra spoke up. “She’s in the proper meditative state.”

  Freitag’s eyes flicked to her, as if he was going to argue with her diagnosis. “Then why isn’t it working?” he demanded instead.

  I could see her brace herself. “I’d guess, sir, that the trouble is on the thunderhead side.”

  Freitag transferred his glare to Zagorin. “Is it, now. Sort of as if they led us out here and then deliberately pulled back?” He shifted the glare once more, this time to Eisenstadt. “I don’t suppose, Doctor, that you’d care to speculate on why these friends of humanity would do something like that?”

  It was the first time I’d heard the thunderheads referred to in that way; and from the way Eisenstadt winced, I gathered the phrase had been his own coinage. For the first time I realized just how hard he’d pushed to get this trip approved, and how much of his reputation and prestige he’d put on the line for it.

  And now, with it threatening to crumble right in front of him, I saw his mind frost over in the face of Freitag’s question. He glanced at me, an unspoken plea behind his eyes— “Perhaps,” I spoke up, “they’re simply unable to make contact.”

  “They can run a zombi over nine light-years farther from Spall than this,” Freitag countered.

  “But we’ve never had a ship come in from this direction,” I pointed out, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. Now it was me on the hot spot, and I wasn’t at all sure where I was even headed with this. “None of the colonies is anywhere near this path.”

  “And?” he challenged.

  “Well …” I floundered a bit. “Perhaps the radiation here is a clue. Coming from seemingly nowhere, and all—”

  “I hope you’re not going to suggest the radiation is scaring them off.”

  I clenched my teeth. “I don’t think the radiation per se is bothering them, no. But perhaps there’s something else associated with the Cloud generator that is.”

  Freitag cocked an eyebrow. “Oh? What Cloud generator is that?” he asked, hand waving across the empty displays.

  “There’s nothing that says the Cloud generator has to be in normal space, is there?” I asked doggedly. Spur-of-the-moment idea or not, I had no intention of letting myself be bullied into just abandoning it. “The Cloud itself certainly doesn’t seem to be. And if the Cloud was created to keep the thunderheads inside Solitaire system, maybe the generator itself was designed to keep them out.”

  Freitag’s mouth opened … closed again. “Uh-huh,” he said at last, thoughtfully. “Interesting, indeed. It’s supposed to be impossible for something to be at rest in Mjollnir space, but let that pass for the moment. Costelic, have we got a solid fix on our position here?”

  The navigator was opening his mouth to reply when, without warning, the Kharg lurched and gravity abruptly returned.

  “Hold it—!” Freitag snapped, his flash of anger turning to equally sharp embarrassment as he suddenly remembered he was yelling an order to a dead man. “Kernyov!—get his hands away from that thing.”

 
; “No!” Eisenstadt barked as Kernyov reached for the Deadman Switch board. “We could lose our path!”

  Freitag threw him a stabbing glare. “We may already have lost it—”

  And, mid-sentence, the circuit breakers cracked and gravity again vanished. Freitag swore under his breath, and for a long second seemed to be trying to regain his mental balance; then the gears meshed and he was back in control again. “All right, let’s sort this out. Costelic, where are we now?”

  The navigator peered at his displays. “Not too far from where we started, Commodore. Looks like we basically did a short loop, back around to a point about five million kilometers closer in to Solitaire. I can give you an exact location in a minute.”

  Freitag eyed me. “You want to try and explain this one, Benedar?” he suggested. “You’ve got a choice: two separate Mjollnir-space generators or one extremely large one. Take your pick.”

  I took a deep breath, trying desperately to come up with an answer that wouldn’t sound overly stupid—and as abruptly as the last time, the displays again flashed with light.

  Eisenstadt yelped something, the words drowned out by the warbling of the radiation alarm. “What in chern-fire—?”

  “Shut up,” Freitag snapped. “Costelic?”

  “Same as before, Commodore,” the other reported. “Hot radiation, but without any of the penetrating power of a beam weapon.”

  For a moment longer the activity continued on the bridge, with crewers reporting generally the same findings as before. But I was watching Freitag … and because I was, I saw the moment when his irritated puzzlement turned suddenly to something cold. “Commodore?” I asked tentatively.

  He ignored me. “Costelic … did we get anything on the aft-starboard instruments?”

  “The flash came from the bow-starboard side again—”

  “I know where it came from,” Freitag said tightly. “I’m asking about aft-starboard. Specifically, ninety degrees from the flash.”

  “Ah—yes, sir.” Costelic’s fingers skittered across the keys. “There’s not really much of anything there, sir. Solitaire system is that direction, of course; a couple of comets in the distance … just a moment.”

  “What is it?” Eisenstadt asked.

  “We’ll know in a minute,” Freitag told him.

  I watched as Costelic’s sense took on a tinge of awe … and when he lifted his gaze from his displays his eyes were haunted. “Aft-starboard instruments show a tube-shaped region of high particle density, Commodore,” he said, the words coming out with some difficulty. “Expanding rapidly into an even larger tube of … extremely hard vacuum. A large fraction of the high density material reads as superexcited helium.”

  The muscles in Freitag’s back visibly tightened. “And the optical scanners?”

  Costelic braced himself. “It’s there, all right, sir. Computer’s doing a cleanup and compensation now—be just a few more seconds.”

  “It who?” Eisenstadt asked. “What did you pick up, one of the thunderheads?”

  “Hardly, Doctor,” Freitag said darkly. “That splash of light and particle radiation … was the backwash of a spacecraft.”

  Eisenstadt blinked. “A space—?”

  And all at once his sense turned to quiet horror. “You mean … traveling space-normal?”

  Freitag nodded grimly. “And over nine light-years in from the edge of the Cloud, too. Even at—looks like they’re doing something over ten percent lightspeed—even at that rate they must have been doing this for one smert of a long time. Costelic?—where’s that adjusted data?”

  “Coming through now, Commodore … oh, bozhe moi.”

  The last word was an abrupt whisper. For a long moment Freitag gazed at his displays … and I watched his sense go from disbelief to something akin to horror.

  Slowly, he looked up, turning to face Eisenstadt. “My error, Doctor,” he said, his voice icy calm. “It’s not, in fact, one spacecraft heading inwards toward Solitaire. It’s something close to two hundred of them.”

  Eisenstadt stared at him. “A war party?”

  “I don’t see what else it could be,” Freitag nodded.

  I suddenly noticed my hands were clenched tightly at my sides. “Couldn’t they simply be colony ships?” I asked, moved by something I only vaguely understood to give the strangers the benefit of the doubt.

  Freitag looked at me. “Does it matter?” he asked bluntly. “Whether they want territory or a fight, the end result is still the same.

  “Solitaire is under attack.”

  Chapter 28

  “… THE SHIPS, FORTUNATELY, ARE only about half the size we’d originally estimated,” Freitag said, splitting his display to show both an actual photo as well as a computer-scrubbed rendition. “Nearly forty percent of the size and mass is taken up by this umbrella-like thing, apparently a scoop-and-shield arrangement that magnetically grabs interstellar hydrogen and funnels it into the drive—those four nozzles on the underside—while simultaneously protecting the passengers from any atoms and micrometeors that the fields missed. The main body of the ship is back here—” he indicated it— “hanging about a kilometer beneath the drive section.”

  “Held there by what?” Governor Rybakov asked coolly. All things considered, I thought, she was taking this with considerable composure.

  “A cable, we assume,” Freitag told her. “Unfortunately, the Kharg’s cameras weren’t good enough to resolve it. That gives us a lower limit for its strength, though, and it’s considerable.”

  “How considerable?” Rybakov demanded. “Beyond Patri capabilities?”

  Eisenstadt shook his head. “I’ve done some checking and we could duplicate it. Tricky and expensive, but possible.”

  The tension in the governor’s sense eased a bit. “At least they’ve got similar technology,” she murmured. “I suppose we should be grateful for small favors.”

  Freitag and Eisenstadt exchanged glances. “Perhaps, Governor,” Freitag said cautiously. “But don’t forget that these ships have been running, probably constantly, for something like eighty-five years—and without putting in at a port for maintenance, I might add. That implies a tremendous technological consistency; and for them to be willing to ride the things in the first place implies an equally impressive confidence in that technology.”

  “Although we don’t really know the ships are manned, do we?” Rybakov countered. “They could just as easily be robots. And as far as your assumed consistency is concerned, remember that we also don’t know how many ships they had when they first started out. These one hundred ninety-two could conceivably be just the tail end of a fleet that originally numbered in the thousands.”

  “Unlikely,” Freitag grunted. “Easy enough to check, though—all we have to do is search their backtrack for derelicts or debris.”

  “Provided the thunderheads will cooperate in such a search,” Rybakov said, turning her gaze on me for the first time. “Which is why I wanted Benedar to be in on this conference today.”

  I gazed back at her … and it was only then, faced with the contrast in attitudes, that I suddenly realized just how much Eisenstadt’s original antagonism toward me had diminished over the past few weeks. “I’ll help in any way I can,” I said evenly.

  She almost grimaced, her sense a mixture of distaste and determination reminiscent of when she’d come to Randon to retrieve her illegally issued customs IDs. “I understand you’ve been keeping an eye on these Halloas Dr. Eisenstadt is using to talk to the thunderheads,” she said.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “Though at the moment there’s only one Seeker there to keep an eye on.”

  “And … ?”

  I shrugged. “So far things seem to be going all right. Shepherd Zagorin is exhibiting some subtle changes, but they seem to be mainly adjustments to the thunderhead presence. There’s no indication that they’re subverting her or anything like that.”

  Rybakov glanced at Eisenstadt; peripherally, I saw his nod of agreement. “Fo
r the moment we’ll assume you’re right,” she went on. “So. If they’re so cooperative and friendly, explain why they didn’t tell us about the Invaders sooner.”

  I winced. “We don’t actually know they’re deliberate invaders—”

  “You can practice turning the other cheek on your own time,” Rybakov cut me off. “Just answer the question, and save the moralizing for your religious friends.”

  “I was answering it, Governor,” I told her, fighting back my own irritation. “I was trying to suggest that the thunderheads may not have said anything about them because they themselves may not see it as an invasion.”

  She snorted. “Ridiculous. What do they think they’re coming for, a picnic?”

  Eisenstadt cleared his throat. “It’s possible they’ve examined both the ships and their passengers and concluded they won’t be wanting Spall,” he said. “We think it likely they did the same with us before they first started guiding us through the Cloud.”

  “The fact remains that, unlike the Invaders, they let us in,” Rybakov countered. “Or are you going to suggest the Invaders were offered the same Deadman Switch approach and were turned down?”

  “The Invaders may not have Mjollnir drive,” Eisenstadt pointed out. Just as I was doing with the aliens, he was clearly trying to give the thunderheads every possible benefit of the doubt. “We won’t know until we can take better pictures and see if the ships are equipped with the necessary hull lacings.”

  Rybakov grimaced. “All right, then, let’s try it from another direction. According to the report you filed when you first asked for a Solitaran zombi, the thunderheads were offering to show you the Cloud generator. They lied about that; what’s to say they aren’t lying about other things, too?”

  “Yes, well, we wondered about that too,” Eisenstadt said, embarrassment seeping through his professionalism. “If you go back and check the tapes, you find that the thunderheads promised to take us to the origination—their word—of the Cloud. ‘Origination,’ my dictionary tells me, is something that gives origin to, or something that initiates. I assumed at the time that they meant the generator of the Cloud; what I gather they actually meant was the reason for the Cloud’s existence.”