by Wil McCarthy
Luna had drawn a crude map for him on a sheet of paper, and he dug it out now and looked at it as he walked, taking the steps and the turns that it indicated. Soon, he found himself at the door of one of the shacks, metal against metal, gray against gray. He took out the green key again and used it, and, squealing on its hinges, the door swung back into shadow.
He stepped into the shack, into the darkness of its interior. Felt for a light switch, didn't find one. He took a step... took another... His eyes began slowly to adjust, and with some surprise he realized that the lights were on inside, typically and dazzlingly white in the Unuan style, but still as nothing compared with the brightness outside. Just as well the Unuans were mainly in hiding; how would they react to such an astonishing reversal?
Pull switch number five, Luna's note said. He looked around, spotted a row of hand-sized switches along one wall. Numbers sat above them, painted on the wall in bright yellow. Number five was right in the middle.
“Well,” he said out loud, “what now?”
“Throw the switch,” he answered himself after a brief pause.
He stepped up to the bank of switches, grasped the handle of number five. Pushed it upward, felt it lock into place. Instantly, something shifted in the character of the background whine. It dropped, becoming softer, less insistent.
“Huh,” he said. Had he just saved the city? Had he completed his mission as simply and effortlessly as that? He began to feel a little insulted. Luna had doubted his ability to do this? Did she think him so helpless, he who had traveled among the stars?
Shaking his head, he moved away from the switches, walked back to the rectangle of bright sky and ground that was the world outside the shack's doorway.
The car, when he got back to it, hummed to life on his second try, its electric motor engaging, jerking the whole machine into sudden motion. He fought the controls for a moment, then settled down for the drive back to Luna's office. He negotiated one corner, then another, and then sped up for a long, straight section of road.
Above him, shaded slightly on one side and burning with unholy fire on the other, an edge of Vano peeked out from behind the car's opaque roof of painted, padded metal.
Something about the image nagged at Jhoe's mind, disturbed him in some subtle way that he could not quite put his finger on. Vano looked like that, held that position in the sky when—
“Oh, right,” he said, suddenly and brightly. “The quakes.”
At that moment, the ground began to shake violently. The car's control wheel popped out of Jhoe's grasp, and the trees and buildings around him lurched for a few seconds, until a wall of plastered, whitewashed brick seemed to swerve out in front of him and smash the car to a halt. He was thrown forward against his restraints as he heard the sounds of buckling metal, of smashing glass and plastic.
Almost as an afterthought, he screamed.
And then, suddenly, the quake had ended and Jhoe's voice sounded loud in his ears. He let the scream die away. He looked around him, at the odd sculpture Luna's delicate vehicle had become.
“Oh, my God,” he said softly.
He sat there for several minutes, feeling another brief tremor come and go, later feeling the slow, mild rocking sensation that signalled the probable end of quake time. Then he sat for several more minutes in relative silence, the only sound the hot breeze blowing through the car's smashed windows.
Eventually, it occurred to him that he should restart the car and continue on his way. His time out here could have no benefit to his health, surely. Feeling a little sick, he engaged the INVERSU gear, then leaned over, grasped and turned the enabling key. The engine groaned, but did not start.
He released the key and then turned it again, with the same result.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, damn.” How would he explain this to Luna? The little vehicle had cost her dearly, he knew.
And then, he became aware of a growing, gnawing sensation in the caverns of his stomach. Damn the money and the vehicle, he was going to have to walk back to the Power Board building! The drive out had not taken long, but on foot he could be several hours getting back. Could he find a shelter that was closer? No, no, he didn't know his way around well enough for that!
He pulled up on the door handle and pushed out on the door, which moved a little and then pushed back. Had he become trapped? With a surge of energy he heaved his weight against the door, and then it gave suddenly and fell open with a squeal of metal.
Anxiously, he hopped out onto the street. From the outside, the car looked even worse, so he turned away from it and, without further ceremony, started off down the street at a brisk walk.
His head was throbbing right along with his stomach, he now noticed, and when he reached a hand up to touch the center of the pain, the pain sharpened tremendously until he pulled his fingers away again. They came away slightly bloody.
“Oh, wonderful,” he said, and wiped the stain off on his shiny blue Malhelan trousers. And this gesture caused him to notice the back of his hand, whose color had shifted somehow from its normal tan to a sort of pink-brown shade, like meat just beginning to cook.
A sunburn? Or, well, what would you call this, “alien spaceship burn?” Or could it be something more sinister? Would radiation damage turn the skin red?
The choker trees seemed to glare at him as he hurried down the empty street.
Chapter Seventeen
“Damn the radiation,” Tom said to Dade Soames. He had not raised his voice, but with the icy tone he'd conjured he hadn't really needed to. “I will not burrow underground like a mole while the most important discovery in human history unfolds around us! You go hide in the mines, but get that damn telescope working first!”
Dade looked angry. “Don't give me orders, Doctor. I am the second in command here, you'll recall, and if I order you down into the mines, you'll damn well do as I say.”
“I damn well will not.”
A sigh. Fingers running through bristled hair. “What do you need the telescope for? Specifically, I mean?”
“To observe the objects as they cross the Aurelo debris ring!” Tom said, and this time he did raise his voice. “And if I don't get to it in the next few minutes, they'll have got through and I'll miss the whole thing!”
Dade shook a hand, flat, as though it were an edged weapon he might possibly use against Tom if he had to. “That's all? That's all? Tomus, Yezu Manaka is in the Aurelo, in much better position than we are to observe the event.”
“Think, Dade. Think! At these angles two observations will give us almost full holographic coverage of the passage. One just gives us a flat picture, with no depth. Which would you rather analyze? Anyway, if luck does not favor Yezu in his placement, his observations may never even reach us.”
That seemed to wake Dade up a bit. “Yezu is in danger? Is that what you mean?”
“Quite possibly,” Tom agreed. “My friend, and yours too, I think. He may find himself in the objects' path as they blast through. I suspect not, I damn well hope not, but I'll need a look through the telescope to know for certain.”
Dade's face froze for a moment, and then his eyes began to roll and glitter. “Okay. Okay. You and I will both stay. I'll inform the captain and get the telescope fired up. Meet me on the bridge in two minutes.”
It took more than a moment for Tom's anger to fade. “Thank you!” he called out as Dade skated away.
Dade raised a hand and waved it in a gesture which said, rather unmistakably, yeah, yeah.
Tom stowed his gear again and skated off after the first mate.
~~~
Yezu's eyes flicked from instruments to viewport to instruments again as the ellipsoids zoomed silently past. Tiny pinpoints of blinding light, blue-tinged as they approached, then white and then a throbbing red-orange as they swept away again with those great, bright, diffuse smears running out ahead of them. Like backward-flying comets, but fast, bright fireworks tearing across a nighttime sky. Light seconds away, and yet they m
oved with tremendous angular motion, ten or twenty degrees per second. He should know how to compute their velocities and trajectories from that. He should, but he didn't.
Oh well.
He fancied he could feel the radiation firing through him, gamma rays, protons and electrons kicked relativistically from the ellipsoids' rear ends to rip tiny tracks through his flesh, through his organs and bones. Properly, he should have radiation prophylactics coursing through his system, sensing the passage of charged particles and high-energy gamma rays, and rushing in to plug the damaged places, to grab the ends of damaged molecules and piece them quickly back together again.
Properly, the Rockhammer should be sitting in a cave somewhere, with full 360-degree shielding instead of the 175 or so they got from huddling against the side of this small planetoid.
Properly, Yezu should view these events from some great far vantage point. Back with Tomus, for example, in the distant Centromo.
Oh well.
He fingered a switch, leaned over to speak into the audio plate mounted on the panel. “Rook to king's rook five, Tomus. Can you see this light show? It will have finished, of course, by the time you hear me say this, but you'll have just started seeing it. Isn't the speed of light funny sometimes? Well, anyway, I admit to a certain discomfort with being this close to the action. I worry for my genome. We all worry, all of us here. Still, since I cannot escape this extraordinary view, I shall take advantage of it.
“I must say, I never expected to find myself in a position like this. I gave up everything I had, for much less than this. How perverse and ridiculous, the twistings and turnings of life, and yet how grand.
“Oh dear, I've begun talking like a poet or a philosopher or something. I think that happens when you've gone petric with fear. I... Let me end this transmission here, with my dignity still intact. I shall speak with you soon.”
Another ellipsoid tore by outside the viewport. So fast! And so close this time! Were these the pursuers or the pursued? Attackers or attacked? Did it matter? Earth had not known a war since his early boyhood, so long ago, and his schools had never taught the subject in detail. He couldn't remember the protocols, who was supposed to do what to whom and at what time.
Or did war even have a protocol? He supposed, after all, that it probably did not. How could anyone enforce such a thing? What use the threat of retaliation, when actual, physical violence, without referees or regulators, formed the only medium of exchange?
An endless series of killing and destruction, without governance? How terrible for the combatants, and how much worse for defenseless innocents caught nearby! He shuddered. This thought disturbed him even more deeply than the goings-on outside the viewport.
~~~
“There they go,” said Dade, his face still pressed, ridiculously, against the telescope viewpiece as if he could crane for a closer view.
Tom grunted. He watched the image repeater's holie screen, more comfortably and with probably just as good a view as Dade had.
One of the ellipsoids, having punched through the Aurelo, burning a path for itself by running tail-first with engines on, had flipped around again and made a hard sprint for the distant Soleco hypermass. Now, hours later, it approached its target with no signs of slowing. Half a light-hour behind it, another ellipsoid followed, accelerating even harder. It had gotten a late start, but made up for it with raw speed, shrinking the distance slowly, steadily. It seemed to Tom that it would not catch up, not before the leader had reached Soleco.
The leader already has reached Soleco, he reminded himself. The events he witnessed now had already occurred, hours ago.
“Is that one chasing the other one?” Dade asked. “Does it mean to approach and attack it?”
“Presumably so,” Tom said, even though he suspected Dade had meant the question rhetorically. “But unless its weapons have terrific range, I don't think it will make it.”
“I don't think so either. Hey, does that front one look different to you? Little bit skinnier? Maybe slightly different color?”
Tom grunted. “Yes, I had thought about that. I really find it hard to tell at this range, though.”
Indeed, ahead of their plumes of relativistic flame the ellipsoids appeared as little more than dots, and he had to squint hard at them to see any detail. Not that they had much detail to be seen.
“How fast do you think they're accelerating?”
“I don't know,” Tom said. “I would think you more qualified to answer that than I.”
“Oh,” Dade said. “Yeah, I guess so. Hang on a minute.”
He pulled away from the viewpiece and swiveled, almost weightless on his feet, to face a computer station. He took up a stylus and began sketching and tapping.
Tom watched the ellipsoids on the telescope's image repeater. The pursuer had a much longer and brighter plume behind it, and yes, it did appear somewhat fatter than the vessel it pursued, and somewhat redder. Could that simply be a function of doppler shift? Oh, of course; it moved away from him more quickly! The light reflected and radiated from it would have its wavelength stretched by that greater velocity.
“Several hundred gee,” Dade said. He paused, put the back end of the stylus in his mouth for a moment, then took it out and resumed feeding sketches and figures to Wedge's computer. “Uh... about four hundred gee for the leader, and almost five hundred for the pursuer. Their velocity is up around sixty-five percent of lightspeed. I'd have better numbers if I knew the ranges more precisely.”
“Ah, well, later when we've got Rockhammer's data we should find it easier to piece this all together. Speaking of which, let's look back at Lacigo again.”
“Okay.” He twitched his hand, spun the stylus in his fingers. “You know, these guys are really stupid. Here they are, inertially shielded and practically massless... For them, that huge acceleration is just about free, and they're pissing it away like it means nothing. Darkness, you give me one of those ships and in three weeks I'd own the cosmos.”
Shaking his head, Dade put the stylus back in its niche and pressed a pair of buttons, then went back to the telescope controls again. The image on Tom's repeater screen swung rapidly, taking the two ellipsoids from view. Within a few seconds, the not-quite-blinding glare of Lacigo filled the screen. The dwarf star, with its tiny, vampiric companion, looked like a glowing hand with fingers outstretched.
Only one ellipsoid could still be seen close by, a tiny pinpoint at the head of a curling comet's tail, a tail that formed a thirty-degree arc measuring probably several light-minutes in length. As he watched, the shape of the tail distorted as the particles which comprised it continued their relativistic scattering, moving in straight lines while their point of origin hooked away.
“Where have they all gone?” Tom asked, rhetorically.
“I don't know,” Dade answered. “It looks like they're well away from Yezu, though. I'm switching to the spotter scope.”
Tom's image remained unchanged.
“Ah. Ah. Look at this!”
Dade pulled his face back, worked the massive dials controlling the telescope's orientation, pressed his face back in the viewer again, and pulled back to work the dials once more.
The repeater image jumped, and jumped, and jumped again. And when it had finished moving, Tom saw the tangle of contrails Dade had intended him to. Good... good Lord, what was going on out there?
“You see that?” Dade asked, his face down in the viewpiece again.
“Oh yeah.”
“What mess. What do you guess they're up to?”
Tom, not replying, studied the image and thought for several seconds. He saw five trails. Two farther ahead, twisted and contorted like carelessly tossed yarn. The other three, considerably less wiggly, seemed to close, purposefully, menacingly, on the pair two or three light-minutes ahead of them.
“The ones out ahead, the ones who flee... I think they've attempted to conceal their true position. The pursuers see an image several minutes out of date, and
can't detect course changes until well after they occur. Oh, but... let me think. The pursuers close in from the sides, yes? You agree, you see that as well?”
Dade grunted noncommitally.
“If the pursuers avoid a stern chase and select a path so that they can move more slowly than the pursued, they take advantage of a smaller time dilation. They can think faster!”
“No, hang on,” Dade waved his arms around as if erasing Tom's suggestion from the air between them. “Time dilation isn't big factor at those velocities. I think they're trying to catch up, but they just haven't managed it yet.”
“Hmm. Maybe, yes.”
Light blossomed on the repeater screen. Brightness, pouring from the telescope viewpiece, illuminated the side of Dade's face. Tom winced, blinked... and stared. One of the ellipsoids under pursuit had disappeared. Had, well, exploded into a ball of glowing gas. The trail behind it went arrow-straight for a moment, and then stopped. The comet's head, diffuse and expanding, had separated from the tail.
“I guess they didn't conceal their location well enough,” Dade said.
Tom pointed. “Look at the other one. Its course changes have become more violent. Does it accelerate faster, as well? It looks that way to me.”
“Uh, yeah, I think so. He didn't like losing his friend like that.”
Tom thought that comment a little overly anthropomorphic, but didn't say so out loud. The object did look, well, unnerved.
Tom and Dade watched the chase in silence for a few minutes.
The sharper course changes seemed to have done the fugitive some good; it had pulled farther away from its enemies, and had even begun, in a tentative sort of way, to loop back around behind them. Tom doubted it could complete this maneuver, but he found he admired the attempt.