by Brian Smith
“Let’s begin,” he said. “Theorem one, logic one. . . .”
Chapter 10
September 2093
Barsoom Traders Torchship Thuvia
Mike Ashburn was in the ship’s gym, wearing weights strapped to his forearms and calves as he pushed himself through an arduous treadmill run. Their next stop was going to be in the Trojans, after which they’d burn for Ell-4, followed by a layover at Terra during which he was anticipating a visit with his sister and her husband. Most of Ell-4’s inhabitants lived in almost full Terran gravity, and he didn’t want to walk around feeling slumped over, fatigued, and weak while he was there, nor even more so while he was on Earth.
It had been far too long since he’d been back, and lately he’d been dreaming of stepping outdoors into a cool autumn morning under a blue sky, without an exosuit. He wanted to breathe natural air, walk on a golden bed of fallen leaves, and listen to the wind rustle through the trees. He wanted to feel the kiss of rain, let the ocean lap at his feet, and swim in the warm waters of a tropical sea. As much as he loved Mars and the life he’d made for himself, only native Terrans could really understand what it meant to give up Earth and live elsewhere in the solar system. There was no place else quite like it. Even if they found a similar place—perhaps one of the two green worlds waiting out there at Alpha Centauri—it wouldn’t really be the same. There was only one Earth.
A smear of light played across his oculars; he was in virtual, running a hillside path in North America’s Columbia River Gorge. The outline of the edges of his treadmill were represented by translucent bars in his overlay, making sure the virtual landscape didn’t trick him into stepping off the treadmill by accident and thereby sending himself sprawling into the nearby bulkhead. A message light abruptly appeared and began blinking in the upper left corner of his vision; he opened a subwindow, and the face of Gina Jackson suddenly hovered godlike over the path, moving along with him as he ran.
“What’s up?” he asked, trying not to sound as winded as he felt.
“We just received a message relay from another company ship: the Kara Vasa. She’s just beginning a down-well burn from the Jovian system for Mars.” Jackson didn’t need to add that Mars was on the far side of the sun from Thuvia at present; any message coming from headquarters at Kasei Spaceport would have to be relayed around old Father Sol.
Ashburn nodded, breathing heavily. “Don’t keep me in suspense, Gina. What did they want?”
Jackson looked uncomfortable. “It’s an odd one. The company has lost telemetry on Dejah Thoris. We were the last company ship to hold her in-network in something close to real time. HQ is requesting an upload of our own network logs; they’re trying to triangulate her exact position and trajectory for when she fell off the net.”
Ashburn wasn’t normally paranoid, by any means, but Jackson’s words hit him in the gut like a cold ball of ice. He reached out, slapped the cutoff for the treadmill, and came out of virtual. Jackson’s face was still in its own comm box in his AR overlay, however. “When was the message sent?” he asked.
“From Mars? About an hour and forty-five minutes ago. The signal had to go about 12.5 AU to get to us.”
Ashburn barely heard her; he called up a virtual representation of the solar system, and an astrogation plot of their own trajectory towards the Trojans. It was a twelve-day trip at one Martian gravity, and they were already past midpoint turnover and into their deceleration hard-burn—they’d left Titan a week ago today. Given the positions of the planets, Dejah Thoris had been looking at a fifteen- or sixteen-day burn back to Mars—inefficient but paid for by the customer, so it didn’t much matter. Mike tried to remember when the old Deety was going to burn for home. Was it the same day Thuvia had burned? the day after? or even one more day after that? He hadn’t paid attention to their schedule as he’d had no need to.
“You okay down there, captain?” Jackson added when he’d gone awhile without answering.
“Fine,” he replied absently. “You have the watch?” he added, certain that was the case but unwilling to make assumptions.
“I do indeed.”
“Okay. Start compiling the network logs Kasei is asking for, and zipping them up for transmission, and alert the engineer that we’ll be sucking some of his electrical mojo to make the signal as strong as possible. Kara Vasa is on the burn. Instead of trying to track her for relay, we’ll just bounce it off the Jovian comm array instead. Don’t send it without my say-so, though. I’ll be adding a personal note to Boss Forester that I still need to write.”
“Will do. Anything else for me?”
“No, that’s it,” Ashburn replied.
Jackson didn’t switch off right away, though. “What do you think might have happened?”
“It could be anything. It’s kind of pointless to speculate. They might have had a glitch with their onboard networking, or possibly a problem with the reactor,” he surmised, although he mentally dismissed the latter almost out of hand. The Deety was his old ship and he knew her backward and forward. Sasha Denisovich, the Deety’s engineer and a good friend of his, kept her power plant tuned like a Swiss watch. The pit in Ashburn’s stomach grew a little heavier. “Anything in the message about a distress call?”
“Nothing,” Jackson replied, “but a communications casualty that knocked them out of network might account for that as well.”
“Well, hopefully it’s something minor and they’re just fine. Start on those logs and I’ll be up to the bridge shortly. We can look at the keplers ourselves. We’ve got nothing better to do for a day or two anyway, right?”
The prospect of doing something that might help—anything—clearly appealed to Jackson; her face brightened visibly. “Sounds good, captain.” She switched off, vanishing from his overlay. Ashburn dabbed at his face with a towel as he took off the body weights and went for a quick shower and a change of clothes.
Please, God, let them be okay, he prayed as he went. At the very least, please don’t let this be my fault!
***
Ashburn was on Thuvia’s bridge less than an hour later, seated in the captain’s chair and tapping away at a virtual keyboard only he could see. He kept the message short and to the point:
XXXX BT XXXX
--- CONFIDENTIAL --- NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE ---
TO:FORESTER, TY
FROM:ASHBURN, MICHAEL
SUBJ: DEJAH THORIS
1. SUBMITTING NETWORK LOGS AS REQUESTED. HOPEFULLY, YOU’VE HEARD FROM HER BY THE TIME YOU RECEIVE THESE. SPOKE FACE TO FACE WITH CAPTAIN XIANG AT SATURN. SHE DIDN’T MENTION ANY ONBOARD PROBLEMS TO ME AND THE SHIP LOOKED GOOD.
2. REGARDING OUR LAST CONVERSATION PRIOR TO MARS DEPARTURE, INTERROGATIVE: DID BILL CAMPBELL EVER FOLLOW UP WITH YOU ABOUT HIS “FAVOR”? IT IS DONE, BUT I WAS NEVER CLEAR ON WHETHER IT WAS FOUNDATION BUSINESS OR NOT. I PASSED COPIES OF DATA TO CAPTAIN XIANG TO COURIER BACK TO MARS AND CAMPBELL. COULD BE A COINCIDENCE?
3. REGARDING THE DEETY, WE’LL BE LOOKING AT KEPS ON THIS END AND FOR ANY OTHER CLUES THAT MIGHT HELP. THUVIA STANDS READY TO ASSIST, HOWEVER ABLE OR DIRECTED.
VERY RESPECTFULLY,
ASHBURN SENDS
--- CONFIDENTIAL --- NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE ---
XXXX BT XXXX
Ashburn encrypted the message using standard company ciphers and then added it to the communications package set to go out. Thuvia’s main communications antennae swiveled around on the exterior of the hull and locked onto the homing signal from the Jovian relay, and the message was sent in a powerful burst transmission. Company headquarters would read it in less than two hours; he could only imagine how agitated Forester was feeling right about now. No Barsoom Traders vessel had ever been attacked, much less taken, by pirates, but the threat was always there, especially on those trajectories between the outer system and the asteroid belt.
He came out of virtual and looked over at Jackson, whose glassy-eyed stare and light-blurred oculars indicated she was studying something. Her fingertips
occasionally traced the air in front of her as she manipulated figures in virtual or rotated the display she was viewing. Ashburn asked her to link him in, and a moment later he was there in virtual with his first officer, looking at an astrogation display that kept cycling through a sixteen-day pattern, showing the trajectory Dejah Thoris had filed with the company for her hard-burn back to Mars.
Jackson showed him where the ship should be—still about a day from midpoint turnover and getting close to her maximum velocity on this run, she should already be at over 2,500 kilometers per second—not the sort of intercept a bad actor would find easy or economical.
The Deety’s turnover point wasn’t going to happen in the asteroid belt, either, but well before it. She’d be decelerating through the asteroid belt and passing close to Vesta, which was home to Kuznetsov Naval Station, a Pan-European Alliance facility. The PEA, particularly the Russians, were death on pirates, so on the face of things piracy might not be the reason for the missing torchship.
“Any newly charted rocks along her trajectory?” Ashburn asked. “If she’s hit something unexpectedly, it would make sense that it would happen near her maximum speed, with little warning.”
“I’ve got the computer chewing on that, but I doubt that’s it,” Jackson replied. “I really hope we’re wasting our time here,” she added. “I hope she turns up in network again in a few hours or so. It’ll take us awhile to hear about it if she does, of course.”
“Do we have our telescopes searching for her torch plume?” Ashburn asked.
Jackson snapped her fingers. “Damn it all! I didn’t think to do that! I jumped right into the keps.”
Ashburn grinned at her. “That’s why I’m the captain,” he said smugly, giving her a virtual wink. “Let’s do that, shall we?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, waxing slightly more respectful than usual.
“We should have a nice clean line of sight, looking away from the sun and based on where she’s supposed to be. We should be able to see her plume from directly abeam. Through our optics it ought to stand out like a candle flame two meters away in a dark room. Mars and Vesta will have a much harder time spotting a plume, given that she’s bow-on to them.”
“I can take care of the optics, Gina, if you want to keep at the keplers,” the watch quartermaster offered. Jackson accepted and kept on playing with the numbers she was looking at.
“You don’t suppose Captain Xiang decided to divert to Vesta, do you?” she asked Ashburn. “A load of Titan methane to sell in the belt, a short, economical burn, and almost right on the way home. It’d tempt the hell out of me if I were in her shoes.”
It would have tempted Ashburn as well, but not enough to risk losing his ship and job over, which is exactly what that would mean if a captain did it without informing headquarters first. Company captains had a lot of leeway when it meant turning a profit, but one had to keep the company informed and give Boss Forester first right of refusal. Furthermore, there was no reason not to do it that way. Still, Captain Xiang was strong-willed, and it remained an outside possibility. If so, it would mean they were looking in the wrong place: the keplers for a Vesta stopover would be totally different.
“Let’s not rule it out completely,” Ashburn allowed. “A shorter run to Vesta would put her past turnover, a lot slower and farther back toward Saturn. Can you run the numbers on that as well? I’m going to start looking at something on my own over here.”
“Sure thing,” Jackson replied.
Ashburn denetworked from Jackson and brought up his own display. This was their own trajectory toward Achilles Habitat, the largest station and cargo-transfer facility in the JL4 Trojans. There were two big habitats out there, and two more under construction. Again, it was a matter of providing people a place to live with some spin-gravity and the comforts of home, rather than having them exist in a null-g or microgravity environment until they atrophied to the point they couldn’t safely tolerate a pregnancy or ever go home again.
Togo Naval Station was also located in the Trojans, not far from Achilles Habitat. It was a Japanese naval base named for the victor at Tsushima, serving its own naval vessels as well as those of allied Trans-Oceanic Alliance navies, or even nonallied navies by special request. Although all spacefaring nations had stations and bases around Earth or in cislunar space, no one nation could afford the expense of putting bases everywhere. Accordingly, the solar system had been unofficially divvied up in terms of areas of responsibility by the various Earth alliances. The U.S. had Halsey Station at Mars and Nimitz Station at Jupiter; the Japanese had Togo Station in the JL4 Trojans; the British Commonwealth had Jellicoe and Hood stations at Ell-4 and Ell-5, respectively. The Pan-European Alliance and the CFR both maintained stations in the JL5 Trojans, in addition to their bigger stations elsewhere, like Kuznetsov at Vesta or China’s Yang Liwei at Mars.
There was a substantial, permanent naval presence in both the asteroid belt and the Trojans; these were the regions where piracy was most prevalent, and a lot of places to hide both people and hardware. Much of the piracy that went on wasn’t random but happened between competing business concerns. A few parties engaged in criminal activity either part-time or as a matter of opportunity, often living anonymously and peaceably in a habitat alongside their neighbors when not out working or prospecting—or claim jumping. The Trojans saw large numbers of smaller naval craft, mostly frigates and corvettes, which could spread out and patrol large areas in squadrons serviced by larger tenders.
Like many naval officers, Ashburn had once snickered and scoffed at “panicky” merchant captains who were always requesting up-to-the-minute data on the nearest naval vessels as they decelerated into higher-risk regions. Now here he was, contemplating the same thing himself. Most piracy occurred in small craft at isolated, out-of-the-way locations—not in the major space lanes into and out of habitats flown by massive commercial torchers. Statistically, most noncorporate piracy was simple claim jumping: one prospector would find a rock containing something valuable, and a fellow prospector would move in and try to knock the other off for it. It was human nature at its worst and devilishly hard to stop, but civilized nations did their best against it.
What national governments were really guarding against out here was something nobody wanted to talk about: the fact that large asteroids could easily be pushed onto trajectories that would eventually impact a planet, moon, or major habitat. Add a fusion torch or two to the mix, and the problem compounded. An asteroid pushed to high velocities made reaction times short and intercepts difficult. Space was vast, and nobody could look everywhere at once no matter how hard he tried. If someone really lost his mind and dropped an asteroid onto Earth with enough kinetic force, it would cause an extinction-level event like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It was the sort of plot only a madman would conceive, but history had proven that there was always a steady supply of those. Gabriel Rogan’s Mars Independence Movement was potentially the latest of that breed, and perhaps the most dangerous of them yet.
Sitting in the captain’s chair of a commercial torchship and feeling unreasonably paranoid, Ashburn tapped at his lips with a finger while he sorted through his thoughts. He wondered if this sort of skittishness was common to all new captains, but in his case he had an extra reason or two to be concerned. In hindsight, it wouldn’t have been too hard for anyone to figure out who had overflown Janus Station on Titan. His subsequent flight to Dejah Thoris was also not only a matter of record, it was easily tracked via optics—Banth One had used her torch all the way to the Deety and back.
His concerns warred with what he already knew: Bill Campbell had been there the first time Ashburn went to Janus Station, and the trustee himself had spent time on the station. This trip, Campbell asked for what amounted to a reconnaissance overflight. Why? It was obviously his facility or he was tied in with it somehow, so anything he wanted to know he should have just been able to ask about. If that wasn’t the case, then how far would Janus Industrie
s go to cover up whatever was happening there?
The data Ashburn had obtained didn’t mean anything to him. It was rather limited, and only the radar imagery really showed anything at all: a subtle, weblike lattice of radar-reflective materials emanating from the station itself. The lattice was large, showing more than 500 node points and obviously undergoing expansion. Whatever it was made of didn’t even show up that well, which indicated that it was probably buried, albeit shallowly.
Maybe that would all mean something to Campbell, but to Ashburn it meant nothing. Was there anything there worth targeting two torchships and their crews? If so, he just didn’t see it. Then, what the hell happened to Dejah Thoris? And why now, of all times? he asked himself.
“Want to hear what Thibodeaux said to Boudreaux?” a voice asked at his elbow.
Ashburn jumped nearly a good fifteen centimeters despite himself. “Jesus, Jerry! You scared the hell out of me!” he fairly growled.
The purser laughed. “Get out of virtual, then, so nobody can sneak up on you!”
Ashburn did just that, and cupped his hands expectantly when he saw the bulbs Sommers was carrying. The purser lofted him one filled with fresh black coffee—not tea. Rank hath its privileges, Ashburn thought to himself. The coffee was good, just what the doctor ordered. The purser’s habit of bringing drinks with him when he came to pester the bridge or engineering watches was a popular one—Sommers was a pretty good shipmate in general.
He leaned against the side of Ashburn’s chair, his voice dropping to a slightly conspiratorial volume. “Heard about what’s going on. The only form of communication that goes FTL is gossip in a torchship. What do you think?”
Ashburn blew out a breath. “I don’t know, man, but I’m a little worried for them.”
