First Flight

by Claremont, Chris

  As soon as the shuttle bay was fully operational, Ciari went EVA with one of their two Science Modules for a starscan. The results didn't cheer anyone.

  "We've come a pretty fair piece from Wolfe's Asteroid," he told them. "We were developing full emergency thrust on the mains when that rock blew, remember, and when the fuel elements in the engines themselves detonated, they added considerably to our Delta-Vee. At the moment, we seem to be in a 'Kirkwood Gap,' a sector of the Belt where there are no asteroids. We're also moving through the outer fringes of the Belt, about three astronomical units from Earth's orbit. Since Earth herself is on the far side of the sun, the distance home is a lot farther. I doubt we could be more remote if we tried."

  "What about our own orbit?" Nicole asked.

  Ciari shrugged. "Too soon to tell, but I wouldn't hope for much. We're moving up from the plane of the ecliptic, and away from the System. None of the Outer Planets are near enough to do any good, which leaves only one significant gravity source which can affect our trajectory—the Sun itself, six hundred million kilometers, thataway." He pointed across the Carousel.

  "We're very small," he continued, "and in relation to our mass, moving very fast. If we're in a Solar orbit, it's bound to be shallow; I'd lay fair odds we won't be back in this neighborhood for quite a while."

  "If ever," Nicole finished. Ciari nodded.

  "Well," she said, "not the end, by any means. Not even close. We play for time, drift as far from where we were ambushed as possible—as far OutSystem—and then we start yelling. True, the raiders may hear us. True, they may arrive before sublight rescue. But a starship... "

  "A triangle run," Ciari asked, "out half a light from DaVinci, and then back to us? If there's minimal risk of any collision, that's... feasible."

  "Assuming anyone hears us," Hana countered. "It'll take our signal better man two hours to reach Earth; even pushing it with every spare erg of power, it'll be barely a whisper when it arrives. The disaster beacon's omni-directional, as well; there's no way to focus its transmission. So who's to say it'll be noticed?"

  "No guarantees, but we've nothing else. All it requires is that we keep ourselves and this bucket functional for a couple or three months. Is that feasible?"

  "Maybe," Hana said slowly. "The longer we wait, the greater the risk."

  "We know the obvious, Hana," Nicole told her and the other woman's eyes flashed. But then, Hana gave a shallow nod; she was willing to concede at least the possibility. Andrei agreed. "Nicole felt indecently pleased with herself. They'd appeared utterly without hope, yet she'd found some. A little victory to balance the grand disaster, a vindication to eat away at her sense of loss, and failure.

  But as the first month crawled by, the crew found themselves confronted by a problem she hadn't anticipated: boredom. Ciari rigged a zero-gee exercise set-up and committed everyone to a rigorous schedule, at least an hour a day, and he doubled it if a session was skipped. He forced Nicole to continue her unarmed combat lessons and drove her harder than he had before. Unfortunately, that did nothing to fill the rest of their time. With access to his lab denied by the lethal radiation levels, Andrei could do little work on his experimental program. All the entertainment modules had crashed with the main computer system. Games, books, movies, records—everything stored in its memory was gone. Their musical instruments helped some but only so many concert singalongs could be staged, so many pieces taught. Andrei had a chess set, but he and Ciari were Grand Masters and even at their most inspired, the women couldn't even come close to making it a decent contest, let alone win. Cards were tried, and there Nicole got some revenge, winning at poker, losing at gin, hating bridge. The four of them began to get on each other's nerves.

  After their night together on the flight deck, Nicole and Ciari stayed apart by mutual choice. The ship had become too small, there was no real privacy, and each felt it wouldn't be fair to the others. And yet, it was equally hard to hide what had happened, the changes it had made between them. Nicole would look up to discover Ciari watching her, or at other times, she would watch him, fixing face and body indelibly in her memory, as if both sensed it wouldn't, couldn't, last. Nicole remembered her conversation with Hana, and thought she understood now what Hana had gone through with her lover. One moment, she would fantasize about being Mrs. Nicole Ciari, what it would be like to bear his children; she saw herself in her mother's place, keeping hearth and home while man and family lived their lives beyond its walls. And then she would look at the stars, and remember her dreams, and know the price was too high, the hunger within her too great to be denied. Perhaps there would be a time, a place—a... man—when it would be right and proper to give them up. But—a realization that made her cry, suddenly and quite without warning, sitting at the galley table writing a letter home—not now. Hana had seen her and offered a silent shoulder, never asking what was wrong while Nicole's tears became harsh, racking, agonized sobs. And afterward, she wondered, perversely, if Ciari cried for her.

  By five weeks on, she was spending more and more time on the flight deck, deliberately isolating herself from the others, reliving in her mind the approach to the asteroid, hearing Paolo's last scream, examining every decision, looking ruthlessly for her mistakes. Wondering, in the dark moments before sleep finally released her, whether she and the others wouldn't have been better off dead along with the Rover. She knew her crew was going through the motions now, marking time, and she wondered how to pull them out of their funk. A fortnight before, in a notebook, she'd begun a long, rambling letter to her father, writing to him as if she were speaking aloud and he were present to hear her. Today, finally reading it, she could see the threads of madness weaving in and around her supposedly rational sentences. That sent a chill up her spine and she slumped forward in her chair to rest her chin on her crossed forearms, on her console, her bleak reflection gloomily looking back from the view port. Am I that far gone, she wondered, so bloody near the edge? Do I fucking care?

  Another face appeared in the transparent window and she turned to discover Andrei hovering nearby, a worried expression on his face as he told her that Hana had gone EVA in a SciMod.

  "She's been out every day lately, at least an hour each trip. I asked her why, but she wouldn't say."

  "You want me to talk to her?"

  "You are in command." Nicole's mouth twisted slightly and a rude thought flashed across her mind, checked almost immediately by the belated realization that he was right, she was in command. The rights, the privileges—such as they were—the responsibilities. She'd been ducking them long enough. "If there is a proper reason for her excursions," he was saying, "well and good. Though I believe she should inform us what it is. Perhaps we can be of assistance. I confess, it would be nice to have some thing constructive to do. But if this is a manifestation of some psychosis... "

  "You mean, is she going stir-crazy?"

  "Dai."

  "Aren't we all, in our own way?" He looked sharply at her, until he realized she was making a joke; his smile was as much relief as genuine amusement. "Except the Marshal, I think."

  "Are the EVAs causing any problem to Wanderer ?" Nicole asked.

  "Not yet. She cannibalized one of the Jeeps for propellant and electronics; she's running her equipment off its powerplant. But what happens when that is exhausted? We may need the other Jeep and the Rover-Three gunship. For lifeboats, if nothing else."

  "Point taken. Where is she now?"

  "Outside. If you look up and off to the right—say, two o'clock, two-thirty—you should see her lights." Nicole did, and said so. "Got 'em—about a half-mile out."

  "Her third SciMod EVA today." Nicole whistled. "That's why I felt the need to inform you."

  She waited for Hana in the R-6 suit bay, watching through the transparent Lexan window and on the monitors as the ungainly craft expertly settled on its extended docking cradle, nodding to herself in appreciation of her friend's skill. Hana was a natural flyer. She waved a greeting as the Rover tr
undled inside and the giant hatch closed behind it. Compartment pressurization took longer than usual and Nicole noted that Hana had modified the pumps to use less power.

  Finally, green lights flashed on the status panel and Nicole cycled the hatch, gasping as she stepped over the threshold. Immediately, her mind flashed back to Rover-One, and the murderous cold she'd felt when Ciari opened her helmet. This was as bad. As Hana hauled herself out of the Rover, Nicole ducked back into the suit bay, sealing the hatch and turning the heaters up full in the same motion, before zipping her jacket up to the neck. Her teeth were chattering like castanets, her entire body popped with goose bumps, a minute later when Hana joined her.

  "Sorry," Hana said as she removed her helmet, the concern in her eyes belying her grin. "I wasn't expecting visitors."

  "Bloody fucking hell!" Nicole snarled, shaking so hard she could hardly talk. She hunched her body forward, hugging herself tight as she could, and waited for the misery to pass, praying with all her heart that it wouldn't provoke a relapse of her flu, since most of their antibiotics had been on the C-2 Carousel.

  "I shifted the heaters over to a manual control mode," Hana explained as she brought Nicole a heaterpak of chicken soup from the bulkhead dispenser. "I've been outside so often, it would have been a waste of power to heat the Bay after each EVA, especially when working in my insulated pressure suit isn't that much of a hassle."

  "Why? What's this all about?" Nicole asked flatly, once the blistering heat of the broth began to thaw her out.

  "Hana," she said, when the other woman didn't answer, "I'm in no mood for a runaround. I want to know what's going on."

  "Can it wait—just awhile longer, Nicole?"

  "No."

  "I didn't want to tell anyone till I was sure."

  "Of what?"

  "I'd rather not say."

  "I'd rather you did."

  Hana tried a disarming grin. "Gonna shoot me if I don't, O Captain, my Captain?"

  Nicole didn't respond in kind and there was a steely edge to her voice as she said, "Hana, there are four survivors on this spacecraft, and our lives are totally dependent on a collection of patchwork systems, any one of which could fail at any moment. You're using power, you're using propellant, you're using atmosphere. No matter how hard you try to divorce your operation from the rest of Wanderer, what you do affects us all. We're in this mess together. You haven't the right to commit us to a course of action without letting us know what it is, and giving us a chance to decide for ourselves!"

  Hana sighed. "I know. It was wrong of me. I guess—" she stood silently, gazing at her thoughts before speaking further—"all this has made me a little crazy, too. You ran to the flight deck, I came here."

  "Nobody's perfect."

  "Part of it, maybe, is jealousy. You had the Marshal to share your strength—and your... grief—with."

  "Why didn't you say something?"

  "You wouldn't have heard," Hana said bluntly, "before today. You'll have to climb into a suit," she continued brusquely, abruptly changing the subject. "My equipment is inside the Bay and the temperature is still way below freezing."

  Nicole pulled a softsuit off its rack and, after changing, followed Hana over to a work table. This section of the Bay was crowded with electronics and computer modules stripped from the Jeep and this SciMod. A fresh photo cassette—the pictures Hana had taken during this latest jaunt—had been inserted into one of the computers and Hana spent some time working on it before she was finally ready. She dimmed the lights and began flashing slides across the face of a viewer.

  Before a half-dozen had passed, Nicole plugged herself into the intercom and called a general crew meeting. She knew why Hana had been so hesitant about revealing her discovery, but also knew that this was something everyone aboard needed to know. Now.

  "These are part of a routine STARSCAN program Paul and I started when we left Luna, as an adjunct to our main SkyMap mission," Hana told them after everyone had gathered in the Bay. "Almost all the shots were stored in the main computer and were, of course, lost when the system crashed. For some experiments, though, we made gel slides of a few choice photos. They all cover the same basic area of the Solar System and were taken at roughly one-week intervals." She showed each of the pictures on the primary display.

  "Anyone notice anything unusual?" she asked when finished, ignoring Ciari's mutter about "goddamn schoolgirl twenty questions."

  "I'll run through it again," she said, "only this time, keep your eyes on this light source...." She used a lightpen to indicate a medium bright dot of white in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. At the touch of a button, the dot was ringed by a red circle. As she went through the sequence, the dot moved perceptibly, shifting almost three centimeters down and to the left.

  "Boszhe moi," Andrei said under his breath, and then, louder, "what is that?!"

  "Hey, babe," Hana smiled, "the best is yet to come. This next sequence is position scans I've been taking since the ambush." By the third picture, Hana had provoked a reaction from them all—Andrei gasping, even Ciari shaking his head in mixed amazement and disbelief, Nicole watching impassively. The dot was easily visible now, its glow far brighter than any of the stellar objects around it, forward motion obvious. The latest slides were slightly streaked.

  "I've been taking measurements with the SciMod's telescopes, optical and radio," Hana continued, "trying to work up as much data on that object as possible. It's blue-shifted, moving towards us. I've also been able to compute a rough parallax: two months ago, that thing was fifty astronomical units distant—roughly seven and a half billion kilometers. I tried to compute one based on our position ten days ago and our position now; that bugger is close."

  "How close?" asked Nicole.

  Hana tapped her keypad and the dot became blindingly intense. "Taken this morning," she told them. "Its albedo is extraordinary, approximately 97%, and there seems to be no measurable fluctuation. The object has no spin; it presents the same face to the Sun."

  "Ninety-seven percent," Andrei murmured. "Virtually a perfect reflecting surface. Offhand, my friends, I can think of no natural object with so high a rating."

  "During my last EVA, I burned out a fuel cell on the SciMod punching a radio beam towards the object," Hana said, as the others edged closer to the screen, trying for better looks at her mysterious contact. "I got a return in less than ninety seconds."

  "Thirteen and a half million kilometers," Nicole replied almost immediately.

  "Right around the corner," Ciari echoed. "Wait," he went on, struck by a thought, "if that's only thirteen mega-klicks distant, we should be able to get some pretty detailed pictures of it. The SciMod carries a built-in fifty-centimeter optical telescope, and since its computers are obviously in fine working order, we can use them to enhance the shots and get far better resolution than this."

  It was the moment Hana had been waiting for. She tapped a key and the display switched to her final photo.

  The silence in the Bay seemed to last forever.

  Ciari was the first to speak. "Fuck," he breathed, "that's a ship!"

  "A ship," Andrei repeated, with a huge smile. Then, he laughed, "A ship," throwing his arms into the air like a cheerleader, forgetting that he was weightless. His cheer becoming a whoop of surprise as he flew away from the deck. Ciari caught him before he crashed into the ceiling. Andrei twisted lithely in the Marshal's grasp, grabbing him in a hearty bear hug and kissing both his cheeks.

  Then he caught sight of Nicole, and his smile faded.

  "What's the matter, Nicole," he asked, trying to hold on to the joyous moment. "That is a ship, and it appears to be coming our way. All we need do is give them a tight-beam alert on our radio and—hey-presto—we are rescued.

  Correct?"

  "Andrei," Hana said with deliberately exaggerated patience, "what do you think I was doing with my radio beam? I hit that ship with as loud an electronic Mayday as I could produce, and I've been listening for a reply
ever since. So far, zilch."

  "If we're to do anything," Nicole said, "we'd better do it pretty damn quickly. We're on a convergent course and at the rate we're closing we'll be past it in a matter of hours. Why'd you wait so bloody long to tell us, Hana; it's almost too late!"

  "I waited because I didn't know what it was," Hana flared back at her. "It's Delta-Vee profile matched that of a starship coming out of warp; when I backtracked its course, it led straight out of the System, nowhere near the Outer Planets or any Station. But it's flying a ballistic trajectory, a virtual straight line from the moment Paul and I first picked it up. And that track doesn't take it any deeper InSystem than we are now! I had to be sure!" She calmed a little realizing that she'd yelled those last words. "Don't you see. I didn't want to get your hopes up, like they are now, only to find it was all for nothing.

  "And the courses aren't convergent, Nicole—not precisely. We're traveling below its line of flight and we'll be crossing its track about a hundred minutes after it passes us."

  "Since they don't seem inclined to acknowledge our communication," Ciari asked, "can we effect a rendezvous?"

  Hana looked to Andrei: "Engineering's more your department."

  "It is risky," Andrei began slowly, expressive face showing his inner doubts and questions, "but feasible. We'll have to dump the main frame, of course, but once that's done, the Command Module APS should provide more than sufficient thrust to match vectors and velocity with that vessel. However, once we separate from the Service Module, we're committed, with twenty-four hours of power and environment. This is an all or nothing decision, my friends."

  Nicole spoke. "I'm afraid the question isn't simply, can we rendezvous; it's also should we?"

  "Of course we should," Hana told her. "Don't be absurd."

  Nicole reached past Hana and tapped a command into the keyboard. The image on the main display transmoded into a computer schematic of the contact, while a secondary screen filled with relevant data.