The Chara Talisman

by Alastair Mayer

  “Shot? I didn’t think Marten went armed.”

  “Probably doesn’t. The caliber matches Warshowski’s gun, so maybe the timoan took it from him. Lots of blood at the scene, most of it Tuco’s. They’re still sorting it out.”

  “Damn,” said Hopkins, his tone a mix of frustration and awe. “He must be good to do that kind of damage while outnumbered two to one. Good thing we’ve got insurance. You did deliver the package, right?” He meant the disk Rico had attached to the Sophie.

  “Yes boss, piece of cake. I just about tripped over Carson as he was crossing the field, but he didn’t see me. It’s all set.”

  “Good. Pity about Tuco, he always was a bit clumsy.” Hopkins said, in a tone that someone else might use for spilled coffee. “All we have to do now is wait.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Jackie finished her pro forma walkaround and climbed the ramp into the Sophie’s portside hatch. She closed it behind her, latched and sealed it, and stepped forward to the cockpit. “Okay, gents, if you have everything secure aft, it’s time to strap in,” she called, looking back to Carson and Marten.

  They double-checked their bunks, looked around the cabin, and came forward to strap into the seats just behind Jackie’s. “All set,” said Carson.

  “Okay.” Jackie touched several controls on her console, and the computer started prompting her as she ran through the checklist. It was quite capable of doing either or both sides of the checklist, but Jackie liked to be involved so that she knew what state the ship was in, too. She got her clearances—no flight plan this time—and began the take-off sequence. Aside from minor turbulence as they passed through the gathering clouds, it was a smooth lift to space.

  As they cleared atmosphere, Jackie checked the navigation screen, cross checked that against what she saw out the windows, and boosted for a rendezvous orbit with the orbital dockyard. A few minutes later, as they reached orbital velocity, she cut the thrust.

  “We’re falling!” cried Marten.

  Jackie and Carson turned to look at him. He was gripping the arms of his seat so tightly that his claws were beginning to dig into it, and he wore a terrified expression.

  “Well, yes,” Jackie said. They were in free fall, of course they were falling—falling around the planet, at the moment, as they had reached orbital velocity.

  By this time Marten had realized that, and the look of terror was replaced by a sheepish grin. He still gripped the armrests tightly, though. “Sorry, I do not like zero gee,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Okay, do you feel space sick? There are barf bags in the side pocket of the seat, I can get you some meds.” As she said the last, Jackie had a sudden doubt. Did she have anything for space sickness in a timoan? Would human drugs help him or kill him? Well, the traumapod was programmed for all likely lifeforms, they could put him in there if it came to that.

  “No, not sick” Marten gritted. “Just a reaction to the feeling of falling. It is passing.” His hands were indeed starting to relax their death grip on the armrests.

  “All right, then. Sorry, I guess I should have given you some warning. We have a rendezvous first, but we’ll have gravity back after we go to warp.” Jackie sometimes didn’t bother with that unless the passengers asked for it. The small inefficiency of adjusting the warp field to leave space with a gradual curve inside the bubble didn’t slow the ship by much, but Jackie liked zero gee.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They came up on the orbital station a half-hour later, and Jackie pulsed the thrusters to match orbits. Near her assigned docking port, two large, oddly shaped objects floated. They looked like pieces of a hard-boiled egg sliced in half lengthwise, a smooth hemispherical, or rather, semi-ovoidal, surface on one side, an irregularly shaped surface on the other. They didn’t match, either. They were the drop tanks.

  The tanks had been on hand because one or the other of the university’s Sapphires would sometimes need the extra range. Essentially they were large plastic balloons with appropriate connectors and fittings. When needed, the tanks were inflated to their pre-programmed size and shape and then rigidized. By Jackie’s calculations, the pair would just give her the range to get to Chara in one long jump, with a slight reserve to maneuver in-system. It was tighter than she liked to cut it, but it would work.

  The Sophie made fast to its docking latches, and a pair of space riggers moved out from an open airlock towards her. Roberts had radioed ahead; Carson was in a hurry.

  “I’m going to suit up to go out and inspect,” she told the others.

  “Surely you don’t need to do that,” Carson said, not sure he entirely liked the idea of the captain leaving the ship while it was in space.

  “Probably not, but it’s my ship they’re messing with, and if they mess up, it’s only their jobs, but it’s our lives.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Carson.

  “Back soon.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Out on the hull, the riggers had already moved one tank into place and had just finished connecting the plumbing and wiring to the appropriate ports on the Sophie.

  “That was fast,” Jackie said to the riggers over the suit-to-suit. “Aren’t those things massy?”

  One space-suited figure looked around, saw her, and waved a greeting. “No ma’am, not very. Right now they’re empty. Way too awkward to be messing with this close to a ship if they’re full.”

  “Oh, of course, that makes sense.”

  They were moving the other tank into place now, pushing and pulling it into place with the practiced ease of experienced space riggers. “When we’re done with this one we’ll hook up the lines to fuel you from the station. Should have you filled up in an hour or so.”

  “Thank you.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The Sophie, drop tanks in place and full, pulled away from the orbital dock. Handles like a pig, thought Jackie, and about as pretty. Jackie had tried to come up with an analogy for the combined shape of the Sophie and her surrounding drop tanks. The best she could come up with was an arrowhead stuck through a ping-pong ball, but that just didn’t convey the massy, bloaty feeling that Jackie had when piloting her. Oh well, it was temporary.

  She reoriented the ship, double checked that everyone was strapped in—Marten still looked rather miserable—and fired thrusters to head out to where space was empty enough to use the warp.

  They reached that a couple of hours later, and Jackie readied the ship. The drop tanks added to the mass, but otherwise didn’t seem to interfere with the handling, the mass was well distributed. She tapped commands into the navigation console, telling the ship to aim at Beta Canum Venaticorum, and the ship sluggishly rotated into position. She lined up the star in the targeting scope and ran a spectrum check that it was indeed the star they wanted. “Okay, sit tight, we’re almost ready for warp,” she told her passengers. “Secure for gravity.” Another few taps on the keyboard and presses on the panel told the warp drive to ready itself. She heard the sounds of fuel pumping into the fusion reactor, of the system readying itself for the huge power demand of the warp generators.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A small package on the outer hull of the ship, placed to be missed in a routine walk-around, on a spot away from the drop tanks, detected the pre-warp power surge from the ship and woke to full alertness. It queried its own inertial sensors, looked to see what stars it could see and where, and waited.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Standby . . .” Jackie checked the targeting again, scanned the board, “. . . in three, two, one, warp!” and pressed the button.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The package detected another change in the ship’s energy signature, and in the microseconds before the warp field formed, it fired a coded signal burst into the aether.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  There was a brief, half-imagined tingle as the Alcubierre-Broek bubble formed, and gravity came back. The view out the window was now a spangled black, with odd twinkles of distorted light working
through the warp, and the brief flash as stray bits of space dust tore themselves apart in the tidal field of the bubble’s edges. The Sophie surfed a bubble of warped space toward Chara at nearly 500 times faster than light.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Boss, we just got a signal from the tracking beacon on the Sophie.” The voice came over the speaker in Hopkins’ cabin.

  “Yes? So they’ve gone to warp? Did we get a direction?” he asked, the eagerness obvious in his voice.

  “Yes and yes. Captain’s just running the coordinates now, hang on.” There was a brief pause, while over the speaker came the sound of talking in the background. “Looks like they’re headed to a star named ‘Chara’, also called Beta Canorum Venti. . . Vantati. . . Venaticum. Captain’s plotting a course now.”

  “A course? Why aren’t we just taking the same vector as Sophie?”

  “Captain says it’s too far for a single jump. Looks like they picked up drop tanks. We’ll have to stop somewhere to refuel.”

  Hopkins swore under his breath. “Can’t we get drop tanks ourselves?”

  More sounds of background conversation. “Captain doesn’t think so for the Hawk’s design, unless we get custom. When we stop at Kakuloa, if we clean out the two aft cabins and put in fuel bladders we can do the Chara run from there in one more jump, otherwise at least two.”

  “I’m tempted.” But that would mean leaving crew behind or doubling them up. “No, screw that, two stops it is. Have him make warp as soon as possible. How long until we get there?”

  “About four weeks. We’ll be a few days behind.”

  That long? Crap. But Hopkins didn’t see any alternative.

  “Okay then, let’s get moving. Whatever route Captain thinks fastest.”

  Chapter 19: En Route

  Aboard the Sophie, between stars

  There’s an expression about traveling: half the fun is getting there. That’s not true of traveling in warp. There’s not much to see out the windows. After a while the sparkling black wears thin, like looking at static on a video screen, only darker. With the gravity of a deliberately distorted warp bubble, Marten was happy. They reviewed their plans—such as they were. They checked their gear. They ate. They slept. They read or watched vids or played games on the ships computer, or on their omnis. They ate. They slept. And they talked.

  “Us? No, we’re not ape-descended or anything like apes,” Marten explained to Jackie. “Non-arboreal. We’re descending from something like your terrestrial mongoose or meerkats.”

  “Cats?”

  “No, meerkats, social ground and burrow dwellers, related to mongooses. Go back 65 megayears and we might share common ancestry with cats, but we’re closer to mongoose. Or rather, our ancestors were. Since they were ground dwellers, they stood on their hind legs a lot—like your meerkats—to watch for predators. Our—oh,” Marten looked at Carson, “what is the word, scientists who study old men?”

  “Old men? I don’t . . . oh! Paleoanthropologists.”

  “That is it! Our paleoanthropologists, or should that be paleosuricatologists, think that that freed up our hands to start using tools, to dig for food. Our ancestors claws weren’t as well developed as a meerkat’s are.” He held out his hand for Jackie to examine. “See, more like your fingernails.”

  Jackie looked at the fingers and held up her own hand to compare. Narrower and sharper, not covering so much of the back of the fingertip, but yes, not quite claws either. “Not retractable, either? Cats’ claws are, but I guess I wouldn’t know about meerkats.”

  “No, ours aren’t retractable.” Marten said. “We do share one trait with your terrestrial cats, though.”

  “Oh, what’s that?”

  “We hate going in the water. We’re not swimmers—our muscle density is high and we don’t have the subcutaneous fat that you aquatic apes do.”

  “Aquatic apes, what?” Jackie had never heard of this.

  Hannibal helped her out. “Yes, there are theories—hypotheses, really—that humans went through a semi-aquatic stage in our evolution. We have a dive reflex—physiological changes when we’re in water—we float a damn sight better than most apes, and so on. No fossil evidence, of course, but that doesn’t prove anything.”

  “So you can’t swim? Some cats actually can. Tigers, I think.”

  “Not to save my life,” Marten said, then added “well, for that maybe, for a short while. But the idea of swimming lessons is as unpleasant to us as, say, falling lessons.”

  “Oh, some humans do that too. It’s called skydiving, jumping out of an aircraft with a parachute, or for the real enthusiasts, from space with a re-entry pack.”

  “What, for fun?” Marten looked at her wide-eyed.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s our arboreal heritage. A lot of people don’t like enclosed spaces, though. I don’t mind starship cabins or houses, but the idea of crawling down a hole in the ground gives me shivers,” said Jackie.

  “What about you, Hannibal?” asked Marten. “Does anything scare you?”

  Hannibal looked thoughtful. Plenty of things scared him in the sense that he would rather not have them happen—getting seriously injured, losing, annual performance reviews, grading student papers—but did anything just plain give him the creeps or weird him out? “Most things that might have frightened me as a boy I’ve grown out of. I don’t particularly like spiders, but I’ll deal with them if I have to.”

  “Spiders?”

  “Yes. Probably traces back to my childhood. When I was a kid in pre-school, oh, maybe age four, there was an older boy who liked to terrorize us little kids. He would find spiders around the outside of the building or the fence in the schoolyard and chase us with them. He liked to pull the legs off of them too. Bizarre fellow, thinking back on it. Hate to think how he might have ended up. They took him away for a psych-eval and we never saw him again. Anyway, put me right off spiders for the longest time, I’d jump at the sight of something small that looked like it was crawling, even a piece of lint.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t have thought it, nothing seems to bother you.”

  “Oh, I can tolerate the beggars now. I’ve spent too much time in the field, crawling around in musty ruins and digging in the dirt. Can’t afford the time to be squeamish about them.

  “And some things do bother me. Grading assignments and bloody academic politicking, that sort of thing. I prefer the field.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A few days later, Jackie checked the computer and turned to the others. “We’ll be out of warp in about six hours, better get everything stowed for free fall.”

  Marten got an odd expression on his face. “I suppose there’s no way to avoid that?”

  “Sorry, artificial gravity is a side effect of warp, and we won’t be under thrust until I figure out exactly where we are and where we want to get to.”

  “I know, I know. It was not a serious question.”

  They spent the next few hours ensuring that everything was stowed away and there was nothing loose to float about the cabin. They also took advantage of the last opportunity for who knew how long to use the head without worrying about zero gee.

  “Okay, we’ve got another half hour by the clock, but we could come out early if we start hitting much dust, so let’s get strapped in.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  It went the full half-hour, and as the timer neared zero, Jackie warned them. “Coming out of warp . . . now.”

  There was the half-imagined tingle of the warp field collapsing, the light of a nearby star against smooth black through the window, and they were falling again.

  Chapter 20: Chara Arrival

  Beta Canum Venaticorum (Chara) system

  Jackie put the Sophie into a slow roll. The drop tanks would be more hindrance than help now. She hit the jettison control and the now-useless tanks cut loose with a muffled thump. She watched as they drifted away in opposite directions, watched as they shrank to pinpoints in the distance and disappeared. She set the Sophie
to rotate slowly through its navigation sequence, turning to pick out selected distant stars and two nearby galaxies on its image sensors. Finally it triangulated them and determined just where in the star system she was. Tiny vagaries in warp geometry and their exact positioning at the start left a broad region of this system that they could have arrived in.

  “So, where are the planets?” asked Marten.

  “I’m still working that out, we need to triangulate where we are first.” Jackie keyed a few commands into the computer, then muttered “Dang!”

  Carson looked over at that. “There’s a problem?”

  “Oh, nothing really. This system is relatively unexplored. The ephemeris data isn’t very precise and it’s a couple of years old. I don’t have a good fix on where the planets are now. No big deal.”

  “And this is no big deal because . . . ?”

  “Watch.” Jackie keyed a few more commands into the ship’s computer, then pressed a button.

  There was a brief tingle as though the ship were going into warp, the windows flickered, then everything was normal again. Except that a couple of bright stars had moved.

  “What just happened?” asked Marten.

  “I took an image of the local sky, then did a fifty millisecond warp jump. We’re five million miles away from where we were a moment ago. Those stars that looked like they moved are really planets, and the computer is now figuring out their positions from the parallax.” Jackie checked the computer screen. “Here we go. The bright bluish one there,” she pointed at it, “is the habitable one, Chara III. The orange one near it is the gas giant, Chara IV. I think Chara II must be in line with its star, either this side or the other, and Chara I is that faint star washed out in the glare.”

  “Don’t they have names?” said Carson.

  “Not in my database.”

  “All right. How long to get to Chara III?”

  “Give me a minute.” She checked the computer, running through a couple of different possibilities. “Okay, we can jump a bit closer, then the rest of the way on thrust.” She paused, glanced at the fuel readings, then nodded to herself. There was enough. “Probably about fourteen hours, maybe a bit more to get set up for orbit.”