The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  SANDMAN: No.

  DUTCHMAN: Sandman is a guy.

  UNICORN: You don't like women, Sandman?

  T_REX: Shut up, Unicorn.

  SANDMAN: Going back to my sandwich now.

  UNICORN: What are you having, Sandman?

  SANDMAN: Steak and eggs with coffee. Byebye.

  He ate his tuna san and lurked, sipped the over-budget coffee fizz. They were mostly young. Well, FrogPrince wasn't. But mostly young and on the hots for money. They were all going to get rich out here at the far side of the useful planets and go back to the easy life at Pell. The cyberchat mostly bored him, obsessive food and sex. Occasionally he and FrogPrince got on and talked mechanics or, well-coded, what the news was out of Beta, what miners had made a find, what contracts were going ahead or falling through.

  Tame, nowadays. Way tame. Unicorn played her games. Dutchman laid his big plans on the stock market. They were all going to eat steak and eggs every meal, in the fanciest restaurant on Pell.

  Same as when the war ended, the War to end all wars, well, ended at least for the next year or so, before the peace heated up. Everybody was going to live high and wide and business was just going to take off like the proverbial bat out of the hot place.

  Well, it might take off for some, and it had, but Dutchman's guesses were dependably wrong, and what mattered to them out here was the politics that occasionally flared through Beta, this or that company deciding to private-enterprise the old guys out of business. They'd privatized mining. That was no big surprise.

  But—Sandman finished the coffee fizz and cycled the container—they didn't privatize the buoys. Every time they tried, the big haulers threatened no-show at Pell, because they knew

  the rates would go sky-high. More, the privatizers also knew they'd come under work-and-safety rules, which meant they'd actually have to provide quality services to the tenders, and bring a tender-ship like BettyB up to standard—or replace her with a robot, which hadn't worked the last time they'd tried it, and which, to do the job a human could, cost way more than the privatizers wanted to id their job,id away more secure than, say, Unicorn, who was probably a kid, probably signed on with one of the private companies, probably going to lose her shirt and her job the next time a sector didn't pan out as rich with floating junk as the company hoped.

  But the Unicorns of the great deep were replaceable. There were always more. They'd assign them out where the pickings were supposed to be rich and the kids, after doing the mapping, would get out of the job with just about enough to keep them fed and bunked until the next big shiny deal . . . the next time the companies found themselves a field of war junk.

  Just last year the companies had had a damn shooting war, for God's sake, over the back end of a wrecked warship. They'd had Allied and Paris Metals hiring on young fools who'd go in there armed and stupid, each with a district court order that had somehow, between Beta and Gamma sectors, ended up in the Supreme Court way back on Pell—but not before several young fools had shot each other. Then Hazards had ruled the whole thing was too hot to work.

  Another bubble burst. Another of Dutchman's hot stock tips gone to hell.

  And a raft of young idiots got themselves stranded at Beta willing to work cheap, no safety questions asked.

  So the system rolled on.

  T_REX: Gotta go now. Hot date.

  FROGPRINCE: Yeah. In your dreams, T_Rex.

  You made the long run out from Beta, you passed through several cyberworlds—well, transited. Blended through them. You traveled, and the cyberflow from various members of the net just got slower and slower in certain threads of the converse. He could key up the full list of participants and get some conversations that would play out over hours. He'd rather not. Murphy's law said the really vital, really interesting conversations were always on the edges, and they mutated faster than your input could reach them. It just made you crazy, wishing you could say something timely and knowing you'd be preempted by some dim-brain smartass a little closer. So you held cyberchats of the mind, imagining all the clever things you could have said to all the threads you could have maintained, and then you got to thinking how far out and lonely you really were.

  He'd rather not. Even if the local chat all swirled about silly Unicorn. Even if he didn't know most of them: space was bigger, out here. Like dots on an inflated balloon, the available number of people was just stretched thin, and the ones willing to do survey and mine out here weren't necessarily the sanest.

  Like buoy-tenders, who played chess with ghost-threads out of the dark and read antique books.

  Last of the coffee fizz. He keyed up the French lessons. Comment allez-vous, mademoiselle? And listened and sketched, a Teach Yourself Art course, correspondence school, that wanted him to draw eggs and put faces on them: he multitasked. He filled his screen with eggs and turned them into people he knew, some he liked, some he didn't, while he muttered French. It was the way to stay sane and happy out here, while BettyB danced her way along the prescribed—

  Alarm blipped. Usually the racket was the buoy noting an arrival, but this being an ecliptic buoy, it didn't get action itself, just relayed from the network, time-bound, just part of the fabric of knowledge—a freighter arrived at zenith. Somebody left at nadir.

  Arrival, it said. Arrival within its range and coming—

  God, coming fast. He scrambled to bring systems up and listen to Number 17. Number 17, so far as a robot could be, was in a state of panic, sending out a warning. Collision, collision, collision.

  There was an object out there. Something Number 17 had heard, as it waited to hear—but Number 17 didn't expect trouble anymore. Peacetime ships didn't switch off their squeal. Long-range scan on the remote buoys didn't operate, wasn't switched on these days—power-saving measure, saving the corporations maintenance and upkeep. Whatever it picked up was close. Damned close.

  Maintenance keys. Maintenance could test it. He keyed, a long, long way from it receiving: turn on, wake up longscan, Number 17, Number 17.

  He relayed Number 17's warning on, system-wide, hear and relay, hear and relay.

  He sent into the cyberstream:

  SANDMAN: Collision alert from Number 17. Heads up.

  But it was a web of time-stretch. A long time for the nearest authority to hear his warning. Double that to answer.

  Number 17 sent an image, at least part of one. Then stopped sending.

  Wasn't talking now. Wasn't talking, wasn't talking.

  Hours until Beta Station even noticed. Until Pell noticed. Until the whole buoy network accounted that Number 17 wasn't transmitting, and that that section of the system chart had frozen. Stopped.

  The image was shadowy. Near-black on black.

  "Damn." An Outsider didn't talk much, didn't use voice, just the key-taps that filled the digital edges of the vast communications web. And he keyed.

  SANDMAN: Number 17 stopped transmitting. Nature of object . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . Unknown. Vectors from impact unknown . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . Impact one hour fifteen minutes before my location.

  The informational wavefront, that was. The instant of space-time with 17's warning had rolled past him and headed past Frog-Prince and Unicorn and the rest, before it could possibly reach Beta. They lived in a spacetime of subsequent events that widened like ripples in a tank, until scatter randomized the information into a universal noise.

  And BettyB was hurtling toward Number 17, and suddenly wasn't going anywhere useful. She might get the order to go look-see, in which case braking wasn't a good idea. She might get the order to return, but he doubted it would come for hours. Decision-making took time in boardrooms. Decision-making had to happen hell and away faster out here, with what might be pieces loose.

  He shifted colors on the image, near-black for green. Nearer black for blue. Black stayed black.

  Ball with an inward or outward dimple and a whole bunch of planar surfaces. He didn't like what he saw. He transmitted his raw ef
fort as he built it. Cigar-shape. Gray scale down one side of the image, magnification in the top line. Scan showed a flock of tiny blips in the same location. Scan was foxed. Totally.

  "God."

  SANDMAN: Transmitting image. Big mother.

  A keystroke switched modes. A button-click rotated the colorized image. Not a ball. Cigar-shape head-on. Cigar-shape with deflecting planes all over it.

  SANDMAN: It's an inert. An old inert missile, inbound. It's blown Buoy 17 . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . Trying to determine V. Don't know class or mass. Cylindrical.

  SANDMAN: . . . Buoy gone silent. May have lost antenna. May have lost orientation . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . May have been destroyed. Warn traffic of possible buoy fragments . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . originating at buoy at 1924h, fragments including . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . high-mass power plant and fuel.

  Best he could do. The wavefront hadn't near reached Beta. And the buoy that could have given him longscan wasn't talking—or no longer existed. The visual out here in the dark, where the sun was a star among other stars, gave him a few scattered flashes of gray that might be buoy fragments. He went on capturing images.

  BettyB went hurtling on toward the impact-point. Whatever was out there might have clipped the buoy, or might have plowed through the low-mass girder-structures like a bullet through a snowball, sending solid pieces of the buoy flying in all directions, themselves dangerous to small craft. The inert, the bullet coming their way, was high-v and high-mass, a solid chunk of metal that might have been traveling for fifty years and more, an iron slug fired by a long-lost warship in a decades-ago war. Didn't need a warhead. Inerts tended to be far longer than wide because the fire mechanism in the old carriers stored them in bundles and fired them in swarms, but no matter how it was oriented when it hit, it was a killer—and if it tumbled, it was that much harder to predict, cutting that much wider a path of destruction. Mass and velocity were its destructive power. An arrow out of a crossbow that, at starship speeds, could take out another ship, wreck a space station, cheap and sure, nothing fragile about it.

  After the war, they'd swept the lanes-Pell system had been a battle zone. Ordnance had flown every which way. They'd worked for years. And the last decade-they'd thought they had the lanes clear.

  Clearly not. He had a small scattering of flashes. He thought they might be debris out of the buoy, maybe the power plant, or one of the several big dishes. He ran calculations, trying to figure what was coming, where the pieces were going, and he could use help-God, he could use help. He transmitted what he had. He kept transmitting.

  FROGPRINCE: Sandman, I copy. Are you all right?

  SANDMAN: FrogPrince, spread it out. I need some help here . . .

  UNICORN: Is this a joke, Sandman?

  SANDMAN: I'm sending raw feed, all the data I've got. Help. Mayday.

  LOVER18: Sandman, what's up?

  SANDMAN: Unicorn, this is serious.

  DUTCHMAN: I copy, Sandman. My numbers man is on it.

  Didn't even know Dutchman had a partner. A miner's numbers man was damned welcome on the case. Desperately welcome.

  Meanwhile Sandman had his onboard encyclopedia. He had his histories. He hunted, paged, ferreted, trying to find a concrete answer on the mass of the antique inerts—which was only part of the equation. Velocity and vector depended on the ship that, somewhere out there, fifty and more years ago, had fired what might be one, or a dozen inerts. There could be a whole swarm inbound, a decades-old broadside that wouldn't decay, or slow, or stop, forever, until it found a rock to hit or a ship full of people, or a space station, or a planet.

  Pell usually had one or another of the big merchanters in. Sandman searched his news files, trying to figure. The big ships had guns. Guns could deal with an inert, at least deflecting it—if they had an armed ship in the system. A big ship could chase it down, even grab it and decelerate it. He fed numbers into what was becoming a jumbled thread of inputs, speculations, calculations.

  Hell of it was—there was one thing that would shift an inert's course. One thing that lay at the heart of a star system, one thing that anchored planets, that anchored moons and stations: that gravity well that led straight to the system's nuclear heart—the sun itself. A star collected the thickest population of planets, and people, and vulnerable real estate to the same place as it collected stray missiles. And no question, the old inert was infalling toward the sun, increasing in v as it went, a man-made comet with a comet-sized punch, that could crack planetary crust, once it gathered all the v the sun's pull could give it.

  T_REX: Sandman, possible that thing's even knocked about the Oort Cloud.

  T_REX: Perturbed out of orbit.

  UNICORN: Perturbing us.

  LOVER18: I've got a trajectory on that buoy debris chunk . . .

  LOVER18: . . .No danger to us.

  Alarm went off. BettyB fired her automated avoidance system. Sandman hooked a foot and both arms and clung to the counter, stylus punching a hole in his hand as his spare styluses hit the bulkhead. The bedding bunched up in the end of the hammock. It was usually a short burst. It wasn't. Sandman clung and watched the camera display, as something occluded the stars for a long few seconds.

  "Hell!" he said aloud, alone in the dark. Desperately, watching a juggernaut go by him. "Hell!" One human mote like a grain of dust.

  Then he saw stars. It was past him. What had hit the buoy was past him and now—now, damn, he and the buoy were two points on a straight line: he had the vector; and he had the camera and with that, God, yes, he could calculate the velocity.

  He calculated. He transmitted both, drawing a simple straight line in the universe, calamity or deliverance reduced to its simplest form.

  He extended the line toward the sun.

  Calamity. Plane of the ecliptic, with Pell Station and its heavy traffic on the same side of the sun as Beta. The straight line extended, bending at the last, velocity accelerating, faster, faster, faster onto the slope of a star's deep well.

  DUTCHMAN: That doesn't look good, Sandman.

  UNICORN: :(

  DUTCHMAN: Missing Pell. Maybe not missing me . . .

  DUTCHMAN: . . . Braking. Stand by,

  UNICORN: Dutchman, take care.

  LOVER18: Letting those damn things loose in the first place . . .

  T_REX: Not liking your calculations, Sandman.

  LOVER18: . . . What were they thinking?

  FROGPRINCE: I'm awake. Sandman, Dutchman, you all right out there?

  DUTCHMAN: I can see it . . .

  UNICORN: Dutchman, be all right.

  DUTCHMAN: I'm all right . . .

  DUTCHMAN: . . . it's going past now. It's huge.

  HAWK29: What's going on?

  LOVER18: Read your damn transcript, Hawkboy.

  CRAZYCHARLIE: Lurking and running numbers.

  DUTCHMAN: It's clear. It's not that fast.

  SANDMAN: Not that fast *yet.*

  DUTCHMAN: We're running numbers, too. Not good.

  SANDMAN: Everybody crosscheck calculations. Not sure . . .

  SANDMAN: . . . about gravity slope . . .

  CRAZYCHARLIE: Could infall the sun.

  UNICORN: We're glad you're alright, Dutchman.

  SANDMAN: if it infalls, not sure how close to Pell.

  WILLWISP: Lurking and listening. Relaying to my local net.

  T_REX: That baby's going to come close.

  Sandman reached, punched a button for the fragile long-range dish. On BettyB's hull, the arm made a racket, extending, working the metal tendons, pulling the silver fan into a metal flower, already aimed at Beta.

  "Warning, warning, warning. This is tender BettyB calling all craft in line between Pell and Buoy 17. A rogue inert has taken out Buoy 17 and passed my location, 08185 on system schematic. Looks like it's infalling the sun. Calculations incomplete. Buoy 17 destroyed, trajectory of fragments including power plant all uncertain, generally toward Beta. Mass a
nd velocity sufficient to damage. Relay, relay, relay and repeat to all craft in system. Transmission of raw data follows."

  He uploaded the images and data he had. He repeated it three times. He tried to figure the power plant's course. It came up headed through empty space.

  CRAZYCHARLIE: It's going to come damn close to Pell. . .

  CRAZYCHARLIE: . . . at least within shipping lanes and insystem hazard.

  DUTCHMAN: I figure same. Sandman?

  UNICORN: I'm transmitting to Beta.

  WILLWISP: Still relaying your flow.

  HAWK29: Warn everybody.

  UNICORN: It's months out for them.

  DUTCHMAN: Those tilings have a stealth coating. Dark . . .

  DUTCHMAN: . . . Hard to find. Easy to lose.

  UNICORN: Lot of metal. Pity we can't grab it . . .

  FROGPRINCE: Don't try it, Unicorn. You and your engines . . .

  UNICORN: . . . But it's bigger than I am.

  FROGPRINCE: . . . couldn't mass big enough.

  UNICORN: I copy that, Froggy . . .

  DUTCHMAN: It's going to be beyond us. All well and good if it goes . . .

  UNICORN: . . . Thanks for caring.

  DUTCHMAN: . . . without hitting anything. Little course change here . . .

  DUTCHMAN: . . . and Pell's going to have real trouble tracking it.

  HAWK29: I feel a real need for a sandwich and a nap . . .

  UNICORN: Hawk, that doesn't make sense.

  HAWK29: . . . We've sent our warning. Months down, Pell will fix it . . .

  HAWK29: . . . All we can do. It's relayed. Passing out of our chat soon.

  T_REX: Sandman, how sure your decimals?

  FROGPRINCE: We can keep transmitting, Hawk. We can tell Sandman . . .

  FROGPRINCE: we're sorry he's off his run. His buoy's destroyed . . .

  FROGPRINCE: . . . He's got to find a new job . . .

  UNICORN: They'll be running construction and supply out. I'll apply, too.

  FROGPRINCE: Use a little damn compassion.