VOR 04 The Rescue

by Ellis, Don

  “So to speak,” said Lamott, who seemed blissfully unaware of the near-death experience he had just witnessed.

  David remembered to breathe again. “Well, then. Once more into the breach, and all that.”

  “So to speak,” Raedawn said, and this time the twinkle in her eyes was unmistakable.

  19

  Boris and Harxae were not coming along on this trip. Boris wasn’t going anywhere for at least a week, and Union Command wasn’t about to let Harxae out of sight until they learned everything they could from him about the Earth’s new environment. That process wouldn’t begin until they knew more about his telepathic ability, but they preferred to keep him under wraps so the Neo-Soviets couldn’t capture him and benefit from his knowledge.

  David shook his head in disgust when he heard that. He still couldn’t believe that a planetary crisis of this magnitude would fail to pull humanity together for the common good, but it hadn’t happened on Mars and it hadn’t happened here, either.

  He once again wondered if humanity was worth saving, but he reminded himself that there must be a few grandmothers and innocent children left in the world. Besides, he had committed himself to saving Earth and he wasn’t about to back out now.

  Lamott couldn’t spare a full-sized warship for a scientific expedition, but he provided them with a new shuttle and a gunner to help place the EMP bombs near the nebula—and to help defend the ship from any more hostile aliens who might come to investigate. David wasn’t sure he wanted the company, then knew he didn’t when he found out the identity of that soldier: Sergeant Stockwell, the one Lamott had sent to the hospital yesterday to assassinate David and his crew.

  Stockwell was already on board when they arrived. At least he was no longer in battle armor. He wore plain brown fatigues today, and the only hand weapon in evidence was the data pad he carried while he ran a systems check and supervised missile stowage. The ship was carrying an entire cargo hold full of pulse bombs, low-yield nuclear warheads not particularly useful as explosives but excellent for disrupting electronics. And, if David’s theory was correct, just the thing for luring what was left of the anomaly toward Earth again. They were rack-mounted for sequential launching without having to reload the launch tubes manually—a big improvement over the impromptu design they had cobbled together on the shuttle.

  The moment Sergeant Stockwell saw David, he stiffened and said, “Sir! Welcome aboard, sir. I’m sorry about yesterday, sir.” Then he saw Raedawn coming up the ramp behind him and amended that to “Sirs.”

  “Me, too,” said David. He noted that the sergeant didn’t apologize for what he’d done, which he couldn’t very well do since he’d been following orders, but he’d still managed to apologize. Nicely done. Maybe this guy wouldn’t be so bad after all. He said, “If we’re going to be sharing a ship for a few days, I think we’d better dispense with all the ‘sirs.’ I’m David, and this is Raedawn.”

  “I’m Rick.” He smiled and extended his hand to shake. “Thank you, s—uh, thanks.”

  “Don’t let the uniform throw you off,” said David. “I thought I’d be trying to impress the brass today, but I normally don’t stand on protocol.”

  “That’s, uh, that’ll be refreshing, sir. David.”

  Raedawn laughed. “Sir David. Earth’s knight in shining armor. I don’t know, but I think you look kind of buff in a uniform.”

  David didn’t know what to say to that. Neither did Rick. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands all of a sudden, but finally settled on waving toward the interior of the ship. “Why don’t you stow your things while I finish the preflight?”

  “Good idea.”

  This ship was big enough to have a separate deck for the control cabin and crew quarters. Raedawn waited until they had laboriously climbed the stairs before she said, “He’s cute.”

  “He’s nervous. And he’s just a kid. Don’t you start giving him the kind of grief you give me.”

  “Grief? Me?”

  “You.”

  There were two doors on either side of a narrow corridor, and one at the end. All five stood open. The control cabin lay beyond the far door, the one on the left behind that held a galley that looked like it had been lifted straight out of a suborbital passenger shuttle. The other three were tiny staterooms about two meters on a side, just big enough for a bed and a locker. The one behind the galley had a hat lying in the middle of the bed, which left the two on the right. There were no adjoining doors, David noted.

  “Take your pick,” he said.

  “Like there’s much difference.” She tossed her bag into the forward one, then went into the control cabin and settled into the pilot’s chair and started examining the controls. “Oh, this is better. I’ll just live in here.”

  There were three seats side by side, and enough switches, dials, displays, and touchpads to satisfy even the most devout gadget-head. David noted the layout and tried to commit as much to memory as he could, then he looked up and saw the entire ceiling covered with more readouts and control panels.

  “I’ve seen simpler systems. You know what all this stuff does?”

  Raedawn reached upward and flipped a couple of toggles over her head, and suddenly David felt as if he were falling.

  “Yow!” he yelped, grabbing the door frame for support.

  “Yep,” said Raedawn. She slowly increased the gravity again, but left it at Mars normal. “Careful on the stairs. I left it Earth normal down below. Didn’t want to give Rick any grief, you know.”

  “You’re so sweet.” David tossed his bag onto the remaining bunk and went back down to see what he could do to help.

  * * *

  They were in space within the hour. Raedawn piloted from the center seat, with Rick on her left and David on her right. With internal agrav to compensate for the thrust, she boosted at eight gees, tearing out of the atmosphere almost as quickly as they had entered it. At least this time the air grew thinner as their velocity increased, and by the time the hull grew dangerously hot they were in vacuum and radiating it away again.

  There were no ships in pursuit this time, either.

  “Next stop, the Sol nebula,” she said as she targeted the glowing white cloud and engaged the autopilot. “At least we’re assuming that’s what it is,” she said for Rick’s benefit.

  “That much we can check from here,” said David. He scanned the panel in front of him for the telescope controls, finally found them next to the communications panel, and zoomed in on the nebula. It was much smaller than before, barely the size of the Moon now, and not nearly as active as it had been. He called up a spectral analysis of it, then called up the solar spectrum from the navigation computer’s memory. They matched perfectly, with the exception of some absorption lines from the nebula.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “There’s actually matter involved. I thought it was all magnetic and quantum effects.”

  “Isn’t that what matter is?” Raedawn asked.

  “Well, yeah, down at the fundamental level. I just didn’t expect to see that kind of effect here. I wonder if we can tell what kind of matter it is.”

  It took a few minutes to run the spectral analysis, but when it popped up on the screen, it contained enough surprises to be worth the wait. There was quite a bit of nitrogen and oxygen, which was to be expected since the Earth’s atmosphere had been so violently disturbed on the way through, but there were also strong lines from iron, aluminum, and copper, plus traces of carbon, hydrogen, sodium, potassium, and a dozen lesser compounds.

  “Air, metals, and carbon,” David mused. “That looks to me like a space station or a ship that didn’t make it through.”

  “I’m sure there were plenty of those,” said Rick. “Our base alone sent two ships back into it after we got here. I’m sure other people must have tried, too, until they realized nobody was coming back to report success.”

  David tried to estimate how much mass they were dealing with based on the strength of the a
bsorption lines and the size of the nebula. He came up with somewhere between a million and ten million kilograms, which seemed within reason for maybe a hundred ships and satellites and other hardware. With an order of magnitude, anyway, which was about all he could expect with such a rough measurement.

  The military ship was far faster than their shuttle had been. At full thrust it only took two hours to reach the nebula. Raedawn brought them to a stop a hundred thousand kilometers away, much closer to it than the Moon was to Earth, but it had shrunk so much that it still looked like a tiny white shred of cloud that had been left behind on a summer afternoon.

  David measured it at less than a thousand klicks across. It had been shrinking at about twelve per hour as they approached. Their presence had slowed it by a couple percent, but not as much as he had expected.

  “All right,” he said. “First let’s see if we can stop that contraction completely. What do you think of four pulse bombs at the corners of a tetrahedron around it?”

  “It’s a start,” Raedawn said.

  “Rick? You want to do the honors?”

  “Sure.” Rick got busy at his weapons control screens, and a minute later the ship rocked as four missiles streaked away. Raedawn canceled the ship’s motion, and they waited as the missiles approached their targets.

  “Should I shut down the drive, or do you think the magnetic effects will matter from this distance?”

  “Leave it hot,” said David. “If it does matter, I want to see how much. But get ready to shut it down if it matters a lot.”

  “Right.”

  He called up a magnetic field map of the nebula. Like the map he’d seen when it swallowed Earth, it was a snarl of intense field lines, swirling around chaotically like a dynamo that had slipped its bearings.

  The missiles continued on, their rocket flames drawing tiny star-bright points against the gray background that bounded the pocket universe. They were the only four stars in the sky, and the only ones likely to be there until they blew open the anomaly again.

  “Coming up on position,” Rick reported. “Detonation in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

  All four charges went off simultaneously, three in an equilateral triangle just beyond the nebula and one directly in front of it. They were just tiny white flashes at this distance, but David saw the magnetic effects on his screen. Four tight swirls of magnetism swelled outward, and four buds immediately stretched out from the nebula toward them. Within seconds the nebula went from roughly spherical to obviously triangular. David checked the distance readings and saw that the center had bulged out toward them—and was still coming.

  “Hold steady. Our presence is definitely having an effect.”

  He switched from the magnetic view to the optical one. It was hard to see the forward motion, since the thing was coming straight toward them, but the three points on the side kept billowing outward, their shapes smoothing out again from angular points to semicircular growths, like ears.

  “Mickey Mouse,” he said. “It looks like Mickey Mouse.”

  “With Pinocchio’s nose,” Raedawn added.

  The center was still coming. David checked its velocity; twenty kilometers per second, but it increased to twenty-one as he watched.

  “Shut down the drive,” he said.

  Raedawn did. The lights blinked as the ship went on battery power. David kept his eye on the screen, watching the velocity figure blink up to twenty-two, hold steady for a minute or so, then fall, but not by much.

  “Man, it’s touchy,” he said. “Let’s see if we can split it in two. How about a string of three bombs on either side of it, timed to blow in sequence just as the leading edge reaches them.”

  “I can do that,” said Rick. His fingers flew over the tactical screens, and a minute later six missiles sped away.

  A few minutes after that, the bombs exploded one after the other like two strings of landing lights leading in opposite directions. The nebula had grown toward the ship like a snake; now it grew two horns. White cloudscape ballooned out to either side, engulfing one field of bomb debris after the other, but the middle kept coming forward.

  “It doesn’t want to split,” David said. “That tells us something.”

  “What?” Raedawn asked.

  “Well, that it doesn’t want to split, for starters. There’s some kind of cohesiveness to it. Either the magnetic field is holding it together, or there’s some other effect we’re not aware of.” He noted the approach velocity, which had not dropped more than a few meters per second. “There seems to be a nearly infinite supply of it, too. The ears in back are slowly drawing toward us as the front side stretches out, but producing those side spikes hardly affected the forward propagation at all.”

  “Now what?” asked Rick.

  “Well,” said David. “We’re supposed to lead the thing back to Earth. Let’s nudge ourselves back in that direction and see if it keeps following us.”

  “Nudge?” Raedawn asked. “It’s coming toward us at over three times orbital velocity. I’ll have to use the main engines for almost four minutes to match that.”

  “Four minutes? You’re kidding.” David did the calculation in his head. Twenty kilometers per—“Oh shit. Kilometers.” He’d been thinking meters. It was coming at them a thousand times faster than he had thought.

  20

  They had two options. They could remain where they were and hope that the nebula would stop expanding before it reached them, or run now and hope to out-accelerate it. David did a quick calculation of how long it would take to come to rest again at its current rate of deceleration and came up with nearly two hours. They were an hour and a half away at its current speed. If it slowed at more than a few meters per second squared it might stop before it reached them. But the closer it came, the more it would feel even the minor magnetic effects from the ship that couldn’t be shielded without shutting down everything, including the air scrubbers. He didn’t want to sit there for two hours waiting to see what would happen while his air slowly ran out.

  “Get us out of here,” he said. “Maximum acceleration.”

  “Roger.” Raedawn warmed up the drive again, firing the injectors the moment the pinch field had stabilized. She swirled the ship around under acceleration, carving out a fuel-wasting arc in space, but that was faster than turning first and then lighting the engine. David was glad for the artificial gravity; in the shuttle, that maneuver would have flattened everyone.

  He switched to the aft view. The nebula didn’t react for a second, then he realized that was the speed-of-light lag he was seeing. The moment the ship’s magnetic field had intensified, the nebula had sensed it, and the forward edge leaped toward them.

  “Twenty-one klicks per second,” he called out. Six seconds ticked by. “Twenty-two.” Another six seconds. “Twenty-three.”

  “At least it isn’t accelerating as fast as it did toward the bombs,” Rick said.

  “It’s fast enough,” said Raedawn. “We’re doing fifteen gees. It’s doing what, sixteen?”

  “About that,” said David.

  “At this rate, it’ll catch us when?”

  “Call it an hour and a half. Maybe less.”

  “Right about the time we get to Earth,” Rick said. “Assuming we lead it that direction.”

  “We can’t,” said Raedawn. “They aren’t ready for us.” She changed their angle, aiming for empty space well above the plane of captured planets.

  That was true enough. David wondered how long it would take them to get ready. At least a week to finish up their little war, and an indefinite time after that to convince everyone that it was possible, then an indefinite time after that to squabble about whether or not it should be done at all, and so on for months. Maybe even years. There was no way they could keep this anomaly stable that long. The very physical laws that governed it seemed to shift from moment to moment. Sometimes it was attracted by small magnetic fields, and sometimes it took pulse bombs to get its atten
tion. What if it suddenly decided to ignore everything they did and close up once and for all?

  “On the other hand,” he said, “what does Earth really need to do? We thought we’d need EMP bombs all over the planet to attract the anomaly, but it’s obvious we don’t. If we keep shooting ours out farther and farther to the side as we go, it’ll be as big as the Earth-Moon system by the time we get there.”

  Raedawn said, “And what happens then? We don’t want to just hit the Earth with it; we have to be ready to blow it open, too.”

  “They’ve got the firepower,” David said. “They’re using it to blow each other up at the moment, but it’s deployed all over the planet and in space, too. It would be just as easy to coordinate an attack on that as it would on each other.” He rapped on the rapidly expanding white cloud on the telescope screen.

  Raedawn ran her left hand through her hair. “They’re not going to like you forcing their hand.”

  “They’re not going to do anything if we don’t,” David pointed out.

  “Do you really think that’s a decision you can make on the spur of the moment like this?”

  David’s voice was urgent. “The Pentagon doesn’t want us to spoil their war, and I don’t imagine the Soviets do, either. Both sides are in it too deep to back out gracefully. They’ll keep stalling and stalling until it’s too late. Don’t you see? This may be our only chance.”

  Raedawn nodded slightly, still considering it.

  Rick was growing more and more nervous in the seat between them. “Um, sirs?” he said finally. “I think I’d better tell you that I have orders to stop you if you try to do anything that will endanger the Earth without General Lamott’s authorization.”

  David focused on the soldier’s face. Drops of sweat were forming on his forehead. “You do, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we’ll have to make sure we don’t endanger the Earth, ’cause I can practically guarantee you Lamott won’t authorize this.”