The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus

by Vonda N. McIntyre

  “Kolya,” J.D. whispered, “Kolya, we’ve got to get rid of this thing!”

  “So I felt...” Kolya did not look up. “But do we have the right to loose it in this unknown place?”

  She wanted to follow his gaze. Instead, she reached out and touched his arm.

  “Kolya,” she said respectfully, without any irony or sarcasm, “Comrade Cherenkov, this missile could destroy Starfarer and all our friends.”

  Kolya looked at her. The far-away expression slowly faded from his face.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.”

  o0o

  Victoria slid between the crushed interior walls of the hill.

  It was freezing. The cold fog of evaporating liquid nitrogen flowed past her feet. The smell was intense, of yeast and agar plates and nutrient medium.

  “Over here. He’s bleeding, I can’t get it stopped.”

  She found Satoshi, awkwardly trying to hold Stephen Thomas above the unbreathable vapor, at the same time trying to staunch a bleeding head cut. Blood spattered Satoshi’s hands and arms, covered Stephen Thomas’s face, and leaked between Satoshi’s fingers.

  Victoria pushed away bits of broken equipment, fragmented glass, crumbled rock foam. She reached Satoshi’s side.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. He was bleeding, but he said it was just a scrape. We were on our way out, and he keeled over.”

  Stephen Thomas was heavily unconscious. His hand was cold, his pulse weak and fast. He must be badly wounded, there was so much blood, it covered his face and sprayed the front of his battered t-shirt and pasted his pale hair against his skin.

  Rock foam panels grated together, rasping each other to dust that sifted down in the dim light. The nitrogen fog crept to Victoria’s waist.

  Stephen Thomas might have a concussion, or even a fractured skull. Victoria knew they should not move him, but she was afraid not to.

  “Let’s get him out of here.”

  They lifted Stephen Thomas and dragged and carried him into the corridor. Satoshi tried to keep pressure on the head wound. A bright light glimmered along the top of the fog. It flashed in Victoria’s eyes, dazzling her.

  Zev appeared silently before them, carrying a flashlight. He glanced at Stephen Thomas.

  “Let me see.” He moved Satoshi’s hand. Blood pulsed from Stephen Thomas’s forehead.

  “Zev, don’t, he’ll bleed to death!”

  Victoria and Satoshi both tried to reapply pressure to the wound, but Zev pushed in between them and leaned over their partner.

  Victoria watched, shocked and appalled, as Zev bent down and placed his lips against the deep cut on Stephen Thomas’s forehead. Before she could protest or push him away, he straightened up. Blood covered his mouth and his chin. Satoshi reached out to put pressure on the wound again, but Zev stopped him.

  “Leave it be.”

  “What did you do?”

  Victoria’s horrified expression amused him. “I stopped the bleeding — what did you think?”

  “I thought you were drinking his blood!”

  Zev grimaced. “Do I look like a lamprey? Why didn’t you — Oh. This must be a difference between divers and people.”

  He pushed bloody, sticky blond hair away from the wound.

  The cut had stopped bleeding.

  “He is lucky,” Zev said.

  “Lucky!”

  “This is not a serious wound — not on land. Divers fear head cuts because they bleed so, even a scratch like this one. Sometimes you can’t stop them before the sharks smell the blood from far away, and come to eat you. But here there is no ocean and there are no sharks.”

  Stephen Thomas groaned. He opened his eyes, the closed them again.

  “What — ?”

  “It’s okay,” Satoshi said. “We’ll be out of here in a minute.”

  “This place looks so weird...” he muttered.

  “Yeah, it’s falling down around us. Let’s go.”

  In the uncertain light of Zev’s flash, they helped Stephen Thomas to the entrance, boosted him out of the ruins of Genetics Hill, and climbed after him.

  As Victoria emerged from the frigid darkness of the ruined genetics building, the light from the sun-tube abruptly faded.

  Victoria looked up, as startled as a creature beneath a total solar eclipse.

  She let out a cry half triumph, half sob.

  Starfarer had reached transition.

  Out of reach of its pursuers, the ship progressed toward an alien star system. Victoria had made its escape possible.

  And right now, instead of feeling triumph, she asked herself if it was worth it.

  Light, strange and watery, rose again as the starship drew energy from the magnetic claws and fed it into the tubes.

  People surrounded her, some in protective suits, some carrying tanks of liquid nitrogen, some with isolation canisters. ASes and AIs also congregated around the entrance. Professor Thanthavong stood in the middle of it all, coordinating the beginnings of a salvage operation. As soon as she saw Stephen Thomas, she called a paramedic over to help him.

  Stephen Thomas stumbled and opened his eyes. Their blue was startling in the mask of drying blood. He looked around groggily.

  “What did you do to the light?” he said. He sank to the ground. “Why does everything look so weird?”

  Victoria looked around. The campus was different, alien and frightening, in the light of transition.

  “You’ve got blood in your eyes,” Thanthavong said.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m a real blue-blood...”

  “Be quiet and sit still for a minute,” the paramedic said.

  Victoria knelt beside Stephen Thomas, concerned. At first she had thought she understood what he was talking about, but now she could not make sense of what he was saying. Beside her, Satoshi rested his head on his knees, breathing deeply.

  “You’re going to have one hell of a black eye,” the paramedic said to Stephen Thomas.

  “A black eye!” Victoria exclaimed. “He was unconscious!”

  “There’s no serious trauma.”

  “Then why — ”

  Stephen Thomas laid his hand on her arm.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I am. Honest. I fainted.” He looked away, embarrassed. “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”

  Relief made Victoria shiver, and then she started to laugh. When Stephen Thomas glared at her, she hugged him.

  Thanthavong hurried over, trailed by Fox and a couple of ASes. Machines had begun to work to clear the entryway of the genetics department.

  “Did you see anyone else inside?”

  “There’s no one,” Satoshi said.

  “You’re sure?” Thanthavong said. She gazed at the ruined hill, her expression unreadable.

  “Yes. I passed every lab and every office, from the top down, looking for Fox. There wasn’t anybody.”

  “Yes. All right. Good...” Her voice trailed off.

  Dr. Thanthavong, whose surface so seldom even ruffled, suddenly cried out in anger and in pain.

  Victoria jumped to her feet, startled and scared. Then she went to Thanthavong and embraced her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “All your work — ”

  “It isn’t that,” Thanthavong said. “It’s — ” She sobbed and struggled for control. “It is that. But in forty years my labs never had a serious accident. And now, my god, look what they’ve done!”

  o0o

  J.D. and Kolya strained to move the missile. J.D. could feel the metabolic enhancer pumping inside her, but it was useless. It helped her endurance. What she needed right now was brute strength. Brute strength and the will to keep her attention away from the weird effects of transition.

  Suddenly the missile shifted in its crater. The squeal of metal on stone vibrated through the skin of Starfarer, through J.D.’s suit, to her ears. It was the only sound except her breathing, her pulse.

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, the missile
slipped free.

  “Hold it!” Kolya shouted. “Keep hold of it!”

  J.D. almost let it go. That was what they had been struggling for — ! But the desperation in Kolya’s voice stopped her.

  She clamped her arms around the missile. It moved like a live thing. It escaped Kolya and wriggled half a meter downward through J.D.’s grasp. Nothing but J.D.’s safety line and her feet hooked around the cables held it.

  The spin had brought them into the canyon between the two cylinders. If J.D. let the missile go, it would ricochet against the wild cylinder.

  Her feet slipped, inexorably. Kolya grabbed her and the missile. She could see the sweat on the cosmonaut’s face. Sweat poured down her own face, down her body. Her arms shook with strain. She feared the warhead might detonate at any second, but she could not let it go. The spin, which had felt so fast a few minutes before, now slowed in her perception to a crawl.

  Her feet sprang free of the cables. She gasped as her safety line snapped taut. It vibrated in the bass range like a huge alien instrument. Kolya shouted as the missile slid through his grasp. J.D. held it tighter. Kolya tried to pull her back, but all he could do was keep himself twined in the cables and clutch J.D.’s ankle.

  Something changed.

  She emerged from the canyon. space opened out around her.

  “Now!” Kolya said.

  She released the missile. Starfarer’s spin flung it away, away from the starship, toward constellations barely skewed by the vast distance the ship had traveled.

  Kolya dragged J.D. to safety.

  J.D. tried to speak. Her mouth was too dry.

  “Come on,” Kolya said. “Hurry.”

  As quickly as J.D. could move, they made their way to the hatch and into the airlock. As soon as the inner door opened, Kolya grabbed her arm and rushed her deeper into the ship, through the suit room and up, without even pausing to open his face mask.

  “What’s wrong?” J.D. said. “We got rid of it!”

  Kolya finally slowed and stopped. He took off his helmet.

  “We should be safe here. I wanted to be sure — ”

  He cut himself off. The ship trembled with a faint vibration. J.D. looked down, toward the outer surface, as if she could see the missile through the floor.

  Outside, the warhead detonated, sending out a wave of debris and radiation that blasted against the starship’s thick skin of lunar rock.

  o0o

  Water sliced and darkened the floor of the lowest tunnel. Infinity kept watch for the leak. He could hear no rush of water, so the sealers must be working. He hoped the attack had not breached the main flow systems and let any significant amount of water escape into space.

  It hurt him to see so much damage to the structure he had helped to build. Making Starfarer whole again would take more than letting the self-sealers creep into the cracks and cement the broken bits. That would be like letting a smashed bone heal without setting it.

  Infinity hurried along the upcurving corridor. It truncated abruptly in a closed baffle.

  As a precaution, he fastened the helmet of his pressure suit. Getting outside might be quicker and easier through another hatch, but that would be a ten minute walk, and more than that much again to return along the outside of the ship. He felt a certain urgency. He kept expecting to encounter other members of damage control, but so far he had seen no one.

  He read the display on the baffle. It showed normal air pressure on the far side. He cautiously opened the door with the manual controls, stepped through into the next compartment, and closed the baffle behind him.

  Soon he faced another airtight baffle. This display showed very low air pressure on the far side, a few millimeters of mercury, nowhere near enough to breathe.

  Infinity paused, listening carefully. The rhythmic, muffled pounding was real, not his imagination. It came from beyond the closed door.

  The pounding stopped. Infinity hit the baffle with the side of his fist. Nothing happened. Perhaps the pounding was nothing but a mechanical malfunction, or perhaps whoever was on the other side of the baffle could not hear or feel the vibrations of his fist. He stamped his foot.

  One loud “Thud!” answered him.

  Infinity stamped again. Another “Thud!” replied.

  He emptied the air from the compartment he was in. When the pressure equalized, the baffle allowed itself to be unlocked, but Infinity had to force it to open.

  A burst of ice crystals exploded through the doorway, scattering like tiny needles against Infinity’s suit. Ice crystals and snowflakes filled the chamber with sparkling white light, then fell straight to the floor and melted in the thin layer of water. At the same time, the temperature of the room fell abruptly and the floor froze in a slow wave. Infinity moved forward, his boots crackling on the ice.

  Snow blanketed the room, covering a large lump in the middle of the floor. The lump lurched as whoever was within it pounded on the floor. The snow sifted off the silver emergency pouch and fell into small drifts.

  Infinity turned the pouch to see its transparent panel.

  Curled up like the worm in a jumping bean, Griffith glared out. He said something, angrily, but of course Infinity could not hear him. Instead of turning on his suit radio, Infinity grabbed the handles of the pouch and dragged Griffith back into the second chamber.

  He left him lying there, helpless — he had no choice about that — while he closed the baffle. He moved some air into the chamber.

  He was laughing uncontrollably.

  By the time the chamber held enough air to carry sounds, he managed to stop laughing. He took off the suit helmet and wiped his eyes.

  The survival pouch writhed against the floor.

  “Get me out of here!”

  Infinity unsealed the pouch. Griffith scrambled up and kicked away the emergency sphere.

  “Damn! What’s going on? Where’s Cherenkov?”

  Infinity did not know the answers, so he did not reply. He settled back on his heels. Griffith strode angrily away, but the closed baffle stopped him.

  “How the hell do I get out of here?”

  “Open the door.”

  Griffith fumbled at the controls. The baffle creaked. Radiating anger and impatience, Griffith waited, But when the door had finally slid aside for him to pass, he swung around and glared at Infinity.

  “Don’t you ever — ever — tell anyone about this!”

  A day ago, an hour ago, Griffith would have terrified Infinity Mendez to silence with such a command. Now, Infinity regarded him quizzically, realizing Griffith no longer held any power to frighten him.

  “I’ll tell anybody I want, anything I want. Don’t you even have the guts to say thank you?”

  And then — he tried not to, but could not help himself — he started to laugh again.

  o0o

  A microsecond’s blast of bright white light spread through the interior of the starship, a flash almost too brief to perceive before the filters damped and darkened it. Stephen Thomas cried out and turned away, flinging his arms across his face. Starfarer plunged into dusk.

  “That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Stephen Thomas said, his voice muffled, his eyes still covered, “when I said I didn’t like the light.”

  The whole cylinder trembled faintly.

  The sun tubes slowly brightened, radiating a more normal light. Victoria knew what must have happened. There was only one explanation for that kind of intense actinic blast. Somehow the missile had followed the starship through transition. And it had detonated. But somehow it was free of the starship, distant enough for Starfarer to survive the explosion. She started to shake. Satoshi knelt beside her and held her, and they drew Stephen Thomas into the embrace. Zev sat on his heels nearby, watching them.

  “We made it,” Victoria whispered. “We’re out of transition.” Suddenly she caught her breath. “If the missile did detonate — Iphigenie is in the sailhouse! Is she — ?”

  Professor Thanthavong switched frequencies on
her AS controller and opened a voice link to the sailhouse.

  “Iphigenie, this is Thanthavong. Can you reply?”

  “Are you all right?” Victoria said.

  “Yes.” Her voice was a whisper. “It’s been... quite exciting out here.”

  “The shielding — ?”

  “It held. Victoria, I saw transition... And we are in the Tau Ceti system.”

  “It’s incredible, Victoria!” The second voice from the sailhouse belonged to Feral. “God, I think I’ll change myself to be a sensory recorder like Chandra!”

  “Don’t do that.” Victoria struggled to her feet, pulling Satoshi and Stephen Thomas with her. “We ought to be in the explorer,” she said. “We’re supposed to be continuing the expedition as if nothing had happened.”

  She reached for the web, expecting emptiness. To her surprise she touched a fragile strand, a tangle of thread tossed over the surface of the massed databases. Though Arachne could not reply, Victoria felt it growing and spreading, interconnecting, compelled to retain its multidimensionality.

  “Stephen Thomas, do you feel up to going out?”

  “I told you I’m all right! But...” He stared at the rubble of Genetics Hill.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Professor Thanthavong said. “No more people are going in there till the AIs and the ASes have been through it.” She spoke to all of them. “You aren’t in danger of illness — we store no pathogens. But I want blood samples. I may have to mix you a depolymerase if you were exposed to sensitizing virus. It isn’t something you want permanently floating around in your system.” An AS buzzed up to her and offered her a half-dozen sampling kits. She took blood from Victoria and Satoshi and Zev and Fox, then came toward Stephen Thomas.

  “You can have my shirt,” he said hopefully.

  “Very funny.”

  As the kit pulled ten centiliters of blood out of him, Stephen Thomas paled. Victoria was afraid he would faint again, but he averted his gaze and collected himself.

  “Where is J.D.?” Zev said.

  “I don’t know.” Victoria looked around. “I thought she was right behind us.”

  “She does not like to run,” Zev said. “She likes to swim.”