Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  The shuttles now moved to deposit two-person Outsider teams at each of the five bands along the length of the assembly, where they would cut the Alpha shaft loose. And they placed Pindar and Shira on the assembly 420 kilometers from the plate. Here they began slicing through Alpha, to separate it from the other twenty-six-hundred-odd kilometers of its length. At the plate, Tom Scolari and his people had returned to work, striving to complete the cuts they’d begun earlier. When they were finished, there would remain as a unit only the Alpha shaft, the connecting plate, and the net.

  All this activity was closely watched by Drummond and his team. His principal concern at the moment was to ensure that the separations at the various points along the shaft were made simultaneously. If they failed to do that, if one end of Alpha started to drift while another section somewhere was still secured to the assembly, it might snap.

  The shuttle Scolari had seen approaching carried Miles and Philip Zossimov, whose image blinked onto Drummond’s screen within seconds of the release of the asteroid. “May we go in close to take a look?” Zossimov asked.

  “Stand by. It’ll be a few minutes.” Drummond opened his link to the Star. Marcel’s carefully controlled features looked back at him.

  “Right on schedule,” Drummond said. “Be ready to go.”

  At the plate, Scolari’s people were three minutes away from completing their cuts. They’d stopped at that point to wait for the signal from Drummond. All along the assembly, the same kind of thing was happening: One by one, each of the five teams at the bands, and Pindar and Jane at the far end of Alpha, were reaching the three-minute mark and reporting back to Drummond, who was watching his own timepiece.

  When they’d all called in, he told them to wait for his signal. He reported again to Marcel, who told him to proceed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he told the Outsider teams, “cut us loose.”

  Marcel and Nicholson, on the Star bridge, listened to the reports filtering back to Drummond.

  Site Two was free.

  The far end was free.

  Sites One and Five.

  Site Three.

  Drummond queried Four.

  “Just a moment, John.” Then: “Yes—”

  Aside from the rock swarm, there were two unsettling moments during the operation. One had come when the asteroid broke free. The other occurred when they finished cutting through the fifteenth shaft and the assembly separated.

  Scolari had expected that the separation would be gradual. They’d cut through most of the shafts, and were working on the final three, when they simply started to snap off one by one, in precise drill, and Alpha abruptly began to float away, taking the plate and a kilometer or so of trailing net with it.

  The assembly trembled, in reaction to the loss of mass. And that was it.

  “Plate’s free,” Drummond told Marcel.

  “Everybody okay?” Janet’s voice.

  Scolari looked around. “We’re all here,” he said.

  “Very fine,” she replied. “Well done.”

  He looked down the length of the assembly. Common sense told him that once the other fourteen shafts had been separated from the plate, they would drift apart, or drift together. Or something. It seemed impossible that the tubes could remain perfectly aligned with each other as they had been. He understood that the other bands were still in place, holding them together. That only the Alpha shaft had been separated. But the nearest connector was eighty kilometers away. Yet they remained parallel.

  He was still holding his cutter. He folded it and put it in his vest. A voice in his earphone said, “Here comes our taxi, Tom.” It was the Academy shuttle that had brought them to the assembly two hours earlier. It came alongside, and the pilot warned them to take their time getting in. The airlock opened. They climbed inside, cycled through, and congratulated one another.

  Cleo beamed at him. “Talent I didn’t know I had,” she said.

  Marcel signaled Nicholson with an almost imperceptible gesture. Nicholson pushed the button. Lori’s voice acknowledged: “Activating phase two.”

  The Alpha shaft, freed from the main body of the assembly, was reduced to about thirteen percent of its former length. Lori, the controlling AI, awaited incoming results from a wide array of sensors.

  When she was satisfied all was in order, and the proper moment in her internal countdown arrived, she fired maneuvering thrusters on Zwick and Wildside, orchestrated to draw Alpha clear of the assembly, to ensure that no tumble developed, and to begin the long rotation that would end with the net and plate moving toward the point out over the Misty Sea where it would, they all hoped, rendezvous in twenty hours with Hutch’s lander.

  She monitored progress, which was slight but satisfactory, and when conditions allowed, she fired the main engines on Wildside, and four minutes later, on Zwick. The shaft began perceptibly to rotate toward its vector.

  Approximately sixteen minutes after the Wildside ignition, she shut off the vessel’s engines, and several minutes later did the same with Zwick.

  Now there was a quick scramble in what everyone perceived as the tightest part of the operation save the actual dip into the atmosphere.

  The Outsiders on Wildside and Zwick hurried back out and released the ships from the shaft. There wasn’t time to bring them back in, so they tethered down on the hulls while everyone waited. When they reported themselves secure, Lori moved the vessels cautiously to new positions along the shaft, and realigned them, bringing their axes parallel to Alpha. When that had been done, the Outsiders reattached the ships.

  Meantime, the other two vessels, the Evening Star and Wendy, snuggled up against the shaft in their assigned places. More of Janet’s people poured out of airlocks and secured them to the shaft.

  The problem she had been waiting for developed on Wendy. One of the volunteers, a researcher from the science team, got ill out on the hull and brought up her lunch. The force field had no provision to handle that kind of event. It was flexible and made room, but the unfortunate woman was quickly immersed in her own ejecta. Panicked, she lost contact with the hull and drifted away from the ship.

  A backup quickly replaced her and a shuttle was dispatched to do a rescue.

  The replacement joined the effort almost without missing a beat.

  It was a difficult maneuver because everything had to be completed within a restrictive time frame, barely two hours, or they’d lose their window. As it turned out, no one need have worried. The job was completed, and everyone, including the woman with the lunch, was back inside with eleven minutes to spare. All four vessels had been aligned directly front to rear along the shaft axis.

  At Lori’s signal, the four superluminals engaged their main engines and gently drew the Alpha shaft forward, beginning their long run toward the Misty Sea.

  There were a few places where the floor had buckled or where the ceiling had caved in. They found fragments of fibrous materials in some of the cubicles off the concourse. Clothing, apparently. Small stuff.

  She took samples of everything, continued to record the locations, and made voluminous notes.

  A call came in from Canyon. “Hutch,” he said, “I’d love to do a program from inside the skyhook. If you’d be willing.” They were already broadcasting the visuals, he hoped she didn’t mind, but it was a huge story back home. And everyone would like to hear her reactions.

  “Give me a break, August. I can’t walk around here pointing my vest at everything.”

  “You don’t have to. The spontaneous shots work fine. We’ll use a delay, and we can reconstruct anything that we miss. You don’t have to worry; we can edit out whatever might not be appropriate, whatever you want us to. It’ll make a great story. And I’d be in your debt.”

  “You won’t see much. It’s foggy.”

  “I know. We like foggy. It’s atmospheric.” He laughed at his own joke.

  The Academy would love it. The romance of edge-of-the-envelope archeology. She glanced at Nightingale
, who nodded his okay. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “I’ll comment occasionally when I think there’s something worthwhile to be said. If you can avoid asking me any questions. Just leave me alone to do my work, and I’ll try to cooperate.”

  “Hutch, I’d really like to do the interview.”

  “I’m busy,” she said.

  “Well, of course. Sure. We can do what you want. I understand entirely.”

  “This is a long empty corridor,” she said. “It’s probably been like this for three thousand years.”

  “Three thousand years? You really think it’s that old?” he asked.

  “Augie,” she said, “you’re incurable.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Must be frustrating for you to be up there out of the action.”

  Momentarily his tone changed. “You know,” he said quietly, “I’d almost accept a chance to go down there with you. It’s that big a story.”

  “Almost,” she said.

  “Yeah. Almost.”

  Curiously, she felt sorry for him.

  Hutch paid particular attention to the inscriptions. The six languages were always in the same order.

  In the areas behind the concourses, among the passageways and cubicles, in what they’d come to think of as back offices, they discovered a seventh alphabet. “I’ve seen this before,” she said, looking at an inscription that hung at the end of a corridor, where it branched off at right angles. Two groups of characters were engraved over symbols that could only be arrows. “They have to be places. Washrooms. Souvenirs here and ice cream over there. Baggage to your left.”

  Nightingale tapped his lips with an index finger. “I’ll tell you where we saw it. At the hovercraft memorial.”

  At that moment, somewhere ahead, they heard a click.

  It was sharp and clear, and it hung in the air.

  Hutch’s heart stopped. Nightingale caught his breath.

  “An animal,” she said.

  They waited, trying to see into the fog.

  There were closed doors along both sides of the passageway. As she watched, one moved. The movement was barely discernible, but it opened a finger’s width. And stopped.

  They drew close together for mutual support. Hutch produced her cutter. Neither spoke.

  When nothing more happened, Hutch walked over to the door.

  It closed, and she jumped.

  It opened again.

  “Maybe we ought to get out of here,” whispered Nightingale.

  “Wait.” She tiptoed closer and tried to look through the opening, but as far as she could see there was nothing inside. Empty room and that was all.

  She took a deep breath and tugged on the door. It opened a little wider and she let go and it swung shut. Then it opened again.

  “Sensors?” asked Nightingale.

  “Apparently. Still working.”

  She recalled that the building seemed to be equipped with solar collectors.

  The door was not quite three meters high, constructed of the same plastic material they’d seen elsewhere in the hexagon. It had no knob and no latch. But she saw a diagonal green strip that might have been the sensor. And another green strip with faded characters that might have indicated who occupied the office, or what function it had performed.

  In spite of his assurances, Canyon reentered the conversation: “Hutch, that was a riveting moment. How did you feel when you first heard the sound?”

  Her next words would eventually travel around the world. She regretted having agreed to let Augie and his two billion listeners eavesdrop. She would have liked to put on a blasé exterior, to behave the way heroes are supposed to, but she couldn’t recall whether she’d made frightened sounds. “Terrified,” she said.

  The door opened again.

  The ground shook. Another tremor.

  They walked on. The door continued to open and close, the only disruption in the general stillness.

  They climbed a ramp into a compartmented section. Eight or nine rooms, several with low ceilings. There were signs at belt level and small benches and knee-high rails around the bulkheads. A cricket-sized staircase went to an upper deck.

  Several rooms were fitted with lines of chairs. Very much like the hovercraft cabin. In one the gauge abruptly shifted to their own comfort level.

  The complex had no egress save the way they’d come in, down the ramp and back into the concourse.

  “I think we just got onto the skyhook,” said Hutch.

  If so, whatever machinery might have made it work was safely concealed. “You might be right.” He looked at the tiny handrails.

  “It wasn’t an advanced culture,” she said. “How do you think the hawks were received when they arrived and told everybody they needed to get out?”

  XXXI

  It’s customary to argue that intelligence grants an evolutionary advantage. But where is the evidence? We are surrounded by believers in psychic healing, astrology, dreams and drugs. Are we to accept the premise that these hordes of unfortunates descended from intelligent forebears?

  I’m prepared to concede that stupidity does not help survival. One must after all understand not to poke a tiger with a stick. But intelligence leads to curiosity, and curiosity has never been a quality that helps one pour his or her genes into the pool. The truth must lie somewhere between. Whatever the reason, it is clearly mediocrity, at best, that lives and breeds.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, Reflections of a Barefoot journalist

  Hours to breakup (est): 29

  Several hundred people were gathered in the Star’s theater, where it was possible to follow the rescue effort on a dozen screens and at the same time down a few drinks with friends. Marcel had been wandering through the giant ship, trying to occupy his mind while events played out, and had stepped into the theater when Beekman called to ask where he was. Moments later they met in a small booth off the observation deck. The project director looked pale.

  “What’s wrong, Gunther?” he asked.

  They were standing near a display exhibiting the construction of the Evening Star. Here was the beginning, Ordway Conover talking to engineers, explaining that he wanted the most spectacular superluminal ever built. There was the Star in Earth orbit when it was only a keel. Here were the electronics installations, and there the Delta deck swimming pool. And the celebrities who had come to see it off on its maiden cruise. And its first captain, Bartlett Hollinger, bearded, gray-eyed, silver-haired, looking impossibly competent, and very much like the uncle everybody remembered fondly. “You know,” said Beekman, “some of the people on Wendy think we’re doing the wrong thing.”

  The statement initially startled Marcel. He understood Beekman to be suggesting that the rescue effort might be going wrong somewhere, that they’d missed something fundamental, something now irreparable. “In what way?” he asked, his voice little more than a whisper. “What do they think we should be doing?”

  “They think we’re neglecting the mission.”

  Marcel felt a surge of relief, and then, as Beekman’s meaning became clear, of incredulity. And finally he had to choke down a rising tide of anger. “Is that how you feel?”

  Beekman needed a long time to answer. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “We’re never going to see anything like this again. Not in the lifetime of anybody here. We stand to learn more about gravity functions and planetary structure than we could pick up in a century of theorizing. Marcel, it is true that we’re letting a priceless opportunity get away from us.”

  “You want to abandon Kellie?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Gunny.”

  “You asked if I wanted to abandon her. I don’t. You know that. But you and I both know that the big stick is probably not going to work. There are too many things that can go wrong. Maybe we’d do better to face that and get back to concentrating on what we came here for.”

  Marcel took a deep breath. “Gunther, l
et’s turn this around for a minute. Make it your call. What do you want to do?”

  “You’d abide by my decision?”

  Marcel glanced up at a large framed picture of a young couple eating dinner off the promenade. Through a window, the Crab Nebula was visible. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll abide by your decision. What do we do? Do we write Kellie off? And the others?”

  Beekman looked back at Marcel, followed his gaze to the portrait, stared at it a long time. “That’s unreasonable,” he said at last.

  “What is?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure. Making the call, as opposed to criticizing.”

  He made a rumbling sound in his throat. “All right,” he said. “Do it your way. But somewhere down the road, we’re going to pay a price.”

  The command crew on the bridge of the Star ooohed and aaahed as images of alien inscriptions and crumbling corridors and regally garbed hawks played across their screens. Lori systematically removed the fog and enhanced the pictures. Here was a series of empty cubicles along a broad concourse, there a gently curving passageway lined by doors engraved with symbols from alien alphabets. Marcel wondered whether they designated the kind of activity carried on behind the door, or whether they were the names of individuals.

  Individual hawks. What had their lives been like? Did they sit around in the evening and play some sort of poker-equivalent? Did they enjoy conversation over meals? Did they have music?

  He would have liked very much to be able to listen in when the decision had been taken to go to the rescue of the medieval world that was entering a dust cloud. It must have required a gigantic engineering effort on the part of a species that apparently didn’t even have spike technology. How many had they saved? Where had they gone?

  He heard the power levels rise, felt the ship adjusting course once more.

  The hexagon was vast. A schematic was taking shape on the main wallscreen. Human-sized cubicles in the east wing, long concourses, sections that might have been waiting or storage areas, upper levels they hadn’t even gotten to. Marcel thought he saw objects on a row of shelves on the north side, but he hadn’t been present when they’d passed by, had seen only the record. Hutch and Nightingale had either missed the figures or thought too little of them to waste time. He’d avoided bringing the matter up later.